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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories, by Richard Harding Davis
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: The Lion and the Unicorn and Other Stories
+
+Author: Richard Harding Davis
+
+Release Date: January, 1999 [eBook #1620]
+[Most recently updated: May 5, 2023]
+
+Language: English
+
+Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LION AND THE UNICORN ***
+
+
+
+
+THE LION AND THE UNICORN
+
+By Richard Harding Davis
+
+
+
+
+     IN MEMORY OF MANY HOT DAYS AND SOME HOT CORNERS
+     THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO
+     LT.-COL. ARTHUR H. LEE, R.A.
+     British Military Attache with the United States Army
+
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+     THE LION AND THE UNICORN
+
+     ON THE FEVER SHIP
+
+     THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT
+
+     THE VAGRANT
+
+     THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER
+
+
+
+
+THE LION AND THE UNICORN
+
+Prentiss had a long lease on the house, and because it stood in Jermyn
+Street the upper floors were, as a matter of course, turned into
+lodgings for single gentlemen; and because Prentiss was a Florist to the
+Queen, he placed a lion and unicorn over his flowershop, just in front
+of the middle window on the first floor. By stretching a little, each of
+them could see into the window just beyond him, and could hear all that
+was said inside; and such things as they saw and heard during the reign
+of Captain Carrington, who moved in at the same time they did! By day
+the table in the centre of the room was covered with maps, and the
+Captain sat with a box of pins, with different-colored flags wrapped
+around them, and amused himself by sticking them in the maps and
+measuring the spaces in between, swearing meanwhile to himself. It was a
+selfish amusement, but it appeared to be the Captain’s only intellectual
+pursuit, for at night, the maps were rolled up, and a green cloth was
+spread across the table, and there was much company and popping of
+soda-bottles, and little heaps of gold and silver were moved this way
+and that across the cloth. The smoke drifted out of the open windows,
+and the laughter of the Captain’s guests rang out loudly in the empty
+street, so that the policeman halted and raised his eyes reprovingly to
+the lighted windows, and cabmen drew up beneath them and lay in wait,
+dozing on their folded arms, for the Captain’s guests to depart. The
+Lion and the Unicorn were rather ashamed of the scandal of it, and they
+were glad when, one day, the Captain went away with his tin boxes and
+gun-cases piled high on a four-wheeler.
+
+Prentiss stood on the sidewalk and said: “I wish you good luck, sir.”
+ And the Captain said: “I’m coming back a Major, Prentiss.” But he never
+came back. And one day--the Lion remembered the day very well, for on
+that same day the newsboys ran up and down Jermyn Street shouting out
+the news of “a ’orrible disaster” to the British arms. It was then that
+a young lady came to the door in a hansom, and Prentiss went out to meet
+her and led her upstairs. They heard him unlock the Captain’s door and
+say, “This is his room, miss,” and after he had gone they watched her
+standing quite still by the centre table. She stood there for a very
+long time looking slowly about her, and then she took a photograph of
+the Captain from the frame on the mantel and slipped it into her pocket,
+and when she went out again her veil was down, and she was crying. She
+must have given Prentiss as much as a sovereign, for he called her “Your
+ladyship,” which he never did under a sovereign.
+
+And she drove off, and they never saw her again either, nor could they
+hear the address she gave the cabman. But it was somewhere up St. John’s
+Wood way.
+
+After that the rooms were empty for some months, and the Lion and the
+Unicorn were forced to amuse themselves with the beautiful ladies and
+smart-looking men who came to Prentiss to buy flowers and “buttonholes,”
+ and the little round baskets of strawberries, and even the peaches
+at three shillings each, which looked so tempting as they lay in the
+window, wrapped up in cotton-wool, like jewels of great price.
+
+Then Philip Carroll, the American gentleman, came, and they heard
+Prentiss telling him that those rooms had always let for five guineas
+a week, which they knew was not true; but they also knew that in the
+economy of nations there must always be a higher price for the rich
+American, or else why was he given that strange accent, except to betray
+him into the hands of the London shopkeeper, and the London cabby?
+
+The American walked to the window toward the west, which was the window
+nearest the Lion, and looked out into the graveyard of St. James’s
+Church, that stretched between their street and Piccadilly.
+
+“You’re lucky in having a bit of green to look out on,” he said to
+Prentiss. “I’ll take these rooms--at five guineas. That’s more than
+they’re worth, you know, but as I know it, too, your conscience needn’t
+trouble you.”
+
+Then his eyes fell on the Lion, and he nodded to him gravely. “How do
+you do?” he said. “I’m coming to live with you for a little time. I
+have read about you and your friends over there. It is a hazard of new
+fortunes with me, your Majesty, so be kind to me, and if I win, I will
+put a new coat of paint on your shield and gild you all over again.”
+
+Prentiss smiled obsequiously at the American’s pleasantry, but the new
+lodger only stared at him.
+
+“He seemed a social gentleman,” said the Unicorn, that night, when the
+Lion and he were talking it over. “Now the Captain, the whole time he
+was here, never gave us so much as a look. This one says he has read of
+us.”
+
+“And why not?” growled the Lion. “I hope Prentiss heard what he said of
+our needing a new layer of gilt. It’s disgraceful. You can see that Lion
+over Scarlett’s, the butcher, as far as Regent Street, and Scarlett is
+only one of Salisbury’s creations. He received his Letters-Patent only
+two years back. We date from Palmerston.”
+
+The lodger came up the street just at that moment, and stopped and
+looked up at the Lion and the Unicorn from the sidewalk, before he
+opened the door with his night-key. They heard him enter the room and
+feel on the mantel for his pipe, and a moment later he appeared at the
+Lion’s window and leaned on the sill, looking down into the street below
+and blowing whiffs of smoke up into the warm night-air.
+
+It was a night in June, and the pavements were dry under foot and the
+streets were filled with well-dressed people, going home from the play,
+and with groups of men in black and white, making their way to supper
+at the clubs. Hansoms of inky-black, with shining lamps inside and out,
+dashed noiselessly past on mysterious errands, chasing close on each
+other’s heels on a mad race, each to its separate goal. From the cross
+streets rose the noises of early night, the rumble of the ’buses, the
+creaking of their brakes, as they unlocked, the cries of the “extras,”
+ and the merging of thousands of human voices in a dull murmur. The great
+world of London was closing its shutters for the night, and putting out
+the lights; and the new lodger from across the sea listened to it with
+his heart beating quickly, and laughed to stifle the touch of fear and
+homesickness that rose in him.
+
+“I have seen a great play to-night,” he said to the Lion, “nobly played
+by great players. What will they care for my poor wares? I see that I
+have been over-bold. But we cannot go back now--not yet.”
+
+He knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and nodded “good-night” to the
+great world beyond his window. “What fortunes lie with ye, ye lights of
+London town?” he quoted, smiling. And they heard him close the door of
+his bedroom, and lock it for the night.
+
+The next morning he bought many geraniums from Prentiss and placed them
+along the broad cornice that stretched across the front of the house
+over the shop window. The flowers made a band of scarlet on either side
+of the Lion as brilliant as a Tommy’s jacket.
+
+“I am trying to propitiate the British Lion by placing flowers before
+his altar,” the American said that morning to a visitor.
+
+“The British public you mean,” said the visitor; “they are each likely
+to tear you to pieces.”
+
+“Yes, I have heard that the pit on the first night of a bad play is
+something awful,” hazarded the American.
+
+“Wait and see,” said the visitor.
+
+“Thank you,” said the American, meekly.
+
+Every one who came to the first floor front talked about a play. It
+seemed to be something of great moment to the American. It was only a
+bundle of leaves printed in red and black inks and bound in brown
+paper covers. There were two of them, and the American called them by
+different names: one was his comedy and one was his tragedy.
+
+“They are both likely to be tragedies,” the Lion heard one of the
+visitors say to another, as they drove away together. “Our young friend
+takes it too seriously.”
+
+The American spent most of his time by his desk at the window writing on
+little blue pads and tearing up what he wrote, or in reading over one of
+the plays to himself in a loud voice. In time the number of his visitors
+increased, and to some of these he would read his play; and after they
+had left him he was either depressed and silent or excited and jubilant.
+The Lion could always tell when he was happy because then he would go to
+the side table and pour himself out a drink and say, “Here’s to me,” but
+when he was depressed he would stand holding the glass in his hand, and
+finally pour the liquor back into the bottle again and say, “What’s the
+use of that?”
+
+After he had been in London a month he wrote less and was more
+frequently abroad, sallying forth in beautiful raiment, and coming home
+by daylight.
+
+And he gave suppers too, but they were less noisy than the Captain’s had
+been, and the women who came to them were much more beautiful, and their
+voices when they spoke were sweet and low. Sometimes one of the women
+sang, and the men sat in silence while the people in the street below
+stopped to listen, and would say, “Why, that is So-and-So singing,” and
+the Lion and the Unicorn wondered how they could know who it was when
+they could not see her.
+
+The lodger’s visitors came to see him at all hours. They seemed to
+regard his rooms as a club, where they could always come for a bite to
+eat or to write notes; and others treated it like a lawyer’s office and
+asked advice on all manner of strange subjects. Sometimes the visitor
+wanted to know whether the American thought she ought to take £10 a
+week and go on tour, or stay in town and try to live on £8; or whether
+she should paint landscapes that would not sell, or racehorses that
+would; or whether Reggie really loved her and whether she really loved
+Reggie; or whether the new part in the piece at the Court was better
+than the old part at Terry’s, and wasn’t she getting too old to play
+“ingenues” anyway.
+
+The lodger seemed to be a general adviser, and smoked and listened
+with grave consideration, and the Unicorn thought his judgment was most
+sympathetic and sensible.
+
+Of all the beautiful ladies who came to call on the lodger the one the
+Unicorn liked the best was the one who wanted to know whether she loved
+Reggie and whether Reggie loved her. She discussed this so interestingly
+while she consumed tea and thin slices of bread that the Unicorn almost
+lost his balance in leaning forward to listen. Her name was Marion
+Cavendish and it was written over many photographs which stood in silver
+frames in the lodger’s rooms. She used to make the tea herself, while
+the lodger sat and smoked; and she had a fascinating way of doubling the
+thin slices of bread into long strips and nibbling at them like a mouse
+at a piece of cheese. She had wonderful little teeth and Cupid’s-bow
+lips, and she had a fashion of lifting her veil only high enough for one
+to see the two Cupid-bow lips. When she did that the American used to
+laugh, at nothing apparently, and say, “Oh, I guess Reggie loves you
+well enough.”
+
+“But do I love Reggie?” she would ask sadly, with her tea-cup held
+poised in air.
+
+“I am sure I hope not,” the lodger would reply, and she would put down
+the veil quickly, as one would drop a curtain over a beautiful picture,
+and rise with great dignity and say, “if you talk like that I shall not
+come again.”
+
+She was sure that if she could only get some work to do her head would
+be filled with more important matters than whether Reggie loved her or
+not.
+
+“But the managers seem inclined to cut their cavendish very fine just
+at present,” she said. “If I don’t get a part soon,” she announced, “I
+shall ask Mitchell to put me down on the list for recitations at evening
+parties.”
+
+“That seems a desperate revenge,” said the American; “and besides, I
+don’t want you to get a part, because some one might be idiotic enough
+to take my comedy, and if he should, you must play Nancy.”
+
+“I would not ask for any salary if I could play Nancy,” Miss Cavendish
+answered.
+
+They spoke of a great many things, but their talk always ended by her
+saying that there must be some one with sufficient sense to see that
+his play was a great play, and by his saying that none but she must play
+Nancy.
+
+The Lion preferred the tall girl with masses and folds of brown hair,
+who came from America to paint miniatures of the British aristocracy.
+Her name was Helen Cabot, and he liked her because she was so brave and
+fearless, and so determined to be independent of every one, even of the
+lodger--especially of the lodger, who it appeared had known her
+very well at home. The lodger, they gathered, did not wish her to be
+independent of him and the two Americans had many arguments and disputes
+about it, but she always said, “It does no good, Philip; it only hurts
+us both when you talk so. I care for nothing, and for no one but my art,
+and, poor as it is, it means everything to me, and you do not, and, of
+course, the man I am to marry, must.” Then Carroll would talk, walking
+up and down, and looking very fierce and determined, and telling her
+how he loved her in such a way that it made her look even more proud and
+beautiful. And she would say more gently, “It is very fine to think that
+any one can care for like that, and very helpful. But unless I cared in
+the same way it would be wicked of me to marry you, and besides--” She
+would add very quickly to prevent his speaking again--“I don’t want
+to marry you or anybody, and I never shall. I want to be free and to
+succeed in my work, just as you want to succeed in your work. So please
+never speak of this again.” When she went away the lodger used to sit
+smoking in the big arm-chair and beat the arms with his hands, and he
+would pace up and down the room while his work would lie untouched and
+his engagements pass forgotten.
+
+Summer came and London was deserted, dull, and dusty, but the lodger
+stayed on in Jermyn Street. Helen Cabot had departed on a round of
+visits to country houses in Scotland, where, as she wrote him, she was
+painting miniatures of her hosts and studying the game of golf. Miss
+Cavendish divided her days between the river and one of the West End
+theatres. She was playing a small part in a farce-comedy.
+
+One day she came up from Cookham earlier than usual, looking very
+beautiful in a white boating frock and a straw hat with a Leander
+ribbon. Her hands and arms were hard with dragging a punting pole and
+she was sunburnt and happy, and hungry for tea.
+
+“Why don’t you come down to Cookham and get out of this heat?” Miss
+Cavendish asked. “You need it; you look ill.”
+
+“I’d like to, but I can’t,” said Carroll. “The fact is, I paid in
+advance for these rooms, and if I lived anywhere else I’d be losing five
+guineas a week on them.”
+
+Miss Cavendish regarded him severely. She had never quite mastered his
+American humor.
+
+“But five guineas--why that’s nothing to you,” she said. Something in
+the lodger’s face made her pause. “You don’t mean----”
+
+“Yes, I do,” said the lodger, smiling. “You see, I started in to lay
+siege to London without sufficient ammunition. London is a large
+town, and it didn’t fall as quickly as I thought it would. So I am
+economizing. Mr. Lockhart’s Coffee Rooms and I are no longer strangers.”
+
+Miss Cavendish put down her cup of tea untasted and leaned toward him
+
+“Are you in earnest?” she asked. “For how long?”
+
+“Oh, for the last month,” replied the lodger; “they are not at all
+bad--clean and wholesome and all that.”
+
+“But the suppers you gave us, and this,” she cried, suddenly, waving her
+hands over the pretty tea-things, “and the cake and muffins?”
+
+“My friends, at least,” said Carroll, “need not go to Lockhart’s.”
+
+“And the Savoy?” asked Miss Cavendish, mournfully shaking her head.
+
+“A dream of the past,” said Carroll, waving his pipe through the
+smoke. “Gatti’s? Yes, on special occasions; but for necessity, the
+Chancellor’s, where one gets a piece of the prime roast beef of Old
+England, from Chicago, and potatoes for ninepence--a pot of bitter
+twopence-halfpenny, and a penny for the waiter. It’s most amusing on
+the whole. I am learning a little about London, and some things about
+myself. They are both most interesting subjects.”
+
+“Well, I don’t like it,” Miss Cavendish declared helplessly. “When I
+think of those suppers and the flowers, I feel--I feel like a robber.”
+
+“Don’t,” begged Carroll. “I am really the most happy of men--that is, as
+the chap says in the play, I would be if I wasn’t so damned miserable.
+But I owe no man a penny and I have assets--I have £80 to last me
+through the winter and two marvellous plays; and I love, next to
+yourself, the most wonderful woman God ever made. That’s enough.”
+
+“But I thought you made such a lot of money by writing?” asked Miss
+Cavendish.
+
+“I do--that is, I could,” answered Carroll, “if I wrote the things that
+sell; but I keep on writing plays that won’t.”
+
+“And such plays!” exclaimed Marion, warmly; “and to think that they are
+going begging.” She continued indignantly, “I can’t imagine what the
+managers do want.”
+
+“I know what they don’t want,” said the American. Miss Cavendish drummed
+impatiently on the tea-tray.
+
+“I wish you wouldn’t be so abject about it,” she said. “If I were a man
+I’d make them take those plays.”
+
+“How?” asked the American; “with a gun?”
+
+“Well, I’d keep at it until they read them,” declared Marion. “I’d sit
+on their front steps all night and I’d follow them in cabs, and I’d lie
+in wait for them at the stage-door. I’d just make them take them.”
+
+Carroll sighed and stared at the ceiling. “I guess I’ll give up and go
+home,” he said.
+
+“Oh, yes, do, run away before you are beaten,” said Miss Cavendish,
+scornfully. “Why, you can’t go now. Everybody will be back in town soon,
+and there are a lot of new plays coming on, and some of them are sure
+to be failures, and that’s our chance. You rush in with your piece and
+somebody may take it sooner than close the theatre.”
+
+“I’m thinking of closing the theatre myself,” said Carroll. “What’s the
+use of my hanging on here?” he exclaimed. “It distresses Helen to know I
+am in London, feeling about her as I do--and the Lord only knows how it
+distresses me. And, maybe, if I went away,” he said, consciously, “she
+might miss me. She might see the difference.”
+
+Miss Cavendish held herself erect and pressed her lips together with a
+severe smile. “If Helen Cabot doesn’t see the difference between you
+and the other men she knows now,” she said, “I doubt if she ever will.
+Besides--” she continued, and then hesitated. “Well, go on,” urged
+Carroll.
+
+“Well, I was only going to say,” she explained, “that leaving the girl
+alone never did the man any good unless he left her alone willingly.
+If she’s sure he still cares, it’s just the same to her where he is. He
+might as well stay on in London as go to South Africa. It won’t help
+him any. The difference comes when she finds he has stopped caring. Why,
+look at Reggie. He tried that. He went away for ever so long, but
+he kept writing me from wherever he went, so that he was perfectly
+miserable--and I went on enjoying myself. Then when he came back, he
+tried going about with his old friends again. He used to come to the
+theatre with them--oh, with such nice girls--but he always stood in the
+back of the box and yawned and scowled--so I knew. And, anyway, he’d
+always spoil it all by leaving them and waiting at the stage entrance
+for me. But one day he got tired of the way I treated him and went
+off on a bicycle tour with Lady Hacksher’s girls and some men from his
+regiment, and he was gone three weeks and never sent me even a line; and
+I got so scared; I couldn’t sleep, and I stood it for three days more,
+and then I wired him to come back or I’d jump off London Bridge; and he
+came back that very night from Edinburgh on the express, and I was so
+glad to see him that I got confused, and in the general excitement I
+promised to marry him, so that’s how it was with us.”
+
+“Yes,” said the American, without enthusiasm; “but then I still care,
+and Helen knows I care.”
+
+“Doesn’t she ever fancy that you might care for some one else? You have
+a lot of friends, you know.”
+
+“Yes, but she knows they are just that--friends,” said the American.
+
+Miss Cavendish stood up to go, and arranged her veil before the mirror
+above the fireplace.
+
+“I come here very often to tea,” she said.
+
+“It’s very kind of you,” said Carroll. He was at the open window,
+looking down into the street for a cab.
+
+“Well, no one knows I am engaged to Reggie,” continued Miss Cavendish,
+“except you and Reggie, and he isn’t so sure. SHE doesn’t know it.”
+
+“Well?” said Carroll.
+
+Miss Cavendish smiled a mischievous kindly smile at him from the mirror.
+
+“Well?” she repeated, mockingly. Carroll stared at her and laughed.
+After a pause he said: “It’s like a plot in a comedy. But I’m afraid I’m
+too serious for play-acting.”
+
+“Yes, it is serious,” said Miss Cavendish. She seated herself again
+and regarded the American thoughtfully. “You are too good a man to be
+treated the way that girl is treating you, and no one knows it better
+than she does. She’ll change in time, but just now she thinks she wants
+to be independent. She’s in love with this picture-painting idea, and
+with the people she meets. It’s all new to her--the fuss they make over
+her and the titles, and the way she is asked about. We know she can’t
+paint. We know they only give her commissions because she’s so young
+and pretty, and American. She amuses them, that’s all. Well, that cannot
+last; she’ll find it out. She’s too clever a girl, and she is too fine
+a girl to be content with that long. Then--then she’ll come back to you.
+She feels now that she has both you and the others, and she’s making
+you wait: so wait and be cheerful. She’s worth waiting for; she’s young,
+that’s all. She’ll see the difference in time. But, in the meanwhile, it
+would hurry matters a bit if she thought she had to choose between the
+new friends and you.”
+
+“She could still keep her friends, and marry me,” said Carroll; “I have
+told her that a hundred times. She could still paint miniatures and
+marry me. But she won’t marry me.”
+
+“She won’t marry you because she knows she can whenever she wants to;”
+ cried Marion. “Can’t you see that? But if she thought you were going to
+marry some one else now?”
+
+“She would be the first to congratulate me,” said Carroll. He rose and
+walked to the fireplace, where he leaned with his arm on the mantel.
+There was a photograph of Helen Cabot near his hand, and he turned this
+toward him and stood for some time staring at it. “My dear Marion,” he
+said at last, “I’ve known Helen ever since she was as young as that.
+Every year I’ve loved her more, and found new things in her to care for;
+now I love her more than any other man ever loved any other woman.”
+
+Miss Cavendish shook her head sympathetically.
+
+“Yes, I know,” she said; “that’s the way Reggie loves me, too.”
+
+Carroll went on as though he had not heard her.
+
+“There’s a bench in St. James’s Park,” he said, “where we used to sit
+when she first came here, when she didn’t know so many people. We used
+to go there in the morning and throw penny buns to the ducks. That’s
+been my amusement this summer since you’ve all been away--sitting on
+that bench, feeding penny buns to the silly ducks--especially the black
+one, the one she used to like best. And I make pilgrimages to all the
+other places we ever visited together, and try to pretend she is with
+me. And I support the crossing sweeper at Lansdowne Passage because she
+once said she felt sorry for him. I do all the other absurd things that
+a man in love tortures himself by doing. But to what end? She knows how
+I care, and yet she won’t see why we can’t go on being friends as we
+once were. What’s the use of it all?”
+
+“She is young, I tell you,” repeated Miss Cavendish, “and she’s too sure
+of you. You’ve told her you care; now try making her think you don’t
+care.”
+
+Carroll shook his head impatiently.
+
+“I will not stoop to such tricks and pretence, Marion,” he cried
+impatiently. “All I have is my love for her; if I have to cheat and to
+trap her into caring, the whole thing would be degraded.”
+
+Miss Cavendish shrugged her shoulders and walked to the door. “Such
+amateurs!” she exclaimed, and banged the door after her.
