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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mrs. Falchion, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
+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: Mrs. Falchion, Complete
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Release Date: October 17, 2006 [EBook #6194]
+Last Updated: August 26, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. FALCHION, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger and Andrew Sly
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. FALCHION
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This novel was written in the days of the three-decker, and it went out
+to sea as such. Every novel of mine written until 1893 was published in
+two or three volumes, and the sale to the libraries was greater than the
+sale to the general public. This book was begun in 1892 at the time when
+the Pierre stories were being written, and it was finished in the summer
+of 1893. It did not appear serially; indeed, I made no attempt at serial
+publication. I had a feeling that as it was to be my first novel, it
+should be judged as a whole and taken at a gasp, as it were. I believe
+that the reader of Messrs. Methuen & Company was not disposed to publish
+the book, but Mr. Methuen himself (or Mr. Stedman as he was then called)
+was impressed by it and gave it his friendly confidence. He was certain
+that it would arrest the attention of the critics and of the public,
+whether it became popular or not. I have not a set of those original
+three volumes. I wish I had, because they won for me an almost
+unhoped-for pleasure. The ‘Daily Chronicle’ gave the volumes over
+a column of review, and headed the notice, “A Coming Novelist.” The
+‘Athenaeum’ said that ‘Mrs. Falchion’ was a splendid study of character;
+‘The Pall Mall Gazette’ said that the writing was as good as anything
+that had been done in our time, while at the same time it took rather a
+dark view of my future as a novelist, because it said I had not probed
+deep enough into the wounds of character which I had inflicted. The
+article was written by Mr. George W. Stevens, and he was right in saying
+that I had not probed deep enough. Few very young men--and I was very
+young then--do probe very deeply. At the appearance of ‘When Valmond
+Came to Pontiac’, however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my
+future was assured.
+
+I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
+‘Mrs. Falchion’ was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
+been preceded by a short novel called ‘The Chief Factor’, since rescued
+from publication and never published in book form in England. I realised
+when I had written ‘Mrs. Falchion’ that I had not found my metier, and I
+was fearful of complete failure. I had come but a few years before from
+the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
+write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
+still in me was the life which ‘Pierre and His People’, ‘The Seats of
+the Mighty’, ‘The Trail of the Sword’, ‘The Lane That Had no Turning’,
+and ‘The Right of Way’ portrayed. That life was destined to give me
+an assured place and public, while ‘Mrs. Falchion’, and the South Sea
+stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
+and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
+attention.
+
+Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
+as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
+study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
+to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the
+mind of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central
+figure in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge
+of being a mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, “an
+impudent melodrama, which has its own fascinations.”
+
+Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise
+in it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of
+treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting
+episode. It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done
+on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that
+this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements
+of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation
+has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes
+alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and
+it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone, who cares
+for what a character does, and not for what a character is or says,
+except in so far as it emphasises what it does. One has to work,
+however, in one’s own way, after one’s own idiosyncrasies, and here
+is the book that represents one of my own idiosyncrasies in its most
+primitive form.
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+     BOOK I
+
+     BELOW THE SUN LINE
+
+          I.     THE GATES OF THE SEA
+          II.    “MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR”
+           III.   A TALE OF NO MAN’S SEA
+          IV.    THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+          V.     ACCUSING FACES
+          VI.    MUMMERS ALL
+          VII.   THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+          VIII.  A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+          IX.    “THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS”
+           X.     BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+
+
+     BOOK II
+
+     THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+
+          XI.    AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+          XII.   THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+          XIII.   THE SONG OF THE SAW
+          XIV.   THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+          XV.    IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+          XVI.   A DUEL IN ARCADY
+          XVII.   RIDING THE REEFS
+          XVIII.  THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+          XIX.   THE SENTENCE
+          XX.    AFTER THE STORM
+          XXI.   IN PORT
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I. BELOW THE SUN LINE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. THE GATES OF THE SEA
+
+The part I played in Mrs. Falchion’s career was not very noble, but I
+shall set it forth plainly here, else I could not have the boldness to
+write of her faults or those of others. Of my own history little need
+be said in preface. Soon after graduating with honours as a physician,
+I was offered a professional post in a college of medicine in Canada. It
+was difficult to establish a practice in medicine without some capital,
+else I had remained in London; and, being in need of instant means, I
+gladly accepted the offer. But six months were to intervene before
+the beginning of my duties--how to fill that time profitably was the
+question. I longed to travel, having scarcely been out of England during
+my life. Some one suggested the position of surgeon on one of the great
+steamers running between England and Australia. The idea of a long
+sea-voyage was seductive, for I had been suffering from over-study,
+though the position itself was not very distinguished. But in those days
+I cared more for pleasing myself than for what might become a newly-made
+professor, and I was prepared to say with a renowned Irish dean:
+“Dignity and I might be married, for all the relations we are.”
+
+I secured the position with humiliating ease and humiliating smallness
+of pay. The steamer’s name was the ‘Fulvia’. It was one of the largest
+belonging to the Occidental Company. It carried no emigrants and had a
+passenger list of fashionable folk. On the voyage out to Australia the
+weather was pleasant, save in the Bay of Biscay; there was no sickness
+on board, and there were many opportunities for social gaiety, the
+cultivation of pleasant acquaintances, and the encouragement of that
+brisk idleness which aids to health. This was really the first holiday
+in my life, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Nothing of unusual interest
+occurred on the outward voyage; for one thing, because there were no
+unusual people among the passengers; for another, because the vessel
+behaved admirably. The same cannot be said of the return voyage: and
+with it my story really begins. Misfortune followed us out of Sydney
+harbour. We broke a crank-shaft between there and Port Phillip,
+Melbourne; a fire in the hold occurred at Adelaide; and at Albany we
+buried a passenger who had died of consumption one day out from King
+George’s Sound. At Colombo, also, we had a misfortune, but it was of a
+peculiar kind, and did not obtrude itself at once; it was found in
+an addition to our passenger list. I had spent a day in exploring
+Colombo--visiting Arabi Pasha, inspecting Hindu temples, watching the
+jugglers and snake-charmers, evading guides and the sellers of brummagem
+jewellery, and idling in the Cinnamon Gardens. I returned to the ship
+tired out. After I had done some official duties, I sauntered to the
+gangway, and, leaning against the bulwarks, idly watched the passengers
+come on board from the tender. Two of these made an impression on me.
+One was a handsome and fashionably-dressed woman, who was followed by
+a maid or companion (as I fancied), carrying parcels; the other, a
+shabbily-dressed man, who was the last to come up from the tender. The
+woman was going down the companion-way when he stepped on deck with a
+single bag in his hand, and I noticed that he watched her with a strange
+look in his eyes. He stood still as he gazed, and remained so for
+a moment after she had gone; then he seemed to recover himself, and
+started, as I thought, almost guiltily, when he saw that my attention
+was attracted. He nervously shifted his bag from one hand to the other,
+and looked round as though not certain of where he should go. A steward
+came to him officiously, and patronisingly too,--which is the bearing of
+servants to shabbily-dressed people,--but he shook his head, caught his
+bag smartly away from the steward’s fingers, and moved towards the after
+part of the ship, reserved for intermediate passengers. As he went he
+hesitated, came to the side of the vessel, looked down at the tender for
+a moment, cast his eyes to where the anchor was being weighed, made as
+if he would go back to the tender, then, seeing that the ladder was
+now drawn up, sighed, and passed on to the second-class companion-way,
+through which he disappeared.
+
+I stood commenting idly to myself upon this incident, which, slight
+though it was, appeared to have significance of a kind, when Hungerford,
+the fifth officer, caught me slyly by the arm and said, “Lucky fellow!
+Nothing to do but watch the world go by. I wish I had you in the North
+Atlantic on a whaler, or in the No Man’s Sea on a pearl-smack for a
+matter of thirty days.”
+
+“What would come of that, Hungerford?” said I.
+
+“An exchange of matter for mind, Marmion; muscle for meditation, physics
+for philosophy.”
+
+“You do me too much honour; at present I’ve neither mind, meditation,
+nor philosophy; I am simply vegetating.”
+
+“Which proves you to be demoralised. I never saw a surgeon on a ship
+who wasn’t. They began with mind--more or less--they ate the fruits of
+indolence, got precious near being sinful as well as indolent, and
+ended with cheap cynicism, with the old ‘quid refert’--the thing Hamlet
+plagiarised in his, ‘But it is no matter.’”
+
+“Isn’t this an unusual occupation for you, Hungerford--this Swift-like
+criticism?”
+
+“Swift-like, is it? You see, I’ve practised on many of your race,
+Marmion, and I have it pat now. You are all of two classes--those who
+sicken in soul and leave after one trip, and those who make another trip
+and are lost.”
+
+“Lost? How?”
+
+Hungerford pressed his fingers hard on my breastbone, looked at me
+enigmatically from under his well-hung brows, and replied: “Brains put
+out to seed, morals put out to vegetate--that’s ‘lost.’”
+
+“What about fifth officers?”
+
+“Fifth officers work like navvies, and haven’t time for foolishness.
+They’ve got to walk the bridge, and practise the boats, and be
+responsible for luggage--and here I am talking to you like an infallible
+undergraduate, while the lascars are in endless confusion with a
+half-dozen pieces of baggage, and the first officer foams because I’m
+not there to set them right. I leave you to your dreams. Good-bye.”
+
+Hungerford was younger than myself, but he knew the world, and I was
+flattered by these uncommon remarks, because he talked to no one else
+on the ship in the same way. He never sought to make friends, had a
+thorough contempt for social trifling, and shrugged his shoulders at
+the “swagger” of some of the other officers. I think he longed for a
+different kind of sea-life, so accustomed had he been to adventurous and
+hardy ways. He had entered the Occidental service because he had
+fallen in love with a pretty girl, and thought it his duty to become a
+“regular,” and thus have the chance of seeing her every three months in
+London. He had conceived a liking for me, reciprocated on my part; the
+more so, because I knew that behind his blunt exterior there was a warm
+and manly heart. When he left me I went to my cabin and prepared for
+dinner, laughing as I did so at his keen, uncompromising criticism,
+which I knew was correct enough; for of all official posts that of
+a ship-surgeon is least calculated to make a man take a pride in
+existence. At its best, it is assisting in the movement of a panorama;
+at its worst, worse than a vegetation. Hungerford’s solicitude for
+myself, however, was misplaced, because this one voyage would end my
+career as ship-surgeon, and, besides, I had not vegetated, but had been
+interested in everything that had occurred, humdrum as it was. With
+these thoughts, I looked out of the port-hole, to see the shores of
+Colombo, Galle Face, and Mount Lavinia fading in the distance, and heard
+seven bells--the time for dinner. When I took my seat at the table of
+which I was the head, my steward handed to me a slip of paper, saying
+that the chief steward had given a new passenger, a lady, the seat at my
+right hand, which had been vacated at Colombo. The name on the paper was
+“Mrs. Falchion.” The seat was still empty, and I wondered if this
+was the beautiful passenger who had attracted me and interested the
+Intermediate Passenger. I was selfish enough to wish so: and it was so.
+
+We had finished the soup before she entered. The chief steward, with
+that anxious civility which beauty can inspire in even so great a
+personage, conducted her to her seat beside me. I confess that though I
+was at once absorbed in this occurrence, I noticed also that some of the
+ladies present smiled significantly when they saw at whose table Mrs.
+Falchion was placed, and looked not a little ironically at the purser,
+who, as it was known, always tried to get for his table the newest
+addition to the passenger list--when it was a pretty woman. I believe
+that one or two rude people chaffed the chief steward about “favouring
+the doctor”; but he had a habit of saying uncomfortable things in
+a deferential way, and they did not pursue the subject. Then they
+commiserated the purser, who was an unpleasant little Jew of an envious
+turn of mind; and he, as I was told, likened me to Sir John Falstaff.
+I was sensitive in those days, and this annoyed me, particularly that
+I had had nothing to do with placing Mrs. Falchion at my table. We are
+always most sensitive when guilty concerning the spirit and not the
+letter.
+
+One who has lived the cosmopolitan life of London should be quick at
+detecting nationalities, but I found it difficult, even after I heard
+her speak, to guess at Mrs. Falchion’s native land. There were good
+reasons for this, as may be duly seen. Her appearance in the saloon
+caused an instant buzz of admiration and interest, of which she seemed
+oblivious. If it was acting, it was good acting; if it was lack of
+self-consciousness, it was remarkable. As I soon came to know, it was
+the latter--which, in such a woman, increased the remarkableness. I was
+inclined at first to venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I
+discovered that she possessed the attracting power of an actress without
+the calculated manner of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was
+proof of this emancipation.
+
+When she sat down, I immediately welcomed her by name to my table.
+The only surprise she showed at my knowledge of her name and my
+self-introduction was to lift her head slightly and look at me, as if
+wondering whether I was likely to be an inquisitive and troublesome
+host; and also, as I thought, to measure me according to her measure. It
+was a quick look, and the interest she showed was of a passive kind. She
+asked me as she might an old acquaintance--or a waiter--if the soup was
+good, and what the fish was like; decided on my recommendation to wait
+for the entrees; requested her next neighbour to pass the olives; in
+an impersonal way began to talk about the disadvantages of life at sea;
+regretted that all ship food tasted alike; wondered if the cook knew
+how to make a Russian salad; and added that the menu was a national
+compromise.
