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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Bye-Ways, by Robert Smythe Hichens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Bye-Ways
+
+
+Author: Robert Smythe Hichens
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 1, 2010  [eBook #33040]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BYE-WAYS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, S. D., and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+BYE-WAYS
+
+by
+
+ROBERT HICHENS
+
+Author of "The Garden of Allah,"
+"Bella Donna," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead and Company
+1914
+
+Copyright, 1897,
+By Dodd, Mead and Company.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                           PAGE
+
+  THE CHARMER OF SNAKES                                       3
+
+  A TRIBUTE OF SOULS
+
+    Prelude                                                  89
+
+      I. The Stranger by the Burn                            90
+
+     II. The Soul of Dr Wedderburn                          111
+
+    III. The Soul of Kate Walters                           131
+
+     IV. The Soul of Hugh Fraser                            142
+
+      V. The Return of the Grey Traveller                   159
+         Written in conjunction with
+         Lord Frederick Hamilton.
+
+  AN ECHO IN EGYPT                                          171
+
+  THE FACE OF THE MONK                                      211
+
+  THE MAN WHO INTERVENED                                    237
+
+  AFTER TO-MORROW                                           267
+
+  A SILENT GUARDIAN                                         287
+
+  A BOUDOIR BOY                                             319
+
+  THE TEE-TO-TUM                                            343
+
+
+
+
+BYE-WAYS
+
+
+
+
+THE CHARMER OF SNAKES
+
+
+I
+
+The petulant whining of the jackals prevented Renfrew from sleeping. At
+first he lay still on his camp bed, staring at the orifice of the bell
+tent, which was only partially covered by the canvas flap let down by
+Mohammed, after he had bidden his master good-night. Behind the tent the
+fettered mules stamped on the rough, dry ground, and now and then the
+heavy rustling of a wild boar could be heard, as it shuffled through the
+scrub towards the water that lay in the hollow beyond the camp. The
+wayward songs of the Moorish attendants had died into silence. They
+slept, huddled together and shrouded in their djelabes. But their
+wailing rapture of those old triumphant days when on the heights above
+Granada, beneath the eternal snows, their brethren walked as conquerors,
+had been succeeded by the cries of the uneasy beasts that throng the
+mountains between Tangier and Tetuan. And Renfrew said to himself that
+the jackals kept him from sleeping. He lay still and wondered if Claire
+were awake in her tent close by. If so, if her dark eyes were unclouded,
+what journeys must her imagination be making! She was so sensitive to
+sound of any kind. A cry moved her sometimes with a swift violence that
+alarmed those around her. The message of a note of music shut one door
+on her soul, opened another, and let her in to strange regions in which
+she chose to be lonely.
+
+How amazing it was to think that Claire, with all her serpentine beauty,
+all her celebrity, all the legends that clung to her fame, all the wild
+caprices of which two worlds had talked for years,--that Claire was
+hidden away three feet off, beneath the canvas shield that looked like a
+moderate-sized mushroom from the Kasbar on the hill. How amazing to
+think she was no longer Claire Duvigne, but Claire Renfrew. Her cheated
+audiences sighed in London in which a week ago she was acting. And while
+they sighed, she slept in this wild valley of Morocco, or lay awake and
+heard the jackals whining among the dwarf palms. And she was his. She
+belonged to him. He had the right to hold her--this thin, pale wonder of
+night and of fame--in his arms, and to kiss the lips from which came at
+will the coo of a dove or the snarl of a tigress. Although Renfrew could
+not sleep, he fell into a dream. Indeed, ever since he had married
+Claire, a week ago, his life had been a dream. When the goddess suddenly
+bends down to the worshipper, and says: "Don't pray to me any more--sit
+on my throne by my side!"--the worshipper exchanges one form of devotion
+for another, so deep and so different that for a while his ordinary
+faculties seem frozen, his life goes in shadowy places. Renfrew was not
+a man of deep imagination, but he had enough of the dangerous and dear
+quality to make him full of interest in Claire's bonfires of the mind.
+He sunned himself in the sparks which flew from her, even as the
+phlegmatic man in the pit bathes in the fury of some queen of the stage.
+He adored partly because he scarcely understood.
+
+And then, at this moment, he was in the throes of a most unexpected
+honeymoon. Claire, after refusing to have anything to do with him for
+two years or more, had suddenly married him in such a hurry that, though
+London gasped, Renfrew gasped still more. She had sent for him one
+night, from her dressing-room, between the third act and the fourth of
+an angry drama of passion. He came in and found her sitting in an
+arm-chair by a table, on which lay a note containing his last proposal,
+and a dagger with which she was about to commit a stage murder that had
+carried her glory to the four quarters of the universe. Her face was
+covered with powder, and in her long white dress she looked like a
+phantom. As she spoke to him, she ran her thin fingers mechanically up
+and down the blade of the dagger. When Renfrew was in the room, and the
+door shut, she looked up at him and said:--
+
+"Desmond, I'm going to frighten you more than I shall frighten the
+audience out there."
+
+And she pointed towards the hidden stage.
+
+"How?" he said, looking at her hand and at the dagger.
+
+"I'm going to marry you."
+
+Renfrew turned paler than she was.
+
+"Ah!" she cried. "You go white?"
+
+"No, no," he murmured. "But--but I can't believe it."
+
+"I will marry you when you like, to-morrow, whenever you can get a
+licence."
+
+"Oh, Claire!"
+
+Suddenly she got up.
+
+"Take me away from here," she said. "From this heat and noise. Take me
+to some place where it is wild and desolate. I want to be in starlight,
+with people who know nothing of me, and my trumpery talent. O God,
+Desmond, you don't know how a woman can get to hate being famous! I
+should like to act to-night to a circle of savages who had never heard
+of me and of my glory."
+
+"Curtain's up!" sang a shrill voice outside.
+
+Claire picked up the dagger.
+
+"Well?" she said. "Shall it be--?"
+
+"Ah, yes--yes!" Renfrew answered in a choked voice.
+
+She smiled and glided out, like a white snake, he thought.
+
+And now--yes, those were really jackals whining, and Claire slept,
+surrounded by a circle of Moors under the stars of Morocco.
+
+Renfrew trembled at the astounding surprises of life. Now the devil of
+the night--thought--had filled his veins with fever. He got up softly,
+drew on his clothes, unfastened the canvas flap, and emerged, like a
+shadow, from the mouth of the tent. The night was dewy and cool. All the
+heaven was full of eyes. The line of tethered mules looked like a black
+hedge in whose shelter the group of tents was pitched. A low fire, held
+in a cup of earth, was dying down in the distance, and as Renfrew came
+out a lanky dog slunk off among the bushes that clothed the low hills on
+every side.
+
+Renfrew stood quite still. He was bare-headed, and the breeze caught at
+his thick brown hair, and seemed to tug it like a rough child at play
+with a kindly elder. His eyes were turned towards the tiny peaked tent
+which shrouded Claire. A small moon half way up the sky sent out a beam
+which faintly illuminated this home of a wanderer, and Renfrew thought
+the beam was like a silver finger pointing at this wonderful creature
+whom glory had so long attended. Such beings must walk in light. Nature
+herself protests against their endeavours to shroud themselves even for
+a moment in darkness. He drew close to the tent, and listened for
+Claire's low breathing. But he could not hear it. Perhaps she was awake
+then.
+
+"Claire!" he called, in a low voice.
+
+There was no answer. Renfrew hesitated and glanced round the little
+camp. It was just then that he noticed the absence of two figures which
+had been standing like statues near his tent when he went to bed. These
+were soldiers sent from the nearest village to guard the camp from
+marauders during the night. Clad in earth-coloured rags, shrouded in
+loose robes that looked like musty dressing-gowns, with fez on head, and
+musket in hand, they had seemed devoutly intent on doing their duty
+then. But now--where were they? Renfrew strolled among the tents,
+expecting to find them squatting near the fire smoking cigarettes, or
+playing some Spanish game of cards. But they had vanished. He returned,
+and posted himself again by the door of Claire's rude bed-room, saying
+to himself that he would be her guard. Those Moorish vagabonds had
+deserted her. They cared nothing for the safety of this jewel, whom the
+whole civilised world cherished. But in his heart glowed a passion of
+protection for her. And then he gazed again at the impenetrable canvas
+wall that divided him from her. Only two hours ago he had held her in
+his arms and kissed her lips, yet already he felt as if a river of years
+flowed between them. He began to torture himself deliberately, as lovers
+will, by the imagination of non-existent evils. Suppose Claire
+possessed the power of a fairy, and could evaporate at will into the
+spaces of the air, leaving no trace behind. She might then have
+departed, have faded into the scented silence and darkness of this land
+so strange and desolate. Renfrew supposed the departure an actual fact.
+What a loneliness would fill his night then; if that little tent stood
+empty, if that slim sleeper were removed from the camp round which the
+jackals sat on their tiny haunches, whining like peevish spirits. He
+trembled beneath the weight of this absurd supposition, revelling in the
+intolerable with the folly of worship. Gradually he forced himself on
+step by step along the fanciful path till he had assured his imagination
+that Claire was really gone, and that he was just such a travelling
+Englishman as may come alone across the Straits, take out a camp, and
+spend his days in stalking wild boar, or shooting duck, his nights in
+the heavy slumber of complete weariness. And, at length, having gained a
+ghastly summit of imaginative despair, he suddenly stretched forth his
+hand, unhooked the canvas that shrouded Claire's tent door, and peeped
+cautiously in, courting the delicious revulsion of feeling which he
+would secure when he saw her half defined form in the shadow of the
+leaning roof that hid her from the stars.
+
+He bent forward with greedy anxiety. But the pale and tragic face he
+looked for, did not greet his eyes. The tent was empty.
+
+Renfrew stood for a moment holding back the canvas flap with one hand.
+This denial calmly offered to his expectation bewildered him. He was
+confused, and for a moment scarcely thought at all. Then his mind broke
+away with the violence of a dog unleashed, and ran a wild course of
+surmises. He thought first of rousing the camp and organising an
+immediate search. Then he remembered the absence of the two soldiers who
+ought to be guarding the tents and the mules. Claire gone, those
+soldiers absent! He linked the two facts together, and turned white and
+sick. But he did not rouse the camp. Indeed, he thanked God that all the
+men were sleeping. He sprang softly back from the tent, turned on his
+heel, and stole out of the camp so silently that he scarcely seemed a
+living thing. The ground towards the water was boggy and spongy, and the
+scent of the thickly growing myrtles was heavy in the air. Renfrew
+brushed through them swiftly. He heard the harsh snuffling of a boar,
+and the tread of its feet in the mud at the water-side. And these sounds
+filled the night with a sense of unknown dangers. Darkness, a wild
+country, wild men, wild beasts, and his beautiful Claire out somewhere
+alone, near him, perhaps, yet hidden behind the impenetrable veil of
+darkness. He saw her fainting, struggling, crying out for him. He saw
+her silent and dead, and frenzy seized him. She was not here by the
+water. And with a gesture of despair he turned back. Low and rounded
+hills faced him on all sides, covered with a dense undergrowth of palms
+and close-growing shrubs that looked almost like black velvet in the
+night. On one, the highest, was perched the native village from which
+the soldiers had come. Dogs were barking in it incessantly. It seemed to
+Renfrew that Claire might have been conveyed there by these ruffians;
+and he began hastily to ascend in the direction of the dogs' acute
+voices. He stumbled among the palms at first; but, mounting higher, he
+came into the eye of the moon, and was swallowed up in a shrouded silver
+radiance. The camp faded away below him, and he felt the breeze with
+greater force. Yet its breath was warm. Could Claire feel it? Did she
+see the moon? Now the dogs were evidently close by. The village must be
+behind that big clump of trees. Renfrew sprang upward, passed through
+them, suddenly drew a great breath and stood still.
+
+Beyond the trees there was a small clearing that almost corresponded to
+our English notion of a village green. On the near side of it was the
+clump of trees in whose shadow Renfrew now stood. On the far side of it
+was the Moorish village, a minute collection of low huts like hovels,
+featureless and filthy. The moon streamed over the clearing and lit up
+faintly a cluster of seated figures that formed a good-sized circle. The
+figures looked broad and almost shapeless, for they were all smothered
+in long, voluminous robes, and over all the heads great hoods were drawn
+which hid the faces of the wearers. They were absolutely motionless, and
+differed little from the more distant clumps of dwarf palms that grew
+everywhere among the huts. Only they possessed the curiously sullen
+aspect of things alive but entirely motionless. It was not this living
+Stonehenge of Morocco, however, which caused Renfrew to catch his breath
+and rooted him in the shadow. In the centre of the circle, lit up by the
+moon, there stood something that might have been a phantom, it was so
+thin, so tall, so white-faced, so strange in its movements. It was a
+woman, and long black hair flowed down to its waist,--night standing
+back from that moon, vague and spectral, the face. In this human night
+and moon, great sombre eyes gleamed with a sort of fatigued beauty. This
+spectre stretched out its long arms in weird gesticulations and
+sometimes swayed its body as if it moved to music. And from its lips
+came a soft and liquid stream of golden words that mingled with the acid
+barking of the dogs, some of which crept furtively about on the
+outskirts of the serene hooded circle of the listeners. This murmuring
+spectre was Claire. She was girt about with silently staring Moors. And
+she was in the act of delivering one of her most famous recitations,
+which she had last given at a monster morning performance before
+Royalties in London, on a sultry day of the season. As this fact broke
+upon Renfrew's mind, he seemed for a moment to be back in the hot
+dressing-room in which Claire had said: "I will marry you." He seemed to
+hear her passionate exclamation: "I should like to act to-night to a
+circle of savages!" The hill men of this part of Morocco may not be
+savages, but they are fierce and wild and ruthless. And now they hung
+upon the lips that had spoken to London, Paris, Vienna, New York--but
+never before to such an audience as this. The recitation was a
+description of the performance of a snake-charmer, his harangue to his
+reptiles and to the crowd watching him, and his departure into the
+solitude of the great desert, there to obtain, in communion with its
+spirit, the power to work greater miracles, and to charm not alone the
+serpents that dwell among the rocks and in the forests, but also men,
+women, little children,--the power to thrust a human world into a kennel
+of plaited straw, to take it out in sections at pleasure, and to make it
+dance, pose, and posture, like a viper tamed into a species of
+ballet-dancer. In this recitation the peculiar and almost serpentine
+fascination of Claire had full liberty. She represented the
+snake-charmer as a being who through long and intimate association with
+snakes had become like them, lithe, fantastic, and unexpected, soft and
+deadly, by turns sleepy and violent, a coil of glistening velvet and a
+length of cast-iron, tipped with a poisoned fang and the music of a
+hiss. His fanaticism, his greed for money, the passionate prayer to Sidi
+Mahomet that flowed from his lips while his terrible eyes searched an
+imaginary crowd in search of the richest man or the most excited woman
+in it, his bursts of dancing humour, his deadly stillness, his playful
+familiarity with his dangerous captives, his mesmeric anger when they
+were sullen and recalcitrant, his relapse into the savage churchwarden
+with the collecting box when his "show" was at an end,--every side,
+every subtlety of such a creature Claire could give with the certainty
+of genius. As you watched her, you beheld the snakes, you beheld their
+master. Even at the end you almost saw the vast and trackless desert
+open its haggard arms to receive its child, who passed from the crowd to
+the silence in which alone he could learn to fascinate the crowd. At the
+great morning performance in London, a prince who knew the East had said
+to Claire, "Miss Duvigne, you must have lived with snake-charmers. You
+must have studied them for months."
+
+"I never saw one in my life," she answered truthfully.
+
+And now she gave her performance to those who, in the dingy market
+squares of their white-walled cities, had seen the snakes dance and had
+heard the prayer to Sidi Mahomet. And they squatted in the moonbeams,
+immobile as goblins carved in dusky oak. Yet they inspired Claire. From
+his hiding place Renfrew could note this. She had let her genius loose
+upon them, as she had let her cloud of hair loose upon her shoulders.
+The frosty touch of smart conventionality bewilders and half paralyses
+the utterly unconventional. Often Renfrew had heard Claire curse the
+smiling and self-contented Londoners who thronged the stalls of her
+theatre. She felt, with the swiftness of genius, the retarding hand they
+laid upon her winged talents. She had no inclination to curse these
+hooded figures gathered round her in the night, staring upon her with
+the fixed concentration of children who behold, rather than hear, a
+fairy tale, they paid her the fine compliment of an undivided attention.
+It was a curious scene and one that stirred in Renfrew a deep
+excitement. He watched it with a double sense, of living keenly and of
+dreaming deeply. Claire gave to him the first sense, the moon and the
+motionless Moors the second. But presently one of the hooded statues
+stirred and swayed, and there mingled with the voice of Claire a twisted
+melody, so thin and wandering that it was like a thread binding a bundle
+of gold. It pierced the night, and enclosed the words of the reciter,
+one sound prisoned by another lighter and less than itself. The dogs had
+ceased to bark now, and only the voice that told of the snake-charmer's
+journey into the desert, and this whispering Moorish tune, plucked by
+dark fingers from the strings of a rough lute, moved in the night, till
+Claire ceased. The lute continued for a few bars, like the symphony that
+closes a song, and then it too ceased abruptly on a note that brought no
+feeling of finale to modern ears. For an instant Claire stood motionless
+in the centre of the human circle. Then her arms fell to her sides. She
+moved swiftly towards the trees in whose shadow Renfrew was watching.
+The Moors made a gap, and as she passed out all the shapeless figures
+were suddenly elongated and crowded together upon her footsteps. As
+Claire came into the blackness of the trees, Renfrew stretched out his
+hand and clasped her arm. She stopped with no tremor, and faced him.
+
+"Claire!"
+
+"What, it is you, Desmond! I thought you were asleep."
+
+"When you were awake? You have given me a fright. I came to your tent; I
+found it empty. The soldiers were gone."
+
+"They were guarding me up the hill. I could not sleep. I wandered out.
+How hot your hand is!"
+
+Renfrew released her. All the Moors had gathered round them like
+enormous shadows.
+
+"My audience has come to the stage door!" Claire said.
+
+Her eyes were gleaming with excitement.
+
+"They are a beautiful audience," she added; "and the orchestra, the
+soft music--that was better than London fiddles."
+
+"Come back to the camp, Claire."
+
+"Very well."
+
+He drew her arm through his, and led her out into the moonlight and down
+the hill. Two shadows detached themselves from the silent assembly and
+followed them, barefooted, over the dewy grass. They were the soldiers.
+Claire looked back and saw them.
+
+"I shall give those men a handful of pesetas, to-morrow," she said.
+
+They reached the camp and sat down on two folding chairs in the shadow
+of Claire's tent. The soldiers stood near, gazing intently at them.
+Claire sat in a curved attitude. She had drawn a dark veil over her
+hair, and her enormous and tragic eyes were turned sombrely on Renfrew.
+She looked fatigued, as she often did after acting a long and passionate
+part. To Renfrew she seemed more wonderful than ever. He could scarcely
+believe that he was her husband.
+
+"You have had your circle of savages," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you liked them?"
+
+"Do you think they liked me? I wonder if there was a snake-charmer among
+them. When I came to Sidi Mahomet I thought perhaps they would kill me.
+That thought made me pray better than I can in London."
+
+"You could charm snakes more certainly than any Arab," Renfrew said.
+
+"I daresay. Perhaps I shall try at Tetuan. Good-night, Desmond."
+
+She vanished into the tent. It seemed that she evaporated as Sarah
+Bernhardt evaporates in the fourth act of "La Tosca."
+
+
+II
+
+On the following day they rode across the mountain to Tetuan. They
+started in the dawn. Claire's eyes were heavy. She came languidly out
+from the tent door to mount her horse, and when she touched Renfrew he
+felt that her hand was cold like an icicle. He looked at her anxiously.
+
+"Are you ill?" he asked.
+
+"No, Desmond."
+
+He lifted her into the saddle.
+
+"You haven't slept," he said.
+
+She looked down at him as she slowly gathered up her reins.
+
+"Unfortunately, I have," she replied.
+
+Before Renfrew had time to express surprise at this unexpected
+rejoinder, she had struck her horse with the whip, and trotted off over
+the grass in the direction of the white Kasbar that gleamed on the hill
+under the kiss of the rising sun. He leaped into the saddle, and
+followed her. The path into which they came was narrow, winding through
+wild fig-trees and olives, and constantly ascending. Claire did not turn
+her head, and Renfrew could not ride by her side. He watched her thin
+and sinuous figure swaying slightly in obedience to the motion of her
+horse, which scrambled over the rough path with the activity of a wild
+cat. In front of her their personal attendant, Mohammed, rode on a huge
+grey mule, and sang to himself incessantly in a deep and murmuring
+voice. Once or twice Renfrew spoke to Claire, but she did not seem to
+hear him. He resolved to ask about her sleep when they gained some
+plateau on which they could rest for a moment. At present it was
+necessary to concentrate his attention on his horse and on the dangers
+of the road.
+
+When the sun was high in the heavens, and they were high on the
+mountain, above a gorge in which the scrub grew densely, and great
+bushes starred with yellow and white flowers hid the rocks and made a
+home for birds, Mohammed called a halt. Renfrew lifted Claire to the
+ground. The men passed on towards Tetuan with their camp, and Claire
+sank down on a gay rug beneath the shade of a huge white umbrella, which
+was pitched on a square of level ground and circled with luxuriant
+vegetation. Renfrew lay at her feet and lit his pipe, while Mohammed,
+the dragoman, and one of the porters squatted at a little distance, and
+began to play cards in a cloud of keef. Claire was fanning herself
+slowly with an enormous Spanish fan in which all gay colours met. She
+still looked very tired. The shuffle of the descending mules died away
+down the mountain, and a silence, through which the butterflies flitted,
+fell round them.
+
+"Is this journey too much for you, Claire?" Renfrew asked.
+
+"No. I can rehearse for six hours in London, surely I can ride for six
+here."
+
+"But you look tired."
+
+"Because, as I told you, I slept too much last night."
+
+"What does that mean?"
+
+She stretched herself on the rug with the easy grace of a woman who has
+trained her body to carry to the eyes of others, as a message, all the
+moods of passion and of peace. Then she leaned her cheek on her hand.
+
+"In the darkness of the tent, Desmond, I slept and did not know it. I
+believed that I lay awake. I thought I still could hear the jackals, and
+the stamping of the mules. But, really, I slept."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because of what I am going to tell you. The wind blew about the canvas
+door, and when it bulged outwards I could see on each side of it a tiny
+section of the night outside, a bit of a bush, blades of short grass
+moving, a ray of the moon, the slinking shadow of one of the dogs from
+the village."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Presently there came, I thought, a stronger gust than usual. It tore
+the canvas flap from the pegs, and the whole thing blew up, leaving the
+entrance quite open. Then it blew down again. It was only up for a
+minute. During that minute I had seen that a very tall man was standing
+outside the tent."
+
+"One of the soldiers."
+
+"If I had been awake it might have been."
+
+"You mean that all this was a dream?"
+
+"I mean that I slept last night, and that I wish I hadn't."
+
+She turned her great eyes on Renfrew, holding the red, green, and yellow
+fan so that it concealed the lower part of her face. And he looked at
+her, staring at him like some tragic stranger above the rampart of an
+unknown city, and wondered whether she was acting to him in the sun. On
+the forefinger of the hand that held up the fan a huge black pearl
+perched in a circle of gold. Renfrew had often noticed it on the stage,
+when Claire lifted the silver dagger to kill the man who loved her in
+the play.
+
+"The door of your tent was securely closed when I got up and came out
+this morning," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+She spoke with the utmost indifference. Then she added more sharply:--
+
+"Desmond, has it ever occurred to you that I am serpentine?"
+
+He was startled and made no answer.
+
+"Well--has it?"
+
+"Yes," he said truthfully.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Every one thinks so. You are so thin. You move so silently. Your body
+is so elastic and controlled. You always look as if you could glide into
+places where other women could never go, and be at home in attitudes
+they could never assume."
+
+"But I'm an actress--my body is trained, you know, to lie, to fall, as I
+choose."
+
+"Other actresses don't give one the same impression."
+
+"No," she said thoughtfully. "My peculiar physique has a great deal to
+do with it."
+
+"Of course, and there's something more than that, something mental."
+
+Claire's heavy eyes grew more thoughtful. The white lids fluttered lower
+over them till they looked like the eyes of one half asleep. She lay in
+silence, plunged in a reverie that was deep and dark. In this reverie
+she forgot to move her fan, which dropped from her hand and fell softly
+upon the rug. Renfrew did not interrupt her. His worship had learned to
+wait upon her moods. A huge dragon-fly passed on its journey towards the
+far blue range of the Atlas Mountains. It whirred in its haste, and its
+burnished body shone in the sunshine between its gleaming wings. Claire
+snatched at it with her hand, but missed it.
+
+"I should like to wear it as a jewel," she said.
+
+Then she turned slowly again towards Renfrew, and continued her nocturne
+as if it had never been broken off.
+
+"The canvas flap fell down again over the doorway, Desmond, and it
+seemed that just then the breeze died away, expiring in that angry gust.
+I could not see anything but the interior of the tent, and only that
+very dimly. But this man outside. I wanted to see him."
+
+"Did you recognise that he was not one of the soldiers, then?"
+
+"Perfectly. He was not dressed as they are. They were entirely muffled
+up with hoods drawn forward above their faces. And in their hands one
+could see their guns. This man was bareheaded, and looked half naked.
+And in his hands--"
+
+She stopped meditatively.
+
+"Was there anything in his hands?"
+
+"Well--yes, there was."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I wanted to know what it was. But at first I only lay quite still and
+wished the wind would come again and blow the flap up so that I could
+see out. But it had quite gone down. The canvas did not even quiver."
+
+"Was it near dawn?"
+
+"I haven't an idea. Does the breeze sink then?"
+
+"Very often."
+
+"Ah! Perhaps it was then. Oh, but you'll see in a minute what nonsense
+it is to think about that. I lay still, as I said, for some time,
+waiting for the breeze. And when it wouldn't come, I made up my mind
+that I must arrive at a decision either to turn my face on the pillow
+and go to sleep, or else to get up, go to the tent door, and look out."
+
+"To see this man?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"Which did you do?"
+
+"Turned my face on the pillow."
+
+"And went off to sleep?"
+
+"No, grew most intensely awake--as I supposed. The pillow was like fire
+against my cheek. It burnt me. With the departure of the breeze the
+night had become suddenly most intolerably hot. I turned over on my back
+and lay like that. Then I felt as if there was sand on the sheets."
+
+"Sand! Impossible! We aren't in the desert."
+
+"No. But it seemed as if I lay in hot sand. I shifted my position, but
+it made no difference. I sat up. The tent door was still closed. I
+listened. All those dogs had ceased to bark. There wasn't a sound. Even
+the jackals had left off whining. Then I slipped out of bed and threw
+that rose-coloured Moorish cloak over me. It rustled just like a thing
+rustles in grass, Desmond."
+
+She looked at him with a sort of peculiar significance, and as if she
+expected him to gather something definite from the remark.
+
+"A thing in grass," he repeated, wondering. "What sort of thing?"
+
+But Claire avoided the question. She had taken up the fan again, and was
+opening and shutting it with a quiet and careful sort of precision, as
+she went on in a low and even voice:--
+
+"I disliked this rustling, and held the cloak tightly together with my
+hands. I felt as if the man outside the tent had been waiting to hear
+that very little noise."
+
+"The rustling?"
+
+"Yes. And that when he heard it he smiled to himself. I didn't intend he
+should hear it again though, and as I glided towards the tent door, I
+held the cloak very tight and away from my body. And I don't think I can
+have made any noise. You know how softly I can move when I choose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When I got to the door, I waited. I couldn't hear the man; but I felt
+that he was still there, just on the other side of the flap."
+
+Renfrew leaned forward on the rug. He felt deeply interested, perhaps
+only because Claire was the narrator. She held him much as she could
+hold an audience in a theatre, by her pose, her hands, her pale, almost
+weary face, her heavy sombre eyes, even more than by any words she
+chanced to be uttering. She could make anything seem vitally important
+if she chose, simply by her manner. Renfrew's pipe had gone out; but he
+did not know it, and still kept it between his lips.
+
+"I waited for some time by the flap," Claire continued calmly. "I was
+going to lift it presently, I knew; but I could not do it at once. The
+man and I were standing, I suppose, for full five minutes only divided
+by that strip of canvas. I tried not to breathe audibly, and I could not
+hear him breathe. At last I resolved to see him, and considered how I
+should do so. If I remained standing and looked out, I should have to
+push the flap quite away and my eyes would be nearly on a level with
+his. He would certainly see me. I didn't wish that. I didn't intend at
+all that he should see me. Therefore I resolved to lie down."
+
+"On the ground?"
+
+"Yes, quite flat, and to raise the bottom of the flap gently an inch or
+two. This would enable me to see him without being seen, if I did it
+without noise. I dropped down quite softly. Do you remember my death in
+'Camille'?"
+
+Renfrew nodded.
+
+"Almost like that. But the rose-coloured stuff rustled again. I wished I
+hadn't put it on. I raised the flap very slightly and peeped out. Do
+you know what I felt like just then, Desmond?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Just like a snake in ambush. When my cloak rustled, it was the grass
+against my body. I lay in cover, and could see my enemy like a creature
+in a forest, or a reptile in scrub."
+
+She glanced round at the bushes and the densely growing palms.
+
+"Yes, I lay there like a snake in the grass."
+
+She stretched herself out on the rug as she spoke, with her head towards
+Renfrew and her eyes fastened on his.
+
+"I saw first the feet of the man close to my eyes. His feet were almost
+black and bare. His legs were bare. My glance travelled up him, and I
+saw that his chest and his arms were bare too. He was clothed in a sort
+of loose rough garment, the colour of sacking, that fell into a kind of
+hood behind; and he looked enormously powerful. That struck me very
+much--his power."
+
+"Did you see his face?"
+
+"Quite well. It was the face of a man watching and listening with the
+closest attention. He was smiling slightly, too, as if something that
+had just happened had satisfied him. I knew he had heard the rustle of
+my robe as I slipped to the ground."
+
+"But why should that please him?"
+
+"It told him that I was there, that I was attentive too."
+
+Renfrew's face slightly darkened.
+
+"As I looked, I saw what he was holding in his hands."
+
+"What was it--a dagger--a staff?"
+
+"A serpent."
+
+Renfrew could not repress an exclamation.
+
+"Very large and striped. Its skin was like shot silk in the moonlight.
+It writhed softly between his hands, and turned its flat head from side
+to side. It seemed to be trying to bend down towards where I lay. Its
+tongue shot out like a length of riband out of one of those wooden
+winders that you buy in cheap shops. I should think its body was quite
+five feet long, and its colour seemed to change as it turned about.
+Sometimes it was pink, then it looked dull green and almost black. Once
+it wriggled down so near to the ground that I could see two fangs in its
+open mouth like hooks, and the roof of its mouth was flesh colour."
+
+"How abominable!" said Renfrew, softly.
+
+"I didn't feel it so at all," Claire said. "I wanted it to come to
+me,--back into the grass where such things are safe. But the man
+wouldn't let it go. He thrust it into his breast. He wanted to have his
+hands free."
+
+"Good God, Claire--what for? Did he--?"
+
+She smiled at his sudden violence, which showed his interest.
+
+"When the snake was safe, he drew out, still smiling and listening, a
+little pipe that looked as if it were made of straw, very common and
+dirty. He held it up to his black lips, and began to play very softly
+and sleepily. Desmond, the tune he played was charmed. It was a tune
+composed--for--for--"
+
+She broke off.
+
+"You know the Pied Piper had his tune," she said; "the rats had to
+follow it. Well, this tune was for the serpents."
+
+"To charm them you mean?"
+
+"Wisely--dangerously--almost irresistibly, perhaps in time, Desmond,
+quite, quite irresistibly. There is a music for all creatures, all
+reptiles, birds,--everything that lives; this was for the snakes."
+
+"Well, but, Claire, how did you know that?"
+
+She looked at him with a sort of dull amusement and pity in her
+half-shut eyes.
+
+"Shall I tell you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I knew it, because the tune charmed me, Desmond."
+
+"Ah, you are acting! I half suspected it from the first," Renfrew
+exclaimed almost roughly.
+
+He sat up as a man who has been lying under a spell stirs when the spell
+is broken. Now he knew that his pipe was out, and he felt for his
+match-box. But Claire still kept her eyes fixed on him, and laid her
+hand on his arm gently.
+
+"No, I am not acting," she said. "The tune charmed me. You see I am a
+woman; and there are many women who feel at moments that what attracts
+some special creature, thing, of the so-called world without a soul,
+attracts them too. Some men can whistle a woman as they would a dog,
+can't they?"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Yes, and some men can charm a woman as they could charm a serpent."
+
+"I don't understand you, Claire."
+
+"You don't choose to. The animal is in us all, hidden deftly by Nature,
+the artful dodger of the scheme of creation, Desmond; and we know it
+when the right tune is played to summon it from its slumber in the nest
+of the human body. Only the right tune can waken it."
+
+"The animal! But--"
+
+"Or the reptile, perhaps. What does it matter? This was the right tune
+for me. I lay there like a snake in the grass and it thrilled me! And
+all the time the black man smiled and listened for the rustling at his
+feet. You look black, Desmond! How absurd of you to be angry!"
+
+And she closed her fingers over his hand till the frown died out of his
+face.
+
+"The tune seemed to draw me to the man. I understood just how he had
+captured the serpent that lay hidden in his bosom. It had once lain in
+ambush as I lay now, long ago perhaps, in the desert among the rocks, on
+the sand, Desmond."
+
+"Ah, the sand!" he said, remembering suddenly the strange feeling
+Claire had described as coming upon her when she was trying to sleep.
+
+"Yes. And he had drawn it from the sand to the oasis among the palms
+where he stood playing, till he heard its rustling in the grass about
+his feet, as it glided nearer to him, and nearer, and nearer, till at
+last it reared up its body, and wound up him and round him, and laid its
+flat head between his great hands. Yes, that was how it came."
+
+"You fancy."
+
+"I know. But I would not go. I determined that I would not, and I lay
+perfectly still. But all the time I longed to go. I had an almost
+irresistible passion for movement towards that tune. It seemed to me a
+stream of music into which I yearned to plunge, and drown and die. And
+it flowed up there at the man's lips! The longing increased as he piped
+the tune, over and over and over again, almost under his breath. I was
+sick with it, and it hurt me because I resisted it. And at last I knew
+that resisting it would kill me. I must either go, or not go, and die.
+There was no alternative. That music simply claimed me. It had the right
+to. And if I denied that right I should cease. I did deny it."
+
+She shuddered in the sun, then added, almost harshly:--
+
+"Like a fool."
+
+"And then, Claire, then--?"
+
+"It seemed to me that I died in most horrible pain. I lived once more
+when you said, outside my tent, 'Claire, time to get up.' You see, I
+slept too much last night."
+
+And again she shuddered. A look of relief shot into Renfrew's face.
+
+"All this came from your mad performance to those Moors," he said. "You
+impersonate so vividly that even sleep cannot release your genius, and
+bring it out from the world which you have deliberately forced it to
+enter."
+
+"But, Desmond, I impersonated the charmer of the snake, not the snake
+itself."
+
+"Oh, in a dream the mind always wanders a little from the event that has
+caused the dream. It is like a faulty mimic who strives to reproduce
+with exactitude and slightly fails. Time to go, Absalem?"
+
+The dragoman had come up.
+
+As they rode down the mountain a strange thing occurred, strange at
+least in connection with Claire's narrative of the night. Mohammed, who
+was riding just in front of them, pulled up his mule beside a thicket at
+the wayside, and, turning his head, signed to them to be silent. Then,
+pursing his lips, he whistled a shrill little tune. In a moment an
+answer came from the thicket; Claire glanced at Renfrew with a slight
+smile. Here was a sort of side light of reality thrown upon her dream
+and upon their conversation. Mohammed whistled again. The echo followed.
+And then suddenly a bird flew out, almost into his face, and, startled,
+swerved and darted away across the gorge into the dense woods beyond.
+
+"A charm of birds," Claire murmured to Renfrew, as they rode on. "The
+summoning tune--what can resist it?"
+
+"Claire," he said, almost reproachfully, "you speak like a fatalist."
+
+"And I believe I am one," she answered. "Destiny is not only a phantom
+but also a fact. Mine is marked out for me and known--"
+
+"To whom? Not to yourself?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"To whom then?"
+
+"To the hidden force that directs all things."
+
+"I am your destiny."
+
+"Ah, Desmond--or Morocco. I feel to-day as if I shall never see England
+again, or a civilised audience such as I have known."
+
+And then she seemed to fall into a waking dream. Even Renfrew felt
+drowsy, the air was so intensely hot and the motion of the horses so
+monotonous. And Mohammed's deep voice was never silent. It buzzed like a
+bourdon in the glare of the noontide, till, far away on the hill-side,
+they saw white Tetuan facing the plain, the river moving stagnantly
+towards the sea, the great fields of corn in which strange flowers grew,
+and the giant range of shaggy mountains, swimming in a mist of gold that
+looked like spangled tissue.
+
+
+III
+
+The camp was pitched beyond the city in the green plain that lies
+between Tetuan and the sea. From the tents Renfrew and Claire saw the
+trains of camels and donkeys passing slowly along the high road towards
+the steep and stony hill that leads up to the lower city gate, the
+white-washed summer palaces of the wealthy Moors, nestling in gardens,
+among green fields and groves of acacias, olives and almond trees, the
+far-off line of blue water on the one hand and the fairy-like and ivory
+town upon the other. Clouds of brown dust flew up in the air, and the
+hoarse cry of "Balak! Balak!" made a perpetual and distant music. Far
+more strange and barbarous was this city than Tangier. All traces of
+Europe had faded away. Thousands of years seemed now to stand like a
+wall between the Continents, and the hordes of dark and fanatical
+Moslems gazed upon the great actress and her husband as we gaze at wild
+animals whose aspects and whose habits are strange to us.
+
+"I know now what it is to feel like an unclean dog," Claire said, as
+they sat at dinner under the stars that night, after their halting
+progress through the filthy alleys of the white fairyland on the
+hill-side. "It is a grand sensation. I suppose children enjoy it, too.
+That must be why they like making mud-pies."
+
+"To-morrow is market-day, Absalem tells me," Renfrew said. "We will
+spend it in the town, and you can feel unclean to your heart's
+content--you!"
+
+He looked at her and laughed low, with the pride of a lover in a
+beautiful woman who is his own.
+
+"They ought to fall down and worship you," he said.
+
+"Moors worship a woman! Desmond, you are mad!"
+
+"No, they are--they are. See, Claire, the moon is coming up already. Can
+it be shining on Piccadilly too, and on the façade of the theatre?"
+
+"The theatre! I can't believe I shall ever see it again."
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Is it? This wild country seems to have swallowed me up, and I don't
+feel as if it will ever disgorge me again. Desmond, perhaps there are
+some lands that certain people ought never to visit. For those lands
+love them, and, once they have seized their prey, they will never yield
+it up again. Poor men must often feel that when they are dying in
+foreign places. It is the land which has taken them to itself as an
+octopus takes a drifting boat in a lonely sea. Africa!"
+
+She had risen from her seat and moved out into the vague plain. Renfrew
+followed her.
+
+"I wonder in which direction the desert lies nearest," she said. "All
+the strange people come in from the desert, as the strange things of
+life come in from the future, only one so seldom hears the tinkling
+bells of those deadly silent caravans in which they travel. If we could
+hear and see them coming, what emotions we should have!"
+
+"There are premonitions, some men say," Renfrew answered.
+
+"The faint bells of the caravans ringing,--do you ever hear them?"
+
+"No, Claire--never. And you?"
+
+"I half thought I did once."
+
+"When was that?"
+
+"Last night. Hark! The men have finished supper and are beginning to
+sing. That's a song about dancing."
+
+"To-morrow we are going to feast the soldiers, and have an African
+fire."
+
+"Splendid! I think I will leap through the flames."
+
+Renfrew put his arm round her.
+
+"No, no. They might singe your beauty. And yet, you are a flame too. You
+have burnt your name, yourself, like a brand upon my heart."
+
+The dancing song rang up in the moonlight like the wailing of dead
+masqueraders. All Moorish songs are sad and thrilling, fateful and
+pregnant with unrest and with forebodings.
+
+With the daylight the Jews came, in their long and morose garments and
+black skull-caps, bearing bales of embroideries, slippers, and uncut
+jewels. When they saw the wonderful black pearl upon Claire's finger
+their huge eyes flamed with an avarice so fierce and open that Renfrew
+instinctively moved between them and Claire, as if to guard her from
+assault.
+
+But the wonderful pearl was not for them.
+
+The sun blazed furiously when they got upon their horses to ride to the
+Soko. Each day the season was growing hotter, and Absalem told them that
+there were no English in Tetuan. Nor did they set eyes on a European
+woman until that day when Renfrew rode back, crouching along his horse,
+to the villas of Tangier.
+
+Tetuan has more than one open mouth, and when it swallows you the
+contemplation of a fairyland is immediately exchanged for a desperate
+reality of populous filth, stentorian uproar, uneven boulders, beggars,
+bazaars like rabbit hutches, men and children pitted with small-pox till
+they appear scarcely human, lepers, Jews, pirates from the Riff
+Mountains, fanatics from the Ape's Hill, water-carriers, veiled,
+waddling women, dogs like sharp shadows, and monkeys that appear and
+vanish in sinister doorways with the rapidity and gestures of demons. On
+a market-day the city is so full that it seems as if the circling and
+irregular white walls must burst and disgorge the clamouring and
+gesticulating inhabitants into the tranquil plain below. Claire surveyed
+this blanched hell with a still serenity, as she had often surveyed an
+applauding audience at the close of her evening's task, ere she thanked
+them with the curious gesture, that was almost a salaam, in which
+humility and a remote pride mingled. Noise generally gave her calm; and
+when passion broke from her she taught the world to be intensely silent.
+These alleys became like a dream to her, and the tiny interiors of the
+bazaars were little histories of visionary lives, some, but only a few,
+mysteriously beautiful. One, in a very dark place where, for some
+unknown cause, all voices died away till the hot air was full of a
+whispering stillness, brought slow tears to Claire's eyes. In the Street
+of the Slippers she passed a cupboard of wood raised high from the
+pavement, with low roof, leaning walls, and, in front, a little bar like
+that which fences an English baby in its chair before the fire. In this
+cupboard squatted two tiny Moorish infants, sole occupants of the
+cupboard, with solemn faces, bending to ply their trade of pricking
+patterns upon rose-coloured Morocco leather. There was no beauty in the
+cupboard, sweetness of light, or ease. And the faces of the little boys
+were sad and elderly. But, placed carefully between them, was an ugly
+three-legged stool, on which stood two dwarf earthen jars containing two
+sprigs of orange flower, and, as Claire looked, one of the babes laid
+down his leather, lifted his jar, sniffed, with a sort of gentle
+resignation, at his flower, and then resumed his diligent labours,
+refreshed perhaps, and strengthened. In the action Claire seemed to
+catch sight of a little pallid soul striving to exist feebly among the
+slippers.
+
+"Did you see?" she cried to Renfrew, when the baby shoemakers were lost
+to sight.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"I wish I were a Moorish woman, Desmond."
+
+"Good Heaven! Why!"
+
+"So that I could kiss the infant who smelt the orange flower in his own
+language. Little artist!"
+
+Her sudden blaze of enthusiasm was checked by the infernal Soko into
+which they now entered. In this unpaved square, upon which the pitiless
+sun beat, the earth seemed to have come alive, to have formed itself
+into a thousand vague semblances of human figures, and to be shrieking,
+moving, twisting, gesticulating, as if striving to impart a thousand
+abominable secrets till now hidden from the world that walks upon its
+surface. As snow-men resemble the snow, so did these bargainers, these
+buyers, sellers, barterers, pedlars, resemble the baked earth on which
+they squatted. Shrouded in earth-coloured garments, they shrieked,
+strove, rang their bells, kicked their donkeys, elbowed their rivals,
+pommelled their camels, recited the Koran, or testified with frenzy, the
+terrific honesty of all their dealings. Here and there tents made of
+mud-coloured rags cast a grotesque shadow, in which broad women, hidden
+by veils like sacks, and dominated by straw hats a yard wide, sat
+huddled together and pecked at by wandering fowls. Jew boys, with long
+and expressive faces, their black hair plastered upon their foreheads in
+fringes that touched their eyes, strolled through the mob in batches,
+some of them reading in little books. Soudanese slave girls carried
+bouquets of orange flowers. In a corner some Hawadji were leaping
+monotonously to the thunder of a Moorish drum made of baked earth and of
+parchment. A sheep, escaped from the slaughterer, tumbled with piteous
+bleatings into a group of half breeds, Spanish Moors, who were playing
+cards near a stall covered with raw meat and great lumps of some
+substance that looked like lard. On a huge heap of rotten oranges and
+decaying fish, over which millions of flies swarmed, a number of
+children in close white caps were moving in some mysterious game in
+which two prowling cats occasionally took an unintentional part. Some
+Riff Arabs, fierce as tigers, tall and half-naked, stalked feverishly
+towards a water-carrier whose lean form, tottering with age, was almost
+eclipsed beneath the monstrous bladder he bore incessantly through the
+multitude. The horses of Renfrew and of Claire could scarcely plant
+their hoofs on anything that was not moving, crying, panting, or
+cursing; and they pulled up, and prepared to descend into this human
+ocean of which all the waves roared in their deafened ears. As Claire
+leant to Renfrew, who stretched his arms to help her, she said to him:--
+
+"Can you swim? If not, you will certainly be drowned."
+
+"You must not be. Cling to my arm."
+
+They sank together to their necks in the sea. In whatever direction they
+looked, they saw a mass of heads, an infinite expanse of shouting
+mouths. But suddenly the pressure became extraordinary, the uproar
+ear-splitting. And with the voices there mingled a piercing music like a
+continuous screech. People began to run, to trample in one direction.
+The drum of the leaping Hawadji was drowned by a louder drumming that
+came from the centre of the square. Children squeaked with excitement.
+The Riffians forgot to drink, and slid forward with the cushioned feet
+of animals in a jungle. A tempest arose, and in it a whirlpool formed.
+It seemed that Renfrew and Claire must be torn in pieces.
+
+"What on earth is happening?" Renfrew exclaimed to Absalem, with the
+English anger our countrymen always display when trodden by a foreign
+element.
+
+Absalem smiled with airy dignity, and moved forward, beckoning them to
+follow.
+
+"Miracle man, all want see him," he remarked. "Great miracle man."
+
+With consummate adroitness he drew them with him to the edge of the
+whirlpool. As they reached it, Renfrew felt that Claire's hand suddenly
+tightened upon his arm until his flesh puckered between her fingers as
+the flesh of a rabbit puckers in a trap. He glanced at her in
+astonishment. Her eyes were fixed on something, or some one, beyond
+them, even beyond Absalem, who was forcing people out of their way with
+his powerful arms and back. Renfrew followed her eyes, and saw the
+centre of the whirlpool.
+
+This mass of humanity had now assumed the form of a rough circus, the
+ring of which was kept clear. And in this ring a strange figure had just
+appeared with upraised arms, and a manner of wild, even of frantic,
+authority. This was a gigantic man, almost black, half-naked, with long
+arms, furious eyes, and legs which, though muscular, tapered at the
+ankles like the legs of a finely bred race-horse. His head was shaved in
+front; but at the back the black hair grew in a long and waving lock,
+and his features, magnificently cut, might have been those of a grand
+European of some headstrong and high-couraged race. Upon this man
+Claire's eyes were fixed, with an expression so strange and knowing that
+Renfrew turned on her with a sharp exclamation.
+
+"Claire! Claire!"
+
+She slowly withdrew her eyes.
+
+"Yes, Desmond."
+
+A question stammered on his lips; but as she smiled at him, he felt the
+mad absurdity of it, and was silent.
+
+"Well, Desmond, what is it?"
+
+"Nothing," he answered.
+
+Absalem now claimed their attention. He was determined that they should
+be in the front of the crowd, and ruthlessly pushed away the Moors who
+had obtained the best places, pointing at Claire and Renfrew, and wildly
+vociferating their mighty rank and enormous wealth. The staring mob gave
+way; and in a moment Claire and the miracle man stood face to face. His
+frenzied eyes had no sooner seen her than he too fell upon the
+surrounding natives, thrusting them violently to one side, and cursing
+them for daring to draw near to the great English gentleman and lady. In
+the whole mighty mob these two were the only Europeans, and they
+attracted as universal an attention as two Aztecs would in a Bank
+Holiday gathering at the Crystal Palace. Renfrew could now see that the
+screeching music came from one side of the ring, where a couple of men,
+clothed in filthy rags, were sitting on the ground, one playing a long
+pipe of straw, the other beating an enormous drum. Immediately behind
+them a very old man, evidently a maniac, swayed his body violently
+backwards and forwards, and at regular intervals uttered a loud and
+chuckling cry that might have been the ejaculation of a tipsy
+school-boy, and came strangely from withered lips hanging loose with
+weakness and with age. This dancing Methuselah caught Renfrew's
+attention; and, for the moment, he forgot to look at the miracle man. A
+general outcry from the multitude made him turn his head. He saw then
+that the miracle man held in his huge hands a sort of kennel of straw,
+the mouth of which was closed with a movable flap. Lifting this aloft,
+he sprang wildly round the ring, vociferating some words at the top of
+his voice; then, suddenly casting it down, he flung himself upon the
+ground, which he beat with his forehead, while he shrieked out a prayer
+to his patron saint for protection in the great miracle which he was
+about to perform.
+
+"What is he doing?" Renfrew asked of Absalem.
+
+"Don't you know?" Claire said.
+
+Her eyes were gleaming with excitement as they stared at the salaaming
+figure that grovelled at their feet.
+
+"No. How should I?"
+
+"He is praying to Sidi Mahomet," she said.
+
+And then she looked at Renfrew. He understood. At that moment, despite
+the excessive heat engendered by the blazing sun and the pressure of the
+crowd, he turned very cold, as if his body was plunged in glacier water.
+He thought of the tall figure that had stood before Claire's tent door
+in the moonbeams, the lips that had coaxed from the pipe the tune that
+charmed all serpents,--that right tune that they must follow, which drew
+them from the desert sands to the grass of the oasis, till they wound up
+the body of this gaunt and tremendous savage, and hid themselves in his
+hairy bosom. This miracle man, then, was a snake-charmer, and Claire had
+divined it at once. How? Renfrew put the question quickly.
+
+"How did I know? He is the man who played outside my tent in the night,
+Desmond."
+
+"The very man! Impossible."
+
+"The very man."
+
+"Then you were not asleep, not dreaming?"
+
+"How can one tell? Hush!"
+
+She spoke in the low voice of one whose attention is becoming
+concentrated, and who cannot endure the interruption. The charmer had
+now finished his petition to his god, and, standing up, thrust into his
+mouth a handful of some green herb, which he chewed and swallowed. Then
+his whole manner abruptly changed. The frenzy died out of his eyes. A
+calm suffused his tall and muscular body till it became strangely
+statuesque. His lips slowly smiled, and he raised his hands towards the
+glaring sky with a sublime gesture of gratitude.
+
+"What an actor!" Renfrew heard Claire murmur softly.
+
+He, too, had become intensely engrossed by this man in whom he, from
+this moment, began to see Claire: the exquisite woman whom the civilised
+world worshipped in the mighty savage who came from the remote depths of
+Morocco; the white being who played with the minds of the capitals of
+Europe, in the black being who played with the reptiles of the desert
+and of the jungle. For Claire, guided by the spirit that ever goes
+before genius bearing the torch, had instinctively divined what she had
+never known. In London it seemed that she had entered into the very soul
+of this man who now stood before her. She had caught the wild graces of
+his bearing. She had reproduced his smile, so full of secrets and of
+power. She had moved as he did. She had been motionless as now he was
+motionless. In the sun she stood at this moment and beheld the reality
+of which she had been the magnificent reflection. And Renfrew felt his
+heart oppressed, as if clouds were closing round him.
+
+Now the snake-charmer looked slowly all round the great circle of
+watching faces until his eyes rested on Claire. He had taken the straw
+kennel into his hands, and he softly lifted the flap, and turned it flat
+upon the top of the kennel, leaving the mouth open. Then he thrust one
+hand into this mouth, and withdrew it, holding a writhing snake whose
+striped satin skin changed colour in the sunshine, turning from pink to
+green, from green to black.
+
+"It is the snake I saw," Claire whispered to Renfrew.
+
+He did not reply. He seemed fascinated by the savage and the serpent.
+Holding the snake at arm's length, the charmer walked softly round the
+circle, collecting money from the crowd. He stopped in front of Claire.
+The snake thrust out its flat head towards her. She did not shrink from
+it; and the charmer cried aloud some words that seemed like praise of
+her beauty and of her composure. She gave him a piece of gold. Renfrew
+gave him nothing.
+
+Then, standing once more in the centre of the circle, he burst into a
+frantic incantation, while the musicians redoubled their efforts, and
+the old maniac in the corner gave forth his chuckling cry with greater
+force, and swayed his trembling body more vehemently to and fro. The
+snake, suddenly brought from the darkness of the kennel to the light of
+day, was torpid and weary. It drooped between the charmer's hands. He
+shook it, called on it, caught up a stick and struck it. Then, forcing
+its mouth wide open, he barred its pink throat with the stick, on which
+he made it fix its two fangs, which were like two sharp hooks. Holding
+the end of the stick, he came again to Claire, to whom his whole
+performance was now exclusively devoted; and, approaching the hanging
+reptile close to her eyes, he jumped it up and down to the sound of the
+drum and pipe.
+
+"You see," Claire said to Renfrew, "the roof of its mouth is
+flesh-colour."
+
+He did not answer. Why did all this mean so much to him? Why did the
+clouds grow darker? The music and the cries of the old maniac perturbed
+him and bewildered his brain. And he wanted to be calm, and to watch
+Claire and this savage with a cool and undivided attention. By this
+time the snake was growing irritated. It agitated its long body
+furiously; and when the charmer unhooked its fangs from the stick, it
+turned its head towards him and made a sudden dart at his face. He
+opened his mouth wide, thrust the snake into it, and let the creature
+fasten on his tongue, from which blood began to flow. Still bleeding,
+and with the snake fixed on his tongue, he danced and sprang into the
+air. His eyes grew wild. Foam ran from his mouth, and his whole
+appearance became demoniacal. Yet his eyes still fastened themselves
+upon Claire. In his most frantic moments his attention was never
+entirely distracted from the spot where she was standing. He tore the
+snake from his tongue and buried its fangs in the flesh of his left
+wrist. Cries broke from the crowd. The sight of the blood had excited
+them, for these people love blood as the toper loves wine. They urged
+the charmer on to fresh exertions with furious screams of encouragement.
+The maniac bent his body like a dervish in the last exercises of his
+religion, and the ragged musicians forced a more extreme uproar from
+their instruments. The charmer caught the snake by the tail, and strove
+to pull it backwards off his wrist. But the reptile's fangs were firmly
+fastened. It held on with a terrible tenacity, and a struggle ensued
+between it and its master. When at length it gave way, it was streaked
+with blood, and now at last thoroughly aroused. The charmer scraped his
+tongue with a straw; then, casting himself again upon the earth, he
+prayed once more with fury to Sidi Mahomet. Claire watched him always,
+with that pale and exquisite attention which one genius gives to the
+performance of another. Her face was white and still. Her body never
+moved. But her eyes blazed with life, and with the fires of a violent
+soul completely awake. Having finished his prayer, which ended in a cry
+so poignant that it might have burst from the lips of that world on
+which the flood came, the charmer remained upon the ground in a sitting
+posture, laid the snake in his lap, and drew from the inside of his
+ragged robe a Moorish lute made of a bladder, bamboo, and two strings,
+and coloured a pale yellowish-green. He plucked the strings gently, and
+played the fragment of a wild tune. Then, suddenly catching up the
+snake, and thrusting his tongue far out of his mouth, he poised the
+snake upon it, rose to his feet and stood at his full height in front of
+Claire, fixing his eyes upon her with a glance that seemed to claim from
+her both wonder and worship. The snake reared itself up higher and
+higher upon the quivering tongue; and the charmer, extending his long
+arms, whirled slowly round as if poised upon a movable platform, while a
+terrific clamour broke from the Moors, who seemed to be roused by this
+feat to the highest pitch of excitement. Still turning and turning, the
+charmer drew from his bosom a second snake that was black and larger
+than the first, and coiled it round his sinewy neck like a gigantic
+necklace, the darting head in front, resting, a sort of monstrous
+pendant, upon his uncovered chest. To Renfrew he looked like some
+hateful grotesque in a nightmare, inhuman, endowed with attributes of a
+devil. The serpents were part of him, growths of his body, visible signs
+of some terrible disease in which he gloried and of which he made a
+show. The creature was intolerable. His exhibition had suddenly become
+to Renfrew unfit for the eyes of any woman; and, without a word, he took
+hold of Claire and pulled her almost violently away from the circle on
+which the fascinated mob was beginning to encroach. She resisted him.
+
+"Desmond!" she exclaimed, "what are you doing?"
+
+"Claire--come. I insist upon it!"
+
+Already the Moors had thronged the place which they had left vacant. She
+turned a white face on him. There was in her eyes the hideous expression
+of a sleep-walker suddenly awakened, and she trembled in every limb. She
+swung round from Renfrew, and, above the intercepting Moors, high in the
+air, she saw the snake, which seemed climbing to heaven. While she
+looked, a huge hand closed upon it and took it out of sight. The
+charmer, observing the departure of his distinguished patrons, had
+abruptly stopped his performance. Claire made no further resistance.
+Without a word, she permitted Renfrew to lead her to the horses and
+help her into the saddle. They rode down the hill to the camp without
+exchanging a word.
+
+When Claire had dismounted, she stood for a moment twisting her whip in
+her hands. Then she said:--
+
+"Desmond, I must ask you never to startle me again as you did to-day, by
+sudden action. You can't understand how such an interruption hurts a
+nature like mine. I would rather you had struck me. That would only have
+wounded my body."
+
+She turned and went into her tent, leaving Renfrew in an agony of
+penitence and self-reproach. All the rest of the afternoon she was very
+cold and silent, rather dreamy than sullen, but obviously disinclined
+for conversation, and still more obviously unwilling to endure even the
+slightest demonstration of affection on the part of Renfrew. When the
+sheep which were to be slaughtered for the soldiers' feast were driven
+bleating into the camp, she retired into her tent, and remained there,
+resting, until the sun was low in the heavens, and the porters and
+mule-drivers went gaily out to search for the materials of the African
+fire with which the night was to be celebrated. They returned, singing
+the Moorish conquest of Granada, with their strong arms full of canes,
+dry and brittle branches of trees, logs that looked like whole trunks,
+and huge shrubs, green and sweet-smelling. Hearing their song, Claire
+came out of her tent. The sky was red, and, in the southwest, turrets of
+vapour rose and streamed out, assuming mysterious and thin shapes in the
+gathering dimness. A great flock of birds, flying very high, and forming
+a definite and beautiful pattern, passed slowly on the wing towards the
+kingdom of the storks, that lies near the sand banks of Ceuta. They
+moved in silence, and faded away in the twilight stealthily, like things
+full of quiet intention and governed by some furtive, but inexorable,
+desire. Renfrew, who was wandering rather miserably near the camp,
+watching descending pilgrims from the city melt into the vast bosom of
+the plain, saw Claire's white figure in the tent door, half hidden in a
+soft rosy mist which stole from the lips of evening as scent steals from
+the lips of a flower. He felt afraid to go to her. He possessed her; and
+yet it seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her. He was only an
+ordinary man. She was a strange woman; not merely because of her
+womanhood, as all women are to all men, but strange in that which lay
+beyond and beneath her womanhood, in her genius, and in the dull or
+ardent moods that stood round it, one, and yet not one, with it. In the
+tent door she leaned like a spirit born of the evening, a child of
+fading things, dying lights, fainting colours, retreating sounds,--a
+spirit waiting for the coming of the stars, and the rising of the moon,
+and the mysteries of the night, and the subtle odours that the winds of
+Northern Africa bring with them over the mountains and down the lonely
+valleys, when the sun descends. And as a spirit may listen to the songs
+of men, with the melancholy of a thing apart, she listened to the songs
+of the Moors, until at length they seemed to be in her own heart that
+evening, as if they were songs of her own country. And these dark men
+with wild eyes who sang them, while they flung upon the grass their
+burdens from the thickets, and from the hedgeless and wide fields, were
+no longer alien to her. She stood in the tent door, and, without any
+conscious effort of the imagination, became their fancied mate,--a woman
+sprung from the same soil, or come in--like the strange people--from the
+deserts of their country. Only she was not as one of their women,
+mindless, patient, and concealed; but as their women should be, strong,
+hot-blooded, brave, serene, and looked upon by a world without reproach.
+
+Absalem came up to her to tell her some details of the night's
+festivity. Before he spoke she said to him:--
+
+"Where does the desert lie?"
+
+He told her.
+
+"Does the miracle man come from there?"
+
+Absalem answered that no one knew. He had been much in Wasan, the sacred
+city of Morocco; but none knew his birthplace, his tribe, his name.
+Often he disappeared, no man could tell whither. But, doubtless, he
+made vast journeys. Some said that he had exhibited his snakes on the
+banks of the Nile, that he had gone with the pilgrim trains to Mecca,
+that he knew Khartoum as he knew Marakesh, and that he never ceased from
+wandering.
+
+"What is his age?" Claire asked.
+
+Absalem answered that he must be old, but that Time had no power over
+him.
+
+"He miracle man; he live long as he wish."
+
+Last she asked when he would leave Tetuan.
+
+"Perhaps this night. Perhaps to-morrow night, perhaps never. Perhaps he
+go already."
+
+"Already!"
+
+Suddenly Claire moved out from the tent, and joined Renfrew, who was
+still watching her, and weaving lover's fancies about her white figure.
+
+"Have you been here long, Desmond?" she asked.
+
+"Very long, dearest. Are you rested?"
+
+"Quite. From here you can see all the people travelling away from the
+city towards the sea?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you been watching them?"
+
+"Yes, indeed; for half the afternoon."
+
+She turned her great eyes on him searchingly, and seemed as if she
+checked a question which was almost on her lips.
+
+"They must have been a strange multitude," she said at length. "I wonder
+where they are all going?"
+
+"Some to the villages in the plain, some to the coast. I saw the Riffs
+who were in the Soko pass by. I suppose they were returning to the
+caverns from which they plunder becalmed vessels, Spanish and
+Portuguese."
+
+"The Riffs--yes?"
+
+Her intonation suggested that she was waiting for some further
+information. Renfrew's curiosity was aroused.
+
+"Why do you look at me like that?" he asked. "What do you want to know?"
+
+"Nothing, Desmond. How dark it is getting! There is Mohammed ringing the
+bell. And look, those must be the soldiers. They are just marching in
+from the city."
+
+With the coming of night a wind arose, blowing towards the sea from the
+mountains; and with it came up a troop of clouds which blotted out stars
+and moon, and plunged the plain into a gulf of darkness. Tetuan does not
+gleam with lamps at night like a European city, and all the distant
+villas of the Moors were closely shuttered. So the wind, warm and
+scented and strong, swept over a black land, deserted and vacant. Only
+in the camp was there movement, music, and an illumination that strove
+up in the night, as if it would climb to the clouds. Scarcely had Claire
+and Renfrew finished dinner, when Absalem and Mohammed ceremoniously
+appeared to conduct them out to the bare space before the tents on
+which the African fire had been carefully built. Absalem carried a lamp
+which swung in the wind, and, behind, there appeared from the kitchen
+tent some of the porters, bearing burning brands, the flames of which
+were at right angles to the wood from which they sprung. The guard of
+soldiers, one dozen in all, armed with immense guns and wrapped in
+hooded cloaks, were already crouched in a silent mass before the
+lifeless and portentous erection which came out of the darkness, as
+Absalem swung forward the lamp, like the skeleton of a monster. They
+turned their shadowy faces on Claire, and stared with eyes intent and
+unself-conscious as those of an animal. The porters flung their brands
+on to the mountain of twigs, and instantaneously a huge sheet of livid
+gold sprang up against the black background of the night, as if it had
+been shaken out on the wind by invisible hands. This sheet expanded,
+swayed, fluttered in ragged edges, and cast forth a cloud of sparks
+which were carried away into the air and vanished in the sky. The shrubs
+caught fire and crackled furiously, and finally the foundation of
+gigantic logs began to glow steadily, and to fill the wind with a
+scorching heat. The camp was gradually defined, at first vaguely and in
+sections,--the peak of a tent, the head of a mule, a startled pariah
+dog, a Moor set in the eye of the flames; then clearly, as the buildings
+one may see in a furnace, complete and glowing. The faces of the
+soldiers were barred with flickering orange, and red lights played in
+their huge and staring eyeballs. The horses and mules could be counted.
+Before the kitchen tent the sacrifice of sheep was visible, stewing in
+enormous pans upon red embers in a trench of earth. And the grave cook,
+who was distinguished by a white turban, shone like a pantomime magician
+at the mouth of an enchanted cave. Warmth, light, life poured upon the
+night, and the voices of men began to mingle with the continuous voice
+of this superb fire. The Moors, soldiers, servants, porters, kindled
+into furious gaiety with the swiftness of the canes and olive boughs.
+They sprang up from the ground, pulled the shrouding hoods from their
+faces, tossed away their djelabes, and began, with shouts and
+ejaculations, to dance up and down before the golden sheet, spreading
+their hands to it with the glee of children. A sudden joy beamed in the
+dusky and solemn faces, twinkled in the sombre eyes. One man flung away
+his fez, another dashed his turban to the ground. Round, shaven heads,
+bare arms, brown legs, half concealed by fluttering linen
+knickerbockers, lithe bodies emerged with eager haste into the light.
+Shadows became abruptly men, formless humps athletes. Mutes sent out
+great voices to startle the sweeping bats. Mourners turned into maniacs.
+It was a fantasia that exploded into life like a rocket, shedding a
+stream of vivid human fire. Mohammed drew away from the flames, taking
+a dozen swift footsteps to the rear. Then, with a shout, he dashed
+forward, bounded into the golden sheet, and disappeared as a clown
+disappears through a paper hoop. Only the paper closed up behind him. He
+leaped through light to darkness, pursued by a thousand eager sparks.
+One soldier followed him, then another, and another. The porters,
+linking hands, leaped in twos and threes. Even the cook, old, and
+serious with a weight of savoury knowledge, tottered to the edge of the
+fire, which was now becoming a furnace, and took it as an Irish horse
+takes a stone wall, striking the topmost branches with his bare feet
+amid a chorus of yells.
+
+Claire watched the darting figures with a silent gravity. She did not
+seem to be stirred by the fantasia of the firelight, or to catch any
+gaiety or life from the boisterous activity of those about her. The
+flames lit up the whiteness of her face, and showed Renfrew that she was
+looking gloomy and even despairing.
+
+"Is anything the matter, Claire?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"No. How could there be?"
+
+The wind, which was increasing in violence, blew her thin dress forward,
+and she shivered. Absalem noticed it.
+
+"Wear djelabe, lady," he said.
+
+And in a moment he had taken his off, and was carefully wrapping Claire
+in it. She seemed glad of it, thanked him, and, with a quick gesture
+that hurt Renfrew, pulled the big brown hood up over her head, so that
+her face was entirely concealed from view. She now looked exactly like a
+Moor, and might have been mistaken for one of the soldiers before the
+fire was lit and all impeding garments were thrown aside.
+
+Renfrew, uneasy, and wondering what conduct on his part would best suit
+her mysterious mood, after one or two remarks to which she barely
+replied, drew away a little, and gave his attention to the antics of the
+soldiers. Some of them were already resuming their djelabes, in
+preparation for the feast, which they sniffed even through the odour of
+burning wood and leaves. The cook, after his emotional and acrobatic
+outburst, had returned to his pans, which he was stirring tenderly with
+a stick. When Renfrew again looked towards Claire, he found it
+impossible to tell which cloak shrouded her from his sight. Four or five
+hooded figures stood near the fire. She must be one of them. He
+approached the group, but found, to his surprise, that all the members
+of it were soldiers. Claire had moved away. Renfrew stood for a few
+minutes with the men, till they were summoned to their feast, which,
+strangely enough, was to take place away from the fire in the dense
+darkness behind the tents. Then he was left alone by the huge mass of
+flame, which roared hoarsely in the wind. Where could Claire be? On any
+ordinary occasion Renfrew would certainly have sought for her, but
+to-night something held him back. He knew very well that she wished to
+be alone, that something was closely occupying her mind. Whether she was
+still brooding over the event of the afternoon, when he had forcibly led
+her away in the very crisis of the snake-charmer's performance, he could
+not tell. To an ordinary woman such a matter would have been a trifle;
+but Renfrew understood that Claire felt it more deeply. Her mind
+appeared to be mysteriously moved and awakened by this savage from the
+depths of Morocco. Various circumstances combined to render him more
+interesting to her than he could possibly be to any ordinary traveller.
+Renfrew recognised that fully and quietly. The genius of Claire had
+enabled her to realise in London all the wildly picturesque
+idiosyncrasies of a man whom she had never seen or heard of. Suddenly
+fate had led her to him, and she had beheld her own performance, the
+original of her imitation. As Renfrew stood by the fire, he began to
+feel the folly of his proceeding of the afternoon, and to imagine more
+clearly than before the condition into which it had thrown Claire. It is
+a sin to disturb the contemplations of genius. It is sacrilege. And then
+Renfrew had been moved to his act by a preposterous access of jealousy.
+He acknowledged this to himself. He had been jealous of Claire's
+interest in this man's performance, jealous perhaps even of her dream
+among the hills in the midnight camp, where the man stood before her
+sleeping eyes, and played with his visionary serpent. How mad can a
+lover be? He resolved to go to Claire, and ask her pardon. This resolve
+thrilled him. To carry it out, he would have to draw very near to
+Claire, to unpack his heart to her. After all, she had given herself to
+him. But he had appreciated the wonder of his rôle as possessor so
+keenly, that he had waited upon her moods with an almost trembling awe.
+Now, in asking pardon, he would show that in his passion he could be
+strong. Women want to see the man in the lover, as well as the devotee.
+Renfrew, in acknowledging his jealousy of a black savage, meant to clasp
+Claire with the arms of a whirlwind.
+
+Meanwhile she was hidden from him. The wind blew strongly. The sparks
+leaped away in clouds toward the sea. From the dense darkness behind him
+came a sound of music. The soldiers were feasting. The porters were
+striking the lute, and singing songs of the dance and of love and of
+victory. It was a night of comradeship and of rejoicing. Yet he stood
+alone; and the turmoil of his heart was unheeded. He tried to explore
+the blackness of the night which stood round the golden fire with his
+eyes. Claire must be in that blackness close to him. Doubtless she saw
+him, a red and yellow creature, painted into fictitious brilliance by
+the illumination which was shed upon him. She saw him and kept from
+him. Renfrew resolved to be patient. When her mood of reserve died she
+would come to him, in her dress of a Moor, and he would kiss the white
+face beneath the hood, and put his arms round the thin figure that was
+lost in the djelabe of brawny Absalem, and tell her the true story of
+his heart, never fully told to her yet. He squatted down before the
+fire, lit his pipe, shrugged his shoulders against the tempest from the
+mountains, and waited, listening to the weird music that swept by him
+like a hidden bird on the wind.
+
+And Claire--where was she? When Absalem wrapped her in the huge djelabe
+it seemed to Claire that he had divined her secret longing to be in
+hiding. She disappeared into the mighty hood of the garment as into a
+cave. Its shadow concealed her from the watching eyes of Renfrew. There
+was warmth in it and a beautiful darkness. She desired both. She saw
+Renfrew turn to watch the leaping soldiers, and stole away out of the
+illuminated circle formed by the glow from the fire, into the night
+beyond. She did not go far, only into the nearest shadow. And there she
+sat down on the short dry grass, and forgot Renfrew, the roaring flames,
+the wind that felt incessantly at her robe, the shouting guard, the
+radiant and dancing attendants. She forgot them all as completely as if
+they had never been in her life; for the strangeness of certain
+incidents preoccupied her, to the exclusion of everything else. In the
+double existence of a really great actress there are many moments in
+which the truths of the imagination seem more important than the truths
+of physical phenomena of things seen by the eye, of sounds received and
+appreciated by the ear. In these moments, genius usurps the throne of
+reason, and the mind beholds fancies as sunlit gods, facts as timid and
+scarcely defined shadows. So it was with Claire now. Even the
+snake-charmer, as he gave his performance in the Soko, was a shadow in
+comparison with that man who summoned her to the tent door in the
+solitary encampment. And behind and beyond both these figures of truth
+and dreaming stood a third, created for herself by Claire in London,
+that figure into whom she had poured her soul as into a mould, when she
+charmed imaginary serpents, and prayed to the god in whom, for a moment,
+she believed with the passion of the perfect mime. This trio Claire
+placed in line, and reviewed: charmer of her imagination, of her dream,
+of the Soko.
+
+They were the same, and yet not the same. For the first was dominated,
+even was created by her. The second stood above her, like some magician,
+and summoned her as one possessing a right. The third--what of him? He
+was a wild creature of blood and foam, crafty, a player like herself, a
+maker of money, a savage in sacking, and almost nothing to her now. Out
+of the desert he came. Into the desert he was, perhaps, even now,
+returning, with his snakes sleeping in his bosom, and the money of the
+Tetuan Moors jingling in his pouch.
+
+Yes, she saw him, travelling like a shadow in the night, one of those
+grotesques which leap on bedroom walls when a lamp flares in the wind
+that sighs through an open casement. He was going; but the man of the
+dream remained. The dream man had come up out of the world that is
+vaguer to us than the desert when we wake, and clearer to us than the
+desert when we sleep. Claire saw him still, and, while the wonderful
+mountebank of the Soko passed, he stood in the tent door like a statue
+of ebony, a rooted reality. And the snake was in his bosom; and the pipe
+was at his lips; and the power was in his heart. And as he played,
+Claire thought beneath the djelabe of Absalem, there came to him, with
+the faltering steps of a thing irresistibly charmed, that third man
+whose soul she had seen in London, like approaching like, with the
+manner of a slave and the glance of the conquered. And her soul was
+still within that charmed figure. She could not rescue it now from the
+place where she had put it. And the statue at the tent door played the
+irresistible melody until his wild and cringing double stole to his very
+feet, and nearer and nearer, till they melted together, and where two
+men had been, there was only one. He smiled with a subtle triumph, laid
+down his pipe, stretched out his arms and vanished. But within him now
+was the soul of Claire, borne wherever he should go, his captive, his
+possession for all eternity.
+
+Behind her, in the cloudy darkness, Claire heard a movement, and the
+gliding of soft feet on grass. She did not turn her head, supposing that
+one of the soldiers was keeping his guard. The movement ceased. But the
+little noise had broken the thread on which her fancies were strung.
+They were scattered like beads. She found herself feeling quite
+ordinary, and listening with an urging attention for a renewal of the
+trifling noise behind her. In the distance she could see Renfrew, now
+crouching before the fire, which poured colour and a piercing vitality
+upon him. She heard also, and for the first time, the sound of the
+porters' music, which had been audible in the night all through her
+reverie, though she was entirely unaware of the fact. She realised that
+the soldiers were devouring the stew of mutton, and that she was in a
+gay camp, full of human beings in a state of unusual satisfaction. One
+of these human beings must be close to her. She turned her head. But she
+was sitting in the darkness beyond the illumination of the fire, and
+beyond her the night was like a black wall. Whatever had moved there was
+invisible to her. She had not heard the gliding step go away, and she
+felt that she was not alone. This feeling began to render her uneasy.
+She got up, with the intention of returning to the firelight and to
+Renfrew. Indeed she had taken a step or two in his direction, when she
+was checked by an unreasonable desire to see who had come so close to
+her, who had broken her reverie. Acting upon the sudden impulse, she
+turned swiftly and came on into the darkness. Almost instantly she stood
+before the dim outline of a man, and paused. Here in the night it was
+very lonely, even though the illuminated camp was so near. Claire
+hesitated to approach this man who seemed to be on watch and who was
+perfectly motionless. She waited a moment, wishing that he would come to
+her in order that she might see what he was like, whether he carried a
+gun and was a soldier. But it was soon evident that he did not mean to
+move. Then Claire went up so close to him that his coarse garment rubbed
+against her djelabe and his eyes stared right down into hers. And she
+saw that it was the snake-charmer from the Soko, who was looking into
+her face with the very smile of the man in her dream. Round his bare
+throat one of his snakes was twined, and he held its neck between the
+fingers of his left hand. The wind tossed his short and ragged cloak
+wildly to and fro, and whirled the long lock of hair at the back of his
+shaven head about, and made it dance like a living thing. When Claire
+came up to him, he never said a word, or moved at all. It seemed to her
+that his face was that of some dark and triumphant being, waiting
+immovably for something that was certain to come to him, and to come so
+close that he need not even stretch out his hand to take it as his
+possession. What was the thing he waited for? She looked at his black
+face and at the snake which moved slowly, trying to thrust its way
+downward into the warmth of his bosom, out of the reach of the wind and
+of the night. And, when the man's fingers unclosed to release it, and it
+slid away and softly disappeared beneath his garment, Claire shuddered
+under the influence of a sensation that was surely mad. For she felt
+that she envied the snake, and that the charmer was waiting there in the
+darkness for her. As the snake vanished, Claire recoiled towards the
+fire. The charmer did not attempt to follow her, and his huge and
+watchful figure quickly faded from Claire's eyes till his blackness had
+become one with the blackness of the night.
+
+
+IV
+
+Renfrew, as he crouched before the fire, felt a light touch on his
+shoulder. He looked up, saw Claire's white face peering down on him, and
+sprang to his feet.
+
+"I thought you were never coming, that you had deserted me altogether,
+and left me lonely in the midst of the fantasia," he cried, seizing her
+hands.
+
+"I am cold," she said; "horribly cold. Let me sit beside you, close to
+the fire."
+
+She sat down on the ground, almost touching the roaring flames.
+
+"Where have you been?"
+
+"Sitting in the dark. The soldiers are feasting?"
+
+"Yes, and the camp fellows are all singing and playing. Don't you hear
+them? We are quite alone. That's all I want, all I care for. Claire,
+when you go away like this, and leave me, even for a few minutes,
+Morocco is the most desolate place in all the world, and I'm the most
+desolate vagabond in it."
+
+He put his arm round her. The terrific glow from the fire played over
+her face, danced in the deep folds of her djelabe, shone in her eyes,
+showered a cloud of gold and red about her hair. For she had let her
+hood fall down on her shoulders. She attained to that fine and almost
+demoniacal picturesqueness which glorifies even the most commonplace
+smith when you see him in his forge by night. Her cheeks were suffused
+with scarlet, as if she had suddenly painted them to go on the stage.
+Yet she shivered again as Renfrew spoke.
+
+"You should not have left the fire," he said. "And yet the wind is
+warm."
+
+"It can't be. But it's not the wind, it's the darkness that has chilled
+me."
+
+"Or is it the loneliness?" he asked, tenderly. "For you have been alone
+as well as I, and nothing on earth makes one so cold as solitude."
+
+"I scarcely ever feel alone, Desmond," she said.
+
+And, as she spoke, she cast a glance behind her into the darkness from
+which she had just come. Renfrew noticed it.
+
+"You have been alone?" he asked hastily. Then he checked himself with an
+ashamed laugh.
+
+"What a fool I am," he exclaimed.
+
+He clasped her more closely.
+
+"A fool, because I'm so desperately in love with you, Claire," he said,
+rushing on his confession with the swiftness of alarmed bravery. "Look
+here, I want to tell you something. You must put everything I do,
+everything I am, down to the account of my love,--shyness, anger,
+abruptness, violence,--everything, Claire. My love's responsible. It
+does play the devil with an ordinary man when he's given his very soul
+to--to a woman like you, to a great woman. It keeps him back when he
+ought to go on, and sends him on when he ought to stay quiet, and makes
+him jealous of stones and--and savages."
+
+"Savages, Desmond?"
+
+Renfrew's face was scarlet. He put up his hand before it and muttered:--
+
+"This fire's scorching. Yes, Claire, of savages. Didn't you find that
+out this afternoon, when we were in Tetuan? But of course you couldn't.
+You couldn't know you'd married such an infernal lunatic."
+
+He broke off. She was watching him with a close attention, and her body
+had ceased to tremble under his arm.
+
+"Go on, Desmond."
+
+"You want me to tell you the sort of man you've married?"
+
+"I want you to tell me what you mean."
+
+"Then I will. Claire, this afternoon I took you away from that
+snake-charming chap because--well, because you watched him as if he
+fascinated you."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Of course I knew why. His performance was clever, and he was
+picturesque in his way, although, to be sure, it was all put on, as far
+as that goes."
+
+"Like my stage performances, Desmond."
+
+"Claire," he said hotly. "How can you?"
+
+"That man acts far better than I do--if he acts at all."
+
+"Was that why he interested you so much?"
+
+"In what other way could he interest me?"
+
+Renfrew kicked at one of the blazing logs and sent up a shower of
+red-hot flakes.
+
+"Well, there was your dream, Claire."
+
+"Yes, there was that."
+
+"It was curious, coming just before we saw the fellow. And you say the
+two men were alike."
+
+"I did not say alike. I said the same."
+
+"How could that be?"
+
+"How can a thousand things be? Yet we cannot deny them when they are,
+any more than we can deny that we feel an earthly immortality within us
+and yet crumble into dust. In sleep I saw that man. I saw his snake. I
+heard him play."
+
+"Yes, Claire, I know. It's damned strange."
+
+Renfrew's forehead was wrinkled in a meditative frown.
+
+"But, after all, what's a dream?" he exclaimed. "A vagary of a sleeping
+brain. And in your dream you wouldn't go to that beggar, Claire."
+
+"No. I wouldn't go, and so I died."
+
+"It all means nothing--nothing at all."
+
+She looked at him gravely.
+
+"I wonder whether there are things in life that we are compelled to do,
+Desmond," she said. "I sometimes think there must be. How otherwise can
+a thousand strange events be accounted for, especially things that women
+do?"
+
+"I don't know," he muttered, staring at her anxiously in the firelight.
+
+"Every one acknowledges the irresistible power of physical force over
+physical weakness. Some day, perhaps, when the world has grown a little
+older, we shall all understand that the power of mental force is
+precisely similar, and can as little be resisted. What's that?"
+
+Renfrew felt that she was suddenly alert. Her thin form grew hard and
+quivering, like the body of a greyhound about to be let loose on a
+hare. He heard nothing except a sound of music from the darkness, and
+the gentle rustle of the wind.
+
+"I hear nothing," he said. "What was it--a cry?"
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Oh, Desmond--hush!"
+
+He was obedient, and strained his ears, wondering what Claire had heard.
+The fire was at last beginning to die down, for the flames had devoured
+the masses of dry twigs, and had now nothing to feed upon except the
+heavy logs. So the darkness drew a little closer round the camp, as if
+the night expanded noiselessly. One of the porters, or, perhaps, one of
+the soldiers, was playing a queer little air upon a pipe over and over
+again. It was plaintive and very soft. But the tone of the instrument
+was strangely penetrating, and the wind carried it along over the plain,
+as if anxious to bear it to the sea, that the cave men might hear it,
+and the sailors bearing up for the Spanish coast. Was Claire listening
+to this odd little tune? Renfrew wondered. There seemed no other sound.
+She was moving uneasily now, as if an intense restlessness had taken
+hold of her. And she turned her head away from him and gazed into the
+night.
+
+Presently she put her hand on Renfrew's arm, which was still round her
+waist, and tried to remove it. But he would not yield to her desire. He
+only held her closer, and again--he could not tell why--the smouldering
+jealousy began to flare up in his heart.
+
+"No, Claire," he said, in answer to her movement, "you are mine. You
+have given yourself to me. I alone have the right to keep you, to hold
+you close--close to my heart."
+
+"Can you keep me always, Desmond?" she said, suddenly turning on him
+with a sort of fierce excitement.
+
+She looked into his eyes as if she would search the very depths of his
+soul for strength, for power.
+
+"You have the right. Yes; but that is nothing--nothing."
+
+"Nothing, Claire?"
+
+"You must have the strength, Desmond. That is everything."
+
+There was a look almost of despair in her face. She threw herself
+against him as if moved by a sudden yearning for protection, and put her
+arms round his shoulders.
+
+The hidden Moor was still playing the same monotonous little tune, an
+African aria, as wild as a bird that flies over the desert, or a cloud
+that is driven across the sky above a dangerous sea. It was imaginative,
+and, as all tunes seem to have a shape, this melody was misshapen and
+yet delicious, like a twisted tangled creature that has the smile of a
+sweet woman, or the eyes of an alluring child. In its plaintiveness
+there was the atmosphere of solitary places. And there was a sound of
+love in it, too, but of a love so uncivilised as to be almost monstrous.
+Some earth man of a dead age might have sung it to his mate in a land
+where the sun looked down on things primeval. It might have caught the
+heart of maidens very long ago, before they learned to think of passion
+as the twin of law, and to regard a kiss as the seal set upon the tape
+of matrimony. The queer sorrow of it could hardly have moved any eyes to
+tears. Yet few women could have heard it without a sense of desolation.
+It ran through the darkness as cold water runs in the black shadow of a
+forest, a trickle of sound as thin and persistent as the cry of a wild
+creature in the night.
+
+Renfrew thrilled under the touch of Claire's hand.
+
+"You can give me the strength every woman seeks in the man she yields
+herself up to," he said.
+
+"How?"
+
+"By loving me."
+
+"Ah, yes. But the strength must not come, however subtly, from the
+woman. No--no."
+
+Again she leaned away from him, with her face turned towards the
+darkness. Tremors ran through her, and her hands dropped almost feebly
+from Renfrew's shoulders, as the hands of an invalid fall away, and
+down, after an embrace.
+
+"Oh, no," she reiterated, and her voice was almost a wail. "It must be
+there, in the man, part of him, whether he is with the woman in the
+night, or alone--far off--in the jungle, or in the--the desert. He must
+have the strange strength that comes from solitude. Where can the men of
+our country find that now?"
+
+"They find strength in the clash of wills, Claire, and in the battles of
+love."
+
+"Most of them never find it at all," she said, with a sort of sullen
+resignation. "And most of the women do not want it, or ask for it, or
+know what it is. The danger is when some accident or some fate teaches
+them what it is. Then--then--"
+
+She stopped, and glanced at Renfrew suspiciously, as if she had so
+nearly betrayed a secret that he might, nay, must have guessed it.
+
+"What do you mean? Then they seek it away from--?"
+
+"Where they know they will find it," she said, almost defiantly.
+
+Renfrew's face grew cold and rigid.
+
+"What are you saying to me, Claire?"
+
+"What is true of some women, Desmond."
+
+He was silent. Pain and fear invaded his heart; and, by degrees, the
+little tune played by the Moor seemed to approach him, very quietly, and
+to become one with this slow agony. Music, among its many and terrible
+powers, numbers one that is scarcely possessed as forcibly by any other
+art. It can glide into a man and direct his emotions as irresistibly as
+science can direct the flow of a stream. It can penetrate as a thing
+seen cannot penetrate. For that which is invisible is that which is
+invincible. And this tune of the Moor, while it added to Renfrew's
+distress, touched his distress with confusion and bewilderment. At first
+he did not realise that the music had anything to do with his state of
+mind, or with the growing turmoil of his heart and brain; but he felt
+that something was becoming intolerable to him, and pushing him on in a
+dangerous path. He thought it was the statement of Claire; and, for the
+first time in his life, he was stirred by an anger against her that was
+horrible to him. He released her from his arm.
+
+"How dare you say that to me?" he asked. "Do you understand what your
+words imply, that--Good God!--that women are like animals, creatures
+without souls, running to the feet of the master who has the whip with
+the longest, the most stinging lash? Why, such a creed as yours would
+keep men savages, and kill all gentleness out of the world. Curse that
+chap! That hideous music of his--"
+
+He had suddenly become aware that the Moor's melody added something to
+his torment. At his last exclamation, the sullen look in Claire's pale
+face gave way to an expression of fear and of startling solicitude.
+
+"Desmond, you are putting a wrong interpretation on what I said," she
+began hastily.
+
+But he was excited, and could not endure any interruption.
+
+"And you imply a degrading immorality as a prevailing characteristic of
+women too," he went on, "that they should leave their homes, deny their
+obligations, because they find elsewhere--away, out in some dark place
+with a blackguard--a powerful will to curb them and keep them down,
+like--why, like these wretched women all round us here in this
+country,--the women we saw in Tetuan only to-day, veiled, hidden, loaded
+with burdens, worse off than animals, because their masters doubt them,
+and would not dream of trusting them. Claire, there's something
+barbarous about you."
+
+He spoke the words with the intonation of one who thinks he is uttering
+an insult. But she smiled.
+
+"It's the something barbarous about me that has placed me where I am,"
+she said, with a cold pride. "It is that which civilisation worships in
+me, that which has set me above the other women of my time. It is even
+that which has made you love me, Desmond, whether you know it or not."
+
+He looked at her like a man half dazed.
+
+"I frighten the dove-cotes. I can make men tremble by my outbursts of
+passion, and women faint because I am sad; and even the stony-hearted
+sob when I die. And I can make you love me, Desmond. Yes, perhaps I am
+more barbarous than other women. But do you think I am sorry for it?
+No."
+
+"Some day you may be, Claire."
+
+He spoke more gently. The wonder and worship he had for this woman
+stirred in him again. While she had been speaking, she had instinctively
+risen to her feet, and she stood in the dull red glow of the waning
+fire, looking down at him as if he were a creature in a lower world than
+the one in which she could walk at will.
+
+"I shall never choose to be sorry," she said, "whatever my fate may be.
+To be sorry is to be feeble, and to be feeble is to be unfit to live,
+and unfit to die. Never, never think of me as being sorry for anything I
+have done, or may do. Never deceive yourself about me."
+
+A great log, eaten through by a flame at its heart, broke gently asunder
+on the summit of the heaped wood. One half of it, red-hot, and alive
+with multitudes of flickering fires, gold, primrose, steel-blue, and
+deep purple, dropped and fell at Claire's feet. She glanced down at it,
+and at Renfrew.
+
+"My deeds may burn me up," she said, "as those coloured fires burn up
+that wood, until it is no longer wood but fire itself. They shall never
+drench me with wretched, contemptible tears."
+
+He got up; and, when he was on his feet, he seemed to hear the incessant
+music more clearly, blending with the words of Claire. The notes were
+like hot sparks falling on him. He winced under them, and looked round
+almost wildly. Then, without speaking, he hurried away in the darkness
+to the place where the soldiers were feasting, and the men of the camp
+were holding their fantasia. Claire divined why he went. She started a
+step forward as if to try and stop him; but his movement had been so
+abrupt that she was too late. She had to let him go. Her hands fell at
+her sides, and she waited by the dying fire in the attitude of one who
+listens intently. The soft melody of that hidden and persistent musician
+wailed in her ears, on and on. It came again and again, never ceasing,
+never altering in time. And its influence upon Claire was terrible as
+the influence of the dream music in the valley beneath the Kasbar. She
+longed to go to it. She seemed to belong to it,--to be its possession,
+and to have erred when she separated herself from it. In the darkness it
+was awaiting her, and it sent out its crying voice in the night as a
+message, as a summons soft, clear, and quietly determined. She clenched
+her hands as she stood by the fire. She strove to root her feet in the
+ground. If there had been anything to cling to just then, she would have
+stretched forth her arms and clung to it, resisting what she loved from
+fear of the future. But there was nothing. And she thought of the
+children and of the Pied Piper. But they were legendary beings of a
+fable long ago. And she thought of Renfrew and of his love. But that
+seemed nothing. That could not keep her. He was a pale phantom, and her
+career was a handful of dust, and her name was as the name graven upon a
+tomb, and her life was but as a gift to be offered to an unknown
+destiny,--while that melody called to her. Had any one seen her then in
+the glow of the firelight, she would have seemed to him terrible. For
+suddenly she let the djelabe of Absalem slip from her shoulders to the
+ground. And, in the fiercely flickering light, that makes all things and
+people assume unearthly aspects, her thin figure in its white robe
+looked like the white body of a serpent, erect and trembling, under the
+influence of the charmer. But the melody grew softer and softer, more
+faint, more dreamy in the darkness. Presently it ceased. As it did so,
+Claire drew a deep breath, lifted her head like one released from a
+thraldom, and turned her face towards the camp.
+
+Almost directly she saw Renfrew returning towards her. He looked
+puzzled.
+
+"It wasn't any of the men playing," he said to her.
+
+"No?"
+
+Claire bent, caught up the djelabe and drew it over her.
+
+"I went to them, and found them listening to some story Absalem was
+telling. They were all gathered close round him, huddled up together in
+the dark. And the piping came from quite another direction--not from the
+soldiers either. It must have been some vagabond out of Tetuan. I was
+just going to make a search for him, when the noise stopped. He must
+have heard me coming."
+
+He still looked disturbed and angry, and this break in their
+conversation was final. It seemed impossible to take up the thread of it
+again. They stood together watching the fire fade away till it was a
+faint glow almost level with the ground. Then at last Renfrew spoke, in
+a voice that was almost timid.
+
+"Claire," he said.
+
+"Yes," she answered out of the dull twilight that would soon be
+darkness.
+
+"If I have said anything to-night to hurt you, don't think of it, don't
+remember it. I don't know--I don't seem to have been like myself
+to-night. I believe that cursed music irritated me, so ugly, and so
+monotonous; it got right on my nerves, I think."
+
+"Did it?"
+
+"Without my knowing it."
+
+He felt for one of her hands and clasped it.
+
+"Yes, dear. We both said more than we meant. Didn't we?"
+
+Claire did not assent; but she let her hand lie in his. That satisfied
+him then, although afterwards he remembered her silence. Soon the fire
+was dead; and they said good-night in the wind, which seemed colder
+because there was no more light.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Renfrew went to his tent, undressed, and got into bed. The wind roared
+against the canvas. But the pegs had been driven stoutly into the ground
+by the porters, and held the cords fast. He felt very tired and
+depressed, and thought he would not fall asleep quickly. But he soon
+began to be drowsy, and to have a sense of dropping into the very arms
+of the tempest, lulled by its noise. He slept for a time. Presently,
+however, and while it was still quite dark, he woke up. He heard the
+wind as before, but was troubled by an idea that some other sound was
+mingling with it, some murmur so indistinct that he could not decide
+what it was, although he was aware of it. He sat up and strained his
+ears, and wished the wind would lull, if only for a moment, or that this
+other sound--which had surely been the cause of his waking--would
+increase, and stand out distinctly in the night. And, at last, by dint
+of listening with all his force, Renfrew seemed to himself to compel the
+sound to greater clearness. Then he knew that somewhere, far off perhaps
+in the wind, the player on the pipe reiterated his soft and stealthy
+music. It was swept on the tempest like a drowning thing caught in a
+whirlpool. It was so faint as to be almost inaudible. But in all its
+weakness it retained most completely its character, and made the same
+impression upon Renfrew as when it was near and distinct. It irritated
+and it repelled him. And, with an angry exclamation, he flung himself
+down and buried his head in the pillow, stopping his ears with his
+hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With daylight the camp was in a turmoil. Claire was gone. Her bed had
+not been slept in. She had not undressed. She had not even taken off
+Absalem's djelabe. At least it could not be found. Renfrew, frantic,
+almost mad with anxiety, explored the plain, rode at a gallop to the
+gate of the city, called upon the Governor of Tetuan to help him in his
+search, and summoned the Consul to his aid in his despair. Every effort
+was made to find the missing woman; but no success crowned the quest,
+either at that time, or afterwards, when weeks became months, and months
+grew into years. A great actress was lost to the world. His world was
+lost to Renfrew. He rode back at last one day to the villas of Tangier,
+bent down upon his horse, broken, alone. In his despair he cursed
+himself. He accused himself of cruelty to Claire that night beside the
+African fire, when he had been roused to a momentary anger against her.
+He even told himself that he had driven her away from him. But other
+men, who had known Claire and the strangeness of her caprices, said to
+each other that she had got tired of Renfrew and given him the slip,
+wandering away disguised in the djelabe of a Moor, and that some fine
+day she would turn up again, and re-appear upon the stage that had seen
+her glory.
+
+Later on, when Renfrew at last, after long searching, came hopelessly
+back to England, so changed that his friends scarcely recognised him, he
+was sometimes seized with strange and terrible thoughts as he sat
+brooding over the wreck of his love. He seemed to see, as in a pale
+vision of flame and darkness, a little dusky Moorish boy bending to
+smell at a withered sprig of orange flower, and to remember that
+once--how long ago it seemed--Claire had wished to kiss that boy as a
+Moorish woman might have kissed him. And then he saw a veiled figure,
+that he seemed to know even in its deceitful robe, bend down to the boy.
+And the vision faded. At another time he would hear the little tune that
+had persecuted him in the night. And then he recalled the music of
+Claire's dream, and the melody that charmed the snakes; and he
+shuddered. For the miracle man had never been seen in Tetuan since the
+day when Claire had watched him in the Soko. Nor could Renfrew ever find
+out whither he had wandered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very long afterwards, however,--although this fact was never known to
+Renfrew,--two Russian travellers in the Great Sahara desert witnessed
+one evening, as they sat in their tent door, the performance of a savage
+charmer of snakes who carried upon his body three serpents,--one
+striped, one black, one white. And the younger of them noticed, and
+remarked to the other, that the charmer wore half-way up the little
+finger of his left hand a thin gold circle in which there was set a
+magnificent black pearl.
+
+
+
+
+A TRIBUTE OF SOULS
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+The matter of Carlounie, the village of Perthshire in Scotland, is
+become notorious in the world. The name of its late owner, his
+remarkable transformation, his fortunate career, his married life, the
+brooding darkness that fell latterly upon his mind, the flaming deed
+that he consummated, its appalling outcome, and the finding of him by Mr
+Mackenzie, the minister of the parish of Carlounie, sunk in a pool of
+the burn that runs through a "den" close to his house--all these things
+are fresh in the minds of many men. It has been supposed that he had
+discovered a common intrigue between his wife, Kate, formerly an
+hospital nurse, and his tenant, Hugh Fraser of Piccadilly, London. It
+has been universally thought that this discovery led to the last action
+of his life. The following pages, found among his papers, seem to put a
+very different complexion on the affair, although they suggest a
+mediæval legend rather than a history of modern days. It may be added
+that careful enquiries have been made among the inhabitants of
+Carlounie, and that no man, woman, or child has been discovered who ever
+saw, or heard of, the grey traveller mentioned in Alistair Ralston's
+narrative.
+
+
+I
+
+THE STRANGER BY THE BURN
+
+Can a fever change a man's whole nature, giving him powers that he never
+had before? Can he go into it impotent, starved, naked, emerge from it
+potent, satisfied, clothed with possibilities that are wonders, that are
+miracles to him? It must be so; it is so. And yet--I must go back to
+that sad autumn day when I walked beside the burn. Can I write down my
+moods, my feelings of that day and of the following days? And if I can,
+does that power of pinning the butterfly of my soul down upon the
+board--does that power, too, bud, blossom from a soil mysteriously
+fertilised by illness? Formerly, I could as easily have flown in the air
+to the summit of cloud-capped Schiehallion as have set on paper even the
+smallest fragment of my mind. Now--well, let me see, let me still
+further know my new, my marvellous self.
+
+Yes, that first day! It was Autumn, but only early Autumn. The leaves
+were changing colour upon the birch trees, upon the rowans. At dawn,
+mists stood round to shield the toilet of the rising sun. At evening,
+they thronged together like a pale troop of shadowy mutes to assist at
+his departure to the under world. It was a misty season, through which
+the bracken upon the hillsides of my Carlounie glowed furtively in
+tints of brown and of orange; and my mind, my whole being, seemed to
+move in mists. I was just twenty-two, an orphan, master of my estate of
+Carlounie, a Scotch laird, and my own governor. And some idiots envied
+me then, as many begin to envy me now. I even remember one ghastly old
+man who clapped me on the shoulder, and, with the addition of an
+unnecessary oath, swore that I was "a lucky youngster." I, with my thin,
+chétif body, my burning, weakly, starved, and yet ambitious soul--lucky!
+I remember that I broke into a harsh laugh, and longed to kill the
+babbling beast.
+
+And it was the next day, in the afternoon, that I took that book--my
+Bible--and went forth alone to the long den in which the burn hides and
+cries its presence. Yes, I took Goethe's "Faust," and my own complaining
+spirit, and went out into the mist with my misty, clouded mind. My
+cousin Gavin wanted me to go out shooting. He laughed and rallied me
+upon my ill-luck on the previous day, when I had gone out and been the
+joke of my own keepers because I had missed every bird; and I turned and
+railed at him, and told him to leave me to myself. And, as I went, I
+heard him muttering, "That wretched little fellow! To think that he
+should be owner of Carlounie!" Now, he sings another tune.
+
+With "Faust" in my hand, and hatred in my heart, I went out into the
+delicately chilly air, down the winding ways of the garden, through the
+creaking iron gateway. I emerged on to the wilder land, irregular,
+grass-covered ground, strewn with grey granite boulders, among which
+coarse, wiry ferns grew sturdily. The blackfaced sheep whisked their
+broad tails at me as I passed, then stooped their ever-greedy mouths to
+their damp and eternal meal again. I heard the thin and distant cry of a
+hawk, poised somewhere up in the mist. The hills, clothed in the
+death-like glory of the bracken, loomed around me, like some phantom,
+tricked-out procession passing through desolate places. And then I heard
+the voice of the burn--that voice which is even now for ever in my ears.
+To me that day it was the voice of one alive; and it is the voice of one
+alive to me now. I descended the sloping hill with my lounging,
+weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called me master had so
+often looked contemptuously askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I
+descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the tree-fringed den, and
+the burn was noisy in my ears. I could see it now, leaping here and
+there out of its hiding-place--ivory foam among the dripping larches,
+and the birches with their silver stems; ivory foam among the deep brown
+and flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a voice
+calling--calling me to come down into its hiding-place, presided over by
+the mists--to come down into its hiding-place, away from men: away from
+the living creatures whom I hated because I envied them, because they
+were stronger than I, because they could do what I could not do, say
+what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn, my tenants, the smallest
+farm boy, the grooms, the little leaping peasants--I hated, I hated them
+all. And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and I went down into
+the hiding-place of the burn.
+
+It ran through strange and secret places where the soft mists hung in
+wet wreaths. I seemed to be in another world when I was in its lair. On
+the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees like shadows, some of
+them with tortured and tormented shapes. As I turned and looked straight
+up the hill of the burn's descending course, the mountain from which it
+came closed in the prospect inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in--me
+and the burn which talked to me. We two were out of the world which I
+hated and longed to have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world, full
+of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now that I was right down at the
+water-side, the ivory face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to
+me, the ivory heart that beat against my heart--so sick and so
+weary--were varied and were changed. As thoughts streak a mind, the
+clear amber of the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous foam
+that marked the incessant leaps taken by the water towards the valley.
+The silence of those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for
+contemplation in a great career of action; and their silence spoke to
+me, mingling mysteriously with the voice of the foam. The course of the
+burn is broken up, and attended by rocks that have been modelled by the
+action of the running water into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in
+mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch, and all covered with
+drops of moisture; some are gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp
+edges and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a cunning and almost
+coquettish grace, dashes brutally against others, as if impelled by an
+internal violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses quite gently,
+and would be glad to linger by, if Nature would allow the dalliance. And
+this army of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite
+variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut of expression; for the
+differing shape of each boulder, against which it rushes in its long
+career, gives it a different note. It flickers across the small and
+round stone with the purling cry of a child. From the stone curved
+inwards, and with a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody. The
+pointed and narrow colony of rocks which break it into an intricate
+network of small water threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards
+the dark pool under the birches, where the trout play like sinister
+shadows and the insects dance in the sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it
+gains a great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from which it
+takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and defiant, and shrieks with a
+banshee of triumph--in which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of
+wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices among the rocks, under the
+ferns and the birch trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and
+shadows, between the steep walls of the green banks that hem it in! Many
+voices which can sing, when they choose, one song, again and again
+and--monotonously--again!
+
+So--now on this sad Autumn day--I was with the burn in its hiding-place,
+cool, damp, fretful. Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden, the wilder
+land beyond, the moors on which yesterday my incompetence as a shot had
+roused the contempt of my cousin and of my hirelings--all were lost to
+view. I was away from all men in this narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a
+world. I sat down on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my
+heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear brown water glided
+swiftly. I sat and listened to its murmur. And, just then, it did not
+occur to me that water can utter words like men. The murmur was
+suggestive but definitely inarticulate. I had come down here to be away
+and to think. The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur of the burn;
+and, as ever, in those days, it lamented and cursed and bitterly
+complained.
+
+Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence that clung to both
+mind and body? (So ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten by
+Providence? Why had I been given a soul that could not express itself in
+the frame of a coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost a
+deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded exactly to my body, then
+all might have been well enough. I should have been more complete,
+although less, in some way, than I now was. For such a soul would have
+accepted cowardice, weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it,
+as a right fate. Such a soul would never have known the meaning of the
+word rebellion, would never have been able to understand its own cancer
+of disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous and creeping
+malady. It would never have aspired like a flame, and longed in vain to
+burn clearly and grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would such a
+soul have guttered on like some cheap and ill-smelling candle, shedding
+shadows rather than any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless
+of the possibilities that teem like waking children in the wondrous womb
+of life, oblivious of the contempt of the souls around it, heedless of
+ambition, of the trumpet call of success, of the lust to be something,
+to do something, of the magic, of the stinging magic of achievement.
+With such a soul in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body--I thought,
+sitting thus by the burn--I might have been content, an utterly low, and
+perhaps an utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.
+
+But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was the most bitterly
+miserable of men. God--or the Devil--had made me ill-shaped, physically
+despicable, with the malign sort of countenance that so often
+accompanies and illustrates a bad poor body. My limbs, without being
+actually twisted, were shrunken and incompetent--they would not obey my
+desires as do the limbs of other men. My legs would not grip a horse.
+When I rode I was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness, no
+agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When I tried to box, to
+fence, I was one whirling, jigging incapacity. I had feeble sight, and
+objects presented themselves to my vision so strangely that I could not
+shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the young Laird of Carlounie! When I
+walked my limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no grace, no
+lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence of bodily power. And this
+was bitter, yet as nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my body was
+in a way complete. It was a wretch. But when you came to the mind you
+had the real tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there dwells a
+commanding spirit, as a great God might dwell--of mysterious choice--in
+a ruinous and decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit rules,
+disposes, presides, develops, has its own full and superb existence,
+triumphing not merely over, but actually through the contemptible body
+in which it resides, so that men even are led to worship the very
+ugliness and poverty of this body, to adore it for its power to retain
+such a mighty spirit within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it been,
+I might have been happy by the burn that Autumn day. Had it been, I
+might never--But I am anticipating, and I must not anticipate. I must
+sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch of my limbs, and
+recall the horror of my musing.
+
+In a manner, then, my soul matched my body. It was feeble and
+incompetent too. My brain was dull and clouded. My intellect was
+sluggish and inert. But--and this was the terror for me!--within the
+rank nest of my soul--my spirit--lay coiled two vipers that never ceased
+from biting me with their poisoned fangs--Self-consciousness and
+Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to be other than I was. I watched
+my own incompetence as one who watches from a tower. I divined how
+others regarded me--precisely. The blatant and comfortable egoism of a
+dwarf mind in a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I was that
+terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and incompetent thing that
+adored, with a curious wildness of passion, completeness, competence.
+Nor had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided
+perfection. My desires were Gargantuan. When I was with my cousin Gavin,
+a fine all-round sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot, to
+throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on a horse. I felt that I
+would give up years of life to beat him once in any of his pursuits.
+When I was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense, were utterly
+different. He represented in my neighbourhood Intellect--with a capital
+I. A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of Carlounie, he was
+astonishingly adroit as a controversialist, astonishingly eloquent as a
+divine. His voice was full of music. His eyes were full of light and of
+the most superb self-confidence. He rested upon his intellect as a man
+may rest upon a rock. The power of his personality was calm and immense.
+I felt it vehemently. I shook and trembled under it. I hated and loathed
+the man for it, because I wanted and could never possess it. So, too, I
+hated my cousin Gavin for his possessions, his long and sure-sighted
+eyes, great and strong arms, broad chest, lithe legs, bright agility. My
+body could do nothing. My soul could do nothing--except one great thing.
+It could fully observe and comprehend its own impotence. It could fully
+and desperately envy and pine to be what it could never be. Could never
+be, do I say? Wait! Remember that is only what I thought then as I sat
+upon the rock, and, with haggard young eyes, watched the clear brown
+water slipping furtively past between my knees.
+
+My disease seemed to culminate that day, I remember. I was a sick
+invalid alone in the mist. Something--it might have been vitriol--was
+eating into me, eating, eating its way to my very heart, to the core of
+me. Oh, to be stunted and desire to be straight and tall, to be dwarf
+and wish to be giant, to be stupid and long to be a genius, to be ugly
+and yearn to be in face as one of the shining gods, to have no power
+over men, and to pine to fascinate, hold, dominate a world of men--this
+indeed is to be in hell! I was in hell that Autumn day. I clenched my
+thin, weak hands together. I clenched my teeth from which the pale lips
+were drawn back in a grin; and I realised all the spectral crowd of my
+shortcomings. They stood before me like demons of the Brocken--yes, yes,
+of the Brocken!--and I cursed God with the sound of the burn ringing and
+chattering in my ears. And I devoted Gavin, Doctor Wedderburn, every man
+highly placed, every lowest peasant, who could do even one of all the
+things I could not do, to damnation. The paroxysm that took hold of me
+was like a fit, a convulsion. I came out of it white and feeble. And,
+suddenly, the voice of the burn seemed to come from a long way off. I
+put out my hand, and took up from the rock on which I had laid it,
+"Faust." And, scarcely knowing what I did, I began mechanically to
+read--to the dim rapture of the burn--
+
+"_Scene III.--The Study. Faust (entering, with the poodle)._" I began to
+read, do I say, mechanically? Yes, it is true, but soon, very soon, the
+spell of Goethe was laid upon me. I was in the lofty-arched, narrow
+Gothic chamber, with that living symbol of the weariness, broken
+ambition, learned despair of all the ages. I was engrossed. I heard the
+poodle snarling by the stove. I heard the spirits whispering in the
+corridor. Vapour rose--or was it indeed the mist from the mountains
+among the birch trees?--and out of the vapour came Mephistopheles in the
+garb of a travelling scholar. And then--and then the great bargain was
+struck. I heard--yes, I did, I actually, and most distinctly, heard a
+voice--Faust's--say, "_Let us the sensual deeps explore.... Plunge we in
+Time's tumultuous dance, In the rush and roll of circumstance._" A
+pause; then the Student's grave and astonished tones came to me: _Eritis
+sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum._ The cloak was spread, and on the
+burning air Faust was wafted to his new life--nay, not to his new life
+merely, but to life itself. He vanished with his guide in a coloured,
+flower-like mist. I dropped my hand holding the book down upon the cold
+rock by which the cold water splashed. It felt burning hot to my touch.
+My head fell upon my breast, and I had my dreams--dreams of the life of
+Faust and of its glories, gained by this bargain that he made. And
+then--yes, then it was!--the voice of the burn, as from leagues away in
+the bosom of this very mist, began to sing like a fairy voice, or a
+voice in dreams, and in visions of the night, "_If it was so then, it
+might be so now._" At first I scarcely heeded it, for I was enwrapt.
+But the song grew louder, more insistent. It was travelling to me from a
+far country. I heard it coming: "_If it was so then, it might be so
+now_"--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" How near it was at
+last, how loud in my ears! And yet always there was something vague,
+visionary about it, something of the mist, I think. At length I heard it
+with the attention that is of earth. I came to myself, out of the narrow
+Gothic chamber in which the genius of Goethe had prisoned me, and I
+stared into the mist, which was gathering thicker as the night began to
+fall. It seemed flower-like, and full of strange and mysterious colour.
+I trembled. I got up. Still I heard the voice of the burn singing that
+monotonous legend, on, and on, and on. Slowly I turned. I climbed the
+bank of the den. The sheep scattered lethargically at my approach. I
+passed through the creaking iron gate into the garden. Carlounie was
+before me. There was something altered, something triumphant about its
+aspect. The voice of the burn faded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even as I
+gained the door of my house, and, before entering it, paused in an
+attentive attitude, I heard the water chanting faintly from the
+den--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" ... As I came into the
+hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn stood together talking earnestly,
+I remember that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From that moment not a day passed without my visiting the burn. It
+summoned me. Always it sang those words persistently. The sound of the
+water can be very faintly heard from the windows of Carlounie. Each day,
+at dawn, I pushed open the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear
+if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise, or in the darkness
+through which the soft and small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the
+sill and listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among the mountains.
+Sometimes the silence was intense and awful. But in storm or in
+stillness the burn sang on, ever and ever the same words. At moments I
+fancied that the voice was as the voice of a man demented, repeating
+with mirthless frenzy through all his years one hollow sentence. At
+moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman, a siren, a Lorelei among my
+rocks in my valley. Then again I said, "It is a spirit voice, a voice
+from the inner chamber of my own heart." And--why I know not--at that
+last fantasy I shuddered. Even in the midnight from my window ledge I
+leaned while the world slept and I heard the mystic message of the burn.
+My visits to its bed were not unobserved. One morning my cousin Gavin
+said to me roughly, "Why the devil are you always stealing off to that
+ditch"--so he called the den that was the home of my voice--"when you
+ought to be practising to conquer your infernal deficiencies? Why, the
+children of your own keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man,
+and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling." I stared at him and
+answered, "You don't understand everything." Once Dr Wedderburn, who had
+been my tutor, said to me more kindly, "Alistair, action is better for
+you than thought. Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try to
+work, for work is the best man-maker after all."
+
+And to him I said, "Yes, I know!" and flew with a strong wing in the
+face of his advice. For the voice of the burn was more to me than the
+voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind of the burn meant more to
+me than the mind of any man. And so the Autumn died slowly, with a
+lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in mist. I often felt ill,
+even then. My body was dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever
+was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it crawling in my veins? Was it
+nestling about my heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...
+
+Certainly during this period life seemed alien to me, and I moved as one
+apart in a remote world, full of the music of the burn, and full, too,
+of vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know it. Still, I cannot be
+sure what is the truth. In the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the
+burn before my illness seized me. The cold of early Winter was in the
+air and a great stillness. It was afternoon when I left the house
+walking slowly with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white and
+drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching. I did not carry my volume
+of Goethe in my hand; but, in its place, held an old book on
+transcendental magic. The voice of the burn--yes, that alone--had led me
+to study this book. So now I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the
+foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the den to this strange
+writing on the black art? Who knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put
+the book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold as I descended the
+steep ground that lay about the water, which that day seemed to roar in
+my ears the sentence I had heard so many days and nights. And this time,
+as I hearkened, my heart and my brain echoed the last words--"_It might
+be so now._" Gaining the edge of the burn, then in heavy spate, I
+watched for a while the passage of the foam from rock to rock. I peered
+into the pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and with
+whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all my meagre body seemed pulsing
+with those everlasting words: "Why not now?" I murmured to myself, with
+a sort of silent sneer, too, at my own absurdity. I remember I glanced
+furtively around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness, dripping
+bare trees through whose branches the mist curled silently, cold rocks,
+the cold flood of the swollen burn--such was the blank prospect that met
+my eyes.
+
+There was no man near me. There was no one to look at me. I was remote,
+hidden in a secret place, and the early twilight was already beginning
+to fall. No one could see me. I opened my old and ragged book, or,
+rather, let it fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for the
+hundredth time, and read that he who would evoke the Devil must choose a
+solitary and condemned spot. The burn was solitary. The burn was
+condemned surely by the despair and by the endless incapacities of the
+wretched being who owned it. I had taken off my shoes and placed them
+upon a rock. My feet were bare. My head was covered. I now furtively
+proceeded to gather together a small heap of sticks and leaves, and to
+these I set fire, after several attempts. As the flames at last crept
+up, the mist gathered more closely round me and my fire, as if striving
+to warm itself at the blaze. The voice of the burn mingled with the
+uneasy crackle of the twigs, and a murmur of its words seemed to emanate
+also from the flames, two elements uniting to imitate the utterance of
+man to my brain, already surely tormented with fever. And now, with my
+eyes upon my book, I proceeded to trace with the sharp point of a stick
+in some sandy soil between two rocks a rough Goetic Circle of Black
+evocations and pacts. From time to time I paused in my work and glanced
+uneasily about me, but I saw only the mists and the waters.
+
+At length my task was finished, and the time had arrived for the
+supreme effort of my insane and childish folly. Standing at Amasarac in
+the Circle, I said aloud the formula of Evocation of the Grand Grimoire,
+ending with the words "Jehosua, Evam, Zariat, natmik, Come, come, come."
+
+My voice died away in the twilight, and I stood among the grey rocks
+waiting, mad creature that I surely was! But only the rippling voice of
+the burn answered my adjuration. Then I repeated the words in a louder
+tone, adding menaces and imprecations to my formula. And all the time
+the fire I had kindled sprang up into the mist; and the twilight of the
+heavy Autumn fell slowly round me. Again I paused, and again my madness
+received no satisfaction, no response. But it seemed to me that I heard
+the browsing sheep on the summit of the right bank of the gully scatter
+as if at the approach of some one. Yet there was no stir of footsteps.
+It must have been my fancy, or the animals were merely changing their
+feeding ground in a troop, as they sometimes will, for no assignable
+cause. And now I made one last effort, urged by the voice of the burn,
+which sang so loudly the words which had mingled with my dream of Faust.
+I cried aloud the supreme appellation, making an effort that brought out
+the sweat on my forehead, and set the pulses leaping in my thin and
+shivering body. "_Chavajoth! chavajoth! chavajoth! I command thee by the
+Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little way up the course of the burn the dead wood cracked and
+shuffled under the pressure of descending feet. Again I heard a
+scattering of the sheep upon the hillside. My hair stirred on my head
+under my cap, and the noise of the falling water was intolerably loud to
+me. I wanted to hear plainly, to hear what was coming down to me in the
+mist. The brush-wood sang nearer. In the heavy and damp air there was
+the small, sharp report of a branch snapped from a tree. I heard it drop
+among the ferns close to me. And then in the mist and in the twilight I
+saw a slim figure standing motionless. It was vague, but less vague than
+a shadow. It seemed to be a man, or a youth, clad in a grey suit that
+could scarcely be differentiated from the mist. The flames of my fire,
+bent by a light breeze that had sprung up, stretched themselves towards
+it, as if to salute it. And now I could not hear any movement of the
+sheep; evidently they had gone to a distance. At first, seized with a
+strange feeling of extreme, almost unutterable fear, I neither moved nor
+spoke. Then, making a strong effort to regain control of my ordinary
+faculties, I cried out in the twilight--
+
+"What is that? What is it?"
+
+"Only a stranger who has missed his way on the mountain, and wants to go
+on to Wester Denoon."
+
+The voice that came to me from the figure beyond the fire sounded, I
+remember, quite young, like the voice of a boy. It was clear and level,
+and perhaps a little formal. So that was all. A tourist--that was all!
+
+"Can you direct me on the way?" the voice said.
+
+I gave the required direction slowly, for I was still confused, nervous,
+exhausted with my insane practices in the den. But the youth--as I
+supposed he was--did not move away at once.
+
+"What are you doing by this fire?" he said. "I heard your voice calling
+by the torrent among the trees when I was a very long way off."
+
+Strangely, I did not resent the question. Still more strangely, I was
+impelled to give him the true answer to it.
+
+"Raising the Devil!" he said. "And did he come to you?"
+
+"No; of course not. You must think me mad."
+
+"And why do you call him?"
+
+Suddenly a desire to confide in this stranger, whose face I could not
+see now, whose shadowy form I should, in all probability, never see
+again, came upon me. My usual nervousness deserted me. I let loose my
+heart in a turbulent crowd of words. I explained my impotence of body
+and of mind to this grey traveller in the twilight. I dwelt upon my
+misery. I repeated the cry of the burn and related my insane dream of
+imitating Faust, of making my poor pact with Lucifer, with the Sphinx of
+mediæval terrors. When I ceased, the boy's voice answered:--
+
+"They say that in these modern days Satan has grown exigent. It is not
+enough to dedicate to him your own soul; but you must also pay a tribute
+of souls to the Cæsar of hell."
+
+"A tribute of souls?"
+
+"Yes. You must bring, they say, the mystic number, three souls to
+Satan."
+
+Suddenly I laughed.
+
+"I could never do that," I said. "I have no power to seduce man or
+woman. I cannot win souls to heaven or to hell."
+
+"But if you received new powers, such as you desire, would you use them
+to win souls, three souls, to Lucifer?"
+
+"Yes," I said with passionate earnestness. "I swear to you that I
+would."
+
+Suddenly the boy's voice laughed.
+
+"_Quomodo cecidisti_, Lucifer!" he said. "When thou canst not contrive
+to capture souls for thyself! But," he added, as if addressing himself
+once more to me, after this strange ejaculation, "your words have,
+perhaps, sealed the bond. Who knows? Words that come from the very heart
+are often deeds. For, as we can never go back from things that we have
+done, it may be that, sometimes, we can never go back from things that
+we have said."
+
+On the words he moved, and passed so swiftly by me into the twilight
+down the glen that I never saw his face. I turned instinctively to look
+after him; and, this was strange, it seemed that the wind at that very
+moment must have turned with me, blowing from, instead of towards, the
+mountain. This certainly was so; for the tongues of flame from my fire
+bent backward on a sudden and leaned after the grey traveller, whose
+steps died swiftly away among the rocks, and on the shuffling dead wood
+and leaves of the birches and the oaks.
+
+And then there came a singing in my ears, a beating of many drums in my
+brain. I drooped and sank down by the fire in the mist. My fever came
+upon me like a giant, and presently Gavin and Doctor Wedderburn,
+searching in the night, found me in a delirium, and bore me back to
+Carlounie.
+
+
+II
+
+THE SOUL OF DR WEDDERBURN
+
+To emerge from a great illness is sometimes dreadful, sometimes divine.
+To one man the return from the gates of death is a progress of despair.
+He feels that he cannot face the wild contrasts of the surprising world
+again, that his courage has been broken upon the wheel, that energy is
+desolation, and sleep true beauty. To another this return is a
+marvellous and superb experience. It is like the vivid re-awakening of
+youth in one who is old, a rapture of the past committing an act of
+brigandage upon the weariness of the present, a glorious substitution of
+Eden for the outer courts where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It
+will be supposed that I found myself in the first category, a
+terror-stricken and rebellious mortal when the fever gave me up to the
+world again. For the world had always been cruel to me, because I was
+afraid of it, and was a puny thing in it. Yet this was not so. My
+convalescence was like a beautiful dream of rest underneath which riot
+stirred. A simile will explain best exactly what I mean. Let me liken
+the calm of my convalescence to the calm of earth on the edge of Spring.
+What a riot of form, of scent, of colour, of movement, is preparing
+beneath that enigmatic, and apparently profound, repose. In the simile
+you have my exact state. And I alone felt that, within this womb of
+inaction, the child, action, lay hid, developing silently, but
+inexorably, day by day. This knowledge was my strange secret. It came
+upon me one night when I lay awake in the faint twilight, shed by a
+carefully shaded lamp over my bed. Rain drummed gently against the
+windows. There was no other sound. By the fire, in a great armchair, the
+trained nurse, Kate Walters, was sitting with a book--"Jane Eyre" it
+was--upon her knees. I had been sleeping and now awoke thirsty. I put
+out my hand to get at a tumbler of lemonade that stood on a table by my
+pillow. And suddenly a thought, a curious thought, was with me. My hand
+had grasped the tumbler and lifted it from the table; but, instead of
+bringing my hand to my mouth I kept my arm rigidly extended, the tumbler
+poised on my palm as upon the palm of a juggler.
+
+"How long my arm is!" that was my thought, "and how strong!" Formerly it
+had been short, weak, awkward. Now, surely, after my illness, my arms
+would naturally be nerveless, useless things. The odd fact was that now,
+for the first time in my life, I felt joy in a physical act. An absurd
+and puny act, you will say, I daresay. What of that? With it came a
+sudden stirring of triumph. I lay there on my back and kept my arm
+extended for full five minutes by the watch that ticked by my bed-head.
+And with each second that passed joy blossomed more fully within my
+heart. I drank the lemonade as one who drinks a glad toast. Yet I was
+puzzled. "Is this--can this be a remnant of delirium?" I asked myself.
+And beneath the clothes drawn up to my chin I fingered my arm above the
+elbow. It was the limb of a big, strong man. Surprise, supreme
+astonishment forced an exclamation from my lips. Kate got up softly and
+came towards me; but I feigned to be asleep, and she returned to the
+fire. Yet, peering under my lowered eyelids, I noticed an expression of
+amazement upon her young and pretty face. I knew afterwards that it was
+the sound of my voice--my new voice--that drew it there. After that
+night my convalescence was more than a joy to me, it was a rapture,
+touched by, and mingled with something that was almost awe. Is not the
+earth awe-struck when she considers that Spring and Summer nestle
+silently in her bosom? With each day the secret which I kept grew more
+mysterious, more profound. Soon I knew it could be a secret no longer.
+The fever--it must be that!--had wrought magic within my body, driving
+out weakness, impotence, lassitude, developing my physical powers to an
+extent that was nothing less than astounding. Lying there in my bed, I
+felt the dwarf expand into the giant. Think of it! Did ever living man
+know such an experience before? A bodily spring came about within me.
+And I was already twenty-two years old before the fever took me. My
+limbs grew large and strong; the muscles of my chest and back were
+tensely strung and knit as firmly as the muscles of an athlete. I lay
+still, it is true, and felt much of the peculiar vagueness that follows
+fever; but I was conscious of a supine, latent energy never known
+before. I was conscious that when I rose, and went out into the world
+again, it would be as a man, capable of holding his own against other
+strong, straight men. That was a wonder. But it was succeeded by a
+greater marvel yet.
+
+One afternoon, while I was still in bed, Doctor Wedderburn came to see
+me and to sit with me. He had been away on a holiday, and,
+consequently, had not visited me before, except once when I had been
+delirious. The doctor was a short, spare man, with a sharply cut
+brick-red face, lively and daring dark eyes, and straight hair already
+on the road to grey. His self-possession bordered on self-satisfaction;
+and, despite his good heart and the real and anxious sanctity of his
+life, he could seldom entirely banish from his manner the contempt he
+felt for those less intellectual, less swift-minded than himself. Often
+had I experienced the stinging lash of his sarcasm. Often had I withered
+beneath one of his keen glances that dismissed me from an argument as a
+profound sage might kick an urchin from the study into the street. Often
+had I hated him with a sick hatred and ground my teeth because my mind
+was so clouded and so helpless, while his was so lucent and so adroit.
+So now, when I heard his tap on the door, his deep voice asking to come
+in, a rage of self-contempt seized me, as in the days before my illness.
+The doctor entered with an elaborate softness, and walked, flat-footed,
+to my bed, pursing his large lips gently as men do when filled with
+cautious thoughts. I could see he desired to moderate his habitual voice
+and manner; but, arrived close to me, he suddenly cried aloud, with a
+singularly full-throated amazement.
+
+"Boy--boy, what's come to you?" he called. Then, abruptly putting his
+finger to his lips, he sank down in a chair, his bright eyes fixed upon
+me.
+
+"It's a miracle," he said slowly.
+
+"What is?" I asked with an invalid's pettishness.
+
+"The voice, too--the voice!"
+
+I grew angry easily, as men do when they are sick.
+
+"Why do you say that? Of course I've been bad--of course I'm changed."
+
+"Changed! Look at yourself--and praise God, Alistair."
+
+He had caught up a hand-mirror that lay on the dressing-table and now
+put it into my hand. For the first time since the fever I saw my face.
+It was as it had been and yet it was utterly different, for now it was
+beautiful. The pinched features seemed to have been smoothed out. The
+mouth had become firm and masterful. The haggard eyes were alight as if
+torches burned behind them. My expression, too, was powerful, collected,
+alert. I scarcely recognised myself. But I pretended to see no change.
+
+"Well--what is it?" I asked, dropping the glass.
+
+The doctor was confused by my calm.
+
+"Your look of health startled me," he answered, sitting down by the bed
+and examining me keenly.
+
+All at once I was seized by a strange desire to get up an argument with
+this man, by whom I had so often been crushed in conversation. I leaned
+on my elbow in the bed, and fixing my eyes on him, I said:--
+
+"And why should I praise God?"
+
+The doctor seemed in amazement at my tone.
+
+"Because you are a Christian and have been brought back from death," he
+replied, but with none of his usual half-sarcastic self-confidence.
+
+"You think God did that?"
+
+"Alistair, do you dare to blaspheme the Almighty?"
+
+I felt at that moment like a cat playing with a mouse. My lips, I know,
+curved in a smile of mockery, and yet I will swear--yes, even to my own
+heart--that all I said that day I said in pure mischief, with no evil
+intent. It seemed that I, Alistair Ralston, the dolt, the ignoramus,
+longed to try mental conclusions with this brilliant and opinionated
+divine. He bade me praise God. In reply I praised--the Devil, and I
+forced him to hear me. Absolutely I broke into a flood of words, and he
+sat silent. I compared the good and evil in the scheme of the world,
+balancing them in the scales, the one against the other. I took up the
+stock weapon of atheism, the deadly nature, the deadly outcome of free
+will. I used it with skill. The names of Strauss, Comte, Schopenhauer,
+Renan, a dozen others, sprang from my lips. The dreary doctrine of the
+illimitable triumph of sin, of the appalling mistake of the permission
+granted it to step into the scheme of creation, in order that its
+presence might create a _raison d'être_ for the power of personal action
+one way or the other in mankind--such matters as these I treated with a
+vehement eloquence and command of words that laid a spell upon the
+doctor. Going very far, I dared to exclaim that since God had allowed
+his own scheme to get out of gear, the only hope of man lay in the
+direction of the opposing force, in frank and ardent Satanism.
+
+When at length I ceased from speaking, I expected Dr Wedderburn to rise
+up in his wrath and to annihilate me, but he sat still in his chair with
+a queer, and, as I thought, puzzled expression upon his face. At last he
+said, as if to himself:
+
+"The miracle of Balaam; verily, the miracle of Balaam."
+
+The ass had indeed spoken as never ass spoke before. I waited a moment,
+then I said:--
+
+"Well, why don't you rebuke me, or why don't you try to controvert me?"
+
+Again he looked upon me, very uneasily I thought, and with something
+that was almost fear in his keen eyes.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I have praised the Lord many a morning and evening for
+his gift of words to me. It seems others bestow that gift too.
+Alistair"--and here his voice became deeply solemn--"where have you been
+visiting when you lay there, mad to all seeming? In what dark place have
+you been to gather destruction for men? With whom have you been
+talking?"
+
+Suddenly, I know not why, I thought of the grey stranger, and, with a
+laugh, I cried:--
+
+"The grey traveller taught me all I have said to you."
+
+"The grey traveller! Who may he be?"
+
+But I lay back upon the pillows and refused to answer, and very soon the
+doctor went, still bending uneasy, nervous eyes upon me.
+
+In those eyes I read the change that had stolen over my intellect, as in
+the hand-mirror I had read the change that had stolen over my face. This
+strange fever had caused both soul and body to blossom. I trembled with
+an exquisite joy. Had Fate relented to me at last? Was it possible that
+I was to know the joys of the heroes? I longed for, yet feared my full
+recovery. In it alone should I discover how sincere was my
+transformation. Doctor Wedderburn did not come to me again. The days
+passed, my convalescence strengthened, watched over by the pretty nurse,
+Kate Walters, a fresh, pure, pious, innocent, beautiful soul, tender,
+temperate, and pitiful for all sorrow and evil. At length I was well. At
+length I knew, to some extent, my new, my marvellous self. For I had,
+indeed, been folded up in my fever like a vesture, and, like a vesture,
+changed. I had grown taller, expanded, put forth mighty muscles as a
+tree puts forth leaves. My cheeks and my eyes glowed with the radiance
+of strong health. I went out with my cousin Gavin, whose estate marched
+with mine, and I shot so well that he was filled with admiration, and
+forthwith conceived a sort of foolish worship for me--having a
+sportsman's soul but no real mind. For the first time in my life I felt
+absolutely at home on a horse, an unwonted skill came to my hands, and I
+actually schooled Gavin's horses over some fences he had had set up in a
+grass park at the Mains of Cossens. The keepers who had once secretly
+jeered at me were now at my very feet. Their children looked upon me as
+a young god. I rejoiced in my strength as a giant. But I asked myself
+then, as I ask myself now--what does it mean? The days of miracles are
+over. Yet, is this not a miracle? And in a miracle is there not a gleam
+of terror, as there is a gleam of stormy yellow in the fated opal? But
+here I leave my condition of body alone, and pass on to the episode of
+Doctor Wedderburn, partially related in the newspapers of the day and
+marvelled at, I believe, by all who ever knew, or even set eyes upon
+him.
+
+The doctor, as I have said, did not come again to see me, but I felt an
+over-mastering desire to set forth and visit him. This was surprising,
+as hitherto I had rather avoided and hated him. Now something drew me to
+the Manse. At first I resisted my inclination, but a chance word led me
+to yield to it impulsively. Since my illness I had not once attended
+church. Moved by a violent distaste for the religious service, that was
+novel in me, I had frankly avowed my intention of keeping away. But, as
+I did not go to the kirk, I missed seeing Dr Wedderburn; and I wanted to
+see him. One day, leaning by chance against a stone dyke in the Glen of
+Ogilvy, smoking a pipe and enjoying the soft air of Spring as it blew
+over the rolling moorland, I heard two ploughmen exchange a fragment of
+gossip that made excitement start up quick within me.
+
+One said:--
+
+"The doctor's failin'. Man, he was fairly haverin' last Sabbath, on and
+on, wi'out logic or argeyment or sense."
+
+The other answered:--
+
+"Ay; he's greatly changed. He's no the man he was. It fairly beats me; I
+canna mak' it out. Ye've heard that--" And here he lowered his voice and
+I could not catch his words.
+
+I turned away from the wall, and walking swiftly, set out for the Manse
+with a busy mind. The afternoon was already late, and when I gained a
+view of the Manse, a cold grey house standing a little apart in a grove
+of weary-looking sycamores, one or two lights smiled on me from the
+small windows that stared upon the narrow and muddy road. The minister's
+study was on the right of the hall door; and, as I pulled the bell, I
+observed the shadow of his head to dance upon the drawn white blind, a
+thought fantastically, or with a palsied motion, I fancied. The
+yellow-headed maidservant admitted me with a shrunken grin, that
+suggested wild humour stifled by achieved respect, and I was soon in the
+minister's study. Then I saw that Doctor Wedderburn was moving up and
+down the room, and that his head was going this way and that, as he
+communed in a loud voice with himself. My entrance checked him as soon
+as he observed me, which was not instantly, as, at first, his back was
+set towards me and the mood-swept maid. When he turned about, his
+discomposure was evident. His gaze was troubled, and his manner, as he
+shook hands with me, had in it something of the tremulous, and was
+backward in geniality. We sat down on either side of the fire, the tea
+service and the hot cakes, loved of the doctor, between us. At first we
+talked warily of such things as my recovery, the weather, the condition
+of affairs in the parish and so forth. I noticed that though the
+doctor's eyes often rested with an almost glaring expression of scrutiny
+or of surprise upon me, he made no remark on the change of my
+appearance. Nor did I on the change of his, which was startling, and
+suggested I know not what of sorrow and of the attempt to kill it with
+evil weapons. The healthy brick-red of his complexion was now become
+scarlet and full of heat; his mouth worked loosely while he talked; the
+flesh of his cheeks was puffed and wrinkled; his eyes had the clouded
+and yet fierce aspect of the drunkard. But, absurdly enough, what most
+struck me in him was his abstinence from an accustomed act. He drank
+his tea, but he ate no hot cakes. This was a departure from an
+established, if trifling custom of many years' standing, and worked on
+my imaginative conception of what the doctor now was more than would, at
+the first blush, appear likely, or even possible. Instead of, as of old,
+feeling myself on the worm level in his presence, I was filled with a
+sense of pity, as I looked upon him and wondered what subtle process of
+mental or physical development or retrogression had wrought this dreary
+change. Presently, while I wondered, he put his cup down with an awkward
+and errant hand that set it swaying and clattering in the tray, and said
+abruptly:--
+
+"And what have you come for, Alistair, eh? what have you come for? To go
+on with what you've begun? Well, well, lad, I'm ready for you; I'm ready
+now."
+
+His voice was full of timorous irritation, his manner of pitiable
+distress.
+
+"I've thought it out, I've thought it all out," he continued; "and I can
+combat you, I can combat you, Alistair, wherever you've got your
+fever-mind from and your fever-tongue."
+
+I knew what he meant, and suddenly I knew, too, why I had wanted so
+eagerly to come to the Manse. My instinct of pity and of sympathy died
+softly away. My new instinct of cruel rapture in the ruthless exercise
+of my--shall I call them fever-powers then?--woke, dawned to sunrise.
+And Doctor Wedderburn and I fell forthwith into an animated theological
+discussion. He was desperately nervous, desperately ill at ease. His
+argumentative struggles were those of a drowning man positively
+convinced--note this,--that he would drown, that no human or divine aid
+could save him. There was, too, a strong hint of personal anger in his
+manner, which was strictly undignified. He fought a losing battle with
+bludgeons, and had an obvious contempt for the bludgeons while in the
+act of using them in defence or in attack. And at last, with a sort of
+sharp cry, he threw up his hands, and exclaimed in a voice I hardly knew
+as his:--
+
+"God forgive you, Alistair, for what you're doing! God forgive
+you--murderer, murderer!"
+
+This dolorous exclamation ran through me like cold water and chilled all
+the warmth of my intellectual excitement.
+
+"Murderer!" I repeated inexpressively.
+
+Doctor Wedderburn sat in his chair trembling, and looking upon me with
+despairing and menacing eyes, the eyes of a man who curses but cannot
+fight his enemy.
+
+"Of a soul, of a soul," he said. "The poisoned dagger?--doubt, the
+poisoned dagger--you've plunged it into me, boy."
+
+Then raising his voice harshly, he exclaimed:
+
+"Curse you, curse you!"
+
+I was thunderstruck. I declare it here, for it is true. I had
+defamed--and deliberately--the doctor's dearest idols. I had driven my
+lance into his convictions. I had blasphemed what he worshipped, and had
+denied all he affirmed. But that I had made so terrific an impression
+upon his mind, his soul--this astounded me. Yet what else could his
+passionate denunciation mean? Had I, a boy, unused to controversy,
+unskilled in dialectics, overthrown with my hasty words the faith of
+this strong and fervent man? The thought thrilled one side of my dual
+nature with triumph, pierced the other with grim horror. My emotions
+were divided and complex. As I sat silent, my face dogged yet ashamed,
+the doctor got up from his chair trembling like one with the palsy.
+
+"Away from me--away," he cried in a hoarse voice, and pointing at the
+door. "I'll have no more talk with the Devil, no more--no more!"
+
+I had not a word. I got up and went, bending a steady, fascinated look
+upon this old mentor of mine, who now proclaimed himself my victim.
+Arrived in the garden I found a thin moon riding above the sycamores,
+and soft airs of Spring playing round the doctor's habitation.
+Strangely, I had no mind to begone from it immediately. I crossed the
+garden bit and paced up and down the country lane that skirted it,
+keeping an eye upon the lighted window of the study. So I went back and
+forth for full an hour, I suppose. Then I heard a sound in the Spring
+night. The doctor's hall door banged, and, peering through the privet
+hedge that protected his meagre domain, I perceived him come out into
+the air bareheaded. He took his way to the small path that ran by the
+hedge parallel to the lane, coming close to the place by which I
+crouched, spying upon his privacy. And there he paced, bemoaning aloud
+the ill fate that had come upon him. I heard all the awful complaining
+of this soul in distress, besieged by doubts, deserted by the faith and
+hope of a lifetime. It was villainous to be his audience. Yet, I could
+not go. Sometimes the poor man prayed with a desolate voice, calling
+upon God for a sign, imploring against temptation. Sometimes--and this
+was terrible--he blasphemed, he imprecated. And then again he prayed--to
+the Devil, as do the Satanists. I heard him weeping in his garden in the
+night, alone under the sycamores. It was a new agony of the garden and
+it wrung my heart. Yet I watched it till the spectral moon waned, and
+the trees were black as sins against the faded sky.
+
+About this time, as I have said, his parishioners began to mark the
+outward change of Dr Wedderburn that signified the inward change in him.
+The talking ploughmen had their fellows. All who sat under the doctor
+were conscious of a difference, at first vague, in his eloquent
+discourses, of a diminuendo in the full fervour of his delivery and
+manner. Gossip flowed about him, and presently there were whisperings
+of change in his bodily habits. He had been seen by night wandering
+about his garden in very unholy condition, he who had so often rebuked
+excess. Children, passing his gate in the dark of evening, had endured
+with terror his tipsy shoutings. A maidservant left him, and spread
+doleful reports of his conduct through the village. By degrees, rumours
+of our minister's shortcomings stole, like snakes, into the local
+papers, carefully shrouded by the wrappings that protect scandal-mongers
+against libel actions. The congregation beneath the doctor's pulpit
+dwindled. Women looked at him askance. Men were surly to him, or--and
+that was less kind--jocular. I, alone, followed with fascination the
+paling to dusk of a bright and useful career. I, alone, partially
+understood the hell this poor creature carried within him. For I often
+heard his dreary night-thoughts, and assisted, unperceived of him, at
+the vigils that he kept. The lamp within his study burned till dawn
+while he wrestled, but in vain, with the disease of his soul, the malady
+of his tortured heart.
+
+One night in Summer time, towards midnight, I bent my steps furtively to
+the Manse. It was very dark and the weather was dumb and agitating. No
+leaf danced, no grass quivered. Breathless, dead, seemed the woods and
+fields, the ocean of moorland, the assemblage of the mountains. I heard
+no step upon the lonely road but my own, and life seemed to have left
+the world until I came upon the Manse. Then I saw the light in the
+doctor's window, and, drawing near, observed that the blind was up and
+the lattice thrust open among the climbing dog-roses. Craftily I stole
+up the narrow garden path, and, keeping to the side of the window,
+looked into the room.
+
+Doctor Wedderburn lounged within at the table facing me. A pen was in
+his shaking hand. A shuffle of manuscript paper was before him, and a
+Bible, in which he thrust his fingers as if to keep texts already looked
+out. Beyond the Bible was a bottle, three-quarters full of whiskey, and
+a glass. His muttering lips and dull yet shining eyes betokened his
+condition. I saw before me a drunkard writing a sermon. The vision was
+sufficiently bizarre. A tragedy of infinite pathos mingled with a comedy
+of hideous yet undeniable humour in the live picture. I neither wept nor
+did I laugh. I only watched, shrouded by the inarticulate night. The
+doctor took a pull at the bottle, then swept the leaves of the Bible....
+
+"Let me die the death of the righteous," he murmured thickly. "That's
+it--that's--that's--" He wrote on the paper before him with a wandering
+pen, then pushed the sheet from him. It fell on the floor by the window.
+
+"And let my last end be like his--Ah--ah!"
+
+He drank again, and again wrote with fury. How old and how wicked he
+looked, yet how sad! He crouched down over the table and the pen broke
+in his hand. A dull exclamation burst from him. Taking up the bottle, he
+poured by accident some of the whiskey over the open Bible.
+
+"A baptism! A baptism!" he ejaculated, bursting into laughter.
+"Now--now--let's see--let's see."
+
+Again he violently turned the sodden leaves and shook his head. He could
+not read the words, and that angered him. He drank again and again till
+the bottle was empty, then staggered out of the room. I heard his
+frantic footsteps echoing in the uncarpeted passage. Quickly I leaned in
+at the window and caught up the sheet of paper that had fallen to the
+floor. I held it up to the light. Only one sentence writhed up and down
+over it, repeated a dozen times; "There is no God!" While I read I heard
+the doctor returning, and I shrank back into the night. He came
+stumbling in, another whiskey bottle full in his hand. Falling down in
+the chair he applied his lips to it and drank--on and on. He was killing
+himself there and then. I knew it. I wanted to leap into the room, to
+stop him, yet I only watched him. Why?--I want to know why--
+
+At last he fell forward across the Bible with a choking noise. His limbs
+struggled. His arms shot out wildly, the table broke under him--there
+was a crash of glass. The lamp was extinguished. Darkness crowded the
+little room--and silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The papers recorded the shocking death of a minister. They did not
+record this.