+
+Carroll never quite knew how he had come to make a confidante of Miss
+Cavendish. Helen and he had met her when they first arrived in London,
+and as she had acted for a season in the United States, she adopted
+the two Americans--and told Helen where to go for boots and hats, and
+advised Carroll about placing his plays. Helen soon made other friends,
+and deserted the artists, with whom her work had first thrown her. She
+seemed to prefer the society of the people who bought her paintings, and
+who admired and made much of the painter. As she was very beautiful and
+at an age when she enjoyed everything in life keenly and eagerly, to
+give her pleasure was in itself a distinct pleasure; and the worldly
+tired people she met were considering their own entertainment quite
+as much as hers when they asked her to their dinners and dances, or
+to spend a week with them in the country. In her way, she was as
+independent as was Carroll in his, and as she was not in love, as he
+was, her life was not narrowed down to but one ideal. But she was not
+so young as to consider herself infallible, and she had one excellent
+friend on whom she was dependent for advice and to whose directions she
+submitted implicitly. This was Lady Gower, the only person to whom Helen
+had spoken of Carroll and of his great feeling for her. Lady Gower,
+immediately after her marriage, had been a conspicuous and brilliant
+figure in that set in London which works eighteen hours a day to keep
+itself amused, but after the death of her husband she had disappeared
+into the country as completely as though she had entered a convent,
+and after several years had then re-entered the world as a professional
+philanthropist. Her name was now associated entirely with Women’s
+Leagues, with committees that presented petitions to Parliament, and
+with public meetings, at which she spoke with marvellous ease and
+effect. Her old friends said she had taken up this new pose as an outlet
+for her nervous energies, and as an effort to forget the man who alone
+had made life serious to her. Others knew her as an earnest woman,
+acting honestly for what she thought was right. Her success, all
+admitted, was due to her knowledge of the world and to her sense of
+humor, which taught her with whom to use her wealth and position, and
+when to demand what she wanted solely on the ground that the cause was
+just.
+
+She had taken more than a fancy for Helen, and the position of the
+beautiful, motherless girl had appealed to her as one filled with
+dangers. When she grew to know Helen better, she recognized that these
+fears were quite unnecessary, and as she saw more of her she learned
+to care for her deeply. Helen had told her much of Carroll and of his
+double purpose in coming to London; of his brilliant work and his lack
+of success in having it recognized; and of his great and loyal devotion
+to her, and of his lack of success, not in having that recognized, but
+in her own inability to return it. Helen was proud that she had been
+able to make Carroll care for her as he did, and that there was anything
+about her which could inspire a man whom she admired so much, to believe
+in her so absolutely and for so long a time. But what convinced her that
+the outcome for which he hoped was impossible, was the very fact that
+she could admire him, and see how fine and unselfish his love for her
+was, and yet remain untouched by it.
+
+She had been telling Lady Gower one day of the care he had taken of her
+ever since she was fourteen years of age, and had quoted some of the
+friendly and loverlike acts he had performed in her service, until one
+day they had both found out that his attitude of the elder brother was
+no longer possible, and that he loved her in the old and only way. Lady
+Gower looked at her rather doubtfully and smiled.
+
+“I wish you would bring him to see me, Helen” she said; “I think I
+should like your friend very much. From what you tell me of him I doubt
+if you will find many such men waiting for you in this country. Our men
+marry for reasons of property, or they love blindly, and are exacting
+and selfish before and after they are married. I know, because so many
+women came to me when my husband was alive to ask how it was that I
+continued so happy in my married life.”
+
+“But I don’t want to marry any one,” Helen remonstrated gently.
+“American girls are not always thinking only of getting married.”
+
+“What I meant was this,” said Lady Gower, “that, in my experience, I
+have heard of but few men who care in the way this young man seems to
+care for you. You say you do not love him; but if he had wanted to gain
+my interest, he could not have pleaded his cause better than you have
+done. He seems to see your faults and yet love you still, in spite of
+them--or on account of them. And I like the things he does for you. I
+like, for instance, his sending you the book of the moment every week
+for two years. That shows a most unswerving spirit of devotion. And the
+story of the broken bridge in the woods is a wonderful story. If I were
+a young girl, I could love a man for that alone. It was a beautiful
+thing to do.”
+
+Helen sat with her chin on her hands, deeply considering this new point
+of view.
+
+“I thought it very foolish of him,” she confessed questioningly, “to
+take such a risk for such a little thing.”
+
+Lady Gower smiled down at her from the height of her many years.
+
+“Wait,” she said dryly, “you are very young now--and very rich; every
+one is crowding to give you pleasure, to show his admiration. You are
+a very fortunate girl. But later, these things which some man has done
+because he loved you, and which you call foolish, will grow large in
+your life, and shine out strongly, and when you are discouraged and
+alone, you will take them out, and the memory of them will make you
+proud and happy. They are the honors which women wear in secret.”
+
+Helen came back to town in September, and for the first few days was so
+occupied in refurnishing her studio and in visiting the shops that she
+neglected to send Carroll word of her return. When she found that a
+whole week had passed without her having made any effort to see him,
+and appreciated how the fact would hurt her friend, she was filled with
+remorse, and drove at once in great haste to Jermyn Street, to announce
+her return in person. On the way she decided that she would soften the
+blow of her week of neglect by asking him to take her out to luncheon.
+This privilege she had once or twice accorded him, and she felt that the
+pleasure these excursions gave Carroll were worth the consternation they
+caused to Lady Gower.
+
+The servant was uncertain whether Mr. Carroll was at home or not, but
+Helen was too intent upon making restitution to wait for the fact to be
+determined, and, running up the stairs, knocked sharply at the door of
+his study.
+
+A voice bade her come in, and she entered, radiant and smiling her
+welcome. But Carroll was not there to receive it, and instead, Marion
+Cavendish looked up at her from his desk where she was busily writing.
+Helen paused with a surprised laugh, but Marion sprang up and hailed her
+gladly. They met half way across the room and kissed each other with the
+most friendly feeling.
+
+Philip was out, Marion said, and she had just stepped in for a moment to
+write him a note. If Helen would excuse her, she would finish it, as she
+was late for rehearsal.
+
+But she asked over her shoulder, with great interest, if Helen had
+passed a pleasant summer. She thought she had never seen her looking so
+well. Helen thought Miss Cavendish herself was looking very well also,
+but Marion said no; that she was too sunburnt, she would not be able to
+wear a dinner-dress for a month. There was a pause while Marion’s quill
+scratched violently across Carroll’s note-paper. Helen felt that in some
+way she was being treated as an intruder; or worse, as a guest. She did
+not sit down, it seemed impossible to do so, but she moved uncertainly
+about the room. She noted that there were many changes, it seemed more
+bare and empty; her picture was still on the writing-desk, but there
+were at least six new photographs of Marion. Marion herself had brought
+them to the room that morning, and had carefully arranged them in
+conspicuous places. But Helen could not know that. She thought there was
+an unnecessary amount of writing scribbled over the face of each.
+
+Marion addressed her letter and wrote “Immediate” across the envelope,
+and placed it before the clock on the mantelshelf. “You will find Philip
+looking very badly,” she said, as she pulled on her gloves. “He has been
+in town all summer, working very hard--he has had no holiday at all. I
+don’t think he’s well. I have been a great deal worried about him,” she
+added. Her face was bent over the buttons of her glove, and when she
+raised her blue eyes to Helen they were filled with serious concern.
+
+“Really,” Helen stammered, “I--I didn’t know--in his letters he seemed
+very cheerful.”
+
+Marion shook her head and turned and stood looking thoughtfully out of
+the window. “He’s in a very hard place,” she began abruptly, and then
+stopped as though she had thought better of what she intended to say.
+Helen tried to ask her to go on, but could not bring herself to do so.
+She wanted to get away.
+
+“I tell him he ought to leave London,” Marion began again; “he needs a
+change and a rest.”
+
+“I should think he might,” Helen agreed, “after three months of this
+heat. He wrote me he intended going to Herne Bay or over to Ostend.”
+
+“Yes, he had meant to go,” Marion answered. She spoke with the air of
+one who possessed the most intimate knowledge of Carroll’s movements and
+plans, and change of plans. “But he couldn’t,” she added. “He couldn’t
+afford it. Helen,” she said, turning to the other girl, dramatically,
+“do you know--I believe that Philip is very poor.”
+
+Miss Cabot exclaimed incredulously, “Poor!” She laughed. “Why, what do
+you mean?”
+
+“I mean that he has no money,” Marion answered, sharply. “These rooms
+represent nothing. He only keeps them on because he paid for them in
+advance. He’s been living on three shillings a day. That’s poor for him.
+He takes his meals at cabmen’s shelters and at Lockhart’s, and he’s been
+doing so for a month.”
+
+Helen recalled with a guilty thrill the receipt of certain boxes of
+La France roses--cut long, in the American fashion--which had arrived
+within the last month at various country houses. She felt indignant
+at herself, and miserable. Her indignation was largely due to the
+recollection that she had given these flowers to her hostess to decorate
+the dinner-table.
+
+She hated to ask this girl of things which she should have known better
+than any one else. But she forced herself to do it. She felt she must
+know certainly and at once.
+
+“How do you know this?” she asked. “Are you sure there is no mistake?”
+
+“He told me himself,” said Marion, “when he talked of letting the plays
+go and returning to America. He said he must go back; that his money was
+gone.”
+
+“He is gone to America!” Helen said, blankly.
+
+“No, he wanted to go, but I wouldn’t let him,” Marion went on. “I told
+him that some one might take his play any day. And this third one he has
+written, the one he finished this summer in town, is the best of all, I
+think. It’s a love-story. It’s quite beautiful.” She turned and
+arranged her veil at the glass, and as she did so, her eyes fell on the
+photographs of herself scattered over the mantelpiece, and she smiled
+slightly. But Helen did not see her--she was sitting down now, pulling
+at the books on the table. She was confused and disturbed by emotions
+which were quite strange to her, and when Marion bade her good-by she
+hardly noticed her departure. What impressed her most of all in what
+Marion had told her, was, she was surprised to find, that Philip was
+going away. That she herself had frequently urged him to do so, for his
+own peace of mind, seemed now of no consequence. Now that he seriously
+contemplated it, she recognized that his absence meant to her a change
+in everything. She felt for the first time the peculiar place he held
+in her life. Even if she had seen him but seldom, the fact that he was
+within call had been more of a comfort and a necessity to her than she
+understood.
+
+That he was poor, concerned her chiefly because she knew that, although
+this condition could only be but temporary, it would distress him not to
+have his friends around him, and to entertain them as he had been used
+to do. She wondered eagerly if she might offer to help him, but a second
+thought assured her that, for a man, that sort of help from a woman was
+impossible.
+
+She resented the fact that Marion was deep in his confidence; that it
+was Marion who had told her of his changed condition and of his plans.
+It annoyed her so acutely that she could not remain in the room where
+she had seen her so complacently in possession. And after leaving a
+brief note for Philip, she went away. She stopped a hansom at the door,
+and told the man to drive along the Embankment--she wanted to be quite
+alone, and she felt she could see no one until she had thought it all
+out, and had analyzed the new feelings.
+
+So for several hours she drove slowly up and down, sunk far back in
+the cushions of the cab, and staring with unseeing eyes at the white
+enamelled tariff and the black dash-board.
+
+She assured herself that she was not jealous of Marion, because, in
+order to be jealous, she first would have to care for Philip in the very
+way she could not bring herself to do.
+
+She decided that his interest in Marion hurt her, because it showed that
+Philip was not capable of remaining true to the one ideal of his life.
+She was sure that this explained her feelings--she was disappointed that
+he had not kept up to his own standard; that he was weak enough to turn
+aside from it for the first pretty pair of eyes. But she was too honest
+and too just to accept that diagnosis of her feelings as final--she knew
+there had been many pairs of eyes in America and in London, and that
+though Philip had seen them, he had not answered them when they spoke.
+No, she confessed frankly, she was hurt with herself for neglecting her
+old friend so selfishly and for so long a time; his love gave him claims
+on her consideration, at least, and she had forgotten that and him, and
+had run after strange gods and allowed others to come in and take her
+place, and to give him the sympathy and help which she should have been
+the first to offer, and which would have counted more when coming from
+her than from any one else. She determined to make amends at once
+for her thoughtlessness and selfishness, and her brain was pleasantly
+occupied with plans and acts of kindness. It was a new entertainment,
+and she found she delighted in it. She directed the cabman to go to
+Solomons’s, and from there sent Philip a bunch of flowers and a line
+saying that on the following day she was coming to take tea with him.
+She had a guilty feeling that he might consider her friendly advances
+more seriously than she meant them, but it was her pleasure to be
+reckless: her feelings were running riotously, and the sensation was so
+new that she refused to be circumspect or to consider consequences. Who
+could tell, she asked herself with a quick, frightened gasp, but that,
+after all, it might be that she was learning to care? From Solomons’s
+she bade the man drive to the shop in Cranbourne Street where she was
+accustomed to purchase the materials she used in painting, and Fate,
+which uses strange agents to work out its ends, so directed it that
+the cabman stopped a few doors below this shop, and opposite one where
+jewelry and other personal effects were bought and sold. At any other
+time, or had she been in any other mood, what followed might not have
+occurred, but Fate, in the person of the cabman, arranged it so that the
+hour and the opportunity came together.
+
+There were some old mezzotints in the window of the loan shop, a string
+of coins and medals, a row of new French posters; and far down to the
+front a tray filled with gold and silver cigarette-cases and watches and
+rings. It occurred to Helen, who was still bent on making restitution
+for her neglect, that a cigarette-case would be more appropriate for a
+man than flowers, and more lasting. And she scanned the contents of
+the window with the eye of one who now saw in everything only something
+which might give Philip pleasure. The two objects of value in the tray
+upon which her eyes first fell were the gold seal-ring with which Philip
+had sealed his letters to her, and, lying next to it, his gold watch!
+There was something almost human in the way the ring and watch spoke to
+her from the past--in the way they appealed to her to rescue them from
+the surroundings to which they had been abandoned. She did not know what
+she meant to do with them nor how she could return them to Philip; but
+there was no question of doubt in her manner as she swept with a rush
+into the shop. There was no attempt, either, at bargaining in the way
+in which she pointed out to the young woman behind the counter the
+particular ring and watch she wanted. They had not been left as
+collateral, the young woman said; they had been sold outright.
+
+“Then any one can buy them?” Helen asked eagerly. “They are for sale to
+the public--to any one?”
+
+
+The young woman made note of the customer’s eagerness, but with an
+unmoved countenance.
+
+“Yes, miss, they are for sale. The ring is four pounds and the watch
+twenty-five.”
+
+“Twenty-nine pounds!” Helen gasped.
+
+That was more money than she had in the world, but the fact did not
+distress her, for she had a true artistic disregard for ready money, and
+the absence of it had never disturbed her. But now it assumed a sudden
+and alarming value. She had ten pounds in her purse and ten pounds at
+her studio--these were just enough to pay for a quarter’s rent and the
+rates, and there was a hat and cloak in Bond Street which she certainly
+must have. Her only assets consisted of the possibility that some one
+might soon order a miniature, and to her mind that was sufficient. Some
+one always had ordered a miniature, and there was no reasonable doubt
+but that some one would do it again. For a moment she questioned if it
+would not be sufficient if she bought the ring and allowed the watch
+to remain. But she recognized that the ring meant more to her than the
+watch, while the latter, as an old heirloom which had been passed down
+to him from a great-grandfather, meant more to Philip. It was for
+Philip she was doing this, she reminded herself. She stood holding his
+possessions, one in each hand, and looking at the young woman blankly.
+She had no doubt in her mind that at least part of the money he had
+received for them had paid for the flowers he had sent to her in
+Scotland. The certainty of this left her no choice. She laid the ring
+and watch down and pulled the only ring she possessed from her own
+finger. It was a gift from Lady Gower. She had no doubt that it was of
+great value.
+
+“Can you lend me some money on that?” she asked. It was the first time
+she had conducted a business transaction of this nature, and she felt as
+though she were engaging in a burglary.
+
+“We don’t lend money, miss,” the girl said, “we buy outright. I can give
+you twenty-eight shillings for this,” she added.
+
+“Twenty-eight shillings,” Helen gasped; “why, it is worth--oh, ever so
+much more than that!”
+
+“That is all it is worth to us,” the girl answered. She regarded the
+ring indifferently and laid it away from her on the counter. The action
+was final.
+
+Helen’s hands rose slowly to her breast, where a pretty watch dangled
+from a bowknot of crushed diamonds. It was her only possession, and she
+was very fond of it. It also was the gift of one of the several great
+ladies who had adopted her since her residence in London. Helen had
+painted a miniature of this particular great lady which had looked so
+beautiful that the pleasure which the original of the portrait derived
+from the thought that she still really looked as she did in the
+miniature was worth more to her than many diamonds.
+
+But it was different with Helen, and no one could count what it cost her
+to tear away her one proud possession.
+
+“What will you give me for this?” she asked defiantly.
+
+The girl’s eyes showed greater interest. “I can give you twenty pounds
+for that,” she said.
+
+“Take it, please,” Helen begged, as though she feared if she kept it a
+moment longer she might not be able to make the sacrifice.
+
+“That will be enough now,” she went on, taking out her ten-pound note.
+She put Lady Gower’s ring back upon her finger and picked up Philip’s
+ring and watch with the pleasure of one who has come into a great
+fortune. She turned back at the door.
+
+“Oh,” she stammered, “in case any one should inquire, you are not to say
+who bought these.”
+
+“No, miss, certainly not,” said the woman. Helen gave the direction to
+the cabman and, closing the doors of the hansom, sat looking down at the
+watch and the ring, as they lay in her lap. The thought that they had
+been his most valued possessions, which he had abandoned forever, and
+that they were now entirely hers, to do with as she liked, filled her
+with most intense delight and pleasure. She took up the heavy gold ring
+and placed it on the little finger of her left hand; it was much too
+large, and she removed it and balanced it for a moment doubtfully in the
+palm of her right hand. She was smiling, and her face was lit with shy
+and tender thoughts. She cast a quick glance to the left and right as
+though fearful that people passing in the street would observe her, and
+then slipped the ring over the fourth finger of her left hand. She gazed
+at it with a guilty smile and then, covering it hastily with her other
+hand, leaned back, clasping it closely, and sat frowning far out before
+her with puzzled eyes.
+
+To Carroll all roads led past Helen’s studio, and during the summer,
+while she had been absent in Scotland it was one of his sad pleasures to
+make a pilgrimage to her street and to pause opposite the house and look
+up at the empty windows of her rooms.
+
+It was during this daily exercise that he learned, through the arrival
+of her luggage, of her return to London, and when day followed day
+without her having shown any desire to see him or to tell him of her
+return he denounced himself most bitterly as a fatuous fool.
+
+At the end of the week he sat down and considered his case quite calmly.
+For three years he had loved this girl, deeply and tenderly. He had been
+lover, brother, friend, and guardian. During that time, even though she
+had accepted him in every capacity except as that of the prospective
+husband, she had never given him any real affection, nor sympathy, nor
+help; all she had done for him had been done without her knowledge or
+intent. To know her, to love her, and to scheme to give her pleasure had
+been its own reward, and the only one. For the last few months he had
+been living like a crossing-sweeper in order to be able to stay in
+London until she came back to it, and that he might still send her the
+gifts he had always laid on her altar. He had not seen her in three
+months. Three months that had been to him a blank, except for his
+work--which like all else that he did, was inspired and carried on for
+her. Now at last she had returned and had shown that, even as a friend,
+he was of so little account in her thoughts, of so little consequence in
+her life, that after this long absence she had no desire to learn of his
+welfare or to see him--she did not even give him the chance to see her.
+And so, placing these facts before him for the first time since he had
+loved her, he considered what was due to himself. “Was it good enough?”
+ he asked. “Was it just that he should continue to wear out his soul and
+body for this girl who did not want what he had to give, who treated him
+less considerately than a man whom she met for the first time at dinner?”
+ He felt he had reached the breaking-point; that the time had come when
+he must consider what he owed to himself. There could never be any other
+woman save Helen, but as it was not to be Helen, he could no longer,
+with self-respect, continue to proffer his love only to see it slighted
+and neglected. He was humble enough concerning himself, but of his love
+he was very proud. Other men could give her more in wealth or position,
+but no one could ever love her as he did. “He that hath more let
+him give,” he had often quoted to her defiantly, as though he were
+challenging the world, and now he felt he must evolve a make-shift world
+of his own--a world in which she was not his only spring of acts; he
+must begin all over again and keep his love secret and sacred until she
+understood it and wanted it. And if she should never want it he would at
+least have saved it from many rebuffs and insults.
+
+With this determination strong in him, the note Helen had left for him
+after her talk with Marion, and the flowers, and the note with them,
+saying she was coming to take tea on the morrow, failed to move him
+except to make him more bitter. He saw in them only a tardy recognition
+of her neglect--an effort to make up to him for thoughtlessness which,
+from her, hurt him worse than studied slight.
+
+A new regime had begun, and he was determined to establish it firmly and
+to make it impossible for himself to retreat from it; and in the note
+in which he thanked Helen for the flowers and welcomed her to tea, he
+declared his ultimatum.
+
+“You know how terribly I feel,” he wrote; “I don’t have to tell you
+that, but I cannot always go on dragging out my love and holding it up
+to excite your pity as beggars show their sores. I cannot always go on
+praying before your altar, cutting myself with knives and calling upon
+you to listen to me. You know that there is no one else but you, and
+that there never can be any one but you, and that nothing is changed
+except that after this I am not going to urge and torment you. I shall
+wait as I have always waited--only now I shall wait in silence. You know
+just how little, in one way, I have to offer you, and you know just how
+much I have in love to offer you. It is now for you to speak--some day,
+or never. But you will have to speak first. You will never hear a word
+of love from me again. Why should you? You know it is always waiting for
+you. But if you should ever want it, you must come to me, and take off
+your hat and put it on my table and say, ‘Philip, I have come to stay.’
+Whether you can ever do that or not can make no difference in my love
+for you. I shall love you always, as no man has ever loved a woman in
+this world, but it is you who must speak first; for me, the rest is
+silence.”
+
+The following morning as Helen was leaving the house she found this
+letter lying on the hall-table, and ran back with it to her rooms. A
+week before she would have let it lie on the table and read it on her
+return. She was conscious that this was what she would have done, and it
+pleased her to find that what concerned Philip was now to her the thing
+of greatest interest. She was pleased with her own eagerness--her own
+happiness was a welcome sign, and she was proud and glad that she was
+learning to care.
+
+She read the letter with an anxious pride and pleasure in each word that
+was entirely new. Philip’s recriminations did not hurt her, they were
+the sign that he cared; nor did his determination not to speak of his
+love to her hurt her, for she believed him when he said that he would
+always care. She read the letter twice, and then sat for some time
+considering the kind of letter Philip would have written had he known
+her secret--had he known that the ring he had abandoned was now upon her
+finger.
+
+She rose and, crossing to a desk, placed the letter in a drawer, and
+then took it out again and re-read the last page. When she had finished
+it she was smiling. For a moment she stood irresolute, and then, moving
+slowly toward the centre-table, cast a guilty look about her and,
+raising her hands, lifted her veil and half withdrew the pins that
+fastened her hat.