+
+Now that she was close to me, I could see that her beauty was real and
+notable. Her features were regular, her eyes of a greyish violet, her
+chin strong, yet not too strong--the chin of a singer; her hands had
+that charming quiet certainty of movement possessed by so few; and her
+colour was of the most delightful health. In this delightful health, in
+her bountiful yet perfect physical eloquence, her attractiveness, as
+it seemed to me, chiefly lay. For no one would ever have guessed her to
+possess an emotional temperament. All that was outer was fascinating,
+all that was inner suggested coldness. After experience assured me that
+all who came to know her shared this estimate, even in those days when
+every man on the ship was willing to be her slave. She had a compelling
+atmosphere, a possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time
+was unemotional--like Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, “of a cold
+conversation.” She was striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well
+within convention and “good form.” Her dress was simply and modestly
+worn, and had little touches of grace and taste which, I understand,
+many ladies on board sought to imitate, when they recovered from the
+first feeling of envy.
+
+She was an example of splendid life. I cared to look at her as one would
+dwell on the sleek beauty of a deer--as, indeed, I have many a time
+since then, in India, watched a tigress asleep on her chain, claws
+hidden, wild life latent but slumbering. I could have staked my life
+that Mrs. Falchion was insensible to love or passion, and unimpeachable
+in the broad scheme of right and wrong; imperious in requiring homage,
+incapable of giving it. I noticed when she laughed, as she did once at
+table, that her teeth were very white and small and square; and, like a
+schoolgirl, she had a habit of clicking them together very lightly, but
+not conspicuously, as if trying their quality. This suggested, however,
+something a little cruel. Her appetite was very good. She was coolly
+anxious about the amusements; she asked me if I could get her a list
+of the passengers, said that she was never sea-sick, and took a languid
+interest in the ladies present. Her glance at the men was keen at first,
+then neutral.
+
+Once again, during the meal, she slowly turned and flashed an
+inquiring glance at me. I caught her eyes. She did not show the least
+embarrassment, and asked me if the band insisted on playing every day.
+Before she left the saloon, one could see that many present were talking
+about her. Even the grim old captain followed her with his eyes as she
+went. When she rose, I asked her if she was going on deck. I did it
+casually, as though it was her usual custom to appear there after
+dinner. In like fashion she replied that her maid had some unpacking
+to do, she had some things to superintend, and, when this was done,
+she intended to spend a time on deck. Then, with a peculiar smile, she
+passed out.
+
+   [Note by Dr. Marmion appended to his MSS.:--“Many of the
+   conversations and monologues in this history, not heard by myself
+   when they occurred, were told to me afterwards, or got from the
+   diaries and notes of the persons concerned. Only a few are purely
+   imaginary.”]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. “MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR”
+
+I went to my cabin, took a book, sat down, and began to smoke. My
+thoughts drifted from the book, and then occurred a strange, incongruous
+thing. It was a remembered incident. It came like a vision as I was
+lighting a fresh cigar:
+
+A boy and a girl in a village chemist’s shop; he with a boy’s love
+for her, she responding in terms, but not in fact. He passed near her
+carrying a measure of sulphuric acid. She put out her hand suddenly and
+playfully, as though to bar his way. His foot slipped on the oily floor,
+and the acid spilled on his hands and the skirt of her dress. He turned
+instantly and plunged his hands into a measure of alcohol standing near
+before the acid had more than slightly scalded them. She glanced at
+his startled face; hers was without emotion. She looked down, and said
+petulantly: “You have spoiled my dress; I cannot go into the street.”
+
+The boy’s clothes were burnt also. He was poor, and to replace them must
+be a trial to him; her father owned the shop, and was well-to-do. Still,
+he grieved most that she should be annoyed, though he saw her injustice.
+But she turned away and left him.
+
+Another scene then crossed the disc of smoke:
+
+The boy and girl, now man and woman, standing alone in the chemist’s
+shop. He had come out of the big working world, after travel in many
+countries. His fame had come with him. She was to be married the next
+day to a seller of purple and fine linen. He was smiling a good-bye, and
+there was nothing of the old past in the smile. The flame now was in her
+eyes, and she put out both her hands to stop him as he turned to go;
+but his face was passionless. “You have spoiled my heart,” she said; “I
+cannot go into the world so.”
+
+“It is too late; the measures are empty,” he replied.
+
+“I love you to-day, I will loathe you to-morrow,” was the answer.
+
+But he turned and left her, and she blindly stretched out her hands and
+followed him into the darkness, weeping.
+
+Was it the scent of the chemicals in my cabin, coupled with some
+subterranean association of things, which brought these scenes vividly
+before me at this moment? What had they to do with Mrs. Falchion?
+
+A time came when the occurrence appeared to me in the light of
+prescience, but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all
+reason and philosophy, are the result of outer impression. The primal
+language of our minds is in the concrete. Afterwards it becomes the
+cypher, and even at its highest it is expressed by angles, lines, and
+geometrical forms--substances and allusive shapes. But now, as the scene
+shifted by, I had involuntarily thrust forward my hands as did the
+girl when she passed out into the night, and, in doing so, touched the
+curtain of my cabin door swinging in towards me. I recovered myself,
+and a man timidly stepped inside, knocking as he did so. It was the
+Intermediate Passenger. His face was pale; he looked ill.
+
+Poor as his dress was, I saw that he had known the influences and
+practised the graces of good society, though his manner was hesitating
+and anxious now. I knew at a glance that he was suffering from both
+physical pain and mental worry. Without a word, I took his wrist and
+felt his pulse, and he said: “I thought I might venture to come--”
+
+I motioned him not to speak. I counted the irregular pulse-beats, then
+listened to the action of his heart, with my ear to his breast. There
+lay his physical trouble. I poured out a dose of digitalis, and, handing
+it to him, asked him to sit down. As he sat and drank the medicine,
+I rapidly studied him. The chin was firm, and the eyes had a dogged,
+persistent look that, when turned on you, saw not you, but something
+beyond you. The head was thrown slightly forward, the eyes looking up at
+an angle. This last action was habitual with him. It gave him a peculiar
+earnestness. As I noted these peculiarities, my mind was also with his
+case; I saw that his life was threatened. Perhaps he guessed what was
+going on in me, for he said in a low, cultured voice: “The wheels will
+stop too long some time, and there will be no rebound;”--referring to
+the irregular action of his heart.
+
+“Perhaps that is true,” I said; “yet it depends a good deal upon
+yourself when it will be. Men can die if they wish without committing
+suicide. Look at the Maori, the Tongan, the Malay. They can also prolong
+life (not indefinitely, but in a case like yours considerably), if
+they choose. You can lengthen your days if you do not brood on fatal
+things--fatal to you; if you do not worry yourself into the grave.”
+
+I knew that something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such
+a man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed. I was
+aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or
+constitutional thing, but springs from some extraneous cause.
+
+He smiled faintly, raised his head a little higher, and said:
+“Yes, that’s just it, I suppose; but then we do not order our own
+constitutions; and I believe, Doctor, that you must kill a nerve before
+it ceases to hurt. One doesn’t choose to worry, I think, any more than
+one chooses to lay bare a nerve.” And then his eyes dropped, as if he
+thought he had already said too much.
+
+Again I studied him, repeating my definitions in my mind. He was not a
+drunkard; he might have had no vice, so free was his face from any sign
+of dissipation or indulgence; but there was suffering, possibly the
+marks of some endured shame. The suffering and shadows showed the more
+because his features were refined enough for a woman. And altogether it
+struck me that he was possessed by some one idea, which gave his looks a
+kind of sorrowful eloquence, such as one sees on occasion in the face of
+a great actor like Salvini, on the forehead of a devout Buddhist, or in
+the eyes of a Jesuit missionary who martyrs himself in the wilds.
+
+I felt at once for the man a sympathy, a brotherliness, the causes of
+which I should be at a loss to trace. Most people have this experience
+at one time or another in their lives. It is not a matter of sex; it may
+be between an old man and a little child, a great man and a labourer, a
+schoolgirl and an old native woman. There is in such companionships less
+self-interest than in any other. As I have said, I thought that this man
+had a trouble, and I wished to know it; not from curiosity,--though my
+mind had a selfish, inquiring strain,--but because I hoped I might
+be able to help him in some way. I put my hand on his shoulder, and
+replied: “You will never be better unless you get rid of your worry.”
+
+He drew in a sharp breath, and said: “I know that. I am afraid I shall
+never be better.”
+
+There was a silence in which we looked at each other steadily, and then
+he added, with an intense but quiet misery: “Never--never!”
+
+At that he moved his hand across his forehead wearily, rose, and turned
+toward the door. He swayed as he did so, and would have fallen, but I
+caught him as he lost consciousness, and laid him on the cabin sofa.
+I chafed his hands, unloosed his collar, and opened the bosom of his
+shirt. As the linen dropped away from his throat, a small portrait on
+ivory was exposed on his breast. I did not look closely at it then, but
+it struck me that the woman’s head in the portrait was familiar, though
+the artistic work was not recent, and the fashion of the hair was
+of years before. When his eyes opened, and he felt his neck bare, he
+hurriedly put up his hand and drew the collar close, and at the same
+time sent a startled and inquiring look at me. After a few moments I
+helped him to his feet, and, thanking me more with a look than with
+words, he turned towards the door again.
+
+“Wait,” I said, “until I give you some medicine, and then you shall
+take my arm to your cabin.” With a motion of the hand, signifying the
+uselessness of remedies, he sat down again. As I handed him the phial,
+I continued: “I know that it is none of my business, but you are
+suffering. To help your body, your mind should be helped also. Can’t you
+tell me your trouble? Perhaps I should be able to serve you. I would if
+I could.”
+
+It may be that I spoke with a little feeling and an apparent honesty;
+for his eyes searched mine in a kind of earnest bewilderment, as if this
+could not be true--as if, indeed, life had gone so hard with him that
+he had forgotten the way of kindness. Then he stretched out his hand and
+said brokenly: “I am grateful, believe me. I cannot tell you just now,
+but I will soon, perhaps.” His hand was upon the curtain of the door,
+when my steward’s voice was heard outside, calling my name. The man
+himself entered immediately, and said that Mrs. Falchion sent her
+compliments, and would I come at once to see her companion, Miss Caron,
+who had injured herself.
+
+The Intermediate Passenger turned towards me a strange look; his lips
+opened as if about to speak, but he said nothing. At the instant there
+came to my mind whom the picture on his breast resembled: it was Mrs.
+Falchion.
+
+I think he saw this new intelligence in my face, and a meaning smile
+took the place of words, as he slowly left the cabin, mutely refusing
+assistance.
+
+I went to Mrs. Falchion’s cabin, and met her outside the door. She
+looked displeased. “Justine has hurt herself,” she said. “Please attend
+to her; I am going on deck.”
+
+The unfeeling nature of this remark held me to the spot for a moment;
+then I entered the cabin. Justine Caron, a delicate but warm-faced girl
+of little more than twenty, was sitting on the cabin sofa, her head
+supported against the wall, and her hand wound in a handkerchief
+soaked in blood. Her dress and the floor were also stained. I undid the
+handkerchief and found an ugly wound in the palm of the hand. I called
+the steward, and sent him to my dispensary for some necessaries; then
+I asked her how it happened. At the moment I saw the cause--a broken
+bottle lying on the floor. “The ship rolled,” she said. “The bottle fell
+from the shelf upon the marble washstand, and, breaking, from there to
+the floor. Madame caught at my arm to save herself from falling; but I
+slipped, and was cut on the bottle--so.”
+
+As she ended there was a knock, but the curtain was not drawn, and Mrs.
+Falchion’s voice was heard. “My dress is stained, Justine.”
+
+The half-fainting girl weakly replied: “I am very sorry, madame,
+indeed.”
+
+To this Mrs. Falchion rejoined: “When you have been attended to, you
+may go to bed, Justine. I shall not want you again to-night. But I shall
+change my dress. It is so unpleasant; I hate blood. I hope you will be
+well in the morning.”
+
+To this Justine replied: “Ah, madame, I am sorry. I could not help it;
+but I shall be quite well in the morning, I am sure.” Then she added
+quietly to me: “The poor madame! She will not see suffering. She hates
+pain. Sickness troubles her. Shall I be able to use my hand very soon,
+monsieur?”
+
+There was a wistful look in her eyes, and guessing why it was there, I
+said: “Yes, soon, I hope--in a few days, no doubt.”
+
+Her face lighted up, and she said: “Madame likes about her people who
+are happy and well.” Then, as if she might have said too much, she
+hurriedly added: “But she is very kind;” and, stooping down quickly, her
+face whitening with the effort, she caught up the broken glass and threw
+it through the port-hole into the sea.
+
+A half-hour later I went on deck, and found Mrs. Falchion comfortably
+seated in her deck-chair. I brought a stool over, and sat down beside
+her. To this hour the quickness with which I got upon friendly terms
+with her astonishes me.
+
+“Justine is better?” she said, and her hand made a slight motion of
+disgust.