+
+As I stole home that night, alone in my knowledge of the doctor's
+appalling end, I heard going before me light and tripping footsteps,
+those, apparently, of some youth, not above three yards or so from me.
+What wanderer thus preceded me, I asked myself, with a certain tingling
+of the nerves, shaken, perhaps, by what I had just seen? I paused. The
+steps also paused. The person was stopping too. I resumed my way. Again
+I heard the tripping footfalls. Their sound greatly disquieted me, yet I
+hurried, intending to catch up the wayfarer. Still the steps hastened
+along the highway, and always just before me. I ran, yet did not come up
+with any person. I called "Stop! Stop!" There was no reply. Again I
+waited. This man--or boy--(the steps seemed young) waited also. I
+started forward once more. So did he. Then a fury of fear ran over me,
+urging me at all hazards to see in whose train I travelled. We were now
+close to Carlounie. We entered the policies. Yes, this person turned
+from the public road through my gates into the drive, and the footfalls
+reached the very house. I stopped. I dared not approach quite close to
+the door. With trembling fingers I fumbled in my pocket, drew out my
+match-box, and, in the airless night, struck a match. The tiny flame
+burned steadily. I stretched my hand out, approaching it, as I supposed,
+to the face of the stranger.
+
+But I saw nothing. Only, on a sudden, I heard some one hasten from me
+across the sweep of gravel in the direction of the burn. And then, after
+an interval, I heard the rush of startled sheep through the night.
+
+Just so had they scattered on the day I spoke with the grey traveller by
+the waterside.
+
+
+III
+
+THE SOUL OF KATE WALTERS
+
+It is more than two years since I wrote down any incident of my life.
+Two years ago I seemed to myself a stranger. To-day an intimacy has
+sprung up between myself and that observant, detached something within
+me--that little extra spirit which looks on at me, and yet is, somehow,
+me. I am at home with my own power. I am accustomed to my strength of
+personality. From my fever I rose like some giant. Long ago my world
+recognised the obedience it owed me. Long ago, by many signs, in many
+ways, it taught me the paramount quality of the emanation from my soul
+that is called my influence. Yet sometimes, even now, I seem to stare at
+myself aghast, to turn cold when I am alone with myself. I am seized
+with terrible fancies. I think of the voice of the burn. I think of that
+childish Autumn ceremony upon its bank among the mists and the flying
+leaves. I think of the grey youth who spoke with me in the twilight, and
+my soul is full of questions. I muse upon the Wandering Jew, upon Faust,
+upon Van Der Decken, upon the monstrous figures that are legends, yet
+sometimes realities to men. And then--and this is ghastly--I say to
+myself, can it be that I, too, shall become a legend? Can it be that my
+name will be whispered by the pale lips of good men long after I am
+dead? For, is there not a whirl of white faces attending my progress as
+the whirl of dead leaves attends the Autumn? Do I not hear a faint
+symphony of despairing cries like a dreadful music about my life? Is not
+my power upon men malign? Boys with their hopes shattered, men with
+their faiths broken, women with their love turned to gall--do they not
+crowd about my chariot wheels? Or is it my vain fancy that they do? Here
+and there from the sea of these beings one rises like a drowned creature
+whom the ocean will not hide, stark, stiff, corpse-like. Doctor
+Wedderburn was the first. Kate Walters is the second--Kate Walters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When my convalescence was well advanced she left Carlounie and went back
+to Edinburgh. Some months afterwards I heard casually that she was
+working in an hospital there. But a year and a half went by before I saw
+this girl again. Her fresh, pure, ministering face had nearly faded
+from my memory. Yet, she had attended intimately upon my marvellous
+transformation from my death of weakness to the life of strength. She
+had lifted me in her girl's arms when I was nothing. Yes, I had been in
+her arms then. How strange, how close are the commonest relations
+between the invalid and his nurse! When I chanced to meet Kate again I
+had no thought of this. I had forgotten. I came to Edinburgh on some
+business connected with a mine discovered on my estate, which seemed
+likely to make a great fortune for me, and is already on the way to
+accomplishing this first duty of a mine. My business done, I stayed on
+at my hotel in Princes Street amusing myself, for I had a multitude of
+friends in Edinburgh. One of these friends was a medical student
+attached to the hospital there, and he chanced to invite me to go with
+him through the wards one day. In one of the wards I encountered Kate
+Walters, fresh, clear, calm as in the old Carlounie days of my illness.
+She did not know me till I recalled myself to her recollection; then she
+looked into my face with the frankest astonishment. My superb physique
+amazed her, although she had attended upon its beginnings. I asked after
+her life in the interval since our last meeting; and she told me, with a
+delightful blush, that her period of nursing was nearly concluded, as
+she was engaged to be married to one Hugh Fraser, a handsome, rich,
+and--strange thing this!--most steadfast youth, who lived in England in
+the south, and who loved her tenderly. I congratulated her, and was on
+the point of moving away down the ward with my friend when my eyes were
+caught again by Kate's blushing cheeks and eyes alight with the fiery
+shames and joys of love. How beautiful is the human face when the
+torches of the heart are kindled thus. How beautiful! I paused, and,
+before I went, invited Kate to tea one afternoon at my hotel. She
+accepted the invitation. Why not? In our meeting the old chain of
+sympathy between patient and nurse seemed forged anew. We felt that we
+were indeed friends. As we left the ward, my student chum chaffed me--I
+let his words go by heedlessly. I was not in love with Kate, but I was
+half in love with her love for Hugh Fraser. It had such pretty features.
+She came to tea and told me all about him; and when she talked of him
+she was so fascinating that I was loath to let her go. It was a sweet
+evening, and, as Kate had not to be back at the hospital early, I
+suggested that we should go for a stroll on Carlton Hill, and talk a
+little more about Hugh Fraser. The bribe tempted her. I saw that. And
+she agreed after a moment's hesitation.
+
+There is certainly an influence that lives only out of doors and can
+never enter a house, or exercise itself within four walls. There is a
+wandering spirit in the air of evening, a soul that walks with
+gathering shadows, speaks in the distant hum of a city, and gazes
+through its twinkling lights. _There is a grey traveller who journeys in
+the twilight._ (What am I saying? To-day, as I write, I am full of
+fancies.) I felt that, so soon as Kate and I were away from the hotel,
+out under the sky and amid the mysteries of Edinburgh, we were changed.
+In a flash our intimacy advanced, the sympathy already existing between
+us deepened. Leaving the streets, we mounted the flight of steps that
+leads to the hill, and joined the few couples who were walking, almost
+like gods on some Olympus, above the world. They were all obviously
+lovers. I pointed this fact out to Kate, saying, "Hugh Fraser should be
+here, not I."
+
+She smiled, but scarcely, I thought, with much regret. For the moment it
+seemed that a confidant satisfied her; and this pleased me. I drew her
+arm within mine.
+
+"We must not alarm the lovers," I said. "We must appear to be as they
+are, or we shall carry a fiery sword into their Eden."
+
+"You seem to understand us very well," she answered with a smile. And
+she left her arm in mine.
+
+The mention of "us" chilled me. It seemed to set me outside a magic
+circle within which she, Hugh Fraser, these people sauntering near us,
+like amorous ghosts in the dimness, moved. I pressed her arm ever so
+gently.
+
+"Tell me how lovers feel at such a time as this," I whispered, looking
+into her eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Carlton Hill at night one sees a heaving ocean of yellow lights,
+gleaming like phosphorescence on ebon waves. Towards Arthur's Seat,
+towards the Castle, they rise; by Holyrood, by the old town, they fall.
+That night I could fancy that this sea of light spoke to me, murmured in
+my ear, urging me to prosecute my will, ruthlessly stirring a strange
+and, perhaps, evanescent romance in my heart. I know that when I parted
+from Kate that night I bent and kissed her. I know that she looked up at
+me startled, even terrified, yet found no voice to rebuke me. I know
+that I did not leave Edinburgh, as I had originally intended, upon the
+morrow. And I know this best of all--that I had no ill-intent in
+staying. I was caught in a net of impulse despite my own desire. I was
+held fast. There are--I believe it unalterably now--influences in life
+that are the very Tsars of the empires of men's souls. They must be
+obeyed. Possibly--is it so I wonder?--they only mount upon their thrones
+when they are urgently invoked by men who, as it were, say, "Come and
+rule over us!" But once that invocation has been made, once it has been
+responded to, there is never again free will for him who has rashly
+called upon the power he does not understand, and bowed before the
+tyrant whose face he has not seen. I tremble now, as I write; I tremble
+as does the bond slave. Yet I neither speak with, nor hear, nor have
+sight of, my master. Unless, indeed--but I will not give way to any
+madness of the brain. No, no; I do not hear, I do not see, although I am
+conscious of, my Tsar, whose unemancipated serf I am.
+
+I need not tell all the story of my soul's impression that was stamped
+upon the soul of Kate Walters. Perhaps it is old. Certainly it is sad. I
+stamped deceit upon the nature which had not known it, knowledge of evil
+where only purity had been, satiety upon temperance. And, worst of all,
+I expelled from this girl's heart love for a good man who loved her, and
+planted, in its stead, passion for a--must I say a bad, or may I not
+cry, a driven man? And all this time Hugh Fraser knew nothing of his
+sorrow, growing up swiftly to meet him like a giant. Even now, while I
+write these words, he knows nothing of it. As I had carelessly taken
+possession of the mind, the very nature of Dr Wedderburn, so now I took
+possession of the very nature of Kate Walters. My immense strength, my
+abounding physical glory drew her--who had known me a puny
+invalid--irresistibly. I won the doctor by my mind; this girl, in the
+main, I think, by my body. And when at length I tired of her slightly,
+the woman, the gentle woman, sprang up a tigress. I had said one night
+that, since I was obliged to go to London, we must part for a while. I
+had added that it was well Hugh Fraser lived in complete ignorance of
+his betrayal.
+
+"Why?" Kate suddenly cried out.
+
+"Because--because it is best so. He and you--some day."
+
+I paused. She understood my meaning. Instantly the tigress had sprung
+upon me. The scene that followed was eloquent. I learned what lives and
+moves in the very depths of a nature, stirred by the inexhaustible greed
+of passion, twisted by passion's fulfilment, the ardent touched by the
+inert. But upon that hurricane has followed an immense and very strange
+calm. Kate is almost cold to me, though very sweet. She has acquiesced
+in my departure for town. She has come to one mind with me on the
+subject of Hugh Fraser. More, she has even written a letter to him
+asking him to come to her, pressing forward their marriage, and I am to
+be the bearer of it to him. This is only a woman's whim. She insists
+that I must see once the man who is to be her husband.
+
+So, after all, the tragedy of Dr Wedderburn is not to be repeated. I--I
+shall not hear, stealing along the steep and windy streets of Edinburgh,
+any--any strange footsteps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is the awful fate that pursues me? A year ago I left Edinburgh
+carrying with me the letter which I understood to contain the request
+of Kate Walters to her lover, Hugh Fraser, to hasten on their marriage.
+As the train roared southwards, I congratulated myself on my clever
+management of a woman. I had, it is true, stepped in between Kate and
+the calm happiness she had been anticipating when I first met her in the
+hospital ward. But now I had withdrawn. And, I told myself, in time. All
+would be well. This girl would marry the boy who loved her. She would
+deceive him. He would never know that the girl he married was not the
+girl he originally loved. He would never perceive that a human being had
+intervened between her and purity, truth, honour. In this letter--I
+touched it with my fingers, congratulating myself--Hugh Fraser would
+read the summons to the future he desired, the future with Kate Walters.
+His soul would rush to meet hers, and surely, after a little while, hers
+would cease to hold back. She would really once more be as she had been.
+I forgot that no human soul can ever retreat from knowledge to
+ignorance.
+
+Hugh Fraser's rooms in London were in Piccadilly. Directly I arrived in
+town I wrote him a note, saying that I was from Edinburgh with a message
+from Kate Walters for him. I explained that she had nursed me through a
+severe illness, and hoped I might have the pleasure of making his
+acquaintance. In reply, I received a most friendly note, begging me to
+call at an hour on the evening of the following day.
+
+That evening I drove in a hansom from the Grand Hotel to Piccadilly,
+taking Kate's note with me. I was conscious of a certain excitement, and
+also of a certain moral exultation. Ridiculously enough, I felt as if I
+were about to perform a sort of fine, almost paternal act, blessing
+these children with genuine, as opposed to stage, emotion. Yes; I glowed
+with a consciousness of personal merit. How incredible human beings are!
+Arrived at Hugh Fraser's rooms, I was at once shown in. How vividly I
+remember that first interview of ours, the exact condition of the room,
+Hugh's attitude of lively anticipation, the precise way in which he held
+his cigarette, the grim, short bark of the fox-terrier that sprang up
+from a sofa when I came in. Hugh was almost twenty-four years old,
+rather tall, slim, with intense, large, dark eyes--full of shining
+cheerfulness just then--very short, curling black hair, and fine,
+straight features. His expression was boyish; so were his movements. As
+soon as he saw me, he sprang forward and gave me an enthusiastic
+welcome--for the sake of Kate, I knew. He led me to the fire and made me
+sit down. I at once handed him my credentials, Kate's letter. His face
+flushed with pleasure, and his fingers twitched with the desire to tear
+it open, but he refrained politely, and began to talk--about her, I
+confess. I understood in three minutes how deeply he was in love with
+her. I told him all about her that might please him, and hinted at the
+contents of the letter.
+
+"What!" he exclaimed joyously. "She wants to hasten on our marriage at
+last. And she's kept me off--but you know what girls are! She couldn't
+leave the hospital immediately. She swore it. There were a thousand
+reasons for delay. But now--by Jove!"
+
+His eyes were suddenly radiant, and he clutched hold of my hand like a
+schoolboy.
+
+"You are a good chap to bring me such a letter," he cried.
+
+"Read it," I said, again filled with moral self-satisfaction, vain,
+paltry egoist that I was.
+
+"No, no--presently."
+
+But I insisted; and at length he complied, enchanted to yield to my
+importunity. He opened the letter, and, as he broke the seal, his face
+was like morning. Never shall I forget the change that grew in it as he
+read. When he had finished his face was like starless night. He looked
+old, haggard, black, shrunken. I watched him with a sensation that
+something had gone wrong with my sight. Surely radiance was fully before
+me and my tricked vision saw it as despair. Raising his blank, bleak
+eyes from the letter, Hugh stared towards me and opened his lips. But no
+sound came from them. He frowned, as if in fury at his own dumbness.
+Then at last, with a sharp shake of his head sideways, he said in a low
+and dry voice:
+
+"You know what is in this letter, you say?"
+
+"I--I thought so," I answered, growing cold and filled with anxiety.
+
+"Well, read it, will you?"
+
+I took the paper from his hand and read:--
+
+   "DEAR HUGH,--Make the man who brings you this letter marry me.
+   If you don't, I will kill myself; for I am ruined. KATE."
+
+I looked up at Hugh Fraser over the letter which my hand still
+mechanically held near my eyes. I wonder how long the silence through
+which we stared lasted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A month later I was married to Kate Walters!
+
+
+IV
+
+THE SOUL OF HUGH FRASER
+
+It may seem strange that my influence upon the soul of Hugh Fraser
+should follow upon such a situation as I have just described; but
+everything connected with my life, since the day when I met the grey boy
+by the burn, has been utterly strange, utterly abnormal. My treachery,
+one would have thought, must have led Fraser to hate me. I had wrecked
+his happiness. I had done him the deepest injury one man can do to
+another, and at first he hated me. When he had wrung from me a promise
+to marry Kate, he left me, and I did not see him again until after the
+wedding. But then, it seemed, he could not keep away from her. For he
+forgave us the wrong we had done him; and, after a while, wrote a
+friendly letter in which he suggested that we should all forget the
+past.
+
+"Why should I not see you sometimes?" he concluded. "I only wish you
+both good, there is no longer any evil in my heart."
+
+Poor boy! It was to be, I suppose. The Tsar of the empire of my soul set
+forth his edict, and one winter day carriage wheels ground harshly upon
+the gravel sweep, and Hugh Fraser was my guest at Carlounie. I welcomed
+him upon the very spot where those light footsteps paused that black
+night of Doctor Wedderburn's dreary end. And the faint sound of the burn
+mingled with our voices in greeting and reply.
+
+The boy was changed. He had aged, grown grave, heavier in movement,
+fiercer in observation, less ready in speech. But his manner was
+friendly even to me, and it was plain to see that Kate still had his
+heart. They met quietly enough, but a flush ran from his cheek to hers
+as they touched hands. Their voices quivered when they spoke a
+commonplace of pleasure at the encounter. So the wheels of Fate began
+slowly to turn on this winter's day.
+
+I must tell you that my fortunes had greatly changed before Hugh Fraser
+came to Carlounie. I was grown rich. My investments, my speculations had
+prospered almost miraculously. The mine I have spoken of was proving a
+gold mine to me. All worldly things went well with me--all worldly
+things, yes.
+
+Now, I believe that all mighty circumstances are born tiny, like
+children, at some given moment. As a rule, they usually seem so
+insignificant, so puny at the birth, that we take no heed of the fact
+that they have come into being, and that, in process of time, they will
+grow to might, perhaps to horrible majesty. Only, when we trace events
+backwards do we know the exact moment when their first faint wail broke
+upon our mental hearing. Generally this is so. But I affirm that I felt,
+at the very time of its first coming, the presence of the shadow, the
+tiny shadow of the events which I am about to describe. I even said to
+myself, "This is a birthday."
+
+Among many improvements on my estate I had built a new Manse, in which,
+of course, our new minister lived. The old habitation of Doctor
+Wedderburn stood empty and deserted among its sycamores. One winter's
+day Hugh Fraser, Kate, and I, in our walk, passed along the lane by the
+now ragged privet hedge through which I had so often observed the
+doctor's agonies. It was a black and white day of frost, which crawled
+along the dark trees and outlined twig and branch. The air was misty,
+and distant objects assumed a mysterious importance. Slight sounds, too,
+suggested infinite activities to the mind. As we neared the Manse, Hugh
+Fraser said to me:--
+
+"Who lives in that old house?"
+
+"Nobody," I replied.
+
+Hugh glanced at me very doubtfully.
+
+"Nobody," I reiterated.
+
+"Really," he rejoined. "But the garden?"
+
+"Is deserted."
+
+"Hardly," he exclaimed, pointing with his hand. "Look!"
+
+"Yes," said Kate, as if in agreement.
+
+And she grew duskily pale.
+
+I looked over the privet hedge, seeing only the rank and frost-bitten
+grass, the wild bushes and narrow mossy paths. Then I stared at my two
+companions in silence. Their eyes appeared to follow the onward movement
+of some object invisible to me.
+
+"The old man makes himself at home," Hugh said. "He has gone into the
+summer-house now."
+
+"Yes," Kate said again.
+
+There was fear in her eyes.
+
+I felt suddenly that the air was very chill.
+
+"That house is unoccupied," I repeated shortly.
+
+We all walked on in silence. But, through our silence, it certainly
+seemed to me that there came a sound of some one lamenting in the
+garden.
+
+A day or two later Fraser said to me:--
+
+"Why is that old house shut up?"
+
+"Who would occupy it?" I said. "Of course, if I could get a tenant--"
+
+"I'll take it," he rejoined quickly. "You can let me some shooting with
+it, can't you?"
+
+"But," I began; and then I stopped. I had an instinct to keep the old
+Manse empty, but I fought it, merely because it struck me as
+unreasonable. How seldom are our instincts unreasonable! God--how
+seldom!
+
+"I've been looking out for a shooting-box," Hugh said. "That house would
+suit me admirably."
+
+"All right," I answered. "I shall be very glad to have you for a
+tenant."
+
+So it was arranged. When Kate heard of the arrangement, I observed her
+to go very pale; but she made no objection. Hugh Fraser rented the
+house, furnished it, engaged servants, a gardener, enlarged the stables,
+and took up his abode there. Doctor Wedderburn's old study was now his
+den. When I looked in at the window through which I had seen the doctor
+die, I saw Fraser smoking, or playing with his setters. I don't know
+why, but the sight turned me sick.
+
+My relations with Kate, of which I have said nothing, were rather cold
+and distant. My passion, such as it was, had died before marriage. Hers
+seemed to languish afterwards. I believe that she had really loved me,
+but that the shame of being with me, after I had wedded her actually
+against my will, struck this sentiment to the dust. When one feeling
+that has been very strong dies, its place is generally filled by
+another. Sometimes I fancied that this was so with Kate, that the
+bitterness of shattered self-respect gradually transformed her nature,
+that a cruel frost bound the tendernesses, the warm vagaries of what had
+been a sweet woman's heart. But, to tell the truth, I did not trouble
+much about the matter. My affairs were prospering so greatly, my health
+was so abounding, I had so much beside the mere egotism of brilliant
+physical strength to occupy me, that I was heedless, reckless--at first.
+Yet, I had moments of a dull alarm connected with the dweller at the
+Manse.
+
+If Hugh Fraser changed as he read that fateful letter in London, he
+changed far more after he came to live at the Manse. And it seemed to me
+that there were times when--how shall I put it?--when he bore a curious,
+and, to me, almost intolerable likeness to--some one who was dead. A
+certain old man's manner came upon him at moments. His body, in sitting
+or standing, assumed, to my eyes, elderly and damnable attitudes. Once,
+when I glanced in at the study window before entering the Manse, I
+perceived him lounging over a table facing me, a pen in his hand and
+paper before him, and the spectacle threw all my senses into a violent
+and most distressing disorder. Instead of going into the house, as I had
+intended, I struck sharply upon the glass at the window. Fraser looked
+up quickly.
+
+"What--what are you writing?" I cried out.
+
+He got up, came to the window, and opened it.
+
+"Eh? What's the row, man?" he said. "Why don't you come in?"
+
+I repeated my question, with an anxiety I strove to mask.
+
+"Writing? Only a letter to town," he said, looking at me in wonder.
+
+"Not a sermon?" I blurted forth.
+
+"A sermon? Good heavens, no. Why should I write a sermon?"
+
+"Oh," I replied, forcing an uneasy laugh. "You--you live in a Manse.
+Doctor Wedderburn used to write his sermons in that room."
+
+That evening I remember that I said to Kate:
+
+"Don't you think Fraser is getting to look very old at times?"
+
+"I haven't observed it," she replied coldly.
+
+Another curious thing. Very soon after he took up his abode in the
+Manse, Fraser, who had been a godly youth, became markedly averse to
+religion. He informed us, with some excitement, that he had changed his
+views, and seemed much inclined to carry on an atheistical propaganda
+among the devout people of the neighbourhood. He declared that much evil
+had been wrought by faith in Carlounie, and appeared to deem it as his
+special duty to preach some sort of a crusade against the accepted
+Christianity of the parish. I began to combat his views, and once sought
+the reason of his ardour and self-election to the post of teacher. His
+answer struck me exceedingly. He said:--
+
+"Why should I be the one to clear away these senseless beliefs in
+phantasms, you say? Why, because I suppose they were woven by my
+predecessor in the Manse. Didn't the minister live and die there? Do you
+know, Ralston, sometimes, as I sit in that study at night, I have a
+feeling that instead of turning to what is called repentance when he
+died, the minister turned the other way, recanted in his last hour the
+faith he had professed all through his life, and expired before he could
+give words to his new mind and heart. And then I feel as if his
+influence was left behind him in that room, and fell upon me and imposed
+on me this mission."
+
+And as he spoke, he suddenly plucked at his face with an old, habitual
+action of Doctor Wedderburn's when excited. I scarcely restrained a cry,
+and with difficulty forced myself to go out slowly from his presence.
+Nevertheless, I felt strongly impelled to fight against the atheism of
+this boy, I who had formerly sown the seeds of destruction in the soul
+of Doctor Wedderburn. But it was as if my own act of the past rose and
+conquered me in the present. I declare solemnly it was so. Some
+emanation from the poor dead creature's soul clung round that cursed
+place of his doom, and, seizing upon the soul of Fraser, spread tyranny
+from its throne. And whom did it take first as its victim, think you?
+Kate, my wife.
+
+Let our individual beliefs be what they may, one thing we must all--when
+we think--acknowledge, that the pulse which beats eternally in the heart
+of life is reparation.
+
+Kate, as I have said, was originally finely pure and finely dowered with
+the blessings of faith in a divine Providence, trust in the eventual
+redemption of the world, hope that sin, sorrow, and sighing would,
+indeed, flee away, and all mankind find eternal and unutterable peace.
+In my worst moments I had never tried to destroy this beauty of her
+soul; and, in her fall, now repaired, she had never abandoned her
+religion. It was, I know, a haunting memory of the last moments of the
+doctor that held me back from ever attacking the faith of another. For
+myself, I did not think much of my future beyond death. Life filled my
+horizon then.
+
+But now, after a short absence in England, during which I left Kate at
+Carlounie, I returned to find her infected with Fraser's pestilent
+notions. She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was better to
+act up to her real convictions than to set what is called a good example
+to her dependants. She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found
+damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually how the matter struck
+me when I began carefully to consider it. Men often see only what
+irreligion really is and means when they find it existing in a woman. I
+was appalled at this deadly fire flaring up in the heart of Kate, and I
+set myself, at first feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and
+stamp it out.
+
+But I fought against my own former self. I fought against the influence
+of the spectre that surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose
+originally from the very bosom of the burn at my summons. Am I mad to
+think so? No, no. Oh, the eternal horror that may spring from one wild
+and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic litany! This was
+surely the strangest, subtlest reparation that ever beat in the
+inexorable heart of Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence,
+still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to
+its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number
+was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I
+write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And
+in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second
+and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and
+Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in
+pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor Wedderburn had
+formerly--before the fever--dominated my influence, so now it dominated
+my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a
+drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor
+wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died
+undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now.
+He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me.
+
+Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a
+moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of
+health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust--I was as
+Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when
+the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And
+then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey
+boy's words at the thought of the Cæsar of hell whose tribute was three
+human souls.
+
+Kate and I were taking tea one evening with Fraser. We sat around the
+hearth, by which was placed the table with the tea-service and the hot
+cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss religious subjects
+and to rail against the professors of faith. Kate listened to him
+eagerly--a filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes. I was
+silent, watching. And presently it seemed to me that Fraser's gestures
+in talking grew like the dead gestures of the doctor. He threw his
+hands abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of Wedderburn's. He
+struck his knees sharply, and simultaneously, with both his palms to
+emphasise his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So vehement
+was the similarity that I began presently to feel that the doctor
+himself declaimed in the firelight, and I was seized with a desire to
+combat effectively his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in, then,
+upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of religion. He turned upon me,
+dealt with my pleas, scattered my contentions--growing, I fancied, very
+old and with the rumbling voice of age,--thrust at me with the lances of
+sarcasm, sore belaboured me into silence and mute fury. And all the time
+Kate sat by, and I seemed to see her soul, with fluttering outstretched
+wings, sinking down to hell, as a hawk drops out of sight into a dark
+cleft of the mountains. And then, in the last resort, Fraser struck his
+hand down on mine to clinch his defeat of me. And I, looking upon that
+poor Kate, cried out:--
+
+"God forgive you, Fraser, for what you're doing--murderer! murderer!"
+
+Scarcely had my cry died away than I knew I had borrowed the very words
+of Wedderburn to me. A cold, like ice, came upon me. This reversal of
+the past in the present was too ironic. I heard the doctor chuckling
+drearily in Hades. I suddenly sprang up like one pursued, and got away
+into the night, leaving Kate and Fraser together by the fire. But the
+spectre of the Manse surely pursued me. I heard its soft but heavy
+footsteps coming in my wake. I heard its old laughter in the dark behind
+me; and I sickened and faltered, and was in fear beyond all human fear
+of an enemy. The next day I told Fraser he must leave the Manse; I would
+build him a shooting-lodge on any part of my estate that he preferred.
+
+"No," he said, "no; I have grown to love the old place; I never feel
+alone there."
+
+I looked in his eyes, searching after his meaning.
+
+"I would rather pull down the Manse," I said.
+
+In reply, he touched with his forefinger the lease I had signed with
+him, which lay on his writing-table.
+
+"You cannot, my friend," he said.
+
+I cannot do anything that I would. I am driven on a dark road by the
+creature with the whip that is surely after every man who once yields to
+his worst desires.
+
+Just after this I received a visit from Mr. Mackenzie, the new minister,
+a young and fervent, but not very knowledgeable man, whose zeal was
+red-hot, but incompetent, and who would have died for the faith he could
+never properly expound, like many young ministers of our church. The
+little man was in a twisting turmoil of distress, and was moved, so he
+said, to deal very plainly with me. I bade him deal on. It seemed that
+his flock was becoming infected with atheism, which spread like the
+plague, from the old Manse. The young children lisped it to each other
+in the lanes; lovers talked it between their kisses; youths chattered
+perdition at the idle corner by the church wall. Even the old began to
+look askance at the Bible that had been their only book of age, and to
+shiver wantonly at the inevitable approach of death. The young minister
+cried denunciation upon Fraser, like a vague-minded, but angry Jonah
+before a provincial Nineveh.
+
+"Turn him out, Mr. Ralston, drive him forth," he ejaculated. "What is
+his rent to you? What is his money in comparison with the immortal souls
+of men? Away with him, away with him."
+
+I mentioned the small matter of the lease. The young minister, with a
+quivering scarlet face, replied stammering:--
+
+"A lease! But--but--your own wife--she is--is--"
+
+"I do not discuss her," I said sternly.
+
+"Well; they are deserting the services. You see that yourself. They will
+not come to hear me preach. They will not listen to me."
+
+The man was tasting bitterness. He was almost crying. I was terribly
+sorry for him. Yet, all I could do was to think of the spectre at the
+Manse and answer:--
+
+"I can do nothing."
+
+His words were true. Carlounie's soul was being devoured as by a plague.
+A colony of unbelievers was springing up in the midst of the beautiful
+woods and the mountains. Soon the evil fame of the place began to spread
+abroad, and men, in distant parts of Scotland, to speak of mad
+Carlounie. The matter weighed intolerably upon me, and at last became a
+fixed idea. I could think of nothing else but this devil's home in the
+hills, this haunted and harassed centre of doom and darkness which was
+my possession and in which I lived. I fell into silence. I ceased to
+stir abroad beyond my own land. It seemed to me that Carlounie should
+keep strict quarantine, should be isolated, and that each person who
+went over its borders carried a strange infection and was guilty of
+murder. I forbade Kate to drive beyond my estates.
+
+"I never wish to," she said.
+
+And I knew that where Fraser was she was happy. He had her soul fast by
+this; or, it would be truer to say, the spectre of the Manse had both
+him and her. And he aged apace and bore on his countenance the stamp of
+evil. And I brooded and brooded upon the whole matter. But, from
+whatever point I started, I came back to the Manse and to the spectre
+dwelling in it with Hugh Fraser. I had given death to Doctor Wedderburn,
+in return for the life so miraculously given to me, and now his spirit,
+retained in its ancient abiding-place, spread death about it in its
+turn. This was, and is, my conviction. The influence of the departed
+clings to roof, to walls, to floors, leans on the accustomed
+window-seat, trembles by the bed-head, sits by the hearthstone, stands
+invisible in the passage way. _To kill it one must destroy its home._ It
+was my duty to kill it, therefore it was my duty to destroy the Manse.
+This thought at length took complete possession of me, and, following
+it, I strove in every imaginable way to oust Fraser from the house among
+the sycamores. But he would not go. He loved the place, he said. He
+stood by his lease and I was powerless.
+
+Oh, God, I have, surely I have, my excuse for what I have done! I meant
+to be a saviour, not a destroyer! I would have restored Fraser and my
+poor Kate to their freedom of heart. That was what I meant. Ay, but the
+grey traveller fought against me. Shut up here by night in my house, on
+the verge of--that which I cannot, dare not speak of, I declare that I
+am guiltless. Let him bear the burden, him alone! In these last moments,
+before my deed is known, I write the truth that men may exonerate me.
+This is the truth.
+
+Overwhelmed with this idea that Carlounie must be rescued, that Hugh
+Fraser and Kate must be rescued from this damnation that was preying
+upon them, I determined, secretly, on the destruction of the Manse, in
+which the spectre of the doctor stayed to work such evil. But, to do
+this, I must first make sure that Hugh Fraser was at a distance, and
+that his small household--he only kept two servants, hired from the
+village--were away from the haunted dwelling. I, therefore, suggested to
+Fraser that he should come and spend a week with me, and give his maids
+a holiday. After a little demur, and drawn, I see now, by his hidden
+passion for Kate, he accepted my invitation. He dismissed the maids to
+their homes for a week, and moved over to us. When the minister knew of
+it, he, no doubt, fully included me in his prayers for the damnation of
+those who worked evil among his flock. Will he ever read these pages, I
+wonder? Kate was now an avowed atheist, and she and Fraser were
+continually together, glorying in their complete freedom from old
+prejudices, and their new outlook upon life. They had, I heard them say,
+broken through the ties that bound poor, terrified Christians; and, when
+they said this, they smiled, the one upon the other. I did not then know
+why. Meanwhile, I was preparing for my deed of redemption, as I called
+it, and meant it to be. I was resolved to go out by night to the empty
+Manse, and secretly to set it in flames. It stood alone. The country
+people slept sound at night. I calculated that if I chose midnight for
+my act none would see the flames, and, ere the peasants woke at dawn,
+the Manse and the spectre within it would be destroyed for ever. Such
+was my belief--such the spirit in which I prepared myself for this
+strange work.
+
+
+V
+
+THE RETURN OF THE GREY TRAVELLER
+
+I write these last words after the dead of night, towards the coming of
+the dawn. Ere the light is grey in the sky I shall be away to the burn
+to meet him, the grey traveller. He is there waiting for me. He has come
+back. I go to meet him, and I shall never return. Carlounie will know my
+face no more. All is done as he ordained. My words have been as deeds,
+have marched on inevitably to actual deeds. Long ago he said that
+sometimes, even as we can never go back from things that we have done,
+we can never go back from things that we have said. So, indeed, it is.
+
+According to my fixed intention, I determined on a night for the
+destruction of the Manse. The house was old and would burn like tinder.
+I should break into it through the window of the study, which was never
+shuttered. I should set fire to the interior at several points, and
+escape in the darkness of the night. By dawn the accursed place would be
+a ruin, and then--then I looked for a new era. Fool! Fool! I looked to
+see the burden of the vile influence of the spectre lifted from the soul
+of Fraser, and so from the soul of Kate, which was infected by him. I
+looked to see my people sane and satisfied as of old, Carlounie no more
+a plague-spot in the land, that poor and zealous man, the minister, calm
+and at rest with his little faithful flock once more. All this I looked
+for confidently. And so, when the black and starless night of my deed
+came, I was happy and serene. That night Kate pleaded a headache, and
+went to bed very early, before nine. She begged me not to come to her
+room to bid her good-night, as she wanted perfect quiet and sleep. All
+unsuspecting, I agreed to her request. Soon after she had gone, Fraser,
+who had seemed heavy with unusual fatigue all through the evening, also
+went off to bed, and I was left alone. But it was not yet time for me to
+start on my errand of the darkness. The burning Manse would surely
+attract attention before midnight. People might be out and about in the
+village. A belated peasant might be on his way home by the lane that
+skirted the privet hedge. I must wait till all were sleeping. The time
+seemed very long. Once I fancied I heard a movement in the house--again
+I dreamed that soft and hurried footsteps upon the gravel outside broke
+on the silence. But I said to myself that I was nervous, highly strung
+because of my strange project, that my imagination tricked me. At last
+the hour came. Without going upstairs I drew on my thickest overcoat,
+took my hat and a heavy stick, opened the hall door, and passed out into
+the night. It was still and very cold, and the voice of the burn came
+loudly to my ears. Treading quietly, I made my way into the road, and
+set forth along it in the direction of the Manse. The ground was hard,
+and scarcely had I gone a few yards before I thought that some one was
+furtively following me. I stopped rather uneasily, and listened, but
+heard nothing. I went on, and again seemed aware of distant footsteps
+treading gently behind me. The sound made me suppose that some one of my
+household must be after me, moved by curiosity as to the reason of my
+present pilgrimage; but I was not minded to be watched, so I turned
+sharply, yet very softly, around and faced the way I had come. I
+encountered no one, nor did I any longer catch the patter of feet. So,
+reckoning that my nerves must be playing with me, I pursued my way. But
+the whole of the distance between my dwelling and the Manse I seemed
+vaguely to hear a noise of one treading behind me. And, although I said
+to myself that there was nobody out beside myself, I was filled with the
+stir of a shifting uneasiness. I entered the lonely and narrow lane that
+led beside the Manse, and presently arrived in front of the house; when,
+what was my astonishment to perceive a light gleaming in the study
+window. My hand was on the gate when it went out, and all the front of
+the house was black and eyeless. For so brief a moment had I seen the
+light that I was moved to think that it, too, existed, like the sound of
+steps, only in my excited brain. Nevertheless, I did not go up at once
+to the house, but paced the lane for a full half-hour, always--so it
+seemed to me--tracked by some one. But, since I kept turning about, and
+the footfalls were always at my back, I grew certain that they were
+nothing more nor less than a fantasy on my part. It must have been well
+after twelve when I summoned courage to enter the garden and to approach
+the Manse. The steps, I thought, followed me to the gate and then
+paused, as if a sentinel was posted there to keep watch. Arrived at the
+stone step which preceded the hall door, I, too, paused in my turn and
+listened. Did the spectre that inhabited this abode know of my coming,
+of my purpose? Was it crouching within, like some frantic shadow,
+fearful of its impending fate? Or was it, perhaps, preparing to attack,
+to repel me? Strangely, I had now no fear of it, or of anything. I was
+calm. I felt that my deed was one of rescue, even though, by performing
+it, I wrought destruction. I moved to the study window, and was about to
+smash in the glass with my heavy stick when a mad idea came to me to try
+the hall door. I put my hand upon it and found it not locked. This
+opening of the door sent a shiver through me, and a ghastly sense of the
+occupation of this deserted abode. I was filled again with an acute
+consciousness of the indwelling spectre, whom, in truth, I came to
+murder. But, I reasoned, this door has been left unbarred by the
+carelessness of Fraser's servants, that is all.
+
+I stood on the lintel, struck a match and set it to a candle end which
+I drew from my coat pocket. The flame burned up, showing the narrow
+passage, the umbrella stand, the doors on either side. I entered the
+study softly, looking swiftly on all sides of me as I did so. Did I
+expect a vision of Doctor Wedderburn lounging at the table, his fingers
+thrust into a Bible? I scarcely know; but I saw nothing except the
+grimly standing furniture, the lamp on the table, the vacant chairs, the
+books in their shelves. I listened. There was no rustle of the spectre
+that I came to kill. Did it watch me? Did it see me there? I set fire to
+the room, passed quickly to the chamber on the other side of the
+passage, from thence to the kitchen and the dining-parlour, leaving a
+track of dwarf flames behind me. The means of destruction I had prepared
+and carried with me. They availed. When I once more reached the garden,
+the ground floor of the Manse was in a blaze. But now came the
+incredible event which I must chronicle before I go down to the burn for
+the last time.
+
+Having gained the garden, I waited there in the darkness to watch my
+work progress. I saw the light within the Manse, at first a twinkle,
+grow to a glare. I heard the faint crackle of the burning rooms increase
+to a soft and continuous roar. And, as I watched and listened, a mighty
+sense of relief ran through me. Thus did I burn up my past! thus did I
+sacrifice grandly and gladly the ill spirit my wild desires had evoked!
+Thus--thus! All the base of the Manse was red-hot, when, on a sudden, I
+heard a great shout that seemed to come from the sky. Light sprang in an
+upper window. There followed a sound like the smash of glass, and I saw
+two arms shoot out, the top part of a figure and a face framed in the
+glare. I deemed it the vision of the poor spectre that I destroyed. I
+looked upon it and fancied I could detect the tortured lineaments of the
+doctor, his accustomed gestures distorted by fear and fury. But then I
+seemed to see behind him another figure, struggling, and to hear the
+failing scream of a woman. But the flames from below leaped to the roof.
+The floors fell in with an uproar. The figure, or figures, disappeared.
+
+Trembling I turned to go, my mind shuddering at the thought of the
+apparition I had seen. I got into the lane and hastened towards home.
+Soon the burning Manse was out of sight, and I was swallowed up in the
+intense darkness.
+
+Now, as I went along, a terrible and very peculiar sensation came upon
+me. I heard no footsteps; all was silence. Yet I seemed to be aware that
+I was closely companioned, that at my very side something--I knew not
+what--walked, keeping pace with me. And so close did I believe this
+thing to be, that at moments I even felt it pressing against me like a
+slim figure in the night. Once, when it thus nestled to me, as if in
+affection, I could not refrain from crying out aloud. I stretched forth
+my arms to grasp this surely amorous horror of the darkness, but found
+nothing, and pursued my road in a sweat of apprehension. And still, the
+thing was certainly with me, and seemed, I thought, to praise me as I
+walked, as the good man is praised on his journey. My great horror was
+that this creature that I could not see, could not hear, could not feel,
+and yet was so sharply conscious of, was _well disposed towards me_. My
+heart craved its hatred--but it loved me I knew. My soul demanded its
+curses. I almost heard it bless me as I moved. My knees knocked
+together, my limbs were turned to wax, as it was borne in upon me that I
+had surely done this terror that walked in darkness a service of some
+kind. To be pursued in fury by one of the dreadful beings that dwell in
+the borderland beyond our sight is sad and dreary; but to be followed
+thus by one as by a dog, to be fawned upon and caressed--this is
+appalling. I longed to shriek aloud. I broke into a run, and, like one
+demented, gained the gate of Carlounie; but always the thing was with
+me--full of joy and laudation. At the house door I paused, facing round.
+I was moved to address this thing I could not see.
+
+"Who is it that walks with me?" I cried, and my voice was high and
+strained.
+
+A voice I knew, young, clear, level, a little formal, answered out of
+the darkness:--
+
+"It is I."
+
+It was the voice of the grey traveller whom I had seen long ago by the
+burnside. I leaned back against the door and my shoulders shook against
+it.
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"I come to thank you."
+
+"What, then, have I done?"
+
+"You have brought the tribute money."
+
+I did not understand, and I answered:--
+
+"No. One soul I may have destroyed, but two I have saved to-night. For I
+have slain the spectre that preyed upon them and I have set them free
+from bondage."
+
+The voice answered:--
+
+"_Go into the house and see._"
+
+Then again I was filled with apprehension. I turned to go in at my door,
+and, as I did so, I heard footsteps treading in the direction of the
+burn, and a fading voice which cried, like an echo:--
+
+"And then come to me."
+
+And, as the voice died, I heard the rush of sheep in the night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Filled with nameless fear and a cold apprehension, I entered the house,
+and, led by some cruel instinct, made my way to Kate's room. The lamp
+she always had at night burned dimly on the dressing-table and cast a
+grave radiance upon an empty bed.
+
+What could this mean?
+
+I stole to the room of Fraser, bearing the lamp with me. His chamber was
+also untenanted; but, on the quilt of the bed, lay a piece of paper
+written over. I took it up and read--with the sound of the burn in my
+ears:--
+
+   "You stole her from me. I take back my own. To-night we stay
+   at the old Manse. To-morrow we shall be far away. HUGH FRASER."
+
+The paper dropped from my hand upon the quilt. A woman's scream rang in
+my ears above the roar of flames. I understood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tribute money has been paid. I go down to the burn. The grey
+traveller is waiting there for me.
+
+  ROBERT HICHENS.
+  FREDERIC HAMILTON.
+
+
+
+
+AN ECHO IN EGYPT
+
+
+That lustrous land of weary music and wild dancing, of reverend tombs
+and pert Arabs, that Egypt of plagues and tourists, to whose sandy bosom
+Society flocks, affects her visitors in many different ways. Bellairs
+went to her under the fixed impression that he was a cynic, and found
+that he was a romanticist. Very acute in mind, he had long flattered
+himself on being unimpressionable; and he was much inclined to think
+that to be insensitive was to be strong with the best kind of strength.
+He loved to lay stress on all that was devil-may-care in his character,
+and to put aside all that was prone to cling, or weep, or wonder, or
+pray, and he fancied that if he cultivated one side of his mind
+assiduously he could eliminate the other sides. In England, in London,
+the process had seemed to be successful. But Egypt gave to him illusions
+with both hands, and, against his will, he had to accept them. Protests
+were unavailing, and soon he ceased to protest, and told himself the
+horrid fact that he was a sentimentalist, perhaps even a poet. Good
+heavens! a Bellairs--a poet! His soldier ancestors seemed forming a
+square and fixing bayonets to resist the charging notion. And yet--and
+yet--
+
+Instead of playing pool after dinner at night, Bellairs found himself
+wandering, like Haroun Al Raschid, through the narrow ways of Cairo,
+mixing with the natives, studying their loves, and drinking their
+coffee. There were moments, retrograde moments, when he even wished to
+wear their dress, to drape his long-limbed British form in a flowing
+blue robe, and wrap his dark head in a bulging white turban. He resisted
+this devil of an idea; but the fact that it had ever come to him
+troubled him. And, partly to regain his manhood, his hard scepticism,
+his contempt of outside, delicate influences, he went up the Nile--and
+succumbed utterly to fantasy and to old romance. "I am no longer Jack
+Bellairs," he told himself one day, as the steamer on which he travelled
+neared Luxor on its way down the river from the First Cataract--"I am
+somebody else; some one who is touched by a sunset, and responsive to a
+gleam of rose on the Libyan Mountains, some one who dreams at night when
+the pipes wail under the palm-trees, some one who feels that the great
+river has life, and that the desert owns a wistful soul, and has a sweet
+armour with silence. Good-bye, Jack Bellairs! Go home to England--I stay
+here."
+
+And that evening he left the steamer, and took a room for a month at the
+Luxor Hotel. And that evening he cast the skin of his former self, and
+emerged, with fluttering wings, from the chrysalis of his identity. He
+was a bachelor, aged twenty-eight, and he was travelling alone; so
+there was no critical eye to mark the change in him, no chattering
+tongue to express surprise at his pleasant abandonment to the follies
+which make up the lives of sensitive artists and refined sensualists who
+can differentiate between the promenade of the "Empire," and the garden
+of love. As he stepped out into the Arab-haunted village that night,
+after dinner, Bellairs breathed a sigh of relief. For a month he would
+let himself go. Where to? He bent his steps towards the river, the Nile
+that is the pulsing blood in the veins of Egypt. Moored in the shadow of
+its brown banks lay a string of bright-eyed dahabeeyahs. From more than
+one of them came music. Bellairs, his cigarette his only companion,
+strolled slowly along listening idly in a pleasant dream. A woman's
+voice sang, asking "Ninon" what was her scheme of life. A man beat out
+his soul at the feet of "Medje." And, upon the deck of the last
+dahabeeyah, a woman played a fantastic mazurka. Bellairs was fond of
+music, and her performance was so clever, so full of nuances,
+understanding, wild passion, that he stood still to remark it more
+closely.
+
+"She has known many things, good and evil," he thought, as his mind
+noted the intellect that spoke in the changes of time, the regret and
+the gaiety that the touch demonstrated so surely and easily, as the mood
+of the composition changed. The music ceased.
+
+"Betty," a woman's voice said, in English, but with a slight French
+accent, "I want to see the stars. This awning hides them. Come for a
+little walk."
+
+"Yes; I want to see the stars too, and the awning does hide them," a
+girl's voice answered. "Do let us take a little walk."
+
+Bellairs smiled, as he said to himself, "The first voice is the voice of
+the musician, and the second voice seems to be its echo." He was still
+standing on the bank when the two women stepped upon the gangway to the
+shore and climbed to the narrow path.
+
+As they passed him by they glanced at him rather curiously. One was a
+woman of about thirty, dark, with a pale, strong-featured face. The
+other was a fair, aristocratic-looking girl, not more than seventeen.
+
+"She is the echo," Bellairs thought. "Rather a sweet one." Then, at a
+distance, he followed them, and presently found them sitting together in
+the garden of the Hotel. He sat down not far off. A man, whom he knew
+slightly, spoke to them, and afterwards crossed to him.
+
+"That lady plays very cleverly," Bellairs said.
+
+"Mademoiselle Leroux, you mean--yes. You know her?"
+
+"Not at all. I only heard her from the river bank."
+
+"She is travelling with Lord Braydon. She is a great friend of Lady
+Betty Lambe, his daughter."
+
+"That pretty girl?"
+
+"Yes. Shall I introduce you?"
+
+"I should be delighted."
+
+A moment later Bellairs was sitting with the two ladies and talking of
+Egypt. It seemed to him that they were the first nurses to dandle his
+new baby-nature, this nature which Egypt had given to him, and which
+only to-night he had definitely accepted. Perhaps this fact quickly
+cemented their acquaintance. At any rate, a distinct friendship began to
+walk in their conversation, and Bellairs found himself listening to
+Mdlle. Leroux, and looking at Lady Betty, with a great deal of interest
+and of admiration. Presently the former said:--
+
+"I knew you would be introduced to us to-night."
+
+Bellairs was surprised.
+
+"When?" he asked.
+
+"When we passed you just now on the bank of the Nile."
+
+"I knew we should too," said Lady Betty.
+
+"You must be very intuitive," said Bellairs.
+
+"Women generally are," remarked Mdlle. Leroux.
+
+"Yes. Do your intuitions tell you whether our acquaintance will be long
+and agreeable?"
+
+"Perhaps--but I never prophesy."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I am always right."
+
+"Is that a valid reason for abstention?"
+
+"I think so. For in this world those who look forward generally see
+darkness."
+
+"I cannot achieve a proper pessimism in Upper Egypt," Bellairs replied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week later, Bellairs felt quite certain that there had never been a
+period in his life when he had not known and talked with Mdlle. Leroux
+and Lady Betty Lambe. Lord and Lady Braydon asked him to lunch on the
+dahabeeyah almost every day, and he often strolled down to tea without
+invitation. Then, in the afternoon, there were donkey expeditions to
+Karnak, or across the river to the tombs of the kings, to the desert
+villa of Monsieur Naville, to ancient Thebes, to the two Colossi. Lord
+Braydon was consumptive and was spending the winter and spring in Egypt.
+Lady Braydon seldom left his side, and so it happened that Bellairs and
+his two acquaintances of the garden were often alone together. Bellairs
+became deeply interested in them, and for a rather peculiar reason. He
+was fascinated by the extraordinary sympathy that existed between the
+two women--if Lady Betty could be called a woman yet. Mdlle. Leroux had
+obtained so strong an influence over the girl that she seemed to have
+grafted not only her mind, but her heart, her apparatus of emotions and
+of affections, on to Lady Betty's. What the former silently thought,
+the latter silently thought too, and when the silence died in
+expression, they frequently spoke almost the same sentence
+simultaneously. Sometimes Mdlle. Leroux would express some feeling with
+vehemence to Bellairs when Lady Betty was out of hearing, and an hour or
+two afterwards, with only a slightly fainter vehemence, Lady Betty would
+express the same feeling. Indeed, these two women seemed to have only
+one heart, one soul, between them, the heart and soul that had
+originally been the sole property of the elder one.
+
+"You are very generous," said Bellairs one day to Mdlle. Leroux.
+
+"Why?" she asked in surprise.
+
+"You give away things that most of us have only the power to keep."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Some day, perhaps, I will tell you."
+
+Clarice Leroux was tremendously impulsive, and she had taken an
+immediate and strong liking to Bellairs. In this Lady Betty, as usual,
+coincided. But when Clarice's liking passed through self-revelations,
+confidences, towards a stronger feeling, it was rather strange to find
+Lady Betty still treading in her footsteps, still ever succeeding her in
+her attitudes of mind and of heart. Yet the inevitable double
+flirtation, apparently expected and desired by the two women, was
+strangely gilded by novelty; and, at first, Bellairs played as happily
+with these two dual natures as a child plays with two doll
+representatives of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For, at first, he
+possessed the child's power of detachment, and felt that he could at any
+moment discard dolls for soldiers, or a Noah's Ark, and still keep
+happiness in his lap. But most things have an inherent tendency to
+become complicated if they are let alone and allowed to develop free
+from definite guidance, and presently Bellairs became conscious of
+advancing complications. His intellectual appreciation of a new
+situation began to degenerate into a more emotional condition, which
+disturbed and irritated him. It seemed that he was peering through the
+bars of the gate that guards the garden of passion. Which of the two
+women did he see in the garden?
+
+He told himself that, having regard to the circumstances of the case, he
+ought to see both of them. Unfortunately, a vision of that kind never
+has been, and never will be, seen by a man. The temple in which the idol
+sits always makes a difference in the nature of our worship of the idol.
+Bellairs was forced to recognise this fact. And the temple in which sat
+the idol of Lady Betty's nature attracted him more than the temple in
+which sat the idol of Mdlle. Leroux's nature. He came to this conclusion
+one afternoon at Karnak. They three were hidden away in a stone nook of
+this great stone forest, enshrined from the gaze of tourists by mighty
+rugged pillars, walled in by huge blocks of antique masonry that threw
+cold shadows whence the lizards stole to seek the sun. The blue sky was
+broken to their gaze by a narrow section of what had been, doubtless,
+once a wide-spread roof. A silence of endless ages hung around them in
+this haven fashioned by dead men and living Time.
+
+Mdlle. Leroux had been boiling a kettle; and they sipped tea, and, at
+first, did not talk. But tea unlooses the bonds of speech. After their
+second cups they felt communicative.
+
+"One week gone out of my four," Bellairs said, "and each will seem
+shorter-lived than its forerunner."
+
+"You go in three weeks from now?" said Mdlle. Leroux, with an uneven
+intonation that betokened a sudden awakening to the finality of things.
+
+"Yes; at the end of January."
+
+"And we are here until nearly the end of March."
+
+"Yes," said Lady Betty; "it will seem a very long time. February will be
+eternal."
+
+"It is the shortest month in the year," Bellairs remarked.
+
+Mdlle. Leroux looked at him sarcastically.
+
+"You English are so prosaic," she exclaimed. "Any Frenchman would have
+understood."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That we were paying you a compliment."
+
+"Perhaps I did understand it, and preferred not to show my
+comprehension; there is such a thing as modesty!"
+
+"There is--such a thing as false modesty!"
+
+"Exactly," remarked Lady Betty.
+
+"I will accept your compliment gladly," said Bellairs, looking at Lady
+Betty.
+
+"Mine?" asked Clarice Leroux.
+
+"Yes," Bellairs replied.
+
+The consciousness that he cared very much more for such a pretty meaning
+in Lady Betty than in Clarice Leroux led him then, for the first time,
+to that Garden Gate. He looked at Lady Betty again with a new feeling.
+She returned his gaze quietly. Then he turned his eyes to those of
+Clarice. Hers were fixed upon him with a curious violence. He had a
+momentary sensation, literally for the first time, that these two women
+after all, had not one soul, one heart, between them. They did not feel
+quite simultaneously. Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice. Yes,
+that was the difference between them. However quickly the echo follows
+the voice that summons it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady Betty
+never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself wondering eagerly, for
+that afternoon a strange certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash,
+that Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on the verge of
+loving him. He knew now that he loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love
+him yet, was not even quite close to loving him. Had she been in Egypt
+alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs believed that he would not have
+attracted her. He attracted her through Clarice, because he attracted
+Clarice. Could he make her love him in the same way? It would be a
+curious, subtle experiment to try to win one woman's heart by winning
+another's: Bellairs silently decided to make it. All the rest of that
+afternoon he talked to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt
+had given him, the poetry which had ousted the prose inherited from a
+long line of ancestors, the sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed
+now he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win two hearts, the
+heart that contained another heart, as one conjurer's box contains a
+hundred others.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I knew it when I first saw you," Clarice said. "Directly I looked at
+you that evening on the bank I knew it."
+
+"How strange," Bellairs answered.
+
+"And you--did you know it when you heard me playing?"
+
+"That mazurka! Remember I am a man."
+
+They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out,
+for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and
+the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could
+hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in
+the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill
+the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed
+by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had
+told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been
+returned.
+
+"Will this kiss, too, have its echo?" he thought; and his eyes travelled
+towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty
+sat. He turned again to Clarice.
+
+"Do you believe in echoes?" he asked.
+
+"Echoes!"
+
+"That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls
+into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?"
+
+"From the same person?"
+
+"Or from some other person."
+
+"What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without
+finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that
+there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repetition of
+our feeling, our doing, to-night."
+
+"Yet, there may be. Who knows?"
+
+"I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never
+will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in
+the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a
+hateful thing?"
+
+"I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me."
+
+And again he glanced towards the lighted windows.
+
+"The world is very full of echoes," he went on; "our troubles are
+repeated."
+
+"But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!"
+
+"There have always been lovers, and they all act in much the same way!"
+
+"Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some new mode of expression for
+ourselves--you and I?"
+
+"Because we are human beings, and one network of tangled limitations."
+
+"You make me cry with anger," she said.
+
+And when he looked, he saw that there were tears shining in her eyes.
+
+At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction swept over him. What
+had he done? A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do. He had made an
+experiment, as a scientist may make an experiment. He had vivisected a
+soul, but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When it knew, would it
+die? But then he told himself he had to do it. For he loved
+passionately, and was certain that he could only gain the heart he had
+not yet completely won by gaining this heart that he had completely won.
+He had made an experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail. All that
+Clarice said, all that she thought, all that she desired, Betty said,
+thought, desired. After the necessary interval the echo must follow the
+voice. And he smiled to himself.
+
+"Why do you smile like that?" Clarice asked.
+
+"Because--because I thought I heard an echo," he replied. And then they
+kissed again. He, with his eyes shut, forced his imagination to tell him
+that the lips he pressed were the lips of Betty. She thought only of the
+lips of love, that burn up all the recollections of the lonely years,
+all the phantoms which dwell in the deserts through which women pass to
+joy--or to despair.
+
+The Austrian pianist was exhausted. Even his long hair could no longer
+sustain his failing energies. He expired magnificently, the seventh
+rhapsody of Liszt serving as his bier. Lady Betty came out into the
+garden.
+
+"How unmusical you two are," she said; "his playing was exquisite."
+
+"We heard finer music here," Clarice answered, as she got up to go back
+to the dahabeeyah--"did we not?"
+
+She turned to Bellairs. He was looking at Lady Betty and did not hear.
+Clarice's cheek flushed angrily.
+
+"Come, Betty," she exclaimed. "Good-night, Mr Bellairs."
+
+"Good-night, Mr Bellairs," echoed Lady Betty.
+
+The two women moved away, and vanished down the narrow and dusty avenue
+that leads to the bank of the Nile. Bellairs stood looking after them.
+He was wondering why he loved Betty and did not love Clarice. It seemed
+feeble to love an echo. Yet, the intonation of an echo is sometimes
+exquisite in its trilling vagueness, its far-off, thrilling beauty. And
+Bellairs fancied that if he once wakened Betty to passion he would free
+her, in a moment, from her curious bondage, would give to her the soul
+that Clarice must surely have crushed down and expelled, replacing it
+with a replica of her own soul. And then he asked himself, being
+analytically inclined that night, what he adored in Betty. Was it merely
+her fresh young beauty? It could not be her nature; for that, at
+present, was merely Clarice's, and he did not love the nature of
+Clarice. Yet he felt it was something more than her beauty. When he had
+made her love him he would know; for, when he had made her love him, he
+would force her to be herself.
+
+He watched the bats circling among the shadowy palms. How gentle the air
+was. How sweet the stars looked. Bellairs thought of England that was so
+far away. It seemed impossible that he could ever be in London again,
+ever again assume a Piccadilly nature, and laugh at the folly of having
+a romance. Yes, it seemed impossible. Nevertheless, in a fortnight he
+must go. But he would take Betty's promise with him. He was resolved on
+that. And then he left the silent garden to the bats, and was soon
+between the mosquito curtains, dreaming.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days afterwards Clarice was prostrated with a nervous headache.
+She could not bear to have any one in her cabin, and Lady Betty sat on
+the deck of the _Queen Hatasoo_ quite inconsolable. Bellairs, arriving
+to pay his usual afternoon call, found her there. Lord Braydon was out,
+sailing in a flat-bottomed boat far up the river with Lady Braydon, so
+Lady Betty was quite desolate. She told Bellairs so mournfully.
+
+"And Clarice won't let me come near her," she exclaimed. "A step on the
+floor, the creak of the cabin door as I come in, tortures her. She is
+all nerves. I hope I shan't have her headache presently."
+
+"Is it likely?"
+
+"I often do. She seems to pass it on to me. I never had a headache until
+I knew her. But, indeed, I never seemed to live, I never seemed to know
+anything, be anything, until she came into my life."
+
+"I wish I had known you before you knew her," Bellairs said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I don't know--perhaps to see if you were really so very different from
+what you are now."
+
+"I was--utterly."
+
+"What were you like?"
+
+"I can't remember--but I was utterly different."
+
+As she ceased speaking, Bellairs glanced over the rail to the river
+bank. Two blue-robed donkey boys stood there trying to attract his
+attention, and pointing significantly to their gaily-bedizened donkeys.
+
+"Shall we go for a ride?" he said to Lady Betty. "Just along the river
+bank? Then we shall see Lord Braydon as he sails back. Mdlle. Leroux
+won't miss you. Shall we go?"
+
+Betty hesitated. But she could do the invalid no good by staying. So she
+assented. Bellairs helped her to the bank and placed her in the smart
+red saddle. He motioned the boys to keep well in the rear, and they
+started at a quick, tripping walk. As they went, a white face appeared
+at a cabin window, staring after them, the face of Clarice, who had with
+difficulty lifted her throbbing head from the pillow. She watched the
+donkeys diminishing till they were black shadows moving along against
+the sky, then she began to cry weakly, but only because she was too ill
+to be with them. Her gift of prophecy failed her at this critical
+juncture of her life, and she had no sense of a coming disaster, as she
+lay back on her berth, and gave herself up once more to pain.
+
+That evening Lord Braydon asked Bellairs to dine on the dahabeeyah, and
+he accepted the invitation. Clarice was still in durance, having
+entirely failed to pass her headache on to Lady Betty. After dinner Lord
+Braydon went into the saloon to write a letter to England, and Lady
+Betty and Bellairs had the deck to themselves. He was resolved to put
+his fate to the touch; for, during the donkey ride, he had discovered
+the change in Betty which he had so eagerly desired, the change from
+warm friendship to a different feeling. The girl had not acknowledged
+it. Bellairs had not asked her to do so; but he meant to. Only the
+thought of his treachery to the woman lying in the cabin below held him
+back, just for a moment, and prompted him to talk lightly of indifferent
+things. But that treachery had been a necessary manoeuvre in his
+campaign of happiness. He strove to dismiss it from his mind as he leant
+forward in his chair, and led Lady Betty to the subject that lay so near
+to his heart.
+
+"You love me?" she said presently.
+
+"Yes--deeply. You are angry?"
+
+"How can I be? No, no--and yet--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"And yet, when you told me, I felt sad."
+
+Bellairs looked keenly vexed, and she hastened to add:--
+
+"Not because I am--indifferent. No, no. I can't explain why the feeling
+came. It was gone in a moment. And now--"
+
+"Now you are happy?"
+
+He caught her hand and she left it in his.
+
+"Yes, very happy."
+
+Bellairs bent over her and kissed her--as he lifted himself up a white
+hand appeared on the rail of the companion that led from the lower to
+the upper deck of the _Hatasoo_. Clarice wearily dragged herself up.
+She was wrapped in a shawl and looked very ill. Betty ran to help her.
+
+"I thought I must get a little air," she said feebly. "How d'you do, Mr
+Bellairs?"
+
+She sank down in a chair.
+
+Bellairs felt like a man between two fires.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later Lord Braydon gave his consent to his daughter's
+engagement with Bellairs, and Lady Betty ran to tell Clarice. She had
+not previously said a word to her friend of what had passed between her
+and Bellairs. He had begged her to keep silence until he had spoken to
+Lord Braydon, and she had promised and had kept her promise. But now she
+rushed into the saloon where Clarice was playing Chopin, and, throwing
+her arms round her friend, told her the great news. The body of Clarice
+became rigid in her arms.
+
+"And the king has consented," Betty cried.
+
+The king was her father.
+
+"Clarice, Clarice, isn't it wonderful?"
+
+"Wonderful! I thought so when you told me. But already I begin to doubt
+if it is."
+
+"To doubt, Clarice?"
+
+"To doubt whether anything a man does is wonderful."
+
+That was all Clarice said. Then she kissed Betty, and went on playing
+Chopin feverishly, while Betty told, to the accompaniment of the music,
+all that was in her heart.
+
+"And," she said at last, "I love him, Clarice; I love him intensely. I
+shall always love him."
+
+Clarice played a final chord and got up.
+
+Bellairs lunched on the dahabeeyah that day and Clarice met him as
+usual. Her manner gave no sign of any mental disturbance. Perhaps it was
+curiously calm. He wondered a little, but was too happy to wonder much.
+Joy made him cruel, for nothing is so cruel as joy. Only he was glad
+that Clarice had so much pride, for he thought now that in her pride lay
+his safety. He no longer feared that she would condescend to a scene,
+and he even thought that perhaps she did not feel so deeply as he had
+supposed.
+
+"After all," he said to himself exultantly, "there's no harm done. I
+need not have been so conscience-stricken. What is a pretty speech and a
+kiss to a woman who has lived, travelled over the world, read widely,
+thought many things? Now, if I had treated Betty in such a way I should
+be a blackguard. She could not have understood. She could only have
+suffered. I will never hurt her--Betty!"
+
+His nature was so full of her that it could no longer hold any thought
+of Clarice. And for a little while, as Bellairs dived into Betty's
+heart, he was astonished at the passion he found there, and
+congratulated himself on having released her from bondage. Now, at
+least, he was teaching her to be herself. He was killing the echo and
+creating a voice, a beautiful, clear, radiant voice that would sing to
+him, to him alone.
+
+"Betty has a great deal in her," he said to Clarice once.
+
+"Yes--a great deal. Who put it there, do you think?"
+
+"Who? Why, nobody. Surely you would not say that all you yourself have
+of--of strength, originality, courage, was put into you by some other
+man or woman."
+
+"No. I would not say that. But then--I am not Betty."
+
+Bellairs felt irritated.
+
+"Please don't run Betty down," he exclaimed hastily.
+
+"I! I run down Betty! I don't think you understand what I feel about
+Betty. She is the one perfect being I know. I worship her."
+
+"I am sure you do," he said, mollified. "And you have done much for her,
+perhaps too much."
+
+"I cannot tell that--yet," Clarice answered. "Some day I may know
+whether I have done very much, or very little."
+
+"Some day--when?"
+
+"Perhaps very soon."
+
+Bellairs wondered what she meant, and wondered, too, why he had a sudden
+sense of uneasiness.
+
+It was a day or two after this conversation that a light cloud seemed to
+float across his lover's happiness with Betty. He could not tell the
+exact moment when it came, nor from what quarter it journeyed. But he
+felt the obscuring of the sun and the lessening of the lovely warmth of
+intimacy. He was chilled and alarmed, and at night, when he was alone
+with Betty in the stern of the _Hatasoo_ bidding her good-bye, he could
+not refrain from saying:--
+
+"Betty, is anything the matter?"
+
+"The matter, Jack?"
+
+"Yes. Are you quite happy to-day? Quite as happy as you were yesterday?"
+
+"I suppose so--I believe so."
+
+But she did not speak with a perfect conviction, and Bellairs was more
+gravely troubled.
+
+"I am certain something is wrong," he persisted. "I have done something
+that has offended you, or said something stupid. What is it? Do tell
+me."
+
+"I can't. There is nothing to tell. Really, there is not."
+
+"You would tell me if there was?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And you love me as much as ever?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+He looked into her eyes, asking them mutely to tell him the truth. And
+he thought their expression was strangely cold. The light had surely
+faded out of them. He kissed her silently and went forward. Clarice was
+standing there looking at the rising moon.
+
+"Good-night," he said, holding out his hand.
+
+"How grave you look," she answered, not seeing the hand.
+
+"The moonlight makes people look unnatural."
+
+"It does not reach the deck yet."
+
+"Good-night," he said again, and he went down the stairs.
+
+She looked after him with a smile. When he had gone, she turned her head
+and called.
+
+"Betty!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Come here and sit with me. Let us watch the moon. Don't talk. I want to
+think--and to make you think--as I do."
+
+The cloud which Bellairs had fancied he noticed did not dissolve in the
+night. It was not drawn up mysteriously into the sun to fade in gold. On
+the contrary, next day he could no longer pretend to himself that his
+anxiety as a lover rendered him foolishly self-conscious, dangerously
+observant of the merest trifles. There really was a change in Betty, and
+a change which grew. He became seriously alarmed. Could it be possible
+that the ardent passion which she had displayed in the first moments of
+their engagement was already subsiding as cynics say passion subsides
+after marriage? Such a supposition seemed ridiculous. The ardour which
+has never fulfilled itself is not liable to cool. And Betty was a young
+girl who had not known love before. If she tired of it after so short
+an experience of its delights, she could be nothing less than a wholly
+unnatural and distorted being. And she was strangely natural. Bellairs
+rode out alone with her along the built-up brown roads into the desert,
+and tried to interest her, but she was abstracted and seemed deep in
+thought. Often she didn't hear what he was saying, and when she did hear
+and replied, her answers were short and careless, and rather dismissed
+than encouraged the subject to which they were applied. Bellairs, at
+last, gave up attempting to talk, and from time to time stole a cautious
+glance at her pretty face. He noticed that it wore a puzzled expression,
+as if she were turning over something in her mind and could not come to
+a conclusion about it. She did not look exactly sad, but merely grave
+and distrait. At length he exclaimed, determined to rouse her into some
+sort of comradeship:--
+
+"You never caught that headache, did you?"
+
+"Clarice's, you mean? No."
+
+"Is it coming on now?"
+
+"Oh, no. I feel perfectly well. What made you think it was?"
+
+"You won't talk to me, and you look so preternaturally serious. I am
+sure I have unwittingly offended you?"
+
+"No, you haven't. You are just as you always are, better to me than I
+deserve."
+
+"You deserve the best man in the world."
+
+"I already have the best woman."
+
+"Mdlle. Leroux?"
+
+"Yes; Clarice."
+
+"You admire her very much."
+
+"Of course. I would give anything to be like her."
+
+Bellairs hesitated a moment. Then he said with a slight, uneasy laugh:--
+
+"But you are wonderfully like her."
+
+Betty looked surprised.
+
+"I don't see how," she answered.
+
+"No, because we never see ourselves. But when I first knew you both, I
+was immensely struck by the curious resemblance between you, in mind, in
+the things you said, in the things you did, the people you liked."
+
+"We both liked you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It would have been strange if we had both loved you!" Betty said,
+musingly.
+
+Bellairs laughed again, and gave his horse a cut with the whip. "I only
+wanted one to do that," he said, not quite truthfully. "And, thank God,
+I have got my desire."
+
+Betty did not answer.
+
+"Haven't I?" he persisted.
+
+"You know whether you have or not," she answered. "How beautiful the
+sunset is going to be to-night. Look at the light over Karnak."
+
+She pointed towards the temple with her whip. Bellairs felt a crawling
+despair that numbed him What did it all mean? Was he torturing himself
+foolishly, or was this instinct which gnawed at his heart a thing to be
+reckoned with? When he left Betty at the dahabeeyah, he walked slowly,
+in the gathering shadows, along the path which skirts the dingy temple
+of Luxor. This change in Betty was simply inexplicable. In no way could
+he account for it. She had not the definite, angry coldness of a girl
+who had made a dreadful mistake and hated the man who had led her to
+make it. No; she seemed rather in a state of mental transition. She was
+setting foot on some bridge, which, Bellairs felt, led away from the
+shore on which she had been standing with him. Was her first transport
+of love and joy a pretence? He could not believe so. He knew it was
+genuine. That was the puzzle which he could not put together. And then
+he tried to comfort himself by thinking deliberately of the many moods
+that make the feminine mind so full of April weather, of how they come
+and pass and are dead. All men had suffered from them, especially all
+lovers. He could not expect to be exempt--only, till now, Betty had
+seemed so utterly free from moods, so steadily frank, eager, charming,
+responsive. Bellairs finally argued himself into a condition of despair,
+during which he came to a resolve of despair. He silently decided to
+seek a quiet interview with Clarice, and ask her what was the matter
+with Betty. After all, there was no reason why he should not take this
+step. Clarice had evidently not cared deeply for him. Otherwise, she
+would not have accepted his desertion with such truly agreeable
+fortitude. Theirs had been a passing flirtation--nothing more. And,
+indeed, their intimacy gave him the right to consult her, while her
+close knowledge of Betty must render her an infallible judge of any
+reasons which there might be to render the latter's conduct
+intelligible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bellairs did not have to wait long before he put his resolve into
+practice. That evening Betty, who had become more and more abstracted
+and silent, got up soon after dinner, and said she was tired, and was
+going to bed. Bellairs tried to get a moment with her alone, but she
+frustrated the attempt by holding out her hand to him in public and
+markedly bidding him good-night before Lord and Lady Braydon. When she
+had disappeared, Bellairs sought Clarice, who was downstairs in the
+saloon writing letters. Clarice looked up from the blotting-pad as he
+entered.
+
+"I want to talk to you," he exclaimed abruptly.
+
+"I am writing letters."
+
+"Do give me a few minutes."
+
+"Very well," she said, pushing her paper away and laying down her pen.
+"What is it?"
+
+"That's what I want to ask you. What has come over Betty? Is she ill?"
+
+"Betty! Has anything come over her?"
+
+Bellairs tapped his fingers impatiently on the table.
+
+"Don't tell me you haven't noticed the change," he said. "Forgive me for
+saying that I couldn't believe it if you did."
+
+"In that case I won't trouble myself to say it."
+
+"Ah--you have! Then what's the matter? Tell me."
+
+"Hush, don't speak so loud or the sailors will hear you, and Abdul
+understands English. I did not say I knew the reason of this change."
+
+"You must. You are Betty's other self, or rather she is--was--yours."
+
+"Was! Do you mean that she is not now?"
+
+"Remember, she loves me."
+
+"Oh, and that makes a difference?"
+
+"Surely!"
+
+"You have observed it?"
+
+Bellairs hesitated. He scarcely knew whether to reply in the affirmative
+or the negative. He resolved upon a compromise.
+
+"There has hardly been time yet," he said; "naturally, I expect that
+Betty will place me before every one else."
+
+Mdlle. Leroux's eyes flashed under the hanging lamp.
+
+"What we expect is not always what we get," she said significantly.
+
+Bellairs flushed. He understood that she was alluding to his treatment
+of her, but he preferred to ignore it, and went on:--
+
+"Is Betty ill to-night?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+"Then what on earth is the matter? I ask you for a plain answer. I think
+I deserve so much."
+
+"Men are always so deserving," she said with bitterness.
+
+"And women are always so exacting," he retorted. "But please answer my
+question."
+
+"I will first ask you another. If you reply frankly to me, I will reply
+frankly to you."
+
+She leaned her elbows on the table, supporting her face on the palms of
+her upturned hands, and looked into his eyes.
+
+"Ask me," said Bellairs eagerly; "I'll do anything if you'll only
+explain Betty to me."
+
+"Why did you try to make me love you? Why did you make love to me?"
+
+Bellairs pushed back his chair and there was an awkward silence.
+Clarice's question was very unexpected and very difficult to answer.
+
+"Well?" she said, still with her eyes on his.
+
+"Is it any good our discussing this?" he replied at length. "It meant
+nothing to you. It is over."
+
+"How do you know it meant nothing to me?"
+
+"You have shown that by your conduct. You care nothing. I am indifferent
+to you."
+
+"No, not indifferent, not at all."
+
+"What? You can't mean--no, it is absurd!"
+
+"What is absurd?"
+
+"You can't--you don't mean that you really have any feeling for me?"
+
+"I do mean it!"
+
+Bellairs felt very uncomfortable. He scarcely knew what to do or say. He
+fidgeted on his chair almost like a boy caught in a dishonest act.
+
+"We had really better not talk about it," he said.
+
+"Very well." Clarice reached out her hand for her pen and drew the
+blotting-pad towards her.
+
+"But Betty?" said Bellairs uneasily.
+
+"You have not answered my question. I shall not answer yours." She
+dipped her pen in the ink and prepared to go on with her letter.
+Bellairs grew desperate.
+
+"Look here," he said; "you must tell me the reason of this change in
+Betty. Now I know you don't care for me, you don't really love me."
+
+"No, I don't love you," she said quickly.
+
+"Well, then, since you say that, I will answer your question. I tried to
+win your heart because I wanted to win Betty's!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"That Betty is practically you--or was, your echo, in word, deed,
+thought. Her mind, her heart, followed yours in everything. I loved her,
+and I knew that if I made you like me very much she must follow you in
+that feeling as in others. Since you don't love me, I can dare to tell
+you this."
+
+Clarice sat silent.
+
+"Are you angry?" he asked.
+
+"Go on," she said.
+
+"That's all." Again a silence.
+
+"It was your fault in a way," Bellairs said awkwardly. "You made Betty
+your other self. Why did you not let her alone?"
+
+"Can a strong nature help impressing itself on others?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I'm no psychologist. But--you must let Betty alone
+now," he said.
+
+"Suppose I can't. Suppose this sympathy between us has got beyond my
+control?"
+
+"I shall release Betty from this bondage to you," Bellairs said, "my
+love will--"
+
+"You! Your love!" Clarice said. And she burst into a laugh.
+
+Bellairs suddenly leaned forward across the table.
+
+"I believe you hate me," he exclaimed.
+
+She, on her part, leaned forward till her face was near his.
+
+"You're right," she whispered; "I do hate you. Now you know what's the
+matter with Betty."
+
+For a moment Bellairs did not understand.
+
+"Now--I know--" he repeated. "I don't--Ah!" Comprehension flashed upon
+him.
+
+"You devil," he said--"you she-devil! Curse--curse you!" Clarice laughed
+again. Bellairs sprang up.
+
+"No, no, I won't believe it," he cried. "I can't. The thing's
+impossible."
+
+"Is it? The pendulum of my heart has swung back from love to hate.
+Betty's is following."
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"Wait, and you will see. Already she seems to care less for you. You
+yourself have remarked it."
+
+"I have not," he said with violence.
+
+"To-morrow she will care less, and so less--less--till she too--hates
+you."
+
+"Never!"
+
+"Only wait--and you will know. And now, good-night. I must really write
+my letter. It is to my mother, and must go by to-morrow's mail."
+
+She resumed her writing quietly. Bellairs watched her for a moment. Then
+he strode out of the room, across the gangway, up the bank.
+
+How dark the night was.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The explanation of Clarice struck Bellairs with a benumbing force. In
+vain he argued to himself that it was not the true one, that no heart
+could follow another as she said Betty's followed hers, that no nature
+could merely for ever echo another's. Some furtive despair lurking in
+his soul whispered that she had spoken the truth. An appalling sense of
+utter impotence seized him, as it seizes a man who fights with a shadow.
+But he resolved to fight. His whole life's happiness hung on the issue.
+
+On the following day he forced himself to be cheerful, gay, talkative.
+He went early to the dahabeeyah, and proposed to Lord Braydon a picnic
+to Thebes. Lord Braydon assented. A hamper was packed. The boat was
+ordered. The little party assembled on the deck of the _Hatasoo_ for the
+start; Lady Braydon, in a wide hat and sweeping grey veil, Clarice with
+her big white parasol lined with pale green, Lord Braydon in his helmet,
+his eyes protected by enormous spectacles. But where was Betty? Abdul,
+the dragoman, went to tell her that they were going. She came, without
+her hat, or gloves, holding a palm leaf fan in her hand.
+
+"I am not coming," she said.
+
+Clarice glanced at Bellairs. He pressed his lips together and felt that
+he was turning white underneath the tan the Egyptian sun rays had
+painted on his cheeks. Lady Braydon protested.
+
+"What's the matter, Betty?" she said. "The donkeys are ordered and
+waiting for us on the opposite bank. Why aren't you coming?"
+
+"I have got a headache. I'm afraid of the sun to-day." All persuasion
+was useless. They had to set out without her. Bellairs was bitterly
+angry, bitterly afraid. He could scarcely make the necessary effort to
+be polite and talkative, but Lord and Lady Braydon readily excused his
+gloom, understanding his disappointment, and Clarice no longer desired
+his conversation. That night he did not see Betty. She was confined to
+her cabin and would see no one but Clarice. On the following day
+Bellairs went very early to the dahabeeyah and asked for her. Abdul took
+his message, and, after an interval, returned to him with the following
+note:--
+
+   "DEAR MR BELLAIRS,--I am very sorry I cannot see you this
+   morning, but I am still very unwell. I think the mental agony
+   I have been and am undergoing accounts for my condition. I
+   must tell you the truth. I cannot marry you. I mistook my
+   feeling for you. I honestly thought it love. I find it is only
+   friendship. Can you ever forgive me the pain I am causing you?
+   I cannot forgive myself. But I should do you a much greater
+   wrong by marrying you than by giving you up. I have told my
+   father and mother. See them if you like. We sail to-morrow
+   morning for Assouan.
+
+                                                    "BETTY."
+
+Bellairs, crumpling this note in his hand, would have burst forth into a
+passion of useless rage and despair, but Abdul's lustrous eyes were
+fixed upon him. Abdul's dignified form calmly waited his pleasure.
+
+"Where is Lord Braydon?" said Bellairs, "I must see him."
+
+"His lordship is on the second deck, sir."
+
+"Take me to him."
+
+The interview that followed only increased the despair of Bellairs. Lord
+Braydon was most sympathetic, most courteously sorry, but he said that
+his daughter's decision was absolutely irrevocable, and he could not
+attempt to coerce her in such an important matter.
+
+"At any rate, I must see her before you sail," said Bellairs at last. "I
+think she owes me at least that one last debt."
+
+"I think so too," said Lord Braydon. "Come at six. I will undertake that
+you shall see her."
+
+How Bellairs spent the intervening hours he could never remember. He did
+not go back to the hotel; he must have wandered all day along the river
+bank. Yet he felt neither the heat, nor any fatigue, nor any hunger. At
+six o'clock he reached the dahabeeyah. Lady Betty was sitting alone on
+the deck. She looked very pale and grave.
+
+"My father and mother and Clarice have gone up to the hotel," she said.
+"That Austrian is playing again this evening."
+
+"Is he?" Bellairs answered. He sat down beside her and tried to take her
+hand. But she would not let him.
+
+"No," she said. "No, it's no use. I have made a ghastly mistake, but I
+will not make another. Oh, forgive me, do forgive me!"
+
+"How can I? If you will not try to love me my life is ruined."
+
+"Don't say that. It's no use to try to love. You know that. We must just
+let ourselves alone. Love comes, or hate, just as God wills it. We can
+only accept our fate."
+
+"As God wills," Bellairs said passionately; "why do you say that, when
+you know it is not true?"
+
+"Not true--Mr Bellairs!"
+
+"Yes. If you echoed the will of God how could I blame you? We must all
+do that--at least, when we are good. And those of us who are wicked I
+suppose echo the Devil. But you--what do you echo?"
+
+"I--I echo no one. I don't understand you."
+
+"But you shall, before it is too late. Betty, be yourself. Emancipate
+your soul. You are the echo of that woman, of Clarice. Don't you see it?
+Don't you know it? You are her echo--and she hates me!"
+
+Betty drew back from him--she was evidently alarmed.
+
+"Are you mad?" she said. "Why do you say such things to me? Clarice and
+I love each other, it is true, but our real natures are totally
+different. She does not hate you, nor do I. She has never said one word
+against you to me. She has always told me how much she liked you. What
+are you saying?"
+
+"The truth!"
+
+"I--her echo! Why, then--then if that were the case she must have loved
+you, or thought she loved you. Do you dare to tell me that?"
+
+"I do not say that," Bellairs answered hopelessly.
+
+"Of course not. The idea is so absurd. Clarice--oh! how can you talk
+like this? And if I am only an echo, as you call it, how can you say you
+care for me, care for another woman's shadow? You do not love me."
+
+"I do--with all my heart."
+
+"And yet you say I am nothing, that I have not even a heart of my own,
+that I love or hate at the will of another."
+
+"Forgive me, forgive me! I don't know what I say. I only know I love
+you."
+
+Her face softened.
+
+"And you deserve to be loved," she said; "but I--it is so horrible--I
+cannot!"
+
+Suddenly Bellairs caught her in his arms.
+
+"You shall," he exclaimed, "you shall. I will make you." But she pushed
+him back with a strange strength, and her face hardened till he scarcely
+recognised it.
+
+"Don't do that--don't touch me--or you'll make me hate you," she said
+vehemently.
+
+Bellairs let her go. At that moment there was a step on the deck.
+Clarice appeared. She did not seem to notice that anything was wrong.
+She smiled.
+
+"Isn't it sad, Mr Bellairs," she said, "we sail to-morrow. I love Luxor.
+I can't bear to leave it."
+
+Bellairs suddenly turned and hurried away. He could no longer trust
+himself. There was blood before his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was dawn. The Nile was smooth as a river of oil. Light mists rolled
+upwards gently, discovering the rosy flanks of the Libyan mountains to
+the sun. The sky began to glimmer with a dancing golden heat. On the
+brown bank where the boats lie in the shadow a man stood alone. His
+hands were tightly clenched. His lips worked silently. His eyes were
+fixed in a stare. And away in the distance up river, a tiny trail of
+smoke floated towards Luxor. It came from a steam tug that drew a
+following dahabeeyah.
+
+The _Queen Hatasoo_ was on her voyage to Assouan.
+
+
+
+
+THE FACE OF THE MONK
+
+
+I
+
+"No, it will not hurt him to see you," the doctor said to me; "and I
+have no doubt he will recognise you. He is the quietest patient I have
+ever had under my care--gentle, kind, agreeable, perfect in conduct, and
+yet quite mad. You know him well?"
+
+"He was my dearest friend," I said. "Before I went out to America three
+years ago we were inseparable. Doctor, I cannot believe that he is mad,
+he--Hubert Blair--one of the cleverest young writers in London, so
+brilliant, so acute! Wild, if you like, a libertine perhaps, a strange
+mixture of the intellectual and the sensual--but mad! I can't believe
+it!"
+
+"Not when I tell you that he was brought to me suffering from acute
+religious mania?"
+
+"Religious! Hubert Blair!"
+
+"Yes. He tried to destroy himself, declaring that he was unfit to live,
+that he was a curse to some person unknown. He protested that each deed
+of his affected this unknown person, that his sins were counted as the
+sins of another, and that this other had haunted him--would haunt him
+for ever."
+
+The doctor's words troubled me.
+
+"Take me to him," I said at last. "Leave us together."
+
+It was a strange, sad moment when I entered the room in which Hubert was
+sitting. I was painfully agitated. He knew me, and greeted me warmly. I
+sat down opposite to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a long silence. Hubert looked away into the fire. He saw, I
+think, traced in scarlet flames, the scenes he was going to describe to
+me; and I, gazing at him, wondered of what nature the change in my
+friend might be. That he had changed since we were together three years
+ago was evident, yet he did not look mad. His dark, clean-shaven young
+face was still passionate. The brown eyes were still lit with a certain
+devouring eagerness. The mouth had not lost its mingled sweetness and
+sensuality. But Hubert was curiously transformed. There was a dignity,
+almost an elevation, in his manner. His former gaiety had vanished. I
+knew, without words, that my friend was another man--very far away from
+me now. Yet once we had lived together as chums, and had no secrets the
+one from the other.
+
+At last Hubert looked up and spoke.
+
+"I see you are wondering about me," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I have altered, of course--completely altered."
+
+"Yes," I said, awkwardly enough. "Why is that?"
+
+I longed to probe this madness of his that I might convince myself of
+it, otherwise Hubert's situation must for ever appal me.
+
+He answered quietly, "I will tell you--nobody else knows--and even you
+may--"
+
+He hesitated, then he said:--
+
+"No, you will believe it."
+
+"Yes, if you tell me it is true."
+
+"It is absolutely true.
+
+"Bernard, you know what I was when you left England for America--gay,
+frivolous in my pleasures, although earnest when I was working. You know
+how I lived to sound the depths of sensation, how I loved to stretch all
+my mental and physical capacities to the snapping-point, how I shrank
+from no sin that could add one jot or tittle to my knowledge of the mind
+of any man or woman who interested me. My life seemed a full life then.
+I moved in the midst of a thousand intrigues. I strung beads of all
+emotions upon my rosary, and told them until at times my health gave
+way. You remember my recurring periods of extraordinary and horrible
+mental depression--when life was a demon to me, and all my success in
+literature less than nothing; when I fancied myself hated, and could
+believe I heard phantom voices abusing me. Then those fits passed away,
+and once more I lived as ardently as ever, the most persistent worker,
+and the most persistent excitement-seeker in London.
+
+"Well, after you went away I continued my career. As you know, my
+success increased. Through many sins I had succeeded in diving very deep
+into human hearts of men and women. Often I led people deliberately away
+from innocence in order that I might observe the gradual transformation
+of their natures. Often I spurred them on to follies that I might see
+the effect our deeds have upon our faces--the seal our actions set upon
+our souls. I was utterly unscrupulous, and yet I thought myself
+good-hearted. You remember that my servants always loved me, that I
+attracted people. I can say this to you. For some time my usual course
+was not stayed. Then--I recollect it was in the middle of the London
+season--one of my horrible fits of unreasonable melancholy swept over
+me. It stunned my soul like a heavy blow. It numbed me. I could not go
+about. I could not bear to see anybody. I could only shut myself up and
+try to reason myself back into my usual gaiety and excitement. My
+writing was put aside. My piano was locked. I tried to read, but even
+that solace was denied to me. My attention was utterly self-centred,
+riveted upon my own condition.
+
+"Why, I said to myself, am I the victim of this despair, this despair
+without a cause? What is this oppression which weighs me down without
+reason? It attacks me abruptly, as if it were sent to me by some power,
+shot at me like an arrow by an enemy hidden in the dark. I am well--I am
+gay. Life is beautiful and wonderful to me. All that I do interests me.
+My soul is full of vitality. I know that I have troops of friends, that
+I am loved and thought of by many people. And then suddenly the arrow
+strikes me. My soul is wounded and sickens to death. Night falls over
+me, night so sinister that I shudder when its twilight comes. All my
+senses faint within me. Life is at once a hag, weary, degraded, with
+tears on her cheeks and despair in her hollow eyes. I feel that I am
+deserted, that my friends despise me, that the world hates me, that I am
+less than all other men--less in powers, less in attraction--that I am
+the most crawling, the most grovelling of all the human species, and
+that there is no one who does not know it. Yet the doctors say I am not
+physically ill, and I know that I am not mad. Whence does this awful
+misery, this unmeaning, causeless horror of life and of myself come? Why
+am I thus afflicted?
+
+"Of course I could find no answer to all these old questions, which I
+had asked many times before. But this time, Bernard, my depression was
+more lasting, more overwhelming than usual. I grew terribly afraid of
+it. I thought I might be driven to suicide. One day a crisis seemed to
+come. I dared no longer remain alone, so I put on my hat and coat, took
+my stick, and hurried out, without any definite intention. I walked
+along Piccadilly, avoiding the glances of those whom I met. I fancied
+they could all read the agony, the degradation of my soul. I turned into
+Bond Street, and suddenly I felt a strong inclination to stop before a
+certain door. I obeyed the impulse, and my eyes fell on a brass plate,
+upon which was engraved these words:--
+
+       VANE.
+    Clairvoyant.
+  11 till 4 daily.
+
+"I remember I read them several times over, and even repeated them in a
+whisper to myself. Why? I don't know. Then I turned away, and was about
+to resume my walk. But I could not. Again I stopped and read the legend
+on the brass plate. On the right-hand side of the door was an electric
+bell. I put my finger on it and pressed the button inwards. The door
+opened, and I walked, like a man in a dream, I think, up a flight of
+narrow stairs. At the top of them was a second door, at which a
+maidservant was standing.
+
+"'You want to see Mr Vane, sir?'
+
+"'Yes. Can I?'
+
+"'If you will come in, sir, I will see.'
+
+"She showed me into a commonplace, barely-furnished little room, and,
+after a short period of waiting, summoned me to another, in which stood
+a tall, dark youth, dressed in a gown rather like a college gown. He
+bowed to me, and I silently returned the salutation. The servant left
+us. Then he said:--
+
+"'You wish me to exert my powers for you?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'Will you sit here?'
+
+"He motioned me to a seat beside a small round table, sat down opposite
+to me, and took my hand. After examining it through a glass, and telling
+my character fairly correctly by the lines in it, he laid the glass down
+and regarded me narrowly.
+
+"'You suffer terribly from depression,' he said.
+
+"'That is true.'
+
+"He continued to gaze upon me more and more fixedly. At length he
+said:--
+
+"'Do you know that everybody has a companion?'
+
+"'How--a companion?'
+
+"'Somebody incessantly with them, somebody they cannot see.'
+
+"'You believe in the theory of guardian angels?'
+
+"'I do not say these companions are always guardian angels. I see your
+companion now, as I look at you. His face is by your shoulder.'
+
+"I started, and glanced hastily round; but, of course, could see
+nothing.
+
+"'Shall I describe him?'
+
+"'Yes,' I said.
+
+"'His face is dark, like yours; shaven, like yours. He has brown eyes,
+just as brown as yours are. His mouth and his chin are firm and small,
+as firm and small as yours.'
+
+"'He must be very like me.'
+
+"'He is. But there is a difference between you.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"'His hair is cut more closely than yours, and part of it is shaved
+off.'
+
+"'He is a priest, then?'
+
+"'He wears a cowl. He is a monk.'
+
+"'A monk! But why does he come to me?'
+
+"'I should say that he cannot help it, that he is your spirit in some
+former state. Yes'--and he stared at me till his eyes almost mesmerised
+me--'you must have been a monk once.'
+
+"'I--a monk! Impossible! Even if I have lived on earth before, it could
+never have been as a monk.'
+
+"'How do you know that?'
+
+"'Because I am utterly without superstitions, utterly free from any
+lingering desire for an ascetic life. That existence of silence, of
+ignorance, of perpetual prayer, can never have been mine.'
+
+"'You cannot tell,' was all his answer.
+
+
+II
+
+"When I left Bond Street that afternoon I was full of disbelief.
+However, I had paid my half-guinea and escaped from my own core of
+misery for a quarter of an hour. That was something. I didn't regret my
+visit to this man Vane, whom I regarded as an agreeable charlatan. For a
+moment he had interested me. For a moment he had helped me to forget my
+useless wretchedness. I ought to have been grateful to him. And, as
+always, my soul regained its composure at last. One morning I awoke and
+said to myself that I was happy. Why? I did not know. But I got up. I
+was able to write once more. I was able to play. I felt that I had
+friends who loved me and a career before me. I could again look people
+in the face without fear. I could even feel a certain delightful conceit
+of mind and body. Bernard, I was myself. So I thought, so I knew. And
+yet, as days went by, I caught myself often thinking of this invisible,
+tonsured, and cowled companion of mine, whom Vane had seen, whom I did
+not see. Was he indeed with me? And, if so, had he thoughts, had he the
+holy thoughts of a spirit that has renounced the world and all fleshly
+things? Did he still keep that cloistered nature which is at home with
+silence, which aspires, and prays, and lives for possible eternity,
+instead of for certain time? Did he still hold desolate vigils? Did he
+still scourge himself along the thorny paths of faith? And, if he did,
+how must he regard me?
+
+"I remember one night especially how this last thought was with me in a
+dreary house, where I sinned, and where I dissected a heart.
+
+"And I trembled as if an eye was upon me. And I went home.
+
+"You will say that my imagination is keen, and that I gave way to it.
+But wait and hear the end.
+
+"This definite act of mine--this, my first conscious renunciation--did
+not tend, as you might suppose, to the peace of my mind. On the
+contrary, I found myself angry, perturbed, as I analysed the cause of my
+warfare with self. I have naturally a supreme hatred of all control.
+Liberty is my fetish. And now I had offered a sacrifice to a prisoning
+unselfishness, to a false god that binds and gags its devotees. I was
+angry, and I violently resumed my former course. But now I began to be
+ceaselessly companioned by uneasiness, by a furtive cowardice that was
+desolating. I felt that I was watched, and by some one who suffered when
+I sinned, who shrank and shuddered when I followed where my desires led.
+
+"It was the monk.
+
+"Soon I gave to him a most definite personality. I endowed him with a
+mind and with moods. I imagined not only a heart for him, but a voice,
+deep with a certain ecclesiastical beauty, austere, with a note more apt
+for denunciation than for praise. His face was my own face, but with an
+expression not mine, elevated, almost fanatical, yet nobly beautiful;
+praying eyes--and mine were only observant; praying lips--and mine were
+but sensitively sensual. And he was haggard with abstinence, while
+I--was I not often haggard with indulgence? Yes, his face was mine, and
+not mine. It seemed the face of a great saint who might have been a
+great sinner. Bernard, that is the most attractive face in all the
+world. Accustoming myself thus to a thought-companion, I at length--for
+we men are so inevitably materialistic--embodied him, gave to him hands,
+feet, a figure, all--as before, mine, yet not mine, a sort of saintly
+replica of my sinfulness. For do not hands, feet, figure cry our deeds
+as the watchman cries the hour in the night?
+
+"So, I had the man. There he stood in my vision as you are now.
+
+"Yes, he was there; but only when I sinned.
+
+"When I worked and yielded myself up to the clear assertion of my
+intellect, when I fought to give out the thoughts that lingered like
+reluctant fish far down in the deep pools of my mind, when I wrestled
+for beauty of diction and for nameless graces of expression, when I was
+the author, I could not see him.
+
+"But when I was the man, and lived the fables that I was afterwards to
+write, then he was with me. And his face was as the face of one who is
+wasted with grey grief.
+
+"He came to me when I sinned, as if by my sins I did him grave injury.
+And, allowing my imagination to range wildly, as you will say, I grew
+gradually to feel as if each sin did indeed strike a grievous blow upon
+his holy nature.
+
+"This troubled me at last. I found myself continually brooding over the
+strange idea. I was aware that if my friends could know I entertained
+it, they would think me mad. And yet I often fancied that thought moved
+me in the direction of a sanity more perfect, more desirable than my
+sanity of self-indulgence. Sometimes even I said to myself that I would
+reorganise my life, that I would be different from what I had been. And
+then, again, I laughed at my folly of the imagination, and cursed that
+clairvoyant of Bond Street, who made a living by trading upon the latent
+imbecility of human nature. Yet, the desire of change, of
+soul-transformation, came and lingered, and the vision of the monk's
+worn young face was often with me. And whenever, in my waking dreams, I
+looked upon it, I felt that a time might come when I could pray and weep
+for the wild catalogue of my many sins.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Bernard, at last the day came when I left England. I had long wished to
+travel. I had grown tired of the hum of literary cliques, and the jargon
+of that deadly parasite called 'modernity.' Praise fainted, and lay like
+a corpse before my mind. I was sick of gaiety. It seemed to me that
+London was stifling my powers, narrowing my outlook, barring out real
+life from me with its moods and its fashions, and its idols of the hour,
+and its heroes of a day, who are the traitors of the day's night.
+
+"So I went away.
+
+"And now I come to the part of my story that you may find it hard to
+believe. Yet it is true.
+
+"One day, in my wanderings, I came to a monastery. I remember the day
+well. It was an afternoon of early winter, and I was _en route_ to a
+warm climate. But to gain my climate, and snatch a vivid contrast such
+as I love, I toiled over a gaunt and dreary pass, presided over by
+heavy, beetling-browed mountains. I rode upon a mule, attended only by
+my manservant and by a taciturn guide who led a baggage-mule. Slowly we
+wound, by thin paths, among the desolate crags, which sprang to sight in
+crowds at each turn of the way, pressing upon us, like dead faces of
+Nature, the corpses of things we call inanimate, but which had surely
+once lived. For the earth is alive, and gives life. But these mountains
+were now utterly dead. These grey, petrified countenances of the hills
+subdued my soul. The pattering shuffle of the mules woke an occasional
+echo, and even an echo I hated. For the environing silence was immense,
+and I wished to steep myself in it. As we still ascended, in the waste
+winter afternoon, towards the hour of twilight, snow--the first snow of
+the season--began to fall. I watched the white vision of the flakes
+against the grey vision of the crags, and I thought that this path,
+which I had chosen as my road to Summer, was like the path by which holy
+men slowly gain Paradise, treading difficult ways through life that they
+may attain at last those eternal roses which bloom beyond the granite
+and the snows. Up and up I rode, into the clouds and the night, into the
+veil of the world, into the icy winds of the heights. An eagle screamed
+above my head, poised like a black shadow in the opaque gloom. That
+flying life was the only life in this waste.
+
+"And then my mule, edging ever to the precipice as a man to his fate,
+sidled round a promontory of rock and set its feet in snow. For we had
+passed the snow-line. And upon the snow lay thin spears of yellow light.
+They streamed from the lattices of the monastery which crowns the very
+summit of the pass.
+
+
+III
+
+"At this monastery I was to spend the night. The good monks entertain
+all travellers, and in summer-time their hospitalities are lavishly
+exercised. But in winter, wanderers are few, and these holy men are left
+almost undisturbed in their meditative solitudes. My mule paused upon a
+rocky plateau before the door of the narrow grey building. The guide
+struck upon the heavy wood. After a while we were admitted by a robed
+figure, who greeted us kindly and made us welcome. Within, the place was
+bare and poor enough, but scrupulously clean. I was led through long,
+broad, and bitterly cold corridors to a big chamber in which I was to
+pass the night. Here were ranged in a row four large beds with white
+curtains. I occupied one bed, my servant another. The rest were
+untenanted. The walls were lined with light wood. The wooden floor was
+uncarpeted. I threw open the narrow window. Dimly I could see a mountain
+of rocks, on which snow lay in patches, towering up into the clouds in
+front of me. And to the left there was a glimmer of water. On the
+morrow, by that water, I should ride down into the land of flowers to
+which I was bound. Till then I would allow my imagination to luxuriate
+in the bleak romance of this wild home of prayer. The pathos of the
+night, shivering in the snow, and of this brotherhood of aspiring souls,
+detached from the excitement of the world for ever, seeking restlessly
+their final salvation day by day, night by night, in clouds of mountain
+vapour and sanctified incense, entered into my soul. And I thought of
+that imagined companion of mine. If he were with me now, surely he would
+feel that he had led me to his home at length. Surely he would secretly
+long to remain here.
+
+"I smiled, as I said to myself--'Monk, to-morrow, if, indeed, you are
+fated to be my eternal attendant, you must come with me from this cold
+station of the cross down into the sunshine, where the blood of men is
+hot, where passions sing among the vineyards, where the battle is not of
+souls but of flowers. To-morrow you must come with me. But to-night be
+at peace!'
+
+"And I smiled to myself again as I fancied that my visionary companion
+was glad.
+
+"Then I went down into the refectory.
+
+"That night, before I retired to my room of the four beds, I asked if I
+might go into the chapel of the monastery. My request was granted. I
+shall never forget the curious sensation which overtook me as my guide
+led me down some steps past a dim, little, old, painted window set in
+the wall, to the chapel. That there should be a church here, that the
+deep tones of an organ should ever sound among these rocks and clouds,
+that the Host should be elevated and the censer swung, and litanies and
+masses be chanted amid these everlasting snows, all this was wonderful
+and quickening to me. When we reached the chapel, I begged my kind guide
+to leave me for a while. I longed to meditate alone. He left me, and
+instinctively I sank down upon my knees.
+
+"I could just hear the keening of the wind outside. A dim light
+glimmered near the altar, and in one of the oaken stalls I saw a bent
+form praying. I knelt a long time. I did not pray. At first I scarcely
+thought definitely. Only, I received into my heart the strange,
+indelible impression of this wonderful place; and, as I knelt, my eyes
+were ever upon that dark praying figure near to me. By degrees I
+imagined that a wave of sympathy flowed from it to me, that in this
+monk's devotions my name was not forgotten.
+
+"'What absurd tricks our imaginations can play us!' you will say.
+
+"I grew to believe that he prayed for me, there, under the dim light
+from the tall tapers.
+
+"What blessing did he ask on me? I could not tell; but I longed that his
+prayer might be granted.
+
+"And then, Bernard, at last he rose. He lifted his face from his hands
+and stood up. Something in his figure seemed so strangely familiar to
+me, so strangely that, on a sudden, I longed, I craved to see his face.
+
+"He seemed about to retreat through a side door near to the altar; then
+he paused, appeared to hesitate, then came down the chapel towards me.
+As he drew near to me--I scarcely knew why--but I hid my face deep in my
+hands, with a dreadful sense of overwhelming guilt which dyed my cheeks
+with blood. I shrank--I cowered. I trembled and was afraid. Then I felt
+a gentle touch on my shoulder. I looked up into the face of the monk.
+
+"Bernard, it was the face of my invisible companion--it was my own
+face.
+
+"The monk looked down into my eyes searchingly. He recoiled.
+
+"'_Mon démon!_' he whispered in French. '_Mon démon!_'
+
+"For a moment he stood still, like one appalled. Then he turned and
+abruptly quitted the chapel.
+
+"I started up to follow him, but something held me back. I let him go,
+and I listened to hear if his tread sounded upon the chapel floor as a
+human footstep, if his robe rustled as he went.
+
+"Yes. Then he was, indeed, a living man, and it was a human voice which
+had reached my ears, not a voice of imagination. He was a living man,
+this double of my body, this antagonist of my soul, this being who
+called me demon, who fled from me, who, doubtless, hated me. He was a
+living man.
+
+"I could not sleep that night. This encounter troubled me. I felt that
+it had a meaning for me which I must discover, that it was not chance
+which had led me to take this cold road to the sunshine. Something had
+bound me with an invisible thread, and led me up here into the clouds,
+where already I--or the likeness of me--dwelt, perhaps had been dwelling
+for many years. I had looked upon my living wraith, and my living wraith
+had called me demon.
+
+"How could I sleep?
+
+"Very early I got up. The dawn was bitterly cold, but the snow had
+ceased, though a coating of ice covered the little lake. How delicate
+was the dawn here! The gathering, growing light fell upon the rocks,
+upon the snow, upon the ice of the lake, upon the slate walls of the
+monastery. And upon each it lay with a pretty purity, a thin refinement,
+an austerity such as I had never seen before. So, even Nature, it
+seemed, was purged by the continual prayers of these holy men. She, too,
+like men, has her lusts, and her hot passions, and her wrath of warfare.
+She, too, like men, can be edified and tended into grace. Nature among
+these heights was a virgin, not a wanton, a fit companion for those who
+are dedicated to virginity.
+
+"I dressed by the window, and went out to see the entrance of the
+morning. There was nobody about. I had to find my own way. But when I
+had gained the refectory, I saw a monk standing by the door.
+
+"It was my wraith waiting for me.
+
+"Silently he went before me to the great door of the building. He opened
+it, and we stepped out upon the rocky plateau on which the snow lay
+thickly. He closed the door behind us, and motioned me to attend him
+among the rocks till we were out of sight of the monastery. Then he
+stopped, and we faced one another, still without a word, the grey light
+of the wintry dawn clothing us so wearily, so plaintively.
+
+"We gazed at each other, dark face to dark face, brown eyes to brown
+eyes. The monk's pale hands, my hands, were clenched. The monk's strong
+lips, my lips, were set. The two souls looked upon each other, there, in
+the dawn.
+
+"And then at last he spoke in French, and with the beautiful voice I
+knew.
+
+"'Whence have you come?' he said.
+
+"'From England, father.'
+
+"'From England? Then you live! you live. You are a man, as I am! And I
+have believed you to be a spirit, some strange spirit of myself, lost to
+my control, interrupting my prayers with your cries, interrupting my
+sleep with your desires. You are a man like myself?'
+
+"He stretched out his hand and touched mine.
+
+"'Yes; it is indeed so,' he murmured.
+
+"'And you,' I said in my turn, 'are no spirit. Yet, I, too, believed you
+to be a wraith of myself, interrupting my sins with your sorrow,
+interrupting my desires with your prayers. I have seen you. I have
+imagined you. And now I find you live. What does it mean? For we are as
+one and yet not as one.'
+
+"'We are as two halves of a strangely-mingled whole,' he answered. 'Do
+you know what you have done to me?'
+
+"'No, father.'
+
+"'Listen,' he said. 'When a boy I dedicated myself to God. Early, early
+I dedicated myself, so that I might never know sin. For I had heard
+that the charm of sin is so great and so terrible that, once it is
+known, once it is felt, it can never be forgotten. And so it can make
+the holiest life hideous with its memories. It can intrude into the very
+sanctuary like a ghost, and murmur its music with the midnight mass.
+Even at the elevation of the Host will it be present, and stir the heart
+of the officiator to longing so keen that it is like the Agony of the
+Garden, the Agony of Christ. There are monks here who weep because they
+dare not sin, who rage secretly like beasts--because they will not sin.'
+
+"He paused. The grey light grew over the mountains.
+
+"'Knowing this, I resolved that I would never know sin, lest I, too,
+should suffer so horribly. I threw myself at once into the arms of God.
+Yet I have suffered--how I have suffered!'
+
+"His face was contorted, and his lips worked. I stood as if under a
+spell, my eyes upon his face. I had only the desire to hear him. He went
+on, speaking now in a voice roughened by emotion:
+
+"'For I became like these monks. You'--and he pointed at me with
+outstretched fingers--'you, my wraith, made in my very likeness, were
+surely born when I was born, to torment me. For, while I have prayed, I
+have been conscious of your neglect of prayer as if it were my own. When
+I have believed, I have been conscious of your unbelief as if it were
+my own. Whatever I have feebly tried to do for God, has been marred and
+defaced by all that you have left undone. I have wrestled with you; I
+have tried to hold you back; I have tried to lead you with me where I
+want to go, where I must go. All these years I have tried, all these
+years I have striven. But it has seemed as if God did not choose it.
+When you have been sinning, I have been agonising. I have lain upon the
+floor of my cell in the night, and I have torn at my evil heart.
+For--sometimes--I have longed--how I have longed!--to sin your sin.'
+
+"He crossed himself. Sudden tears sprang into his eyes.
+
+"'I have called you my demon,' he cried. 'But you are my cross. Oh,
+brother, will you not be my crown?'
+
+"His eyes, shadowed with tears, gazed down into mine. Bernard, in that
+moment, I understood all--my depression, my unreasoning despair, the
+fancied hatred of others, even my few good impulses, all came from him,
+from this living holy wraith of my evil self.
+
+"'Will you not be my crown?' he said.
+
+"Bernard, there, in the snow, I fell at his feet. I confessed to him. I
+received his absolution.
+
+"And, as the light of the dawn grew strong upon the mountains, he, my
+other self, my wraith, blessed me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a long silence between us. Then I said:--
+
+"And now?"
+
+"And now you know why I have changed. That day, as I went down into the
+land of the sunshine, I made a vow."
+
+"A vow?"
+
+"Yes; to be his crown, not his cross. I soon returned to England. At
+first I was happy, and then one day my old evil nature came upon me like
+a giant. I fell again into sin, and, even as I sinned, I saw his face
+looking into mine, Bernard, pale, pale to the lips, and with eyes--such
+sad eyes of reproach! Then I thought I was not fit to live, and I tried
+to kill myself. They saved me, and brought me here."
+
+"Yes; and now, Hubert?"
+
+"Now," he said, "I am so happy. God surely placed me here where I cannot
+sin. The days pass and the nights, and they are stainless. And he--he
+comes by night and blesses me. I live for him now, and see always the
+grey walls of his monastery, his face which shall, at last, be
+completely mine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good-bye," the doctor said to me as I got into the carriage to drive
+back to the station. "Yes, he is perfectly happy, happier in his mania,
+I believe, than you or I in our sanity."
+
+I drove away from that huge home of madness, set in the midst of lovely
+gardens in a smiling landscape, and I pondered those last words of the
+doctor's:--
+
+"You and I--in our sanity."
+
+And, thinking of the peace that lay on Hubert's face, I compared the
+so-called mad of the world with the so-called sane--and wondered.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO INTERVENED
+
+
+I
+
+The atmosphere of the room in which Sergius Blake was sitting seemed to
+him strange and cold. As he looked round it, he could imagine that a
+light mist invaded it stealthily, like miasma rising from some sinister
+marsh. There was surely a cloud about the electric light that gleamed in
+the ceiling, a cloud sweeping in feathery, white flakes across the faces
+of the pictures upon the wall. Even the familiar furniture seemed to
+loom out faintly, with a gaunt and grotesque aspect, from shadows less
+real, yet more fearful, than any living form could be.
+
+Sergius stared round him slowly, pressing his strong lips together. When
+he concentrated his gaze upon any one thing--a table, a sofa, a
+chair--the cloud faded, and the object stood out clearly before his
+eyes. Yet always the rest of the room seemed to lie in mist and in
+shadows. He knew that this dim atmosphere did not really exist, that it
+was projected by his mind. Yet it troubled him, and added a dull horror
+to his thoughts, which moved again and again, in persistent promenade,
+round one idea.
+
+The hour was seven o'clock of an autumn night. Darkness lay over
+London, and rain made a furtive music on roofs and pavements. Sergius
+Blake listened to the drops upon the panes of his windows. They seemed
+to beckon him forth, to tell him that it was time to exchange thought
+for action. He had come to a definite and tremendous resolution. He must
+now carry it out.
+
+He got up slowly from his chair, and with the movement the mist seemed
+to gather itself together in the room and to disappear. It passed away,
+evaporating among the pictures and ornaments, the prayer-rugs and
+divans. A clearness and an insight came to Sergius. He stood still by
+the piano, on which he rested one hand lightly, and listened. The
+rain-drops pattered close by. Beyond them rose the dull music of the
+evening traffic of New Bond Street, in which thoroughfare he lived. As
+he stood thus at attention, his young and handsome face seemed carved in
+stone. His lips were set in a hard and straight line. His dark-grey eyes
+stared, like eyes in a photograph. The muscles of his long-fingered
+hands were tense and knotted. He was in evening dress, and had been
+engaged to dine in Curzon Street; but he had written a hasty note to say
+he was ill and could not come. Another appointment claimed him. He had
+made it for himself.
+
+Presently, lifting his hand from the piano, he took up a small leather
+case from a table that stood near, opened it, and drew out a revolver.
+He examined it carefully. Two chambers were loaded. They would be
+enough. He put on his long overcoat, and slipped the revolver into his
+left breast pocket. His heart could beat against it there.
+
+Each time his heart pulsed, Sergius seemed to hear the silence of
+another heart.
+
+And now, though his mind was quite clear, and the mists and shadows had
+slunk away, his familiar room looked very peculiar to him. The very
+chair in which he generally sat wore the aspect of a stranger. Was the
+wall paper really blue? Sergius went close up to it and examined it
+narrowly, and then he drew back and laughed softly, like a child. In the
+sound of his laugh irresponsibility chimed. "What is the cab fare to
+Phillimore Place, Kensington?" he thought, searching in his waistcoat
+pocket. "Half a crown?" He put the coin carefully in the ticket pocket
+of his overcoat, buttoned the coat up slowly, took his hat and stick,
+and drew on a pair of lavender gloves. Just then a new thought seemed to
+strike him and he glanced down at his hands.
+
+"Lavender gloves for such a deed!" he murmured. For a moment he paused
+irresolute, even partially unbuttoned them. But then he smiled and shook
+his head. In some way the gloves would not be wholly inappropriate.
+Sergius cast one final glance round the room.
+
+"When I stand here again," he said aloud, "I shall be a criminal--a
+criminal!"
+
+He repeated the last word, as if trying thoroughly to realise its
+meaning.
+
+Then he opened the door swiftly and went out on to the staircase.
+
+Just as he was putting a hasty foot upon the first stair, a man out in
+the street touched his electric bell. Its thin tingling cry made Sergius
+start and hesitate. In the semi-twilight he waited, his hands deep in
+his pockets, his silk hat tilted slightly over his eyes. The porter
+tramped along the passage below. The hall door opened, and a deep and
+strong voice asked, rather anxiously and breathlessly:--
+
+"Is Mr. Blake at home?"
+
+"I rather think he's gone out, sir."
+
+"No--surely--how long ago?"
+
+"I don't know, sir. He may be in. I'll see."
+
+"Do--do--quickly. If he's in, say I must see him--Mr Endover. But you
+know my name."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The porter, mounting the stone staircase, suddenly came upon Sergius
+standing there like a stone figure.
+
+"Lord, sir!" he ejaculated. "You give me a start!" His voice was loud
+from astonishment.
+
+"Hush!" Sergius whispered. "Go down at once and say that I've gone out!"
+
+The man turned to obey, but Anthony Endover was half-way up the stairs.
+
+"It's all right," he exclaimed, as he met the porter.
+
+He had passed him in an instant and arrived at the place where Sergius
+was standing.
+
+"Sergius," he cried, and there was a great music of relief in his voice.
+"Hulloa! Now you're not going out."
+
+"Yes, I am, Anthony."
+
+"But I want to talk to you tremendously. Where are you going?"
+
+"To dine with the Venables in Curzon Street."
+
+"I met young Venables just now, and he said you'd written that you were
+ill and couldn't come. He asked me to fill your place."
+
+Sergius muttered a "Damn!" under his breath.
+
+"Well, come in for a minute," he said, attempting no excuse.
+
+He turned round slowly and re-entered his flat, followed by Endover.
+
+
+II
+
+For some years Endover had been Sergius Blake's close friend. They had
+left Eton at the same time; had been at Oxford together. Their intimacy,
+born in the playing fields, grew out of its cricket and football stage
+as their minds developed, and the world of thought opened like a holy
+of holies--beyond the world of action. They both passed behind the veil,
+but Anthony went farther than Sergius. Yet this slight separation did
+not lead to alienation, but merely caused the admiration of Sergius for
+his friend to be mingled with respect. He looked up to Anthony.
+Recognising that his friend's mind was more thoughtful than his own,
+while his passions were far stronger than Anthony's, he grew to lean
+upon Anthony, to claim his advice sometimes, to follow it often. Anthony
+was his mentor, and thought he knew instinctively all the workings of
+Sergius' mind and all the possibilities of his nature. The mother of
+Sergius was a Russian and a great heiress. Soon after he left Oxford,
+she died. His father had been killed by an accident when he was a child.
+So he was rich, free, young, in London, with no one to look after him,
+until Anthony Endover, who had meanwhile taken orders, was attached as
+fourth--or fifth--curate to a smart West End church, and came to live in
+lodgings in George Street, Hanover Square.
+
+Then, as Sergius laughingly said, he had a father confessor on the
+premises. Yet to-night he had bidden his porter to tell a lie in order
+to keep his father confessor out. The lie had been vain. Sergius led the
+way morosely into his drawing-room, and turned on the light. Anthony
+walked up to the fire, and stretched his tall athletic figure in its
+long ebon coat. His firm throat rose out of a jam-pot collar, but his
+thin, strongly-marked face rather suggested an intellectual Hercules
+than a Mayfair parson, and neither his voice nor his manner was tinged
+with what so many people consider the true clericalism.
+
+For all that he was a splendid curate, as his rector very well knew.
+
+Now he stood by the fire for a minute in silence, while Sergius moved
+uneasily about the room. Presently Anthony turned round.
+
+"It's beastly wet," he said in a melodious ringing voice. "The black dog
+is on me to-night, Sergius."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"You don't want to go out, really," Anthony continued, looking narrowly
+at his friend's curiously rigid face.
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"Not to Curzon Street. They've filled up your place. I told Venables to
+ask Hugh Graham. I knew he was disengaged to-night. Besides--you're
+seedy."
+
+Sergius frowned.
+
+"I'm all right again now," he said coldly, "and I particularly wished to
+go. You needn't have been so deuced anxious to make the number right."
+
+"Well, it's done now. And I can't say I'm sorry, because I want to have
+a talk with you. I say, Serge, take off those lavender gloves, pull off
+your coat, let's send out for some dinner, and have a comfortable
+evening together in here. I've had a hard day's work, and I want a
+rest."
+
+"I must go out presently."
+
+"After dinner then."
+
+"Before ten o'clock."
+
+"Say eleven."
+
+"No--that's too late."
+
+A violent, though fleeting expression of anxiety crossed Endover's face.
+Then, with a smile, he said:--
+
+"All right. Shall I ring the bell and order some dinner to be sent in
+from Galton's?"
+
+"If you like. I'm not hungry."
+
+"I am."
+
+Anthony summoned the servant and gave the order. Then he turned again to
+Sergius.
+
+"Here, I'll help you off with your coat," he said.
+
+But Sergius moved away.
+
+"No thanks, I'll do it. There are some cigarettes on the mantelpiece."
+
+Anthony went to get one. As he was taking it, he looked into the
+mirror over the fireplace, and saw Sergius--while removing his
+overcoat--transfer something from it to the left breast pocket of his
+evening coat.
+
+He wanted still to feel his heart beat against that tiny weapon, still
+to hear--with each pulse of his own heart--the silence, not yet alive,
+but so soon to be alive, of that other heart.
+
+And, as Anthony glanced into the mirror, he said to himself, "I was
+right!"
+
+He withdrew his eyes from the glass and lit his cigarette. Sergius
+joined him.
+
+"I'm in the blues to-night," Anthony said, puffing at his cigarette.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+"Yes--been down in the East End. The misery there is ghastly."
+
+"It's just as bad in the West End, only different in kind. You're
+smoking your cigarette all down one side."
+
+Anthony took it out of his mouth and threw it into the grate. He lit two
+or three matches, but held them so badly that they went out before he
+could ignite another cigarette. At last, inwardly cursing his nerves
+that made his hasty actions belie the determined calm of his face, he
+dropped the cigarette.
+
+"I don't think I'll smoke before dinner," he said. "Ah, here it is. And
+wine--champagne--that's good for you!"
+
+"I shan't drink it. I hate to drink alone."
+
+"You shan't drink alone then."
+
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+"I'll drink with you."
+
+"But you're a teetotaller."
+
+"I don't care to-night."
+
+Anthony spoke briefly and firmly. Sergius was amazed.
+
+"What!" he said. "You're going to break your vow? You a parson!"
+
+"Sometimes salvation lies in the breaking of a vow," Anthony answered as
+they sat down. "Have you never registered a silent vow?"
+
+Sergius looked at him hard in the eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; and in his voice there was the hint of a thrilling note.
+"But I shan't--I shouldn't break it."
+
+"I've known a soul saved alive by the breaking of a vow," Anthony
+answered. "Give me some champagne."
+
+Sergius--wondering, as much as the condition of his mind, possessed by
+one idea, would allow--filled his friend's glass. Anthony began to eat,
+with a well-assumed hunger. Sergius scarcely touched food, but drank a
+good deal of wine. The hands of the big oaken-cased clock that stood in
+a far corner of the room crawled slowly upon their round, recurring
+tour. Anthony's eyes were often upon them, then moved with a swift
+directness that was akin to passion to the face of Sergius, which was
+always strangely rigid, like the painted face of a mask.
+
+"I sat by a woman to-day," he said presently, "sat by her in an attic
+that looked on to a narrow street full of rain, and watched her die."
+
+"This morning?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And now she's been out of the world seven or eight hours. Lucky woman!"
+
+"Ah, Sergius, but the mischief, the horror of it was that she wasn't
+ready to go, not a bit ready."
+
+Sergius suddenly smiled, a straight, glaring smile, over the sparkling
+champagne that he was lifting to his lips.
+
+"Yes; it's devilish bad for a woman or a--man to be shot into another
+world before they're prepared," he said. "It must be--devilish bad."
+
+"And how can we know that any one is thoroughly prepared?"
+
+Sergius' smile developed into a short laugh.
+
+"It's easier to be certain who isn't than who is," he said.
+
+The eyes of Anthony fled to the clock face mechanically and returned.
+
+"Death terrified me to-day, Sergius," he said; "and it struck me that
+the most awful power that God has given to man is the power of setting
+death--like a dog--at another man."
+
+Sergius swallowed all the wine in his glass at a gulp. He was no longer
+smiling. His hand went up to his left side.
+
+"It may be awful," he rejoined; "but it's grand. By Heaven! it's
+magnificent."
+
+He got up, as if excited, and moved about the room, while Anthony went
+on pretending to eat. After a minute or two Sergius sat down again.
+
+"Power of any kind is a grand thing," he said.
+
+"Only power for good."
+
+"You're bound to say that; you're a parson."
+
+"I only say what I really feel; you know that, Serge."
+
+"Ah, you don't understand."
+
+Anthony looked at him with a sudden, strong significance.
+
+"Part of a parson's profession--the most important part--is to
+understand men who aren't parsons."
+
+"You think you understand men?"
+
+"Some men."
+
+"Me, for instance?"
+
+The question came abruptly, defiantly. Anthony seemed glad to answer it.
+
+"Well, yes, Sergius; I think I do thoroughly understand you. My great
+friendship alone might well make me do that."
+
+The face of Sergius grew a little softer in expression, but he did not
+assent.
+
+"Perhaps it might blind you," he said.
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"Well, then, now, if you understand me--tell me--"
+
+Sergius broke off suddenly.
+
+"This champagne is awfully good," he said, filling his glass again.
+
+"What were you going to say?" Anthony asked.
+
+"I don't know--nothing."
+
+Anthony tried to conceal his disappointment. Sergius had seemed to be on
+the verge of over-leaping the barrier which lay between them. Once that
+barrier was overleapt, or broken down, Anthony felt that the mission he
+had imposed upon himself would stand a chance of being accomplished,
+that his gnawing anxiety would be laid to rest. But once more Sergius
+diffused around him a strange and cold atmosphere of violent and knowing
+reserve. He went away from the table and sat down close to the fire.
+From there he threw over his shoulder the remark:--
+
+"No man or woman ever understands another--really."
+
+
+III
+
+Anthony did not reply for a moment and Sergius continued:--
+
+"You, for instance, could never guess what I should do in certain
+circumstances."
+
+"Such as--"
+
+"Oh, in a thousand things."
+
+"I should have a shrewd idea."
+
+"No."
+
+Anthony didn't contradict him, but got up from the dinner-table and
+joined him by the fire, glass in hand.
+
+"I might not let you know how much I guessed, how much I knew."
+
+Sergius laughed.
+
+"Oh, ignorance always surrounds itself with mystery," he said.
+
+"Knowledge need not go naked."
+
+Again the eyes of the two friends met in the firelight, and over the
+face of Sergius there ran a new expression. There was an awakening of
+wonder in it, but no uneasiness. Anxiety was far away from him that
+night. When passion has gripped a man, passion strong enough, resolute
+enough, to over-ride all the prejudices of civilisation, all the
+promptings of the coward within us, whose voice, whining, we name
+prudence, the semi-comprehension, the criticism of another man cannot
+move him. Sergius wondered for an instant whether Anthony suspected
+against what his heart was beating. That was all.
+
+While he wondered, the clock chimed the half hour after nine. He heard
+it.
+
+"I shall have to go very soon," he said.
+
+"You can't. Just listen to the rain."
+
+"Rain! What's that got to do with it?"
+
+Sergius spoke with a sudden unutterable contempt.
+
+"Ring for another bottle of champagne," Anthony replied. "This one is
+empty."
+
+"Well--for a parson and a teetotaller, I must say!"
+
+Sergius rang the bell. A second bottle was opened. The servant went out
+of the room. As he closed the door, the wind sighed harshly against the
+window panes, driving the rain before it.
+
+"Rough at sea to-night," Anthony said.
+
+The remark was an obvious one; but, as spoken, it sounded oddly furtive,
+and full of hidden meaning. Sergius evidently found it so, for he said:
+
+"Why, whom d'you know that's going to sea to-night?"
+
+Anthony was startled by the quick question, and replied almost
+nervously:--
+
+"Nobody in particular--why should I?"
+
+"I don't know why, but I think you do."
+
+"People one knows cross the channel every night almost."
+
+"Of course," Sergius said indifferently.
+
+He glanced towards the clock and again mechanically his hand went up,
+for a second, to his left breast. Anthony leaned forward in his chair
+quickly, and broke into speech. He had seen the stare at the clock-face,
+the gesture.
+
+"It's strange," he said, "how people go out of our lives, how friends
+go, and enemies!"
+
+"Enemies!"
+
+"Yes. I sometimes wonder which exit is the sadder. When a friend
+goes--with him goes, perhaps for ever, the chance of saying 'I am your
+friend.' When an enemy goes--"
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"With him goes, perhaps for ever, too, the chance of saying, 'I am not
+your enemy.'"
+
+"Pshaw! Parson's talk, Anthony."
+
+"No, Sergius, other men forgive besides parsons; and other men, and
+parsons too, pass by their chances of forgiving."
+
+"You're a whole Englishman, I'm only half an Englishman. There's
+something untamed in my blood, and I say--damn forgiveness!"
+
+"And yet you've forgiven."
+
+"Whom?"
+
+"Olga Mayne."
+
+The face of Sergius did not change at the sound of this name, unless,
+perhaps, to a more fixed calm, a more still and pale coldness.
+
+"Olga is punished," he said. "She is ruined."
+
+"Her ruin may be repaired."
+
+Sergius smiled quietly.
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"Yes. Tell me, Sergius"--Anthony spoke with a strong earnestness, a
+strong excitement that he strove to conceal and hold in check--"you
+loved her?"
+
+"Yes, I loved her--certainly."
+
+"You will always love her?"
+
+"Since I'm not changeable, I daresay I shall."
+
+Anthony's thin, eager face brightened. A glow of warmth burned in his
+eyes and on his cheeks.
+
+"Then you would wish her ruin repaired."
+
+"Should I?"
+
+"If you love her, you must."
+
+"How could it be repaired?"
+
+"By her marriage with--Vernon."
+
+Anthony's strong voice quivered before he pronounced the last word, and
+his eyes were alight with fervent anxiety. He was looking at Sergius
+like a man on the watch for a tremendous outbreak of emotion. The
+champagne he had drunk--a new experience for him since he had taken
+orders--put a sort of wild finishing touch to the intensity of the
+feelings, under the impulse of which he had forced himself upon Sergius
+to-night. He supposed that his inward excitement must be more than
+matched by the so different inward excitement of his friend. But he--who
+thought he understood!--had no true conception of the region of cold,
+frosty fury in which Sergius was living, like a being apart from all
+other men, ostracised by the immensity and peculiarity of his own power
+of emotion. Therefore he was astonished when Sergius, with undiminished
+quietude, replied:
+
+"Oh, with Vernon, that charming man of fashion, whose very soul, they
+say, always wears lavender gloves? You think that would be a good
+thing?"
+
+"Good! I don't say that. I say--as the world is now--the only thing. He
+is the author of her fall. He should be her husband."
+
+"And I?"
+
+Anthony stretched out his hand to grasp his friend's hand, but Sergius
+suddenly took up his champagne glass, and avoided the demonstration of
+sympathy.
+
+"You can be nothing to her now, Serge," Anthony said, and his voice
+quivered with sympathy.
+
+"You think so? I might be."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, not her husband, not her lover, not her friend."
+
+"What then?"
+
+Sergius avoided answering.
+
+"You would have her settle down with Vernon in Phillimore Place?" he
+said. "Play the wife to his noble husband? Well, I know there's been
+some idea of that, as I told you yesterday."
+
+The clock chimed ten. Although Sergius seemed so calm, so
+self-possessed, Anthony observed that now he paid no heed to the little,
+devilish note of time. This new subject of conversation had been
+Anthony's weapon. Desperately he had used it, and not, it seemed,
+altogether in vain.
+
+"Yes; as you told me yesterday."
+
+"And it seems good to you?"
+
+"It seems to me the only thing possible now."
+
+"There are generally more possibilities than one in any given event, I
+fancy."
+
+Again Anthony was surprised at the words of Sergius, who seemed to grow
+calmer as he grew more excited, who seemed, to-night, strangely
+powerful, not simply in temper, but even in intellect.
+
+"For a woman there is sometimes only one possibility if she is to be
+saved from ignominy, Serge."
+
+"So you think that Olga Mayne must become the wife of Vernon, who is
+a--"
+
+"Coward. Yes."
+
+At the word coward, Sergius seemed startled out of his hard calm. He
+looked swiftly and searchingly at Anthony.
+
+"Why do you say coward?" he asked sharply. "I was not going to use that
+word."
+
+Anthony was obviously disconcerted.
+
+"It came to me," he said hurriedly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Any man that brings a girl to the dust is a coward."
+
+"Ah--that's not what you meant," Sergius said.
+
+Anthony stole a glance at the clock. The hand crawled slowly over the
+quarter of an hour past ten.
+
+"No, it was not," he said slowly.
+
+
+IV
+
+Sergius got up from his chair and stood by the fire. He was obviously
+becoming engrossed by the conversation. Anthony could at least notice
+this with thankfulness.
+
+"Anthony, I see you've got a fresh knowledge of Vernon since I was with
+you yesterday," Sergius continued; "some new knowledge of his nature."
+
+"Perhaps I have."
+
+"How did you get it?"
+
+"Does that matter?"
+
+"You have heard of something about him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You have seen him, then; I say, you have seen him?"
+
+Anthony hesitated. He pushed the champagne bottle over towards Sergius.
+It had been placed on a little table near the fireplace.
+
+"No; I don't want to drink. Why on earth don't you answer me, Anthony?"
+
+"I have always felt that Vernon was a coward. His conduct to you shows
+it. He was--or seemed--your friend. He saw you deeply in love with
+this--with Olga. He chose to ruin her after he knew of your love. Who
+but a coward could act in such a way?"
+
+An expression of dark impatience came into the eyes of Sergius.
+
+"You are confusing treachery and cowardice, and you are doing it
+untruthfully. You have seen Vernon."
+
+Anthony thought for a moment, and then said:
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"By chance, of course. Why did you speak to him?"
+
+"I thought I would."
+
+Sergius was obviously disturbed and surprised. The deeply emotional, yet
+rigid calm in which he had been enveloped all the evening was broken at
+last. A slight excitement, a distinct surface irritation, woke in him.
+Anthony felt an odd sense of relief as he observed it. For the
+constraint of Sergius had begun to weigh upon him like a heavy burden
+and to move him to an indefinable dread.
+
+"I wonder you didn't cut him," Sergius said. "You're my friend. And
+he's--he's--"
+
+"He's done you a deadly injury. I know that. I am your friend, Serge; I
+would do anything for you."
+
+"Yet you speak to that--devil."
+
+"I spoke to him because I'm your friend."
+
+Sergius sat down again, with a heavy look, the look of a man who has
+been thrashed, and means to return every blow with curious interest.
+
+"You parsons are a riddle to me," he said in a low and dull voice. "You
+and your charity and your loving-kindness, and your turning the cheek to
+the smiter and all the rest of it. And as to your way of showing
+friendship--"
+
+His voice died away in something that was almost a growl, and he stared
+at the carpet. Between it and his eyes once more the mist seemed rising
+stealthily. It began to curl upwards softly about him. As he watched it,
+he heard Anthony say:--
+
+"Sergius, you don't understand how well I understand you."
+
+The big hand of the clock had left the half-hour after ten behind him.
+Anthony breathed more freely. At last he could be more explicit, more
+unreserved. He thought of a train rushing through the night, devouring
+the spaces of land that lie between London and the sea that speaks,
+moaning, to the South of England. He saw a ship glide out from the
+dreary docks. Her lights gleamed. He heard the bell struck and the harsh
+cry of the sailors, and then the dim sigh of a coward who had escaped
+what he had merited. Then he heard Sergius laugh.
+
+"That again, Anthony!"
+
+"Yes. I didn't meet Vernon by chance at all."
+
+"What? You wrote to him, you fixed a meeting?"
+
+"I went to Phillimore Place, to his house."
+
+Sergius said nothing. Strange furrows ploughed themselves in his young
+face, which was growing dusky white. He remained in the attitude of one
+devoted entirely to listening.
+
+"You hear, Sergius?"
+
+"Go on--when?"
+
+"To-day. I decided to go after I met you yesterday night--and after I
+had seen that woman die--unprepared."
+
+"What could she have to do with it?"
+
+"Much. Everything almost."
+
+Anthony got up now, almost sprang up from his chair. His face was
+glowing and working with emotion. There was a choking sensation in his
+throat.
+
+"You don't know what it is," he said hoarsely, "to a man with--with
+strong religious belief to see a human being's soul go out to blackness,
+to punishment--perhaps to punishment that will never end. It's
+abominable. It's unbearable. That woman will haunt me. Her despair will
+be with me always. I could not add to that horror."
+
+His eyes once more sought the clock. Seeing the hour, he turned, with a
+kind of liberating relief, to Sergius.
+
+"I couldn't add to it," he exclaimed, almost fiercely, "so I went to
+Vernon."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Sergius--to warn him."
+
+There was a dead silence. Even the rain was hushed against the window.
+Then Sergius said, in a voice that was cold as the sound of falling
+water in winter:--
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Because you won't understand how I have learnt to know you, Sergius, to
+understand you, to read your soul."
+
+"Mine too?"
+
+"Yes; I've felt this awful blow that's come upon you--the loss of Olga,
+her ruin--as if I myself were you. We haven't said much about it till
+yesterday. Then, from the way you spoke, from the way you looked, from
+what you said, even what you wouldn't say, I guessed all that was in
+your heart."
+
+"You guessed all that?"
+
+Sergius was looking directly at Anthony and leaning against the
+mantelpiece, along which he stretched one arm. His fingers closed and
+unclosed, with a mechanical and rhythmical movement, round a china
+figure. The motion looked as if it were made in obedience to some
+fiercely monotonous music.
+
+"Yes, more--I knew it."
+
+Sergius nodded.
+
+"I see," he said.
+
+Anthony touched his arm, almost with an awe-struck gesture.
+
+"I knew then that you--that you intended to kill Vernon. And--God
+forgive me!--at first I was almost glad."
+
+"Well--go on!"
+
+Anthony shivered. The voice of Sergius was so strangely calm and level.
+
+"I--I--" he stammered. "Serge, why do you look at me like that?"
+
+Sergius looked away without a word.
+
+"For I, too, hated Vernon, more for what he had done to you even than
+for what he had done to Olga. But, Sergius, after you had gone, in the
+night, and in the dawn too, I kept on thinking of it over and over. I
+couldn't get away from it--that you were going to commit such an awful
+crime. I never slept. When at last it was morning, I went down to my
+district; there are criminals there, you know."
+
+"I know."
+
+"I looked at them with new eyes, and in their eyes I saw you, always
+you; and then I said to myself could I bear that you should become a
+criminal?"
+
+"You said that?"
+
+The fingers of Sergius closed over the china figure, and did not
+unclose.
+
+"Yes. I almost resolved then to go to Vernon at once and to tell him
+what I suspected--what I really knew."
+
+The clock struck eleven. Anthony heard it; Sergius did not hear it.
+
+"Then I went to sit with that wretched woman. Already I had resolved, as
+I believed, on the course to take. I had no thought for Vernon yet, only
+for you. It seemed to me that I did not care in the least to save him
+from death. I only cared to save you--my friend--from murder. But when
+the woman died I felt differently. My resolve was strengthened, my
+desire was just doubled. I had to save not only you, but also him. He
+was not ready to die."
+
+Anthony trembled with a passion of emotion. Sergius remained always
+perfectly calm, the china figure prisoned in his hand.
+
+"So--so I went to him, Sergius."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I saw him. Almost as I entered he received your letter, saying that you
+forgave him, that you would call to-night after eight o'clock to tell
+him so, and to urge on his marriage with Olga. When he had read the
+letter--I interpreted it to him; and then I found out that he was a
+coward. His terror was abject--despicable; he implored my help; he
+started at every sound."
+
+"To-night he'll sleep quietly, Anthony."
+
+"To-night he has gone. Before morning he will be on the sea."
+
+The sound of the wind came to them again, and Sergius understood why
+Anthony had said: "Rough at sea to-night."
+
+Suddenly Sergius moved; he unclosed his fingers: the ruins of the china
+figure fell from them in a dust of blue and white upon the mantelpiece.
+
+"No--it's too late, Sergius. He went at eleven."
+
+Sergius stood quite still.
+
+"You came here to-night to keep me here till he had gone?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's why you--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"That's why I came. That's why I broke my pledge. I thought wine--any
+weapon to keep you from this crime. And, Sergius, think. Vernon dead
+could never have restored Olga to the place she has lost. That, too,
+must have driven me to the right course, though I scarcely thought of it
+till now."
+
+Sergius said, as if in reply: "So you have understood me!"
+
+"Yes, Sergius. Friendship is something. Let us thank God, not even that
+he is safe, but that you--you are safe--and that Olga--"
+
+"Hush! Has she gone with him?"
+
+"She will meet him. He has sworn to marry her."
+
+The hand of Sergius moved to his left breast. Anthony's glowing eyes
+were fixed upon him.
+
+"Ah, yes, Sergius," Anthony cried. "Put that cursed, cursed thing down,
+put it away. Now it can never wreck your life and my peace."
+
+Sergius drew out the revolver slowly and carefully. Again the mist rose
+around him. But it was no longer white; it was scarlet.
+
+There was a report. Anthony fell, without a word, a cry.
+
+Then Sergius bent down, and listened to the silence of his friend's
+heart--the long silence of the man who intervened.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER TO-MORROW
+
+
+I
+
+In his gilded cage, above the window-boxes that were full of white
+daisies, the canary chirped with a desultory vivacity. That was the only
+near sound that broke the silence in the drawing-room of No. 100 Mill
+Street, Knightsbridge, in which a man and a woman stood facing one
+another. Away, beyond his twittering voice, sang in the London streets
+the muffled voice of the season. The time was late afternoon, and rays
+of mellow light slanted into the pretty room, and touched its crowd of
+inanimate occupants with a radiance in which the motes danced merrily.
+The china faces of two goblins on the mantelpiece glowed with a
+grotesque meaning, and their yellow smiles seemed to call aloud on
+mirth; but the faces of the man and woman were pale, and their lips
+trembled, and did not smile.
+
+She was tall, dark, and passionate-looking, perhaps twenty-eight or
+thirty. He was a few years older, a man so steadfast in expression that
+silly people, who spring at exaggeration as saints spring at heaven,
+called him stern, and even said he looked forbidding--at balls.
+
+At last the song of the canary was broken upon by a voice. Sir Hugh
+Maine spoke, very quietly. "Why not?" he said.
+
+"I don't think I can tell you," Mrs. Glinn answered, with an obvious
+effort.
+
+"You prefer to refuse me without giving a reason?"
+
+"I have a right to," she said.
+
+"I don't question it. You cannot expect me to say more than that."
+
+He took up his hat, which lay on a chair, and smoothed it mechanically
+with his coat-sleeve.
+
+The action seemed to pierce her like a knife, for she started, and
+half-extended her hand. "Don't!" she exclaimed. "At least, wait one
+moment. So you belong to the second class of men."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Men are divided into two classes--those who refuse to be refused, and
+those who accept. But don't be too--too swift in your acceptance. After
+all, a refusal is not exactly a bank-note."
+
+She tried to smile.
+
+"But I am exactly a beggar," he answered, still keeping the hat in his
+hand. "And if you have nothing to give me, I may as well go."
+
+"And spend the rest of your life in sweeping the old crossing?"
+
+"And spend the rest of my life as I can," he said. "That need not
+concern you."
+
+"A woman must be all to a man, or nothing?"
+
+"You must be all to me, or nothing."
+
+She sat down in an arm-chair in that part of the room that was in
+shadow. She always sat instinctively in shadow when she wanted to think.
+
+"Well?" Sir Hugh said. "What are you thinking?"
+
+She glanced up at him. "That you don't look much like a beggar," she
+said.
+
+"It is possible to feel tattered in a frock-coat and patent-leather
+boots," he answered. "Good-bye. I am going back to my crossing." And he
+moved towards the door.
+
+"No, stop!" she exclaimed. "Before you go, tell me one thing."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Will you ever ask me to marry you again?"
+
+He looked hard into her eyes. "I shall always want to, but I shall never
+do it," he said slowly.
+
+"I am glad you have told me that. We women depend so much on a
+repetition of the offence, when we blame a man for saying he loves us,
+and ask him not to do it again. If you really mean only to propose once,
+I must reconsider my position."