+
+“Philip,” she began in a frightened whisper, “I have--I have come to--”
+
+The sentence ended in a cry of protest, and she rushed across the room
+as though she were running from herself. She was blushing violently.
+
+“Never!” she cried, as she pulled open the door; “I could never do
+it--never!”
+
+The following afternoon, when Helen was to come to tea, Carroll decided
+that he would receive her with all the old friendliness, but that he
+must be careful to subdue all emotion.
+
+He was really deeply hurt at her treatment, and had it not been that she
+came on her own invitation he would not of his own accord have sought to
+see her. In consequence, he rather welcomed than otherwise the arrival
+of Marion Cavendish, who came a half-hour before Helen was expected, and
+who followed a hasty knock with a precipitate entrance.
+
+“Sit down,” she commanded breathlessly; “and listen. I’ve been at
+rehearsal all day, or I’d have been here before you were awake.” She
+seated herself nervously and nodded her head at Carroll in an excited
+and mysterious manner.
+
+“What is it?” he asked. “Have you and Reggie--”
+
+“Listen,” Marion repeated, “our fortunes are made; that is what’s the
+matter--and I’ve made them. If you took half the interest in your work I
+do, you’d have made yours long ago. Last night,” she began impressively,
+“I went to a large supper at the Savoy, and I sat next to Charley
+Wimpole. He came in late, after everybody had finished, and I attacked
+him while he was eating his supper. He said he had been rehearsing
+‘Caste’ after the performance; that they’ve put it on as a stop-gap on
+account of the failure of the ‘Triflers,’ and that he knew revivals were
+of no use; that he would give any sum for a good modern comedy. That
+was my cue, and I told him I knew of a better comedy than any he had
+produced at his theatre in five years, and that it was going begging.
+He laughed, and asked where was he to find this wonderful comedy, and
+I said, ‘It’s been in your safe for the last two months and you haven’t
+read it.’ He said, ‘Indeed, how do you know that?’ and I said, ‘Because
+if you’d read it, it wouldn’t be in your safe, but on your stage.’ So he
+asked me what the play was about, and I told him the plot and what sort
+of a part his was, and some of his scenes, and he began to take notice.
+He forgot his supper, and very soon he grew so interested that he turned
+his chair round and kept eying my supper-card to find out who I was, and
+at last remembered seeing me in ‘The New Boy’--and a rotten part it was,
+too--but he remembered it, and he told me to go on and tell him more
+about your play. So I recited it, bit by bit, and he laughed in all the
+right places and got very much excited, and said finally that he would
+read it the first thing this morning.” Marion paused, breathlessly. “Oh,
+yes, and he wrote your address on his cuff,” she added, with the air of
+delivering a complete and convincing climax.
+
+Carroll stared at her and pulled excitedly on his pipe.
+
+“Oh, Marion!” he gasped, “suppose he should? He won’t though,” he added,
+but eying her eagerly and inviting contradiction.
+
+“He will,” she answered, stoutly, “if he reads it.”
+
+“The other managers read it,” Carroll suggested, doubtfully.
+
+“Yes, but what do they know?” Marion returned, loftily. “He knows.
+Charles Wimpole is the only intelligent actor-manager in London.”
+
+There was a sharp knock at the door, which Marion in her excitement had
+left ajar, and Prentiss threw it wide open with an impressive sweep, as
+though he were announcing royalty: “Mr. Charles Wimpole,” he said.
+
+The actor-manager stopped in the doorway bowing gracefully, his hat
+held before him and his hand on his stick as though it were resting on a
+foil. He had the face and carriage of a gallant of the days of Congreve,
+and he wore his modern frock-coat with as much distinction as if it were
+of silk and lace. He was evidently amused. “I couldn’t help overhearing
+the last line,” he said, smiling. “It gives me a good entrance.”
+
+Marion gazed at him blankly: “Oh,” she gasped, “we--we--were just
+talking about you.”
+
+“If you hadn’t mentioned my name,” the actor said, “I should never have
+guessed it. And this is Mr. Carroll, I hope.”
+
+The great man was rather pleased with the situation. As he read it, it
+struck him as possessing strong dramatic possibilities: Carroll was the
+struggling author on the verge of starvation: Marion, his sweetheart,
+flying to him gave him hope; and he was the good fairy arriving in the
+nick of time to set everything right and to make the young people happy
+and prosperous. He rather fancied himself in the part of the good fairy,
+and as he seated himself he bowed to them both in a manner which was
+charmingly inclusive and confidential.
+
+“Miss Cavendish, I imagine, has already warned you that you might expect
+a visit from me,” he said tentatively. Carroll nodded. He was too much
+concerned to interrupt.
+
+“Then I need only tell you,” Wimpole continued, “that I got up at an
+absurd hour this morning to read your play; that I did read it; that I
+like it immensely--and that if we can come to terms I shall produce it I
+shall produce it at once, within a fortnight or three weeks.”
+
+Carroll was staring at him intently and continued doing so after Wimpole
+had finished speaking. The actor felt he had somehow missed his point,
+or that Carroll could not have understood him, and repeated, “I say I
+shall put it in rehearsal at once.”
+
+Carroll rose abruptly, and pushed back his chair. “I should be very
+glad,” he murmured, and strode over to the window, where he stood with
+his back turned to his guests. Wimpole looked after him with a kindly
+smile and nodded his head appreciatively. He had produced even a greater
+effect than his lines seemed to warrant. When he spoke again, it was
+quite simply, and sincerely, and though he spoke for Carroll’s benefit,
+he addressed himself to Marion.
+
+“You were quite right last night,” he said, “it is a most charming piece
+of work. I am really extremely grateful to you for bringing it to my
+notice.” He rose, and going to Carroll, put his hand on his shoulder.
+“My boy,” he said, “I congratulate you. I should like to be your age,
+and to have written that play. Come to my theatre to-morrow and we will
+talk terms. Talk it over first with your friends, so that I sha’n’t rob
+you. Do you think you would prefer a lump sum now, and so be done with
+it altogether, or trust that the royalties may--”
+
+“Royalties,” prompted Marion, in an eager aside.
+
+The men laughed. “Quite right,” Wimpole assented, good-humoredly; “it’s
+a poor sportsman who doesn’t back his own horse. Well, then, until
+to-morrow.”
+
+“But,” Carroll began, “one moment please. I haven’t thanked you.”
+
+“My dear boy,” cried Wimpole, waving him away with his stick, “it is I
+who have to thank you.”
+
+“And--and there is a condition,” Carroll said, “which goes with the
+play. It is that Miss Cavendish is to have the part of Nancy.”
+
+Wimpole looked serious and considered for a moment.
+
+“Nancy,” he said, “the girl who interferes--a very good part. I have
+cast Miss Maddox for it in my mind, but, of course, if the author
+insists--”
+
+Marion, with her elbows on the table, clasped her hands appealingly
+before her.
+
+“Oh, Mr. Wimpole!” she cried, “you owe me that, at least.”
+
+Carroll leaned over and took both of Marion’s hands in one of his.
+
+“It’s all right,” he said; “the author insists.”
+
+Wimpole waved his stick again as though it were the magic wand of the
+good fairy.
+
+“You shall have it,” he said. “I recall your performance in ‘The New
+Boy’ with pleasure. I take the play, and Miss Cavendish shall be cast
+for Nancy. We shall begin rehearsals at once. I hope you are a quick
+study.”
+
+“I’m letter-perfect now{,}” laughed Marion.
+
+Wimpole turned at the door and nodded to them. They were both so young,
+so eager, and so jubilant that he felt strangely old and out of it.
+“Good-by, then,” he said.
+
+“Good-by, sir,” they both chorussed. And Marion cried after him, “And
+thank you a thousand times.”
+
+He turned again and looked back at them, but in their rejoicing they had
+already forgotten him. “Bless you, my children,” he said, smiling. As
+he was about to close the door a young girl came down the passage toward
+it, and as she was apparently going to Carroll’s rooms, the actor left
+the door open behind him.
+
+Neither Marion nor Carroll had noticed his final exit. They were both
+gazing at each other as though, could they find speech, they would ask
+if it were true.
+
+“It’s come at last, Marion,” Philip said, with an uncertain voice.
+
+“I could weep,” cried Marion. “Philip,” she exclaimed, “I would rather
+see that play succeed than any play ever written, and I would rather
+play that part in it than--Oh, Philip,” she ended. “I’m so proud of
+you!” and rising, she threw her arms about his neck and sobbed on his
+shoulder.
+
+Carroll raised one of her hands and kissed the tips of her fingers
+gently. “I owe it to you, Marion,” he said--“all to you.”
+
+This was the tableau that was presented through the open door to Miss
+Helen Cabot, hurrying on her errand of restitution and good-will, and
+with Philip’s ring and watch clasped in her hand. They had not heard
+her, nor did they see her at the door, so she drew back quickly and ran
+along the passage and down the stairs into the street.
+
+She did not need now to analyze her feelings. They were only too
+evident. For she could translate what she had just seen as meaning only
+one thing--that she had considered Philip’s love so lightly that she had
+not felt it passing away from her until her neglect had killed it--until
+it was too late. And now that it was too late she felt that without it
+her life could not go on. She tried to assure herself that only the fact
+that she had lost it made it seem invaluable, but this thought did not
+comfort her--she was not deceived by it, she knew that at last she
+cared for him deeply and entirely. In her distress she blamed herself
+bitterly, but she also blamed Philip no less bitterly for having failed
+to wait for her. “He might have known that I must love him in time,” she
+repeated to herself again and again. She was so unhappy that her letter
+congratulating Philip on his good fortune in having his comedy accepted
+seemed to him cold and unfeeling, and as his success meant for him only
+what it meant to her, he was hurt and grievously disappointed.
+
+He accordingly turned the more readily to Marion, whose interests
+and enthusiasm at the rehearsals of the piece seemed in contrast most
+friendly and unselfish. He could not help but compare the attitude of
+the two girls at this time, when the failure or success of his best work
+was still undecided. He felt that as Helen took so little interest
+in his success he could not dare to trouble her with his anxieties
+concerning it, and she attributed his silence to his preoccupation and
+interest in Marion. So the two grew apart, each misunderstanding the
+other and each troubled in spirit at the other’s indifference.
+
+The first night of the play justified all that Marion and Wimpole had
+claimed for it, and was a great personal triumph for the new playwright.
+The audience was the typical first-night audience of the class which
+Charles Wimpole always commanded. It was brilliant, intelligent, and
+smart, and it came prepared to be pleased.
+
+From one of the upper stage-boxes Helen and Lady Gower watched the
+successful progress of the play with an anxiety almost as keen as that
+of the author. To Helen it seemed as though the giving of these lines to
+the public--these lines which he had so often read to her, and altered
+to her liking--was a desecration. It seemed as though she were losing
+him indeed--as though he now belonged to these strange people, all of
+whom were laughing and applauding his words, from the German Princess
+in the Royal box to the straight-backed Tommy in the pit. Instead of the
+painted scene before her, she saw the birch-trees by the river at home,
+where he had first read her the speech to which they were now listening
+so intensely--the speech in which the hero tells the girl he loves her.
+She remembered that at the time she had thought how wonderful it would
+be if some day some one made such a speech to her--not Philip--but a man
+she loved. And now? If Philip would only make that speech to her now!
+
+He came out at last, with Wimpole leading him, and bowed across a
+glaring barrier of lights at a misty but vociferous audience that was
+shouting the generous English bravo! and standing up to applaud. He
+raised his eyes to the box where Helen sat, and saw her staring down
+at the tumult, with her hands clasped under her chin. Her face was
+colorless, but lit with the excitement of the moment; and he saw that
+she was crying.
+
+Lady Gower, from behind her, was clapping her hands delightedly.
+
+“But, my dear Helen,” she remonstrated breathlessly, “you never told me
+he was so good-looking.”
+
+“Yes,” said Helen, rising abruptly, “he is--very good-looking.”
+
+She crossed the box to where her cloak was hanging, but instead of
+taking it down buried her face in its folds.
+
+“My dear child!” cried Lady Gower, in dismay. “What is it? The
+excitement has been too much for you.”
+
+“No, I am just happy,” sobbed Helen. “I am just happy for him.”
+
+“We will go and tell him so then,” said Lady Gower. “I am sure he would
+like to hear it from you to-night.”
+
+Philip was standing in the centre of the stage, surrounded by many
+pretty ladies and elderly men. Wimpole was hovering over him as though
+he had claims upon him by the right of discovery.
+
+But when Philip saw Helen, he pushed his way toward her eagerly and took
+her hand in both of his.
+
+“I am so glad, Phil,” she said. She felt it all so deeply that she was
+afraid to say more, but that meant so much to her that she was sure he
+would understand.
+
+He had planned it very differently. For a year he had dreamed that, on
+the first night of his play, there would be a supper, and that he would
+rise and drink her health, and tell his friends and the world that she
+was the woman he loved, and that she had agreed to marry him, and that
+at last he was able, through the success of his play, to make her his
+wife.
+
+And now they met in a crowd to shake hands, and she went her way with
+one of her grand ladies, and he was left among a group of chattering
+strangers. The great English playwright took him by the hand and in the
+hearing of all, praised him gracefully and kindly. It did not matter
+to Philip whether the older playwright believed what he said or not; he
+knew it was generously meant.
+
+“I envy you this,” the great man was saying. “Don’t lose any of it,
+stay and listen to all they have to say. You will never live through the
+first night of your first play but once.”
+
+“Yes, I hear them,” said Philip, nervously; “they are all too kind.
+But I don’t hear the voice I have been listening for,” he added in a
+whisper. The older man pressed his hand again quickly. “My dear boy,” he
+said, “I am sorry.”
+
+“Thank you,” Philip answered.
+
+Within a week he had forgotten the great man’s fine words of praise, but
+the clasp of his hand he cherished always.
+
+Helen met Marion as she was leaving the stage door and stopped to
+congratulate her on her success in the new part. Marion was radiant. To
+Helen she seemed obstreperously happy and jubilant.
+
+“And, Marion,” Helen began bravely, “I also want to congratulate you
+on something else. You--you--neither of you have told me yet,” she
+stammered, “but I am such an old friend of both that I will not be kept
+out of the secret.” At these words Marion’s air of triumphant gayety
+vanished; she regarded Helen’s troubled eyes closely and kindly.
+
+“What secret, Helen?” she asked.
+
+“I came to the door of Philip’s room the other day when you did not know
+I was there,” Helen answered; “and I could not help seeing how matters
+were. And I do congratulate you both--and wish you--oh, such happiness!”
+ Without a word Marion dragged her back down the passage to her
+dressing-room, and closed the door.
+
+“Now tell me what you mean,” she said.
+
+“I am sorry if I discovered anything you didn’t want known yet,” said
+Helen, “but the door was open. Mr. Wimpole had just left you and had not
+shut it, and I could not help seeing.”
+
+Marion interrupted her with an eager exclamation of enlightenment.
+
+“Oh, you were there, then,” she cried. “And you?” she asked
+eagerly--“you thought Phil cared for me--that we are engaged, and it
+hurt you; you are sorry? Tell me,” she demanded, “are you sorry?”
+
+Helen drew back and stretched out her hand toward the door.
+
+“How can you!” she exclaimed, indignantly. “You have no right.”
+
+Marion stood between her and the door.
+
+“I have every right,” she said, “to help my friends, and I want to
+help you and Philip. And indeed I do hope you ARE sorry. I hope you are
+miserable. And I’m glad you saw me kiss him. That was the first and
+the last time, and I did it because I was happy and glad for him; and
+because I love him too, but not in the least in the way he loves you. No
+one ever loved any one as he loves you. And it’s time you found it out.
+And if I have helped to make you find it out I’m glad, and I don’t care
+how much I hurt you.”
+
+“Marion!” exclaimed Helen, “what does it mean? Do you mean that you are
+not engaged; that--”
+
+“Certainly not,” Marion answered. “I am going to marry Reggie. It is you
+that Philip loves, and I am very sorry for you that you don’t love him.”
+
+Helen clasped Marion’s hands in both of hers.
+
+“But, Marion!” she cried, “I do, oh, I do!”
+
+
+There was a thick yellow fog the next morning, and with it rain and a
+sticky, depressing dampness which crept through the window-panes, and
+which neither a fire nor blazing gas-jets could overcome.
+
+Philip stood in front of the fireplace with the morning papers piled
+high on the centre-table and scattered over the room about him.
+
+He had read them all, and he knew now what it was to wake up famous, but
+he could not taste it. Now that it had come it meant nothing, and
+that it was so complete a triumph only made it the harder. In his most
+optimistic dreams he had never imagined success so satisfying as the
+reality had proved to be; but in his dreams Helen had always held the
+chief part, and without her, success seemed only to mock him.
+
+He wanted to lay it all before her, to say, “If you are pleased, I am
+happy. If you are satisfied, then I am content. It was done for you, and
+I am wholly yours, and all that I do is yours.”
+
+And, as though in answer to his thoughts, there was an instant knock at
+the door, and Helen entered the room and stood smiling at him across the
+table.
+
+Her eyes were lit with excitement, and spoke with many emotions, and
+her cheeks were brilliant with color. He had never seen her look more
+beautiful.
+
+“Why, Helen!” he exclaimed, “how good of you to come. Is there anything
+wrong? Is anything the matter?”
+
+She tried to speak, but faltered, and smiled at him appealingly.
+
+“What is it?” he asked in great concern.
+
+Helen drew in her breath quickly, and at the same moment motioned him
+away--and he stepped back and stood watching her in much perplexity.
+
+With her eyes fixed on his she raised her hands to her head, and her
+fingers fumbled with the knot of her veil. She pulled it loose, and
+then, with a sudden courage, lifted her hat proudly, as though it were a
+coronet, and placed it between them on his table.
+
+“Philip,” she stammered, with the tears in her voice and eyes, “if you
+will let me--I have come to stay.”
+
+The table was no longer between them. He caught her in his arms and
+kissed her face and her uncovered head again and again. From outside
+the rain beat drearily and the fog rolled through the street, but inside
+before the fire the two young people sat close together, asking eager
+questions or sitting in silence, staring at the flames with wondering,
+happy eyes.
+
+
+The Lion and the Unicorn saw them only once again. It was a month later
+when they stopped in front of the shop in a four-wheeler, with their
+baggage mixed on top of it, and steamer-labels pasted over every trunk.
+
+“And, oh, Prentiss!” Carroll called from the cab-window. “I came near
+forgetting. I promised to gild the Lion and the Unicorn if I won out in
+London. So have it done, please, and send the bill to me. For I’ve won
+out all right.” And then he shut the door of the cab, and they drove
+away forever.
+
+“Nice gal, that,” growled the Lion. “I always liked her. I am glad
+they’ve settled it at last.”
+
+The Unicorn sighed, sentimentally. “The other one’s worth two of her,”
+ he said.
+
+
+
+
+ON THE FEVER SHIP
+
+There were four rails around the ship’s sides, the three lower ones of
+iron and the one on top of wood, and as he looked between them from
+the canvas cot he recognized them as the prison-bars which held him in.
+Outside his prison lay a stretch of blinding blue water which ended in a
+line of breakers and a yellow coast with ragged palms. Beyond that again
+rose a range of mountain-peaks, and, stuck upon the loftiest peak of
+all, a tiny block-house. It rested on the brow of the mountain against
+the naked sky as impudently as a cracker-box set upon the dome of a
+great cathedral.
+
+As the transport rode on her anchor-chains, the iron bars around her
+sides rose and sank and divided the landscape with parallel lines. From
+his cot the officer followed this phenomenon with severe, painstaking
+interest. Sometimes the wooden rail swept up to the very block-house
+itself, and for a second of time blotted it from sight. And again it
+sank to the level of the line of breakers, and wiped them out of the
+picture as though they were a line of chalk.
+
+The soldier on the cot promised himself that the next swell of the sea
+would send the lowest rail climbing to the very top of the palm-trees
+or, even higher, to the base of the mountains; and when it failed to
+reach even the palm-trees he felt a distinct sense of ill use, of having
+been wronged by some one. There was no other reason for submitting to
+this existence, save these tricks upon the wearisome, glaring landscape;
+and, now, whoever it was who was working them did not seem to be making
+this effort to entertain him with any heartiness.
+
+It was most cruel. Indeed, he decided hotly, it was not to be endured;
+he would bear it no longer, he would make his escape. But he knew that
+this move, which could be conceived in a moment’s desperation, could
+only be carried to success with great strategy, secrecy, and careful
+cunning. So he fell back upon his pillow and closed his eyes, as though
+he were asleep, and then opening them again, turned cautiously, and
+spied upon his keeper. As usual, his keeper sat at the foot of the
+cot turning the pages of a huge paper filled with pictures of the war
+printed in daubs of tawdry colors. His keeper was a hard-faced boy
+without human pity or consideration, a very devil of obstinacy and
+fiendish cruelty. To make it worse, the fiend was a person without a
+collar, in a suit of soiled khaki, with a curious red cross bound by a
+safety-pin to his left arm. He was intent upon the paper in his hands;
+he was holding it between his eyes and his prisoner. His vigilance had
+relaxed, and the moment seemed propitious. With a sudden plunge of arms
+and legs, the prisoner swept the bed sheet from him, and sprang at the
+wooden rail and grasped the iron stanchion beside it. He had his knee
+pressed against the top bar and his bare toes on the iron rail beneath
+it. Below him the blue water waited for him. It was cool and dark and
+gentle and deep. It would certainly put out the fire in his bones, he
+thought; it might even shut out the glare of the sun which scorched his
+eyeballs.
+
+But as he balanced for the leap, a swift weakness and nausea swept over
+him, a weight seized upon his body and limbs. He could not lift the
+lower foot from the iron rail, and he swayed dizzily and trembled. He
+trembled. He who had raced his men and beaten them up the hot hill to
+the trenches of San Juan. But now he was a baby in the hands of a giant,
+who caught him by the wrist and with an iron arm clasped him around his
+waist and pulled him down, and shouted, brutally, “Help, some of you’se,
+quick; he’s at it again. I can’t hold him.”
+
+More giants grasped him by the arms and by the legs. One of them took
+the hand that clung to the stanchion in both of his, and pulled back the
+fingers one by one, saying, “Easy now, Lieutenant--easy.”
+
+The ragged palms and the sea and block-house were swallowed up in a
+black fog, and his body touched the canvas cot again with a sense of
+home-coming and relief and rest. He wondered how he could have cared
+to escape from it. He found it so good to be back again that for a long
+time he wept quite happily, until the fiery pillow was moist and cool.
+
+The world outside of the iron bars was like a scene in a theatre set
+for some great event, but the actors were never ready. He remembered
+confusedly a play he had once witnessed before that same scene. Indeed,
+he believed he had played some small part in it; but he remembered it
+dimly, and all trace of the men who had appeared with him in it was
+gone. He had reasoned it out that they were up there behind the range
+of mountains, because great heavy wagons and ambulances and cannon were
+emptied from the ships at the wharf above and were drawn away in long
+lines behind the ragged palms, moving always toward the passes between
+the peaks. At times he was disturbed by the thought that he should be up
+and after them, that some tradition of duty made his presence with them
+imperative. There was much to be done back of the mountains. Some event
+of momentous import was being carried forward there, in which he held a
+part; but the doubt soon passed from him, and he was content to lie and
+watch the iron bars rising and falling between the block-house and the
+white surf.