+
+“Yes. She was not dangerously hurt, of course.”
+
+“Let us change the subject, please. They are going to have a fancy-dress
+ball on board, I believe, before we get to Aden. How tiresome! Isn’t it
+a little affectation on the part of the stage-struck committee? Isn’t
+it--inconsequent?”
+
+“That depends,” I said vaguely, inviting a question. She idled with a
+book in her lap.
+
+“On what?”
+
+“On those who go, what costumes are worn, and how much beauty and art
+appear.”
+
+“But the trouble! Does it pay? What return does one get?”
+
+“If all admire, half are envious, some are jealous, and one is
+devoted--isn’t that enough?” I think I was a fool that night.
+
+“You seem to understand women,” she said, with a puzzling and not quite
+satisfactory smile. “Yes, all that is something.”
+
+Though I was looking at the sea rather than at her, I saw again that
+inquiring look in her eyes--such a measuring look as a recruiting
+sergeant might give a victim of the Queen’s shilling.
+
+After a moment’s pause she continued, I thought, abstractedly: “As what
+should you go?”
+
+I answered lightly and without premeditation, “As Caius Cassius. Why
+should you not appear as Portia?”
+
+She lifted her eyebrows at me.
+
+“As Portia?”
+
+“As Portia, the wife of Brutus,” I blundered on, at the same time
+receiving her permission, by a nod, to light my cigar.
+
+“The pious, love-sick wife of Brutus!” This in a disdainful tone, and
+the white teeth clicked softly together.
+
+“Yes, a good disguise,” I said banteringly, though I fancy somewhat
+tentatively also, and certainly with a touch of rudeness. I was thinking
+at that moment of the Intermediate Passenger, and I was curious.
+
+“And you think of going in the disguise of a gentleman? Caius Cassius
+was that, wasn’t he?” she retorted in an ironical tone.
+
+“I suppose he was, though he was punished once for rudeness,” I replied
+apologetically.
+
+“Quite so,” was the decisive reply.
+
+I felt that she was perfectly cool, while I was a little confused, and
+ashamed too, that I had attempted to be playfully satirical. And so,
+wondering what I should say next, I remarked in desperation: “Do you
+like the sea?”
+
+“I am never ill at sea,” was her reply. “But I do not really like it; it
+is treacherous. The land would satisfy me if--” She paused.
+
+“Yes, Mrs. Falchion--‘if’?”
+
+“If I did not wish to travel,” she vaguely added, looking blandly at me.
+
+“You have travelled much?” I ventured.
+
+“A great deal;” and again I saw that scrutiny in her eyes. It occurred
+to me at the moment that she might think I possessed some previous
+knowledge of her.
+
+My mind became occupied again with the Intermediate Passenger and the
+portrait that he wore at his neck. I almost laughed to think of the
+melodramatic turn which my first conversation with this woman might
+chance to take. I felt that I was dealing with one who was able to meet
+cleverly any advance of mine, but I determined to lead the talk into as
+deep waters as possible.
+
+“I suppose, too, you are a good practical sailor--that is, you
+understand seamanship, if you have travelled much?” I do not know why I
+said that, for it sounded foolish to me afterwards.
+
+“Pretty well,” she replied. “I can manage a sail; I know the argot, I
+could tell the shrouds from the bulwarks, and I’ve rowed a boat in a
+choppy sea.”
+
+“It is not an accomplishment usual to your sex.”
+
+“It was ordinary enough where I spent the early part of my life,” was
+the idle reply; and she settled herself more comfortably in her chair.
+
+“Yes? May I ask where that was?” and as I said this, it occurred to
+me that she was, perhaps, leading me on, instead of my leading her; to
+betray me as to anything I knew about her.
+
+“In the South Seas,” she replied. “My father was a British consul in the
+Islands.”
+
+“You have not come from the Islands now, I suppose?”
+
+“No,” she said a little more softly; “it is years since I was in Samoa.
+... My father is buried there.”
+
+“You must have found it a romantic life in those half-barbaric places?”
+
+She shifted in her chair. “Romantic!” Her tone conveyed a very slight
+uneasiness and vagueness. “I am afraid you must ask some one else about
+that sort of thing. I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that
+was half-barbaric.” Here she laughed slightly.
+
+Just then I saw the lights of a vessel far off. “See--a vessel!” I said;
+and I watched the lights in silence, but thinking. I saw that she too
+was watching idly.
+
+At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: “Yes, I suppose
+life must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like
+the Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?”
+
+“Indeed, then,” she replied decisively, “you are not to suppose anything
+of the kind. The danger is not alone for the white people.”
+
+At this I appeared, as I really was, interested, and begged her to
+explain what she meant. She thought a moment, and then briefly, but
+clearly, sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of
+missionary labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim
+of civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were
+protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns;
+how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the
+crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest
+and purest, the valour of nationality. These phrases are my own--the
+substance, not the fashion, of her speech.
+
+“You do not, then,” I said, “believe wholly in the unselfishness of
+missionaries, the fair dealing of traders, the perfect impartiality of
+justice, as shown through steel-clad cruisers?”
+
+“I have seen too much to be quite fair in judgment, I fear, even to
+men-of-war’s men;” and she paused, listening to a song which came from
+the after-part of the ship. The air was very still, and a few of the
+words of the droll, plaintive ditty came to us.
+
+Quartermaster Stone, as he passed us, hummed it, and some voices of the
+first-class passengers near joined in the refrain:
+
+        “Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+          And the old world!”
+
+Some days later I got all of the song from one of the intermediate
+passengers, and the last verse of it I give here:
+
+       “I’m a-sailing, I’m a-sailing on the sea,
+         To a harbour where the wind is still;
+        Oh, my dearie, do you wait for me?
+         Oh, my dearie, do you love me still?
+        Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+          And the old world!”
+
+I noticed that Mrs. Falchion’s brow contracted as the song proceeded,
+making a deep vertical line between the eyes, and that the fingers of
+the hand nearest me closed on the chair-arm firmly. The hand attracted
+me. It was long, the fingers were shapely, but not markedly tapering,
+and suggested firmness. I remarked afterward, when I chanced to shake
+hands with her, that her fingers enclosed one’s hand; it was not a mere
+touch or pressure, but an unemotional and possessive clasp. I felt sure
+that she had heard the song before, else it had not produced even this
+so slight effect on her nerves. I said: “It is a quaint song. I suppose
+you are familiar with it and all of its kind?”
+
+“I fancy I have heard it somewhere,” she answered in a cold voice.
+
+I am aware that my next question was not justified by our very
+short acquaintance; but this acquaintance had been singular from its
+beginning, and it did not seem at that moment as it looks on paper;
+besides, I had the Intermediate Passenger in my mind. “Perhaps your
+husband is a naval man?” I asked.
+
+A faint flush passed over her face, and then, looking at me with a
+neutral expression and some reserve of manner, she replied: “My husband
+was not a naval man.”
+
+She said “was not.” That implied his death.
+
+There was no trouble in her manner; I could detect no sign of
+excitement. I turned to look at the lights of the approaching vessel,
+and there, leaning against the railing that divided the two decks, was
+the Intermediate Passenger. He was looking at us intently. A moment
+after he disappeared. Beyond doubt there was some intimate association
+between these two.
+
+My thoughts were, however, distracted by our vessel signalling the
+other. Hungerford was passing just then, and I said: “Have you any idea
+what vessel it is, Hungerford?”
+
+“Yes, man-of-war ‘Porcupine’, bound for Aden, I think.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion at this laughed strangely, as she leaned forward looking,
+and then, rising quickly, said: “I prefer to walk.”
+
+“May I accompany you?” I asked.
+
+She inclined her head, and we joined the promenaders. The band was
+playing, and, for a ship-band, playing very well, the ballet music
+of Delibes’ ‘Sylvia’. The musicians had caught that unaccentuated
+and sensuous swing of the melody which the soft, tropical atmosphere
+rendered still more languorous. With Mrs. Falchion’s hand upon my arm,
+I felt a sense of capitulation to the music and to her, uncanny in its
+suddenness. At this distance of time it seems to me absurd. I had once
+experienced something of the same feeling with the hand of a young
+medical student, who, skilled in thought-reading, discovered the number
+of a bank-note that was in my mind.
+
+This woman had an attractiveness compelling and delightful, at least in
+its earlier application to me. Both professionally and socially I have
+been brought into contact with women of beauty and grace, but never one
+who, like Mrs. Falchion, being beautiful, seemed so unconscious of
+the fact, so indifferent to those about her, so untouched by another’s
+emotion, so lacking in sensitiveness of heart; and who still drew people
+to her. I am speaking now of the earlier portion of our acquaintance; of
+her as she was up to this period in her life.
+
+I was not alone in this opinion of her, for, as time went on, every
+presentable man and woman on the boat was introduced to her; and if some
+women criticised and some disliked her, all acknowledged her talent and
+her imperial attraction. Among the men her name was never spoken but
+with reserve and respect, and her afternoon teas were like a little
+court. She had no compromising tenderness of manner for man or woman;
+she ruled, yet was unapproachable through any avenues of sentiment. She
+had a quiet aplomb, which would be called ‘sang-froid’ in a man.
+
+“Did you ever see a Spanish-Mexican woman dance?” she asked in one of
+the pauses of the music.
+
+“Never: never any good dancing, save what one gets at a London theatre.”
+
+“That is graceful,” she said, “but not dancing. You have heard of music
+stirring the blood; of savage races--and others--working themselves up
+to ecstatic fury? Maybe you have seen the Dervishes, or the Fijians, or
+the Australian aboriginals? No? Well, I have, and I have seen--which
+is so much more--those Spanish-Mexican women dance. Did you ever see
+anything so thrilling, so splendid, that you felt you must possess
+it?”--She asked me that with her hand upon my arm!--“Well, that is it. I
+have felt that way towards a horse which has won a great race, and to
+a woman who has carried me with her through the fantastic drama of her
+dance, until she stood at the climax, head thrown back, face glowing--a
+statue. It is grand to be eloquent like that, not in words, but in
+person.”
+
+In this was the key to her own nature. Body and mind she was free from
+ordinary morbidness, unless her dislike of all suffering was morbid.
+With her this was a dislike of any shock to the senses. She was selfish
+at all points.
+
+These conclusions were pursued at the expense of speech on my part.
+At first she did not appear to regard my silence. She seemed to have
+thoughts of her own; but she shook them off with a little firm motion of
+the shoulders, and, with the assumption of a demureness of manner and an
+airy petulance, said: “Well, amuse me.”
+
+“Amuse you?” was my reply. “Delighted to do so if I can. How?”
+
+“Talk to me,” was the quick response.
+
+“Would that accomplish the purpose?” This in a tone of mock protest.
+
+“Please don’t be foolish, Dr. Marmion. I dislike having to explain. Tell
+me things.”
+
+“About what?”
+
+“Oh, about yourself--about people you have met, and all that; for I
+suppose you have seen a good deal and lived a good deal.”
+
+“About hospital cases?” I said a little maliciously.
+
+“No, please, no! I abhor everything that is sick and poor and
+miserable.”
+
+“Well,” said I, at idle venture, “if not a hospital, what about a gaol?”
+
+I felt the hand on my arm twitch slightly, and then her reply came.
+
+“I said I hated everything that was wretched and wicked. You are either
+dense, or purposely irritating.”
+
+“Well, then, a college?”
+
+“A college? Yes, that sounds better. But I do not wish descriptions
+of being ‘gated,’ or ‘sent down,’ or ‘ploughed,’ and that kind of
+commonplace. I should prefer, unless your vanity leads you irresistibly
+in that direction, something with mature life and amusement; or, at
+least, life and incident, and good sport--if you do not dwell on the
+horrors of killing.”
+
+On the instant there came to me the remembrance of Professor Valiant’s
+wife. I think it was not what she wanted; but I had a purpose, and I
+began:
+
+“Every one at St. Luke’s admired and respected Professor Valiant’s wife,
+she was so frank and cordial and prettily downright. In our rooms we all
+called her a good chap, and a dashed good chap when her husband happened
+to be rustier than usual. He was our professor in science. It was the
+general belief that he chose science for his life-work because it gave
+unusual opportunities for torture. He was believed to be a devoted
+vivisectionist; he certainly had methods of cruelty, masterly in their
+ingenuity. He could make a whole class raw with punishment in a few
+words; and many a scorching bit of Latin verse was written about his
+hooked nose and fishy eye.
+
+“But his highest talents in this direction were reserved for his wife.
+His distorted idea of his own importance made him view her as a chattel,
+an inferior being; the more so, I believe, because she brought him
+little money when he married her. She was too much the woman to pretend
+to kneel to him, and because she would not be his slave, she had a hard
+time of it. He began by insisting that she should learn science, that
+she might assist him in his experiments. She knew that she had no taste
+for it, that it was no part of her wifely duty, and she did what suited
+her better--followed the hounds. It was a picture to see her riding
+across country. She could take a fence with a sound hunter like a bird.
+And so it happened that, after a time, they went their own ways pretty
+well; he ignoring her, neglecting her, deprecating her by manner, if not
+by speech, and making her life more than uncomfortable.