+
+She was laughing, but the tears stood in her eyes.
+
+"Why do you want to make this moment a farcical one?" he asked rather
+bitterly.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she answered, "don't you see? Because it is really--really
+so tragic. I only try to do for this moment what we all try to do for
+life."
+
+"Then you love me?" he said, moving a step forward.
+
+"I never denied that," she replied. "I might as well deny that I am a
+woman."
+
+He held out his arms. "Eve--then I shall never go back to the crossing."
+
+But she drew back. "Go--go there till to-morrow! To-morrow afternoon I
+will see you; and if you love me after that--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+She turned away and pressed the bell. "Good-bye," she said. Her voice
+sounded strange to him.
+
+He came nearer, and touched her hand; but she drew it away.
+
+"You may kiss me," she said.
+
+"Eve!"
+
+"After to-morrow."
+
+The footman came in answer to the bell. Mrs Glinn did not turn round. "I
+only rang for you to open the door for Sir Hugh," she said. "Good-bye
+then, Sir Hugh. Come at five."
+
+"I will," he answered, wondering.
+
+When he had gone, Mrs Glinn sat down in a chair and took up a French
+novel. It was by Gyp. She tried to read it, with tears running over her
+cheeks. But at last she laid it down.
+
+"After to-morrow," she murmured. "Ah, why--why does a woman ever love
+twice?" And then she sobbed.
+
+But the canary sang, and the motes danced merrily in the sunbeams. And
+on the table where she had put it down lay "_Le Mariage de Chiffon_."
+
+
+II
+
+That evening, when Sir Hugh Maine came back to his rooms in Jermyn
+Street after dining out, he found a large man sprawling in one of his
+saddle-back chairs, puffing vigorously at a pipe that looked worn with
+long and faithful service. The man took the pipe out of his mouth and
+sprang up.
+
+"Hullo, Maine!" he cried. "D'you recognise the tobacco and me?"
+
+Hugh grasped his hand warmly. "Rather," he said. "Neither is changed. At
+least--h'm--I think you both seem a bit stronger even than usual. Who
+would have thought of seeing you, Manning? I did not know you were in
+Europe."
+
+"I came from Asia. I thought I should like to hear Melba before the end
+of the season. And it was getting sultry out there. So here I am."
+
+"And were those your only reasons?"
+
+"Give me a brandy-and-soda," said the other.
+
+Maine did as he was bid, lit a cigar, and sat down, stretching out his
+long legs. The other man took a pull at his glass, and spoke again.
+
+"I am very fond of music," he said; "and Melba sings very well."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Look here, Maine," Manning broke out suddenly, "you are right--I had
+another reason. Kipling says that those who have heard the East
+a-calling never heed any other voice. He's wrong though. The West has
+been calling me, or, at least, a voice in the West, and I have resisted
+it for a deuce of a time. But at last it became imperative."
+
+"A woman's voice, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tell me what is its _timbre_, if you care to."
+
+"I will. You're an old friend, and I can talk to you. But you tell me
+one thing first: Is a man really a fool to marry a woman with a past?"
+
+"You are going to?"
+
+"I have tried not to. I have been trying not to for three years. Listen!
+When I was travelling in Japan I met her. She was with an American
+called Glinn."
+
+"What?"
+
+"You knew him?"
+
+"No! It's all right. I was surprised, because at the moment I was
+thinking of that very name."
+
+"Oh! Well, she passed as Mrs Glinn; but, somehow, it got out that she
+was something else. The usual story, you know. People fought shy of
+her; but I don't think she cared much. Glinn was devoted to her, and she
+loved him, and was as true to him as any wife could have been. Then the
+tragedy came."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"Glinn died suddenly in Tokio, of typhoid. She nursed him to the end.
+And when the end came her situation was awful, so lonely and deserted.
+There wasn't a woman in the hotel who would be her friend; so I tried to
+come to the rescue, arranged her affairs, saw about the funeral, and did
+what I could. She was well off; Glinn left her nearly all his money. He
+would have married her, only he had a wife alive somewhere."
+
+"And you fell in love with her, of course?"
+
+"That was the sort of thing. If you knew her you would not wonder at it.
+She was not a bad woman. Glinn had been the only one. She loved him too
+much; that was all. She came to Europe, and lived in Paris for a time,
+keeping the name of Mrs Glinn. I used to see her sometimes, but I never
+said anything. You see, there was her past. In fact, I have been
+fighting against her for three years. I went to India to get cured; but
+it was no good. And now, here I am."
+
+"And she is in Paris?"
+
+"No, in London at present; but I didn't know her address till to-day. I
+think she had her doubts of me, and meant to give me the slip."
+
+"How did you find it out?"
+
+"Quite by chance. I was walking in Mill Street, Knightsbridge, and saw
+her pass in a victoria."
+
+Maine got up suddenly, and went over to the spirit-stand. "In Mill
+Street?" he said.
+
+"Yes. The carriage stopped at No. 100. She went in. A footman came out
+and carried in her rug. _Ergo_, she lives there."
+
+"How hot it is!" said Maine in a hard voice. He threw up one of the
+windows and leaned out. He felt as if he were choking. A little way down
+the street a half-tipsy guardsman was reeling along, singing his own
+private version of "Tommy Atkins." He narrowly avoided a lamp-post by an
+abrupt lurch which took him into the gutter. Maine heard some one laugh.
+It was himself.
+
+"Well, old chap," said Manning, who had come up behind him, "what would
+you advise me to do? I'm in a fix. I'm in love with Eve--that's her
+name; I can't live without her happily, and yet I hate to marry a woman
+with a--well, you know how it is."
+
+Maine drew himself back into the room and faced round. "Does she love
+you?" he asked; and there was a curious change in his manner towards his
+friend.
+
+"I don't know that she does," Manning said, rather uncomfortably. "But
+that would come right. She would marry me, naturally."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well, I mean the position. Lady Herbert Manning could go where Mrs
+Glinn could not, and all that sort of thing."
+
+"The only question is whether you can bring yourself to ask her?"
+
+"My dear chap, you don't put it too pleasantly."
+
+"It's the fact, though."
+
+Lord Herbert hesitated. Then he said dubiously, "I suppose so."
+
+Maine lit another cigar and sat down again. His face was very white.
+"You're rather conventional, Manning," he said presently.
+
+"Conventional! Why?"
+
+"You think her--this Mrs Glinn--a good woman. Isn't that enough for
+you?"
+
+"But, besides Eve and myself, there is a third person in the situation."
+
+"How on earth did you find out that?" exclaimed Maine.
+
+The other looked surprised. "How did I find out? I don't understand
+you."
+
+Maine recollected himself. He had made the common mistake of fancying
+another might know a thing because he knew it.
+
+"Who is this third person?" he asked.
+
+"Society."
+
+"Ah! I said you were conventional."
+
+"Every sensible man and woman is."
+
+"I don't know that I agree. But the third person does certainly
+complicate the situation. What are you going to do then?"
+
+Lord Herbert put down his pipe. It was not smoked out. "That's what I
+want to know," he answered.
+
+"Of course, there's the one way--of being unconventional. Then, there's
+the way of being conventional but unhappy. Is there any alternative?"
+
+Lord Herbert hesitated obviously, but at length he said: "There is, of
+course; but Mrs Glinn is a curious sort of woman. I don't quite know--"
+
+He paused, looking at his friend. Maine's face was drawn and fierce.
+
+"What's the row?" Lord Herbert asked.
+
+"Nothing; only I shouldn't advise you to try the alternative. That's
+all."
+
+"Maine, what do you mean?"
+
+"Just this," replied the other. "That I know Mrs Glinn, that I agree
+with you about her character--"
+
+"You know her? That's odd!"
+
+"I have known her for a year."
+
+They looked each other in the eyes while a minute passed. Then Lord
+Herbert said slowly, "I understand."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That I have come to the wrong man for advice."
+
+There was a silence, broken only by the ticking of a clock and the
+uneasy movements of Maine's fox-terrier, which was lying before the
+empty grate and dreaming of departed fires.
+
+At last Maine said: "To-day I asked Mrs Glinn to marry me."
+
+The other started perceptibly. "Knowing what I have told you?" he asked.
+
+"Not knowing it."
+
+"What--what did she say?"
+
+"Nothing. I am to see her to-morrow."
+
+Lord Herbert glanced at him furtively. "I suppose you will not go--now?"
+he said.
+
+"Yes, Manning, I shall," Maine answered.
+
+"Well," the other man continued, looking at his watch and yawning, "I
+must be going. It's late. Glad to have seen you, Maine. I am to be found
+at 80 St James's Place. Thanks; yes I will have my coat on. My pipe--oh!
+here it is. Good-night."
+
+The door closed, and Maine was left alone.
+
+"Will she tell me to-morrow, or will she be silent?" he said to himself.
+"That depends on one thing: Has love of truth the largest half of her
+heart, or love of me?"
+
+He sighed--at the conventionality of the world, perhaps.
+
+
+III
+
+"I am not at home to any one except Sir Hugh Maine," Mrs Glinn said to
+the footman. "You understand?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+He went out softly and closed the door.
+
+The English summer had gone back upon its steps that afternoon, and
+remembered the duty it owed to its old-time reputation. The canary, a
+puffed-out ball of ragged-looking feathers in its cage, seemed listening
+with a depressed attention to the beat of the cold rain against the
+window. The daisies, in their boxes, dripped and nodded in the wind.
+There was a darkness in the pretty room, and the smile of the china
+goblins was no longer yellow. Like many people who are not made of
+china, they depended upon adventitious circumstances for much of their
+outward show. When they were not gilded there was a good deal of the
+pill apparent in their nature.
+
+Mrs Glinn was trying not to be restless. She was very pale, and her dark
+eyes gleamed with an almost tragic fire; but she sat down firmly on the
+white sofa, and read Gyp, as Carmen may have read her doom in the cards.
+One by one the pages were turned. One by one the epigrams were made the
+property of another mind. But through all the lightness and humour of
+the story there crept like a little snake a sentence that Gyp had not
+written:--
+
+"Can I tell him?"
+
+And no answer ever came to that question. When the door-bell at last
+rang, Mrs Glinn laid down her novel carefully, and mechanically stood
+up. A change of attitude was necessary to her.
+
+Sir Hugh came in, and was followed by tea. They sat down by the tiny
+table, and discussed French literature. Flaubert and Daudet go as well
+with tea as Fielding and Smollett go with supper.
+
+But, when the cups were put down, Maine drove the French authors in a
+pack out of the conversation.
+
+"I did not come here to say what I can say to every woman I meet who
+understands French," he remarked.
+
+And then Mrs Glinn was fully face to face with her particular guardian
+devil.
+
+"No?" she said.
+
+She did not try to postpone the moment she dreaded. For she had a strong
+man to deal with, and, being a strong woman at heart, she generally held
+out her hand to the inevitable.
+
+"You have been thinking?" Maine went on.
+
+"Yes. What a sad occupation that is sometimes--like knitting, or
+listening to church-bells at night!"
+
+"Eve, let us be serious."
+
+"God knows I am," she answered. "But modern gravity is dressed in
+flippancy. No feeling must go quite naked."
+
+"Don't talk like that," he said. "As there is a nudity in art that may
+be beautiful, so there is a nudity in expression, in words, that may be
+beautiful. Eve, I have come to hear you tell me something. You know
+that." He glanced into her face with an anxiety that she did not fully
+understand. Then he said: "Tell it me."
+
+"There is--is so much to tell," she said.
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"He does not understand," she thought.
+
+He thought, "She does not understand."
+
+"And I am not good at telling stories."
+
+"Then tell me the truth."
+
+She tried to smile, but she was trembling. "Of course. Why should I
+not?" She hesitated, and then added, with a forced attempt at petulance,
+"But there is nothing so awkward as giving people more than they expect.
+Is there?"
+
+He understood her question, despite its apparent inconsequence, and his
+heart quickened its beating: "Give me everything."
+
+"I suppose I should be doing that if I gave you myself," she said
+nervously.
+
+"You know best," he answered; and for a moment she was puzzled by not
+catching the affirmative for which she had angled.
+
+"Do you want me very, very much?" she asked.
+
+"So much that, as I told you yesterday, I could not ask for you twice.
+Don't you understand?"
+
+"Yes. I could not marry a man who had bothered me to be his wife. One
+might as well be scolded into virtue. You want me, then, Hugh, and I
+want you. But--"
+
+Again she stopped, with sentences fluttering, as it seemed, on the very
+edges of her lips. Her heart was at such fearful odds with her
+conscience, that she felt as if he must hear the clashing of the swords.
+And he did hear it. He would fain have cheered on both the combatants.
+Which did he wish should be the conqueror? He hardly knew.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+"It is always so difficult to finish a sentence that begins with 'but,'"
+she began; and for the first time her voice sounded tremulous. "When two
+people want each other very much, there is always something that ought
+to keep them apart--at least, I think so. God must love solitude; it is
+His gift to so many." There were tears in her eyes.
+
+"Why should we keep apart, Eve?"
+
+"Because we should be too happy together, I suppose."
+
+He leaned suddenly forward and took both her hands in his. "How cold you
+are!" he said, startled.
+
+The words seemed to brace her like a sea-breeze.
+
+"Hugh," she said, "I wish to tell you something. There is a 'but' in the
+sentence of my life."
+
+He drew her closer to him, with a strange impulse to be nearer the soul
+that was about to prove itself as noble as he desired. But that very act
+prevented the fulfilment of his wish. The touch of his hands, the
+eagerness of his eyes, gave the victory to her heart. She shut the lips
+that were speaking, and he kissed them. Kisses act as an opiate on a
+woman's conscience. Only when Eve felt his lips on hers did she know her
+own weakness. Sir Hugh having kissed her, waited for the telling of the
+secret. At that moment he might as well have sat down and waited for the
+millennium.
+
+"What is it?" he said at last.
+
+"Nothing," she answered, "nothing." She spoke the word with a hard
+intonation.
+
+Hugh held her close in his arms, with a sort of strange idea that to do
+so would crush his disappointment. She was proving her love by her
+silence. Why, then, did he wish that she should speak? At last she said,
+in a low voice:--
+
+"There is one thing you ought to know. If I marry you, I marry you a
+beggar. I shall lose my fortune. I am not obliged to lose it, but I mean
+to give it up. Don't ask me why."
+
+He had no need to. He waited, but she was silent. So that was all. He
+kissed her again, loosened his arms from about her and stood up.
+
+"I have enough for both," he said.
+
+He did not look at her, and she could not look at him.
+
+"Are you going?" she said.
+
+"Yes; but I will call this evening."
+
+He was at the door, and had half-opened it when he turned back, moved by
+a passionate impulse.
+
+"Eve!" he cried, and his eyes seemed asking her for something.
+
+"Yes?" she said, looking away.
+
+There was a silence. Then he said "Good-bye!" The door closed upon him.
+
+Mrs Glinn stood for a moment where he had left her. In her mind she was
+counting the seconds that must elapse before he could reach the street.
+If she could be untrue to herself till then, she could be untrue to
+herself for ever. Would he walk down the stairs slowly or fast? She
+wanted to be a false woman so much, so very much, that she clenched her
+hands together. The action seemed as if it might help her to keep on
+doing wrong. But suddenly she unclasped her hands, darted across the
+room to the door, and opened it. She listened, and heard Hugh's
+footsteps in the hall. He picked up his umbrella, and unfolded it to be
+ready for the rain. The _frou-frou_ of the silk seemed to stir her to
+action.
+
+"Hugh!" she cried in a broken voice.
+
+He turned in the hall, and looked up.
+
+"Come back," she said.
+
+He came up the stairs three steps at a time.
+
+"Hugh," she said, leaning heavily on the balustrade, and looking away,
+"I have a secret to tell you. I have tried to be wicked to-day, but
+somehow I can't. Listen to the truth."
+
+"I need not," he answered. "I know it already."
+
+Then she looked at him, and drew in her breath: "You know it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How you must love me!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a ring at the hall door. The footman opened it, held a short
+parley with some one who was invisible, shut the door, and came upstairs
+with a card.
+
+Mrs Glinn took it, and read, "Lord Herbert Manning."
+
+He had decided to be unconventional too late.
+
+
+
+
+A SILENT GUARDIAN
+
+
+I
+
+The door of the long, dreary room, with its mahogany chairs, its
+littered table, its motley crew of pale, silent people, opened
+noiselessly. A dreary, lean footman appeared in the aperture, bowing
+towards a corner where, in a recess near a forlorn, lofty window, sat a
+tall, athletic-looking man of about forty-five years of age, with a
+strong yet refined face, clean shaven, and short, crisp, dark hair. The
+tall man rose immediately, laying down an old number of _Punch_, and
+made his way out, watched rather wolfishly by the other occupants of the
+room. The door closed upon him, and there was a slight rustle and a hiss
+of whispering.
+
+Two well-dressed women leaned to one another, the feathers in their hats
+almost mingling as they murmured: "Not much the matter with him, I
+should fancy."
+
+"He looks as strong as a horse; but modern men are always imagining
+themselves ill. He has lived too much, probably."
+
+They laughed in a suppressed ripple.
+
+At the end of the room near the door, under the big picture of a grave
+man in a frock-coat, holding a double eye-glass tentatively in his right
+hand as if to emphasise an argument--a young girl bent towards her
+father, who said to her in a low voice:
+
+"That man who has just left the room is Brune, the great sculptor."
+
+"Is he ill?" the girl asked.
+
+"It seems so, since he is here."
+
+Then a silence fell again, broken only by the rustle of turned pages and
+the occasional uneasy shifting of feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, in a small room across the hall, by a window through which
+the autumn sun streamed with a tepid brightness, Reginald Brune lay on a
+narrow sofa. His coat and waistcoat were thrown open; his chest was
+bared. Gerard Fane, the great discoverer of hidden diseases, raised
+himself from a bent posture, and spoke some words in a clear, even
+voice.
+
+Brune lifted himself half up on his elbow, and began mechanically to
+button the collar of his shirt. His long fingers did not tremble, though
+his face was very pale.
+
+He fastened the collar, arranged his loose tie, and then sat up slowly.
+
+A boy, clanking two shining milk-cans, passed along the pavement,
+whistling a music-hall song. The shrill melody died down the street, and
+Brune listened to it until there was a silence. Then he looked up at
+the man opposite to him, and said, as one dully protesting, without
+feeling, without excitement:--
+
+"But, doctor, I was only married three weeks ago."
+
+Gerard Fane gave a short upward jerk of the head, and said nothing. His
+face was calmly grave. His glittering brown eyes were fastened on his
+patient. His hands were loosely folded together.
+
+Brune repeated, in a sightly raised voice:--
+
+"I was married three weeks ago. It cannot be true."
+
+"I am here to tell the truth," the other replied.
+
+"But it is so--so ironic. To allow me to start a new life--a beautiful
+life--just as the night is coming. Why, it is diabolical; it is not
+just; the cruelty of it is fiendish."
+
+A spot of gleaming red stained each of the speaker's thin cheeks. He
+clenched his hands together, riveting his gaze on the doctor, as he went
+on:--
+
+"Can't you see what I mean? I had no idea--I had not the faintest
+suspicion of what you say. And I have had a very hard struggle. I have
+been poor and quite friendless. I have had to fight, and I have lost
+much of the good in my nature by fighting, as we often do. But at last I
+have won the battle, and I have won more. I have won goodness to give
+me back some of my illusions. I had begun to trust life again. I had--"
+
+He stopped abruptly. Then he said:--
+
+"Doctor, are you married?"
+
+"No," the other answered; and there was a note of pity in his voice.
+
+"Then you can't understand what your verdict means to me. Is it
+irrevocable?"
+
+Gerard Fane hesitated.
+
+"I wish I could hope not; but--"
+
+"But--?"
+
+"It is."
+
+Brune stood up. His face was quite calm now and his voice, when he spoke
+again, was firm and vibrating.
+
+"I have some work that I should wish to finish. How long can you give
+me?"
+
+"Three months."
+
+"One will do if my strength keeps up at all. Good-bye."
+
+There was a thin chink of coins grating one against the other. The
+specialist said:--
+
+"I will call on you to-morrow, between four and five. I have more
+directions to give you. To-day my time is so much taken up. Good-bye."
+
+The door closed.
+
+In the waiting-room, a moment later, Brune was gathering up his coat and
+hat.
+
+The two ladies eyed him curiously as he took them and passed out.
+
+"He does look a little pale, after all," whispered one of them. A
+moment later he was in the street.
+
+From the window of his consulting-room, Gerard Fane watched the tall
+figure striding down the pavement.
+
+"I am sorry that man is going to die," he said to himself.
+
+And then he turned gravely to greet a new patient.
+
+
+II
+
+Gerard Fane's victoria drew up at the iron gate of No. 5 Ilbury Road,
+Kensington, at a quarter past four the following afternoon. A narrow
+strip of garden divided the sculptor's big red house from the road.
+Ornamental ironwork on a brick foundation closed it in. The great
+studio, with its huge windows and its fluted pillars, was built out at
+one end. The failing sunlight glittered on its glass, and the dingy
+sparrows perched upon the roof to catch the parting radiance as the
+twilight fell. The doctor glanced round him and thought, "How hard this
+man must have worked! In London this is a little palace."
+
+"Will you come into the studio, sir, please?" said the footman in answer
+to his summons. "Mr Brune is there at present."
+
+"Surely he cannot be working," thought the doctor, as he followed the
+man down a glass-covered paved passage, and through a high doorway
+across which a heavy curtain fell. "If so, he must possess resolution
+almost more than mortal."
+
+He passed beyond the curtain, and looked round him curiously.
+
+The studio was only dimly lit now, for daylight was fast fading. On a
+great open hearth, with dogs, a log-fire was burning; and beside it, on
+an old-fashioned oaken settle, sat a woman in a loose cream-coloured
+tea-gown. She was half turning round to speak to Reginald Brune, who
+stood a little to her left, clad in a long blouse, fastened round his
+waist with a band. He had evidently recently finished working, for his
+hands still bore evident traces of labour, and in front of him, on a
+raised platform, stood a statue that was not far from completion. The
+doctor's eyes were attracted from the woman by the log-fire, from his
+patient, by the lifeless, white, nude figure that seemed to press
+forward out of the gathering gloom. The sculptor and his wife had not
+heard him announced, apparently, for they continued conversing in low
+tones, and he paused in the doorway, strangely fascinated--he could
+scarcely tell why--by the marble creation of a dying man.
+
+The statue, which was life size, represented the figure of a beautiful,
+grave youth, standing with one foot advanced, as if on the point of
+stepping forward. His muscular arms hung loosely; his head was slightly
+turned aside as in the attitude of one who listens for a repetition of
+some vague sound heard at a distance. His whole pose suggested an alert,
+yet restrained, watchfulness. The triumph of the sculptor lay in the
+extraordinary suggestion of life he had conveyed into the marble. His
+creature lived as many mollusc men never live. Its muscles seemed tense,
+its body quivering with eagerness to accomplish--what? To attack, to
+repel, to protect, to perform some deed demanding manfulness, energy,
+free, fearless strength.
+
+"That marble thing could slay if necessary," thought Gerard Fane, with a
+thrill of the nerves all through him that startled him, and recalled him
+to himself.
+
+He stepped forward to the hearth quietly, and Brune turned and took him
+by the hand.
+
+"I did not hear you," the sculptor said. "The man must have opened the
+door very gently. Sydney, this is Dr Gerard Fane, who is kindly looking
+after me."
+
+The woman by the fire had risen, and stood in the firelight and the
+twilight, which seemed to join hands just where she was. She greeted the
+specialist in a girl's young voice, and he glanced at her with the
+furtive thought, "Does she know yet?"
+
+She looked twenty-two, not more.
+
+Her eyes were dark grey, and her hair was bronze. Her figure was thin
+almost to emaciation; but health glowed in her smooth cheeks, and spoke
+in her swift movements and easy gestures. Her expression was responsive
+and devouringly eager. Life ran in her veins with turbulence, never with
+calm. Her mouth was pathetic and sensitive, but there was an odd
+suggestion of almost boyish humour in her smile.
+
+Before she smiled, Fane thought, "She knows."
+
+Afterwards, "She cannot know."
+
+"Have you a few moments to spare?" Brune asked him. "Will you have tea
+with us?"
+
+Fane looked at Mrs Brune and assented. He felt a strange interest in
+this man and this woman. The tragedy of their situation appealed to him,
+although he lived in a measure by foretelling tragedies. Mrs Brune
+touched an electric bell let into the oak-panelled wall, and her husband
+drew a big chair forward to the hearth.
+
+As he was about to sit down in it, Gerard Fane's eyes were again
+irresistibly drawn towards the statue; and a curious fancy, born,
+doubtless, of the twilight that invents spectres and of the firelight
+that evokes imaginations, came to him, and made him for a moment hold
+his breath.
+
+It seemed to him that the white face menaced him, that the white body
+had a soul, and that the soul cried out against him.
+
+His hand trembled on the back of the chair. Then he laughed to himself
+at the absurd fancy, and sat down.
+
+"Your husband has been working?" he said to Mrs Brune.
+
+"Yes, all the day. I could not tempt him out for even five minutes. But
+then, he has had a holiday, as he says, although it was only a
+fortnight. That was not very long for--for a honeymoon."
+
+As she said the last sentence she blushed a little, and shot a swift,
+half-tender, half-reproachful glance at her husband. But he did not meet
+it; he only looked into the fire, while his brows slightly contracted.
+
+"I think Art owns more than half his soul," the girl said, with the
+flash of a smile. "He only gives to me the fortnights and to Art the
+years."
+
+There was a vague jealousy in her voice; but then the footman brought in
+tea, and she poured it out, talking gaily.
+
+From her conversation, Fane gathered that she had no idea of her
+husband's condition. With a curious and fascinating naturalness she
+spoke of her marriage, of her intentions for the long future.
+
+"If Reginald is really seedy, Dr Fane," she said, "get him well quickly,
+that he may complete his commissions. Because, you know, he has
+promised, when they are finished, to take me to Italy, and to Greece, to
+the country of Phidias, whose mantle has fallen upon my husband."
+
+"Do not force Dr Fane into untruth," said Brune, with an attempt at a
+smile.
+
+"And is that statue a commission?" Fane asked, indicating the marble
+figure, that seemed to watch them and to listen.
+
+"No; that is an imaginative work on which I have long been engaged. I
+call it, 'A Silent Guardian.'"
+
+"It is very beautiful," the doctor said. "What is your idea exactly?
+What is the figure guarding?"
+
+Brune and his wife glanced at one another--he gravely, she with a
+confident smile.
+
+Then he said, "I leave that to the imagination."
+
+Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said slowly, "You have wrought
+it so finely that in this light my nerves tell me it is alive."
+
+Mrs Brune looked triumphant.
+
+"All the world would feel so if they could see it," she said; "but it is
+not to be exhibited. That is our fancy--his and mine. And now I will
+leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him of his ills, Dr Fane,
+won't you?"
+
+She vanished through the door at the end of the studio. The two men
+stood together by the hearth.
+
+"She does not know?" Fane asked.
+
+The other leaned his head upon his hand, which was pressed against the
+oak mantelpiece.
+
+"I am too cowardly to tell her," he said in a choked voice. "You must."
+
+"And when?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional manner, Fane gave
+some directions, and wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into
+the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:--
+
+"Shall I tell her now?" he asked gently.
+
+Brune nodded without speaking. His face looked drawn and contorted as he
+moved towards the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and the effort
+to remain calm put a strain upon him that was terrible.
+
+Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment--alone with the statue whose
+personality, it seemed to him, pervaded the great studio. In its
+attitude there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and blind eyes a
+resolution of intention, that took possession of his soul. He told
+himself that it was lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble;
+that it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no soul to burn
+with impulse or with agony; that its feet could never walk, its hands
+never seize or slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace. Then
+he looked at it again, and he shuddered.
+
+"I am over-working," he said to himself; "my nerves are beginning to
+play me tricks. I must be careful."
+
+And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the marble that could never
+feel to the man and woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his
+relation towards them.
+
+A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy with strangers. To the
+sculptor it was as if Fane held the keys of the gates of life and death
+for him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the consulting-room,
+the doctor had decided, almost of his own volition, that death should
+cut short a life of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it seemed
+as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought about, a tragedy that
+appealed to his imagination with peculiar force. His position towards
+this curiously interesting girl was strange. He had seen her for a
+quarter of an hour only, and now it was his mission to cause her the
+most weary pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The opening of the
+studio door startled him, and his heart, that usually beat so calmly,
+throbbed almost with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, facing him, and looking him full in the eyes
+with a violence of interrogation that was positively startling. "What is
+it you have to tell me? Reginald says you have ordered him to keep
+quiet--that you wish me to help you in--in something. Is he ill? May he
+not finish his commissions?"
+
+"He is ill," said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward frankness that
+surprised himself.
+
+She kept her eyes on his face.
+
+"Very ill?"
+
+"Sit down," the doctor said, taking her hands and gently putting her
+into a chair.
+
+With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women, she heard in those
+two words the whole truth. Her head drooped forward. She put out her
+hands as if to implore Fane's silence.
+
+"Don't speak," she murmured. "Don't say it; I know."
+
+He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue that made a silent third
+in their sad conference. How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy
+listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its expressionless eyes
+met his, and was there not a light in them? He knew there was not, yet
+he caught himself saying mentally:--
+
+"What does he think of this?" and wondering about the workings of a soul
+that did not, could not, exist.
+
+Presently the girl moved slightly, and said:--
+
+"He only knew this for certain yesterday?"
+
+"Only yesterday."
+
+"Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,"--she pointed towards the
+statue--"when he began that."
+
+"I don't understand," Fane said. "What can that marble have to do with
+his health or illness?"
+
+"When we first began to love each other," she said, "he began to work on
+that. It was to be his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He told
+me he would put all his soul into it, and that sometimes he fancied, if
+he died before me, his soul would really enter into that statue and
+watch over and guard me. 'A Silent Guardian' he has always called it.
+He must have known."
+
+"I do not think so," Fane said. "It was impossible he should."
+
+The girl stood up. The tears were running over her face now. She turned
+towards the statue.
+
+"And he will be cold--cold like that!" she cried in a heart-breaking
+voice. "His eyes will be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice
+silent."
+
+She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's arms. He held her a moment;
+and when he laid her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless
+though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon him. He remembered the
+previous day, the doomed man going down the street--his thought as he
+looked from the window of his consulting-room, "I am sorry that man is
+going to die."
+
+Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered, forming the very
+words with his lips, "I am not sorry."
+
+And the statue seemed to bend and to listen.
+
+
+III
+
+Six weeks passed away. Winter was deepening. Through the gloom and fog
+that shrouded London, Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable snow.
+The dying man had finished his work, and a strange peace stole over
+him. Now, when he suffered, when his body shivered and tried to shrink
+away, as if it felt the cold hands of death laid upon it, he looked at
+the completed statue, and found he could still feel joy. There had
+always been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element, so
+fantastic that he had ever striven to conceal it, of romance; and in his
+mind, affected by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew the
+curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from him, entered into his
+creation. As he became feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed
+towered above him in more God-like strength, that light flowed into the
+sightless eyes, that the marble muscles were tense with vigour, that a
+soul was born in the thing which had been soulless. The theory, held by
+so many, of re-incarnation upon earth, took root in his mind, and he
+came to believe that, at the moment of death, he would pass into his
+work and live again, unconscious, it might be, of his former existence.
+He loved the statue as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom
+spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney.
+
+Only, he sometimes said to her, pointing to his work:--
+
+"You will never be alone, unprotected, while he is there."
+
+And she tried to smile through the tears she could not always keep back.
+
+Gerard Fane was often with them. He sunk the specialist in the friend,
+and not a day passed without a visit from him to the great studio, in
+which the sculptor and his wife almost lived.
+
+He was unwearied in his attendance upon the sick man, unwavering in his
+attempts to soothe his sufferings. But, in reality, and almost against
+his will, the doctor numbered each breath his patient drew, noted with a
+furious eagerness each sign of failing vitality, bent his ear to catch
+every softest note in the prolonged _diminuendo_ of this human symphony.
+
+When Fane saw Mrs Brune leaning over her husband, touching the damp brow
+with her cool, soft fingers, or the dry, parched lips with her soft,
+rosy lips, he turned away in a sick fury, and said to himself:--
+
+"He is dying, he is dying. It will soon be over."
+
+For with a desperate love had entered into him a desperate jealousy, and
+even while he ministered to Brune he hated him.
+
+And the statue, with blind eyes, observed the drama enacted by those
+three people, the two men and the woman, till the curtain fell and one
+of the actors made his final exit.
+
+Fane's nerves still played him tricks sometimes. He could not look at
+the statue without a shudder; and while Brune imaginatively read into
+the marble face love and protection, the doctor saw there menace and
+hatred. He came to feel almost jealous of the statue, because Sydney
+loved it and fell in with her husband's fancy that his life was fast
+ebbing into and vitalising the marble limbs, that his soul would watch
+her from the eyes that were now without expression and thought.
+
+When Fane entered the studio, he always involuntarily cast a glance at
+the white figure--at first, a glance of shuddering distaste, then, as he
+acknowledged to himself his love for Sydney, a glance of defiance, of
+challenge.
+
+One evening, after a day of many appointments and much mental stress and
+strain, he drove up to Ilbury Road, was admitted, and shown as usual
+into the studio. He found it empty. Only the statue greeted him silently
+in the soft lamplight, that scarcely accomplished more than the defining
+of the gloom.
+
+"My master is upstairs, sir," said the footman. "I will tell him you are
+here."
+
+In a moment Sydney entered, with a lagging step and pale cheeks. Without
+thinking of the usual polite form of greeting, she said to Fane, "He is
+much worse to-day. There is a change in him, a horrible change. Dr Fane,
+just now when I was talking to him it seemed to me that he was a long
+way off. I caught hold of his hands to reassure myself. I held them. I
+heard him speaking, but it was as if his words came from a distance.
+What does it mean? He is not--he is not--"
+
+She looked the word he could not speak.
+
+Fane made her sit down.
+
+"I will go to him immediately," he said. "I may be able to do
+something."
+
+"Yes, go--do go!" she exclaimed with feverish excitement.
+
+Then suddenly she sprang up, and seizing his hands with hers, she said
+in a piercing voice: "You are a great doctor. Surely--surely you can
+keep this one life for me a little longer."
+
+As they stood, Fane was facing the statue, which was at her back, and
+while she spoke his eyes were drawn from the woman he loved to the
+marble thing he senselessly hated. It struck him that a ghastly change
+had stolen over it. A sudden flicker of absolute life surely infused it,
+quickened it even while she spoke, stole through the limbs one by one,
+welled up to the eyes as light pierces from a depth, flowed through all
+the marble. A pulse beat in the dead, cold heart. A mind rippled into
+the rigid, watching face. There was no absolute movement, and yet there
+was the sense of stir. Fane, absorbed in horror, seemed to watch an act
+of creation, to see life poured from some invisible and unknown source
+into the bodily chamber that had been void and dark.
+
+Motionless he saw the statue dead; motionless he saw the statue live.
+
+He drew his hands from Sydney's. He was too powerfully impressed to
+speak, but she looked up into his face, turned, and followed his eyes.
+
+She, too, observed the change, for her lips parted, and a wild
+amazement shone in her eyes. Then she touched Fane's arm, and whispered,
+rather in awe than in horror, "Go--go to him. See if anything has
+happened. I will stay and watch here."
+
+With a hushed tread Fane left the studio, passed through the hall,
+ascended the stairs to the sculptor's room. Outside the door he
+hesitated for a moment. He was trembling. He heard a clock ticking
+within. It sounded very loud, like a hammer beating in his ears. He
+pushed the door open at length, and entered. Brune's tall figure was
+sitting in an armchair, bowed over a table on which lay an open Art
+magazine.
+
+His head lay hidden on his arms, which were crossed.
+
+Fane raised the face and turned it up towards him.
+
+It was the face of a dead man.
+
+He looked at it, and smiled.
+
+Then he stole down again to the studio, where Sydney was still standing.
+
+"Yes?" she said interrogatively, as he entered.
+
+"He is dead," Fane answered.
+
+She only bowed her head, as if in assent. She stood a moment, then she
+turned her tearless eyes to him, and said:--
+
+"Why could not you save him?"
+
+"Because I am human," Fane answered.
+
+"And we did not say good-bye," she said.
+
+Fane was strung up. Conflicting feelings found a wild playground in his
+soul. His nerves were in a state of abnormal excitement, and something
+seemed to let go in him--the something that holds us back, normally,
+from mad follies. He suddenly caught Sydney's hand, and in a choked
+voice said:--
+
+"He is dead. Think a little of the living."
+
+She looked at him, wondering.
+
+"Think of the living that love you. He neither hates nor loves any more.
+Sydney! Sydney!"
+
+As she understood his meaning she wrung her hand out of his, and said,
+as one trying to clear the road for reason:--
+
+"You love me, and he bought you to keep him alive. Why, then--"
+
+A sick, white change came over her face.
+
+"Sydney! Sydney!" he said.
+
+"Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!"
+
+She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there till the servant hurried
+in.
+
+"Show Dr Fane out," she said. "He will not come here again."
+
+And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest, ready to strike himself for
+his folly, went without a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at
+the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile in its marble eyes?
+
+
+IV
+
+People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself.
+His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient,
+intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that
+went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered
+him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of mind for a
+physician to adopt; and he was even known to pronounce on sufferers
+sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well
+as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less
+crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had
+leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent
+misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again.
+Woman-like--for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable--she
+had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought
+about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She
+simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never
+left her.
+
+Again and again Fane called. She was always denied to him. Then he met
+her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on without a
+reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him
+was flagrantly unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had
+allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent
+hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney
+with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed
+through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to
+work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood,
+never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should
+have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of
+sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became
+by degrees a monomaniac.
+
+He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved passion, over the
+thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he
+was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but
+when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his
+passion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred.
+By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her
+suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain
+wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who
+consulted him.
+
+That his career was going to the dogs Fane understood, but he did not
+care. The vision of Sydney was always before him. He was for ever
+plotting and planning to be with her alone--against her will or not, it
+was nothing to him. And when he was alone with her, what then?
+
+He would know how to act.
+
+It was just in the dawn of the spring season over London that further
+inaction became insupportable to him. One evening, after a day of
+listless inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who no longer came
+in crowds to his door, he put on his hat and walked from Mayfair to
+Kensington, vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even absent;
+but he was a desperate man. All fear of what the world thinks or says,
+all consideration of outward circumstances and their relation to worldly
+happiness, had died within him. He was entirely abstracted and
+self-centred.
+
+He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury Road, with its line of
+artistic red houses, detached and standing in their gardens. The
+darkness was falling as he turned into it and began to walk up and down
+opposite the house with the big studio in which he was once a welcome
+visitor. There was a light in one of the bedroom windows and in the
+hall, and presently, as Fane watched, a brougham drove up to the door.
+It waited a few moments before the house, then some one entered the
+carriage. The door was banged; the horse moved on. Through the windows
+Fane saw a woman's face, pale, against the pane. It was the face of
+Sydney. For a moment he thought he would call to the coachman to stop.
+Then he restrained himself, and again walked up and down, waiting. She
+must return presently. He would speak to her as she was getting out of
+the carriage. He would force her to receive him.
+
+Towards nine o'clock his plans were altered by an event which took
+place. The house door opened, and the footman came out with a handful of
+letters for the post. The pillar-box was very near, and the man
+carelessly left the hall door on the jar while he walked down the road.
+Fane caught a glimpse of the hall that he knew so well. A step, and he
+could be in the house. He hesitated. He looked down the road. The man
+had his back turned, and was putting the letters into the box. Fane
+slipped into the garden, up the steps, through the door. The hall was
+empty. At his right was the passage leading to the studio. He stole down
+it, and tried the door. It opened. In the darkness the heavy curtain
+blew against his face. In another instant he closed the door softly at
+his back, and stood alone in the wide space and the blackness. Here
+there was not a glimmer of light. Thick curtains fell over the windows.
+No fire burned upon the hearth. There was no sound except when a
+carriage occasionally rolled down the road, and even then the wheels
+sounded distant.
+
+The silence and darkness had their effect upon Fane. He had done a
+desperate thing; but, until he found himself alone in the vacant
+studio, he had not fully realised the madness of his conduct, and how it
+would appear to the world. After the first moments of solitude had
+passed he came to himself a little, and half opened the door with the
+intention of stealing out; but he heard steps in the hall, and shrank
+back again like a guilty creature. He must wait, at least, until the
+household retired to rest.
+
+And, waiting, the old, haunting thoughts came back to assail him once
+more. He began to brood over Sydney's cruel treatment of him, over her
+vile suspicions. Here, in the atmosphere which he knew so well--for a
+faint, strange perfume always lingered about the studio, and gave to it
+the subtle sense of life which certain perfumes can impart--his emotions
+were gradually quickened to fury. He recalled the days of his intimacy
+with the sculptor, of his unrestrained converse with Sydney. He recalled
+his care for the invalid, persevered in, despite his passion, to the
+end. And then his thought fastened upon the statue, which, strange to
+say, he had almost forgotten.
+
+The statue!
+
+It must be there, with him, in the darkness, staring with those white
+eyes in which he had seen a soul flicker.
+
+As the recollection of it came to him, he trembled, leaning against the
+wall.
+
+He was in one of those states of acute mental tension in which the mind
+becomes so easily the prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly,
+laboriously, he began to frame a connection between the lifeless marble
+creature and his own dreary trouble.
+
+Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated him as a pariah, as a
+criminal. Her gentle nature had been transformed suddenly.
+
+By what subtle influence?
+
+Fane remembered the day of his first visit to Ilbury Road, and his
+curious imagination that the statue recognised and hated him.
+
+Had that hatred prompted action? Was there a devil lurking in the white,
+cold marble to work his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her presence
+for ever, the watching face had seemed to smile.
+
+Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was
+possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the
+execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the
+rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.
+
+His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on
+something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead
+sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers closed on it
+mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his
+forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his
+ears that irritated him.
+
+He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's carriage.
+
+His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his
+enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the
+silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the
+woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind
+against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose
+the winds upon his summer.
+
+His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly upon the slippery
+steel.
+
+Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him a criminal. What if he
+should earn the title? A sound as of the sea beating was in his ears,
+and flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision. What would a
+man worth the name do to his enemy?
+
+And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.
+
+He drew himself up straight and steadied himself against the wall,
+peering through the blackness in the direction of the statue.
+
+And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the atmosphere the breath
+of another living presence. He could fancy he heard the pulse of another
+heart beating near to his. The sensation increased upon him powerfully
+until suspicion grew into conviction.
+
+His intention had subtly communicated itself to the thing he could not
+see.
+
+He knew it was on guard.
+
+There was no actual sound, no movement, but the atmosphere became
+charged by degrees with a deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost
+in the air. A chill ran through Fane's blood. A sluggish terror began to
+steal over him, folding him for the moment in a strange inertia of mind
+and of body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his senses, like the
+paralysis of nightmare that envelops the dreamer. He opened his lips to
+speak, but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his hand clutched
+the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.
+
+His enemy--then Sydney.
+
+He would not be a coward. He struggled against the horror that was upon
+him.
+
+And still the cold increased, and the personality of Fane's invisible
+companion seemed to develop in power. There was a sort of silent
+violence in the hidden room, as if a noiseless combat were taking place.
+Waves of darkness were stirred into motion; and Fane, as a man is drawn
+by the retreating tides of the sea out and away, was drawn from the wall
+where he had been crouching.
+
+He stole along the floor, the dagger held in his right hand, his heart
+barely beating, his lips white--nearer, nearer to his enemy.
+
+He counted each step, until he was enfolded in the inmost circle of that
+deadly frost emanating from the blackness before him.
+
+Then, with a hoarse cry, he lifted his arm and sprang forward and
+upward, dashing the dagger down as one plunging it through a human
+heart.
+
+The cry died suddenly into silence.
+
+There was the sound of a heavy fall.
+
+It reached the ears of the servants below stairs.
+
+The footman took a light, and, with a scared face, went hesitatingly to
+the studio door, paused outside and listened while the female servants
+huddled in the passage.
+
+The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound appalled them, but at
+length the man thrust the door open and peered in.
+
+The light from the candle flickered merrily upon Fane's bowed figure,
+huddled face downwards upon the floor.
+
+His neck was broken.
+
+The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last earthly achievement, stood
+as if watching over him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.
+
+Some splinters of marble had been struck from the left breast, and among
+them, on the smooth parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.
+
+
+
+
+A BOUDOIR BOY
+
+
+I
+
+"It is so impossible to be young," Claude Melville said very wearily,
+and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a
+cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought,
+went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.
+
+His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish
+woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed
+to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so
+doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this
+conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On
+his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug
+with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had
+an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning,
+although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in
+the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.
+
+"It is so impossible to be young," Claude repeated, without emphasis. "I
+was middle-aged at ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I
+ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether
+improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy--the correct age for
+entering into one's dotage, I believe--I cannot expect to have a second
+childhood. I have never had a first."
+
+He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.
+
+His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing
+at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked
+among his divans and his roses.
+
+After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy remarked:--
+
+"Would you like to take a lesson in the art of being young?"
+
+"Immensely."
+
+"I know somebody who could give you one."
+
+"Really, Jimmy! What strange people you always know; curates, and women
+who have never written improper novels, and all sorts of beings who seem
+merely mythical to the rest of us!"
+
+"This is not a curate."
+
+"Then it must be a woman who has never written an improper novel."
+
+"It is."
+
+"And you mean to tell me seriously that there is such a person? To see
+her would be to take what _Punch_ calls a pre-historic peep. She must be
+ingeniously old."
+
+"She is sixty-four, and she is my aunt."
+
+"How beautiful of her. I am an only child, so I can never be an uncle.
+It is one of my lasting regrets, although I daresay that profession is
+terribly overcrowded like the others. But why is she sixty-four? It
+seems a risky thing for a woman to be?"
+
+"She takes the risk without thinking at all about it."
+
+"She must be very daring."
+
+"No; she's only completely natural."
+
+"Natural. What is that?"
+
+Jimmy laughed again. He was fond of Claude, but he and Claude met so
+often chiefly because they were extremes. Jimmy was a handsome athlete,
+who had been called to the bar, and persistently played cricket or
+football whenever the courts were sitting. He was cursed with a large
+private income, which he spent royally, and blessed with a good heart.
+Once he had appeared for the defence in a divorce case, which--lasting
+longer than he had anticipated, owing to the obvious guilt of all
+parties concerned in it, and the consequent difficulty of getting an
+innocent jury to agree about a verdict--had cost him a cricket match.
+Since then he had looked upon the law in the legendary way, as an ass,
+and spent most of his time in exercising his muscles. In the intervals
+of leisure which he allowed himself from sports and pastimes, he saw a
+good deal of Claude, who amused him, and whom he never bored. He called
+him a boudoir boy, but had a real liking for him, nevertheless, and
+sometimes longed to wake him up, and separate him from the absurd
+_chiffons_ with which he occupied his time. Now he laughed at him
+openly, and Claude did not mind in the least. They were really friends,
+however preposterous such a friendship might seem.
+
+"What is that? Well--my aunt. When you see her you will understand
+thoroughly."
+
+"Does she live in Park Lane or in Clapham?"
+
+"She lives in the country, in Northamptonshire, is very well off, and
+has a place of her own."
+
+"And a husband?"
+
+"No. She is a prosperous spinster, dines the local cricket team once a
+year, keeps the church going, knows all the poor people, and all the
+rich in the neighbourhood, and has only one fad."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"She always wears her hair powdered. Come down and stay with her, and
+she will teach you to be young."
+
+"Well--but I am afraid she will work me very hard."
+
+"Not she. You would like a new experience."
+
+Claude yawned, and blinked his long dark eyes in a carefully Eastern
+manner.
+
+"I am afraid there is no such thing left for me," he said with an
+elaborate dreariness. "Still, if your aunt will invite me, I will come.
+Of course you will accompany me, I must have a chaperon."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Ah!" Claude said, as a footman came softly into the room, "here is our
+absinthe. Now, Jimmy, please do forget your horrible football, and I
+will teach you to be decadent."
+
+"As my aunt will teach you to be young--you old boy."
+
+
+II
+
+"Mr Haddon has left, sir," said the footman, standing by Claude's
+bedside in the detached manner of the well-bred domestic. "Here is a
+note for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing."
+
+And he handed it on a salver.
+
+Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took it, without manifesting
+any of the surprise that he felt. When the footman had gone, he poured
+out a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a small table at
+his elbow, sipped it, and quietly opened the square envelope. The
+Northamptonshire sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour through
+the bedroom window. Outside the birds twittered in Miss Haddon's
+cherished garden. For Claude had come down at that contented spinster's
+invitation to spend a week with her, bringing Jimmy as chaperon, and
+this was the very first morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his
+chaperon had already "left," possibly to be a "half-back," or something
+equally ridiculous, at a local football match in a neighbouring
+village. Claude spread the note out and read it, while the birds chirped
+to the very manifest spring.
+
+   "DEAR BOY,--Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are
+   never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to
+   be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson
+   better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her
+   cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all
+   right. Study hard.--Yours ever,
+
+                                                       JIM."
+
+Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note
+four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown--a fine
+specimen of Cairene embroidery--closely round him, shut his eyes, and
+seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:--
+
+"Jimmy writes a very dull letter."
+
+At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner
+with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it
+very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his
+dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep,
+instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his
+manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath
+that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an
+intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously subtle tie, shot with
+rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in
+time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second--or
+breakfast--gong, which he encountered in the hall.
+
+"Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a
+boiled egg and a bit of toast?" he asked himself as he entered the
+breakfast-room.
+
+Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper
+English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed
+high, and void of cap.
+
+"You are very punctual," she said with a smile. "I was going to send up
+to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew
+told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy
+has run away and left us together, I find."
+
+"Yes, Jimmy has run away," Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the
+full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy
+face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the
+plot.
+
+"I hope you will not be bored," Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down
+together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to
+dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. "But, indeed, I
+think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country."
+
+Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly
+astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.
+
+"You don't agree with me?" she asked.
+
+"I cannot disagree, at least," he said; "because, to tell the truth, I
+am always in towns."
+
+"Probably you are happy there then," she rejoined, with a briskness that
+was agreeable, because it was not a hideous assumption, like the
+geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.
+
+But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this
+utterly erroneous belief.
+
+"Oh, please--" he said, with gentle rebuke, "I am not happy anywhere."
+
+Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly
+acute, scrutiny.
+
+"Perhaps you are too young to be happy," she said; "you have not
+suffered enough."
+
+"I have never been young," he answered, eating his devilled kidney with
+a silent pathos of perseverance--"never."
+
+"And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done.
+I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take
+an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a
+pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so.
+There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a
+day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a
+quarter of the different departments."
+
+"I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments
+till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?"
+
+"Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It
+is a most delightful time."
+
+Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and
+more surprised.
+
+"You enjoy the country, and London?" he said.
+
+"I enjoy everything," said Miss Haddon. "And surely most people do."
+
+"None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try
+everything, of course. That is one's duty."
+
+"Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine," Miss
+Haddon said. "If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as
+well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have
+thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of
+facts."
+
+"Such as what books?"
+
+"Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But
+it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the
+moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?"
+
+"They ignore nothing."
+
+"Not even duty?"
+
+"Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored."
+
+Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon.
+She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to
+the egg.
+
+"That, I understand," she remarked briskly, "is the doctrine of what is
+called in London the young decadent; and in the country--forgive
+me--sometimes the young devil of the day."
+
+"I am decadent, Miss Haddon," Claude said with a gentle pride that was
+not wholly ungraceful.
+
+The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy
+interest.
+
+"How exciting," she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with
+a completely natural air. "You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy
+isn't one, is he?"
+
+"Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for
+lunch."
+
+"Do tell me--how does one do it?"
+
+She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown
+in one of her own orchards.
+
+Claude raised his dark eyebrows.
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"How does one become a decadent? I have heard so much about you all,
+about your cleverness, and your clothes, and the things you write, and
+draw, and smoke, and think, and--and eat--"
+
+She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.
+
+"Oh, Mr Melville!" she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great
+silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, "will
+you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me,
+teach me to be a decadent."
+
+"But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo--" Claude began, and
+stopped just in time. "I mean--er--"
+
+He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the
+boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for
+an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to
+be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.
+
+"Will you?" Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot.
+
+"Well, we might try," Claude answered doubtfully.
+
+He was remarking to himself:--
+
+"Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't understand his aunt!"
+
+She was murmuring in her mind: "I have always heard they have no sense
+of humour!"
+
+
+III
+
+"Mr Melville, Mr Melville," cried Miss Haddon's voice towards evening on
+the following day, "the absinthe has arrived!"
+
+Claude came out languidly into the hall.
+
+"Has it?" he said dreamily.
+
+"Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue books--I mean the yellow
+books, and" (rummaging in a just-opened parcel) "yes, here are two
+novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those rose-tipped cigarettes.
+Now, what ought I to do? Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea,
+or what?"
+
+Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion, but her grey hair
+crowned an eager face decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion
+was lulled to rest.
+
+"We had better have our tea," he answered slowly. "I like my absinthe
+about an hour or so before dinner."
+
+"Very well. Tea, James, and muffins."
+
+The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the
+unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with
+books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude
+placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of
+rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon regarded him
+expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming,
+"What's to be done now?"
+
+The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct
+it.
+
+"Please try to be a little--a--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"A little more restrained," he said. "What we feel about life is that it
+should never be crude. All extremes are crude."
+
+"What--even extremes of wickedness?"
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or happiness, or anything of that
+kind. When one comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really
+absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous what is called a happy
+face always looks, covered with those dreadful, wrinkled things named
+smiles, all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you agree with me.
+Happiness drives all thought out of a face, and distorts the features in
+a most painful manner. When I go out walking on a Bank Holiday, a thing
+I seldom do, I always think a cheerful expression the most degrading of
+all expressions. A contented clerk disfigures a whole street--really."
+
+Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown very sombre during this
+speech, and she did not brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins
+on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.
+
+"Perhaps you are right," she said. "I daresay happiness is
+unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the floor too?"
+
+Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his hostess. Sitting on the
+floor was one of his pet originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides,
+Miss Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of thing.
+
+"I do it because I feel so Turkish," he explained. "Otherwise, it would
+be an assumption, and not naïve. People make a great mistake in fancying
+the decadent is unnatural. If anything, he is too natural. He follows
+his whim. The world only calls us natural when we do everything we
+dislike. If Rossetti had played football every Saturday, his poetry
+would have been much more read in England than it has been. Yes, please,
+I will have another muffin."
+
+"But I think I feel Turkish too," Miss Haddon said calmly. "Yes, I am
+sure I do. I ought not to resist it; ought I? Otherwise I shall be
+flying in the face of your beautiful theories." And she squatted down on
+the floor at his elbow.
+
+Claude had a wonderful purple moment of acute irritation, during which
+he felt strangely natural. Miss Haddon did not appear to notice it. She
+went on bombarding him with questions in a cheery manner until he began
+to be rather ill, but her face never lost its expression of grave
+sadness, a strange, inexplicable melancholy that was not in the least
+Bank Holiday. The contrast between her expression and her voice worried
+Claude, as an intelligent pantaloon might worry a clown. He felt that
+something was wrong. Either face or voice required alteration. And then
+questions are like death--extremely irksome. Besides, he found it
+difficult to answer many of them, difficult to define precisely the
+position of the decadent, his intentions and his aims. It was no use to
+tell Miss Haddon that he didn't possess either the one or the other.
+Always with the same definitely sad face, the same definitely cheerful
+voice, she declined to believe him. He fidgeted on his cushion, and his
+Turkish placidity threatened to be seriously disturbed.
+
+The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion. Claude arranged a
+glass of it, much diluted with water, for the benefit of his hostess,
+and she began to sip it with an air of determined reverence.
+
+"It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt," she said after a while.
+
+Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.
+
+"When they drag a trail over a course and satisfy the hounds with a dead
+rabbit at the end of it," she explained.
+
+"My dear lady," he protested plaintively. "Really, you do not grasp the
+inner meaning of what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect
+sensation will steal over you, a curious happy detachment from
+everything, as if you were floating in some exquisite element. You will
+not care what happens, or what--"
+
+"But must I drink it all before I feel detached?" she asked. "It's
+really so very nasty, quite disgusting to the taste. Surely you think
+so."
+
+"I drink it for its after-effect."
+
+"Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the moment, and gives us
+the pleasure of self-satisfaction ultimately?"
+
+"I don't know," the boy exclaimed abruptly. To compare absinthe to a
+good act seemed to him quite intolerable.
+
+He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was glad when the dressing
+gong sounded in the hall.
+
+Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.
+
+"I rather admire you for drinking this stuff," she said. "I am sure you
+do it to mortify the flesh. A Lenten penance out of Lent is most
+invigorating to the mind."
+
+As Claude went up to dress, he felt as if he never wished to touch
+absinthe again. The glitter of its personality was dulled for him now
+that it was looked upon as merely a nasty sort of medicine to be
+indulged in as a mortification of the flesh, like wearing a hair shirt,
+or rejecting meat on Fridays. He found Miss Haddon painfully prosaic. It
+seemed almost silly to be a decadent in her company. To feel Turkish
+alone was graceful and quaint, almost intellectual, but to have an old
+lady feeling Turkish, too, and squatting on the floor to emphasise the
+sensation, was tragic, seemed to bring imbecility very near. Claude
+dressed with unusual agitation, and made a distinct failure of his tie.
+
+All through dinner Miss Haddon talked optimistically about her prospects
+as a successful decadent, much as if she were discussing her future on
+the Stock Exchange, or as the editor of a paper. She calculated that at
+her present rate of progress she ought to be almost on a level with her
+guest by the end of the week, and spoke hopefully of ceasing to take any
+interest in the ordinary facts of life, of learning a proper contempt
+for all healthy-minded humanity, and of appreciating at its proper value
+what seems to ordinary people, weak-kneed affection in literature, in
+art, and, above all, in movement and in appearance. Her bright eyes
+flashed upon Claude beneath her crown of powdered hair, as she talked,
+and the big room rang with her jovial voice.
+
+The boy began to feel exceedingly confused. Yet he had never been less
+bored. Miss Haddon might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her net
+personality was far less wearisome than that of many a town-bred sylph.
+Unconsciously Claude ate with a hearty appetite, indulged immoderately
+in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a beautifully-cooked Spanish
+onion without thinking of the committal of a crime. During dessert Miss
+Haddon gave him a racy description of a rural cricket match and of the
+supper and speeches which followed it, and he found himself laughing
+heartily and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself up short with
+a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?" she asked; "or would they be out of
+order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets."
+
+"Dear lady, please, we have no tenets," he protested. "Do remember that,
+or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any
+games."
+
+"Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the 'Yellow Book'?"
+
+She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something
+in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:
+
+"Please--please teach me Halma."
+
+That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph.
+
+Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had
+he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.
+
+
+IV
+
+Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding
+chickens--under protest.
+
+"I mean to give it up, of course," the former said. "It's a degrading
+pursuit; it's almost as bad as the 'things that Jimmy does,' the things
+that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so
+magnificent."
+
+She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged
+meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:
+
+"Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me,
+are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the
+eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and
+supple?"
+
+All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over
+Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to
+pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly
+yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.
+
+"There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe,"
+she continued. "But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for
+subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object."
+
+Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered
+furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with
+a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel
+and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her
+furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured, for the first
+time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.
+
+Silently he resolved to give instructions to his tailor not to spare the
+padding in his future coats. He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for
+which he had occasionally sighed, had not come into fashion again. After
+all, modern dress had its little advantages. Miss Haddon was still
+scattering grain, rather in the attitude of Millet's "_Sower_," and
+still talking reflectively.
+
+"We must try to convert Jimmy," she said. "I have a good deal of
+influence over him, Mr Melville. We must try to make him more like you,
+more thoughtful, more inactive, more frankly sensual, more fond of
+sofas, in the future than he has been in the past. Do you know, I am
+ashamed to say it, but I don't believe I have ever seen Jimmy lying on a
+sofa. Poor Jimmy! Look at that hen! She is choking. Hens gulp their food
+so! And then, he's inclined to be persistently unselfish. That must be
+stopped too. I have learnt from you that to be decadent one must be
+acutely and untiringly selfish. The blessings of selfishness! What a
+volume might be written upon them! Mr Melville, all chickens must be
+decadent, for all chickens are entirely selfish. It is strange to think
+that the average fowl is more advanced in ethics--is it ethics I
+mean?--than the average man or woman, is it not? And we ate a decadent
+at dinner last night. I feel almost like a cannibal."
+
+She threw away the last grain, and was silent. But suddenly Claude
+spoke.
+
+"Miss Haddon," he said, and his voice had never sounded so boyish to her
+before, "you have been laughing at me for nearly a week." He paused,
+then he went on, rather unevenly, in the up-and-down tones induced by
+stifled excitement, "and I have never found it out until this moment. I
+suppose you think me a great fool. I daresay I have been one. But please
+don't--I mean, please let us give up acting our farce."
+
+"But have we reached the third act?" she said.
+
+They were walking through the garden, among the crocuses and violets
+now.
+
+"I am sure I don't know," he answered, trying to seem easy. "Perhaps it
+is a farce in one act."
+
+"Perhaps it is not a farce at all, my dear boy," she said very gently
+and with a sudden old-world gravity that was not without its grace.
+
+They reached the house. She put her basket down on the oak table in the
+wide hall, and faced him in the eager way that was natural to her, and
+that was so youthful.
+
+"Mr Melville--Claude," she said, as she held out her hand, clad in a
+very countrified brown glove, with a fan-like gauntlet, "of all Jimmy's
+friends I think I shall like you the best. People who have acted
+together ought to be good comrades."
+
+He took the hand. That seemed necessary.
+
+"But I haven't been acting," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes, you have," she answered, "and I have only been on the stage
+for a week; while you--well, I suppose you have been on it for at least
+two or three years. I am taking my farewell of it this morning, and
+you--?"
+
+The boy's face was deeply flushed, but he did not look, or feel,
+actually angry.
+
+"I don't know about myself yet," he said.
+
+"Think it all over," the old lady exclaimed. "And now let us have lunch.
+I am hungry."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jimmy arrived that evening.
+
+"How old are you, Claude?" he exclaimed, clapping his friend on the
+back.
+
+"I am not sure," Claude replied. "But I almost begin to wish that I were
+sixty-four."
+
+
+
+
+THE TEE-TO-TUM
+
+
+I
+
+Jack Burnham was quite determined not to marry Mrs Lorton, and if there
+was one thing in the world upon which she had rigidly set her heart it
+was upon refusing him. There were several things about her which he
+deliberately disliked. In the first place, she was a widow, and he
+always had an uneasy suspicion that widows, like dynamite, were
+mysteriously dangerous. Then her Christian name was Harriet, and she
+never took afternoon tea. The former of these two facts indicated,
+according to his ideas, that her parents were people of bad taste, the
+latter that she possessed notions that were against nature. Also, she
+was well informed, and knew it. This condition of the mind, he
+considered, should be the blessed birthright of the male sex, and he
+looked upon her as an usurper. She didn't wear mourning, which implied
+that she was forgetful--of dead husbands. Then--well, that was about all
+he had against her, and it was quite enough.
+
+As for her, the whole nature of her protested eloquently against the way
+he waxed his moustache, against the colour of his brown hair, and of
+his brown boots, against his lounging gait, and his opinion of Mr
+Gladstone. He had a certain arrogance about him, when with her, which
+arose in truth from his fear of her intellectual prowess. This led her
+to dub him intolerably conceited. She desired to humble him, and
+considered that she could best do so by refusing his offer of marriage.
+But she must first persuade him to propose. That was the difficulty.
+
+They were constantly meeting in London. You always constantly meet your
+enemies in London. And, when they met, they always devoted a great deal
+of time to the advancement of the tacit and polite quarrel between them.
+They argued with one another in Hyde Park on fine mornings, and were
+really disgusted with one another at dinner parties and "At Homes." He
+thought her fast--at balls; and she had once considered him blatant--at
+a Marlborough House garden party. This last fact, indeed, put the coping
+stone to the feud between them, for Mrs Lorton expressed her opinion to
+a friend, and Burnham, of course, got to know of it. To be thought
+blatant at Marlborough House was really intolerable. One might as well
+be pronounced to have had a heathen air at Lambeth Palace.
+
+Distinctly, Jack Burnham and Harriet Lorton were acutely antagonistic.
+
+Yet, there must surely have been some strange, unknown link of sympathy
+between them, for they both caught the influenza on the same day--it
+was a Sunday morning--and both permitted it to develop into double
+pneumonia.
+
+After all, spar as we may, are we not all brothers and sisters?
+
+The double pneumonia ought to have drawn them together; but, as he lived
+in Piccadilly and she in Queen's Gate, and each was thoroughly
+self-centred--nothing produces egoism so certainly as influenza--neither
+knew of the illness of the other.
+
+Providence denied to both that subtle joy, and they got to the mutton
+chop and chipped potato stage of convalescence in childlike ignorance of
+each other's misfortune.
+
+There must certainly have been a curious community of mind between them,
+for both their doctors ordered them to Margate, and they both took rooms
+at Westgate. Now a similar taste in seaside places is undoubtedly an
+excellent foundation for eternal friendship. Let the world crumble in
+atoms, two people who both like Westgate will still find something to
+talk about amid the confusion occasioned by the dissolution of kingdoms.
+
+Jack Burnham arrived at the St Mildred's Hotel on a Thursday, with his
+man.
+
+Harriet Lorton came on the following Friday, with her maid.
+
+Neither had any notion of the other's proceedings until they met back to
+back, as you shall presently hear.
+
+
+II
+
+In ordinary circumstances of health and vigour, Burnham and Mrs Lorton
+possessed dispositions of quite singular vivacity, looked upon life as a
+fairly good, if rather practical joke, and were fully disposed to
+consider happiness their _métier_. Being modern, they sometimes
+concealed their original gaiety, as if it were original sin, and
+pretended to a cruel cynicism; yet at heart, it must be confessed, they
+were as lively as poor children playing in the street. But when they
+went to Westgate, influenza had had its fill of them, and the infinite
+pathos of the world, and of all that is therein, appealed to them with a
+seizing vitality. Burnham, on the Thursday, was moved to tears at
+Birchington Station by the sight of a mother and eleven children missing
+the last train to Margate. Harriet Lorton, on the following Friday, had
+hysterics at Victoria, when she perceived a young lady drop a cage
+containing a grey parrot, and smash the bird's china bath upon the
+platform. The fact that the parrot had been actually taking its bath at
+the moment, and was left by the misfortune in much confusion and no
+water, struck her so poignantly as nearly to break her heart. She wept
+in a first-class carriage all the way down, and arrived at Westgate,
+towards ten o'clock, in a state of complete collapse.
+
+Mr Burnham was in bed drinking a cup of soup at this time. He heard the
+luggage being carried up, but did not suspect whose it was.
+Nevertheless, the ravages of disease led him to consider the slight
+noise and bustle a personal insult, and he lay awake most of the night
+brooding upon the wrongs of which he, erroneously, believed himself to
+be the victim.
+
+It was on the next morning that the two invalids met back to back in a
+shelter with glass partitions upon the lawn.
+
+Mrs Lorton, smothered in wraps, had taken up her position on the bench
+that faces Westgate without noticing a bowed and ulstered figure, shod
+in brown boots, sitting in a haggard posture on the reciprocal bench
+that faces the sea. Nobody was about, for it was not the season, and Mrs
+Lorton began slowly to weep on account of the loneliness. It struck her
+disordered fancy as so personal. Creation was sending her to Coventry.
+At her back the tears ran over Burnham's handsome countenance. He was
+staring at the sea, and thinking of all the people who had been drowned
+in water since the days of the Deluge. He wondered how many there were,
+and cried copiously, considering himself absolutely alone and free to
+give vent to his feelings, which struck him as splendidly human.
+
+When two people weep together one of them usually weeps louder than the
+other, and, on this occasion, Burnham made the most noise. He became,
+in fact, so uproariously solicitous about the drowned men and women whom
+he had never known that Mrs Lorton gradually was made aware of the
+presence of another mourner who was not a mute. She turned round and
+beheld a back convulsed with emotion. Its grief went straight to her
+heart, and, casting her own sorrow and her sense of etiquette to the
+wind--which blew bracingly from the north-east--she tapped upon the
+glass screen that bisected the shelter.
+
+Burnham took no notice. He was too deeply involved in grief. So Mrs
+Lorton knocked again, with all the vigour that incipient convalescence
+gave to her. This time Burnham was startled, and turned a hollow face
+upon her. They stared at each other through the intervening glass for a
+moment in wild surprise, the tears congealing upon their cheeks.
+
+Beyond Burnham Mrs Lorton saw the whirling white foam of the sea. Beyond
+Mrs Lorton Burnham saw the neat villas of Westgate. It struck them both
+as a tremendous moment, and they trembled.
+
+Remember that they were very weak.
+
+At last he, conceiving naturally that she had recognised and desired to
+summon him, walked slowly round to her side of the shelter, and held out
+to her a wavering hand.
+
+"Good heavens!" he ejaculated. "The last person I--"
+
+"You!" said Mrs Lorton. "How astonishing! What on earth--"
+
+He seized the opening she gave him with all the ardour of the
+whole-souled influenza patient.
+
+"I have been ill," he said with a deep pathos, "very, very ill. My
+symptoms were most extraordinary."
+
+He sank down heavily at her side, and continued, "I doubt if any one has
+endured such agony before. It began on a Sunday with--"
+
+"So did mine," Mrs Lorton interrupted with some show of determination.
+"You cannot conceive what it was like. I had pains in every limb, every
+limb positively. The doctor--"
+
+"Of course I went straight to bed," he remarked with firmness. "I knew
+at once what was wrong. But mine was no ordinary case. Talk of
+thumbscrews! Why--"
+
+"For nights I tossed in agony," she went on with a poignant self-pity,
+so much engrossed that she never noticed the brown boots which on other
+occasions had so deeply offended her. "Morphia and eucalyptus were no--"
+
+"He said it was pneumonia, double pneumonia," Burnham concluded
+emphatically. "How I came through it I shall never know." His smile at
+this point was wan, and seemed to deprecate existence. "I suppose there
+is still some work for me to do. At the same time, I--"
+
+"Mine was also double!" Mrs Lorton said with distinct tartness,
+condemning privately his arrogance, and noticing the boots with a
+strange feeling of sudden and unutterable despair.
+
+"It is all so much worse for a woman," she added vaguely, with some idea
+of out-doing him, such as she had felt once or twice at dinner parties,
+when her epigrams had been smarter than his.
+
+"The strong possess a greater capacity for suffering than the weak,"
+Burnham retorted. "Medical science tells us that--"
+
+"Please spare me the revelations of the dissecting-room," she cried
+bitterly; "I am in no condition to bear them."
+
+She glanced at him with pathetic eyes, and added, "I ought to have gone
+to Margate."
+
+"I ought to have gone there too," he said.
+
+"Really, you make the conversation sound like one of Maeterlinck's
+plays," she rejoined. "Do be more original."
+
+The reproach cut him to the heart. He never knew why, but he felt so
+much injured that he with great difficulty restrained his tears.
+
+"Women can be very brutal," he said moodily, biting his lips, and
+wondering how many authors it was necessary to read in order never to be
+at a disadvantage with a clever woman.
+
+Mrs Lorton was conscious that she had hurt him, and instead of being her
+nice, natural self and glorying in the fact, she experienced a sense of
+profound pity that gave her quite a tightened feeling about the left
+side. However, she only said, "Men can be very selfish"--a generality
+that many people consider as convincing as a bomb--and got up to go.
+
+"I am staying at the St Mildred's," she remarked. "It is the dull
+season, so I am the only person there at present."
+
+"I beg your pardon," Burnham said, also getting upon his feet, "I am
+there too. My number is 12 and I have a private sitting-room. I do not
+feel up to the coffee-room yet."
+
+Mrs Lorton turned as pale as ashes with vexation. She had no private
+sitting-room, and had ordered dinner in the coffee-room for that very
+evening.
+
+She felt herself at a disadvantage as they walked in a gloomy silence
+towards the beach.
+
+
+III
+
+Three days had passed away, and Jack Burnham had found that he was, in
+his own phrase, "up to the coffee-room" after all. In consequence, Mrs
+Lorton and he dined there every evening at separate tables. A sense of
+rivalry--and there is no rivalry more keen than that between contesting
+invalids--prevented both of them from eating as much as they would have
+liked. When the widow refused a course, Burnham shook his head at it
+wearily, and they rose from their meals in a state of passionate hunger,
+which they solaced with captain's biscuits in the seclusion of their
+bedrooms. Since they had Westgate almost to themselves, and the weather
+was becoming bright and warm, they were much out of doors; but their
+profound depression still continued, and they were as morbid human
+beings as Max Nordau could have desired to meet with when he was seeking
+for specimens of degeneration.
+
+Their continual greedy anxiety to narrate the details of their physical
+and mental sensations drove them to seek one another's company, and soon
+it became an understood thing that they should sit together on the lawn
+or in the winter garden during the morning, and stroll feebly in the
+direction of Margate during the breezy afternoon.
+
+These times were times of battle, of a struggle for supremacy in
+symptoms that led to much heart searching and to infinite exaggeration.
+Mrs Lorton, being a woman, generally got the best of it, and Burnham
+entered the hotel at tea-time with set teeth, and an appalling sense of
+injustice and of failure in his breast. One night at dinner, determined
+to conquer or to die, he refused everything but soup; and noted, with a
+grim satisfaction, that Mrs Lorton could hardly contain her chagrin at
+having inadvertently devoured a cutlet and a spoonful of jelly. Indeed,
+her temper was so much upset by this occurrence that she went straight
+to bed on leaving the coffee-room, and sent down a message the next
+morning to say that she was far too ill to venture out.
+
+Burnham, therefore, sat in the shelter alone, cursing the craft of
+woman. In the intervals between the cursings he was conscious of a
+certain loneliness that seemed to be in the atmosphere. It hovered with
+the seagulls above the sprightly waves, swept over the lawn hand in hand
+with the wind, basked in the sunshine, and companioned him closely upon
+the esplanade as he walked home to lunch. He was puzzled by it.
+
+At lunch-time Mrs Lorton was still confined to bed, so her maid
+announced. Burnham promptly began to wonder whether she was going to
+die. He strolled towards Margate wondering, and found himself presently
+in the sunset, gazing with tears in his eyes at the silhouette of
+Margate Pier, and, mentally, placing a reverent tribute of flowers from
+Covent Garden upon her early grave in Brompton Cemetery.
+
+He also found himself, later, dropping a tear at the thought of his own
+death, for of course with his weak health he could not hope to outlive
+anybody for very long. Mrs Lorton's absence at dinner struck him as more
+pathetic than all the misery of the travailing universe, until he
+remembered that at last he could gratify his appetite, and even accept
+two _entrées_ at the hands of the waiter.
+
+Life, if it is full of sorrows, is also full of consolations.
+
+He ate steadily for a couple of hours, pitying himself all the time.
+
+Next day Mrs Lorton re-appeared in a very bad temper. Her seclusion,
+although it had enabled her to score several points off her rival, had
+been in other respects wearisome and vexatious. She barely nodded to
+Burnham, and went out towards the shelter alone. He followed furtively,
+longing, as usual, for condolence, and presently saw her seat herself
+facing the sea. The strained relations between them seemed to forbid his
+placing himself at her side. The back-to-back posture would be more
+illustrative of the exact position of affairs, and Burnham's nicety and
+accuracy of mind induced him accordingly to face Westgate. Their
+positions of the first day were thus reversed. She looked at the sea; he
+stared at the villas. Strange turmoil of life, in which we never know
+which way we shall be facing next! It struck Burnham suddenly, and so
+forcibly, _à propos_ of his and Mrs Lorton's reversal, that the ready
+tears sprang to his eyes. How would it all end? Man spins about like a
+tee-to-tum, bowing to all points of the compass. The time comes when the
+tee-to-tum runs down--and what then? Burnham was certainly run down.
+That must be his excuse for what he did. He glanced behind him through
+the glass screen, and saw by the motion of Mrs Lorton's back that she
+was sobbing. In truth, the sight of the dancing waves had set her
+thinking of all the poor people who have been drowned in water since the
+beginning of things. Poor dead folk! She was trembling with emotion, and
+still wept mechanically when she found Mr Burnham on her side of the
+shelter proposing to her with all his might and main. He was asking her
+to comfort him, to be a true woman and shield him with her strength, to
+support his tottering footsteps along the rugged ways of life, to dry
+his tears and stay the agonies of his shaken soul.
+
+"Your health will help my weakness," he said. "Your vigour will teach me
+to be strong."
+
+It was a strange proposal, and she began to defend herself from his
+imputations, stating her maladies, marshalling her symptoms of decay in
+an imposing procession.
+
+But it was no good. He had taken her unawares and got the start of her.
+She felt it, and his determined weakness obtained a power over her which
+she could never afterwards explain.
+
+His influenza triumphed, for she forgot her resolution.
+
+A wave of morbid pity for him swept over the woman in her. If he was
+disorganised now, what would be his condition if she refused him?
+
+"Have I the right," she asked herself, "to devote a fellow-creature to
+everlasting misery?"
+
+Her influenza told her plainly that she had not.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+People say that the marriage will really come off.
+
+Jack Burnham announced it everywhere before Mrs Lorton got thoroughly
+well, and Mrs Lorton told everybody while Jack Burnham was still what
+his friends called "awfully dicky."
+
+One can but hope that their married life will be passed on the same side
+of the shelter. If he persists in facing the sea, and she in staring at
+the villas--well, they will live most of Ibsen's plays!
+
+But at least they will be modern.
+
+And so the tee-to-tum, thought of pathetically by Burnham on a memorable
+occasion, spins round, and the sea and the villas are the two aspects of
+life.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.
+
+Duplicate title headings at the beginning of the book and before each
+story have been removed.
+
+The following corrections were made to the text:
+
+p. 267: missing period added (danced merrily.)
+
+p. 325: single close quote to double close quote ("I hope you will not
+be bored,")
+
+p. 328: healthly to healthy (fresh and healthy interest)
+
+p. 331: be to he ("A little more restrained," he said.)
+
+p. 349: paragraph break removed after comma (and continued, "I doubt if
+any one)
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
+<title>The Project Gutenberg eBook of Bye-Ways, by Robert Smythe Hichens</title>
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+<body>
+<h1>The Project Gutenberg eBook, Bye-Ways, by Robert Smythe Hichens</h1>
+<pre>
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at <a href = "http://www.gutenberg.org">www.gutenberg.org</a></pre>
+<p>Title: Bye-Ways</p>
+<p>Author: Robert Smythe Hichens</p>
+<p>Release Date: July 1, 2010  [eBook #33040]</p>
+<p>Language: English</p>
+<p>Character set encoding: UTF-8</p>
+<p>***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BYE-WAYS***</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<h3>E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, S. D.,<br />
+    and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team<br />
+    (http://www.pgdp.net)</h3>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<hr class="full" />
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="figcenter" style="width: 368px;">
+<img src="images/cover.jpg" width="368" height="575" alt="" title="" />
+</div>
+
+<div class="tp">
+<h1>BYE-WAYS</h1>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="sm">BY</span><br />
+<span class="lg">ROBERT HICHENS</span></p>
+
+<p class="center sm">Author of “The Garden of Allah,�<br />
+“Bella Donna,� etc.</p>
+
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p>&nbsp;</p>
+<p class="center pad-t">NEW YORK<br />
+DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY<br />
+1914
+</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="center sm"><i>Copyright, 1897</i>,<br />
+<span class="smcap">By Dodd, Mead and Company.</span></p>
+
+<h2>Contents</h2>
+
+<table border="0" summary="Table of Contents">
+<tr><td></td><td></td> <td align="right" class="smcap sm">Page</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">The Charmer of Snakes</td><td align="right"><a href="#Page_3">3</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">A Tribute of Souls</td><td></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="pad-l">Prelude</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_89">89</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="pad-l">I.</td> <td>The Stranger by the Burn</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_90">90</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="pad-l">II.</td> <td>The Soul of Dr Wedderburn</td>      <td align="right"><a href="#Page_111">111</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="pad-l">III.</td> <td>The Soul of Kate Walters</td>      <td align="right"><a href="#Page_131">131</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="pad-l">IV.</td> <td>The Soul of Hugh Fraser</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_142">142</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right" class="top pad-l">V.</td> <td>The Return of the Grey Traveller<br />
+<span class="sm">Written in conjunction with Lord Frederick Hamilton.</span></td> <td align="right" class="top"><a href="#Page_159">159</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">An Echo in Egypt</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_171">171</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">The Face of the Monk</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_211">211</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">The Man who Intervened</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_237">237</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">After To-morrow</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_267">267</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">A Silent Guardian</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_287">287</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">A Boudoir Boy</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_319">319</a></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td colspan="2" class="smcap">The Tee-to-tum</td>       <td align="right"><a href="#Page_343">343</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+
+<h1 id="begin">BYE-WAYS</h1>
+
+<h2>THE CHARMER OF SNAKES</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> petulant whining of the jackals prevented
+Renfrew from sleeping. At first he lay still on his
+camp bed, staring at the orifice of the bell tent,
+which was only partially covered by the canvas flap
+let down by Mohammed, after he had bidden his
+master good-night. Behind the tent the fettered
+mules stamped on the rough, dry ground, and now
+and then the heavy rustling of a wild boar could
+be heard, as it shuffled through the scrub towards
+the water that lay in the hollow beyond the camp.
+The wayward songs of the Moorish attendants had
+died into silence. They slept, huddled together
+and shrouded in their djelabes. But their wailing
+rapture of those old triumphant days when on
+the heights above Granada, beneath the eternal
+snows, their brethren walked as conquerors, had
+been succeeded by the cries of the uneasy beasts
+that throng the mountains between Tangier and
+Tetuan. And Renfrew said to himself that the
+jackals kept him from sleeping. He lay still and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+wondered if Claire were awake in her tent close
+by. If so, if her dark eyes were unclouded, what
+journeys must her imagination be making! She
+was so sensitive to sound of any kind. A cry
+moved her sometimes with a swift violence that
+alarmed those around her. The message of a
+note of music shut one door on her soul, opened
+another, and let her in to strange regions in which
+she chose to be lonely.</p>
+
+<p>How amazing it was to think that Claire, with
+all her serpentine beauty, all her celebrity, all the
+legends that clung to her fame, all the wild caprices
+of which two worlds had talked for years,&mdash;that
+Claire was hidden away three feet off, beneath the
+canvas shield that looked like a moderate-sized
+mushroom from the Kasbar on the hill. How
+amazing to think she was no longer Claire Duvigne,
+but Claire Renfrew. Her cheated audiences sighed
+in London in which a week ago she was acting.
+And while they sighed, she slept in this wild
+valley of Morocco, or lay awake and heard the
+jackals whining among the dwarf palms. And she
+was his. She belonged to him. He had the right
+to hold her&mdash;this thin, pale wonder of night and of
+fame&mdash;in his arms, and to kiss the lips from which
+came at will the coo of a dove or the snarl of a
+tigress. Although Renfrew could not sleep, he fell
+into a dream. Indeed, ever since he had married
+Claire, a week ago, his life had been a dream.
+When the goddess suddenly bends down to the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span>
+worshipper, and says: “Don't pray to me any
+more&mdash;sit on my throne by my side!�&mdash;the
+worshipper exchanges one form of devotion for
+another, so deep and so different that for a while
+his ordinary faculties seem frozen, his life goes in
+shadowy places. Renfrew was not a man of deep
+imagination, but he had enough of the dangerous
+and dear quality to make him full of interest in
+Claire's bonfires of the mind. He sunned himself
+in the sparks which flew from her, even as
+the phlegmatic man in the pit bathes in the fury
+of some queen of the stage. He adored partly
+because he scarcely understood.</p>
+
+<p>And then, at this moment, he was in the throes
+of a most unexpected honeymoon. Claire, after
+refusing to have anything to do with him for two
+years or more, had suddenly married him in such a
+hurry that, though London gasped, Renfrew gasped
+still more. She had sent for him one night, from
+her dressing-room, between the third act and the
+fourth of an angry drama of passion. He came
+in and found her sitting in an arm-chair by a
+table, on which lay a note containing his last proposal,
+and a dagger with which she was about to
+commit a stage murder that had carried her glory
+to the four quarters of the universe. Her face
+was covered with powder, and in her long white
+dress she looked like a phantom. As she spoke
+to him, she ran her thin fingers mechanically up
+and down the blade of the dagger. When Renfrew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span>
+was in the room, and the door shut, she looked
+up at him and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Desmond, I'm going to frighten you more
+than I shall frighten the audience out there.�</p>
+
+<p>And she pointed towards the hidden stage.</p>
+
+<p>“How?� he said, looking at her hand and at
+the dagger.</p>
+
+<p>“I'm going to marry you.�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew turned paler than she was.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!� she cried. “You go white?�</p>
+
+<p>“No, no,� he murmured. “But&mdash;but I can't
+believe it.�</p>
+
+<p>“I will marry you when you like, to-morrow,
+whenever you can get a licence.�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Claire!�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly she got up.</p>
+
+<p>“Take me away from here,� she said. “From
+this heat and noise. Take me to some place where
+it is wild and desolate. I want to be in starlight,
+with people who know nothing of me, and my
+trumpery talent. O God, Desmond, you don't
+know how a woman can get to hate being
+famous! I should like to act to-night to a circle
+of savages who had never heard of me and of my
+glory.�</p>
+
+<p>“Curtain's up!� sang a shrill voice outside.</p>
+
+<p>Claire picked up the dagger.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?� she said. “Shall it be&mdash;?�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes&mdash;yes!� Renfrew answered in a
+choked voice.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>
+<p>She smiled and glided out, like a white snake, he
+thought.</p>
+
+<p>And now&mdash;yes, those were really jackals whining,
+and Claire slept, surrounded by a circle of
+Moors under the stars of Morocco.</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew trembled at the astounding surprises of
+life. Now the devil of the night&mdash;thought&mdash;had
+filled his veins with fever. He got up softly, drew
+on his clothes, unfastened the canvas flap, and
+emerged, like a shadow, from the mouth of the
+tent. The night was dewy and cool. All the
+heaven was full of eyes. The line of tethered
+mules looked like a black hedge in whose shelter
+the group of tents was pitched. A low fire, held in
+a cup of earth, was dying down in the distance, and
+as Renfrew came out a lanky dog slunk off among
+the bushes that clothed the low hills on every side.</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew stood quite still. He was bare-headed,
+and the breeze caught at his thick brown hair, and
+seemed to tug it like a rough child at play with a
+kindly elder. His eyes were turned towards the
+tiny peaked tent which shrouded Claire. A small
+moon half way up the sky sent out a beam which
+faintly illuminated this home of a wanderer, and
+Renfrew thought the beam was like a silver finger
+pointing at this wonderful creature whom glory had
+so long attended. Such beings must walk in light.
+Nature herself protests against their endeavours to
+shroud themselves even for a moment in darkness.
+He drew close to the tent, and listened for Claire's<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+low breathing. But he could not hear it. Perhaps
+she was awake then.</p>
+
+<p>“Claire!� he called, in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>There was no answer. Renfrew hesitated and
+glanced round the little camp. It was just then
+that he noticed the absence of two figures which
+had been standing like statues near his tent when he
+went to bed. These were soldiers sent from the
+nearest village to guard the camp from marauders
+during the night. Clad in earth-coloured rags,
+shrouded in loose robes that looked like musty
+dressing-gowns, with fez on head, and musket in
+hand, they had seemed devoutly intent on doing
+their duty then. But now&mdash;where were they?
+Renfrew strolled among the tents, expecting to
+find them squatting near the fire smoking cigarettes,
+or playing some Spanish game of cards. But
+they had vanished. He returned, and posted himself
+again by the door of Claire's rude bed-room,
+saying to himself that he would be her guard.
+Those Moorish vagabonds had deserted her. They
+cared nothing for the safety of this jewel, whom
+the whole civilised world cherished. But in his
+heart glowed a passion of protection for her. And
+then he gazed again at the impenetrable canvas
+wall that divided him from her. Only two hours
+ago he had held her in his arms and kissed her lips,
+yet already he felt as if a river of years flowed
+between them. He began to torture himself deliberately,
+as lovers will, by the imagination of non-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>existent
+evils. Suppose Claire possessed the power
+of a fairy, and could evaporate at will into the
+spaces of the air, leaving no trace behind. She
+might then have departed, have faded into the
+scented silence and darkness of this land so strange
+and desolate. Renfrew supposed the departure an
+actual fact. What a loneliness would fill his night
+then; if that little tent stood empty, if that slim
+sleeper were removed from the camp round which
+the jackals sat on their tiny haunches, whining like
+peevish spirits. He trembled beneath the weight
+of this absurd supposition, revelling in the intolerable
+with the folly of worship. Gradually he forced
+himself on step by step along the fanciful path till
+he had assured his imagination that Claire was
+really gone, and that he was just such a travelling
+Englishman as may come alone across the Straits,
+take out a camp, and spend his days in stalking
+wild boar, or shooting duck, his nights in the heavy
+slumber of complete weariness. And, at length,
+having gained a ghastly summit of imaginative
+despair, he suddenly stretched forth his hand, unhooked
+the canvas that shrouded Claire's tent door,
+and peeped cautiously in, courting the delicious
+revulsion of feeling which he would secure when
+he saw her half defined form in the shadow of the
+leaning roof that hid her from the stars.</p>
+
+<p>He bent forward with greedy anxiety. But the
+pale and tragic face he looked for, did not greet his
+eyes. The tent was empty.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
+<p>Renfrew stood for a moment holding back the
+canvas flap with one hand. This denial calmly
+offered to his expectation bewildered him. He
+was confused, and for a moment scarcely thought
+at all. Then his mind broke away with the
+violence of a dog unleashed, and ran a wild course
+of surmises. He thought first of rousing the
+camp and organising an immediate search. Then
+he remembered the absence of the two soldiers
+who ought to be guarding the tents and the
+mules. Claire gone, those soldiers absent! He
+linked the two facts together, and turned white
+and sick. But he did not rouse the camp. Indeed,
+he thanked God that all the men were sleeping.
+He sprang softly back from the tent, turned
+on his heel, and stole out of the camp so silently
+that he scarcely seemed a living thing. The
+ground towards the water was boggy and spongy,
+and the scent of the thickly growing myrtles was
+heavy in the air. Renfrew brushed through them
+swiftly. He heard the harsh snuffling of a boar,
+and the tread of its feet in the mud at the water-side.
+And these sounds filled the night with a
+sense of unknown dangers. Darkness, a wild
+country, wild men, wild beasts, and his beautiful
+Claire out somewhere alone, near him, perhaps,
+yet hidden behind the impenetrable veil of darkness.
+He saw her fainting, struggling, crying out
+for him. He saw her silent and dead, and
+frenzy seized him. She was not here by the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+water. And with a gesture of despair he turned
+back. Low and rounded hills faced him on all
+sides, covered with a dense undergrowth of palms
+and close-growing shrubs that looked almost like
+black velvet in the night. On one, the highest,
+was perched the native village from which the
+soldiers had come. Dogs were barking in it incessantly.
+It seemed to Renfrew that Claire
+might have been conveyed there by these ruffians;
+and he began hastily to ascend in the direction of
+the dogs' acute voices. He stumbled among the
+palms at first; but, mounting higher, he came into
+the eye of the moon, and was swallowed up in a
+shrouded silver radiance. The camp faded away
+below him, and he felt the breeze with greater
+force. Yet its breath was warm. Could Claire
+feel it? Did she see the moon? Now the dogs
+were evidently close by. The village must be
+behind that big clump of trees. Renfrew sprang
+upward, passed through them, suddenly drew a
+great breath and stood still.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond the trees there was a small clearing that
+almost corresponded to our English notion of a village
+green. On the near side of it was the clump
+of trees in whose shadow Renfrew now stood.
+On the far side of it was the Moorish village, a
+minute collection of low huts like hovels, featureless
+and filthy. The moon streamed over the clearing
+and lit up faintly a cluster of seated figures that
+formed a good-sized circle. The figures looked<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+broad and almost shapeless, for they were all
+smothered in long, voluminous robes, and over all
+the heads great hoods were drawn which hid the
+faces of the wearers. They were absolutely
+motionless, and differed little from the more distant
+clumps of dwarf palms that grew everywhere
+among the huts. Only they possessed the curiously
+sullen aspect of things alive but entirely
+motionless. It was not this living Stonehenge of
+Morocco, however, which caused Renfrew to catch
+his breath and rooted him in the shadow. In the
+centre of the circle, lit up by the moon, there
+stood something that might have been a phantom,
+it was so thin, so tall, so white-faced, so strange
+in its movements. It was a woman, and long
+black hair flowed down to its waist,&mdash;night standing
+back from that moon, vague and spectral, the
+face. In this human night and moon, great
+sombre eyes gleamed with a sort of fatigued
+beauty. This spectre stretched out its long arms
+in weird gesticulations and sometimes swayed its
+body as if it moved to music. And from its lips
+came a soft and liquid stream of golden words
+that mingled with the acid barking of the dogs,
+some of which crept furtively about on the outskirts
+of the serene hooded circle of the listeners.
+This murmuring spectre was Claire. She was
+girt about with silently staring Moors. And she
+was in the act of delivering one of her most
+famous recitations, which she had last given at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+a monster morning performance before Royalties
+in London, on a sultry day of the season. As
+this fact broke upon Renfrew's mind, he seemed
+for a moment to be back in the hot dressing-room
+in which Claire had said: “I will marry
+you.� He seemed to hear her passionate
+exclamation: “I should like to act to-night to
+a circle of savages!� The hill men of this part
+of Morocco may not be savages, but they are
+fierce and wild and ruthless. And now they hung
+upon the lips that had spoken to London, Paris,
+Vienna, New York&mdash;but never before to such
+an audience as this. The recitation was a description
+of the performance of a snake-charmer,
+his harangue to his reptiles and to the crowd
+watching him, and his departure into the solitude
+of the great desert, there to obtain, in communion
+with its spirit, the power to work greater miracles,
+and to charm not alone the serpents that dwell
+among the rocks and in the forests, but also men,
+women, little children,&mdash;the power to thrust a
+human world into a kennel of plaited straw, to
+take it out in sections at pleasure, and to make it
+dance, pose, and posture, like a viper tamed into a
+species of ballet-dancer. In this recitation the
+peculiar and almost serpentine fascination of Claire
+had full liberty. She represented the snake-charmer
+as a being who through long and intimate association
+with snakes had become like them, lithe,
+fantastic, and unexpected, soft and deadly, by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+turns sleepy and violent, a coil of glistening
+velvet and a length of cast-iron, tipped with a
+poisoned fang and the music of a hiss. His
+fanaticism, his greed for money, the passionate
+prayer to Sidi Mahomet that flowed from his lips
+while his terrible eyes searched an imaginary
+crowd in search of the richest man or the most
+excited woman in it, his bursts of dancing humour,
+his deadly stillness, his playful familiarity with his
+dangerous captives, his mesmeric anger when they
+were sullen and recalcitrant, his relapse into the
+savage churchwarden with the collecting box when
+his “show� was at an end,&mdash;every side, every
+subtlety of such a creature Claire could give with
+the certainty of genius. As you watched her, you
+beheld the snakes, you beheld their master. Even
+at the end you almost saw the vast and trackless
+desert open its haggard arms to receive its child,
+who passed from the crowd to the silence in which
+alone he could learn to fascinate the crowd. At
+the great morning performance in London, a prince
+who knew the East had said to Claire, “Miss
+Duvigne, you must have lived with snake-charmers.
+You must have studied them for months.�</p>
+
+<p>“I never saw one in my life,� she answered
+truthfully.</p>
+
+<p>And now she gave her performance to those
+who, in the dingy market squares of their white-walled
+cities, had seen the snakes dance and had
+heard the prayer to Sidi Mahomet. And they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+squatted in the moonbeams, immobile as goblins
+carved in dusky oak. Yet they inspired Claire.
+From his hiding place Renfrew could note this.
+She had let her genius loose upon them, as she had
+let her cloud of hair loose upon her shoulders.
+The frosty touch of smart conventionality bewilders
+and half paralyses the utterly unconventional.
+Often Renfrew had heard Claire curse the
+smiling and self-contented Londoners who thronged
+the stalls of her theatre. She felt, with the swiftness
+of genius, the retarding hand they laid upon
+her winged talents. She had no inclination to
+curse these hooded figures gathered round her in
+the night, staring upon her with the fixed concentration
+of children who behold, rather than hear,
+a fairy tale, they paid her the fine compliment of
+an undivided attention. It was a curious scene and
+one that stirred in Renfrew a deep excitement.
+He watched it with a double sense, of living keenly
+and of dreaming deeply. Claire gave to him the
+first sense, the moon and the motionless Moors the
+second. But presently one of the hooded statues
+stirred and swayed, and there mingled with the
+voice of Claire a twisted melody, so thin and wandering
+that it was like a thread binding a bundle of
+gold. It pierced the night, and enclosed the words
+of the reciter, one sound prisoned by another lighter
+and less than itself. The dogs had ceased to bark
+now, and only the voice that told of the snake-charmer's
+journey into the desert, and this whisper<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>ing
+Moorish tune, plucked by dark fingers from the
+strings of a rough lute, moved in the night, till
+Claire ceased. The lute continued for a few bars,
+like the symphony that closes a song, and then it
+too ceased abruptly on a note that brought no feeling
+of finale to modern ears. For an instant
+Claire stood motionless in the centre of the human
+circle. Then her arms fell to her sides. She moved
+swiftly towards the trees in whose shadow Renfrew
+was watching. The Moors made a gap, and as she
+passed out all the shapeless figures were suddenly
+elongated and crowded together upon her footsteps.
+As Claire came into the blackness of the trees,
+Renfrew stretched out his hand and clasped her
+arm. She stopped with no tremor, and faced him.</p>
+
+<p>“Claire!�</p>
+
+<p>“What, it is you, Desmond! I thought you
+were asleep.�</p>
+
+<p>“When you were awake? You have given me
+a fright. I came to your tent; I found it empty.
+The soldiers were gone.�</p>
+
+<p>“They were guarding me up the hill. I could
+not sleep. I wandered out. How hot your hand
+is!�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew released her. All the Moors had
+gathered round them like enormous shadows.</p>
+
+<p>“My audience has come to the stage door!�
+Claire said.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were gleaming with excitement.</p>
+
+<p>“They are a beautiful audience,� she added;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+“and the orchestra, the soft music&mdash;that was
+better than London fiddles.�</p>
+
+<p>“Come back to the camp, Claire.�</p>
+
+<p>“Very well.�</p>
+
+<p>He drew her arm through his, and led her out
+into the moonlight and down the hill. Two
+shadows detached themselves from the silent assembly
+and followed them, barefooted, over the
+dewy grass. They were the soldiers. Claire
+looked back and saw them.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall give those men a handful of pesetas,
+to-morrow,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>They reached the camp and sat down on two
+folding chairs in the shadow of Claire's tent. The
+soldiers stood near, gazing intently at them. Claire
+sat in a curved attitude. She had drawn a dark
+veil over her hair, and her enormous and tragic
+eyes were turned sombrely on Renfrew. She looked
+fatigued, as she often did after acting a long and
+passionate part. To Renfrew she seemed more
+wonderful than ever. He could scarcely believe
+that he was her husband.</p>
+
+<p>“You have had your circle of savages,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“And you liked them?�</p>
+
+<p>“Do you think they liked me? I wonder if
+there was a snake-charmer among them. When
+I came to Sidi Mahomet I thought perhaps they
+would kill me. That thought made me pray better
+than I can in London.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span></p>
+<p>“You could charm snakes more certainly than
+any Arab,� Renfrew said.</p>
+
+<p>“I daresay. Perhaps I shall try at Tetuan.
+Good-night, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>She vanished into the tent. It seemed that she
+evaporated as Sarah Bernhardt evaporates in the
+fourth act of “La Tosca.�</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>On the following day they rode across the mountain
+to Tetuan. They started in the dawn.
+Claire's eyes were heavy. She came languidly out
+from the tent door to mount her horse, and when
+she touched Renfrew he felt that her hand was cold
+like an icicle. He looked at her anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you ill?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>He lifted her into the saddle.</p>
+
+<p>“You haven't slept,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>She looked down at him as she slowly gathered
+up her reins.</p>
+
+<p>“Unfortunately, I have,� she replied.</p>
+
+<p>Before Renfrew had time to express surprise at
+this unexpected rejoinder, she had struck her horse
+with the whip, and trotted off over the grass in the
+direction of the white Kasbar that gleamed on the
+hill under the kiss of the rising sun. He leaped
+into the saddle, and followed her. The path into<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+which they came was narrow, winding through
+wild fig-trees and olives, and constantly ascending.
+Claire did not turn her head, and Renfrew could
+not ride by her side. He watched her thin and
+sinuous figure swaying slightly in obedience to the
+motion of her horse, which scrambled over the
+rough path with the activity of a wild cat. In
+front of her their personal attendant, Mohammed,
+rode on a huge grey mule, and sang to himself
+incessantly in a deep and murmuring voice. Once
+or twice Renfrew spoke to Claire, but she did not
+seem to hear him. He resolved to ask about her
+sleep when they gained some plateau on which
+they could rest for a moment. At present it was
+necessary to concentrate his attention on his horse
+and on the dangers of the road.</p>
+
+<p>When the sun was high in the heavens, and they
+were high on the mountain, above a gorge in which
+the scrub grew densely, and great bushes starred
+with yellow and white flowers hid the rocks and
+made a home for birds, Mohammed called a halt.
+Renfrew lifted Claire to the ground. The men
+passed on towards Tetuan with their camp, and
+Claire sank down on a gay rug beneath the shade
+of a huge white umbrella, which was pitched on a
+square of level ground and circled with luxuriant
+vegetation. Renfrew lay at her feet and lit his
+pipe, while Mohammed, the dragoman, and one of
+the porters squatted at a little distance, and began
+to play cards in a cloud of keef. Claire was fan<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>ning
+herself slowly with an enormous Spanish fan
+in which all gay colours met. She still looked
+very tired. The shuffle of the descending mules
+died away down the mountain, and a silence,
+through which the butterflies flitted, fell round them.</p>
+
+<p>“Is this journey too much for you, Claire?�
+Renfrew asked.</p>
+
+<p>“No. I can rehearse for six hours in London,
+surely I can ride for six here.�</p>
+
+<p>“But you look tired.�</p>
+
+<p>“Because, as I told you, I slept too much last
+night.�</p>
+
+<p>“What does that mean?�</p>
+
+<p>She stretched herself on the rug with the easy
+grace of a woman who has trained her body to
+carry to the eyes of others, as a message, all the
+moods of passion and of peace. Then she leaned
+her cheek on her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“In the darkness of the tent, Desmond, I slept
+and did not know it. I believed that I lay awake.
+I thought I still could hear the jackals, and the
+stamping of the mules. But, really, I slept.�</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know that?�</p>
+
+<p>“Because of what I am going to tell you. The
+wind blew about the canvas door, and when it
+bulged outwards I could see on each side of it a
+tiny section of the night outside, a bit of a bush,
+blades of short grass moving, a ray of the moon,
+the slinking shadow of one of the dogs from the
+village.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“Presently there came, I thought, a stronger
+gust than usual. It tore the canvas flap from the
+pegs, and the whole thing blew up, leaving the
+entrance quite open. Then it blew down again.
+It was only up for a minute. During that minute
+I had seen that a very tall man was standing outside
+the tent.�</p>
+
+<p>“One of the soldiers.�</p>
+
+<p>“If I had been awake it might have been.�</p>
+
+<p>“You mean that all this was a dream?�</p>
+
+<p>“I mean that I slept last night, and that I wish I
+hadn't.�</p>
+
+<p>She turned her great eyes on Renfrew, holding
+the red, green, and yellow fan so that it concealed
+the lower part of her face. And he looked at her,
+staring at him like some tragic stranger above the
+rampart of an unknown city, and wondered whether
+she was acting to him in the sun. On the forefinger
+of the hand that held up the fan a huge black
+pearl perched in a circle of gold. Renfrew had
+often noticed it on the stage, when Claire lifted
+the silver dagger to kill the man who loved her in
+the play.</p>
+
+<p>“The door of your tent was securely closed
+when I got up and came out this morning,� he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes.�</p>
+
+<p>She spoke with the utmost indifference. Then
+she added more sharply:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Desmond, has it ever occurred to you that I
+am serpentine?�</p>
+
+<p>He was startled and made no answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Well&mdash;has it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� he said truthfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“Every one thinks so. You are so thin. You
+move so silently. Your body is so elastic and controlled.
+You always look as if you could glide
+into places where other women could never go,
+and be at home in attitudes they could never
+assume.�</p>
+
+<p>“But I'm an actress&mdash;my body is trained, you
+know, to lie, to fall, as I choose.�</p>
+
+<p>“Other actresses don't give one the same impression.�</p>
+
+<p>“No,� she said thoughtfully. “My peculiar
+physique has a great deal to do with it.�</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, and there's something more than
+that, something mental.�</p>
+
+<p>Claire's heavy eyes grew more thoughtful. The
+white lids fluttered lower over them till they looked
+like the eyes of one half asleep. She lay in silence,
+plunged in a reverie that was deep and dark. In
+this reverie she forgot to move her fan, which
+dropped from her hand and fell softly upon the
+rug. Renfrew did not interrupt her. His worship
+had learned to wait upon her moods. A huge
+dragon-fly passed on its journey towards the far
+blue range of the Atlas Mountains. It whirred in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+its haste, and its burnished body shone in the
+sunshine between its gleaming wings. Claire
+snatched at it with her hand, but missed it.</p>
+
+<p>“I should like to wear it as a jewel,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>Then she turned slowly again towards Renfrew,
+and continued her nocturne as if it had never been
+broken off.</p>
+
+<p>“The canvas flap fell down again over the
+doorway, Desmond, and it seemed that just then
+the breeze died away, expiring in that angry gust.
+I could not see anything but the interior of the
+tent, and only that very dimly. But this man
+outside. I wanted to see him.�</p>
+
+<p>“Did you recognise that he was not one of the
+soldiers, then?�</p>
+
+<p>“Perfectly. He was not dressed as they are.
+They were entirely muffled up with hoods drawn
+forward above their faces. And in their hands one
+could see their guns. This man was bareheaded,
+and looked half naked. And in his hands&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>She stopped meditatively.</p>
+
+<p>“Was there anything in his hands?�</p>
+
+<p>“Well&mdash;yes, there was.�</p>
+
+<p>“What?�</p>
+
+<p>“I wanted to know what it was. But at first I
+only lay quite still and wished the wind would
+come again and blow the flap up so that I could
+see out. But it had quite gone down. The canvas
+did not even quiver.�</p>
+
+<p>“Was it near dawn?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span></p>
+<p>“I haven't an idea. Does the breeze sink
+then?�</p>
+
+<p>“Very often.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! Perhaps it was then. Oh, but you'll
+see in a minute what nonsense it is to think about
+that. I lay still, as I said, for some time, waiting
+for the breeze. And when it wouldn't come, I
+made up my mind that I must arrive at a decision
+either to turn my face on the pillow and go to
+sleep, or else to get up, go to the tent door, and
+look out.�</p>
+
+<p>“To see this man?�</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly.�</p>
+
+<p>“Which did you do?�</p>
+
+<p>“Turned my face on the pillow.�</p>
+
+<p>“And went off to sleep?�</p>
+
+<p>“No, grew most intensely awake&mdash;as I supposed.
+The pillow was like fire against my cheek.
+It burnt me. With the departure of the breeze
+the night had become suddenly most intolerably hot.
+I turned over on my back and lay like that. Then
+I felt as if there was sand on the sheets.�</p>
+
+<p>“Sand! Impossible! We aren't in the
+desert.�</p>
+
+<p>“No. But it seemed as if I lay in hot sand. I
+shifted my position, but it made no difference. I
+sat up. The tent door was still closed. I listened.
+All those dogs had ceased to bark. There wasn't
+a sound. Even the jackals had left off whining.
+Then I slipped out of bed and threw that rose-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>coloured
+Moorish cloak over me. It rustled just
+like a thing rustles in grass, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a sort of peculiar significance,
+and as if she expected him to gather something
+definite from the remark.</p>
+
+<p>“A thing in grass,� he repeated, wondering.
+“What sort of thing?�</p>
+
+<p>But Claire avoided the question. She had taken
+up the fan again, and was opening and shutting it
+with a quiet and careful sort of precision, as she
+went on in a low and even voice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I disliked this rustling, and held the cloak
+tightly together with my hands. I felt as if the
+man outside the tent had been waiting to hear that
+very little noise.�</p>
+
+<p>“The rustling?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. And that when he heard it he smiled to
+himself. I didn't intend he should hear it again
+though, and as I glided towards the tent door, I
+held the cloak very tight and away from my body.
+And I don't think I can have made any noise.
+You know how softly I can move when I choose?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“When I got to the door, I waited. I couldn't
+hear the man; but I felt that he was still there, just
+on the other side of the flap.�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew leaned forward on the rug. He felt
+deeply interested, perhaps only because Claire was
+the narrator. She held him much as she could
+hold an audience in a theatre, by her pose, her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>
+hands, her pale, almost weary face, her heavy
+sombre eyes, even more than by any words she
+chanced to be uttering. She could make anything
+seem vitally important if she chose, simply by her
+manner. Renfrew's pipe had gone out; but he
+did not know it, and still kept it between his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“I waited for some time by the flap,� Claire
+continued calmly. “I was going to lift it presently,
+I knew; but I could not do it at once. The man
+and I were standing, I suppose, for full five minutes
+only divided by that strip of canvas. I tried
+not to breathe audibly, and I could not hear him
+breathe. At last I resolved to see him, and considered
+how I should do so. If I remained standing
+and looked out, I should have to push the flap
+quite away and my eyes would be nearly on a
+level with his. He would certainly see me. I
+didn't wish that. I didn't intend at all that
+he should see me. Therefore I resolved to lie
+down.�</p>
+
+<p>“On the ground?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, quite flat, and to raise the bottom of the
+flap gently an inch or two. This would enable
+me to see him without being seen, if I did it without
+noise. I dropped down quite softly. Do
+you remember my death in ‘Camille’?�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“Almost like that. But the rose-coloured stuff
+rustled again. I wished I hadn't put it on. I<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>
+raised the flap very slightly and peeped out. Do
+you know what I felt like just then, Desmond?�</p>
+
+<p>“What?�</p>
+
+<p>“Just like a snake in ambush. When my
+cloak rustled, it was the grass against my body. I
+lay in cover, and could see my enemy like a creature
+in a forest, or a reptile in scrub.�</p>
+
+<p>She glanced round at the bushes and the densely
+growing palms.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I lay there like a snake in the grass.�</p>
+
+<p>She stretched herself out on the rug as she
+spoke, with her head towards Renfrew and her eyes
+fastened on his.</p>
+
+<p>“I saw first the feet of the man close to my
+eyes. His feet were almost black and bare. His
+legs were bare. My glance travelled up him, and
+I saw that his chest and his arms were bare too.
+He was clothed in a sort of loose rough garment,
+the colour of sacking, that fell into a kind of hood
+behind; and he looked enormously powerful.
+That struck me very much&mdash;his power.�</p>
+
+<p>“Did you see his face?�</p>
+
+<p>“Quite well. It was the face of a man watching
+and listening with the closest attention. He was
+smiling slightly, too, as if something that had just
+happened had satisfied him. I knew he had heard
+the rustle of my robe as I slipped to the ground.�</p>
+
+<p>“But why should that please him?�</p>
+
+<p>“It told him that I was there, that I was
+attentive too.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span></p>
+<p>Renfrew's face slightly darkened.</p>
+
+<p>“As I looked, I saw what he was holding in his
+hands.�</p>
+
+<p>“What was it&mdash;a dagger&mdash;a staff?�</p>
+
+<p>“A serpent.�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew could not repress an exclamation.</p>
+
+<p>“Very large and striped. Its skin was like shot
+silk in the moonlight. It writhed softly between
+his hands, and turned its flat head from side to side.
+It seemed to be trying to bend down towards
+where I lay. Its tongue shot out like a length of
+riband out of one of those wooden winders that
+you buy in cheap shops. I should think its body
+was quite five feet long, and its colour seemed to
+change as it turned about. Sometimes it was
+pink, then it looked dull green and almost black.
+Once it wriggled down so near to the ground that
+I could see two fangs in its open mouth like hooks,
+and the roof of its mouth was flesh colour.�</p>
+
+<p>“How abominable!� said Renfrew, softly.</p>
+
+<p>“I didn't feel it so at all,� Claire said. “I
+wanted it to come to me,&mdash;back into the grass
+where such things are safe. But the man wouldn't
+let it go. He thrust it into his breast. He
+wanted to have his hands free.�</p>
+
+<p>“Good God, Claire&mdash;what for? Did he&mdash;?�</p>
+
+<p>She smiled at his sudden violence, which showed
+his interest.</p>
+
+<p>“When the snake was safe, he drew out, still
+smiling and listening, a little pipe that looked as if<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+it were made of straw, very common and dirty.
+He held it up to his black lips, and began to play
+very softly and sleepily. Desmond, the tune he
+played was charmed. It was a tune composed&mdash;for&mdash;for&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>She broke off.</p>
+
+<p>“You know the Pied Piper had his tune,� she
+said; “the rats had to follow it. Well, this tune
+was for the serpents.�</p>
+
+<p>“To charm them you mean?�</p>
+
+<p>“Wisely&mdash;dangerously&mdash;almost irresistibly,
+perhaps in time, Desmond, quite, quite irresistibly.
+There is a music for all creatures, all reptiles, birds,&mdash;everything
+that lives; this was for the snakes.�</p>
+
+<p>“Well, but, Claire, how did you know that?�</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him with a sort of dull amusement
+and pity in her half-shut eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I tell you?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“I knew it, because the tune charmed me,
+Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, you are acting! I half suspected it from
+the first,� Renfrew exclaimed almost roughly.</p>
+
+<p>He sat up as a man who has been lying under a
+spell stirs when the spell is broken. Now he knew
+that his pipe was out, and he felt for his match-box.
+But Claire still kept her eyes fixed on him,
+and laid her hand on his arm gently.</p>
+
+<p>“No, I am not acting,� she said. “The tune
+charmed me. You see I am a woman; and there<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+are many women who feel at moments that what
+attracts some special creature, thing, of the so-called
+world without a soul, attracts them too.
+Some men can whistle a woman as they would a
+dog, can't they?�</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and some men can charm a woman as
+they could charm a serpent.�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't understand you, Claire.�</p>
+
+<p>“You don't choose to. The animal is in us all,
+hidden deftly by Nature, the artful dodger of the
+scheme of creation, Desmond; and we know it
+when the right tune is played to summon it from
+its slumber in the nest of the human body. Only
+the right tune can waken it.�</p>
+
+<p>“The animal! But&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Or the reptile, perhaps. What does it matter?
+This was the right tune for me. I lay
+there like a snake in the grass and it thrilled me!
+And all the time the black man smiled and listened
+for the rustling at his feet. You look black,
+Desmond! How absurd of you to be angry!�</p>
+
+<p>And she closed her fingers over his hand till the
+frown died out of his face.</p>
+
+<p>“The tune seemed to draw me to the man. I
+understood just how he had captured the serpent
+that lay hidden in his bosom. It had once lain
+in ambush as I lay now, long ago perhaps, in the
+desert among the rocks, on the sand, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, the sand!� he said, remembering suddenly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+the strange feeling Claire had described as coming
+upon her when she was trying to sleep.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. And he had drawn it from the sand to
+the oasis among the palms where he stood playing,
+till he heard its rustling in the grass about his feet,
+as it glided nearer to him, and nearer, and nearer,
+till at last it reared up its body, and wound up him
+and round him, and laid its flat head between his
+great hands. Yes, that was how it came.�</p>
+
+<p>“You fancy.�</p>
+
+<p>“I know. But I would not go. I determined
+that I would not, and I lay perfectly still. But all
+the time I longed to go. I had an almost irresistible
+passion for movement towards that tune. It
+seemed to me a stream of music into which I yearned
+to plunge, and drown and die. And it flowed up
+there at the man's lips! The longing increased as
+he piped the tune, over and over and over again,
+almost under his breath. I was sick with it, and it
+hurt me because I resisted it. And at last I knew
+that resisting it would kill me. I must either go, or
+not go, and die. There was no alternative. That
+music simply claimed me. It had the right to. And
+if I denied that right I should cease. I did deny it.�</p>
+
+<p>She shuddered in the sun, then added, almost
+harshly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Like a fool.�</p>
+
+<p>“And then, Claire, then&mdash;?�</p>
+
+<p>“It seemed to me that I died in most horrible
+pain. I lived once more when you said, outside<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+my tent, ‘Claire, time to get up.’ You see, I
+slept too much last night.�</p>
+
+<p>And again she shuddered. A look of relief shot
+into Renfrew's face.</p>
+
+<p>“All this came from your mad performance to
+those Moors,� he said. “You impersonate so
+vividly that even sleep cannot release your genius,
+and bring it out from the world which you have
+deliberately forced it to enter.�</p>
+
+<p>“But, Desmond, I impersonated the charmer of
+the snake, not the snake itself.�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, in a dream the mind always wanders a
+little from the event that has caused the dream.
+It is like a faulty mimic who strives to reproduce
+with exactitude and slightly fails. Time to go,
+Absalem?�</p>
+
+<p>The dragoman had come up.</p>
+
+<p>As they rode down the mountain a strange thing
+occurred, strange at least in connection with
+Claire's narrative of the night. Mohammed, who
+was riding just in front of them, pulled up his mule
+beside a thicket at the wayside, and, turning his
+head, signed to them to be silent. Then, pursing
+his lips, he whistled a shrill little tune. In a
+moment an answer came from the thicket; Claire
+glanced at Renfrew with a slight smile. Here was
+a sort of side light of reality thrown upon her
+dream and upon their conversation. Mohammed
+whistled again. The echo followed. And then
+suddenly a bird flew out, almost into his face, and,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+startled, swerved and darted away across the gorge
+into the dense woods beyond.</p>
+
+<p>“A charm of birds,� Claire murmured to Renfrew,
+as they rode on. “The summoning tune&mdash;what
+can resist it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Claire,� he said, almost reproachfully, “you
+speak like a fatalist.�</p>
+
+<p>“And I believe I am one,� she answered.
+“Destiny is not only a phantom but also a fact.
+Mine is marked out for me and known&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“To whom? Not to yourself?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no!�</p>
+
+<p>“To whom then?�</p>
+
+<p>“To the hidden force that directs all things.�</p>
+
+<p>“I am your destiny.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, Desmond&mdash;or Morocco. I feel to-day
+as if I shall never see England again, or a civilised
+audience such as I have known.�</p>
+
+<p>And then she seemed to fall into a waking
+dream. Even Renfrew felt drowsy, the air was
+so intensely hot and the motion of the horses so
+monotonous. And Mohammed's deep voice was
+never silent. It buzzed like a bourdon in the
+glare of the noontide, till, far away on the hill-side,
+they saw white Tetuan facing the plain, the river
+moving stagnantly towards the sea, the great fields
+of corn in which strange flowers grew, and the
+giant range of shaggy mountains, swimming in a
+mist of gold that looked like spangled tissue.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>The camp was pitched beyond the city in the
+green plain that lies between Tetuan and the sea.
+From the tents Renfrew and Claire saw the trains
+of camels and donkeys passing slowly along the
+high road towards the steep and stony hill that
+leads up to the lower city gate, the white-washed
+summer palaces of the wealthy Moors, nestling in
+gardens, among green fields and groves of acacias,
+olives and almond trees, the far-off line of blue
+water on the one hand and the fairy-like and ivory
+town upon the other. Clouds of brown dust flew
+up in the air, and the hoarse cry of “Balak! Balak!�
+made a perpetual and distant music. Far more
+strange and barbarous was this city than Tangier.
+All traces of Europe had faded away. Thousands
+of years seemed now to stand like a wall between
+the Continents, and the hordes of dark and fanatical
+Moslems gazed upon the great actress and her
+husband as we gaze at wild animals whose aspects
+and whose habits are strange to us.</p>
+
+<p>“I know now what it is to feel like an unclean
+dog,� Claire said, as they sat at dinner under the
+stars that night, after their halting progress through
+the filthy alleys of the white fairyland on the hill-side.
+“It is a grand sensation. I suppose children
+enjoy it, too. That must be why they like
+making mud-pies.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span></p>
+<p>“To-morrow is market-day, Absalem tells me,�
+Renfrew said. “We will spend it in the town, and
+you can feel unclean to your heart's content&mdash;you!�</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her and laughed low, with the
+pride of a lover in a beautiful woman who is his
+own.</p>
+
+<p>“They ought to fall down and worship you,� he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“Moors worship a woman! Desmond, you are
+mad!�</p>
+
+<p>“No, they are&mdash;they are. See, Claire, the
+moon is coming up already. Can it be shining on
+Piccadilly too, and on the façade of the theatre?�</p>
+
+<p>“The theatre! I can't believe I shall ever see
+it again.�</p>
+
+<p>“Nonsense!�</p>
+
+<p>“Is it? This wild country seems to have
+swallowed me up, and I don't feel as if it will ever
+disgorge me again. Desmond, perhaps there are
+some lands that certain people ought never to
+visit. For those lands love them, and, once they
+have seized their prey, they will never yield it up
+again. Poor men must often feel that when they
+are dying in foreign places. It is the land which
+has taken them to itself as an octopus takes a drifting
+boat in a lonely sea. Africa!�</p>
+
+<p>She had risen from her seat and moved out into
+the vague plain. Renfrew followed her.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder in which direction the desert lies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+nearest,� she said. “All the strange people come
+in from the desert, as the strange things of life come
+in from the future, only one so seldom hears the
+tinkling bells of those deadly silent caravans in
+which they travel. If we could hear and see them
+coming, what emotions we should have!�</p>
+
+<p>“There are premonitions, some men say,� Renfrew
+answered.</p>
+
+<p>“The faint bells of the caravans ringing,&mdash;do
+you ever hear them?�</p>
+
+<p>“No, Claire&mdash;never. And you?�</p>
+
+<p>“I half thought I did once.�</p>
+
+<p>“When was that?�</p>
+
+<p>“Last night. Hark! The men have finished
+supper and are beginning to sing. That's a song
+about dancing.�</p>
+
+<p>“To-morrow we are going to feast the soldiers,
+and have an African fire.�</p>
+
+<p>“Splendid! I think I will leap through the
+flames.�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew put his arm round her.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no. They might singe your beauty.
+And yet, you are a flame too. You have burnt
+your name, yourself, like a brand upon my heart.�</p>
+
+<p>The dancing song rang up in the moonlight like
+the wailing of dead masqueraders. All Moorish
+songs are sad and thrilling, fateful and pregnant
+with unrest and with forebodings.</p>
+
+<p>With the daylight the Jews came, in their long
+and morose garments and black skull-caps, bearing<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+bales of embroideries, slippers, and uncut jewels.
+When they saw the wonderful black pearl upon
+Claire's finger their huge eyes flamed with an
+avarice so fierce and open that Renfrew instinctively
+moved between them and Claire, as if to guard her
+from assault.</p>
+
+<p>But the wonderful pearl was not for them.</p>
+
+<p>The sun blazed furiously when they got upon
+their horses to ride to the Soko. Each day the
+season was growing hotter, and Absalem told them
+that there were no English in Tetuan. Nor did they
+set eyes on a European woman until that day when
+Renfrew rode back, crouching along his horse, to
+the villas of Tangier.</p>
+
+<p>Tetuan has more than one open mouth, and when
+it swallows you the contemplation of a fairyland is
+immediately exchanged for a desperate reality of
+populous filth, stentorian uproar, uneven boulders,
+beggars, bazaars like rabbit hutches, men and children
+pitted with small-pox till they appear scarcely
+human, lepers, Jews, pirates from the Riff Mountains,
+fanatics from the Ape's Hill, water-carriers,
+veiled, waddling women, dogs like sharp shadows,
+and monkeys that appear and vanish in sinister
+doorways with the rapidity and gestures of demons.
+On a market-day the city is so full that it seems as
+if the circling and irregular white walls must burst
+and disgorge the clamouring and gesticulating inhabitants
+into the tranquil plain below. Claire
+surveyed this blanched hell with a still serenity, as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+she had often surveyed an applauding audience at
+the close of her evening's task, ere she thanked
+them with the curious gesture, that was almost a
+salaam, in which humility and a remote pride
+mingled. Noise generally gave her calm; and when
+passion broke from her she taught the world to be
+intensely silent. These alleys became like a dream
+to her, and the tiny interiors of the bazaars were
+little histories of visionary lives, some, but only a
+few, mysteriously beautiful. One, in a very dark
+place where, for some unknown cause, all voices
+died away till the hot air was full of a whispering
+stillness, brought slow tears to Claire's eyes. In
+the Street of the Slippers she passed a cupboard of
+wood raised high from the pavement, with low
+roof, leaning walls, and, in front, a little bar like
+that which fences an English baby in its chair before
+the fire. In this cupboard squatted two tiny
+Moorish infants, sole occupants of the cupboard,
+with solemn faces, bending to ply their trade of
+pricking patterns upon rose-coloured Morocco
+leather. There was no beauty in the cupboard,
+sweetness of light, or ease. And the faces of the
+little boys were sad and elderly. But, placed carefully
+between them, was an ugly three-legged stool,
+on which stood two dwarf earthen jars containing
+two sprigs of orange flower, and, as Claire looked,
+one of the babes laid down his leather, lifted his
+jar, sniffed, with a sort of gentle resignation, at his
+flower, and then resumed his diligent labours, re<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>freshed
+perhaps, and strengthened. In the action
+Claire seemed to catch sight of a little pallid soul
+striving to exist feebly among the slippers.</p>
+
+<p>“Did you see?� she cried to Renfrew, when
+the baby shoemakers were lost to sight.</p>
+
+<p>He nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish I were a Moorish woman, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>“Good Heaven! Why!�</p>
+
+<p>“So that I could kiss the infant who smelt
+the orange flower in his own language. Little
+artist!�</p>
+
+<p>Her sudden blaze of enthusiasm was checked
+by the infernal Soko into which they now entered.
+In this unpaved square, upon which the pitiless
+sun beat, the earth seemed to have come alive,
+to have formed itself into a thousand vague semblances
+of human figures, and to be shrieking,
+moving, twisting, gesticulating, as if striving to
+impart a thousand abominable secrets till now
+hidden from the world that walks upon its surface.
+As snow-men resemble the snow, so did
+these bargainers, these buyers, sellers, barterers,
+pedlars, resemble the baked earth on which they
+squatted. Shrouded in earth-coloured garments,
+they shrieked, strove, rang their bells, kicked their
+donkeys, elbowed their rivals, pommelled their
+camels, recited the Koran, or testified with frenzy,
+the terrific honesty of all their dealings. Here
+and there tents made of mud-coloured rags cast
+a grotesque shadow, in which broad women,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+hidden by veils like sacks, and dominated by straw
+hats a yard wide, sat huddled together and pecked
+at by wandering fowls. Jew boys, with long and
+expressive faces, their black hair plastered upon their
+foreheads in fringes that touched their eyes, strolled
+through the mob in batches, some of them reading
+in little books. Soudanese slave girls carried
+bouquets of orange flowers. In a corner some
+Hawadji were leaping monotonously to the thunder
+of a Moorish drum made of baked earth and
+of parchment. A sheep, escaped from the slaughterer,
+tumbled with piteous bleatings into a group
+of half breeds, Spanish Moors, who were playing
+cards near a stall covered with raw meat and great
+lumps of some substance that looked like lard.
+On a huge heap of rotten oranges and decaying
+fish, over which millions of flies swarmed, a
+number of children in close white caps were
+moving in some mysterious game in which two
+prowling cats occasionally took an unintentional
+part. Some Riff Arabs, fierce as tigers, tall and
+half-naked, stalked feverishly towards a water-carrier
+whose lean form, tottering with age, was
+almost eclipsed beneath the monstrous bladder
+he bore incessantly through the multitude. The
+horses of Renfrew and of Claire could scarcely
+plant their hoofs on anything that was not moving,
+crying, panting, or cursing; and they pulled up,
+and prepared to descend into this human ocean of
+which all the waves roared in their deafened ears.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+As Claire leant to Renfrew, who stretched his
+arms to help her, she said to him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Can you swim? If not, you will certainly
+be drowned.�</p>
+
+<p>“You must not be. Cling to my arm.�</p>
+
+<p>They sank together to their necks in the sea.
+In whatever direction they looked, they saw a
+mass of heads, an infinite expanse of shouting
+mouths. But suddenly the pressure became extraordinary,
+the uproar ear-splitting. And with the
+voices there mingled a piercing music like a continuous
+screech. People began to run, to trample
+in one direction. The drum of the leaping
+Hawadji was drowned by a louder drumming that
+came from the centre of the square. Children
+squeaked with excitement. The Riffians forgot
+to drink, and slid forward with the cushioned feet
+of animals in a jungle. A tempest arose, and in it
+a whirlpool formed. It seemed that Renfrew and
+Claire must be torn in pieces.</p>
+
+<p>“What on earth is happening?� Renfrew exclaimed
+to Absalem, with the English anger our
+countrymen always display when trodden by a
+foreign element.</p>
+
+<p>Absalem smiled with airy dignity, and moved
+forward, beckoning them to follow.</p>
+
+<p>“Miracle man, all want see him,� he remarked.
+“Great miracle man.�</p>
+
+<p>With consummate adroitness he drew them
+with him to the edge of the whirlpool. As they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>
+reached it, Renfrew felt that Claire's hand suddenly
+tightened upon his arm until his flesh
+puckered between her fingers as the flesh of a
+rabbit puckers in a trap. He glanced at her in
+astonishment. Her eyes were fixed on something,
+or some one, beyond them, even beyond Absalem,
+who was forcing people out of their way with his
+powerful arms and back. Renfrew followed her
+eyes, and saw the centre of the whirlpool.</p>
+
+<p>This mass of humanity had now assumed the
+form of a rough circus, the ring of which was
+kept clear. And in this ring a strange figure had
+just appeared with upraised arms, and a manner
+of wild, even of frantic, authority. This was a
+gigantic man, almost black, half-naked, with long
+arms, furious eyes, and legs which, though muscular,
+tapered at the ankles like the legs of a finely
+bred race-horse. His head was shaved in front;
+but at the back the black hair grew in a long and
+waving lock, and his features, magnificently cut,
+might have been those of a grand European of
+some headstrong and high-couraged race. Upon
+this man Claire's eyes were fixed, with an expression
+so strange and knowing that Renfrew
+turned on her with a sharp exclamation.</p>
+
+<p>“Claire! Claire!�</p>
+
+<p>She slowly withdrew her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>A question stammered on his lips; but as she
+smiled at him, he felt the mad absurdity of it, and
+was silent.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Well, Desmond, what is it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing,� he answered.</p>
+
+<p>Absalem now claimed their attention. He was
+determined that they should be in the front of the
+crowd, and ruthlessly pushed away the Moors who
+had obtained the best places, pointing at Claire and
+Renfrew, and wildly vociferating their mighty rank
+and enormous wealth. The staring mob gave
+way; and in a moment Claire and the miracle man
+stood face to face. His frenzied eyes had no sooner
+seen her than he too fell upon the surrounding
+natives, thrusting them violently to one side, and
+cursing them for daring to draw near to the great
+English gentleman and lady. In the whole mighty
+mob these two were the only Europeans, and they
+attracted as universal an attention as two Aztecs
+would in a Bank Holiday gathering at the Crystal
+Palace. Renfrew could now see that the screeching
+music came from one side of the ring, where a
+couple of men, clothed in filthy rags, were sitting
+on the ground, one playing a long pipe of straw,
+the other beating an enormous drum. Immediately
+behind them a very old man, evidently a
+maniac, swayed his body violently backwards and
+forwards, and at regular intervals uttered a loud
+and chuckling cry that might have been the ejaculation
+of a tipsy school-boy, and came strangely from
+withered lips hanging loose with weakness and
+with age. This dancing Methuselah caught Renfrew's
+attention; and, for the moment, he forgot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+to look at the miracle man. A general outcry
+from the multitude made him turn his head. He
+saw then that the miracle man held in his huge
+hands a sort of kennel of straw, the mouth of which
+was closed with a movable flap. Lifting this aloft,
+he sprang wildly round the ring, vociferating some
+words at the top of his voice; then, suddenly
+casting it down, he flung himself upon the ground,
+which he beat with his forehead, while he shrieked
+out a prayer to his patron saint for protection in
+the great miracle which he was about to perform.</p>
+
+<p>“What is he doing?� Renfrew asked of Absalem.</p>
+
+<p>“Don't you know?� Claire said.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were gleaming with excitement as they
+stared at the salaaming figure that grovelled at their
+feet.</p>
+
+<p>“No. How should I?�</p>
+
+<p>“He is praying to Sidi Mahomet,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>And then she looked at Renfrew. He understood.
+At that moment, despite the excessive heat
+engendered by the blazing sun and the pressure of
+the crowd, he turned very cold, as if his body was
+plunged in glacier water. He thought of the tall
+figure that had stood before Claire's tent door in
+the moonbeams, the lips that had coaxed from the
+pipe the tune that charmed all serpents,&mdash;that right
+tune that they must follow, which drew them from
+the desert sands to the grass of the oasis, till they
+wound up the body of this gaunt and tremendous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+savage, and hid themselves in his hairy bosom.
+This miracle man, then, was a snake-charmer, and
+Claire had divined it at once. How? Renfrew
+put the question quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“How did I know? He is the man who played
+outside my tent in the night, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>“The very man! Impossible.�</p>
+
+<p>“The very man.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then you were not asleep, not dreaming?�</p>
+
+<p>“How can one tell? Hush!�</p>
+
+<p>She spoke in the low voice of one whose attention
+is becoming concentrated, and who cannot
+endure the interruption. The charmer had now
+finished his petition to his god, and, standing up,
+thrust into his mouth a handful of some green herb,
+which he chewed and swallowed. Then his whole
+manner abruptly changed. The frenzy died out
+of his eyes. A calm suffused his tall and muscular
+body till it became strangely statuesque. His lips
+slowly smiled, and he raised his hands towards the
+glaring sky with a sublime gesture of gratitude.</p>
+
+<p>“What an actor!� Renfrew heard Claire
+murmur softly.</p>
+
+<p>He, too, had become intensely engrossed by this
+man in whom he, from this moment, began to see
+Claire: the exquisite woman whom the civilised
+world worshipped in the mighty savage who came
+from the remote depths of Morocco; the white being
+who played with the minds of the capitals of
+Europe, in the black being who played with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+reptiles of the desert and of the jungle. For Claire,
+guided by the spirit that ever goes before genius
+bearing the torch, had instinctively divined what
+she had never known. In London it seemed that
+she had entered into the very soul of this man who
+now stood before her. She had caught the wild
+graces of his bearing. She had reproduced his smile,
+so full of secrets and of power. She had moved as
+he did. She had been motionless as now he was
+motionless. In the sun she stood at this moment
+and beheld the reality of which she had been the
+magnificent reflection. And Renfrew felt his heart
+oppressed, as if clouds were closing round him.</p>
+
+<p>Now the snake-charmer looked slowly all round
+the great circle of watching faces until his eyes
+rested on Claire. He had taken the straw kennel
+into his hands, and he softly lifted the flap, and
+turned it flat upon the top of the kennel, leaving
+the mouth open. Then he thrust one hand into
+this mouth, and withdrew it, holding a writhing
+snake whose striped satin skin changed colour in
+the sunshine, turning from pink to green, from
+green to black.</p>
+
+<p>“It is the snake I saw,� Claire whispered to
+Renfrew.</p>
+
+<p>He did not reply. He seemed fascinated by the
+savage and the serpent. Holding the snake at
+arm's length, the charmer walked softly round
+the circle, collecting money from the crowd. He
+stopped in front of Claire. The snake thrust out<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+its flat head towards her. She did not shrink from
+it; and the charmer cried aloud some words that
+seemed like praise of her beauty and of her composure.
+She gave him a piece of gold. Renfrew
+gave him nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Then, standing once more in the centre of the
+circle, he burst into a frantic incantation, while the
+musicians redoubled their efforts, and the old maniac
+in the corner gave forth his chuckling cry with
+greater force, and swayed his trembling body more
+vehemently to and fro. The snake, suddenly
+brought from the darkness of the kennel to the
+light of day, was torpid and weary. It drooped
+between the charmer's hands. He shook it, called
+on it, caught up a stick and struck it. Then,
+forcing its mouth wide open, he barred its pink
+throat with the stick, on which he made it fix its
+two fangs, which were like two sharp hooks.
+Holding the end of the stick, he came again to
+Claire, to whom his whole performance was now
+exclusively devoted; and, approaching the hanging
+reptile close to her eyes, he jumped it up and down
+to the sound of the drum and pipe.</p>
+
+<p>“You see,� Claire said to Renfrew, “the roof of
+its mouth is flesh-colour.�</p>
+
+<p>He did not answer. Why did all this mean so
+much to him? Why did the clouds grow darker?
+The music and the cries of the old maniac perturbed
+him and bewildered his brain. And he
+wanted to be calm, and to watch Claire and this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span>
+savage with a cool and undivided attention. By
+this time the snake was growing irritated. It
+agitated its long body furiously; and when the
+charmer unhooked its fangs from the stick, it
+turned its head towards him and made a sudden
+dart at his face. He opened his mouth wide, thrust
+the snake into it, and let the creature fasten on
+his tongue, from which blood began to flow. Still
+bleeding, and with the snake fixed on his tongue,
+he danced and sprang into the air. His eyes grew
+wild. Foam ran from his mouth, and his whole
+appearance became demoniacal. Yet his eyes still
+fastened themselves upon Claire. In his most
+frantic moments his attention was never entirely
+distracted from the spot where she was standing.
+He tore the snake from his tongue and buried its
+fangs in the flesh of his left wrist. Cries broke
+from the crowd. The sight of the blood had excited
+them, for these people love blood as the toper
+loves wine. They urged the charmer on to fresh
+exertions with furious screams of encouragement.
+The maniac bent his body like a dervish in the last
+exercises of his religion, and the ragged musicians
+forced a more extreme uproar from their instruments.
+The charmer caught the snake by the tail,
+and strove to pull it backwards off his wrist. But
+the reptile's fangs were firmly fastened. It held
+on with a terrible tenacity, and a struggle ensued
+between it and its master. When at length it gave
+way, it was streaked with blood, and now at last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+thoroughly aroused. The charmer scraped his
+tongue with a straw; then, casting himself again
+upon the earth, he prayed once more with fury to
+Sidi Mahomet. Claire watched him always, with
+that pale and exquisite attention which one genius
+gives to the performance of another. Her face was
+white and still. Her body never moved. But her
+eyes blazed with life, and with the fires of a violent
+soul completely awake. Having finished his prayer,
+which ended in a cry so poignant that it might have
+burst from the lips of that world on which the
+flood came, the charmer remained upon the ground
+in a sitting posture, laid the snake in his lap, and drew
+from the inside of his ragged robe a Moorish lute
+made of a bladder, bamboo, and two strings, and
+coloured a pale yellowish-green. He plucked the
+strings gently, and played the fragment of a wild
+tune. Then, suddenly catching up the snake, and
+thrusting his tongue far out of his mouth, he poised
+the snake upon it, rose to his feet and stood at his
+full height in front of Claire, fixing his eyes upon
+her with a glance that seemed to claim from her
+both wonder and worship. The snake reared itself
+up higher and higher upon the quivering tongue;
+and the charmer, extending his long arms, whirled
+slowly round as if poised upon a movable platform,
+while a terrific clamour broke from the Moors, who
+seemed to be roused by this feat to the highest pitch
+of excitement. Still turning and turning, the
+charmer drew from his bosom a second snake that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+was black and larger than the first, and coiled it
+round his sinewy neck like a gigantic necklace, the
+darting head in front, resting, a sort of monstrous
+pendant, upon his uncovered chest. To Renfrew
+he looked like some hateful grotesque in a nightmare,
+inhuman, endowed with attributes of a devil.
+The serpents were part of him, growths of his
+body, visible signs of some terrible disease in which
+he gloried and of which he made a show. The
+creature was intolerable. His exhibition had suddenly
+become to Renfrew unfit for the eyes of any
+woman; and, without a word, he took hold of
+Claire and pulled her almost violently away from
+the circle on which the fascinated mob was beginning
+to encroach. She resisted him.</p>
+
+<p>“Desmond!� she exclaimed, “what are you
+doing?�</p>
+
+<p>“Claire&mdash;come. I insist upon it!�</p>
+
+<p>Already the Moors had thronged the place which
+they had left vacant. She turned a white face on
+him. There was in her eyes the hideous expression
+of a sleep-walker suddenly awakened, and she
+trembled in every limb. She swung round from
+Renfrew, and, above the intercepting Moors, high
+in the air, she saw the snake, which seemed climbing
+to heaven. While she looked, a huge hand
+closed upon it and took it out of sight. The
+charmer, observing the departure of his distinguished
+patrons, had abruptly stopped his performance.
+Claire made no further resistance. Without a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span>
+word, she permitted Renfrew to lead her to the
+horses and help her into the saddle. They rode
+down the hill to the camp without exchanging a
+word.</p>
+
+<p>When Claire had dismounted, she stood for a
+moment twisting her whip in her hands. Then
+she said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Desmond, I must ask you never to startle me
+again as you did to-day, by sudden action. You
+can't understand how such an interruption hurts
+a nature like mine. I would rather you had
+struck me. That would only have wounded my
+body.�</p>
+
+<p>She turned and went into her tent, leaving Renfrew
+in an agony of penitence and self-reproach.
+All the rest of the afternoon she was very cold and
+silent, rather dreamy than sullen, but obviously
+disinclined for conversation, and still more obviously
+unwilling to endure even the slightest demonstration
+of affection on the part of Renfrew.
+When the sheep which were to be slaughtered for
+the soldiers' feast were driven bleating into the
+camp, she retired into her tent, and remained
+there, resting, until the sun was low in the heavens,
+and the porters and mule-drivers went gaily out to
+search for the materials of the African fire with
+which the night was to be celebrated. They
+returned, singing the Moorish conquest of Granada,
+with their strong arms full of canes, dry and brittle
+branches of trees, logs that looked like whole<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span>
+trunks, and huge shrubs, green and sweet-smelling.
+Hearing their song, Claire came out of her tent.
+The sky was red, and, in the southwest, turrets of
+vapour rose and streamed out, assuming mysterious
+and thin shapes in the gathering dimness. A great
+flock of birds, flying very high, and forming a
+definite and beautiful pattern, passed slowly on the
+wing towards the kingdom of the storks, that lies
+near the sand banks of Ceuta. They moved in
+silence, and faded away in the twilight stealthily,
+like things full of quiet intention and governed by
+some furtive, but inexorable, desire. Renfrew, who
+was wandering rather miserably near the camp,
+watching descending pilgrims from the city melt
+into the vast bosom of the plain, saw Claire's white
+figure in the tent door, half hidden in a soft rosy
+mist which stole from the lips of evening as scent
+steals from the lips of a flower. He felt afraid to
+go to her. He possessed her; and yet it seemed to
+him now that he scarcely knew her. He was only
+an ordinary man. She was a strange woman; not
+merely because of her womanhood, as all women
+are to all men, but strange in that which lay
+beyond and beneath her womanhood, in her genius,
+and in the dull or ardent moods that stood round
+it, one, and yet not one, with it. In the tent door
+she leaned like a spirit born of the evening, a child
+of fading things, dying lights, fainting colours,
+retreating sounds,&mdash;a spirit waiting for the coming
+of the stars, and the rising of the moon, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+the mysteries of the night, and the subtle odours
+that the winds of Northern Africa bring with them
+over the mountains and down the lonely valleys,
+when the sun descends. And as a spirit may listen
+to the songs of men, with the melancholy of a thing
+apart, she listened to the songs of the Moors, until
+at length they seemed to be in her own heart that
+evening, as if they were songs of her own country.