+
+If they had been only humanely kind, his lot would have been bearable,
+but they starved him and held him down when he wished to rise; and they
+would not put out the fire in the pillow, which they might easily have
+done by the simple expedient of throwing it over the ship’s side into
+the sea. He himself had done this twice, but the keeper had immediately
+brought a fresh pillow already heated for the torture and forced it
+under his head.
+
+His pleasures were very simple, and so few that he could not understand
+why they robbed him of them so jealously. One was to watch a green
+cluster of bananas that hung above him from the awning twirling on a
+string. He could count as many of them as five before the bunch turned
+and swung lazily back again, when he could count as high as twelve;
+sometimes when the ship rolled heavily he could count to twenty. It was
+a most fascinating game, and contented him for many hours. But when they
+found this out they sent for the cook to come and cut them down, and the
+cook carried them away to his galley.
+
+Then, one day, a man came out from the shore, swimming through the blue
+water with great splashes. He was a most charming man, who spluttered
+and dove and twisted and lay on his back and kicked his legs in an
+excess of content and delight. It was a real pleasure to watch him;
+not for days had anything so amusing appeared on the other side of the
+prison-bars. But as soon as the keeper saw that the man in the water
+was amusing his prisoner, he leaned over the ship’s side and shouted,
+“Sa-ay, you, don’t you know there’s sharks in there?”
+
+And the swimming man said, “The h--ll there is!” and raced back to the
+shore like a porpoise with great lashing of the water, and ran up the
+beach half-way to the palms before he was satisfied to stop. Then
+the prisoner wept again. It was so disappointing. Life was robbed of
+everything now. He remembered that in a previous existence soldiers who
+cried were laughed at and mocked.
+
+But that was so far away and it was such an absurd superstition that he
+had no patience with it. For what could be more comforting to a man when
+he is treated cruelly than to cry. It was so obvious an exercise, and
+when one is so feeble that one cannot vault a four-railed barrier it is
+something to feel that at least one is strong enough to cry.
+
+He escaped occasionally, traversing space with marvellous rapidity and
+to great distances, but never to any successful purpose; and his flight
+inevitably ended in ignominious recapture and a sudden awakening in
+bed. At these moments the familiar and hated palms, the peaks and the
+block-house were more hideous in their reality than the most terrifying
+of his nightmares.
+
+These excursions afield were always predatory; he went forth always to
+seek food. With all the beautiful world from which to elect and choose,
+he sought out only those places where eating was studied and elevated
+to an art. These visits were much more vivid in their detail than any he
+had ever before made to these same resorts. They invariably began in
+a carriage, which carried him swiftly over smooth asphalt. One route
+brought him across a great and beautiful square, radiating with rows and
+rows of flickering lights; two fountains splashed in the centre of the
+square, and six women of stone guarded its approaches. One of the
+women was hung with wreaths of mourning. Ahead of him the late twilight
+darkened behind a great arch, which seemed to rise on the horizon of the
+world, a great window into the heavens beyond. At either side strings
+of white and colored globes hung among the trees, and the sound of music
+came joyfully from theatres in the open air. He knew the restaurant
+under the trees to which he was now hastening, and the fountain beside
+it, and the very sparrows balancing on the fountain’s edge; he knew
+every waiter at each of the tables, he felt again the gravel crunching
+under his feet, he saw the maitre d’hotel coming forward smiling to
+receive his command, and the waiter in the green apron bowing at his
+elbow, deferential and important, presenting the list of wines. But his
+adventure never passed that point, for he was captured again and once
+more bound to his cot with a close burning sheet.
+
+Or else, he drove more sedately through the London streets in the late
+evening twilight, leaning expectantly across the doors of the hansom and
+pulling carefully at his white gloves. Other hansoms flashed past him,
+the occupant of each with his mind fixed on one idea--dinner. He was one
+of a million of people who were about to dine, or who had dined, or who
+were deep in dining.
+
+He was so famished, so weak for food of any quality, that the galloping
+horse in the hansom seemed to crawl. The lights of the Embankment passed
+like the lamps of a railroad station as seen from the window of an
+express; and while his mind was still torn between the choice of a thin
+or thick soup or an immediate attack upon cold beef, he was at the door,
+and the chasseur touched his cap, and the little chasseur put the wicker
+guard over the hansom’s wheel. As he jumped out he said, “Give him
+half-a-crown,” and the driver called after him, “Thank you, sir.”
+
+It was a beautiful world, this world outside of the iron bars. Every one
+in it contributed to his pleasure and to his comfort. In this world he
+was not starved nor manhandled. He thought of this joyfully as he leaped
+up the stairs, where young men with grave faces and with their hands
+held negligently behind their backs bowed to him in polite surprise at
+his speed. But they had not been starved on condensed milk. He threw his
+coat and hat at one of them, and came down the hall fearfully and quite
+weak with dread lest it should not be real. His voice was shaking when
+he asked Ellis if he had reserved a table. The place was all so real, it
+must be true this time. The way Ellis turned and ran his finger down
+the list showed it was real, because Ellis always did that, even when he
+knew there would not be an empty table for an hour. The room was crowded
+with beautiful women; under the light of the red shades they looked kind
+and approachable, and there was food on every table, and iced drinks in
+silver buckets.
+
+It was with the joy of great relief that he heard Ellis say to his
+underling, “Numero cinq, sur la terrace, un couvert.” It was real at
+last. Outside, the Thames lay a great gray shadow. The lights of the
+Embankment flashed and twinkled across it, the tower of the House of
+Commons rose against the sky, and here, inside, the waiter was hurrying
+toward him carrying a smoking plate of rich soup with a pungent
+intoxicating odor.
+
+And then the ragged palms, the glaring sun, the immovable peaks, and
+the white surf stood again before him. The iron rails swept up and sank
+again, the fever sucked at his bones, and the pillow scorched his cheek.
+
+One morning for a brief moment he came back to real life again and lay
+quite still, seeing everything about him with clear eyes and for the
+first time, as though he had but just that instant been lifted over
+the ship’s side. His keeper, glancing up, found the prisoner’s eyes
+considering him curiously, and recognized the change. The instinct of
+discipline brought him to his feet with his fingers at his sides.
+
+“Is the Lieutenant feeling better?”
+
+The Lieutenant surveyed him gravely.
+
+“You are one of our hospital stewards.”
+
+“Yes, Lieutenant.”
+
+“Why ar’n’t you with the regiment?”
+
+“I was wounded, too, sir. I got it same time you did, Lieutenant.”
+
+“Am I wounded? Of course, I remember. Is this a hospital ship?”
+
+The steward shrugged his shoulders. “She’s one of the transports. They
+have turned her over to the fever cases.”
+
+The Lieutenant opened his lips to ask another question; but his own body
+answered that one, and for a moment he lay silent.
+
+“Do they know up North that I--that I’m all right?”
+
+“Oh, yes, the papers had it in--there was pictures of the Lieutenant in
+some of them.”
+
+“Then I’ve been ill some time?”
+
+“Oh, about eight days.”
+
+The soldier moved uneasily, and the nurse in him became uppermost.
+
+“I guess the Lieutenant hadn’t better talk any more,” he said. It was
+his voice now which held authority.
+
+The Lieutenant looked out at the palms and the silent gloomy mountains
+and the empty coast-line, where the same wave was rising and falling
+with weary persistence.
+
+“Eight days,” he said. His eyes shut quickly, as though with a sudden
+touch of pain. He turned his head and sought for the figure at the foot
+of the cot. Already the figure had grown faint and was receding and
+swaying.
+
+“Has any one written or cabled?” the Lieutenant spoke, hurriedly.
+
+He was fearful lest the figure should disappear altogether before he
+could obtain his answer. “Has any one come?”
+
+“Why, they couldn’t get here, Lieutenant, not yet.”
+
+The voice came very faintly. “You go to sleep now, and I’ll run and
+fetch some letters and telegrams. When you wake up, may be I’ll have a
+lot for you.”
+
+But the Lieutenant caught the nurse by the wrist, and crushed his hand
+in his own thin fingers. They were hot, and left the steward’s skin wet
+with perspiration. The Lieutenant laughed gayly.
+
+“You see, Doctor,” he said, briskly, “that you can’t kill me. I can’t
+die. I’ve got to live, you understand. Because, sir, she said she would
+come. She said if I was wounded, or if I was ill, she would come to me.
+She didn’t care what people thought. She would come any way and nurse
+me--well, she will come.
+
+“So, Doctor--old man--” He plucked at the steward’s sleeve, and stroked
+his hand eagerly, “old man--” he began again, beseechingly, “you’ll
+not let me die until she comes, will you? What? No, I know I won’t die.
+Nothing made by man can kill me. No, not until she comes. Then, after
+that--eight days, she’ll be here soon, any moment? What? You think so,
+too? Don’t you? Surely, yes, any moment. Yes, I’ll go to sleep now, and
+when you see her rowing out from shore you wake me. You’ll know her; you
+can’t make a mistake. She is like--no, there is no one like her--but you
+can’t make a mistake.”
+
+That day strange figures began to mount the sides of the ship, and to
+occupy its every turn and angle of space. Some of them fell on their
+knees and slapped the bare deck with their hands, and laughed and
+cried out, “Thank God, I’ll see God’s country again!” Some of them
+were regulars, bound in bandages; some were volunteers, dirty and
+hollow-eyed, with long beards on boys’ faces. Some came on crutches;
+others with their arms around the shoulders of their comrades, staring
+ahead of them with a fixed smile, their lips drawn back and their teeth
+protruding. At every second step they stumbled, and the face of each was
+swept by swift ripples of pain.
+
+They lay on cots so close together that the nurses could not walk
+between them. They lay on the wet decks, in the scuppers, and along the
+transoms and hatches. They were like shipwrecked mariners clinging to
+a raft, and they asked nothing more than that the ship’s bow be turned
+toward home. Once satisfied as to that, they relaxed into a state of
+self-pity and miserable oblivion to their environment, from which hunger
+nor nausea nor aching bones could shake them.
+
+The hospital steward touched the Lieutenant lightly on the shoulder.
+
+“We are going North, sir,” he said. “The transport’s ordered North to
+New York, with these volunteers and the sick and wounded. Do you hear
+me, sir?”
+
+The Lieutenant opened his eyes. “Has she come?” he asked.
+
+“Gee!” exclaimed the hospital steward. He glanced impatiently at the
+blue mountains and the yellow coast, from which the transport was
+drawing rapidly away.
+
+“Well, I can’t see her coming just now,” he said. “But she will,” he
+added.
+
+“You let me know at once when she comes.”
+
+“Why, cert’nly, of course,” said the steward.
+
+Three trained nurses came over the side just before the transport
+started North. One was a large, motherly-looking woman, with a German
+accent. She had been a trained nurse, first in Berlin, and later in the
+London Hospital in Whitechapel, and at Bellevue.
+
+The nurse was dressed in white, and wore a little silver medal at her
+throat; and she was strong enough to lift a volunteer out of his cot and
+hold him easily in her arms, while one of the convalescents pulled his
+cot out of the rain. Some of the men called her “nurse;” others, who
+wore scapulars around their necks, called her “Sister;” and the officers
+of the medical staff addressed her as Miss Bergen.
+
+Miss Bergen halted beside the cot of the Lieutenant and asked, “Is this
+the fever case you spoke about, Doctor--the one you want moved to the
+officers’ ward?” She slipped her hand up under his sleeve and felt his
+wrist.
+
+“His pulse is very high,” she said to the steward. “When did you take
+his temperature?” She drew a little morocco case from her pocket and
+from that took a clinical thermometer, which she shook up and down,
+eying the patient meanwhile with a calm, impersonal scrutiny. The
+Lieutenant raised his head and stared up at the white figure beside his
+cot. His eyes opened and then shut quickly, with a startled look, in
+which doubt struggled with wonderful happiness. His hand stole out
+fearfully and warily until it touched her apron, and then, finding it
+was real, he clutched it desperately, and twisting his face and body
+toward her, pulled her down, clasping her hands in both of his, and
+pressing them close to his face and eyes and lips. He put them from him
+for an instant, and looked at her through his tears.
+
+“Sweetheart,” he whispered, “sweetheart, I knew you’d come.”
+
+As the nurse knelt on the deck beside him, her thermometer slipped from
+her fingers and broke, and she gave an exclamation of annoyance. The
+young Doctor picked up the pieces and tossed them overboard. Neither of
+them spoke, but they smiled appreciatively. The Lieutenant was looking
+at the nurse with the wonder and hope and hunger of soul in his eyes
+with which a dying man looks at the cross the priest holds up before
+him. What he saw where the German nurse was kneeling was a tall, fair
+girl with great bands and masses of hair, with a head rising like a lily
+from a firm, white throat, set on broad shoulders above a straight back
+and sloping breast--a tall, beautiful creature, half-girl, half-woman,
+who looked back at him shyly, but steadily.
+
+“Listen,” he said.
+
+The voice of the sick man was so sure and so sane that the young Doctor
+started, and moved nearer to the head of the cot. “Listen, dearest,” the
+Lieutenant whispered. “I wanted to tell you before I came South. But I
+did not dare; and then I was afraid something might happen to me, and I
+could never tell you, and you would never know. So I wrote it to you in
+the will I made at Baiquiri, the night before the landing. If you hadn’t
+come now, you would have learned it in that way. You would have read
+there that there never was any one but you; the rest were all dream
+people, foolish, silly--mad. There is no one else in the world but you;
+you have been the only thing in life that has counted. I thought I might
+do something down here that would make you care. But I got shot going
+up a hill, and after that I wasn’t able to do anything. It was very hot,
+and the hills were on fire; and they took me prisoner, and kept me tied
+down here, burning on these coals. I can’t live much longer, but now
+that I have told you I can have peace. They tried to kill me before you
+came; but they didn’t know I loved you, they didn’t know that men who
+love you can’t die. They tried to starve my love for you, to burn it out
+of me; they tried to reach it with their knives. But my love for you
+is my soul, and they can’t kill a man’s soul. Dear heart, I have lived
+because you lived. Now that you know--now that you understand--what does
+it matter?”
+
+Miss Bergen shook her head with great vigor. “Nonsense,” she said,
+cheerfully. “You are not going to die. As soon as we move you out of
+this rain, and some food cook--”
+
+“Good God!” cried the young Doctor, savagely. “Do you want to kill him?”
+
+When she spoke the patient had thrown his arms heavily across his face,
+and had fallen back, lying rigid on the pillow.
+
+The Doctor led the way across the prostrate bodies, apologizing as he
+went. “I am sorry I spoke so quickly,” he said, “but he thought you were
+real. I mean he thought you were some one he really knew--”
+
+“He was just delirious,” said the German nurse, calmly.
+
+The Doctor mixed himself a Scotch and soda and drank it with a single
+gesture.
+
+“Ugh!” he said to the ward-room. “I feel as though I’d been opening
+another man’s letters.”
+
+
+The transport drove through the empty seas with heavy, clumsy
+upheavals, rolling like a buoy. Having been originally intended for the
+freight-carrying trade, she had no sympathy with hearts that beat for
+a sight of their native land, or for lives that counted their remaining
+minutes by the throbbing of her engines. Occasionally, without apparent
+reason, she was thrown violently from her course: but it was invariably
+the case that when her stern went to starboard, something splashed in
+the water on her port side and drifted past her, until, when it had
+cleared the blades of her propeller, a voice cried out, and she was
+swung back on her home-bound track again.
+
+The Lieutenant missed the familiar palms and the tiny block-house; and
+seeing nothing beyond the iron rails but great wastes of gray water, he
+decided he was on board a prison-ship, or that he had been strapped to
+a raft and cast adrift. People came for hours at a time and stood at the
+foot of his cot, and talked with him and he to them--people he had loved
+and people he had long forgotten, some of whom he had thought were dead.
+One of them he could have sworn he had seen buried in a deep trench, and
+covered with branches of palmetto. He had heard the bugler, with tears
+choking him, sound “taps;” and with his own hand he had placed the dead
+man’s campaign hat on the mound of fresh earth above the grave. Yet here
+he was still alive, and he came with other men of his troop to speak to
+him; but when he reached out to them they were gone--the real and the
+unreal, the dead and the living--and even She disappeared whenever he
+tried to take her hand, and sometimes the hospital steward drove her
+away.
+
+“Did that young lady say when she was coming back again?” he asked the
+steward.
+
+“The young lady! What young lady?” asked the steward, wearily.
+
+“The one who has been sitting there,” he answered. He pointed with his
+gaunt hand at the man in the next cot.
+
+“Oh, that young lady. Yes, she’s coming back. She’s just gone below to
+fetch you some hard-tack.”
+
+The young volunteer in the next cot whined grievously.
+
+“That crazy man gives me the creeps,” he groaned. “He’s always waking me
+up, and looking at me as though he was going to eat me.”
+
+“Shut your head,” said the steward. “He’s a better man crazy than you’ll
+ever be with the little sense you’ve got. And he has two Mauser holes
+in him. Crazy, eh? It’s a damned good thing for you that there was about
+four thousand of us regulars just as crazy as him, or you’d never seen
+the top of the hill.”
+
+One morning there was a great commotion on deck, and all the
+convalescents balanced themselves on the rail, shivering in their
+pajamas, and pointed one way. The transport was moving swiftly and
+smoothly through water as flat as a lake, and making a great noise with
+her steam-whistle. The noise was echoed by many more steam-whistles; and
+the ghosts of out-bound ships and tugs and excursion steamers ran past
+her out of the mist and disappeared, saluting joyously. All of the
+excursion steamers had a heavy list to the side nearest the transport,
+and the ghosts on them crowded to that rail and waved handkerchiefs
+and cheered. The fog lifted suddenly, and between the iron rails the
+Lieutenant saw high green hills on either side of a great harbor.
+
+Houses and trees and thousands of masts swept past like a panorama;
+and beyond was a mirage of three cities, with curling smoke-wreaths and
+sky-reaching buildings, and a great swinging bridge, and a giant statue
+of a woman waving a welcome home.
+
+The Lieutenant surveyed the spectacle with cynical disbelief. He was
+far too wise and far too cunning to be bewitched by it. In his heart he
+pitied the men about him, who laughed wildly, and shouted, and climbed
+recklessly to the rails and ratlines. He had been deceived too often not
+to know that it was not real. He knew from cruel experience that in
+a few moments the tall buildings would crumble away, the thousands of
+columns of white smoke that flashed like snow in the sun, the busy,
+shrieking tug-boats, and the great statue would vanish into the sea,
+leaving it gray and bare. He closed his eyes and shut the vision out. It
+was so beautiful that it tempted him; but he would not be mocked, and he
+buried his face in his hands. They were carrying the farce too far, he
+thought. It was really too absurd; for now they were at a wharf which
+was so real that, had he not known by previous suffering, he would have
+been utterly deceived by it. And there were great crowds of smiling,
+cheering people, and a waiting guard of honor in fresh uniforms, and
+rows of police pushing the people this way and that; and these men about
+him were taking it all quite seriously, and making ready to disembark,
+carrying their blanket-rolls and rifles with them.
+
+A band was playing joyously, and the man in the next cot, who was being
+lifted to a stretcher, said, “There’s the Governor and his staff; that’s
+him in the high hat.” It was really very well done. The Custom-house
+and the Elevated Railroad and Castle Garden were as like to life as a
+photograph, and the crowd was as well handled as a mob in a play. His
+heart ached for it so that he could not bear the pain, and he turned his
+back on it. It was cruel to keep it up so long. His keeper lifted him
+in his arms, and pulled him into a dirty uniform which had belonged,
+apparently, to a much larger man--a man who had been killed probably,
+for there were dark-brown marks of blood on the tunic and breeches. When
+he tried to stand on his feet, Castle Garden and the Battery disappeared
+in a black cloud of night, just as he knew they would; but when he
+opened his eyes from the stretcher, they had returned again. It was a
+most remarkably vivid vision. They kept it up so well. Now the young
+Doctor and the hospital steward were pretending to carry him down a
+gang-plank and into an open space; and he saw quite close to him a long
+line of policemen, and behind them thousands of faces, some of them
+women’s faces--women who pointed at him and then shook their heads and
+cried, and pressed their hands to their cheeks, still looking at him. He
+wondered why they cried. He did not know them, nor did they know him. No
+one knew him; these people were only ghosts.
+
+There was a quick parting in the crowd. A man he had once known shoved
+two of the policemen to one side, and he heard a girl’s voice speaking
+his name, like a sob; and She came running out across the open space and
+fell on her knees beside the stretcher, and bent down over him, and he
+was clasped in two young, firm arms.
+
+“Of course it is not real, of course it is not She,” he assured himself.
+“Because She would not do such a thing. Before all these people She
+would not do it.”
+
+But he trembled and his heart throbbed so cruelly that he could not bear
+the pain.
+
+She was pretending to cry.
+
+“They wired us you had started for Tampa on the hospital ship,” She was
+saying, “and Aunt and I went all the way there before we heard you had
+been sent North. We have been on the cars a week. That is why I missed
+you. Do you understand? It was not my fault. I tried to come. Indeed, I
+tried to come.”
+
+She turned her head and looked up fearfully at the young Doctor.
+
+“Tell me, why does he look at me like that?” she asked. “He doesn’t know
+me. Is he very ill? Tell me the truth.” She drew in her breath quickly.
+“Of course you will tell me the truth.”
+
+When she asked the question he felt her arms draw tight about his
+shoulders. It was as though she was holding him to herself, and from
+some one who had reached out for him. In his trouble he turned to his
+old friend and keeper. His voice was hoarse and very low.
+
+“Is this the same young lady who was on the transport--the one you used
+to drive away?”
+
+In his embarrassment, the hospital steward blushed under his tan, and
+stammered.
+
+“Of course it’s the same young lady,” the Doctor answered briskly. “And
+I won’t let them drive her away.” He turned to her, smiling gravely. “I
+think his condition has ceased to be dangerous, madam,” he said.
+
+People who in a former existence had been his friends, and Her brother,
+gathered about his stretcher and bore him through the crowd and lifted
+him into a carriage filled with cushions, among which he sank lower
+and lower. Then She sat beside him, and he heard Her brother say to the
+coachman, “Home, and drive slowly and keep on the asphalt.”
+
+The carriage moved forward, and She put her arm about him and his head
+fell on her shoulder, and neither of them spoke. The vision had lasted
+so long now that he was torn with the joy that after all it might be
+real. But he could not bear the awakening if it were not, so he raised
+his head fearfully and looked up into the beautiful eyes above him. His
+brows were knit, and he struggled with a great doubt and an awful joy.
+
+“Dearest,” he said, “is it real?”
+
+“Is it real?” she repeated.