+
+“She was always kind to me. I was the youngest chap in the college, and
+was known as ‘Marmy’ by every one; and because I was fonder of science
+than most other men in the different years, Valiant was more gracious to
+me than the rest, though I did not like him. One day, when I called, I
+heard her say to him, not knowing that I was near: ‘Whatever you feel,
+or however you act towards me in private, I will have respect when
+others are present.’
+
+“It was the custom for the professors to invite each student to luncheon
+or dinner once during term-time. Being somewhat of a favourite of both
+Professor and Mrs. Valiant however, I lunched with them often. I need
+hardly say that I should not have exceeded the regulation once had it
+not been for Mrs. Valiant. The last time I went is as clear in my memory
+as if it were yesterday. Valiant was more satirical and cold-blooded
+than usual. I noticed a kind of shining hardness in his wife’s eyes,
+which gave me a strange feeling; yet she was talkative and even gay,
+I thought, while I more than once clinched my fist under the table,
+so much did I want to pummel him; for I was a lover of hers, in a
+deferential, boyish way.
+
+“At last, knowing that she liked the hunt, I asked her if she was going
+to the meet on the following Saturday, saying that I intended to follow,
+having been offered a horse. With a steely ring to her voice, and a
+further brightening of the eyes, she said: ‘You are a stout little
+sportsman, Marmy. Yes, I am going on Major Karney’s big horse, Carbine.’
+
+“Valiant looked up, half sneering, half doubtful, I thought, and
+rejoined: ‘Carbine is a valuable horse, and the fences are stiff in the
+Garston country.’
+
+“She smiled gravely, then, with her eyes fixed on her husband, said:
+‘Carbine is a perfect gentleman. He will do what I ask him. I have
+ridden him.’
+
+“‘The devil you have!’ he replied.
+
+“‘I am sure,’ said I, as I hoped, bravely, and not a little
+enthusiastically, ‘that Carbine would take any fence you asked him.’
+
+“‘Or not, as the case might be. Thank you, Marmy, for the compliment,’
+she said.
+
+“‘A Triton among minnows,’ remarked Valiant, not entirely under his
+breath; ‘horses obey, and students admire, and there is no end to her
+greatness.’
+
+“‘There is an end to everything, Edward,’ she remarked a shade sadly and
+quietly.
+
+“He turned to me and said: ‘Science is a great study, Marmion, but it is
+sardonic too; for you shall find that when you reduce even a Triton to
+its original elements--’
+
+“‘Oh, please let me finish,’ she interrupted softly. ‘I know the lecture
+so well. It reads this way: “The place of generation must break to
+give place to the generated; but the influence spreads out beyond the
+fragments, and is greater thus than in the mass--neither matter nor mind
+can be destroyed. The earth was molten before it became cold rock and
+quiet world.” There, you see, Marmy, that I am a fellow-student of
+yours.’
+
+“Valiant’s eyes were ugly to watch; for she had quoted from a lecture
+of his, delivered to us that week. After an instant he said, with slow
+maliciousness: ‘Oh, ye gods, render me worthy of this Portia, and teach
+her to do as Brutus’s Portia did, ad eternum!’
+
+“She shuddered a little, then said very graciously, and as if he
+had meant nothing but kindness: ‘Beggar that I am, I am even poor in
+thanks.’ I will leave you now to your cigarettes; and because I must go
+out soon, and shall not, I fear, see you again this afternoon, good-bye,
+Marmy, till Saturday--till Saturday.’ And she left us.
+
+“I was white and trembling with anger. He smiled coolly, and was
+careful to choose me one of his best cigars, saying as he handed
+it: ‘Conversation is a science, Marmion. Study it; there is solid
+satisfaction in it; it is the only art that brings instant pleasure.
+Like the stage, it gets its immediate applause.’
+
+“Well, Mrs. Valiant did ride Carbine on that Saturday. Such a scene
+it was! I see it now--the mottled plump of hounds upon the scent, the
+bright sun showing up the scarlet coats of the whips gloriously, the
+long stride of the hunters, ears back and quarters down! She rode
+Carbine, and the fences WERE stiff--so stiff that I couldn’t have taken
+half of them. Afterward I was not sorry that I couldn’t; for she rode
+for a fall that day on Carbine, her own horse, she had bought him of
+Major Karney a few days before,--and I heard her last words as she
+lay beside him, smiling through the dreadful whiteness of her lips.
+‘Goodbye, Marmy,’ she whispered. ‘Carbine and I go together. It is
+better so, in the full cry and a big field. Tell the men at Luke’s that
+I hope they will pass at the coming exams.... I am going up--for my
+final--Marmy.--I wonder--if I’ll--pass.’ And then the words froze on her
+lips.
+
+“It was persecution that did it--diabolical persecution and selfishness.
+That was the worst day the college ever knew. At the funeral, when the
+provost read, ‘For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister
+out of the miseries of this sinful world,’ Big Wallington, the wildest
+chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we all
+followed. And that gold-spectacled sneak stood there, with a lying white
+handkerchief at his eyes.
+
+“I laid myself out to make the college too hot for him. In a week I had
+every man in the place with me, and things came to such a pass that
+all of us must be sent down, or Valiant resign. He resigned. He found
+another professorship; but the thing followed him, and he was obliged to
+leave the country.”
+
+When I finished the story, Mrs. Falchion was silent for a time, then,
+with a slight air of surprise, and in a quite critical way, she said:
+“I should think you would act very well, if you used less emotion. Mrs.
+Valiant had a kind of courage, but she was foolish to die. She should
+have stayed and fought him--fought him every way, until she was his
+master. She could have done it; she was clever, I should think. Still,
+if she had to die, it was better to go with a good horse that way. I
+think I should prefer to go swiftly, suddenly, but without the horror
+of blood and bruises, and that sort of thing.... I should like to meet
+Professor Valiant. He was hard, but he was able too.... But haven’t
+we had enough of horror? I asked you to amuse me, and you have merely
+interested me instead. Oh!--”
+
+This exclamation, I thought, was caused by the voice of the
+quartermaster humming:
+
+       “I’m a-sailing, I’m a-sailing on the sea,
+         To a harbour where the wind is still”--
+
+Almost immediately she said: “I think I will go below.” Then, after a
+slight pause: “This is a liberal acquaintance for one day, Dr. Marmion;
+and, you know, we were not introduced.”
+
+“No, Mrs. Falchion, we were not introduced; but I am in some regards
+your host, and I fear we should all be very silent if we waited for
+regular introductions here. The acquaintance gives me pleasure, but it
+is not nearly so liberal as I hope it may become.”
+
+She did not answer, but smiled at me over her shoulder as she passed
+down the staircase, and the next instant I could have bitten my tongue
+for playing the cavalier as I had done; for showing, as I think I did,
+that she had an influence over me--an influence peculiar to herself, and
+difficult to account for when not in her presence.
+
+I sat down, lit a cigar, and went over in my mind all that had been said
+between us; all that had occurred in my cabin after dinner; every minute
+since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail. Lascars
+slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near
+alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon
+there came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly. Under the
+influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted. My
+eyes shifted to the lights of the ‘Porcupine’ in the distance, and from
+them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck. The
+“All’s well” of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance;
+the swish of water against the dividing hull of the ‘Fulvia’ sounded
+like a call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming
+through the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and
+dreams. These dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on
+my shoulder, and I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English
+novelist, had dropped out from the promenade to talk with me. He saw
+my mood, however, and said quietly: “Give me a light for my cigar, will
+you? Then, astride this stool, I’ll help you to make inventory of the
+rest of them. A pretty study; for, at our best, ‘What fools we mortals
+be!’”
+
+“‘Motley is your only wear,’” was my reply; and for a full half-hour,
+which, even for a man, is considerable, we spoke no word, but only
+nodded when some one of the promenaders noticed us. There was a
+bookmaker fresh from the Melbourne races; an American, Colonel Ryder,
+whose eloquence had carried him round the world; a stalwart squatter
+from Queensland; a pretty widow, who had left her husband under the sods
+of Tasmania; a brace of girls going to join their lovers and be married
+in England; a few officers fleeing from India with their livers and
+their lives; a family of four lanky lasses travelling “home” to school;
+a row of affable ladies, who alternated between envy and gaiety and
+delight in, and criticism of, their husbands; a couple of missionaries,
+preparing to give us lectures on the infamous gods of the heathen,--gods
+which, poor harmless little creatures! might be bought at a few annas a
+pint at Aden or Colombo,--and on the Exodus and the Pharaohs--pleasures
+reserved for the Red Sea; a commercial traveller, who arranged
+theatricals, and cast himself for all the principal parts; a humorous
+and naive person who industriously hinted at the opulence of his estates
+in Ireland; two stately English ladies of title; a cheerful array
+of colonial knights and judges off to Europe for a holiday; and many
+others, who made little worlds unto themselves, called cliques by blunt
+people.
+
+“To my mind, the most interesting persons on the ship,” said Clovelly at
+last, “are the bookmaker, Miss Treherne, and the lady with whom you have
+just been talking--an exceptional type.”
+
+“An unusual woman, I fancy,” was my reply. “But which is Miss Treherne?
+I am afraid I am not quite sure.”
+
+He described her and her father, with whom I had talked--a London Q.C.,
+travelling for his health, a notable man with a taste for science, who
+spent his idle hours in reading astronomy and the plays of Euripides.
+
+“Why not include the father in the list of the most interesting
+persons?” I questioned.
+
+“Because I have met many men like him, but no one quite like his
+daughter, or Mrs.--what is her name?”
+
+“Mrs. Falchion.”
+
+“Or Mrs. Falchion or the bookmaker.”
+
+“What is there so uncommon about Miss Treherne? She had not struck me as
+being remarkable.”
+
+“No? Well, of course, she is not striking after the fashion of Mrs.
+Falchion. But watch her, study her, and you will find her to be the
+perfection of a type--the finest expression of a decorous convention, a
+perfect product of social conservatism; unaffected, cheerful, sensitive,
+composed, very talented, altogether companionable.”
+
+“Excuse me,” I said, laughing, though I was impressed; “that sounds as
+if you had been writing about her, and applying to her the novelist’s
+system of analysis, which makes an imperfect individual a perfect type.
+Now, frankly, are you speaking of Miss Treherne, or of some one of whom
+she is the outline, as it were?”
+
+Clovelly turned and looked at me steadily. “When you consider a
+patient,” he said, “do you arrange a diagnosis of a type or of a
+person?--And, by the way, ‘type’ is a priggish word.”
+
+“I consider the type in connection with the person.”
+
+“Exactly. The person is the thing. That clears up the matter of business
+and art. But now, as to Miss Treherne: I want to say that, having been
+admitted to her acquaintance and that of her father, I have thought of
+them only as friends, and not as ‘characters’ or ‘copy.’”
+
+“I beg your pardon, Clovelly,” said I. “I might have known.”
+
+“Now, to prove how magnanimous I am, I shall introduce you to Miss
+Treherne, if you will let me. You’ve met her father, I suppose?” he
+added, and tossed his cigar overboard.
+
+“Yes, I have talked with him. He is a courteous and able man, I should
+think.”
+
+We rose. Presently he continued: “See, Miss Treherne is sitting there
+with the Tasmanian widow--what is HER name?”
+
+“Mrs. Callendar,” I replied. “Blackburn, the Queenslander, is joining
+them.”
+
+“So much the better,” he said. “Come on.”
+
+As we passed the music saloon, we paused for an instant to look through
+the port-hole at a pale-faced girl with big eyes and a wonderful
+bright red dress, singing “The Angels’ Serenade,” while an excitable
+bear-leader turned her music for her. Near her stood a lanky girl who
+adored actors and tenors, and lived in the hope of meeting some of those
+gentlemen of the footlights, who plough their way so calmly through the
+hearts of maidens fresh from school.
+
+We drew back to go on towards Miss Treherne, when Hungerford touched me
+on the arm, and said: “I want to see you for a little while, Marmion, if
+Mr. Clovelly will excuse you.”
+
+I saw by Hungerford’s face that he had something of importance to say,
+and, linking my arm in his, I went with him to his cabin, which was near
+those of the intermediate passengers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. A TALE OF NO MAN’S SEA
+
+Inside the cabin Hungerford closed the door, gripped me by the arm, and
+then handed me a cheroot, with the remark: “My pater gave them to me
+last voyage home. Have kept ‘em in tea.” And then he added, with no
+appearance of consecutiveness: “Hang the bally ship, anyhow!”
+
+I shall not attempt to tone down the crudeness of Hungerford’s language.
+It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth
+will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will
+certainly be seen in his acts;--he was sound at heart and true as steel.
+
+“What is the matter, Hungerford?” I asked lighting the cheroot.
+
+“Everything’s the matter. Captain, with his nose in the air, and
+trusting all round to his officers. First officer, no good--never any
+use since they poured the coal on him. Purser, ought to be on a Chinese
+junk. Second, third, fourth officers, first-rate chaps, but so-so
+sailors. Doctor, frivolling with a lovely filly, pedigree not known.
+Why, confound it! nobody takes this business seriously except the
+captain, and he sits on a golden throne. He doesn’t know that in any
+real danger this swagger craft would be filled with foolishness.