+And these dark men with wild eyes who sang
+them, while they flung upon the grass their burdens
+from the thickets, and from the hedgeless and wide
+fields, were no longer alien to her. She stood in
+the tent door, and, without any conscious effort of
+the imagination, became their fancied mate,&mdash;a
+woman sprung from the same soil, or come in&mdash;like
+the strange people&mdash;from the deserts of their
+country. Only she was not as one of their women,
+mindless, patient, and concealed; but as their women
+should be, strong, hot-blooded, brave, serene, and
+looked upon by a world without reproach.</p>
+
+<p>Absalem came up to her to tell her some details
+of the night's festivity. Before he spoke she said
+to him:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Where does the desert lie?�</p>
+
+<p>He told her.</p>
+
+<p>“Does the miracle man come from there?�</p>
+
+<p>Absalem answered that no one knew. He had
+been much in Wasan, the sacred city of Morocco;
+but none knew his birthplace, his tribe, his name.
+Often he disappeared, no man could tell whither.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span>
+But, doubtless, he made vast journeys. Some said
+that he had exhibited his snakes on the banks of
+the Nile, that he had gone with the pilgrim trains
+to Mecca, that he knew Khartoum as he knew
+Marakesh, and that he never ceased from wandering.</p>
+
+<p>“What is his age?� Claire asked.</p>
+
+<p>Absalem answered that he must be old, but
+that Time had no power over him.</p>
+
+<p>“He miracle man; he live long as he wish.�</p>
+
+<p>Last she asked when he would leave Tetuan.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps this night. Perhaps to-morrow night,
+perhaps never. Perhaps he go already.�</p>
+
+<p>“Already!�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Claire moved out from the tent, and
+joined Renfrew, who was still watching her, and
+weaving lover's fancies about her white figure.</p>
+
+<p>“Have you been here long, Desmond?� she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Very long, dearest. Are you rested?�</p>
+
+<p>“Quite. From here you can see all the people
+travelling away from the city towards the sea?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“Have you been watching them?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, indeed; for half the afternoon.�</p>
+
+<p>She turned her great eyes on him searchingly,
+and seemed as if she checked a question which
+was almost on her lips.</p>
+
+<p>“They must have been a strange multitude,�
+she said at length. “I wonder where they are
+all going?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Some to the villages in the plain, some to the
+coast. I saw the Riffs who were in the Soko pass
+by. I suppose they were returning to the caverns
+from which they plunder becalmed vessels, Spanish
+and Portuguese.�</p>
+
+<p>“The Riffs&mdash;yes?�</p>
+
+<p>Her intonation suggested that she was waiting
+for some further information. Renfrew's curiosity
+was aroused.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you look at me like that?� he asked.
+“What do you want to know?�</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing, Desmond. How dark it is getting!
+There is Mohammed ringing the bell. And look,
+those must be the soldiers. They are just marching
+in from the city.�</p>
+
+<p>With the coming of night a wind arose, blowing
+towards the sea from the mountains; and with
+it came up a troop of clouds which blotted out
+stars and moon, and plunged the plain into a gulf
+of darkness. Tetuan does not gleam with lamps
+at night like a European city, and all the distant
+villas of the Moors were closely shuttered. So
+the wind, warm and scented and strong, swept
+over a black land, deserted and vacant. Only in
+the camp was there movement, music, and an
+illumination that strove up in the night, as if it
+would climb to the clouds. Scarcely had Claire
+and Renfrew finished dinner, when Absalem and
+Mohammed ceremoniously appeared to conduct
+them out to the bare space before the tents on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+which the African fire had been carefully built.
+Absalem carried a lamp which swung in the wind,
+and, behind, there appeared from the kitchen tent
+some of the porters, bearing burning brands, the
+flames of which were at right angles to the wood
+from which they sprung. The guard of soldiers,
+one dozen in all, armed with immense guns and
+wrapped in hooded cloaks, were already crouched
+in a silent mass before the lifeless and portentous
+erection which came out of the darkness, as
+Absalem swung forward the lamp, like the skeleton
+of a monster. They turned their shadowy faces
+on Claire, and stared with eyes intent and unself-conscious
+as those of an animal. The porters
+flung their brands on to the mountain of twigs, and
+instantaneously a huge sheet of livid gold sprang up
+against the black background of the night, as if it
+had been shaken out on the wind by invisible
+hands. This sheet expanded, swayed, fluttered in
+ragged edges, and cast forth a cloud of sparks
+which were carried away into the air and vanished
+in the sky. The shrubs caught fire and crackled
+furiously, and finally the foundation of gigantic
+logs began to glow steadily, and to fill the wind
+with a scorching heat. The camp was gradually
+defined, at first vaguely and in sections,&mdash;the peak
+of a tent, the head of a mule, a startled pariah
+dog, a Moor set in the eye of the flames; then
+clearly, as the buildings one may see in a furnace,
+complete and glowing. The faces of the soldiers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+were barred with flickering orange, and red lights
+played in their huge and staring eyeballs. The
+horses and mules could be counted. Before the
+kitchen tent the sacrifice of sheep was visible,
+stewing in enormous pans upon red embers in a
+trench of earth. And the grave cook, who was
+distinguished by a white turban, shone like a pantomime
+magician at the mouth of an enchanted
+cave. Warmth, light, life poured upon the night,
+and the voices of men began to mingle with the
+continuous voice of this superb fire. The Moors,
+soldiers, servants, porters, kindled into furious
+gaiety with the swiftness of the canes and olive
+boughs. They sprang up from the ground, pulled
+the shrouding hoods from their faces, tossed away
+their djelabes, and began, with shouts and ejaculations,
+to dance up and down before the golden
+sheet, spreading their hands to it with the glee of
+children. A sudden joy beamed in the dusky and
+solemn faces, twinkled in the sombre eyes. One
+man flung away his fez, another dashed his turban
+to the ground. Round, shaven heads, bare arms,
+brown legs, half concealed by fluttering linen
+knickerbockers, lithe bodies emerged with eager
+haste into the light. Shadows became abruptly
+men, formless humps athletes. Mutes sent out
+great voices to startle the sweeping bats. Mourners
+turned into maniacs. It was a fantasia that
+exploded into life like a rocket, shedding a stream
+of vivid human fire. Mohammed drew away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+from the flames, taking a dozen swift footsteps to
+the rear. Then, with a shout, he dashed forward,
+bounded into the golden sheet, and disappeared as
+a clown disappears through a paper hoop. Only
+the paper closed up behind him. He leaped
+through light to darkness, pursued by a thousand
+eager sparks. One soldier followed him, then
+another, and another. The porters, linking hands,
+leaped in twos and threes. Even the cook, old,
+and serious with a weight of savoury knowledge,
+tottered to the edge of the fire, which was now
+becoming a furnace, and took it as an Irish horse
+takes a stone wall, striking the topmost branches
+with his bare feet amid a chorus of yells.</p>
+
+<p>Claire watched the darting figures with a silent
+gravity. She did not seem to be stirred by the fantasia
+of the firelight, or to catch any gaiety or life
+from the boisterous activity of those about her.
+The flames lit up the whiteness of her face, and
+showed Renfrew that she was looking gloomy and
+even despairing.</p>
+
+<p>“Is anything the matter, Claire?� he asked
+anxiously.</p>
+
+<p>“No. How could there be?�</p>
+
+<p>The wind, which was increasing in violence,
+blew her thin dress forward, and she shivered.
+Absalem noticed it.</p>
+
+<p>“Wear djelabe, lady,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>And in a moment he had taken his off, and was
+carefully wrapping Claire in it. She seemed glad of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>
+it, thanked him, and, with a quick gesture that hurt
+Renfrew, pulled the big brown hood up over her
+head, so that her face was entirely concealed from
+view. She now looked exactly like a Moor, and
+might have been mistaken for one of the soldiers
+before the fire was lit and all impeding garments
+were thrown aside.</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew, uneasy, and wondering what conduct on
+his part would best suit her mysterious mood, after
+one or two remarks to which she barely replied,
+drew away a little, and gave his attention to the
+antics of the soldiers. Some of them were already
+resuming their djelabes, in preparation for the feast,
+which they sniffed even through the odour of burning
+wood and leaves. The cook, after his emotional
+and acrobatic outburst, had returned to his pans,
+which he was stirring tenderly with a stick. When
+Renfrew again looked towards Claire, he found it
+impossible to tell which cloak shrouded her from
+his sight. Four or five hooded figures stood near
+the fire. She must be one of them. He approached
+the group, but found, to his surprise, that
+all the members of it were soldiers. Claire had
+moved away. Renfrew stood for a few minutes
+with the men, till they were summoned to their
+feast, which, strangely enough, was to take place
+away from the fire in the dense darkness behind
+the tents. Then he was left alone by the huge
+mass of flame, which roared hoarsely in the wind.
+Where could Claire be? On any ordinary occa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>sion
+Renfrew would certainly have sought for her,
+but to-night something held him back. He knew
+very well that she wished to be alone, that something
+was closely occupying her mind. Whether
+she was still brooding over the event of the afternoon,
+when he had forcibly led her away in the
+very crisis of the snake-charmer's performance, he
+could not tell. To an ordinary woman such a
+matter would have been a trifle; but Renfrew
+understood that Claire felt it more deeply. Her
+mind appeared to be mysteriously moved and
+awakened by this savage from the depths of
+Morocco. Various circumstances combined to
+render him more interesting to her than he could
+possibly be to any ordinary traveller. Renfrew
+recognised that fully and quietly. The genius of
+Claire had enabled her to realise in London all
+the wildly picturesque idiosyncrasies of a man
+whom she had never seen or heard of. Suddenly
+fate had led her to him, and she had beheld her
+own performance, the original of her imitation.
+As Renfrew stood by the fire, he began to feel the
+folly of his proceeding of the afternoon, and to
+imagine more clearly than before the condition into
+which it had thrown Claire. It is a sin to disturb
+the contemplations of genius. It is sacrilege.
+And then Renfrew had been moved to his act by a
+preposterous access of jealousy. He acknowledged
+this to himself. He had been jealous of Claire's
+interest in this man's performance, jealous perhaps<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+even of her dream among the hills in the midnight
+camp, where the man stood before her sleeping eyes,
+and played with his visionary serpent. How mad
+can a lover be? He resolved to go to Claire, and
+ask her pardon. This resolve thrilled him. To
+carry it out, he would have to draw very near to
+Claire, to unpack his heart to her. After all, she
+had given herself to him. But he had appreciated
+the wonder of his rôle as possessor so keenly, that
+he had waited upon her moods with an almost
+trembling awe. Now, in asking pardon, he would
+show that in his passion he could be strong.
+Women want to see the man in the lover, as well
+as the devotee. Renfrew, in acknowledging his
+jealousy of a black savage, meant to clasp Claire
+with the arms of a whirlwind.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile she was hidden from him. The
+wind blew strongly. The sparks leaped away in
+clouds toward the sea. From the dense darkness
+behind him came a sound of music. The soldiers
+were feasting. The porters were striking the lute,
+and singing songs of the dance and of love and of
+victory. It was a night of comradeship and of rejoicing.
+Yet he stood alone; and the turmoil of
+his heart was unheeded. He tried to explore the
+blackness of the night which stood round the golden
+fire with his eyes. Claire must be in that blackness
+close to him. Doubtless she saw him, a red and
+yellow creature, painted into fictitious brilliance by
+the illumination which was shed upon him. She<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span>
+saw him and kept from him. Renfrew resolved to
+be patient. When her mood of reserve died she
+would come to him, in her dress of a Moor, and
+he would kiss the white face beneath the hood,
+and put his arms round the thin figure that was
+lost in the djelabe of brawny Absalem, and tell her
+the true story of his heart, never fully told to her
+yet. He squatted down before the fire, lit his pipe,
+shrugged his shoulders against the tempest from
+the mountains, and waited, listening to the weird
+music that swept by him like a hidden bird on the
+wind.</p>
+
+<p>And Claire&mdash;where was she? When Absalem
+wrapped her in the huge djelabe it seemed to Claire
+that he had divined her secret longing to be in hiding.
+She disappeared into the mighty hood of the garment
+as into a cave. Its shadow concealed her
+from the watching eyes of Renfrew. There was
+warmth in it and a beautiful darkness. She desired
+both. She saw Renfrew turn to watch the leaping
+soldiers, and stole away out of the illuminated circle
+formed by the glow from the fire, into the night
+beyond. She did not go far, only into the nearest
+shadow. And there she sat down on the short dry
+grass, and forgot Renfrew, the roaring flames, the
+wind that felt incessantly at her robe, the shouting
+guard, the radiant and dancing attendants. She forgot
+them all as completely as if they had never been
+in her life; for the strangeness of certain incidents
+preoccupied her, to the exclusion of everything else.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+In the double existence of a really great actress
+there are many moments in which the truths of the
+imagination seem more important than the truths
+of physical phenomena of things seen by the eye,
+of sounds received and appreciated by the ear. In
+these moments, genius usurps the throne of reason,
+and the mind beholds fancies as sunlit gods, facts
+as timid and scarcely defined shadows. So it was
+with Claire now. Even the snake-charmer, as he
+gave his performance in the Soko, was a shadow in
+comparison with that man who summoned her to
+the tent door in the solitary encampment. And
+behind and beyond both these figures of truth and
+dreaming stood a third, created for herself by Claire
+in London, that figure into whom she had poured
+her soul as into a mould, when she charmed imaginary
+serpents, and prayed to the god in whom,
+for a moment, she believed with the passion of
+the perfect mime. This trio Claire placed in line,
+and reviewed: charmer of her imagination, of her
+dream, of the Soko.</p>
+
+<p>They were the same, and yet not the same.
+For the first was dominated, even was created by
+her. The second stood above her, like some
+magician, and summoned her as one possessing a
+right. The third&mdash;what of him? He was a wild
+creature of blood and foam, crafty, a player like
+herself, a maker of money, a savage in sacking, and
+almost nothing to her now. Out of the desert he
+came. Into the desert he was, perhaps, even now,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+returning, with his snakes sleeping in his bosom,
+and the money of the Tetuan Moors jingling in
+his pouch.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, she saw him, travelling like a shadow in
+the night, one of those grotesques which leap on
+bedroom walls when a lamp flares in the wind that
+sighs through an open casement. He was going;
+but the man of the dream remained. The dream
+man had come up out of the world that is vaguer
+to us than the desert when we wake, and clearer
+to us than the desert when we sleep. Claire saw
+him still, and, while the wonderful mountebank of
+the Soko passed, he stood in the tent door like a
+statue of ebony, a rooted reality. And the snake
+was in his bosom; and the pipe was at his lips;
+and the power was in his heart. And as he played,
+Claire thought beneath the djelabe of Absalem,
+there came to him, with the faltering steps of a
+thing irresistibly charmed, that third man whose soul
+she had seen in London, like approaching like,
+with the manner of a slave and the glance of the
+conquered. And her soul was still within that
+charmed figure. She could not rescue it now from
+the place where she had put it. And the statue at
+the tent door played the irresistible melody until
+his wild and cringing double stole to his very feet,
+and nearer and nearer, till they melted together,
+and where two men had been, there was only one.
+He smiled with a subtle triumph, laid down his
+pipe, stretched out his arms and vanished. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+within him now was the soul of Claire, borne
+wherever he should go, his captive, his possession
+for all eternity.</p>
+
+<p>Behind her, in the cloudy darkness, Claire heard
+a movement, and the gliding of soft feet on grass.
+She did not turn her head, supposing that one of
+the soldiers was keeping his guard. The movement
+ceased. But the little noise had broken the
+thread on which her fancies were strung. They
+were scattered like beads. She found herself feeling
+quite ordinary, and listening with an urging
+attention for a renewal of the trifling noise behind
+her. In the distance she could see Renfrew, now
+crouching before the fire, which poured colour and
+a piercing vitality upon him. She heard also, and
+for the first time, the sound of the porters' music,
+which had been audible in the night all through her
+reverie, though she was entirely unaware of the
+fact. She realised that the soldiers were devouring
+the stew of mutton, and that she was in a gay camp,
+full of human beings in a state of unusual satisfaction.
+One of these human beings must be close
+to her. She turned her head. But she was sitting
+in the darkness beyond the illumination of the fire,
+and beyond her the night was like a black wall.
+Whatever had moved there was invisible to her.
+She had not heard the gliding step go away, and
+she felt that she was not alone. This feeling
+began to render her uneasy. She got up, with the
+intention of returning to the firelight and to Ren<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>frew.
+Indeed she had taken a step or two in his
+direction, when she was checked by an unreasonable
+desire to see who had come so close to her,
+who had broken her reverie. Acting upon the
+sudden impulse, she turned swiftly and came on
+into the darkness. Almost instantly she stood
+before the dim outline of a man, and paused. Here
+in the night it was very lonely, even though the
+illuminated camp was so near. Claire hesitated to
+approach this man who seemed to be on watch and
+who was perfectly motionless. She waited a moment,
+wishing that he would come to her in order
+that she might see what he was like, whether he
+carried a gun and was a soldier. But it was soon
+evident that he did not mean to move. Then
+Claire went up so close to him that his coarse
+garment rubbed against her djelabe and his eyes
+stared right down into hers. And she saw that it
+was the snake-charmer from the Soko, who was
+looking into her face with the very smile of the
+man in her dream. Round his bare throat one
+of his snakes was twined, and he held its neck
+between the fingers of his left hand. The wind
+tossed his short and ragged cloak wildly to and fro,
+and whirled the long lock of hair at the back of his
+shaven head about, and made it dance like a living
+thing. When Claire came up to him, he never
+said a word, or moved at all. It seemed to her
+that his face was that of some dark and triumphant
+being, waiting immovably for something that was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span>
+certain to come to him, and to come so close that
+he need not even stretch out his hand to take it as
+his possession. What was the thing he waited for?
+She looked at his black face and at the snake which
+moved slowly, trying to thrust its way downward
+into the warmth of his bosom, out of the reach of
+the wind and of the night. And, when the man's
+fingers unclosed to release it, and it slid away and
+softly disappeared beneath his garment, Claire
+shuddered under the influence of a sensation that
+was surely mad. For she felt that she envied the
+snake, and that the charmer was waiting there in
+the darkness for her. As the snake vanished,
+Claire recoiled towards the fire. The charmer
+did not attempt to follow her, and his huge and
+watchful figure quickly faded from Claire's eyes till
+his blackness had become one with the blackness
+of the night.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Renfrew, as he crouched before the fire, felt a
+light touch on his shoulder. He looked up, saw
+Claire's white face peering down on him, and
+sprang to his feet.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought you were never coming, that you had
+deserted me altogether, and left me lonely in the
+midst of the fantasia,� he cried, seizing her hands.</p>
+
+<p>“I am cold,� she said; “horribly cold. Let
+me sit beside you, close to the fire.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span></p>
+<p>She sat down on the ground, almost touching
+the roaring flames.</p>
+
+<p>“Where have you been?�</p>
+
+<p>“Sitting in the dark. The soldiers are feasting?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and the camp fellows are all singing and
+playing. Don't you hear them? We are quite
+alone. That's all I want, all I care for. Claire,
+when you go away like this, and leave me, even
+for a few minutes, Morocco is the most desolate
+place in all the world, and I'm the most desolate
+vagabond in it.�</p>
+
+<p>He put his arm round her. The terrific glow
+from the fire played over her face, danced in the
+deep folds of her djelabe, shone in her eyes, showered
+a cloud of gold and red about her hair. For
+she had let her hood fall down on her shoulders.
+She attained to that fine and almost demoniacal
+picturesqueness which glorifies even the most
+commonplace smith when you see him in his forge
+by night. Her cheeks were suffused with scarlet,
+as if she had suddenly painted them to go on
+the stage. Yet she shivered again as Renfrew
+spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“You should not have left the fire,� he said.
+“And yet the wind is warm.�</p>
+
+<p>“It can't be. But it's not the wind, it's the
+darkness that has chilled me.�</p>
+
+<p>“Or is it the loneliness?� he asked, tenderly.
+“For you have been alone as well as I, and nothing
+on earth makes one so cold as solitude.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span></p>
+<p>“I scarcely ever feel alone, Desmond,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>And, as she spoke, she cast a glance behind her
+into the darkness from which she had just come.
+Renfrew noticed it.</p>
+
+<p>“You have been alone?� he asked hastily.
+Then he checked himself with an ashamed laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“What a fool I am,� he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>He clasped her more closely.</p>
+
+<p>“A fool, because I'm so desperately in love with
+you, Claire,� he said, rushing on his confession
+with the swiftness of alarmed bravery. “Look
+here, I want to tell you something. You must
+put everything I do, everything I am, down to the
+account of my love,&mdash;shyness, anger, abruptness,
+violence,&mdash;everything, Claire. My love's responsible.
+It does play the devil with an ordinary man
+when he's given his very soul to&mdash;to a woman
+like you, to a great woman. It keeps him back
+when he ought to go on, and sends him on when
+he ought to stay quiet, and makes him jealous of
+stones and&mdash;and savages.�</p>
+
+<p>“Savages, Desmond?�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew's face was scarlet. He put up his hand
+before it and muttered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“This fire's scorching. Yes, Claire, of savages.
+Didn't you find that out this afternoon,
+when we were in Tetuan? But of course you
+couldn't. You couldn't know you'd married
+such an infernal lunatic.�</p>
+
+<p>He broke off. She was watching him with a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+close attention, and her body had ceased to tremble
+under his arm.</p>
+
+<p>“Go on, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>“You want me to tell you the sort of man
+you've married?�</p>
+
+<p>“I want you to tell me what you mean.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then I will. Claire, this afternoon I took
+you away from that snake-charming chap because&mdash;well,
+because you watched him as if he fascinated
+you.�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!�</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I knew why. His performance
+was clever, and he was picturesque in his way,
+although, to be sure, it was all put on, as far as
+that goes.�</p>
+
+<p>“Like my stage performances, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>“Claire,� he said hotly. “How can you?�</p>
+
+<p>“That man acts far better than I do&mdash;if he
+acts at all.�</p>
+
+<p>“Was that why he interested you so much?�</p>
+
+<p>“In what other way could he interest me?�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew kicked at one of the blazing logs and
+sent up a shower of red-hot flakes.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, there was your dream, Claire.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, there was that.�</p>
+
+<p>“It was curious, coming just before we saw the
+fellow. And you say the two men were alike.�</p>
+
+<p>“I did not say alike. I said the same.�</p>
+
+<p>“How could that be?�</p>
+
+<p>“How can a thousand things be? Yet we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span>
+cannot deny them when they are, any more than
+we can deny that we feel an earthly immortality
+within us and yet crumble into dust. In sleep I
+saw that man. I saw his snake. I heard him
+play.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Claire, I know. It's damned strange.�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew's forehead was wrinkled in a meditative
+frown.</p>
+
+<p>“But, after all, what's a dream?� he exclaimed.
+“A vagary of a sleeping brain. And in your
+dream you wouldn't go to that beggar, Claire.�</p>
+
+<p>“No. I wouldn't go, and so I died.�</p>
+
+<p>“It all means nothing&mdash;nothing at all.�</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him gravely.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder whether there are things in life that
+we are compelled to do, Desmond,� she said. “I
+sometimes think there must be. How otherwise
+can a thousand strange events be accounted for,
+especially things that women do?�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know,� he muttered, staring at her
+anxiously in the firelight.</p>
+
+<p>“Every one acknowledges the irresistible power
+of physical force over physical weakness. Some
+day, perhaps, when the world has grown a little
+older, we shall all understand that the power of
+mental force is precisely similar, and can as little
+be resisted. What's that?�</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew felt that she was suddenly alert. Her
+thin form grew hard and quivering, like the body
+of a greyhound about to be let loose on a hare.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>
+He heard nothing except a sound of music from
+the darkness, and the gentle rustle of the wind.</p>
+
+<p>“I hear nothing,� he said. “What was it&mdash;a
+cry?�</p>
+
+<p>“No, no!�</p>
+
+<p>“What then?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Desmond&mdash;hush!�</p>
+
+<p>He was obedient, and strained his ears, wondering
+what Claire had heard. The fire was at last
+beginning to die down, for the flames had devoured
+the masses of dry twigs, and had now nothing to
+feed upon except the heavy logs. So the darkness
+drew a little closer round the camp, as if the night
+expanded noiselessly. One of the porters, or,
+perhaps, one of the soldiers, was playing a queer
+little air upon a pipe over and over again. It was
+plaintive and very soft. But the tone of the instrument
+was strangely penetrating, and the wind
+carried it along over the plain, as if anxious to bear
+it to the sea, that the cave men might hear it, and
+the sailors bearing up for the Spanish coast. Was
+Claire listening to this odd little tune? Renfrew
+wondered. There seemed no other sound. She
+was moving uneasily now, as if an intense restlessness
+had taken hold of her. And she turned her
+head away from him and gazed into the night.</p>
+
+<p>Presently she put her hand on Renfrew's arm,
+which was still round her waist, and tried to remove
+it. But he would not yield to her desire.
+He only held her closer, and again&mdash;he could<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+not tell why&mdash;the smouldering jealousy began to
+flare up in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>“No, Claire,� he said, in answer to her movement,
+“you are mine. You have given yourself
+to me. I alone have the right to keep you, to
+hold you close&mdash;close to my heart.�</p>
+
+<p>“Can you keep me always, Desmond?� she
+said, suddenly turning on him with a sort of fierce
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>She looked into his eyes as if she would search
+the very depths of his soul for strength, for power.</p>
+
+<p>“You have the right. Yes; but that is nothing&mdash;nothing.�</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing, Claire?�</p>
+
+<p>“You must have the strength, Desmond. That
+is everything.�</p>
+
+<p>There was a look almost of despair in her face.
+She threw herself against him as if moved by a
+sudden yearning for protection, and put her arms
+round his shoulders.</p>
+
+<p>The hidden Moor was still playing the same
+monotonous little tune, an African aria, as wild
+as a bird that flies over the desert, or a cloud that
+is driven across the sky above a dangerous sea. It
+was imaginative, and, as all tunes seem to have a
+shape, this melody was misshapen and yet delicious,
+like a twisted tangled creature that has the
+smile of a sweet woman, or the eyes of an alluring
+child. In its plaintiveness there was the atmosphere
+of solitary places. And there was a sound<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+of love in it, too, but of a love so uncivilised as to
+be almost monstrous. Some earth man of a dead
+age might have sung it to his mate in a land where
+the sun looked down on things primeval. It might
+have caught the heart of maidens very long ago,
+before they learned to think of passion as the twin
+of law, and to regard a kiss as the seal set upon
+the tape of matrimony. The queer sorrow of it
+could hardly have moved any eyes to tears. Yet
+few women could have heard it without a sense of
+desolation. It ran through the darkness as cold
+water runs in the black shadow of a forest, a
+trickle of sound as thin and persistent as the cry
+of a wild creature in the night.</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew thrilled under the touch of Claire's hand.</p>
+
+<p>“You can give me the strength every woman
+seeks in the man she yields herself up to,� he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“How?�</p>
+
+<p>“By loving me.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes. But the strength must not come,
+however subtly, from the woman. No&mdash;no.�</p>
+
+<p>Again she leaned away from him, with her face
+turned towards the darkness. Tremors ran through
+her, and her hands dropped almost feebly from
+Renfrew's shoulders, as the hands of an invalid fall
+away, and down, after an embrace.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no,� she reiterated, and her voice was
+almost a wail. “It must be there, in the man,
+part of him, whether he is with the woman in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+night, or alone&mdash;far off&mdash;in the jungle, or in
+the&mdash;the desert. He must have the strange
+strength that comes from solitude. Where can the
+men of our country find that now?�</p>
+
+<p>“They find strength in the clash of wills,
+Claire, and in the battles of love.�</p>
+
+<p>“Most of them never find it at all,� she said,
+with a sort of sullen resignation. “And most of
+the women do not want it, or ask for it, or know
+what it is. The danger is when some accident
+or some fate teaches them what it is. Then&mdash;then&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>She stopped, and glanced at Renfrew suspiciously,
+as if she had so nearly betrayed a secret
+that he might, nay, must have guessed it.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean? Then they seek it
+away from&mdash;?�</p>
+
+<p>“Where they know they will find it,� she said,
+almost defiantly.</p>
+
+<p>Renfrew's face grew cold and rigid.</p>
+
+<p>“What are you saying to me, Claire?�</p>
+
+<p>“What is true of some women, Desmond.�</p>
+
+<p>He was silent. Pain and fear invaded his
+heart; and, by degrees, the little tune played by
+the Moor seemed to approach him, very quietly,
+and to become one with this slow agony. Music,
+among its many and terrible powers, numbers one
+that is scarcely possessed as forcibly by any other
+art. It can glide into a man and direct his
+emotions as irresistibly as science can direct the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+flow of a stream. It can penetrate as a thing
+seen cannot penetrate. For that which is invisible
+is that which is invincible. And this tune
+of the Moor, while it added to Renfrew's distress,
+touched his distress with confusion and bewilderment.
+At first he did not realise that the music
+had anything to do with his state of mind, or with
+the growing turmoil of his heart and brain; but
+he felt that something was becoming intolerable to
+him, and pushing him on in a dangerous path.
+He thought it was the statement of Claire; and,
+for the first time in his life, he was stirred by an
+anger against her that was horrible to him. He
+released her from his arm.</p>
+
+<p>“How dare you say that to me?� he asked.
+“Do you understand what your words imply, that&mdash;Good
+God!&mdash;that women are like animals,
+creatures without souls, running to the feet of the
+master who has the whip with the longest, the
+most stinging lash? Why, such a creed as yours
+would keep men savages, and kill all gentleness out
+of the world. Curse that chap! That hideous
+music of his&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He had suddenly become aware that the Moor's
+melody added something to his torment. At his
+last exclamation, the sullen look in Claire's pale
+face gave way to an expression of fear and of
+startling solicitude.</p>
+
+<p>“Desmond, you are putting a wrong interpretation
+on what I said,� she began hastily.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span></p>
+<p>But he was excited, and could not endure any
+interruption.</p>
+
+<p>“And you imply a degrading immorality as a
+prevailing characteristic of women too,� he went
+on, “that they should leave their homes, deny
+their obligations, because they find elsewhere&mdash;away,
+out in some dark place with a blackguard&mdash;a
+powerful will to curb them and keep them
+down, like&mdash;why, like these wretched women all
+round us here in this country,&mdash;the women we
+saw in Tetuan only to-day, veiled, hidden, loaded
+with burdens, worse off than animals, because
+their masters doubt them, and would not dream of
+trusting them. Claire, there's something barbarous
+about you.�</p>
+
+<p>He spoke the words with the intonation of one
+who thinks he is uttering an insult. But she
+smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“It's the something barbarous about me that
+has placed me where I am,� she said, with a cold
+pride. “It is that which civilisation worships in
+me, that which has set me above the other women
+of my time. It is even that which has made you
+love me, Desmond, whether you know it or not.�</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her like a man half dazed.</p>
+
+<p>“I frighten the dove-cotes. I can make men
+tremble by my outbursts of passion, and women
+faint because I am sad; and even the stony-hearted
+sob when I die. And I can make you love me,
+Desmond. Yes, perhaps I am more barbarous<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+than other women. But do you think I am sorry
+for it? No.�</p>
+
+<p>“Some day you may be, Claire.�</p>
+
+<p>He spoke more gently. The wonder and worship
+he had for this woman stirred in him again.
+While she had been speaking, she had instinctively
+risen to her feet, and she stood in the dull red
+glow of the waning fire, looking down at him as if
+he were a creature in a lower world than the one
+in which she could walk at will.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall never choose to be sorry,� she said,
+“whatever my fate may be. To be sorry is to
+be feeble, and to be feeble is to be unfit to live,
+and unfit to die. Never, never think of me as
+being sorry for anything I have done, or may do.
+Never deceive yourself about me.�</p>
+
+<p>A great log, eaten through by a flame at its
+heart, broke gently asunder on the summit of the
+heaped wood. One half of it, red-hot, and alive
+with multitudes of flickering fires, gold, primrose,
+steel-blue, and deep purple, dropped and fell at
+Claire's feet. She glanced down at it, and at
+Renfrew.</p>
+
+<p>“My deeds may burn me up,� she said, “as
+those coloured fires burn up that wood, until it is
+no longer wood but fire itself. They shall never
+drench me with wretched, contemptible tears.�</p>
+
+<p>He got up; and, when he was on his feet, he
+seemed to hear the incessant music more clearly,
+blending with the words of Claire. The notes<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+were like hot sparks falling on him. He winced
+under them, and looked round almost wildly.
+Then, without speaking, he hurried away in the
+darkness to the place where the soldiers were feasting,
+and the men of the camp were holding their
+fantasia. Claire divined why he went. She
+started a step forward as if to try and stop him;
+but his movement had been so abrupt that she was
+too late. She had to let him go. Her hands fell
+at her sides, and she waited by the dying fire in the
+attitude of one who listens intently. The soft
+melody of that hidden and persistent musician
+wailed in her ears, on and on. It came again and
+again, never ceasing, never altering in time. And
+its influence upon Claire was terrible as the influence
+of the dream music in the valley beneath
+the Kasbar. She longed to go to it. She seemed
+to belong to it,&mdash;to be its possession, and to have
+erred when she separated herself from it. In the
+darkness it was awaiting her, and it sent out its
+crying voice in the night as a message, as a summons
+soft, clear, and quietly determined. She
+clenched her hands as she stood by the fire. She
+strove to root her feet in the ground. If there had
+been anything to cling to just then, she would
+have stretched forth her arms and clung to it, resisting
+what she loved from fear of the future. But
+there was nothing. And she thought of the children
+and of the Pied Piper. But they were legendary
+beings of a fable long ago. And she thought<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+of Renfrew and of his love. But that seemed
+nothing. That could not keep her. He was a
+pale phantom, and her career was a handful of dust,
+and her name was as the name graven upon a
+tomb, and her life was but as a gift to be offered to
+an unknown destiny,&mdash;while that melody called
+to her. Had any one seen her then in the glow of
+the firelight, she would have seemed to him terrible.
+For suddenly she let the djelabe of Absalem slip
+from her shoulders to the ground. And, in the
+fiercely flickering light, that makes all things and
+people assume unearthly aspects, her thin figure in
+its white robe looked like the white body of a
+serpent, erect and trembling, under the influence of
+the charmer. But the melody grew softer and
+softer, more faint, more dreamy in the darkness.
+Presently it ceased. As it did so, Claire drew
+a deep breath, lifted her head like one released
+from a thraldom, and turned her face towards the
+camp.</p>
+
+<p>Almost directly she saw Renfrew returning
+towards her. He looked puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>“It wasn't any of the men playing,� he said
+to her.</p>
+
+<p>“No?�</p>
+
+<p>Claire bent, caught up the djelabe and drew it
+over her.</p>
+
+<p>“I went to them, and found them listening to
+some story Absalem was telling. They were all
+gathered close round him, huddled up together in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+the dark. And the piping came from quite another
+direction&mdash;not from the soldiers either. It
+must have been some vagabond out of Tetuan. I
+was just going to make a search for him, when the
+noise stopped. He must have heard me coming.�</p>
+
+<p>He still looked disturbed and angry, and this
+break in their conversation was final. It seemed
+impossible to take up the thread of it again. They
+stood together watching the fire fade away till it
+was a faint glow almost level with the ground.
+Then at last Renfrew spoke, in a voice that was
+almost timid.</p>
+
+<p>“Claire,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� she answered out of the dull twilight
+that would soon be darkness.</p>
+
+<p>“If I have said anything to-night to hurt you,
+don't think of it, don't remember it. I don't
+know&mdash;I don't seem to have been like myself
+to-night. I believe that cursed music irritated me,
+so ugly, and so monotonous; it got right on my
+nerves, I think.�</p>
+
+<p>“Did it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Without my knowing it.�</p>
+
+<p>He felt for one of her hands and clasped it.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, dear. We both said more than we meant.
+Didn't we?�</p>
+
+<p>Claire did not assent; but she let her hand
+lie in his. That satisfied him then, although afterwards
+he remembered her silence. Soon the fire
+was dead; and they said good-night in the wind,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+which seemed colder because there was no more
+light.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Renfrew went to his tent, undressed, and got
+into bed. The wind roared against the canvas.
+But the pegs had been driven stoutly into the
+ground by the porters, and held the cords fast.
+He felt very tired and depressed, and thought he
+would not fall asleep quickly. But he soon began
+to be drowsy, and to have a sense of dropping into
+the very arms of the tempest, lulled by its noise.
+He slept for a time. Presently, however, and
+while it was still quite dark, he woke up. He
+heard the wind as before, but was troubled by an
+idea that some other sound was mingling with it,
+some murmur so indistinct that he could not decide
+what it was, although he was aware of it.
+He sat up and strained his ears, and wished the
+wind would lull, if only for a moment, or that this
+other sound&mdash;which had surely been the cause of
+his waking&mdash;would increase, and stand out distinctly
+in the night. And, at last, by dint of listening
+with all his force, Renfrew seemed to himself
+to compel the sound to greater clearness. Then
+he knew that somewhere, far off perhaps in the
+wind, the player on the pipe reiterated his soft and
+stealthy music. It was swept on the tempest like
+a drowning thing caught in a whirlpool. It was so
+faint as to be almost inaudible. But in all its
+weakness it retained most completely its character,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span>
+and made the same impression upon Renfrew as
+when it was near and distinct. It irritated and it
+repelled him. And, with an angry exclamation, he
+flung himself down and buried his head in the
+pillow, stopping his ears with his hands.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>With daylight the camp was in a turmoil.
+Claire was gone. Her bed had not been slept in.
+She had not undressed. She had not even taken
+off Absalem's djelabe. At least it could not be
+found. Renfrew, frantic, almost mad with anxiety,
+explored the plain, rode at a gallop to the gate of
+the city, called upon the Governor of Tetuan
+to help him in his search, and summoned the
+Consul to his aid in his despair. Every effort was
+made to find the missing woman; but no success
+crowned the quest, either at that time, or afterwards,
+when weeks became months, and months grew into
+years. A great actress was lost to the world.
+His world was lost to Renfrew. He rode back at
+last one day to the villas of Tangier, bent down
+upon his horse, broken, alone. In his despair he
+cursed himself. He accused himself of cruelty to
+Claire that night beside the African fire, when he
+had been roused to a momentary anger against her.
+He even told himself that he had driven her away
+from him. But other men, who had known Claire
+and the strangeness of her caprices, said to each
+other that she had got tired of Renfrew and given
+him the slip, wandering away disguised in the djelabe<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+of a Moor, and that some fine day she would turn
+up again, and re-appear upon the stage that had seen
+her glory.</p>
+
+<p>Later on, when Renfrew at last, after long searching,
+came hopelessly back to England, so changed
+that his friends scarcely recognised him, he was
+sometimes seized with strange and terrible thoughts
+as he sat brooding over the wreck of his love. He
+seemed to see, as in a pale vision of flame and
+darkness, a little dusky Moorish boy bending to
+smell at a withered sprig of orange flower, and to
+remember that once&mdash;how long ago it seemed&mdash;Claire
+had wished to kiss that boy as a Moorish
+woman might have kissed him. And then he saw
+a veiled figure, that he seemed to know even in
+its deceitful robe, bend down to the boy. And the
+vision faded. At another time he would hear the
+little tune that had persecuted him in the night.
+And then he recalled the music of Claire's dream,
+and the melody that charmed the snakes; and he
+shuddered. For the miracle man had never been
+seen in Tetuan since the day when Claire had
+watched him in the Soko. Nor could Renfrew
+ever find out whither he had wandered.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Very long afterwards, however,&mdash;although this
+fact was never known to Renfrew,&mdash;two Russian
+travellers in the Great Sahara desert witnessed one
+evening, as they sat in their tent door, the performance
+of a savage charmer of snakes who carried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+upon his body three serpents,&mdash;one striped, one
+black, one white. And the younger of them
+noticed, and remarked to the other, that the charmer
+wore half-way up the little finger of his left hand a
+thin gold circle in which there was set a magnificent
+black pearl.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87"><br />[87]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88"><br /><br />[88]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89"><br /><br /><br />[89]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>A TRIBUTE OF SOULS</h2>
+
+<h3>PRELUDE</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> matter of Carlounie, the village of Perthshire
+in Scotland, is become notorious in the
+world. The name of its late owner, his remarkable
+transformation, his fortunate career, his
+married life, the brooding darkness that fell
+latterly upon his mind, the flaming deed that he
+consummated, its appalling outcome, and the finding
+of him by Mr Mackenzie, the minister of the
+parish of Carlounie, sunk in a pool of the burn that
+runs through a “den� close to his house&mdash;all
+these things are fresh in the minds of many men.
+It has been supposed that he had discovered a
+common intrigue between his wife, Kate, formerly
+an hospital nurse, and his tenant, Hugh Fraser of
+Piccadilly, London. It has been universally thought
+that this discovery led to the last action of his life.
+The following pages, found among his papers, seem
+to put a very different complexion on the affair,
+although they suggest a mediæval legend rather than
+a history of modern days. It may be added that careful
+enquiries have been made among the inhabitants
+of Carlounie, and that no man, woman, or child has
+been discovered who ever saw, or heard of, the grey
+traveller mentioned in Alistair Ralston's narrative.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>I<br />
+THE STRANGER BY THE BURN</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Can</span> a fever change a man's whole nature, giving
+him powers that he never had before? Can he
+go into it impotent, starved, naked, emerge from it
+potent, satisfied, clothed with possibilities that are
+wonders, that are miracles to him? It must be
+so; it is so. And yet&mdash;I must go back to that
+sad autumn day when I walked beside the burn.
+Can I write down my moods, my feelings of that
+day and of the following days? And if I can,
+does that power of pinning the butterfly of my soul
+down upon the board&mdash;does that power, too, bud,
+blossom from a soil mysteriously fertilised by illness?
+Formerly, I could as easily have flown in
+the air to the summit of cloud-capped Schiehallion
+as have set on paper even the smallest fragment of
+my mind. Now&mdash;well, let me see, let me still
+further know my new, my marvellous self.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that first day! It was Autumn, but only
+early Autumn. The leaves were changing colour
+upon the birch trees, upon the rowans. At dawn,
+mists stood round to shield the toilet of the rising
+sun. At evening, they thronged together like a
+pale troop of shadowy mutes to assist at his departure
+to the under world. It was a misty season,
+through which the bracken upon the hillsides of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+my Carlounie glowed furtively in tints of brown
+and of orange; and my mind, my whole being,
+seemed to move in mists. I was just twenty-two,
+an orphan, master of my estate of Carlounie, a
+Scotch laird, and my own governor. And some
+idiots envied me then, as many begin to envy me
+now. I even remember one ghastly old man who
+clapped me on the shoulder, and, with the addition
+of an unnecessary oath, swore that I was “a lucky
+youngster.� I, with my thin, chétif body, my
+burning, weakly, starved, and yet ambitious soul&mdash;lucky!
+I remember that I broke into a harsh
+laugh, and longed to kill the babbling beast.</p>
+
+<p>And it was the next day, in the afternoon,
+that I took that book&mdash;my Bible&mdash;and went
+forth alone to the long den in which the burn
+hides and cries its presence. Yes, I took Goethe's
+“Faust,� and my own complaining spirit, and went
+out into the mist with my misty, clouded mind.
+My cousin Gavin wanted me to go out shooting.
+He laughed and rallied me upon my ill-luck on the
+previous day, when I had gone out and been the
+joke of my own keepers because I had missed
+every bird; and I turned and railed at him, and
+told him to leave me to myself. And, as I went, I
+heard him muttering, “That wretched little fellow!
+To think that he should be owner of Carlounie!�
+Now, he sings another tune.</p>
+
+<p>With “Faust� in my hand, and hatred in my
+heart, I went out into the delicately chilly air,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+down the winding ways of the garden, through
+the creaking iron gateway. I emerged on to the
+wilder land, irregular, grass-covered ground, strewn
+with grey granite boulders, among which coarse,
+wiry ferns grew sturdily. The blackfaced sheep
+whisked their broad tails at me as I passed, then
+stooped their ever-greedy mouths to their damp
+and eternal meal again. I heard the thin and
+distant cry of a hawk, poised somewhere up in the
+mist. The hills, clothed in the death-like glory of
+the bracken, loomed around me, like some phantom,
+tricked-out procession passing through desolate
+places. And then I heard the voice of the
+burn&mdash;that voice which is even now for ever in
+my ears. To me that day it was the voice of one
+alive; and it is the voice of one alive to me now.
+I descended the sloping hill with my lounging,
+weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called
+me master had so often looked contemptuously
+askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I
+descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the
+tree-fringed den, and the burn was noisy in my
+ears. I could see it now, leaping here and there
+out of its hiding-place&mdash;ivory foam among the
+dripping larches, and the birches with their silver
+stems; ivory foam among the deep brown and
+flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a
+voice calling&mdash;calling me to come down into its
+hiding-place, presided over by the mists&mdash;to come
+down into its hiding-place, away from men: away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+from the living creatures whom I hated because I
+envied them, because they were stronger than I,
+because they could do what I could not do, say
+what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn,
+my tenants, the smallest farm boy, the grooms, the
+little leaping peasants&mdash;I hated, I hated them all.
+And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and
+I went down into the hiding-place of the burn.</p>
+
+<p>It ran through strange and secret places where
+the soft mists hung in wet wreaths. I seemed to
+be in another world when I was in its lair. On
+the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees
+like shadows, some of them with tortured and tormented
+shapes. As I turned and looked straight
+up the hill of the burn's descending course, the
+mountain from which it came closed in the prospect
+inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in&mdash;me
+and the burn which talked to me. We two
+were out of the world which I hated and longed to
+have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world,
+full of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now
+that I was right down at the water-side, the ivory
+face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to me,
+the ivory heart that beat against my heart&mdash;so
+sick and so weary&mdash;were varied and were changed.
+As thoughts streak a mind, the clear amber of
+the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous
+foam that marked the incessant leaps taken by
+the water towards the valley. The silence of
+those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>templation
+in a great career of action; and their
+silence spoke to me, mingling mysteriously with
+the voice of the foam. The course of the burn
+is broken up, and attended by rocks that have
+been modelled by the action of the running water
+into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in
+mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch,
+and all covered with drops of moisture; some are
+gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp edges
+and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a
+cunning and almost coquettish grace, dashes
+brutally against others, as if impelled by an internal
+violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses
+quite gently, and would be glad to linger by, if
+Nature would allow the dalliance. And this army
+of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite
+variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut
+of expression; for the differing shape of each
+boulder, against which it rushes in its long career,
+gives it a different note. It flickers across the
+small and round stone with the purling cry of a
+child. From the stone curved inwards, and with
+a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody.
+The pointed and narrow colony of rocks which
+break it into an intricate network of small water
+threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards the
+dark pool under the birches, where the trout play
+like sinister shadows and the insects dance in the
+sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it gains a
+great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+which it takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and
+defiant, and shrieks with a banshee of triumph&mdash;in
+which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of
+wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices
+among the rocks, under the ferns and the birch
+trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and
+shadows, between the steep walls of the green
+banks that hem it in! Many voices which can
+sing, when they choose, one song, again and again
+and&mdash;monotonously&mdash;again!</p>
+
+<p>So&mdash;now on this sad Autumn day&mdash;I was
+with the burn in its hiding-place, cool, damp, fretful.
+Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden,
+the wilder land beyond, the moors on which yesterday
+my incompetence as a shot had roused the contempt
+of my cousin and of my hirelings&mdash;all were
+lost to view. I was away from all men in this
+narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a world. I sat down
+on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my
+heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear
+brown water glided swiftly. I sat and listened to
+its murmur. And, just then, it did not occur to
+me that water can utter words like men. The
+murmur was suggestive but definitely inarticulate.
+I had come down here to be away and to think.
+The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur
+of the burn; and, as ever, in those days, it
+lamented and cursed and bitterly complained.</p>
+
+<p>Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence
+that clung to both mind and body? (So<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span>
+ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten
+by Providence? Why had I been given a soul
+that could not express itself in the frame of a
+coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost
+a deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded
+exactly to my body, then all might have
+been well enough. I should have been more complete,
+although less, in some way, than I now was.
+For such a soul would have accepted cowardice,
+weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it, as a
+right fate. Such a soul would never have known
+the meaning of the word rebellion, would never
+have been able to understand its own cancer of
+disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous
+and creeping malady. It would never have aspired
+like a flame, and longed in vain to burn clearly and
+grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would
+such a soul have guttered on like some cheap and
+ill-smelling candle, shedding shadows rather than
+any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless
+of the possibilities that teem like waking children
+in the wondrous womb of life, oblivious of the contempt
+of the souls around it, heedless of ambition,
+of the trumpet call of success, of the lust to be
+something, to do something, of the magic, of the
+stinging magic of achievement. With such a soul
+in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body&mdash;I
+thought, sitting thus by the burn&mdash;I might have
+been content, an utterly low, and perhaps an
+utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span></p>
+<p>But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was
+the most bitterly miserable of men. God&mdash;or the
+Devil&mdash;had made me ill-shaped, physically despicable,
+with the malign sort of countenance that
+so often accompanies and illustrates a bad poor
+body. My limbs, without being actually twisted,
+were shrunken and incompetent&mdash;they would not
+obey my desires as do the limbs of other men.
+My legs would not grip a horse. When I rode I
+was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness,
+no agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When
+I tried to box, to fence, I was one whirling, jigging
+incapacity. I had feeble sight, and objects presented
+themselves to my vision so strangely that I
+could not shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the
+young Laird of Carlounie! When I walked my
+limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no
+grace, no lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence
+of bodily power. And this was bitter, yet as
+nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my
+body was in a way complete. It was a wretch.
+But when you came to the mind you had the real
+tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there
+dwells a commanding spirit, as a great God might
+dwell&mdash;of mysterious choice&mdash;in a ruinous and
+decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit
+rules, disposes, presides, develops, has its own full
+and superb existence, triumphing not merely over,
+but actually through the contemptible body in
+which it resides, so that men even are led to wor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>ship
+the very ugliness and poverty of this body, to
+adore it for its power to retain such a mighty spirit
+within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it
+been, I might have been happy by the burn that
+Autumn day. Had it been, I might never&mdash;But I
+am anticipating, and I must not anticipate. I must
+sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch
+of my limbs, and recall the horror of my musing.</p>
+
+<p>In a manner, then, my soul matched my body.
+It was feeble and incompetent too. My brain was
+dull and clouded. My intellect was sluggish and
+inert. But&mdash;and this was the terror for me!&mdash;within
+the rank nest of my soul&mdash;my spirit&mdash;lay
+coiled two vipers that never ceased from biting me
+with their poisoned fangs&mdash;Self-consciousness
+and Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to
+be other than I was. I watched my own incompetence
+as one who watches from a tower. I
+divined how others regarded me&mdash;precisely. The
+blatant and comfortable egoism of a dwarf mind in
+a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I
+was that terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and
+incompetent thing that adored, with a curious wildness
+of passion, completeness, competence. Nor
+had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided
+perfection. My desires were Gargantuan.
+When I was with my cousin Gavin, a fine all-round
+sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot,
+to throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on
+a horse. I felt that I would give up years of life<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+to beat him once in any of his pursuits. When I
+was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense,
+were utterly different. He represented in
+my neighbourhood Intellect&mdash;with a capital I.
+A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of
+Carlounie, he was astonishingly adroit as a controversialist,
+astonishingly eloquent as a divine. His
+voice was full of music. His eyes were full of
+light and of the most superb self-confidence. He
+rested upon his intellect as a man may rest upon a
+rock. The power of his personality was calm and
+immense. I felt it vehemently. I shook and
+trembled under it. I hated and loathed the man
+for it, because I wanted and could never possess
+it. So, too, I hated my cousin Gavin for his possessions,
+his long and sure-sighted eyes, great and
+strong arms, broad chest, lithe legs, bright agility.
+My body could do nothing. My soul could do
+nothing&mdash;except one great thing. It could fully
+observe and comprehend its own impotence. It
+could fully and desperately envy and pine to be
+what it could never be. Could never be, do I
+say? Wait! Remember that is only what I
+thought then as I sat upon the rock, and, with
+haggard young eyes, watched the clear brown
+water slipping furtively past between my knees.</p>
+
+<p>My disease seemed to culminate that day, I
+remember. I was a sick invalid alone in the mist.
+Something&mdash;it might have been vitriol&mdash;was eating
+into me, eating, eating its way to my very heart,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+to the core of me. Oh, to be stunted and desire
+to be straight and tall, to be dwarf and wish to be
+giant, to be stupid and long to be a genius, to be
+ugly and yearn to be in face as one of the shining
+gods, to have no power over men, and to pine to
+fascinate, hold, dominate a world of men&mdash;this
+indeed is to be in hell! I was in hell that Autumn
+day. I clenched my thin, weak hands
+together. I clenched my teeth from which the
+pale lips were drawn back in a grin; and I realised
+all the spectral crowd of my shortcomings.
+They stood before me like demons of the Brocken&mdash;yes,
+yes, of the Brocken!&mdash;and I cursed God
+with the sound of the burn ringing and chattering
+in my ears. And I devoted Gavin, Doctor Wedderburn,
+every man highly placed, every lowest
+peasant, who could do even one of all the things
+I could not do, to damnation. The paroxysm that
+took hold of me was like a fit, a convulsion. I
+came out of it white and feeble. And, suddenly,
+the voice of the burn seemed to come from a long
+way off. I put out my hand, and took up from
+the rock on which I had laid it, “Faust.� And,
+scarcely knowing what I did, I began mechanically
+to read&mdash;to the dim rapture of the burn&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Scene III.&mdash;The Study. Faust (entering, with
+the poodle).</i>� I began to read, do I say, mechanically?
+Yes, it is true, but soon, very soon, the
+spell of Goethe was laid upon me. I was in the
+lofty-arched, narrow Gothic chamber, with that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+living symbol of the weariness, broken ambition,
+learned despair of all the ages. I was engrossed.
+I heard the poodle snarling by the stove. I heard
+the spirits whispering in the corridor. Vapour
+rose&mdash;or was it indeed the mist from the mountains
+among the birch trees?&mdash;and out of the
+vapour came Mephistopheles in the garb of a
+travelling scholar. And then&mdash;and then the
+great bargain was struck. I heard&mdash;yes, I did,
+I actually, and most distinctly, heard a voice&mdash;Faust's&mdash;say,
+“<i>Let us the sensual deeps explore....
+Plunge we in Time's tumultuous dance, In the
+rush and roll of circumstance.</i>� A pause; then the
+Student's grave and astonished tones came to me:
+<i>Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum.</i> The
+cloak was spread, and on the burning air Faust
+was wafted to his new life&mdash;nay, not to his new
+life merely, but to life itself. He vanished with
+his guide in a coloured, flower-like mist. I
+dropped my hand holding the book down upon the
+cold rock by which the cold water splashed. It
+felt burning hot to my touch. My head fell upon
+my breast, and I had my dreams&mdash;dreams of the
+life of Faust and of its glories, gained by this bargain
+that he made. And then&mdash;yes, then it was!&mdash;the
+voice of the burn, as from leagues away in
+the bosom of this very mist, began to sing like a
+fairy voice, or a voice in dreams, and in visions of
+the night, “<i>If it was so then, it might be so now.</i>�
+At first I scarcely heeded it, for I was enwrapt.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+But the song grew louder, more insistent. It was
+travelling to me from a far country. I heard it
+coming: “<i>If it was so then, it might be so now</i>�&mdash;“<i>If
+it was so then, it might be so now.</i>� How near
+it was at last, how loud in my ears! And yet
+always there was something vague, visionary about
+it, something of the mist, I think. At length I
+heard it with the attention that is of earth. I came
+to myself, out of the narrow Gothic chamber in
+which the genius of Goethe had prisoned me, and
+I stared into the mist, which was gathering thicker
+as the night began to fall. It seemed flower-like,
+and full of strange and mysterious colour. I
+trembled. I got up. Still I heard the voice of
+the burn singing that monotonous legend, on, and
+on, and on. Slowly I turned. I climbed the
+bank of the den. The sheep scattered lethargically
+at my approach. I passed through the creaking
+iron gate into the garden. Carlounie was
+before me. There was something altered, something
+triumphant about its aspect. The voice of
+the burn faded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even
+as I gained the door of my house, and, before
+entering it, paused in an attentive attitude, I heard
+the water chanting faintly from the den&mdash;“<i>If it
+was so then, it might be so now.</i>� ... As I came
+into the hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn
+stood together talking earnestly, I remember
+that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span></p>
+<p>From that moment not a day passed without
+my visiting the burn. It summoned me. Always
+it sang those words persistently. The sound of the
+water can be very faintly heard from the windows
+of Carlounie. Each day, at dawn, I pushed open
+the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear
+if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise,
+or in the darkness through which the soft and
+small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the sill and
+listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among
+the mountains. Sometimes the silence was intense
+and awful. But in storm or in stillness the burn
+sang on, ever and ever the same words. At
+moments I fancied that the voice was as the voice
+of a man demented, repeating with mirthless frenzy
+through all his years one hollow sentence. At
+moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman,
+a siren, a Lorelei among my rocks in my valley.
+Then again I said, “It is a spirit voice, a voice from
+the inner chamber of my own heart.� And&mdash;why
+I know not&mdash;at that last fantasy I shuddered.
+Even in the midnight from my window ledge I
+leaned while the world slept and I heard the
+mystic message of the burn. My visits to its bed
+were not unobserved. One morning my cousin
+Gavin said to me roughly, “Why the devil are you
+always stealing off to that ditch�&mdash;so he called
+the den that was the home of my voice&mdash;“when
+you ought to be practising to conquer your infernal
+deficiencies? Why, the children of your own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man,
+and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling.�
+I stared at him and answered, “You don't understand
+everything.� Once Dr Wedderburn, who
+had been my tutor, said to me more kindly,
+“Alistair, action is better for you than thought.
+Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try
+to work, for work is the best man-maker after all.�</p>
+
+<p>And to him I said, “Yes, I know!� and flew
+with a strong wing in the face of his advice. For
+the voice of the burn was more to me than the
+voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind
+of the burn meant more to me than the mind of
+any man. And so the Autumn died slowly, with
+a lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in
+mist. I often felt ill, even then. My body was
+dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever
+was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it
+crawling in my veins? Was it nestling about my
+heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...</p>
+
+<p>Certainly during this period life seemed alien to
+me, and I moved as one apart in a remote world,
+full of the music of the burn, and full, too, of
+vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know
+it. Still, I cannot be sure what is the truth. In
+the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the burn
+before my illness seized me. The cold of early
+Winter was in the air and a great stillness. It
+was afternoon when I left the house walking slowly
+with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+and drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching.
+I did not carry my volume of Goethe in my hand;
+but, in its place, held an old book on transcendental
+magic. The voice of the burn&mdash;yes, that
+alone&mdash;had led me to study this book. So now
+I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the
+foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the
+den to this strange writing on the black art? Who
+knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put the
+book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold
+as I descended the steep ground that lay about the
+water, which that day seemed to roar in my ears
+the sentence I had heard so many days and nights.
+And this time, as I hearkened, my heart and my
+brain echoed the last words&mdash;“<i>It might be so
+now.</i>� Gaining the edge of the burn, then in
+heavy spate, I watched for a while the passage of
+the foam from rock to rock. I peered into the
+pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and
+with whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all
+my meagre body seemed pulsing with those everlasting
+words: “Why not now?� I murmured
+to myself, with a sort of silent sneer, too, at my
+own absurdity. I remember I glanced furtively
+around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness,
+dripping bare trees through whose branches
+the mist curled silently, cold rocks, the cold flood
+of the swollen burn&mdash;such was the blank prospect
+that met my eyes.</p>
+
+<p>There was no man near me. There was no<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+one to look at me. I was remote, hidden in a
+secret place, and the early twilight was already
+beginning to fall. No one could see me. I
+opened my old and ragged book, or, rather, let it
+fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for
+the hundredth time, and read that he who would
+evoke the Devil must choose a solitary and condemned
+spot. The burn was solitary. The burn
+was condemned surely by the despair and by the
+endless incapacities of the wretched being who
+owned it. I had taken off my shoes and placed
+them upon a rock. My feet were bare. My
+head was covered. I now furtively proceeded to
+gather together a small heap of sticks and leaves,
+and to these I set fire, after several attempts. As
+the flames at last crept up, the mist gathered more
+closely round me and my fire, as if striving to warm
+itself at the blaze. The voice of the burn mingled
+with the uneasy crackle of the twigs, and a murmur
+of its words seemed to emanate also from the
+flames, two elements uniting to imitate the utterance
+of man to my brain, already surely tormented
+with fever. And now, with my eyes upon my
+book, I proceeded to trace with the sharp point of
+a stick in some sandy soil between two rocks a
+rough Goetic Circle of Black evocations and pacts.
+From time to time I paused in my work and
+glanced uneasily about me, but I saw only the
+mists and the waters.</p>
+
+<p>At length my task was finished, and the time<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+had arrived for the supreme effort of my insane and
+childish folly. Standing at Amasarac in the Circle,
+I said aloud the formula of Evocation of the Grand
+Grimoire, ending with the words “Jehosua, Evam,
+Zariat, natmik, Come, come, come.�</p>
+
+<p>My voice died away in the twilight, and I stood
+among the grey rocks waiting, mad creature that I
+surely was! But only the rippling voice of the
+burn answered my adjuration. Then I repeated the
+words in a louder tone, adding menaces and imprecations
+to my formula. And all the time the fire
+I had kindled sprang up into the mist; and the
+twilight of the heavy Autumn fell slowly round me.
+Again I paused, and again my madness received
+no satisfaction, no response. But it seemed to me
+that I heard the browsing sheep on the summit of the
+right bank of the gully scatter as if at the approach
+of some one. Yet there was no stir of footsteps.
+It must have been my fancy, or the animals were
+merely changing their feeding ground in a troop, as
+they sometimes will, for no assignable cause. And
+now I made one last effort, urged by the voice of
+the burn, which sang so loudly the words which had
+mingled with my dream of Faust. I cried aloud the
+supreme appellation, making an effort that brought
+out the sweat on my forehead, and set the pulses
+leaping in my thin and shivering body. “<i>Chavajoth!
+chavajoth! chavajoth! I command thee by the
+Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras.</i>�</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span></p>
+<p>A little way up the course of the burn the dead
+wood cracked and shuffled under the pressure of
+descending feet. Again I heard a scattering of the
+sheep upon the hillside. My hair stirred on my
+head under my cap, and the noise of the falling
+water was intolerably loud to me. I wanted to
+hear plainly, to hear what was coming down to me
+in the mist. The brush-wood sang nearer. In
+the heavy and damp air there was the small, sharp
+report of a branch snapped from a tree. I heard
+it drop among the ferns close to me. And then
+in the mist and in the twilight I saw a slim figure
+standing motionless. It was vague, but less vague
+than a shadow. It seemed to be a man, or a youth,
+clad in a grey suit that could scarcely be differentiated
+from the mist. The flames of my fire, bent
+by a light breeze that had sprung up, stretched
+themselves towards it, as if to salute it. And now
+I could not hear any movement of the sheep; evidently
+they had gone to a distance. At first,
+seized with a strange feeling of extreme, almost
+unutterable fear, I neither moved nor spoke. Then,
+making a strong effort to regain control of my
+ordinary faculties, I cried out in the twilight&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“What is that? What is it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Only a stranger who has missed his way on the
+mountain, and wants to go on to Wester Denoon.�</p>
+
+<p>The voice that came to me from the figure beyond
+the fire sounded, I remember, quite young,
+like the voice of a boy. It was clear and level,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>
+and perhaps a little formal. So that was all. A
+tourist&mdash;that was all!</p>
+
+<p>“Can you direct me on the way?� the voice said.</p>
+
+<p>I gave the required direction slowly, for I was
+still confused, nervous, exhausted with my insane
+practices in the den. But the youth&mdash;as I supposed
+he was&mdash;did not move away at once.</p>
+
+<p>“What are you doing by this fire?� he said.
+“I heard your voice calling by the torrent among
+the trees when I was a very long way off.�</p>
+
+<p>Strangely, I did not resent the question. Still
+more strangely, I was impelled to give him the true
+answer to it.</p>
+
+<p>“Raising the Devil!� he said. “And did he
+come to you?�</p>
+
+<p>“No; of course not. You must think me
+mad.�</p>
+
+<p>“And why do you call him?�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly a desire to confide in this stranger,
+whose face I could not see now, whose shadowy
+form I should, in all probability, never see again,
+came upon me. My usual nervousness deserted
+me. I let loose my heart in a turbulent crowd of
+words. I explained my impotence of body and of
+mind to this grey traveller in the twilight. I dwelt
+upon my misery. I repeated the cry of the burn
+and related my insane dream of imitating Faust, of
+making my poor pact with Lucifer, with the
+Sphinx of mediæval terrors. When I ceased, the
+boy's voice answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span></p>
+<p>“They say that in these modern days Satan has
+grown exigent. It is not enough to dedicate to
+him your own soul; but you must also pay a
+tribute of souls to the Cæsar of hell.�</p>
+
+<p>“A tribute of souls?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. You must bring, they say, the mystic
+number, three souls to Satan.�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly I laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“I could never do that,� I said. “I have no
+power to seduce man or woman. I cannot win
+souls to heaven or to hell.�</p>
+
+<p>“But if you received new powers, such as you
+desire, would you use them to win souls, three
+souls, to Lucifer?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� I said with passionate earnestness. “I
+swear to you that I would.�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly the boy's voice laughed.</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Quomodo cecidisti</i>, Lucifer!� he said. “When
+thou canst not contrive to capture souls for thyself!
+But,� he added, as if addressing himself
+once more to me, after this strange ejaculation,
+“your words have, perhaps, sealed the bond.
+Who knows? Words that come from the very
+heart are often deeds. For, as we can never go
+back from things that we have done, it may be
+that, sometimes, we can never go back from things
+that we have said.�</p>
+
+<p>On the words he moved, and passed so swiftly
+by me into the twilight down the glen that I never
+saw his face. I turned instinctively to look after<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+him; and, this was strange, it seemed that the
+wind at that very moment must have turned with
+me, blowing from, instead of towards, the mountain.
+This certainly was so; for the tongues of
+flame from my fire bent backward on a sudden and
+leaned after the grey traveller, whose steps died
+swiftly away among the rocks, and on the shuffling
+dead wood and leaves of the birches and the oaks.</p>
+
+<p>And then there came a singing in my ears, a
+beating of many drums in my brain. I drooped
+and sank down by the fire in the mist. My fever
+came upon me like a giant, and presently Gavin
+and Doctor Wedderburn, searching in the night,
+found me in a delirium, and bore me back to
+Carlounie.</p>
+
+<h3>II<br />
+THE SOUL OF DR WEDDERBURN</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">To</span> emerge from a great illness is sometimes dreadful,
+sometimes divine. To one man the return
+from the gates of death is a progress of despair.
+He feels that he cannot face the wild contrasts of
+the surprising world again, that his courage has
+been broken upon the wheel, that energy is desolation,
+and sleep true beauty. To another this
+return is a marvellous and superb experience. It
+is like the vivid re-awakening of youth in one who
+is old, a rapture of the past committing an act of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+brigandage upon the weariness of the present, a
+glorious substitution of Eden for the outer courts
+where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It will
+be supposed that I found myself in the first category,
+a terror-stricken and rebellious mortal when
+the fever gave me up to the world again. For the
+world had always been cruel to me, because I was
+afraid of it, and was a puny thing in it. Yet this
+was not so. My convalescence was like a beautiful
+dream of rest underneath which riot stirred.
+A simile will explain best exactly what I mean.
+Let me liken the calm of my convalescence to
+the calm of earth on the edge of Spring. What a
+riot of form, of scent, of colour, of movement, is
+preparing beneath that enigmatic, and apparently
+profound, repose. In the simile you have my
+exact state. And I alone felt that, within this
+womb of inaction, the child, action, lay hid, developing
+silently, but inexorably, day by day. This
+knowledge was my strange secret. It came upon
+me one night when I lay awake in the faint twilight,
+shed by a carefully shaded lamp over my
+bed. Rain drummed gently against the windows.
+There was no other sound. By the fire, in a
+great armchair, the trained nurse, Kate Walters,
+was sitting with a book&mdash;“Jane Eyre� it was&mdash;upon
+her knees. I had been sleeping and now
+awoke thirsty. I put out my hand to get at a
+tumbler of lemonade that stood on a table by my
+pillow. And suddenly a thought, a curious thought,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+was with me. My hand had grasped the tumbler
+and lifted it from the table; but, instead of bringing
+my hand to my mouth I kept my arm rigidly
+extended, the tumbler poised on my palm as upon
+the palm of a juggler.</p>
+
+<p>“How long my arm is!� that was my thought,
+“and how strong!� Formerly it had been short,
+weak, awkward. Now, surely, after my illness,
+my arms would naturally be nerveless, useless
+things. The odd fact was that now, for the first
+time in my life, I felt joy in a physical act. An
+absurd and puny act, you will say, I daresay.
+What of that? With it came a sudden stirring
+of triumph. I lay there on my back and kept my
+arm extended for full five minutes by the watch
+that ticked by my bed-head. And with each
+second that passed joy blossomed more fully
+within my heart. I drank the lemonade as one
+who drinks a glad toast. Yet I was puzzled.
+“Is this&mdash;can this be a remnant of delirium?�
+I asked myself. And beneath the clothes drawn
+up to my chin I fingered my arm above the elbow.
+It was the limb of a big, strong man. Surprise,
+supreme astonishment forced an exclamation from
+my lips. Kate got up softly and came towards
+me; but I feigned to be asleep, and she returned
+to the fire. Yet, peering under my lowered eyelids,
+I noticed an expression of amazement upon
+her young and pretty face. I knew afterwards
+that it was the sound of my voice&mdash;my new voice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span>&mdash;that
+drew it there. After that night my convalescence
+was more than a joy to me, it was a
+rapture, touched by, and mingled with something
+that was almost awe. Is not the earth awe-struck
+when she considers that Spring and Summer nestle
+silently in her bosom? With each day the secret
+which I kept grew more mysterious, more profound.
+Soon I knew it could be a secret no
+longer. The fever&mdash;it must be that!&mdash;had
+wrought magic within my body, driving out weakness,
+impotence, lassitude, developing my physical
+powers to an extent that was nothing less than
+astounding. Lying there in my bed, I felt the
+dwarf expand into the giant. Think of it! Did
+ever living man know such an experience before?
+A bodily spring came about within me. And I
+was already twenty-two years old before the fever
+took me. My limbs grew large and strong; the
+muscles of my chest and back were tensely strung
+and knit as firmly as the muscles of an athlete.
+I lay still, it is true, and felt much of the peculiar
+vagueness that follows fever; but I was conscious
+of a supine, latent energy never known before. I
+was conscious that when I rose, and went out
+into the world again, it would be as a man, capable
+of holding his own against other strong, straight
+men. That was a wonder. But it was succeeded
+by a greater marvel yet.</p>
+
+<p>One afternoon, while I was still in bed, Doctor
+Wedderburn came to see me and to sit with me.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+He had been away on a holiday, and, consequently,
+had not visited me before, except once when I had
+been delirious. The doctor was a short, spare
+man, with a sharply cut brick-red face, lively and
+daring dark eyes, and straight hair already on the
+road to grey. His self-possession bordered on self-satisfaction;
+and, despite his good heart and the
+real and anxious sanctity of his life, he could seldom
+entirely banish from his manner the contempt he
+felt for those less intellectual, less swift-minded
+than himself. Often had I experienced the stinging
+lash of his sarcasm. Often had I withered
+beneath one of his keen glances that dismissed me
+from an argument as a profound sage might kick
+an urchin from the study into the street. Often
+had I hated him with a sick hatred and ground my
+teeth because my mind was so clouded and so
+helpless, while his was so lucent and so adroit. So
+now, when I heard his tap on the door, his deep
+voice asking to come in, a rage of self-contempt
+seized me, as in the days before my illness. The
+doctor entered with an elaborate softness, and
+walked, flat-footed, to my bed, pursing his large
+lips gently as men do when filled with cautious
+thoughts. I could see he desired to moderate his
+habitual voice and manner; but, arrived close to
+me, he suddenly cried aloud, with a singularly full-throated
+amazement.</p>
+
+<p>“Boy&mdash;boy, what's come to you?� he called.
+Then, abruptly putting his finger to his lips,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+he sank down in a chair, his bright eyes fixed
+upon me.</p>
+
+<p>“It's a miracle,� he said slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“What is?� I asked with an invalid's pettishness.</p>
+
+<p>“The voice, too&mdash;the voice!�</p>
+
+<p>I grew angry easily, as men do when they are
+sick.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you say that? Of course I've been
+bad&mdash;of course I'm changed.�</p>
+
+<p>“Changed! Look at yourself&mdash;and praise
+God, Alistair.�</p>
+
+<p>He had caught up a hand-mirror that lay on the
+dressing-table and now put it into my hand. For
+the first time since the fever I saw my face. It
+was as it had been and yet it was utterly different,
+for now it was beautiful. The pinched features
+seemed to have been smoothed out. The mouth
+had become firm and masterful. The haggard eyes
+were alight as if torches burned behind them. My
+expression, too, was powerful, collected, alert. I
+scarcely recognised myself. But I pretended to see
+no change.</p>
+
+<p>“Well&mdash;what is it?� I asked, dropping the glass.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor was confused by my calm.</p>
+
+<p>“Your look of health startled me,� he answered,
+sitting down by the bed and examining me keenly.</p>
+
+<p>All at once I was seized by a strange desire to
+get up an argument with this man, by whom I had
+so often been crushed in conversation. I leaned<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+on my elbow in the bed, and fixing my eyes on
+him, I said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“And why should I praise God?�</p>
+
+<p>The doctor seemed in amazement at my tone.</p>
+
+<p>“Because you are a Christian and have been
+brought back from death,� he replied, but with
+none of his usual half-sarcastic self-confidence.</p>
+
+<p>“You think God did that?�</p>
+
+<p>“Alistair, do you dare to blaspheme the Almighty?�</p>
+
+<p>I felt at that moment like a cat playing with a
+mouse. My lips, I know, curved in a smile of
+mockery, and yet I will swear&mdash;yes, even to my
+own heart&mdash;that all I said that day I said in pure
+mischief, with no evil intent. It seemed that I,
+Alistair Ralston, the dolt, the ignoramus, longed
+to try mental conclusions with this brilliant and
+opinionated divine. He bade me praise God. In
+reply I praised&mdash;the Devil, and I forced him to
+hear me. Absolutely I broke into a flood of words,
+and he sat silent. I compared the good and evil
+in the scheme of the world, balancing them in
+the scales, the one against the other. I took up
+the stock weapon of atheism, the deadly nature, the
+deadly outcome of free will. I used it with skill.
+The names of Strauss, Comte, Schopenhauer,
+Renan, a dozen others, sprang from my lips. The
+dreary doctrine of the illimitable triumph of sin, of
+the appalling mistake of the permission granted it
+to step into the scheme of creation, in order that its<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+presence might create a <i>raison d'être</i> for the power
+of personal action one way or the other in mankind&mdash;such
+matters as these I treated with a vehement
+eloquence and command of words that laid a spell
+upon the doctor. Going very far, I dared to exclaim
+that since God had allowed his own scheme to get
+out of gear, the only hope of man lay in the direction
+of the opposing force, in frank and ardent Satanism.</p>
+
+<p>When at length I ceased from speaking, I
+expected Dr Wedderburn to rise up in his wrath
+and to annihilate me, but he sat still in his chair
+with a queer, and, as I thought, puzzled expression
+upon his face. At last he said, as if to himself:</p>
+
+<p>“The miracle of Balaam; verily, the miracle
+of Balaam.�</p>
+
+<p>The ass had indeed spoken as never ass spoke
+before. I waited a moment, then I said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Well, why don't you rebuke me, or why don't
+you try to controvert me?�</p>
+
+<p>Again he looked upon me, very uneasily I
+thought, and with something that was almost fear
+in his keen eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!� he said, “I have praised the Lord many
+a morning and evening for his gift of words to me.
+It seems others bestow that gift too. Alistair�&mdash;and
+here his voice became deeply solemn&mdash;“where
+have you been visiting when you lay there,
+mad to all seeming? In what dark place have
+you been to gather destruction for men? With
+whom have you been talking?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span></p>
+<p>Suddenly, I know not why, I thought of the
+grey stranger, and, with a laugh, I cried:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“The grey traveller taught me all I have said
+to you.�</p>
+
+<p>“The grey traveller! Who may he be?�</p>
+
+<p>But I lay back upon the pillows and refused to
+answer, and very soon the doctor went, still bending
+uneasy, nervous eyes upon me.</p>
+
+<p>In those eyes I read the change that had stolen
+over my intellect, as in the hand-mirror I had read
+the change that had stolen over my face. This
+strange fever had caused both soul and body to
+blossom. I trembled with an exquisite joy. Had
+Fate relented to me at last? Was it possible that
+I was to know the joys of the heroes? I longed
+for, yet feared my full recovery. In it alone should
+I discover how sincere was my transformation.
+Doctor Wedderburn did not come to me again.
+The days passed, my convalescence strengthened,
+watched over by the pretty nurse, Kate Walters, a
+fresh, pure, pious, innocent, beautiful soul, tender,
+temperate, and pitiful for all sorrow and evil. At
+length I was well. At length I knew, to some
+extent, my new, my marvellous self. For I had,
+indeed, been folded up in my fever like a vesture,
+and, like a vesture, changed. I had grown taller,
+expanded, put forth mighty muscles as a tree puts
+forth leaves. My cheeks and my eyes glowed with
+the radiance of strong health. I went out with my
+cousin Gavin, whose estate marched with mine,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+and I shot so well that he was filled with admiration,
+and forthwith conceived a sort of foolish worship
+for me&mdash;having a sportsman's soul but no
+real mind. For the first time in my life I felt absolutely
+at home on a horse, an unwonted skill came
+to my hands, and I actually schooled Gavin's
+horses over some fences he had had set up in a
+grass park at the Mains of Cossens. The keepers
+who had once secretly jeered at me were now at
+my very feet. Their children looked upon me as
+a young god. I rejoiced in my strength as a giant.
+But I asked myself then, as I ask myself now&mdash;what
+does it mean? The days of miracles are
+over. Yet, is this not a miracle? And in a miracle
+is there not a gleam of terror, as there is a
+gleam of stormy yellow in the fated opal? But
+here I leave my condition of body alone, and pass
+on to the episode of Doctor Wedderburn, partially
+related in the newspapers of the day and marvelled
+at, I believe, by all who ever knew, or even set
+eyes upon him.</p>
+
+<p>The doctor, as I have said, did not come again
+to see me, but I felt an over-mastering desire to
+set forth and visit him. This was surprising, as
+hitherto I had rather avoided and hated him. Now
+something drew me to the Manse. At first I resisted
+my inclination, but a chance word led me
+to yield to it impulsively. Since my illness I had
+not once attended church. Moved by a violent
+distaste for the religious service, that was novel in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+me, I had frankly avowed my intention of keeping
+away. But, as I did not go to the kirk, I missed
+seeing Dr Wedderburn; and I wanted to see him.
+One day, leaning by chance against a stone dyke
+in the Glen of Ogilvy, smoking a pipe and enjoying
+the soft air of Spring as it blew over the rolling
+moorland, I heard two ploughmen exchange a
+fragment of gossip that made excitement start up
+quick within me.</p>
+
+<p>One said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“The doctor's failin'. Man, he was fairly
+haverin' last Sabbath, on and on, wi'out logic or
+argeyment or sense.�</p>
+
+<p>The other answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Ay; he's greatly changed. He's no the man
+he was. It fairly beats me; I canna mak' it out.
+Ye've heard that&mdash;� And here he lowered his
+voice and I could not catch his words.</p>
+
+<p>I turned away from the wall, and walking
+swiftly, set out for the Manse with a busy mind.
+The afternoon was already late, and when I gained
+a view of the Manse, a cold grey house standing a
+little apart in a grove of weary-looking sycamores,
+one or two lights smiled on me from the small
+windows that stared upon the narrow and muddy
+road. The minister's study was on the right of
+the hall door; and, as I pulled the bell, I observed
+the shadow of his head to dance upon the drawn
+white blind, a thought fantastically, or with a palsied
+motion, I fancied. The yellow-headed maidser<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>vant
+admitted me with a shrunken grin, that suggested
+wild humour stifled by achieved respect, and
+I was soon in the minister's study. Then I saw
+that Doctor Wedderburn was moving up and down
+the room, and that his head was going this way and
+that, as he communed in a loud voice with himself.
+My entrance checked him as soon as he observed
+me, which was not instantly, as, at first, his back
+was set towards me and the mood-swept maid.
+When he turned about, his discomposure was evident.
+His gaze was troubled, and his manner, as
+he shook hands with me, had in it something of the
+tremulous, and was backward in geniality. We sat
+down on either side of the fire, the tea service and
+the hot cakes, loved of the doctor, between us. At
+first we talked warily of such things as my recovery,
+the weather, the condition of affairs in the
+parish and so forth. I noticed that though the
+doctor's eyes often rested with an almost glaring
+expression of scrutiny or of surprise upon me, he
+made no remark on the change of my appearance.
+Nor did I on the change of his, which was startling,
+and suggested I know not what of sorrow and
+of the attempt to kill it with evil weapons. The
+healthy brick-red of his complexion was now become
+scarlet and full of heat; his mouth worked
+loosely while he talked; the flesh of his cheeks
+was puffed and wrinkled; his eyes had the clouded
+and yet fierce aspect of the drunkard. But,
+absurdly enough, what most struck me in him was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+his abstinence from an accustomed act. He drank
+his tea, but he ate no hot cakes. This was a
+departure from an established, if trifling custom of
+many years' standing, and worked on my imaginative
+conception of what the doctor now was more
+than would, at the first blush, appear likely, or even
+possible. Instead of, as of old, feeling myself on
+the worm level in his presence, I was filled with a
+sense of pity, as I looked upon him and wondered
+what subtle process of mental or physical development
+or retrogression had wrought this dreary
+change. Presently, while I wondered, he put his
+cup down with an awkward and errant hand that
+set it swaying and clattering in the tray, and said
+abruptly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“And what have you come for, Alistair, eh?
+what have you come for? To go on with what
+you've begun? Well, well, lad, I'm ready for
+you; I'm ready now.�</p>
+
+<p>His voice was full of timorous irritation, his
+manner of pitiable distress.</p>
+
+<p>“I've thought it out, I've thought it all out,� he
+continued; “and I can combat you, I can combat
+you, Alistair, wherever you've got your fever-mind
+from and your fever-tongue.�</p>
+
+<p>I knew what he meant, and suddenly I knew,
+too, why I had wanted so eagerly to come to the
+Manse. My instinct of pity and of sympathy died
+softly away. My new instinct of cruel rapture in
+the ruthless exercise of my&mdash;shall I call them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+fever-powers then?&mdash;woke, dawned to sunrise.
+And Doctor Wedderburn and I fell forthwith into
+an animated theological discussion. He was desperately
+nervous, desperately ill at ease. His
+argumentative struggles were those of a drowning
+man positively convinced&mdash;note this,&mdash;that he
+would drown, that no human or divine aid could
+save him. There was, too, a strong hint of personal
+anger in his manner, which was strictly undignified.
+He fought a losing battle with bludgeons, and had
+an obvious contempt for the bludgeons while in
+the act of using them in defence or in attack.
+And at last, with a sort of sharp cry, he threw
+up his hands, and exclaimed in a voice I hardly
+knew as his:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“God forgive you, Alistair, for what you're
+doing! God forgive you&mdash;murderer, murderer!�</p>
+
+<p>This dolorous exclamation ran through me like
+cold water and chilled all the warmth of my intellectual
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>“Murderer!� I repeated inexpressively.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Wedderburn sat in his chair trembling,
+and looking upon me with despairing and menacing
+eyes, the eyes of a man who curses but cannot
+fight his enemy.</p>
+
+<p>“Of a soul, of a soul,� he said. “The poisoned
+dagger?&mdash;doubt, the poisoned dagger&mdash;you've
+plunged it into me, boy.�</p>
+
+<p>Then raising his voice harshly, he exclaimed:</p>
+
+<p>“Curse you, curse you!�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span></p>
+<p>I was thunderstruck. I declare it here, for it is
+true. I had defamed&mdash;and deliberately&mdash;the
+doctor's dearest idols. I had driven my lance into
+his convictions. I had blasphemed what he worshipped,
+and had denied all he affirmed. But
+that I had made so terrific an impression upon
+his mind, his soul&mdash;this astounded me. Yet what
+else could his passionate denunciation mean? Had
+I, a boy, unused to controversy, unskilled in dialectics,
+overthrown with my hasty words the faith
+of this strong and fervent man? The thought
+thrilled one side of my dual nature with triumph,
+pierced the other with grim horror. My emotions
+were divided and complex. As I sat silent, my
+face dogged yet ashamed, the doctor got up from
+his chair trembling like one with the palsy.</p>
+
+<p>“Away from me&mdash;away,� he cried in a hoarse
+voice, and pointing at the door. “I'll have no
+more talk with the Devil, no more&mdash;no more!�</p>
+
+<p>I had not a word. I got up and went, bending
+a steady, fascinated look upon this old mentor of
+mine, who now proclaimed himself my victim.
+Arrived in the garden I found a thin moon riding
+above the sycamores, and soft airs of Spring playing
+round the doctor's habitation. Strangely, I
+had no mind to begone from it immediately. I
+crossed the garden bit and paced up and down
+the country lane that skirted it, keeping an eye
+upon the lighted window of the study. So I went
+back and forth for full an hour, I suppose. Then<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+I heard a sound in the Spring night. The doctor's
+hall door banged, and, peering through the privet
+hedge that protected his meagre domain, I perceived
+him come out into the air bareheaded. He
+took his way to the small path that ran by the
+hedge parallel to the lane, coming close to the place
+by which I crouched, spying upon his privacy.
+And there he paced, bemoaning aloud the ill fate
+that had come upon him. I heard all the awful
+complaining of this soul in distress, besieged by
+doubts, deserted by the faith and hope of a lifetime.
+It was villainous to be his audience. Yet, I could
+not go. Sometimes the poor man prayed with a
+desolate voice, calling upon God for a sign, imploring
+against temptation. Sometimes&mdash;and this was
+terrible&mdash;he blasphemed, he imprecated. And
+then again he prayed&mdash;to the Devil, as do the
+Satanists. I heard him weeping in his garden in
+the night, alone under the sycamores. It was a
+new agony of the garden and it wrung my heart.
+Yet I watched it till the spectral moon waned, and
+the trees were black as sins against the faded sky.</p>
+
+<p>About this time, as I have said, his parishioners
+began to mark the outward change of Dr Wedderburn
+that signified the inward change in him. The
+talking ploughmen had their fellows. All who sat
+under the doctor were conscious of a difference, at
+first vague, in his eloquent discourses, of a diminuendo
+in the full fervour of his delivery and manner.
+Gossip flowed about him, and presently there were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+whisperings of change in his bodily habits. He
+had been seen by night wandering about his garden
+in very unholy condition, he who had so often
+rebuked excess. Children, passing his gate in the
+dark of evening, had endured with terror his tipsy
+shoutings. A maidservant left him, and spread
+doleful reports of his conduct through the village.
+By degrees, rumours of our minister's shortcomings
+stole, like snakes, into the local papers, carefully
+shrouded by the wrappings that protect scandal-mongers
+against libel actions. The congregation
+beneath the doctor's pulpit dwindled. Women
+looked at him askance. Men were surly to him,
+or&mdash;and that was less kind&mdash;jocular. I, alone,
+followed with fascination the paling to dusk of a
+bright and useful career. I, alone, partially understood
+the hell this poor creature carried within him.
+For I often heard his dreary night-thoughts, and
+assisted, unperceived of him, at the vigils that he
+kept. The lamp within his study burned till dawn
+while he wrestled, but in vain, with the disease of
+his soul, the malady of his tortured heart.</p>
+
+<p>One night in Summer time, towards midnight, I
+bent my steps furtively to the Manse. It was very
+dark and the weather was dumb and agitating.
+No leaf danced, no grass quivered. Breathless,
+dead, seemed the woods and fields, the ocean of
+moorland, the assemblage of the mountains. I
+heard no step upon the lonely road but my own,
+and life seemed to have left the world until I came<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+upon the Manse. Then I saw the light in the doctor's
+window, and, drawing near, observed that the
+blind was up and the lattice thrust open among
+the climbing dog-roses. Craftily I stole up the
+narrow garden path, and, keeping to the side of
+the window, looked into the room.</p>
+
+<p>Doctor Wedderburn lounged within at the table
+facing me. A pen was in his shaking hand. A
+shuffle of manuscript paper was before him, and a
+Bible, in which he thrust his fingers as if to keep
+texts already looked out. Beyond the Bible was a
+bottle, three-quarters full of whiskey, and a glass.
+His muttering lips and dull yet shining eyes betokened
+his condition. I saw before me a drunkard
+writing a sermon. The vision was sufficiently
+bizarre. A tragedy of infinite pathos mingled with
+a comedy of hideous yet undeniable humour in the
+live picture. I neither wept nor did I laugh. I
+only watched, shrouded by the inarticulate night.
+The doctor took a pull at the bottle, then swept
+the leaves of the Bible....</p>
+
+<p>“Let me die the death of the righteous,� he
+murmured thickly. “That's it&mdash;that's&mdash;that's&mdash;�
+He wrote on the paper before him with a
+wandering pen, then pushed the sheet from him.
+It fell on the floor by the window.</p>
+
+<p>“And let my last end be like his&mdash;Ah&mdash;ah!�</p>
+
+<p>He drank again, and again wrote with fury.
+How old and how wicked he looked, yet how sad!
+He crouched down over the table and the pen<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+broke in his hand. A dull exclamation burst from
+him. Taking up the bottle, he poured by accident
+some of the whiskey over the open Bible.</p>
+
+<p>“A baptism! A baptism!� he ejaculated, bursting
+into laughter. “Now&mdash;now&mdash;let's see&mdash;let's
+see.�</p>
+
+<p>Again he violently turned the sodden leaves and
+shook his head. He could not read the words,
+and that angered him. He drank again and again
+till the bottle was empty, then staggered out of the
+room. I heard his frantic footsteps echoing in the
+uncarpeted passage. Quickly I leaned in at the
+window and caught up the sheet of paper that had
+fallen to the floor. I held it up to the light.
+Only one sentence writhed up and down over it,
+repeated a dozen times; “There is no God!�
+While I read I heard the doctor returning, and I
+shrank back into the night. He came stumbling
+in, another whiskey bottle full in his hand. Falling
+down in the chair he applied his lips to it and
+drank&mdash;on and on. He was killing himself
+there and then. I knew it. I wanted to leap
+into the room, to stop him, yet I only watched
+him. Why?&mdash;I want to know why&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>At last he fell forward across the Bible with a
+choking noise. His limbs struggled. His arms
+shot out wildly, the table broke under him&mdash;there
+was a crash of glass. The lamp was extinguished.
+Darkness crowded the little room&mdash;and silence.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span></p>
+<p>The papers recorded the shocking death of a
+minister. They did not record this.</p>
+
+<p>As I stole home that night, alone in my knowledge
+of the doctor's appalling end, I heard going
+before me light and tripping footsteps, those, apparently,
+of some youth, not above three yards or so
+from me. What wanderer thus preceded me, I
+asked myself, with a certain tingling of the nerves,
+shaken, perhaps, by what I had just seen? I
+paused. The steps also paused. The person was
+stopping too. I resumed my way. Again I heard
+the tripping footfalls. Their sound greatly disquieted
+me, yet I hurried, intending to catch up
+the wayfarer. Still the steps hastened along the
+highway, and always just before me. I ran, yet
+did not come up with any person. I called
+“Stop! Stop!� There was no reply. Again I
+waited. This man&mdash;or boy&mdash;(the steps seemed
+young) waited also. I started forward once more.
+So did he. Then a fury of fear ran over me, urging
+me at all hazards to see in whose train I travelled.
+We were now close to Carlounie. We
+entered the policies. Yes, this person turned from
+the public road through my gates into the drive,
+and the footfalls reached the very house. I
+stopped. I dared not approach quite close to the
+door. With trembling fingers I fumbled in my
+pocket, drew out my match-box, and, in the airless
+night, struck a match. The tiny flame burned
+steadily. I stretched my hand out, approaching it,
+as I supposed, to the face of the stranger.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span></p>
+<p>But I saw nothing. Only, on a sudden, I
+heard some one hasten from me across the sweep
+of gravel in the direction of the burn. And then,
+after an interval, I heard the rush of startled sheep
+through the night.</p>
+
+<p>Just so had they scattered on the day I spoke
+with the grey traveller by the waterside.</p>
+
+<h3>III<br />
+THE SOUL OF KATE WALTERS</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is more than two years since I wrote down
+any incident of my life. Two years ago I seemed
+to myself a stranger. To-day an intimacy has
+sprung up between myself and that observant, detached
+something within me&mdash;that little extra
+spirit which looks on at me, and yet is, somehow,
+me. I am at home with my own power. I am
+accustomed to my strength of personality. From
+my fever I rose like some giant. Long ago my
+world recognised the obedience it owed me. Long
+ago, by many signs, in many ways, it taught me
+the paramount quality of the emanation from my
+soul that is called my influence. Yet sometimes,
+even now, I seem to stare at myself aghast, to
+turn cold when I am alone with myself. I am
+seized with terrible fancies. I think of the voice
+of the burn. I think of that childish Autumn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+ceremony upon its bank among the mists and the
+flying leaves. I think of the grey youth who
+spoke with me in the twilight, and my soul is
+full of questions. I muse upon the Wandering
+Jew, upon Faust, upon Van Der Decken, upon
+the monstrous figures that are legends, yet sometimes
+realities to men. And then&mdash;and this is
+ghastly&mdash;I say to myself, can it be that I, too,
+shall become a legend? Can it be that my name
+will be whispered by the pale lips of good men
+long after I am dead? For, is there not a whirl
+of white faces attending my progress as the whirl
+of dead leaves attends the Autumn? Do I not
+hear a faint symphony of despairing cries like a
+dreadful music about my life? Is not my power
+upon men malign? Boys with their hopes shattered,
+men with their faiths broken, women with
+their love turned to gall&mdash;do they not crowd
+about my chariot wheels? Or is it my vain fancy
+that they do? Here and there from the sea of
+these beings one rises like a drowned creature
+whom the ocean will not hide, stark, stiff, corpse-like.
+Doctor Wedderburn was the first. Kate
+Walters is the second&mdash;Kate Walters.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>When my convalescence was well advanced she
+left Carlounie and went back to Edinburgh. Some
+months afterwards I heard casually that she was
+working in an hospital there. But a year and a
+half went by before I saw this girl again. Her<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span>
+fresh, pure, ministering face had nearly faded from
+my memory. Yet, she had attended intimately
+upon my marvellous transformation from my death
+of weakness to the life of strength. She had lifted
+me in her girl's arms when I was nothing. Yes,
+I had been in her arms then. How strange, how
+close are the commonest relations between the
+invalid and his nurse! When I chanced to meet
+Kate again I had no thought of this. I had forgotten.
+I came to Edinburgh on some business
+connected with a mine discovered on my estate,
+which seemed likely to make a great fortune for
+me, and is already on the way to accomplishing
+this first duty of a mine. My business done, I
+stayed on at my hotel in Princes Street amusing
+myself, for I had a multitude of friends in Edinburgh.
+One of these friends was a medical student
+attached to the hospital there, and he chanced to
+invite me to go with him through the wards one
+day. In one of the wards I encountered Kate
+Walters, fresh, clear, calm as in the old Carlounie
+days of my illness. She did not know me till I
+recalled myself to her recollection; then she
+looked into my face with the frankest astonishment.
+My superb physique amazed her, although
+she had attended upon its beginnings. I asked
+after her life in the interval since our last meeting;
+and she told me, with a delightful blush, that her
+period of nursing was nearly concluded, as she
+was engaged to be married to one Hugh Fraser, a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span>
+handsome, rich, and&mdash;strange thing this!&mdash;most
+steadfast youth, who lived in England in the south,
+and who loved her tenderly. I congratulated her,
+and was on the point of moving away down the
+ward with my friend when my eyes were caught
+again by Kate's blushing cheeks and eyes alight
+with the fiery shames and joys of love. How
+beautiful is the human face when the torches of
+the heart are kindled thus. How beautiful! I
+paused, and, before I went, invited Kate to tea one
+afternoon at my hotel. She accepted the invitation.
+Why not? In our meeting the old chain of sympathy
+between patient and nurse seemed forged
+anew. We felt that we were indeed friends. As
+we left the ward, my student chum chaffed me&mdash;I
+let his words go by heedlessly. I was not in
+love with Kate, but I was half in love with her
+love for Hugh Fraser. It had such pretty features.
+She came to tea and told me all about him; and
+when she talked of him she was so fascinating that
+I was loath to let her go. It was a sweet evening,
+and, as Kate had not to be back at the hospital
+early, I suggested that we should go for a stroll
+on Carlton Hill, and talk a little more about Hugh
+Fraser. The bribe tempted her. I saw that.
+And she agreed after a moment's hesitation.</p>
+
+<p>There is certainly an influence that lives only
+out of doors and can never enter a house, or
+exercise itself within four walls. There is a
+wandering spirit in the air of evening, a soul<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+that walks with gathering shadows, speaks in the
+distant hum of a city, and gazes through its twinkling
+lights. <i>There is a grey traveller who journeys in
+the twilight.</i> (What am I saying? To-day, as I
+write, I am full of fancies.) I felt that, so soon as
+Kate and I were away from the hotel, out under
+the sky and amid the mysteries of Edinburgh, we
+were changed. In a flash our intimacy advanced,
+the sympathy already existing between us deepened.
+Leaving the streets, we mounted the flight of steps
+that leads to the hill, and joined the few couples
+who were walking, almost like gods on some
+Olympus, above the world. They were all obviously
+lovers. I pointed this fact out to Kate, saying,
+“Hugh Fraser should be here, not I.�</p>
+
+<p>She smiled, but scarcely, I thought, with much
+regret. For the moment it seemed that a confidant
+satisfied her; and this pleased me. I drew
+her arm within mine.</p>
+
+<p>“We must not alarm the lovers,� I said. “We
+must appear to be as they are, or we shall carry a
+fiery sword into their Eden.�</p>
+
+<p>“You seem to understand us very well,� she
+answered with a smile. And she left her arm in
+mine.</p>
+
+<p>The mention of “us� chilled me. It seemed
+to set me outside a magic circle within which she,
+Hugh Fraser, these people sauntering near us, like
+amorous ghosts in the dimness, moved. I pressed
+her arm ever so gently.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Tell me how lovers feel at such a time as
+this,� I whispered, looking into her eyes.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>From Carlton Hill at night one sees a heaving
+ocean of yellow lights, gleaming like phosphorescence
+on ebon waves. Towards Arthur's Seat,
+towards the Castle, they rise; by Holyrood, by the
+old town, they fall. That night I could fancy that
+this sea of light spoke to me, murmured in my ear,
+urging me to prosecute my will, ruthlessly stirring
+a strange and, perhaps, evanescent romance in my
+heart. I know that when I parted from Kate that
+night I bent and kissed her. I know that she
+looked up at me startled, even terrified, yet found
+no voice to rebuke me. I know that I did not
+leave Edinburgh, as I had originally intended, upon
+the morrow. And I know this best of all&mdash;that
+I had no ill-intent in staying. I was caught in a
+net of impulse despite my own desire. I was held
+fast. There are&mdash;I believe it unalterably now&mdash;influences
+in life that are the very Tsars of the
+empires of men's souls. They must be obeyed.
+Possibly&mdash;is it so I wonder?&mdash;they only mount
+upon their thrones when they are urgently invoked
+by men who, as it were, say, “Come and rule over
+us!� But once that invocation has been made,
+once it has been responded to, there is never again
+free will for him who has rashly called upon the
+power he does not understand, and bowed before
+the tyrant whose face he has not seen. I tremble<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+now, as I write; I tremble as does the bond slave.
+Yet I neither speak with, nor hear, nor have sight
+of, my master. Unless, indeed&mdash;but I will not
+give way to any madness of the brain. No, no; I
+do not hear, I do not see, although I am conscious
+of, my Tsar, whose unemancipated serf I am.</p>
+
+<p>I need not tell all the story of my soul's impression
+that was stamped upon the soul of Kate
+Walters. Perhaps it is old. Certainly it is sad.
+I stamped deceit upon the nature which had not
+known it, knowledge of evil where only purity had
+been, satiety upon temperance. And, worst of all,
+I expelled from this girl's heart love for a good
+man who loved her, and planted, in its stead, passion
+for a&mdash;must I say a bad, or may I not cry, a
+driven man? And all this time Hugh Fraser
+knew nothing of his sorrow, growing up swiftly
+to meet him like a giant. Even now, while I
+write these words, he knows nothing of it. As I
+had carelessly taken possession of the mind, the
+very nature of Dr Wedderburn, so now I took
+possession of the very nature of Kate Walters.
+My immense strength, my abounding physical
+glory drew her&mdash;who had known me a puny
+invalid&mdash;irresistibly. I won the doctor by my
+mind; this girl, in the main, I think, by my body.
+And when at length I tired of her slightly, the
+woman, the gentle woman, sprang up a tigress. I
+had said one night that, since I was obliged to go to
+London, we must part for a while. I had added<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+that it was well Hugh Fraser lived in complete
+ignorance of his betrayal.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?� Kate suddenly cried out.</p>
+
+<p>“Because&mdash;because it is best so. He and you&mdash;some
+day.�</p>
+
+<p>I paused. She understood my meaning. Instantly
+the tigress had sprung upon me. The
+scene that followed was eloquent. I learned what
+lives and moves in the very depths of a nature,
+stirred by the inexhaustible greed of passion,
+twisted by passion's fulfilment, the ardent touched
+by the inert. But upon that hurricane has followed
+an immense and very strange calm. Kate
+is almost cold to me, though very sweet. She has
+acquiesced in my departure for town. She has
+come to one mind with me on the subject of
+Hugh Fraser. More, she has even written a letter
+to him asking him to come to her, pressing forward
+their marriage, and I am to be the bearer
+of it to him. This is only a woman's whim. She
+insists that I must see once the man who is to be
+her husband.</p>
+
+<p>So, after all, the tragedy of Dr Wedderburn is
+not to be repeated. I&mdash;I shall not hear, stealing
+along the steep and windy streets of Edinburgh, any&mdash;any
+strange footsteps.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>What is the awful fate that pursues me? A
+year ago I left Edinburgh carrying with me the
+letter which I understood to contain the request<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+of Kate Walters to her lover, Hugh Fraser, to
+hasten on their marriage. As the train roared
+southwards, I congratulated myself on my clever
+management of a woman. I had, it is true,
+stepped in between Kate and the calm happiness
+she had been anticipating when I first met her in
+the hospital ward. But now I had withdrawn.
+And, I told myself, in time. All would be well.
+This girl would marry the boy who loved her. She
+would deceive him. He would never know that the
+girl he married was not the girl he originally loved.
+He would never perceive that a human being had
+intervened between her and purity, truth, honour.
+In this letter&mdash;I touched it with my fingers, congratulating
+myself&mdash;Hugh Fraser would read the
+summons to the future he desired, the future with
+Kate Walters. His soul would rush to meet hers,
+and surely, after a little while, hers would cease to
+hold back. She would really once more be as she
+had been. I forgot that no human soul can ever
+retreat from knowledge to ignorance.</p>
+
+<p>Hugh Fraser's rooms in London were in Piccadilly.
+Directly I arrived in town I wrote him
+a note, saying that I was from Edinburgh with
+a message from Kate Walters for him. I explained
+that she had nursed me through a severe
+illness, and hoped I might have the pleasure of
+making his acquaintance. In reply, I received a
+most friendly note, begging me to call at an hour
+on the evening of the following day.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span></p>
+<p>That evening I drove in a hansom from the
+Grand Hotel to Piccadilly, taking Kate's note with
+me. I was conscious of a certain excitement, and
+also of a certain moral exultation. Ridiculously
+enough, I felt as if I were about to perform a sort
+of fine, almost paternal act, blessing these children
+with genuine, as opposed to stage, emotion. Yes;
+I glowed with a consciousness of personal merit.
+How incredible human beings are! Arrived at
+Hugh Fraser's rooms, I was at once shown in.
+How vividly I remember that first interview of
+ours, the exact condition of the room, Hugh's
+attitude of lively anticipation, the precise way in
+which he held his cigarette, the grim, short bark
+of the fox-terrier that sprang up from a sofa when
+I came in. Hugh was almost twenty-four years
+old, rather tall, slim, with intense, large, dark eyes&mdash;full
+of shining cheerfulness just then&mdash;very
+short, curling black hair, and fine, straight features.
+His expression was boyish; so were his movements.
+As soon as he saw me, he sprang forward
+and gave me an enthusiastic welcome&mdash;for the
+sake of Kate, I knew. He led me to the fire
+and made me sit down. I at once handed him
+my credentials, Kate's letter. His face flushed
+with pleasure, and his fingers twitched with the
+desire to tear it open, but he refrained politely,
+and began to talk&mdash;about her, I confess. I
+understood in three minutes how deeply he was
+in love with her. I told him all about her that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+might please him, and hinted at the contents of the
+letter.</p>
+
+<p>“What!� he exclaimed joyously. “She wants
+to hasten on our marriage at last. And she's kept
+me off&mdash;but you know what girls are! She
+couldn't leave the hospital immediately. She
+swore it. There were a thousand reasons for
+delay. But now&mdash;by Jove!�</p>
+
+<p>His eyes were suddenly radiant, and he clutched
+hold of my hand like a schoolboy.</p>
+
+<p>“You are a good chap to bring me such a letter,�
+he cried.</p>
+
+<p>“Read it,� I said, again filled with moral self-satisfaction,
+vain, paltry egoist that I was.</p>
+
+<p>“No, no&mdash;presently.�</p>
+
+<p>But I insisted; and at length he complied, enchanted
+to yield to my importunity. He opened
+the letter, and, as he broke the seal, his face was
+like morning. Never shall I forget the change
+that grew in it as he read. When he had finished
+his face was like starless night. He looked old,
+haggard, black, shrunken. I watched him with a
+sensation that something had gone wrong with my
+sight. Surely radiance was fully before me and
+my tricked vision saw it as despair. Raising his
+blank, bleak eyes from the letter, Hugh stared
+towards me and opened his lips. But no sound
+came from them. He frowned, as if in fury at his
+own dumbness. Then at last, with a sharp shake of
+his head sideways, he said in a low and dry voice:</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span></p>
+<p>“You know what is in this letter, you say?�</p>
+
+<p>“I&mdash;I thought so,� I answered, growing cold
+and filled with anxiety.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, read it, will you?�</p>
+
+<p>I took the paper from his hand and read:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Dear Hugh,</span>&mdash;Make the man who brings you this
+letter marry me. If you don't, I will kill myself; for I
+am ruined. <span class="smcap" style="float:right;">Kate.</span>�</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>I looked up at Hugh Fraser over the letter which
+my hand still mechanically held near my eyes. I
+wonder how long the silence through which we
+stared lasted.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A month later I was married to Kate Walters!</p>
+
+<h3>IV<br />
+THE SOUL OF HUGH FRASER</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> may seem strange that my influence upon the
+soul of Hugh Fraser should follow upon such a
+situation as I have just described; but everything
+connected with my life, since the day when I met
+the grey boy by the burn, has been utterly strange,
+utterly abnormal. My treachery, one would have
+thought, must have led Fraser to hate me. I had
+wrecked his happiness. I had done him the
+deepest injury one man can do to another, and at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+first he hated me. When he had wrung from me
+a promise to marry Kate, he left me, and I did not
+see him again until after the wedding. But then,
+it seemed, he could not keep away from her. For
+he forgave us the wrong we had done him; and,
+after a while, wrote a friendly letter in which he
+suggested that we should all forget the past.</p>
+
+<p>“Why should I not see you sometimes?� he
+concluded. “I only wish you both good, there is
+no longer any evil in my heart.�</p>
+
+<p>Poor boy! It was to be, I suppose. The Tsar
+of the empire of my soul set forth his edict, and
+one winter day carriage wheels ground harshly
+upon the gravel sweep, and Hugh Fraser was my
+guest at Carlounie. I welcomed him upon the
+very spot where those light footsteps paused that
+black night of Doctor Wedderburn's dreary end.
+And the faint sound of the burn mingled with our
+voices in greeting and reply.</p>
+
+<p>The boy was changed. He had aged, grown
+grave, heavier in movement, fiercer in observation,
+less ready in speech. But his manner was friendly
+even to me, and it was plain to see that Kate still
+had his heart. They met quietly enough, but a
+flush ran from his cheek to hers as they touched
+hands. Their voices quivered when they spoke
+a commonplace of pleasure at the encounter. So
+the wheels of Fate began slowly to turn on this
+winter's day.</p>
+
+<p>I must tell you that my fortunes had greatly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+changed before Hugh Fraser came to Carlounie.
+I was grown rich. My investments, my speculations
+had prospered almost miraculously. The
+mine I have spoken of was proving a gold mine to
+me. All worldly things went well with me&mdash;all
+worldly things, yes.</p>
+
+<p>Now, I believe that all mighty circumstances
+are born tiny, like children, at some given moment.
+As a rule, they usually seem so insignificant, so
+puny at the birth, that we take no heed of the fact
+that they have come into being, and that, in process
+of time, they will grow to might, perhaps to
+horrible majesty. Only, when we trace events
+backwards do we know the exact moment when
+their first faint wail broke upon our mental hearing.
+Generally this is so. But I affirm that I felt, at
+the very time of its first coming, the presence of the
+shadow, the tiny shadow of the events which I am
+about to describe. I even said to myself, “This
+is a birthday.�</p>
+
+<p>Among many improvements on my estate I had
+built a new Manse, in which, of course, our new
+minister lived. The old habitation of Doctor
+Wedderburn stood empty and deserted among its
+sycamores. One winter's day Hugh Fraser, Kate,
+and I, in our walk, passed along the lane by the
+now ragged privet hedge through which I had so
+often observed the doctor's agonies. It was a
+black and white day of frost, which crawled along
+the dark trees and outlined twig and branch. The<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>
+air was misty, and distant objects assumed a mysterious
+importance. Slight sounds, too, suggested
+infinite activities to the mind. As we neared the
+Manse, Hugh Fraser said to me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Who lives in that old house?�</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody,� I replied.</p>
+
+<p>Hugh glanced at me very doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody,� I reiterated.</p>
+
+<p>“Really,� he rejoined. “But the garden?�</p>
+
+<p>“Is deserted.�</p>
+
+<p>“Hardly,� he exclaimed, pointing with his hand.
+“Look!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� said Kate, as if in agreement.</p>
+
+<p>And she grew duskily pale.</p>
+
+<p>I looked over the privet hedge, seeing only the
+rank and frost-bitten grass, the wild bushes and
+narrow mossy paths. Then I stared at my two
+companions in silence. Their eyes appeared to
+follow the onward movement of some object invisible
+to me.</p>
+
+<p>“The old man makes himself at home,� Hugh
+said. “He has gone into the summer-house
+now.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� Kate said again.</p>
+
+<p>There was fear in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>I felt suddenly that the air was very chill.</p>
+
+<p>“That house is unoccupied,� I repeated shortly.</p>
+
+<p>We all walked on in silence. But, through our
+silence, it certainly seemed to me that there came
+a sound of some one lamenting in the garden.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span></p>
+<p>A day or two later Fraser said to me:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Why is that old house shut up?�</p>
+
+<p>“Who would occupy it?� I said. “Of course,
+if I could get a tenant&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“I'll take it,� he rejoined quickly. “You can
+let me some shooting with it, can't you?�</p>
+
+<p>“But,� I began; and then I stopped. I had
+an instinct to keep the old Manse empty, but I
+fought it, merely because it struck me as unreasonable.
+How seldom are our instincts unreasonable!
+God&mdash;how seldom!</p>
+
+<p>“I've been looking out for a shooting-box,�
+Hugh said. “That house would suit me
+admirably.�</p>
+
+<p>“All right,� I answered. “I shall be very glad
+to have you for a tenant.�</p>
+
+<p>So it was arranged. When Kate heard of the
+arrangement, I observed her to go very pale; but
+she made no objection. Hugh Fraser rented the
+house, furnished it, engaged servants, a gardener,
+enlarged the stables, and took up his abode there.
+Doctor Wedderburn's old study was now his den.
+When I looked in at the window through which I
+had seen the doctor die, I saw Fraser smoking, or
+playing with his setters. I don't know why, but
+the sight turned me sick.</p>
+
+<p>My relations with Kate, of which I have said
+nothing, were rather cold and distant. My passion,
+such as it was, had died before marriage. Hers
+seemed to languish afterwards. I believe that she<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+had really loved me, but that the shame of being
+with me, after I had wedded her actually against
+my will, struck this sentiment to the dust. When
+one feeling that has been very strong dies, its place
+is generally filled by another. Sometimes I fancied
+that this was so with Kate, that the bitterness of
+shattered self-respect gradually transformed her
+nature, that a cruel frost bound the tendernesses,
+the warm vagaries of what had been a sweet
+woman's heart. But, to tell the truth, I did not
+trouble much about the matter. My affairs were
+prospering so greatly, my health was so abounding,
+I had so much beside the mere egotism of brilliant
+physical strength to occupy me, that I was heedless,
+reckless&mdash;at first. Yet, I had moments of
+a dull alarm connected with the dweller at the
+Manse.</p>
+
+<p>If Hugh Fraser changed as he read that fateful
+letter in London, he changed far more after he
+came to live at the Manse. And it seemed to me
+that there were times when&mdash;how shall I put it?&mdash;when
+he bore a curious, and, to me, almost intolerable
+likeness to&mdash;some one who was dead. A
+certain old man's manner came upon him at
+moments. His body, in sitting or standing, assumed,
+to my eyes, elderly and damnable attitudes.
+Once, when I glanced in at the study window
+before entering the Manse, I perceived him lounging
+over a table facing me, a pen in his hand and
+paper before him, and the spectacle threw all my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+senses into a violent and most distressing disorder.
+Instead of going into the house, as I had intended,
+I struck sharply upon the glass at the window.
+Fraser looked up quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“What&mdash;what are you writing?� I cried out.</p>
+
+<p>He got up, came to the window, and opened it.</p>
+
+<p>“Eh? What's the row, man?� he said. “Why
+don't you come in?�</p>
+
+<p>I repeated my question, with an anxiety I strove
+to mask.</p>
+
+<p>“Writing? Only a letter to town,� he said,
+looking at me in wonder.</p>
+
+<p>“Not a sermon?� I blurted forth.</p>
+
+<p>“A sermon? Good heavens, no. Why should
+I write a sermon?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh,� I replied, forcing an uneasy laugh.
+“You&mdash;you live in a Manse. Doctor Wedderburn
+used to write his sermons in that room.�</p>
+
+<p>That evening I remember that I said to Kate:</p>
+
+<p>“Don't you think Fraser is getting to look very
+old at times?�</p>
+
+<p>“I haven't observed it,� she replied coldly.</p>
+
+<p>Another curious thing. Very soon after he
+took up his abode in the Manse, Fraser, who had
+been a godly youth, became markedly averse to
+religion. He informed us, with some excitement,
+that he had changed his views, and seemed much
+inclined to carry on an atheistical propaganda
+among the devout people of the neighbourhood.
+He declared that much evil had been wrought by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+faith in Carlounie, and appeared to deem it as his
+special duty to preach some sort of a crusade
+against the accepted Christianity of the parish. I
+began to combat his views, and once sought the
+reason of his ardour and self-election to the post
+of teacher. His answer struck me exceedingly.
+He said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Why should I be the one to clear away these
+senseless beliefs in phantasms, you say? Why,
+because I suppose they were woven by my predecessor
+in the Manse. Didn't the minister live and
+die there? Do you know, Ralston, sometimes, as
+I sit in that study at night, I have a feeling that
+instead of turning to what is called repentance
+when he died, the minister turned the other way,
+recanted in his last hour the faith he had professed
+all through his life, and expired before he could
+give words to his new mind and heart. And then
+I feel as if his influence was left behind him in
+that room, and fell upon me and imposed on me
+this mission.�</p>
+
+<p>And as he spoke, he suddenly plucked at his
+face with an old, habitual action of Doctor Wedderburn's
+when excited. I scarcely restrained a
+cry, and with difficulty forced myself to go out
+slowly from his presence. Nevertheless, I felt
+strongly impelled to fight against the atheism of
+this boy, I who had formerly sown the seeds of
+destruction in the soul of Doctor Wedderburn.
+But it was as if my own act of the past rose and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span>
+conquered me in the present. I declare solemnly
+it was so. Some emanation from the poor dead
+creature's soul clung round that cursed place of his
+doom, and, seizing upon the soul of Fraser, spread
+tyranny from its throne. And whom did it take
+first as its victim, think you? Kate, my wife.</p>
+
+<p>Let our individual beliefs be what they may, one
+thing we must all&mdash;when we think&mdash;acknowledge,
+that the pulse which beats eternally in the
+heart of life is reparation.</p>
+
+<p>Kate, as I have said, was originally finely pure
+and finely dowered with the blessings of faith in a
+divine Providence, trust in the eventual redemption
+of the world, hope that sin, sorrow, and sighing
+would, indeed, flee away, and all mankind find
+eternal and unutterable peace. In my worst moments
+I had never tried to destroy this beauty of
+her soul; and, in her fall, now repaired, she had
+never abandoned her religion. It was, I know, a
+haunting memory of the last moments of the doctor
+that held me back from ever attacking the faith
+of another. For myself, I did not think much of
+my future beyond death. Life filled my horizon
+then.</p>
+
+<p>But now, after a short absence in England, during
+which I left Kate at Carlounie, I returned to
+find her infected with Fraser's pestilent notions.
+She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was
+better to act up to her real convictions than to set
+what is called a good example to her dependants.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span>
+She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found
+damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually
+how the matter struck me when I began carefully
+to consider it. Men often see only what irreligion
+really is and means when they find it existing in a
+woman. I was appalled at this deadly fire flaring
+up in the heart of Kate, and I set myself, at first
+feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and
+stamp it out.</p>
+
+<p>But I fought against my own former self. I
+fought against the influence of the spectre that
+surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose
+originally from the very bosom of the burn at my
+summons. Am I mad to think so? No, no. Oh,
+the eternal horror that may spring from one wild
+and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic
+litany! This was surely the strangest, subtlest
+reparation that ever beat in the inexorable heart of
+Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence,
+still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul
+that was gone to its account. Through him it
+seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number was
+made up, three souls were bound and linked together.
+(I hear as I write the voice of the grey
+traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And in the
+first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in
+the second and in the third. Now, thrusting as it
+were backward through Kate and Hugh Fraser, I
+fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped
+in pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+Wedderburn had formerly&mdash;before the fever&mdash;dominated
+my influence, so now it dominated my
+influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom
+I had destroyed had a drear revenge upon me.
+There had been an interregnum when the doctor
+wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that
+had ceased to be. He died undoubting, a blatant
+unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now.
+He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre
+at the Manse defied me.</p>
+
+<p>Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did
+not come upon me in a moment; for sometimes
+my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of
+health and of strength still delighted me. I was as
+Faust&mdash;I was as Faust in his monstrous and damnable
+youth. But there came a time when the
+spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of
+Hugh Fraser. And then I rose up to battle with
+it, trembling at the thought of the grey boy's
+words at the thought of the Cæsar of hell whose
+tribute was three human souls.</p>
+
+<p>Kate and I were taking tea one evening with
+Fraser. We sat around the hearth, by which was
+placed the table with the tea-service and the hot
+cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss
+religious subjects and to rail against the professors
+of faith. Kate listened to him eagerly&mdash;a
+filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes.
+I was silent, watching. And presently it seemed
+to me that Fraser's gestures in talking grew like the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+dead gestures of the doctor. He threw his hands
+abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of
+Wedderburn's. He struck his knees sharply, and
+simultaneously, with both his palms to emphasise
+his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So
+vehement was the similarity that I began presently to
+feel that the doctor himself declaimed in the firelight,
+and I was seized with a desire to combat effectively
+his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in,
+then, upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of
+religion. He turned upon me, dealt with my pleas,
+scattered my contentions&mdash;growing, I fancied, very
+old and with the rumbling voice of age,&mdash;thrust at
+me with the lances of sarcasm, sore belaboured me
+into silence and mute fury. And all the time Kate
+sat by, and I seemed to see her soul, with fluttering
+outstretched wings, sinking down to hell, as a hawk
+drops out of sight into a dark cleft of the mountains.
+And then, in the last resort, Fraser struck his hand
+down on mine to clinch his defeat of me. And I,
+looking upon that poor Kate, cried out:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“God forgive you, Fraser, for what you're doing&mdash;murderer!
+murderer!�</p>
+
+<p>Scarcely had my cry died away than I knew I
+had borrowed the very words of Wedderburn to
+me. A cold, like ice, came upon me. This reversal
+of the past in the present was too ironic.
+I heard the doctor chuckling drearily in Hades. I
+suddenly sprang up like one pursued, and got away
+into the night, leaving Kate and Fraser together<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span>
+by the fire. But the spectre of the Manse surely
+pursued me. I heard its soft but heavy footsteps
+coming in my wake. I heard its old laughter in
+the dark behind me; and I sickened and faltered,
+and was in fear beyond all human fear of an
+enemy. The next day I told Fraser he must leave
+the Manse; I would build him a shooting-lodge
+on any part of my estate that he preferred.</p>
+
+<p>“No,� he said, “no; I have grown to love the
+old place; I never feel alone there.�</p>
+
+<p>I looked in his eyes, searching after his meaning.</p>
+
+<p>“I would rather pull down the Manse,� I said.</p>
+
+<p>In reply, he touched with his forefinger the
+lease I had signed with him, which lay on his
+writing-table.</p>
+
+<p>“You cannot, my friend,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>I cannot do anything that I would. I am driven
+on a dark road by the creature with the whip that
+is surely after every man who once yields to his
+worst desires.</p>
+
+<p>Just after this I received a visit from Mr. Mackenzie,
+the new minister, a young and fervent, but
+not very knowledgeable man, whose zeal was red-hot,
+but incompetent, and who would have died for
+the faith he could never properly expound, like
+many young ministers of our church. The little
+man was in a twisting turmoil of distress, and was
+moved, so he said, to deal very plainly with me. I
+bade him deal on. It seemed that his flock was
+becoming infected with atheism, which spread like<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+the plague, from the old Manse. The young children
+lisped it to each other in the lanes; lovers
+talked it between their kisses; youths chattered
+perdition at the idle corner by the church wall.
+Even the old began to look askance at the Bible
+that had been their only book of age, and to shiver
+wantonly at the inevitable approach of death.
+The young minister cried denunciation upon
+Fraser, like a vague-minded, but angry Jonah before
+a provincial Nineveh.</p>
+
+<p>“Turn him out, Mr. Ralston, drive him forth,�
+he ejaculated. “What is his rent to you? What
+is his money in comparison with the immortal
+souls of men? Away with him, away with him.�</p>
+
+<p>I mentioned the small matter of the lease.
+The young minister, with a quivering scarlet face,
+replied stammering:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“A lease! But&mdash;but&mdash;your own wife&mdash;she
+is&mdash;is&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“I do not discuss her,� I said sternly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well; they are deserting the services. You
+see that yourself. They will not come to hear me
+preach. They will not listen to me.�</p>
+
+<p>The man was tasting bitterness. He was
+almost crying. I was terribly sorry for him. Yet,
+all I could do was to think of the spectre at the
+Manse and answer:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I can do nothing.�</p>
+
+<p>His words were true. Carlounie's soul was
+being devoured as by a plague. A colony of un<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>believers
+was springing up in the midst of the
+beautiful woods and the mountains. Soon the evil
+fame of the place began to spread abroad, and
+men, in distant parts of Scotland, to speak of
+mad Carlounie. The matter weighed intolerably
+upon me, and at last became a fixed idea. I could
+think of nothing else but this devil's home in the
+hills, this haunted and harassed centre of doom
+and darkness which was my possession and in
+which I lived. I fell into silence. I ceased to
+stir abroad beyond my own land. It seemed to
+me that Carlounie should keep strict quarantine,
+should be isolated, and that each person who went
+over its borders carried a strange infection and was
+guilty of murder. I forbade Kate to drive beyond
+my estates.</p>
+
+<p>“I never wish to,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>And I knew that where Fraser was she was
+happy. He had her soul fast by this; or, it would
+be truer to say, the spectre of the Manse had both
+him and her. And he aged apace and bore on his
+countenance the stamp of evil. And I brooded
+and brooded upon the whole matter. But, from
+whatever point I started, I came back to the Manse
+and to the spectre dwelling in it with Hugh Fraser.
+I had given death to Doctor Wedderburn, in return
+for the life so miraculously given to me, and
+now his spirit, retained in its ancient abiding-place,
+spread death about it in its turn. This was, and
+is, my conviction. The influence of the departed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+clings to roof, to walls, to floors, leans on the accustomed
+window-seat, trembles by the bed-head,
+sits by the hearthstone, stands invisible in the passage
+way. <i>To kill it one must destroy its home.</i> It
+was my duty to kill it, therefore it was my duty to
+destroy the Manse. This thought at length took
+complete possession of me, and, following it, I
+strove in every imaginable way to oust Fraser from
+the house among the sycamores. But he would
+not go. He loved the place, he said. He stood
+by his lease and I was powerless.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, God, I have, surely I have, my excuse for
+what I have done! I meant to be a saviour, not a
+destroyer! I would have restored Fraser and my
+poor Kate to their freedom of heart. That was
+what I meant. Ay, but the grey traveller fought
+against me. Shut up here by night in my house,
+on the verge of&mdash;that which I cannot, dare not
+speak of, I declare that I am guiltless. Let him
+bear the burden, him alone! In these last moments,
+before my deed is known, I write the truth
+that men may exonerate me. This is the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Overwhelmed with this idea that Carlounie
+must be rescued, that Hugh Fraser and Kate must
+be rescued from this damnation that was preying
+upon them, I determined, secretly, on the destruction
+of the Manse, in which the spectre of the
+doctor stayed to work such evil. But, to do this,
+I must first make sure that Hugh Fraser was at
+a distance, and that his small household&mdash;he only<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+kept two servants, hired from the village&mdash;were
+away from the haunted dwelling. I, therefore,
+suggested to Fraser that he should come and spend
+a week with me, and give his maids a holiday.
+After a little demur, and drawn, I see now, by his
+hidden passion for Kate, he accepted my invitation.
+He dismissed the maids to their homes for
+a week, and moved over to us. When the minister
+knew of it, he, no doubt, fully included me
+in his prayers for the damnation of those who
+worked evil among his flock. Will he ever read
+these pages, I wonder? Kate was now an avowed
+atheist, and she and Fraser were continually together,
+glorying in their complete freedom from
+old prejudices, and their new outlook upon life.
+They had, I heard them say, broken through the
+ties that bound poor, terrified Christians; and,
+when they said this, they smiled, the one upon the
+other. I did not then know why. Meanwhile, I
+was preparing for my deed of redemption, as I
+called it, and meant it to be. I was resolved to go
+out by night to the empty Manse, and secretly to
+set it in flames. It stood alone. The country
+people slept sound at night. I calculated that if I
+chose midnight for my act none would see the
+flames, and, ere the peasants woke at dawn, the
+Manse and the spectre within it would be destroyed
+for ever. Such was my belief&mdash;such the
+spirit in which I prepared myself for this strange
+work.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>V<br />
+THE RETURN OF THE GREY TRAVELLER</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">I write</span> these last words after the dead of night,
+towards the coming of the dawn. Ere the light is
+grey in the sky I shall be away to the burn to meet
+him, the grey traveller. He is there waiting for me.
+He has come back. I go to meet him, and I shall
+never return. Carlounie will know my face no
+more. All is done as he ordained. My words
+have been as deeds, have marched on inevitably to
+actual deeds. Long ago he said that sometimes,
+even as we can never go back from things that we
+have done, we can never go back from things that
+we have said. So, indeed, it is.</p>
+
+<p>According to my fixed intention, I determined
+on a night for the destruction of the Manse. The
+house was old and would burn like tinder. I
+should break into it through the window of the
+study, which was never shuttered. I should set
+fire to the interior at several points, and escape in
+the darkness of the night. By dawn the accursed
+place would be a ruin, and then&mdash;then I looked
+for a new era. Fool! Fool! I looked to see
+the burden of the vile influence of the spectre lifted
+from the soul of Fraser, and so from the soul of
+Kate, which was infected by him. I looked to
+see my people sane and satisfied as of old, Carlounie<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+no more a plague-spot in the land, that poor and
+zealous man, the minister, calm and at rest with
+his little faithful flock once more. All this I
+looked for confidently. And so, when the black
+and starless night of my deed came, I was happy and
+serene. That night Kate pleaded a headache, and
+went to bed very early, before nine. She begged
+me not to come to her room to bid her good-night,
+as she wanted perfect quiet and sleep. All
+unsuspecting, I agreed to her request. Soon after
+she had gone, Fraser, who had seemed heavy with
+unusual fatigue all through the evening, also went
+off to bed, and I was left alone. But it was not
+yet time for me to start on my errand of the darkness.
+The burning Manse would surely attract
+attention before midnight. People might be out
+and about in the village. A belated peasant might
+be on his way home by the lane that skirted the
+privet hedge. I must wait till all were sleeping.
+The time seemed very long. Once I fancied I
+heard a movement in the house&mdash;again I dreamed
+that soft and hurried footsteps upon the gravel outside
+broke on the silence. But I said to myself that
+I was nervous, highly strung because of my strange
+project, that my imagination tricked me. At last
+the hour came. Without going upstairs I drew on
+my thickest overcoat, took my hat and a heavy
+stick, opened the hall door, and passed out into
+the night. It was still and very cold, and the voice
+of the burn came loudly to my ears. Treading<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+quietly, I made my way into the road, and set
+forth along it in the direction of the Manse. The
+ground was hard, and scarcely had I gone a few
+yards before I thought that some one was furtively
+following me. I stopped rather uneasily, and listened,
+but heard nothing. I went on, and again
+seemed aware of distant footsteps treading gently
+behind me. The sound made me suppose that
+some one of my household must be after me, moved
+by curiosity as to the reason of my present pilgrimage;
+but I was not minded to be watched, so I
+turned sharply, yet very softly, around and faced
+the way I had come. I encountered no one, nor
+did I any longer catch the patter of feet. So,
+reckoning that my nerves must be playing with me,
+I pursued my way. But the whole of the distance
+between my dwelling and the Manse I seemed
+vaguely to hear a noise of one treading behind me.
+And, although I said to myself that there was
+nobody out beside myself, I was filled with the stir
+of a shifting uneasiness. I entered the lonely and
+narrow lane that led beside the Manse, and presently
+arrived in front of the house; when, what
+was my astonishment to perceive a light gleaming
+in the study window. My hand was on the gate
+when it went out, and all the front of the house
+was black and eyeless. For so brief a moment
+had I seen the light that I was moved to think that
+it, too, existed, like the sound of steps, only in my
+excited brain. Nevertheless, I did not go up at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+once to the house, but paced the lane for a full half-hour,
+always&mdash;so it seemed to me&mdash;tracked by
+some one. But, since I kept turning about, and the
+footfalls were always at my back, I grew certain
+that they were nothing more nor less than a fantasy
+on my part. It must have been well after
+twelve when I summoned courage to enter the
+garden and to approach the Manse. The steps, I
+thought, followed me to the gate and then paused,
+as if a sentinel was posted there to keep watch.
+Arrived at the stone step which preceded the hall
+door, I, too, paused in my turn and listened. Did
+the spectre that inhabited this abode know of my
+coming, of my purpose? Was it crouching within,
+like some frantic shadow, fearful of its impending
+fate? Or was it, perhaps, preparing to attack, to
+repel me? Strangely, I had now no fear of it, or
+of anything. I was calm. I felt that my deed
+was one of rescue, even though, by performing it,
+I wrought destruction. I moved to the study
+window, and was about to smash in the glass with
+my heavy stick when a mad idea came to me to
+try the hall door. I put my hand upon it and
+found it not locked. This opening of the door
+sent a shiver through me, and a ghastly sense of
+the occupation of this deserted abode. I was filled
+again with an acute consciousness of the indwelling
+spectre, whom, in truth, I came to murder. But, I
+reasoned, this door has been left unbarred by the
+carelessness of Fraser's servants, that is all.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span></p>
+<p>I stood on the lintel, struck a match and set it
+to a candle end which I drew from my coat pocket.
+The flame burned up, showing the narrow passage,
+the umbrella stand, the doors on either side.
+I entered the study softly, looking swiftly on all
+sides of me as I did so. Did I expect a vision of
+Doctor Wedderburn lounging at the table, his
+fingers thrust into a Bible? I scarcely know;
+but I saw nothing except the grimly standing furniture,
+the lamp on the table, the vacant chairs, the
+books in their shelves. I listened. There was no
+rustle of the spectre that I came to kill. Did it
+watch me? Did it see me there? I set fire to
+the room, passed quickly to the chamber on the
+other side of the passage, from thence to the
+kitchen and the dining-parlour, leaving a track of
+dwarf flames behind me. The means of destruction
+I had prepared and carried with me. They
+availed. When I once more reached the garden, the
+ground floor of the Manse was in a blaze. But now
+came the incredible event which I must chronicle
+before I go down to the burn for the last time.</p>
+
+<p>Having gained the garden, I waited there in the
+darkness to watch my work progress. I saw the
+light within the Manse, at first a twinkle, grow
+to a glare. I heard the faint crackle of the
+burning rooms increase to a soft and continuous
+roar. And, as I watched and listened, a mighty
+sense of relief ran through me. Thus did I burn
+up my past! thus did I sacrifice grandly and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+gladly the ill spirit my wild desires had evoked!
+Thus&mdash;thus! All the base of the Manse was
+red-hot, when, on a sudden, I heard a great shout
+that seemed to come from the sky. Light sprang
+in an upper window. There followed a sound like
+the smash of glass, and I saw two arms shoot out,
+the top part of a figure and a face framed in the
+glare. I deemed it the vision of the poor spectre
+that I destroyed. I looked upon it and fancied
+I could detect the tortured lineaments of the
+doctor, his accustomed gestures distorted by fear
+and fury. But then I seemed to see behind him
+another figure, struggling, and to hear the failing
+scream of a woman. But the flames from below
+leaped to the roof. The floors fell in with an
+uproar. The figure, or figures, disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Trembling I turned to go, my mind shuddering
+at the thought of the apparition I had seen. I
+got into the lane and hastened towards home.
+Soon the burning Manse was out of sight, and I
+was swallowed up in the intense darkness.</p>
+
+<p>Now, as I went along, a terrible and very peculiar
+sensation came upon me. I heard no footsteps;
+all was silence. Yet I seemed to be aware
+that I was closely companioned, that at my very
+side something&mdash;I knew not what&mdash;walked,
+keeping pace with me. And so close did I believe
+this thing to be, that at moments I even felt it
+pressing against me like a slim figure in the night.
+Once, when it thus nestled to me, as if in affection,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>
+I could not refrain from crying out aloud. I
+stretched forth my arms to grasp this surely amorous
+horror of the darkness, but found nothing, and
+pursued my road in a sweat of apprehension. And
+still, the thing was certainly with me, and seemed,
+I thought, to praise me as I walked, as the good
+man is praised on his journey. My great horror
+was that this creature that I could not see, could
+not hear, could not feel, and yet was so sharply
+conscious of, was <i>well disposed towards me</i>. My
+heart craved its hatred&mdash;but it loved me I knew.
+My soul demanded its curses. I almost heard it
+bless me as I moved. My knees knocked together,
+my limbs were turned to wax, as it was borne in
+upon me that I had surely done this terror that
+walked in darkness a service of some kind. To be
+pursued in fury by one of the dreadful beings
+that dwell in the borderland beyond our sight is
+sad and dreary; but to be followed thus by one
+as by a dog, to be fawned upon and caressed&mdash;this
+is appalling. I longed to shriek aloud. I
+broke into a run, and, like one demented, gained
+the gate of Carlounie; but always the thing was
+with me&mdash;full of joy and laudation. At the house
+door I paused, facing round. I was moved to
+address this thing I could not see.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is it that walks with me?� I cried, and
+my voice was high and strained.</p>
+
+<p>A voice I knew, young, clear, level, a little
+formal, answered out of the darkness:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span></p>
+<p>“It is I.�</p>
+
+<p>It was the voice of the grey traveller whom I
+had seen long ago by the burnside. I leaned back
+against the door and my shoulders shook against it.</p>
+
+<p>“What do you want of me?�</p>
+
+<p>“I come to thank you.�</p>
+
+<p>“What, then, have I done?�</p>
+
+<p>“You have brought the tribute money.�</p>
+
+<p>I did not understand, and I answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“No. One soul I may have destroyed, but two
+I have saved to-night. For I have slain the spectre
+that preyed upon them and I have set them free
+from bondage.�</p>
+
+<p>The voice answered:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“<i>Go into the house and see.</i>�</p>
+
+<p>Then again I was filled with apprehension. I
+turned to go in at my door, and, as I did so, I
+heard footsteps treading in the direction of the
+burn, and a fading voice which cried, like an
+echo:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“And then come to me.�</p>
+
+<p>And, as the voice died, I heard the rush of
+sheep in the night.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Filled with nameless fear and a cold apprehension,
+I entered the house, and, led by some
+cruel instinct, made my way to Kate's room.
+The lamp she always had at night burned dimly
+on the dressing-table and cast a grave radiance
+upon an empty bed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span></p>
+<p>What could this mean?</p>
+
+<p>I stole to the room of Fraser, bearing the lamp
+with me. His chamber was also untenanted;
+but, on the quilt of the bed, lay a piece of paper
+written over. I took it up and read&mdash;with the
+sound of the burn in my ears:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p>“You stole her from me. I take back my own. To-night
+we stay at the old Manse. To-morrow we shall
+be far away.
+<span class="smcap" style="float:right;">Hugh Fraser.</span>�</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>The paper dropped from my hand upon the
+quilt. A woman's scream rang in my ears above
+the roar of flames. I understood.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The tribute money has been paid.
+I go down to the burn. The grey traveller is
+waiting there for me.</p>
+
+<p style="margin-left:65%;">
+<span class="smcap">Robert Hichens.</span><br />
+<span class="smcap">Frederic Hamilton.</span></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169"><br />[169]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170"><br /><br />[170]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171"><br /><br /><br />[171]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>AN ECHO IN EGYPT</h2>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">That</span> lustrous land of weary music and wild dancing,
+of reverend tombs and pert Arabs, that Egypt
+of plagues and tourists, to whose sandy bosom
+Society flocks, affects her visitors in many different
+ways. Bellairs went to her under the fixed impression
+that he was a cynic, and found that he
+was a romanticist. Very acute in mind, he had
+long flattered himself on being unimpressionable;
+and he was much inclined to think that to be insensitive
+was to be strong with the best kind of
+strength. He loved to lay stress on all that was
+devil-may-care in his character, and to put aside all
+that was prone to cling, or weep, or wonder, or
+pray, and he fancied that if he cultivated one side
+of his mind assiduously he could eliminate the other
+sides. In England, in London, the process had
+seemed to be successful. But Egypt gave to him
+illusions with both hands, and, against his will, he
+had to accept them. Protests were unavailing, and
+soon he ceased to protest, and told himself the
+horrid fact that he was a sentimentalist, perhaps
+even a poet. Good heavens! a Bellairs&mdash;a poet!
+His soldier ancestors seemed forming a square and
+fixing bayonets to resist the charging notion. And
+yet&mdash;and yet&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span></p>
+<p>Instead of playing pool after dinner at night,
+Bellairs found himself wandering, like Haroun Al
+Raschid, through the narrow ways of Cairo, mixing
+with the natives, studying their loves, and drinking
+their coffee. There were moments, retrograde moments,
+when he even wished to wear their dress,
+to drape his long-limbed British form in a flowing
+blue robe, and wrap his dark head in a bulging
+white turban. He resisted this devil of an idea;
+but the fact that it had ever come to him troubled
+him. And, partly to regain his manhood, his hard
+scepticism, his contempt of outside, delicate influences,
+he went up the Nile&mdash;and succumbed
+utterly to fantasy and to old romance. “I am no
+longer Jack Bellairs,� he told himself one day, as
+the steamer on which he travelled neared Luxor
+on its way down the river from the First Cataract&mdash;“I
+am somebody else; some one who is touched
+by a sunset, and responsive to a gleam of rose on
+the Libyan Mountains, some one who dreams at
+night when the pipes wail under the palm-trees,
+some one who feels that the great river has life, and
+that the desert owns a wistful soul, and has a sweet
+armour with silence. Good-bye, Jack Bellairs!
+Go home to England&mdash;I stay here.�</p>
+
+<p>And that evening he left the steamer, and took
+a room for a month at the Luxor Hotel. And
+that evening he cast the skin of his former
+self, and emerged, with fluttering wings, from the
+chrysalis of his identity. He was a bachelor, aged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>
+twenty-eight, and he was travelling alone; so there
+was no critical eye to mark the change in him, no
+chattering tongue to express surprise at his pleasant
+abandonment to the follies which make up the lives
+of sensitive artists and refined sensualists who can
+differentiate between the promenade of the “Empire,�
+and the garden of love. As he stepped out
+into the Arab-haunted village that night, after
+dinner, Bellairs breathed a sigh of relief. For a
+month he would let himself go. Where to? He
+bent his steps towards the river, the Nile that is the
+pulsing blood in the veins of Egypt. Moored in
+the shadow of its brown banks lay a string of
+bright-eyed dahabeeyahs. From more than one of
+them came music. Bellairs, his cigarette his only
+companion, strolled slowly along listening idly in a
+pleasant dream. A woman's voice sang, asking
+“Ninon� what was her scheme of life. A man
+beat out his soul at the feet of “Medje.� And,
+upon the deck of the last dahabeeyah, a woman
+played a fantastic mazurka. Bellairs was fond of
+music, and her performance was so clever, so full
+of nuances, understanding, wild passion, that he
+stood still to remark it more closely.</p>
+
+<p>“She has known many things, good and evil,�
+he thought, as his mind noted the intellect that
+spoke in the changes of time, the regret and the
+gaiety that the touch demonstrated so surely and
+easily, as the mood of the composition changed.
+The music ceased.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Betty,� a woman's voice said, in English, but
+with a slight French accent, “I want to see the stars.
+This awning hides them. Come for a little walk.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I want to see the stars too, and the
+awning does hide them,� a girl's voice answered.
+“Do let us take a little walk.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs smiled, as he said to himself, “The
+first voice is the voice of the musician, and the
+second voice seems to be its echo.� He was still
+standing on the bank when the two women stepped
+upon the gangway to the shore and climbed to the
+narrow path.</p>
+
+<p>As they passed him by they glanced at him
+rather curiously. One was a woman of about
+thirty, dark, with a pale, strong-featured face.
+The other was a fair, aristocratic-looking girl, not
+more than seventeen.</p>
+
+<p>“She is the echo,� Bellairs thought. “Rather
+a sweet one.� Then, at a distance, he followed
+them, and presently found them sitting together
+in the garden of the Hotel. He sat down not far
+off. A man, whom he knew slightly, spoke to
+them, and afterwards crossed to him.</p>
+
+<p>“That lady plays very cleverly,� Bellairs said.</p>
+
+<p>“Mademoiselle Leroux, you mean&mdash;yes. You
+know her?�</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all. I only heard her from the river
+bank.�</p>
+
+<p>“She is travelling with Lord Braydon. She is
+a great friend of Lady Betty Lambe, his daughter.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span></p>
+<p>“That pretty girl?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Shall I introduce you?�</p>
+
+<p>“I should be delighted.�</p>
+
+<p>A moment later Bellairs was sitting with the
+two ladies and talking of Egypt. It seemed to
+him that they were the first nurses to dandle his
+new baby-nature, this nature which Egypt had
+given to him, and which only to-night he had
+definitely accepted. Perhaps this fact quickly
+cemented their acquaintance. At any rate, a distinct
+friendship began to walk in their conversation,
+and Bellairs found himself listening to Mdlle.