+
+Even as a dream, it was so wonderfully beautiful that he was satisfied
+if it could only continue so, if but for a little while.
+
+“Do you think,” he begged again, trembling, “that it is going to last
+much longer?”
+
+She smiled, and, bending her head slowly, kissed him.
+
+“It is going to last--always,” she said.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WITH ONE TALENT
+
+The mass-meeting in the Madison Square Garden which was to help set
+Cuba free was finished, and the people were pushing their way out of
+the overheated building into the snow and sleet of the streets. They
+had been greatly stirred and the spell of the last speaker still hung so
+heavily upon them that as they pressed down the long corridor they were
+still speaking loudly in his praise.
+
+A young man moved eagerly amongst them, and pushed his way to wherever a
+voice was raised above the rest. He strained forward, listening openly,
+as though he tried to judge the effect of the meeting by the verdict of
+those about him.
+
+But the words he overheard seemed to clash with what he wished them to
+be, and the eager look on his face changed to one of doubt and of grave
+disappointment. When he had reached the sidewalk he stopped and stood
+looking back alternately into the lighted hall and at the hurrying
+crowds which were dispersing rapidly. He made a movement as though he
+would recall them, as though he felt they were still unconvinced, as
+though there was much still left unsaid.
+
+A fat stranger halted at his elbow to light his cigar, and glancing up
+nodded his head approvingly.
+
+“Fine speaker, Senator Stanton, ain’t he?” he said.
+
+The young man answered eagerly. “Yes,” he assented, “he is a great
+orator, but how could he help but speak well with such a subject?”
+
+“Oh, you ought to have heard him last November at Tammany Hall,” the fat
+stranger answered. “He wasn’t quite up to himself to-night. He wasn’t so
+interested. Those Cubans are foreigners, you see, but you ought to
+heard him last St. Patrick’s day on Home Rule for Ireland. Then he was
+talking! That speech made him a United States senator, I guess. I don’t
+just see how he expects to win out on this Cuba game. The Cubans haven’t
+got no votes.”
+
+The young man opened his eyes in some bewilderment.
+
+“He speaks for the good of Cuba, for the sake of humanity,” he ventured.
+
+“What?” inquired the fat stranger. “Oh, yes, of course. Well, I must be
+getting on. Good-night, sir.”
+
+The stranger moved on his way, but the young man still lingered
+uncertainly in the snow-swept corridor shivering violently with the cold
+and stamping his feet for greater comfort. His face was burned to a deep
+red, which seemed to have come from some long exposure to a tropical
+sun, but which held no sign of health. His cheeks were hollow and his
+eyes were lighted with the fire of fever and from time to time he was
+shaken by violent bursts of coughing which caused him to reach toward
+one of the pillars for support.
+
+As the last of the lights went out in the Garden, the speaker of the
+evening and three of his friends came laughing and talking down the long
+corridor. Senator Stanton was a conspicuous figure at any time, and even
+in those places where his portraits had not penetrated he was at once
+recognized as a personage. Something in his erect carriage and an
+unusual grace of movement, and the power and success in his face, made
+men turn to look at him. He had been told that he resembled the
+early portraits of Henry Clay, and he had never quite forgotten the
+coincidence.
+
+The senator was wrapping the collar of his fur coat around his throat
+and puffing contentedly at a fresh cigar, and as he passed, the night
+watchman and the ushers bowed to the great man and stood looking after
+him with the half-humorous, half-envious deference that the American
+voter pays to the successful politician. At the sidewalk, the policemen
+hurried to open the door of his carriage and in their eagerness made a
+double line, through which he passed nodding to them gravely. The young
+man who had stood so long in waiting pushed his way through the line to
+his side.
+
+“Senator Stanton,” he began timidly, “might I speak to you a moment? My
+name is Arkwright; I am just back from Cuba, and I want to thank you for
+your speech. I am an American, and I thank God that I am since you are
+too, sir. No one has said anything since the war began that compares
+with what you said to-night. You put it nobly, and I know, for I’ve been
+there for three years, only I can’t make other people understand it, and
+I am thankful that some one can. You’ll forgive my stopping you, sir,
+but I wanted to thank you. I feel it very much.”
+
+Senator Stanton’s friends had already seated themselves in his carriage
+and were looking out of the door and smiling with mock patience. But the
+senator made no move to follow them. Though they were his admirers they
+were sometimes skeptical, and he was not sorry that they should hear
+this uninvited tribute. So he made a pretence of buttoning his long coat
+about him, and nodded encouragingly to Arkwright to continue. “I’m glad
+you liked it, sir,” he said with the pleasant, gracious smile that
+had won him a friend wherever it had won him a vote. “It is very
+satisfactory to know from one who is well informed on the subject that
+what I have said is correct. The situation there is truly terrible. You
+have just returned, you say? Where were you--in Havana?”
+
+“No, in the other provinces, sir,” Arkwright answered. “I have been all
+over the island, I am a civil engineer. The truth has not been half
+told about Cuba, I assure you, sir. It is massacre there, not war. It is
+partly so through ignorance, but nevertheless it is massacre. And what
+makes it worse is, that it is the massacre of the innocents. That is
+what I liked best of what you said in that great speech, the part about
+the women and children.”
+
+He reached out his hands detainingly, and then drew back as though in
+apology for having already kept the great man so long waiting in the
+cold. “I wish I could tell you some of the terrible things I have seen,”
+ he began again, eagerly as Stanton made no movement to depart. “They are
+much worse than those you instanced to-night, and you could make so much
+better use of them than any one else. I have seen starving women nursing
+dead babies, and sometimes starving babies sucking their dead mother’s
+breasts; I have seen men cut down in the open roads and while digging
+in the fields--and two hundred women imprisoned in one room without
+food and eaten with small-pox, and huts burned while the people in them
+slept--”
+
+The young man had been speaking impetuously, but he stopped as suddenly,
+for the senator was not listening to him. He had lowered his eyes
+and was looking with a glance of mingled fascination and disgust at
+Arkwright’s hands. In his earnestness the young man had stretched them
+out, and as they showed behind the line of his ragged sleeves the others
+could see, even in the blurred light and falling snow, that the wrists
+of each hand were gashed and cut in dark-brown lines like the skin of a
+mulatto, and in places were a raw red, where the fresh skin had but just
+closed over. The young man paused and stood shivering, still holding his
+hands out rigidly before him.
+
+The senator raised his eyes slowly and drew away.
+
+“What is that?” he said in a low voice, pointing with a gloved finger at
+the black lines on the wrists.
+
+A sergeant in the group of policemen who had closed around the speakers
+answered him promptly from his profound fund of professional knowledge.
+
+“That’s handcuffs, senator,” he said importantly, and glanced at
+Stanton as though to signify that at a word from him he would take this
+suspicious character into custody. The young man pulled the frayed cuffs
+of his shirt over his wrists and tucked his hands, which the cold had
+frozen into an ashy blue, under his armpits to warm them.
+
+“No, they don’t use handcuffs in the field,” he said in the same low,
+eager tone; “they use ropes and leather thongs; they fastened me behind
+a horse and when he stumbled going down the trail it jerked me forward
+and the cords would tighten and tear the flesh. But they have had a long
+time to heal now. I have been eight months in prison.”
+
+The young men at the carriage window had ceased smiling and were
+listening intently. One of them stepped out and stood beside the
+carriage door looking down at the shivering figure before him with a
+close and curious scrutiny.
+
+“Eight months in prison!” echoed the police sergeant with a note of
+triumph; “what did I tell you?”
+
+“Hold your tongue!” said the young man at the carriage door. There was
+silence for a moment, while the men looked at the senator, as though
+waiting for him to speak.
+
+“Where were you in prison, Mr. Arkwright?” he asked.
+
+“First in the calaboose at Santa Clara for two months, and then
+in Cabanas. The Cubans who were taken when I was, were shot by the
+fusillade on different days during this last month. Two of them, the
+Ezetas, were father and son, and the Volunteer band played all the time
+the execution was going on, so that the other prisoners might not hear
+them cry ‘Cuba Libre’ when the order came to fire. But we heard them.”
+
+The senator shivered slightly and pulled his fur collar up farther
+around his face. “I’d like to talk with you,” he said, “if you have
+nothing to do to-morrow. I’d like to go into this thing thoroughly.
+Congress must be made to take some action.”
+
+The young man clasped his hands eagerly. “Ah, Mr. Stanton, if you
+would,” he cried, “if you would only give me an hour! I could tell you
+so much that you could use. And you can believe what I say, sir--it is
+not necessary to lie--God knows the truth is bad enough. I can give you
+names and dates for everything I say. Or I can do better than that, sir.
+I can take you there yourself--in three months I can show you all you
+need to see, without danger to you in any way. And they would not know
+me, now that I have grown a beard, and I am a skeleton to what I was.
+I can speak the language well, and I know just what you should see, and
+then you could come back as one speaking with authority and not have to
+say, ‘I have read,’ or ‘have been told,’ but you can say, ‘These are the
+things I have seen’--and you could free Cuba.”
+
+The senator coughed and put the question aside for the moment with a
+wave of the hand that held his cigar. “We will talk of that to-morrow
+also. Come to lunch with me at one. My apartments are in the Berkeley
+on Fifth Avenue. But aren’t you afraid to go back there?” he asked
+curiously. “I should think you’d had enough of it. And you’ve got a
+touch of fever, haven’t you?” He leaned forward and peered into the
+other’s eyes.
+
+“It is only the prison fever,” the young man answered; “food and this
+cold will drive that out of me. And I must go back. There is so much to
+do there,” he added. “Ah, if I could tell them, as you can tell them,
+what I feel here.” He struck his chest sharply with his hand, and on the
+instant fell into a fit of coughing so violent that the young man at
+the carriage door caught him around the waist, and one of the policemen
+supported him from the other side.
+
+“You need a doctor,” said the senator kindly. “I’ll ask mine to have a
+look at you. Don’t forget, then, at one o’clock to-morrow. We will go
+into this thing thoroughly.” He shook Arkwright warmly by the hand and
+stooping stepped into the carriage. The young man who had stood at the
+door followed him and crowded back luxuriously against the cushions.
+The footman swung himself up beside the driver, and said “Uptown
+Delmonico’s,” as he wrapped the fur rug around his legs, and with
+a salute from the policemen and a scraping of hoofs on the slippery
+asphalt the great man was gone.
+
+“That poor fellow needs a doctor,” he said as the carriage rolled up
+the avenue, “and he needs an overcoat, and he needs food. He needs about
+almost everything, by the looks of him.”
+
+But the voice of the young man in the corner of the carriage objected
+drowsily--
+
+“On the contrary,” he said, “it seemed to me that he had the one thing
+needful.”
+
+By one o’clock of the day following, Senator Stanton, having read the
+reports of his speech in the morning papers, punctuated with “Cheers,”
+ “Tremendous enthusiasm” and more “Cheers,” was still in a willing frame
+of mind toward Cuba and her self-appointed envoy, young Mr. Arkwright.
+
+Over night he had had doubts but that the young man’s enthusiasm would
+bore him on the morrow, but Mr. Arkwright, when he appeared, developed,
+on the contrary, a practical turn of mind which rendered his suggestions
+both flattering and feasible. He was still terribly in earnest, but
+he was clever enough or serious enough to see that the motives which
+appealed to him might not have sufficient force to move a successful
+statesman into action. So he placed before the senator only those
+arguments and reasons which he guessed were the best adapted to
+secure his interest and his help. His proposal as he set it forth was
+simplicity itself.
+
+“Here is a map of the island,” he said; “on it I have marked the places
+you can visit in safety, and where you will meet the people you ought to
+see. If you leave New York at midnight you can reach Tampa on the second
+day. From Tampa we cross in another day to Havana. There you can visit
+the Americans imprisoned in Morro and Cabanas, and in the streets you
+can see the starving pacificos. From Havana I shall take you by rail to
+Jucaro, Matanzas, Santa Clara and Cienfuegos. You will not be able
+to see the insurgents in the fields--it is not necessary that you
+should--but you can visit one of the sugar plantations and some of the
+insurgent chiefs will run the forts by night and come in to talk with
+you. I will show you burning fields and houses, and starving men and
+women by the thousands, and men and women dying of fevers. You can see
+Cuban prisoners shot by a firing squad and you can note how these rebels
+meet death. You can see all this in three weeks and be back in New York
+in a month, as any one can see it who wishes to learn the truth. Why,
+English members of Parliament go all the way to India and British
+Columbia to inform themselves about those countries, they travel
+thousands of miles, but only one member of either of our houses of
+Congress has taken the trouble to cross these eighty miles of water that
+lie between us and Cuba. You can either go quietly and incognito, as
+it were, or you can advertise the fact of your going, which would be
+better. And from the moment you start the interest in your visit will
+grow and increase until there will be no topic discussed in any of our
+papers except yourself, and what you are doing and what you mean to do.
+
+“By the time you return the people will be waiting, ready and eager to
+hear whatever you may have to say. Your word will be the last word for
+them. It is not as though you were some demagogue seeking notoriety, or
+a hotel piazza correspondent at Key West or Jacksonville. You are the
+only statesman we have, the only orator Americans will listen to, and I
+tell you that when you come before them and bring home to them as
+only you can the horrors of this war, you will be the only man in this
+country. You will be the Patrick Henry of Cuba; you can go down to
+history as the man who added the most beautiful island in the seas to
+the territory of the United States, who saved thousands of innocent
+children and women, and who dared to do what no other politician has
+dared to do--to go and see for himself and to come back and speak the
+truth. It only means a month out of your life, a month’s trouble and
+discomfort, but with no risk. What is a month out of a lifetime, when
+that month means immortality to you and life to thousands? In a month
+you would make a half dozen after-dinner speeches and cause your friends
+to laugh and applaud. Why not wring their hearts instead, and hold this
+thing up before them as it is, and shake it in their faces? Show it to
+them in all its horror--bleeding, diseased and naked, an offence to our
+humanity, and to our prated love of liberty, and to our God.”
+
+The young man threw himself eagerly forward and beat the map with his
+open palm. But the senator sat apparently unmoved gazing thoughtfully
+into the open fire, and shook his head.
+
+While the luncheon was in progress the young gentleman who the night
+before had left the carriage and stood at Arkwright’s side, had entered
+the room and was listening intently. He had invited himself to some
+fresh coffee, and had then relapsed into an attentive silence, following
+what the others said with an amused and interested countenance. Stanton
+had introduced him as Mr. Livingstone, and appeared to take it for
+granted that Arkwright would know who he was. He seemed to regard him
+with a certain deference which Arkwright judged was due to some fixed
+position the young man held, either of social or of political value.
+
+“I do not know,” said Stanton with consideration, “that I am prepared to
+advocate the annexation of the island. It is a serious problem.”
+
+“I am not urging that,” Arkwright interrupted anxiously; “the
+Cubans themselves do not agree as to that, and in any event it is an
+afterthought. Our object now should be to prevent further bloodshed. If
+you see a man beating a boy to death, you first save the boy’s life
+and decide afterward where he is to go to school. If there were any one
+else, senator,” Arkwright continued earnestly, “I would not trouble you.
+But we all know your strength in this country. You are independent and
+fearless, and men of both parties listen to you. Surely, God has given
+you this great gift of oratory, if you will forgive my speaking so, to
+use only in a great cause. A grand organ in a cathedral is placed there
+to lift men’s thoughts to high resolves and purposes, not to make people
+dance. A street organ can do that. Now, here is a cause worthy of your
+great talents, worthy of a Daniel Webster, of a Henry Clay.”
+
+The senator frowned at the fire and shook his head doubtfully.
+
+“If they knew what I was down there for,” he asked, “wouldn’t they put
+me in prison too?”
+
+Arkwright laughed incredulously.
+
+“Certainly not,” he said; “you would go there as a private citizen, as
+a tourist to look on and observe. Spain is not seeking complications
+of that sort. She has troubles enough without imprisoning United States
+senators.”
+
+“Yes; but these fevers now,” persisted Stanton, “they’re no respecter
+of persons, I imagine. A United States senator is not above smallpox or
+cholera.”
+
+Arkwright shook his head impatiently and sighed.
+
+“It is difficult to make it clear to one who has not been there,” he
+said. “These people and soldiers are dying of fever because they are
+forced to live like pigs, and they are already sick with starvation. A
+healthy man like yourself would be in no more danger than you would be
+in walking through the wards of a New York hospital.”
+
+Senator Stanton turned in his armchair, and held up his hand
+impressively.
+
+“If I were to tell them the things you have told me,” he said warningly,
+“if I were to say I have seen such things--American property in flames,
+American interests ruined, and that five times as many women and
+children have died of fever and starvation in three months in Cuba as
+the Sultan has massacred in Armenia in three years--it would mean war
+with Spain.”
+
+“Well?” said Arkwright.
+
+Stanton shrugged his shoulders and sank back again in his chair.
+
+“It would either mean war,” Arkwright went on, “or it might mean the
+sending of the Red Cross army to Cuba. It went to Constantinople, five
+thousand miles away, to help the Armenian Christians--why has it waited
+three years to go eighty miles to feed and clothe the Cuban women and
+children? It is like sending help to a hungry peasant in Russia while a
+man dies on your doorstep.”
+
+“Well,” said the senator, rising, “I will let you know to-morrow.
+If it is the right thing to do, and if I can do it, of course it must
+be done. We start from Tampa, you say? I know the presidents of all
+of those roads and they’ll probably give me a private car for the trip
+down. Shall we take any newspaper men with us, or shall I wait until I
+get back and be interviewed? What do you think?”
+
+“I would wait until my return,” Arkwright answered, his eyes glowing
+with the hope the senator’s words had inspired, “and then speak to a
+mass-meeting here and in Boston and in Chicago. Three speeches will be
+enough. Before you have finished your last one the American warships
+will be in the harbor of Havana.”
+
+“Ah, youth, youth!” said the senator, smiling gravely, “it is no light
+responsibility to urge a country into war.”
+
+“It is no light responsibility,” Arkwright answered, “to know you
+have the chance to save the lives of thousands of little children and
+helpless women and to let the chance pass.”
+
+“Quite so, that is quite true,” said the senator. “Well, good-morning. I
+shall let you know to-morrow.”
+
+Young Livingstone went down in the elevator with Arkwright, and when
+they had reached the sidewalk stood regarding him for a moment in
+silence.
+
+“You mustn’t count too much on Stanton, you know,” he said kindly; “he
+has a way of disappointing people.”
+
+“Ah, he can never disappoint me,” Arkwright answered confidently, “no
+matter how much I expected. Besides, I have already heard him speak.”
+
+“I don’t mean that, I don’t mean he is disappointing as a speaker.
+Stanton is a great orator, I think. Most of those Southerners are, and
+he’s the only real orator I ever heard. But what I mean is, that he
+doesn’t go into things impulsively; he first considers himself, and then
+he considers every other side of the question before he commits himself
+to it. Before he launches out on a popular wave he tries to find out
+where it is going to land him. He likes the sort of popular wave that
+carries him along with it where every one can see him; he doesn’t fancy
+being hurled up on the beach with his mouth full of sand.”
+
+“You are saying that he is selfish, self-seeking?” Arkwright demanded
+with a challenge in his voice. “I thought you were his friend.”
+
+“Yes, he is selfish, and yes, I am his friend,” the young man answered,
+smiling; “at least, he seems willing to be mine. I am saying nothing
+against him that I have not said to him. If you’ll come back with me up
+the elevator I’ll tell him he’s a self-seeker and selfish, and with
+no thought above his own interests. He won’t mind. He’d say I cannot
+comprehend his motives. Why, you’ve only to look at his record. When the
+Venezuelan message came out he attacked the President and declared he
+was trying to make political capital and to drag us into war, and that
+what we wanted was arbitration; but when the President brought out the
+Arbitration Treaty he attacked that too in the Senate and destroyed
+it. Why? Not because he had convictions, but because the President had
+refused a foreign appointment to a friend of his in the South. He has
+been a free silver man for the last ten years, he comes from a free
+silver state, and the members of the legislature that elected him were
+all for silver, but this last election his Wall Street friends got hold
+of him and worked on his feelings, and he repudiated his party, his
+state, and his constituents and came out for gold.”
+
+“Well, but surely,” Arkwright objected, “that took courage? To own that
+for ten years you had been wrong, and to come out for the right at the
+last.”
+
+Livingstone stared and shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all a question of
+motives,” he said indifferently. “I don’t want to shatter your idol; I
+only want to save you from counting too much on him.”
+
+When Arkwright called on the morrow Senator Stanton was not at home,
+and the day following he was busy, and could give him only a brief
+interview. There were previous engagements and other difficulties in the
+way of his going which he had not foreseen, he said, and he feared he
+should have to postpone his visit to Cuba indefinitely. He asked if Mr.
+Arkwright would be so kind as to call again within a week; he would then
+be better able to give him a definite answer.
+
+Arkwright left the apartment with a sensation of such keen
+disappointment that it turned him ill and dizzy. He felt that the great
+purpose of his life was being played with and put aside. But he had not
+selfish resentment on his own account; he was only the more determined
+to persevere. He considered new arguments and framed new appeals; and
+one moment blamed himself bitterly for having foolishly discouraged the
+statesman by too vivid pictures of the horrors he might encounter, and
+the next, questioned if he had not been too practical and so failed
+because he had not made the terrible need of immediate help his sole
+argument. Every hour wasted in delay meant, as he knew, the sacrifice
+of many lives, and there were other, more sordid and more practical,
+reasons for speedy action. For his supply of money was running low and
+there was now barely enough remaining to carry him through the month of
+travel he had planned to take at Stanton’s side. What would happen to
+him when that momentous trip was over was of no consequence. He would
+have done the work as far as his small share in it lay, he would have
+set in motion a great power that was to move Congress and the people of
+the United States to action. If he could but do that, what became of him
+counted for nothing.
+
+But at the end of the week his fears and misgivings were scattered
+gloriously and a single line from the senator set his heart leaping and
+brought him to his knees in gratitude and thanksgiving. On returning one
+afternoon to the mean lodging into which he had moved to save his money,
+he found a telegram from Stanton and he tore it open trembling between
+hope and fear.
+
+“Have arranged to leave for Tampa with you Monday, at midnight” it read.
+“Call for me at ten o’clock same evening.--STANTON.”
+
+Arkwright read the message three times. There was a heavy, suffocating
+pressure at his heart as though it had ceased beating. He sank back
+limply upon the edge of his bed and clutching the piece of paper in his
+two hands spoke the words aloud triumphantly as though to assure himself
+that they were true. Then a flood of unspeakable relief, of happiness
+and gratitude, swept over him, and he turned and slipped to the floor,
+burying his face in the pillow, and wept out his thanks upon his knees.
+
+A man so deeply immersed in public affairs as was Stanton and with
+such a multiplicity of personal interests, could not prepare to absent
+himself for a month without his intention becoming known, and on the
+day when he was to start for Tampa the morning newspapers proclaimed the
+fact that he was about to visit Cuba. They gave to his mission all
+the importance and display that Arkwright had foretold. Some of the
+newspapers stated that he was going as a special commissioner of the
+President to study and report; others that he was acting in behalf
+of the Cuban legation in Washington and had plenipotentiary powers.