+There isn’t more than one good boat’s crew on board--sailors, lascars,
+stewards, and all. As for the officers, if the surgeon would leave the
+lovely ladies to themselves, he’d find cases worth treating, and duties
+worth doing. He should keep himself fit for shocks. And he can take my
+word for it--for I’ve been at sea since I was a kid, worse luck!--that a
+man with anything to do on a ship ought to travel every day nose out for
+shipwreck next day, and so on, port to port. Ship-surgeons, as well as
+all other officers, weren’t ordained to follow after cambric skirts and
+lace handkerchiefs at sea. Believe me or not as you like, but, for a man
+having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks. Now, I suppose you’ll
+think I’m insolent, for I’m younger than you are, Marmion, but you know
+what a rough-and-tumble fellow I am, and you’ll not mind.”
+
+“Well, Hungerford,” I said, “to what does this lead?”
+
+“To Number 116 Intermediate, for one thing. It’s letting off steam for
+another. I tell you, Marmion, these big ships are too big. There are
+those canvas boats. They won’t work; you can’t get them together. You
+couldn’t launch one in an hour. And as for the use of the others, the
+lascars would melt like snow in any real danger. There’s about one
+decent boat’s crew on the ship, that’s all. There! I’ve unburdened
+myself; I feel better.”
+
+Presently he added, with a shake of the head: “See here: now-a-days we
+trust too much to machinery and chance, and not enough to skill of hand
+and brain stuff. I’d like to show you some of the crews I’ve had in the
+Pacific and the China Sea--but I’m at it again! I’ll now come, Marmion,
+to the real reason why I brought you here.... Number 116 Intermediate
+is under the weather; I found him fainting in the passage. I helped
+him into his cabin. He said he’d been to you to get medicine, and you’d
+given him some. Now, the strange part of the business is, I know him. He
+didn’t remember me, however--perhaps because he didn’t get a good look
+at me. Coincidence is a strange thing. I can point to a dozen in my
+short life, every one as remarkable, if not as startling, as this. Here,
+I’ll spin you a yarn:
+
+“It happened four years ago. I had no moustache then, was fat like a
+whale, and first mate on the ‘Dancing Kate’, a pearler in the Indian
+Ocean, between Java and Australia. That was sailing, mind you--real
+seamanship, no bally nonsense; a fight every weather, interesting
+all round. If it wasn’t a deadly calm, it was a typhoon; if it wasn’t
+either, it was want of food and water. I’ve seen us with pearls on board
+worth a thousand quid, and not a drop of water nor three square meals
+in the caboose. But that was life for men and not Miss Nancys. If
+they weren’t saints, they were sailors, afraid of nothing but God
+Almighty--and they do respect Him, even when they curse the winds and
+the sea. Well, one day we were lying in the open sea, about two hundred
+and fifty miles from Port Darwin. There wasn’t a breath of air. The sea
+was like glass; the sun was drawing turpentine out of every inch of
+the ‘Dancing Kate’. The world was one wild blister. There wasn’t a
+comfortable spot in the craft, and all round us was that staring,
+oily sea. It was too hot to smoke, and I used to make a Sede boy do my
+smoking for me. I got the benefit of the smell without any work. I was
+lying under the droop of a dingey, making the Sede boy call on all his
+gods for wind, with interludes of smoke, when he chucked his deities and
+tobacco, and, pointing, shouted, ‘Man! man!’
+
+“I snatched a spy-glass. Sure enough, there was a boat on the water.
+It was moving ever so slowly. It seemed to stop, and we saw something
+lifted and waved, and then all was still again. I got a boat’s crew
+together, and away we went in that deadly smother. An hour’s row and we
+got within hail of the derelict--as one of the crew said, ‘feelin’ as
+if the immortal life was jerked out of us.’ The dingey lay there on the
+glassy surface, not a sign of life about her. Yet I had, as I said, seen
+something waved. The water didn’t even lap its sides. It was ghostly, I
+can tell you. Our oars licked the water; they didn’t attack it. Now, I’m
+going to tell you something, Marmion, that’ll make you laugh. I don’t
+think I’ve got any poetry in me, but just then I thought of some verses
+I learned when I was a little cove at Wellington--a devilishly weird
+thing. It came to me at that moment like a word in my ear. It made me
+feel awkward for a second. All sailors are superstitious, you know. I’m
+superstitious about this ship. Never mind; I’ll tell you the verses, to
+show you what a queer thing memory is. The thing was called ‘No Man’s
+Sea’:
+
+       “‘The days are dead in the No Man’s Sea,
+         And God has left it alone;
+        The angels cover their heads and flee,
+         And the wild four winds have flown.
+
+       “‘There’s never a ripple upon the tide,
+         There’s never a word or sound;
+        But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+         To look for the souls of the drowned.
+
+       “‘The No Man’s Sea is a gaol of souls,
+         And its gate is a burning sun,
+        And deep beneath it a great bell tolls
+         For a death that never is done.
+
+       “‘Alas! for any that comes anear,
+         That lies on its moveless breast;
+        The grumbling water shall be his bier,
+         And never a place of rest.”’
+
+“There are four of the verses. Well, I made a motion to stop the rowing,
+and was mum for a minute. The men got nervous. They looked at the boat
+in front of us, and then turned round, as though to see if the ‘Dancing
+Kate’ was still in sight. I spoke, and they got more courage. I stood
+up in the boat, but could see nothing in the dingey. I gave a sign to go
+on, and soon we were alongside. In the bottom of the dingey lay a man,
+apparently dead, wearing the clothes of a convict. One of the crew gave
+a grunt of disgust, the others said nothing. I don’t take to men often,
+and to convicts precious seldom; but there was a look in this man’s face
+which the prison clothes couldn’t demoralise--a damned pathetic look,
+which seemed to say, ‘Not guilty.’
+
+“In a minute I was beside him, and found he wasn’t dead. Brandy brought
+him round a little; but he was a bit gone in the head, and muttered all
+the way back to the ship. I had unbuttoned his shirt, and I saw on his
+breast a little ivory portrait of a woman. I didn’t let the crew see it;
+for the fellow, even in his delirium, appeared to know I had exposed the
+thing, and drew the linen close in his fingers, and for a long time held
+it at his throat.”
+
+“What was the woman’s face like, Hungerford?” I asked.
+
+He parried, remarking only that she had the face of a lady, and was
+handsome.
+
+I pressed him. “But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?”
+
+With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: “Don’t ask foolish
+questions, Marmion. Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life. He
+wouldn’t have lived at all, if a breeze hadn’t come up and let us get
+away to the coast. It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went
+bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake.
+However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he
+told me his story. He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western
+Australia. He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to
+do some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey. His crime was
+stealing funds belonging to a Squatting and Mining Company. There was
+this extenuating circumstance: he could have replaced the money, which,
+as he said, he’d only intended to use for a few weeks. But a personal
+enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts were examined, and though he
+showed he’d only used the money while more of his own was on the way to
+him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him. For two reasons: because
+it was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this trial to divert public
+attention from its own dirty position; and because he had against him
+not only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to hit the Company
+through him. He’d filched to be able to meet the large expenses of his
+wife’s establishment. Into this he didn’t enter minutely, and he didn’t
+blame her for having so big a menage; he only said he was sorry that he
+hadn’t been able to support it without having to come, even for a day,
+to the stupidity of stealing. After two years he escaped. He asked me
+to write a letter to his wife, which he’d dictate. Marmion, you or I
+couldn’t have dictated that letter if we’d taken a year to do it. There
+was no religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full of
+sorrow for what he’d done, and for the disgrace he’d brought on her.
+I remember the last few sentences as if I’d seen them yesterday. ‘I am
+dying on the open sea, disgraced, but free,’ he said. ‘I am not innocent
+in act, but I was not guilty of intentional wrong. I did what I did
+that you should have all you wished, all you ought to have. I ask
+but this--and I shall soon ask for nothing--that you will have a kind
+thought, now and then, for the man who always loved you, and loves
+you yet. I have never blamed you that you did not come near me in my
+trouble; but I wish you were here for a moment before I go away for
+ever. You must forgive me now, for you will be free. If I were a better
+man I would say, God bless you. In my last conscious moments I will
+think of you, and speak your name. And now good-bye--an everlasting
+good-bye. I was your loving husband, and am your lover until death.’ And
+it was signed, ‘Boyd Madras.’
+
+“However, he didn’t die. Between the captain and myself, we kept life
+in him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and
+crew, swearing to let no one know he was a convict. And I’ll say this
+for the crew of the ‘Dancing Kate’ that, so far as I know, they kept
+their word. That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne
+bankers, I gave back to him before we landed. We made him up a purse
+of fifty pounds,--for the crew got to like him,--and left him at Port
+Darwin, sailing away again in a few days to another pearl-field farther
+east. What happened to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don’t know;
+but one day I found him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean,
+looking almost as near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey
+on No Man’s Sea. As I said before, I think he didn’t recognise me; and
+he’s lying now in 116 Intermediate, with a look on him that I’ve seen
+in the face of a man condemned to death by the devils of cholera or
+equatorial fever. And that’s the story, Marmion, which I brought you to
+hear--told, as you notice, in fine classical style.”
+
+“And why do you tell ME this, Hungerford--a secret you’ve kept all these
+years? Knowledge of that man’s crime wasn’t necessary before giving him
+belladonna or a hot bath.”
+
+Hungerford kept back the whole truth for reasons of his own. He said:
+“Chiefly because I want you to take a decent interest in the chap. He
+looks as if he might go off on the long voyage any tick o’ the clock.
+You are doctor, parson, and everything else of the kind on board. I like
+the poor devil, but anyhow I’m not in a position to be going around with
+ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,--very good things.
+Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the
+body, and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras’s mind is as sick
+as his torso. By the way, he calls himself ‘Charles Boyd,’ so I suppose
+we needn’t recall to him his former experiences by adding the ‘Madras.’”
+
+Hungerford squeezed my arm again violently, and added: “Look here,
+Marmion, we understand each other in this, don’t we? To do what we can
+for the fellow, and be mum.”
+
+Some of this looks rough and blunt, but as it was spoken there was that
+in it which softened it to my ear. I knew he had told all he thought
+I ought to know, and that he wished me to question him no more, nor to
+refer to Mrs. Falchion, whose relationship to Boyd Madras--or Charles
+Boyd--both of us suspected.
+
+“It was funny about those verses coming to my mind, wasn’t it, Marmion?”
+ he continued. And he began to repeat one of them, keeping time to the
+wave-like metre with his cheroot, winding up with a quick, circular
+movement, and putting it again between his lips:
+
+       “‘There’s never a ripple upon the tide,
+         There’s never a breath or sound;
+        But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+         To look for the souls of the drowned.”’
+
+Then he jumped off the berth where he had been sitting, put on his
+jacket, said it was time to take his turn on the bridge, and prepared
+to go out, having apparently dismissed Number 116 Intermediate from his
+mind.
+
+I went to Charles Boyd’s cabin, and knocked gently. There was no
+response. I entered. He lay sleeping soundly--the sleep that comes after
+nervous exhaustion. I had a good chance to study him as he lay there.
+The face was sensitive and well fashioned, but not strong; the hands
+were delicate, yet firmly made. One hand was clinched upon that portion
+of his breast where the portrait hung.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+
+I went on deck again, and found Clovelly in the smoking-room. The
+bookmaker was engaged in telling tales of the turf, alternated with
+comic songs by Blackburn--an occupation which lasted throughout the
+voyage, and was associated with electric appeals to the steward to fill
+the flowing bowl. Clovelly came with me, and we joined Miss Treherne
+and her father. Mr. Treherne introduced me to his daughter, and Clovelly
+amiably drew the father into a discussion of communism as found in the
+South Sea Islands.
+
+I do not think my conversation with Miss Treherne was brilliant. She has
+since told me that I appeared self-conscious and preoccupied. This being
+no compliment to her, I was treated accordingly. I could have endorsed
+Clovelly’s estimate of her so far as her reserve and sedateness were
+concerned. It seemed impossible to talk naturally. The events of the day
+were interrupting the ordinary run of thought, and I felt at a miserable
+disadvantage. I saw, however, that the girl was gifted and clear of
+mind, and possessed of great physical charm, but of that fine sort which
+must be seen in suitable surroundings to be properly appreciated.
+Here on board ship a sweet gravity and a proud decorum--not altogether
+unnecessary--prevented her from being seen at once to the best
+advantage. Even at this moment I respected her the more for it, and was
+not surprised, nor exactly displeased, that she adroitly drew her father
+and Clovelly into the conversation. With Clovelly she seemed to find
+immediate ground for naive and pleasant talk; on his part, deferential,
+original, and attentive; on hers, easy, allusive, and warmed with
+piquant humour. I admired her; saw how cleverly Clovelly was making the
+most of her; guessed at the solicitude, studious care, and affection of
+her bringing-up; watched the fond pleasure of the father as he listened;
+and was angry with myself that Mrs. Falchion’s voice rang in my ears at
+the same moment as hers. But it did ring there, and the real value of
+that smart tournament of ideas was partially lost to me.