+Leroux, and looking at Lady Betty, with a great
+deal of interest and of admiration. Presently the
+former said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I knew you would be introduced to us
+to-night.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs was surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“When?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“When we passed you just now on the bank
+of the Nile.�</p>
+
+<p>“I knew we should too,� said Lady Betty.</p>
+
+<p>“You must be very intuitive,� said Bellairs.</p>
+
+<p>“Women generally are,� remarked Mdlle.
+Leroux.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Do your intuitions tell you whether our
+acquaintance will be long and agreeable?�</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps&mdash;but I never prophesy.�</p>
+
+<p>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“Because I am always right.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Is that a valid reason for abstention?�</p>
+
+<p>“I think so. For in this world those who look
+forward generally see darkness.�</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot achieve a proper pessimism in Upper
+Egypt,� Bellairs replied.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>A week later, Bellairs felt quite certain that
+there had never been a period in his life when he
+had not known and talked with Mdlle. Leroux and
+Lady Betty Lambe. Lord and Lady Braydon
+asked him to lunch on the dahabeeyah almost every
+day, and he often strolled down to tea without
+invitation. Then, in the afternoon, there were
+donkey expeditions to Karnak, or across the river
+to the tombs of the kings, to the desert villa of
+Monsieur Naville, to ancient Thebes, to the two
+Colossi. Lord Braydon was consumptive and
+was spending the winter and spring in Egypt.
+Lady Braydon seldom left his side, and so it happened
+that Bellairs and his two acquaintances of
+the garden were often alone together. Bellairs
+became deeply interested in them, and for a rather
+peculiar reason. He was fascinated by the extraordinary
+sympathy that existed between the two
+women&mdash;if Lady Betty could be called a woman
+yet. Mdlle. Leroux had obtained so strong an
+influence over the girl that she seemed to have
+grafted not only her mind, but her heart, her apparatus
+of emotions and of affections, on to Lady
+Betty's. What the former silently thought, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+latter silently thought too, and when the silence
+died in expression, they frequently spoke almost
+the same sentence simultaneously. Sometimes
+Mdlle. Leroux would express some feeling with
+vehemence to Bellairs when Lady Betty was out
+of hearing, and an hour or two afterwards, with
+only a slightly fainter vehemence, Lady Betty
+would express the same feeling. Indeed, these two
+women seemed to have only one heart, one soul,
+between them, the heart and soul that had originally
+been the sole property of the elder one.</p>
+
+<p>“You are very generous,� said Bellairs one day
+to Mdlle. Leroux.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?� she asked in surprise.</p>
+
+<p>“You give away things that most of us have
+only the power to keep.�</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?�</p>
+
+<p>“Some day, perhaps, I will tell you.�</p>
+
+<p>Clarice Leroux was tremendously impulsive,
+and she had taken an immediate and strong liking
+to Bellairs. In this Lady Betty, as usual, coincided.
+But when Clarice's liking passed through
+self-revelations, confidences, towards a stronger
+feeling, it was rather strange to find Lady Betty
+still treading in her footsteps, still ever succeeding
+her in her attitudes of mind and of heart. Yet the
+inevitable double flirtation, apparently expected
+and desired by the two women, was strangely
+gilded by novelty; and, at first, Bellairs played as
+happily with these two dual natures as a child plays<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+with two doll representatives of Tweedledum and
+Tweedledee. For, at first, he possessed the child's
+power of detachment, and felt that he could at any
+moment discard dolls for soldiers, or a Noah's
+Ark, and still keep happiness in his lap. But most
+things have an inherent tendency to become complicated
+if they are let alone and allowed to develop
+free from definite guidance, and presently Bellairs
+became conscious of advancing complications.
+His intellectual appreciation of a new situation
+began to degenerate into a more emotional condition,
+which disturbed and irritated him. It
+seemed that he was peering through the bars of the
+gate that guards the garden of passion. Which
+of the two women did he see in the garden?</p>
+
+<p>He told himself that, having regard to the circumstances
+of the case, he ought to see both of
+them. Unfortunately, a vision of that kind never
+has been, and never will be, seen by a man. The
+temple in which the idol sits always makes a difference
+in the nature of our worship of the idol.
+Bellairs was forced to recognise this fact. And
+the temple in which sat the idol of Lady Betty's
+nature attracted him more than the temple in which
+sat the idol of Mdlle. Leroux's nature. He came
+to this conclusion one afternoon at Karnak. They
+three were hidden away in a stone nook of this
+great stone forest, enshrined from the gaze of tourists
+by mighty rugged pillars, walled in by huge
+blocks of antique masonry that threw cold shadows<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+whence the lizards stole to seek the sun. The blue
+sky was broken to their gaze by a narrow section
+of what had been, doubtless, once a wide-spread
+roof. A silence of endless ages hung around them
+in this haven fashioned by dead men and living
+Time.</p>
+
+<p>Mdlle. Leroux had been boiling a kettle; and
+they sipped tea, and, at first, did not talk. But
+tea unlooses the bonds of speech. After their
+second cups they felt communicative.</p>
+
+<p>“One week gone out of my four,� Bellairs
+said, “and each will seem shorter-lived than its
+forerunner.�</p>
+
+<p>“You go in three weeks from now?� said
+Mdlle. Leroux, with an uneven intonation that betokened
+a sudden awakening to the finality of things.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; at the end of January.�</p>
+
+<p>“And we are here until nearly the end of March.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� said Lady Betty; “it will seem a very
+long time. February will be eternal.�</p>
+
+<p>“It is the shortest month in the year,� Bellairs
+remarked.</p>
+
+<p>Mdlle. Leroux looked at him sarcastically.</p>
+
+<p>“You English are so prosaic,� she exclaimed.
+“Any Frenchman would have understood.�</p>
+
+<p>“What?�</p>
+
+<p>“That we were paying you a compliment.�</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I did understand it, and preferred not
+to show my comprehension; there is such a thing
+as modesty!�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span></p>
+<p>“There is&mdash;such a thing as false modesty!�</p>
+
+<p>“Exactly,� remarked Lady Betty.</p>
+
+<p>“I will accept your compliment gladly,� said
+Bellairs, looking at Lady Betty.</p>
+
+<p>“Mine?� asked Clarice Leroux.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� Bellairs replied.</p>
+
+<p>The consciousness that he cared very much
+more for such a pretty meaning in Lady Betty
+than in Clarice Leroux led him then, for the first
+time, to that Garden Gate. He looked at Lady
+Betty again with a new feeling. She returned his
+gaze quietly. Then he turned his eyes to those of
+Clarice. Hers were fixed upon him with a curious
+violence. He had a momentary sensation,
+literally for the first time, that these two women
+after all, had not one soul, one heart, between
+them. They did not feel quite simultaneously.
+Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice.
+Yes, that was the difference between them. However
+quickly the echo follows the voice that summons
+it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady
+Betty never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself
+wondering eagerly, for that afternoon a strange
+certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash, that
+Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on
+the verge of loving him. He knew now that he
+loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love him yet,
+was not even quite close to loving him. Had she
+been in Egypt alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs
+believed that he would not have attracted her.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+He attracted her through Clarice, because he
+attracted Clarice. Could he make her love him in
+the same way? It would be a curious, subtle
+experiment to try to win one woman's heart by
+winning another's: Bellairs silently decided to
+make it. All the rest of that afternoon he talked
+to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt
+had given him, the poetry which had ousted the
+prose inherited from a long line of ancestors, the
+sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed now
+he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win
+two hearts, the heart that contained another heart,
+as one conjurer's box contains a hundred others.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>“I knew it when I first saw you,� Clarice said.
+“Directly I looked at you that evening on the
+bank I knew it.�</p>
+
+<p>“How strange,� Bellairs answered.</p>
+
+<p>“And you&mdash;did you know it when you heard
+me playing?�</p>
+
+<p>“That mazurka! Remember I am a man.�</p>
+
+<p>They were sitting in the garden. It was night.
+Very few people were out, for a great Austrian
+pianist was playing in the public drawing-room,
+and the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly.
+They two could hear, mingling with a
+Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in
+the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry
+of the pipes, which fill the soul at the same time
+with desire, and regret for past desire killed by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+gratification. Bellairs had been making love to
+Clarice, and she had told him that she loved him.
+And he had kissed her and his kiss had been
+returned.</p>
+
+<p>“Will this kiss, too, have its echo?� he
+thought; and his eyes travelled towards the lighted
+windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady
+Betty sat. He turned again to Clarice.</p>
+
+<p>“Do you believe in echoes?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Echoes!�</p>
+
+<p>“That each thing we do in life, each word, each
+cry, each act, calls into being, perhaps very soon,
+perhaps very late, a repetition?�</p>
+
+<p>“From the same person?�</p>
+
+<p>“Or from some other person.�</p>
+
+<p>“What a curious idea. You think we cannot
+ever do anything without finding an imitator! I
+don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that there
+can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact
+repetition of our feeling, our doing, to-night.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yet, there may be. Who knows?�</p>
+
+<p>“I do. Instinct tells me there never can.
+There has never been, never will be, any woman
+with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in
+the same way as mine is given to you. Why
+should you think such a hateful thing?�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred
+to me.�</p>
+
+<p>And again he glanced towards the lighted
+windows.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span></p>
+<p>“The world is very full of echoes,� he went on;
+“our troubles are repeated.�</p>
+
+<p>“But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no,
+never!�</p>
+
+<p>“There have always been lovers, and they all
+act in much the same way!�</p>
+
+<p>“Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some
+new mode of expression for ourselves&mdash;you and
+I?�</p>
+
+<p>“Because we are human beings, and one network
+of tangled limitations.�</p>
+
+<p>“You make me cry with anger,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>And when he looked, he saw that there were
+tears shining in her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction
+swept over him. What had he done?
+A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do.
+He had made an experiment, as a scientist may
+make an experiment. He had vivisected a soul,
+but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When
+it knew, would it die? But then he told himself
+he had to do it. For he loved passionately, and
+was certain that he could only gain the heart he
+had not yet completely won by gaining this heart
+that he had completely won. He had made an
+experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail.
+All that Clarice said, all that she thought, all that
+she desired, Betty said, thought, desired. After
+the necessary interval the echo must follow the
+voice. And he smiled to himself.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Why do you smile like that?� Clarice asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Because&mdash;because I thought I heard an
+echo,� he replied. And then they kissed again.
+He, with his eyes shut, forced his imagination to tell
+him that the lips he pressed were the lips of Betty.
+She thought only of the lips of love, that burn up
+all the recollections of the lonely years, all the
+phantoms which dwell in the deserts through which
+women pass to joy&mdash;or to despair.</p>
+
+<p>The Austrian pianist was exhausted. Even his
+long hair could no longer sustain his failing energies.
+He expired magnificently, the seventh
+rhapsody of Liszt serving as his bier. Lady Betty
+came out into the garden.</p>
+
+<p>“How unmusical you two are,� she said; “his
+playing was exquisite.�</p>
+
+<p>“We heard finer music here,� Clarice answered,
+as she got up to go back to the dahabeeyah&mdash;“did
+we not?�</p>
+
+<p>She turned to Bellairs. He was looking at Lady
+Betty and did not hear. Clarice's cheek flushed
+angrily.</p>
+
+<p>“Come, Betty,� she exclaimed. “Good-night,
+Mr Bellairs.�</p>
+
+<p>“Good-night, Mr Bellairs,� echoed Lady
+Betty.</p>
+
+<p>The two women moved away, and vanished
+down the narrow and dusty avenue that leads to
+the bank of the Nile. Bellairs stood looking after
+them. He was wondering why he loved Betty<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+and did not love Clarice. It seemed feeble to
+love an echo. Yet, the intonation of an echo is
+sometimes exquisite in its trilling vagueness, its
+far-off, thrilling beauty. And Bellairs fancied that
+if he once wakened Betty to passion he would
+free her, in a moment, from her curious bondage,
+would give to her the soul that Clarice must
+surely have crushed down and expelled, replacing
+it with a replica of her own soul. And then he
+asked himself, being analytically inclined that night,
+what he adored in Betty. Was it merely her fresh
+young beauty? It could not be her nature; for
+that, at present, was merely Clarice's, and he did
+not love the nature of Clarice. Yet he felt it was
+something more than her beauty. When he had made
+her love him he would know; for, when he had
+made her love him, he would force her to be herself.</p>
+
+<p>He watched the bats circling among the shadowy
+palms. How gentle the air was. How sweet the
+stars looked. Bellairs thought of England that
+was so far away. It seemed impossible that he
+could ever be in London again, ever again assume
+a Piccadilly nature, and laugh at the folly of having
+a romance. Yes, it seemed impossible.
+Nevertheless, in a fortnight he must go. But he
+would take Betty's promise with him. He was
+resolved on that. And then he left the silent
+garden to the bats, and was soon between the
+mosquito curtains, dreaming.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span></p>
+<p>Three days afterwards Clarice was prostrated
+with a nervous headache. She could not bear to
+have any one in her cabin, and Lady Betty sat on
+the deck of the <i>Queen Hatasoo</i> quite inconsolable.
+Bellairs, arriving to pay his usual afternoon call,
+found her there. Lord Braydon was out, sailing
+in a flat-bottomed boat far up the river with Lady
+Braydon, so Lady Betty was quite desolate. She
+told Bellairs so mournfully.</p>
+
+<p>“And Clarice won't let me come near her,� she
+exclaimed. “A step on the floor, the creak of the
+cabin door as I come in, tortures her. She is
+all nerves. I hope I shan't have her headache
+presently.�</p>
+
+<p>“Is it likely?�</p>
+
+<p>“I often do. She seems to pass it on to me.
+I never had a headache until I knew her. But,
+indeed, I never seemed to live, I never seemed to
+know anything, be anything, until she came into
+my life.�</p>
+
+<p>“I wish I had known you before you knew her,�
+Bellairs said.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know&mdash;perhaps to see if you were
+really so very different from what you are now.�</p>
+
+<p>“I was&mdash;utterly.�</p>
+
+<p>“What were you like?�</p>
+
+<p>“I can't remember&mdash;but I was utterly different.�</p>
+
+<p>As she ceased speaking, Bellairs glanced over
+the rail to the river bank. Two blue-robed donkey<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>
+boys stood there trying to attract his attention,
+and pointing significantly to their gaily-bedizened
+donkeys.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall we go for a ride?� he said to Lady
+Betty. “Just along the river bank? Then we
+shall see Lord Braydon as he sails back. Mdlle.
+Leroux won't miss you. Shall we go?�</p>
+
+<p>Betty hesitated. But she could do the invalid
+no good by staying. So she assented. Bellairs
+helped her to the bank and placed her in the smart
+red saddle. He motioned the boys to keep well in
+the rear, and they started at a quick, tripping walk.
+As they went, a white face appeared at a cabin window,
+staring after them, the face of Clarice, who had
+with difficulty lifted her throbbing head from the pillow.
+She watched the donkeys diminishing till they
+were black shadows moving along against the sky,
+then she began to cry weakly, but only because she
+was too ill to be with them. Her gift of prophecy
+failed her at this critical juncture of her life, and she
+had no sense of a coming disaster, as she lay back
+on her berth, and gave herself up once more to pain.</p>
+
+<p>That evening Lord Braydon asked Bellairs to
+dine on the dahabeeyah, and he accepted the invitation.
+Clarice was still in durance, having entirely
+failed to pass her headache on to Lady Betty.
+After dinner Lord Braydon went into the saloon to
+write a letter to England, and Lady Betty and
+Bellairs had the deck to themselves. He was
+resolved to put his fate to the touch; for, during<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>
+the donkey ride, he had discovered the change in
+Betty which he had so eagerly desired, the change
+from warm friendship to a different feeling. The
+girl had not acknowledged it. Bellairs had not
+asked her to do so; but he meant to. Only the
+thought of his treachery to the woman lying in the
+cabin below held him back, just for a moment, and
+prompted him to talk lightly of indifferent things.
+But that treachery had been a necessary manœuvre
+in his campaign of happiness. He strove to dismiss
+it from his mind as he leant forward in his
+chair, and led Lady Betty to the subject that lay so
+near to his heart.</p>
+
+<p>“You love me?� she said presently.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes&mdash;deeply. You are angry?�</p>
+
+<p>“How can I be? No, no&mdash;and yet&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?�</p>
+
+<p>“And yet, when you told me, I felt sad.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs looked keenly vexed, and she hastened
+to add:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Not because I am&mdash;indifferent. No, no. I
+can't explain why the feeling came. It was gone
+in a moment. And now&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Now you are happy?�</p>
+
+<p>He caught her hand and she left it in his.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, very happy.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs bent over her and kissed her&mdash;as he
+lifted himself up a white hand appeared on the rail
+of the companion that led from the lower to the
+upper deck of the <i>Hatasoo</i>. Clarice wearily dragged<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span>
+herself up. She was wrapped in a shawl and looked
+very ill. Betty ran to help her.</p>
+
+<p>“I thought I must get a little air,� she said
+feebly. “How d'you do, Mr Bellairs?�</p>
+
+<p>She sank down in a chair.</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs felt like a man between two fires.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Two days later Lord Braydon gave his consent
+to his daughter's engagement with Bellairs, and
+Lady Betty ran to tell Clarice. She had not previously
+said a word to her friend of what had passed
+between her and Bellairs. He had begged her to
+keep silence until he had spoken to Lord Braydon,
+and she had promised and had kept her promise.
+But now she rushed into the saloon where Clarice
+was playing Chopin, and, throwing her arms round
+her friend, told her the great news. The body of
+Clarice became rigid in her arms.</p>
+
+<p>“And the king has consented,� Betty cried.</p>
+
+<p>The king was her father.</p>
+
+<p>“Clarice, Clarice, isn't it wonderful?�</p>
+
+<p>“Wonderful! I thought so when you told me.
+But already I begin to doubt if it is.�</p>
+
+<p>“To doubt, Clarice?�</p>
+
+<p>“To doubt whether anything a man does is
+wonderful.�</p>
+
+<p>That was all Clarice said. Then she kissed
+Betty, and went on playing Chopin feverishly,
+while Betty told, to the accompaniment of the
+music, all that was in her heart.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span></p>
+<p>“And,� she said at last, “I love him, Clarice;
+I love him intensely. I shall always love him.�</p>
+
+<p>Clarice played a final chord and got up.</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs lunched on the dahabeeyah that day and
+Clarice met him as usual. Her manner gave no
+sign of any mental disturbance. Perhaps it was
+curiously calm. He wondered a little, but was too
+happy to wonder much. Joy made him cruel, for
+nothing is so cruel as joy. Only he was glad that
+Clarice had so much pride, for he thought now that
+in her pride lay his safety. He no longer feared
+that she would condescend to a scene, and he even
+thought that perhaps she did not feel so deeply as
+he had supposed.</p>
+
+<p>“After all,� he said to himself exultantly,
+“there's no harm done. I need not have been so
+conscience-stricken. What is a pretty speech and
+a kiss to a woman who has lived, travelled over the
+world, read widely, thought many things? Now,
+if I had treated Betty in such a way I should be a
+blackguard. She could not have understood. She
+could only have suffered. I will never hurt her&mdash;Betty!�</p>
+
+<p>His nature was so full of her that it could no
+longer hold any thought of Clarice. And for a
+little while, as Bellairs dived into Betty's heart, he
+was astonished at the passion he found there, and
+congratulated himself on having released her from
+bondage. Now, at least, he was teaching her to
+be herself. He was killing the echo and creating<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+a voice, a beautiful, clear, radiant voice that would
+sing to him, to him alone.</p>
+
+<p>“Betty has a great deal in her,� he said to
+Clarice once.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes&mdash;a great deal. Who put it there, do you
+think?�</p>
+
+<p>“Who? Why, nobody. Surely you would
+not say that all you yourself have of&mdash;of strength,
+originality, courage, was put into you by some
+other man or woman.�</p>
+
+<p>“No. I would not say that. But then&mdash;I am
+not Betty.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs felt irritated.</p>
+
+<p>“Please don't run Betty down,� he exclaimed
+hastily.</p>
+
+<p>“I! I run down Betty! I don't think you
+understand what I feel about Betty. She is the one
+perfect being I know. I worship her.�</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure you do,� he said, mollified. “And
+you have done much for her, perhaps too much.�</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot tell that&mdash;yet,� Clarice answered.
+“Some day I may know whether I have done very
+much, or very little.�</p>
+
+<p>“Some day&mdash;when?�</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps very soon.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs wondered what she meant, and wondered,
+too, why he had a sudden sense of uneasiness.</p>
+
+<p>It was a day or two after this conversation that
+a light cloud seemed to float across his lover's
+happiness with Betty. He could not tell the exact<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+moment when it came, nor from what quarter it
+journeyed. But he felt the obscuring of the sun
+and the lessening of the lovely warmth of intimacy.
+He was chilled and alarmed, and at night, when he
+was alone with Betty in the stern of the <i>Hatasoo</i>
+bidding her good-bye, he could not refrain from
+saying:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Betty, is anything the matter?�</p>
+
+<p>“The matter, Jack?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Are you quite happy to-day? Quite as
+happy as you were yesterday?�</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose so&mdash;I believe so.�</p>
+
+<p>But she did not speak with a perfect conviction,
+and Bellairs was more gravely troubled.</p>
+
+<p>“I am certain something is wrong,� he persisted.
+“I have done something that has offended
+you, or said something stupid. What is it? Do
+tell me.�</p>
+
+<p>“I can't. There is nothing to tell. Really,
+there is not.�</p>
+
+<p>“You would tell me if there was?�</p>
+
+<p>“Of course.�</p>
+
+<p>“And you love me as much as ever?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes.�</p>
+
+<p>He looked into her eyes, asking them mutely to
+tell him the truth. And he thought their expression
+was strangely cold. The light had surely
+faded out of them. He kissed her silently and
+went forward. Clarice was standing there looking
+at the rising moon.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Good-night,� he said, holding out his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“How grave you look,� she answered, not
+seeing the hand.</p>
+
+<p>“The moonlight makes people look unnatural.�</p>
+
+<p>“It does not reach the deck yet.�</p>
+
+<p>“Good-night,� he said again, and he went down
+the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>She looked after him with a smile. When he
+had gone, she turned her head and called.</p>
+
+<p>“Betty!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes!�</p>
+
+<p>“Come here and sit with me. Let us watch
+the moon. Don't talk. I want to think&mdash;and
+to make you think&mdash;as I do.�</p>
+
+<p>The cloud which Bellairs had fancied he noticed
+did not dissolve in the night. It was not drawn up
+mysteriously into the sun to fade in gold. On the
+contrary, next day he could no longer pretend to
+himself that his anxiety as a lover rendered him
+foolishly self-conscious, dangerously observant of
+the merest trifles. There really was a change in
+Betty, and a change which grew. He became
+seriously alarmed. Could it be possible that the
+ardent passion which she had displayed in the first
+moments of their engagement was already subsiding
+as cynics say passion subsides after marriage?
+Such a supposition seemed ridiculous. The ardour
+which has never fulfilled itself is not liable to cool.
+And Betty was a young girl who had not known
+love before. If she tired of it after so short an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+experience of its delights, she could be nothing
+less than a wholly unnatural and distorted being.
+And she was strangely natural. Bellairs rode out
+alone with her along the built-up brown roads into
+the desert, and tried to interest her, but she was
+abstracted and seemed deep in thought. Often she
+didn't hear what he was saying, and when she did
+hear and replied, her answers were short and careless,
+and rather dismissed than encouraged the
+subject to which they were applied. Bellairs, at
+last, gave up attempting to talk, and from time to
+time stole a cautious glance at her pretty face. He
+noticed that it wore a puzzled expression, as if she
+were turning over something in her mind and could
+not come to a conclusion about it. She did not
+look exactly sad, but merely grave and distrait.
+At length he exclaimed, determined to rouse her
+into some sort of comradeship:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“You never caught that headache, did you?�</p>
+
+<p>“Clarice's, you mean? No.�</p>
+
+<p>“Is it coming on now?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, no. I feel perfectly well. What made
+you think it was?�</p>
+
+<p>“You won't talk to me, and you look so preternaturally
+serious. I am sure I have unwittingly
+offended you?�</p>
+
+<p>“No, you haven't. You are just as you always
+are, better to me than I deserve.�</p>
+
+<p>“You deserve the best man in the world.�</p>
+
+<p>“I already have the best woman.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Mdlle. Leroux?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; Clarice.�</p>
+
+<p>“You admire her very much.�</p>
+
+<p>“Of course. I would give anything to be like
+her.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs hesitated a moment. Then he said with
+a slight, uneasy laugh:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“But you are wonderfully like her.�</p>
+
+<p>Betty looked surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't see how,� she answered.</p>
+
+<p>“No, because we never see ourselves. But
+when I first knew you both, I was immensely
+struck by the curious resemblance between you,
+in mind, in the things you said, in the things you
+did, the people you liked.�</p>
+
+<p>“We both liked you.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“It would have been strange if we had both
+loved you!� Betty said, musingly.</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs laughed again, and gave his horse a cut
+with the whip. “I only wanted one to do that,�
+he said, not quite truthfully. “And, thank God,
+I have got my desire.�</p>
+
+<p>Betty did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Haven't I?� he persisted.</p>
+
+<p>“You know whether you have or not,� she
+answered. “How beautiful the sunset is going to
+be to-night. Look at the light over Karnak.�</p>
+
+<p>She pointed towards the temple with her whip.
+Bellairs felt a crawling despair that numbed him<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+What did it all mean? Was he torturing himself
+foolishly, or was this instinct which gnawed at his
+heart a thing to be reckoned with? When he left
+Betty at the dahabeeyah, he walked slowly, in the
+gathering shadows, along the path which skirts
+the dingy temple of Luxor. This change in Betty
+was simply inexplicable. In no way could he
+account for it. She had not the definite, angry
+coldness of a girl who had made a dreadful mistake
+and hated the man who had led her to make it.
+No; she seemed rather in a state of mental transition.
+She was setting foot on some bridge, which,
+Bellairs felt, led away from the shore on which she
+had been standing with him. Was her first transport
+of love and joy a pretence? He could not
+believe so. He knew it was genuine. That was
+the puzzle which he could not put together. And
+then he tried to comfort himself by thinking deliberately
+of the many moods that make the feminine
+mind so full of April weather, of how they come
+and pass and are dead. All men had suffered from
+them, especially all lovers. He could not expect to
+be exempt&mdash;only, till now, Betty had seemed so
+utterly free from moods, so steadily frank, eager,
+charming, responsive. Bellairs finally argued himself
+into a condition of despair, during which he
+came to a resolve of despair. He silently decided
+to seek a quiet interview with Clarice, and ask her
+what was the matter with Betty. After all, there
+was no reason why he should not take this step.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+Clarice had evidently not cared deeply for him.
+Otherwise, she would not have accepted his desertion
+with such truly agreeable fortitude. Theirs
+had been a passing flirtation&mdash;nothing more.
+And, indeed, their intimacy gave him the right to
+consult her, while her close knowledge of Betty
+must render her an infallible judge of any reasons
+which there might be to render the latter's conduct
+intelligible.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Bellairs did not have to wait long before he put
+his resolve into practice. That evening Betty,
+who had become more and more abstracted and
+silent, got up soon after dinner, and said she was
+tired, and was going to bed. Bellairs tried to get
+a moment with her alone, but she frustrated the
+attempt by holding out her hand to him in public
+and markedly bidding him good-night before Lord
+and Lady Braydon. When she had disappeared,
+Bellairs sought Clarice, who was downstairs in the
+saloon writing letters. Clarice looked up from the
+blotting-pad as he entered.</p>
+
+<p>“I want to talk to you,� he exclaimed abruptly.</p>
+
+<p>“I am writing letters.�</p>
+
+<p>“Do give me a few minutes.�</p>
+
+<p>“Very well,� she said, pushing her paper away
+and laying down her pen. “What is it?�</p>
+
+<p>“That's what I want to ask you. What has
+come over Betty? Is she ill?�</p>
+
+<p>“Betty! Has anything come over her?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span></p>
+<p>Bellairs tapped his fingers impatiently on the
+table.</p>
+
+<p>“Don't tell me you haven't noticed the change,�
+he said. “Forgive me for saying that I couldn't
+believe it if you did.�</p>
+
+<p>“In that case I won't trouble myself to say
+it.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah&mdash;you have! Then what's the matter?
+Tell me.�</p>
+
+<p>“Hush, don't speak so loud or the sailors will
+hear you, and Abdul understands English. I did
+not say I knew the reason of this change.�</p>
+
+<p>“You must. You are Betty's other self, or
+rather she is&mdash;was&mdash;yours.�</p>
+
+<p>“Was! Do you mean that she is not now?�</p>
+
+<p>“Remember, she loves me.�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, and that makes a difference?�</p>
+
+<p>“Surely!�</p>
+
+<p>“You have observed it?�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs hesitated. He scarcely knew whether
+to reply in the affirmative or the negative. He
+resolved upon a compromise.</p>
+
+<p>“There has hardly been time yet,� he said;
+“naturally, I expect that Betty will place me before
+every one else.�</p>
+
+<p>Mdlle. Leroux's eyes flashed under the hanging
+lamp.</p>
+
+<p>“What we expect is not always what we get,�
+she said significantly.</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs flushed. He understood that she was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+alluding to his treatment of her, but he preferred
+to ignore it, and went on:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Is Betty ill to-night?�</p>
+
+<p>“Not at all.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then what on earth is the matter? I ask
+you for a plain answer. I think I deserve so
+much.�</p>
+
+<p>“Men are always so deserving,� she said with
+bitterness.</p>
+
+<p>“And women are always so exacting,� he retorted.
+“But please answer my question.�</p>
+
+<p>“I will first ask you another. If you reply
+frankly to me, I will reply frankly to you.�</p>
+
+<p>She leaned her elbows on the table, supporting
+her face on the palms of her upturned hands, and
+looked into his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Ask me,� said Bellairs eagerly; “I'll do
+anything if you'll only explain Betty to me.�</p>
+
+<p>“Why did you try to make me love you? Why
+did you make love to me?�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs pushed back his chair and there was an
+awkward silence. Clarice's question was very unexpected
+and very difficult to answer.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?� she said, still with her eyes on his.</p>
+
+<p>“Is it any good our discussing this?� he replied
+at length. “It meant nothing to you. It is over.�</p>
+
+<p>“How do you know it meant nothing to me?�</p>
+
+<p>“You have shown that by your conduct. You
+care nothing. I am indifferent to you.�</p>
+
+<p>“No, not indifferent, not at all.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span></p>
+<p>“What? You can't mean&mdash;no, it is absurd!�</p>
+
+<p>“What is absurd?�</p>
+
+<p>“You can't&mdash;you don't mean that you really
+have any feeling for me?�</p>
+
+<p>“I do mean it!�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs felt very uncomfortable. He scarcely
+knew what to do or say. He fidgeted on his chair
+almost like a boy caught in a dishonest act.</p>
+
+<p>“We had really better not talk about it,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Very well.� Clarice reached out her hand for
+her pen and drew the blotting-pad towards her.</p>
+
+<p>“But Betty?� said Bellairs uneasily.</p>
+
+<p>“You have not answered my question. I shall
+not answer yours.� She dipped her pen in the ink
+and prepared to go on with her letter. Bellairs
+grew desperate.</p>
+
+<p>“Look here,� he said; “you must tell me the
+reason of this change in Betty. Now I know you
+don't care for me, you don't really love me.�</p>
+
+<p>“No, I don't love you,� she said quickly.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, since you say that, I will answer
+your question. I tried to win your heart because
+I wanted to win Betty's!�</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?�</p>
+
+<p>“That Betty is practically you&mdash;or was, your
+echo, in word, deed, thought. Her mind, her heart,
+followed yours in everything. I loved her, and I
+knew that if I made you like me very much she
+must follow you in that feeling as in others. Since
+you don't love me, I can dare to tell you this.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span></p>
+<p>Clarice sat silent.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you angry?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Go on,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>“That's all.� Again a silence.</p>
+
+<p>“It was your fault in a way,� Bellairs said
+awkwardly. “You made Betty your other self.
+Why did you not let her alone?�</p>
+
+<p>“Can a strong nature help impressing itself on
+others?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I don't know. I'm no psychologist. But&mdash;you
+must let Betty alone now,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Suppose I can't. Suppose this sympathy between
+us has got beyond my control?�</p>
+
+<p>“I shall release Betty from this bondage to you,�
+Bellairs said, “my love will&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“You! Your love!� Clarice said. And she
+burst into a laugh.</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs suddenly leaned forward across the table.</p>
+
+<p>“I believe you hate me,� he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>She, on her part, leaned forward till her face was
+near his.</p>
+
+<p>“You're right,� she whispered; “I do hate
+you. Now you know what's the matter with
+Betty.�</p>
+
+<p>For a moment Bellairs did not understand.</p>
+
+<p>“Now&mdash;I know&mdash;� he repeated. “I don't&mdash;Ah!�
+Comprehension flashed upon him.</p>
+
+<p>“You devil,� he said&mdash;“you she-devil! Curse&mdash;curse
+you!� Clarice laughed again. Bellairs
+sprang up.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span></p>
+<p>“No, no, I won't believe it,� he cried. “I can't.
+The thing's impossible.�</p>
+
+<p>“Is it? The pendulum of my heart has swung
+back from love to hate. Betty's is following.�</p>
+
+<p>“No, no!�</p>
+
+<p>“Wait, and you will see. Already she seems to
+care less for you. You yourself have remarked it.�</p>
+
+<p>“I have not,� he said with violence.</p>
+
+<p>“To-morrow she will care less, and so less&mdash;less&mdash;till
+she too&mdash;hates you.�</p>
+
+<p>“Never!�</p>
+
+<p>“Only wait&mdash;and you will know. And now,
+good-night. I must really write my letter. It is
+to my mother, and must go by to-morrow's mail.�</p>
+
+<p>She resumed her writing quietly. Bellairs watched
+her for a moment. Then he strode out of the
+room, across the gangway, up the bank.</p>
+
+<p>How dark the night was.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The explanation of Clarice struck Bellairs with
+a benumbing force. In vain he argued to himself
+that it was not the true one, that no heart could
+follow another as she said Betty's followed hers,
+that no nature could merely for ever echo another's.
+Some furtive despair lurking in his soul whispered
+that she had spoken the truth. An appalling sense
+of utter impotence seized him, as it seizes a man
+who fights with a shadow. But he resolved to fight.
+His whole life's happiness hung on the issue.</p>
+
+<p>On the following day he forced himself to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+cheerful, gay, talkative. He went early to the
+dahabeeyah, and proposed to Lord Braydon a
+picnic to Thebes. Lord Braydon assented. A
+hamper was packed. The boat was ordered. The
+little party assembled on the deck of the <i>Hatasoo</i>
+for the start; Lady Braydon, in a wide hat and
+sweeping grey veil, Clarice with her big white
+parasol lined with pale green, Lord Braydon in his
+helmet, his eyes protected by enormous spectacles.
+But where was Betty? Abdul, the dragoman,
+went to tell her that they were going. She came,
+without her hat, or gloves, holding a palm leaf fan
+in her hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I am not coming,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>Clarice glanced at Bellairs. He pressed his
+lips together and felt that he was turning white
+underneath the tan the Egyptian sun rays had
+painted on his cheeks. Lady Braydon protested.</p>
+
+<p>“What's the matter, Betty?� she said. “The
+donkeys are ordered and waiting for us on the
+opposite bank. Why aren't you coming?�</p>
+
+<p>“I have got a headache. I'm afraid of the
+sun to-day.� All persuasion was useless. They
+had to set out without her. Bellairs was bitterly
+angry, bitterly afraid. He could scarcely make the
+necessary effort to be polite and talkative, but Lord
+and Lady Braydon readily excused his gloom, understanding
+his disappointment, and Clarice no
+longer desired his conversation. That night he
+did not see Betty. She was confined to her cabin<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+and would see no one but Clarice. On the following
+day Bellairs went very early to the dahabeeyah
+and asked for her. Abdul took his message,
+and, after an interval, returned to him with the
+following note:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Dear Mr Bellairs</span>,&mdash;I am very sorry I cannot
+see you this morning, but I am still very unwell. I
+think the mental agony I have been and am undergoing
+accounts for my condition. I must tell you the truth.
+I cannot marry you. I mistook my feeling for you. I
+honestly thought it love. I find it is only friendship.
+Can you ever forgive me the pain I am causing you? I
+cannot forgive myself. But I should do you a much
+greater wrong by marrying you than by giving you up.
+I have told my father and mother. See them if you like.
+We sail to-morrow morning for Assouan.</p>
+
+<p class="ralign">“<span class="smcap">Betty.</span>�</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Bellairs, crumpling this note in his hand, would
+have burst forth into a passion of useless rage and
+despair, but Abdul's lustrous eyes were fixed upon
+him. Abdul's dignified form calmly waited his
+pleasure.</p>
+
+<p>“Where is Lord Braydon?� said Bellairs, “I
+must see him.�</p>
+
+<p>“His lordship is on the second deck, sir.�</p>
+
+<p>“Take me to him.�</p>
+
+<p>The interview that followed only increased the
+despair of Bellairs. Lord Braydon was most sympathetic,
+most courteously sorry, but he said that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+his daughter's decision was absolutely irrevocable,
+and he could not attempt to coerce her in such an
+important matter.</p>
+
+<p>“At any rate, I must see her before you sail,�
+said Bellairs at last. “I think she owes me at
+least that one last debt.�</p>
+
+<p>“I think so too,� said Lord Braydon. “Come
+at six. I will undertake that you shall see her.�</p>
+
+<p>How Bellairs spent the intervening hours he
+could never remember. He did not go back to
+the hotel; he must have wandered all day along
+the river bank. Yet he felt neither the heat, nor
+any fatigue, nor any hunger. At six o'clock he
+reached the dahabeeyah. Lady Betty was sitting
+alone on the deck. She looked very pale and grave.</p>
+
+<p>“My father and mother and Clarice have gone
+up to the hotel,� she said. “That Austrian is
+playing again this evening.�</p>
+
+<p>“Is he?� Bellairs answered. He sat down
+beside her and tried to take her hand. But she
+would not let him.</p>
+
+<p>“No,� she said. “No, it's no use. I have
+made a ghastly mistake, but I will not make another.
+Oh, forgive me, do forgive me!�</p>
+
+<p>“How can I? If you will not try to love me
+my life is ruined.�</p>
+
+<p>“Don't say that. It's no use to try to love.
+You know that. We must just let ourselves alone.
+Love comes, or hate, just as God wills it. We
+can only accept our fate.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span></p>
+<p>“As God wills,� Bellairs said passionately; “why
+do you say that, when you know it is not true?�</p>
+
+<p>“Not true&mdash;Mr Bellairs!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. If you echoed the will of God how
+could I blame you? We must all do that&mdash;at
+least, when we are good. And those of us who
+are wicked I suppose echo the Devil. But you&mdash;what
+do you echo?�</p>
+
+<p>“I&mdash;I echo no one. I don't understand you.�</p>
+
+<p>“But you shall, before it is too late. Betty,
+be yourself. Emancipate your soul. You are the
+echo of that woman, of Clarice. Don't you see
+it? Don't you know it? You are her echo&mdash;and
+she hates me!�</p>
+
+<p>Betty drew back from him&mdash;she was evidently
+alarmed.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you mad?� she said. “Why do you
+say such things to me? Clarice and I love each
+other, it is true, but our real natures are totally
+different. She does not hate you, nor do I. She
+has never said one word against you to me. She
+has always told me how much she liked you. What
+are you saying?�</p>
+
+<p>“The truth!�</p>
+
+<p>“I&mdash;her echo! Why, then&mdash;then if that
+were the case she must have loved you, or thought
+she loved you. Do you dare to tell me that?�</p>
+
+<p>“I do not say that,� Bellairs answered hopelessly.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course not. The idea is so absurd.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+Clarice&mdash;oh! how can you talk like this? And
+if I am only an echo, as you call it, how can you
+say you care for me, care for another woman's
+shadow? You do not love me.�</p>
+
+<p>“I do&mdash;with all my heart.�</p>
+
+<p>“And yet you say I am nothing, that I have
+not even a heart of my own, that I love or hate at
+the will of another.�</p>
+
+<p>“Forgive me, forgive me! I don't know what
+I say. I only know I love you.�</p>
+
+<p>Her face softened.</p>
+
+<p>“And you deserve to be loved,� she said; “but
+I&mdash;it is so horrible&mdash;I cannot!�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Bellairs caught her in his arms.</p>
+
+<p>“You shall,� he exclaimed, “you shall. I will
+make you.� But she pushed him back with a
+strange strength, and her face hardened till he
+scarcely recognised it.</p>
+
+<p>“Don't do that&mdash;don't touch me&mdash;or you'll
+make me hate you,� she said vehemently.</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs let her go. At that moment there was
+a step on the deck. Clarice appeared. She did
+not seem to notice that anything was wrong. She
+smiled.</p>
+
+<p>“Isn't it sad, Mr Bellairs,� she said, “we sail
+to-morrow. I love Luxor. I can't bear to leave it.�</p>
+
+<p>Bellairs suddenly turned and hurried away. He
+could no longer trust himself. There was blood
+before his eyes.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span></p>
+<p>It was dawn. The Nile was smooth as a river
+of oil. Light mists rolled upwards gently, discovering
+the rosy flanks of the Libyan mountains to
+the sun. The sky began to glimmer with a dancing
+golden heat. On the brown bank where the
+boats lie in the shadow a man stood alone. His
+hands were tightly clenched. His lips worked
+silently. His eyes were fixed in a stare. And
+away in the distance up river, a tiny trail of smoke
+floated towards Luxor. It came from a steam tug
+that drew a following dahabeeyah.</p>
+
+<p>The <i>Queen Hatasoo</i> was on her voyage to
+Assouan.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210"><br />[210]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211"><br /><br />[211]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>THE FACE OF THE MONK</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">No</span>, it will not hurt him to see you,� the doctor
+said to me; “and I have no doubt he will recognise
+you. He is the quietest patient I have ever had
+under my care&mdash;gentle, kind, agreeable, perfect
+in conduct, and yet quite mad. You know him
+well?�</p>
+
+<p>“He was my dearest friend,� I said. “Before
+I went out to America three years ago we were
+inseparable. Doctor, I cannot believe that he is
+mad, he&mdash;Hubert Blair&mdash;one of the cleverest
+young writers in London, so brilliant, so acute!
+Wild, if you like, a libertine perhaps, a strange
+mixture of the intellectual and the sensual&mdash;but
+mad! I can't believe it!�</p>
+
+<p>“Not when I tell you that he was brought to me
+suffering from acute religious mania?�</p>
+
+<p>“Religious! Hubert Blair!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. He tried to destroy himself, declaring
+that he was unfit to live, that he was a curse to
+some person unknown. He protested that each
+deed of his affected this unknown person, that his
+sins were counted as the sins of another, and that
+this other had haunted him&mdash;would haunt him
+for ever.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span></p>
+<p>The doctor's words troubled me.</p>
+
+<p>“Take me to him,� I said at last. “Leave us
+together.�</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange, sad moment when I entered the
+room in which Hubert was sitting. I was painfully
+agitated. He knew me, and greeted me warmly.
+I sat down opposite to him.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There was a long silence. Hubert looked away
+into the fire. He saw, I think, traced in scarlet
+flames, the scenes he was going to describe to me;
+and I, gazing at him, wondered of what nature
+the change in my friend might be. That he had
+changed since we were together three years ago
+was evident, yet he did not look mad. His dark,
+clean-shaven young face was still passionate. The
+brown eyes were still lit with a certain devouring
+eagerness. The mouth had not lost its mingled
+sweetness and sensuality. But Hubert was curiously
+transformed. There was a dignity, almost
+an elevation, in his manner. His former gaiety had
+vanished. I knew, without words, that my friend
+was another man&mdash;very far away from me now.
+Yet once we had lived together as chums, and had
+no secrets the one from the other.</p>
+
+<p>At last Hubert looked up and spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“I see you are wondering about me,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“I have altered, of course&mdash;completely
+altered.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Yes,� I said, awkwardly enough. “Why is
+that?�</p>
+
+<p>I longed to probe this madness of his that I
+might convince myself of it, otherwise Hubert's
+situation must for ever appal me.</p>
+
+<p>He answered quietly, “I will tell you&mdash;nobody
+else knows&mdash;and even you may&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated, then he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“No, you will believe it.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, if you tell me it is true.�</p>
+
+<p>“It is absolutely true.</p>
+
+<p>“Bernard, you know what I was when you left
+England for America&mdash;gay, frivolous in my
+pleasures, although earnest when I was working.
+You know how I lived to sound the depths of
+sensation, how I loved to stretch all my mental and
+physical capacities to the snapping-point, how I
+shrank from no sin that could add one jot or tittle
+to my knowledge of the mind of any man or
+woman who interested me. My life seemed a full
+life then. I moved in the midst of a thousand
+intrigues. I strung beads of all emotions upon my
+rosary, and told them until at times my health
+gave way. You remember my recurring periods
+of extraordinary and horrible mental depression&mdash;when
+life was a demon to me, and all my success in
+literature less than nothing; when I fancied myself
+hated, and could believe I heard phantom voices
+abusing me. Then those fits passed away, and
+once more I lived as ardently as ever, the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+persistent worker, and the most persistent excitement-seeker
+in London.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, after you went away I continued my
+career. As you know, my success increased.
+Through many sins I had succeeded in diving very
+deep into human hearts of men and women. Often
+I led people deliberately away from innocence in
+order that I might observe the gradual transformation
+of their natures. Often I spurred them on to
+follies that I might see the effect our deeds have
+upon our faces&mdash;the seal our actions set upon
+our souls. I was utterly unscrupulous, and yet I
+thought myself good-hearted. You remember that
+my servants always loved me, that I attracted people.
+I can say this to you. For some time my
+usual course was not stayed. Then&mdash;I recollect
+it was in the middle of the London season&mdash;one
+of my horrible fits of unreasonable melancholy
+swept over me. It stunned my soul like a heavy
+blow. It numbed me. I could not go about. I
+could not bear to see anybody. I could only shut
+myself up and try to reason myself back into my
+usual gaiety and excitement. My writing was put
+aside. My piano was locked. I tried to read, but
+even that solace was denied to me. My attention was
+utterly self-centred, riveted upon my own condition.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, I said to myself, am I the victim of this
+despair, this despair without a cause? What is
+this oppression which weighs me down without
+reason? It attacks me abruptly, as if it were sent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+to me by some power, shot at me like an arrow by
+an enemy hidden in the dark. I am well&mdash;I am
+gay. Life is beautiful and wonderful to me. All
+that I do interests me. My soul is full of vitality.
+I know that I have troops of friends, that I am
+loved and thought of by many people. And then
+suddenly the arrow strikes me. My soul is
+wounded and sickens to death. Night falls over
+me, night so sinister that I shudder when its twilight
+comes. All my senses faint within me. Life
+is at once a hag, weary, degraded, with tears on
+her cheeks and despair in her hollow eyes. I feel
+that I am deserted, that my friends despise me, that
+the world hates me, that I am less than all other
+men&mdash;less in powers, less in attraction&mdash;that I
+am the most crawling, the most grovelling of all
+the human species, and that there is no one who
+does not know it. Yet the doctors say I am not
+physically ill, and I know that I am not mad.
+Whence does this awful misery, this unmeaning,
+causeless horror of life and of myself come? Why
+am I thus afflicted?</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I could find no answer to all these
+old questions, which I had asked many times before.
+But this time, Bernard, my depression was
+more lasting, more overwhelming than usual. I
+grew terribly afraid of it. I thought I might be
+driven to suicide. One day a crisis seemed to
+come. I dared no longer remain alone, so I put
+on my hat and coat, took my stick, and hurried<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+out, without any definite intention. I walked
+along Piccadilly, avoiding the glances of those
+whom I met. I fancied they could all read the
+agony, the degradation of my soul. I turned into
+Bond Street, and suddenly I felt a strong inclination
+to stop before a certain door. I obeyed the
+impulse, and my eyes fell on a brass plate, upon
+which was engraved these words:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<span class="smcap">Vane.</span><br />
+Clairvoyant.<br />
+11 till 4 daily.</p>
+
+<p>“I remember I read them several times over,
+and even repeated them in a whisper to myself.
+Why? I don't know. Then I turned away, and
+was about to resume my walk. But I could not.
+Again I stopped and read the legend on the brass
+plate. On the right-hand side of the door was an
+electric bell. I put my finger on it and pressed
+the button inwards. The door opened, and I
+walked, like a man in a dream, I think, up a flight
+of narrow stairs. At the top of them was a second
+door, at which a maidservant was standing.</p>
+
+<p>“‘You want to see Mr Vane, sir?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Yes. Can I?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘If you will come in, sir, I will see.’</p>
+
+<p>“She showed me into a commonplace, barely-furnished
+little room, and, after a short period of
+waiting, summoned me to another, in which stood
+a tall, dark youth, dressed in a gown rather like a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+college gown. He bowed to me, and I silently
+returned the salutation. The servant left us. Then
+he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“‘You wish me to exert my powers for you?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Yes.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Will you sit here?’</p>
+
+<p>“He motioned me to a seat beside a small round
+table, sat down opposite to me, and took my hand.
+After examining it through a glass, and telling my
+character fairly correctly by the lines in it, he laid
+the glass down and regarded me narrowly.</p>
+
+<p>“‘You suffer terribly from depression,’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>“‘That is true.’</p>
+
+<p>“He continued to gaze upon me more and more
+fixedly. At length he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“‘Do you know that everybody has a companion?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘How&mdash;a companion?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Somebody incessantly with them, somebody
+they cannot see.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘You believe in the theory of guardian angels?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘I do not say these companions are always
+guardian angels. I see your companion now, as I
+look at you. His face is by your shoulder.’</p>
+
+<p>“I started, and glanced hastily round; but, of
+course, could see nothing.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Shall I describe him?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Yes,’ I said.</p>
+
+<p>“'His face is dark, like yours; shaven, like
+yours. He has brown eyes, just as brown as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+yours are. His mouth and his chin are firm and
+small, as firm and small as yours.'</p>
+
+<p>“‘He must be very like me.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘He is. But there is a difference between
+you.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘What is it?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘His hair is cut more closely than yours, and
+part of it is shaved off.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘He is a priest, then?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘He wears a cowl. He is a monk.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘A monk! But why does he come to me?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘I should say that he cannot help it, that he is
+your spirit in some former state. Yes’&mdash;and he
+stared at me till his eyes almost mesmerised me&mdash;‘you
+must have been a monk once.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘I&mdash;a monk! Impossible! Even if I have
+lived on earth before, it could never have been as a
+monk.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘How do you know that?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Because I am utterly without superstitions,
+utterly free from any lingering desire for an ascetic
+life. That existence of silence, of ignorance, of
+perpetual prayer, can never have been mine.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘You cannot tell,’ was all his answer.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>“When I left Bond Street that afternoon I was
+full of disbelief. However, I had paid my half-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>guinea
+and escaped from my own core of misery
+for a quarter of an hour. That was something.
+I didn't regret my visit to this man Vane, whom
+I regarded as an agreeable charlatan. For a
+moment he had interested me. For a moment he
+had helped me to forget my useless wretchedness.
+I ought to have been grateful to him. And, as
+always, my soul regained its composure at last.
+One morning I awoke and said to myself that I
+was happy. Why? I did not know. But I got
+up. I was able to write once more. I was able
+to play. I felt that I had friends who loved me
+and a career before me. I could again look people
+in the face without fear. I could even feel a certain
+delightful conceit of mind and body. Bernard,
+I was myself. So I thought, so I knew. And
+yet, as days went by, I caught myself often thinking
+of this invisible, tonsured, and cowled companion
+of mine, whom Vane had seen, whom I
+did not see. Was he indeed with me? And, if
+so, had he thoughts, had he the holy thoughts of
+a spirit that has renounced the world and all
+fleshly things? Did he still keep that cloistered
+nature which is at home with silence, which aspires,
+and prays, and lives for possible eternity,
+instead of for certain time? Did he still hold
+desolate vigils? Did he still scourge himself along
+the thorny paths of faith? And, if he did, how
+must he regard me?</p>
+
+<p>“I remember one night especially how this last<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+thought was with me in a dreary house, where I
+sinned, and where I dissected a heart.</p>
+
+<p>“And I trembled as if an eye was upon me.
+And I went home.</p>
+
+<p>“You will say that my imagination is keen, and
+that I gave way to it. But wait and hear the
+end.</p>
+
+<p>“This definite act of mine&mdash;this, my first conscious
+renunciation&mdash;did not tend, as you might
+suppose, to the peace of my mind. On the contrary,
+I found myself angry, perturbed, as I analysed
+the cause of my warfare with self. I have
+naturally a supreme hatred of all control. Liberty
+is my fetish. And now I had offered a sacrifice
+to a prisoning unselfishness, to a false god that
+binds and gags its devotees. I was angry, and I
+violently resumed my former course. But now I
+began to be ceaselessly companioned by uneasiness,
+by a furtive cowardice that was desolating. I felt
+that I was watched, and by some one who suffered
+when I sinned, who shrank and shuddered when I
+followed where my desires led.</p>
+
+<p>“It was the monk.</p>
+
+<p>“Soon I gave to him a most definite personality.
+I endowed him with a mind and with moods. I
+imagined not only a heart for him, but a voice,
+deep with a certain ecclesiastical beauty, austere,
+with a note more apt for denunciation than for
+praise. His face was my own face, but with an
+expression not mine, elevated, almost fanatical, yet<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+nobly beautiful; praying eyes&mdash;and mine were
+only observant; praying lips&mdash;and mine were but
+sensitively sensual. And he was haggard with
+abstinence, while I&mdash;was I not often haggard with
+indulgence? Yes, his face was mine, and not
+mine. It seemed the face of a great saint who
+might have been a great sinner. Bernard, that is
+the most attractive face in all the world. Accustoming
+myself thus to a thought-companion, I at
+length&mdash;for we men are so inevitably materialistic&mdash;embodied
+him, gave to him hands, feet, a figure,
+all&mdash;as before, mine, yet not mine, a sort of
+saintly replica of my sinfulness. For do not hands,
+feet, figure cry our deeds as the watchman cries the
+hour in the night?</p>
+
+<p>“So, I had the man. There he stood in my
+vision as you are now.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, he was there; but only when I sinned.</p>
+
+<p>“When I worked and yielded myself up to the
+clear assertion of my intellect, when I fought to
+give out the thoughts that lingered like reluctant
+fish far down in the deep pools of my mind, when
+I wrestled for beauty of diction and for nameless
+graces of expression, when I was the author, I
+could not see him.</p>
+
+<p>“But when I was the man, and lived the fables
+that I was afterwards to write, then he was with
+me. And his face was as the face of one who is
+wasted with grey grief.</p>
+
+<p>“He came to me when I sinned, as if by my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+sins I did him grave injury. And, allowing my
+imagination to range wildly, as you will say, I grew
+gradually to feel as if each sin did indeed strike a
+grievous blow upon his holy nature.</p>
+
+<p>“This troubled me at last. I found myself continually
+brooding over the strange idea. I was
+aware that if my friends could know I entertained
+it, they would think me mad. And yet I often
+fancied that thought moved me in the direction of
+a sanity more perfect, more desirable than my
+sanity of self-indulgence. Sometimes even I said
+to myself that I would reorganise my life, that I
+would be different from what I had been. And
+then, again, I laughed at my folly of the imagination,
+and cursed that clairvoyant of Bond Street,
+who made a living by trading upon the latent
+imbecility of human nature. Yet, the desire of
+change, of soul-transformation, came and lingered,
+and the vision of the monk's worn young face
+was often with me. And whenever, in my waking
+dreams, I looked upon it, I felt that a time might
+come when I could pray and weep for the wild
+catalogue of my many sins.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>“Bernard, at last the day came when I left
+England. I had long wished to travel. I had
+grown tired of the hum of literary cliques, and the
+jargon of that deadly parasite called ‘modernity.’
+Praise fainted, and lay like a corpse before my
+mind. I was sick of gaiety. It seemed to me<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span>
+that London was stifling my powers, narrowing
+my outlook, barring out real life from me with its
+moods and its fashions, and its idols of the hour,
+and its heroes of a day, who are the traitors of the
+day's night.</p>
+
+<p>“So I went away.</p>
+
+<p>“And now I come to the part of my story that
+you may find it hard to believe. Yet it is true.</p>
+
+<p>“One day, in my wanderings, I came to a
+monastery. I remember the day well. It was an
+afternoon of early winter, and I was <i>en route</i> to a
+warm climate. But to gain my climate, and
+snatch a vivid contrast such as I love, I toiled over
+a gaunt and dreary pass, presided over by heavy,
+beetling-browed mountains. I rode upon a mule,
+attended only by my manservant and by a taciturn
+guide who led a baggage-mule. Slowly we wound,
+by thin paths, among the desolate crags, which
+sprang to sight in crowds at each turn of the way,
+pressing upon us, like dead faces of Nature, the
+corpses of things we call inanimate, but which had
+surely once lived. For the earth is alive, and gives
+life. But these mountains were now utterly dead.
+These grey, petrified countenances of the hills subdued
+my soul. The pattering shuffle of the mules
+woke an occasional echo, and even an echo I hated.
+For the environing silence was immense, and I
+wished to steep myself in it. As we still ascended,
+in the waste winter afternoon, towards the hour of
+twilight, snow&mdash;the first snow of the season<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span>&mdash;began
+to fall. I watched the white vision of the
+flakes against the grey vision of the crags, and I
+thought that this path, which I had chosen as my
+road to Summer, was like the path by which holy
+men slowly gain Paradise, treading difficult ways
+through life that they may attain at last those
+eternal roses which bloom beyond the granite and
+the snows. Up and up I rode, into the clouds and
+the night, into the veil of the world, into the icy
+winds of the heights. An eagle screamed above
+my head, poised like a black shadow in the opaque
+gloom. That flying life was the only life in this
+waste.</p>
+
+<p>“And then my mule, edging ever to the precipice
+as a man to his fate, sidled round a promontory
+of rock and set its feet in snow. For we had
+passed the snow-line. And upon the snow lay
+thin spears of yellow light. They streamed from
+the lattices of the monastery which crowns the very
+summit of the pass.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>“At this monastery I was to spend the night.
+The good monks entertain all travellers, and in
+summer-time their hospitalities are lavishly exercised.
+But in winter, wanderers are few, and
+these holy men are left almost undisturbed in their
+meditative solitudes. My mule paused upon a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+rocky plateau before the door of the narrow grey
+building. The guide struck upon the heavy wood.
+After a while we were admitted by a robed figure,
+who greeted us kindly and made us welcome.
+Within, the place was bare and poor enough, but
+scrupulously clean. I was led through long, broad,
+and bitterly cold corridors to a big chamber in
+which I was to pass the night. Here were ranged
+in a row four large beds with white curtains. I
+occupied one bed, my servant another. The rest
+were untenanted. The walls were lined with
+light wood. The wooden floor was uncarpeted.
+I threw open the narrow window. Dimly I could
+see a mountain of rocks, on which snow lay in
+patches, towering up into the clouds in front of
+me. And to the left there was a glimmer of water.
+On the morrow, by that water, I should ride down
+into the land of flowers to which I was bound.
+Till then I would allow my imagination to luxuriate
+in the bleak romance of this wild home of
+prayer. The pathos of the night, shivering in the
+snow, and of this brotherhood of aspiring souls,
+detached from the excitement of the world for
+ever, seeking restlessly their final salvation day by
+day, night by night, in clouds of mountain vapour
+and sanctified incense, entered into my soul. And
+I thought of that imagined companion of mine.
+If he were with me now, surely he would feel that
+he had led me to his home at length. Surely he
+would secretly long to remain here.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span></p>
+<p>“I smiled, as I said to myself&mdash;‘Monk, to-morrow,
+if, indeed, you are fated to be my eternal
+attendant, you must come with me from this cold
+station of the cross down into the sunshine, where
+the blood of men is hot, where passions sing
+among the vineyards, where the battle is not of
+souls but of flowers. To-morrow you must come
+with me. But to-night be at peace!’</p>
+
+<p>“And I smiled to myself again as I fancied that
+my visionary companion was glad.</p>
+
+<p>“Then I went down into the refectory.</p>
+
+<p>“That night, before I retired to my room of
+the four beds, I asked if I might go into the chapel
+of the monastery. My request was granted. I
+shall never forget the curious sensation which
+overtook me as my guide led me down some steps
+past a dim, little, old, painted window set in the
+wall, to the chapel. That there should be a
+church here, that the deep tones of an organ
+should ever sound among these rocks and clouds,
+that the Host should be elevated and the censer
+swung, and litanies and masses be chanted amid
+these everlasting snows, all this was wonderful and
+quickening to me. When we reached the chapel,
+I begged my kind guide to leave me for a while.
+I longed to meditate alone. He left me, and instinctively
+I sank down upon my knees.</p>
+
+<p>“I could just hear the keening of the wind outside.
+A dim light glimmered near the altar, and
+in one of the oaken stalls I saw a bent form pray<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>ing.
+I knelt a long time. I did not pray. At
+first I scarcely thought definitely. Only, I received
+into my heart the strange, indelible impression of
+this wonderful place; and, as I knelt, my eyes
+were ever upon that dark praying figure near to
+me. By degrees I imagined that a wave of sympathy
+flowed from it to me, that in this monk's
+devotions my name was not forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>“‘What absurd tricks our imaginations can play
+us!’ you will say.</p>
+
+<p>“I grew to believe that he prayed for me, there,
+under the dim light from the tall tapers.</p>
+
+<p>“What blessing did he ask on me? I could
+not tell; but I longed that his prayer might be
+granted.</p>
+
+<p>“And then, Bernard, at last he rose. He lifted
+his face from his hands and stood up. Something
+in his figure seemed so strangely familiar to me, so
+strangely that, on a sudden, I longed, I craved to
+see his face.</p>
+
+<p>“He seemed about to retreat through a side
+door near to the altar; then he paused, appeared to
+hesitate, then came down the chapel towards me.
+As he drew near to me&mdash;I scarcely knew why&mdash;but
+I hid my face deep in my hands, with a dreadful
+sense of overwhelming guilt which dyed my
+cheeks with blood. I shrank&mdash;I cowered. I
+trembled and was afraid. Then I felt a gentle
+touch on my shoulder. I looked up into the face
+of the monk.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Bernard, it was the face of my invisible companion&mdash;it
+was my own face.</p>
+
+<p>“The monk looked down into my eyes searchingly.
+He recoiled.</p>
+
+<p>“‘<i>Mon démon!</i>’ he whispered in French.
+‘<i>Mon démon!</i>’</p>
+
+<p>“For a moment he stood still, like one appalled.
+Then he turned and abruptly quitted the chapel.</p>
+
+<p>“I started up to follow him, but something held
+me back. I let him go, and I listened to hear if
+his tread sounded upon the chapel floor as a human
+footstep, if his robe rustled as he went.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Then he was, indeed, a living man, and
+it was a human voice which had reached my ears,
+not a voice of imagination. He was a living man,
+this double of my body, this antagonist of my soul,
+this being who called me demon, who fled from
+me, who, doubtless, hated me. He was a living
+man.</p>
+
+<p>“I could not sleep that night. This encounter
+troubled me. I felt that it had a meaning for me
+which I must discover, that it was not chance
+which had led me to take this cold road to the
+sunshine. Something had bound me with an invisible
+thread, and led me up here into the clouds,
+where already I&mdash;or the likeness of me&mdash;dwelt,
+perhaps had been dwelling for many years. I had
+looked upon my living wraith, and my living wraith
+had called me demon.</p>
+
+<p>“How could I sleep?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Very early I got up. The dawn was bitterly
+cold, but the snow had ceased, though a coating
+of ice covered the little lake. How delicate was
+the dawn here! The gathering, growing light fell
+upon the rocks, upon the snow, upon the ice of
+the lake, upon the slate walls of the monastery.
+And upon each it lay with a pretty purity, a thin
+refinement, an austerity such as I had never seen
+before. So, even Nature, it seemed, was purged
+by the continual prayers of these holy men. She,
+too, like men, has her lusts, and her hot passions,
+and her wrath of warfare. She, too, like men, can
+be edified and tended into grace. Nature among
+these heights was a virgin, not a wanton, a fit companion
+for those who are dedicated to virginity.</p>
+
+<p>“I dressed by the window, and went out to see
+the entrance of the morning. There was nobody
+about. I had to find my own way. But when I
+had gained the refectory, I saw a monk standing
+by the door.</p>
+
+<p>“It was my wraith waiting for me.</p>
+
+<p>“Silently he went before me to the great door
+of the building. He opened it, and we stepped
+out upon the rocky plateau on which the snow
+lay thickly. He closed the door behind us, and
+motioned me to attend him among the rocks till
+we were out of sight of the monastery. Then he
+stopped, and we faced one another, still without a
+word, the grey light of the wintry dawn clothing
+us so wearily, so plaintively.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span></p>
+<p>“We gazed at each other, dark face to dark
+face, brown eyes to brown eyes. The monk's
+pale hands, my hands, were clenched. The
+monk's strong lips, my lips, were set. The two
+souls looked upon each other, there, in the dawn.</p>
+
+<p>“And then at last he spoke in French, and with
+the beautiful voice I knew.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Whence have you come?’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>“‘From England, father.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘From England? Then you live! you live.
+You are a man, as I am! And I have believed
+you to be a spirit, some strange spirit of myself,
+lost to my control, interrupting my prayers with
+your cries, interrupting my sleep with your desires.
+You are a man like myself?’</p>
+
+<p>“He stretched out his hand and touched mine.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Yes; it is indeed so,’ he murmured.</p>
+
+<p>“‘And you,’ I said in my turn, ‘are no spirit.
+Yet, I, too, believed you to be a wraith of myself,
+interrupting my sins with your sorrow, interrupting
+my desires with your prayers. I have seen you.
+I have imagined you. And now I find you live.
+What does it mean? For we are as one and yet
+not as one.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘We are as two halves of a strangely-mingled
+whole,’ he answered. ‘Do you know what you
+have done to me?’</p>
+
+<p>“‘No, father.’</p>
+
+<p>“‘Listen,’ he said. ‘When a boy I dedicated
+myself to God. Early, early I dedicated myself,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+so that I might never know sin. For I had heard
+that the charm of sin is so great and so terrible
+that, once it is known, once it is felt, it can never
+be forgotten. And so it can make the holiest life
+hideous with its memories. It can intrude into
+the very sanctuary like a ghost, and murmur its
+music with the midnight mass. Even at the elevation
+of the Host will it be present, and stir the
+heart of the officiator to longing so keen that it
+is like the Agony of the Garden, the Agony of
+Christ. There are monks here who weep because
+they dare not sin, who rage secretly like beasts&mdash;because
+they will not sin.’</p>
+
+<p>“He paused. The grey light grew over the
+mountains.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Knowing this, I resolved that I would never
+know sin, lest I, too, should suffer so horribly. I
+threw myself at once into the arms of God. Yet
+I have suffered&mdash;how I have suffered!’</p>
+
+<p>“His face was contorted, and his lips worked.
+I stood as if under a spell, my eyes upon his face.
+I had only the desire to hear him. He went on,
+speaking now in a voice roughened by emotion:</p>
+
+<p>“‘For I became like these monks. You’&mdash;and
+he pointed at me with outstretched fingers&mdash;'you,
+my wraith, made in my very likeness, were
+surely born when I was born, to torment me.
+For, while I have prayed, I have been conscious
+of your neglect of prayer as if it were my own.
+When I have believed, I have been conscious of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+your unbelief as if it were my own. Whatever I
+have feebly tried to do for God, has been marred
+and defaced by all that you have left undone. I have
+wrestled with you; I have tried to hold you back; I
+have tried to lead you with me where I want to go,
+where I must go. All these years I have tried, all
+these years I have striven. But it has seemed as if
+God did not choose it. When you have been sinning,
+I have been agonising. I have lain upon the
+floor of my cell in the night, and I have torn at
+my evil heart. For&mdash;sometimes&mdash;I have longed&mdash;how
+I have longed!&mdash;to sin your sin.'</p>
+
+<p>“He crossed himself. Sudden tears sprang into
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“‘I have called you my demon,’ he cried. ‘But
+you are my cross. Oh, brother, will you not be
+my crown?’</p>
+
+<p>“His eyes, shadowed with tears, gazed down
+into mine. Bernard, in that moment, I understood
+all&mdash;my depression, my unreasoning despair, the
+fancied hatred of others, even my few good impulses,
+all came from him, from this living holy
+wraith of my evil self.</p>
+
+<p>“‘Will you not be my crown?’ he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Bernard, there, in the snow, I fell at his feet.
+I confessed to him. I received his absolution.</p>
+
+<p>“And, as the light of the dawn grew strong
+upon the mountains, he, my other self, my wraith,
+blessed me.�</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span></p>
+<p>There was a long silence between us. Then
+I said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“And now?�</p>
+
+<p>“And now you know why I have changed.
+That day, as I went down into the land of the
+sunshine, I made a vow.�</p>
+
+<p>“A vow?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; to be his crown, not his cross. I soon
+returned to England. At first I was happy, and
+then one day my old evil nature came upon me
+like a giant. I fell again into sin, and, even as I
+sinned, I saw his face looking into mine, Bernard,
+pale, pale to the lips, and with eyes&mdash;such sad
+eyes of reproach! Then I thought I was not fit
+to live, and I tried to kill myself. They saved me,
+and brought me here.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; and now, Hubert?�</p>
+
+<p>“Now,� he said, “I am so happy. God surely
+placed me here where I cannot sin. The days
+pass and the nights, and they are stainless. And
+he&mdash;he comes by night and blesses me. I live
+for him now, and see always the grey walls of his
+monastery, his face which shall, at last, be completely
+mine.�</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>“Good-bye,� the doctor said to me as I got into
+the carriage to drive back to the station. “Yes,
+he is perfectly happy, happier in his mania, I
+believe, than you or I in our sanity.�</p>
+
+<p>I drove away from that huge home of madness,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
+set in the midst of lovely gardens in a smiling
+landscape, and I pondered those last words of the
+doctor's:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“You and I&mdash;in our sanity.�</p>
+
+<p>And, thinking of the peace that lay on Hubert's
+face, I compared the so-called mad of the world
+with the so-called sane&mdash;and wondered.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236"><br />[236]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237"><br /><br />[237]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>THE MAN WHO INTERVENED</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> atmosphere of the room in which Sergius
+Blake was sitting seemed to him strange and
+cold. As he looked round it, he could imagine
+that a light mist invaded it stealthily, like miasma
+rising from some sinister marsh. There was surely
+a cloud about the electric light that gleamed in
+the ceiling, a cloud sweeping in feathery, white
+flakes across the faces of the pictures upon the
+wall. Even the familiar furniture seemed to loom
+out faintly, with a gaunt and grotesque aspect,
+from shadows less real, yet more fearful, than any
+living form could be.</p>
+
+<p>Sergius stared round him slowly, pressing his
+strong lips together. When he concentrated his
+gaze upon any one thing&mdash;a table, a sofa, a chair&mdash;the
+cloud faded, and the object stood out clearly
+before his eyes. Yet always the rest of the room
+seemed to lie in mist and in shadows. He knew
+that this dim atmosphere did not really exist, that
+it was projected by his mind. Yet it troubled
+him, and added a dull horror to his thoughts, which
+moved again and again, in persistent promenade,
+round one idea.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span></p>
+<p>The hour was seven o'clock of an autumn
+night. Darkness lay over London, and rain made
+a furtive music on roofs and pavements. Sergius
+Blake listened to the drops upon the panes of his
+windows. They seemed to beckon him forth, to
+tell him that it was time to exchange thought for
+action. He had come to a definite and tremendous
+resolution. He must now carry it out.</p>
+
+<p>He got up slowly from his chair, and with the
+movement the mist seemed to gather itself together
+in the room and to disappear. It passed away,
+evaporating among the pictures and ornaments,
+the prayer-rugs and divans. A clearness and an
+insight came to Sergius. He stood still by the
+piano, on which he rested one hand lightly, and
+listened. The rain-drops pattered close by. Beyond
+them rose the dull music of the evening
+traffic of New Bond Street, in which thoroughfare
+he lived. As he stood thus at attention, his young
+and handsome face seemed carved in stone. His
+lips were set in a hard and straight line. His
+dark-grey eyes stared, like eyes in a photograph.
+The muscles of his long-fingered hands were tense
+and knotted. He was in evening dress, and had
+been engaged to dine in Curzon Street; but he
+had written a hasty note to say he was ill and
+could not come. Another appointment claimed
+him. He had made it for himself.</p>
+
+<p>Presently, lifting his hand from the piano, he
+took up a small leather case from a table that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span>
+stood near, opened it, and drew out a revolver.
+He examined it carefully. Two chambers were
+loaded. They would be enough. He put on his
+long overcoat, and slipped the revolver into his
+left breast pocket. His heart could beat against
+it there.</p>
+
+<p>Each time his heart pulsed, Sergius seemed to
+hear the silence of another heart.</p>
+
+<p>And now, though his mind was quite clear, and
+the mists and shadows had slunk away, his familiar
+room looked very peculiar to him. The very chair
+in which he generally sat wore the aspect of a
+stranger. Was the wall paper really blue? Sergius
+went close up to it and examined it narrowly,
+and then he drew back and laughed softly, like a
+child. In the sound of his laugh irresponsibility
+chimed. “What is the cab fare to Phillimore
+Place, Kensington?� he thought, searching in his
+waistcoat pocket. “Half a crown?� He put
+the coin carefully in the ticket pocket of his overcoat,
+buttoned the coat up slowly, took his hat and
+stick, and drew on a pair of lavender gloves. Just
+then a new thought seemed to strike him and he
+glanced down at his hands.</p>
+
+<p>“Lavender gloves for such a deed!� he murmured.
+For a moment he paused irresolute, even
+partially unbuttoned them. But then he smiled
+and shook his head. In some way the gloves
+would not be wholly inappropriate. Sergius cast
+one final glance round the room.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span></p>
+<p>“When I stand here again,� he said aloud, “I
+shall be a criminal&mdash;a criminal!�</p>
+
+<p>He repeated the last word, as if trying thoroughly
+to realise its meaning.</p>
+
+<p>Then he opened the door swiftly and went out
+on to the staircase.</p>
+
+<p>Just as he was putting a hasty foot upon the first
+stair, a man out in the street touched his electric
+bell. Its thin tingling cry made Sergius start and
+hesitate. In the semi-twilight he waited, his hands
+deep in his pockets, his silk hat tilted slightly over
+his eyes. The porter tramped along the passage
+below. The hall door opened, and a deep and
+strong voice asked, rather anxiously and breathlessly:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Is Mr. Blake at home?�</p>
+
+<p>“I rather think he's gone out, sir.�</p>
+
+<p>“No&mdash;surely&mdash;how long ago?�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know, sir. He may be in. I'll see.�</p>
+
+<p>“Do&mdash;do&mdash;quickly. If he's in, say I must
+see him&mdash;Mr Endover. But you know my
+name.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, sir.�</p>
+
+<p>The porter, mounting the stone staircase, suddenly
+came upon Sergius standing there like a
+stone figure.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord, sir!� he ejaculated. “You give me a
+start!� His voice was loud from astonishment.</p>
+
+<p>“Hush!� Sergius whispered. “Go down at
+once and say that I've gone out!�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span></p>
+<p>The man turned to obey, but Anthony Endover
+was half-way up the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>“It's all right,� he exclaimed, as he met the
+porter.</p>
+
+<p>He had passed him in an instant and arrived at
+the place where Sergius was standing.</p>
+
+<p>“Sergius,� he cried, and there was a great music
+of relief in his voice. “Hulloa! Now you're
+not going out.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I am, Anthony.�</p>
+
+<p>“But I want to talk to you tremendously.
+Where are you going?�</p>
+
+<p>“To dine with the Venables in Curzon Street.�</p>
+
+<p>“I met young Venables just now, and he said
+you'd written that you were ill and couldn't come.
+He asked me to fill your place.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius muttered a “Damn!� under his breath.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, come in for a minute,� he said, attempting
+no excuse.</p>
+
+<p>He turned round slowly and re-entered his flat,
+followed by Endover.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>For some years Endover had been Sergius Blake's
+close friend. They had left Eton at the same
+time; had been at Oxford together. Their intimacy,
+born in the playing fields, grew out of its
+cricket and football stage as their minds developed,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+and the world of thought opened like a holy of
+holies&mdash;beyond the world of action. They both
+passed behind the veil, but Anthony went farther
+than Sergius. Yet this slight separation did not
+lead to alienation, but merely caused the admiration
+of Sergius for his friend to be mingled with respect.
+He looked up to Anthony. Recognising that his
+friend's mind was more thoughtful than his own,
+while his passions were far stronger than Anthony's,
+he grew to lean upon Anthony, to claim his advice
+sometimes, to follow it often. Anthony was his
+mentor, and thought he knew instinctively all the
+workings of Sergius' mind and all the possibilities
+of his nature. The mother of Sergius was a Russian
+and a great heiress. Soon after he left Oxford,
+she died. His father had been killed by an
+accident when he was a child. So he was rich,
+free, young, in London, with no one to look after
+him, until Anthony Endover, who had meanwhile
+taken orders, was attached as fourth&mdash;or fifth&mdash;curate
+to a smart West End church, and came
+to live in lodgings in George Street, Hanover
+Square.</p>
+
+<p>Then, as Sergius laughingly said, he had a father
+confessor on the premises. Yet to-night he had
+bidden his porter to tell a lie in order to keep his
+father confessor out. The lie had been vain.
+Sergius led the way morosely into his drawing-room,
+and turned on the light. Anthony walked up
+to the fire, and stretched his tall athletic figure in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+its long ebon coat. His firm throat rose out of a
+jam-pot collar, but his thin, strongly-marked face
+rather suggested an intellectual Hercules than a
+Mayfair parson, and neither his voice nor his
+manner was tinged with what so many people
+consider the true clericalism.</p>
+
+<p>For all that he was a splendid curate, as his
+rector very well knew.</p>
+
+<p>Now he stood by the fire for a minute in silence,
+while Sergius moved uneasily about the room.
+Presently Anthony turned round.</p>
+
+<p>“It's beastly wet,� he said in a melodious ringing
+voice. “The black dog is on me to-night,
+Sergius.�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh!�</p>
+
+<p>“You don't want to go out, really,� Anthony
+continued, looking narrowly at his friend's curiously
+rigid face.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I do.�</p>
+
+<p>“Not to Curzon Street. They've filled up
+your place. I told Venables to ask Hugh Graham.
+I knew he was disengaged to-night. Besides&mdash;you're
+seedy.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius frowned.</p>
+
+<p>“I'm all right again now,� he said coldly, “and
+I particularly wished to go. You needn't have
+been so deuced anxious to make the number right.�</p>
+
+<p>“Well, it's done now. And I can't say I'm
+sorry, because I want to have a talk with you. I
+say, Serge, take off those lavender gloves, pull off<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>
+your coat, let's send out for some dinner, and have
+a comfortable evening together in here. I've had
+a hard day's work, and I want a rest.�</p>
+
+<p>“I must go out presently.�</p>
+
+<p>“After dinner then.�</p>
+
+<p>“Before ten o'clock.�</p>
+
+<p>“Say eleven.�</p>
+
+<p>“No&mdash;that's too late.�</p>
+
+<p>A violent, though fleeting expression of anxiety
+crossed Endover's face. Then, with a smile, he
+said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“All right. Shall I ring the bell and order
+some dinner to be sent in from Galton's?�</p>
+
+<p>“If you like. I'm not hungry.�</p>
+
+<p>“I am.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony summoned the servant and gave the
+order. Then he turned again to Sergius.</p>
+
+<p>“Here, I'll help you off with your coat,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>But Sergius moved away.</p>
+
+<p>“No thanks, I'll do it. There are some cigarettes
+on the mantelpiece.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony went to get one. As he was taking it,
+he looked into the mirror over the fireplace, and
+saw Sergius&mdash;while removing his overcoat&mdash;transfer
+something from it to the left breast
+pocket of his evening coat.</p>
+
+<p>He wanted still to feel his heart beat against
+that tiny weapon, still to hear&mdash;with each pulse
+of his own heart&mdash;the silence, not yet alive, but
+so soon to be alive, of that other heart.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span></p>
+<p>And, as Anthony glanced into the mirror, he
+said to himself, “I was right!�</p>
+
+<p>He withdrew his eyes from the glass and lit his
+cigarette. Sergius joined him.</p>
+
+<p>“I'm in the blues to-night,� Anthony said, puffing
+at his cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes&mdash;been down in the East End. The
+misery there is ghastly.�</p>
+
+<p>“It's just as bad in the West End, only different
+in kind. You're smoking your cigarette all
+down one side.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony took it out of his mouth and threw it
+into the grate. He lit two or three matches, but
+held them so badly that they went out before he
+could ignite another cigarette. At last, inwardly
+cursing his nerves that made his hasty actions belie
+the determined calm of his face, he dropped the
+cigarette.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't think I'll smoke before dinner,� he
+said. “Ah, here it is. And wine&mdash;champagne&mdash;that's
+good for you!�</p>
+
+<p>“I shan't drink it. I hate to drink alone.�</p>
+
+<p>“You shan't drink alone then.�</p>
+
+<p>“What d'you mean?�</p>
+
+<p>“I'll drink with you.�</p>
+
+<p>“But you're a teetotaller.�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't care to-night.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony spoke briefly and firmly. Sergius was
+amazed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span></p>
+<p>“What!� he said. “You're going to break
+your vow? You a parson!�</p>
+
+<p>“Sometimes salvation lies in the breaking of a
+vow,� Anthony answered as they sat down.
+“Have you never registered a silent vow?�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius looked at him hard in the eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes,� he said; and in his voice there was the
+hint of a thrilling note. “But I shan't&mdash;I
+shouldn't break it.�</p>
+
+<p>“I've known a soul saved alive by the breaking
+of a vow,� Anthony answered. “Give me some
+champagne.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius&mdash;wondering, as much as the condition of
+his mind, possessed by one idea, would allow&mdash;filled
+his friend's glass. Anthony began to eat, with a well-assumed
+hunger. Sergius scarcely touched food,
+but drank a good deal of wine. The hands of the
+big oaken-cased clock that stood in a far corner of
+the room crawled slowly upon their round, recurring
+tour. Anthony's eyes were often upon them, then
+moved with a swift directness that was akin to
+passion to the face of Sergius, which was always
+strangely rigid, like the painted face of a mask.</p>
+
+<p>“I sat by a woman to-day,� he said presently,
+“sat by her in an attic that looked on to a narrow
+street full of rain, and watched her die.�</p>
+
+<p>“This morning?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“And now she's been out of the world seven or
+eight hours. Lucky woman!�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Ah, Sergius, but the mischief, the horror of it
+was that she wasn't ready to go, not a bit ready.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius suddenly smiled, a straight, glaring smile,
+over the sparkling champagne that he was lifting
+to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; it's devilish bad for a woman or a&mdash;man
+to be shot into another world before they're
+prepared,� he said. “It must be&mdash;devilish bad.�</p>
+
+<p>“And how can we know that any one is
+thoroughly prepared?�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius' smile developed into a short laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“It's easier to be certain who isn't than who
+is,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>The eyes of Anthony fled to the clock face
+mechanically and returned.</p>
+
+<p>“Death terrified me to-day, Sergius,� he said;
+“and it struck me that the most awful power that
+God has given to man is the power of setting death&mdash;like
+a dog&mdash;at another man.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius swallowed all the wine in his glass at
+a gulp. He was no longer smiling. His hand
+went up to his left side.</p>
+
+<p>“It may be awful,� he rejoined; “but it's
+grand. By Heaven! it's magnificent.�</p>
+
+<p>He got up, as if excited, and moved about the
+room, while Anthony went on pretending to eat.
+After a minute or two Sergius sat down again.</p>
+
+<p>“Power of any kind is a grand thing,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Only power for good.�</p>
+
+<p>“You're bound to say that; you're a parson.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span></p>
+<p>“I only say what I really feel; you know that,
+Serge.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, you don't understand.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony looked at him with a sudden, strong
+significance.</p>
+
+<p>“Part of a parson's profession&mdash;the most important
+part&mdash;is to understand men who aren't
+parsons.�</p>
+
+<p>“You think you understand men?�</p>
+
+<p>“Some men.�</p>
+
+<p>“Me, for instance?�</p>
+
+<p>The question came abruptly, defiantly. Anthony
+seemed glad to answer it.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, yes, Sergius; I think I do thoroughly
+understand you. My great friendship alone might
+well make me do that.�</p>
+
+<p>The face of Sergius grew a little softer in expression,
+but he did not assent.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps it might blind you,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't think so.�</p>
+
+<p>“Well, then, now, if you understand me&mdash;tell
+me&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius broke off suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>“This champagne is awfully good,� he said, filling
+his glass again.</p>
+
+<p>“What were you going to say?� Anthony
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know&mdash;nothing.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony tried to conceal his disappointment.
+Sergius had seemed to be on the verge of over-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>leaping
+the barrier which lay between them. Once
+that barrier was overleapt, or broken down, Anthony
+felt that the mission he had imposed upon himself
+would stand a chance of being accomplished, that
+his gnawing anxiety would be laid to rest. But
+once more Sergius diffused around him a strange
+and cold atmosphere of violent and knowing reserve.
+He went away from the table and sat down
+close to the fire. From there he threw over his
+shoulder the remark:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“No man or woman ever understands another&mdash;really.�</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Anthony did not reply for a moment and Sergius
+continued:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“You, for instance, could never guess what I
+should do in certain circumstances.�</p>
+
+<p>“Such as&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, in a thousand things.�</p>
+
+<p>“I should have a shrewd idea.�</p>
+
+<p>“No.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony didn't contradict him, but got up from
+the dinner-table and joined him by the fire, glass
+in hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I might not let you know how much I guessed,
+how much I knew.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius laughed.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Oh, ignorance always surrounds itself with
+mystery,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Knowledge need not go naked.�</p>
+
+<p>Again the eyes of the two friends met in the
+firelight, and over the face of Sergius there ran a
+new expression. There was an awakening of wonder
+in it, but no uneasiness. Anxiety was far away
+from him that night. When passion has gripped a
+man, passion strong enough, resolute enough, to
+over-ride all the prejudices of civilisation, all the
+promptings of the coward within us, whose voice,
+whining, we name prudence, the semi-comprehension,
+the criticism of another man cannot move him.
+Sergius wondered for an instant whether Anthony
+suspected against what his heart was beating. That
+was all.</p>
+
+<p>While he wondered, the clock chimed the half
+hour after nine. He heard it.</p>
+
+<p>“I shall have to go very soon,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“You can't. Just listen to the rain.�</p>
+
+<p>“Rain! What's that got to do with it?�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius spoke with a sudden unutterable contempt.</p>
+
+<p>“Ring for another bottle of champagne,� Anthony
+replied. “This one is empty.�</p>
+
+<p>“Well&mdash;for a parson and a teetotaller, I must
+say!�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius rang the bell. A second bottle was
+opened. The servant went out of the room.
+As he closed the door, the wind sighed harshly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
+against the window panes, driving the rain before
+it.</p>
+
+<p>“Rough at sea to-night,� Anthony said.</p>
+
+<p>The remark was an obvious one; but, as spoken,
+it sounded oddly furtive, and full of hidden meaning.
+Sergius evidently found it so, for he said:</p>
+
+<p>“Why, whom d'you know that's going to sea
+to-night?�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony was startled by the quick question, and
+replied almost nervously:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Nobody in particular&mdash;why should I?�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know why, but I think you do.�</p>
+
+<p>“People one knows cross the channel every night
+almost.�</p>
+
+<p>“Of course,� Sergius said indifferently.</p>
+
+<p>He glanced towards the clock and again mechanically
+his hand went up, for a second, to his left
+breast. Anthony leaned forward in his chair
+quickly, and broke into speech. He had seen the
+stare at the clock-face, the gesture.</p>
+
+<p>“It's strange,� he said, “how people go out of
+our lives, how friends go, and enemies!�</p>
+
+<p>“Enemies!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I sometimes wonder which exit is the
+sadder. When a friend goes&mdash;with him goes, perhaps
+for ever, the chance of saying ‘I am your
+friend.’ When an enemy goes&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Well, what then?�</p>
+
+<p>“With him goes, perhaps for ever, too, the chance
+of saying, ‘I am not your enemy.’�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Pshaw! Parson's talk, Anthony.�</p>
+
+<p>“No, Sergius, other men forgive besides parsons;
+and other men, and parsons too, pass by
+their chances of forgiving.�</p>
+
+<p>“You're a whole Englishman, I'm only half
+an Englishman. There's something untamed in
+my blood, and I say&mdash;damn forgiveness!�</p>
+
+<p>“And yet you've forgiven.�</p>
+
+<p>“Whom?�</p>
+
+<p>“Olga Mayne.�</p>
+
+<p>The face of Sergius did not change at the sound
+of this name, unless, perhaps, to a more fixed
+calm, a more still and pale coldness.</p>
+
+<p>“Olga is punished,� he said. “She is ruined.�</p>
+
+<p>“Her ruin may be repaired.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius smiled quietly.</p>
+
+<p>“You think so?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. Tell me, Sergius�&mdash;Anthony spoke
+with a strong earnestness, a strong excitement that
+he strove to conceal and hold in check&mdash;“you
+loved her?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I loved her&mdash;certainly.�</p>
+
+<p>“You will always love her?�</p>
+
+<p>“Since I'm not changeable, I daresay I shall.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony's thin, eager face brightened. A glow
+of warmth burned in his eyes and on his cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you would wish her ruin repaired.�</p>
+
+<p>“Should I?�</p>
+
+<p>“If you love her, you must.�</p>
+
+<p>“How could it be repaired?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span></p>
+<p>“By her marriage with&mdash;Vernon.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony's strong voice quivered before he pronounced
+the last word, and his eyes were alight
+with fervent anxiety. He was looking at Sergius
+like a man on the watch for a tremendous outbreak
+of emotion. The champagne he had drunk&mdash;a
+new experience for him since he had taken orders&mdash;put
+a sort of wild finishing touch to the intensity
+of the feelings, under the impulse of which
+he had forced himself upon Sergius to-night. He
+supposed that his inward excitement must be more
+than matched by the so different inward excitement
+of his friend. But he&mdash;who thought he
+understood!&mdash;had no true conception of the region
+of cold, frosty fury in which Sergius was
+living, like a being apart from all other men,
+ostracised by the immensity and peculiarity of
+his own power of emotion. Therefore he was
+astonished when Sergius, with undiminished quietude,
+replied:</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, with Vernon, that charming man of
+fashion, whose very soul, they say, always wears
+lavender gloves? You think that would be a
+good thing?�</p>
+
+<p>“Good! I don't say that. I say&mdash;as the
+world is now&mdash;the only thing. He is the author
+of her fall. He should be her husband.�</p>
+
+<p>“And I?�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony stretched out his hand to grasp his
+friend's hand, but Sergius suddenly took up his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
+champagne glass, and avoided the demonstration of
+sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>“You can be nothing to her now, Serge,�
+Anthony said, and his voice quivered with sympathy.</p>
+
+<p>“You think so? I might be.�</p>
+
+<p>“What?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, not her husband, not her lover, not her
+friend.�</p>
+
+<p>“What then?�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius avoided answering.</p>
+
+<p>“You would have her settle down with Vernon
+in Phillimore Place?� he said. “Play the wife to
+his noble husband? Well, I know there's been
+some idea of that, as I told you yesterday.�</p>
+
+<p>The clock chimed ten. Although Sergius seemed
+so calm, so self-possessed, Anthony observed that
+now he paid no heed to the little, devilish note of
+time. This new subject of conversation had been
+Anthony's weapon. Desperately he had used it,
+and not, it seemed, altogether in vain.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; as you told me yesterday.�</p>
+
+<p>“And it seems good to you?�</p>
+
+<p>“It seems to me the only thing possible now.�</p>
+
+<p>“There are generally more possibilities than one
+in any given event, I fancy.�</p>
+
+<p>Again Anthony was surprised at the words of Sergius,
+who seemed to grow calmer as he grew more
+excited, who seemed, to-night, strangely powerful,
+not simply in temper, but even in intellect.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span></p>
+<p>“For a woman there is sometimes only one
+possibility if she is to be saved from ignominy,
+Serge.�</p>
+
+<p>“So you think that Olga Mayne must become
+the wife of Vernon, who is a&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Coward. Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>At the word coward, Sergius seemed startled
+out of his hard calm. He looked swiftly and
+searchingly at Anthony.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you say coward?� he asked sharply.
+“I was not going to use that word.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony was obviously disconcerted.</p>
+
+<p>“It came to me,� he said hurriedly.</p>
+
+<p>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“Any man that brings a girl to the dust is a
+coward.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah&mdash;that's not what you meant,� Sergius
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Anthony stole a glance at the clock. The hand
+crawled slowly over the quarter of an hour past
+ten.</p>
+
+<p>“No, it was not,� he said slowly.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Sergius got up from his chair and stood by the
+fire. He was obviously becoming engrossed by
+the conversation. Anthony could at least notice
+this with thankfulness.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Anthony, I see you've got a fresh knowledge of
+Vernon since I was with you yesterday,� Sergius
+continued; “some new knowledge of his nature.�</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps I have.�</p>
+
+<p>“How did you get it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Does that matter?�</p>
+
+<p>“You have heard of something about him?�</p>
+
+<p>“No.�</p>
+
+<p>“You have seen him, then; I say, you have
+seen him?�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony hesitated. He pushed the champagne
+bottle over towards Sergius. It had been placed on
+a little table near the fireplace.</p>
+
+<p>“No; I don't want to drink. Why on earth
+don't you answer me, Anthony?�</p>
+
+<p>“I have always felt that Vernon was a coward.
+His conduct to you shows it. He was&mdash;or seemed&mdash;your
+friend. He saw you deeply in love with
+this&mdash;with Olga. He chose to ruin her after he
+knew of your love. Who but a coward could act
+in such a way?�</p>
+
+<p>An expression of dark impatience came into the
+eyes of Sergius.</p>
+
+<p>“You are confusing treachery and cowardice,
+and you are doing it untruthfully. You have seen
+Vernon.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony thought for a moment, and then said:</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, I have.�</p>
+
+<p>“By chance, of course. Why did you speak
+to him?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span></p>
+<p>“I thought I would.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius was obviously disturbed and surprised.
+The deeply emotional, yet rigid calm in which he
+had been enveloped all the evening was broken at
+last. A slight excitement, a distinct surface irritation,
+woke in him. Anthony felt an odd sense of
+relief as he observed it. For the constraint of
+Sergius had begun to weigh upon him like a heavy
+burden and to move him to an indefinable dread.</p>
+
+<p>“I wonder you didn't cut him,� Sergius said.
+“You're my friend. And he's&mdash;he's&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“He's done you a deadly injury. I know that.
+I am your friend, Serge; I would do anything
+for you.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yet you speak to that&mdash;devil.�</p>
+
+<p>“I spoke to him because I'm your friend.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius sat down again, with a heavy look, the
+look of a man who has been thrashed, and means
+to return every blow with curious interest.</p>
+
+<p>“You parsons are a riddle to me,� he said in a
+low and dull voice. “You and your charity and
+your loving-kindness, and your turning the cheek
+to the smiter and all the rest of it. And as to
+your way of showing friendship&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>His voice died away in something that was
+almost a growl, and he stared at the carpet. Between
+it and his eyes once more the mist seemed
+rising stealthily. It began to curl upwards softly
+about him. As he watched it, he heard Anthony
+say:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Sergius, you don't understand how well I
+understand you.�</p>
+
+<p>The big hand of the clock had left the half-hour
+after ten behind him. Anthony breathed more
+freely. At last he could be more explicit, more
+unreserved. He thought of a train rushing through
+the night, devouring the spaces of land that lie
+between London and the sea that speaks, moaning,
+to the South of England. He saw a ship glide out
+from the dreary docks. Her lights gleamed. He
+heard the bell struck and the harsh cry of the
+sailors, and then the dim sigh of a coward who
+had escaped what he had merited. Then he heard
+Sergius laugh.</p>
+
+<p>“That again, Anthony!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I didn't meet Vernon by chance at
+all.�</p>
+
+<p>“What? You wrote to him, you fixed a
+meeting?�</p>
+
+<p>“I went to Phillimore Place, to his house.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius said nothing. Strange furrows ploughed
+themselves in his young face, which was growing
+dusky white. He remained in the attitude of one
+devoted entirely to listening.</p>
+
+<p>“You hear, Sergius?�</p>
+
+<p>“Go on&mdash;when?�</p>
+
+<p>“To-day. I decided to go after I met you
+yesterday night&mdash;and after I had seen that woman
+die&mdash;unprepared.�</p>
+
+<p>“What could she have to do with it?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Much. Everything almost.�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony got up now, almost sprang up from
+his chair. His face was glowing and working
+with emotion. There was a choking sensation in
+his throat.</p>
+
+<p>“You don't know what it is,� he said hoarsely,
+“to a man with&mdash;with strong religious belief to
+see a human being's soul go out to blackness, to
+punishment&mdash;perhaps to punishment that will
+never end. It's abominable. It's unbearable.
+That woman will haunt me. Her despair will
+be with me always. I could not add to that
+horror.�</p>
+
+<p>His eyes once more sought the clock. Seeing
+the hour, he turned, with a kind of liberating relief,
+to Sergius.</p>
+
+<p>“I couldn't add to it,� he exclaimed, almost
+fiercely, “so I went to Vernon.�</p>
+
+<p>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“Sergius&mdash;to warn him.�</p>
+
+<p>There was a dead silence. Even the rain was
+hushed against the window. Then Sergius said,
+in a voice that was cold as the sound of falling
+water in winter:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I don't understand.�</p>
+
+<p>“Because you won't understand how I have
+learnt to know you, Sergius, to understand you,
+to read your soul.�</p>
+
+<p>“Mine too?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; I've felt this awful blow that's come<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
+upon you&mdash;the loss of Olga, her ruin&mdash;as if I
+myself were you. We haven't said much about
+it till yesterday. Then, from the way you spoke,
+from the way you looked, from what you said,
+even what you wouldn't say, I guessed all that
+was in your heart.�</p>
+
+<p>“You guessed all that?�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius was looking directly at Anthony and
+leaning against the mantelpiece, along which he
+stretched one arm. His fingers closed and unclosed,
+with a mechanical and rhythmical movement,
+round a china figure. The motion looked
+as if it were made in obedience to some fiercely
+monotonous music.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, more&mdash;I knew it.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius nodded.</p>
+
+<p>“I see,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>Anthony touched his arm, almost with an awe-struck
+gesture.</p>
+
+<p>“I knew then that you&mdash;that you intended to
+kill Vernon. And&mdash;God forgive me!&mdash;at first I
+was almost glad.�</p>
+
+<p>“Well&mdash;go on!�</p>
+
+<p>Anthony shivered. The voice of Sergius was
+so strangely calm and level.</p>
+
+<p>“I&mdash;I&mdash;� he stammered. “Serge, why do you
+look at me like that?�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius looked away without a word.</p>
+
+<p>“For I, too, hated Vernon, more for what he
+had done to you even than for what he had done<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+to Olga. But, Sergius, after you had gone, in the
+night, and in the dawn too, I kept on thinking of
+it over and over. I couldn't get away from it&mdash;that
+you were going to commit such an awful
+crime. I never slept. When at last it was morning,
+I went down to my district; there are criminals
+there, you know.�</p>
+
+<p>“I know.�</p>
+
+<p>“I looked at them with new eyes, and in their
+eyes I saw you, always you; and then I said to
+myself could I bear that you should become a
+criminal?�</p>
+
+<p>“You said that?�</p>
+
+<p>The fingers of Sergius closed over the china
+figure, and did not unclose.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I almost resolved then to go to Vernon
+at once and to tell him what I suspected&mdash;what
+I really knew.�</p>
+
+<p>The clock struck eleven. Anthony heard it;
+Sergius did not hear it.</p>
+
+<p>“Then I went to sit with that wretched woman.
+Already I had resolved, as I believed, on the
+course to take. I had no thought for Vernon
+yet, only for you. It seemed to me that I did not
+care in the least to save him from death. I only
+cared to save you&mdash;my friend&mdash;from murder.
+But when the woman died I felt differently. My
+resolve was strengthened, my desire was just
+doubled. I had to save not only you, but also him.
+He was not ready to die.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span></p>
+<p>Anthony trembled with a passion of emotion.
+Sergius remained always perfectly calm, the china
+figure prisoned in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>“So&mdash;so I went to him, Sergius.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“I saw him. Almost as I entered he received
+your letter, saying that you forgave him, that you
+would call to-night after eight o'clock to tell him
+so, and to urge on his marriage with Olga. When
+he had read the letter&mdash;I interpreted it to him;
+and then I found out that he was a coward. His
+terror was abject&mdash;despicable; he implored my
+help; he started at every sound.�</p>
+
+<p>“To-night he'll sleep quietly, Anthony.�</p>
+
+<p>“To-night he has gone. Before morning he
+will be on the sea.�</p>
+
+<p>The sound of the wind came to them again,
+and Sergius understood why Anthony had said:
+“Rough at sea to-night.�</p>
+
+<p>Suddenly Sergius moved; he unclosed his fingers:
+the ruins of the china figure fell from them
+in a dust of blue and white upon the mantelpiece.</p>
+
+<p>“No&mdash;it's too late, Sergius. He went at
+eleven.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius stood quite still.</p>
+
+<p>“You came here to-night to keep me here till
+he had gone?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“That's why you&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He stopped.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span></p>
+<p>“That's why I came. That's why I broke my
+pledge. I thought wine&mdash;any weapon to keep
+you from this crime. And, Sergius, think. Vernon
+dead could never have restored Olga to the place
+she has lost. That, too, must have driven me to
+the right course, though I scarcely thought of it
+till now.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius said, as if in reply: “So you have understood
+me!�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Sergius. Friendship is something. Let
+us thank God, not even that he is safe, but that
+you&mdash;you are safe&mdash;and that Olga&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Hush! Has she gone with him?�</p>
+
+<p>“She will meet him. He has sworn to marry
+her.�</p>
+
+<p>The hand of Sergius moved to his left breast.
+Anthony's glowing eyes were fixed upon him.</p>
+
+<p>“Ah, yes, Sergius,� Anthony cried. “Put that
+cursed, cursed thing down, put it away. Now
+it can never wreck your life and my peace.�</p>
+
+<p>Sergius drew out the revolver slowly and carefully.
+Again the mist rose around him. But it
+was no longer white; it was scarlet.</p>
+
+<p>There was a report. Anthony fell, without a
+word, a cry.</p>
+
+<p>Then Sergius bent down, and listened to the
+silence of his friend's heart&mdash;the long silence of
+the man who intervened.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265"><br />[265]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266"><br /><br />[266]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267"><br /><br /><br />[267]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>AFTER TO-MORROW</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> his gilded cage, above the window-boxes that
+were full of white daisies, the canary chirped with
+a desultory vivacity. That was the only near
+sound that broke the silence in the drawing-room
+of No. 100 Mill Street, Knightsbridge, in which
+a man and a woman stood facing one another.
+Away, beyond his twittering voice, sang in the
+London streets the muffled voice of the season.
+The time was late afternoon, and rays of mellow
+light slanted into the pretty room, and touched its
+crowd of inanimate occupants with a radiance in
+which the motes danced merrily. The china faces
+of two goblins on the mantelpiece glowed with a
+grotesque meaning, and their yellow smiles seemed
+to call aloud on mirth; but the faces of the man
+and woman were pale, and their lips trembled, and
+did not smile.</p>
+
+<p>She was tall, dark, and passionate-looking, perhaps
+twenty-eight or thirty. He was a few years
+older, a man so steadfast in expression that silly
+people, who spring at exaggeration as saints spring
+at heaven, called him stern, and even said he looked
+forbidding&mdash;at balls.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span></p>
+<p>At last the song of the canary was broken upon
+by a voice. Sir Hugh Maine spoke, very quietly.
+“Why not?� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't think I can tell you,� Mrs. Glinn
+answered, with an obvious effort.</p>
+
+<p>“You prefer to refuse me without giving a
+reason?�</p>
+
+<p>“I have a right to,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't question it. You cannot expect me to
+say more than that.�</p>
+
+<p>He took up his hat, which lay on a chair, and
+smoothed it mechanically with his coat-sleeve.</p>
+
+<p>The action seemed to pierce her like a knife,
+for she started, and half-extended her hand.
+“Don't!� she exclaimed. “At least, wait one
+moment. So you belong to the second class of
+men.�</p>
+
+<p>“What do you mean?�</p>
+
+<p>“Men are divided into two classes&mdash;those who
+refuse to be refused, and those who accept. But
+don't be too&mdash;too swift in your acceptance. After
+all, a refusal is not exactly a bank-note.�</p>
+
+<p>She tried to smile.</p>
+
+<p>“But I am exactly a beggar,� he answered, still
+keeping the hat in his hand. “And if you have
+nothing to give me, I may as well go.�</p>
+
+<p>“And spend the rest of your life in sweeping the
+old crossing?�</p>
+
+<p>“And spend the rest of my life as I can,� he
+said. “That need not concern you.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span></p>
+<p>“A woman must be all to a man, or nothing?�</p>
+
+<p>“You must be all to me, or nothing.�</p>
+
+<p>She sat down in an arm-chair in that part of
+the room that was in shadow. She always sat
+instinctively in shadow when she wanted to think.</p>
+
+<p>“Well?� Sir Hugh said. “What are you
+thinking?�</p>
+
+<p>She glanced up at him. “That you don't look
+much like a beggar,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>“It is possible to feel tattered in a frock-coat
+and patent-leather boots,� he answered. “Good-bye.
+I am going back to my crossing.� And he
+moved towards the door.</p>
+
+<p>“No, stop!� she exclaimed. “Before you go,
+tell me one thing.�</p>
+
+<p>“What is it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Will you ever ask me to marry you again?�</p>
+
+<p>He looked hard into her eyes. “I shall always
+want to, but I shall never do it,� he said slowly.</p>
+
+<p>“I am glad you have told me that. We women
+depend so much on a repetition of the offence,
+when we blame a man for saying he loves us, and
+ask him not to do it again. If you really mean
+only to propose once, I must reconsider my
+position.�</p>
+
+<p>She was laughing, but the tears stood in her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Why do you want to make this moment a
+farcical one?� he asked rather bitterly.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Hugh!� she answered, “don't you see?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
+Because it is really&mdash;really so tragic. I only try
+to do for this moment what we all try to do for
+life.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then you love me?� he said, moving a step
+forward.</p>
+
+<p>“I never denied that,� she replied. “I might
+as well deny that I am a woman.�</p>
+
+<p>He held out his arms. “Eve&mdash;then I shall
+never go back to the crossing.�</p>
+
+<p>But she drew back. “Go&mdash;go there till to-morrow!
+To-morrow afternoon I will see you;
+and if you love me after that&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?�</p>
+
+<p>She turned away and pressed the bell. “Good-bye,�
+she said. Her voice sounded strange to him.</p>
+
+<p>He came nearer, and touched her hand; but she
+drew it away.</p>
+
+<p>“You may kiss me,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Eve!�</p>
+
+<p>“After to-morrow.�</p>
+
+<p>The footman came in answer to the bell. Mrs
+Glinn did not turn round. “I only rang for you
+to open the door for Sir Hugh,� she said. “Good-bye
+then, Sir Hugh. Come at five.�</p>
+
+<p>“I will,� he answered, wondering.</p>
+
+<p>When he had gone, Mrs Glinn sat down in a
+chair and took up a French novel. It was by
+Gyp. She tried to read it, with tears running over
+her cheeks. But at last she laid it down.</p>
+
+<p>“After to-morrow,� she murmured. “Ah,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
+why&mdash;why does a woman ever love twice?�
+And then she sobbed.</p>
+
+<p>But the canary sang, and the motes danced merrily
+in the sunbeams. And on the table where she
+had put it down lay “<i>Le Mariage de Chiffon</i>.�</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>That evening, when Sir Hugh Maine came back
+to his rooms in Jermyn Street after dining out, he
+found a large man sprawling in one of his saddle-back
+chairs, puffing vigorously at a pipe that
+looked worn with long and faithful service. The
+man took the pipe out of his mouth and sprang
+up.</p>
+
+<p>“Hullo, Maine!� he cried. “D'you recognise
+the tobacco and me?�</p>
+
+<p>Hugh grasped his hand warmly. “Rather,� he
+said. “Neither is changed. At least&mdash;h'm&mdash;I
+think you both seem a bit stronger even than usual.
+Who would have thought of seeing you, Manning?
+I did not know you were in Europe.�</p>
+
+<p>“I came from Asia. I thought I should like to
+hear Melba before the end of the season. And it
+was getting sultry out there. So here I am.�</p>
+
+<p>“And were those your only reasons?�</p>
+
+<p>“Give me a brandy-and-soda,� said the other.</p>
+
+<p>Maine did as he was bid, lit a cigar, and sat down,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+stretching out his long legs. The other man took
+a pull at his glass, and spoke again.</p>
+
+<p>“I am very fond of music,� he said; “and
+Melba sings very well.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!�</p>
+
+<p>“Look here, Maine,� Manning broke out suddenly,
+“you are right&mdash;I had another reason.
+Kipling says that those who have heard the East
+a-calling never heed any other voice. He's wrong
+though. The West has been calling me, or, at
+least, a voice in the West, and I have resisted it
+for a deuce of a time. But at last it became
+imperative.�</p>
+
+<p>“A woman's voice, I suppose?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“Tell me what is its <i>timbre</i>, if you care to.�</p>
+
+<p>“I will. You're an old friend, and I can talk to
+you. But you tell me one thing first: Is a man
+really a fool to marry a woman with a past?�</p>
+
+<p>“You are going to?�</p>
+
+<p>“I have tried not to. I have been trying not to
+for three years. Listen! When I was travelling
+in Japan I met her. She was with an American
+called Glinn.�</p>
+
+<p>“What?�</p>
+
+<p>“You knew him?�</p>
+
+<p>“No! It's all right. I was surprised, because
+at the moment I was thinking of that very name.�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh! Well, she passed as Mrs Glinn; but,
+somehow, it got out that she was something else.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span>
+The usual story, you know. People fought shy of
+her; but I don't think she cared much. Glinn was
+devoted to her, and she loved him, and was as true
+to him as any wife could have been. Then the
+tragedy came.�</p>
+
+<p>“What was it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Glinn died suddenly in Tokio, of typhoid.
+She nursed him to the end. And when the end
+came her situation was awful, so lonely and deserted.
+There wasn't a woman in the hotel who
+would be her friend; so I tried to come to the
+rescue, arranged her affairs, saw about the funeral,
+and did what I could. She was well off; Glinn
+left her nearly all his money. He would have
+married her, only he had a wife alive somewhere.�</p>
+
+<p>“And you fell in love with her, of course?�</p>
+
+<p>“That was the sort of thing. If you knew her
+you would not wonder at it. She was not a bad
+woman. Glinn had been the only one. She loved
+him too much; that was all. She came to Europe,
+and lived in Paris for a time, keeping the name of
+Mrs Glinn. I used to see her sometimes, but I
+never said anything. You see, there was her past.
+In fact, I have been fighting against her for three
+years. I went to India to get cured; but it was
+no good. And now, here I am.�</p>
+
+<p>“And she is in Paris?�</p>
+
+<p>“No, in London at present; but I didn't know
+her address till to-day. I think she had her doubts
+of me, and meant to give me the slip.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span></p>
+<p>“How did you find it out?�</p>
+
+<p>“Quite by chance. I was walking in Mill
+Street, Knightsbridge, and saw her pass in a
+victoria.�</p>
+
+<p>Maine got up suddenly, and went over to the
+spirit-stand. “In Mill Street?� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. The carriage stopped at No. 100. She
+went in. A footman came out and carried in her
+rug. <i>Ergo</i>, she lives there.�</p>
+
+<p>“How hot it is!� said Maine in a hard voice.
+He threw up one of the windows and leaned out.
+He felt as if he were choking. A little way down
+the street a half-tipsy guardsman was reeling along,
+singing his own private version of “Tommy
+Atkins.� He narrowly avoided a lamp-post by an
+abrupt lurch which took him into the gutter. Maine
+heard some one laugh. It was himself.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, old chap,� said Manning, who had come
+up behind him, “what would you advise me to do?
+I'm in a fix. I'm in love with Eve&mdash;that's her
+name; I can't live without her happily, and yet I
+hate to marry a woman with a&mdash;well, you know
+how it is.�</p>
+
+<p>Maine drew himself back into the room and faced
+round. “Does she love you?� he asked; and
+there was a curious change in his manner towards
+his friend.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know that she does,� Manning said,
+rather uncomfortably. “But that would come right.
+She would marry me, naturally.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“Well, I mean the position. Lady Herbert
+Manning could go where Mrs Glinn could not,
+and all that sort of thing.�</p>
+
+<p>“The only question is whether you can bring
+yourself to ask her?�</p>
+
+<p>“My dear chap, you don't put it too pleasantly.�</p>
+
+<p>“It's the fact, though.�</p>
+
+<p>Lord Herbert hesitated. Then he said dubiously,
+“I suppose so.�</p>
+
+<p>Maine lit another cigar and sat down again. His
+face was very white. “You're rather conventional,
+Manning,� he said presently.</p>
+
+<p>“Conventional! Why?�</p>
+
+<p>“You think her&mdash;this Mrs Glinn&mdash;a good
+woman. Isn't that enough for you?�</p>
+
+<p>“But, besides Eve and myself, there is a third
+person in the situation.�</p>
+
+<p>“How on earth did you find out that?� exclaimed
+Maine.</p>
+
+<p>The other looked surprised. “How did I find
+out? I don't understand you.�</p>
+
+<p>Maine recollected himself. He had made the
+common mistake of fancying another might know
+a thing because he knew it.</p>
+
+<p>“Who is this third person?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Society.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! I said you were conventional.�</p>
+
+<p>“Every sensible man and woman is.�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know that I agree. But the third per<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span>son
+does certainly complicate the situation. What
+are you going to do then?�</p>
+
+<p>Lord Herbert put down his pipe. It was not
+smoked out. “That's what I want to know,�
+he answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Of course, there's the one way&mdash;of being
+unconventional. Then, there's the way of being
+conventional but unhappy. Is there any alternative?�</p>
+
+<p>Lord Herbert hesitated obviously, but at length
+he said: “There is, of course; but Mrs Glinn is a
+curious sort of woman. I don't quite know&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He paused, looking at his friend. Maine's face
+was drawn and fierce.</p>
+
+<p>“What's the row?� Lord Herbert asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing; only I shouldn't advise you to try
+the alternative. That's all.�</p>
+
+<p>“Maine, what do you mean?�</p>
+
+<p>“Just this,� replied the other. “That I know
+Mrs Glinn, that I agree with you about her
+character&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“You know her? That's odd!�</p>
+
+<p>“I have known her for a year.�</p>
+
+<p>They looked each other in the eyes while a
+minute passed. Then Lord Herbert said slowly,
+“I understand.�</p>
+
+<p>“What?�</p>
+
+<p>“That I have come to the wrong man for
+advice.�</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence, broken only by the ticking<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+of a clock and the uneasy movements of Maine's
+fox-terrier, which was lying before the empty grate
+and dreaming of departed fires.</p>
+
+<p>At last Maine said: “To-day I asked Mrs Glinn
+to marry me.�</p>
+
+<p>The other started perceptibly. “Knowing what
+I have told you?� he asked.</p>
+
+<p>“Not knowing it.�</p>
+
+<p>“What&mdash;what did she say?�</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing. I am to see her to-morrow.�</p>
+
+<p>Lord Herbert glanced at him furtively. “I
+suppose you will not go&mdash;now?� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Manning, I shall,� Maine answered.</p>
+
+<p>“Well,� the other man continued, looking at
+his watch and yawning, “I must be going. It's
+late. Glad to have seen you, Maine. I am to
+be found at 80 St James's Place. Thanks; yes I
+will have my coat on. My pipe&mdash;oh! here it is.
+Good-night.�</p>
+
+<p>The door closed, and Maine was left alone.</p>
+
+<p>“Will she tell me to-morrow, or will she be
+silent?� he said to himself. “That depends on
+one thing: Has love of truth the largest half of
+her heart, or love of me?�</p>
+
+<p>He sighed&mdash;at the conventionality of the world,
+perhaps.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>“I am not at home to any one except Sir Hugh
+Maine,� Mrs Glinn said to the footman. “You
+understand?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, ma'am.�</p>
+
+<p>He went out softly and closed the door.</p>
+
+<p>The English summer had gone back upon its
+steps that afternoon, and remembered the duty it
+owed to its old-time reputation. The canary, a
+puffed-out ball of ragged-looking feathers in its
+cage, seemed listening with a depressed attention
+to the beat of the cold rain against the window.
+The daisies, in their boxes, dripped and nodded in
+the wind. There was a darkness in the pretty
+room, and the smile of the china goblins was no
+longer yellow. Like many people who are not
+made of china, they depended upon adventitious
+circumstances for much of their outward show.
+When they were not gilded there was a good deal
+of the pill apparent in their nature.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Glinn was trying not to be restless. She
+was very pale, and her dark eyes gleamed with an
+almost tragic fire; but she sat down firmly on the
+white sofa, and read Gyp, as Carmen may have
+read her doom in the cards. One by one the
+pages were turned. One by one the epigrams
+were made the property of another mind. But
+through all the lightness and humour of the story<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
+there crept like a little snake a sentence that Gyp
+had not written:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Can I tell him?�</p>
+
+<p>And no answer ever came to that question.
+When the door-bell at last rang, Mrs Glinn
+laid down her novel carefully, and mechanically
+stood up. A change of attitude was necessary to
+her.</p>
+
+<p>Sir Hugh came in, and was followed by tea.
+They sat down by the tiny table, and discussed
+French literature. Flaubert and Daudet go as
+well with tea as Fielding and Smollett go with
+supper.</p>
+
+<p>But, when the cups were put down, Maine
+drove the French authors in a pack out of the
+conversation.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not come here to say what I can say to
+every woman I meet who understands French,�
+he remarked.</p>
+
+<p>And then Mrs Glinn was fully face to face with
+her particular guardian devil.</p>
+
+<p>“No?� she said.</p>
+
+<p>She did not try to postpone the moment she
+dreaded. For she had a strong man to deal with,
+and, being a strong woman at heart, she generally
+held out her hand to the inevitable.</p>
+
+<p>“You have been thinking?� Maine went on.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. What a sad occupation that is sometimes&mdash;like
+knitting, or listening to church-bells at
+night!�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Eve, let us be serious.�</p>
+
+<p>“God knows I am,� she answered. “But
+modern gravity is dressed in flippancy. No feeling
+must go quite naked.�</p>
+
+<p>“Don't talk like that,� he said. “As there is
+a nudity in art that may be beautiful, so there is a
+nudity in expression, in words, that may be beautiful.
+Eve, I have come to hear you tell me something.
+You know that.� He glanced into her
+face with an anxiety that she did not fully understand.
+Then he said: “Tell it me.�</p>
+
+<p>“There is&mdash;is so much to tell,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“He does not understand,� she thought.</p>
+
+<p>He thought, “She does not understand.�</p>
+
+<p>“And I am not good at telling stories.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then tell me the truth.�</p>
+
+<p>She tried to smile, but she was trembling. “Of
+course. Why should I not?� She hesitated, and
+then added, with a forced attempt at petulance,
+“But there is nothing so awkward as giving people
+more than they expect. Is there?�</p>
+
+<p>He understood her question, despite its apparent
+inconsequence, and his heart quickened its beating:
+“Give me everything.�</p>
+
+<p>“I suppose I should be doing that if I gave you
+myself,� she said nervously.</p>
+
+<p>“You know best,� he answered; and for a
+moment she was puzzled by not catching the
+affirmative for which she had angled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Do you want me very, very much?� she
+asked.</p>
+
+<p>“So much that, as I told you yesterday, I could
+not ask for you twice. Don't you understand?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes. I could not marry a man who had
+bothered me to be his wife. One might as well
+be scolded into virtue. You want me, then,
+Hugh, and I want you. But&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>Again she stopped, with sentences fluttering, as
+it seemed, on the very edges of her lips. Her
+heart was at such fearful odds with her conscience,
+that she felt as if he must hear the clashing of the
+swords. And he did hear it. He would fain have
+cheered on both the combatants. Which did he
+wish should be the conqueror? He hardly knew.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“It is always so difficult to finish a sentence that
+begins with ‘but,’� she began; and for the first
+time her voice sounded tremulous. “When two
+people want each other very much, there is always
+something that ought to keep them apart&mdash;at
+least, I think so. God must love solitude; it is
+His gift to so many.� There were tears in her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>“Why should we keep apart, Eve?�</p>
+
+<p>“Because we should be too happy together, I
+suppose.�</p>
+
+<p>He leaned suddenly forward and took both her
+hands in his. “How cold you are!� he said,
+startled.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The words seemed to brace her like a sea-breeze.</p>
+
+<p>“Hugh,� she said, “I wish to tell you something.
+There is a ‘but’ in the sentence of my
+life.�</p>
+
+<p>He drew her closer to him, with a strange impulse
+to be nearer the soul that was about to prove
+itself as noble as he desired. But that very act
+prevented the fulfilment of his wish. The touch
+of his hands, the eagerness of his eyes, gave the
+victory to her heart. She shut the lips that were
+speaking, and he kissed them. Kisses act as an
+opiate on a woman's conscience. Only when Eve
+felt his lips on hers did she know her own weakness.
+Sir Hugh having kissed her, waited for the
+telling of the secret. At that moment he might as
+well have sat down and waited for the millennium.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it?� he said at last.</p>
+
+<p>“Nothing,� she answered, “nothing.� She
+spoke the word with a hard intonation.</p>
+
+<p>Hugh held her close in his arms, with a sort of
+strange idea that to do so would crush his disappointment.
+She was proving her love by her
+silence. Why, then, did he wish that she should
+speak? At last she said, in a low voice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“There is one thing you ought to know. If I
+marry you, I marry you a beggar. I shall lose my
+fortune. I am not obliged to lose it, but I mean
+to give it up. Don't ask me why.�</p>
+
+<p>He had no need to. He waited, but she was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
+silent. So that was all. He kissed her again,
+loosened his arms from about her and stood up.</p>
+
+<p>“I have enough for both,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>He did not look at her, and she could not look
+at him.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you going?� she said.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes; but I will call this evening.�</p>
+
+<p>He was at the door, and had half-opened it
+when he turned back, moved by a passionate
+impulse.</p>
+
+<p>“Eve!� he cried, and his eyes seemed asking
+her for something.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?� she said, looking away.</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence. Then he said “Good-bye!�
+The door closed upon him.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Glinn stood for a moment where he had left
+her. In her mind she was counting the seconds
+that must elapse before he could reach the street.
+If she could be untrue to herself till then, she could
+be untrue to herself for ever. Would he walk
+down the stairs slowly or fast? She wanted to be
+a false woman so much, so very much, that she
+clenched her hands together. The action seemed
+as if it might help her to keep on doing wrong.
+But suddenly she unclasped her hands, darted across
+the room to the door, and opened it. She listened,
+and heard Hugh's footsteps in the hall. He picked
+up his umbrella, and unfolded it to be ready for
+the rain. The <i>frou-frou</i> of the silk seemed to stir
+her to action.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Hugh!� she cried in a broken voice.</p>
+
+<p>He turned in the hall, and looked up.</p>
+
+<p>“Come back,� she said.</p>
+
+<p>He came up the stairs three steps at a time.</p>
+
+<p>“Hugh,� she said, leaning heavily on the balustrade,
+and looking away, “I have a secret to tell
+you. I have tried to be wicked to-day, but somehow
+I can't. Listen to the truth.�</p>
+
+<p>“I need not,� he answered. “I know it
+already.�</p>
+
+<p>Then she looked at him, and drew in her breath:
+“You know it?�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes.�</p>
+
+<p>“How you must love me!�</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>There was a ring at the hall door. The footman
+opened it, held a short parley with some one who
+was invisible, shut the door, and came upstairs
+with a card.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Glinn took it, and read, “Lord Herbert
+Manning.�</p>
+
+<p>He had decided to be unconventional too late.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286"><br />[286]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287"><br /><br />[287]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>A SILENT GUARDIAN</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> door of the long, dreary room, with its
+mahogany chairs, its littered table, its motley crew
+of pale, silent people, opened noiselessly. A
+dreary, lean footman appeared in the aperture,
+bowing towards a corner where, in a recess near a
+forlorn, lofty window, sat a tall, athletic-looking
+man of about forty-five years of age, with a strong
+yet refined face, clean shaven, and short, crisp,
+dark hair. The tall man rose immediately, laying
+down an old number of <i>Punch</i>, and made his
+way out, watched rather wolfishly by the other
+occupants of the room. The door closed upon
+him, and there was a slight rustle and a hiss of
+whispering.</p>
+
+<p>Two well-dressed women leaned to one another,
+the feathers in their hats almost mingling as they
+murmured: “Not much the matter with him, I
+should fancy.�</p>
+
+<p>“He looks as strong as a horse; but modern
+men are always imagining themselves ill. He has
+lived too much, probably.�</p>
+
+<p>They laughed in a suppressed ripple.</p>
+
+<p>At the end of the room near the door, under the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+big picture of a grave man in a frock-coat, holding
+a double eye-glass tentatively in his right hand as
+if to emphasise an argument&mdash;a young girl bent
+towards her father, who said to her in a low voice:</p>
+
+<p>“That man who has just left the room is Brune,
+the great sculptor.�</p>
+
+<p>“Is he ill?� the girl asked.</p>
+
+<p>“It seems so, since he is here.�</p>
+
+<p>Then a silence fell again, broken only by the
+rustle of turned pages and the occasional uneasy
+shifting of feet.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Meanwhile, in a small room across the hall, by
+a window through which the autumn sun streamed
+with a tepid brightness, Reginald Brune lay on a
+narrow sofa. His coat and waistcoat were thrown
+open; his chest was bared. Gerard Fane, the
+great discoverer of hidden diseases, raised himself
+from a bent posture, and spoke some words in a
+clear, even voice.</p>
+
+<p>Brune lifted himself half up on his elbow, and
+began mechanically to button the collar of his
+shirt. His long fingers did not tremble, though his
+face was very pale.</p>
+
+<p>He fastened the collar, arranged his loose tie,
+and then sat up slowly.</p>
+
+<p>A boy, clanking two shining milk-cans, passed
+along the pavement, whistling a music-hall song.
+The shrill melody died down the street, and Brune
+listened to it until there was a silence. Then he<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>
+looked up at the man opposite to him, and said,
+as one dully protesting, without feeling, without
+excitement:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“But, doctor, I was only married three weeks
+ago.�</p>
+
+<p>Gerard Fane gave a short upward jerk of the
+head, and said nothing. His face was calmly
+grave. His glittering brown eyes were fastened
+on his patient. His hands were loosely folded
+together.</p>
+
+<p>Brune repeated, in a sightly raised voice:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I was married three weeks ago. It cannot be
+true.�</p>
+
+<p>“I am here to tell the truth,� the other replied.</p>
+
+<p>“But it is so&mdash;so ironic. To allow me to start
+a new life&mdash;a beautiful life&mdash;just as the night is
+coming. Why, it is diabolical; it is not just; the
+cruelty of it is fiendish.�</p>
+
+<p>A spot of gleaming red stained each of the
+speaker's thin cheeks. He clenched his hands
+together, riveting his gaze on the doctor, as he
+went on:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Can't you see what I mean? I had no idea&mdash;I
+had not the faintest suspicion of what you say.
+And I have had a very hard struggle. I have been
+poor and quite friendless. I have had to fight, and
+I have lost much of the good in my nature by
+fighting, as we often do. But at last I have won the
+battle, and I have won more. I have won good<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>ness
+to give me back some of my illusions. I had
+begun to trust life again. I had&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He stopped abruptly. Then he said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Doctor, are you married?�</p>
+
+<p>“No,� the other answered; and there was a
+note of pity in his voice.</p>
+
+<p>“Then you can't understand what your verdict
+means to me. Is it irrevocable?�</p>
+
+<p>Gerard Fane hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“I wish I could hope not; but&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“But&mdash;?�</p>
+
+<p>“It is.�</p>
+
+<p>Brune stood up. His face was quite calm now
+and his voice, when he spoke again, was firm and
+vibrating.</p>
+
+<p>“I have some work that I should wish to finish.
+How long can you give me?�</p>
+
+<p>“Three months.�</p>
+
+<p>“One will do if my strength keeps up at all.
+Good-bye.�</p>
+
+<p>There was a thin chink of coins grating one
+against the other. The specialist said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“I will call on you to-morrow, between four and
+five. I have more directions to give you. To-day
+my time is so much taken up. Good-bye.�</p>
+
+<p>The door closed.</p>
+
+<p>In the waiting-room, a moment later, Brune was
+gathering up his coat and hat.</p>
+
+<p>The two ladies eyed him curiously as he took
+them and passed out.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span></p>
+<p>“He does look a little pale, after all,� whispered
+one of them. A moment later he was in the
+street.</p>
+
+<p>From the window of his consulting-room, Gerard
+Fane watched the tall figure striding down the
+pavement.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sorry that man is going to die,� he said
+to himself.</p>
+
+<p>And then he turned gravely to greet a new
+patient.</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Gerard Fane's victoria drew up at the iron gate
+of No. 5 Ilbury Road, Kensington, at a quarter
+past four the following afternoon. A narrow strip
+of garden divided the sculptor's big red house from
+the road. Ornamental ironwork on a brick foundation
+closed it in. The great studio, with its huge
+windows and its fluted pillars, was built out at
+one end. The failing sunlight glittered on its
+glass, and the dingy sparrows perched upon the
+roof to catch the parting radiance as the twilight
+fell. The doctor glanced round him and thought,
+“How hard this man must have worked! In
+London this is a little palace.�</p>
+
+<p>“Will you come into the studio, sir, please?�
+said the footman in answer to his summons. “Mr
+Brune is there at present.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Surely he cannot be working,� thought the
+doctor, as he followed the man down a glass-covered
+paved passage, and through a high doorway
+across which a heavy curtain fell. “If so, he must
+possess resolution almost more than mortal.�</p>
+
+<p>He passed beyond the curtain, and looked round
+him curiously.</p>
+
+<p>The studio was only dimly lit now, for daylight
+was fast fading. On a great open hearth, with
+dogs, a log-fire was burning; and beside it, on an
+old-fashioned oaken settle, sat a woman in a loose
+cream-coloured tea-gown. She was half turning
+round to speak to Reginald Brune, who stood a
+little to her left, clad in a long blouse, fastened
+round his waist with a band. He had evidently
+recently finished working, for his hands still bore
+evident traces of labour, and in front of him, on a
+raised platform, stood a statue that was not far
+from completion. The doctor's eyes were attracted
+from the woman by the log-fire, from his patient,
+by the lifeless, white, nude figure that seemed to
+press forward out of the gathering gloom. The
+sculptor and his wife had not heard him announced,
+apparently, for they continued conversing in low
+tones, and he paused in the doorway, strangely
+fascinated&mdash;he could scarcely tell why&mdash;by the
+marble creation of a dying man.</p>
+
+<p>The statue, which was life size, represented the
+figure of a beautiful, grave youth, standing with
+one foot advanced, as if on the point of stepping<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
+forward. His muscular arms hung loosely; his
+head was slightly turned aside as in the attitude
+of one who listens for a repetition of some vague
+sound heard at a distance. His whole pose suggested
+an alert, yet restrained, watchfulness. The
+triumph of the sculptor lay in the extraordinary
+suggestion of life he had conveyed into the marble.
+His creature lived as many mollusc men never live.
+Its muscles seemed tense, its body quivering with
+eagerness to accomplish&mdash;what? To attack, to
+repel, to protect, to perform some deed demanding
+manfulness, energy, free, fearless strength.</p>
+
+<p>“That marble thing could slay if necessary,�
+thought Gerard Fane, with a thrill of the nerves
+all through him that startled him, and recalled him
+to himself.</p>
+
+<p>He stepped forward to the hearth quietly, and
+Brune turned and took him by the hand.</p>
+
+<p>“I did not hear you,� the sculptor said. “The
+man must have opened the door very gently.
+Sydney, this is Dr Gerard Fane, who is kindly
+looking after me.�</p>
+
+<p>The woman by the fire had risen, and stood in
+the firelight and the twilight, which seemed to join
+hands just where she was. She greeted the specialist
+in a girl's young voice, and he glanced at her with
+the furtive thought, “Does she know yet?�</p>
+
+<p>She looked twenty-two, not more.</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were dark grey, and her hair was
+bronze. Her figure was thin almost to emaciation;<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+but health glowed in her smooth cheeks, and spoke
+in her swift movements and easy gestures. Her
+expression was responsive and devouringly eager.
+Life ran in her veins with turbulence, never with
+calm. Her mouth was pathetic and sensitive, but
+there was an odd suggestion of almost boyish
+humour in her smile.</p>
+
+<p>Before she smiled, Fane thought, “She knows.�</p>
+
+<p>Afterwards, “She cannot know.�</p>
+
+<p>“Have you a few moments to spare?� Brune
+asked him. “Will you have tea with us?�</p>
+
+<p>Fane looked at Mrs Brune and assented. He
+felt a strange interest in this man and this woman.
+The tragedy of their situation appealed to him,
+although he lived in a measure by foretelling
+tragedies. Mrs Brune touched an electric bell let
+into the oak-panelled wall, and her husband drew
+a big chair forward to the hearth.</p>
+
+<p>As he was about to sit down in it, Gerard Fane's
+eyes were again irresistibly drawn towards the
+statue; and a curious fancy, born, doubtless, of the
+twilight that invents spectres and of the firelight
+that evokes imaginations, came to him, and made
+him for a moment hold his breath.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him that the white face menaced
+him, that the white body had a soul, and that the
+soul cried out against him.</p>
+
+<p>His hand trembled on the back of the chair.
+Then he laughed to himself at the absurd fancy,
+and sat down.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Your husband has been working?� he said to
+Mrs Brune.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, all the day. I could not tempt him out
+for even five minutes. But then, he has had a
+holiday, as he says, although it was only a fortnight.
+That was not very long for&mdash;for a honeymoon.�</p>
+
+<p>As she said the last sentence she blushed a little,
+and shot a swift, half-tender, half-reproachful glance
+at her husband. But he did not meet it; he only
+looked into the fire, while his brows slightly
+contracted.</p>
+
+<p>“I think Art owns more than half his soul,� the
+girl said, with the flash of a smile. “He only
+gives to me the fortnights and to Art the years.�</p>
+
+<p>There was a vague jealousy in her voice; but
+then the footman brought in tea, and she poured it
+out, talking gaily.</p>
+
+<p>From her conversation, Fane gathered that she
+had no idea of her husband's condition. With a
+curious and fascinating naturalness she spoke of
+her marriage, of her intentions for the long future.</p>
+
+<p>“If Reginald is really seedy, Dr Fane,� she
+said, “get him well quickly, that he may complete
+his commissions. Because, you know, he has
+promised, when they are finished, to take me to
+Italy, and to Greece, to the country of Phidias,
+whose mantle has fallen upon my husband.�</p>
+
+<p>“Do not force Dr Fane into untruth,� said
+Brune, with an attempt at a smile.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span></p>
+<p>“And is that statue a commission?� Fane
+asked, indicating the marble figure, that seemed to
+watch them and to listen.</p>
+
+<p>“No; that is an imaginative work on which I
+have long been engaged. I call it, ‘A Silent
+Guardian.’�</p>
+
+<p>“It is very beautiful,� the doctor said. “What
+is your idea exactly? What is the figure guarding?�</p>
+
+<p>Brune and his wife glanced at one another&mdash;he
+gravely, she with a confident smile.</p>
+
+<p>Then he said, “I leave that to the imagination.�</p>
+
+<p>Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said
+slowly, “You have wrought it so finely that in
+this light my nerves tell me it is alive.�</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Brune looked triumphant.</p>
+
+<p>“All the world would feel so if they could see
+it,� she said; “but it is not to be exhibited. That
+is our fancy&mdash;his and mine. And now I will
+leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him
+of his ills, Dr Fane, won't you?�</p>
+
+<p>She vanished through the door at the end of
+the studio. The two men stood together by the
+hearth.</p>
+
+<p>“She does not know?� Fane asked.</p>
+
+<p>The other leaned his head upon his hand, which
+was pressed against the oak mantelpiece.</p>
+
+<p>“I am too cowardly to tell her,� he said in
+a choked voice. “You must.�</p>
+
+<p>“And when?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span></p>
+<p>“To-day.�</p>
+
+<p>There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional
+manner, Fane gave some directions, and
+wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into
+the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Shall I tell her now?� he asked gently.</p>
+
+<p>Brune nodded without speaking. His face
+looked drawn and contorted as he moved towards
+the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and
+the effort to remain calm put a strain upon him
+that was terrible.</p>
+
+<p>Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment&mdash;alone
+with the statue whose personality, it seemed
+to him, pervaded the great studio. In its attitude
+there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and
+blind eyes a resolution of intention, that took possession
+of his soul. He told himself that it was
+lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble; that
+it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no
+soul to burn with impulse or with agony; that its
+feet could never walk, its hands never seize or
+slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace.
+Then he looked at it again, and he shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>“I am over-working,� he said to himself; “my
+nerves are beginning to play me tricks. I must be
+careful.�</p>
+
+<p>And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the
+marble that could never feel to the man and
+woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his
+relation towards them.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span></p>
+<p>A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy
+with strangers. To the sculptor it was as if Fane
+held the keys of the gates of life and death for
+him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the
+consulting-room, the doctor had decided, almost of
+his own volition, that death should cut short a life
+of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it
+seemed as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought
+about, a tragedy that appealed to his imagination
+with peculiar force. His position towards this
+curiously interesting girl was strange. He had
+seen her for a quarter of an hour only, and now
+it was his mission to cause her the most weary
+pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The
+opening of the studio door startled him, and his
+heart, that usually beat so calmly, throbbed almost
+with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.</p>
+
+<p>“What is it?� she asked, facing him, and looking
+him full in the eyes with a violence of interrogation
+that was positively startling. “What is it
+you have to tell me? Reginald says you have
+ordered him to keep quiet&mdash;that you wish me to
+help you in&mdash;in something. Is he ill? May he
+not finish his commissions?�</p>
+
+<p>“He is ill,� said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward
+frankness that surprised himself.</p>
+
+<p>She kept her eyes on his face.</p>
+
+<p>“Very ill?�</p>
+
+<p>“Sit down,� the doctor said, taking her hands
+and gently putting her into a chair.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span></p>
+<p>With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women,
+she heard in those two words the whole truth. Her
+head drooped forward. She put out her hands as
+if to implore Fane's silence.</p>
+
+<p>“Don't speak,� she murmured. “Don't say
+it; I know.�</p>
+
+<p>He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue
+that made a silent third in their sad conference.
+How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy
+listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its
+expressionless eyes met his, and was there not a
+light in them? He knew there was not, yet he
+caught himself saying mentally:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“What does he think of this?� and wondering
+about the workings of a soul that did not, could
+not, exist.</p>
+
+<p>Presently the girl moved slightly, and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“He only knew this for certain yesterday?�</p>
+
+<p>“Only yesterday.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,�&mdash;she
+pointed towards the statue&mdash;“when he
+began that.�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't understand,� Fane said. “What can
+that marble have to do with his health or illness?�</p>
+
+<p>“When we first began to love each other,� she
+said, “he began to work on that. It was to be
+his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He
+told me he would put all his soul into it, and that
+sometimes he fancied, if he died before me, his
+soul would really enter into that statue and watch<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+over and guard me. ‘A Silent Guardian’ he has
+always called it. He must have known.�</p>
+
+<p>“I do not think so,� Fane said. “It was impossible
+he should.�</p>
+
+<p>The girl stood up. The tears were running
+over her face now. She turned towards the statue.</p>
+
+<p>“And he will be cold&mdash;cold like that!� she
+cried in a heart-breaking voice. “His eyes will
+be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice
+silent.�</p>
+
+<p>She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's
+arms. He held her a moment; and when he laid
+her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless
+though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon
+him. He remembered the previous day, the
+doomed man going down the street&mdash;his thought
+as he looked from the window of his consulting-room,
+“I am sorry that man is going to die.�</p>
+
+<p>Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered,
+forming the very words with his lips, “I am
+not sorry.�</p>
+
+<p>And the statue seemed to bend and to listen.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Six weeks passed away. Winter was deepening.
+Through the gloom and fog that shrouded London,
+Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable
+snow. The dying man had finished his work, and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
+a strange peace stole over him. Now, when he
+suffered, when his body shivered and tried to
+shrink away, as if it felt the cold hands of death
+laid upon it, he looked at the completed statue, and
+found he could still feel joy. There had always
+been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element,
+so fantastic that he had ever striven to
+conceal it, of romance; and in his mind, affected
+by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew
+the curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from
+him, entered into his creation. As he became
+feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed
+towered above him in more God-like strength, that
+light flowed into the sightless eyes, that the marble
+muscles were tense with vigour, that a soul was
+born in the thing which had been soulless. The
+theory, held by so many, of re-incarnation upon
+earth, took root in his mind, and he came to believe
+that, at the moment of death, he would pass
+into his work and live again, unconscious, it might
+be, of his former existence. He loved the statue
+as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom
+spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney.</p>
+
+<p>Only, he sometimes said to her, pointing to his
+work:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“You will never be alone, unprotected, while
+he is there.�</p>
+
+<p>And she tried to smile through the tears she
+could not always keep back.</p>
+
+<p>Gerard Fane was often with them. He sunk<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
+the specialist in the friend, and not a day passed
+without a visit from him to the great studio, in
+which the sculptor and his wife almost lived.</p>
+
+<p>He was unwearied in his attendance upon the
+sick man, unwavering in his attempts to soothe his
+sufferings. But, in reality, and almost against his
+will, the doctor numbered each breath his patient
+drew, noted with a furious eagerness each sign of
+failing vitality, bent his ear to catch every softest
+note in the prolonged <i>diminuendo</i> of this human
+symphony.</p>
+
+<p>When Fane saw Mrs Brune leaning over her
+husband, touching the damp brow with her cool,
+soft fingers, or the dry, parched lips with her soft,
+rosy lips, he turned away in a sick fury, and said
+to himself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“He is dying, he is dying. It will soon be
+over.�</p>
+
+<p>For with a desperate love had entered into him
+a desperate jealousy, and even while he ministered
+to Brune he hated him.</p>
+
+<p>And the statue, with blind eyes, observed the
+drama enacted by those three people, the two men
+and the woman, till the curtain fell and one of the
+actors made his final exit.</p>
+
+<p>Fane's nerves still played him tricks sometimes.
+He could not look at the statue without a shudder;
+and while Brune imaginatively read into the marble
+face love and protection, the doctor saw there
+menace and hatred. He came to feel almost<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span>
+jealous of the statue, because Sydney loved it and
+fell in with her husband's fancy that his life was
+fast ebbing into and vitalising the marble limbs,
+that his soul would watch her from the eyes that
+were now without expression and thought.</p>
+
+<p>When Fane entered the studio, he always involuntarily
+cast a glance at the white figure&mdash;at first,
+a glance of shuddering distaste, then, as he acknowledged
+to himself his love for Sydney, a glance of
+defiance, of challenge.</p>
+
+<p>One evening, after a day of many appointments
+and much mental stress and strain, he drove up
+to Ilbury Road, was admitted, and shown as usual
+into the studio. He found it empty. Only the
+statue greeted him silently in the soft lamplight,
+that scarcely accomplished more than the defining
+of the gloom.</p>
+
+<p>“My master is upstairs, sir,� said the footman.
+“I will tell him you are here.�</p>
+
+<p>In a moment Sydney entered, with a lagging
+step and pale cheeks. Without thinking of the
+usual polite form of greeting, she said to Fane,
+“He is much worse to-day. There is a change in
+him, a horrible change. Dr Fane, just now when
+I was talking to him it seemed to me that he was
+a long way off. I caught hold of his hands to reassure
+myself. I held them. I heard him speaking,
+but it was as if his words came from a distance.