+Opposition organs suggested that he was acting in the interests of
+the sugar trust, and his own particular organ declared that it was his
+intention to free Cuba at the risk of his own freedom, safety, and even
+life.
+
+The Spanish minister in Washington sent a cable for publication to
+Madrid, stating that a distinguished American statesman was about
+to visit Cuba, to investigate, and, later, to deny the truth of the
+disgraceful libels published concerning the Spanish officials on the
+island by the papers of the United States. At the same time he cabled
+in cipher to the captain-general in Havana to see that the distinguished
+statesman was closely spied upon from the moment of his arrival until
+his departure, and to place on the “suspect” list all Americans and
+Cubans who ventured to give him any information.
+
+The afternoon papers enlarged on the importance of the visit and on the
+good that would surely come of it. They told that Senator Stanton had
+refused to be interviewed or to disclose the object of his journey. But
+it was enough, they said, that some one in authority was at last to seek
+out the truth, and added that no one would be listened to with greater
+respect than would the Southern senator. On this all the editorial
+writers were agreed.
+
+The day passed drearily for Arkwright. Early in the morning he packed
+his valise and paid his landlord, and for the remainder of the day
+walked the streets or sat in the hotel corridor waiting impatiently for
+each fresh edition of the papers. In them he read the signs of the great
+upheaval of popular feeling that was to restore peace and health and
+plenty to the island for which he had given his last three years of
+energy and life.
+
+He was trembling with excitement, as well as with the cold, when at ten
+o’clock precisely he stood at Senator Stanton’s door. He had forgotten
+to eat his dinner, and the warmth of the dimly lit hall and the odor of
+rich food which was wafted from an inner room touched his senses with
+tantalizing comfort.
+
+“The senator says you are to come this way, sir,” the servant directed.
+He took Arkwright’s valise from his hand and parted the heavy curtains
+that hid the dining-room, and Arkwright stepped in between them and then
+stopped in some embarrassment. He found himself in the presence of a
+number of gentlemen seated at a long dinner-table, who turned their
+heads as he entered and peered at him through the smoke that floated in
+light layers above the white cloth. The dinner had been served, but the
+senator’s guests still sat with their chairs pushed back from a table
+lighted by candles under yellow shades, and covered with beautiful
+flowers and with bottles of varied sizes in stands of quaint and
+intricate design. Senator Stanton’s tall figure showed dimly through the
+smoke, and his deep voice hailed Arkwright cheerily from the farther end
+of the room. “This way, Mr. Arkwright,” he said. “I have a chair waiting
+for you here.” He grasped Arkwright’s hand warmly and pulled him into
+the vacant place at his side. An elderly gentleman on Arkwright’s other
+side moved to make more room for him and shoved a liqueur glass toward
+him with a friendly nod and pointed at an open box of cigars. He was a
+fine-looking man, and Arkwright noticed that he was regarding him with
+a glance of the keenest interest. All of those at the table were men of
+twice Arkwright’s age, except Livingstone, whom he recognized and
+who nodded to him pleasantly and at the same time gave an order to a
+servant, pointing at Arkwright as he did so. Some of the gentlemen
+wore their business suits, and one opposite Arkwright was still in his
+overcoat, and held his hat in his hand. These latter seemed to have
+arrived after the dinner had begun, for they formed a second line
+back of those who had places at the table; they all seemed to know one
+another and were talking with much vivacity and interest.
+
+Stanton did not attempt to introduce Arkwright to his guests
+individually, but said: “Gentlemen, this is Mr. Arkwright, of whom I
+have been telling you, the young gentleman who has done such magnificent
+work for the cause of Cuba.” Those who caught Arkwright’s eye nodded to
+him, and others raised their glasses at him, but with a smile that
+he could not understand. It was as though they all knew something
+concerning him of which he was ignorant. He noted that the faces of some
+were strangely familiar, and he decided that he must have seen their
+portraits in the public prints. After he had introduced Arkwright, the
+senator drew his chair slightly away from him and turned in what seemed
+embarrassment to the man on his other side. The elderly gentleman next
+to Arkwright filled his glass, a servant placed a small cup of coffee at
+his elbow, and he lit a cigar and looked about him.
+
+“You must find this weather very trying after the tropics,” his neighbor
+said.
+
+Arkwright assented cordially. The brandy was flowing through his veins
+and warming him; he forgot that he was hungry, and the kind, interested
+glances of those about him set him at his ease. It was a propitious
+start, he thought, a pleasant leave-taking for the senator and himself,
+full of good will and good wishes.
+
+He turned toward Stanton and waited until he had ceased speaking.
+
+“The papers have begun well, haven’t they?” he asked, eagerly.
+
+He had spoken in a low voice, almost in a whisper, but those about the
+table seemed to have heard him, for there was silence instantly and when
+he glanced up he saw the eyes of all turned upon him and he noticed on
+their faces the same smile he had seen there when he entered.
+
+“Yes,” Stanton answered constrainedly. “Yes, I--” he lowered his voice,
+but the silence still continued. Stanton had his eyes fixed on the
+table, but now he frowned and half rose from his chair.
+
+“I want to speak with you, Arkwright,” he said. “Suppose we go into the
+next room. I’ll be back in a moment,” he added, nodding to the others.
+
+But the man on his right removed his cigar from his lips and said in an
+undertone, “No, sit down, stay where you are;” and the elderly gentleman
+at Arkwright’s side laid his hand detainingly on his arm. “Oh, you won’t
+take Mr. Arkwright away from us, Stanton?” he asked, smiling.
+
+Stanton shrugged his shoulders and sat down again, and there was a
+moment’s pause. It was broken by the man in the overcoat, who laughed.
+
+“He’s paying you a compliment, Mr. Arkwright,” he said. He pointed with
+his cigar to the gentleman at Arkwright’s side.
+
+“I don’t understand,” Arkwright answered doubtfully.
+
+“It’s a compliment to your eloquence--he’s afraid to leave you alone
+with the senator. Livingstone’s been telling us that you are a better
+talker than Stanton.” Arkwright turned a troubled countenance toward the
+men about the table, and then toward Livingstone, but that young man had
+his eyes fixed gravely on the glasses before him and did not raise them.
+
+Arkwright felt a sudden, unreasonable fear of the circle of
+strong-featured, serene and confident men about him. They seemed to
+be making him the subject of a jest, to be enjoying something among
+themselves of which he was in ignorance, but which concerned him
+closely. He turned a white face toward Stanton.
+
+“You don’t mean,” he began piteously, “that--that you are not going? Is
+that it--tell me--is that what you wanted to say?”
+
+Stanton shifted in his chair and muttered some words between his lips,
+then turned toward Arkwright and spoke quite clearly and distinctly.
+
+“I am very sorry, Mr. Arkwright,” he said, “but I am afraid I’ll have to
+disappoint you. Reasons I cannot now explain have arisen which make my
+going impossible--quite impossible,” he added firmly--“not only now, but
+later,” he went on quickly, as Arkwright was about to interrupt him.
+
+Arkwright made no second attempt to speak. He felt the muscles of his
+face working and the tears coming to his eyes, and to hide his weakness
+he twisted in his chair and sat staring ahead of him with his back
+turned to the table. He heard Livingstone’s voice break the silence with
+some hurried question, and immediately his embarrassment was hidden in a
+murmur of answers and the moving of glasses as the men shifted in their
+chairs and the laughter and talk went on as briskly as before. Arkwright
+saw a sideboard before him and a servant arranging some silver on one of
+the shelves. He watched the man do this with a concentrated interest
+as though the dull, numbed feeling in his brain caught at the trifle in
+order to put off, as long as possible, the consideration of the truth.
+
+And then beyond the sideboard and the tapestry on the wall above it, he
+saw the sun shining down upon the island of Cuba, he saw the royal palms
+waving and bending, the dusty columns of Spanish infantry crawling along
+the white roads and leaving blazing huts and smoking cane-fields in
+their wake; he saw skeletons of men and women seeking for food among the
+refuse of the street; he heard the order given to the firing squad, the
+splash of the bullets as they scattered the plaster on the prison wall,
+and he saw a kneeling figure pitch forward on its face, with a useless
+bandage tied across its sightless eyes.
+
+Senator Stanton brought him back with a sharp shake of the shoulder. He
+had also turned his back on the others, and was leaning forward with
+his elbows on his knees. He spoke rapidly, and in a voice only slightly
+raised above a whisper.
+
+“I am more than sorry, Arkwright,” he said earnestly. “You mustn’t blame
+me altogether. I have had a hard time of it this afternoon. I wanted to
+go. I really wanted to go. The thing appealed to me, it touched me, it
+seemed as if I owed it to myself to do it. But they were too many for
+me,” he added with a backward toss of his head toward the men around his
+table.
+
+“If the papers had not told on me I could have got well away,” he went
+on in an eager tone, “but as soon as they read of it, they came here
+straight from their offices. You know who they are, don’t you?”
+ he asked, and even in his earnestness there was an added touch of
+importance in his tone as he spoke the name of his party’s leader, of
+men who stood prominently in Wall Street and who were at the head of
+great trusts.
+
+“You see how it is,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. “They have
+enormous interests at stake. They said I would drag them into war, that
+I would disturb values, that the business interests of the country would
+suffer. I’m under obligations to most of them, they have advised me
+in financial matters, and they threatened--they threatened to make
+it unpleasant for me.” His voice hardened and he drew in his breath
+quickly, and laughed. “You wouldn’t understand if I were to tell you.
+It’s rather involved. And after all, they may be right, agitation may
+be bad for the country. And your party leader after all is your party
+leader, isn’t he, and if he says ‘no’ what are you to do? My sympathies
+are just as keen for these poor women and children as ever, but as these
+men say, ‘charity begins at home,’ and we mustn’t do anything to bring
+on war prices again, or to send stocks tumbling about our heads, must
+we?” He leaned back in his chair again and sighed. “Sympathy is an
+expensive luxury, I find,” he added.
+
+Arkwright rose stiffly and pushed Stanton away from him with his hand.
+He moved like a man coming out of a dream.
+
+“Don’t talk to me like that,” he said in a low voice. The noise about
+the table ended on the instant, but Arkwright did not notice that it had
+ceased. “You know I don’t understand that,” he went on; “what does it
+matter to me!” He put his hand up to the side of his face and held it
+there, looking down at Stanton. He had the dull, heavy look in his eyes
+of a man who has just come through an operation under some heavy drug.
+“‘Wall Street,’ ‘trusts,’ ‘party leaders,’” he repeated, “what are they
+to me? The words don’t reach me, they have lost their meaning, it is a
+language I have forgotten, thank God!” he added. He turned and moved his
+eyes around the table, scanning the faces of the men before him.
+
+“Yes, you are twelve to one,” he said at last, still speaking dully and
+in a low voice, as though he were talking to himself. “You have won a
+noble victory, gentlemen. I congratulate you. But I do not blame you, we
+are all selfish and self-seeking. I thought I was working only for Cuba,
+but I was working for myself, just as you are. I wanted to feel that it
+was I who had helped to bring relief to that plague-spot, that it was
+through my efforts the help had come. Yes, if he had done as I asked, I
+suppose I would have taken the credit.”
+
+He swayed slightly, and to steady himself caught at the back of his
+chair. But at the same moment his eyes glowed fiercely and he held
+himself erect again. He pointed with his finger at the circle of great
+men who sat looking up at him in curious silence.
+
+“You are like a ring of gamblers around a gaming table,” he cried
+wildly, “who see nothing but the green cloth and the wheel and the piles
+of money before them, who forget in watching the money rise and
+fall, that outside the sun is shining, that human beings are sick and
+suffering, that men are giving their lives for an idea, for a sentiment,
+for a flag. You are the money-changers in the temple of this great
+republic and the day will come, I pray to God, when you will be scourged
+and driven out with whips. Do you think you can form combines and deals
+that will cheat you into heaven? Can your ‘trusts’ save your souls--is
+‘Wall Street’ the strait and narrow road to salvation?”
+
+The men about the table leaned back and stared at Arkwright in as great
+amazement as though he had violently attempted an assault upon their
+pockets, or had suddenly gone mad in their presence. Some of them
+frowned, and others appeared not to have heard, and others smiled grimly
+and waited for him to continue as though they were spectators at a play.
+
+The political leader broke the silence with a low aside to Stanton.
+“Does the gentleman belong to the Salvation Army?” he asked.
+
+Arkwright whirled about and turned upon him fiercely.
+
+“Old gods give way to new gods,” he cried. “Here is your brother. I am
+speaking for him. Do you ever think of him? How dare you sneer at me?”
+ he cried. “You can crack your whip over that man’s head and turn him
+from what in his heart and conscience he knows is right; you can crack
+your whip over the men who call themselves free-born American citizens
+and who have made you their boss--sneer at them if you like, but you
+have no collar on my neck. If you are a leader, why don’t you lead your
+people to what is good and noble? Why do you stop this man in the work
+God sent him here to do? You would make a party hack of him, a political
+prostitute, something lower than the woman who walks the streets. She
+sells her body--this man is selling his soul.”
+
+He turned, trembling and quivering, and shook his finger above the
+upturned face of the senator.
+
+“What have you done with your talents, Stanton?” he cried. “What have
+you done with your talents?”
+
+The man in the overcoat struck the table before him with his fist so
+that the glasses rang.
+
+“By God,” he laughed, “I call him a better speaker than Stanton!
+Livingstone’s right, he IS better than Stanton--but he lacks Stanton’s
+knack of making himself popular,” he added. He looked around the table
+inviting approbation with a smile, but no one noticed him, nor spoke to
+break the silence.
+
+Arkwright heard the words dully and felt that he was being mocked. He
+covered his face with his hands and stood breathing brokenly; his body
+was still trembling with an excitement he could not master.
+
+Stanton rose from his chair and shook him by the shoulder. “Are you mad,
+Arkwright?” he cried. “You have no right to insult my guests or me. Be
+calm--control yourself.”
+
+“What does it matter what I say?” Arkwright went on desperately. “I am
+mad. Yes, that is it, I am mad. They have won and I have lost, and it
+drove me beside myself. I counted on you. I knew that no one else could
+let my people go. But I’ll not trouble you again. I wish you good-night,
+sir, and good-bye. If I have been unjust, you must forget it.”
+
+He turned sharply, but Stanton placed a detaining hand on his shoulder.
+“Wait,” he commanded querulously; “where are you going? Will you,
+still--?”
+
+Arkwright bowed his head. “Yes,” he answered. “I have but just time now
+to catch our train--my train, I mean.”
+
+He looked up at Stanton and taking his hand in both of his, drew the man
+toward him. All the wildness and intolerance in his manner had passed,
+and as he raised his eyes they were full of a firm resolve.
+
+“Come,” he said simply; “there is yet time. Leave these people behind
+you. What can you answer when they ask what have you done with your
+talents?”
+
+“Good God, Arkwright,” the senator exclaimed angrily, pulling his hand
+away; “don’t talk like a hymn-book, and don’t make another scene. What
+you ask is impossible. Tell me what I can do to help you in any other
+way, and--”
+
+“Come,” repeated the young man firmly.
+
+“The world may judge you by what you do to-night.”
+
+Stanton looked at the boy for a brief moment with a strained and eager
+scrutiny, and then turned away abruptly and shook his head in silence,
+and Arkwright passed around the table and on out of the room.
+
+A month later, as the Southern senator was passing through the
+reading-room of the Union Club, Livingstone beckoned to him, and handing
+him an afternoon paper pointed at a paragraph in silence.
+
+The paragraph was dated Sagua la Grande, and read:
+
+“The body of Henry Arkwright, an American civil engineer, was brought
+into Sagua to-day by a Spanish column. It was found lying in a road
+three miles beyond the line of forts. Arkwright was surprised by a
+guerilla force while attempting to make his way to the insurgent camp,
+and on resisting was shot. The body has been handed over to the American
+consul for interment. It is badly mutilated.”
+
+Stanton lowered the paper and stood staring out of the window at the
+falling snow and the cheery lights and bustling energy of the avenue.
+
+“Poor fellow,” he said, “he wanted so much to help them. And he didn’t
+accomplish anything, did he?”
+
+Livingstone stared at the older man and laughed shortly.
+
+“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “He died. Some of us only live.”
+
+
+
+
+THE VAGRANT
+
+His Excellency Sir Charles Greville, K. C. M. G., Governor of the
+Windless Islands, stood upon the veranda of Government House surveying
+the new day with critical and searching eyes. Sir Charles had been
+so long absolute monarch of the Windless Isles that he had assumed
+unconsciously a mental attitude of suzerainty over even the glittering
+waters of the Caribbean Sea, and the coral reefs under the waters,
+and the rainbow skies that floated above them. But on this particular
+morning not even the critical eye of the Governor could distinguish a
+single flaw in the tropical landscape before him.
+
+The lawn at his feet ran down to meet the dazzling waters of the bay,
+the blue waters of the bay ran to meet a great stretch of absinthe
+green, the green joined a fairy sky of pink and gold and saffron.
+Islands of coral floated on the sea of absinthe, and derelict clouds of
+mother-of-pearl swung low above them, starting from nowhere and going
+nowhere, but drifting beautifully, like giant soap-bubbles of light and
+color. Where the lawn touched the waters of the bay the cocoanut-palms
+reached their crooked lengths far up into the sunshine, and as the
+sea-breeze stirred their fronds they filled the hot air with whispers
+and murmurs like the fluttering of many fans. Nature smiled boldly upon
+the Governor, confident in her bountiful beauty, as though she said,
+“Surely you cannot but be pleased with me to-day.” And, as though in
+answer, the critical and searching glance of Sir Charles relaxed.
+
+The crunching of the gravel and the rattle of the sentry’s musket at
+salute recalled him to his high office and to the duties of the morning.
+He waved his hand, and, as though it were a wand, the sentry moved
+again, making his way to the kitchen-garden, and so around Government
+House and back to the lawn-tennis court, maintaining in his solitary
+pilgrimage the dignity of her Majesty’s representative, as well as her
+Majesty’s power over the Windless Isles.
+
+The Governor smiled slightly, with the ease of mind of one who finds
+all things good. Supreme authority, surroundings of endless beauty, the
+respectful, even humble, deference of his inferiors, and never even an
+occasional visit from a superior, had in four years lowered him into a
+bed of ease and self-satisfaction. He was cut off from the world, and
+yet of it. Each month there came, via Jamaica, the three weeks’ old copy
+of The Weekly Times; he subscribed to Mudie’s Colonial Library; and
+from the States he had imported an American lawn-mower, the mechanism of
+which no one as yet understood. Within his own borders he had created
+a healthy, orderly seaport out of what had been a sink of fever and a
+refuge for all the ne’er-do-wells and fugitive revolutionists of Central
+America.
+
+He knew, as he sat each evening on his veranda, looking across the
+bay, that in the world beyond the pink and gold sunset men were still
+panting, struggling, and starving; crises were rising and passing;
+strikes and panics, wars and the rumors of wars, swept from continent to
+continent; a plague crept through India; a filibuster with five hundred
+men at his back crossed an imaginary line and stirred the world from
+Cape Town to London; Emperors were crowned; the good Queen celebrated
+the longest reign; and a captain of artillery imprisoned in a swampy
+island in the South Atlantic caused two hemispheres to clamor for
+his rescue, and lit a race war that stretched from Algiers to the
+boulevards.
+
+And yet, at the Windless Isles, all these happenings seemed to Sir
+Charles like the morning’s memory of a dream. For these things never
+crossed the ring of the coral reefs; he saw them only as pictures in an
+illustrated paper a month old. And he was pleased to find that this
+was so. He was sufficient to himself, with his own responsibilities and
+social duties and public works.
+
+He was a man in authority, who said to others, “Come!” and “Go!” Under
+him were commissioners, and under the commissioners district inspectors
+and boards of education and of highways. For the better health of the
+colony he had planted trees that sucked the malaria from the air;
+for its better morals he had substituted as a Sunday amusement
+cricket-matches for cock-fights; and to keep it at peace he had created
+a local constabulary of native negroes, and had dressed them in the
+cast-off uniforms of London policemen. His handiwork was everywhere,
+and his interest was all sunk in his handiwork. The days passed gorgeous
+with sunshine, the nights breathed with beauty. It was an existence
+of leisurely occupation, and one that promised no change, and he was
+content.
+
+As it was Thursday, the Council met that morning, and some questions
+of moment to the colony were to be brought up for consideration.
+The question of the dog-tax was one which perplexed Sir Charles most
+particularly. The two Councillors elected by the people and the three
+appointed by the crown had disagreed as to this tax. Of the five hundred
+British subjects at the seaport, all but ten were owners of dogs, and it
+had occurred to Sassoon, the chemist, that a tax of half-a-crown a
+year on each of these dogs would meet the expense of extending the
+oyster-shell road to the new cricket-grounds. To this Snellgrove, who
+held the contract for the narrow-gauge railroad, agreed; but the three
+crown Councillors opposed the tax vigorously, on the ground that as
+scavengers alone the dogs were a boon to the colony and should be
+encouraged. The fact that each of these gentlemen owned not only one,
+but several dogs of high pedigree made their position one of great
+delicacy.
+
+There was no way by which the Governor could test the popular will
+in the matter, except through his secretary, Mr. Clarges, who, at the
+cricket-match between the local eleven and the officers and crew of
+H. M. S. Partridge, had been informed by the other owners of several
+fox-terriers that, in their opinion, the tax was a piece of “condemned
+tommy-rot.” From this the Governor judged that it would not prove a
+popular measure. As he paced the veranda, drawing deliberately on his
+cigar, and considering to which party he should give the weight of
+his final support, his thoughts were disturbed by the approach of a
+stranger, who advanced along the gravel walk, guarded on either side
+by one of the local constabulary. The stranger was young and of poor
+appearance. His bare feet were bound in a pair of the rope sandals worn
+by the natives, his clothing was of torn and soiled drill, and he fanned
+his face nonchalantly with a sombrero of battered and shapeless felt.
+
+Sir Charles halted in his walk, and holding his cigar behind his back,
+addressed himself to the sergeant.
+
+“A vagrant?” he asked.
+
+The words seemed to bear some amusing significance to the stranger, for
+his face lit instantly with a sweet and charming smile, and while he
+turned to hear the sergeant’s reply, he regarded him with a kindly and
+affectionate interest.
+
+“Yes, your Excellency.”
+
+The Governor turned to the prisoner.
+
+“Do you know the law of this colony regarding vagrants?”
+
+“I do not,” the young man answered. His tone was politely curious, and
+suggested that he would like to be further informed as to the local
+peculiarities of a foreign country.
+
+“After two weeks’ residence,” the Governor recited, impressively, “all
+able-bodied persons who will not work are put to work or deported. Have
+you made any effort to find work?”
+
+Again the young man smiled charmingly. He shook his head and laughed.
+“Oh dear no,” he said.
+
+The laugh struck the Governor as impertinent.