+
+The next morning I went to Boyd Madras’s cabin. He welcomed me
+gratefully, and said that he was much better; as he seemed; but he
+carried a hectic flush, such as comes to a consumptive person. I said
+little to him beyond what was necessary for the discussion of his case.
+I cautioned him about any unusual exertion, and was about to leave, when
+an impulse came to me, and I returned and said: “You will not let me
+help you in any other way?”
+
+“Yes,” he answered; “I shall be very glad of your help, but not just
+yet. And, Doctor, believe me, I think medicines can do very little.
+Though I am thankful to you for visiting me, you need not take the
+trouble, unless I am worse, and then I will send a steward to you, or go
+to you myself.”
+
+What lay behind this request, unless it was sensitiveness, I could not
+tell; but I determined to take my own course, and to visit him when I
+thought fit.
+
+Still, I saw him but once or twice on the after-deck in the succeeding
+days. He evidently wished to keep out of sight as much as possible. I am
+ashamed to say there was a kind of satisfaction in this to me; for, when
+a man’s wife--and I believed she was Boyd Madras’s wife--hangs on your
+arm, and he himself is denied that privilege, and fares poorly beside
+her sumptuousness, and lives as a stranger to her, you can scarcely
+regard his presence with pleasure. And from the sheer force of
+circumstances, as it seemed to me then, Mrs. Falchion’s hand was often
+on my arm; and her voice was always in my ear at meal-times and when
+I visited Justine Caron to attend to her wound, or joined in the
+chattering recreations of the music saloon. It was impossible not to
+feel her influence; and if I did not yield entirely to it, I was more
+possessed by it than I was aware. I was inquisitive to know beyond doubt
+that she was the wife of this man. I think it was in my mind at the
+time that, perhaps, by being with her much, I should be able to do him
+a service. But there came a time when I was sufficiently undeceived. It
+was all a game of misery in which some one stood to lose all round.
+Who was it: she, or I, or the refugee of misfortune, Number 116
+Intermediate? She seemed safe enough. He or I would suffer in the crash
+of penalties.
+
+It was a strange situation. I, the acquaintance of a day, was welcome
+within the circle of this woman’s favour--though it was an unemotional
+favour on her side; he, the husband, as I believed, though only half the
+length of the ship away, was as distant from her as the north star. When
+I sat with her on deck at night, I seemed to feel Boyd Madras’s face
+looking at me from the half-darkness of the after-deck; and Mrs.
+Falchion, whose keen eyes missed little, remarked once on my gaze in
+that direction. Thereafter I was more careful, but the idea haunted
+me. Yet, I was not the only person who sat with her. Other men paid her
+attentive court. The difference was, however, that with me she assumed
+ever so delicate, yet palpable an air of proprietorship, none the
+less alluring because there was no heart in it. So far as the other
+passengers were concerned, there was nothing jarring to propriety in
+our companionship. They did not know of Number 116 Intermediate. She
+had been announced as a widow; and she had told Mrs. Callendar that her
+father’s brother, who, years before, had gone to California, had died
+within the past two years and left her his property; and, because all
+Californians are supposed to be millionaires, her wealth was counted
+fabulous. She was going now to England, and from there to California in
+the following year. People said that Dr. Marmion knew on which side his
+bread was buttered. They may have said more unpleasant things, but I did
+not hear them, or of them.
+
+All the time I was conscious of a kind of dishonour, and perhaps it was
+that which prompted me (I had fallen away from my intention of visiting
+him freely) to send my steward to see how Boyd Madras came on, rather
+than go myself. I was, however, conscious that the position could
+not--should not--be maintained long. The practical outcome of this
+knowledge was not tardy. A new influence came into my life which was to
+affect it permanently: but not without a struggle.
+
+A series of concerts and lectures had been arranged for the voyage, and
+the fancy-dress ball was to close the first part of the journey--that
+is, at Aden. One night a concert was on in the music saloon. I had just
+come from seeing a couple of passengers who had been suffering from the
+heat, and was debating whether to find Mrs. Falchion, who, I knew, was
+on the other side of the deck, go in to the concert, or join Colonel
+Ryder and Clovelly, who had asked me to come to the smoking-room when I
+could. I am afraid I was balancing heavily in favour of Mrs. Falchion,
+when I heard a voice that was new to me, singing a song I had known
+years before, when life was ardent, and love first came--halcyon days in
+country lanes, in lilac thickets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our
+footsteps met a small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze,
+along the green common that sloped to the village. I thought of all
+this, and of HER everlasting quiet.
+
+With a different voice the words of the song would have sent me out of
+hearing; now I stood rooted to the spot, as the notes floated out
+past me to the nervelessness of the Indian Ocean, every one of them a
+commandment from behind the curtain of a sanctuary.
+
+The voice was a warm, full contralto of exquisite culture. It suggested
+depths of rich sound behind, from which the singer, if she chose, might
+draw, until the room and the deck and the sea ached with sweetness. I
+scarcely dared to look in to see who it was, lest I should find it a
+dream. I stood with my head turned away towards the dusky ocean. When,
+at last, with the closing notes of the song, I went to the port-hole
+and looked in, I saw that the singer was Miss Treherne. There was
+an abstracted look in her eyes as she raised them, and she seemed
+unconscious of the applause following the last chords of the
+accompaniment. She stood up, folding the music as she did so, and
+unconsciously raised her eyes toward the port-hole where I was. Her
+glance caught mine, and instantly a change passed over her face. The
+effect of the song upon her was broken; she flushed slightly, and, as I
+thought, with faint annoyance. I know of nothing so little complimentary
+to a singer as the audience that patronisingly listens outside a room
+or window,--not bound by any sense of duty as an audience,--between whom
+and the artists an unnatural barrier is raised. But I have reason to
+think now that Belle Treherne was not wholly moved by annoyance--that
+she had seen something unusual, maybe oppressive, in my look. She turned
+to her father. He adjusted his glasses as if, in his pride, to see her
+better. Then he fondly took her arm, and they left the room.
+
+Then I saw Mrs. Falchion’s face at the port-hole opposite. Her eyes were
+on me. An instant before, I had intended following Miss Treherne and her
+father; now some spirit of defiance, some unaccountable revolution, took
+possession of me, so that I flashed back to her a warm recognition. I
+could not have believed it possible, if it had been told of me, that,
+one minute affected by beautiful and sacred remembrances, the next I
+should be yielding to the unimpassioned tyranny of a woman who could
+never be anything but a stumbling-block and an evil influence. I had yet
+to learn that in times of mental and moral struggle the mixed fighting
+forces in us resolve themselves into two cohesive powers, and strive for
+mastery; that no past thought or act goes for nothing at such a time,
+but creeps out from the darkness where we thought it had gone for ever,
+and does battle with its kind against the common foe. There moved before
+my sight three women: one, sweet and unsubstantial, wistful and mute and
+very young, not of the earth earthy; one, lissom, grave, with gracious
+body and warm abstracted eyes, all delicacy, strength, reserve; the
+other and last, daring, cold, beautiful, with irresistible charm, silent
+and compelling. And these are the three women who have influenced my
+life, who fought in me then for mastery; one from out the unchangeable
+past, the others in the tangible and delible present. Most of us have to
+pass through such ordeals before character and conviction receive their
+final bias; before human nature has its wild trouble, and then settles
+into “cold rock and quiet world;” which any lesser after-shocks may
+modify, but cannot radically change.
+
+I tried to think. I felt that to be wholly a man I should turn from
+those eyes drawing me on. I recalled the words of Clovelly, who had said
+to me that afternoon, half laughingly: “Dr. Marmion, I wonder how many
+of us wish ourselves transported permanently to that time when we
+didn’t know champagne from ‘alter feiner madeira’ or dry hock from sweet
+sauterne; when a pretty face made us feel ready to abjure all the sinful
+lusts of the flesh and become inheritors of the kingdom of heaven? Egad!
+I should like to feel it once again. But how can we, when we have
+been intoxicated with many things; when we are drunk with success and
+experience; have hung on the fringe of unrighteousness; and know the
+world backward, and ourselves mercilessly?”
+
+Was I, like the drunkard, coming surely to the time when I could no
+longer say yes to my wisdom, or no to my weakness? I knew that, an
+hour before, in filling a phial with medicine, I found I was doing it
+mechanically, and had to begin over again, making an effort to keep my
+mind to my task. I think it is an axiom that no man can properly perform
+the business of life who indulges in emotional preoccupation.
+
+These thoughts, which take so long to write, passed then through my
+mind swiftly; but her eyes were on me with a peculiar and confident
+insistence--and I yielded. On my way to her I met Clovelly and Colonel
+Ryder. Hungerford was walking between them. Colonel Ryder said: “I’ve
+been saving that story for you, Doctor; better come and get it while
+it’s hot.”
+
+This was a promised tale of the taking of Mobile in the American Civil
+War.
+
+At any other time the invitation would have pleased me mightily; for,
+apart from the other two, Hungerford’s brusque and original conversation
+was always a pleasure--so were his cheroots; but now I was under an
+influence selfish in its source. At the same time I felt that Hungerford
+was storing up some acute criticism of me, and that he might let me hear
+it any moment. I knew, numbering the order of his duties, that he could
+have but a very short time to spare for gossip at this juncture, yet I
+said that I could not join them for half an hour or so. Hungerford had
+a fashion of looking at me searchingly from under his heavy brows, and I
+saw that he did so now with impatience, perhaps contempt. I was certain
+that he longed to thrash me. That was his idea of punishment and
+penalty. He linked his arm in those of the other two men, and they moved
+on, Colonel Ryder saying that he would keep the story till I came and
+would wait in the smoking-room for me.
+
+The concert was still on when I sat down beside Mrs. Falchion. “You
+seemed to enjoy Miss Treherne’s singing?” she said cordially enough as
+she folded her hands in her lap.
+
+“Yes, I thought it beautiful. Didn’t you?”
+
+“Pretty, most pretty; and admirable in technique and tone; but she has
+too much feeling to be really artistic. She felt the thing, instead of
+pretending to feel it--which makes all the difference. She belongs to
+a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls
+good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.
+Still, all of that pleasant race will read their husband’s letters and
+smuggle. They have no civic virtues. Yet they would be shocked to bathe
+on the beach without a machine, as American women do,--and they look for
+a new fall of Jerusalem when one of their sex smokes a cigarette after
+dinner. Now, I do not smoke cigarettes after dinner, so I can speak
+freely. But, at the same time, I do not smuggle, and I do bathe on the
+beach without a machine--when I am in a land where there are no sharks
+and no taboo. If morally consumptive people were given a few years in
+the South Seas, where they could not get away from nature, there would
+be more strength and less scandal in society.”
+
+I laughed. “There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
+the world and my sex thoroughly. He says as much in his books.--Have you
+read his ‘A Sweet Apocalypse’? He said more than as much to me. But he
+knows a mere nothing about women--their amusing inconsistencies;
+their infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their
+self-torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods
+of religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints
+of a woman’s position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
+really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you. He has only got two
+or three kinds of women in his mind, and the representatives of these
+fooled him, as far as he went with them, to their hearts’ content.
+Believe me, there is no one quite so foolish as the professional student
+of character. He sees things with a glamour; he is impressionable; he
+immediately begins to make a woman what he wishes her to be for his
+book, not what she is; and women laugh at him when they read his books,
+or pity him if they know him personally. I venture to say that I could
+make Mr. Clovelly use me in a novel--not ‘A Sweet Apocalypse’--as a
+placid lover of fancy bazaars and Dorcas societies, instead of a very
+practical person, who has seen life without the romantic eye, and knows
+as well the working of a buccaneering craft--through consular papers and
+magisterial trials, of course--as of a colonial Government House. But it
+is not worth while trying to make him falsify my character. Besides, you
+are here to amuse me.”
+
+This speech, as she made it, was pleasantly audacious and clever. I
+laughed, and made a gesture of mock dissent, and she added: “Now I have
+finished my lecture. Please tie my shoe-lace there, and then, as I said,
+amuse me. Oh, you can, if you choose! You are clever when you like to
+be. Only, this time, do not let it be a professor’s wife who foolishly
+destroys herself, and cuts short what might have been a brilliant
+career.”
+
+On the instant I determined to probe deeper into her life, and try her
+nerve, by telling a story with enough likeness to her own (if she was
+the wife of Boyd Madras) to affect her acutely; though I was not sure I
+could succeed. A woman who triumphs over sea-sickness, whom steam from
+the boilers never affects, nor the propeller-screw disturbs, has little
+to fear from the words of a man who is neither adroit, eloquent, nor
+dramatic. However, I determined to try what I could do. I said: “I fancy
+you would like something in the line of adventure; but my career has not
+run in that direction, so I shall resort to less exciting fields, and, I
+fear, also, a not very cheerful subject.”
+
+“Oh, never mind!” said she. “What you wish, so long as it is not
+conventional and hackneyed. But I know you will not be prosy, so go on,
+please.”
+
+“Well,” I began, “once, in the hospital, I attended a man--Anson was
+his name--who, when he thought he was going to die, confided to me
+his life’s secret. I liked the man; he was good-looking, amiable, but
+hopelessly melancholy. He was dying as much from trouble as disease. No
+counsel or encouragement had any effect upon him; he did, as I have seen
+so many do--he resigned himself to the out-going tide. Well, for the
+secret. He had been a felon. His crime had been committed through
+ministering to his wife’s vanity.”