+What does it mean? He is not&mdash;he is not&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>She looked the word he could not speak.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span></p>
+<p>Fane made her sit down.</p>
+
+<p>“I will go to him immediately,� he said. “I
+may be able to do something.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, go&mdash;do go!� she exclaimed with feverish
+excitement.</p>
+
+<p>Then suddenly she sprang up, and seizing his
+hands with hers, she said in a piercing voice: “You
+are a great doctor. Surely&mdash;surely you can keep
+this one life for me a little longer.�</p>
+
+<p>As they stood, Fane was facing the statue, which
+was at her back, and while she spoke his eyes were
+drawn from the woman he loved to the marble
+thing he senselessly hated. It struck him that a
+ghastly change had stolen over it. A sudden flicker
+of absolute life surely infused it, quickened it even
+while she spoke, stole through the limbs one by
+one, welled up to the eyes as light pierces from a
+depth, flowed through all the marble. A pulse
+beat in the dead, cold heart. A mind rippled into
+the rigid, watching face. There was no absolute
+movement, and yet there was the sense of stir.
+Fane, absorbed in horror, seemed to watch an act
+of creation, to see life poured from some invisible
+and unknown source into the bodily chamber that
+had been void and dark.</p>
+
+<p>Motionless he saw the statue dead; motionless
+he saw the statue live.</p>
+
+<p>He drew his hands from Sydney's. He was too
+powerfully impressed to speak, but she looked up
+into his face, turned, and followed his eyes.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span></p>
+<p>She, too, observed the change, for her lips parted,
+and a wild amazement shone in her eyes. Then she
+touched Fane's arm, and whispered, rather in awe
+than in horror, “Go&mdash;go to him. See if anything
+has happened. I will stay and watch here.�</p>
+
+<p>With a hushed tread Fane left the studio, passed
+through the hall, ascended the stairs to the sculptor's
+room. Outside the door he hesitated for a moment.
+He was trembling. He heard a clock ticking within.
+It sounded very loud, like a hammer beating in
+his ears. He pushed the door open at length, and
+entered. Brune's tall figure was sitting in an armchair,
+bowed over a table on which lay an open
+Art magazine.</p>
+
+<p>His head lay hidden on his arms, which were
+crossed.</p>
+
+<p>Fane raised the face and turned it up towards
+him.</p>
+
+<p>It was the face of a dead man.</p>
+
+<p>He looked at it, and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>Then he stole down again to the studio, where
+Sydney was still standing.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?� she said interrogatively, as he entered.</p>
+
+<p>“He is dead,� Fane answered.</p>
+
+<p>She only bowed her head, as if in assent. She
+stood a moment, then she turned her tearless eyes
+to him, and said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Why could not you save him?�</p>
+
+<p>“Because I am human,� Fane answered.</p>
+
+<p>“And we did not say good-bye,� she said.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span></p>
+<p>Fane was strung up. Conflicting feelings found
+a wild playground in his soul. His nerves were in a
+state of abnormal excitement, and something seemed
+to let go in him&mdash;the something that holds us back,
+normally, from mad follies. He suddenly caught
+Sydney's hand, and in a choked voice said:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“He is dead. Think a little of the living.�</p>
+
+<p>She looked at him, wondering.</p>
+
+<p>“Think of the living that love you. He neither
+hates nor loves any more. Sydney! Sydney!�</p>
+
+<p>As she understood his meaning she wrung her
+hand out of his, and said, as one trying to clear the
+road for reason:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“You love me, and he bought you to keep him
+alive. Why, then&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>A sick, white change came over her face.</p>
+
+<p>“Sydney! Sydney!� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!�</p>
+
+<p>She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there
+till the servant hurried in.</p>
+
+<p>“Show Dr Fane out,� she said. “He will not
+come here again.�</p>
+
+<p>And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest,
+ready to strike himself for his folly, went without
+a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at
+the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile
+in its marble eyes?</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working,
+that he was not himself. His manner to patients
+was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient,
+intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed
+the world that went to him for healing very
+unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered him
+now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of
+mind for a physician to adopt; and he was even
+known to pronounce on sufferers sentence of death
+with a callous indifference that was inhuman as
+well as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his
+reception-room became less crowded than of old.
+There were even moments in his day when he had
+leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his
+mood of impotent misery and despair. Sydney had
+never consented to receive him again. Woman-like&mdash;for
+she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable&mdash;she
+had clung to the idea that Fane
+had hastened, if not actually brought about, her
+husband's death by his treatment. She made no
+accusation. She simply closed her doors upon him.
+She had a horror of him, which never left her.</p>
+
+<p>Again and again Fane called. She was always
+denied to him. Then he met her in the street.
+She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on
+without a reply. At last a dull fury took possession
+of him. Her treatment of him was flagrantly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
+unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he
+had allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided,
+even to some extent hampered and hindered
+by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney
+with the violence of a man whose emotions had
+been sedulously repressed through youth, vanquished
+but not killed by ambition, and the need to work
+for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults
+of early manhood, never given fair play, now raged
+in his breast, from which they should have been
+long since expelled, and played havoc with every
+creed of sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom
+and experience. Fane became by degrees a monomaniac.</p>
+
+<p>He brooded incessantly over his developed but
+starved passion, over the thought that Sydney
+chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when
+he was trying day after day to see her, he clung
+to his love for her; but when he found her obdurate,
+set upon wronging him in her thought,
+his passion, verging towards despair, changed, and
+was coloured with hatred. By degrees he came
+to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her
+suspicion than upon his love of her, and then
+it was that a certain wildness crept into his manner,
+and alarmed or puzzled those who consulted
+him.</p>
+
+<p>That his career was going to the dogs Fane
+understood, but he did not care. The vision of
+Sydney was always before him. He was for ever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span>
+plotting and planning to be with her alone&mdash;against
+her will or not, it was nothing to him.
+And when he was alone with her, what then?</p>
+
+<p>He would know how to act.</p>
+
+<p>It was just in the dawn of the spring season
+over London that further inaction became insupportable
+to him. One evening, after a day of listless
+inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who
+no longer came in crowds to his door, he put on
+his hat and walked from Mayfair to Kensington,
+vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even
+absent; but he was a desperate man. All fear of
+what the world thinks or says, all consideration of
+outward circumstances and their relation to worldly
+happiness, had died within him. He was entirely
+abstracted and self-centred.</p>
+
+<p>He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury
+Road, with its line of artistic red houses, detached
+and standing in their gardens. The darkness was
+falling as he turned into it and began to walk up
+and down opposite the house with the big studio in
+which he was once a welcome visitor. There was
+a light in one of the bedroom windows and in the
+hall, and presently, as Fane watched, a brougham
+drove up to the door. It waited a few moments
+before the house, then some one entered the carriage.
+The door was banged; the horse moved
+on. Through the windows Fane saw a woman's
+face, pale, against the pane. It was the face of
+Sydney. For a moment he thought he would call<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span>
+to the coachman to stop. Then he restrained
+himself, and again walked up and down, waiting.
+She must return presently. He would speak to
+her as she was getting out of the carriage. He
+would force her to receive him.</p>
+
+<p>Towards nine o'clock his plans were altered by
+an event which took place. The house door
+opened, and the footman came out with a handful
+of letters for the post. The pillar-box was very
+near, and the man carelessly left the hall door on
+the jar while he walked down the road. Fane
+caught a glimpse of the hall that he knew so well.
+A step, and he could be in the house. He hesitated.
+He looked down the road. The man had
+his back turned, and was putting the letters into
+the box. Fane slipped into the garden, up the
+steps, through the door. The hall was empty.
+At his right was the passage leading to the studio.
+He stole down it, and tried the door. It opened.
+In the darkness the heavy curtain blew against his
+face. In another instant he closed the door softly
+at his back, and stood alone in the wide space and
+the blackness. Here there was not a glimmer of
+light. Thick curtains fell over the windows.
+No fire burned upon the hearth. There was no
+sound except when a carriage occasionally rolled
+down the road, and even then the wheels sounded
+distant.</p>
+
+<p>The silence and darkness had their effect upon
+Fane. He had done a desperate thing; but, until<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
+he found himself alone in the vacant studio, he had
+not fully realised the madness of his conduct, and
+how it would appear to the world. After the first
+moments of solitude had passed he came to himself
+a little, and half opened the door with the
+intention of stealing out; but he heard steps in
+the hall, and shrank back again like a guilty creature.
+He must wait, at least, until the household
+retired to rest.</p>
+
+<p>And, waiting, the old, haunting thoughts came
+back to assail him once more. He began to
+brood over Sydney's cruel treatment of him, over
+her vile suspicions. Here, in the atmosphere
+which he knew so well&mdash;for a faint, strange perfume
+always lingered about the studio, and gave
+to it the subtle sense of life which certain perfumes
+can impart&mdash;his emotions were gradually
+quickened to fury. He recalled the days of his
+intimacy with the sculptor, of his unrestrained converse
+with Sydney. He recalled his care for the invalid,
+persevered in, despite his passion, to the end.
+And then his thought fastened upon the statue,
+which, strange to say, he had almost forgotten.</p>
+
+<p>The statue!</p>
+
+<p>It must be there, with him, in the darkness,
+staring with those white eyes in which he had seen
+a soul flicker.</p>
+
+<p>As the recollection of it came to him, he trembled,
+leaning against the wall.</p>
+
+<p>He was in one of those states of acute mental<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
+tension in which the mind becomes so easily the
+prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly, laboriously,
+he began to frame a connection between
+the lifeless marble creature and his own dreary
+trouble.</p>
+
+<p>Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated
+him as a pariah, as a criminal. Her gentle nature
+had been transformed suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>By what subtle influence?</p>
+
+<p>Fane remembered the day of his first visit to
+Ilbury Road, and his curious imagination that the
+statue recognised and hated him.</p>
+
+<p>Had that hatred prompted action? Was there
+a devil lurking in the white, cold marble to work
+his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her
+presence for ever, the watching face had seemed
+to smile.</p>
+
+<p>Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no
+longer sane. He was possessed. The tragedy of
+thought within him invited him to the execution of
+another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with
+the rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.</p>
+
+<p>His hand fell upon an oak table that stood
+against the wall, and hit on something smooth and
+cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead
+sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers
+closed on it mechanically. The frigid steel
+thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his forehead
+started beating till there was a dull, senseless music
+in his ears that irritated him.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's
+carriage.</p>
+
+<p>His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone
+in the darkness with his enemy; the cold, deadly,
+blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the silent
+thing that had yet whispered malign accusations
+of him to the woman he loved; the nerveless thing
+that poisoned a beautiful mind against him, that
+stole the music from his harp of life and let loose
+the winds upon his summer.</p>
+
+<p>His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly
+upon the slippery steel.</p>
+
+<p>Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him
+a criminal. What if he should earn the title? A
+sound as of the sea beating was in his ears, and
+flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision.
+What would a man worth the name do to his
+enemy?</p>
+
+<p>And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.</p>
+
+<p>He drew himself up straight and steadied himself
+against the wall, peering through the blackness
+in the direction of the statue.</p>
+
+<p>And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the
+atmosphere the breath of another living presence.
+He could fancy he heard the pulse of another heart
+beating near to his. The sensation increased upon
+him powerfully until suspicion grew into conviction.</p>
+
+<p>His intention had subtly communicated itself to
+the thing he could not see.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>He knew it was on guard.</p>
+
+<p>There was no actual sound, no movement, but
+the atmosphere became charged by degrees with a
+deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost in
+the air. A chill ran through Fane's blood. A
+sluggish terror began to steal over him, folding him
+for the moment in a strange inertia of mind and of
+body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his
+senses, like the paralysis of nightmare that envelops
+the dreamer. He opened his lips to speak,
+but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his
+hand clutched the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.</p>
+
+<p>His enemy&mdash;then Sydney.</p>
+
+<p>He would not be a coward. He struggled
+against the horror that was upon him.</p>
+
+<p>And still the cold increased, and the personality
+of Fane's invisible companion seemed to develop in
+power. There was a sort of silent violence in
+the hidden room, as if a noiseless combat were
+taking place. Waves of darkness were stirred into
+motion; and Fane, as a man is drawn by the
+retreating tides of the sea out and away, was
+drawn from the wall where he had been crouching.</p>
+
+<p>He stole along the floor, the dagger held in his
+right hand, his heart barely beating, his lips white&mdash;nearer,
+nearer to his enemy.</p>
+
+<p>He counted each step, until he was enfolded in
+the inmost circle of that deadly frost emanating
+from the blackness before him.</p>
+
+<p>Then, with a hoarse cry, he lifted his arm and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_315" id="Page_315">[315]</a></span>
+sprang forward and upward, dashing the dagger
+down as one plunging it through a human heart.</p>
+
+<p>The cry died suddenly into silence.</p>
+
+<p>There was the sound of a heavy fall.</p>
+
+<p>It reached the ears of the servants below stairs.</p>
+
+<p>The footman took a light, and, with a scared
+face, went hesitatingly to the studio door, paused
+outside and listened while the female servants huddled
+in the passage.</p>
+
+<p>The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound
+appalled them, but at length the man thrust the
+door open and peered in.</p>
+
+<p>The light from the candle flickered merrily
+upon Fane's bowed figure, huddled face downwards
+upon the floor.</p>
+
+<p>His neck was broken.</p>
+
+<p>The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last
+earthly achievement, stood as if watching over
+him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.</p>
+
+<p>Some splinters of marble had been struck from
+the left breast, and among them, on the smooth
+parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_316" id="Page_316">[316]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_317" id="Page_317"><br />[317]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_318" id="Page_318"><br /><br />[318]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_319" id="Page_319"><br /><br /><br />[319]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>A BOUDOIR BOY</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>“<span class="smcap">It</span> is so impossible to be young,� Claude Melville
+said very wearily, and with his little air of played-out
+indifference. He was smoking a cigarette, as
+always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he
+thought, went excellently with his black eyes and
+swarthy complexion.</p>
+
+<p>His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant,
+his mother a pretty Kentish woman, with an apple-blossom
+complexion and sunny hair; yet he
+managed to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought
+himself a clever boy for so doing. But then he
+always thought himself clever. He had cultivated
+this conception of himself until it had become a
+confirmed habit of mind. On his head was a fez
+with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug
+with his long legs crossed meditatively. His
+room was dimly lit, and had an aspect of divans,
+Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning,
+although it was a spring evening and not cold.
+London roared faintly in the distance, like a lion
+at a far-away evening party.</p>
+
+<p>“It is so impossible to be young,� Claude repeated,
+without emphasis. “I was middle-aged at<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_320" id="Page_320">[320]</a></span>
+ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything
+I ought not to have done, I feel that life
+has become altogether improbable. Even if I live
+until I am seventy&mdash;the correct age for entering
+into one's dotage, I believe&mdash;I cannot expect to
+have a second childhood. I have never had a first.�</p>
+
+<p>He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of
+one's legal dotage.</p>
+
+<p>His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and
+laughed. Jimmy was puffing at a pipe. His pipe
+was the only one Claude ever allowed to be
+smoked among his divans and his roses.</p>
+
+<p>After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy
+remarked:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Would you like to take a lesson in the art of
+being young?�</p>
+
+<p>“Immensely.�</p>
+
+<p>“I know somebody who could give you one.�</p>
+
+<p>“Really, Jimmy! What strange people you
+always know; curates, and women who have never
+written improper novels, and all sorts of beings
+who seem merely mythical to the rest of us!�</p>
+
+<p>“This is not a curate.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then it must be a woman who has never
+written an improper novel.�</p>
+
+<p>“It is.�</p>
+
+<p>“And you mean to tell me seriously that there
+is such a person? To see her would be to take
+what <i>Punch</i> calls a pre-historic peep. She must
+be ingeniously old.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_321" id="Page_321">[321]</a></span></p>
+<p>“She is sixty-four, and she is my aunt.�</p>
+
+<p>“How beautiful of her. I am an only child, so
+I can never be an uncle. It is one of my lasting
+regrets, although I daresay that profession is terribly
+overcrowded like the others. But why is she sixty-four?
+It seems a risky thing for a woman to be?�</p>
+
+<p>“She takes the risk without thinking at all
+about it.�</p>
+
+<p>“She must be very daring.�</p>
+
+<p>“No; she's only completely natural.�</p>
+
+<p>“Natural. What is that?�</p>
+
+<p>Jimmy laughed again. He was fond of Claude,
+but he and Claude met so often chiefly because
+they were extremes. Jimmy was a handsome
+athlete, who had been called to the bar, and persistently
+played cricket or football whenever the
+courts were sitting. He was cursed with a large
+private income, which he spent royally, and blessed
+with a good heart. Once he had appeared for the
+defence in a divorce case, which&mdash;lasting longer
+than he had anticipated, owing to the obvious
+guilt of all parties concerned in it, and the consequent
+difficulty of getting an innocent jury to
+agree about a verdict&mdash;had cost him a cricket
+match. Since then he had looked upon the law
+in the legendary way, as an ass, and spent most
+of his time in exercising his muscles. In the
+intervals of leisure which he allowed himself from
+sports and pastimes, he saw a good deal of Claude,
+who amused him, and whom he never bored. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_322" id="Page_322">[322]</a></span>
+called him a boudoir boy, but had a real liking for
+him, nevertheless, and sometimes longed to wake
+him up, and separate him from the absurd <i>chiffons</i>
+with which he occupied his time. Now he laughed
+at him openly, and Claude did not mind in the
+least. They were really friends, however preposterous
+such a friendship might seem.</p>
+
+<p>“What is that? Well&mdash;my aunt. When you
+see her you will understand thoroughly.�</p>
+
+<p>“Does she live in Park Lane or in Clapham?�</p>
+
+<p>“She lives in the country, in Northamptonshire,
+is very well off, and has a place of her own.�</p>
+
+<p>“And a husband?�</p>
+
+<p>“No. She is a prosperous spinster, dines the
+local cricket team once a year, keeps the church
+going, knows all the poor people, and all the rich
+in the neighbourhood, and has only one fad.�</p>
+
+<p>“What is that?�</p>
+
+<p>“She always wears her hair powdered. Come
+down and stay with her, and she will teach you to
+be young.�</p>
+
+<p>“Well&mdash;but I am afraid she will work me very
+hard.�</p>
+
+<p>“Not she. You would like a new experience.�</p>
+
+<p>Claude yawned, and blinked his long dark eyes
+in a carefully Eastern manner.</p>
+
+<p>“I am afraid there is no such thing left for me,�
+he said with an elaborate dreariness. “Still, if
+your aunt will invite me, I will come. Of course
+you will accompany me, I must have a chaperon.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_323" id="Page_323">[323]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Of course.�</p>
+
+<p>“Ah!� Claude said, as a footman came softly
+into the room, “here is our absinthe. Now, Jimmy,
+please do forget your horrible football, and I will
+teach you to be decadent.�</p>
+
+<p>“As my aunt will teach you to be young&mdash;you
+old boy.�</p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>“Mr Haddon has left, sir,� said the footman,
+standing by Claude's bedside in the detached manner
+of the well-bred domestic. “Here is a note
+for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing.�</p>
+
+<p>And he handed it on a salver.</p>
+
+<p>Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took
+it, without manifesting any of the surprise that he
+felt. When the footman had gone, he poured out
+a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a
+small table at his elbow, sipped it, and quietly
+opened the square envelope. The Northamptonshire
+sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour
+through the bedroom window. Outside the birds
+twittered in Miss Haddon's cherished garden. For
+Claude had come down at that contented spinster's
+invitation to spend a week with her, bringing
+Jimmy as chaperon, and this was the very first
+morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his
+chaperon had already “left,� possibly to be a
+“half-back,� or something equally ridiculous, at a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_324" id="Page_324">[324]</a></span>
+local football match in a neighbouring village.
+Claude spread the note out and read it, while the
+birds chirped to the very manifest spring.</p>
+
+<div class="letter">
+<p>“<span class="smcap">Dear Boy</span>,&mdash;Good-bye, and good luck to you. I
+know you are never angry, so it is scarcely worth while
+to tell you not to be. I am off. Back in a week. You
+will learn your lesson better alone with Aunt Kitty.
+There is no absinthe in her cellar, but she knows good
+champagne from bad. You will be all right. Study
+hard.&mdash;Yours ever,</p>
+
+<p class="ralign"><span class="smcap">Jim</span>.�</p>
+</div>
+
+<p>Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his
+usual one, and read the note four times. Then
+he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown&mdash;a fine
+specimen of Cairene embroidery&mdash;closely round
+him, shut his eyes, and seemed to go to sleep. All
+he said to himself was:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Jimmy writes a very dull letter.�</p>
+
+<p>At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated
+in a hollow manner with the barbarous
+music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard
+it very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined
+merely to take off his dressing-gown, as an act of
+mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep, instead
+of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered
+his manners wearily, and slid out of bed
+and into a carefully-warmed bath that was prepared
+in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed
+an intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_325" id="Page_325">[325]</a></span>
+subtle tie, shot with rigorously subdued, but voluptuous
+colours, he sauntered downstairs in time to
+be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the
+second&mdash;or breakfast&mdash;gong, which he encountered
+in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>“Why will people wake the dead merely because
+they are going to eat a boiled egg and a bit of
+toast?� he asked himself as he entered the breakfast-room.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading
+letters in the proper English manner. The
+sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed
+high, and void of cap.</p>
+
+<p>“You are very punctual,� she said with a smile.
+“I was going to send up to know whether you
+would prefer to breakfast in your room. My
+nephew told me you might like to. I shall be
+glad to have your company. Jimmy has run away
+and left us together, I find.�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, Jimmy has run away,� Claude answered,
+beginning slowly to feel the full force of Jimmy's
+perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful,
+rosy face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered
+whether she had been in the plot.</p>
+
+<p>“I hope you will not be bored,� Miss Haddon
+went on, as they sat down together, the intonation
+of her melodious elderly voice seeming to dismiss
+the supposition, even while she suggested it. “But,
+indeed, I think it is almost impossible to be bored
+in the country.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_326" id="Page_326">[326]</a></span></p>
+<p>Claude, who was always either in London or
+Paris, looked frankly astonished. In handing him
+his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.</p>
+
+<p>“You don't agree with me?� she asked.</p>
+
+<p>“I cannot disagree, at least,� he said; “because,
+to tell the truth, I am always in towns.�</p>
+
+<p>“Probably you are happy there then,� she rejoined,
+with a briskness that was agreeable, because
+it was not a hideous assumption, like the geniality
+that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.</p>
+
+<p>But Claude could not permit his hostess to
+remain comfortable in this utterly erroneous
+belief.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, please&mdash;� he said, with gentle rebuke,
+“I am not happy anywhere.�</p>
+
+<p>Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and
+whimsical, but decidedly acute, scrutiny.</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps you are too young to be happy,� she
+said; “you have not suffered enough.�</p>
+
+<p>“I have never been young,� he answered, eating
+his devilled kidney with a silent pathos of perseverance&mdash;“never.�</p>
+
+<p>“And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel
+old. It can't be done. I'm sixty-four, and look
+it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take an interest
+in people, and regard life as my half-opened
+oyster. It is a pity one can't go on living till one
+is two or three hundred or so. There is so much
+to see and know. Our existence in the world is
+like a day at the Stores. We have to go away<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_327" id="Page_327">[327]</a></span>
+before we have been into a quarter of the different
+departments.�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't find life at all like that. I have seen
+all the departments till I am sick of them. But
+perhaps you never come to London?�</p>
+
+<p>“Every year for three months to see my
+friends. I stay at an hotel. It is a most delightful
+time.�</p>
+
+<p>Her tone was warm with pleasant memories.
+Claude felt himself more and more surprised.</p>
+
+<p>“You enjoy the country, and London?� he
+said.</p>
+
+<p>“I enjoy everything,� said Miss Haddon. “And
+surely most people do.�</p>
+
+<p>“None of the people I know seem to enjoy
+anything very much. They try everything, of
+course. That is one's duty.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then the latest literature really reflects life, I
+imagine,� Miss Haddon said. “If what you say
+is true, everything includes the sins as well as the
+virtues. I have often wondered whether the books
+that I have thought utterly and absurdly false
+could possibly be the outcome of facts.�</p>
+
+<p>“Such as what books?�</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may
+be your personal friends. But it is so then? In
+their search after happiness the people of to-day,
+the moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as
+well as to virtue?�</p>
+
+<p>“They ignore nothing.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_328" id="Page_328">[328]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“Not even duty?�</p>
+
+<p>“Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be
+ignored.�</p>
+
+<p>Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply
+on its head with a spoon. She wondered if the
+action were a performance of duty to herself or to
+the egg.</p>
+
+<p>“That, I understand,� she remarked briskly,
+“is the doctrine of what is called in London the
+young decadent; and in the country&mdash;forgive me&mdash;sometimes
+the young devil of the day.�</p>
+
+<p>“I am decadent, Miss Haddon,� Claude said
+with a gentle pride that was not wholly ungraceful.</p>
+
+<p>The elderly lady swept him with a bright look
+of fresh and healthy interest.</p>
+
+<p>“How exciting,� she exclaimed, after a moment's
+decisive pause, but with a completely
+natural air. “You are the first I have seen. For
+Jimmy isn't one, is he?�</p>
+
+<p>“Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats
+cold roast beef and cheese for lunch.�</p>
+
+<p>“Do tell me&mdash;how does one do it?�</p>
+
+<p>She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily
+munching an apple grown in one of her own
+orchards.</p>
+
+<p>Claude raised his dark eyebrows.</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon?�</p>
+
+<p>“How does one become a decadent? I have
+heard so much about you all, about your clever<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_329" id="Page_329">[329]</a></span>ness,
+and your clothes, and the things you write,
+and draw, and smoke, and think, and&mdash;and
+eat&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, Mr Melville!� she exclaimed, leaning
+forward behind the great silver urn, and darting at
+him a glance of imploring earnestness, “will you
+do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a
+whole week. Teach me, teach me to be a
+decadent.�</p>
+
+<p>“But I thought you were going to teach me to
+be yo&mdash;� Claude began, and stopped just in time.
+“I mean&mdash;er&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He paused, and they gazed at each other.
+There was meditation in the boy's eyes. He was
+wondering seriously whether it would be possible
+for an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals
+and rural procedure, to be decadent. She was
+rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.</p>
+
+<p>“Will you?� Miss Haddon breathed across the
+urn and the teapot.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, we might try,� Claude answered doubtfully.</p>
+
+<p>He was remarking to himself:&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>“Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't
+understand his aunt!�</p>
+
+<p>She was murmuring in her mind: “I have
+always heard they have no sense of humour!�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_330" id="Page_330">[330]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>“Mr Melville, Mr Melville,� cried Miss
+Haddon's voice towards evening on the following
+day, “the absinthe has arrived!�</p>
+
+<p>Claude came out languidly into the hall.</p>
+
+<p>“Has it?� he said dreamily.</p>
+
+<p>“Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue
+books&mdash;I mean the yellow books, and� (rummaging
+in a just-opened parcel) “yes, here are two
+novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those
+rose-tipped cigarettes. Now, what ought I to do?
+Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea, or
+what?�</p>
+
+<p>Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion,
+but her grey hair crowned an eager face
+decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion
+was lulled to rest.</p>
+
+<p>“We had better have our tea,� he answered
+slowly. “I like my absinthe about an hour or so
+before dinner.�</p>
+
+<p>“Very well. Tea, James, and muffins.�</p>
+
+<p>The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering
+not a little at the unusual vagaries of his mistress.
+Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with
+books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down
+by the fire. Claude placed himself, cross-legged,
+upon a cushion on the floor. The box of rose-tipped
+cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_331" id="Page_331">[331]</a></span>
+regarded him expectantly from her sofa. Her
+expression seemed continually exclaiming, “What's
+to be done now?�</p>
+
+<p>The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured
+gently to correct it.</p>
+
+<p>“Please try to be a little&mdash;a&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Yes?�</p>
+
+<p>“A little more restrained,� he said. “What
+we feel about life is that it should never be crude.
+All extremes are crude.�</p>
+
+<p>“What&mdash;even extremes of wickedness?�</p>
+
+<p>He hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>“Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or
+happiness, or anything of that kind. When one
+comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really
+absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous
+what is called a happy face always looks, covered
+with those dreadful, wrinkled things named smiles,
+all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you
+agree with me. Happiness drives all thought out
+of a face, and distorts the features in a most painful
+manner. When I go out walking on a Bank
+Holiday, a thing I seldom do, I always think a
+cheerful expression the most degrading of all expressions.
+A contented clerk disfigures a whole
+street&mdash;really.�</p>
+
+<p>Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown
+very sombre during this speech, and she did not
+brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins
+on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_332" id="Page_332">[332]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Perhaps you are right,� she said. “I daresay
+happiness is unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the
+floor too?�</p>
+
+<p>Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his
+hostess. Sitting on the floor was one of his pet
+originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides, Miss
+Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of
+thing.</p>
+
+<p>“I do it because I feel so Turkish,� he explained.
+“Otherwise, it would be an assumption,
+and not naïve. People make a great mistake in
+fancying the decadent is unnatural. If anything,
+he is too natural. He follows his whim. The
+world only calls us natural when we do everything
+we dislike. If Rossetti had played football every
+Saturday, his poetry would have been much more
+read in England than it has been. Yes, please, I
+will have another muffin.�</p>
+
+<p>“But I think I feel Turkish too,� Miss Haddon
+said calmly. “Yes, I am sure I do. I ought not
+to resist it; ought I? Otherwise I shall be flying
+in the face of your beautiful theories.� And she
+squatted down on the floor at his elbow.</p>
+
+<p>Claude had a wonderful purple moment of acute
+irritation, during which he felt strangely natural.
+Miss Haddon did not appear to notice it. She
+went on bombarding him with questions in a cheery
+manner until he began to be rather ill, but her face
+never lost its expression of grave sadness, a strange,
+inexplicable melancholy that was not in the least<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_333" id="Page_333">[333]</a></span>
+Bank Holiday. The contrast between her expression
+and her voice worried Claude, as an intelligent
+pantaloon might worry a clown. He felt that
+something was wrong. Either face or voice required
+alteration. And then questions are like
+death&mdash;extremely irksome. Besides, he found it
+difficult to answer many of them, difficult to define
+precisely the position of the decadent, his intentions
+and his aims. It was no use to tell Miss
+Haddon that he didn't possess either the one or
+the other. Always with the same definitely sad
+face, the same definitely cheerful voice, she declined
+to believe him. He fidgeted on his cushion,
+and his Turkish placidity threatened to be seriously
+disturbed.</p>
+
+<p>The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion.
+Claude arranged a glass of it, much diluted
+with water, for the benefit of his hostess, and she
+began to sip it with an air of determined reverence.</p>
+
+<p>“It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt,� she
+said after a while.</p>
+
+<p>Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.</p>
+
+<p>“When they drag a trail over a course and
+satisfy the hounds with a dead rabbit at the end of
+it,� she explained.</p>
+
+<p>“My dear lady,� he protested plaintively.
+“Really, you do not grasp the inner meaning of
+what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect
+sensation will steal over you, a curious happy de<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_334" id="Page_334">[334]</a></span>tachment
+from everything, as if you were floating
+in some exquisite element. You will not care
+what happens, or what&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“But must I drink it all before I feel detached?�
+she asked. “It's really so very nasty, quite disgusting
+to the taste. Surely you think so.�</p>
+
+<p>“I drink it for its after-effect.�</p>
+
+<p>“Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the
+moment, and gives us the pleasure of self-satisfaction
+ultimately?�</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know,� the boy exclaimed abruptly.
+To compare absinthe to a good act seemed to him
+quite intolerable.</p>
+
+<p>He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was
+glad when the dressing gong sounded in the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.</p>
+
+<p>“I rather admire you for drinking this stuff,� she
+said. “I am sure you do it to mortify the flesh.
+A Lenten penance out of Lent is most invigorating
+to the mind.�</p>
+
+<p>As Claude went up to dress, he felt as if he never
+wished to touch absinthe again. The glitter of its
+personality was dulled for him now that it was
+looked upon as merely a nasty sort of medicine to
+be indulged in as a mortification of the flesh, like
+wearing a hair shirt, or rejecting meat on Fridays.
+He found Miss Haddon painfully prosaic. It
+seemed almost silly to be a decadent in her company.
+To feel Turkish alone was graceful and
+quaint, almost intellectual, but to have an old lady<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_335" id="Page_335">[335]</a></span>
+feeling Turkish, too, and squatting on the floor to
+emphasise the sensation, was tragic, seemed to bring
+imbecility very near. Claude dressed with unusual
+agitation, and made a distinct failure of his tie.</p>
+
+<p>All through dinner Miss Haddon talked optimistically
+about her prospects as a successful decadent,
+much as if she were discussing her future on the
+Stock Exchange, or as the editor of a paper. She
+calculated that at her present rate of progress she
+ought to be almost on a level with her guest by the
+end of the week, and spoke hopefully of ceasing to
+take any interest in the ordinary facts of life, of
+learning a proper contempt for all healthy-minded
+humanity, and of appreciating at its proper value
+what seems to ordinary people, weak-kneed affection
+in literature, in art, and, above all, in movement
+and in appearance. Her bright eyes flashed
+upon Claude beneath her crown of powdered hair,
+as she talked, and the big room rang with her
+jovial voice.</p>
+
+<p>The boy began to feel exceedingly confused.
+Yet he had never been less bored. Miss Haddon
+might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her
+net personality was far less wearisome than that of
+many a town-bred sylph. Unconsciously Claude
+ate with a hearty appetite, indulged immoderately
+in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a
+beautifully-cooked Spanish onion without thinking
+of the committal of a crime. During dessert
+Miss Haddon gave him a racy description of a rural<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_336" id="Page_336">[336]</a></span>
+cricket match and of the supper and speeches which
+followed it, and he found himself laughing heartily
+and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself
+up short with a sudden sensation of horror,
+and his hostess rose to go into the drawing-room.</p>
+
+<p>“Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?� she asked;
+“or would they be out of order? I wish particularly
+to conform to all your tenets.�</p>
+
+<p>“Dear lady, please, we have no tenets,� he protested.
+“Do remember that, or you will never
+become what you wish. But I do not care for
+any games.�</p>
+
+<p>“Then shall we sit down and each read a volume
+of the ‘Yellow Book’?�</p>
+
+<p>She hastened towards a table to find copies of
+that work, but something in her brisk and anxious
+movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:</p>
+
+<p>“Please&mdash;please teach me Halma.�</p>
+
+<p>That night he went up to bed flushed with
+triumph.</p>
+
+<p>Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple
+of games. Never before had he felt so absolutely
+certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.</p>
+
+<h3>IV</h3>
+
+<p>Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude
+Melville were feeding chickens&mdash;under protest.</p>
+
+<p>“I mean to give it up, of course,� the former<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_337" id="Page_337">[337]</a></span>
+said. “It's a degrading pursuit; it's almost as
+bad as the ‘things that Jimmy does,’ the things
+that give him such a marvellous complexion and
+keep his figure so magnificent.�</p>
+
+<p>She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied
+denizens of the enlarged meat-safe before them,
+and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:</p>
+
+<p>“Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which,
+as you have taught me, are unworthy of thinking
+people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the
+eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the
+limbs straight and supple?�</p>
+
+<p>All the time that she was speaking her glance
+crept musingly over Claude's tall, but weak-looking
+and rather flaccid form, seeming to pause on
+his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his
+slightly yellow face. That face began to flush.
+She sighed.</p>
+
+<p>“There must be something radically wrong in
+the scheme of the universe,� she continued. “But,
+of course, one ought to live for the mind and for
+subtle sensations, even though they do make one
+look an object.�</p>
+
+<p>Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were
+fighting like feathered furies, pouncing, clucking,
+running for safety, grain in beak, or, with a fiery
+anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had
+secured a morsel and were hoping to be permitted
+to swallow it. Claude glanced at her furtively
+out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_338" id="Page_338">[338]</a></span>
+for the first time in his life, to stand erect and
+broaden his rather narrow chest.</p>
+
+<p>Silently he resolved to give instructions to his
+tailor not to spare the padding in his future coats.
+He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for which
+he had occasionally sighed, had not come into
+fashion again. After all, modern dress had its
+little advantages. Miss Haddon was still scattering
+grain, rather in the attitude of Millet's
+“<i>Sower</i>,� and still talking reflectively.</p>
+
+<p>“We must try to convert Jimmy,� she said.
+“I have a good deal of influence over him, Mr
+Melville. We must try to make him more like you,
+more thoughtful, more inactive, more frankly sensual,
+more fond of sofas, in the future than he has been
+in the past. Do you know, I am ashamed to say it,
+but I don't believe I have ever seen Jimmy lying
+on a sofa. Poor Jimmy! Look at that hen! She
+is choking. Hens gulp their food so! And then,
+he's inclined to be persistently unselfish. That
+must be stopped too. I have learnt from you that
+to be decadent one must be acutely and untiringly
+selfish. The blessings of selfishness! What a
+volume might be written upon them! Mr Melville,
+all chickens must be decadent, for all chickens are
+entirely selfish. It is strange to think that the
+average fowl is more advanced in ethics&mdash;is it
+ethics I mean?&mdash;than the average man or woman,
+is it not? And we ate a decadent at dinner last
+night. I feel almost like a cannibal.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_339" id="Page_339">[339]</a></span></p>
+<p>She threw away the last grain, and was silent.
+But suddenly Claude spoke.</p>
+
+<p>“Miss Haddon,� he said, and his voice had
+never sounded so boyish to her before, “you have
+been laughing at me for nearly a week.� He
+paused, then he went on, rather unevenly, in the
+up-and-down tones induced by stifled excitement,
+“and I have never found it out until this moment.
+I suppose you think me a great fool. I daresay
+I have been one. But please don't&mdash;I mean,
+please let us give up acting our farce.�</p>
+
+<p>“But have we reached the third act?� she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>They were walking through the garden, among
+the crocuses and violets now.</p>
+
+<p>“I am sure I don't know,� he answered, trying
+to seem easy. “Perhaps it is a farce in one act.�</p>
+
+<p>“Perhaps it is not a farce at all, my dear boy,�
+she said very gently and with a sudden old-world
+gravity that was not without its grace.</p>
+
+<p>They reached the house. She put her basket
+down on the oak table in the wide hall, and faced
+him in the eager way that was natural to her, and
+that was so youthful.</p>
+
+<p>“Mr Melville&mdash;Claude,� she said, as she held
+out her hand, clad in a very countrified brown glove,
+with a fan-like gauntlet, “of all Jimmy's friends
+I think I shall like you the best. People who have
+acted together ought to be good comrades.�</p>
+
+<p>He took the hand. That seemed necessary.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_340" id="Page_340">[340]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>“But I haven't been acting,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, yes, you have,� she answered, “and I
+have only been on the stage for a week; while
+you&mdash;well, I suppose you have been on it for at
+least two or three years. I am taking my farewell
+of it this morning, and you&mdash;?�</p>
+
+<p>The boy's face was deeply flushed, but he did
+not look, or feel, actually angry.</p>
+
+<p>“I don't know about myself yet,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Think it all over,� the old lady exclaimed.
+“And now let us have lunch. I am hungry.�</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>Jimmy arrived that evening.</p>
+
+<p>“How old are you, Claude?� he exclaimed,
+clapping his friend on the back.</p>
+
+<p>“I am not sure,� Claude replied. “But I
+almost begin to wish that I were sixty-four.�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_341" id="Page_341">[341]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_342" id="Page_342"><br />[342]</a></span></p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_343" id="Page_343"><br /><br />[343]</a></span></p>
+
+<h2>THE TEE-TO-TUM</h2>
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p><span class="smcap">Jack Burnham</span> was quite determined not to
+marry Mrs Lorton, and if there was one thing in
+the world upon which she had rigidly set her heart
+it was upon refusing him. There were several
+things about her which he deliberately disliked. In
+the first place, she was a widow, and he always had
+an uneasy suspicion that widows, like dynamite,
+were mysteriously dangerous. Then her Christian
+name was Harriet, and she never took afternoon
+tea. The former of these two facts indicated,
+according to his ideas, that her parents were people
+of bad taste, the latter that she possessed notions
+that were against nature. Also, she was well informed,
+and knew it. This condition of the mind,
+he considered, should be the blessed birthright of
+the male sex, and he looked upon her as an usurper.
+She didn't wear mourning, which implied that she
+was forgetful&mdash;of dead husbands. Then&mdash;well,
+that was about all he had against her, and it was
+quite enough.</p>
+
+<p>As for her, the whole nature of her protested
+eloquently against the way he waxed his moustache,
+against the colour of his brown hair, and of his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_344" id="Page_344">[344]</a></span>
+brown boots, against his lounging gait, and his
+opinion of Mr Gladstone. He had a certain arrogance
+about him, when with her, which arose in
+truth from his fear of her intellectual prowess.
+This led her to dub him intolerably conceited. She
+desired to humble him, and considered that she
+could best do so by refusing his offer of marriage.
+But she must first persuade him to propose. That
+was the difficulty.</p>
+
+<p>They were constantly meeting in London. You
+always constantly meet your enemies in London.
+And, when they met, they always devoted a great
+deal of time to the advancement of the tacit and
+polite quarrel between them. They argued with
+one another in Hyde Park on fine mornings, and
+were really disgusted with one another at dinner
+parties and “At Homes.� He thought her fast&mdash;at
+balls; and she had once considered him blatant&mdash;at
+a Marlborough House garden party. This
+last fact, indeed, put the coping stone to the feud
+between them, for Mrs Lorton expressed her
+opinion to a friend, and Burnham, of course, got to
+know of it. To be thought blatant at Marlborough
+House was really intolerable. One might as well
+be pronounced to have had a heathen air at Lambeth
+Palace.</p>
+
+<p>Distinctly, Jack Burnham and Harriet Lorton
+were acutely antagonistic.</p>
+
+<p>Yet, there must surely have been some strange,
+unknown link of sympathy between them, for they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_345" id="Page_345">[345]</a></span>
+both caught the influenza on the same day&mdash;it
+was a Sunday morning&mdash;and both permitted it to
+develop into double pneumonia.</p>
+
+<p>After all, spar as we may, are we not all brothers
+and sisters?</p>
+
+<p>The double pneumonia ought to have drawn
+them together; but, as he lived in Piccadilly and she
+in Queen's Gate, and each was thoroughly self-centred&mdash;nothing
+produces egoism so certainly as
+influenza&mdash;neither knew of the illness of the other.</p>
+
+<p>Providence denied to both that subtle joy, and
+they got to the mutton chop and chipped potato
+stage of convalescence in childlike ignorance of
+each other's misfortune.</p>
+
+<p>There must certainly have been a curious community
+of mind between them, for both their doctors
+ordered them to Margate, and they both took
+rooms at Westgate. Now a similar taste in seaside
+places is undoubtedly an excellent foundation for
+eternal friendship. Let the world crumble in atoms,
+two people who both like Westgate will still find
+something to talk about amid the confusion occasioned
+by the dissolution of kingdoms.</p>
+
+<p>Jack Burnham arrived at the St Mildred's Hotel
+on a Thursday, with his man.</p>
+
+<p>Harriet Lorton came on the following Friday,
+with her maid.</p>
+
+<p>Neither had any notion of the other's proceedings
+until they met back to back, as you shall presently
+hear.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_346" id="Page_346">[346]</a></span></p>
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>In ordinary circumstances of health and vigour,
+Burnham and Mrs Lorton possessed dispositions
+of quite singular vivacity, looked upon life as a
+fairly good, if rather practical joke, and were fully
+disposed to consider happiness their <i>métier</i>. Being
+modern, they sometimes concealed their original
+gaiety, as if it were original sin, and pretended to
+a cruel cynicism; yet at heart, it must be confessed,
+they were as lively as poor children playing
+in the street. But when they went to Westgate,
+influenza had had its fill of them, and the infinite
+pathos of the world, and of all that is therein,
+appealed to them with a seizing vitality. Burnham,
+on the Thursday, was moved to tears at Birchington
+Station by the sight of a mother and eleven
+children missing the last train to Margate. Harriet
+Lorton, on the following Friday, had hysterics at
+Victoria, when she perceived a young lady drop a
+cage containing a grey parrot, and smash the bird's
+china bath upon the platform. The fact that the
+parrot had been actually taking its bath at the
+moment, and was left by the misfortune in much
+confusion and no water, struck her so poignantly
+as nearly to break her heart. She wept in a first-class
+carriage all the way down, and arrived at
+Westgate, towards ten o'clock, in a state of complete
+collapse.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_347" id="Page_347">[347]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Mr Burnham was in bed drinking a cup of
+soup at this time. He heard the luggage being
+carried up, but did not suspect whose it was.
+Nevertheless, the ravages of disease led him to
+consider the slight noise and bustle a personal
+insult, and he lay awake most of the night brooding
+upon the wrongs of which he, erroneously, believed
+himself to be the victim.</p>
+
+<p>It was on the next morning that the two invalids
+met back to back in a shelter with glass partitions
+upon the lawn.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Lorton, smothered in wraps, had taken up
+her position on the bench that faces Westgate
+without noticing a bowed and ulstered figure, shod
+in brown boots, sitting in a haggard posture on the
+reciprocal bench that faces the sea. Nobody was
+about, for it was not the season, and Mrs Lorton
+began slowly to weep on account of the loneliness.
+It struck her disordered fancy as so personal.
+Creation was sending her to Coventry. At her
+back the tears ran over Burnham's handsome countenance.
+He was staring at the sea, and thinking
+of all the people who had been drowned in water
+since the days of the Deluge. He wondered how
+many there were, and cried copiously, considering
+himself absolutely alone and free to give vent to his
+feelings, which struck him as splendidly human.</p>
+
+<p>When two people weep together one of them
+usually weeps louder than the other, and, on this
+occasion, Burnham made the most noise. He<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_348" id="Page_348">[348]</a></span>
+became, in fact, so uproariously solicitous about
+the drowned men and women whom he had never
+known that Mrs Lorton gradually was made aware
+of the presence of another mourner who was not
+a mute. She turned round and beheld a back convulsed
+with emotion. Its grief went straight to
+her heart, and, casting her own sorrow and her
+sense of etiquette to the wind&mdash;which blew
+bracingly from the north-east&mdash;she tapped upon
+the glass screen that bisected the shelter.</p>
+
+<p>Burnham took no notice. He was too deeply
+involved in grief. So Mrs Lorton knocked again,
+with all the vigour that incipient convalescence
+gave to her. This time Burnham was startled, and
+turned a hollow face upon her. They stared at
+each other through the intervening glass for a
+moment in wild surprise, the tears congealing upon
+their cheeks.</p>
+
+<p>Beyond Burnham Mrs Lorton saw the whirling
+white foam of the sea. Beyond Mrs Lorton
+Burnham saw the neat villas of Westgate. It
+struck them both as a tremendous moment, and
+they trembled.</p>
+
+<p>Remember that they were very weak.</p>
+
+<p>At last he, conceiving naturally that she had
+recognised and desired to summon him, walked
+slowly round to her side of the shelter, and held
+out to her a wavering hand.</p>
+
+<p>“Good heavens!� he ejaculated. “The last
+person I&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_349" id="Page_349">[349]</a></span></p>
+<p>“You!� said Mrs Lorton. “How astonishing!
+What on earth&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>He seized the opening she gave him with all the
+ardour of the whole-souled influenza patient.</p>
+
+<p>“I have been ill,� he said with a deep pathos,
+“very, very ill. My symptoms were most extraordinary.�</p>
+
+<p>He sank down heavily at her side, and continued,
+“I doubt if any one has endured such agony
+before. It began on a Sunday with&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“So did mine,� Mrs Lorton interrupted with
+some show of determination. “You cannot conceive
+what it was like. I had pains in every limb,
+every limb positively. The doctor&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Of course I went straight to bed,� he remarked
+with firmness. “I knew at once what
+was wrong. But mine was no ordinary case.
+Talk of thumbscrews! Why&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“For nights I tossed in agony,� she went on
+with a poignant self-pity, so much engrossed that
+she never noticed the brown boots which on other
+occasions had so deeply offended her. “Morphia
+and eucalyptus were no&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“He said it was pneumonia, double pneumonia,�
+Burnham concluded emphatically. “How
+I came through it I shall never know.� His
+smile at this point was wan, and seemed to
+deprecate existence. “I suppose there is still
+some work for me to do. At the same time,
+I&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_350" id="Page_350">[350]</a></span></p>
+<p>“Mine was also double!� Mrs Lorton said with
+distinct tartness, condemning privately his arrogance,
+and noticing the boots with a strange feeling
+of sudden and unutterable despair.</p>
+
+<p>“It is all so much worse for a woman,� she
+added vaguely, with some idea of out-doing him,
+such as she had felt once or twice at dinner parties,
+when her epigrams had been smarter than his.</p>
+
+<p>“The strong possess a greater capacity for suffering
+than the weak,� Burnham retorted. “Medical
+science tells us that&mdash;�</p>
+
+<p>“Please spare me the revelations of the dissecting-room,�
+she cried bitterly; “I am in no condition
+to bear them.�</p>
+
+<p>She glanced at him with pathetic eyes, and
+added, “I ought to have gone to Margate.�</p>
+
+<p>“I ought to have gone there too,� he said.</p>
+
+<p>“Really, you make the conversation sound like
+one of Maeterlinck's plays,� she rejoined. “Do be
+more original.�</p>
+
+<p>The reproach cut him to the heart. He never
+knew why, but he felt so much injured that he
+with great difficulty restrained his tears.</p>
+
+<p>“Women can be very brutal,� he said moodily,
+biting his lips, and wondering how many authors
+it was necessary to read in order never to be at a
+disadvantage with a clever woman.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Lorton was conscious that she had hurt
+him, and instead of being her nice, natural self and
+glorying in the fact, she experienced a sense of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_351" id="Page_351">[351]</a></span>
+profound pity that gave her quite a tightened
+feeling about the left side. However, she only
+said, “Men can be very selfish�&mdash;a generality
+that many people consider as convincing as a
+bomb&mdash;and got up to go.</p>
+
+<p>“I am staying at the St Mildred's,� she remarked.
+“It is the dull season, so I am the only
+person there at present.�</p>
+
+<p>“I beg your pardon,� Burnham said, also getting
+upon his feet, “I am there too. My number is 12
+and I have a private sitting-room. I do not feel
+up to the coffee-room yet.�</p>
+
+<p>Mrs Lorton turned as pale as ashes with vexation.
+She had no private sitting-room, and had
+ordered dinner in the coffee-room for that very
+evening.</p>
+
+<p>She felt herself at a disadvantage as they walked
+in a gloomy silence towards the beach.</p>
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Three days had passed away, and Jack Burnham
+had found that he was, in his own phrase, “up to
+the coffee-room� after all. In consequence, Mrs
+Lorton and he dined there every evening at separate
+tables. A sense of rivalry&mdash;and there is no
+rivalry more keen than that between contesting
+invalids&mdash;prevented both of them from eating as
+much as they would have liked. When the widow<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_352" id="Page_352">[352]</a></span>
+refused a course, Burnham shook his head at it
+wearily, and they rose from their meals in a state
+of passionate hunger, which they solaced with captain's
+biscuits in the seclusion of their bedrooms.
+Since they had Westgate almost to themselves,
+and the weather was becoming bright and warm,
+they were much out of doors; but their profound
+depression still continued, and they were as morbid
+human beings as Max Nordau could have desired
+to meet with when he was seeking for specimens
+of degeneration.</p>
+
+<p>Their continual greedy anxiety to narrate the
+details of their physical and mental sensations drove
+them to seek one another's company, and soon it
+became an understood thing that they should sit
+together on the lawn or in the winter garden during
+the morning, and stroll feebly in the direction
+of Margate during the breezy afternoon.</p>
+
+<p>These times were times of battle, of a struggle
+for supremacy in symptoms that led to much heart
+searching and to infinite exaggeration. Mrs Lorton,
+being a woman, generally got the best of it,
+and Burnham entered the hotel at tea-time with
+set teeth, and an appalling sense of injustice and of
+failure in his breast. One night at dinner, determined
+to conquer or to die, he refused everything
+but soup; and noted, with a grim satisfaction, that
+Mrs Lorton could hardly contain her chagrin at
+having inadvertently devoured a cutlet and a spoonful
+of jelly. Indeed, her temper was so much<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_353" id="Page_353">[353]</a></span>
+upset by this occurrence that she went straight to
+bed on leaving the coffee-room, and sent down a
+message the next morning to say that she was far
+too ill to venture out.</p>
+
+<p>Burnham, therefore, sat in the shelter alone,
+cursing the craft of woman. In the intervals between
+the cursings he was conscious of a certain
+loneliness that seemed to be in the atmosphere.
+It hovered with the seagulls above the sprightly
+waves, swept over the lawn hand in hand with the
+wind, basked in the sunshine, and companioned
+him closely upon the esplanade as he walked home
+to lunch. He was puzzled by it.</p>
+
+<p>At lunch-time Mrs Lorton was still confined to
+bed, so her maid announced. Burnham promptly
+began to wonder whether she was going to die.
+He strolled towards Margate wondering, and found
+himself presently in the sunset, gazing with tears
+in his eyes at the silhouette of Margate Pier, and,
+mentally, placing a reverent tribute of flowers from
+Covent Garden upon her early grave in Brompton
+Cemetery.</p>
+
+<p>He also found himself, later, dropping a tear at
+the thought of his own death, for of course with
+his weak health he could not hope to outlive anybody
+for very long. Mrs Lorton's absence at
+dinner struck him as more pathetic than all the
+misery of the travailing universe, until he remembered
+that at last he could gratify his appetite, and
+even accept two <i>entrées</i> at the hands of the waiter.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_354" id="Page_354">[354]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Life, if it is full of sorrows, is also full of consolations.</p>
+
+<p>He ate steadily for a couple of hours, pitying
+himself all the time.</p>
+
+<p>Next day Mrs Lorton re-appeared in a very bad
+temper. Her seclusion, although it had enabled
+her to score several points off her rival, had been
+in other respects wearisome and vexatious. She
+barely nodded to Burnham, and went out towards
+the shelter alone. He followed furtively, longing,
+as usual, for condolence, and presently saw her
+seat herself facing the sea. The strained relations
+between them seemed to forbid his placing himself
+at her side. The back-to-back posture would be
+more illustrative of the exact position of affairs,
+and Burnham's nicety and accuracy of mind induced
+him accordingly to face Westgate. Their
+positions of the first day were thus reversed. She
+looked at the sea; he stared at the villas. Strange
+turmoil of life, in which we never know which
+way we shall be facing next! It struck Burnham
+suddenly, and so forcibly, <i>à propos</i> of his and Mrs
+Lorton's reversal, that the ready tears sprang to
+his eyes. How would it all end? Man spins about
+like a tee-to-tum, bowing to all points of the compass.
+The time comes when the tee-to-tum runs
+down&mdash;and what then? Burnham was certainly
+run down. That must be his excuse for what he
+did. He glanced behind him through the glass
+screen, and saw by the motion of Mrs Lorton's back<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_355" id="Page_355">[355]</a></span>
+that she was sobbing. In truth, the sight of the
+dancing waves had set her thinking of all the poor
+people who have been drowned in water since the
+beginning of things. Poor dead folk! She was
+trembling with emotion, and still wept mechanically
+when she found Mr Burnham on her side of
+the shelter proposing to her with all his might and
+main. He was asking her to comfort him, to be
+a true woman and shield him with her strength,
+to support his tottering footsteps along the rugged
+ways of life, to dry his tears and stay the agonies
+of his shaken soul.</p>
+
+<p>“Your health will help my weakness,� he said.
+“Your vigour will teach me to be strong.�</p>
+
+<p>It was a strange proposal, and she began to
+defend herself from his imputations, stating her
+maladies, marshalling her symptoms of decay in an
+imposing procession.</p>
+
+<p>But it was no good. He had taken her unawares
+and got the start of her. She felt it, and
+his determined weakness obtained a power over
+her which she could never afterwards explain.</p>
+
+<p>His influenza triumphed, for she forgot her resolution.</p>
+
+<p>A wave of morbid pity for him swept over
+the woman in her. If he was disorganised now,
+what would be his condition if she refused
+him?</p>
+
+<p>“Have I the right,� she asked herself, “to devote
+a fellow-creature to everlasting misery?�</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_356" id="Page_356">[356]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Her influenza told her plainly that she had not.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>People say that the marriage will really come off.</p>
+
+<p>Jack Burnham announced it everywhere before
+Mrs Lorton got thoroughly well, and Mrs Lorton
+told everybody while Jack Burnham was still what
+his friends called “awfully dicky.�</p>
+
+<p>One can but hope that their married life will be
+passed on the same side of the shelter. If he
+persists in facing the sea, and she in staring at the
+villas&mdash;well, they will live most of Ibsen's plays!</p>
+
+<p>But at least they will be modern.</p>
+
+<p>And so the tee-to-tum, thought of pathetically
+by Burnham on a memorable occasion, spins round,
+and the sea and the villas are the two aspects of
+life.</p>
+
+<p id="end">&nbsp;</p>
+
+<div class="tn">
+
+<p>Transcriber's note:</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.</p>
+
+<p>Duplicate title headings at
+the beginning of the book and before each story have been removed.</p>
+
+<p>The following corrections were made to the text:</p>
+<ul>
+<li><a href="#Page_267">p. 267</a>: missing period added (danced merrily.)</li>
+<li><a href="#Page_325">p. 325</a>: single close quote to double close quote (“I hope you will not be bored,�)</li>
+<li><a href="#Page_328">p. 328</a>: healthly to healthy (fresh and healthy interest)</li>
+<li><a href="#Page_331">p. 331</a>: be to he (“A little more restrained,� he said.)</li>
+<li><a href="#Page_349">p. 349</a>: paragraph break removed after comma (and continued,
+“I doubt if any one)</li>
+</ul>
+</div>
+
+<hr class="full" />
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+</pre>
+</body>
+</html>
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new file mode 100644
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+++ b/33040-h/images/cover.jpg
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+++ b/33040.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,9693 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Bye-Ways, by Robert Smythe Hichens
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Bye-Ways
+
+
+Author: Robert Smythe Hichens
+
+
+
+Release Date: July 1, 2010  [eBook #33040]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BYE-WAYS***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, S. D., and the Project Gutenberg Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+BYE-WAYS
+
+by
+
+ROBERT HICHENS
+
+Author of "The Garden of Allah,"
+"Bella Donna," etc.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+New York
+Dodd, Mead and Company
+1914
+
+Copyright, 1897,
+By Dodd, Mead and Company.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                           PAGE
+
+  THE CHARMER OF SNAKES                                       3
+
+  A TRIBUTE OF SOULS
+
+    Prelude                                                  89
+
+      I. The Stranger by the Burn                            90
+
+     II. The Soul of Dr Wedderburn                          111
+
+    III. The Soul of Kate Walters                           131
+
+     IV. The Soul of Hugh Fraser                            142
+
+      V. The Return of the Grey Traveller                   159
+         Written in conjunction with
+         Lord Frederick Hamilton.
+
+  AN ECHO IN EGYPT                                          171
+
+  THE FACE OF THE MONK                                      211
+
+  THE MAN WHO INTERVENED                                    237
+
+  AFTER TO-MORROW                                           267
+
+  A SILENT GUARDIAN                                         287
+
+  A BOUDOIR BOY                                             319
+
+  THE TEE-TO-TUM                                            343
+
+
+
+
+BYE-WAYS
+
+
+
+
+THE CHARMER OF SNAKES
+
+
+I
+
+The petulant whining of the jackals prevented Renfrew from sleeping. At
+first he lay still on his camp bed, staring at the orifice of the bell
+tent, which was only partially covered by the canvas flap let down by
+Mohammed, after he had bidden his master good-night. Behind the tent the
+fettered mules stamped on the rough, dry ground, and now and then the
+heavy rustling of a wild boar could be heard, as it shuffled through the
+scrub towards the water that lay in the hollow beyond the camp. The
+wayward songs of the Moorish attendants had died into silence. They
+slept, huddled together and shrouded in their djelabes. But their
+wailing rapture of those old triumphant days when on the heights above
+Granada, beneath the eternal snows, their brethren walked as conquerors,
+had been succeeded by the cries of the uneasy beasts that throng the
+mountains between Tangier and Tetuan. And Renfrew said to himself that
+the jackals kept him from sleeping. He lay still and wondered if Claire
+were awake in her tent close by. If so, if her dark eyes were unclouded,
+what journeys must her imagination be making! She was so sensitive to
+sound of any kind. A cry moved her sometimes with a swift violence that
+alarmed those around her. The message of a note of music shut one door
+on her soul, opened another, and let her in to strange regions in which
+she chose to be lonely.
+
+How amazing it was to think that Claire, with all her serpentine beauty,
+all her celebrity, all the legends that clung to her fame, all the wild
+caprices of which two worlds had talked for years,--that Claire was
+hidden away three feet off, beneath the canvas shield that looked like a
+moderate-sized mushroom from the Kasbar on the hill. How amazing to
+think she was no longer Claire Duvigne, but Claire Renfrew. Her cheated
+audiences sighed in London in which a week ago she was acting. And while
+they sighed, she slept in this wild valley of Morocco, or lay awake and
+heard the jackals whining among the dwarf palms. And she was his. She
+belonged to him. He had the right to hold her--this thin, pale wonder of
+night and of fame--in his arms, and to kiss the lips from which came at
+will the coo of a dove or the snarl of a tigress. Although Renfrew could
+not sleep, he fell into a dream. Indeed, ever since he had married
+Claire, a week ago, his life had been a dream. When the goddess suddenly
+bends down to the worshipper, and says: "Don't pray to me any more--sit
+on my throne by my side!"--the worshipper exchanges one form of devotion
+for another, so deep and so different that for a while his ordinary
+faculties seem frozen, his life goes in shadowy places. Renfrew was not
+a man of deep imagination, but he had enough of the dangerous and dear
+quality to make him full of interest in Claire's bonfires of the mind.
+He sunned himself in the sparks which flew from her, even as the
+phlegmatic man in the pit bathes in the fury of some queen of the stage.
+He adored partly because he scarcely understood.
+
+And then, at this moment, he was in the throes of a most unexpected
+honeymoon. Claire, after refusing to have anything to do with him for
+two years or more, had suddenly married him in such a hurry that, though
+London gasped, Renfrew gasped still more. She had sent for him one
+night, from her dressing-room, between the third act and the fourth of
+an angry drama of passion. He came in and found her sitting in an
+arm-chair by a table, on which lay a note containing his last proposal,
+and a dagger with which she was about to commit a stage murder that had
+carried her glory to the four quarters of the universe. Her face was
+covered with powder, and in her long white dress she looked like a
+phantom. As she spoke to him, she ran her thin fingers mechanically up
+and down the blade of the dagger. When Renfrew was in the room, and the
+door shut, she looked up at him and said:--
+
+"Desmond, I'm going to frighten you more than I shall frighten the
+audience out there."
+
+And she pointed towards the hidden stage.
+
+"How?" he said, looking at her hand and at the dagger.
+
+"I'm going to marry you."
+
+Renfrew turned paler than she was.
+
+"Ah!" she cried. "You go white?"
+
+"No, no," he murmured. "But--but I can't believe it."
+
+"I will marry you when you like, to-morrow, whenever you can get a
+licence."
+
+"Oh, Claire!"
+
+Suddenly she got up.
+
+"Take me away from here," she said. "From this heat and noise. Take me
+to some place where it is wild and desolate. I want to be in starlight,
+with people who know nothing of me, and my trumpery talent. O God,
+Desmond, you don't know how a woman can get to hate being famous! I
+should like to act to-night to a circle of savages who had never heard
+of me and of my glory."
+
+"Curtain's up!" sang a shrill voice outside.
+
+Claire picked up the dagger.
+
+"Well?" she said. "Shall it be--?"
+
+"Ah, yes--yes!" Renfrew answered in a choked voice.
+
+She smiled and glided out, like a white snake, he thought.
+
+And now--yes, those were really jackals whining, and Claire slept,
+surrounded by a circle of Moors under the stars of Morocco.
+
+Renfrew trembled at the astounding surprises of life. Now the devil of
+the night--thought--had filled his veins with fever. He got up softly,
+drew on his clothes, unfastened the canvas flap, and emerged, like a
+shadow, from the mouth of the tent. The night was dewy and cool. All the
+heaven was full of eyes. The line of tethered mules looked like a black
+hedge in whose shelter the group of tents was pitched. A low fire, held
+in a cup of earth, was dying down in the distance, and as Renfrew came
+out a lanky dog slunk off among the bushes that clothed the low hills on
+every side.
+
+Renfrew stood quite still. He was bare-headed, and the breeze caught at
+his thick brown hair, and seemed to tug it like a rough child at play
+with a kindly elder. His eyes were turned towards the tiny peaked tent
+which shrouded Claire. A small moon half way up the sky sent out a beam
+which faintly illuminated this home of a wanderer, and Renfrew thought
+the beam was like a silver finger pointing at this wonderful creature
+whom glory had so long attended. Such beings must walk in light. Nature
+herself protests against their endeavours to shroud themselves even for
+a moment in darkness. He drew close to the tent, and listened for
+Claire's low breathing. But he could not hear it. Perhaps she was awake
+then.
+
+"Claire!" he called, in a low voice.
+
+There was no answer. Renfrew hesitated and glanced round the little
+camp. It was just then that he noticed the absence of two figures which
+had been standing like statues near his tent when he went to bed. These
+were soldiers sent from the nearest village to guard the camp from
+marauders during the night. Clad in earth-coloured rags, shrouded in
+loose robes that looked like musty dressing-gowns, with fez on head, and
+musket in hand, they had seemed devoutly intent on doing their duty
+then. But now--where were they? Renfrew strolled among the tents,
+expecting to find them squatting near the fire smoking cigarettes, or
+playing some Spanish game of cards. But they had vanished. He returned,
+and posted himself again by the door of Claire's rude bed-room, saying
+to himself that he would be her guard. Those Moorish vagabonds had
+deserted her. They cared nothing for the safety of this jewel, whom the
+whole civilised world cherished. But in his heart glowed a passion of
+protection for her. And then he gazed again at the impenetrable canvas
+wall that divided him from her. Only two hours ago he had held her in
+his arms and kissed her lips, yet already he felt as if a river of years
+flowed between them. He began to torture himself deliberately, as lovers
+will, by the imagination of non-existent evils. Suppose Claire
+possessed the power of a fairy, and could evaporate at will into the
+spaces of the air, leaving no trace behind. She might then have
+departed, have faded into the scented silence and darkness of this land
+so strange and desolate. Renfrew supposed the departure an actual fact.
+What a loneliness would fill his night then; if that little tent stood
+empty, if that slim sleeper were removed from the camp round which the
+jackals sat on their tiny haunches, whining like peevish spirits. He
+trembled beneath the weight of this absurd supposition, revelling in the
+intolerable with the folly of worship. Gradually he forced himself on
+step by step along the fanciful path till he had assured his imagination
+that Claire was really gone, and that he was just such a travelling
+Englishman as may come alone across the Straits, take out a camp, and
+spend his days in stalking wild boar, or shooting duck, his nights in
+the heavy slumber of complete weariness. And, at length, having gained a
+ghastly summit of imaginative despair, he suddenly stretched forth his
+hand, unhooked the canvas that shrouded Claire's tent door, and peeped
+cautiously in, courting the delicious revulsion of feeling which he
+would secure when he saw her half defined form in the shadow of the
+leaning roof that hid her from the stars.
+
+He bent forward with greedy anxiety. But the pale and tragic face he
+looked for, did not greet his eyes. The tent was empty.
+
+Renfrew stood for a moment holding back the canvas flap with one hand.
+This denial calmly offered to his expectation bewildered him. He was
+confused, and for a moment scarcely thought at all. Then his mind broke
+away with the violence of a dog unleashed, and ran a wild course of
+surmises. He thought first of rousing the camp and organising an
+immediate search. Then he remembered the absence of the two soldiers who
+ought to be guarding the tents and the mules. Claire gone, those
+soldiers absent! He linked the two facts together, and turned white and
+sick. But he did not rouse the camp. Indeed, he thanked God that all the
+men were sleeping. He sprang softly back from the tent, turned on his
+heel, and stole out of the camp so silently that he scarcely seemed a
+living thing. The ground towards the water was boggy and spongy, and the
+scent of the thickly growing myrtles was heavy in the air. Renfrew
+brushed through them swiftly. He heard the harsh snuffling of a boar,
+and the tread of its feet in the mud at the water-side. And these sounds
+filled the night with a sense of unknown dangers. Darkness, a wild
+country, wild men, wild beasts, and his beautiful Claire out somewhere
+alone, near him, perhaps, yet hidden behind the impenetrable veil of
+darkness. He saw her fainting, struggling, crying out for him. He saw
+her silent and dead, and frenzy seized him. She was not here by the
+water. And with a gesture of despair he turned back. Low and rounded
+hills faced him on all sides, covered with a dense undergrowth of palms
+and close-growing shrubs that looked almost like black velvet in the
+night. On one, the highest, was perched the native village from which
+the soldiers had come. Dogs were barking in it incessantly. It seemed to
+Renfrew that Claire might have been conveyed there by these ruffians;
+and he began hastily to ascend in the direction of the dogs' acute
+voices. He stumbled among the palms at first; but, mounting higher, he
+came into the eye of the moon, and was swallowed up in a shrouded silver
+radiance. The camp faded away below him, and he felt the breeze with
+greater force. Yet its breath was warm. Could Claire feel it? Did she
+see the moon? Now the dogs were evidently close by. The village must be
+behind that big clump of trees. Renfrew sprang upward, passed through
+them, suddenly drew a great breath and stood still.
+
+Beyond the trees there was a small clearing that almost corresponded to
+our English notion of a village green. On the near side of it was the
+clump of trees in whose shadow Renfrew now stood. On the far side of it
+was the Moorish village, a minute collection of low huts like hovels,
+featureless and filthy. The moon streamed over the clearing and lit up
+faintly a cluster of seated figures that formed a good-sized circle. The
+figures looked broad and almost shapeless, for they were all smothered
+in long, voluminous robes, and over all the heads great hoods were drawn
+which hid the faces of the wearers. They were absolutely motionless, and
+differed little from the more distant clumps of dwarf palms that grew
+everywhere among the huts. Only they possessed the curiously sullen
+aspect of things alive but entirely motionless. It was not this living
+Stonehenge of Morocco, however, which caused Renfrew to catch his breath
+and rooted him in the shadow. In the centre of the circle, lit up by the
+moon, there stood something that might have been a phantom, it was so
+thin, so tall, so white-faced, so strange in its movements. It was a
+woman, and long black hair flowed down to its waist,--night standing
+back from that moon, vague and spectral, the face. In this human night
+and moon, great sombre eyes gleamed with a sort of fatigued beauty. This
+spectre stretched out its long arms in weird gesticulations and
+sometimes swayed its body as if it moved to music. And from its lips
+came a soft and liquid stream of golden words that mingled with the acid
+barking of the dogs, some of which crept furtively about on the
+outskirts of the serene hooded circle of the listeners. This murmuring
+spectre was Claire. She was girt about with silently staring Moors. And
+she was in the act of delivering one of her most famous recitations,
+which she had last given at a monster morning performance before
+Royalties in London, on a sultry day of the season. As this fact broke
+upon Renfrew's mind, he seemed for a moment to be back in the hot
+dressing-room in which Claire had said: "I will marry you." He seemed to
+hear her passionate exclamation: "I should like to act to-night to a
+circle of savages!" The hill men of this part of Morocco may not be
+savages, but they are fierce and wild and ruthless. And now they hung
+upon the lips that had spoken to London, Paris, Vienna, New York--but
+never before to such an audience as this. The recitation was a
+description of the performance of a snake-charmer, his harangue to his
+reptiles and to the crowd watching him, and his departure into the
+solitude of the great desert, there to obtain, in communion with its
+spirit, the power to work greater miracles, and to charm not alone the
+serpents that dwell among the rocks and in the forests, but also men,
+women, little children,--the power to thrust a human world into a kennel
+of plaited straw, to take it out in sections at pleasure, and to make it
+dance, pose, and posture, like a viper tamed into a species of
+ballet-dancer. In this recitation the peculiar and almost serpentine
+fascination of Claire had full liberty. She represented the
+snake-charmer as a being who through long and intimate association with
+snakes had become like them, lithe, fantastic, and unexpected, soft and
+deadly, by turns sleepy and violent, a coil of glistening velvet and a
+length of cast-iron, tipped with a poisoned fang and the music of a
+hiss. His fanaticism, his greed for money, the passionate prayer to Sidi
+Mahomet that flowed from his lips while his terrible eyes searched an
+imaginary crowd in search of the richest man or the most excited woman
+in it, his bursts of dancing humour, his deadly stillness, his playful
+familiarity with his dangerous captives, his mesmeric anger when they
+were sullen and recalcitrant, his relapse into the savage churchwarden
+with the collecting box when his "show" was at an end,--every side,
+every subtlety of such a creature Claire could give with the certainty
+of genius. As you watched her, you beheld the snakes, you beheld their
+master. Even at the end you almost saw the vast and trackless desert
+open its haggard arms to receive its child, who passed from the crowd to
+the silence in which alone he could learn to fascinate the crowd. At the
+great morning performance in London, a prince who knew the East had said
+to Claire, "Miss Duvigne, you must have lived with snake-charmers. You
+must have studied them for months."
+
+"I never saw one in my life," she answered truthfully.
+
+And now she gave her performance to those who, in the dingy market
+squares of their white-walled cities, had seen the snakes dance and had
+heard the prayer to Sidi Mahomet. And they squatted in the moonbeams,
+immobile as goblins carved in dusky oak. Yet they inspired Claire. From
+his hiding place Renfrew could note this. She had let her genius loose
+upon them, as she had let her cloud of hair loose upon her shoulders.
+The frosty touch of smart conventionality bewilders and half paralyses
+the utterly unconventional. Often Renfrew had heard Claire curse the
+smiling and self-contented Londoners who thronged the stalls of her
+theatre. She felt, with the swiftness of genius, the retarding hand they
+laid upon her winged talents. She had no inclination to curse these
+hooded figures gathered round her in the night, staring upon her with
+the fixed concentration of children who behold, rather than hear, a
+fairy tale, they paid her the fine compliment of an undivided attention.
+It was a curious scene and one that stirred in Renfrew a deep
+excitement. He watched it with a double sense, of living keenly and of
+dreaming deeply. Claire gave to him the first sense, the moon and the
+motionless Moors the second. But presently one of the hooded statues
+stirred and swayed, and there mingled with the voice of Claire a twisted
+melody, so thin and wandering that it was like a thread binding a bundle
+of gold. It pierced the night, and enclosed the words of the reciter,
+one sound prisoned by another lighter and less than itself. The dogs had
+ceased to bark now, and only the voice that told of the snake-charmer's
+journey into the desert, and this whispering Moorish tune, plucked by
+dark fingers from the strings of a rough lute, moved in the night, till
+Claire ceased. The lute continued for a few bars, like the symphony that
+closes a song, and then it too ceased abruptly on a note that brought no
+feeling of finale to modern ears. For an instant Claire stood motionless
+in the centre of the human circle. Then her arms fell to her sides. She
+moved swiftly towards the trees in whose shadow Renfrew was watching.
+The Moors made a gap, and as she passed out all the shapeless figures
+were suddenly elongated and crowded together upon her footsteps. As
+Claire came into the blackness of the trees, Renfrew stretched out his
+hand and clasped her arm. She stopped with no tremor, and faced him.
+
+"Claire!"
+
+"What, it is you, Desmond! I thought you were asleep."
+
+"When you were awake? You have given me a fright. I came to your tent; I
+found it empty. The soldiers were gone."
+
+"They were guarding me up the hill. I could not sleep. I wandered out.
+How hot your hand is!"
+
+Renfrew released her. All the Moors had gathered round them like
+enormous shadows.
+
+"My audience has come to the stage door!" Claire said.
+
+Her eyes were gleaming with excitement.
+
+"They are a beautiful audience," she added; "and the orchestra, the
+soft music--that was better than London fiddles."
+
+"Come back to the camp, Claire."
+
+"Very well."
+
+He drew her arm through his, and led her out into the moonlight and down
+the hill. Two shadows detached themselves from the silent assembly and
+followed them, barefooted, over the dewy grass. They were the soldiers.
+Claire looked back and saw them.
+
+"I shall give those men a handful of pesetas, to-morrow," she said.
+
+They reached the camp and sat down on two folding chairs in the shadow
+of Claire's tent. The soldiers stood near, gazing intently at them.
+Claire sat in a curved attitude. She had drawn a dark veil over her
+hair, and her enormous and tragic eyes were turned sombrely on Renfrew.
+She looked fatigued, as she often did after acting a long and passionate
+part. To Renfrew she seemed more wonderful than ever. He could scarcely
+believe that he was her husband.
+
+"You have had your circle of savages," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And you liked them?"
+
+"Do you think they liked me? I wonder if there was a snake-charmer among
+them. When I came to Sidi Mahomet I thought perhaps they would kill me.
+That thought made me pray better than I can in London."
+
+"You could charm snakes more certainly than any Arab," Renfrew said.
+
+"I daresay. Perhaps I shall try at Tetuan. Good-night, Desmond."
+
+She vanished into the tent. It seemed that she evaporated as Sarah
+Bernhardt evaporates in the fourth act of "La Tosca."
+
+
+II
+
+On the following day they rode across the mountain to Tetuan. They
+started in the dawn. Claire's eyes were heavy. She came languidly out
+from the tent door to mount her horse, and when she touched Renfrew he
+felt that her hand was cold like an icicle. He looked at her anxiously.
+
+"Are you ill?" he asked.
+
+"No, Desmond."
+
+He lifted her into the saddle.
+
+"You haven't slept," he said.
+
+She looked down at him as she slowly gathered up her reins.
+
+"Unfortunately, I have," she replied.
+
+Before Renfrew had time to express surprise at this unexpected
+rejoinder, she had struck her horse with the whip, and trotted off over
+the grass in the direction of the white Kasbar that gleamed on the hill
+under the kiss of the rising sun. He leaped into the saddle, and
+followed her. The path into which they came was narrow, winding through
+wild fig-trees and olives, and constantly ascending. Claire did not turn
+her head, and Renfrew could not ride by her side. He watched her thin
+and sinuous figure swaying slightly in obedience to the motion of her
+horse, which scrambled over the rough path with the activity of a wild
+cat. In front of her their personal attendant, Mohammed, rode on a huge
+grey mule, and sang to himself incessantly in a deep and murmuring
+voice. Once or twice Renfrew spoke to Claire, but she did not seem to
+hear him. He resolved to ask about her sleep when they gained some
+plateau on which they could rest for a moment. At present it was
+necessary to concentrate his attention on his horse and on the dangers
+of the road.
+
+When the sun was high in the heavens, and they were high on the
+mountain, above a gorge in which the scrub grew densely, and great
+bushes starred with yellow and white flowers hid the rocks and made a
+home for birds, Mohammed called a halt. Renfrew lifted Claire to the
+ground. The men passed on towards Tetuan with their camp, and Claire
+sank down on a gay rug beneath the shade of a huge white umbrella, which
+was pitched on a square of level ground and circled with luxuriant
+vegetation. Renfrew lay at her feet and lit his pipe, while Mohammed,
+the dragoman, and one of the porters squatted at a little distance, and
+began to play cards in a cloud of keef. Claire was fanning herself
+slowly with an enormous Spanish fan in which all gay colours met. She
+still looked very tired. The shuffle of the descending mules died away
+down the mountain, and a silence, through which the butterflies flitted,
+fell round them.
+
+"Is this journey too much for you, Claire?" Renfrew asked.
+
+"No. I can rehearse for six hours in London, surely I can ride for six
+here."
+
+"But you look tired."
+
+"Because, as I told you, I slept too much last night."
+
+"What does that mean?"
+
+She stretched herself on the rug with the easy grace of a woman who has
+trained her body to carry to the eyes of others, as a message, all the
+moods of passion and of peace. Then she leaned her cheek on her hand.
+
+"In the darkness of the tent, Desmond, I slept and did not know it. I
+believed that I lay awake. I thought I still could hear the jackals, and
+the stamping of the mules. But, really, I slept."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"Because of what I am going to tell you. The wind blew about the canvas
+door, and when it bulged outwards I could see on each side of it a tiny
+section of the night outside, a bit of a bush, blades of short grass
+moving, a ray of the moon, the slinking shadow of one of the dogs from
+the village."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Presently there came, I thought, a stronger gust than usual. It tore
+the canvas flap from the pegs, and the whole thing blew up, leaving the
+entrance quite open. Then it blew down again. It was only up for a
+minute. During that minute I had seen that a very tall man was standing
+outside the tent."
+
+"One of the soldiers."
+
+"If I had been awake it might have been."
+
+"You mean that all this was a dream?"
+
+"I mean that I slept last night, and that I wish I hadn't."
+
+She turned her great eyes on Renfrew, holding the red, green, and yellow
+fan so that it concealed the lower part of her face. And he looked at
+her, staring at him like some tragic stranger above the rampart of an
+unknown city, and wondered whether she was acting to him in the sun. On
+the forefinger of the hand that held up the fan a huge black pearl
+perched in a circle of gold. Renfrew had often noticed it on the stage,
+when Claire lifted the silver dagger to kill the man who loved her in
+the play.
+
+"The door of your tent was securely closed when I got up and came out
+this morning," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+She spoke with the utmost indifference. Then she added more sharply:--
+
+"Desmond, has it ever occurred to you that I am serpentine?"
+
+He was startled and made no answer.
+
+"Well--has it?"
+
+"Yes," he said truthfully.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Every one thinks so. You are so thin. You move so silently. Your body
+is so elastic and controlled. You always look as if you could glide into
+places where other women could never go, and be at home in attitudes
+they could never assume."
+
+"But I'm an actress--my body is trained, you know, to lie, to fall, as I
+choose."
+
+"Other actresses don't give one the same impression."
+
+"No," she said thoughtfully. "My peculiar physique has a great deal to
+do with it."
+
+"Of course, and there's something more than that, something mental."
+
+Claire's heavy eyes grew more thoughtful. The white lids fluttered lower
+over them till they looked like the eyes of one half asleep. She lay in
+silence, plunged in a reverie that was deep and dark. In this reverie
+she forgot to move her fan, which dropped from her hand and fell softly
+upon the rug. Renfrew did not interrupt her. His worship had learned to
+wait upon her moods. A huge dragon-fly passed on its journey towards the
+far blue range of the Atlas Mountains. It whirred in its haste, and its
+burnished body shone in the sunshine between its gleaming wings. Claire
+snatched at it with her hand, but missed it.
+
+"I should like to wear it as a jewel," she said.
+
+Then she turned slowly again towards Renfrew, and continued her nocturne
+as if it had never been broken off.
+
+"The canvas flap fell down again over the doorway, Desmond, and it
+seemed that just then the breeze died away, expiring in that angry gust.
+I could not see anything but the interior of the tent, and only that
+very dimly. But this man outside. I wanted to see him."
+
+"Did you recognise that he was not one of the soldiers, then?"
+
+"Perfectly. He was not dressed as they are. They were entirely muffled
+up with hoods drawn forward above their faces. And in their hands one
+could see their guns. This man was bareheaded, and looked half naked.
+And in his hands--"
+
+She stopped meditatively.
+
+"Was there anything in his hands?"
+
+"Well--yes, there was."
+
+"What?"
+
+"I wanted to know what it was. But at first I only lay quite still and
+wished the wind would come again and blow the flap up so that I could
+see out. But it had quite gone down. The canvas did not even quiver."
+
+"Was it near dawn?"
+
+"I haven't an idea. Does the breeze sink then?"
+
+"Very often."
+
+"Ah! Perhaps it was then. Oh, but you'll see in a minute what nonsense
+it is to think about that. I lay still, as I said, for some time,
+waiting for the breeze. And when it wouldn't come, I made up my mind
+that I must arrive at a decision either to turn my face on the pillow
+and go to sleep, or else to get up, go to the tent door, and look out."
+
+"To see this man?"
+
+"Exactly."
+
+"Which did you do?"
+
+"Turned my face on the pillow."
+
+"And went off to sleep?"
+
+"No, grew most intensely awake--as I supposed. The pillow was like fire
+against my cheek. It burnt me. With the departure of the breeze the
+night had become suddenly most intolerably hot. I turned over on my back
+and lay like that. Then I felt as if there was sand on the sheets."
+
+"Sand! Impossible! We aren't in the desert."
+
+"No. But it seemed as if I lay in hot sand. I shifted my position, but
+it made no difference. I sat up. The tent door was still closed. I
+listened. All those dogs had ceased to bark. There wasn't a sound. Even
+the jackals had left off whining. Then I slipped out of bed and threw
+that rose-coloured Moorish cloak over me. It rustled just like a thing
+rustles in grass, Desmond."
+
+She looked at him with a sort of peculiar significance, and as if she
+expected him to gather something definite from the remark.
+
+"A thing in grass," he repeated, wondering. "What sort of thing?"
+
+But Claire avoided the question. She had taken up the fan again, and was
+opening and shutting it with a quiet and careful sort of precision, as
+she went on in a low and even voice:--
+
+"I disliked this rustling, and held the cloak tightly together with my
+hands. I felt as if the man outside the tent had been waiting to hear
+that very little noise."
+
+"The rustling?"
+
+"Yes. And that when he heard it he smiled to himself. I didn't intend he
+should hear it again though, and as I glided towards the tent door, I
+held the cloak very tight and away from my body. And I don't think I can
+have made any noise. You know how softly I can move when I choose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When I got to the door, I waited. I couldn't hear the man; but I felt
+that he was still there, just on the other side of the flap."
+
+Renfrew leaned forward on the rug. He felt deeply interested, perhaps
+only because Claire was the narrator. She held him much as she could
+hold an audience in a theatre, by her pose, her hands, her pale, almost
+weary face, her heavy sombre eyes, even more than by any words she
+chanced to be uttering. She could make anything seem vitally important
+if she chose, simply by her manner. Renfrew's pipe had gone out; but he
+did not know it, and still kept it between his lips.
+
+"I waited for some time by the flap," Claire continued calmly. "I was
+going to lift it presently, I knew; but I could not do it at once. The
+man and I were standing, I suppose, for full five minutes only divided
+by that strip of canvas. I tried not to breathe audibly, and I could not
+hear him breathe. At last I resolved to see him, and considered how I
+should do so. If I remained standing and looked out, I should have to
+push the flap quite away and my eyes would be nearly on a level with
+his. He would certainly see me. I didn't wish that. I didn't intend at
+all that he should see me. Therefore I resolved to lie down."
+
+"On the ground?"
+
+"Yes, quite flat, and to raise the bottom of the flap gently an inch or
+two. This would enable me to see him without being seen, if I did it
+without noise. I dropped down quite softly. Do you remember my death in
+'Camille'?"
+
+Renfrew nodded.
+
+"Almost like that. But the rose-coloured stuff rustled again. I wished I
+hadn't put it on. I raised the flap very slightly and peeped out. Do
+you know what I felt like just then, Desmond?"
+
+"What?"
+
+"Just like a snake in ambush. When my cloak rustled, it was the grass
+against my body. I lay in cover, and could see my enemy like a creature
+in a forest, or a reptile in scrub."
+
+She glanced round at the bushes and the densely growing palms.
+
+"Yes, I lay there like a snake in the grass."
+
+She stretched herself out on the rug as she spoke, with her head towards
+Renfrew and her eyes fastened on his.
+
+"I saw first the feet of the man close to my eyes. His feet were almost
+black and bare. His legs were bare. My glance travelled up him, and I
+saw that his chest and his arms were bare too. He was clothed in a sort
+of loose rough garment, the colour of sacking, that fell into a kind of
+hood behind; and he looked enormously powerful. That struck me very
+much--his power."
+
+"Did you see his face?"
+
+"Quite well. It was the face of a man watching and listening with the
+closest attention. He was smiling slightly, too, as if something that
+had just happened had satisfied him. I knew he had heard the rustle of
+my robe as I slipped to the ground."
+
+"But why should that please him?"
+
+"It told him that I was there, that I was attentive too."
+
+Renfrew's face slightly darkened.
+
+"As I looked, I saw what he was holding in his hands."
+
+"What was it--a dagger--a staff?"
+
+"A serpent."
+
+Renfrew could not repress an exclamation.
+
+"Very large and striped. Its skin was like shot silk in the moonlight.
+It writhed softly between his hands, and turned its flat head from side
+to side. It seemed to be trying to bend down towards where I lay. Its
+tongue shot out like a length of riband out of one of those wooden
+winders that you buy in cheap shops. I should think its body was quite
+five feet long, and its colour seemed to change as it turned about.
+Sometimes it was pink, then it looked dull green and almost black. Once
+it wriggled down so near to the ground that I could see two fangs in its
+open mouth like hooks, and the roof of its mouth was flesh colour."
+
+"How abominable!" said Renfrew, softly.
+
+"I didn't feel it so at all," Claire said. "I wanted it to come to
+me,--back into the grass where such things are safe. But the man
+wouldn't let it go. He thrust it into his breast. He wanted to have his
+hands free."
+
+"Good God, Claire--what for? Did he--?"
+
+She smiled at his sudden violence, which showed his interest.
+
+"When the snake was safe, he drew out, still smiling and listening, a
+little pipe that looked as if it were made of straw, very common and
+dirty. He held it up to his black lips, and began to play very softly
+and sleepily. Desmond, the tune he played was charmed. It was a tune
+composed--for--for--"
+
+She broke off.
+
+"You know the Pied Piper had his tune," she said; "the rats had to
+follow it. Well, this tune was for the serpents."
+
+"To charm them you mean?"
+
+"Wisely--dangerously--almost irresistibly, perhaps in time, Desmond,
+quite, quite irresistibly. There is a music for all creatures, all
+reptiles, birds,--everything that lives; this was for the snakes."
+
+"Well, but, Claire, how did you know that?"
+
+She looked at him with a sort of dull amusement and pity in her
+half-shut eyes.
+
+"Shall I tell you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I knew it, because the tune charmed me, Desmond."
+
+"Ah, you are acting! I half suspected it from the first," Renfrew
+exclaimed almost roughly.
+
+He sat up as a man who has been lying under a spell stirs when the spell
+is broken. Now he knew that his pipe was out, and he felt for his
+match-box. But Claire still kept her eyes fixed on him, and laid her
+hand on his arm gently.
+
+"No, I am not acting," she said. "The tune charmed me. You see I am a
+woman; and there are many women who feel at moments that what attracts
+some special creature, thing, of the so-called world without a soul,
+attracts them too. Some men can whistle a woman as they would a dog,
+can't they?"
+
+"Perhaps."
+
+"Yes, and some men can charm a woman as they could charm a serpent."
+
+"I don't understand you, Claire."
+
+"You don't choose to. The animal is in us all, hidden deftly by Nature,
+the artful dodger of the scheme of creation, Desmond; and we know it
+when the right tune is played to summon it from its slumber in the nest
+of the human body. Only the right tune can waken it."
+
+"The animal! But--"
+
+"Or the reptile, perhaps. What does it matter? This was the right tune
+for me. I lay there like a snake in the grass and it thrilled me! And
+all the time the black man smiled and listened for the rustling at his
+feet. You look black, Desmond! How absurd of you to be angry!"
+
+And she closed her fingers over his hand till the frown died out of his
+face.
+
+"The tune seemed to draw me to the man. I understood just how he had
+captured the serpent that lay hidden in his bosom. It had once lain in
+ambush as I lay now, long ago perhaps, in the desert among the rocks, on
+the sand, Desmond."
+
+"Ah, the sand!" he said, remembering suddenly the strange feeling
+Claire had described as coming upon her when she was trying to sleep.
+
+"Yes. And he had drawn it from the sand to the oasis among the palms
+where he stood playing, till he heard its rustling in the grass about
+his feet, as it glided nearer to him, and nearer, and nearer, till at
+last it reared up its body, and wound up him and round him, and laid its
+flat head between his great hands. Yes, that was how it came."
+
+"You fancy."
+
+"I know. But I would not go. I determined that I would not, and I lay
+perfectly still. But all the time I longed to go. I had an almost
+irresistible passion for movement towards that tune. It seemed to me a
+stream of music into which I yearned to plunge, and drown and die. And
+it flowed up there at the man's lips! The longing increased as he piped
+the tune, over and over and over again, almost under his breath. I was
+sick with it, and it hurt me because I resisted it. And at last I knew
+that resisting it would kill me. I must either go, or not go, and die.
+There was no alternative. That music simply claimed me. It had the right
+to. And if I denied that right I should cease. I did deny it."
+
+She shuddered in the sun, then added, almost harshly:--
+
+"Like a fool."
+
+"And then, Claire, then--?"
+
+"It seemed to me that I died in most horrible pain. I lived once more
+when you said, outside my tent, 'Claire, time to get up.' You see, I
+slept too much last night."
+
+And again she shuddered. A look of relief shot into Renfrew's face.
+
+"All this came from your mad performance to those Moors," he said. "You
+impersonate so vividly that even sleep cannot release your genius, and
+bring it out from the world which you have deliberately forced it to
+enter."
+
+"But, Desmond, I impersonated the charmer of the snake, not the snake
+itself."
+
+"Oh, in a dream the mind always wanders a little from the event that has
+caused the dream. It is like a faulty mimic who strives to reproduce
+with exactitude and slightly fails. Time to go, Absalem?"
+
+The dragoman had come up.
+
+As they rode down the mountain a strange thing occurred, strange at
+least in connection with Claire's narrative of the night. Mohammed, who
+was riding just in front of them, pulled up his mule beside a thicket at
+the wayside, and, turning his head, signed to them to be silent. Then,
+pursing his lips, he whistled a shrill little tune. In a moment an
+answer came from the thicket; Claire glanced at Renfrew with a slight
+smile. Here was a sort of side light of reality thrown upon her dream
+and upon their conversation. Mohammed whistled again. The echo followed.
+And then suddenly a bird flew out, almost into his face, and, startled,
+swerved and darted away across the gorge into the dense woods beyond.
+
+"A charm of birds," Claire murmured to Renfrew, as they rode on. "The
+summoning tune--what can resist it?"
+
+"Claire," he said, almost reproachfully, "you speak like a fatalist."
+
+"And I believe I am one," she answered. "Destiny is not only a phantom
+but also a fact. Mine is marked out for me and known--"
+
+"To whom? Not to yourself?"
+
+"Oh, no!"
+
+"To whom then?"
+
+"To the hidden force that directs all things."
+
+"I am your destiny."
+
+"Ah, Desmond--or Morocco. I feel to-day as if I shall never see England
+again, or a civilised audience such as I have known."
+
+And then she seemed to fall into a waking dream. Even Renfrew felt
+drowsy, the air was so intensely hot and the motion of the horses so
+monotonous. And Mohammed's deep voice was never silent. It buzzed like a
+bourdon in the glare of the noontide, till, far away on the hill-side,
+they saw white Tetuan facing the plain, the river moving stagnantly
+towards the sea, the great fields of corn in which strange flowers grew,
+and the giant range of shaggy mountains, swimming in a mist of gold that
+looked like spangled tissue.
+
+
+III
+
+The camp was pitched beyond the city in the green plain that lies
+between Tetuan and the sea. From the tents Renfrew and Claire saw the
+trains of camels and donkeys passing slowly along the high road towards
+the steep and stony hill that leads up to the lower city gate, the
+white-washed summer palaces of the wealthy Moors, nestling in gardens,
+among green fields and groves of acacias, olives and almond trees, the
+far-off line of blue water on the one hand and the fairy-like and ivory
+town upon the other. Clouds of brown dust flew up in the air, and the
+hoarse cry of "Balak! Balak!" made a perpetual and distant music. Far
+more strange and barbarous was this city than Tangier. All traces of
+Europe had faded away. Thousands of years seemed now to stand like a
+wall between the Continents, and the hordes of dark and fanatical
+Moslems gazed upon the great actress and her husband as we gaze at wild
+animals whose aspects and whose habits are strange to us.
+
+"I know now what it is to feel like an unclean dog," Claire said, as
+they sat at dinner under the stars that night, after their halting
+progress through the filthy alleys of the white fairyland on the
+hill-side. "It is a grand sensation. I suppose children enjoy it, too.
+That must be why they like making mud-pies."
+
+"To-morrow is market-day, Absalem tells me," Renfrew said. "We will
+spend it in the town, and you can feel unclean to your heart's
+content--you!"
+
+He looked at her and laughed low, with the pride of a lover in a
+beautiful woman who is his own.
+
+"They ought to fall down and worship you," he said.
+
+"Moors worship a woman! Desmond, you are mad!"
+
+"No, they are--they are. See, Claire, the moon is coming up already. Can
+it be shining on Piccadilly too, and on the facade of the theatre?"
+
+"The theatre! I can't believe I shall ever see it again."
+
+"Nonsense!"
+
+"Is it? This wild country seems to have swallowed me up, and I don't
+feel as if it will ever disgorge me again. Desmond, perhaps there are
+some lands that certain people ought never to visit. For those lands
+love them, and, once they have seized their prey, they will never yield
+it up again. Poor men must often feel that when they are dying in
+foreign places. It is the land which has taken them to itself as an
+octopus takes a drifting boat in a lonely sea. Africa!"
+
+She had risen from her seat and moved out into the vague plain. Renfrew
+followed her.
+
+"I wonder in which direction the desert lies nearest," she said. "All
+the strange people come in from the desert, as the strange things of
+life come in from the future, only one so seldom hears the tinkling
+bells of those deadly silent caravans in which they travel. If we could
+hear and see them coming, what emotions we should have!"
+
+"There are premonitions, some men say," Renfrew answered.
+
+"The faint bells of the caravans ringing,--do you ever hear them?"
+
+"No, Claire--never. And you?"
+
+"I half thought I did once."
+
+"When was that?"
+
+"Last night. Hark! The men have finished supper and are beginning to
+sing. That's a song about dancing."
+
+"To-morrow we are going to feast the soldiers, and have an African
+fire."
+
+"Splendid! I think I will leap through the flames."
+
+Renfrew put his arm round her.
+
+"No, no. They might singe your beauty. And yet, you are a flame too. You
+have burnt your name, yourself, like a brand upon my heart."
+
+The dancing song rang up in the moonlight like the wailing of dead
+masqueraders. All Moorish songs are sad and thrilling, fateful and
+pregnant with unrest and with forebodings.
+
+With the daylight the Jews came, in their long and morose garments and
+black skull-caps, bearing bales of embroideries, slippers, and uncut
+jewels. When they saw the wonderful black pearl upon Claire's finger
+their huge eyes flamed with an avarice so fierce and open that Renfrew
+instinctively moved between them and Claire, as if to guard her from
+assault.
+
+But the wonderful pearl was not for them.
+
+The sun blazed furiously when they got upon their horses to ride to the
+Soko. Each day the season was growing hotter, and Absalem told them that
+there were no English in Tetuan. Nor did they set eyes on a European
+woman until that day when Renfrew rode back, crouching along his horse,
+to the villas of Tangier.
+
+Tetuan has more than one open mouth, and when it swallows you the
+contemplation of a fairyland is immediately exchanged for a desperate
+reality of populous filth, stentorian uproar, uneven boulders, beggars,
+bazaars like rabbit hutches, men and children pitted with small-pox till
+they appear scarcely human, lepers, Jews, pirates from the Riff
+Mountains, fanatics from the Ape's Hill, water-carriers, veiled,
+waddling women, dogs like sharp shadows, and monkeys that appear and
+vanish in sinister doorways with the rapidity and gestures of demons. On
+a market-day the city is so full that it seems as if the circling and
+irregular white walls must burst and disgorge the clamouring and
+gesticulating inhabitants into the tranquil plain below. Claire surveyed
+this blanched hell with a still serenity, as she had often surveyed an
+applauding audience at the close of her evening's task, ere she thanked
+them with the curious gesture, that was almost a salaam, in which
+humility and a remote pride mingled. Noise generally gave her calm; and
+when passion broke from her she taught the world to be intensely silent.
+These alleys became like a dream to her, and the tiny interiors of the
+bazaars were little histories of visionary lives, some, but only a few,
+mysteriously beautiful. One, in a very dark place where, for some
+unknown cause, all voices died away till the hot air was full of a
+whispering stillness, brought slow tears to Claire's eyes. In the Street
+of the Slippers she passed a cupboard of wood raised high from the
+pavement, with low roof, leaning walls, and, in front, a little bar like
+that which fences an English baby in its chair before the fire. In this
+cupboard squatted two tiny Moorish infants, sole occupants of the
+cupboard, with solemn faces, bending to ply their trade of pricking
+patterns upon rose-coloured Morocco leather. There was no beauty in the
+cupboard, sweetness of light, or ease. And the faces of the little boys
+were sad and elderly. But, placed carefully between them, was an ugly
+three-legged stool, on which stood two dwarf earthen jars containing two
+sprigs of orange flower, and, as Claire looked, one of the babes laid
+down his leather, lifted his jar, sniffed, with a sort of gentle
+resignation, at his flower, and then resumed his diligent labours,
+refreshed perhaps, and strengthened. In the action Claire seemed to
+catch sight of a little pallid soul striving to exist feebly among the
+slippers.
+
+"Did you see?" she cried to Renfrew, when the baby shoemakers were lost
+to sight.
+
+He nodded.
+
+"I wish I were a Moorish woman, Desmond."
+
+"Good Heaven! Why!"
+
+"So that I could kiss the infant who smelt the orange flower in his own
+language. Little artist!"
+
+Her sudden blaze of enthusiasm was checked by the infernal Soko into
+which they now entered. In this unpaved square, upon which the pitiless
+sun beat, the earth seemed to have come alive, to have formed itself
+into a thousand vague semblances of human figures, and to be shrieking,
+moving, twisting, gesticulating, as if striving to impart a thousand
+abominable secrets till now hidden from the world that walks upon its
+surface. As snow-men resemble the snow, so did these bargainers, these
+buyers, sellers, barterers, pedlars, resemble the baked earth on which
+they squatted. Shrouded in earth-coloured garments, they shrieked,
+strove, rang their bells, kicked their donkeys, elbowed their rivals,
+pommelled their camels, recited the Koran, or testified with frenzy, the
+terrific honesty of all their dealings. Here and there tents made of
+mud-coloured rags cast a grotesque shadow, in which broad women, hidden
+by veils like sacks, and dominated by straw hats a yard wide, sat
+huddled together and pecked at by wandering fowls. Jew boys, with long
+and expressive faces, their black hair plastered upon their foreheads in
+fringes that touched their eyes, strolled through the mob in batches,
+some of them reading in little books. Soudanese slave girls carried
+bouquets of orange flowers. In a corner some Hawadji were leaping
+monotonously to the thunder of a Moorish drum made of baked earth and of
+parchment. A sheep, escaped from the slaughterer, tumbled with piteous
+bleatings into a group of half breeds, Spanish Moors, who were playing
+cards near a stall covered with raw meat and great lumps of some
+substance that looked like lard. On a huge heap of rotten oranges and
+decaying fish, over which millions of flies swarmed, a number of
+children in close white caps were moving in some mysterious game in
+which two prowling cats occasionally took an unintentional part. Some
+Riff Arabs, fierce as tigers, tall and half-naked, stalked feverishly
+towards a water-carrier whose lean form, tottering with age, was almost
+eclipsed beneath the monstrous bladder he bore incessantly through the
+multitude. The horses of Renfrew and of Claire could scarcely plant
+their hoofs on anything that was not moving, crying, panting, or
+cursing; and they pulled up, and prepared to descend into this human
+ocean of which all the waves roared in their deafened ears. As Claire
+leant to Renfrew, who stretched his arms to help her, she said to him:--
+
+"Can you swim? If not, you will certainly be drowned."
+
+"You must not be. Cling to my arm."
+
+They sank together to their necks in the sea. In whatever direction they
+looked, they saw a mass of heads, an infinite expanse of shouting
+mouths. But suddenly the pressure became extraordinary, the uproar
+ear-splitting. And with the voices there mingled a piercing music like a
+continuous screech. People began to run, to trample in one direction.
+The drum of the leaping Hawadji was drowned by a louder drumming that
+came from the centre of the square. Children squeaked with excitement.
+The Riffians forgot to drink, and slid forward with the cushioned feet
+of animals in a jungle. A tempest arose, and in it a whirlpool formed.
+It seemed that Renfrew and Claire must be torn in pieces.
+
+"What on earth is happening?" Renfrew exclaimed to Absalem, with the
+English anger our countrymen always display when trodden by a foreign
+element.
+
+Absalem smiled with airy dignity, and moved forward, beckoning them to
+follow.
+
+"Miracle man, all want see him," he remarked. "Great miracle man."
+
+With consummate adroitness he drew them with him to the edge of the
+whirlpool. As they reached it, Renfrew felt that Claire's hand suddenly
+tightened upon his arm until his flesh puckered between her fingers as
+the flesh of a rabbit puckers in a trap. He glanced at her in
+astonishment. Her eyes were fixed on something, or some one, beyond
+them, even beyond Absalem, who was forcing people out of their way with
+his powerful arms and back. Renfrew followed her eyes, and saw the
+centre of the whirlpool.
+
+This mass of humanity had now assumed the form of a rough circus, the
+ring of which was kept clear. And in this ring a strange figure had just
+appeared with upraised arms, and a manner of wild, even of frantic,
+authority. This was a gigantic man, almost black, half-naked, with long
+arms, furious eyes, and legs which, though muscular, tapered at the
+ankles like the legs of a finely bred race-horse. His head was shaved in
+front; but at the back the black hair grew in a long and waving lock,
+and his features, magnificently cut, might have been those of a grand
+European of some headstrong and high-couraged race. Upon this man
+Claire's eyes were fixed, with an expression so strange and knowing that
+Renfrew turned on her with a sharp exclamation.
+
+"Claire! Claire!"
+
+She slowly withdrew her eyes.
+
+"Yes, Desmond."
+
+A question stammered on his lips; but as she smiled at him, he felt the
+mad absurdity of it, and was silent.
+
+"Well, Desmond, what is it?"
+
+"Nothing," he answered.
+
+Absalem now claimed their attention. He was determined that they should
+be in the front of the crowd, and ruthlessly pushed away the Moors who
+had obtained the best places, pointing at Claire and Renfrew, and wildly
+vociferating their mighty rank and enormous wealth. The staring mob gave
+way; and in a moment Claire and the miracle man stood face to face. His
+frenzied eyes had no sooner seen her than he too fell upon the
+surrounding natives, thrusting them violently to one side, and cursing
+them for daring to draw near to the great English gentleman and lady. In
+the whole mighty mob these two were the only Europeans, and they
+attracted as universal an attention as two Aztecs would in a Bank
+Holiday gathering at the Crystal Palace. Renfrew could now see that the
+screeching music came from one side of the ring, where a couple of men,
+clothed in filthy rags, were sitting on the ground, one playing a long
+pipe of straw, the other beating an enormous drum. Immediately behind
+them a very old man, evidently a maniac, swayed his body violently
+backwards and forwards, and at regular intervals uttered a loud and
+chuckling cry that might have been the ejaculation of a tipsy
+school-boy, and came strangely from withered lips hanging loose with
+weakness and with age. This dancing Methuselah caught Renfrew's
+attention; and, for the moment, he forgot to look at the miracle man. A
+general outcry from the multitude made him turn his head. He saw then
+that the miracle man held in his huge hands a sort of kennel of straw,
+the mouth of which was closed with a movable flap. Lifting this aloft,
+he sprang wildly round the ring, vociferating some words at the top of
+his voice; then, suddenly casting it down, he flung himself upon the
+ground, which he beat with his forehead, while he shrieked out a prayer
+to his patron saint for protection in the great miracle which he was
+about to perform.
+
+"What is he doing?" Renfrew asked of Absalem.
+
+"Don't you know?" Claire said.
+
+Her eyes were gleaming with excitement as they stared at the salaaming
+figure that grovelled at their feet.
+
+"No. How should I?"
+
+"He is praying to Sidi Mahomet," she said.
+
+And then she looked at Renfrew. He understood. At that moment, despite
+the excessive heat engendered by the blazing sun and the pressure of the
+crowd, he turned very cold, as if his body was plunged in glacier water.
+He thought of the tall figure that had stood before Claire's tent door
+in the moonbeams, the lips that had coaxed from the pipe the tune that
+charmed all serpents,--that right tune that they must follow, which drew
+them from the desert sands to the grass of the oasis, till they wound up
+the body of this gaunt and tremendous savage, and hid themselves in his
+hairy bosom. This miracle man, then, was a snake-charmer, and Claire had
+divined it at once. How? Renfrew put the question quickly.
+
+"How did I know? He is the man who played outside my tent in the night,
+Desmond."
+
+"The very man! Impossible."
+
+"The very man."
+
+"Then you were not asleep, not dreaming?"
+
+"How can one tell? Hush!"
+
+She spoke in the low voice of one whose attention is becoming
+concentrated, and who cannot endure the interruption. The charmer had
+now finished his petition to his god, and, standing up, thrust into his
+mouth a handful of some green herb, which he chewed and swallowed. Then
+his whole manner abruptly changed. The frenzy died out of his eyes. A
+calm suffused his tall and muscular body till it became strangely
+statuesque. His lips slowly smiled, and he raised his hands towards the
+glaring sky with a sublime gesture of gratitude.
+
+"What an actor!" Renfrew heard Claire murmur softly.
+
+He, too, had become intensely engrossed by this man in whom he, from
+this moment, began to see Claire: the exquisite woman whom the civilised
+world worshipped in the mighty savage who came from the remote depths of
+Morocco; the white being who played with the minds of the capitals of
+Europe, in the black being who played with the reptiles of the desert
+and of the jungle. For Claire, guided by the spirit that ever goes
+before genius bearing the torch, had instinctively divined what she had
+never known. In London it seemed that she had entered into the very soul
+of this man who now stood before her. She had caught the wild graces of
+his bearing. She had reproduced his smile, so full of secrets and of
+power. She had moved as he did. She had been motionless as now he was
+motionless. In the sun she stood at this moment and beheld the reality
+of which she had been the magnificent reflection. And Renfrew felt his
+heart oppressed, as if clouds were closing round him.
+
+Now the snake-charmer looked slowly all round the great circle of
+watching faces until his eyes rested on Claire. He had taken the straw
+kennel into his hands, and he softly lifted the flap, and turned it flat
+upon the top of the kennel, leaving the mouth open. Then he thrust one
+hand into this mouth, and withdrew it, holding a writhing snake whose
+striped satin skin changed colour in the sunshine, turning from pink to
+green, from green to black.
+
+"It is the snake I saw," Claire whispered to Renfrew.
+
+He did not reply. He seemed fascinated by the savage and the serpent.
+Holding the snake at arm's length, the charmer walked softly round the
+circle, collecting money from the crowd. He stopped in front of Claire.
+The snake thrust out its flat head towards her. She did not shrink from
+it; and the charmer cried aloud some words that seemed like praise of
+her beauty and of her composure. She gave him a piece of gold. Renfrew
+gave him nothing.
+
+Then, standing once more in the centre of the circle, he burst into a
+frantic incantation, while the musicians redoubled their efforts, and
+the old maniac in the corner gave forth his chuckling cry with greater
+force, and swayed his trembling body more vehemently to and fro. The
+snake, suddenly brought from the darkness of the kennel to the light of
+day, was torpid and weary. It drooped between the charmer's hands. He
+shook it, called on it, caught up a stick and struck it. Then, forcing
+its mouth wide open, he barred its pink throat with the stick, on which
+he made it fix its two fangs, which were like two sharp hooks. Holding
+the end of the stick, he came again to Claire, to whom his whole
+performance was now exclusively devoted; and, approaching the hanging
+reptile close to her eyes, he jumped it up and down to the sound of the
+drum and pipe.
+
+"You see," Claire said to Renfrew, "the roof of its mouth is
+flesh-colour."
+
+He did not answer. Why did all this mean so much to him? Why did the
+clouds grow darker? The music and the cries of the old maniac perturbed
+him and bewildered his brain. And he wanted to be calm, and to watch
+Claire and this savage with a cool and undivided attention. By this
+time the snake was growing irritated. It agitated its long body
+furiously; and when the charmer unhooked its fangs from the stick, it
+turned its head towards him and made a sudden dart at his face. He
+opened his mouth wide, thrust the snake into it, and let the creature
+fasten on his tongue, from which blood began to flow. Still bleeding,
+and with the snake fixed on his tongue, he danced and sprang into the
+air. His eyes grew wild. Foam ran from his mouth, and his whole
+appearance became demoniacal. Yet his eyes still fastened themselves
+upon Claire. In his most frantic moments his attention was never
+entirely distracted from the spot where she was standing. He tore the
+snake from his tongue and buried its fangs in the flesh of his left
+wrist. Cries broke from the crowd. The sight of the blood had excited
+them, for these people love blood as the toper loves wine. They urged
+the charmer on to fresh exertions with furious screams of encouragement.
+The maniac bent his body like a dervish in the last exercises of his
+religion, and the ragged musicians forced a more extreme uproar from
+their instruments. The charmer caught the snake by the tail, and strove
+to pull it backwards off his wrist. But the reptile's fangs were firmly
+fastened. It held on with a terrible tenacity, and a struggle ensued
+between it and its master. When at length it gave way, it was streaked
+with blood, and now at last thoroughly aroused. The charmer scraped his
+tongue with a straw; then, casting himself again upon the earth, he
+prayed once more with fury to Sidi Mahomet. Claire watched him always,
+with that pale and exquisite attention which one genius gives to the
+performance of another. Her face was white and still. Her body never
+moved. But her eyes blazed with life, and with the fires of a violent
+soul completely awake. Having finished his prayer, which ended in a cry
+so poignant that it might have burst from the lips of that world on
+which the flood came, the charmer remained upon the ground in a sitting
+posture, laid the snake in his lap, and drew from the inside of his
+ragged robe a Moorish lute made of a bladder, bamboo, and two strings,
+and coloured a pale yellowish-green. He plucked the strings gently, and
+played the fragment of a wild tune. Then, suddenly catching up the
+snake, and thrusting his tongue far out of his mouth, he poised the
+snake upon it, rose to his feet and stood at his full height in front of
+Claire, fixing his eyes upon her with a glance that seemed to claim from
+her both wonder and worship. The snake reared itself up higher and
+higher upon the quivering tongue; and the charmer, extending his long
+arms, whirled slowly round as if poised upon a movable platform, while a
+terrific clamour broke from the Moors, who seemed to be roused by this
+feat to the highest pitch of excitement. Still turning and turning, the
+charmer drew from his bosom a second snake that was black and larger
+than the first, and coiled it round his sinewy neck like a gigantic
+necklace, the darting head in front, resting, a sort of monstrous
+pendant, upon his uncovered chest. To Renfrew he looked like some
+hateful grotesque in a nightmare, inhuman, endowed with attributes of a
+devil. The serpents were part of him, growths of his body, visible signs
+of some terrible disease in which he gloried and of which he made a
+show. The creature was intolerable. His exhibition had suddenly become
+to Renfrew unfit for the eyes of any woman; and, without a word, he took
+hold of Claire and pulled her almost violently away from the circle on
+which the fascinated mob was beginning to encroach. She resisted him.
+
+"Desmond!" she exclaimed, "what are you doing?"
+
+"Claire--come. I insist upon it!"
+
+Already the Moors had thronged the place which they had left vacant. She
+turned a white face on him. There was in her eyes the hideous expression
+of a sleep-walker suddenly awakened, and she trembled in every limb. She
+swung round from Renfrew, and, above the intercepting Moors, high in the
+air, she saw the snake, which seemed climbing to heaven. While she
+looked, a huge hand closed upon it and took it out of sight. The
+charmer, observing the departure of his distinguished patrons, had
+abruptly stopped his performance. Claire made no further resistance.
+Without a word, she permitted Renfrew to lead her to the horses and
+help her into the saddle. They rode down the hill to the camp without
+exchanging a word.
+
+When Claire had dismounted, she stood for a moment twisting her whip in
+her hands. Then she said:--
+
+"Desmond, I must ask you never to startle me again as you did to-day, by
+sudden action. You can't understand how such an interruption hurts a
+nature like mine. I would rather you had struck me. That would only have
+wounded my body."
+
+She turned and went into her tent, leaving Renfrew in an agony of
+penitence and self-reproach. All the rest of the afternoon she was very
+cold and silent, rather dreamy than sullen, but obviously disinclined
+for conversation, and still more obviously unwilling to endure even the
+slightest demonstration of affection on the part of Renfrew. When the
+sheep which were to be slaughtered for the soldiers' feast were driven
+bleating into the camp, she retired into her tent, and remained there,
+resting, until the sun was low in the heavens, and the porters and
+mule-drivers went gaily out to search for the materials of the African
+fire with which the night was to be celebrated. They returned, singing
+the Moorish conquest of Granada, with their strong arms full of canes,
+dry and brittle branches of trees, logs that looked like whole trunks,
+and huge shrubs, green and sweet-smelling. Hearing their song, Claire
+came out of her tent. The sky was red, and, in the southwest, turrets of
+vapour rose and streamed out, assuming mysterious and thin shapes in the
+gathering dimness. A great flock of birds, flying very high, and forming
+a definite and beautiful pattern, passed slowly on the wing towards the
+kingdom of the storks, that lies near the sand banks of Ceuta. They
+moved in silence, and faded away in the twilight stealthily, like things
+full of quiet intention and governed by some furtive, but inexorable,
+desire. Renfrew, who was wandering rather miserably near the camp,
+watching descending pilgrims from the city melt into the vast bosom of
+the plain, saw Claire's white figure in the tent door, half hidden in a
+soft rosy mist which stole from the lips of evening as scent steals from
+the lips of a flower. He felt afraid to go to her. He possessed her; and
+yet it seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her. He was only an
+ordinary man. She was a strange woman; not merely because of her
+womanhood, as all women are to all men, but strange in that which lay
+beyond and beneath her womanhood, in her genius, and in the dull or
+ardent moods that stood round it, one, and yet not one, with it. In the
+tent door she leaned like a spirit born of the evening, a child of
+fading things, dying lights, fainting colours, retreating sounds,--a
+spirit waiting for the coming of the stars, and the rising of the moon,
+and the mysteries of the night, and the subtle odours that the winds of
+Northern Africa bring with them over the mountains and down the lonely
+valleys, when the sun descends. And as a spirit may listen to the songs
+of men, with the melancholy of a thing apart, she listened to the songs
+of the Moors, until at length they seemed to be in her own heart that
+evening, as if they were songs of her own country. And these dark men
+with wild eyes who sang them, while they flung upon the grass their
+burdens from the thickets, and from the hedgeless and wide fields, were
+no longer alien to her. She stood in the tent door, and, without any
+conscious effort of the imagination, became their fancied mate,--a woman
+sprung from the same soil, or come in--like the strange people--from the
+deserts of their country. Only she was not as one of their women,
+mindless, patient, and concealed; but as their women should be, strong,
+hot-blooded, brave, serene, and looked upon by a world without reproach.
+
+Absalem came up to her to tell her some details of the night's
+festivity. Before he spoke she said to him:--
+
+"Where does the desert lie?"
+
+He told her.
+
+"Does the miracle man come from there?"
+
+Absalem answered that no one knew. He had been much in Wasan, the sacred
+city of Morocco; but none knew his birthplace, his tribe, his name.
+Often he disappeared, no man could tell whither. But, doubtless, he
+made vast journeys. Some said that he had exhibited his snakes on the
+banks of the Nile, that he had gone with the pilgrim trains to Mecca,
+that he knew Khartoum as he knew Marakesh, and that he never ceased from
+wandering.
+
+"What is his age?" Claire asked.
+
+Absalem answered that he must be old, but that Time had no power over
+him.
+
+"He miracle man; he live long as he wish."
+
+Last she asked when he would leave Tetuan.
+
+"Perhaps this night. Perhaps to-morrow night, perhaps never. Perhaps he
+go already."
+
+"Already!"
+
+Suddenly Claire moved out from the tent, and joined Renfrew, who was
+still watching her, and weaving lover's fancies about her white figure.
+
+"Have you been here long, Desmond?" she asked.
+
+"Very long, dearest. Are you rested?"
+
+"Quite. From here you can see all the people travelling away from the
+city towards the sea?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Have you been watching them?"
+
+"Yes, indeed; for half the afternoon."
+
+She turned her great eyes on him searchingly, and seemed as if she
+checked a question which was almost on her lips.
+
+"They must have been a strange multitude," she said at length. "I wonder
+where they are all going?"
+
+"Some to the villages in the plain, some to the coast. I saw the Riffs
+who were in the Soko pass by. I suppose they were returning to the
+caverns from which they plunder becalmed vessels, Spanish and
+Portuguese."
+
+"The Riffs--yes?"
+
+Her intonation suggested that she was waiting for some further
+information. Renfrew's curiosity was aroused.
+
+"Why do you look at me like that?" he asked. "What do you want to know?"
+
+"Nothing, Desmond. How dark it is getting! There is Mohammed ringing the
+bell. And look, those must be the soldiers. They are just marching in
+from the city."
+
+With the coming of night a wind arose, blowing towards the sea from the
+mountains; and with it came up a troop of clouds which blotted out stars
+and moon, and plunged the plain into a gulf of darkness. Tetuan does not
+gleam with lamps at night like a European city, and all the distant
+villas of the Moors were closely shuttered. So the wind, warm and
+scented and strong, swept over a black land, deserted and vacant. Only
+in the camp was there movement, music, and an illumination that strove
+up in the night, as if it would climb to the clouds. Scarcely had Claire
+and Renfrew finished dinner, when Absalem and Mohammed ceremoniously
+appeared to conduct them out to the bare space before the tents on
+which the African fire had been carefully built. Absalem carried a lamp
+which swung in the wind, and, behind, there appeared from the kitchen
+tent some of the porters, bearing burning brands, the flames of which
+were at right angles to the wood from which they sprung. The guard of
+soldiers, one dozen in all, armed with immense guns and wrapped in
+hooded cloaks, were already crouched in a silent mass before the
+lifeless and portentous erection which came out of the darkness, as
+Absalem swung forward the lamp, like the skeleton of a monster. They
+turned their shadowy faces on Claire, and stared with eyes intent and
+unself-conscious as those of an animal. The porters flung their brands
+on to the mountain of twigs, and instantaneously a huge sheet of livid
+gold sprang up against the black background of the night, as if it had
+been shaken out on the wind by invisible hands. This sheet expanded,
+swayed, fluttered in ragged edges, and cast forth a cloud of sparks
+which were carried away into the air and vanished in the sky. The shrubs
+caught fire and crackled furiously, and finally the foundation of
+gigantic logs began to glow steadily, and to fill the wind with a
+scorching heat. The camp was gradually defined, at first vaguely and in
+sections,--the peak of a tent, the head of a mule, a startled pariah
+dog, a Moor set in the eye of the flames; then clearly, as the buildings
+one may see in a furnace, complete and glowing. The faces of the
+soldiers were barred with flickering orange, and red lights played in
+their huge and staring eyeballs. The horses and mules could be counted.
+Before the kitchen tent the sacrifice of sheep was visible, stewing in
+enormous pans upon red embers in a trench of earth. And the grave cook,
+who was distinguished by a white turban, shone like a pantomime magician
+at the mouth of an enchanted cave. Warmth, light, life poured upon the
+night, and the voices of men began to mingle with the continuous voice
+of this superb fire. The Moors, soldiers, servants, porters, kindled
+into furious gaiety with the swiftness of the canes and olive boughs.
+They sprang up from the ground, pulled the shrouding hoods from their
+faces, tossed away their djelabes, and began, with shouts and
+ejaculations, to dance up and down before the golden sheet, spreading
+their hands to it with the glee of children. A sudden joy beamed in the
+dusky and solemn faces, twinkled in the sombre eyes. One man flung away
+his fez, another dashed his turban to the ground. Round, shaven heads,
+bare arms, brown legs, half concealed by fluttering linen
+knickerbockers, lithe bodies emerged with eager haste into the light.
+Shadows became abruptly men, formless humps athletes. Mutes sent out
+great voices to startle the sweeping bats. Mourners turned into maniacs.
+It was a fantasia that exploded into life like a rocket, shedding a
+stream of vivid human fire. Mohammed drew away from the flames, taking
+a dozen swift footsteps to the rear. Then, with a shout, he dashed
+forward, bounded into the golden sheet, and disappeared as a clown
+disappears through a paper hoop. Only the paper closed up behind him. He
+leaped through light to darkness, pursued by a thousand eager sparks.
+One soldier followed him, then another, and another. The porters,
+linking hands, leaped in twos and threes. Even the cook, old, and
+serious with a weight of savoury knowledge, tottered to the edge of the
+fire, which was now becoming a furnace, and took it as an Irish horse
+takes a stone wall, striking the topmost branches with his bare feet
+amid a chorus of yells.
+
+Claire watched the darting figures with a silent gravity. She did not
+seem to be stirred by the fantasia of the firelight, or to catch any
+gaiety or life from the boisterous activity of those about her. The
+flames lit up the whiteness of her face, and showed Renfrew that she was
+looking gloomy and even despairing.
+
+"Is anything the matter, Claire?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"No. How could there be?"
+
+The wind, which was increasing in violence, blew her thin dress forward,
+and she shivered. Absalem noticed it.
+
+"Wear djelabe, lady," he said.
+
+And in a moment he had taken his off, and was carefully wrapping Claire
+in it. She seemed glad of it, thanked him, and, with a quick gesture
+that hurt Renfrew, pulled the big brown hood up over her head, so that
+her face was entirely concealed from view. She now looked exactly like a
+Moor, and might have been mistaken for one of the soldiers before the
+fire was lit and all impeding garments were thrown aside.
+
+Renfrew, uneasy, and wondering what conduct on his part would best suit
+her mysterious mood, after one or two remarks to which she barely
+replied, drew away a little, and gave his attention to the antics of the
+soldiers. Some of them were already resuming their djelabes, in
+preparation for the feast, which they sniffed even through the odour of
+burning wood and leaves. The cook, after his emotional and acrobatic
+outburst, had returned to his pans, which he was stirring tenderly with
+a stick. When Renfrew again looked towards Claire, he found it
+impossible to tell which cloak shrouded her from his sight. Four or five
+hooded figures stood near the fire. She must be one of them. He
+approached the group, but found, to his surprise, that all the members
+of it were soldiers. Claire had moved away. Renfrew stood for a few
+minutes with the men, till they were summoned to their feast, which,
+strangely enough, was to take place away from the fire in the dense
+darkness behind the tents. Then he was left alone by the huge mass of
+flame, which roared hoarsely in the wind. Where could Claire be? On any
+ordinary occasion Renfrew would certainly have sought for her, but
+to-night something held him back. He knew very well that she wished to
+be alone, that something was closely occupying her mind. Whether she was
+still brooding over the event of the afternoon, when he had forcibly led
+her away in the very crisis of the snake-charmer's performance, he could
+not tell. To an ordinary woman such a matter would have been a trifle;
+but Renfrew understood that Claire felt it more deeply. Her mind
+appeared to be mysteriously moved and awakened by this savage from the
+depths of Morocco. Various circumstances combined to render him more
+interesting to her than he could possibly be to any ordinary traveller.
+Renfrew recognised that fully and quietly. The genius of Claire had
+enabled her to realise in London all the wildly picturesque
+idiosyncrasies of a man whom she had never seen or heard of. Suddenly
+fate had led her to him, and she had beheld her own performance, the
+original of her imitation. As Renfrew stood by the fire, he began to
+feel the folly of his proceeding of the afternoon, and to imagine more
+clearly than before the condition into which it had thrown Claire. It is
+a sin to disturb the contemplations of genius. It is sacrilege. And then
+Renfrew had been moved to his act by a preposterous access of jealousy.
+He acknowledged this to himself. He had been jealous of Claire's
+interest in this man's performance, jealous perhaps even of her dream
+among the hills in the midnight camp, where the man stood before her
+sleeping eyes, and played with his visionary serpent. How mad can a
+lover be? He resolved to go to Claire, and ask her pardon. This resolve
+thrilled him. To carry it out, he would have to draw very near to
+Claire, to unpack his heart to her. After all, she had given herself to
+him. But he had appreciated the wonder of his role as possessor so
+keenly, that he had waited upon her moods with an almost trembling awe.
+Now, in asking pardon, he would show that in his passion he could be
+strong. Women want to see the man in the lover, as well as the devotee.
+Renfrew, in acknowledging his jealousy of a black savage, meant to clasp
+Claire with the arms of a whirlwind.
+
+Meanwhile she was hidden from him. The wind blew strongly. The sparks
+leaped away in clouds toward the sea. From the dense darkness behind him
+came a sound of music. The soldiers were feasting. The porters were
+striking the lute, and singing songs of the dance and of love and of
+victory. It was a night of comradeship and of rejoicing. Yet he stood
+alone; and the turmoil of his heart was unheeded. He tried to explore
+the blackness of the night which stood round the golden fire with his
+eyes. Claire must be in that blackness close to him. Doubtless she saw
+him, a red and yellow creature, painted into fictitious brilliance by
+the illumination which was shed upon him. She saw him and kept from
+him. Renfrew resolved to be patient. When her mood of reserve died she
+would come to him, in her dress of a Moor, and he would kiss the white
+face beneath the hood, and put his arms round the thin figure that was
+lost in the djelabe of brawny Absalem, and tell her the true story of
+his heart, never fully told to her yet. He squatted down before the
+fire, lit his pipe, shrugged his shoulders against the tempest from the
+mountains, and waited, listening to the weird music that swept by him
+like a hidden bird on the wind.
+
+And Claire--where was she? When Absalem wrapped her in the huge djelabe
+it seemed to Claire that he had divined her secret longing to be in
+hiding. She disappeared into the mighty hood of the garment as into a
+cave. Its shadow concealed her from the watching eyes of Renfrew. There
+was warmth in it and a beautiful darkness. She desired both. She saw
+Renfrew turn to watch the leaping soldiers, and stole away out of the
+illuminated circle formed by the glow from the fire, into the night
+beyond. She did not go far, only into the nearest shadow. And there she
+sat down on the short dry grass, and forgot Renfrew, the roaring flames,
+the wind that felt incessantly at her robe, the shouting guard, the
+radiant and dancing attendants. She forgot them all as completely as if
+they had never been in her life; for the strangeness of certain
+incidents preoccupied her, to the exclusion of everything else. In the
+double existence of a really great actress there are many moments in
+which the truths of the imagination seem more important than the truths
+of physical phenomena of things seen by the eye, of sounds received and
+appreciated by the ear. In these moments, genius usurps the throne of
+reason, and the mind beholds fancies as sunlit gods, facts as timid and
+scarcely defined shadows. So it was with Claire now. Even the
+snake-charmer, as he gave his performance in the Soko, was a shadow in
+comparison with that man who summoned her to the tent door in the
+solitary encampment. And behind and beyond both these figures of truth
+and dreaming stood a third, created for herself by Claire in London,
+that figure into whom she had poured her soul as into a mould, when she
+charmed imaginary serpents, and prayed to the god in whom, for a moment,
+she believed with the passion of the perfect mime. This trio Claire
+placed in line, and reviewed: charmer of her imagination, of her dream,
+of the Soko.
+
+They were the same, and yet not the same. For the first was dominated,
+even was created by her. The second stood above her, like some magician,
+and summoned her as one possessing a right. The third--what of him? He
+was a wild creature of blood and foam, crafty, a player like herself, a
+maker of money, a savage in sacking, and almost nothing to her now. Out
+of the desert he came. Into the desert he was, perhaps, even now,
+returning, with his snakes sleeping in his bosom, and the money of the
+Tetuan Moors jingling in his pouch.
+
+Yes, she saw him, travelling like a shadow in the night, one of those
+grotesques which leap on bedroom walls when a lamp flares in the wind
+that sighs through an open casement. He was going; but the man of the
+dream remained. The dream man had come up out of the world that is
+vaguer to us than the desert when we wake, and clearer to us than the
+desert when we sleep. Claire saw him still, and, while the wonderful
+mountebank of the Soko passed, he stood in the tent door like a statue
+of ebony, a rooted reality. And the snake was in his bosom; and the pipe
+was at his lips; and the power was in his heart. And as he played,
+Claire thought beneath the djelabe of Absalem, there came to him, with
+the faltering steps of a thing irresistibly charmed, that third man
+whose soul she had seen in London, like approaching like, with the
+manner of a slave and the glance of the conquered. And her soul was
+still within that charmed figure. She could not rescue it now from the
+place where she had put it. And the statue at the tent door played the
+irresistible melody until his wild and cringing double stole to his very
+feet, and nearer and nearer, till they melted together, and where two
+men had been, there was only one. He smiled with a subtle triumph, laid
+down his pipe, stretched out his arms and vanished. But within him now
+was the soul of Claire, borne wherever he should go, his captive, his
+possession for all eternity.
+
+Behind her, in the cloudy darkness, Claire heard a movement, and the
+gliding of soft feet on grass. She did not turn her head, supposing that
+one of the soldiers was keeping his guard. The movement ceased. But the
+little noise had broken the thread on which her fancies were strung.
+They were scattered like beads. She found herself feeling quite
+ordinary, and listening with an urging attention for a renewal of the
+trifling noise behind her. In the distance she could see Renfrew, now
+crouching before the fire, which poured colour and a piercing vitality
+upon him. She heard also, and for the first time, the sound of the
+porters' music, which had been audible in the night all through her
+reverie, though she was entirely unaware of the fact. She realised that
+the soldiers were devouring the stew of mutton, and that she was in a
+gay camp, full of human beings in a state of unusual satisfaction. One
+of these human beings must be close to her. She turned her head. But she
+was sitting in the darkness beyond the illumination of the fire, and
+beyond her the night was like a black wall. Whatever had moved there was
+invisible to her. She had not heard the gliding step go away, and she
+felt that she was not alone. This feeling began to render her uneasy.
+She got up, with the intention of returning to the firelight and to
+Renfrew. Indeed she had taken a step or two in his direction, when she
+was checked by an unreasonable desire to see who had come so close to
+her, who had broken her reverie. Acting upon the sudden impulse, she
+turned swiftly and came on into the darkness. Almost instantly she stood
+before the dim outline of a man, and paused. Here in the night it was
+very lonely, even though the illuminated camp was so near. Claire
+hesitated to approach this man who seemed to be on watch and who was
+perfectly motionless. She waited a moment, wishing that he would come to
+her in order that she might see what he was like, whether he carried a
+gun and was a soldier. But it was soon evident that he did not mean to
+move. Then Claire went up so close to him that his coarse garment rubbed
+against her djelabe and his eyes stared right down into hers. And she
+saw that it was the snake-charmer from the Soko, who was looking into
+her face with the very smile of the man in her dream. Round his bare
+throat one of his snakes was twined, and he held its neck between the
+fingers of his left hand. The wind tossed his short and ragged cloak
+wildly to and fro, and whirled the long lock of hair at the back of his
+shaven head about, and made it dance like a living thing. When Claire
+came up to him, he never said a word, or moved at all. It seemed to her
+that his face was that of some dark and triumphant being, waiting
+immovably for something that was certain to come to him, and to come so
+close that he need not even stretch out his hand to take it as his
+possession. What was the thing he waited for? She looked at his black
+face and at the snake which moved slowly, trying to thrust its way
+downward into the warmth of his bosom, out of the reach of the wind and
+of the night. And, when the man's fingers unclosed to release it, and it
+slid away and softly disappeared beneath his garment, Claire shuddered
+under the influence of a sensation that was surely mad. For she felt
+that she envied the snake, and that the charmer was waiting there in the
+darkness for her. As the snake vanished, Claire recoiled towards the
+fire. The charmer did not attempt to follow her, and his huge and
+watchful figure quickly faded from Claire's eyes till his blackness had
+become one with the blackness of the night.
+
+
+IV
+
+Renfrew, as he crouched before the fire, felt a light touch on his
+shoulder. He looked up, saw Claire's white face peering down on him, and
+sprang to his feet.
+
+"I thought you were never coming, that you had deserted me altogether,
+and left me lonely in the midst of the fantasia," he cried, seizing her
+hands.
+
+"I am cold," she said; "horribly cold. Let me sit beside you, close to
+the fire."
+
+She sat down on the ground, almost touching the roaring flames.
+
+"Where have you been?"
+
+"Sitting in the dark. The soldiers are feasting?"
+
+"Yes, and the camp fellows are all singing and playing. Don't you hear
+them? We are quite alone. That's all I want, all I care for. Claire,
+when you go away like this, and leave me, even for a few minutes,
+Morocco is the most desolate place in all the world, and I'm the most
+desolate vagabond in it."
+
+He put his arm round her. The terrific glow from the fire played over
+her face, danced in the deep folds of her djelabe, shone in her eyes,
+showered a cloud of gold and red about her hair. For she had let her
+hood fall down on her shoulders. She attained to that fine and almost
+demoniacal picturesqueness which glorifies even the most commonplace
+smith when you see him in his forge by night. Her cheeks were suffused
+with scarlet, as if she had suddenly painted them to go on the stage.
+Yet she shivered again as Renfrew spoke.
+
+"You should not have left the fire," he said. "And yet the wind is
+warm."
+
+"It can't be. But it's not the wind, it's the darkness that has chilled
+me."
+
+"Or is it the loneliness?" he asked, tenderly. "For you have been alone
+as well as I, and nothing on earth makes one so cold as solitude."
+
+"I scarcely ever feel alone, Desmond," she said.
+
+And, as she spoke, she cast a glance behind her into the darkness from
+which she had just come. Renfrew noticed it.
+
+"You have been alone?" he asked hastily. Then he checked himself with an
+ashamed laugh.
+
+"What a fool I am," he exclaimed.
+
+He clasped her more closely.
+
+"A fool, because I'm so desperately in love with you, Claire," he said,
+rushing on his confession with the swiftness of alarmed bravery. "Look
+here, I want to tell you something. You must put everything I do,
+everything I am, down to the account of my love,--shyness, anger,
+abruptness, violence,--everything, Claire. My love's responsible. It
+does play the devil with an ordinary man when he's given his very soul
+to--to a woman like you, to a great woman. It keeps him back when he
+ought to go on, and sends him on when he ought to stay quiet, and makes
+him jealous of stones and--and savages."
+
+"Savages, Desmond?"
+
+Renfrew's face was scarlet. He put up his hand before it and muttered:--
+
+"This fire's scorching. Yes, Claire, of savages. Didn't you find that
+out this afternoon, when we were in Tetuan? But of course you couldn't.
+You couldn't know you'd married such an infernal lunatic."
+
+He broke off. She was watching him with a close attention, and her body
+had ceased to tremble under his arm.
+
+"Go on, Desmond."
+
+"You want me to tell you the sort of man you've married?"
+
+"I want you to tell me what you mean."
+
+"Then I will. Claire, this afternoon I took you away from that
+snake-charming chap because--well, because you watched him as if he
+fascinated you."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"Of course I knew why. His performance was clever, and he was
+picturesque in his way, although, to be sure, it was all put on, as far
+as that goes."
+
+"Like my stage performances, Desmond."
+
+"Claire," he said hotly. "How can you?"
+
+"That man acts far better than I do--if he acts at all."
+
+"Was that why he interested you so much?"
+
+"In what other way could he interest me?"
+
+Renfrew kicked at one of the blazing logs and sent up a shower of
+red-hot flakes.
+
+"Well, there was your dream, Claire."
+
+"Yes, there was that."
+
+"It was curious, coming just before we saw the fellow. And you say the
+two men were alike."
+
+"I did not say alike. I said the same."
+
+"How could that be?"
+
+"How can a thousand things be? Yet we cannot deny them when they are,
+any more than we can deny that we feel an earthly immortality within us
+and yet crumble into dust. In sleep I saw that man. I saw his snake. I
+heard him play."
+
+"Yes, Claire, I know. It's damned strange."
+
+Renfrew's forehead was wrinkled in a meditative frown.
+
+"But, after all, what's a dream?" he exclaimed. "A vagary of a sleeping
+brain. And in your dream you wouldn't go to that beggar, Claire."
+
+"No. I wouldn't go, and so I died."
+
+"It all means nothing--nothing at all."
+
+She looked at him gravely.
+
+"I wonder whether there are things in life that we are compelled to do,
+Desmond," she said. "I sometimes think there must be. How otherwise can
+a thousand strange events be accounted for, especially things that women
+do?"
+
+"I don't know," he muttered, staring at her anxiously in the firelight.
+
+"Every one acknowledges the irresistible power of physical force over
+physical weakness. Some day, perhaps, when the world has grown a little
+older, we shall all understand that the power of mental force is
+precisely similar, and can as little be resisted. What's that?"
+
+Renfrew felt that she was suddenly alert. Her thin form grew hard and
+quivering, like the body of a greyhound about to be let loose on a
+hare. He heard nothing except a sound of music from the darkness, and
+the gentle rustle of the wind.
+
+"I hear nothing," he said. "What was it--a cry?"
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"What then?"
+
+"Oh, Desmond--hush!"
+
+He was obedient, and strained his ears, wondering what Claire had heard.
+The fire was at last beginning to die down, for the flames had devoured
+the masses of dry twigs, and had now nothing to feed upon except the
+heavy logs. So the darkness drew a little closer round the camp, as if
+the night expanded noiselessly. One of the porters, or, perhaps, one of
+the soldiers, was playing a queer little air upon a pipe over and over
+again. It was plaintive and very soft. But the tone of the instrument
+was strangely penetrating, and the wind carried it along over the plain,
+as if anxious to bear it to the sea, that the cave men might hear it,
+and the sailors bearing up for the Spanish coast. Was Claire listening
+to this odd little tune? Renfrew wondered. There seemed no other sound.
+She was moving uneasily now, as if an intense restlessness had taken
+hold of her. And she turned her head away from him and gazed into the
+night.
+
+Presently she put her hand on Renfrew's arm, which was still round her
+waist, and tried to remove it. But he would not yield to her desire. He
+only held her closer, and again--he could not tell why--the smouldering
+jealousy began to flare up in his heart.
+
+"No, Claire," he said, in answer to her movement, "you are mine. You
+have given yourself to me. I alone have the right to keep you, to hold
+you close--close to my heart."
+
+"Can you keep me always, Desmond?" she said, suddenly turning on him
+with a sort of fierce excitement.
+
+She looked into his eyes as if she would search the very depths of his
+soul for strength, for power.
+
+"You have the right. Yes; but that is nothing--nothing."
+
+"Nothing, Claire?"
+
+"You must have the strength, Desmond. That is everything."
+
+There was a look almost of despair in her face. She threw herself
+against him as if moved by a sudden yearning for protection, and put her
+arms round his shoulders.
+
+The hidden Moor was still playing the same monotonous little tune, an
+African aria, as wild as a bird that flies over the desert, or a cloud
+that is driven across the sky above a dangerous sea. It was imaginative,
+and, as all tunes seem to have a shape, this melody was misshapen and
+yet delicious, like a twisted tangled creature that has the smile of a
+sweet woman, or the eyes of an alluring child. In its plaintiveness
+there was the atmosphere of solitary places. And there was a sound of
+love in it, too, but of a love so uncivilised as to be almost monstrous.
+Some earth man of a dead age might have sung it to his mate in a land
+where the sun looked down on things primeval. It might have caught the
+heart of maidens very long ago, before they learned to think of passion
+as the twin of law, and to regard a kiss as the seal set upon the tape
+of matrimony. The queer sorrow of it could hardly have moved any eyes to
+tears. Yet few women could have heard it without a sense of desolation.
+It ran through the darkness as cold water runs in the black shadow of a
+forest, a trickle of sound as thin and persistent as the cry of a wild
+creature in the night.
+
+Renfrew thrilled under the touch of Claire's hand.
+
+"You can give me the strength every woman seeks in the man she yields
+herself up to," he said.
+
+"How?"
+
+"By loving me."
+
+"Ah, yes. But the strength must not come, however subtly, from the
+woman. No--no."
+
+Again she leaned away from him, with her face turned towards the
+darkness. Tremors ran through her, and her hands dropped almost feebly
+from Renfrew's shoulders, as the hands of an invalid fall away, and
+down, after an embrace.
+
+"Oh, no," she reiterated, and her voice was almost a wail. "It must be
+there, in the man, part of him, whether he is with the woman in the
+night, or alone--far off--in the jungle, or in the--the desert. He must
+have the strange strength that comes from solitude. Where can the men of
+our country find that now?"
+
+"They find strength in the clash of wills, Claire, and in the battles of
+love."