+
+“Then you must leave by the next mail-steamer, if you have any money to
+pay your passage, or, if you have no money, you must go to work on the
+roads. Have you any money?”
+
+“If I had, I wouldn’t--be a vagrant,” the young man answered. His voice
+was low and singularly sweet. It seemed to suit the indolence of his
+attitude and the lazy, inconsequent smile. “I called on our consular
+agent here,” he continued, leisurely, “to write a letter home for money,
+but he was disgracefully drunk, so I used his official note-paper to
+write to the State Department about him, instead.”
+
+The Governor’s deepest interest was aroused. The American consular agent
+was one of the severest trials he was forced to endure.
+
+“You are not a British subject, then? Ah, I see--and--er--your
+representative was unable to assist you?”
+
+“He was drunk,” the young man repeated, placidly. “He has been drunk
+ever since I have been here, particularly in the mornings.”
+
+He halted, as though the subject had lost interest for him, and gazed
+pleasantly at the sunny bay and up at the moving palms.
+
+“Then,” said the Governor, as though he had not been interrupted, “as
+you have no means of support, you will help support the colony until you
+can earn money to leave it. That will do, sergeant.”
+
+The young man placed his hat upon his head and turned to move away, but
+at the first step he swayed suddenly and caught at the negro’s shoulder,
+clasping his other hand across his eyes. The sergeant held him by the
+waist, and looked up at the Governor with some embarrassment.
+
+“The young gentleman has not been well, Sir Charles,” he said,
+apologetically.
+
+The stranger straightened himself up and smiled vaguely. “I’m all
+right,” he murmured. “Sun’s too hot.”
+
+“Sit down,” said the Governor.
+
+He observed the stranger more closely. He noticed now that beneath the
+tan his face was delicate and finely cut, and that his yellow hair clung
+closely to a well-formed head.
+
+“He seems faint. Has he had anything to eat?” asked the Governor.
+
+The sergeant grinned guiltily. “Yes, Sir Charles; we’ve been feeding him
+at the barracks. It’s fever, sir.”
+
+Sir Charles was not unacquainted with fallen gentlemen, “beach-combers,”
+ “remittance men,” and vagrants who had known better days, and there had
+been something winning in this vagrant’s smile, and, moreover, he had
+reported that thorn in his flesh, the consular agent, to the proper
+authorities.
+
+He conceived an interest in a young man who, though with naked feet, did
+not hesitate to correspond with his Minister of Foreign Affairs.
+
+“How long have you been ill?” he asked.
+
+The young man looked up from where he had sunk on the steps, and roused
+himself with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’ve had a touch
+of Chagres ever since I was on the Isthmus. I was at work there on the
+railroad.”
+
+“Did you come here from Colon?”
+
+“No; I worked up the Pacific side. I was clerking with Rossner Brothers
+at Amapala for a while, because I speak a little German, and then I
+footed it over to Puerto Cortez and got a job with the lottery people.
+They gave me twenty dollars a month gold for rolling the tickets, and
+I put it all in the drawing, and won as much as ten.” He laughed, and
+sitting erect, drew from his pocket a roll of thin green papers. “These
+are for the next drawing,” he said. “Have some?” he added. He held
+them towards the negro sergeant, who, under the eye of the Governor,
+resisted, and then spread the tickets on his knee like a hand at cards.
+“I stand to win a lot with these,” he said, with a cheerful sigh. “You
+see, until the list’s published I’m prospectively worth twenty
+thousand dollars. And,” he added, “I break stones in the sun.” He rose
+unsteadily, and saluted the Governor with a nod. “Good-morning, sir,” he
+said, “and thank you.”
+
+“Wait,” Sir Charles commanded. A new form of punishment had suggested
+itself, in which justice was tempered with mercy. “Can you work one of
+your American lawn-mowers?” he asked.
+
+The young man laughed delightedly. “I never tried,” he said, “but I’ve
+seen it done.”
+
+“If you’ve been ill, it would be murder to put you on the shell
+road.” The Governor’s dignity relaxed into a smile. “I don’t desire
+international complications,” he said. “Sergeant, take this--him--to the
+kitchen, and tell Corporal Mallon to give him that American lawn-mowing
+machine. Possibly he may understand its mechanism. Mallon only cuts
+holes in the turf with it.” And he waved his hand in dismissal, and as
+the three men moved away he buried himself again in the perplexities of
+the dog-tax.
+
+Ten minutes later the deliberations of the Council were disturbed by a
+loud and persistent rattle, like the whir of a Maxim gun, which proved,
+on investigation, to arise from the American lawn-mower. The vagrant was
+propelling it triumphantly across the lawn, and gazing down at it with
+the same fond pride with which a nursemaid leans over the perambulator
+to observe her lusty and gurgling charge.
+
+
+The Councillors had departed, Sir Charles was thinking of breakfast, the
+Maxim-like lawn-mower still irritated the silent hush of midday, when
+from the waters of the inner harbor there came suddenly the sharp report
+of a saluting gun and the rush of falling anchor-chains. There was
+still a week to pass before the mail-steamer should arrive, and H. M. S.
+Partridge had departed for Nassau. Besides these ships, no other vessel
+had skirted the buoys of the bay in eight long smiling months. Mr.
+Clarges, the secretary, with an effort to appear calm, and the orderly,
+suffocated with the news, entered through separate doors at the same
+instant.
+
+The secretary filed his report first. “A yacht’s just anchored in the
+bay, Sir Charles,” he said.
+
+The orderly’s face fell. He looked aggrieved. “An American yacht,” he
+corrected.
+
+“And much larger than the Partridge,” continued the secretary.
+
+The orderly took a hasty glance back over his shoulder. “She has her
+launch lowered already, sir,” he said.
+
+Outside the whir of the lawn-mower continued undisturbed. Sir Charles
+reached for his marine-glass, and the three men hurried to the veranda.
+
+“It looks like a man-of-war,” said Sir Charles. “No,” he added,
+adjusting the binocular; “she’s a yacht. She flies the New York Yacht
+Club pennant--now she’s showing the owner’s absent pennant. He must have
+left in the launch. He’s coming ashore now.”
+
+“He seems in a bit of a hurry,” growled Mr. Clarges.
+
+“Those Americans always--” murmured Sir Charles from behind the
+binocular. He did not quite know that he enjoyed this sudden onslaught
+upon the privacy of his harbor and port.
+
+It was in itself annoying, and he was further annoyed to find that it
+could in the least degree disturb his poise.
+
+The launch was growing instantly larger, like an express train
+approaching a station at full speed; her flags flew out as flat as
+pieces of painted tin; her bits of brass-work flashed like fire. Already
+the ends of the wharves were white with groups of natives.
+
+“You might think he was going to ram the town,” suggested the secretary.
+
+“Oh, I say,” he exclaimed, in remonstrance, “he’s making in for your
+private wharf.”
+
+The Governor was rearranging the focus of the glass with nervous
+fingers. “I believe,” he said, “no--yes--upon my word, there are--there
+are ladies in that launch!”
+
+“Ladies, sir!” The secretary threw a hasty glance at the binocular, but
+it was in immediate use.
+
+The clatter of the lawn-mower ceased suddenly, and the relief of its
+silence caused the Governor to lower his eyes. He saw the lawn-mower
+lying prostrate on the grass. The vagrant had vanished.
+
+There was a sharp tinkle of bells, and the launch slipped up to the
+wharf and halted as softly as a bicycle. A man in a yachting-suit jumped
+from her, and making some laughing speech to the two women in the stern,
+walked briskly across the lawn, taking a letter from his pocket as he
+came. Sir Charles awaited him gravely; the occupants of the launch had
+seen him, and it was too late to retreat.
+
+“Sir Charles Greville, I believe,” said the yachtsman. He bowed, and ran
+lightly up the steps. “I am Mr. Robert Collier, from New York,” he said.
+“I have a letter to you from your ambassador at Washington. If you’ll
+pardon me, I’ll present it in person. I had meant to leave it, but
+seeing you--” He paused, and gave the letter in his hand to Sir Charles,
+who waved him towards his library.
+
+Sir Charles scowled at the letter through his monocle, and then shook
+hands with his visitor. “I am very glad to see you, Mr. Collier,” he
+said. “He says here you are preparing a book on our colonies in the West
+Indies.” He tapped the letter with his monocle. “I am sure I shall be
+most happy to assist you with any information in my power.”
+
+“Well, I am writing a book--yes,” Mr. Collier observed, doubtfully,
+“but it’s a logbook. This trip I am on pleasure bent, and I also wish
+to consult with you on a personal matter. However, that can wait.” He
+glanced out of the windows to where the launch lay in the sun. “My wife
+came ashore with me, Sir Charles,” he said, “so that in case there was
+a Lady Greville, Mrs. Collier could call on her, and we could ask if you
+would waive etiquette and do us the honor to dine with us to-night on
+the yacht--that is, if you are not engaged.”
+
+Sir Charles smiled. “There is no Lady Greville,” he said, “and I
+personally do not think I am engaged elsewhere.” He paused in thought,
+as though to make quite sure he was not. “No,” he added, “I have no
+other engagement. I will come with pleasure.”
+
+Sir Charles rose and clapped his hands for the orderly. “Possibly the
+ladies will come up to the veranda?” he asked. “I cannot allow them to
+remain at the end of my wharf.” He turned, and gave directions to the
+orderly to bring limes and bottles of soda and ice, and led the way
+across the lawn.
+
+Mrs. Collier and her friend had not explored the grounds of Government
+House for over ten minutes before Sir Charles felt that many years ago
+he had personally arranged their visit, that he had known them for even
+a longer time, and that, now that they had finally arrived, they must
+never depart.
+
+To them there was apparently nothing on his domain which did not thrill
+with delightful interest. They were as eager as two children at a
+pantomime, and as unconscious. As a rule, Sir Charles had found it
+rather difficult to meet the women of his colony on a path which they
+were capable of treading intelligently. In fairness to them, he
+had always sought out some topic in which they could take an equal
+part--something connected with the conduct of children, or the better
+ventilation of the new school-house and chapel. But these new-comers did
+not require him to select topics of conversation; they did not even wait
+for him to finish those which he himself introduced. They flitted from
+one end of the garden to the other with the eagerness of two midshipmen
+on shore leave, and they found something to enjoy in what seemed to
+the Governor the most commonplace of things. The Zouave uniform of the
+sentry, the old Spanish cannon converted into peaceful gate-posts, the
+aviary with its screaming paroquets, the botanical station, and even the
+ice-machine were all objects of delight.
+
+On the other hand, the interior of the famous palace, which had been
+sent out complete from London, and which was wont to fill the wives of
+the colonials with awe or to reduce them to whispers, for some reason
+failed of its effect. But they said they “loved” the large gold V. R.’s
+on the back of the Councillors’ chairs, and they exclaimed aloud over
+the red leather despatch-boxes and the great seal of the colony, and the
+mysterious envelopes marked “On her Majesty’s service.”
+
+“Isn’t it too exciting, Florence?” demanded Mrs. Collier. “This is
+the table where Sir Charles sits and writes letters ‘on her Majesty’s
+service,’ and presses these buttons, and war-ships spring up in perfect
+shoals. Oh, Robert,” she sighed, “I do wish you had been a Governor!”
+
+The young lady called Florence stood looking down into the great
+arm-chair in front of the Governor’s table.
+
+“May I?” she asked. She slid fearlessly in between the oak arms of the
+chair and smiled about her. Afterwards Sir Charles remembered her as she
+appeared at that moment with the red leather of the chair behind her,
+with her gloved hands resting on the carved oak, and her head on one
+side, smiling up at him. She gazed with large eyes at the blue linen
+envelopes, the stiff documents in red tape, the tray of black sand, and
+the goose-quill pens.
+
+“I am now the Countess Zika,” she announced; “no, I am Diana of the
+Crossways, and I mean to discover a state secret and sell it to the
+Daily Telegraph. Sir Charles,” she demanded, “if I press this electric
+button is war declared anywhere, or what happens?”
+
+“That second button,” said Sir Charles, after deliberate scrutiny, “is
+the one which communicates with the pantry.”
+
+The Governor would not consider their returning to the yacht for
+luncheon.
+
+“You might decide to steam away as suddenly as you came,” he said,
+gallantly, “and I cannot take that chance. This is Bachelor’s Hall, so
+you must pardon my people if things do not go very smoothly.” He himself
+led them to the great guest-chamber, where there had not been a guest
+for many years, and he noticed, as though for the first time, that
+the halls through which they passed were bare, and that the floor was
+littered with unpacked boxes and gun-cases. He also observed for the
+first time that maps of the colony, with the coffee-plantations and
+mahogany belt marked in different inks, were not perhaps so decorative
+as pictures and mirrors and family portraits. And he could have wished
+that the native servants had not stared so admiringly at the guests,
+nor directed each other in such aggressive whispers. On those other
+occasions, when the wives of the Councillors came to the semi-annual
+dinners, the native servants had seemed adequate to all that was
+required of them. He recollected with a flush that in the town these
+semi-annual dinners were described as banquets. He wondered if to these
+visitors from the outside world it was all equally provincial.
+
+But their enjoyment was apparently unfeigned and generous. It was
+evident that they had known each other for many years, yet they received
+every remark that any of them made as though it had been pronounced by a
+new and interesting acquaintance. Sir Charles found it rather difficult
+to keep up with the talk across the table, they changed the subject
+so rapidly, and they half spoke of so many things without waiting to
+explain. He could not at once grasp the fact that people who had no
+other position in the world save that of observers were speaking so
+authoritatively of public men and public measures. He found, to his
+delight, that for the first time in several years he was not presiding
+at his own table, and that his guests seemed to feel no awe of him.
+
+“What’s the use of a yacht nowadays?” Collier was saying--“what’s the
+use of a yacht, when you can go to sleep in a wagon-lit at the Gare du
+Nord, and wake up at Vladivostok? And look at the time it saves; eleven
+days to Gib, six to Port Said, and fifteen to Colombo--there you are,
+only half-way around, and you’re already sixteen days behind the man in
+the wagon-lit.”
+
+“But nobody wants to go to Vladivostok,” said Miss Cameron, “or anywhere
+else in a wagon-lit. But with a yacht you can explore out-of-the-way
+places, and you meet new and interesting people. We wouldn’t have met
+Sir Charles if we had waited for a wagon-lit.” She bowed her head to
+the Governor, and he smiled with gratitude. He had lost Mr. Collier
+somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and he was glad she had brought them back
+to the Windless Isles once more.
+
+“And again I repeat that the answer to that is, ‘Why not? said the March
+Hare,’” remarked Mr. Collier, determinedly.
+
+The answer, as an answer, did not strike Sir Charles as a very good one.
+But the ladies seemed to comprehend, for Miss Cameron said: “Did I tell
+you about meeting him at Oxford just a few months before his death--at
+a children’s tea-party? He was so sweet and understanding with them!
+Two women tried to lionize him, and he ran away and played with the
+children. I was more glad to meet him than any one I can think of. Not
+as a personage, you know, but because I felt grateful to him.”
+
+“Yes, that way, distinctly,” said Mrs. Collier. “I should have felt that
+way towards Mrs. Ewing more than any one else.”
+
+“I know, ‘Jackanapes,’” remarked Collier, shortly; “a brutal assault
+upon the feelings, I say.”
+
+“Some one else said it before you, Robert,” Mrs. Collier commented,
+calmly. “Perhaps Sir Charles met him at Apia.” They all turned and
+looked at him. He wished he could say he had met him at Apia. He did
+not quite see how they had made their way from a children’s tea party
+at Oxford to the South Pacific islands, but he was anxious to join in
+somewhere with a clever observation. But they never seemed to settle in
+one place sufficiently long for him to recollect what he knew of it. He
+hoped they would get around to the west coast of Africa in time. He had
+been Governor of Sierra Leone for five years.
+
+His success that night at dinner on the yacht was far better. The others
+seemed a little tired after the hours of sight-seeing to which he had
+treated them, and they were content to listen. In the absence of Mr.
+Clarges, who knew them word by word, he felt free to tell his three
+stories of life at Sierra Leone. He took his time in the telling, and
+could congratulate himself that his efforts had never been more keenly
+appreciated. He felt that he was holding his own.
+
+The night was still and warm, and while the men lingered below at the
+table, the two women mounted to the deck and watched the lights of
+the town as they vanished one by one and left the moon in unchallenged
+possession of the harbor. For a long time Miss Cameron stood silent,
+looking out across the bay at the shore and the hills beyond. A fish
+splashed near them, and the sound of oars rose from the mist that
+floated above the water, until they were muffled in the distance. The
+palms along the shore glistened like silver, and overhead the Southern
+Cross shone white against a sky of purple. The silence deepened and
+continued for so long a time that Mrs. Collier felt its significance,
+and waited for the girl to end it.
+
+Miss Cameron raised her eyes to the stars and frowned. “I am not
+surprised that he is content to stay here,” she said. “Are you? It is so
+beautiful, so wonderfully beautiful.”
+
+For a moment Mrs. Collier made no answer. “Two years is a long time,
+Florence,” she said; “and he is all I have; he is not only my only
+brother, he is the only living soul who is related to me. That makes
+it harder.”
+
+The girl seemed to find some implied reproach in the speech, for she
+turned and looked at her friend closely. “Do you feel it is my fault,
+Alice?” she asked.
+
+The older woman shook her head. “How could it be your fault?” she
+answered. “If you couldn’t love him enough to marry him, you couldn’t,
+that’s all. But that is no reason why he should have hidden himself from
+all of us. Even if he could not stand being near you, caring as he did,
+he need not have treated me so. We have done all we can do, and Robert
+has been more than fine about it. He and his agents have written to
+every consul and business house in Central America, and I don’t believe
+there is a city that he hasn’t visited. He has sent him money and
+letters to every bank and to every post-office--”
+
+The girl raised her head quickly.
+
+“--but he never calls for either,” Mrs. Collier continued, “for I know
+that if he had read my letters he would have come home.”
+
+The girl lifted her head as though she were about to speak, and then
+turned and walked slowly away. After a few moments she returned, and
+stood, with her hands resting on the rail, looking down into the water.
+“I wrote him two letters,” she said. In the silence of the night her
+voice was unusually clear and distinct. “I--you make me wonder--if they
+ever reached him.”
+
+Mrs. Collier, with her eyes fixed upon the girl, rose slowly from her
+chair and came towards her. She reached out her hand and touched Miss
+Cameron on the arm.
+
+“Florence,” she said, in a whisper, “have you--”
+
+The girl raised her head slowly, and lowered it again. “Yes,” she
+answered; “I told him to come back--to come back to me. Alice,” she
+cried, “I--I begged him to come back!” She tossed her hands apart and
+again walked rapidly away, leaving the older woman standing motionless.
+
+A moment later, when Sir Charles and Mr. Collier stepped out upon the
+deck, they discovered the two women standing close together, two white,
+ghostly figures in the moonlight, and as they advanced towards them they
+saw Mrs. Collier take the girl for an instant in her arms.
+
+Sir Charles was asking Miss Cameron how long she thought an immigrant
+should be made to work for his freehold allotment, when Mr. Collier and
+his wife rose at the same moment and departed on separate errands. They
+met most mysteriously in the shadow of the wheel-house.
+
+“What is it? Is anything wrong with Florence?” Collier asked, anxiously.
+“Not homesick, is she?”
+
+Mrs. Collier put her hands on her husband’s shoulders and shook her
+head.
+
+“Wrong? No, thank Heaven! it’s as right as right can be!” she cried.
+“She’s written to him to come back, but he’s never answered, and so--and
+now it’s all right.”
+
+Mr. Collier gazed blankly at his wife’s upturned face. “Well, I don’t
+see that,” he remonstrated. “What’s the use of her being in love with
+him now when he can’t be found? What? Why didn’t she love him two years
+ago when he was where you could get at him--at her house, for instance.
+He was there most of his time. She would have saved a lot of trouble.
+However,” he added, energetically, “this makes it absolutely necessary
+to find that young man and bring him to his senses. We’ll search this
+place for the next few days, and then we’ll try the mainland again. I
+think I’ll offer a reward for him, and have it printed in Spanish, and
+paste it up in all the plazas. We might add a line in English, ‘She has
+changed her mind.’ That would bring him home, wouldn’t it?”
+
+“Don’t be unfeeling, Robert,” said Mrs. Collier.
+
+Her husband raised his eyes appealingly, and addressed himself to the
+moon. “I ask you now,” he complained, “is that fair to a man who
+has spent six months on muleback trying to round up a prodigal
+brother-in-law?”
+
+That same evening, after the ladies had gone below, Mr. Collier asked
+Sir Charles to assist him in his search for his wife’s brother, and
+Sir Charles heartily promised his most active co-operation. There were
+several Americans at work in the interior, he said, as overseers on
+the coffee-plantations. It was possible that the runaway might be among
+them. It was only that morning, Sir Charles remembered, that an American
+had been at work “repairing his lawn-mower,” as he considerately
+expressed it. He would send for him on the morrow.
+
+But on the morrow the slave of the lawn-mower was reported on the list
+of prisoners as “missing,” and Corporal Mallon was grieved, but refused
+to consider himself responsible. Sir Charles himself had allowed the
+vagrant unusual freedom, and the vagrant had taken advantage of it, and
+probably escaped to the hills, or up the river to the logwood camp.
+
+“Telegraph a description of him to Inspector Garrett,” Sir Charles
+directed, “and to the heads of all up stations. And when he returns,
+bring him to me.”
+
+So great was his zeal that Sir Charles further offered to join Mr.
+Collier in his search among the outlying plantations; but Mr. Collier
+preferred to work alone. He accordingly set out at once, armed with
+letters to the different district inspectors, and in his absence
+delegated to Sir Charles the pleasant duty of caring for the wants of
+Miss Cameron and his wife. Sir Charles regarded the latter as deserving
+of all sympathy, for Mr. Collier, in his efforts to conceal the fact
+from the Governor that Florence Cameron was responsible, or in any
+way concerned, in the disappearance of the missing man, had been too
+mysterious. Sir Charles was convinced that the fugitive had swindled his
+brother-in-law and stolen his sister’s jewels.
+
+The days which followed were to the Governor days and nights of strange
+discoveries. He recognized that the missionaries from the great outside
+world had invaded his shores and disturbed his gods and temples. Their
+religion of progress and activity filled him with doubt and unrest.
+
+“In this century,” Mr. Collier had declared, “nothing can stand still.
+It’s the same with a corporation, or a country, or a man. We must either
+march ahead or fall out. We can’t mark time. What?”