+
+Here I paused. I felt Mrs. Falchion’s eyes searching me. I raised mine
+steadily to hers with an impersonal glance, and saw that she had not
+changed colour in the least. But her eyes were busy.
+
+I proceeded: “When he was disgraced she did not come near him. When he
+went to her, after he was released” (here I thought it best to depart
+from any close resemblance to Mrs. Falchion’s own story), “and was
+admitted to her, she treated him as an absolute stranger--as one who
+had intruded, and might be violent. She said that she and her maid were
+alone in the house, and hinted that he had come to disturb them. She
+bade him go, or she must herself go. He called her by his own name, and
+begged her, by the memory of their dead child, to speak kindly to him.
+She said he was quite mistaken in her name, that she was Mrs. Glave, not
+Mrs. Anson, and again insisted that he should go. He left her, and
+at last, broken-hearted, found his way, in illness and poverty to the
+hospital, where, toward the last, he was cared for by a noble girl,
+a companion of his boyhood and his better days, who urged his wife to
+visit him. She left him alone, said unpleasant things to the girl, did
+not come to see her husband when he was dead, and provided nothing for
+his burial. You see that, like you, she hated suffering and misery--and
+criminals. The girl and her mother paid the expenses of the funeral,
+and, with myself, were the only mourners. I am doubtful if the wife
+knows even where he lies. I admit that the story sounds melodramatic;
+but truth is more drama than comedy, I fancy. Now, what do you think of
+it all, Mrs. Falchion?”
+
+I had felt her shrink a little at the earlier part of my story, as if
+she feared that her own tale was to be brutally bared before her;
+but that soon passed, and she languidly tapped the chair-arm as the
+narrative continued. When it was finished, she leaned over slightly, and
+with these same fingers tapped my arm. I thrilled involuntarily.
+
+“He died, did he?” she said. “That was the most graceful thing he could
+do. So far as my knowledge of the world is concerned, men of his class
+do NOT die. They live, and they never rise above their degradation. They
+had not brains or courage enough to keep them out of gaol, and they have
+not pluck or brains enough to succeed--afterwards. Your friend Anson was
+quite gentlemanly in his action at the last. He had some sense of the
+fitness of things. He could not find a place in the world without making
+other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble. If he had lived, he
+would always have added to the blight on his wife’s career, and have
+been an arrow--not a thorn--in her side. Very likely he would have
+created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him. He made the
+false step, and compelled society to reject him. It did not want to
+do so; it never does. It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and
+acknowledge things until the culprit himself forces it to take action.
+Then it says: ‘Now you have openly and inconsiderately broken our bond
+of mutual forbearance. You make me send you away. Go, then, behind stone
+walls, and please do not come to me again. If you do, you will only be
+a troublesome ghost. You will cause awkwardness and distress.’ So,
+Mr. Anson--I must be polite to him--did the most reasonable and proper
+thing. He disappeared from the play before it actually became tragedy.
+There was no tragedy in his death--death is a magnificent ally; it
+untangles knots. The tragedy was in his living--in the perpetual ruin
+of his wife’s life, renewed every morning. He disappeared. Then the
+play became drama, with only a little shadow of tragedy behind it. Now,
+frankly, am I not right?”
+
+“Mrs. Falchion,” I said, “your argument is clever, but it is only
+incidentally true. You draw life, society and men no more correctly than
+the author of ‘A Sweet Apocalypse’ would draw you. The social law you
+sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless. It does not
+provide for repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
+It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable.”
+
+“Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair
+of priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final
+so far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned.
+What his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his
+fellow-men require of him is another. The world says, You shall have
+latitude enough to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code.
+As soon as you break the law openly, and set the machinery of public
+penalty in motion, there is an end of you, so far as this world is
+concerned. You may live on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and
+broken you always will be. It is not a question of right or wrong, of
+kindness or cruelty, but of general expediency and inevitableness. To
+all effect, Mr. Anson was dead before he breathed his last. He died when
+he passed within the walls of a gaol--condemned for theft.”
+
+There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did
+from her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
+downrightness--enchanted by the glow of her face. To this hour, knowing
+all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid achievement
+of nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents with the
+general sense and the straitest interpretation of life; convincing even
+in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be acting not
+so much by impulse as by the law of her nature. Her emotions were
+apparently rationalised at birth--to be derationalised and broken up by
+a power greater than herself before her life had worked itself out. I
+had counted her clever; I had not reckoned with her powers of reasoning.
+Influenced as I was by emotion when in her presence, I resorted to a
+personal application of my opinions--the last and most unfair resort of
+a disputant. I said I would rather be Anson dead than Mrs. Anson living;
+I would rather be the active than the passive sinner; the victim, than a
+part of that great and cruel machine of penalty.
+
+“The passive sinner!” she replied. “Why, what wrong did she do?”
+
+The highest moral conceptions worked dully in her. Yet she seemed then,
+as she always appeared to be, free from any action that should set the
+machine of penalty going against herself. She was inexorable, but she
+had never, knowingly, so much as slashed the hem of the moral code.
+
+“It was to give his wife pleasure that Anson made the false step,” I
+urged.
+
+“Do you think she would have had the pleasure at the price? The man was
+vain and selfish to run any risk, to do anything that might endanger her
+safety--that is, her happiness and comfort.”
+
+“But suppose he knew that she loved ease and pleasure?--that he feared
+her anger or disdain if he did not minister to her luxuries?”
+
+“Then he ought not to have married that kind of a woman.” The hardness
+in her voice was matched at that moment by the coldness of her face.
+
+“That is begging the question,” I replied. “What would such a selfish
+woman do in such a case, if her pleasure could not be gratified?”
+
+“You must ask that kind of woman,” was her ironical answer.
+
+I rashly felt that her castle of strength was crumbling. I ventured
+farther.
+
+“I have done so.”
+
+She turned slightly toward me, yet not nervously, as I had expected.
+
+“What did she say?”
+
+“She declined to answer directly.”
+
+There was a pause, in which I felt her eyes searching my face. I fear I
+must have learned dissimulation well; for, after a minute, I looked
+at her, and saw, from the absence of any curious anxiety, that I had
+betrayed nothing. She looked me straight in the eyes and said: “Dr.
+Marmion, a man must not expect to be forgiven, who has brought shame on
+a woman.”
+
+“Not even when he has repented and atoned?”
+
+“Atoned! How mad you are! How can there be atonement? You cannot wipe
+things out--on earth. We are of the earth. Records remain. If a man
+plays the fool, the coward, and the criminal, he must expect to wear the
+fool’s cap, the white feather, and the leg-chain until his life’s end.
+And now, please, let us change the subject. We have been bookish long
+enough.” She rose with a gesture of impatience.
+
+I did not rise. “Pardon me, Mrs. Falchion,” I urged, “but this interests
+me so. I have thought much of Anson lately. Please, let us talk a little
+longer. Do sit down.”
+
+She sat down again with an air of concession rather than of pleasure.
+
+“I am interested,” I said, “in looking at this question from a woman’s
+standpoint. You see, I am apt to side with the miserable fellow who
+made a false step--foolish, if you like--all for love of a selfish and
+beautiful woman.”
+
+“She was beautiful?”
+
+“Yes, as you are.” She did not blush at that rank compliment, any more
+than a lioness would, if you praised the astonishing sleekness and
+beauty of its skin.
+
+“And she had been a true wife to him before that?”
+
+“Yes, in all that concerned the code.”
+
+“Well?--Well, was not that enough? She did what she could, as long as
+she could.” She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.
+
+“Don’t you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs. Anson might
+at least have come to him when he was dying?”
+
+“It would only have been uncomfortable for her. She had no part in his
+life; she could not feel with him. She could do nothing.”
+
+“But suppose she had loved him? By that memory, then, of the time when
+they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
+them?”
+
+“Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
+free world into a cage. Besides, we are talking about people marrying,
+not about their loving.”
+
+“I will admit,” I said, with a little raw irony, “that I was not exact
+in definition.”
+
+Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not
+so marvellous to me as they might seem to others. She thought a moment
+quite indolently, and then continued: “You make one moralise like George
+Eliot. Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action. The one is a
+contract, the other is complete possession, a principle--that is, if it
+exists at all. I do not know.”
+
+She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them
+was a wedding-ring! Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now
+she seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the
+humming darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a
+boatswain’s whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous
+hour in the smoking-room.
+
+I am now about to record an act of madness, of folly, on my part. I
+suppose most men have such moments of temptation, but I suppose, also,
+that they act more sensibly and honourably than I did then. Her hand had
+dropped gently on the chair-arm, near to my own, and though our fingers
+did not touch, I felt mine thrilled and impelled toward hers. I do not
+seek to palliate my action. Though the man I believed to be her husband
+was below, I yielded myself to an imagined passion for her. In that
+moment I was a captive. I caught her hand and kissed it hotly.
+
+“But you might know what love is,” I said. “You might learn--learn of
+me. You--”
+
+Abruptly and with surprise she withdrew her hand, and, without any
+visible emotion save a quicker pulsation of her breast, which might have
+been indignation, spoke. “But even if I might learn, Dr. Marmion, be
+sure that neither your college nor Heaven gave you the knowledge to
+instruct me.... There: pardon me, if I speak harshly; but this is most
+inconsiderate of you, most impulsive--and compromising. You are capable
+of singular contrasts. Please let us be friends, friends simply. You are
+too interesting for a lover, really you are.”
+
+Her words were a cold shock to my emotion--my superficial emotion;
+though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me. Without any
+apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
+were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
+“I do not wonder now!”
+
+“You do not wonder at what?” she questioned; and she laid her hand
+kindly on my arm.
+
+I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, “At men going to
+the devil.” But this was not what I thought.
+
+“That does not sound complimentary to somebody. May I ask you what you
+mean?” she said calmly. “I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did
+not love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same
+time.”
+
+“Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant? You are not my
+husband--not my slave. But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson’s wife was
+not responsible for his loving her. Love, as I take it, is a voluntary
+thing. It pleased him to love her--he would not have done it if it
+did not please him; probably his love was an inconvenient thing
+domestically--if he had no tact.”
+
+“Of that,” I said, “neither you nor I can know with any certainty. But,
+to be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where
+she had not strawed. If she did not make the man love her,--I believe
+she did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,--she used
+his love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire
+her. She was richer in personal power for that experience; but she was
+not grateful for it nor for his devotion.”
+
+“You mean, in fact, that I--for you make the personal application--shall
+be better able henceforth to win men’s love, because--ah, surely, Dr.
+Marmion, you do not dignify this impulse, this foolishness of yours, by
+the name of love!” She smiled a little satirically at the fingers I had
+kissed.
+
+I was humiliated, and annoyed with her and with myself, though, down
+in my mind, I knew that she was right. “I mean,” said I, “that I can
+understand how men have committed suicide because of just such things.
+My wonder is that Anson, poor devil! did not do it.” I knew I was
+talking foolishly.
+
+“He hadn’t the courage, my dear sir. He was gentlemanly enough to die,
+but not to be heroic to that extent. For it does need a strong dash of
+heroism to take one’s own life. As I conceive it, suicide would have
+been the best thing for him when he sinned against the code. The world
+would have pitied him then, would have said, He spared us the trial of
+punishing him. But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!”
+
+She shuddered and then almost coldly continued: “Suicide is an act of
+importance; it shows that a man recognises, at least, the worthlessness
+of his life. He does one dramatic and powerful thing; he has an instant
+of great courage, and all is over. If it had been a duel in which, of
+intention, he would fire wide, and his assailant would fire to kill, so
+much the better; so much the more would the world pity. But either
+is superior, as a final situation, than death with a broken heart--I
+suppose that is possible?--and disgrace, in a hospital.”
+
+“You seem to think only of the present, only of the code and the world;
+and as if there were no heroism in a man living down his shame, righting
+himself heroically at all points possible, bearing his penalty, and
+showing the courage of daily wearing the sackcloth of remorse and
+restitution.”
+
+“Oh,” she persisted, “you make me angry. I know what you wish to
+express; I know that you consider it a sin to take one’s life, even in
+‘the high Roman fashion.’ But, frankly, I do not, and I fear--or rather,
+I fancy--that I never shall. After all, your belief is a pitiless one;
+for, as I have tried to say, the man has not himself alone to consider,
+but those to whom his living is a perpetual shame and menace and cruelty
+insupportable--insupportable! Now, please, let us change the subject
+finally; and”--here she softly laughed--“forgive me if I have treated
+your fancied infatuation lightly or indifferently. I want you for a
+friend--at least, for a friendly acquaintance. I do not want you for a
+lover.”
+
+We both rose. I was not quite content with her nor with myself yet. I
+felt sure that while she did not wish me for a lover, she was not averse
+to my playing the devoted cavalier, who should give all, while she
+should give nothing. I knew that my punishment had already begun.
+We paced the deck in silence; and once, as we walked far aft, I saw,
+leaning upon the railing of the intermediate deck, and looking towards
+us--Boyd Madras; and the words of that letter which he wrote on the No
+Man’s Sea came to me.