+
+"Most of them never find it at all," she said, with a sort of sullen
+resignation. "And most of the women do not want it, or ask for it, or
+know what it is. The danger is when some accident or some fate teaches
+them what it is. Then--then--"
+
+She stopped, and glanced at Renfrew suspiciously, as if she had so
+nearly betrayed a secret that he might, nay, must have guessed it.
+
+"What do you mean? Then they seek it away from--?"
+
+"Where they know they will find it," she said, almost defiantly.
+
+Renfrew's face grew cold and rigid.
+
+"What are you saying to me, Claire?"
+
+"What is true of some women, Desmond."
+
+He was silent. Pain and fear invaded his heart; and, by degrees, the
+little tune played by the Moor seemed to approach him, very quietly, and
+to become one with this slow agony. Music, among its many and terrible
+powers, numbers one that is scarcely possessed as forcibly by any other
+art. It can glide into a man and direct his emotions as irresistibly as
+science can direct the flow of a stream. It can penetrate as a thing
+seen cannot penetrate. For that which is invisible is that which is
+invincible. And this tune of the Moor, while it added to Renfrew's
+distress, touched his distress with confusion and bewilderment. At first
+he did not realise that the music had anything to do with his state of
+mind, or with the growing turmoil of his heart and brain; but he felt
+that something was becoming intolerable to him, and pushing him on in a
+dangerous path. He thought it was the statement of Claire; and, for the
+first time in his life, he was stirred by an anger against her that was
+horrible to him. He released her from his arm.
+
+"How dare you say that to me?" he asked. "Do you understand what your
+words imply, that--Good God!--that women are like animals, creatures
+without souls, running to the feet of the master who has the whip with
+the longest, the most stinging lash? Why, such a creed as yours would
+keep men savages, and kill all gentleness out of the world. Curse that
+chap! That hideous music of his--"
+
+He had suddenly become aware that the Moor's melody added something to
+his torment. At his last exclamation, the sullen look in Claire's pale
+face gave way to an expression of fear and of startling solicitude.
+
+"Desmond, you are putting a wrong interpretation on what I said," she
+began hastily.
+
+But he was excited, and could not endure any interruption.
+
+"And you imply a degrading immorality as a prevailing characteristic of
+women too," he went on, "that they should leave their homes, deny their
+obligations, because they find elsewhere--away, out in some dark place
+with a blackguard--a powerful will to curb them and keep them down,
+like--why, like these wretched women all round us here in this
+country,--the women we saw in Tetuan only to-day, veiled, hidden, loaded
+with burdens, worse off than animals, because their masters doubt them,
+and would not dream of trusting them. Claire, there's something
+barbarous about you."
+
+He spoke the words with the intonation of one who thinks he is uttering
+an insult. But she smiled.
+
+"It's the something barbarous about me that has placed me where I am,"
+she said, with a cold pride. "It is that which civilisation worships in
+me, that which has set me above the other women of my time. It is even
+that which has made you love me, Desmond, whether you know it or not."
+
+He looked at her like a man half dazed.
+
+"I frighten the dove-cotes. I can make men tremble by my outbursts of
+passion, and women faint because I am sad; and even the stony-hearted
+sob when I die. And I can make you love me, Desmond. Yes, perhaps I am
+more barbarous than other women. But do you think I am sorry for it?
+No."
+
+"Some day you may be, Claire."
+
+He spoke more gently. The wonder and worship he had for this woman
+stirred in him again. While she had been speaking, she had instinctively
+risen to her feet, and she stood in the dull red glow of the waning
+fire, looking down at him as if he were a creature in a lower world than
+the one in which she could walk at will.
+
+"I shall never choose to be sorry," she said, "whatever my fate may be.
+To be sorry is to be feeble, and to be feeble is to be unfit to live,
+and unfit to die. Never, never think of me as being sorry for anything I
+have done, or may do. Never deceive yourself about me."
+
+A great log, eaten through by a flame at its heart, broke gently asunder
+on the summit of the heaped wood. One half of it, red-hot, and alive
+with multitudes of flickering fires, gold, primrose, steel-blue, and
+deep purple, dropped and fell at Claire's feet. She glanced down at it,
+and at Renfrew.
+
+"My deeds may burn me up," she said, "as those coloured fires burn up
+that wood, until it is no longer wood but fire itself. They shall never
+drench me with wretched, contemptible tears."
+
+He got up; and, when he was on his feet, he seemed to hear the incessant
+music more clearly, blending with the words of Claire. The notes were
+like hot sparks falling on him. He winced under them, and looked round
+almost wildly. Then, without speaking, he hurried away in the darkness
+to the place where the soldiers were feasting, and the men of the camp
+were holding their fantasia. Claire divined why he went. She started a
+step forward as if to try and stop him; but his movement had been so
+abrupt that she was too late. She had to let him go. Her hands fell at
+her sides, and she waited by the dying fire in the attitude of one who
+listens intently. The soft melody of that hidden and persistent musician
+wailed in her ears, on and on. It came again and again, never ceasing,
+never altering in time. And its influence upon Claire was terrible as
+the influence of the dream music in the valley beneath the Kasbar. She
+longed to go to it. She seemed to belong to it,--to be its possession,
+and to have erred when she separated herself from it. In the darkness it
+was awaiting her, and it sent out its crying voice in the night as a
+message, as a summons soft, clear, and quietly determined. She clenched
+her hands as she stood by the fire. She strove to root her feet in the
+ground. If there had been anything to cling to just then, she would have
+stretched forth her arms and clung to it, resisting what she loved from
+fear of the future. But there was nothing. And she thought of the
+children and of the Pied Piper. But they were legendary beings of a
+fable long ago. And she thought of Renfrew and of his love. But that
+seemed nothing. That could not keep her. He was a pale phantom, and her
+career was a handful of dust, and her name was as the name graven upon a
+tomb, and her life was but as a gift to be offered to an unknown
+destiny,--while that melody called to her. Had any one seen her then in
+the glow of the firelight, she would have seemed to him terrible. For
+suddenly she let the djelabe of Absalem slip from her shoulders to the
+ground. And, in the fiercely flickering light, that makes all things and
+people assume unearthly aspects, her thin figure in its white robe
+looked like the white body of a serpent, erect and trembling, under the
+influence of the charmer. But the melody grew softer and softer, more
+faint, more dreamy in the darkness. Presently it ceased. As it did so,
+Claire drew a deep breath, lifted her head like one released from a
+thraldom, and turned her face towards the camp.
+
+Almost directly she saw Renfrew returning towards her. He looked
+puzzled.
+
+"It wasn't any of the men playing," he said to her.
+
+"No?"
+
+Claire bent, caught up the djelabe and drew it over her.
+
+"I went to them, and found them listening to some story Absalem was
+telling. They were all gathered close round him, huddled up together in
+the dark. And the piping came from quite another direction--not from the
+soldiers either. It must have been some vagabond out of Tetuan. I was
+just going to make a search for him, when the noise stopped. He must
+have heard me coming."
+
+He still looked disturbed and angry, and this break in their
+conversation was final. It seemed impossible to take up the thread of it
+again. They stood together watching the fire fade away till it was a
+faint glow almost level with the ground. Then at last Renfrew spoke, in
+a voice that was almost timid.
+
+"Claire," he said.
+
+"Yes," she answered out of the dull twilight that would soon be
+darkness.
+
+"If I have said anything to-night to hurt you, don't think of it, don't
+remember it. I don't know--I don't seem to have been like myself
+to-night. I believe that cursed music irritated me, so ugly, and so
+monotonous; it got right on my nerves, I think."
+
+"Did it?"
+
+"Without my knowing it."
+
+He felt for one of her hands and clasped it.
+
+"Yes, dear. We both said more than we meant. Didn't we?"
+
+Claire did not assent; but she let her hand lie in his. That satisfied
+him then, although afterwards he remembered her silence. Soon the fire
+was dead; and they said good-night in the wind, which seemed colder
+because there was no more light.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Renfrew went to his tent, undressed, and got into bed. The wind roared
+against the canvas. But the pegs had been driven stoutly into the ground
+by the porters, and held the cords fast. He felt very tired and
+depressed, and thought he would not fall asleep quickly. But he soon
+began to be drowsy, and to have a sense of dropping into the very arms
+of the tempest, lulled by its noise. He slept for a time. Presently,
+however, and while it was still quite dark, he woke up. He heard the
+wind as before, but was troubled by an idea that some other sound was
+mingling with it, some murmur so indistinct that he could not decide
+what it was, although he was aware of it. He sat up and strained his
+ears, and wished the wind would lull, if only for a moment, or that this
+other sound--which had surely been the cause of his waking--would
+increase, and stand out distinctly in the night. And, at last, by dint
+of listening with all his force, Renfrew seemed to himself to compel the
+sound to greater clearness. Then he knew that somewhere, far off perhaps
+in the wind, the player on the pipe reiterated his soft and stealthy
+music. It was swept on the tempest like a drowning thing caught in a
+whirlpool. It was so faint as to be almost inaudible. But in all its
+weakness it retained most completely its character, and made the same
+impression upon Renfrew as when it was near and distinct. It irritated
+and it repelled him. And, with an angry exclamation, he flung himself
+down and buried his head in the pillow, stopping his ears with his
+hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+With daylight the camp was in a turmoil. Claire was gone. Her bed had
+not been slept in. She had not undressed. She had not even taken off
+Absalem's djelabe. At least it could not be found. Renfrew, frantic,
+almost mad with anxiety, explored the plain, rode at a gallop to the
+gate of the city, called upon the Governor of Tetuan to help him in his
+search, and summoned the Consul to his aid in his despair. Every effort
+was made to find the missing woman; but no success crowned the quest,
+either at that time, or afterwards, when weeks became months, and months
+grew into years. A great actress was lost to the world. His world was
+lost to Renfrew. He rode back at last one day to the villas of Tangier,
+bent down upon his horse, broken, alone. In his despair he cursed
+himself. He accused himself of cruelty to Claire that night beside the
+African fire, when he had been roused to a momentary anger against her.
+He even told himself that he had driven her away from him. But other
+men, who had known Claire and the strangeness of her caprices, said to
+each other that she had got tired of Renfrew and given him the slip,
+wandering away disguised in the djelabe of a Moor, and that some fine
+day she would turn up again, and re-appear upon the stage that had seen
+her glory.
+
+Later on, when Renfrew at last, after long searching, came hopelessly
+back to England, so changed that his friends scarcely recognised him, he
+was sometimes seized with strange and terrible thoughts as he sat
+brooding over the wreck of his love. He seemed to see, as in a pale
+vision of flame and darkness, a little dusky Moorish boy bending to
+smell at a withered sprig of orange flower, and to remember that
+once--how long ago it seemed--Claire had wished to kiss that boy as a
+Moorish woman might have kissed him. And then he saw a veiled figure,
+that he seemed to know even in its deceitful robe, bend down to the boy.
+And the vision faded. At another time he would hear the little tune that
+had persecuted him in the night. And then he recalled the music of
+Claire's dream, and the melody that charmed the snakes; and he
+shuddered. For the miracle man had never been seen in Tetuan since the
+day when Claire had watched him in the Soko. Nor could Renfrew ever find
+out whither he had wandered.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Very long afterwards, however,--although this fact was never known to
+Renfrew,--two Russian travellers in the Great Sahara desert witnessed
+one evening, as they sat in their tent door, the performance of a savage
+charmer of snakes who carried upon his body three serpents,--one
+striped, one black, one white. And the younger of them noticed, and
+remarked to the other, that the charmer wore half-way up the little
+finger of his left hand a thin gold circle in which there was set a
+magnificent black pearl.
+
+
+
+
+A TRIBUTE OF SOULS
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+The matter of Carlounie, the village of Perthshire in Scotland, is
+become notorious in the world. The name of its late owner, his
+remarkable transformation, his fortunate career, his married life, the
+brooding darkness that fell latterly upon his mind, the flaming deed
+that he consummated, its appalling outcome, and the finding of him by Mr
+Mackenzie, the minister of the parish of Carlounie, sunk in a pool of
+the burn that runs through a "den" close to his house--all these things
+are fresh in the minds of many men. It has been supposed that he had
+discovered a common intrigue between his wife, Kate, formerly an
+hospital nurse, and his tenant, Hugh Fraser of Piccadilly, London. It
+has been universally thought that this discovery led to the last action
+of his life. The following pages, found among his papers, seem to put a
+very different complexion on the affair, although they suggest a
+mediaeval legend rather than a history of modern days. It may be added
+that careful enquiries have been made among the inhabitants of
+Carlounie, and that no man, woman, or child has been discovered who ever
+saw, or heard of, the grey traveller mentioned in Alistair Ralston's
+narrative.
+
+
+I
+
+THE STRANGER BY THE BURN
+
+Can a fever change a man's whole nature, giving him powers that he never
+had before? Can he go into it impotent, starved, naked, emerge from it
+potent, satisfied, clothed with possibilities that are wonders, that are
+miracles to him? It must be so; it is so. And yet--I must go back to
+that sad autumn day when I walked beside the burn. Can I write down my
+moods, my feelings of that day and of the following days? And if I can,
+does that power of pinning the butterfly of my soul down upon the
+board--does that power, too, bud, blossom from a soil mysteriously
+fertilised by illness? Formerly, I could as easily have flown in the air
+to the summit of cloud-capped Schiehallion as have set on paper even the
+smallest fragment of my mind. Now--well, let me see, let me still
+further know my new, my marvellous self.
+
+Yes, that first day! It was Autumn, but only early Autumn. The leaves
+were changing colour upon the birch trees, upon the rowans. At dawn,
+mists stood round to shield the toilet of the rising sun. At evening,
+they thronged together like a pale troop of shadowy mutes to assist at
+his departure to the under world. It was a misty season, through which
+the bracken upon the hillsides of my Carlounie glowed furtively in
+tints of brown and of orange; and my mind, my whole being, seemed to
+move in mists. I was just twenty-two, an orphan, master of my estate of
+Carlounie, a Scotch laird, and my own governor. And some idiots envied
+me then, as many begin to envy me now. I even remember one ghastly old
+man who clapped me on the shoulder, and, with the addition of an
+unnecessary oath, swore that I was "a lucky youngster." I, with my thin,
+chetif body, my burning, weakly, starved, and yet ambitious soul--lucky!
+I remember that I broke into a harsh laugh, and longed to kill the
+babbling beast.
+
+And it was the next day, in the afternoon, that I took that book--my
+Bible--and went forth alone to the long den in which the burn hides and
+cries its presence. Yes, I took Goethe's "Faust," and my own complaining
+spirit, and went out into the mist with my misty, clouded mind. My
+cousin Gavin wanted me to go out shooting. He laughed and rallied me
+upon my ill-luck on the previous day, when I had gone out and been the
+joke of my own keepers because I had missed every bird; and I turned and
+railed at him, and told him to leave me to myself. And, as I went, I
+heard him muttering, "That wretched little fellow! To think that he
+should be owner of Carlounie!" Now, he sings another tune.
+
+With "Faust" in my hand, and hatred in my heart, I went out into the
+delicately chilly air, down the winding ways of the garden, through the
+creaking iron gateway. I emerged on to the wilder land, irregular,
+grass-covered ground, strewn with grey granite boulders, among which
+coarse, wiry ferns grew sturdily. The blackfaced sheep whisked their
+broad tails at me as I passed, then stooped their ever-greedy mouths to
+their damp and eternal meal again. I heard the thin and distant cry of a
+hawk, poised somewhere up in the mist. The hills, clothed in the
+death-like glory of the bracken, loomed around me, like some phantom,
+tricked-out procession passing through desolate places. And then I heard
+the voice of the burn--that voice which is even now for ever in my ears.
+To me that day it was the voice of one alive; and it is the voice of one
+alive to me now. I descended the sloping hill with my lounging,
+weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called me master had so
+often looked contemptuously askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I
+descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the tree-fringed den, and
+the burn was noisy in my ears. I could see it now, leaping here and
+there out of its hiding-place--ivory foam among the dripping larches,
+and the birches with their silver stems; ivory foam among the deep brown
+and flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a voice
+calling--calling me to come down into its hiding-place, presided over by
+the mists--to come down into its hiding-place, away from men: away from
+the living creatures whom I hated because I envied them, because they
+were stronger than I, because they could do what I could not do, say
+what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn, my tenants, the smallest
+farm boy, the grooms, the little leaping peasants--I hated, I hated them
+all. And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and I went down into
+the hiding-place of the burn.
+
+It ran through strange and secret places where the soft mists hung in
+wet wreaths. I seemed to be in another world when I was in its lair. On
+the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees like shadows, some of
+them with tortured and tormented shapes. As I turned and looked straight
+up the hill of the burn's descending course, the mountain from which it
+came closed in the prospect inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in--me
+and the burn which talked to me. We two were out of the world which I
+hated and longed to have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world, full
+of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now that I was right down at the
+water-side, the ivory face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to
+me, the ivory heart that beat against my heart--so sick and so
+weary--were varied and were changed. As thoughts streak a mind, the
+clear amber of the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous foam
+that marked the incessant leaps taken by the water towards the valley.
+The silence of those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for
+contemplation in a great career of action; and their silence spoke to
+me, mingling mysteriously with the voice of the foam. The course of the
+burn is broken up, and attended by rocks that have been modelled by the
+action of the running water into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in
+mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch, and all covered with
+drops of moisture; some are gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp
+edges and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a cunning and almost
+coquettish grace, dashes brutally against others, as if impelled by an
+internal violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses quite gently,
+and would be glad to linger by, if Nature would allow the dalliance. And
+this army of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite
+variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut of expression; for the
+differing shape of each boulder, against which it rushes in its long
+career, gives it a different note. It flickers across the small and
+round stone with the purling cry of a child. From the stone curved
+inwards, and with a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody. The
+pointed and narrow colony of rocks which break it into an intricate
+network of small water threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards
+the dark pool under the birches, where the trout play like sinister
+shadows and the insects dance in the sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it
+gains a great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from which it
+takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and defiant, and shrieks with a
+banshee of triumph--in which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of
+wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices among the rocks, under the
+ferns and the birch trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and
+shadows, between the steep walls of the green banks that hem it in! Many
+voices which can sing, when they choose, one song, again and again
+and--monotonously--again!
+
+So--now on this sad Autumn day--I was with the burn in its hiding-place,
+cool, damp, fretful. Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden, the wilder
+land beyond, the moors on which yesterday my incompetence as a shot had
+roused the contempt of my cousin and of my hirelings--all were lost to
+view. I was away from all men in this narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a
+world. I sat down on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my
+heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear brown water glided
+swiftly. I sat and listened to its murmur. And, just then, it did not
+occur to me that water can utter words like men. The murmur was
+suggestive but definitely inarticulate. I had come down here to be away
+and to think. The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur of the burn;
+and, as ever, in those days, it lamented and cursed and bitterly
+complained.
+
+Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence that clung to both
+mind and body? (So ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten by
+Providence? Why had I been given a soul that could not express itself in
+the frame of a coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost a
+deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded exactly to my body, then
+all might have been well enough. I should have been more complete,
+although less, in some way, than I now was. For such a soul would have
+accepted cowardice, weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it,
+as a right fate. Such a soul would never have known the meaning of the
+word rebellion, would never have been able to understand its own cancer
+of disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous and creeping
+malady. It would never have aspired like a flame, and longed in vain to
+burn clearly and grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would such a
+soul have guttered on like some cheap and ill-smelling candle, shedding
+shadows rather than any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless
+of the possibilities that teem like waking children in the wondrous womb
+of life, oblivious of the contempt of the souls around it, heedless of
+ambition, of the trumpet call of success, of the lust to be something,
+to do something, of the magic, of the stinging magic of achievement.
+With such a soul in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body--I thought,
+sitting thus by the burn--I might have been content, an utterly low, and
+perhaps an utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.
+
+But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was the most bitterly
+miserable of men. God--or the Devil--had made me ill-shaped, physically
+despicable, with the malign sort of countenance that so often
+accompanies and illustrates a bad poor body. My limbs, without being
+actually twisted, were shrunken and incompetent--they would not obey my
+desires as do the limbs of other men. My legs would not grip a horse.
+When I rode I was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness, no
+agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When I tried to box, to
+fence, I was one whirling, jigging incapacity. I had feeble sight, and
+objects presented themselves to my vision so strangely that I could not
+shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the young Laird of Carlounie! When I
+walked my limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no grace, no
+lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence of bodily power. And this
+was bitter, yet as nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my body was
+in a way complete. It was a wretch. But when you came to the mind you
+had the real tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there dwells a
+commanding spirit, as a great God might dwell--of mysterious choice--in
+a ruinous and decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit rules,
+disposes, presides, develops, has its own full and superb existence,
+triumphing not merely over, but actually through the contemptible body
+in which it resides, so that men even are led to worship the very
+ugliness and poverty of this body, to adore it for its power to retain
+such a mighty spirit within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it been,
+I might have been happy by the burn that Autumn day. Had it been, I
+might never--But I am anticipating, and I must not anticipate. I must
+sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch of my limbs, and
+recall the horror of my musing.
+
+In a manner, then, my soul matched my body. It was feeble and
+incompetent too. My brain was dull and clouded. My intellect was
+sluggish and inert. But--and this was the terror for me!--within the
+rank nest of my soul--my spirit--lay coiled two vipers that never ceased
+from biting me with their poisoned fangs--Self-consciousness and
+Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to be other than I was. I watched
+my own incompetence as one who watches from a tower. I divined how
+others regarded me--precisely. The blatant and comfortable egoism of a
+dwarf mind in a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I was that
+terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and incompetent thing that
+adored, with a curious wildness of passion, completeness, competence.
+Nor had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided
+perfection. My desires were Gargantuan. When I was with my cousin Gavin,
+a fine all-round sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot, to
+throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on a horse. I felt that I
+would give up years of life to beat him once in any of his pursuits.
+When I was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense, were utterly
+different. He represented in my neighbourhood Intellect--with a capital
+I. A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of Carlounie, he was
+astonishingly adroit as a controversialist, astonishingly eloquent as a
+divine. His voice was full of music. His eyes were full of light and of
+the most superb self-confidence. He rested upon his intellect as a man
+may rest upon a rock. The power of his personality was calm and immense.
+I felt it vehemently. I shook and trembled under it. I hated and loathed
+the man for it, because I wanted and could never possess it. So, too, I
+hated my cousin Gavin for his possessions, his long and sure-sighted
+eyes, great and strong arms, broad chest, lithe legs, bright agility. My
+body could do nothing. My soul could do nothing--except one great thing.
+It could fully observe and comprehend its own impotence. It could fully
+and desperately envy and pine to be what it could never be. Could never
+be, do I say? Wait! Remember that is only what I thought then as I sat
+upon the rock, and, with haggard young eyes, watched the clear brown
+water slipping furtively past between my knees.
+
+My disease seemed to culminate that day, I remember. I was a sick
+invalid alone in the mist. Something--it might have been vitriol--was
+eating into me, eating, eating its way to my very heart, to the core of
+me. Oh, to be stunted and desire to be straight and tall, to be dwarf
+and wish to be giant, to be stupid and long to be a genius, to be ugly
+and yearn to be in face as one of the shining gods, to have no power
+over men, and to pine to fascinate, hold, dominate a world of men--this
+indeed is to be in hell! I was in hell that Autumn day. I clenched my
+thin, weak hands together. I clenched my teeth from which the pale lips
+were drawn back in a grin; and I realised all the spectral crowd of my
+shortcomings. They stood before me like demons of the Brocken--yes, yes,
+of the Brocken!--and I cursed God with the sound of the burn ringing and
+chattering in my ears. And I devoted Gavin, Doctor Wedderburn, every man
+highly placed, every lowest peasant, who could do even one of all the
+things I could not do, to damnation. The paroxysm that took hold of me
+was like a fit, a convulsion. I came out of it white and feeble. And,
+suddenly, the voice of the burn seemed to come from a long way off. I
+put out my hand, and took up from the rock on which I had laid it,
+"Faust." And, scarcely knowing what I did, I began mechanically to
+read--to the dim rapture of the burn--
+
+"_Scene III.--The Study. Faust (entering, with the poodle)._" I began to
+read, do I say, mechanically? Yes, it is true, but soon, very soon, the
+spell of Goethe was laid upon me. I was in the lofty-arched, narrow
+Gothic chamber, with that living symbol of the weariness, broken
+ambition, learned despair of all the ages. I was engrossed. I heard the
+poodle snarling by the stove. I heard the spirits whispering in the
+corridor. Vapour rose--or was it indeed the mist from the mountains
+among the birch trees?--and out of the vapour came Mephistopheles in the
+garb of a travelling scholar. And then--and then the great bargain was
+struck. I heard--yes, I did, I actually, and most distinctly, heard a
+voice--Faust's--say, "_Let us the sensual deeps explore.... Plunge we in
+Time's tumultuous dance, In the rush and roll of circumstance._" A
+pause; then the Student's grave and astonished tones came to me: _Eritis
+sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum._ The cloak was spread, and on the
+burning air Faust was wafted to his new life--nay, not to his new life
+merely, but to life itself. He vanished with his guide in a coloured,
+flower-like mist. I dropped my hand holding the book down upon the cold
+rock by which the cold water splashed. It felt burning hot to my touch.
+My head fell upon my breast, and I had my dreams--dreams of the life of
+Faust and of its glories, gained by this bargain that he made. And
+then--yes, then it was!--the voice of the burn, as from leagues away in
+the bosom of this very mist, began to sing like a fairy voice, or a
+voice in dreams, and in visions of the night, "_If it was so then, it
+might be so now._" At first I scarcely heeded it, for I was enwrapt.
+But the song grew louder, more insistent. It was travelling to me from a
+far country. I heard it coming: "_If it was so then, it might be so
+now_"--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" How near it was at
+last, how loud in my ears! And yet always there was something vague,
+visionary about it, something of the mist, I think. At length I heard it
+with the attention that is of earth. I came to myself, out of the narrow
+Gothic chamber in which the genius of Goethe had prisoned me, and I
+stared into the mist, which was gathering thicker as the night began to
+fall. It seemed flower-like, and full of strange and mysterious colour.
+I trembled. I got up. Still I heard the voice of the burn singing that
+monotonous legend, on, and on, and on. Slowly I turned. I climbed the
+bank of the den. The sheep scattered lethargically at my approach. I
+passed through the creaking iron gate into the garden. Carlounie was
+before me. There was something altered, something triumphant about its
+aspect. The voice of the burn faded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even as I
+gained the door of my house, and, before entering it, paused in an
+attentive attitude, I heard the water chanting faintly from the
+den--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" ... As I came into the
+hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn stood together talking earnestly,
+I remember that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From that moment not a day passed without my visiting the burn. It
+summoned me. Always it sang those words persistently. The sound of the
+water can be very faintly heard from the windows of Carlounie. Each day,
+at dawn, I pushed open the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear
+if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise, or in the darkness
+through which the soft and small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the
+sill and listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among the mountains.
+Sometimes the silence was intense and awful. But in storm or in
+stillness the burn sang on, ever and ever the same words. At moments I
+fancied that the voice was as the voice of a man demented, repeating
+with mirthless frenzy through all his years one hollow sentence. At
+moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman, a siren, a Lorelei among my
+rocks in my valley. Then again I said, "It is a spirit voice, a voice
+from the inner chamber of my own heart." And--why I know not--at that
+last fantasy I shuddered. Even in the midnight from my window ledge I
+leaned while the world slept and I heard the mystic message of the burn.
+My visits to its bed were not unobserved. One morning my cousin Gavin
+said to me roughly, "Why the devil are you always stealing off to that
+ditch"--so he called the den that was the home of my voice--"when you
+ought to be practising to conquer your infernal deficiencies? Why, the
+children of your own keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man,
+and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling." I stared at him and
+answered, "You don't understand everything." Once Dr Wedderburn, who had
+been my tutor, said to me more kindly, "Alistair, action is better for
+you than thought. Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try to
+work, for work is the best man-maker after all."
+
+And to him I said, "Yes, I know!" and flew with a strong wing in the
+face of his advice. For the voice of the burn was more to me than the
+voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind of the burn meant more to
+me than the mind of any man. And so the Autumn died slowly, with a
+lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in mist. I often felt ill,
+even then. My body was dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever
+was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it crawling in my veins? Was it
+nestling about my heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...
+
+Certainly during this period life seemed alien to me, and I moved as one
+apart in a remote world, full of the music of the burn, and full, too,
+of vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know it. Still, I cannot be
+sure what is the truth. In the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the
+burn before my illness seized me. The cold of early Winter was in the
+air and a great stillness. It was afternoon when I left the house
+walking slowly with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white and
+drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching. I did not carry my volume
+of Goethe in my hand; but, in its place, held an old book on
+transcendental magic. The voice of the burn--yes, that alone--had led me
+to study this book. So now I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the
+foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the den to this strange
+writing on the black art? Who knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put
+the book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold as I descended the
+steep ground that lay about the water, which that day seemed to roar in
+my ears the sentence I had heard so many days and nights. And this time,
+as I hearkened, my heart and my brain echoed the last words--"_It might
+be so now._" Gaining the edge of the burn, then in heavy spate, I
+watched for a while the passage of the foam from rock to rock. I peered
+into the pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and with
+whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all my meagre body seemed pulsing
+with those everlasting words: "Why not now?" I murmured to myself, with
+a sort of silent sneer, too, at my own absurdity. I remember I glanced
+furtively around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness, dripping
+bare trees through whose branches the mist curled silently, cold rocks,
+the cold flood of the swollen burn--such was the blank prospect that met
+my eyes.
+
+There was no man near me. There was no one to look at me. I was remote,
+hidden in a secret place, and the early twilight was already beginning
+to fall. No one could see me. I opened my old and ragged book, or,
+rather, let it fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for the
+hundredth time, and read that he who would evoke the Devil must choose a
+solitary and condemned spot. The burn was solitary. The burn was
+condemned surely by the despair and by the endless incapacities of the
+wretched being who owned it. I had taken off my shoes and placed them
+upon a rock. My feet were bare. My head was covered. I now furtively
+proceeded to gather together a small heap of sticks and leaves, and to
+these I set fire, after several attempts. As the flames at last crept
+up, the mist gathered more closely round me and my fire, as if striving
+to warm itself at the blaze. The voice of the burn mingled with the
+uneasy crackle of the twigs, and a murmur of its words seemed to emanate
+also from the flames, two elements uniting to imitate the utterance of
+man to my brain, already surely tormented with fever. And now, with my
+eyes upon my book, I proceeded to trace with the sharp point of a stick
+in some sandy soil between two rocks a rough Goetic Circle of Black
+evocations and pacts. From time to time I paused in my work and glanced
+uneasily about me, but I saw only the mists and the waters.
+
+At length my task was finished, and the time had arrived for the
+supreme effort of my insane and childish folly. Standing at Amasarac in
+the Circle, I said aloud the formula of Evocation of the Grand Grimoire,
+ending with the words "Jehosua, Evam, Zariat, natmik, Come, come, come."
+
+My voice died away in the twilight, and I stood among the grey rocks
+waiting, mad creature that I surely was! But only the rippling voice of
+the burn answered my adjuration. Then I repeated the words in a louder
+tone, adding menaces and imprecations to my formula. And all the time
+the fire I had kindled sprang up into the mist; and the twilight of the
+heavy Autumn fell slowly round me. Again I paused, and again my madness
+received no satisfaction, no response. But it seemed to me that I heard
+the browsing sheep on the summit of the right bank of the gully scatter
+as if at the approach of some one. Yet there was no stir of footsteps.
+It must have been my fancy, or the animals were merely changing their
+feeding ground in a troop, as they sometimes will, for no assignable
+cause. And now I made one last effort, urged by the voice of the burn,
+which sang so loudly the words which had mingled with my dream of Faust.
+I cried aloud the supreme appellation, making an effort that brought out
+the sweat on my forehead, and set the pulses leaping in my thin and
+shivering body. "_Chavajoth! chavajoth! chavajoth! I command thee by the
+Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A little way up the course of the burn the dead wood cracked and
+shuffled under the pressure of descending feet. Again I heard a
+scattering of the sheep upon the hillside. My hair stirred on my head
+under my cap, and the noise of the falling water was intolerably loud to
+me. I wanted to hear plainly, to hear what was coming down to me in the
+mist. The brush-wood sang nearer. In the heavy and damp air there was
+the small, sharp report of a branch snapped from a tree. I heard it drop
+among the ferns close to me. And then in the mist and in the twilight I
+saw a slim figure standing motionless. It was vague, but less vague than
+a shadow. It seemed to be a man, or a youth, clad in a grey suit that
+could scarcely be differentiated from the mist. The flames of my fire,
+bent by a light breeze that had sprung up, stretched themselves towards
+it, as if to salute it. And now I could not hear any movement of the
+sheep; evidently they had gone to a distance. At first, seized with a
+strange feeling of extreme, almost unutterable fear, I neither moved nor
+spoke. Then, making a strong effort to regain control of my ordinary
+faculties, I cried out in the twilight--
+
+"What is that? What is it?"
+
+"Only a stranger who has missed his way on the mountain, and wants to go
+on to Wester Denoon."
+
+The voice that came to me from the figure beyond the fire sounded, I
+remember, quite young, like the voice of a boy. It was clear and level,
+and perhaps a little formal. So that was all. A tourist--that was all!
+
+"Can you direct me on the way?" the voice said.
+
+I gave the required direction slowly, for I was still confused, nervous,
+exhausted with my insane practices in the den. But the youth--as I
+supposed he was--did not move away at once.
+
+"What are you doing by this fire?" he said. "I heard your voice calling
+by the torrent among the trees when I was a very long way off."
+
+Strangely, I did not resent the question. Still more strangely, I was
+impelled to give him the true answer to it.
+
+"Raising the Devil!" he said. "And did he come to you?"
+
+"No; of course not. You must think me mad."
+
+"And why do you call him?"
+
+Suddenly a desire to confide in this stranger, whose face I could not
+see now, whose shadowy form I should, in all probability, never see
+again, came upon me. My usual nervousness deserted me. I let loose my
+heart in a turbulent crowd of words. I explained my impotence of body
+and of mind to this grey traveller in the twilight. I dwelt upon my
+misery. I repeated the cry of the burn and related my insane dream of
+imitating Faust, of making my poor pact with Lucifer, with the Sphinx of
+mediaeval terrors. When I ceased, the boy's voice answered:--
+
+"They say that in these modern days Satan has grown exigent. It is not
+enough to dedicate to him your own soul; but you must also pay a tribute
+of souls to the Caesar of hell."
+
+"A tribute of souls?"
+
+"Yes. You must bring, they say, the mystic number, three souls to
+Satan."
+
+Suddenly I laughed.
+
+"I could never do that," I said. "I have no power to seduce man or
+woman. I cannot win souls to heaven or to hell."
+
+"But if you received new powers, such as you desire, would you use them
+to win souls, three souls, to Lucifer?"
+
+"Yes," I said with passionate earnestness. "I swear to you that I
+would."
+
+Suddenly the boy's voice laughed.
+
+"_Quomodo cecidisti_, Lucifer!" he said. "When thou canst not contrive
+to capture souls for thyself! But," he added, as if addressing himself
+once more to me, after this strange ejaculation, "your words have,
+perhaps, sealed the bond. Who knows? Words that come from the very heart
+are often deeds. For, as we can never go back from things that we have
+done, it may be that, sometimes, we can never go back from things that
+we have said."
+
+On the words he moved, and passed so swiftly by me into the twilight
+down the glen that I never saw his face. I turned instinctively to look
+after him; and, this was strange, it seemed that the wind at that very
+moment must have turned with me, blowing from, instead of towards, the
+mountain. This certainly was so; for the tongues of flame from my fire
+bent backward on a sudden and leaned after the grey traveller, whose
+steps died swiftly away among the rocks, and on the shuffling dead wood
+and leaves of the birches and the oaks.
+
+And then there came a singing in my ears, a beating of many drums in my
+brain. I drooped and sank down by the fire in the mist. My fever came
+upon me like a giant, and presently Gavin and Doctor Wedderburn,
+searching in the night, found me in a delirium, and bore me back to
+Carlounie.
+
+
+II
+
+THE SOUL OF DR WEDDERBURN
+
+To emerge from a great illness is sometimes dreadful, sometimes divine.
+To one man the return from the gates of death is a progress of despair.
+He feels that he cannot face the wild contrasts of the surprising world
+again, that his courage has been broken upon the wheel, that energy is
+desolation, and sleep true beauty. To another this return is a
+marvellous and superb experience. It is like the vivid re-awakening of
+youth in one who is old, a rapture of the past committing an act of
+brigandage upon the weariness of the present, a glorious substitution of
+Eden for the outer courts where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It
+will be supposed that I found myself in the first category, a
+terror-stricken and rebellious mortal when the fever gave me up to the
+world again. For the world had always been cruel to me, because I was
+afraid of it, and was a puny thing in it. Yet this was not so. My
+convalescence was like a beautiful dream of rest underneath which riot
+stirred. A simile will explain best exactly what I mean. Let me liken
+the calm of my convalescence to the calm of earth on the edge of Spring.
+What a riot of form, of scent, of colour, of movement, is preparing
+beneath that enigmatic, and apparently profound, repose. In the simile
+you have my exact state. And I alone felt that, within this womb of
+inaction, the child, action, lay hid, developing silently, but
+inexorably, day by day. This knowledge was my strange secret. It came
+upon me one night when I lay awake in the faint twilight, shed by a
+carefully shaded lamp over my bed. Rain drummed gently against the
+windows. There was no other sound. By the fire, in a great armchair, the
+trained nurse, Kate Walters, was sitting with a book--"Jane Eyre" it
+was--upon her knees. I had been sleeping and now awoke thirsty. I put
+out my hand to get at a tumbler of lemonade that stood on a table by my
+pillow. And suddenly a thought, a curious thought, was with me. My hand
+had grasped the tumbler and lifted it from the table; but, instead of
+bringing my hand to my mouth I kept my arm rigidly extended, the tumbler
+poised on my palm as upon the palm of a juggler.
+
+"How long my arm is!" that was my thought, "and how strong!" Formerly it
+had been short, weak, awkward. Now, surely, after my illness, my arms
+would naturally be nerveless, useless things. The odd fact was that now,
+for the first time in my life, I felt joy in a physical act. An absurd
+and puny act, you will say, I daresay. What of that? With it came a
+sudden stirring of triumph. I lay there on my back and kept my arm
+extended for full five minutes by the watch that ticked by my bed-head.
+And with each second that passed joy blossomed more fully within my
+heart. I drank the lemonade as one who drinks a glad toast. Yet I was
+puzzled. "Is this--can this be a remnant of delirium?" I asked myself.
+And beneath the clothes drawn up to my chin I fingered my arm above the
+elbow. It was the limb of a big, strong man. Surprise, supreme
+astonishment forced an exclamation from my lips. Kate got up softly and
+came towards me; but I feigned to be asleep, and she returned to the
+fire. Yet, peering under my lowered eyelids, I noticed an expression of
+amazement upon her young and pretty face. I knew afterwards that it was
+the sound of my voice--my new voice--that drew it there. After that
+night my convalescence was more than a joy to me, it was a rapture,
+touched by, and mingled with something that was almost awe. Is not the
+earth awe-struck when she considers that Spring and Summer nestle
+silently in her bosom? With each day the secret which I kept grew more
+mysterious, more profound. Soon I knew it could be a secret no longer.
+The fever--it must be that!--had wrought magic within my body, driving
+out weakness, impotence, lassitude, developing my physical powers to an
+extent that was nothing less than astounding. Lying there in my bed, I
+felt the dwarf expand into the giant. Think of it! Did ever living man
+know such an experience before? A bodily spring came about within me.
+And I was already twenty-two years old before the fever took me. My
+limbs grew large and strong; the muscles of my chest and back were
+tensely strung and knit as firmly as the muscles of an athlete. I lay
+still, it is true, and felt much of the peculiar vagueness that follows
+fever; but I was conscious of a supine, latent energy never known
+before. I was conscious that when I rose, and went out into the world
+again, it would be as a man, capable of holding his own against other
+strong, straight men. That was a wonder. But it was succeeded by a
+greater marvel yet.
+
+One afternoon, while I was still in bed, Doctor Wedderburn came to see
+me and to sit with me. He had been away on a holiday, and,
+consequently, had not visited me before, except once when I had been
+delirious. The doctor was a short, spare man, with a sharply cut
+brick-red face, lively and daring dark eyes, and straight hair already
+on the road to grey. His self-possession bordered on self-satisfaction;
+and, despite his good heart and the real and anxious sanctity of his
+life, he could seldom entirely banish from his manner the contempt he
+felt for those less intellectual, less swift-minded than himself. Often
+had I experienced the stinging lash of his sarcasm. Often had I withered
+beneath one of his keen glances that dismissed me from an argument as a
+profound sage might kick an urchin from the study into the street. Often
+had I hated him with a sick hatred and ground my teeth because my mind
+was so clouded and so helpless, while his was so lucent and so adroit.
+So now, when I heard his tap on the door, his deep voice asking to come
+in, a rage of self-contempt seized me, as in the days before my illness.
+The doctor entered with an elaborate softness, and walked, flat-footed,
+to my bed, pursing his large lips gently as men do when filled with
+cautious thoughts. I could see he desired to moderate his habitual voice
+and manner; but, arrived close to me, he suddenly cried aloud, with a
+singularly full-throated amazement.
+
+"Boy--boy, what's come to you?" he called. Then, abruptly putting his
+finger to his lips, he sank down in a chair, his bright eyes fixed upon
+me.
+
+"It's a miracle," he said slowly.
+
+"What is?" I asked with an invalid's pettishness.
+
+"The voice, too--the voice!"
+
+I grew angry easily, as men do when they are sick.
+
+"Why do you say that? Of course I've been bad--of course I'm changed."
+
+"Changed! Look at yourself--and praise God, Alistair."
+
+He had caught up a hand-mirror that lay on the dressing-table and now
+put it into my hand. For the first time since the fever I saw my face.
+It was as it had been and yet it was utterly different, for now it was
+beautiful. The pinched features seemed to have been smoothed out. The
+mouth had become firm and masterful. The haggard eyes were alight as if
+torches burned behind them. My expression, too, was powerful, collected,
+alert. I scarcely recognised myself. But I pretended to see no change.
+
+"Well--what is it?" I asked, dropping the glass.
+
+The doctor was confused by my calm.
+
+"Your look of health startled me," he answered, sitting down by the bed
+and examining me keenly.
+
+All at once I was seized by a strange desire to get up an argument with
+this man, by whom I had so often been crushed in conversation. I leaned
+on my elbow in the bed, and fixing my eyes on him, I said:--
+
+"And why should I praise God?"
+
+The doctor seemed in amazement at my tone.
+
+"Because you are a Christian and have been brought back from death," he
+replied, but with none of his usual half-sarcastic self-confidence.
+
+"You think God did that?"
+
+"Alistair, do you dare to blaspheme the Almighty?"
+
+I felt at that moment like a cat playing with a mouse. My lips, I know,
+curved in a smile of mockery, and yet I will swear--yes, even to my own
+heart--that all I said that day I said in pure mischief, with no evil
+intent. It seemed that I, Alistair Ralston, the dolt, the ignoramus,
+longed to try mental conclusions with this brilliant and opinionated
+divine. He bade me praise God. In reply I praised--the Devil, and I
+forced him to hear me. Absolutely I broke into a flood of words, and he
+sat silent. I compared the good and evil in the scheme of the world,
+balancing them in the scales, the one against the other. I took up the
+stock weapon of atheism, the deadly nature, the deadly outcome of free
+will. I used it with skill. The names of Strauss, Comte, Schopenhauer,
+Renan, a dozen others, sprang from my lips. The dreary doctrine of the
+illimitable triumph of sin, of the appalling mistake of the permission
+granted it to step into the scheme of creation, in order that its
+presence might create a _raison d'etre_ for the power of personal action
+one way or the other in mankind--such matters as these I treated with a
+vehement eloquence and command of words that laid a spell upon the
+doctor. Going very far, I dared to exclaim that since God had allowed
+his own scheme to get out of gear, the only hope of man lay in the
+direction of the opposing force, in frank and ardent Satanism.
+
+When at length I ceased from speaking, I expected Dr Wedderburn to rise
+up in his wrath and to annihilate me, but he sat still in his chair with
+a queer, and, as I thought, puzzled expression upon his face. At last he
+said, as if to himself:
+
+"The miracle of Balaam; verily, the miracle of Balaam."
+
+The ass had indeed spoken as never ass spoke before. I waited a moment,
+then I said:--
+
+"Well, why don't you rebuke me, or why don't you try to controvert me?"
+
+Again he looked upon me, very uneasily I thought, and with something
+that was almost fear in his keen eyes.
+
+"Ah!" he said, "I have praised the Lord many a morning and evening for
+his gift of words to me. It seems others bestow that gift too.
+Alistair"--and here his voice became deeply solemn--"where have you been
+visiting when you lay there, mad to all seeming? In what dark place have
+you been to gather destruction for men? With whom have you been
+talking?"
+
+Suddenly, I know not why, I thought of the grey stranger, and, with a
+laugh, I cried:--
+
+"The grey traveller taught me all I have said to you."
+
+"The grey traveller! Who may he be?"
+
+But I lay back upon the pillows and refused to answer, and very soon the
+doctor went, still bending uneasy, nervous eyes upon me.
+
+In those eyes I read the change that had stolen over my intellect, as in
+the hand-mirror I had read the change that had stolen over my face. This
+strange fever had caused both soul and body to blossom. I trembled with
+an exquisite joy. Had Fate relented to me at last? Was it possible that
+I was to know the joys of the heroes? I longed for, yet feared my full
+recovery. In it alone should I discover how sincere was my
+transformation. Doctor Wedderburn did not come to me again. The days
+passed, my convalescence strengthened, watched over by the pretty nurse,
+Kate Walters, a fresh, pure, pious, innocent, beautiful soul, tender,
+temperate, and pitiful for all sorrow and evil. At length I was well. At
+length I knew, to some extent, my new, my marvellous self. For I had,
+indeed, been folded up in my fever like a vesture, and, like a vesture,
+changed. I had grown taller, expanded, put forth mighty muscles as a
+tree puts forth leaves. My cheeks and my eyes glowed with the radiance
+of strong health. I went out with my cousin Gavin, whose estate marched
+with mine, and I shot so well that he was filled with admiration, and
+forthwith conceived a sort of foolish worship for me--having a
+sportsman's soul but no real mind. For the first time in my life I felt
+absolutely at home on a horse, an unwonted skill came to my hands, and I
+actually schooled Gavin's horses over some fences he had had set up in a
+grass park at the Mains of Cossens. The keepers who had once secretly
+jeered at me were now at my very feet. Their children looked upon me as
+a young god. I rejoiced in my strength as a giant. But I asked myself
+then, as I ask myself now--what does it mean? The days of miracles are
+over. Yet, is this not a miracle? And in a miracle is there not a gleam
+of terror, as there is a gleam of stormy yellow in the fated opal? But
+here I leave my condition of body alone, and pass on to the episode of
+Doctor Wedderburn, partially related in the newspapers of the day and
+marvelled at, I believe, by all who ever knew, or even set eyes upon
+him.
+
+The doctor, as I have said, did not come again to see me, but I felt an
+over-mastering desire to set forth and visit him. This was surprising,
+as hitherto I had rather avoided and hated him. Now something drew me to
+the Manse. At first I resisted my inclination, but a chance word led me
+to yield to it impulsively. Since my illness I had not once attended
+church. Moved by a violent distaste for the religious service, that was
+novel in me, I had frankly avowed my intention of keeping away. But, as
+I did not go to the kirk, I missed seeing Dr Wedderburn; and I wanted to
+see him. One day, leaning by chance against a stone dyke in the Glen of
+Ogilvy, smoking a pipe and enjoying the soft air of Spring as it blew
+over the rolling moorland, I heard two ploughmen exchange a fragment of
+gossip that made excitement start up quick within me.
+
+One said:--
+
+"The doctor's failin'. Man, he was fairly haverin' last Sabbath, on and
+on, wi'out logic or argeyment or sense."
+
+The other answered:--
+
+"Ay; he's greatly changed. He's no the man he was. It fairly beats me; I
+canna mak' it out. Ye've heard that--" And here he lowered his voice and
+I could not catch his words.
+
+I turned away from the wall, and walking swiftly, set out for the Manse
+with a busy mind. The afternoon was already late, and when I gained a
+view of the Manse, a cold grey house standing a little apart in a grove
+of weary-looking sycamores, one or two lights smiled on me from the
+small windows that stared upon the narrow and muddy road. The minister's
+study was on the right of the hall door; and, as I pulled the bell, I
+observed the shadow of his head to dance upon the drawn white blind, a
+thought fantastically, or with a palsied motion, I fancied. The
+yellow-headed maidservant admitted me with a shrunken grin, that
+suggested wild humour stifled by achieved respect, and I was soon in the
+minister's study. Then I saw that Doctor Wedderburn was moving up and
+down the room, and that his head was going this way and that, as he
+communed in a loud voice with himself. My entrance checked him as soon
+as he observed me, which was not instantly, as, at first, his back was
+set towards me and the mood-swept maid. When he turned about, his
+discomposure was evident. His gaze was troubled, and his manner, as he
+shook hands with me, had in it something of the tremulous, and was
+backward in geniality. We sat down on either side of the fire, the tea
+service and the hot cakes, loved of the doctor, between us. At first we
+talked warily of such things as my recovery, the weather, the condition
+of affairs in the parish and so forth. I noticed that though the
+doctor's eyes often rested with an almost glaring expression of scrutiny
+or of surprise upon me, he made no remark on the change of my
+appearance. Nor did I on the change of his, which was startling, and
+suggested I know not what of sorrow and of the attempt to kill it with
+evil weapons. The healthy brick-red of his complexion was now become
+scarlet and full of heat; his mouth worked loosely while he talked; the
+flesh of his cheeks was puffed and wrinkled; his eyes had the clouded
+and yet fierce aspect of the drunkard. But, absurdly enough, what most
+struck me in him was his abstinence from an accustomed act. He drank
+his tea, but he ate no hot cakes. This was a departure from an
+established, if trifling custom of many years' standing, and worked on
+my imaginative conception of what the doctor now was more than would, at
+the first blush, appear likely, or even possible. Instead of, as of old,
+feeling myself on the worm level in his presence, I was filled with a
+sense of pity, as I looked upon him and wondered what subtle process of
+mental or physical development or retrogression had wrought this dreary
+change. Presently, while I wondered, he put his cup down with an awkward
+and errant hand that set it swaying and clattering in the tray, and said
+abruptly:--
+
+"And what have you come for, Alistair, eh? what have you come for? To go
+on with what you've begun? Well, well, lad, I'm ready for you; I'm ready
+now."
+
+His voice was full of timorous irritation, his manner of pitiable
+distress.
+
+"I've thought it out, I've thought it all out," he continued; "and I can
+combat you, I can combat you, Alistair, wherever you've got your
+fever-mind from and your fever-tongue."
+
+I knew what he meant, and suddenly I knew, too, why I had wanted so
+eagerly to come to the Manse. My instinct of pity and of sympathy died
+softly away. My new instinct of cruel rapture in the ruthless exercise
+of my--shall I call them fever-powers then?--woke, dawned to sunrise.
+And Doctor Wedderburn and I fell forthwith into an animated theological
+discussion. He was desperately nervous, desperately ill at ease. His
+argumentative struggles were those of a drowning man positively
+convinced--note this,--that he would drown, that no human or divine aid
+could save him. There was, too, a strong hint of personal anger in his
+manner, which was strictly undignified. He fought a losing battle with
+bludgeons, and had an obvious contempt for the bludgeons while in the
+act of using them in defence or in attack. And at last, with a sort of
+sharp cry, he threw up his hands, and exclaimed in a voice I hardly knew
+as his:--
+
+"God forgive you, Alistair, for what you're doing! God forgive
+you--murderer, murderer!"
+
+This dolorous exclamation ran through me like cold water and chilled all
+the warmth of my intellectual excitement.
+
+"Murderer!" I repeated inexpressively.
+
+Doctor Wedderburn sat in his chair trembling, and looking upon me with
+despairing and menacing eyes, the eyes of a man who curses but cannot
+fight his enemy.
+
+"Of a soul, of a soul," he said. "The poisoned dagger?--doubt, the
+poisoned dagger--you've plunged it into me, boy."
+
+Then raising his voice harshly, he exclaimed:
+
+"Curse you, curse you!"
+
+I was thunderstruck. I declare it here, for it is true. I had
+defamed--and deliberately--the doctor's dearest idols. I had driven my
+lance into his convictions. I had blasphemed what he worshipped, and had
+denied all he affirmed. But that I had made so terrific an impression
+upon his mind, his soul--this astounded me. Yet what else could his
+passionate denunciation mean? Had I, a boy, unused to controversy,
+unskilled in dialectics, overthrown with my hasty words the faith of
+this strong and fervent man? The thought thrilled one side of my dual
+nature with triumph, pierced the other with grim horror. My emotions
+were divided and complex. As I sat silent, my face dogged yet ashamed,
+the doctor got up from his chair trembling like one with the palsy.
+
+"Away from me--away," he cried in a hoarse voice, and pointing at the
+door. "I'll have no more talk with the Devil, no more--no more!"
+
+I had not a word. I got up and went, bending a steady, fascinated look
+upon this old mentor of mine, who now proclaimed himself my victim.
+Arrived in the garden I found a thin moon riding above the sycamores,
+and soft airs of Spring playing round the doctor's habitation.
+Strangely, I had no mind to begone from it immediately. I crossed the
+garden bit and paced up and down the country lane that skirted it,
+keeping an eye upon the lighted window of the study. So I went back and
+forth for full an hour, I suppose. Then I heard a sound in the Spring
+night. The doctor's hall door banged, and, peering through the privet
+hedge that protected his meagre domain, I perceived him come out into
+the air bareheaded. He took his way to the small path that ran by the
+hedge parallel to the lane, coming close to the place by which I
+crouched, spying upon his privacy. And there he paced, bemoaning aloud
+the ill fate that had come upon him. I heard all the awful complaining
+of this soul in distress, besieged by doubts, deserted by the faith and
+hope of a lifetime. It was villainous to be his audience. Yet, I could
+not go. Sometimes the poor man prayed with a desolate voice, calling
+upon God for a sign, imploring against temptation. Sometimes--and this
+was terrible--he blasphemed, he imprecated. And then again he prayed--to
+the Devil, as do the Satanists. I heard him weeping in his garden in the
+night, alone under the sycamores. It was a new agony of the garden and
+it wrung my heart. Yet I watched it till the spectral moon waned, and
+the trees were black as sins against the faded sky.
+
+About this time, as I have said, his parishioners began to mark the
+outward change of Dr Wedderburn that signified the inward change in him.
+The talking ploughmen had their fellows. All who sat under the doctor
+were conscious of a difference, at first vague, in his eloquent
+discourses, of a diminuendo in the full fervour of his delivery and
+manner. Gossip flowed about him, and presently there were whisperings
+of change in his bodily habits. He had been seen by night wandering
+about his garden in very unholy condition, he who had so often rebuked
+excess. Children, passing his gate in the dark of evening, had endured
+with terror his tipsy shoutings. A maidservant left him, and spread
+doleful reports of his conduct through the village. By degrees, rumours
+of our minister's shortcomings stole, like snakes, into the local
+papers, carefully shrouded by the wrappings that protect scandal-mongers
+against libel actions. The congregation beneath the doctor's pulpit
+dwindled. Women looked at him askance. Men were surly to him, or--and
+that was less kind--jocular. I, alone, followed with fascination the
+paling to dusk of a bright and useful career. I, alone, partially
+understood the hell this poor creature carried within him. For I often
+heard his dreary night-thoughts, and assisted, unperceived of him, at
+the vigils that he kept. The lamp within his study burned till dawn
+while he wrestled, but in vain, with the disease of his soul, the malady
+of his tortured heart.
+
+One night in Summer time, towards midnight, I bent my steps furtively to
+the Manse. It was very dark and the weather was dumb and agitating. No
+leaf danced, no grass quivered. Breathless, dead, seemed the woods and
+fields, the ocean of moorland, the assemblage of the mountains. I heard
+no step upon the lonely road but my own, and life seemed to have left
+the world until I came upon the Manse. Then I saw the light in the
+doctor's window, and, drawing near, observed that the blind was up and
+the lattice thrust open among the climbing dog-roses. Craftily I stole
+up the narrow garden path, and, keeping to the side of the window,
+looked into the room.
+
+Doctor Wedderburn lounged within at the table facing me. A pen was in
+his shaking hand. A shuffle of manuscript paper was before him, and a
+Bible, in which he thrust his fingers as if to keep texts already looked
+out. Beyond the Bible was a bottle, three-quarters full of whiskey, and
+a glass. His muttering lips and dull yet shining eyes betokened his
+condition. I saw before me a drunkard writing a sermon. The vision was
+sufficiently bizarre. A tragedy of infinite pathos mingled with a comedy
+of hideous yet undeniable humour in the live picture. I neither wept nor
+did I laugh. I only watched, shrouded by the inarticulate night. The
+doctor took a pull at the bottle, then swept the leaves of the Bible....
+
+"Let me die the death of the righteous," he murmured thickly. "That's
+it--that's--that's--" He wrote on the paper before him with a wandering
+pen, then pushed the sheet from him. It fell on the floor by the window.
+
+"And let my last end be like his--Ah--ah!"
+
+He drank again, and again wrote with fury. How old and how wicked he
+looked, yet how sad! He crouched down over the table and the pen broke
+in his hand. A dull exclamation burst from him. Taking up the bottle, he
+poured by accident some of the whiskey over the open Bible.
+
+"A baptism! A baptism!" he ejaculated, bursting into laughter.
+"Now--now--let's see--let's see."
+
+Again he violently turned the sodden leaves and shook his head. He could
+not read the words, and that angered him. He drank again and again till
+the bottle was empty, then staggered out of the room. I heard his
+frantic footsteps echoing in the uncarpeted passage. Quickly I leaned in
+at the window and caught up the sheet of paper that had fallen to the
+floor. I held it up to the light. Only one sentence writhed up and down
+over it, repeated a dozen times; "There is no God!" While I read I heard
+the doctor returning, and I shrank back into the night. He came
+stumbling in, another whiskey bottle full in his hand. Falling down in
+the chair he applied his lips to it and drank--on and on. He was killing
+himself there and then. I knew it. I wanted to leap into the room, to
+stop him, yet I only watched him. Why?--I want to know why--
+
+At last he fell forward across the Bible with a choking noise. His limbs
+struggled. His arms shot out wildly, the table broke under him--there
+was a crash of glass. The lamp was extinguished. Darkness crowded the
+little room--and silence.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The papers recorded the shocking death of a minister. They did not
+record this.
+
+As I stole home that night, alone in my knowledge of the doctor's
+appalling end, I heard going before me light and tripping footsteps,
+those, apparently, of some youth, not above three yards or so from me.
+What wanderer thus preceded me, I asked myself, with a certain tingling
+of the nerves, shaken, perhaps, by what I had just seen? I paused. The
+steps also paused. The person was stopping too. I resumed my way. Again
+I heard the tripping footfalls. Their sound greatly disquieted me, yet I
+hurried, intending to catch up the wayfarer. Still the steps hastened
+along the highway, and always just before me. I ran, yet did not come up
+with any person. I called "Stop! Stop!" There was no reply. Again I
+waited. This man--or boy--(the steps seemed young) waited also. I
+started forward once more. So did he. Then a fury of fear ran over me,
+urging me at all hazards to see in whose train I travelled. We were now
+close to Carlounie. We entered the policies. Yes, this person turned
+from the public road through my gates into the drive, and the footfalls
+reached the very house. I stopped. I dared not approach quite close to
+the door. With trembling fingers I fumbled in my pocket, drew out my
+match-box, and, in the airless night, struck a match. The tiny flame
+burned steadily. I stretched my hand out, approaching it, as I supposed,
+to the face of the stranger.
+
+But I saw nothing. Only, on a sudden, I heard some one hasten from me
+across the sweep of gravel in the direction of the burn. And then, after
+an interval, I heard the rush of startled sheep through the night.
+
+Just so had they scattered on the day I spoke with the grey traveller by
+the waterside.
+
+
+III
+
+THE SOUL OF KATE WALTERS
+
+It is more than two years since I wrote down any incident of my life.
+Two years ago I seemed to myself a stranger. To-day an intimacy has
+sprung up between myself and that observant, detached something within
+me--that little extra spirit which looks on at me, and yet is, somehow,
+me. I am at home with my own power. I am accustomed to my strength of
+personality. From my fever I rose like some giant. Long ago my world
+recognised the obedience it owed me. Long ago, by many signs, in many
+ways, it taught me the paramount quality of the emanation from my soul
+that is called my influence. Yet sometimes, even now, I seem to stare at
+myself aghast, to turn cold when I am alone with myself. I am seized
+with terrible fancies. I think of the voice of the burn. I think of that
+childish Autumn ceremony upon its bank among the mists and the flying
+leaves. I think of the grey youth who spoke with me in the twilight, and
+my soul is full of questions. I muse upon the Wandering Jew, upon Faust,
+upon Van Der Decken, upon the monstrous figures that are legends, yet
+sometimes realities to men. And then--and this is ghastly--I say to
+myself, can it be that I, too, shall become a legend? Can it be that my
+name will be whispered by the pale lips of good men long after I am
+dead? For, is there not a whirl of white faces attending my progress as
+the whirl of dead leaves attends the Autumn? Do I not hear a faint
+symphony of despairing cries like a dreadful music about my life? Is not
+my power upon men malign? Boys with their hopes shattered, men with
+their faiths broken, women with their love turned to gall--do they not
+crowd about my chariot wheels? Or is it my vain fancy that they do? Here
+and there from the sea of these beings one rises like a drowned creature
+whom the ocean will not hide, stark, stiff, corpse-like. Doctor
+Wedderburn was the first. Kate Walters is the second--Kate Walters.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When my convalescence was well advanced she left Carlounie and went back
+to Edinburgh. Some months afterwards I heard casually that she was
+working in an hospital there. But a year and a half went by before I saw
+this girl again. Her fresh, pure, ministering face had nearly faded
+from my memory. Yet, she had attended intimately upon my marvellous
+transformation from my death of weakness to the life of strength. She
+had lifted me in her girl's arms when I was nothing. Yes, I had been in
+her arms then. How strange, how close are the commonest relations
+between the invalid and his nurse! When I chanced to meet Kate again I
+had no thought of this. I had forgotten. I came to Edinburgh on some
+business connected with a mine discovered on my estate, which seemed
+likely to make a great fortune for me, and is already on the way to
+accomplishing this first duty of a mine. My business done, I stayed on
+at my hotel in Princes Street amusing myself, for I had a multitude of
+friends in Edinburgh. One of these friends was a medical student
+attached to the hospital there, and he chanced to invite me to go with
+him through the wards one day. In one of the wards I encountered Kate
+Walters, fresh, clear, calm as in the old Carlounie days of my illness.
+She did not know me till I recalled myself to her recollection; then she
+looked into my face with the frankest astonishment. My superb physique
+amazed her, although she had attended upon its beginnings. I asked after
+her life in the interval since our last meeting; and she told me, with a
+delightful blush, that her period of nursing was nearly concluded, as
+she was engaged to be married to one Hugh Fraser, a handsome, rich,
+and--strange thing this!--most steadfast youth, who lived in England in
+the south, and who loved her tenderly. I congratulated her, and was on
+the point of moving away down the ward with my friend when my eyes were
+caught again by Kate's blushing cheeks and eyes alight with the fiery
+shames and joys of love. How beautiful is the human face when the
+torches of the heart are kindled thus. How beautiful! I paused, and,
+before I went, invited Kate to tea one afternoon at my hotel. She
+accepted the invitation. Why not? In our meeting the old chain of
+sympathy between patient and nurse seemed forged anew. We felt that we
+were indeed friends. As we left the ward, my student chum chaffed me--I
+let his words go by heedlessly. I was not in love with Kate, but I was
+half in love with her love for Hugh Fraser. It had such pretty features.
+She came to tea and told me all about him; and when she talked of him
+she was so fascinating that I was loath to let her go. It was a sweet
+evening, and, as Kate had not to be back at the hospital early, I
+suggested that we should go for a stroll on Carlton Hill, and talk a
+little more about Hugh Fraser. The bribe tempted her. I saw that. And
+she agreed after a moment's hesitation.
+
+There is certainly an influence that lives only out of doors and can
+never enter a house, or exercise itself within four walls. There is a
+wandering spirit in the air of evening, a soul that walks with
+gathering shadows, speaks in the distant hum of a city, and gazes
+through its twinkling lights. _There is a grey traveller who journeys in
+the twilight._ (What am I saying? To-day, as I write, I am full of
+fancies.) I felt that, so soon as Kate and I were away from the hotel,
+out under the sky and amid the mysteries of Edinburgh, we were changed.
+In a flash our intimacy advanced, the sympathy already existing between
+us deepened. Leaving the streets, we mounted the flight of steps that
+leads to the hill, and joined the few couples who were walking, almost
+like gods on some Olympus, above the world. They were all obviously
+lovers. I pointed this fact out to Kate, saying, "Hugh Fraser should be
+here, not I."
+
+She smiled, but scarcely, I thought, with much regret. For the moment it
+seemed that a confidant satisfied her; and this pleased me. I drew her
+arm within mine.
+
+"We must not alarm the lovers," I said. "We must appear to be as they
+are, or we shall carry a fiery sword into their Eden."
+
+"You seem to understand us very well," she answered with a smile. And
+she left her arm in mine.
+
+The mention of "us" chilled me. It seemed to set me outside a magic
+circle within which she, Hugh Fraser, these people sauntering near us,
+like amorous ghosts in the dimness, moved. I pressed her arm ever so
+gently.
+
+"Tell me how lovers feel at such a time as this," I whispered, looking
+into her eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+From Carlton Hill at night one sees a heaving ocean of yellow lights,
+gleaming like phosphorescence on ebon waves. Towards Arthur's Seat,
+towards the Castle, they rise; by Holyrood, by the old town, they fall.
+That night I could fancy that this sea of light spoke to me, murmured in
+my ear, urging me to prosecute my will, ruthlessly stirring a strange
+and, perhaps, evanescent romance in my heart. I know that when I parted
+from Kate that night I bent and kissed her. I know that she looked up at
+me startled, even terrified, yet found no voice to rebuke me. I know
+that I did not leave Edinburgh, as I had originally intended, upon the
+morrow. And I know this best of all--that I had no ill-intent in
+staying. I was caught in a net of impulse despite my own desire. I was
+held fast. There are--I believe it unalterably now--influences in life
+that are the very Tsars of the empires of men's souls. They must be
+obeyed. Possibly--is it so I wonder?--they only mount upon their thrones
+when they are urgently invoked by men who, as it were, say, "Come and
+rule over us!" But once that invocation has been made, once it has been
+responded to, there is never again free will for him who has rashly
+called upon the power he does not understand, and bowed before the
+tyrant whose face he has not seen. I tremble now, as I write; I tremble
+as does the bond slave. Yet I neither speak with, nor hear, nor have
+sight of, my master. Unless, indeed--but I will not give way to any
+madness of the brain. No, no; I do not hear, I do not see, although I am
+conscious of, my Tsar, whose unemancipated serf I am.
+
+I need not tell all the story of my soul's impression that was stamped
+upon the soul of Kate Walters. Perhaps it is old. Certainly it is sad. I
+stamped deceit upon the nature which had not known it, knowledge of evil
+where only purity had been, satiety upon temperance. And, worst of all,
+I expelled from this girl's heart love for a good man who loved her, and
+planted, in its stead, passion for a--must I say a bad, or may I not
+cry, a driven man? And all this time Hugh Fraser knew nothing of his
+sorrow, growing up swiftly to meet him like a giant. Even now, while I
+write these words, he knows nothing of it. As I had carelessly taken
+possession of the mind, the very nature of Dr Wedderburn, so now I took
+possession of the very nature of Kate Walters. My immense strength, my
+abounding physical glory drew her--who had known me a puny
+invalid--irresistibly. I won the doctor by my mind; this girl, in the
+main, I think, by my body. And when at length I tired of her slightly,
+the woman, the gentle woman, sprang up a tigress. I had said one night
+that, since I was obliged to go to London, we must part for a while. I
+had added that it was well Hugh Fraser lived in complete ignorance of
+his betrayal.
+
+"Why?" Kate suddenly cried out.
+
+"Because--because it is best so. He and you--some day."
+
+I paused. She understood my meaning. Instantly the tigress had sprung
+upon me. The scene that followed was eloquent. I learned what lives and
+moves in the very depths of a nature, stirred by the inexhaustible greed
+of passion, twisted by passion's fulfilment, the ardent touched by the
+inert. But upon that hurricane has followed an immense and very strange
+calm. Kate is almost cold to me, though very sweet. She has acquiesced
+in my departure for town. She has come to one mind with me on the
+subject of Hugh Fraser. More, she has even written a letter to him
+asking him to come to her, pressing forward their marriage, and I am to
+be the bearer of it to him. This is only a woman's whim. She insists
+that I must see once the man who is to be her husband.
+
+So, after all, the tragedy of Dr Wedderburn is not to be repeated. I--I
+shall not hear, stealing along the steep and windy streets of Edinburgh,
+any--any strange footsteps.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+What is the awful fate that pursues me? A year ago I left Edinburgh
+carrying with me the letter which I understood to contain the request
+of Kate Walters to her lover, Hugh Fraser, to hasten on their marriage.
+As the train roared southwards, I congratulated myself on my clever
+management of a woman. I had, it is true, stepped in between Kate and
+the calm happiness she had been anticipating when I first met her in the
+hospital ward. But now I had withdrawn. And, I told myself, in time. All
+would be well. This girl would marry the boy who loved her. She would
+deceive him. He would never know that the girl he married was not the
+girl he originally loved. He would never perceive that a human being had
+intervened between her and purity, truth, honour. In this letter--I
+touched it with my fingers, congratulating myself--Hugh Fraser would
+read the summons to the future he desired, the future with Kate Walters.
+His soul would rush to meet hers, and surely, after a little while, hers
+would cease to hold back. She would really once more be as she had been.
+I forgot that no human soul can ever retreat from knowledge to
+ignorance.
+
+Hugh Fraser's rooms in London were in Piccadilly. Directly I arrived in
+town I wrote him a note, saying that I was from Edinburgh with a message
+from Kate Walters for him. I explained that she had nursed me through a
+severe illness, and hoped I might have the pleasure of making his
+acquaintance. In reply, I received a most friendly note, begging me to
+call at an hour on the evening of the following day.
+
+That evening I drove in a hansom from the Grand Hotel to Piccadilly,
+taking Kate's note with me. I was conscious of a certain excitement, and
+also of a certain moral exultation. Ridiculously enough, I felt as if I
+were about to perform a sort of fine, almost paternal act, blessing
+these children with genuine, as opposed to stage, emotion. Yes; I glowed
+with a consciousness of personal merit. How incredible human beings are!
+Arrived at Hugh Fraser's rooms, I was at once shown in. How vividly I
+remember that first interview of ours, the exact condition of the room,
+Hugh's attitude of lively anticipation, the precise way in which he held
+his cigarette, the grim, short bark of the fox-terrier that sprang up
+from a sofa when I came in. Hugh was almost twenty-four years old,
+rather tall, slim, with intense, large, dark eyes--full of shining
+cheerfulness just then--very short, curling black hair, and fine,
+straight features. His expression was boyish; so were his movements. As
+soon as he saw me, he sprang forward and gave me an enthusiastic
+welcome--for the sake of Kate, I knew. He led me to the fire and made me
+sit down. I at once handed him my credentials, Kate's letter. His face
+flushed with pleasure, and his fingers twitched with the desire to tear
+it open, but he refrained politely, and began to talk--about her, I
+confess. I understood in three minutes how deeply he was in love with
+her. I told him all about her that might please him, and hinted at the
+contents of the letter.
+
+"What!" he exclaimed joyously. "She wants to hasten on our marriage at
+last. And she's kept me off--but you know what girls are! She couldn't
+leave the hospital immediately. She swore it. There were a thousand
+reasons for delay. But now--by Jove!"
+
+His eyes were suddenly radiant, and he clutched hold of my hand like a
+schoolboy.
+
+"You are a good chap to bring me such a letter," he cried.
+
+"Read it," I said, again filled with moral self-satisfaction, vain,
+paltry egoist that I was.
+
+"No, no--presently."
+
+But I insisted; and at length he complied, enchanted to yield to my
+importunity. He opened the letter, and, as he broke the seal, his face
+was like morning. Never shall I forget the change that grew in it as he
+read. When he had finished his face was like starless night. He looked
+old, haggard, black, shrunken. I watched him with a sensation that
+something had gone wrong with my sight. Surely radiance was fully before
+me and my tricked vision saw it as despair. Raising his blank, bleak
+eyes from the letter, Hugh stared towards me and opened his lips. But no
+sound came from them. He frowned, as if in fury at his own dumbness.
+Then at last, with a sharp shake of his head sideways, he said in a low
+and dry voice:
+
+"You know what is in this letter, you say?"
+
+"I--I thought so," I answered, growing cold and filled with anxiety.
+
+"Well, read it, will you?"
+
+I took the paper from his hand and read:--
+
+   "DEAR HUGH,--Make the man who brings you this letter marry me.
+   If you don't, I will kill myself; for I am ruined. KATE."
+
+I looked up at Hugh Fraser over the letter which my hand still
+mechanically held near my eyes. I wonder how long the silence through
+which we stared lasted.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A month later I was married to Kate Walters!
+
+
+IV
+
+THE SOUL OF HUGH FRASER
+
+It may seem strange that my influence upon the soul of Hugh Fraser
+should follow upon such a situation as I have just described; but
+everything connected with my life, since the day when I met the grey boy
+by the burn, has been utterly strange, utterly abnormal. My treachery,
+one would have thought, must have led Fraser to hate me. I had wrecked
+his happiness. I had done him the deepest injury one man can do to
+another, and at first he hated me. When he had wrung from me a promise
+to marry Kate, he left me, and I did not see him again until after the
+wedding. But then, it seemed, he could not keep away from her. For he
+forgave us the wrong we had done him; and, after a while, wrote a
+friendly letter in which he suggested that we should all forget the
+past.
+
+"Why should I not see you sometimes?" he concluded. "I only wish you
+both good, there is no longer any evil in my heart."
+
+Poor boy! It was to be, I suppose. The Tsar of the empire of my soul set
+forth his edict, and one winter day carriage wheels ground harshly upon
+the gravel sweep, and Hugh Fraser was my guest at Carlounie. I welcomed
+him upon the very spot where those light footsteps paused that black
+night of Doctor Wedderburn's dreary end. And the faint sound of the burn
+mingled with our voices in greeting and reply.
+
+The boy was changed. He had aged, grown grave, heavier in movement,
+fiercer in observation, less ready in speech. But his manner was
+friendly even to me, and it was plain to see that Kate still had his
+heart. They met quietly enough, but a flush ran from his cheek to hers
+as they touched hands. Their voices quivered when they spoke a
+commonplace of pleasure at the encounter. So the wheels of Fate began
+slowly to turn on this winter's day.
+
+I must tell you that my fortunes had greatly changed before Hugh Fraser
+came to Carlounie. I was grown rich. My investments, my speculations had
+prospered almost miraculously. The mine I have spoken of was proving a
+gold mine to me. All worldly things went well with me--all worldly
+things, yes.
+
+Now, I believe that all mighty circumstances are born tiny, like
+children, at some given moment. As a rule, they usually seem so
+insignificant, so puny at the birth, that we take no heed of the fact
+that they have come into being, and that, in process of time, they will
+grow to might, perhaps to horrible majesty. Only, when we trace events
+backwards do we know the exact moment when their first faint wail broke
+upon our mental hearing. Generally this is so. But I affirm that I felt,
+at the very time of its first coming, the presence of the shadow, the
+tiny shadow of the events which I am about to describe. I even said to
+myself, "This is a birthday."
+
+Among many improvements on my estate I had built a new Manse, in which,
+of course, our new minister lived. The old habitation of Doctor
+Wedderburn stood empty and deserted among its sycamores. One winter's
+day Hugh Fraser, Kate, and I, in our walk, passed along the lane by the
+now ragged privet hedge through which I had so often observed the
+doctor's agonies. It was a black and white day of frost, which crawled
+along the dark trees and outlined twig and branch. The air was misty,
+and distant objects assumed a mysterious importance. Slight sounds, too,
+suggested infinite activities to the mind. As we neared the Manse, Hugh
+Fraser said to me:--
+
+"Who lives in that old house?"
+
+"Nobody," I replied.
+
+Hugh glanced at me very doubtfully.
+
+"Nobody," I reiterated.
+
+"Really," he rejoined. "But the garden?"
+
+"Is deserted."
+
+"Hardly," he exclaimed, pointing with his hand. "Look!"
+
+"Yes," said Kate, as if in agreement.
+
+And she grew duskily pale.
+
+I looked over the privet hedge, seeing only the rank and frost-bitten
+grass, the wild bushes and narrow mossy paths. Then I stared at my two
+companions in silence. Their eyes appeared to follow the onward movement
+of some object invisible to me.
+
+"The old man makes himself at home," Hugh said. "He has gone into the
+summer-house now."
+
+"Yes," Kate said again.
+
+There was fear in her eyes.
+
+I felt suddenly that the air was very chill.
+
+"That house is unoccupied," I repeated shortly.
+
+We all walked on in silence. But, through our silence, it certainly
+seemed to me that there came a sound of some one lamenting in the
+garden.
+
+A day or two later Fraser said to me:--
+
+"Why is that old house shut up?"
+
+"Who would occupy it?" I said. "Of course, if I could get a tenant--"
+
+"I'll take it," he rejoined quickly. "You can let me some shooting with
+it, can't you?"
+
+"But," I began; and then I stopped. I had an instinct to keep the old
+Manse empty, but I fought it, merely because it struck me as
+unreasonable. How seldom are our instincts unreasonable! God--how
+seldom!
+
+"I've been looking out for a shooting-box," Hugh said. "That house would
+suit me admirably."
+
+"All right," I answered. "I shall be very glad to have you for a
+tenant."
+
+So it was arranged. When Kate heard of the arrangement, I observed her
+to go very pale; but she made no objection. Hugh Fraser rented the
+house, furnished it, engaged servants, a gardener, enlarged the stables,
+and took up his abode there. Doctor Wedderburn's old study was now his
+den. When I looked in at the window through which I had seen the doctor
+die, I saw Fraser smoking, or playing with his setters. I don't know
+why, but the sight turned me sick.
+
+My relations with Kate, of which I have said nothing, were rather cold
+and distant. My passion, such as it was, had died before marriage. Hers
+seemed to languish afterwards. I believe that she had really loved me,
+but that the shame of being with me, after I had wedded her actually
+against my will, struck this sentiment to the dust. When one feeling
+that has been very strong dies, its place is generally filled by
+another. Sometimes I fancied that this was so with Kate, that the
+bitterness of shattered self-respect gradually transformed her nature,
+that a cruel frost bound the tendernesses, the warm vagaries of what had
+been a sweet woman's heart. But, to tell the truth, I did not trouble
+much about the matter. My affairs were prospering so greatly, my health
+was so abounding, I had so much beside the mere egotism of brilliant
+physical strength to occupy me, that I was heedless, reckless--at first.
+Yet, I had moments of a dull alarm connected with the dweller at the
+Manse.
+
+If Hugh Fraser changed as he read that fateful letter in London, he
+changed far more after he came to live at the Manse. And it seemed to me
+that there were times when--how shall I put it?--when he bore a curious,
+and, to me, almost intolerable likeness to--some one who was dead. A
+certain old man's manner came upon him at moments. His body, in sitting
+or standing, assumed, to my eyes, elderly and damnable attitudes. Once,
+when I glanced in at the study window before entering the Manse, I
+perceived him lounging over a table facing me, a pen in his hand and
+paper before him, and the spectacle threw all my senses into a violent
+and most distressing disorder. Instead of going into the house, as I had
+intended, I struck sharply upon the glass at the window. Fraser looked
+up quickly.
+
+"What--what are you writing?" I cried out.
+
+He got up, came to the window, and opened it.
+
+"Eh? What's the row, man?" he said. "Why don't you come in?"
+
+I repeated my question, with an anxiety I strove to mask.
+
+"Writing? Only a letter to town," he said, looking at me in wonder.
+
+"Not a sermon?" I blurted forth.
+
+"A sermon? Good heavens, no. Why should I write a sermon?"
+
+"Oh," I replied, forcing an uneasy laugh. "You--you live in a Manse.
+Doctor Wedderburn used to write his sermons in that room."
+
+That evening I remember that I said to Kate:
+
+"Don't you think Fraser is getting to look very old at times?"
+
+"I haven't observed it," she replied coldly.
+
+Another curious thing. Very soon after he took up his abode in the
+Manse, Fraser, who had been a godly youth, became markedly averse to
+religion. He informed us, with some excitement, that he had changed his
+views, and seemed much inclined to carry on an atheistical propaganda
+among the devout people of the neighbourhood. He declared that much evil
+had been wrought by faith in Carlounie, and appeared to deem it as his
+special duty to preach some sort of a crusade against the accepted
+Christianity of the parish. I began to combat his views, and once sought
+the reason of his ardour and self-election to the post of teacher. His
+answer struck me exceedingly. He said:--
+
+"Why should I be the one to clear away these senseless beliefs in
+phantasms, you say? Why, because I suppose they were woven by my
+predecessor in the Manse. Didn't the minister live and die there? Do you
+know, Ralston, sometimes, as I sit in that study at night, I have a
+feeling that instead of turning to what is called repentance when he
+died, the minister turned the other way, recanted in his last hour the
+faith he had professed all through his life, and expired before he could
+give words to his new mind and heart. And then I feel as if his
+influence was left behind him in that room, and fell upon me and imposed
+on me this mission."
+
+And as he spoke, he suddenly plucked at his face with an old, habitual
+action of Doctor Wedderburn's when excited. I scarcely restrained a cry,
+and with difficulty forced myself to go out slowly from his presence.
+Nevertheless, I felt strongly impelled to fight against the atheism of
+this boy, I who had formerly sown the seeds of destruction in the soul
+of Doctor Wedderburn. But it was as if my own act of the past rose and
+conquered me in the present. I declare solemnly it was so. Some
+emanation from the poor dead creature's soul clung round that cursed
+place of his doom, and, seizing upon the soul of Fraser, spread tyranny
+from its throne. And whom did it take first as its victim, think you?
+Kate, my wife.
+
+Let our individual beliefs be what they may, one thing we must all--when
+we think--acknowledge, that the pulse which beats eternally in the heart
+of life is reparation.
+
+Kate, as I have said, was originally finely pure and finely dowered with
+the blessings of faith in a divine Providence, trust in the eventual
+redemption of the world, hope that sin, sorrow, and sighing would,
+indeed, flee away, and all mankind find eternal and unutterable peace.
+In my worst moments I had never tried to destroy this beauty of her
+soul; and, in her fall, now repaired, she had never abandoned her
+religion. It was, I know, a haunting memory of the last moments of the
+doctor that held me back from ever attacking the faith of another. For
+myself, I did not think much of my future beyond death. Life filled my
+horizon then.
+
+But now, after a short absence in England, during which I left Kate at
+Carlounie, I returned to find her infected with Fraser's pestilent
+notions. She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was better to
+act up to her real convictions than to set what is called a good example
+to her dependants. She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found
+damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually how the matter struck
+me when I began carefully to consider it. Men often see only what
+irreligion really is and means when they find it existing in a woman. I
+was appalled at this deadly fire flaring up in the heart of Kate, and I
+set myself, at first feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and
+stamp it out.
+
+But I fought against my own former self. I fought against the influence
+of the spectre that surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose
+originally from the very bosom of the burn at my summons. Am I mad to
+think so? No, no. Oh, the eternal horror that may spring from one wild
+and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic litany! This was
+surely the strangest, subtlest reparation that ever beat in the
+inexorable heart of Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence,
+still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to
+its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number
+was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I
+write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And
+in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second
+and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and
+Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in
+pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor Wedderburn had
+formerly--before the fever--dominated my influence, so now it dominated
+my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a
+drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor
+wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died
+undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now.
+He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me.
+
+Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a
+moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of
+health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust--I was as
+Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when
+the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And
+then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey
+boy's words at the thought of the Caesar of hell whose tribute was three
+human souls.
+
+Kate and I were taking tea one evening with Fraser. We sat around the
+hearth, by which was placed the table with the tea-service and the hot
+cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss religious subjects
+and to rail against the professors of faith. Kate listened to him
+eagerly--a filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes. I was
+silent, watching. And presently it seemed to me that Fraser's gestures
+in talking grew like the dead gestures of the doctor. He threw his
+hands abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of Wedderburn's. He
+struck his knees sharply, and simultaneously, with both his palms to
+emphasise his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So vehement
+was the similarity that I began presently to feel that the doctor
+himself declaimed in the firelight, and I was seized with a desire to
+combat effectively his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in, then,
+upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of religion. He turned upon me,
+dealt with my pleas, scattered my contentions--growing, I fancied, very
+old and with the rumbling voice of age,--thrust at me with the lances of
+sarcasm, sore belaboured me into silence and mute fury. And all the time
+Kate sat by, and I seemed to see her soul, with fluttering outstretched
+wings, sinking down to hell, as a hawk drops out of sight into a dark
+cleft of the mountains. And then, in the last resort, Fraser struck his
+hand down on mine to clinch his defeat of me. And I, looking upon that
+poor Kate, cried out:--
+
+"God forgive you, Fraser, for what you're doing--murderer! murderer!"
+
+Scarcely had my cry died away than I knew I had borrowed the very words
+of Wedderburn to me. A cold, like ice, came upon me. This reversal of
+the past in the present was too ironic. I heard the doctor chuckling
+drearily in Hades. I suddenly sprang up like one pursued, and got away
+into the night, leaving Kate and Fraser together by the fire. But the
+spectre of the Manse surely pursued me. I heard its soft but heavy
+footsteps coming in my wake. I heard its old laughter in the dark behind
+me; and I sickened and faltered, and was in fear beyond all human fear
+of an enemy. The next day I told Fraser he must leave the Manse; I would
+build him a shooting-lodge on any part of my estate that he preferred.
+
+"No," he said, "no; I have grown to love the old place; I never feel
+alone there."
+
+I looked in his eyes, searching after his meaning.
+
+"I would rather pull down the Manse," I said.
+
+In reply, he touched with his forefinger the lease I had signed with
+him, which lay on his writing-table.
+
+"You cannot, my friend," he said.
+
+I cannot do anything that I would. I am driven on a dark road by the
+creature with the whip that is surely after every man who once yields to
+his worst desires.
+
+Just after this I received a visit from Mr. Mackenzie, the new minister,
+a young and fervent, but not very knowledgeable man, whose zeal was
+red-hot, but incompetent, and who would have died for the faith he could
+never properly expound, like many young ministers of our church. The
+little man was in a twisting turmoil of distress, and was moved, so he
+said, to deal very plainly with me. I bade him deal on. It seemed that
+his flock was becoming infected with atheism, which spread like the
+plague, from the old Manse. The young children lisped it to each other
+in the lanes; lovers talked it between their kisses; youths chattered
+perdition at the idle corner by the church wall. Even the old began to
+look askance at the Bible that had been their only book of age, and to
+shiver wantonly at the inevitable approach of death. The young minister
+cried denunciation upon Fraser, like a vague-minded, but angry Jonah
+before a provincial Nineveh.
+
+"Turn him out, Mr. Ralston, drive him forth," he ejaculated. "What is
+his rent to you? What is his money in comparison with the immortal souls
+of men? Away with him, away with him."
+
+I mentioned the small matter of the lease. The young minister, with a
+quivering scarlet face, replied stammering:--
+
+"A lease! But--but--your own wife--she is--is--"
+
+"I do not discuss her," I said sternly.
+
+"Well; they are deserting the services. You see that yourself. They will
+not come to hear me preach. They will not listen to me."
+
+The man was tasting bitterness. He was almost crying. I was terribly
+sorry for him. Yet, all I could do was to think of the spectre at the
+Manse and answer:--
+
+"I can do nothing."
+
+His words were true. Carlounie's soul was being devoured as by a plague.
+A colony of unbelievers was springing up in the midst of the beautiful
+woods and the mountains. Soon the evil fame of the place began to spread
+abroad, and men, in distant parts of Scotland, to speak of mad
+Carlounie. The matter weighed intolerably upon me, and at last became a
+fixed idea. I could think of nothing else but this devil's home in the
+hills, this haunted and harassed centre of doom and darkness which was
+my possession and in which I lived. I fell into silence. I ceased to
+stir abroad beyond my own land. It seemed to me that Carlounie should
+keep strict quarantine, should be isolated, and that each person who
+went over its borders carried a strange infection and was guilty of
+murder. I forbade Kate to drive beyond my estates.
+
+"I never wish to," she said.
+
+And I knew that where Fraser was she was happy. He had her soul fast by
+this; or, it would be truer to say, the spectre of the Manse had both
+him and her. And he aged apace and bore on his countenance the stamp of
+evil. And I brooded and brooded upon the whole matter. But, from
+whatever point I started, I came back to the Manse and to the spectre
+dwelling in it with Hugh Fraser. I had given death to Doctor Wedderburn,
+in return for the life so miraculously given to me, and now his spirit,
+retained in its ancient abiding-place, spread death about it in its
+turn. This was, and is, my conviction. The influence of the departed
+clings to roof, to walls, to floors, leans on the accustomed
+window-seat, trembles by the bed-head, sits by the hearthstone, stands
+invisible in the passage way. _To kill it one must destroy its home._ It
+was my duty to kill it, therefore it was my duty to destroy the Manse.
+This thought at length took complete possession of me, and, following
+it, I strove in every imaginable way to oust Fraser from the house among
+the sycamores. But he would not go. He loved the place, he said. He
+stood by his lease and I was powerless.
+
+Oh, God, I have, surely I have, my excuse for what I have done! I meant
+to be a saviour, not a destroyer! I would have restored Fraser and my
+poor Kate to their freedom of heart. That was what I meant. Ay, but the
+grey traveller fought against me. Shut up here by night in my house, on
+the verge of--that which I cannot, dare not speak of, I declare that I
+am guiltless. Let him bear the burden, him alone! In these last moments,
+before my deed is known, I write the truth that men may exonerate me.
+This is the truth.
+
+Overwhelmed with this idea that Carlounie must be rescued, that Hugh
+Fraser and Kate must be rescued from this damnation that was preying
+upon them, I determined, secretly, on the destruction of the Manse, in
+which the spectre of the doctor stayed to work such evil. But, to do
+this, I must first make sure that Hugh Fraser was at a distance, and
+that his small household--he only kept two servants, hired from the
+village--were away from the haunted dwelling. I, therefore, suggested to
+Fraser that he should come and spend a week with me, and give his maids
+a holiday. After a little demur, and drawn, I see now, by his hidden
+passion for Kate, he accepted my invitation. He dismissed the maids to
+their homes for a week, and moved over to us. When the minister knew of
+it, he, no doubt, fully included me in his prayers for the damnation of
+those who worked evil among his flock. Will he ever read these pages, I
+wonder? Kate was now an avowed atheist, and she and Fraser were
+continually together, glorying in their complete freedom from old
+prejudices, and their new outlook upon life. They had, I heard them say,
+broken through the ties that bound poor, terrified Christians; and, when
+they said this, they smiled, the one upon the other. I did not then know
+why. Meanwhile, I was preparing for my deed of redemption, as I called
+it, and meant it to be. I was resolved to go out by night to the empty
+Manse, and secretly to set it in flames. It stood alone. The country
+people slept sound at night. I calculated that if I chose midnight for
+my act none would see the flames, and, ere the peasants woke at dawn,
+the Manse and the spectre within it would be destroyed for ever. Such
+was my belief--such the spirit in which I prepared myself for this
+strange work.
+
+
+V
+
+THE RETURN OF THE GREY TRAVELLER
+
+I write these last words after the dead of night, towards the coming of
+the dawn. Ere the light is grey in the sky I shall be away to the burn
+to meet him, the grey traveller. He is there waiting for me. He has come
+back. I go to meet him, and I shall never return. Carlounie will know my
+face no more. All is done as he ordained. My words have been as deeds,
+have marched on inevitably to actual deeds. Long ago he said that
+sometimes, even as we can never go back from things that we have done,
+we can never go back from things that we have said. So, indeed, it is.
+
+According to my fixed intention, I determined on a night for the
+destruction of the Manse. The house was old and would burn like tinder.
+I should break into it through the window of the study, which was never
+shuttered. I should set fire to the interior at several points, and
+escape in the darkness of the night. By dawn the accursed place would be
+a ruin, and then--then I looked for a new era. Fool! Fool! I looked to
+see the burden of the vile influence of the spectre lifted from the soul
+of Fraser, and so from the soul of Kate, which was infected by him. I
+looked to see my people sane and satisfied as of old, Carlounie no more
+a plague-spot in the land, that poor and zealous man, the minister, calm
+and at rest with his little faithful flock once more. All this I looked
+for confidently. And so, when the black and starless night of my deed
+came, I was happy and serene. That night Kate pleaded a headache, and
+went to bed very early, before nine. She begged me not to come to her
+room to bid her good-night, as she wanted perfect quiet and sleep. All
+unsuspecting, I agreed to her request. Soon after she had gone, Fraser,
+who had seemed heavy with unusual fatigue all through the evening, also
+went off to bed, and I was left alone. But it was not yet time for me to
+start on my errand of the darkness. The burning Manse would surely
+attract attention before midnight. People might be out and about in the
+village. A belated peasant might be on his way home by the lane that
+skirted the privet hedge. I must wait till all were sleeping. The time
+seemed very long. Once I fancied I heard a movement in the house--again
+I dreamed that soft and hurried footsteps upon the gravel outside broke
+on the silence. But I said to myself that I was nervous, highly strung
+because of my strange project, that my imagination tricked me. At last
+the hour came. Without going upstairs I drew on my thickest overcoat,
+took my hat and a heavy stick, opened the hall door, and passed out into
+the night. It was still and very cold, and the voice of the burn came
+loudly to my ears. Treading quietly, I made my way into the road, and
+set forth along it in the direction of the Manse. The ground was hard,
+and scarcely had I gone a few yards before I thought that some one was
+furtively following me. I stopped rather uneasily, and listened, but
+heard nothing. I went on, and again seemed aware of distant footsteps
+treading gently behind me. The sound made me suppose that some one of my
+household must be after me, moved by curiosity as to the reason of my
+present pilgrimage; but I was not minded to be watched, so I turned
+sharply, yet very softly, around and faced the way I had come. I
+encountered no one, nor did I any longer catch the patter of feet. So,
+reckoning that my nerves must be playing with me, I pursued my way. But
+the whole of the distance between my dwelling and the Manse I seemed
+vaguely to hear a noise of one treading behind me. And, although I said
+to myself that there was nobody out beside myself, I was filled with the
+stir of a shifting uneasiness. I entered the lonely and narrow lane that
+led beside the Manse, and presently arrived in front of the house; when,
+what was my astonishment to perceive a light gleaming in the study
+window. My hand was on the gate when it went out, and all the front of
+the house was black and eyeless. For so brief a moment had I seen the
+light that I was moved to think that it, too, existed, like the sound of
+steps, only in my excited brain. Nevertheless, I did not go up at once
+to the house, but paced the lane for a full half-hour, always--so it
+seemed to me--tracked by some one. But, since I kept turning about, and
+the footfalls were always at my back, I grew certain that they were
+nothing more nor less than a fantasy on my part. It must have been well
+after twelve when I summoned courage to enter the garden and to approach
+the Manse. The steps, I thought, followed me to the gate and then
+paused, as if a sentinel was posted there to keep watch. Arrived at the
+stone step which preceded the hall door, I, too, paused in my turn and
+listened. Did the spectre that inhabited this abode know of my coming,
+of my purpose? Was it crouching within, like some frantic shadow,
+fearful of its impending fate? Or was it, perhaps, preparing to attack,
+to repel me? Strangely, I had now no fear of it, or of anything. I was
+calm. I felt that my deed was one of rescue, even though, by performing
+it, I wrought destruction. I moved to the study window, and was about to
+smash in the glass with my heavy stick when a mad idea came to me to try
+the hall door. I put my hand upon it and found it not locked. This
+opening of the door sent a shiver through me, and a ghastly sense of the
+occupation of this deserted abode. I was filled again with an acute
+consciousness of the indwelling spectre, whom, in truth, I came to
+murder. But, I reasoned, this door has been left unbarred by the
+carelessness of Fraser's servants, that is all.
+
+I stood on the lintel, struck a match and set it to a candle end which
+I drew from my coat pocket. The flame burned up, showing the narrow
+passage, the umbrella stand, the doors on either side. I entered the
+study softly, looking swiftly on all sides of me as I did so. Did I
+expect a vision of Doctor Wedderburn lounging at the table, his fingers
+thrust into a Bible? I scarcely know; but I saw nothing except the
+grimly standing furniture, the lamp on the table, the vacant chairs, the
+books in their shelves. I listened. There was no rustle of the spectre
+that I came to kill. Did it watch me? Did it see me there? I set fire to
+the room, passed quickly to the chamber on the other side of the
+passage, from thence to the kitchen and the dining-parlour, leaving a
+track of dwarf flames behind me. The means of destruction I had prepared
+and carried with me. They availed. When I once more reached the garden,
+the ground floor of the Manse was in a blaze. But now came the
+incredible event which I must chronicle before I go down to the burn for
+the last time.
+
+Having gained the garden, I waited there in the darkness to watch my
+work progress. I saw the light within the Manse, at first a twinkle,
+grow to a glare. I heard the faint crackle of the burning rooms increase
+to a soft and continuous roar. And, as I watched and listened, a mighty
+sense of relief ran through me. Thus did I burn up my past! thus did I
+sacrifice grandly and gladly the ill spirit my wild desires had evoked!
+Thus--thus! All the base of the Manse was red-hot, when, on a sudden, I
+heard a great shout that seemed to come from the sky. Light sprang in an
+upper window. There followed a sound like the smash of glass, and I saw
+two arms shoot out, the top part of a figure and a face framed in the
+glare. I deemed it the vision of the poor spectre that I destroyed. I
+looked upon it and fancied I could detect the tortured lineaments of the
+doctor, his accustomed gestures distorted by fear and fury. But then I
+seemed to see behind him another figure, struggling, and to hear the
+failing scream of a woman. But the flames from below leaped to the roof.
+The floors fell in with an uproar. The figure, or figures, disappeared.
+
+Trembling I turned to go, my mind shuddering at the thought of the
+apparition I had seen. I got into the lane and hastened towards home.
+Soon the burning Manse was out of sight, and I was swallowed up in the
+intense darkness.
+
+Now, as I went along, a terrible and very peculiar sensation came upon
+me. I heard no footsteps; all was silence. Yet I seemed to be aware that
+I was closely companioned, that at my very side something--I knew not
+what--walked, keeping pace with me. And so close did I believe this
+thing to be, that at moments I even felt it pressing against me like a
+slim figure in the night. Once, when it thus nestled to me, as if in
+affection, I could not refrain from crying out aloud. I stretched forth
+my arms to grasp this surely amorous horror of the darkness, but found
+nothing, and pursued my road in a sweat of apprehension. And still, the
+thing was certainly with me, and seemed, I thought, to praise me as I
+walked, as the good man is praised on his journey. My great horror was
+that this creature that I could not see, could not hear, could not feel,
+and yet was so sharply conscious of, was _well disposed towards me_. My
+heart craved its hatred--but it loved me I knew. My soul demanded its
+curses. I almost heard it bless me as I moved. My knees knocked
+together, my limbs were turned to wax, as it was borne in upon me that I
+had surely done this terror that walked in darkness a service of some
+kind. To be pursued in fury by one of the dreadful beings that dwell in
+the borderland beyond our sight is sad and dreary; but to be followed
+thus by one as by a dog, to be fawned upon and caressed--this is
+appalling. I longed to shriek aloud. I broke into a run, and, like one
+demented, gained the gate of Carlounie; but always the thing was with
+me--full of joy and laudation. At the house door I paused, facing round.
+I was moved to address this thing I could not see.
+
+"Who is it that walks with me?" I cried, and my voice was high and
+strained.
+
+A voice I knew, young, clear, level, a little formal, answered out of
+the darkness:--
+
+"It is I."
+
+It was the voice of the grey traveller whom I had seen long ago by the
+burnside. I leaned back against the door and my shoulders shook against
+it.
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"I come to thank you."
+
+"What, then, have I done?"
+
+"You have brought the tribute money."
+
+I did not understand, and I answered:--
+
+"No. One soul I may have destroyed, but two I have saved to-night. For I
+have slain the spectre that preyed upon them and I have set them free
+from bondage."
+
+The voice answered:--
+
+"_Go into the house and see._"
+
+Then again I was filled with apprehension. I turned to go in at my door,
+and, as I did so, I heard footsteps treading in the direction of the
+burn, and a fading voice which cried, like an echo:--
+
+"And then come to me."
+
+And, as the voice died, I heard the rush of sheep in the night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Filled with nameless fear and a cold apprehension, I entered the house,
+and, led by some cruel instinct, made my way to Kate's room. The lamp
+she always had at night burned dimly on the dressing-table and cast a
+grave radiance upon an empty bed.
+
+What could this mean?
+
+I stole to the room of Fraser, bearing the lamp with me. His chamber was
+also untenanted; but, on the quilt of the bed, lay a piece of paper
+written over. I took it up and read--with the sound of the burn in my
+ears:--
+
+   "You stole her from me. I take back my own. To-night we stay
+   at the old Manse. To-morrow we shall be far away. HUGH FRASER."
+
+The paper dropped from my hand upon the quilt. A woman's scream rang in
+my ears above the roar of flames. I understood.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The tribute money has been paid. I go down to the burn. The grey
+traveller is waiting there for me.
+
+  ROBERT HICHENS.
+  FREDERIC HAMILTON.
+
+
+
+
+AN ECHO IN EGYPT
+
+
+That lustrous land of weary music and wild dancing, of reverend tombs
+and pert Arabs, that Egypt of plagues and tourists, to whose sandy bosom
+Society flocks, affects her visitors in many different ways. Bellairs
+went to her under the fixed impression that he was a cynic, and found
+that he was a romanticist. Very acute in mind, he had long flattered
+himself on being unimpressionable; and he was much inclined to think
+that to be insensitive was to be strong with the best kind of strength.
+He loved to lay stress on all that was devil-may-care in his character,
+and to put aside all that was prone to cling, or weep, or wonder, or
+pray, and he fancied that if he cultivated one side of his mind
+assiduously he could eliminate the other sides. In England, in London,
+the process had seemed to be successful. But Egypt gave to him illusions
+with both hands, and, against his will, he had to accept them. Protests
+were unavailing, and soon he ceased to protest, and told himself the
+horrid fact that he was a sentimentalist, perhaps even a poet. Good
+heavens! a Bellairs--a poet! His soldier ancestors seemed forming a
+square and fixing bayonets to resist the charging notion. And yet--and
+yet--
+
+Instead of playing pool after dinner at night, Bellairs found himself
+wandering, like Haroun Al Raschid, through the narrow ways of Cairo,
+mixing with the natives, studying their loves, and drinking their
+coffee. There were moments, retrograde moments, when he even wished to
+wear their dress, to drape his long-limbed British form in a flowing
+blue robe, and wrap his dark head in a bulging white turban. He resisted
+this devil of an idea; but the fact that it had ever come to him
+troubled him. And, partly to regain his manhood, his hard scepticism,
+his contempt of outside, delicate influences, he went up the Nile--and
+succumbed utterly to fantasy and to old romance. "I am no longer Jack
+Bellairs," he told himself one day, as the steamer on which he travelled
+neared Luxor on its way down the river from the First Cataract--"I am
+somebody else; some one who is touched by a sunset, and responsive to a
+gleam of rose on the Libyan Mountains, some one who dreams at night when
+the pipes wail under the palm-trees, some one who feels that the great
+river has life, and that the desert owns a wistful soul, and has a sweet
+armour with silence. Good-bye, Jack Bellairs! Go home to England--I stay
+here."
+
+And that evening he left the steamer, and took a room for a month at the
+Luxor Hotel. And that evening he cast the skin of his former self, and
+emerged, with fluttering wings, from the chrysalis of his identity. He
+was a bachelor, aged twenty-eight, and he was travelling alone; so
+there was no critical eye to mark the change in him, no chattering
+tongue to express surprise at his pleasant abandonment to the follies
+which make up the lives of sensitive artists and refined sensualists who
+can differentiate between the promenade of the "Empire," and the garden
+of love. As he stepped out into the Arab-haunted village that night,
+after dinner, Bellairs breathed a sigh of relief. For a month he would
+let himself go. Where to? He bent his steps towards the river, the Nile
+that is the pulsing blood in the veins of Egypt. Moored in the shadow of
+its brown banks lay a string of bright-eyed dahabeeyahs. From more than
+one of them came music. Bellairs, his cigarette his only companion,
+strolled slowly along listening idly in a pleasant dream. A woman's
+voice sang, asking "Ninon" what was her scheme of life. A man beat out
+his soul at the feet of "Medje." And, upon the deck of the last
+dahabeeyah, a woman played a fantastic mazurka. Bellairs was fond of
+music, and her performance was so clever, so full of nuances,
+understanding, wild passion, that he stood still to remark it more
+closely.
+
+"She has known many things, good and evil," he thought, as his mind
+noted the intellect that spoke in the changes of time, the regret and
+the gaiety that the touch demonstrated so surely and easily, as the mood
+of the composition changed. The music ceased.
+
+"Betty," a woman's voice said, in English, but with a slight French
+accent, "I want to see the stars. This awning hides them. Come for a
+little walk."
+
+"Yes; I want to see the stars too, and the awning does hide them," a
+girl's voice answered. "Do let us take a little walk."
+
+Bellairs smiled, as he said to himself, "The first voice is the voice of
+the musician, and the second voice seems to be its echo." He was still
+standing on the bank when the two women stepped upon the gangway to the
+shore and climbed to the narrow path.
+
+As they passed him by they glanced at him rather curiously. One was a
+woman of about thirty, dark, with a pale, strong-featured face. The
+other was a fair, aristocratic-looking girl, not more than seventeen.
+
+"She is the echo," Bellairs thought. "Rather a sweet one." Then, at a
+distance, he followed them, and presently found them sitting together in
+the garden of the Hotel. He sat down not far off. A man, whom he knew
+slightly, spoke to them, and afterwards crossed to him.
+
+"That lady plays very cleverly," Bellairs said.
+
+"Mademoiselle Leroux, you mean--yes. You know her?"
+
+"Not at all. I only heard her from the river bank."
+
+"She is travelling with Lord Braydon. She is a great friend of Lady
+Betty Lambe, his daughter."
+
+"That pretty girl?"
+
+"Yes. Shall I introduce you?"
+
+"I should be delighted."
+
+A moment later Bellairs was sitting with the two ladies and talking of
+Egypt. It seemed to him that they were the first nurses to dandle his
+new baby-nature, this nature which Egypt had given to him, and which
+only to-night he had definitely accepted. Perhaps this fact quickly
+cemented their acquaintance. At any rate, a distinct friendship began to
+walk in their conversation, and Bellairs found himself listening to
+Mdlle. Leroux, and looking at Lady Betty, with a great deal of interest
+and of admiration. Presently the former said:--
+
+"I knew you would be introduced to us to-night."
+
+Bellairs was surprised.
+
+"When?" he asked.
+
+"When we passed you just now on the bank of the Nile."
+
+"I knew we should too," said Lady Betty.
+
+"You must be very intuitive," said Bellairs.
+
+"Women generally are," remarked Mdlle. Leroux.
+
+"Yes. Do your intuitions tell you whether our acquaintance will be long
+and agreeable?"
+
+"Perhaps--but I never prophesy."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because I am always right."
+
+"Is that a valid reason for abstention?"
+
+"I think so. For in this world those who look forward generally see
+darkness."
+
+"I cannot achieve a proper pessimism in Upper Egypt," Bellairs replied.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A week later, Bellairs felt quite certain that there had never been a
+period in his life when he had not known and talked with Mdlle. Leroux
+and Lady Betty Lambe. Lord and Lady Braydon asked him to lunch on the
+dahabeeyah almost every day, and he often strolled down to tea without
+invitation. Then, in the afternoon, there were donkey expeditions to
+Karnak, or across the river to the tombs of the kings, to the desert
+villa of Monsieur Naville, to ancient Thebes, to the two Colossi. Lord
+Braydon was consumptive and was spending the winter and spring in Egypt.
+Lady Braydon seldom left his side, and so it happened that Bellairs and
+his two acquaintances of the garden were often alone together. Bellairs
+became deeply interested in them, and for a rather peculiar reason. He
+was fascinated by the extraordinary sympathy that existed between the
+two women--if Lady Betty could be called a woman yet. Mdlle. Leroux had
+obtained so strong an influence over the girl that she seemed to have
+grafted not only her mind, but her heart, her apparatus of emotions and
+of affections, on to Lady Betty's. What the former silently thought,
+the latter silently thought too, and when the silence died in
+expression, they frequently spoke almost the same sentence
+simultaneously. Sometimes Mdlle. Leroux would express some feeling with
+vehemence to Bellairs when Lady Betty was out of hearing, and an hour or
+two afterwards, with only a slightly fainter vehemence, Lady Betty would
+express the same feeling. Indeed, these two women seemed to have only
+one heart, one soul, between them, the heart and soul that had
+originally been the sole property of the elder one.
+
+"You are very generous," said Bellairs one day to Mdlle. Leroux.
+
+"Why?" she asked in surprise.
+
+"You give away things that most of us have only the power to keep."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Some day, perhaps, I will tell you."
+
+Clarice Leroux was tremendously impulsive, and she had taken an
+immediate and strong liking to Bellairs. In this Lady Betty, as usual,
+coincided. But when Clarice's liking passed through self-revelations,
+confidences, towards a stronger feeling, it was rather strange to find
+Lady Betty still treading in her footsteps, still ever succeeding her in
+her attitudes of mind and of heart. Yet the inevitable double
+flirtation, apparently expected and desired by the two women, was
+strangely gilded by novelty; and, at first, Bellairs played as happily
+with these two dual natures as a child plays with two doll
+representatives of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For, at first, he
+possessed the child's power of detachment, and felt that he could at any
+moment discard dolls for soldiers, or a Noah's Ark, and still keep
+happiness in his lap. But most things have an inherent tendency to
+become complicated if they are let alone and allowed to develop free
+from definite guidance, and presently Bellairs became conscious of
+advancing complications. His intellectual appreciation of a new
+situation began to degenerate into a more emotional condition, which
+disturbed and irritated him. It seemed that he was peering through the
+bars of the gate that guards the garden of passion. Which of the two
+women did he see in the garden?
+
+He told himself that, having regard to the circumstances of the case, he
+ought to see both of them. Unfortunately, a vision of that kind never
+has been, and never will be, seen by a man. The temple in which the idol
+sits always makes a difference in the nature of our worship of the idol.
+Bellairs was forced to recognise this fact. And the temple in which sat
+the idol of Lady Betty's nature attracted him more than the temple in
+which sat the idol of Mdlle. Leroux's nature. He came to this conclusion
+one afternoon at Karnak. They three were hidden away in a stone nook of
+this great stone forest, enshrined from the gaze of tourists by mighty
+rugged pillars, walled in by huge blocks of antique masonry that threw
+cold shadows whence the lizards stole to seek the sun. The blue sky was
+broken to their gaze by a narrow section of what had been, doubtless,
+once a wide-spread roof. A silence of endless ages hung around them in
+this haven fashioned by dead men and living Time.
+
+Mdlle. Leroux had been boiling a kettle; and they sipped tea, and, at
+first, did not talk. But tea unlooses the bonds of speech. After their
+second cups they felt communicative.
+
+"One week gone out of my four," Bellairs said, "and each will seem
+shorter-lived than its forerunner."
+
+"You go in three weeks from now?" said Mdlle. Leroux, with an uneven
+intonation that betokened a sudden awakening to the finality of things.
+
+"Yes; at the end of January."
+
+"And we are here until nearly the end of March."
+
+"Yes," said Lady Betty; "it will seem a very long time. February will be
+eternal."
+
+"It is the shortest month in the year," Bellairs remarked.
+
+Mdlle. Leroux looked at him sarcastically.
+
+"You English are so prosaic," she exclaimed. "Any Frenchman would have
+understood."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That we were paying you a compliment."
+
+"Perhaps I did understand it, and preferred not to show my
+comprehension; there is such a thing as modesty!"
+
+"There is--such a thing as false modesty!"
+
+"Exactly," remarked Lady Betty.
+
+"I will accept your compliment gladly," said Bellairs, looking at Lady
+Betty.
+
+"Mine?" asked Clarice Leroux.
+
+"Yes," Bellairs replied.
+
+The consciousness that he cared very much more for such a pretty meaning
+in Lady Betty than in Clarice Leroux led him then, for the first time,
+to that Garden Gate. He looked at Lady Betty again with a new feeling.
+She returned his gaze quietly. Then he turned his eyes to those of
+Clarice. Hers were fixed upon him with a curious violence. He had a
+momentary sensation, literally for the first time, that these two women
+after all, had not one soul, one heart, between them. They did not feel
+quite simultaneously. Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice. Yes,
+that was the difference between them. However quickly the echo follows
+the voice that summons it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady Betty
+never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself wondering eagerly, for
+that afternoon a strange certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash,
+that Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on the verge of
+loving him. He knew now that he loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love
+him yet, was not even quite close to loving him. Had she been in Egypt
+alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs believed that he would not have
+attracted her. He attracted her through Clarice, because he attracted
+Clarice. Could he make her love him in the same way? It would be a
+curious, subtle experiment to try to win one woman's heart by winning
+another's: Bellairs silently decided to make it. All the rest of that
+afternoon he talked to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt
+had given him, the poetry which had ousted the prose inherited from a
+long line of ancestors, the sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed
+now he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win two hearts, the
+heart that contained another heart, as one conjurer's box contains a
+hundred others.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I knew it when I first saw you," Clarice said. "Directly I looked at
+you that evening on the bank I knew it."
+
+"How strange," Bellairs answered.
+
+"And you--did you know it when you heard me playing?"
+
+"That mazurka! Remember I am a man."
+
+They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out,
+for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and
+the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could
+hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in
+the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill
+the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed
+by gratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had
+told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been
+returned.
+
+"Will this kiss, too, have its echo?" he thought; and his eyes travelled
+towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty
+sat. He turned again to Clarice.
+
+"Do you believe in echoes?" he asked.
+
+"Echoes!"
+
+"That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls
+into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?"
+
+"From the same person?"
+
+"Or from some other person."
+
+"What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without
+finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that
+there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repetition of
+our feeling, our doing, to-night."
+
+"Yet, there may be. Who knows?"
+
+"I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never
+will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in
+the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a
+hateful thing?"
+
+"I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me."
+
+And again he glanced towards the lighted windows.
+
+"The world is very full of echoes," he went on; "our troubles are
+repeated."
+
+"But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!"
+
+"There have always been lovers, and they all act in much the same way!"
+
+"Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some new mode of expression for
+ourselves--you and I?"
+
+"Because we are human beings, and one network of tangled limitations."
+
+"You make me cry with anger," she said.
+
+And when he looked, he saw that there were tears shining in her eyes.
+
+At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction swept over him. What
+had he done? A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do. He had made an
+experiment, as a scientist may make an experiment. He had vivisected a
+soul, but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When it knew, would it
+die? But then he told himself he had to do it. For he loved
+passionately, and was certain that he could only gain the heart he had
+not yet completely won by gaining this heart that he had completely won.
+He had made an experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail. All that
+Clarice said, all that she thought, all that she desired, Betty said,
+thought, desired. After the necessary interval the echo must follow the
+voice. And he smiled to himself.
+
+"Why do you smile like that?" Clarice asked.
+
+"Because--because I thought I heard an echo," he replied. And then they
+kissed again. He, with his eyes shut, forced his imagination to tell him
+that the lips he pressed were the lips of Betty. She thought only of the
+lips of love, that burn up all the recollections of the lonely years,
+all the phantoms which dwell in the deserts through which women pass to
+joy--or to despair.
+
+The Austrian pianist was exhausted. Even his long hair could no longer
+sustain his failing energies. He expired magnificently, the seventh
+rhapsody of Liszt serving as his bier. Lady Betty came out into the
+garden.
+
+"How unmusical you two are," she said; "his playing was exquisite."
+
+"We heard finer music here," Clarice answered, as she got up to go back
+to the dahabeeyah--"did we not?"
+
+She turned to Bellairs. He was looking at Lady Betty and did not hear.
+Clarice's cheek flushed angrily.
+
+"Come, Betty," she exclaimed. "Good-night, Mr Bellairs."
+
+"Good-night, Mr Bellairs," echoed Lady Betty.
+
+The two women moved away, and vanished down the narrow and dusty avenue
+that leads to the bank of the Nile. Bellairs stood looking after them.
+He was wondering why he loved Betty and did not love Clarice. It seemed
+feeble to love an echo. Yet, the intonation of an echo is sometimes
+exquisite in its trilling vagueness, its far-off, thrilling beauty. And
+Bellairs fancied that if he once wakened Betty to passion he would free
+her, in a moment, from her curious bondage, would give to her the soul
+that Clarice must surely have crushed down and expelled, replacing it
+with a replica of her own soul. And then he asked himself, being
+analytically inclined that night, what he adored in Betty. Was it merely
+her fresh young beauty? It could not be her nature; for that, at
+present, was merely Clarice's, and he did not love the nature of
+Clarice. Yet he felt it was something more than her beauty. When he had
+made her love him he would know; for, when he had made her love him, he
+would force her to be herself.
+
+He watched the bats circling among the shadowy palms. How gentle the air
+was. How sweet the stars looked. Bellairs thought of England that was so
+far away. It seemed impossible that he could ever be in London again,
+ever again assume a Piccadilly nature, and laugh at the folly of having
+a romance. Yes, it seemed impossible. Nevertheless, in a fortnight he
+must go. But he would take Betty's promise with him. He was resolved on
+that. And then he left the silent garden to the bats, and was soon
+between the mosquito curtains, dreaming.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three days afterwards Clarice was prostrated with a nervous headache.
+She could not bear to have any one in her cabin, and Lady Betty sat on
+the deck of the _Queen Hatasoo_ quite inconsolable. Bellairs, arriving
+to pay his usual afternoon call, found her there. Lord Braydon was out,
+sailing in a flat-bottomed boat far up the river with Lady Braydon, so
+Lady Betty was quite desolate. She told Bellairs so mournfully.
+
+"And Clarice won't let me come near her," she exclaimed. "A step on the
+floor, the creak of the cabin door as I come in, tortures her. She is
+all nerves. I hope I shan't have her headache presently."
+
+"Is it likely?"
+
+"I often do. She seems to pass it on to me. I never had a headache until
+I knew her. But, indeed, I never seemed to live, I never seemed to know
+anything, be anything, until she came into my life."
+
+"I wish I had known you before you knew her," Bellairs said.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I don't know--perhaps to see if you were really so very different from
+what you are now."
+
+"I was--utterly."
+
+"What were you like?"
+
+"I can't remember--but I was utterly different."
+
+As she ceased speaking, Bellairs glanced over the rail to the river
+bank. Two blue-robed donkey boys stood there trying to attract his
+attention, and pointing significantly to their gaily-bedizened donkeys.
+
+"Shall we go for a ride?" he said to Lady Betty. "Just along the river
+bank? Then we shall see Lord Braydon as he sails back. Mdlle. Leroux
+won't miss you. Shall we go?"
+
+Betty hesitated. But she could do the invalid no good by staying. So she
+assented. Bellairs helped her to the bank and placed her in the smart
+red saddle. He motioned the boys to keep well in the rear, and they
+started at a quick, tripping walk. As they went, a white face appeared
+at a cabin window, staring after them, the face of Clarice, who had with
+difficulty lifted her throbbing head from the pillow. She watched the
+donkeys diminishing till they were black shadows moving along against
+the sky, then she began to cry weakly, but only because she was too ill
+to be with them. Her gift of prophecy failed her at this critical
+juncture of her life, and she had no sense of a coming disaster, as she
+lay back on her berth, and gave herself up once more to pain.
+
+That evening Lord Braydon asked Bellairs to dine on the dahabeeyah, and
+he accepted the invitation. Clarice was still in durance, having
+entirely failed to pass her headache on to Lady Betty. After dinner Lord
+Braydon went into the saloon to write a letter to England, and Lady
+Betty and Bellairs had the deck to themselves. He was resolved to put
+his fate to the touch; for, during the donkey ride, he had discovered
+the change in Betty which he had so eagerly desired, the change from
+warm friendship to a different feeling. The girl had not acknowledged
+it. Bellairs had not asked her to do so; but he meant to. Only the
+thought of his treachery to the woman lying in the cabin below held him
+back, just for a moment, and prompted him to talk lightly of indifferent
+things. But that treachery had been a necessary manoeuvre in his
+campaign of happiness. He strove to dismiss it from his mind as he leant
+forward in his chair, and led Lady Betty to the subject that lay so near
+to his heart.
+
+"You love me?" she said presently.
+
+"Yes--deeply. You are angry?"
+
+"How can I be? No, no--and yet--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"And yet, when you told me, I felt sad."
+
+Bellairs looked keenly vexed, and she hastened to add:--
+
+"Not because I am--indifferent. No, no. I can't explain why the feeling
+came. It was gone in a moment. And now--"
+
+"Now you are happy?"
+
+He caught her hand and she left it in his.
+
+"Yes, very happy."
+
+Bellairs bent over her and kissed her--as he lifted himself up a white
+hand appeared on the rail of the companion that led from the lower to
+the upper deck of the _Hatasoo_. Clarice wearily dragged herself up.
+She was wrapped in a shawl and looked very ill. Betty ran to help her.
+
+"I thought I must get a little air," she said feebly. "How d'you do, Mr
+Bellairs?"
+
+She sank down in a chair.
+
+Bellairs felt like a man between two fires.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later Lord Braydon gave his consent to his daughter's
+engagement with Bellairs, and Lady Betty ran to tell Clarice. She had
+not previously said a word to her friend of what had passed between her
+and Bellairs. He had begged her to keep silence until he had spoken to
+Lord Braydon, and she had promised and had kept her promise. But now she
+rushed into the saloon where Clarice was playing Chopin, and, throwing
+her arms round her friend, told her the great news. The body of Clarice
+became rigid in her arms.
+
+"And the king has consented," Betty cried.
+
+The king was her father.
+
+"Clarice, Clarice, isn't it wonderful?"
+
+"Wonderful! I thought so when you told me. But already I begin to doubt
+if it is."
+
+"To doubt, Clarice?"
+
+"To doubt whether anything a man does is wonderful."
+
+That was all Clarice said. Then she kissed Betty, and went on playing
+Chopin feverishly, while Betty told, to the accompaniment of the music,
+all that was in her heart.
+
+"And," she said at last, "I love him, Clarice; I love him intensely. I
+shall always love him."
+
+Clarice played a final chord and got up.
+
+Bellairs lunched on the dahabeeyah that day and Clarice met him as
+usual. Her manner gave no sign of any mental disturbance. Perhaps it was
+curiously calm. He wondered a little, but was too happy to wonder much.
+Joy made him cruel, for nothing is so cruel as joy. Only he was glad
+that Clarice had so much pride, for he thought now that in her pride lay
+his safety. He no longer feared that she would condescend to a scene,
+and he even thought that perhaps she did not feel so deeply as he had
+supposed.
+
+"After all," he said to himself exultantly, "there's no harm done. I
+need not have been so conscience-stricken. What is a pretty speech and a
+kiss to a woman who has lived, travelled over the world, read widely,
+thought many things? Now, if I had treated Betty in such a way I should
+be a blackguard. She could not have understood. She could only have
+suffered. I will never hurt her--Betty!"
+
+His nature was so full of her that it could no longer hold any thought
+of Clarice. And for a little while, as Bellairs dived into Betty's
+heart, he was astonished at the passion he found there, and
+congratulated himself on having released her from bondage. Now, at
+least, he was teaching her to be herself. He was killing the echo and
+creating a voice, a beautiful, clear, radiant voice that would sing to
+him, to him alone.
+
+"Betty has a great deal in her," he said to Clarice once.
+
+"Yes--a great deal. Who put it there, do you think?"
+
+"Who? Why, nobody. Surely you would not say that all you yourself have
+of--of strength, originality, courage, was put into you by some other
+man or woman."
+
+"No. I would not say that. But then--I am not Betty."
+
+Bellairs felt irritated.
+
+"Please don't run Betty down," he exclaimed hastily.
+
+"I! I run down Betty! I don't think you understand what I feel about
+Betty. She is the one perfect being I know. I worship her."
+
+"I am sure you do," he said, mollified. "And you have done much for her,
+perhaps too much."
+
+"I cannot tell that--yet," Clarice answered. "Some day I may know
+whether I have done very much, or very little."
+
+"Some day--when?"
+
+"Perhaps very soon."
+
+Bellairs wondered what she meant, and wondered, too, why he had a sudden
+sense of uneasiness.
+
+It was a day or two after this conversation that a light cloud seemed to
+float across his lover's happiness with Betty. He could not tell the
+exact moment when it came, nor from what quarter it journeyed. But he
+felt the obscuring of the sun and the lessening of the lovely warmth of
+intimacy. He was chilled and alarmed, and at night, when he was alone
+with Betty in the stern of the _Hatasoo_ bidding her good-bye, he could
+not refrain from saying:--
+
+"Betty, is anything the matter?"
+
+"The matter, Jack?"
+
+"Yes. Are you quite happy to-day? Quite as happy as you were yesterday?"
+
+"I suppose so--I believe so."
+
+But she did not speak with a perfect conviction, and Bellairs was more
+gravely troubled.
+
+"I am certain something is wrong," he persisted. "I have done something
+that has offended you, or said something stupid. What is it? Do tell
+me."
+
+"I can't. There is nothing to tell. Really, there is not."
+
+"You would tell me if there was?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And you love me as much as ever?"
+
+"Oh, yes."
+
+He looked into her eyes, asking them mutely to tell him the truth. And
+he thought their expression was strangely cold. The light had surely
+faded out of them. He kissed her silently and went forward. Clarice was
+standing there looking at the rising moon.
+
+"Good-night," he said, holding out his hand.
+
+"How grave you look," she answered, not seeing the hand.
+
+"The moonlight makes people look unnatural."
+
+"It does not reach the deck yet."
+
+"Good-night," he said again, and he went down the stairs.
+
+She looked after him with a smile. When he had gone, she turned her head
+and called.
+
+"Betty!"
+
+"Yes!"
+
+"Come here and sit with me. Let us watch the moon. Don't talk. I want to
+think--and to make you think--as I do."
+
+The cloud which Bellairs had fancied he noticed did not dissolve in the
+night. It was not drawn up mysteriously into the sun to fade in gold. On
+the contrary, next day he could no longer pretend to himself that his
+anxiety as a lover rendered him foolishly self-conscious, dangerously
+observant of the merest trifles. There really was a change in Betty, and
+a change which grew. He became seriously alarmed. Could it be possible
+that the ardent passion which she had displayed in the first moments of
+their engagement was already subsiding as cynics say passion subsides
+after marriage? Such a supposition seemed ridiculous. The ardour which
+has never fulfilled itself is not liable to cool. And Betty was a young
+girl who had not known love before. If she tired of it after so short
+an experience of its delights, she could be nothing less than a wholly
+unnatural and distorted being. And she was strangely natural. Bellairs
+rode out alone with her along the built-up brown roads into the desert,
+and tried to interest her, but she was abstracted and seemed deep in
+thought. Often she didn't hear what he was saying, and when she did hear
+and replied, her answers were short and careless, and rather dismissed
+than encouraged the subject to which they were applied. Bellairs, at
+last, gave up attempting to talk, and from time to time stole a cautious
+glance at her pretty face. He noticed that it wore a puzzled expression,
+as if she were turning over something in her mind and could not come to
+a conclusion about it. She did not look exactly sad, but merely grave
+and distrait. At length he exclaimed, determined to rouse her into some
+sort of comradeship:--
+
+"You never caught that headache, did you?"
+
+"Clarice's, you mean? No."
+
+"Is it coming on now?"
+
+"Oh, no. I feel perfectly well. What made you think it was?"
+
+"You won't talk to me, and you look so preternaturally serious. I am
+sure I have unwittingly offended you?"
+
+"No, you haven't. You are just as you always are, better to me than I
+deserve."
+
+"You deserve the best man in the world."
+
+"I already have the best woman."
+
+"Mdlle. Leroux?"
+
+"Yes; Clarice."
+
+"You admire her very much."
+
+"Of course. I would give anything to be like her."
+
+Bellairs hesitated a moment. Then he said with a slight, uneasy laugh:--
+
+"But you are wonderfully like her."
+
+Betty looked surprised.
+
+"I don't see how," she answered.
+
+"No, because we never see ourselves. But when I first knew you both, I
+was immensely struck by the curious resemblance between you, in mind, in
+the things you said, in the things you did, the people you liked."
+
+"We both liked you."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It would have been strange if we had both loved you!" Betty said,
+musingly.
+
+Bellairs laughed again, and gave his horse a cut with the whip. "I only
+wanted one to do that," he said, not quite truthfully. "And, thank God,
+I have got my desire."
+
+Betty did not answer.
+
+"Haven't I?" he persisted.
+
+"You know whether you have or not," she answered. "How beautiful the
+sunset is going to be to-night. Look at the light over Karnak."
+
+She pointed towards the temple with her whip. Bellairs felt a crawling
+despair that numbed him What did it all mean? Was he torturing himself
+foolishly, or was this instinct which gnawed at his heart a thing to be
+reckoned with? When he left Betty at the dahabeeyah, he walked slowly,
+in the gathering shadows, along the path which skirts the dingy temple
+of Luxor. This change in Betty was simply inexplicable. In no way could
+he account for it. She had not the definite, angry coldness of a girl
+who had made a dreadful mistake and hated the man who had led her to
+make it. No; she seemed rather in a state of mental transition. She was
+setting foot on some bridge, which, Bellairs felt, led away from the
+shore on which she had been standing with him. Was her first transport
+of love and joy a pretence? He could not believe so. He knew it was
+genuine. That was the puzzle which he could not put together. And then
+he tried to comfort himself by thinking deliberately of the many moods
+that make the feminine mind so full of April weather, of how they come
+and pass and are dead. All men had suffered from them, especially all
+lovers. He could not expect to be exempt--only, till now, Betty had
+seemed so utterly free from moods, so steadily frank, eager, charming,
+responsive. Bellairs finally argued himself into a condition of despair,
+during which he came to a resolve of despair. He silently decided to
+seek a quiet interview with Clarice, and ask her what was the matter
+with Betty. After all, there was no reason why he should not take this
+step. Clarice had evidently not cared deeply for him. Otherwise, she
+would not have accepted his desertion with such truly agreeable
+fortitude. Theirs had been a passing flirtation--nothing more. And,
+indeed, their intimacy gave him the right to consult her, while her
+close knowledge of Betty must render her an infallible judge of any
+reasons which there might be to render the latter's conduct
+intelligible.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Bellairs did not have to wait long before he put his resolve into
+practice. That evening Betty, who had become more and more abstracted
+and silent, got up soon after dinner, and said she was tired, and was
+going to bed. Bellairs tried to get a moment with her alone, but she
+frustrated the attempt by holding out her hand to him in public and
+markedly bidding him good-night before Lord and Lady Braydon. When she
+had disappeared, Bellairs sought Clarice, who was downstairs in the
+saloon writing letters. Clarice looked up from the blotting-pad as he
+entered.
+
+"I want to talk to you," he exclaimed abruptly.
+
+"I am writing letters."
+
+"Do give me a few minutes."
+
+"Very well," she said, pushing her paper away and laying down her pen.
+"What is it?"
+
+"That's what I want to ask you. What has come over Betty? Is she ill?"
+
+"Betty! Has anything come over her?"
+
+Bellairs tapped his fingers impatiently on the table.
+
+"Don't tell me you haven't noticed the change," he said. "Forgive me for
+saying that I couldn't believe it if you did."
+
+"In that case I won't trouble myself to say it."
+
+"Ah--you have! Then what's the matter? Tell me."
+
+"Hush, don't speak so loud or the sailors will hear you, and Abdul
+understands English. I did not say I knew the reason of this change."
+
+"You must. You are Betty's other self, or rather she is--was--yours."
+
+"Was! Do you mean that she is not now?"
+
+"Remember, she loves me."
+
+"Oh, and that makes a difference?"
+
+"Surely!"
+
+"You have observed it?"
+
+Bellairs hesitated. He scarcely knew whether to reply in the affirmative
+or the negative. He resolved upon a compromise.
+
+"There has hardly been time yet," he said; "naturally, I expect that
+Betty will place me before every one else."
+
+Mdlle. Leroux's eyes flashed under the hanging lamp.
+
+"What we expect is not always what we get," she said significantly.
+
+Bellairs flushed. He understood that she was alluding to his treatment
+of her, but he preferred to ignore it, and went on:--
+
+"Is Betty ill to-night?"
+
+"Not at all."
+
+"Then what on earth is the matter? I ask you for a plain answer. I think
+I deserve so much."
+
+"Men are always so deserving," she said with bitterness.
+
+"And women are always so exacting," he retorted. "But please answer my
+question."
+
+"I will first ask you another. If you reply frankly to me, I will reply
+frankly to you."
+
+She leaned her elbows on the table, supporting her face on the palms of
+her upturned hands, and looked into his eyes.
+
+"Ask me," said Bellairs eagerly; "I'll do anything if you'll only
+explain Betty to me."
+
+"Why did you try to make me love you? Why did you make love to me?"
+
+Bellairs pushed back his chair and there was an awkward silence.
+Clarice's question was very unexpected and very difficult to answer.
+
+"Well?" she said, still with her eyes on his.
+
+"Is it any good our discussing this?" he replied at length. "It meant
+nothing to you. It is over."
+
+"How do you know it meant nothing to me?"
+
+"You have shown that by your conduct. You care nothing. I am indifferent
+to you."
+
+"No, not indifferent, not at all."
+
+"What? You can't mean--no, it is absurd!"
+
+"What is absurd?"
+
+"You can't--you don't mean that you really have any feeling for me?"
+
+"I do mean it!"
+
+Bellairs felt very uncomfortable. He scarcely knew what to do or say. He
+fidgeted on his chair almost like a boy caught in a dishonest act.
+
+"We had really better not talk about it," he said.
+
+"Very well." Clarice reached out her hand for her pen and drew the
+blotting-pad towards her.
+
+"But Betty?" said Bellairs uneasily.
+
+"You have not answered my question. I shall not answer yours." She
+dipped her pen in the ink and prepared to go on with her letter.
+Bellairs grew desperate.
+
+"Look here," he said; "you must tell me the reason of this change in
+Betty. Now I know you don't care for me, you don't really love me."
+
+"No, I don't love you," she said quickly.
+
+"Well, then, since you say that, I will answer your question. I tried to
+win your heart because I wanted to win Betty's!"
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"That Betty is practically you--or was, your echo, in word, deed,
+thought. Her mind, her heart, followed yours in everything. I loved her,
+and I knew that if I made you like me very much she must follow you in
+that feeling as in others. Since you don't love me, I can dare to tell
+you this."
+
+Clarice sat silent.
+
+"Are you angry?" he asked.
+
+"Go on," she said.
+
+"That's all." Again a silence.
+
+"It was your fault in a way," Bellairs said awkwardly. "You made Betty
+your other self. Why did you not let her alone?"
+
+"Can a strong nature help impressing itself on others?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know. I'm no psychologist. But--you must let Betty alone
+now," he said.
+
+"Suppose I can't. Suppose this sympathy between us has got beyond my
+control?"
+
+"I shall release Betty from this bondage to you," Bellairs said, "my
+love will--"
+
+"You! Your love!" Clarice said. And she burst into a laugh.
+
+Bellairs suddenly leaned forward across the table.
+
+"I believe you hate me," he exclaimed.
+
+She, on her part, leaned forward till her face was near his.
+
+"You're right," she whispered; "I do hate you. Now you know what's the
+matter with Betty."
+
+For a moment Bellairs did not understand.
+
+"Now--I know--" he repeated. "I don't--Ah!" Comprehension flashed upon
+him.
+
+"You devil," he said--"you she-devil! Curse--curse you!" Clarice laughed
+again. Bellairs sprang up.
+
+"No, no, I won't believe it," he cried. "I can't. The thing's
+impossible."
+
+"Is it? The pendulum of my heart has swung back from love to hate.
+Betty's is following."
+
+"No, no!"
+
+"Wait, and you will see. Already she seems to care less for you. You
+yourself have remarked it."
+
+"I have not," he said with violence.
+
+"To-morrow she will care less, and so less--less--till she too--hates
+you."
+
+"Never!"
+
+"Only wait--and you will know. And now, good-night. I must really write
+my letter. It is to my mother, and must go by to-morrow's mail."
+
+She resumed her writing quietly. Bellairs watched her for a moment. Then
+he strode out of the room, across the gangway, up the bank.
+
+How dark the night was.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The explanation of Clarice struck Bellairs with a benumbing force. In
+vain he argued to himself that it was not the true one, that no heart
+could follow another as she said Betty's followed hers, that no nature
+could merely for ever echo another's. Some furtive despair lurking in
+his soul whispered that she had spoken the truth. An appalling sense of
+utter impotence seized him, as it seizes a man who fights with a shadow.
+But he resolved to fight. His whole life's happiness hung on the issue.
+
+On the following day he forced himself to be cheerful, gay, talkative.
+He went early to the dahabeeyah, and proposed to Lord Braydon a picnic
+to Thebes. Lord Braydon assented. A hamper was packed. The boat was
+ordered. The little party assembled on the deck of the _Hatasoo_ for the
+start; Lady Braydon, in a wide hat and sweeping grey veil, Clarice with
+her big white parasol lined with pale green, Lord Braydon in his helmet,
+his eyes protected by enormous spectacles. But where was Betty? Abdul,
+the dragoman, went to tell her that they were going. She came, without
+her hat, or gloves, holding a palm leaf fan in her hand.
+
+"I am not coming," she said.
+
+Clarice glanced at Bellairs. He pressed his lips together and felt that
+he was turning white underneath the tan the Egyptian sun rays had
+painted on his cheeks. Lady Braydon protested.
+
+"What's the matter, Betty?" she said. "The donkeys are ordered and
+waiting for us on the opposite bank. Why aren't you coming?"
+
+"I have got a headache. I'm afraid of the sun to-day." All persuasion
+was useless. They had to set out without her. Bellairs was bitterly
+angry, bitterly afraid. He could scarcely make the necessary effort to
+be polite and talkative, but Lord and Lady Braydon readily excused his
+gloom, understanding his disappointment, and Clarice no longer desired
+his conversation. That night he did not see Betty. She was confined to
+her cabin and would see no one but Clarice. On the following day
+Bellairs went very early to the dahabeeyah and asked for her. Abdul took
+his message, and, after an interval, returned to him with the following
+note:--
+
+   "DEAR MR BELLAIRS,--I am very sorry I cannot see you this
+   morning, but I am still very unwell. I think the mental agony
+   I have been and am undergoing accounts for my condition. I
+   must tell you the truth. I cannot marry you. I mistook my
+   feeling for you. I honestly thought it love. I find it is only
+   friendship. Can you ever forgive me the pain I am causing you?
+   I cannot forgive myself. But I should do you a much greater
+   wrong by marrying you than by giving you up. I have told my
+   father and mother. See them if you like. We sail to-morrow
+   morning for Assouan.
+
+                                                    "BETTY."
+
+Bellairs, crumpling this note in his hand, would have burst forth into a
+passion of useless rage and despair, but Abdul's lustrous eyes were
+fixed upon him. Abdul's dignified form calmly waited his pleasure.
+
+"Where is Lord Braydon?" said Bellairs, "I must see him."
+
+"His lordship is on the second deck, sir."
+
+"Take me to him."
+
+The interview that followed only increased the despair of Bellairs. Lord
+Braydon was most sympathetic, most courteously sorry, but he said that
+his daughter's decision was absolutely irrevocable, and he could not
+attempt to coerce her in such an important matter.
+
+"At any rate, I must see her before you sail," said Bellairs at last. "I
+think she owes me at least that one last debt."
+
+"I think so too," said Lord Braydon. "Come at six. I will undertake that
+you shall see her."
+
+How Bellairs spent the intervening hours he could never remember. He did
+not go back to the hotel; he must have wandered all day along the river
+bank. Yet he felt neither the heat, nor any fatigue, nor any hunger. At
+six o'clock he reached the dahabeeyah. Lady Betty was sitting alone on
+the deck. She looked very pale and grave.
+
+"My father and mother and Clarice have gone up to the hotel," she said.
+"That Austrian is playing again this evening."
+
+"Is he?" Bellairs answered. He sat down beside her and tried to take her
+hand. But she would not let him.
+
+"No," she said. "No, it's no use. I have made a ghastly mistake, but I
+will not make another. Oh, forgive me, do forgive me!"
+
+"How can I? If you will not try to love me my life is ruined."
+
+"Don't say that. It's no use to try to love. You know that. We must just
+let ourselves alone. Love comes, or hate, just as God wills it. We can
+only accept our fate."
+
+"As God wills," Bellairs said passionately; "why do you say that, when
+you know it is not true?"
+
+"Not true--Mr Bellairs!"
+
+"Yes. If you echoed the will of God how could I blame you? We must all
+do that--at least, when we are good. And those of us who are wicked I
+suppose echo the Devil. But you--what do you echo?"
+
+"I--I echo no one. I don't understand you."
+
+"But you shall, before it is too late. Betty, be yourself. Emancipate
+your soul. You are the echo of that woman, of Clarice. Don't you see it?
+Don't you know it? You are her echo--and she hates me!"
+
+Betty drew back from him--she was evidently alarmed.
+
+"Are you mad?" she said. "Why do you say such things to me? Clarice and
+I love each other, it is true, but our real natures are totally
+different. She does not hate you, nor do I. She has never said one word
+against you to me. She has always told me how much she liked you. What
+are you saying?"
+
+"The truth!"
+
+"I--her echo! Why, then--then if that were the case she must have loved
+you, or thought she loved you. Do you dare to tell me that?"
+
+"I do not say that," Bellairs answered hopelessly.
+
+"Of course not. The idea is so absurd. Clarice--oh! how can you talk
+like this? And if I am only an echo, as you call it, how can you say you
+care for me, care for another woman's shadow? You do not love me."
+
+"I do--with all my heart."
+
+"And yet you say I am nothing, that I have not even a heart of my own,
+that I love or hate at the will of another."
+
+"Forgive me, forgive me! I don't know what I say. I only know I love
+you."
+
+Her face softened.
+
+"And you deserve to be loved," she said; "but I--it is so horrible--I
+cannot!"
+
+Suddenly Bellairs caught her in his arms.
+
+"You shall," he exclaimed, "you shall. I will make you." But she pushed
+him back with a strange strength, and her face hardened till he scarcely
+recognised it.
+
+"Don't do that--don't touch me--or you'll make me hate you," she said
+vehemently.
+
+Bellairs let her go. At that moment there was a step on the deck.
+Clarice appeared. She did not seem to notice that anything was wrong.
+She smiled.
+
+"Isn't it sad, Mr Bellairs," she said, "we sail to-morrow. I love Luxor.
+I can't bear to leave it."
+
+Bellairs suddenly turned and hurried away. He could no longer trust
+himself. There was blood before his eyes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was dawn. The Nile was smooth as a river of oil. Light mists rolled
+upwards gently, discovering the rosy flanks of the Libyan mountains to
+the sun. The sky began to glimmer with a dancing golden heat. On the
+brown bank where the boats lie in the shadow a man stood alone. His
+hands were tightly clenched. His lips worked silently. His eyes were
+fixed in a stare. And away in the distance up river, a tiny trail of
+smoke floated towards Luxor. It came from a steam tug that drew a
+following dahabeeyah.
+
+The _Queen Hatasoo_ was on her voyage to Assouan.
+
+
+
+
+THE FACE OF THE MONK
+
+
+I
+
+"No, it will not hurt him to see you," the doctor said to me; "and I
+have no doubt he will recognise you. He is the quietest patient I have
+ever had under my care--gentle, kind, agreeable, perfect in conduct, and
+yet quite mad. You know him well?"