+
+“Exactly--certainly not,” Sir Charles had answered. But in his heart
+he knew that he himself had been marking time under these soft tropical
+skies while the world was pushing forward. The thought had not disturbed
+him before. Now he felt guilty. He conceived a sudden intolerance, if
+not contempt, for the little village of whitewashed houses, for the
+rafts of mahogany and of logwood that bumped against the pier-heads, for
+the sacks of coffee piled high like barricades under the corrugated zinc
+sheds along the wharf. Each season it had been his pride to note the
+increase in these exports. The development of the resources of his
+colony had been a work in which he had felt that the Colonial Secretary
+took an immediate interest. He had believed that he was one of the
+important wheels of the machinery which moved the British Empire: and
+now, in a day, he was undeceived. It was forced upon him that to the
+eyes of the outside world he was only a greengrocer operating on a large
+scale; he provided the British public with coffee for its breakfast,
+with drugs for its stomach, and with strange woods for its
+dining-room furniture and walking-sticks. He combated this ignominious
+characterization of his position indignantly. The new arrivals certainly
+gave him no hint that they considered him so lightly. This thought
+greatly comforted him, for he felt that in some way he was summoning
+to his aid all of his assets and resources to meet an expert and final
+valuation. As he ranged them before him he was disturbed and happy to
+find that the value he placed upon them was the value they would have
+in the eyes of a young girl--not a girl of the shy, mother-obeying,
+man-worshipping English type, but a girl such as Miss Cameron seemed to
+be, a girl who could understand what you were trying to say before you
+said it, who could take an interest in rates of exchange and preside
+at a dinner table, who was charmingly feminine and clever, and who was
+respectful of herself and of others. In fact, he decided, with a flush,
+that Miss Cameron herself was the young girl he had in his mind.
+
+“Why not?” he asked.
+
+The question came to him in his room, the sixth night of their visit,
+and he strode over to the long pier-glass and stood studying himself
+critically for the first time in years. He was still a fine-looking,
+well-kept man. His hair was thin, but that fact did not show; and his
+waist was lost, but riding and tennis would set that right. He had means
+outside of his official salary, and there was the title, such as it was.
+Lady Greville the wife of the birthday knight sounded as well as Lady
+Greville the marchioness. And Americans cared for these things. He
+doubted whether this particular American would do so, but he was adding
+up all he had to offer, and that was one of the assets. He was sure
+she would not be content to remain mistress of the Windless Isles. Nor,
+indeed, did he longer care to be master there, now that he had inhaled
+this quick, stirring breath from the outer world. He would resign, and
+return and mix with the world again. He would enter Parliament; a man
+so well acquainted as himself with the Gold Coast of Africa and with
+the trade of the West Indies must always be of value in the Lower House.
+This value would be recognized, no doubt, and he would become at
+first an Under-Secretary for the Colonies, and then, in time, Colonial
+Secretary and a cabinet minister. She would like that, he thought. And
+after that place had been reached, all things were possible. For years
+he had not dreamed such dreams--not since he had been a clerk in the
+Foreign Office. They seemed just as possible now as they had seemed real
+then, and just as near. He felt it was all absolutely in his own hands.
+
+He descended to the dining-room with the air of a man who already felt
+the cares of high responsibility upon his shoulders. His head was erect
+and his chest thrown forward. He was ten years younger; his manner was
+alert, assured, and gracious. As he passed through the halls he was
+impatient of the familiar settings of Government House; they seemed
+to him like the furnishings of a hotel where he had paid his bill, and
+where his luggage was lying strapped for departure in the hallway.
+
+In his library he saw on his table a number of papers lying open waiting
+for his signature, the dog-tax among the others. He smiled to remember
+how important it had seemed to him in the past--in that past of
+indolence and easy content. Now he was on fire to put this rekindled
+ambition to work, to tell the woman who had lighted it that it was all
+from her and for her, that without her he had existed, that now he had
+begun to live.
+
+They had never found him so delighful{sic} as he appeared that night.
+He was like a man on the eve of a holiday. He made a jest of his past
+efforts; he made them see, as he now saw it for the first time, that
+side of the life of the Windless Isles which was narrow and petty,
+even ridiculous. He talked of big men in a big way; he criticised, and
+expounded, and advanced his own theories of government and the proper
+control of an empire.
+
+Collier, who had returned from his unsuccessful search of the
+plantations, shook his head.
+
+“It’s a pity you are not in London now,” he said, sincerely. “They need
+some one there who has been on the spot. They can’t direct the colonies
+from what they know of them in Whitehall.”
+
+Sir Charles fingered the dinner cloth nervously, and when he spoke,
+fixed his eyes anxiously upon Miss Cameron.
+
+“Do you know,” he said, “I have been thinking of doing that very thing,
+of resigning my post here and going back, entering Parliament, and all
+the rest of it.”
+
+His declaration met with a unanimous chorus of delight. Miss Cameron
+nodded her head with eager approval.
+
+“Yes, if I were a man, that is where I should wish to be,” she said, “at
+the heart of it. Why, whatever you say in the House of Commons is heard
+all over the world the next morning.”
+
+Sir Charles felt the blood tingle in his pulses. He had not been so
+stirred in years. Her words ran to his head like wine.
+
+Mr. Collier raised his glass.
+
+“Here’s to our next meeting,” he said, “on the terrace of the House of
+Commons.”
+
+But Miss Cameron interrupted. “No; to the Colonial Secretary,” she
+amended.
+
+“Oh yes,” they assented, rising, and so drank his health, smiling down
+upon him with kind, friendly glances and good-will.
+
+“To the Colonial Secretary,” they said. Sir Charles clasped the arms
+of his chair tightly with his hands; his eyes were half closed, and his
+lips pressed into a grim, confident smile. He felt that a single word
+from her would make all that they suggested possible. If she cared for
+such things, they were hers; he had them to give; they were ready lying
+at her feet. He knew that the power had always been with him, lying
+dormant in his heart and brain. It had only waited for the touch of the
+Princess to wake it into life.
+
+The American visitors were to sail for the mainland the next day, but he
+had come to know them so well in the brief period of their visit that he
+felt he dared speak to her that same night. At least he could give
+her some word that would keep him in her mind until they met again in
+London, or until she had considered her answer. He could not expect her
+to answer at once. She could take much time. What else had he to do now
+but to wait for her answer? It was now all that made life.
+
+Collier and his wife had left the veranda and had crossed the lawn
+towards the water’s edge. The moonlight fell full upon them with all the
+splendor of the tropics, and lit the night with a brilliant, dazzling
+radiance. From where Miss Cameron sat on the veranda in the shadow, Sir
+Charles could see only the white outline of her figure and the indolent
+movement of her fan. Collier had left his wife and was returning slowly
+towards the step. Sir Charles felt that if he meant to speak he must
+speak now, and quickly. He rose and placed himself beside her in the
+shadow, and the girl turned her head inquiringly and looked up at him.
+
+But on the instant the hush of the night was broken by a sharp
+challenge, and the sound of men’s voices raised in anger; there was the
+noise of a struggle on the gravel, and from the corner of the house the
+two sentries came running, dragging between them a slight figure that
+fought and wrestled to be free.
+
+Sir Charles exclaimed with indignant impatience, and turning, strode
+quickly to the head of the steps.
+
+“What does this mean?” he demanded. “What are you doing with that man?
+Why did you bring him here?”
+
+As the soldiers straightened to attention, their prisoner ceased to
+struggle, and stood with his head bent on his chest. His sombrero was
+pulled down low across his forehead.
+
+“He was crawling through the bushes, Sir Charles,” the soldier panted,
+“watching that gentleman, sir,”--he nodded over his shoulder towards
+Collier. “I challenged, and he jumped to run, and we collared him. He
+resisted, Sir Charles.”
+
+The mind of the Governor was concerned with other matters than
+trespassers.
+
+“Well, take him to the barracks, then,” he said. “Report to me in the
+morning. That will do.”
+
+The prisoner wheeled eagerly, without further show of resistance, and
+the soldiers closed in on him on either side. But as the three men moved
+away together, their faces, which had been in shadow, were now turned
+towards Mr. Collier, who was advancing leisurely, and with silent
+footsteps, across the grass. He met them face to face, and as he did so
+the prisoner sprang back and threw out his arms in front of him, with
+the gesture of a man who entreats silence. Mr. Collier halted as though
+struck to stone, and the two men confronted each other without moving.
+
+“Good God!” Mr. Collier whispered.
+
+He turned stiffly and slowly, as though in a trance, and beckoned to his
+wife, who had followed him.
+
+“Alice!” he called. He stepped backwards towards her, and taking her
+hand in one of his, drew her towards the prisoner. “Here he is!” he
+said.
+
+They heard her cry “Henry!” with the fierceness of a call for help,
+and saw her rush forward and stumble into the arms of the prisoner, and
+their two heads were bent close together.
+
+Collier ran up the steps and explained breathlessly.
+
+“And now,” he gasped, in conclusion, “what’s to be done? What’s he
+arrested for? Is it bailable? What?”
+
+“Good heavens!” exclaimed Sir Charles, miserably. “It is my fault
+entirely. I assure you I had no idea. How could I? But I should have
+known, I should have guessed it.” He dismissed the sentries with a
+gesture. “That will do,” he said. “Return to your posts.”
+
+Mr. Collier laughed with relief.
+
+“Then it is not serious?” he asked.
+
+“He--he had no money, that was all,” exclaimed Sir Charles. “Serious?
+Certainly not. Upon my word, I’m sorry--”
+
+The young man had released himself from his sister’s embrace, and was
+coming towards them; and Sir Charles, eager to redeem himself, advanced
+hurriedly to greet him. But the young man did not see him; he was
+looking past him up the steps to where Miss Cameron stood in the shadow.
+
+Sir Charles hesitated and drew back. The young man stopped at the foot
+of the steps, and stood with his head raised, staring up at the white
+figure of the girl, who came slowly forward.
+
+It was forced upon Sir Charles that in spite of the fact that the young
+man before them had but just then been rescued from arrest, that in
+spite of his mean garments and ragged sandals, something about him--the
+glamour that surrounds the prodigal, or possibly the moonlight--gave him
+an air of great dignity and distinction.
+
+As Miss Cameron descended the stairs, Sir Charles recognized for the
+first time that the young man was remarkably handsome, and he resented
+it. It hurt him, as did also the prodigal’s youth and his assured
+bearing. He felt a sudden sinking fear, a weakening of all his vital
+forces, and he drew in his breath slowly and deeply. But no one noticed
+him; they were looking at the tall figure of the prodigal, standing with
+his hat at his hip and his head thrown back, holding the girl with his
+eyes.
+
+Collier touched Sir Charles on the arm, and nodded his head towards the
+library. “Come,” he whispered, “let us old people leave them together.
+They’ve a good deal to say.” Sir Charles obeyed in silence, and crossing
+the library to the great oak chair, seated himself and leaned wearily
+on the table before him. He picked up one of the goose quills and began
+separating it into little pieces. Mr. Collier was pacing up and down,
+biting excitedly on the end of his cigar. “Well, this has certainly been
+a great night,” he said. “And it is all due to you, Sir Charles--all due
+to you. Yes, they have you to thank for it.”
+
+“They?” said Sir Charles. He knew that it had to come. He wanted the man
+to strike quickly.
+
+“They? Yes--Florence Cameron and Henry,” Mr. Collier answered. “Henry
+went away because she wouldn’t marry him. She didn’t care for him then,
+but afterwards she cared. Now they’re reunited,--and so they’re happy;
+and my wife is more than happy, and I won’t have to bother any more; and
+it’s all right, and all through you.”
+
+“I am glad,” said Sir Charles. There was a long pause, which the men,
+each deep in his own thoughts, did not notice.
+
+“You will be leaving now, I suppose?” Sir Charles asked. He was looking
+down, examining the broken pen in his hand.
+
+Mr. Collier stopped in his walk and considered. “Yes, I suppose they
+will want to get back,” he said. “I shall be sorry myself. And you? What
+will you do?”
+
+Sir Charles started slightly. He had not yet thought what he would do.
+His eyes wandered over the neglected work, which had accumulated on the
+desk before him. Only an hour before he had thought of it as petty and
+little, as something unworthy of his energy. Since that time what change
+had taken place in him?
+
+For him everything had changed, he answered, but in him there had been
+no change; and if this thing which the girl had brought into his life
+had meant the best in life, it must always mean that. She had been an
+inspiration; she must remain his spring of action. Was he a slave, he
+asked himself, that he should rebel? Was he a boy, that he could turn
+his love to aught but the best account? He must remember her not as the
+woman who had crushed his spirit, but as she who had helped him, who had
+lifted him up to something better and finer. He would make sacrifice in
+her name; it would be in her name that he would rise to high places and
+accomplish much good.
+
+She would not know this, but he would know.
+
+He rose and brushed the papers away from him with an impatient sweep of
+the hand.
+
+“I shall follow out the plan of which I spoke at dinner,” he answered.
+“I shall resign here, and return home and enter Parliament.”
+
+Mr. Collier laughed admiringly. “I love the way you English take your
+share of public life,” he said, “the way you spend yourselves for your
+country, and give your brains, your lives, everything you have--all for
+the empire.”
+
+Through the open window Sir Charles saw Miss Cameron half hidden by the
+vines of the veranda. The moonlight falling about her transformed her
+into a figure which was ideal, mysterious, and elusive, like a woman in
+a dream. He shook his head wearily.
+
+“For the empire?” he asked.
+
+
+
+
+THE LAST RIDE TOGETHER
+
+A SKETCH CONTAINING THREE POINTS OF VIEW
+
+What the Poet Laureate wrote.
+
+    “There are girls in the Gold Reef City
+        There are mothers and children too!
+    And they cry ‘Hurry up for pity!’
+        So what can a brave man do?
+
+    “I suppose we were wrong, were mad men,
+        Still I think at the Judgment Day,
+    When God sifts the good from the bad men,
+        There’ll be something more to say.”
+
+What more the Lord Chief Justice found to say.
+
+“In this case we know the immediate consequence of your crime. It has
+been the loss of human life, it has been the disturbance of public
+peace, it has been the creation of a certain sense of distrust of public
+professions and of public faith.... The sentence of this Court therefore
+is that, as to you, Leander Starr Jameson, you be confined for a period
+of fifteen months without hard labor; that you, Sir John Willoughby,
+have ten months’ imprisonment; and that you, etc., etc.”
+
+London Times, July 29th.
+
+
+What the Hon. “Reggie” Blake thought about it.
+
+“H. M. HOLLOWAY PRISON,
+
+“July 28th.
+
+“I am going to keep a diary while I am in prison, that is, if they will
+let me. I never kept one before because I hadn’t the time; when I was
+home on leave there was too much going on to bother about it, and when
+I was up country I always came back after a day’s riding so tired that I
+was too sleepy to write anything. And now that I have the time, I won’t
+have anything to write about. I fancy that more things happened to me
+to-day than are likely to happen again for the next eight months, so I
+will make this day take up as much room in the diary as it can. I am
+writing this on the back of the paper the Warder uses for his official
+reports, while he is hunting up cells to put us in. We came down on him
+rather unexpectedly and he is nervous.
+
+“Of course, I had prepared myself for this after a fashion, but now I
+see that somehow I never really did think I would be in here, and all
+my friends outside, and everything going on just the same as though I
+wasn’t alive somewhere. It’s like telling yourself that your horse can’t
+possibly pull off a race, so that you won’t mind so much if he doesn’t,
+but you always feel just as bad when he comes in a loser. A man can’t
+fool himself into thinking one way when he is hoping the other.
+
+“But I am glad it is over, and settled. It was a great bore not knowing
+your luck and having the thing hanging over your head every morning
+when you woke up. Indeed it was quite a relief when the counsel got all
+through arguing over those proclamations, and the Chief Justice summed
+up, but I nearly went to sleep when I found he was going all over it
+again to the jury. I didn’t understand about those proclamations myself
+and I’ll lay a fiver the jury didn’t either. The Colonel said he didn’t.
+I couldn’t keep my mind on what Russell was explaining about, and I
+got to thinking how much old Justice Hawkins looked like the counsel in
+‘Alice in Wonderland’ when they tried the knave of spades for stealing
+the tarts. He had just the same sort of a beak and the same sort of a
+wig, and I wondered why he had his wig powdered and the others didn’t.
+Pollock’s wig had a hole in the top; you could see it when he bent over
+to take notes. He was always taking notes. I don’t believe he understood
+about those proclamations either; he never seemed to listen, anyway.
+
+“The Chief Justice certainly didn’t love us very much, that’s sure; and
+he wasn’t going to let anybody else love us either. I felt quite the
+Christian Martyr when Sir Edward was speaking in defence. He made it
+sound as though we were all a lot of Adelphi heroes and ought to be
+promoted and have medals, but when Lord Russell started in to read the
+Riot Act at us I began to believe that hanging was too good for me. I’m
+sure I never knew I was disturbing the peace of nations; it seems like
+such a large order for a subaltern.
+
+“But the worst was when they made us stand up before all those people to
+be sentenced. I must say I felt shaky about the knees then, not because
+I was afraid of what was coming, but because it was the first time I
+had ever been pointed out before people, and made to feel ashamed. And
+having those girls there, too, looking at one. That wasn’t just fair to
+us. It made me feel about ten years old, and I remembered how the Head
+Master used to call me to his desk and say, ‘Blake Senior, two pages of
+Horace and keep in bounds for a week.’ And then I heard our names and
+the months, and my name and ‘eight months’ imprisonment,’ and there was
+a bustle and murmur and the tipstaves cried, ‘Order in the Court,’ and
+the Judges stood up and shook out their big red skirts as though they
+were shaking off the contamination of our presence and rustled away,
+and I sat down, wondering how long eight months was, and wishing they’d
+given me as much as they gave Jameson.
+
+“They put us in a room together then, and our counsel said how sorry
+they were, and shook hands, and went off to dinner and left us. I
+thought they might have waited with us and been a little late for dinner
+just that once; but no one waited except a lot of costers outside whom
+we did not know. It was eight o’clock and still quite light when we came
+out, and there was a line of four-wheelers and a hansom ready for us.
+I’d been hoping they would take us out by the Strand entrance, just
+because I’d like to have seen it again, but they marched us instead
+through the main quadrangle--a beastly, gloomy courtyard that echoed,
+and out, into Carey Street--such a dirty, gloomy street. The costers and
+clerks set up a sort of a cheer when we came out, and one of them cried,
+‘God bless you, sir,’ to the doctor, but I was sorry they cheered. It
+seemed like kicking against the umpire’s decision. The Colonel and I got
+into a hansom together and we trotted off into Chancery Lane and turned
+into Holborn. Most of the shops were closed, and the streets looked
+empty, but there was a lighted clock-face over Mooney’s public-house,
+and the hands stood at a quarter past eight. I didn’t know where
+Holloway was, and was hoping they would have to take us through some
+decent streets to reach it; but we didn’t see a part of the city that
+meant anything to me, or that I would choose to travel through again.
+
+“Neither of us talked, and I imagined that the people in the streets
+knew we were going to prison, and I kept my eyes on the enamel card on
+the back of the apron. I suppose I read, ‘Two-wheeled hackney carriage:
+if hired and discharged within the four-mile limit, 1s.’ at least a
+hundred times. I got more sensible after a bit, and when we had turned
+into Gray’s Inn Road I looked up and saw a tram in front of us with
+‘Holloway Road and King’s X,’ painted on the steps, and the Colonel saw
+it about the same time I fancy, for we each looked at the other, and the
+Colonel raised his eyebrows. It showed us that at least the cabman knew
+where we were going.
+
+“‘They might have taken us for a turn through the West End first, I
+think,’ the Colonel said. ‘I’d like to have had a look around, wouldn’t
+you? This isn’t a cheerful neighborhood, is it?’
+
+“There were a lot of children playing in St. Andrew’s Gardens, and a
+crowd of them ran out just as we passed, shrieking and laughing over
+nothing, the way kiddies do, and that was about the only pleasant sight
+in the ride. I had quite a turn when we came to the New Hospital just
+beyond, for I thought it was Holloway, and it came over me what eight
+months in such a place meant. I believe if I hadn’t pulled myself up
+sharp, I’d have jumped out into the street and run away. It didn’t last
+more than a few seconds, but I don’t want any more like them. I was
+afraid, afraid--there’s no use pretending it was anything else. I was in
+a dumb, silly funk, and I turned sick inside and shook, as I have seen
+a horse shake when he shies at nothing and sweats and trembles down his
+sides.
+
+“During those few seconds it seemed to be more than I could stand; I
+felt sure that I couldn’t do it--that I’d go mad if they tried to force
+me. The idea was so terrible--of not being master over your own legs and
+arms, to have your flesh and blood and what brains God gave you buried
+alive in stone walls as though they were in a safe with a time-lock on
+the door set for eight months ahead. There’s nothing to be afraid of in
+a stone wall really, but it’s the idea of the thing--of not being free
+to move about, especially to a chap that has always lived in the open as
+I have, and has had men under him. It was no wonder I was in a funk for
+a minute. I’ll bet a fiver the others were, too, if they’ll only own up
+to it. I don’t mean for long, but just when the idea first laid hold of
+them. Anyway, it was a good lesson to me, and if I catch myself thinking
+of it again I’ll whistle, or talk to myself out loud and think of
+something cheerful. And I don’t mean to be one of those chaps who spends
+his time in jail counting the stones in his cell, or training spiders,
+or measuring how many of his steps make a mile, for madness lies that
+way. I mean to sit tight and think of all the good times I’ve had, and
+go over them in my mind very slowly, so as to make them last longer and
+remember who was there and what we said, and the jokes and all that;
+I’ll go over house-parties I have been on, and the times I’ve had in the
+Riviera, and scouting parties Dr. Jim led up country when we were taking
+Matabele Land.
+
+“They say that if you’re good here they give you things to read after a
+month or two, and then I can read up all those instructive books that a
+fellow never does read until he’s laid up in bed.
+
+“But that’s crowding ahead a bit; I must keep to what happened to-day.
+We struck York Road at the back of the Great Western Terminus, and I
+half hoped we might see some chap we knew coming or going away: I would
+like to have waved my hand to him. It would have been fun to have seen
+his surprise the next morning when he read in the paper that he had
+been bowing to jail-birds, and then I would like to have cheated the
+tipstaves out of just one more friendly good-by. I wanted to say good-by
+to somebody, but I really couldn’t feel sorry to see the last of any
+one of those we passed in the streets--they were such a dirty,
+unhappy-looking lot, and the railroad wall ran on forever apparently,
+and we might have been in a foreign country for all we knew of it. There
+were just sooty gray brick tenements and gas-works on one side, and
+the railroad cutting on the other, and semaphores and telegraph wires
+overhead, and smoke and grime everywhere, it looked exactly like the
+sort of street that should lead to a prison, and it seemed a pity to
+take a smart hansom and a good cob into it.
+
+“It was just a bit different from our last ride together--when we rode
+through the night from Krugers-Dorp with hundreds of horses’ hoofs
+pounding on the soft veldt behind us, and the carbines clanking against
+the stirrups as they swung on the sling belts. We were being hunted
+then, harassed on either side, scurrying for our lives like the Derby
+Dog in a race-track when every one hoots him and no man steps out to
+help--we were sick for sleep, sick for food, lashed by the rain, and we
+knew that we were beaten; but we were free still, and under open skies
+with the derricks of the Rand rising like gallows on our left, and
+Johannesburg only fifteen miles away.”
+
+
+
+
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