+
+"He was my dearest friend," I said. "Before I went out to America three
+years ago we were inseparable. Doctor, I cannot believe that he is mad,
+he--Hubert Blair--one of the cleverest young writers in London, so
+brilliant, so acute! Wild, if you like, a libertine perhaps, a strange
+mixture of the intellectual and the sensual--but mad! I can't believe
+it!"
+
+"Not when I tell you that he was brought to me suffering from acute
+religious mania?"
+
+"Religious! Hubert Blair!"
+
+"Yes. He tried to destroy himself, declaring that he was unfit to live,
+that he was a curse to some person unknown. He protested that each deed
+of his affected this unknown person, that his sins were counted as the
+sins of another, and that this other had haunted him--would haunt him
+for ever."
+
+The doctor's words troubled me.
+
+"Take me to him," I said at last. "Leave us together."
+
+It was a strange, sad moment when I entered the room in which Hubert was
+sitting. I was painfully agitated. He knew me, and greeted me warmly. I
+sat down opposite to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a long silence. Hubert looked away into the fire. He saw, I
+think, traced in scarlet flames, the scenes he was going to describe to
+me; and I, gazing at him, wondered of what nature the change in my
+friend might be. That he had changed since we were together three years
+ago was evident, yet he did not look mad. His dark, clean-shaven young
+face was still passionate. The brown eyes were still lit with a certain
+devouring eagerness. The mouth had not lost its mingled sweetness and
+sensuality. But Hubert was curiously transformed. There was a dignity,
+almost an elevation, in his manner. His former gaiety had vanished. I
+knew, without words, that my friend was another man--very far away from
+me now. Yet once we had lived together as chums, and had no secrets the
+one from the other.
+
+At last Hubert looked up and spoke.
+
+"I see you are wondering about me," he said.
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I have altered, of course--completely altered."
+
+"Yes," I said, awkwardly enough. "Why is that?"
+
+I longed to probe this madness of his that I might convince myself of
+it, otherwise Hubert's situation must for ever appal me.
+
+He answered quietly, "I will tell you--nobody else knows--and even you
+may--"
+
+He hesitated, then he said:--
+
+"No, you will believe it."
+
+"Yes, if you tell me it is true."
+
+"It is absolutely true.
+
+"Bernard, you know what I was when you left England for America--gay,
+frivolous in my pleasures, although earnest when I was working. You know
+how I lived to sound the depths of sensation, how I loved to stretch all
+my mental and physical capacities to the snapping-point, how I shrank
+from no sin that could add one jot or tittle to my knowledge of the mind
+of any man or woman who interested me. My life seemed a full life then.
+I moved in the midst of a thousand intrigues. I strung beads of all
+emotions upon my rosary, and told them until at times my health gave
+way. You remember my recurring periods of extraordinary and horrible
+mental depression--when life was a demon to me, and all my success in
+literature less than nothing; when I fancied myself hated, and could
+believe I heard phantom voices abusing me. Then those fits passed away,
+and once more I lived as ardently as ever, the most persistent worker,
+and the most persistent excitement-seeker in London.
+
+"Well, after you went away I continued my career. As you know, my
+success increased. Through many sins I had succeeded in diving very deep
+into human hearts of men and women. Often I led people deliberately away
+from innocence in order that I might observe the gradual transformation
+of their natures. Often I spurred them on to follies that I might see
+the effect our deeds have upon our faces--the seal our actions set upon
+our souls. I was utterly unscrupulous, and yet I thought myself
+good-hearted. You remember that my servants always loved me, that I
+attracted people. I can say this to you. For some time my usual course
+was not stayed. Then--I recollect it was in the middle of the London
+season--one of my horrible fits of unreasonable melancholy swept over
+me. It stunned my soul like a heavy blow. It numbed me. I could not go
+about. I could not bear to see anybody. I could only shut myself up and
+try to reason myself back into my usual gaiety and excitement. My
+writing was put aside. My piano was locked. I tried to read, but even
+that solace was denied to me. My attention was utterly self-centred,
+riveted upon my own condition.
+
+"Why, I said to myself, am I the victim of this despair, this despair
+without a cause? What is this oppression which weighs me down without
+reason? It attacks me abruptly, as if it were sent to me by some power,
+shot at me like an arrow by an enemy hidden in the dark. I am well--I am
+gay. Life is beautiful and wonderful to me. All that I do interests me.
+My soul is full of vitality. I know that I have troops of friends, that
+I am loved and thought of by many people. And then suddenly the arrow
+strikes me. My soul is wounded and sickens to death. Night falls over
+me, night so sinister that I shudder when its twilight comes. All my
+senses faint within me. Life is at once a hag, weary, degraded, with
+tears on her cheeks and despair in her hollow eyes. I feel that I am
+deserted, that my friends despise me, that the world hates me, that I am
+less than all other men--less in powers, less in attraction--that I am
+the most crawling, the most grovelling of all the human species, and
+that there is no one who does not know it. Yet the doctors say I am not
+physically ill, and I know that I am not mad. Whence does this awful
+misery, this unmeaning, causeless horror of life and of myself come? Why
+am I thus afflicted?
+
+"Of course I could find no answer to all these old questions, which I
+had asked many times before. But this time, Bernard, my depression was
+more lasting, more overwhelming than usual. I grew terribly afraid of
+it. I thought I might be driven to suicide. One day a crisis seemed to
+come. I dared no longer remain alone, so I put on my hat and coat, took
+my stick, and hurried out, without any definite intention. I walked
+along Piccadilly, avoiding the glances of those whom I met. I fancied
+they could all read the agony, the degradation of my soul. I turned into
+Bond Street, and suddenly I felt a strong inclination to stop before a
+certain door. I obeyed the impulse, and my eyes fell on a brass plate,
+upon which was engraved these words:--
+
+       VANE.
+    Clairvoyant.
+  11 till 4 daily.
+
+"I remember I read them several times over, and even repeated them in a
+whisper to myself. Why? I don't know. Then I turned away, and was about
+to resume my walk. But I could not. Again I stopped and read the legend
+on the brass plate. On the right-hand side of the door was an electric
+bell. I put my finger on it and pressed the button inwards. The door
+opened, and I walked, like a man in a dream, I think, up a flight of
+narrow stairs. At the top of them was a second door, at which a
+maidservant was standing.
+
+"'You want to see Mr Vane, sir?'
+
+"'Yes. Can I?'
+
+"'If you will come in, sir, I will see.'
+
+"She showed me into a commonplace, barely-furnished little room, and,
+after a short period of waiting, summoned me to another, in which stood
+a tall, dark youth, dressed in a gown rather like a college gown. He
+bowed to me, and I silently returned the salutation. The servant left
+us. Then he said:--
+
+"'You wish me to exert my powers for you?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'Will you sit here?'
+
+"He motioned me to a seat beside a small round table, sat down opposite
+to me, and took my hand. After examining it through a glass, and telling
+my character fairly correctly by the lines in it, he laid the glass down
+and regarded me narrowly.
+
+"'You suffer terribly from depression,' he said.
+
+"'That is true.'
+
+"He continued to gaze upon me more and more fixedly. At length he
+said:--
+
+"'Do you know that everybody has a companion?'
+
+"'How--a companion?'
+
+"'Somebody incessantly with them, somebody they cannot see.'
+
+"'You believe in the theory of guardian angels?'
+
+"'I do not say these companions are always guardian angels. I see your
+companion now, as I look at you. His face is by your shoulder.'
+
+"I started, and glanced hastily round; but, of course, could see
+nothing.
+
+"'Shall I describe him?'
+
+"'Yes,' I said.
+
+"'His face is dark, like yours; shaven, like yours. He has brown eyes,
+just as brown as yours are. His mouth and his chin are firm and small,
+as firm and small as yours.'
+
+"'He must be very like me.'
+
+"'He is. But there is a difference between you.'
+
+"'What is it?'
+
+"'His hair is cut more closely than yours, and part of it is shaved
+off.'
+
+"'He is a priest, then?'
+
+"'He wears a cowl. He is a monk.'
+
+"'A monk! But why does he come to me?'
+
+"'I should say that he cannot help it, that he is your spirit in some
+former state. Yes'--and he stared at me till his eyes almost mesmerised
+me--'you must have been a monk once.'
+
+"'I--a monk! Impossible! Even if I have lived on earth before, it could
+never have been as a monk.'
+
+"'How do you know that?'
+
+"'Because I am utterly without superstitions, utterly free from any
+lingering desire for an ascetic life. That existence of silence, of
+ignorance, of perpetual prayer, can never have been mine.'
+
+"'You cannot tell,' was all his answer.
+
+
+II
+
+"When I left Bond Street that afternoon I was full of disbelief.
+However, I had paid my half-guinea and escaped from my own core of
+misery for a quarter of an hour. That was something. I didn't regret my
+visit to this man Vane, whom I regarded as an agreeable charlatan. For a
+moment he had interested me. For a moment he had helped me to forget my
+useless wretchedness. I ought to have been grateful to him. And, as
+always, my soul regained its composure at last. One morning I awoke and
+said to myself that I was happy. Why? I did not know. But I got up. I
+was able to write once more. I was able to play. I felt that I had
+friends who loved me and a career before me. I could again look people
+in the face without fear. I could even feel a certain delightful conceit
+of mind and body. Bernard, I was myself. So I thought, so I knew. And
+yet, as days went by, I caught myself often thinking of this invisible,
+tonsured, and cowled companion of mine, whom Vane had seen, whom I did
+not see. Was he indeed with me? And, if so, had he thoughts, had he the
+holy thoughts of a spirit that has renounced the world and all fleshly
+things? Did he still keep that cloistered nature which is at home with
+silence, which aspires, and prays, and lives for possible eternity,
+instead of for certain time? Did he still hold desolate vigils? Did he
+still scourge himself along the thorny paths of faith? And, if he did,
+how must he regard me?
+
+"I remember one night especially how this last thought was with me in a
+dreary house, where I sinned, and where I dissected a heart.
+
+"And I trembled as if an eye was upon me. And I went home.
+
+"You will say that my imagination is keen, and that I gave way to it.
+But wait and hear the end.
+
+"This definite act of mine--this, my first conscious renunciation--did
+not tend, as you might suppose, to the peace of my mind. On the
+contrary, I found myself angry, perturbed, as I analysed the cause of my
+warfare with self. I have naturally a supreme hatred of all control.
+Liberty is my fetish. And now I had offered a sacrifice to a prisoning
+unselfishness, to a false god that binds and gags its devotees. I was
+angry, and I violently resumed my former course. But now I began to be
+ceaselessly companioned by uneasiness, by a furtive cowardice that was
+desolating. I felt that I was watched, and by some one who suffered when
+I sinned, who shrank and shuddered when I followed where my desires led.
+
+"It was the monk.
+
+"Soon I gave to him a most definite personality. I endowed him with a
+mind and with moods. I imagined not only a heart for him, but a voice,
+deep with a certain ecclesiastical beauty, austere, with a note more apt
+for denunciation than for praise. His face was my own face, but with an
+expression not mine, elevated, almost fanatical, yet nobly beautiful;
+praying eyes--and mine were only observant; praying lips--and mine were
+but sensitively sensual. And he was haggard with abstinence, while
+I--was I not often haggard with indulgence? Yes, his face was mine, and
+not mine. It seemed the face of a great saint who might have been a
+great sinner. Bernard, that is the most attractive face in all the
+world. Accustoming myself thus to a thought-companion, I at length--for
+we men are so inevitably materialistic--embodied him, gave to him hands,
+feet, a figure, all--as before, mine, yet not mine, a sort of saintly
+replica of my sinfulness. For do not hands, feet, figure cry our deeds
+as the watchman cries the hour in the night?
+
+"So, I had the man. There he stood in my vision as you are now.
+
+"Yes, he was there; but only when I sinned.
+
+"When I worked and yielded myself up to the clear assertion of my
+intellect, when I fought to give out the thoughts that lingered like
+reluctant fish far down in the deep pools of my mind, when I wrestled
+for beauty of diction and for nameless graces of expression, when I was
+the author, I could not see him.
+
+"But when I was the man, and lived the fables that I was afterwards to
+write, then he was with me. And his face was as the face of one who is
+wasted with grey grief.
+
+"He came to me when I sinned, as if by my sins I did him grave injury.
+And, allowing my imagination to range wildly, as you will say, I grew
+gradually to feel as if each sin did indeed strike a grievous blow upon
+his holy nature.
+
+"This troubled me at last. I found myself continually brooding over the
+strange idea. I was aware that if my friends could know I entertained
+it, they would think me mad. And yet I often fancied that thought moved
+me in the direction of a sanity more perfect, more desirable than my
+sanity of self-indulgence. Sometimes even I said to myself that I would
+reorganise my life, that I would be different from what I had been. And
+then, again, I laughed at my folly of the imagination, and cursed that
+clairvoyant of Bond Street, who made a living by trading upon the latent
+imbecility of human nature. Yet, the desire of change, of
+soul-transformation, came and lingered, and the vision of the monk's
+worn young face was often with me. And whenever, in my waking dreams, I
+looked upon it, I felt that a time might come when I could pray and weep
+for the wild catalogue of my many sins.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Bernard, at last the day came when I left England. I had long wished to
+travel. I had grown tired of the hum of literary cliques, and the jargon
+of that deadly parasite called 'modernity.' Praise fainted, and lay like
+a corpse before my mind. I was sick of gaiety. It seemed to me that
+London was stifling my powers, narrowing my outlook, barring out real
+life from me with its moods and its fashions, and its idols of the hour,
+and its heroes of a day, who are the traitors of the day's night.
+
+"So I went away.
+
+"And now I come to the part of my story that you may find it hard to
+believe. Yet it is true.
+
+"One day, in my wanderings, I came to a monastery. I remember the day
+well. It was an afternoon of early winter, and I was _en route_ to a
+warm climate. But to gain my climate, and snatch a vivid contrast such
+as I love, I toiled over a gaunt and dreary pass, presided over by
+heavy, beetling-browed mountains. I rode upon a mule, attended only by
+my manservant and by a taciturn guide who led a baggage-mule. Slowly we
+wound, by thin paths, among the desolate crags, which sprang to sight in
+crowds at each turn of the way, pressing upon us, like dead faces of
+Nature, the corpses of things we call inanimate, but which had surely
+once lived. For the earth is alive, and gives life. But these mountains
+were now utterly dead. These grey, petrified countenances of the hills
+subdued my soul. The pattering shuffle of the mules woke an occasional
+echo, and even an echo I hated. For the environing silence was immense,
+and I wished to steep myself in it. As we still ascended, in the waste
+winter afternoon, towards the hour of twilight, snow--the first snow of
+the season--began to fall. I watched the white vision of the flakes
+against the grey vision of the crags, and I thought that this path,
+which I had chosen as my road to Summer, was like the path by which holy
+men slowly gain Paradise, treading difficult ways through life that they
+may attain at last those eternal roses which bloom beyond the granite
+and the snows. Up and up I rode, into the clouds and the night, into the
+veil of the world, into the icy winds of the heights. An eagle screamed
+above my head, poised like a black shadow in the opaque gloom. That
+flying life was the only life in this waste.
+
+"And then my mule, edging ever to the precipice as a man to his fate,
+sidled round a promontory of rock and set its feet in snow. For we had
+passed the snow-line. And upon the snow lay thin spears of yellow light.
+They streamed from the lattices of the monastery which crowns the very
+summit of the pass.
+
+
+III
+
+"At this monastery I was to spend the night. The good monks entertain
+all travellers, and in summer-time their hospitalities are lavishly
+exercised. But in winter, wanderers are few, and these holy men are left
+almost undisturbed in their meditative solitudes. My mule paused upon a
+rocky plateau before the door of the narrow grey building. The guide
+struck upon the heavy wood. After a while we were admitted by a robed
+figure, who greeted us kindly and made us welcome. Within, the place was
+bare and poor enough, but scrupulously clean. I was led through long,
+broad, and bitterly cold corridors to a big chamber in which I was to
+pass the night. Here were ranged in a row four large beds with white
+curtains. I occupied one bed, my servant another. The rest were
+untenanted. The walls were lined with light wood. The wooden floor was
+uncarpeted. I threw open the narrow window. Dimly I could see a mountain
+of rocks, on which snow lay in patches, towering up into the clouds in
+front of me. And to the left there was a glimmer of water. On the
+morrow, by that water, I should ride down into the land of flowers to
+which I was bound. Till then I would allow my imagination to luxuriate
+in the bleak romance of this wild home of prayer. The pathos of the
+night, shivering in the snow, and of this brotherhood of aspiring souls,
+detached from the excitement of the world for ever, seeking restlessly
+their final salvation day by day, night by night, in clouds of mountain
+vapour and sanctified incense, entered into my soul. And I thought of
+that imagined companion of mine. If he were with me now, surely he would
+feel that he had led me to his home at length. Surely he would secretly
+long to remain here.
+
+"I smiled, as I said to myself--'Monk, to-morrow, if, indeed, you are
+fated to be my eternal attendant, you must come with me from this cold
+station of the cross down into the sunshine, where the blood of men is
+hot, where passions sing among the vineyards, where the battle is not of
+souls but of flowers. To-morrow you must come with me. But to-night be
+at peace!'
+
+"And I smiled to myself again as I fancied that my visionary companion
+was glad.
+
+"Then I went down into the refectory.
+
+"That night, before I retired to my room of the four beds, I asked if I
+might go into the chapel of the monastery. My request was granted. I
+shall never forget the curious sensation which overtook me as my guide
+led me down some steps past a dim, little, old, painted window set in
+the wall, to the chapel. That there should be a church here, that the
+deep tones of an organ should ever sound among these rocks and clouds,
+that the Host should be elevated and the censer swung, and litanies and
+masses be chanted amid these everlasting snows, all this was wonderful
+and quickening to me. When we reached the chapel, I begged my kind guide
+to leave me for a while. I longed to meditate alone. He left me, and
+instinctively I sank down upon my knees.
+
+"I could just hear the keening of the wind outside. A dim light
+glimmered near the altar, and in one of the oaken stalls I saw a bent
+form praying. I knelt a long time. I did not pray. At first I scarcely
+thought definitely. Only, I received into my heart the strange,
+indelible impression of this wonderful place; and, as I knelt, my eyes
+were ever upon that dark praying figure near to me. By degrees I
+imagined that a wave of sympathy flowed from it to me, that in this
+monk's devotions my name was not forgotten.
+
+"'What absurd tricks our imaginations can play us!' you will say.
+
+"I grew to believe that he prayed for me, there, under the dim light
+from the tall tapers.
+
+"What blessing did he ask on me? I could not tell; but I longed that his
+prayer might be granted.
+
+"And then, Bernard, at last he rose. He lifted his face from his hands
+and stood up. Something in his figure seemed so strangely familiar to
+me, so strangely that, on a sudden, I longed, I craved to see his face.
+
+"He seemed about to retreat through a side door near to the altar; then
+he paused, appeared to hesitate, then came down the chapel towards me.
+As he drew near to me--I scarcely knew why--but I hid my face deep in my
+hands, with a dreadful sense of overwhelming guilt which dyed my cheeks
+with blood. I shrank--I cowered. I trembled and was afraid. Then I felt
+a gentle touch on my shoulder. I looked up into the face of the monk.
+
+"Bernard, it was the face of my invisible companion--it was my own
+face.
+
+"The monk looked down into my eyes searchingly. He recoiled.
+
+"'_Mon demon!_' he whispered in French. '_Mon demon!_'
+
+"For a moment he stood still, like one appalled. Then he turned and
+abruptly quitted the chapel.
+
+"I started up to follow him, but something held me back. I let him go,
+and I listened to hear if his tread sounded upon the chapel floor as a
+human footstep, if his robe rustled as he went.
+
+"Yes. Then he was, indeed, a living man, and it was a human voice which
+had reached my ears, not a voice of imagination. He was a living man,
+this double of my body, this antagonist of my soul, this being who
+called me demon, who fled from me, who, doubtless, hated me. He was a
+living man.
+
+"I could not sleep that night. This encounter troubled me. I felt that
+it had a meaning for me which I must discover, that it was not chance
+which had led me to take this cold road to the sunshine. Something had
+bound me with an invisible thread, and led me up here into the clouds,
+where already I--or the likeness of me--dwelt, perhaps had been dwelling
+for many years. I had looked upon my living wraith, and my living wraith
+had called me demon.
+
+"How could I sleep?
+
+"Very early I got up. The dawn was bitterly cold, but the snow had
+ceased, though a coating of ice covered the little lake. How delicate
+was the dawn here! The gathering, growing light fell upon the rocks,
+upon the snow, upon the ice of the lake, upon the slate walls of the
+monastery. And upon each it lay with a pretty purity, a thin refinement,
+an austerity such as I had never seen before. So, even Nature, it
+seemed, was purged by the continual prayers of these holy men. She, too,
+like men, has her lusts, and her hot passions, and her wrath of warfare.
+She, too, like men, can be edified and tended into grace. Nature among
+these heights was a virgin, not a wanton, a fit companion for those who
+are dedicated to virginity.
+
+"I dressed by the window, and went out to see the entrance of the
+morning. There was nobody about. I had to find my own way. But when I
+had gained the refectory, I saw a monk standing by the door.
+
+"It was my wraith waiting for me.
+
+"Silently he went before me to the great door of the building. He opened
+it, and we stepped out upon the rocky plateau on which the snow lay
+thickly. He closed the door behind us, and motioned me to attend him
+among the rocks till we were out of sight of the monastery. Then he
+stopped, and we faced one another, still without a word, the grey light
+of the wintry dawn clothing us so wearily, so plaintively.
+
+"We gazed at each other, dark face to dark face, brown eyes to brown
+eyes. The monk's pale hands, my hands, were clenched. The monk's strong
+lips, my lips, were set. The two souls looked upon each other, there, in
+the dawn.
+
+"And then at last he spoke in French, and with the beautiful voice I
+knew.
+
+"'Whence have you come?' he said.
+
+"'From England, father.'
+
+"'From England? Then you live! you live. You are a man, as I am! And I
+have believed you to be a spirit, some strange spirit of myself, lost to
+my control, interrupting my prayers with your cries, interrupting my
+sleep with your desires. You are a man like myself?'
+
+"He stretched out his hand and touched mine.
+
+"'Yes; it is indeed so,' he murmured.
+
+"'And you,' I said in my turn, 'are no spirit. Yet, I, too, believed you
+to be a wraith of myself, interrupting my sins with your sorrow,
+interrupting my desires with your prayers. I have seen you. I have
+imagined you. And now I find you live. What does it mean? For we are as
+one and yet not as one.'
+
+"'We are as two halves of a strangely-mingled whole,' he answered. 'Do
+you know what you have done to me?'
+
+"'No, father.'
+
+"'Listen,' he said. 'When a boy I dedicated myself to God. Early, early
+I dedicated myself, so that I might never know sin. For I had heard
+that the charm of sin is so great and so terrible that, once it is
+known, once it is felt, it can never be forgotten. And so it can make
+the holiest life hideous with its memories. It can intrude into the very
+sanctuary like a ghost, and murmur its music with the midnight mass.
+Even at the elevation of the Host will it be present, and stir the heart
+of the officiator to longing so keen that it is like the Agony of the
+Garden, the Agony of Christ. There are monks here who weep because they
+dare not sin, who rage secretly like beasts--because they will not sin.'
+
+"He paused. The grey light grew over the mountains.
+
+"'Knowing this, I resolved that I would never know sin, lest I, too,
+should suffer so horribly. I threw myself at once into the arms of God.
+Yet I have suffered--how I have suffered!'
+
+"His face was contorted, and his lips worked. I stood as if under a
+spell, my eyes upon his face. I had only the desire to hear him. He went
+on, speaking now in a voice roughened by emotion:
+
+"'For I became like these monks. You'--and he pointed at me with
+outstretched fingers--'you, my wraith, made in my very likeness, were
+surely born when I was born, to torment me. For, while I have prayed, I
+have been conscious of your neglect of prayer as if it were my own. When
+I have believed, I have been conscious of your unbelief as if it were
+my own. Whatever I have feebly tried to do for God, has been marred and
+defaced by all that you have left undone. I have wrestled with you; I
+have tried to hold you back; I have tried to lead you with me where I
+want to go, where I must go. All these years I have tried, all these
+years I have striven. But it has seemed as if God did not choose it.
+When you have been sinning, I have been agonising. I have lain upon the
+floor of my cell in the night, and I have torn at my evil heart.
+For--sometimes--I have longed--how I have longed!--to sin your sin.'
+
+"He crossed himself. Sudden tears sprang into his eyes.
+
+"'I have called you my demon,' he cried. 'But you are my cross. Oh,
+brother, will you not be my crown?'
+
+"His eyes, shadowed with tears, gazed down into mine. Bernard, in that
+moment, I understood all--my depression, my unreasoning despair, the
+fancied hatred of others, even my few good impulses, all came from him,
+from this living holy wraith of my evil self.
+
+"'Will you not be my crown?' he said.
+
+"Bernard, there, in the snow, I fell at his feet. I confessed to him. I
+received his absolution.
+
+"And, as the light of the dawn grew strong upon the mountains, he, my
+other self, my wraith, blessed me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a long silence between us. Then I said:--
+
+"And now?"
+
+"And now you know why I have changed. That day, as I went down into the
+land of the sunshine, I made a vow."
+
+"A vow?"
+
+"Yes; to be his crown, not his cross. I soon returned to England. At
+first I was happy, and then one day my old evil nature came upon me like
+a giant. I fell again into sin, and, even as I sinned, I saw his face
+looking into mine, Bernard, pale, pale to the lips, and with eyes--such
+sad eyes of reproach! Then I thought I was not fit to live, and I tried
+to kill myself. They saved me, and brought me here."
+
+"Yes; and now, Hubert?"
+
+"Now," he said, "I am so happy. God surely placed me here where I cannot
+sin. The days pass and the nights, and they are stainless. And he--he
+comes by night and blesses me. I live for him now, and see always the
+grey walls of his monastery, his face which shall, at last, be
+completely mine."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Good-bye," the doctor said to me as I got into the carriage to drive
+back to the station. "Yes, he is perfectly happy, happier in his mania,
+I believe, than you or I in our sanity."
+
+I drove away from that huge home of madness, set in the midst of lovely
+gardens in a smiling landscape, and I pondered those last words of the
+doctor's:--
+
+"You and I--in our sanity."
+
+And, thinking of the peace that lay on Hubert's face, I compared the
+so-called mad of the world with the so-called sane--and wondered.
+
+
+
+
+THE MAN WHO INTERVENED
+
+
+I
+
+The atmosphere of the room in which Sergius Blake was sitting seemed to
+him strange and cold. As he looked round it, he could imagine that a
+light mist invaded it stealthily, like miasma rising from some sinister
+marsh. There was surely a cloud about the electric light that gleamed in
+the ceiling, a cloud sweeping in feathery, white flakes across the faces
+of the pictures upon the wall. Even the familiar furniture seemed to
+loom out faintly, with a gaunt and grotesque aspect, from shadows less
+real, yet more fearful, than any living form could be.
+
+Sergius stared round him slowly, pressing his strong lips together. When
+he concentrated his gaze upon any one thing--a table, a sofa, a
+chair--the cloud faded, and the object stood out clearly before his
+eyes. Yet always the rest of the room seemed to lie in mist and in
+shadows. He knew that this dim atmosphere did not really exist, that it
+was projected by his mind. Yet it troubled him, and added a dull horror
+to his thoughts, which moved again and again, in persistent promenade,
+round one idea.
+
+The hour was seven o'clock of an autumn night. Darkness lay over
+London, and rain made a furtive music on roofs and pavements. Sergius
+Blake listened to the drops upon the panes of his windows. They seemed
+to beckon him forth, to tell him that it was time to exchange thought
+for action. He had come to a definite and tremendous resolution. He must
+now carry it out.
+
+He got up slowly from his chair, and with the movement the mist seemed
+to gather itself together in the room and to disappear. It passed away,
+evaporating among the pictures and ornaments, the prayer-rugs and
+divans. A clearness and an insight came to Sergius. He stood still by
+the piano, on which he rested one hand lightly, and listened. The
+rain-drops pattered close by. Beyond them rose the dull music of the
+evening traffic of New Bond Street, in which thoroughfare he lived. As
+he stood thus at attention, his young and handsome face seemed carved in
+stone. His lips were set in a hard and straight line. His dark-grey eyes
+stared, like eyes in a photograph. The muscles of his long-fingered
+hands were tense and knotted. He was in evening dress, and had been
+engaged to dine in Curzon Street; but he had written a hasty note to say
+he was ill and could not come. Another appointment claimed him. He had
+made it for himself.
+
+Presently, lifting his hand from the piano, he took up a small leather
+case from a table that stood near, opened it, and drew out a revolver.
+He examined it carefully. Two chambers were loaded. They would be
+enough. He put on his long overcoat, and slipped the revolver into his
+left breast pocket. His heart could beat against it there.
+
+Each time his heart pulsed, Sergius seemed to hear the silence of
+another heart.
+
+And now, though his mind was quite clear, and the mists and shadows had
+slunk away, his familiar room looked very peculiar to him. The very
+chair in which he generally sat wore the aspect of a stranger. Was the
+wall paper really blue? Sergius went close up to it and examined it
+narrowly, and then he drew back and laughed softly, like a child. In the
+sound of his laugh irresponsibility chimed. "What is the cab fare to
+Phillimore Place, Kensington?" he thought, searching in his waistcoat
+pocket. "Half a crown?" He put the coin carefully in the ticket pocket
+of his overcoat, buttoned the coat up slowly, took his hat and stick,
+and drew on a pair of lavender gloves. Just then a new thought seemed to
+strike him and he glanced down at his hands.
+
+"Lavender gloves for such a deed!" he murmured. For a moment he paused
+irresolute, even partially unbuttoned them. But then he smiled and shook
+his head. In some way the gloves would not be wholly inappropriate.
+Sergius cast one final glance round the room.
+
+"When I stand here again," he said aloud, "I shall be a criminal--a
+criminal!"
+
+He repeated the last word, as if trying thoroughly to realise its
+meaning.
+
+Then he opened the door swiftly and went out on to the staircase.
+
+Just as he was putting a hasty foot upon the first stair, a man out in
+the street touched his electric bell. Its thin tingling cry made Sergius
+start and hesitate. In the semi-twilight he waited, his hands deep in
+his pockets, his silk hat tilted slightly over his eyes. The porter
+tramped along the passage below. The hall door opened, and a deep and
+strong voice asked, rather anxiously and breathlessly:--
+
+"Is Mr. Blake at home?"
+
+"I rather think he's gone out, sir."
+
+"No--surely--how long ago?"
+
+"I don't know, sir. He may be in. I'll see."
+
+"Do--do--quickly. If he's in, say I must see him--Mr Endover. But you
+know my name."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+The porter, mounting the stone staircase, suddenly came upon Sergius
+standing there like a stone figure.
+
+"Lord, sir!" he ejaculated. "You give me a start!" His voice was loud
+from astonishment.
+
+"Hush!" Sergius whispered. "Go down at once and say that I've gone out!"
+
+The man turned to obey, but Anthony Endover was half-way up the stairs.
+
+"It's all right," he exclaimed, as he met the porter.
+
+He had passed him in an instant and arrived at the place where Sergius
+was standing.
+
+"Sergius," he cried, and there was a great music of relief in his voice.
+"Hulloa! Now you're not going out."
+
+"Yes, I am, Anthony."
+
+"But I want to talk to you tremendously. Where are you going?"
+
+"To dine with the Venables in Curzon Street."
+
+"I met young Venables just now, and he said you'd written that you were
+ill and couldn't come. He asked me to fill your place."
+
+Sergius muttered a "Damn!" under his breath.
+
+"Well, come in for a minute," he said, attempting no excuse.
+
+He turned round slowly and re-entered his flat, followed by Endover.
+
+
+II
+
+For some years Endover had been Sergius Blake's close friend. They had
+left Eton at the same time; had been at Oxford together. Their intimacy,
+born in the playing fields, grew out of its cricket and football stage
+as their minds developed, and the world of thought opened like a holy
+of holies--beyond the world of action. They both passed behind the veil,
+but Anthony went farther than Sergius. Yet this slight separation did
+not lead to alienation, but merely caused the admiration of Sergius for
+his friend to be mingled with respect. He looked up to Anthony.
+Recognising that his friend's mind was more thoughtful than his own,
+while his passions were far stronger than Anthony's, he grew to lean
+upon Anthony, to claim his advice sometimes, to follow it often. Anthony
+was his mentor, and thought he knew instinctively all the workings of
+Sergius' mind and all the possibilities of his nature. The mother of
+Sergius was a Russian and a great heiress. Soon after he left Oxford,
+she died. His father had been killed by an accident when he was a child.
+So he was rich, free, young, in London, with no one to look after him,
+until Anthony Endover, who had meanwhile taken orders, was attached as
+fourth--or fifth--curate to a smart West End church, and came to live in
+lodgings in George Street, Hanover Square.
+
+Then, as Sergius laughingly said, he had a father confessor on the
+premises. Yet to-night he had bidden his porter to tell a lie in order
+to keep his father confessor out. The lie had been vain. Sergius led the
+way morosely into his drawing-room, and turned on the light. Anthony
+walked up to the fire, and stretched his tall athletic figure in its
+long ebon coat. His firm throat rose out of a jam-pot collar, but his
+thin, strongly-marked face rather suggested an intellectual Hercules
+than a Mayfair parson, and neither his voice nor his manner was tinged
+with what so many people consider the true clericalism.
+
+For all that he was a splendid curate, as his rector very well knew.
+
+Now he stood by the fire for a minute in silence, while Sergius moved
+uneasily about the room. Presently Anthony turned round.
+
+"It's beastly wet," he said in a melodious ringing voice. "The black dog
+is on me to-night, Sergius."
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"You don't want to go out, really," Anthony continued, looking narrowly
+at his friend's curiously rigid face.
+
+"Yes, I do."
+
+"Not to Curzon Street. They've filled up your place. I told Venables to
+ask Hugh Graham. I knew he was disengaged to-night. Besides--you're
+seedy."
+
+Sergius frowned.
+
+"I'm all right again now," he said coldly, "and I particularly wished to
+go. You needn't have been so deuced anxious to make the number right."
+
+"Well, it's done now. And I can't say I'm sorry, because I want to have
+a talk with you. I say, Serge, take off those lavender gloves, pull off
+your coat, let's send out for some dinner, and have a comfortable
+evening together in here. I've had a hard day's work, and I want a
+rest."
+
+"I must go out presently."
+
+"After dinner then."
+
+"Before ten o'clock."
+
+"Say eleven."
+
+"No--that's too late."
+
+A violent, though fleeting expression of anxiety crossed Endover's face.
+Then, with a smile, he said:--
+
+"All right. Shall I ring the bell and order some dinner to be sent in
+from Galton's?"
+
+"If you like. I'm not hungry."
+
+"I am."
+
+Anthony summoned the servant and gave the order. Then he turned again to
+Sergius.
+
+"Here, I'll help you off with your coat," he said.
+
+But Sergius moved away.
+
+"No thanks, I'll do it. There are some cigarettes on the mantelpiece."
+
+Anthony went to get one. As he was taking it, he looked into the
+mirror over the fireplace, and saw Sergius--while removing his
+overcoat--transfer something from it to the left breast pocket of his
+evening coat.
+
+He wanted still to feel his heart beat against that tiny weapon, still
+to hear--with each pulse of his own heart--the silence, not yet alive,
+but so soon to be alive, of that other heart.
+
+And, as Anthony glanced into the mirror, he said to himself, "I was
+right!"
+
+He withdrew his eyes from the glass and lit his cigarette. Sergius
+joined him.
+
+"I'm in the blues to-night," Anthony said, puffing at his cigarette.
+
+"Are you?"
+
+"Yes--been down in the East End. The misery there is ghastly."
+
+"It's just as bad in the West End, only different in kind. You're
+smoking your cigarette all down one side."
+
+Anthony took it out of his mouth and threw it into the grate. He lit two
+or three matches, but held them so badly that they went out before he
+could ignite another cigarette. At last, inwardly cursing his nerves
+that made his hasty actions belie the determined calm of his face, he
+dropped the cigarette.
+
+"I don't think I'll smoke before dinner," he said. "Ah, here it is. And
+wine--champagne--that's good for you!"
+
+"I shan't drink it. I hate to drink alone."
+
+"You shan't drink alone then."
+
+"What d'you mean?"
+
+"I'll drink with you."
+
+"But you're a teetotaller."
+
+"I don't care to-night."
+
+Anthony spoke briefly and firmly. Sergius was amazed.
+
+"What!" he said. "You're going to break your vow? You a parson!"
+
+"Sometimes salvation lies in the breaking of a vow," Anthony answered as
+they sat down. "Have you never registered a silent vow?"
+
+Sergius looked at him hard in the eyes.
+
+"Yes," he said; and in his voice there was the hint of a thrilling note.
+"But I shan't--I shouldn't break it."
+
+"I've known a soul saved alive by the breaking of a vow," Anthony
+answered. "Give me some champagne."
+
+Sergius--wondering, as much as the condition of his mind, possessed by
+one idea, would allow--filled his friend's glass. Anthony began to eat,
+with a well-assumed hunger. Sergius scarcely touched food, but drank a
+good deal of wine. The hands of the big oaken-cased clock that stood in
+a far corner of the room crawled slowly upon their round, recurring
+tour. Anthony's eyes were often upon them, then moved with a swift
+directness that was akin to passion to the face of Sergius, which was
+always strangely rigid, like the painted face of a mask.
+
+"I sat by a woman to-day," he said presently, "sat by her in an attic
+that looked on to a narrow street full of rain, and watched her die."
+
+"This morning?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And now she's been out of the world seven or eight hours. Lucky woman!"
+
+"Ah, Sergius, but the mischief, the horror of it was that she wasn't
+ready to go, not a bit ready."
+
+Sergius suddenly smiled, a straight, glaring smile, over the sparkling
+champagne that he was lifting to his lips.
+
+"Yes; it's devilish bad for a woman or a--man to be shot into another
+world before they're prepared," he said. "It must be--devilish bad."
+
+"And how can we know that any one is thoroughly prepared?"
+
+Sergius' smile developed into a short laugh.
+
+"It's easier to be certain who isn't than who is," he said.
+
+The eyes of Anthony fled to the clock face mechanically and returned.
+
+"Death terrified me to-day, Sergius," he said; "and it struck me that
+the most awful power that God has given to man is the power of setting
+death--like a dog--at another man."
+
+Sergius swallowed all the wine in his glass at a gulp. He was no longer
+smiling. His hand went up to his left side.
+
+"It may be awful," he rejoined; "but it's grand. By Heaven! it's
+magnificent."
+
+He got up, as if excited, and moved about the room, while Anthony went
+on pretending to eat. After a minute or two Sergius sat down again.
+
+"Power of any kind is a grand thing," he said.
+
+"Only power for good."
+
+"You're bound to say that; you're a parson."
+
+"I only say what I really feel; you know that, Serge."
+
+"Ah, you don't understand."
+
+Anthony looked at him with a sudden, strong significance.
+
+"Part of a parson's profession--the most important part--is to
+understand men who aren't parsons."
+
+"You think you understand men?"
+
+"Some men."
+
+"Me, for instance?"
+
+The question came abruptly, defiantly. Anthony seemed glad to answer it.
+
+"Well, yes, Sergius; I think I do thoroughly understand you. My great
+friendship alone might well make me do that."
+
+The face of Sergius grew a little softer in expression, but he did not
+assent.
+
+"Perhaps it might blind you," he said.
+
+"I don't think so."
+
+"Well, then, now, if you understand me--tell me--"
+
+Sergius broke off suddenly.
+
+"This champagne is awfully good," he said, filling his glass again.
+
+"What were you going to say?" Anthony asked.
+
+"I don't know--nothing."
+
+Anthony tried to conceal his disappointment. Sergius had seemed to be on
+the verge of over-leaping the barrier which lay between them. Once that
+barrier was overleapt, or broken down, Anthony felt that the mission he
+had imposed upon himself would stand a chance of being accomplished,
+that his gnawing anxiety would be laid to rest. But once more Sergius
+diffused around him a strange and cold atmosphere of violent and knowing
+reserve. He went away from the table and sat down close to the fire.
+From there he threw over his shoulder the remark:--
+
+"No man or woman ever understands another--really."
+
+
+III
+
+Anthony did not reply for a moment and Sergius continued:--
+
+"You, for instance, could never guess what I should do in certain
+circumstances."
+
+"Such as--"
+
+"Oh, in a thousand things."
+
+"I should have a shrewd idea."
+
+"No."
+
+Anthony didn't contradict him, but got up from the dinner-table and
+joined him by the fire, glass in hand.
+
+"I might not let you know how much I guessed, how much I knew."
+
+Sergius laughed.
+
+"Oh, ignorance always surrounds itself with mystery," he said.
+
+"Knowledge need not go naked."
+
+Again the eyes of the two friends met in the firelight, and over the
+face of Sergius there ran a new expression. There was an awakening of
+wonder in it, but no uneasiness. Anxiety was far away from him that
+night. When passion has gripped a man, passion strong enough, resolute
+enough, to over-ride all the prejudices of civilisation, all the
+promptings of the coward within us, whose voice, whining, we name
+prudence, the semi-comprehension, the criticism of another man cannot
+move him. Sergius wondered for an instant whether Anthony suspected
+against what his heart was beating. That was all.
+
+While he wondered, the clock chimed the half hour after nine. He heard
+it.
+
+"I shall have to go very soon," he said.
+
+"You can't. Just listen to the rain."
+
+"Rain! What's that got to do with it?"
+
+Sergius spoke with a sudden unutterable contempt.
+
+"Ring for another bottle of champagne," Anthony replied. "This one is
+empty."
+
+"Well--for a parson and a teetotaller, I must say!"
+
+Sergius rang the bell. A second bottle was opened. The servant went out
+of the room. As he closed the door, the wind sighed harshly against the
+window panes, driving the rain before it.
+
+"Rough at sea to-night," Anthony said.
+
+The remark was an obvious one; but, as spoken, it sounded oddly furtive,
+and full of hidden meaning. Sergius evidently found it so, for he said:
+
+"Why, whom d'you know that's going to sea to-night?"
+
+Anthony was startled by the quick question, and replied almost
+nervously:--
+
+"Nobody in particular--why should I?"
+
+"I don't know why, but I think you do."
+
+"People one knows cross the channel every night almost."
+
+"Of course," Sergius said indifferently.
+
+He glanced towards the clock and again mechanically his hand went up,
+for a second, to his left breast. Anthony leaned forward in his chair
+quickly, and broke into speech. He had seen the stare at the clock-face,
+the gesture.
+
+"It's strange," he said, "how people go out of our lives, how friends
+go, and enemies!"
+
+"Enemies!"
+
+"Yes. I sometimes wonder which exit is the sadder. When a friend
+goes--with him goes, perhaps for ever, the chance of saying 'I am your
+friend.' When an enemy goes--"
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"With him goes, perhaps for ever, too, the chance of saying, 'I am not
+your enemy.'"
+
+"Pshaw! Parson's talk, Anthony."
+
+"No, Sergius, other men forgive besides parsons; and other men, and
+parsons too, pass by their chances of forgiving."
+
+"You're a whole Englishman, I'm only half an Englishman. There's
+something untamed in my blood, and I say--damn forgiveness!"
+
+"And yet you've forgiven."
+
+"Whom?"
+
+"Olga Mayne."
+
+The face of Sergius did not change at the sound of this name, unless,
+perhaps, to a more fixed calm, a more still and pale coldness.
+
+"Olga is punished," he said. "She is ruined."
+
+"Her ruin may be repaired."
+
+Sergius smiled quietly.
+
+"You think so?"
+
+"Yes. Tell me, Sergius"--Anthony spoke with a strong earnestness, a
+strong excitement that he strove to conceal and hold in check--"you
+loved her?"
+
+"Yes, I loved her--certainly."
+
+"You will always love her?"
+
+"Since I'm not changeable, I daresay I shall."
+
+Anthony's thin, eager face brightened. A glow of warmth burned in his
+eyes and on his cheeks.
+
+"Then you would wish her ruin repaired."
+
+"Should I?"
+
+"If you love her, you must."
+
+"How could it be repaired?"
+
+"By her marriage with--Vernon."
+
+Anthony's strong voice quivered before he pronounced the last word, and
+his eyes were alight with fervent anxiety. He was looking at Sergius
+like a man on the watch for a tremendous outbreak of emotion. The
+champagne he had drunk--a new experience for him since he had taken
+orders--put a sort of wild finishing touch to the intensity of the
+feelings, under the impulse of which he had forced himself upon Sergius
+to-night. He supposed that his inward excitement must be more than
+matched by the so different inward excitement of his friend. But he--who
+thought he understood!--had no true conception of the region of cold,
+frosty fury in which Sergius was living, like a being apart from all
+other men, ostracised by the immensity and peculiarity of his own power
+of emotion. Therefore he was astonished when Sergius, with undiminished
+quietude, replied:
+
+"Oh, with Vernon, that charming man of fashion, whose very soul, they
+say, always wears lavender gloves? You think that would be a good
+thing?"
+
+"Good! I don't say that. I say--as the world is now--the only thing. He
+is the author of her fall. He should be her husband."
+
+"And I?"
+
+Anthony stretched out his hand to grasp his friend's hand, but Sergius
+suddenly took up his champagne glass, and avoided the demonstration of
+sympathy.
+
+"You can be nothing to her now, Serge," Anthony said, and his voice
+quivered with sympathy.
+
+"You think so? I might be."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Oh, not her husband, not her lover, not her friend."
+
+"What then?"
+
+Sergius avoided answering.
+
+"You would have her settle down with Vernon in Phillimore Place?" he
+said. "Play the wife to his noble husband? Well, I know there's been
+some idea of that, as I told you yesterday."
+
+The clock chimed ten. Although Sergius seemed so calm, so
+self-possessed, Anthony observed that now he paid no heed to the little,
+devilish note of time. This new subject of conversation had been
+Anthony's weapon. Desperately he had used it, and not, it seemed,
+altogether in vain.
+
+"Yes; as you told me yesterday."
+
+"And it seems good to you?"
+
+"It seems to me the only thing possible now."
+
+"There are generally more possibilities than one in any given event, I
+fancy."
+
+Again Anthony was surprised at the words of Sergius, who seemed to grow
+calmer as he grew more excited, who seemed, to-night, strangely
+powerful, not simply in temper, but even in intellect.
+
+"For a woman there is sometimes only one possibility if she is to be
+saved from ignominy, Serge."
+
+"So you think that Olga Mayne must become the wife of Vernon, who is
+a--"
+
+"Coward. Yes."
+
+At the word coward, Sergius seemed startled out of his hard calm. He
+looked swiftly and searchingly at Anthony.
+
+"Why do you say coward?" he asked sharply. "I was not going to use that
+word."
+
+Anthony was obviously disconcerted.
+
+"It came to me," he said hurriedly.
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Any man that brings a girl to the dust is a coward."
+
+"Ah--that's not what you meant," Sergius said.
+
+Anthony stole a glance at the clock. The hand crawled slowly over the
+quarter of an hour past ten.
+
+"No, it was not," he said slowly.
+
+
+IV
+
+Sergius got up from his chair and stood by the fire. He was obviously
+becoming engrossed by the conversation. Anthony could at least notice
+this with thankfulness.
+
+"Anthony, I see you've got a fresh knowledge of Vernon since I was with
+you yesterday," Sergius continued; "some new knowledge of his nature."
+
+"Perhaps I have."
+
+"How did you get it?"
+
+"Does that matter?"
+
+"You have heard of something about him?"
+
+"No."
+
+"You have seen him, then; I say, you have seen him?"
+
+Anthony hesitated. He pushed the champagne bottle over towards Sergius.
+It had been placed on a little table near the fireplace.
+
+"No; I don't want to drink. Why on earth don't you answer me, Anthony?"
+
+"I have always felt that Vernon was a coward. His conduct to you shows
+it. He was--or seemed--your friend. He saw you deeply in love with
+this--with Olga. He chose to ruin her after he knew of your love. Who
+but a coward could act in such a way?"
+
+An expression of dark impatience came into the eyes of Sergius.
+
+"You are confusing treachery and cowardice, and you are doing it
+untruthfully. You have seen Vernon."
+
+Anthony thought for a moment, and then said:
+
+"Yes, I have."
+
+"By chance, of course. Why did you speak to him?"
+
+"I thought I would."
+
+Sergius was obviously disturbed and surprised. The deeply emotional, yet
+rigid calm in which he had been enveloped all the evening was broken at
+last. A slight excitement, a distinct surface irritation, woke in him.
+Anthony felt an odd sense of relief as he observed it. For the
+constraint of Sergius had begun to weigh upon him like a heavy burden
+and to move him to an indefinable dread.
+
+"I wonder you didn't cut him," Sergius said. "You're my friend. And
+he's--he's--"
+
+"He's done you a deadly injury. I know that. I am your friend, Serge; I
+would do anything for you."
+
+"Yet you speak to that--devil."
+
+"I spoke to him because I'm your friend."
+
+Sergius sat down again, with a heavy look, the look of a man who has
+been thrashed, and means to return every blow with curious interest.
+
+"You parsons are a riddle to me," he said in a low and dull voice. "You
+and your charity and your loving-kindness, and your turning the cheek to
+the smiter and all the rest of it. And as to your way of showing
+friendship--"
+
+His voice died away in something that was almost a growl, and he stared
+at the carpet. Between it and his eyes once more the mist seemed rising
+stealthily. It began to curl upwards softly about him. As he watched it,
+he heard Anthony say:--
+
+"Sergius, you don't understand how well I understand you."
+
+The big hand of the clock had left the half-hour after ten behind him.
+Anthony breathed more freely. At last he could be more explicit, more
+unreserved. He thought of a train rushing through the night, devouring
+the spaces of land that lie between London and the sea that speaks,
+moaning, to the South of England. He saw a ship glide out from the
+dreary docks. Her lights gleamed. He heard the bell struck and the harsh
+cry of the sailors, and then the dim sigh of a coward who had escaped
+what he had merited. Then he heard Sergius laugh.
+
+"That again, Anthony!"
+
+"Yes. I didn't meet Vernon by chance at all."
+
+"What? You wrote to him, you fixed a meeting?"
+
+"I went to Phillimore Place, to his house."
+
+Sergius said nothing. Strange furrows ploughed themselves in his young
+face, which was growing dusky white. He remained in the attitude of one
+devoted entirely to listening.
+
+"You hear, Sergius?"
+
+"Go on--when?"
+
+"To-day. I decided to go after I met you yesterday night--and after I
+had seen that woman die--unprepared."
+
+"What could she have to do with it?"
+
+"Much. Everything almost."
+
+Anthony got up now, almost sprang up from his chair. His face was
+glowing and working with emotion. There was a choking sensation in his
+throat.
+
+"You don't know what it is," he said hoarsely, "to a man with--with
+strong religious belief to see a human being's soul go out to blackness,
+to punishment--perhaps to punishment that will never end. It's
+abominable. It's unbearable. That woman will haunt me. Her despair will
+be with me always. I could not add to that horror."
+
+His eyes once more sought the clock. Seeing the hour, he turned, with a
+kind of liberating relief, to Sergius.
+
+"I couldn't add to it," he exclaimed, almost fiercely, "so I went to
+Vernon."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Sergius--to warn him."
+
+There was a dead silence. Even the rain was hushed against the window.
+Then Sergius said, in a voice that was cold as the sound of falling
+water in winter:--
+
+"I don't understand."
+
+"Because you won't understand how I have learnt to know you, Sergius, to
+understand you, to read your soul."
+
+"Mine too?"
+
+"Yes; I've felt this awful blow that's come upon you--the loss of Olga,
+her ruin--as if I myself were you. We haven't said much about it till
+yesterday. Then, from the way you spoke, from the way you looked, from
+what you said, even what you wouldn't say, I guessed all that was in
+your heart."
+
+"You guessed all that?"
+
+Sergius was looking directly at Anthony and leaning against the
+mantelpiece, along which he stretched one arm. His fingers closed and
+unclosed, with a mechanical and rhythmical movement, round a china
+figure. The motion looked as if it were made in obedience to some
+fiercely monotonous music.
+
+"Yes, more--I knew it."
+
+Sergius nodded.
+
+"I see," he said.
+
+Anthony touched his arm, almost with an awe-struck gesture.
+
+"I knew then that you--that you intended to kill Vernon. And--God
+forgive me!--at first I was almost glad."
+
+"Well--go on!"
+
+Anthony shivered. The voice of Sergius was so strangely calm and level.
+
+"I--I--" he stammered. "Serge, why do you look at me like that?"
+
+Sergius looked away without a word.
+
+"For I, too, hated Vernon, more for what he had done to you even than
+for what he had done to Olga. But, Sergius, after you had gone, in the
+night, and in the dawn too, I kept on thinking of it over and over. I
+couldn't get away from it--that you were going to commit such an awful
+crime. I never slept. When at last it was morning, I went down to my
+district; there are criminals there, you know."
+
+"I know."
+
+"I looked at them with new eyes, and in their eyes I saw you, always
+you; and then I said to myself could I bear that you should become a
+criminal?"
+
+"You said that?"
+
+The fingers of Sergius closed over the china figure, and did not
+unclose.
+
+"Yes. I almost resolved then to go to Vernon at once and to tell him
+what I suspected--what I really knew."
+
+The clock struck eleven. Anthony heard it; Sergius did not hear it.
+
+"Then I went to sit with that wretched woman. Already I had resolved, as
+I believed, on the course to take. I had no thought for Vernon yet, only
+for you. It seemed to me that I did not care in the least to save him
+from death. I only cared to save you--my friend--from murder. But when
+the woman died I felt differently. My resolve was strengthened, my
+desire was just doubled. I had to save not only you, but also him. He
+was not ready to die."
+
+Anthony trembled with a passion of emotion. Sergius remained always
+perfectly calm, the china figure prisoned in his hand.
+
+"So--so I went to him, Sergius."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I saw him. Almost as I entered he received your letter, saying that you
+forgave him, that you would call to-night after eight o'clock to tell
+him so, and to urge on his marriage with Olga. When he had read the
+letter--I interpreted it to him; and then I found out that he was a
+coward. His terror was abject--despicable; he implored my help; he
+started at every sound."
+
+"To-night he'll sleep quietly, Anthony."
+
+"To-night he has gone. Before morning he will be on the sea."
+
+The sound of the wind came to them again, and Sergius understood why
+Anthony had said: "Rough at sea to-night."
+
+Suddenly Sergius moved; he unclosed his fingers: the ruins of the china
+figure fell from them in a dust of blue and white upon the mantelpiece.
+
+"No--it's too late, Sergius. He went at eleven."
+
+Sergius stood quite still.
+
+"You came here to-night to keep me here till he had gone?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's why you--"
+
+He stopped.
+
+"That's why I came. That's why I broke my pledge. I thought wine--any
+weapon to keep you from this crime. And, Sergius, think. Vernon dead
+could never have restored Olga to the place she has lost. That, too,
+must have driven me to the right course, though I scarcely thought of it
+till now."
+
+Sergius said, as if in reply: "So you have understood me!"
+
+"Yes, Sergius. Friendship is something. Let us thank God, not even that
+he is safe, but that you--you are safe--and that Olga--"
+
+"Hush! Has she gone with him?"
+
+"She will meet him. He has sworn to marry her."
+
+The hand of Sergius moved to his left breast. Anthony's glowing eyes
+were fixed upon him.
+
+"Ah, yes, Sergius," Anthony cried. "Put that cursed, cursed thing down,
+put it away. Now it can never wreck your life and my peace."
+
+Sergius drew out the revolver slowly and carefully. Again the mist rose
+around him. But it was no longer white; it was scarlet.
+
+There was a report. Anthony fell, without a word, a cry.
+
+Then Sergius bent down, and listened to the silence of his friend's
+heart--the long silence of the man who intervened.
+
+
+
+
+AFTER TO-MORROW
+
+
+I
+
+In his gilded cage, above the window-boxes that were full of white
+daisies, the canary chirped with a desultory vivacity. That was the only
+near sound that broke the silence in the drawing-room of No. 100 Mill
+Street, Knightsbridge, in which a man and a woman stood facing one
+another. Away, beyond his twittering voice, sang in the London streets
+the muffled voice of the season. The time was late afternoon, and rays
+of mellow light slanted into the pretty room, and touched its crowd of
+inanimate occupants with a radiance in which the motes danced merrily.
+The china faces of two goblins on the mantelpiece glowed with a
+grotesque meaning, and their yellow smiles seemed to call aloud on
+mirth; but the faces of the man and woman were pale, and their lips
+trembled, and did not smile.
+
+She was tall, dark, and passionate-looking, perhaps twenty-eight or
+thirty. He was a few years older, a man so steadfast in expression that
+silly people, who spring at exaggeration as saints spring at heaven,
+called him stern, and even said he looked forbidding--at balls.
+
+At last the song of the canary was broken upon by a voice. Sir Hugh
+Maine spoke, very quietly. "Why not?" he said.
+
+"I don't think I can tell you," Mrs. Glinn answered, with an obvious
+effort.
+
+"You prefer to refuse me without giving a reason?"
+
+"I have a right to," she said.
+
+"I don't question it. You cannot expect me to say more than that."
+
+He took up his hat, which lay on a chair, and smoothed it mechanically
+with his coat-sleeve.
+
+The action seemed to pierce her like a knife, for she started, and
+half-extended her hand. "Don't!" she exclaimed. "At least, wait one
+moment. So you belong to the second class of men."
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"Men are divided into two classes--those who refuse to be refused, and
+those who accept. But don't be too--too swift in your acceptance. After
+all, a refusal is not exactly a bank-note."
+
+She tried to smile.
+
+"But I am exactly a beggar," he answered, still keeping the hat in his
+hand. "And if you have nothing to give me, I may as well go."
+
+"And spend the rest of your life in sweeping the old crossing?"
+
+"And spend the rest of my life as I can," he said. "That need not
+concern you."
+
+"A woman must be all to a man, or nothing?"
+
+"You must be all to me, or nothing."
+
+She sat down in an arm-chair in that part of the room that was in
+shadow. She always sat instinctively in shadow when she wanted to think.
+
+"Well?" Sir Hugh said. "What are you thinking?"
+
+She glanced up at him. "That you don't look much like a beggar," she
+said.
+
+"It is possible to feel tattered in a frock-coat and patent-leather
+boots," he answered. "Good-bye. I am going back to my crossing." And he
+moved towards the door.
+
+"No, stop!" she exclaimed. "Before you go, tell me one thing."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"Will you ever ask me to marry you again?"
+
+He looked hard into her eyes. "I shall always want to, but I shall never
+do it," he said slowly.
+
+"I am glad you have told me that. We women depend so much on a
+repetition of the offence, when we blame a man for saying he loves us,
+and ask him not to do it again. If you really mean only to propose once,
+I must reconsider my position."
+
+She was laughing, but the tears stood in her eyes.
+
+"Why do you want to make this moment a farcical one?" he asked rather
+bitterly.
+
+"Oh, Hugh!" she answered, "don't you see? Because it is really--really
+so tragic. I only try to do for this moment what we all try to do for
+life."
+
+"Then you love me?" he said, moving a step forward.
+
+"I never denied that," she replied. "I might as well deny that I am a
+woman."
+
+He held out his arms. "Eve--then I shall never go back to the crossing."
+
+But she drew back. "Go--go there till to-morrow! To-morrow afternoon I
+will see you; and if you love me after that--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+She turned away and pressed the bell. "Good-bye," she said. Her voice
+sounded strange to him.
+
+He came nearer, and touched her hand; but she drew it away.
+
+"You may kiss me," she said.
+
+"Eve!"
+
+"After to-morrow."
+
+The footman came in answer to the bell. Mrs Glinn did not turn round. "I
+only rang for you to open the door for Sir Hugh," she said. "Good-bye
+then, Sir Hugh. Come at five."
+
+"I will," he answered, wondering.
+
+When he had gone, Mrs Glinn sat down in a chair and took up a French
+novel. It was by Gyp. She tried to read it, with tears running over her
+cheeks. But at last she laid it down.
+
+"After to-morrow," she murmured. "Ah, why--why does a woman ever love
+twice?" And then she sobbed.
+
+But the canary sang, and the motes danced merrily in the sunbeams. And
+on the table where she had put it down lay "_Le Mariage de Chiffon_."
+
+
+II
+
+That evening, when Sir Hugh Maine came back to his rooms in Jermyn
+Street after dining out, he found a large man sprawling in one of his
+saddle-back chairs, puffing vigorously at a pipe that looked worn with
+long and faithful service. The man took the pipe out of his mouth and
+sprang up.
+
+"Hullo, Maine!" he cried. "D'you recognise the tobacco and me?"
+
+Hugh grasped his hand warmly. "Rather," he said. "Neither is changed. At
+least--h'm--I think you both seem a bit stronger even than usual. Who
+would have thought of seeing you, Manning? I did not know you were in
+Europe."
+
+"I came from Asia. I thought I should like to hear Melba before the end
+of the season. And it was getting sultry out there. So here I am."
+
+"And were those your only reasons?"
+
+"Give me a brandy-and-soda," said the other.
+
+Maine did as he was bid, lit a cigar, and sat down, stretching out his
+long legs. The other man took a pull at his glass, and spoke again.
+
+"I am very fond of music," he said; "and Melba sings very well."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Look here, Maine," Manning broke out suddenly, "you are right--I had
+another reason. Kipling says that those who have heard the East
+a-calling never heed any other voice. He's wrong though. The West has
+been calling me, or, at least, a voice in the West, and I have resisted
+it for a deuce of a time. But at last it became imperative."
+
+"A woman's voice, I suppose?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Tell me what is its _timbre_, if you care to."
+
+"I will. You're an old friend, and I can talk to you. But you tell me
+one thing first: Is a man really a fool to marry a woman with a past?"
+
+"You are going to?"
+
+"I have tried not to. I have been trying not to for three years. Listen!
+When I was travelling in Japan I met her. She was with an American
+called Glinn."
+
+"What?"
+
+"You knew him?"
+
+"No! It's all right. I was surprised, because at the moment I was
+thinking of that very name."
+
+"Oh! Well, she passed as Mrs Glinn; but, somehow, it got out that she
+was something else. The usual story, you know. People fought shy of
+her; but I don't think she cared much. Glinn was devoted to her, and she
+loved him, and was as true to him as any wife could have been. Then the
+tragedy came."
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"Glinn died suddenly in Tokio, of typhoid. She nursed him to the end.
+And when the end came her situation was awful, so lonely and deserted.
+There wasn't a woman in the hotel who would be her friend; so I tried to
+come to the rescue, arranged her affairs, saw about the funeral, and did
+what I could. She was well off; Glinn left her nearly all his money. He
+would have married her, only he had a wife alive somewhere."
+
+"And you fell in love with her, of course?"
+
+"That was the sort of thing. If you knew her you would not wonder at it.
+She was not a bad woman. Glinn had been the only one. She loved him too
+much; that was all. She came to Europe, and lived in Paris for a time,
+keeping the name of Mrs Glinn. I used to see her sometimes, but I never
+said anything. You see, there was her past. In fact, I have been
+fighting against her for three years. I went to India to get cured; but
+it was no good. And now, here I am."
+
+"And she is in Paris?"
+
+"No, in London at present; but I didn't know her address till to-day. I
+think she had her doubts of me, and meant to give me the slip."
+
+"How did you find it out?"
+
+"Quite by chance. I was walking in Mill Street, Knightsbridge, and saw
+her pass in a victoria."
+
+Maine got up suddenly, and went over to the spirit-stand. "In Mill
+Street?" he said.
+
+"Yes. The carriage stopped at No. 100. She went in. A footman came out
+and carried in her rug. _Ergo_, she lives there."
+
+"How hot it is!" said Maine in a hard voice. He threw up one of the
+windows and leaned out. He felt as if he were choking. A little way down
+the street a half-tipsy guardsman was reeling along, singing his own
+private version of "Tommy Atkins." He narrowly avoided a lamp-post by an
+abrupt lurch which took him into the gutter. Maine heard some one laugh.
+It was himself.
+
+"Well, old chap," said Manning, who had come up behind him, "what would
+you advise me to do? I'm in a fix. I'm in love with Eve--that's her
+name; I can't live without her happily, and yet I hate to marry a woman
+with a--well, you know how it is."
+
+Maine drew himself back into the room and faced round. "Does she love
+you?" he asked; and there was a curious change in his manner towards his
+friend.
+
+"I don't know that she does," Manning said, rather uncomfortably. "But
+that would come right. She would marry me, naturally."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Well, I mean the position. Lady Herbert Manning could go where Mrs
+Glinn could not, and all that sort of thing."
+
+"The only question is whether you can bring yourself to ask her?"
+
+"My dear chap, you don't put it too pleasantly."
+
+"It's the fact, though."
+
+Lord Herbert hesitated. Then he said dubiously, "I suppose so."
+
+Maine lit another cigar and sat down again. His face was very white.
+"You're rather conventional, Manning," he said presently.
+
+"Conventional! Why?"
+
+"You think her--this Mrs Glinn--a good woman. Isn't that enough for
+you?"
+
+"But, besides Eve and myself, there is a third person in the situation."
+
+"How on earth did you find out that?" exclaimed Maine.
+
+The other looked surprised. "How did I find out? I don't understand
+you."
+
+Maine recollected himself. He had made the common mistake of fancying
+another might know a thing because he knew it.
+
+"Who is this third person?" he asked.
+
+"Society."
+
+"Ah! I said you were conventional."
+
+"Every sensible man and woman is."
+
+"I don't know that I agree. But the third person does certainly
+complicate the situation. What are you going to do then?"
+
+Lord Herbert put down his pipe. It was not smoked out. "That's what I
+want to know," he answered.
+
+"Of course, there's the one way--of being unconventional. Then, there's
+the way of being conventional but unhappy. Is there any alternative?"
+
+Lord Herbert hesitated obviously, but at length he said: "There is, of
+course; but Mrs Glinn is a curious sort of woman. I don't quite know--"
+
+He paused, looking at his friend. Maine's face was drawn and fierce.
+
+"What's the row?" Lord Herbert asked.
+
+"Nothing; only I shouldn't advise you to try the alternative. That's
+all."
+
+"Maine, what do you mean?"
+
+"Just this," replied the other. "That I know Mrs Glinn, that I agree
+with you about her character--"
+
+"You know her? That's odd!"
+
+"I have known her for a year."
+
+They looked each other in the eyes while a minute passed. Then Lord
+Herbert said slowly, "I understand."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That I have come to the wrong man for advice."
+
+There was a silence, broken only by the ticking of a clock and the
+uneasy movements of Maine's fox-terrier, which was lying before the
+empty grate and dreaming of departed fires.
+
+At last Maine said: "To-day I asked Mrs Glinn to marry me."
+
+The other started perceptibly. "Knowing what I have told you?" he asked.
+
+"Not knowing it."
+
+"What--what did she say?"
+
+"Nothing. I am to see her to-morrow."
+
+Lord Herbert glanced at him furtively. "I suppose you will not go--now?"
+he said.
+
+"Yes, Manning, I shall," Maine answered.
+
+"Well," the other man continued, looking at his watch and yawning, "I
+must be going. It's late. Glad to have seen you, Maine. I am to be found
+at 80 St James's Place. Thanks; yes I will have my coat on. My pipe--oh!
+here it is. Good-night."
+
+The door closed, and Maine was left alone.
+
+"Will she tell me to-morrow, or will she be silent?" he said to himself.
+"That depends on one thing: Has love of truth the largest half of her
+heart, or love of me?"
+
+He sighed--at the conventionality of the world, perhaps.
+
+
+III
+
+"I am not at home to any one except Sir Hugh Maine," Mrs Glinn said to
+the footman. "You understand?"
+
+"Yes, ma'am."
+
+He went out softly and closed the door.
+
+The English summer had gone back upon its steps that afternoon, and
+remembered the duty it owed to its old-time reputation. The canary, a
+puffed-out ball of ragged-looking feathers in its cage, seemed listening
+with a depressed attention to the beat of the cold rain against the
+window. The daisies, in their boxes, dripped and nodded in the wind.
+There was a darkness in the pretty room, and the smile of the china
+goblins was no longer yellow. Like many people who are not made of
+china, they depended upon adventitious circumstances for much of their
+outward show. When they were not gilded there was a good deal of the
+pill apparent in their nature.
+
+Mrs Glinn was trying not to be restless. She was very pale, and her dark
+eyes gleamed with an almost tragic fire; but she sat down firmly on the
+white sofa, and read Gyp, as Carmen may have read her doom in the cards.
+One by one the pages were turned. One by one the epigrams were made the
+property of another mind. But through all the lightness and humour of
+the story there crept like a little snake a sentence that Gyp had not
+written:--
+
+"Can I tell him?"
+
+And no answer ever came to that question. When the door-bell at last
+rang, Mrs Glinn laid down her novel carefully, and mechanically stood
+up. A change of attitude was necessary to her.
+
+Sir Hugh came in, and was followed by tea. They sat down by the tiny
+table, and discussed French literature. Flaubert and Daudet go as well
+with tea as Fielding and Smollett go with supper.
+
+But, when the cups were put down, Maine drove the French authors in a
+pack out of the conversation.
+
+"I did not come here to say what I can say to every woman I meet who
+understands French," he remarked.
+
+And then Mrs Glinn was fully face to face with her particular guardian
+devil.
+
+"No?" she said.
+
+She did not try to postpone the moment she dreaded. For she had a strong
+man to deal with, and, being a strong woman at heart, she generally held
+out her hand to the inevitable.
+
+"You have been thinking?" Maine went on.
+
+"Yes. What a sad occupation that is sometimes--like knitting, or
+listening to church-bells at night!"
+
+"Eve, let us be serious."
+
+"God knows I am," she answered. "But modern gravity is dressed in
+flippancy. No feeling must go quite naked."
+
+"Don't talk like that," he said. "As there is a nudity in art that may
+be beautiful, so there is a nudity in expression, in words, that may be
+beautiful. Eve, I have come to hear you tell me something. You know
+that." He glanced into her face with an anxiety that she did not fully
+understand. Then he said: "Tell it me."
+
+"There is--is so much to tell," she said.
+
+"Yes, yes."
+
+"He does not understand," she thought.
+
+He thought, "She does not understand."
+
+"And I am not good at telling stories."
+
+"Then tell me the truth."
+
+She tried to smile, but she was trembling. "Of course. Why should I
+not?" She hesitated, and then added, with a forced attempt at petulance,
+"But there is nothing so awkward as giving people more than they expect.
+Is there?"
+
+He understood her question, despite its apparent inconsequence, and his
+heart quickened its beating: "Give me everything."
+
+"I suppose I should be doing that if I gave you myself," she said
+nervously.
+
+"You know best," he answered; and for a moment she was puzzled by not
+catching the affirmative for which she had angled.
+
+"Do you want me very, very much?" she asked.
+
+"So much that, as I told you yesterday, I could not ask for you twice.
+Don't you understand?"
+
+"Yes. I could not marry a man who had bothered me to be his wife. One
+might as well be scolded into virtue. You want me, then, Hugh, and I
+want you. But--"
+
+Again she stopped, with sentences fluttering, as it seemed, on the very
+edges of her lips. Her heart was at such fearful odds with her
+conscience, that she felt as if he must hear the clashing of the swords.
+And he did hear it. He would fain have cheered on both the combatants.
+Which did he wish should be the conqueror? He hardly knew.
+
+"Yes?" he said.
+
+"It is always so difficult to finish a sentence that begins with 'but,'"
+she began; and for the first time her voice sounded tremulous. "When two
+people want each other very much, there is always something that ought
+to keep them apart--at least, I think so. God must love solitude; it is
+His gift to so many." There were tears in her eyes.
+
+"Why should we keep apart, Eve?"
+
+"Because we should be too happy together, I suppose."
+
+He leaned suddenly forward and took both her hands in his. "How cold you
+are!" he said, startled.
+
+The words seemed to brace her like a sea-breeze.
+
+"Hugh," she said, "I wish to tell you something. There is a 'but' in the
+sentence of my life."
+
+He drew her closer to him, with a strange impulse to be nearer the soul
+that was about to prove itself as noble as he desired. But that very act
+prevented the fulfilment of his wish. The touch of his hands, the
+eagerness of his eyes, gave the victory to her heart. She shut the lips
+that were speaking, and he kissed them. Kisses act as an opiate on a
+woman's conscience. Only when Eve felt his lips on hers did she know her
+own weakness. Sir Hugh having kissed her, waited for the telling of the
+secret. At that moment he might as well have sat down and waited for the
+millennium.
+
+"What is it?" he said at last.
+
+"Nothing," she answered, "nothing." She spoke the word with a hard
+intonation.
+
+Hugh held her close in his arms, with a sort of strange idea that to do
+so would crush his disappointment. She was proving her love by her
+silence. Why, then, did he wish that she should speak? At last she said,
+in a low voice:--
+
+"There is one thing you ought to know. If I marry you, I marry you a
+beggar. I shall lose my fortune. I am not obliged to lose it, but I mean
+to give it up. Don't ask me why."
+
+He had no need to. He waited, but she was silent. So that was all. He
+kissed her again, loosened his arms from about her and stood up.
+
+"I have enough for both," he said.
+
+He did not look at her, and she could not look at him.
+
+"Are you going?" she said.
+
+"Yes; but I will call this evening."
+
+He was at the door, and had half-opened it when he turned back, moved by
+a passionate impulse.
+
+"Eve!" he cried, and his eyes seemed asking her for something.
+
+"Yes?" she said, looking away.
+
+There was a silence. Then he said "Good-bye!" The door closed upon him.
+
+Mrs Glinn stood for a moment where he had left her. In her mind she was
+counting the seconds that must elapse before he could reach the street.
+If she could be untrue to herself till then, she could be untrue to
+herself for ever. Would he walk down the stairs slowly or fast? She
+wanted to be a false woman so much, so very much, that she clenched her
+hands together. The action seemed as if it might help her to keep on
+doing wrong. But suddenly she unclasped her hands, darted across the
+room to the door, and opened it. She listened, and heard Hugh's
+footsteps in the hall. He picked up his umbrella, and unfolded it to be
+ready for the rain. The _frou-frou_ of the silk seemed to stir her to
+action.
+
+"Hugh!" she cried in a broken voice.
+
+He turned in the hall, and looked up.
+
+"Come back," she said.
+
+He came up the stairs three steps at a time.
+
+"Hugh," she said, leaning heavily on the balustrade, and looking away,
+"I have a secret to tell you. I have tried to be wicked to-day, but
+somehow I can't. Listen to the truth."
+
+"I need not," he answered. "I know it already."
+
+Then she looked at him, and drew in her breath: "You know it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How you must love me!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was a ring at the hall door. The footman opened it, held a short
+parley with some one who was invisible, shut the door, and came upstairs
+with a card.
+
+Mrs Glinn took it, and read, "Lord Herbert Manning."
+
+He had decided to be unconventional too late.
+
+
+
+
+A SILENT GUARDIAN
+
+
+I
+
+The door of the long, dreary room, with its mahogany chairs, its
+littered table, its motley crew of pale, silent people, opened
+noiselessly. A dreary, lean footman appeared in the aperture, bowing
+towards a corner where, in a recess near a forlorn, lofty window, sat a
+tall, athletic-looking man of about forty-five years of age, with a
+strong yet refined face, clean shaven, and short, crisp, dark hair. The
+tall man rose immediately, laying down an old number of _Punch_, and
+made his way out, watched rather wolfishly by the other occupants of the
+room. The door closed upon him, and there was a slight rustle and a hiss
+of whispering.
+
+Two well-dressed women leaned to one another, the feathers in their hats
+almost mingling as they murmured: "Not much the matter with him, I
+should fancy."
+
+"He looks as strong as a horse; but modern men are always imagining
+themselves ill. He has lived too much, probably."
+
+They laughed in a suppressed ripple.
+
+At the end of the room near the door, under the big picture of a grave
+man in a frock-coat, holding a double eye-glass tentatively in his right
+hand as if to emphasise an argument--a young girl bent towards her
+father, who said to her in a low voice:
+
+"That man who has just left the room is Brune, the great sculptor."
+
+"Is he ill?" the girl asked.
+
+"It seems so, since he is here."
+
+Then a silence fell again, broken only by the rustle of turned pages and
+the occasional uneasy shifting of feet.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Meanwhile, in a small room across the hall, by a window through which
+the autumn sun streamed with a tepid brightness, Reginald Brune lay on a
+narrow sofa. His coat and waistcoat were thrown open; his chest was
+bared. Gerard Fane, the great discoverer of hidden diseases, raised
+himself from a bent posture, and spoke some words in a clear, even
+voice.
+
+Brune lifted himself half up on his elbow, and began mechanically to
+button the collar of his shirt. His long fingers did not tremble, though
+his face was very pale.
+
+He fastened the collar, arranged his loose tie, and then sat up slowly.
+
+A boy, clanking two shining milk-cans, passed along the pavement,
+whistling a music-hall song. The shrill melody died down the street, and
+Brune listened to it until there was a silence. Then he looked up at
+the man opposite to him, and said, as one dully protesting, without
+feeling, without excitement:--
+
+"But, doctor, I was only married three weeks ago."
+
+Gerard Fane gave a short upward jerk of the head, and said nothing. His
+face was calmly grave. His glittering brown eyes were fastened on his
+patient. His hands were loosely folded together.
+
+Brune repeated, in a sightly raised voice:--
+
+"I was married three weeks ago. It cannot be true."
+
+"I am here to tell the truth," the other replied.
+
+"But it is so--so ironic. To allow me to start a new life--a beautiful
+life--just as the night is coming. Why, it is diabolical; it is not
+just; the cruelty of it is fiendish."
+
+A spot of gleaming red stained each of the speaker's thin cheeks. He
+clenched his hands together, riveting his gaze on the doctor, as he went
+on:--
+
+"Can't you see what I mean? I had no idea--I had not the faintest
+suspicion of what you say. And I have had a very hard struggle. I have
+been poor and quite friendless. I have had to fight, and I have lost
+much of the good in my nature by fighting, as we often do. But at last I
+have won the battle, and I have won more. I have won goodness to give
+me back some of my illusions. I had begun to trust life again. I had--"
+
+He stopped abruptly. Then he said:--
+
+"Doctor, are you married?"
+
+"No," the other answered; and there was a note of pity in his voice.
+
+"Then you can't understand what your verdict means to me. Is it
+irrevocable?"
+
+Gerard Fane hesitated.
+
+"I wish I could hope not; but--"
+
+"But--?"
+
+"It is."
+
+Brune stood up. His face was quite calm now and his voice, when he spoke
+again, was firm and vibrating.
+
+"I have some work that I should wish to finish. How long can you give
+me?"
+
+"Three months."
+
+"One will do if my strength keeps up at all. Good-bye."
+
+There was a thin chink of coins grating one against the other. The
+specialist said:--
+
+"I will call on you to-morrow, between four and five. I have more
+directions to give you. To-day my time is so much taken up. Good-bye."
+
+The door closed.
+
+In the waiting-room, a moment later, Brune was gathering up his coat and
+hat.
+
+The two ladies eyed him curiously as he took them and passed out.
+
+"He does look a little pale, after all," whispered one of them. A
+moment later he was in the street.
+
+From the window of his consulting-room, Gerard Fane watched the tall
+figure striding down the pavement.
+
+"I am sorry that man is going to die," he said to himself.
+
+And then he turned gravely to greet a new patient.
+
+
+II
+
+Gerard Fane's victoria drew up at the iron gate of No. 5 Ilbury Road,
+Kensington, at a quarter past four the following afternoon. A narrow
+strip of garden divided the sculptor's big red house from the road.
+Ornamental ironwork on a brick foundation closed it in. The great
+studio, with its huge windows and its fluted pillars, was built out at
+one end. The failing sunlight glittered on its glass, and the dingy
+sparrows perched upon the roof to catch the parting radiance as the
+twilight fell. The doctor glanced round him and thought, "How hard this
+man must have worked! In London this is a little palace."
+
+"Will you come into the studio, sir, please?" said the footman in answer
+to his summons. "Mr Brune is there at present."
+
+"Surely he cannot be working," thought the doctor, as he followed the
+man down a glass-covered paved passage, and through a high doorway
+across which a heavy curtain fell. "If so, he must possess resolution
+almost more than mortal."
+
+He passed beyond the curtain, and looked round him curiously.
+
+The studio was only dimly lit now, for daylight was fast fading. On a
+great open hearth, with dogs, a log-fire was burning; and beside it, on
+an old-fashioned oaken settle, sat a woman in a loose cream-coloured
+tea-gown. She was half turning round to speak to Reginald Brune, who
+stood a little to her left, clad in a long blouse, fastened round his
+waist with a band. He had evidently recently finished working, for his
+hands still bore evident traces of labour, and in front of him, on a
+raised platform, stood a statue that was not far from completion. The
+doctor's eyes were attracted from the woman by the log-fire, from his
+patient, by the lifeless, white, nude figure that seemed to press
+forward out of the gathering gloom. The sculptor and his wife had not
+heard him announced, apparently, for they continued conversing in low
+tones, and he paused in the doorway, strangely fascinated--he could
+scarcely tell why--by the marble creation of a dying man.
+
+The statue, which was life size, represented the figure of a beautiful,
+grave youth, standing with one foot advanced, as if on the point of
+stepping forward. His muscular arms hung loosely; his head was slightly
+turned aside as in the attitude of one who listens for a repetition of
+some vague sound heard at a distance. His whole pose suggested an alert,
+yet restrained, watchfulness. The triumph of the sculptor lay in the
+extraordinary suggestion of life he had conveyed into the marble. His
+creature lived as many mollusc men never live. Its muscles seemed tense,
+its body quivering with eagerness to accomplish--what? To attack, to
+repel, to protect, to perform some deed demanding manfulness, energy,
+free, fearless strength.
+
+"That marble thing could slay if necessary," thought Gerard Fane, with a
+thrill of the nerves all through him that startled him, and recalled him
+to himself.
+
+He stepped forward to the hearth quietly, and Brune turned and took him
+by the hand.
+
+"I did not hear you," the sculptor said. "The man must have opened the
+door very gently. Sydney, this is Dr Gerard Fane, who is kindly looking
+after me."
+
+The woman by the fire had risen, and stood in the firelight and the
+twilight, which seemed to join hands just where she was. She greeted the
+specialist in a girl's young voice, and he glanced at her with the
+furtive thought, "Does she know yet?"
+
+She looked twenty-two, not more.
+
+Her eyes were dark grey, and her hair was bronze. Her figure was thin
+almost to emaciation; but health glowed in her smooth cheeks, and spoke
+in her swift movements and easy gestures. Her expression was responsive
+and devouringly eager. Life ran in her veins with turbulence, never with
+calm. Her mouth was pathetic and sensitive, but there was an odd
+suggestion of almost boyish humour in her smile.
+
+Before she smiled, Fane thought, "She knows."
+
+Afterwards, "She cannot know."
+
+"Have you a few moments to spare?" Brune asked him. "Will you have tea
+with us?"
+
+Fane looked at Mrs Brune and assented. He felt a strange interest in
+this man and this woman. The tragedy of their situation appealed to him,
+although he lived in a measure by foretelling tragedies. Mrs Brune
+touched an electric bell let into the oak-panelled wall, and her husband
+drew a big chair forward to the hearth.
+
+As he was about to sit down in it, Gerard Fane's eyes were again
+irresistibly drawn towards the statue; and a curious fancy, born,
+doubtless, of the twilight that invents spectres and of the firelight
+that evokes imaginations, came to him, and made him for a moment hold
+his breath.
+
+It seemed to him that the white face menaced him, that the white body
+had a soul, and that the soul cried out against him.
+
+His hand trembled on the back of the chair. Then he laughed to himself
+at the absurd fancy, and sat down.
+
+"Your husband has been working?" he said to Mrs Brune.
+
+"Yes, all the day. I could not tempt him out for even five minutes. But
+then, he has had a holiday, as he says, although it was only a
+fortnight. That was not very long for--for a honeymoon."
+
+As she said the last sentence she blushed a little, and shot a swift,
+half-tender, half-reproachful glance at her husband. But he did not meet
+it; he only looked into the fire, while his brows slightly contracted.
+
+"I think Art owns more than half his soul," the girl said, with the
+flash of a smile. "He only gives to me the fortnights and to Art the
+years."
+
+There was a vague jealousy in her voice; but then the footman brought in
+tea, and she poured it out, talking gaily.
+
+From her conversation, Fane gathered that she had no idea of her
+husband's condition. With a curious and fascinating naturalness she
+spoke of her marriage, of her intentions for the long future.
+
+"If Reginald is really seedy, Dr Fane," she said, "get him well quickly,
+that he may complete his commissions. Because, you know, he has
+promised, when they are finished, to take me to Italy, and to Greece, to
+the country of Phidias, whose mantle has fallen upon my husband."
+
+"Do not force Dr Fane into untruth," said Brune, with an attempt at a
+smile.
+
+"And is that statue a commission?" Fane asked, indicating the marble
+figure, that seemed to watch them and to listen.
+
+"No; that is an imaginative work on which I have long been engaged. I
+call it, 'A Silent Guardian.'"
+
+"It is very beautiful," the doctor said. "What is your idea exactly?
+What is the figure guarding?"
+
+Brune and his wife glanced at one another--he gravely, she with a
+confident smile.
+
+Then he said, "I leave that to the imagination."
+
+Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said slowly, "You have wrought
+it so finely that in this light my nerves tell me it is alive."
+
+Mrs Brune looked triumphant.
+
+"All the world would feel so if they could see it," she said; "but it is
+not to be exhibited. That is our fancy--his and mine. And now I will
+leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him of his ills, Dr Fane,
+won't you?"
+
+She vanished through the door at the end of the studio. The two men
+stood together by the hearth.
+
+"She does not know?" Fane asked.
+
+The other leaned his head upon his hand, which was pressed against the
+oak mantelpiece.
+
+"I am too cowardly to tell her," he said in a choked voice. "You must."
+
+"And when?"
+
+"To-day."
+
+There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional manner, Fane gave
+some directions, and wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into
+the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:--
+
+"Shall I tell her now?" he asked gently.
+
+Brune nodded without speaking. His face looked drawn and contorted as he
+moved towards the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and the effort
+to remain calm put a strain upon him that was terrible.
+
+Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment--alone with the statue whose
+personality, it seemed to him, pervaded the great studio. In its
+attitude there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and blind eyes a
+resolution of intention, that took possession of his soul. He told
+himself that it was lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble;
+that it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no soul to burn
+with impulse or with agony; that its feet could never walk, its hands
+never seize or slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace. Then
+he looked at it again, and he shuddered.
+
+"I am over-working," he said to himself; "my nerves are beginning to
+play me tricks. I must be careful."
+
+And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the marble that could never
+feel to the man and woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his
+relation towards them.
+
+A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy with strangers. To the
+sculptor it was as if Fane held the keys of the gates of life and death
+for him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the consulting-room,
+the doctor had decided, almost of his own volition, that death should
+cut short a life of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it seemed
+as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought about, a tragedy that
+appealed to his imagination with peculiar force. His position towards
+this curiously interesting girl was strange. He had seen her for a
+quarter of an hour only, and now it was his mission to cause her the
+most weary pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The opening of the
+studio door startled him, and his heart, that usually beat so calmly,
+throbbed almost with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, facing him, and looking him full in the eyes
+with a violence of interrogation that was positively startling. "What is
+it you have to tell me? Reginald says you have ordered him to keep
+quiet--that you wish me to help you in--in something. Is he ill? May he
+not finish his commissions?"
+
+"He is ill," said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward frankness that
+surprised himself.
+
+She kept her eyes on his face.
+
+"Very ill?"
+
+"Sit down," the doctor said, taking her hands and gently putting her
+into a chair.
+
+With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women, she heard in those
+two words the whole truth. Her head drooped forward. She put out her
+hands as if to implore Fane's silence.
+
+"Don't speak," she murmured. "Don't say it; I know."
+
+He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue that made a silent third
+in their sad conference. How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy
+listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its expressionless eyes
+met his, and was there not a light in them? He knew there was not, yet
+he caught himself saying mentally:--
+
+"What does he think of this?" and wondering about the workings of a soul
+that did not, could not, exist.
+
+Presently the girl moved slightly, and said:--
+
+"He only knew this for certain yesterday?"
+
+"Only yesterday."
+
+"Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,"--she pointed towards the
+statue--"when he began that."
+
+"I don't understand," Fane said. "What can that marble have to do with
+his health or illness?"
+
+"When we first began to love each other," she said, "he began to work on
+that. It was to be his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He told
+me he would put all his soul into it, and that sometimes he fancied, if
+he died before me, his soul would really enter into that statue and
+watch over and guard me. 'A Silent Guardian' he has always called it.
+He must have known."
+
+"I do not think so," Fane said. "It was impossible he should."
+
+The girl stood up. The tears were running over her face now. She turned
+towards the statue.
+
+"And he will be cold--cold like that!" she cried in a heart-breaking
+voice. "His eyes will be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice
+silent."
+
+She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's arms. He held her a moment;
+and when he laid her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless
+though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon him. He remembered the
+previous day, the doomed man going down the street--his thought as he
+looked from the window of his consulting-room, "I am sorry that man is
+going to die."
+
+Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered, forming the very
+words with his lips, "I am not sorry."
+
+And the statue seemed to bend and to listen.
+
+
+III
+
+Six weeks passed away. Winter was deepening. Through the gloom and fog
+that shrouded London, Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable snow.
+The dying man had finished his work, and a strange peace stole over
+him. Now, when he suffered, when his body shivered and tried to shrink
+away, as if it felt the cold hands of death laid upon it, he looked at
+the completed statue, and found he could still feel joy. There had
+always been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element, so
+fantastic that he had ever striven to conceal it, of romance; and in his
+mind, affected by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew the
+curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from him, entered into his
+creation. As he became feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed
+towered above him in more God-like strength, that light flowed into the
+sightless eyes, that the marble muscles were tense with vigour, that a
+soul was born in the thing which had been soulless. The theory, held by
+so many, of re-incarnation upon earth, took root in his mind, and he
+came to believe that, at the moment of death, he would pass into his
+work and live again, unconscious, it might be, of his former existence.
+He loved the statue as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom
+spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney.
+
+Only, he sometimes said to her, pointing to his work:--
+
+"You will never be alone, unprotected, while he is there."
+
+And she tried to smile through the tears she could not always keep back.
+
+Gerard Fane was often with them. He sunk the specialist in the friend,
+and not a day passed without a visit from him to the great studio, in
+which the sculptor and his wife almost lived.
+
+He was unwearied in his attendance upon the sick man, unwavering in his
+attempts to soothe his sufferings. But, in reality, and almost against
+his will, the doctor numbered each breath his patient drew, noted with a
+furious eagerness each sign of failing vitality, bent his ear to catch
+every softest note in the prolonged _diminuendo_ of this human symphony.
+
+When Fane saw Mrs Brune leaning over her husband, touching the damp brow
+with her cool, soft fingers, or the dry, parched lips with her soft,
+rosy lips, he turned away in a sick fury, and said to himself:--
+
+"He is dying, he is dying. It will soon be over."
+
+For with a desperate love had entered into him a desperate jealousy, and
+even while he ministered to Brune he hated him.
+
+And the statue, with blind eyes, observed the drama enacted by those
+three people, the two men and the woman, till the curtain fell and one
+of the actors made his final exit.
+
+Fane's nerves still played him tricks sometimes. He could not look at
+the statue without a shudder; and while Brune imaginatively read into
+the marble face love and protection, the doctor saw there menace and
+hatred. He came to feel almost jealous of the statue, because Sydney
+loved it and fell in with her husband's fancy that his life was fast
+ebbing into and vitalising the marble limbs, that his soul would watch
+her from the eyes that were now without expression and thought.
+
+When Fane entered the studio, he always involuntarily cast a glance at
+the white figure--at first, a glance of shuddering distaste, then, as he
+acknowledged to himself his love for Sydney, a glance of defiance, of
+challenge.
+
+One evening, after a day of many appointments and much mental stress and
+strain, he drove up to Ilbury Road, was admitted, and shown as usual
+into the studio. He found it empty. Only the statue greeted him silently
+in the soft lamplight, that scarcely accomplished more than the defining
+of the gloom.
+
+"My master is upstairs, sir," said the footman. "I will tell him you are
+here."
+
+In a moment Sydney entered, with a lagging step and pale cheeks. Without
+thinking of the usual polite form of greeting, she said to Fane, "He is
+much worse to-day. There is a change in him, a horrible change. Dr Fane,
+just now when I was talking to him it seemed to me that he was a long
+way off. I caught hold of his hands to reassure myself. I held them. I
+heard him speaking, but it was as if his words came from a distance.
+What does it mean? He is not--he is not--"
+
+She looked the word he could not speak.
+
+Fane made her sit down.
+
+"I will go to him immediately," he said. "I may be able to do
+something."
+
+"Yes, go--do go!" she exclaimed with feverish excitement.
+
+Then suddenly she sprang up, and seizing his hands with hers, she said
+in a piercing voice: "You are a great doctor. Surely--surely you can
+keep this one life for me a little longer."
+
+As they stood, Fane was facing the statue, which was at her back, and
+while she spoke his eyes were drawn from the woman he loved to the
+marble thing he senselessly hated. It struck him that a ghastly change
+had stolen over it. A sudden flicker of absolute life surely infused it,
+quickened it even while she spoke, stole through the limbs one by one,
+welled up to the eyes as light pierces from a depth, flowed through all
+the marble. A pulse beat in the dead, cold heart. A mind rippled into
+the rigid, watching face. There was no absolute movement, and yet there
+was the sense of stir. Fane, absorbed in horror, seemed to watch an act
+of creation, to see life poured from some invisible and unknown source
+into the bodily chamber that had been void and dark.
+
+Motionless he saw the statue dead; motionless he saw the statue live.
+
+He drew his hands from Sydney's. He was too powerfully impressed to
+speak, but she looked up into his face, turned, and followed his eyes.
+
+She, too, observed the change, for her lips parted, and a wild
+amazement shone in her eyes. Then she touched Fane's arm, and whispered,
+rather in awe than in horror, "Go--go to him. See if anything has
+happened. I will stay and watch here."
+
+With a hushed tread Fane left the studio, passed through the hall,
+ascended the stairs to the sculptor's room. Outside the door he
+hesitated for a moment. He was trembling. He heard a clock ticking
+within. It sounded very loud, like a hammer beating in his ears. He
+pushed the door open at length, and entered. Brune's tall figure was
+sitting in an armchair, bowed over a table on which lay an open Art
+magazine.
+
+His head lay hidden on his arms, which were crossed.
+
+Fane raised the face and turned it up towards him.
+
+It was the face of a dead man.
+
+He looked at it, and smiled.
+
+Then he stole down again to the studio, where Sydney was still standing.
+
+"Yes?" she said interrogatively, as he entered.
+
+"He is dead," Fane answered.
+
+She only bowed her head, as if in assent. She stood a moment, then she
+turned her tearless eyes to him, and said:--
+
+"Why could not you save him?"
+
+"Because I am human," Fane answered.
+
+"And we did not say good-bye," she said.
+
+Fane was strung up. Conflicting feelings found a wild playground in his
+soul. His nerves were in a state of abnormal excitement, and something
+seemed to let go in him--the something that holds us back, normally,
+from mad follies. He suddenly caught Sydney's hand, and in a choked
+voice said:--
+
+"He is dead. Think a little of the living."
+
+She looked at him, wondering.
+
+"Think of the living that love you. He neither hates nor loves any more.
+Sydney! Sydney!"
+
+As she understood his meaning she wrung her hand out of his, and said,
+as one trying to clear the road for reason:--
+
+"You love me, and he bought you to keep him alive. Why, then--"
+
+A sick, white change came over her face.
+
+"Sydney! Sydney!" he said.
+
+"Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!"
+
+She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there till the servant hurried
+in.
+
+"Show Dr Fane out," she said. "He will not come here again."
+
+And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest, ready to strike himself for
+his folly, went without a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at
+the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile in its marble eyes?
+
+
+IV
+
+People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself.
+His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient,
+intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that
+went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered
+him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of mind for a
+physician to adopt; and he was even known to pronounce on sufferers
+sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well
+as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less
+crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had
+leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent
+misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again.
+Woman-like--for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable--she
+had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought
+about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She
+simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never
+left her.
+
+Again and again Fane called. She was always denied to him. Then he met
+her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on without a
+reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him
+was flagrantly unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had
+allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent
+hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney
+with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed
+through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to
+work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood,
+never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should
+have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of
+sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became
+by degrees a monomaniac.
+
+He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved passion, over the
+thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he
+was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but
+when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his
+passion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred.
+By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her
+suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain
+wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who
+consulted him.
+
+That his career was going to the dogs Fane understood, but he did not
+care. The vision of Sydney was always before him. He was for ever
+plotting and planning to be with her alone--against her will or not, it
+was nothing to him. And when he was alone with her, what then?
+
+He would know how to act.
+
+It was just in the dawn of the spring season over London that further
+inaction became insupportable to him. One evening, after a day of
+listless inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who no longer came
+in crowds to his door, he put on his hat and walked from Mayfair to
+Kensington, vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even absent;
+but he was a desperate man. All fear of what the world thinks or says,
+all consideration of outward circumstances and their relation to worldly
+happiness, had died within him. He was entirely abstracted and
+self-centred.
+
+He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury Road, with its line of
+artistic red houses, detached and standing in their gardens. The
+darkness was falling as he turned into it and began to walk up and down
+opposite the house with the big studio in which he was once a welcome
+visitor. There was a light in one of the bedroom windows and in the
+hall, and presently, as Fane watched, a brougham drove up to the door.
+It waited a few moments before the house, then some one entered the
+carriage. The door was banged; the horse moved on. Through the windows
+Fane saw a woman's face, pale, against the pane. It was the face of
+Sydney. For a moment he thought he would call to the coachman to stop.
+Then he restrained himself, and again walked up and down, waiting. She
+must return presently. He would speak to her as she was getting out of
+the carriage. He would force her to receive him.
+
+Towards nine o'clock his plans were altered by an event which took
+place. The house door opened, and the footman came out with a handful of
+letters for the post. The pillar-box was very near, and the man
+carelessly left the hall door on the jar while he walked down the road.
+Fane caught a glimpse of the hall that he knew so well. A step, and he
+could be in the house. He hesitated. He looked down the road. The man
+had his back turned, and was putting the letters into the box. Fane
+slipped into the garden, up the steps, through the door. The hall was
+empty. At his right was the passage leading to the studio. He stole down
+it, and tried the door. It opened. In the darkness the heavy curtain
+blew against his face. In another instant he closed the door softly at
+his back, and stood alone in the wide space and the blackness. Here
+there was not a glimmer of light. Thick curtains fell over the windows.
+No fire burned upon the hearth. There was no sound except when a
+carriage occasionally rolled down the road, and even then the wheels
+sounded distant.
+
+The silence and darkness had their effect upon Fane. He had done a
+desperate thing; but, until he found himself alone in the vacant
+studio, he had not fully realised the madness of his conduct, and how it
+would appear to the world. After the first moments of solitude had
+passed he came to himself a little, and half opened the door with the
+intention of stealing out; but he heard steps in the hall, and shrank
+back again like a guilty creature. He must wait, at least, until the
+household retired to rest.
+
+And, waiting, the old, haunting thoughts came back to assail him once
+more. He began to brood over Sydney's cruel treatment of him, over her
+vile suspicions. Here, in the atmosphere which he knew so well--for a
+faint, strange perfume always lingered about the studio, and gave to it
+the subtle sense of life which certain perfumes can impart--his emotions
+were gradually quickened to fury. He recalled the days of his intimacy
+with the sculptor, of his unrestrained converse with Sydney. He recalled
+his care for the invalid, persevered in, despite his passion, to the
+end. And then his thought fastened upon the statue, which, strange to
+say, he had almost forgotten.
+
+The statue!
+
+It must be there, with him, in the darkness, staring with those white
+eyes in which he had seen a soul flicker.
+
+As the recollection of it came to him, he trembled, leaning against the
+wall.
+
+He was in one of those states of acute mental tension in which the mind
+becomes so easily the prey of the wildest fantasies, and slowly,
+laboriously, he began to frame a connection between the lifeless marble
+creature and his own dreary trouble.
+
+Because of one moment of folly Sydney treated him as a pariah, as a
+criminal. Her gentle nature had been transformed suddenly.
+
+By what subtle influence?
+
+Fane remembered the day of his first visit to Ilbury Road, and his
+curious imagination that the statue recognised and hated him.
+
+Had that hatred prompted action? Was there a devil lurking in the white,
+cold marble to work his ruin? When Sydney sent him out of her presence
+for ever, the watching face had seemed to smile.
+
+Fane set his teeth in the darkness. He was no longer sane. He was
+possessed. The tragedy of thought within him invited him to the
+execution of another tragedy. He stretched out his hand with the
+rehearsing action of one meditating a blow.
+
+His hand fell upon an oak table that stood against the wall, and hit on
+something smooth and cold. It was a long Oriental dagger that the dead
+sculptor had brought from the East. Fane's fingers closed on it
+mechanically. The frigid steel thrilled his hot palm, and a pulse in his
+forehead started beating till there was a dull, senseless music in his
+ears that irritated him.
+
+He wanted to listen for the return of Sydney's carriage.
+
+His soul was ablaze with defiance. He was alone in the darkness with his
+enemy; the cold, deadly, blind, pulseless thing that yet was alive; the
+silent thing that had yet whispered malign accusations of him to the
+woman he loved; the nerveless thing that poisoned a beautiful mind
+against him, that stole the music from his harp of life and let loose
+the winds upon his summer.
+
+His fingers closed more tightly, more feverishly upon the slippery
+steel.
+
+Sydney actually thought, or strove to think, him a criminal. What if he
+should earn the title? A sound as of the sea beating was in his ears,
+and flashes of strange light seem to leap to his vision. What would a
+man worth the name do to his enemy?
+
+And he and his enemy were shut up alone together.
+
+He drew himself up straight and steadied himself against the wall,
+peering through the blackness in the direction of the statue.
+
+And, as he did so, there seemed to steal into the atmosphere the breath
+of another living presence. He could fancy he heard the pulse of another
+heart beating near to his. The sensation increased upon him powerfully
+until suspicion grew into conviction.
+
+His intention had subtly communicated itself to the thing he could not
+see.
+
+He knew it was on guard.
+
+There was no actual sound, no movement, but the atmosphere became
+charged by degrees with a deadly, numbing cold, like the breath of frost
+in the air. A chill ran through Fane's blood. A sluggish terror began to
+steal over him, folding him for the moment in a strange inertia of mind
+and of body. A creeping paralysis crawled upon his senses, like the
+paralysis of nightmare that envelops the dreamer. He opened his lips to
+speak, but they chattered soundlessly. Mechanically his hand clutched
+the thin, sharp steel of the dagger.
+
+His enemy--then Sydney.
+
+He would not be a coward. He struggled against the horror that was upon
+him.
+
+And still the cold increased, and the personality of Fane's invisible
+companion seemed to develop in power. There was a sort of silent
+violence in the hidden room, as if a noiseless combat were taking place.
+Waves of darkness were stirred into motion; and Fane, as a man is drawn
+by the retreating tides of the sea out and away, was drawn from the wall
+where he had been crouching.
+
+He stole along the floor, the dagger held in his right hand, his heart
+barely beating, his lips white--nearer, nearer to his enemy.
+
+He counted each step, until he was enfolded in the inmost circle of that
+deadly frost emanating from the blackness before him.
+
+Then, with a hoarse cry, he lifted his arm and sprang forward and
+upward, dashing the dagger down as one plunging it through a human
+heart.
+
+The cry died suddenly into silence.
+
+There was the sound of a heavy fall.
+
+It reached the ears of the servants below stairs.
+
+The footman took a light, and, with a scared face, went hesitatingly to
+the studio door, paused outside and listened while the female servants
+huddled in the passage.
+
+The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound appalled them, but at
+length the man thrust the door open and peered in.
+
+The light from the candle flickered merrily upon Fane's bowed figure,
+huddled face downwards upon the floor.
+
+His neck was broken.
+
+The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last earthly achievement, stood
+as if watching over him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.
+
+Some splinters of marble had been struck from the left breast, and among
+them, on the smooth parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.
+
+
+
+
+A BOUDOIR BOY
+
+
+I
+
+"It is so impossible to be young," Claude Melville said very wearily,
+and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a
+cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought,
+went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.
+
+His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish
+woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed
+to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so
+doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this
+conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On
+his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug
+with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had
+an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning,
+although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in
+the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.
+
+"It is so impossible to be young," Claude repeated, without emphasis. "I
+was middle-aged at ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I
+ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether
+improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy--the correct age for
+entering into one's dotage, I believe--I cannot expect to have a second
+childhood. I have never had a first."
+
+He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.
+
+His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing
+at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked
+among his divans and his roses.
+
+After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy remarked:--
+
+"Would you like to take a lesson in the art of being young?"
+
+"Immensely."
+
+"I know somebody who could give you one."
+
+"Really, Jimmy! What strange people you always know; curates, and women
+who have never written improper novels, and all sorts of beings who seem
+merely mythical to the rest of us!"
+
+"This is not a curate."
+
+"Then it must be a woman who has never written an improper novel."
+
+"It is."
+
+"And you mean to tell me seriously that there is such a person? To see
+her would be to take what _Punch_ calls a pre-historic peep. She must be
+ingeniously old."
+
+"She is sixty-four, and she is my aunt."
+
+"How beautiful of her. I am an only child, so I can never be an uncle.
+It is one of my lasting regrets, although I daresay that profession is
+terribly overcrowded like the others. But why is she sixty-four? It
+seems a risky thing for a woman to be?"
+
+"She takes the risk without thinking at all about it."
+
+"She must be very daring."
+
+"No; she's only completely natural."
+
+"Natural. What is that?"
+
+Jimmy laughed again. He was fond of Claude, but he and Claude met so
+often chiefly because they were extremes. Jimmy was a handsome athlete,
+who had been called to the bar, and persistently played cricket or
+football whenever the courts were sitting. He was cursed with a large
+private income, which he spent royally, and blessed with a good heart.
+Once he had appeared for the defence in a divorce case, which--lasting
+longer than he had anticipated, owing to the obvious guilt of all
+parties concerned in it, and the consequent difficulty of getting an
+innocent jury to agree about a verdict--had cost him a cricket match.
+Since then he had looked upon the law in the legendary way, as an ass,
+and spent most of his time in exercising his muscles. In the intervals
+of leisure which he allowed himself from sports and pastimes, he saw a
+good deal of Claude, who amused him, and whom he never bored. He called
+him a boudoir boy, but had a real liking for him, nevertheless, and
+sometimes longed to wake him up, and separate him from the absurd
+_chiffons_ with which he occupied his time. Now he laughed at him
+openly, and Claude did not mind in the least. They were really friends,
+however preposterous such a friendship might seem.
+
+"What is that? Well--my aunt. When you see her you will understand
+thoroughly."
+
+"Does she live in Park Lane or in Clapham?"
+
+"She lives in the country, in Northamptonshire, is very well off, and
+has a place of her own."
+
+"And a husband?"
+
+"No. She is a prosperous spinster, dines the local cricket team once a
+year, keeps the church going, knows all the poor people, and all the
+rich in the neighbourhood, and has only one fad."
+
+"What is that?"
+
+"She always wears her hair powdered. Come down and stay with her, and
+she will teach you to be young."
+
+"Well--but I am afraid she will work me very hard."
+
+"Not she. You would like a new experience."
+
+Claude yawned, and blinked his long dark eyes in a carefully Eastern
+manner.
+
+"I am afraid there is no such thing left for me," he said with an
+elaborate dreariness. "Still, if your aunt will invite me, I will come.
+Of course you will accompany me, I must have a chaperon."
+
+"Of course."
+
+"Ah!" Claude said, as a footman came softly into the room, "here is our
+absinthe. Now, Jimmy, please do forget your horrible football, and I
+will teach you to be decadent."
+
+"As my aunt will teach you to be young--you old boy."
+
+
+II
+
+"Mr Haddon has left, sir," said the footman, standing by Claude's
+bedside in the detached manner of the well-bred domestic. "Here is a
+note for you, sir; I was to give it you the first thing."
+
+And he handed it on a salver.
+
+Claude stretched out his thin white arm and took it, without manifesting
+any of the surprise that he felt. When the footman had gone, he poured
+out a cup of tea from the silver teapot that stood on a small table at
+his elbow, sipped it, and quietly opened the square envelope. The
+Northamptonshire sun was pouring in with a countrified ardour through
+the bedroom window. Outside the birds twittered in Miss Haddon's
+cherished garden. For Claude had come down at that contented spinster's
+invitation to spend a week with her, bringing Jimmy as chaperon, and
+this was the very first morning of his visit. Now he learnt that his
+chaperon had already "left," possibly to be a "half-back," or something
+equally ridiculous, at a local football match in a neighbouring
+village. Claude spread the note out and read it, while the birds chirped
+to the very manifest spring.
+
+   "DEAR BOY,--Good-bye, and good luck to you. I know you are
+   never angry, so it is scarcely worth while to tell you not to
+   be. I am off. Back in a week. You will learn your lesson
+   better alone with Aunt Kitty. There is no absinthe in her
+   cellar, but she knows good champagne from bad. You will be all
+   right. Study hard.--Yours ever,
+
+                                                       JIM."
+
+Claude drank two cups of tea instead of his usual one, and read the note
+four times. Then he lay back, wrapping his dressing-gown--a fine
+specimen of Cairene embroidery--closely round him, shut his eyes, and
+seemed to go to sleep. All he said to himself was:--
+
+"Jimmy writes a very dull letter."
+
+At half-past nine, Miss Haddon's house reverberated in a hollow manner
+with the barbarous music of a gong, the dressing-gong. Claude heard it
+very unsympathetically, and felt rather inclined merely to take off his
+dressing-gown, as an act of mute defiance, and go deliberately to sleep,
+instead of getting up and putting things on. But he remembered his
+manners wearily, and slid out of bed and into a carefully-warmed bath
+that was prepared in the neighbouring dressing-room. Having completed an
+intricate toilette, and tied a marvellously subtle tie, shot with
+rigorously subdued, but voluptuous colours, he sauntered downstairs in
+time to be thoroughly immersed in the full clamour of the second--or
+breakfast--gong, which he encountered in the hall.
+
+"Why will people wake the dead merely because they are going to eat a
+boiled egg and a bit of toast?" he asked himself as he entered the
+breakfast-room.
+
+Miss Haddon was standing by the window, reading letters in the proper
+English manner. The sun lay on her grey hair, which she wore dressed
+high, and void of cap.
+
+"You are very punctual," she said with a smile. "I was going to send up
+to know whether you would prefer to breakfast in your room. My nephew
+told me you might like to. I shall be glad to have your company. Jimmy
+has run away and left us together, I find."
+
+"Yes, Jimmy has run away," Claude answered, beginning slowly to feel the
+full force of Jimmy's perfidy. He looked at Miss Haddon's cheerful, rosy
+face, and bright brown eyes, and wondered whether she had been in the
+plot.
+
+"I hope you will not be bored," Miss Haddon went on, as they sat down
+together, the intonation of her melodious elderly voice seeming to
+dismiss the supposition, even while she suggested it. "But, indeed, I
+think it is almost impossible to be bored in the country."
+
+Claude, who was always either in London or Paris, looked frankly
+astonished. In handing him his cup of tea, Miss Haddon noticed it.
+
+"You don't agree with me?" she asked.
+
+"I cannot disagree, at least," he said; "because, to tell the truth, I
+am always in towns."
+
+"Probably you are happy there then," she rejoined, with a briskness that
+was agreeable, because it was not a hideous assumption, like the
+geniality that often prevails, fitfully, at Christmas time.
+
+But Claude could not permit his hostess to remain comfortable in this
+utterly erroneous belief.
+
+"Oh, please--" he said, with gentle rebuke, "I am not happy anywhere."
+
+Miss Haddon glanced at him with a gay and whimsical, but decidedly
+acute, scrutiny.
+
+"Perhaps you are too young to be happy," she said; "you have not
+suffered enough."
+
+"I have never been young," he answered, eating his devilled kidney with
+a silent pathos of perseverance--"never."
+
+"And I shall never be old, or, at any rate, feel old. It can't be done.
+I'm sixty-four, and look it, but I can't cease to revel in details, take
+an interest in people, and regard life as my half-opened oyster. It is a
+pity one can't go on living till one is two or three hundred or so.
+There is so much to see and know. Our existence in the world is like a
+day at the Stores. We have to go away before we have been into a
+quarter of the different departments."
+
+"I don't find life at all like that. I have seen all the departments
+till I am sick of them. But perhaps you never come to London?"
+
+"Every year for three months to see my friends. I stay at an hotel. It
+is a most delightful time."
+
+Her tone was warm with pleasant memories. Claude felt himself more and
+more surprised.
+
+"You enjoy the country, and London?" he said.
+
+"I enjoy everything," said Miss Haddon. "And surely most people do."
+
+"None of the people I know seem to enjoy anything very much. They try
+everything, of course. That is one's duty."
+
+"Then the latest literature really reflects life, I imagine," Miss
+Haddon said. "If what you say is true, everything includes the sins as
+well as the virtues. I have often wondered whether the books that I have
+thought utterly and absurdly false could possibly be the outcome of
+facts."
+
+"Such as what books?"
+
+"Oh, I'll name no names. The authors may be your personal friends. But
+it is so then? In their search after happiness the people of to-day, the
+moderns, give the warm shoulder to vice as well as to virtue?"
+
+"They ignore nothing."
+
+"Not even duty?"
+
+"Our duty is to ourselves, and can never be ignored."
+
+Miss Haddon tapped a boiled egg very sharply on its head with a spoon.
+She wondered if the action were a performance of duty to herself or to
+the egg.
+
+"That, I understand," she remarked briskly, "is the doctrine of what is
+called in London the young decadent; and in the country--forgive
+me--sometimes the young devil of the day."
+
+"I am decadent, Miss Haddon," Claude said with a gentle pride that was
+not wholly ungraceful.
+
+The elderly lady swept him with a bright look of fresh and healthy
+interest.
+
+"How exciting," she exclaimed, after a moment's decisive pause, but with
+a completely natural air. "You are the first I have seen. For Jimmy
+isn't one, is he?"
+
+"Jimmy! No. He plays football, and eats cold roast beef and cheese for
+lunch."
+
+"Do tell me--how does one do it?"
+
+She seemed intensely interested, and was merrily munching an apple grown
+in one of her own orchards.
+
+Claude raised his dark eyebrows.
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"How does one become a decadent? I have heard so much about you all,
+about your cleverness, and your clothes, and the things you write, and
+draw, and smoke, and think, and--and eat--"
+
+She seemed suddenly struck by a bright idea.
+
+"Oh, Mr Melville!" she exclaimed, leaning forward behind the great
+silver urn, and darting at him a glance of imploring earnestness, "will
+you do me a favour? We are left to ourselves for a whole week. Teach me,
+teach me to be a decadent."
+
+"But I thought you were going to teach me to be yo--" Claude began, and
+stopped just in time. "I mean--er--"
+
+He paused, and they gazed at each other. There was meditation in the
+boy's eyes. He was wondering seriously whether it would be possible for
+an elderly spinster lady, of countrified morals and rural procedure, to
+be decadent. She was rather stout, too, and appeared painfully healthy.
+
+"Will you?" Miss Haddon breathed across the urn and the teapot.
+
+"Well, we might try," Claude answered doubtfully.
+
+He was remarking to himself:--
+
+"Poor, dear Jimmy! He certainly doesn't understand his aunt!"
+
+She was murmuring in her mind: "I have always heard they have no sense
+of humour!"
+
+
+III
+
+"Mr Melville, Mr Melville," cried Miss Haddon's voice towards evening on
+the following day, "the absinthe has arrived!"
+
+Claude came out languidly into the hall.
+
+"Has it?" he said dreamily.
+
+"Yes, and Paul Verlaine's poetry, and the blue books--I mean the yellow
+books, and" (rummaging in a just-opened parcel) "yes, here are two
+novels by Catulle Mendez, and a box of those rose-tipped cigarettes.
+Now, what ought I to do? Shall we have some absinthe instead of our tea,
+or what?"
+
+Claude looked at her with a momentary suspicion, but her grey hair
+crowned an eager face decorated with an honest expression. The suspicion
+was lulled to rest.
+
+"We had better have our tea," he answered slowly. "I like my absinthe
+about an hour or so before dinner."
+
+"Very well. Tea, James, and muffins."
+
+The butler retired with fat dignity, but wondering not a little at the
+unusual vagaries of his mistress. Miss Haddon and Claude, laden with
+books, repaired to the drawing-room and sat down by the fire. Claude
+placed himself, cross-legged, upon a cushion on the floor. The box of
+rose-tipped cigarettes was in his hand. Miss Haddon regarded him
+expectantly from her sofa. Her expression seemed continually exclaiming,
+"What's to be done now?"
+
+The boy felt that this was not right, and endeavoured gently to correct
+it.
+
+"Please try to be a little--a--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"A little more restrained," he said. "What we feel about life is that it
+should never be crude. All extremes are crude."
+
+"What--even extremes of wickedness?"
+
+He hesitated.
+
+"Well, certainly extremes of goodness, or happiness, or anything of that
+kind. When one comes to think of it seriously, happiness is really
+absurd, is it not? Just consider how preposterous what is called a happy
+face always looks, covered with those dreadful, wrinkled things named
+smiles, all the teeth showing, and so on. I know you agree with me.
+Happiness drives all thought out of a face, and distorts the features in
+a most painful manner. When I go out walking on a Bank Holiday, a thing
+I seldom do, I always think a cheerful expression the most degrading of
+all expressions. A contented clerk disfigures a whole street--really."
+
+Miss Haddon's appearance had gradually grown very sombre during this
+speech, and she did not brighten up on the approach of tea and muffins
+on a wicker table whimsical with little shelves.
+
+"Perhaps you are right," she said. "I daresay happiness is
+unreasonable. Ought I to sit on the floor too?"
+
+Claude deprecated such an act on the part of his hostess. Sitting on the
+floor was one of his pet originalities, and he hated rivalry. Besides,
+Miss Haddon was distinctly too stout for that sort of thing.
+
+"I do it because I feel so Turkish," he explained. "Otherwise, it would
+be an assumption, and not naive. People make a great mistake in fancying
+the decadent is unnatural. If anything, he is too natural. He follows
+his whim. The world only calls us natural when we do everything we
+dislike. If Rossetti had played football every Saturday, his poetry
+would have been much more read in England than it has been. Yes, please,
+I will have another muffin."
+
+"But I think I feel Turkish too," Miss Haddon said calmly. "Yes, I am
+sure I do. I ought not to resist it; ought I? Otherwise I shall be
+flying in the face of your beautiful theories." And she squatted down on
+the floor at his elbow.
+
+Claude had a wonderful purple moment of acute irritation, during which
+he felt strangely natural. Miss Haddon did not appear to notice it. She
+went on bombarding him with questions in a cheery manner until he began
+to be rather ill, but her face never lost its expression of grave
+sadness, a strange, inexplicable melancholy that was not in the least
+Bank Holiday. The contrast between her expression and her voice worried
+Claude, as an intelligent pantaloon might worry a clown. He felt that
+something was wrong. Either face or voice required alteration. And then
+questions are like death--extremely irksome. Besides, he found it
+difficult to answer many of them, difficult to define precisely the
+position of the decadent, his intentions and his aims. It was no use to
+tell Miss Haddon that he didn't possess either the one or the other.
+Always with the same definitely sad face, the same definitely cheerful
+voice, she declined to believe him. He fidgeted on his cushion, and his
+Turkish placidity threatened to be seriously disturbed.
+
+The appearance of the absinthe created a diversion. Claude arranged a
+glass of it, much diluted with water, for the benefit of his hostess,
+and she began to sip it with an air of determined reverence.
+
+"It tastes like the smell of a drag hunt," she said after a while.
+
+Claude's gently-lifted eyebrows proclaimed misapprehension.
+
+"When they drag a trail over a course and satisfy the hounds with a dead
+rabbit at the end of it," she explained.
+
+"My dear lady," he protested plaintively. "Really, you do not grasp the
+inner meaning of what you are drinking. Presently the most perfect
+sensation will steal over you, a curious happy detachment from
+everything, as if you were floating in some exquisite element. You will
+not care what happens, or what--"
+
+"But must I drink it all before I feel detached?" she asked. "It's
+really so very nasty, quite disgusting to the taste. Surely you think
+so."
+
+"I drink it for its after-effect."
+
+"Is it like a good act that costs us pain at the moment, and gives us
+the pleasure of self-satisfaction ultimately?"
+
+"I don't know," the boy exclaimed abruptly. To compare absinthe to a
+good act seemed to him quite intolerable.
+
+He let his rose-tipped cigarette go out, and was glad when the dressing
+gong sounded in the hall.
+
+Miss Haddon sprang up from the floor briskly.
+
+"I rather admire you for drinking this stuff," she said. "I am sure you
+do it to mortify the flesh. A Lenten penance out of Lent is most
+invigorating to the mind."
+
+As Claude went up to dress, he felt as if he never wished to touch
+absinthe again. The glitter of its personality was dulled for him now
+that it was looked upon as merely a nasty sort of medicine to be
+indulged in as a mortification of the flesh, like wearing a hair shirt,
+or rejecting meat on Fridays. He found Miss Haddon painfully prosaic. It
+seemed almost silly to be a decadent in her company. To feel Turkish
+alone was graceful and quaint, almost intellectual, but to have an old
+lady feeling Turkish, too, and squatting on the floor to emphasise the
+sensation, was tragic, seemed to bring imbecility very near. Claude
+dressed with unusual agitation, and made a distinct failure of his tie.
+
+All through dinner Miss Haddon talked optimistically about her prospects
+as a successful decadent, much as if she were discussing her future on
+the Stock Exchange, or as the editor of a paper. She calculated that at
+her present rate of progress she ought to be almost on a level with her
+guest by the end of the week, and spoke hopefully of ceasing to take any
+interest in the ordinary facts of life, of learning a proper contempt
+for all healthy-minded humanity, and of appreciating at its proper value
+what seems to ordinary people, weak-kneed affection in literature, in
+art, and, above all, in movement and in appearance. Her bright eyes
+flashed upon Claude beneath her crown of powdered hair, as she talked,
+and the big room rang with her jovial voice.
+
+The boy began to feel exceedingly confused. Yet he had never been less
+bored. Miss Haddon might be stout and sixty-four. Nevertheless, her net
+personality was far less wearisome than that of many a town-bred sylph.
+Unconsciously Claude ate with a hearty appetite, indulged immoderately
+in excellent roast beef, and even swallowed a beautifully-cooked Spanish
+onion without thinking of the committal of a crime. During dessert Miss
+Haddon gave him a racy description of a rural cricket match and of the
+supper and speeches which followed it, and he found himself laughing
+heartily and wishing he had been there. He pulled himself up short with
+a sudden sensation of horror, and his hostess rose to go into the
+drawing-room.
+
+"Shall we play Halma or Ek Bahr?" she asked; "or would they be out of
+order? I wish particularly to conform to all your tenets."
+
+"Dear lady, please, we have no tenets," he protested. "Do remember that,
+or you will never become what you wish. But I do not care for any
+games."
+
+"Then shall we sit down and each read a volume of the 'Yellow Book'?"
+
+She hastened towards a table to find copies of that work, but something
+in her brisk and anxious movement caused Claude to exclaim hurriedly:
+
+"Please--please teach me Halma."
+
+That night he went up to bed flushed with triumph.
+
+Miss Haddon had allowed him to win a couple of games. Never before had
+he felt so absolutely certain of the unusual acuteness of his intellect.
+
+
+IV
+
+Three days later, Miss Haddon and Claude Melville were feeding
+chickens--under protest.
+
+"I mean to give it up, of course," the former said. "It's a degrading
+pursuit; it's almost as bad as the 'things that Jimmy does,' the things
+that give him such a marvellous complexion and keep his figure so
+magnificent."
+
+She threw a handful of grain to the frenzied denizens of the enlarged
+meat-safe before them, and added in a tone of pensive reflectiveness:
+
+"Why is it, I wonder, that these actions which, as you have taught me,
+are unworthy of thinking people, tend to make the body so beautiful, the
+eyes so bright and clear, the cheeks rose-tinted, the limbs straight and
+supple?"
+
+All the time that she was speaking her glance crept musingly over
+Claude's tall, but weak-looking and rather flaccid form, seeming to
+pause on his thin undeveloped arms, his lanky legs, and his slightly
+yellow face. That face began to flush. She sighed.
+
+"There must be something radically wrong in the scheme of the universe,"
+she continued. "But, of course, one ought to live for the mind and for
+subtle sensations, even though they do make one look an object."
+
+Her eyes were on the chickens now, who were fighting like feathered
+furies, pouncing, clucking, running for safety, grain in beak, or, with
+a fiery anxiety, chasing the favoured brethren who had secured a morsel
+and were hoping to be permitted to swallow it. Claude glanced at her
+furtively out of the corner of his eye, and endeavoured, for the first
+time in his life, to stand erect and broaden his rather narrow chest.
+
+Silently he resolved to give instructions to his tailor not to spare the
+padding in his future coats. He was glad, too, that knee-breeches, for
+which he had occasionally sighed, had not come into fashion again. After
+all, modern dress had its little advantages. Miss Haddon was still
+scattering grain, rather in the attitude of Millet's "_Sower_," and
+still talking reflectively.
+
+"We must try to convert Jimmy," she said. "I have a good deal of
+influence over him, Mr Melville. We must try to make him more like you,
+more thoughtful, more inactive, more frankly sensual, more fond of
+sofas, in the future than he has been in the past. Do you know, I am
+ashamed to say it, but I don't believe I have ever seen Jimmy lying on a
+sofa. Poor Jimmy! Look at that hen! She is choking. Hens gulp their food
+so! And then, he's inclined to be persistently unselfish. That must be
+stopped too. I have learnt from you that to be decadent one must be
+acutely and untiringly selfish. The blessings of selfishness! What a
+volume might be written upon them! Mr Melville, all chickens must be
+decadent, for all chickens are entirely selfish. It is strange to think
+that the average fowl is more advanced in ethics--is it ethics I
+mean?--than the average man or woman, is it not? And we ate a decadent
+at dinner last night. I feel almost like a cannibal."
+
+She threw away the last grain, and was silent. But suddenly Claude
+spoke.
+
+"Miss Haddon," he said, and his voice had never sounded so boyish to her
+before, "you have been laughing at me for nearly a week." He paused,
+then he went on, rather unevenly, in the up-and-down tones induced by
+stifled excitement, "and I have never found it out until this moment. I
+suppose you think me a great fool. I daresay I have been one. But please
+don't--I mean, please let us give up acting our farce."
+
+"But have we reached the third act?" she said.
+
+They were walking through the garden, among the crocuses and violets
+now.
+
+"I am sure I don't know," he answered, trying to seem easy. "Perhaps it
+is a farce in one act."
+
+"Perhaps it is not a farce at all, my dear boy," she said very gently
+and with a sudden old-world gravity that was not without its grace.
+
+They reached the house. She put her basket down on the oak table in the
+wide hall, and faced him in the eager way that was natural to her, and
+that was so youthful.
+
+"Mr Melville--Claude," she said, as she held out her hand, clad in a
+very countrified brown glove, with a fan-like gauntlet, "of all Jimmy's
+friends I think I shall like you the best. People who have acted
+together ought to be good comrades."
+
+He took the hand. That seemed necessary.
+
+"But I haven't been acting," he said.
+
+"Oh, yes, you have," she answered, "and I have only been on the stage
+for a week; while you--well, I suppose you have been on it for at least
+two or three years. I am taking my farewell of it this morning, and
+you--?"
+
+The boy's face was deeply flushed, but he did not look, or feel,
+actually angry.
+
+"I don't know about myself yet," he said.
+
+"Think it all over," the old lady exclaimed. "And now let us have lunch.
+I am hungry."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Jimmy arrived that evening.
+
+"How old are you, Claude?" he exclaimed, clapping his friend on the
+back.
+
+"I am not sure," Claude replied. "But I almost begin to wish that I were
+sixty-four."
+
+
+
+
+THE TEE-TO-TUM
+
+
+I
+
+Jack Burnham was quite determined not to marry Mrs Lorton, and if there
+was one thing in the world upon which she had rigidly set her heart it
+was upon refusing him. There were several things about her which he
+deliberately disliked. In the first place, she was a widow, and he
+always had an uneasy suspicion that widows, like dynamite, were
+mysteriously dangerous. Then her Christian name was Harriet, and she
+never took afternoon tea. The former of these two facts indicated,
+according to his ideas, that her parents were people of bad taste, the
+latter that she possessed notions that were against nature. Also, she
+was well informed, and knew it. This condition of the mind, he
+considered, should be the blessed birthright of the male sex, and he
+looked upon her as an usurper. She didn't wear mourning, which implied
+that she was forgetful--of dead husbands. Then--well, that was about all
+he had against her, and it was quite enough.
+
+As for her, the whole nature of her protested eloquently against the way
+he waxed his moustache, against the colour of his brown hair, and of
+his brown boots, against his lounging gait, and his opinion of Mr
+Gladstone. He had a certain arrogance about him, when with her, which
+arose in truth from his fear of her intellectual prowess. This led her
+to dub him intolerably conceited. She desired to humble him, and
+considered that she could best do so by refusing his offer of marriage.
+But she must first persuade him to propose. That was the difficulty.
+
+They were constantly meeting in London. You always constantly meet your
+enemies in London. And, when they met, they always devoted a great deal
+of time to the advancement of the tacit and polite quarrel between them.
+They argued with one another in Hyde Park on fine mornings, and were
+really disgusted with one another at dinner parties and "At Homes." He
+thought her fast--at balls; and she had once considered him blatant--at
+a Marlborough House garden party. This last fact, indeed, put the coping
+stone to the feud between them, for Mrs Lorton expressed her opinion to
+a friend, and Burnham, of course, got to know of it. To be thought
+blatant at Marlborough House was really intolerable. One might as well
+be pronounced to have had a heathen air at Lambeth Palace.
+
+Distinctly, Jack Burnham and Harriet Lorton were acutely antagonistic.
+
+Yet, there must surely have been some strange, unknown link of sympathy
+between them, for they both caught the influenza on the same day--it
+was a Sunday morning--and both permitted it to develop into double
+pneumonia.
+
+After all, spar as we may, are we not all brothers and sisters?
+
+The double pneumonia ought to have drawn them together; but, as he lived
+in Piccadilly and she in Queen's Gate, and each was thoroughly
+self-centred--nothing produces egoism so certainly as influenza--neither
+knew of the illness of the other.
+
+Providence denied to both that subtle joy, and they got to the mutton
+chop and chipped potato stage of convalescence in childlike ignorance of
+each other's misfortune.
+
+There must certainly have been a curious community of mind between them,
+for both their doctors ordered them to Margate, and they both took rooms
+at Westgate. Now a similar taste in seaside places is undoubtedly an
+excellent foundation for eternal friendship. Let the world crumble in
+atoms, two people who both like Westgate will still find something to
+talk about amid the confusion occasioned by the dissolution of kingdoms.
+
+Jack Burnham arrived at the St Mildred's Hotel on a Thursday, with his
+man.
+
+Harriet Lorton came on the following Friday, with her maid.
+
+Neither had any notion of the other's proceedings until they met back to
+back, as you shall presently hear.
+
+
+II
+
+In ordinary circumstances of health and vigour, Burnham and Mrs Lorton
+possessed dispositions of quite singular vivacity, looked upon life as a
+fairly good, if rather practical joke, and were fully disposed to
+consider happiness their _metier_. Being modern, they sometimes
+concealed their original gaiety, as if it were original sin, and
+pretended to a cruel cynicism; yet at heart, it must be confessed, they
+were as lively as poor children playing in the street. But when they
+went to Westgate, influenza had had its fill of them, and the infinite
+pathos of the world, and of all that is therein, appealed to them with a
+seizing vitality. Burnham, on the Thursday, was moved to tears at
+Birchington Station by the sight of a mother and eleven children missing
+the last train to Margate. Harriet Lorton, on the following Friday, had
+hysterics at Victoria, when she perceived a young lady drop a cage
+containing a grey parrot, and smash the bird's china bath upon the
+platform. The fact that the parrot had been actually taking its bath at
+the moment, and was left by the misfortune in much confusion and no
+water, struck her so poignantly as nearly to break her heart. She wept
+in a first-class carriage all the way down, and arrived at Westgate,
+towards ten o'clock, in a state of complete collapse.
+
+Mr Burnham was in bed drinking a cup of soup at this time. He heard the
+luggage being carried up, but did not suspect whose it was.
+Nevertheless, the ravages of disease led him to consider the slight
+noise and bustle a personal insult, and he lay awake most of the night
+brooding upon the wrongs of which he, erroneously, believed himself to
+be the victim.
+
+It was on the next morning that the two invalids met back to back in a
+shelter with glass partitions upon the lawn.
+
+Mrs Lorton, smothered in wraps, had taken up her position on the bench
+that faces Westgate without noticing a bowed and ulstered figure, shod
+in brown boots, sitting in a haggard posture on the reciprocal bench
+that faces the sea. Nobody was about, for it was not the season, and Mrs
+Lorton began slowly to weep on account of the loneliness. It struck her
+disordered fancy as so personal. Creation was sending her to Coventry.
+At her back the tears ran over Burnham's handsome countenance. He was
+staring at the sea, and thinking of all the people who had been drowned
+in water since the days of the Deluge. He wondered how many there were,
+and cried copiously, considering himself absolutely alone and free to
+give vent to his feelings, which struck him as splendidly human.
+
+When two people weep together one of them usually weeps louder than the
+other, and, on this occasion, Burnham made the most noise. He became,
+in fact, so uproariously solicitous about the drowned men and women whom
+he had never known that Mrs Lorton gradually was made aware of the
+presence of another mourner who was not a mute. She turned round and
+beheld a back convulsed with emotion. Its grief went straight to her
+heart, and, casting her own sorrow and her sense of etiquette to the
+wind--which blew bracingly from the north-east--she tapped upon the
+glass screen that bisected the shelter.
+
+Burnham took no notice. He was too deeply involved in grief. So Mrs
+Lorton knocked again, with all the vigour that incipient convalescence
+gave to her. This time Burnham was startled, and turned a hollow face
+upon her. They stared at each other through the intervening glass for a
+moment in wild surprise, the tears congealing upon their cheeks.
+
+Beyond Burnham Mrs Lorton saw the whirling white foam of the sea. Beyond
+Mrs Lorton Burnham saw the neat villas of Westgate. It struck them both
+as a tremendous moment, and they trembled.
+
+Remember that they were very weak.
+
+At last he, conceiving naturally that she had recognised and desired to
+summon him, walked slowly round to her side of the shelter, and held out
+to her a wavering hand.
+
+"Good heavens!" he ejaculated. "The last person I--"
+
+"You!" said Mrs Lorton. "How astonishing! What on earth--"
+
+He seized the opening she gave him with all the ardour of the
+whole-souled influenza patient.
+
+"I have been ill," he said with a deep pathos, "very, very ill. My
+symptoms were most extraordinary."
+
+He sank down heavily at her side, and continued, "I doubt if any one has
+endured such agony before. It began on a Sunday with--"
+
+"So did mine," Mrs Lorton interrupted with some show of determination.
+"You cannot conceive what it was like. I had pains in every limb, every
+limb positively. The doctor--"
+
+"Of course I went straight to bed," he remarked with firmness. "I knew
+at once what was wrong. But mine was no ordinary case. Talk of
+thumbscrews! Why--"
+
+"For nights I tossed in agony," she went on with a poignant self-pity,
+so much engrossed that she never noticed the brown boots which on other
+occasions had so deeply offended her. "Morphia and eucalyptus were no--"
+
+"He said it was pneumonia, double pneumonia," Burnham concluded
+emphatically. "How I came through it I shall never know." His smile at
+this point was wan, and seemed to deprecate existence. "I suppose there
+is still some work for me to do. At the same time, I--"
+
+"Mine was also double!" Mrs Lorton said with distinct tartness,
+condemning privately his arrogance, and noticing the boots with a
+strange feeling of sudden and unutterable despair.
+
+"It is all so much worse for a woman," she added vaguely, with some idea
+of out-doing him, such as she had felt once or twice at dinner parties,
+when her epigrams had been smarter than his.
+
+"The strong possess a greater capacity for suffering than the weak,"
+Burnham retorted. "Medical science tells us that--"
+
+"Please spare me the revelations of the dissecting-room," she cried
+bitterly; "I am in no condition to bear them."
+
+She glanced at him with pathetic eyes, and added, "I ought to have gone
+to Margate."
+
+"I ought to have gone there too," he said.
+
+"Really, you make the conversation sound like one of Maeterlinck's
+plays," she rejoined. "Do be more original."
+
+The reproach cut him to the heart. He never knew why, but he felt so
+much injured that he with great difficulty restrained his tears.
+
+"Women can be very brutal," he said moodily, biting his lips, and
+wondering how many authors it was necessary to read in order never to be
+at a disadvantage with a clever woman.
+
+Mrs Lorton was conscious that she had hurt him, and instead of being her
+nice, natural self and glorying in the fact, she experienced a sense of
+profound pity that gave her quite a tightened feeling about the left
+side. However, she only said, "Men can be very selfish"--a generality
+that many people consider as convincing as a bomb--and got up to go.
+
+"I am staying at the St Mildred's," she remarked. "It is the dull
+season, so I am the only person there at present."
+
+"I beg your pardon," Burnham said, also getting upon his feet, "I am
+there too. My number is 12 and I have a private sitting-room. I do not
+feel up to the coffee-room yet."
+
+Mrs Lorton turned as pale as ashes with vexation. She had no private
+sitting-room, and had ordered dinner in the coffee-room for that very
+evening.
+
+She felt herself at a disadvantage as they walked in a gloomy silence
+towards the beach.
+
+
+III
+
+Three days had passed away, and Jack Burnham had found that he was, in
+his own phrase, "up to the coffee-room" after all. In consequence, Mrs
+Lorton and he dined there every evening at separate tables. A sense of
+rivalry--and there is no rivalry more keen than that between contesting
+invalids--prevented both of them from eating as much as they would have
+liked. When the widow refused a course, Burnham shook his head at it
+wearily, and they rose from their meals in a state of passionate hunger,
+which they solaced with captain's biscuits in the seclusion of their
+bedrooms. Since they had Westgate almost to themselves, and the weather
+was becoming bright and warm, they were much out of doors; but their
+profound depression still continued, and they were as morbid human
+beings as Max Nordau could have desired to meet with when he was seeking
+for specimens of degeneration.
+
+Their continual greedy anxiety to narrate the details of their physical
+and mental sensations drove them to seek one another's company, and soon
+it became an understood thing that they should sit together on the lawn
+or in the winter garden during the morning, and stroll feebly in the
+direction of Margate during the breezy afternoon.
+
+These times were times of battle, of a struggle for supremacy in
+symptoms that led to much heart searching and to infinite exaggeration.
+Mrs Lorton, being a woman, generally got the best of it, and Burnham
+entered the hotel at tea-time with set teeth, and an appalling sense of
+injustice and of failure in his breast. One night at dinner, determined
+to conquer or to die, he refused everything but soup; and noted, with a
+grim satisfaction, that Mrs Lorton could hardly contain her chagrin at
+having inadvertently devoured a cutlet and a spoonful of jelly. Indeed,
+her temper was so much upset by this occurrence that she went straight
+to bed on leaving the coffee-room, and sent down a message the next
+morning to say that she was far too ill to venture out.
+
+Burnham, therefore, sat in the shelter alone, cursing the craft of
+woman. In the intervals between the cursings he was conscious of a
+certain loneliness that seemed to be in the atmosphere. It hovered with
+the seagulls above the sprightly waves, swept over the lawn hand in hand
+with the wind, basked in the sunshine, and companioned him closely upon
+the esplanade as he walked home to lunch. He was puzzled by it.
+
+At lunch-time Mrs Lorton was still confined to bed, so her maid
+announced. Burnham promptly began to wonder whether she was going to
+die. He strolled towards Margate wondering, and found himself presently
+in the sunset, gazing with tears in his eyes at the silhouette of
+Margate Pier, and, mentally, placing a reverent tribute of flowers from
+Covent Garden upon her early grave in Brompton Cemetery.
+
+He also found himself, later, dropping a tear at the thought of his own
+death, for of course with his weak health he could not hope to outlive
+anybody for very long. Mrs Lorton's absence at dinner struck him as more
+pathetic than all the misery of the travailing universe, until he
+remembered that at last he could gratify his appetite, and even accept
+two _entrees_ at the hands of the waiter.
+
+Life, if it is full of sorrows, is also full of consolations.
+
+He ate steadily for a couple of hours, pitying himself all the time.
+
+Next day Mrs Lorton re-appeared in a very bad temper. Her seclusion,
+although it had enabled her to score several points off her rival, had
+been in other respects wearisome and vexatious. She barely nodded to
+Burnham, and went out towards the shelter alone. He followed furtively,
+longing, as usual, for condolence, and presently saw her seat herself
+facing the sea. The strained relations between them seemed to forbid his
+placing himself at her side. The back-to-back posture would be more
+illustrative of the exact position of affairs, and Burnham's nicety and
+accuracy of mind induced him accordingly to face Westgate. Their
+positions of the first day were thus reversed. She looked at the sea; he
+stared at the villas. Strange turmoil of life, in which we never know
+which way we shall be facing next! It struck Burnham suddenly, and so
+forcibly, _a propos_ of his and Mrs Lorton's reversal, that the ready
+tears sprang to his eyes. How would it all end? Man spins about like a
+tee-to-tum, bowing to all points of the compass. The time comes when the
+tee-to-tum runs down--and what then? Burnham was certainly run down.
+That must be his excuse for what he did. He glanced behind him through
+the glass screen, and saw by the motion of Mrs Lorton's back that she
+was sobbing. In truth, the sight of the dancing waves had set her
+thinking of all the poor people who have been drowned in water since the
+beginning of things. Poor dead folk! She was trembling with emotion, and
+still wept mechanically when she found Mr Burnham on her side of the
+shelter proposing to her with all his might and main. He was asking her
+to comfort him, to be a true woman and shield him with her strength, to
+support his tottering footsteps along the rugged ways of life, to dry
+his tears and stay the agonies of his shaken soul.
+
+"Your health will help my weakness," he said. "Your vigour will teach me
+to be strong."
+
+It was a strange proposal, and she began to defend herself from his
+imputations, stating her maladies, marshalling her symptoms of decay in
+an imposing procession.
+
+But it was no good. He had taken her unawares and got the start of her.
+She felt it, and his determined weakness obtained a power over her which
+she could never afterwards explain.
+
+His influenza triumphed, for she forgot her resolution.
+
+A wave of morbid pity for him swept over the woman in her. If he was
+disorganised now, what would be his condition if she refused him?
+
+"Have I the right," she asked herself, "to devote a fellow-creature to
+everlasting misery?"
+
+Her influenza told her plainly that she had not.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+People say that the marriage will really come off.
+
+Jack Burnham announced it everywhere before Mrs Lorton got thoroughly
+well, and Mrs Lorton told everybody while Jack Burnham was still what
+his friends called "awfully dicky."
+
+One can but hope that their married life will be passed on the same side
+of the shelter. If he persists in facing the sea, and she in staring at
+the villas--well, they will live most of Ibsen's plays!
+
+But at least they will be modern.
+
+And so the tee-to-tum, thought of pathetically by Burnham on a memorable
+occasion, spins round, and the sea and the villas are the two aspects of
+life.
+
+
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note:
+
+
+Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.
+
+Duplicate title headings at the beginning of the book and before each
+story have been removed.
+
+The following corrections were made to the text:
+
+p. 267: missing period added (danced merrily.)
+
+p. 325: single close quote to double close quote ("I hope you will not
+be bored,")
+
+p. 328: healthly to healthy (fresh and healthy interest)
+
+p. 331: be to he ("A little more restrained," he said.)
+
+p. 349: paragraph break removed after comma (and continued, "I doubt if
+any one)
+
+
+
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