+
+At length she said: “You have made no reply to my last remark. Are we to
+be friends, and not lovers? Or shall you cherish enmity against me?
+Or, worse still,”--and here she laughed, I thought, a little
+ironically,--“avoid me, and be as icy as you have been--fervid?”
+
+“Mrs. Falchion,” I said, “your enemy I do not wish to be--I could not
+be if I wished; but, for the rest, you must please let me see what I may
+think of myself to-morrow. There is much virtue in to-morrow,” I added.
+“It enables one to get perspective.”
+
+“I understand,” she said; and then was silent. We walked the deck slowly
+for several minutes. Then we were accosted by two ladies of a committee
+that had the fancy-dress ball in hand. They wished to consult Mrs.
+Falchion in certain matters of costume and decoration, for which, it
+had been discovered, she had a peculiar faculty. She turned to me half
+inquiringly, and I bade her good-night, inwardly determined (how easy
+it is after having failed to gratify ourselves!) that the touch of her
+fingers should never again make my heart beat faster.
+
+I joined Colonel Ryder and Clovelly in the smoking-room. Hungerford, as
+I guessed gladly, was gone. I was too much the coward to meet his eye
+just then. Colonel Ryder was estimating the amount he would wager--if he
+were in the habit of betting--that the ‘Fulvia’ could not turn round
+in her tracks in twenty minutes, while he parenthetically endorsed
+Hungerford’s remarks to me--though he was ignorant of them--that lascars
+should not be permitted on English passenger ships. He was supported by
+Sir Hayes Craven, a shipowner, who further said that not one out of ten
+British sailors could swim, while not five out of ten could row a boat
+properly. Ryder’s anger was great, because Clovelly remarked with mock
+seriousness that the lascars were picturesque, and asked the American
+if he had watched them listlessly eating rice and curry as they squatted
+between decks; whether he had observed the Serang, with his silver
+whistle, who ruled them, and despised us “poor white trash;” and if
+he did not think it was a good thing to have fatalists like them as
+sailors--they would be cool in time of danger.
+
+Colonel Ryder’s indignation was curbed, however, by the bookmaker,
+who, having no views, but seeing an opportunity for fun, brought up
+reinforcements of chaff and slang, easily construable into profanity,
+and impregnated with terse humour. Many of the ladies had spoken of the
+bookmaker as one of the best-mannered men on board. So he was to all
+appearance. None dressed with better taste, nor carried himself with
+such an air. There was even a deferential tone in his strong language, a
+hesitating quaintness, which made it irresistible. He was at the service
+of any person on board needing championship. His talents were varied.
+He could suggest harmonies in colour to the ladies at one moment, and at
+the next, in the seclusion of the bar counter, arrange deadly harmonies
+in liquor. He was an authority on acting; he knew how to edit a
+newspaper; he picked out the really nice points in the sermons delivered
+by the missionaries in the saloon; he had some marvellous theories about
+navigation; and his trick with a salad was superb. He now convulsed the
+idlers in the smoking-room with laughter, and soon deftly drew off
+the discussion to the speed of the vessel, arranging a sweep-stake
+immediately, upon the possibilities of the run. He instantly proposed to
+sell the numbers by auction. He was the auctioneer. With his eye-glass
+at his eye, and Bohemian pleasantry falling from his lips, he ran the
+prices up. He was selling Clovelly’s number, and had advanced it beyond
+the novelist’s own bidding, when suddenly the screw stopped, the engines
+ceased working, and the ‘Fulvia’ slowed down.
+
+The numbers remained unsold. Word came to us that an accident had
+happened to the machinery, and that we should be hove-to for a day, or
+longer, to accomplish necessary repairs. How serious the accident to the
+machinery was no one knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. ACCUSING FACES
+
+While we were hove-to, the ‘Porcupine’ passed us. In all probability it
+would now get to Aden ahead of us; and herein lay a development of the
+history of Mrs. Falchion. I was standing beside Belle Treherne as the
+ship came within hail of us and signalled to see what was the matter.
+Mrs. Falchion was not far from us. She was looking intently at the
+vessel through marine-glasses, and she did not put them down until it
+had passed. Then she turned away with an abstracted light in her eyes
+and a wintry smile; and the look and the smile continued when she
+sat down in her deck-chair and leaned her cheek meditatively on the
+marine-glass. But I saw now that something was added to the expression
+of her face--a suggestion of brooding or wonder. Belle Treherne,
+noticing the direction of my glances, said: “Have you known Mrs.
+Falchion long?”
+
+“No, not long,” I replied. “Only since she came on board.”
+
+“She is very clever, I believe.”
+
+I felt my face flushing, though, reasonably, there was no occasion for
+it, and I said: “Yes, she is one of the ablest women I have ever met.”
+
+“She is beautiful, too--very beautiful.” This very frankly.
+
+“Have you talked with her?” asked I.
+
+“Yes, a little this morning, for the first time. She did not speak much,
+however.” Here Miss Treherne paused, and then added meditatively: “Do
+you know, she impressed me as having singular frankness and singular
+reserve as well? I think I admired it. There is no feeling in her
+speech, and yet it has great candour. I never before met any one like
+her. She does not wear her heart upon her sleeve, I imagine.”
+
+A moment of irony came over me; that desire to say what one really does
+not believe (a feminine trait), and I replied: “Are both those articles
+necessary to any one? A sleeve?--well, one must be clothed. But a
+heart?--a cumbrous thing, as I take it.”
+
+Belle Treherne turned, and looked me steadily in the eyes for an
+instant, as if she had suddenly awakened from abstraction, and slowly
+said, while she drew back slightly: “Dr. Marmion, I am only a girl,
+I know, and inexperienced, but I hoped most people of education and
+knowledge of life were free from that kind of cynicism to be read of
+in books.” Then something in her thoughts seemed to chill her words and
+manner, and her father coming up a moment after, she took his arm, and
+walked away with a not very cordial bow to me.
+
+The fact is, with a woman’s quick intuition, she had read in my tone
+something suggestive of my recent experience with Mrs. Falchion. Her
+fine womanliness awoke; the purity of her thoughts, rose in opposition
+to my flippancy and to me; and I knew that I had raised a prejudice not
+easy to destroy.
+
+This was on a Friday afternoon.
+
+On the Saturday evening following, the fancy-dress ball was to occur.
+The accident to the machinery and our delay were almost forgotten in the
+preparations therefor. I had little to do; there was only one sick man
+on board, and my hand could not cure his sickness. How he fared, my
+uncomfortable mind, now bitterly alive to a sense of duty, almost
+hesitated to inquire. Yet a change had come. A reaction had set in for
+me. Would it be permanent? I dared scarcely answer that question, with
+Mrs. Falchion at my right hand at table, with her voice at my ear. I was
+not quite myself yet; I was struggling, as it were, with the effects of
+a fantastic dream.
+
+Still, I had determined upon my course. I had made resolutions. I had
+ended the chapter of dalliance. I had wished to go to 116 Intermediate
+and let its occupant demand what satisfaction he would. I wanted to say
+to Hungerford that I was an ass; but that was even harder still. He was
+so thorough and uncompromising in nature, so strong in moral fibre, that
+I felt his sarcasm would be too outspoken for me just at present.
+In this, however, I did not give him credit for a fine sense of
+consideration, as after events showed. Although there had been no spoken
+understanding between us that Mrs. Falchion was the wife of Boyd Madras,
+the mind of one was the other’s also. I understood exactly why he told
+me Boyd Madras’s story: it was a warning. He was not the man to harp on
+things. He gave the hint, and there the matter ended, so far as he was
+concerned, until a time might come when he should think it his duty
+to refer to the subject again. Some time before, he had shown me the
+portrait of the girl who had promised to be his wife. She, of course,
+could trust HIM anywhere, everywhere.
+
+Mrs. Falchion had seen the change in me, and, I am sure, guessed the new
+direction of my thoughts, and knew that I wished to take refuge in a
+new companionship--a thing, indeed, not easily to be achieved, as I felt
+now; for no girl of delicate and proud temper would complacently regard
+a hasty transference of attention from another to herself. Besides, it
+would be neither courteous nor reasonable to break with Mrs. Falchion
+abruptly. The error was mine, not hers. She had not my knowledge of the
+immediate circumstances, which made my position morally untenable. She
+showed unembarrassed ignorance of the change. At the same time I
+caught a tone of voice and a manner which showed she was not actually
+oblivious, but was touched in that nerve called vanity; and from this
+much feminine hatred springs.
+
+I made up my mind to begin a course of scientific reading, and was
+seated in my cabin, vainly trying to digest a treatise on the pathology
+of the nervous system, when Hungerford appeared at the door. With a nod,
+he entered, threw himself down on the cabin sofa, and asked for a match.
+After a pause, he said: “Marmion, Boyd Madras, alias Charles Boyd, has
+recognised me.”
+
+I rose to get a cigar, thus turning my face from him, and said: “Well?”
+
+“Well, there isn’t anything very startling. I suppose he wishes I had
+left him in the dingey on No Man’s Sea. He’s a fool.”
+
+“Indeed, why?”
+
+“Marmion, are your brains softening? Why does he shadow a woman who
+wouldn’t lift her finger to save him from battle, murder, or sudden
+death?”
+
+“From the code,” I said, in half soliloquy.
+
+“From the what?”
+
+“Oh, never mind, Hungerford. I suppose he is shadowing--Mrs. Falchion?”
+
+He eyed me closely.
+
+“I mean the woman that chucked his name; that turned her back on him
+when he was in trouble; that hopes he is dead, if she doesn’t believe
+that he is actually; that would, no doubt, treat him as a burglar if he
+went to her, got down on his knees, and said: ‘Mercy, my girl, I’ve come
+back to you a penitent prodigal. Henceforth I shall be as straight as
+the sun, so help me Heaven and your love and forgiveness!’”
+
+Hungerford paused, as if expecting me to reply; but, leaning forward on
+my knees and smoking hard, I remained silent. This seemed to anger him,
+for he said a little roughly: “Why doesn’t he come out and give you
+blazes on the promenade deck, and corner her down with a mighty cheek,
+and levy on her for a thousand pounds? Both you and she would think more
+of him. Women don’t dislike being bullied, if it is done in the right
+way--haven’t I seen it the world over, from lubra to dowager? I tell
+you, man--sinning or not--was meant to be woman’s master and lover, and
+just as much one as the other.”
+
+At this point Hungerford’s manner underwent a slight change, and he
+continued: “Marmion, I wouldn’t have come near you, only I noticed you
+have altered your course, and are likely to go on a fresh tack. It isn’t
+my habit to worry a man. I gave you a signal, and you didn’t respond at
+first. Well, we have come within hail again; and now, don’t you think
+that you might help to straighten this tangle, and try to arrange a
+reconciliation between those two?
+
+“The scheme is worth trying. Nobody need know but you and me. It
+wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice to her to give him a taste of the thing
+she swore to do--how does it run?--‘to have and to hold from this day
+forward’?--I can’t recall it; but it’s whether the wind blows fair or
+foul, or the keel scrapes the land or gives to the rock, till the sea
+gulps one of ‘em down for ever. That’s the sense of the thing, Marmion,
+and the contract holds between the two, straight on into the eternal
+belly. Whatever happens, a husband is a husband, and a wife a wife. It
+seems to me that, in the sight of Heaven, it’s he that’s running fair
+in the teeth of the wind, every timber straining, and she that’s riding
+with it, well coaled, flags flying, in an open channel, and passing the
+derelict without so much as, ‘Ahoy there!’”
+
+Now, at this distance of time, I look back, and see Hungerford, “the
+rowdy sailor,” as he called himself, lying there, his dark grey
+eyes turned full on me; and I am convinced that no honester, more
+sturdy-minded man ever reefed a sail, took his turn upon the bridge, or
+walked the dry land in the business of life. It did not surprise me,
+a year after, when I saw in public prints that he was the hero of--but
+that must be told elsewhere. I was about to answer him then as I knew
+he would wish, when a steward appeared and said: “Mr. Boyd, 116
+Intermediate, wishes you would come to him, sir, if you would be so
+kind.”
+
+Hungerford rose, and, as I made ready to go, urged quietly: “You’ve got
+the charts and soundings, Marmion, steam ahead!” and, with a swift but
+kindly clench of my shoulder, he left me. In that moment there came a
+cowardly feeling, a sense of shamefacedness, and then, hard upon it, and
+overwhelming it, a determination to serve Boyd Madras so far as lay in
+my power, and to be a man, and not a coward or an idler.
+
+When I found him he was prostrate. In his eyes there was no anger, no
+indignation, nor sullenness--all of which he might reasonably have felt;
+and instantly I was ashamed of the thought which, as I came to him,
+flashed through my mind, that he might do some violent thing. Not that
+I had any fear of violence; but I had an active dislike of awkward
+circumstances. I felt his fluttering pulse, and noted the blue line on
+his warped lips. I gave him some medicine, and then sat down. There was
+a silence. What could I say? A dozen thoughts came to my mind, but I
+rejected them. It was difficult to open up the subject. At last he put
+his hand upon my arm and spoke:
+
+“You told me one night that you would help me if you could. I ought
+to have accepted your offer at first; it would have been better.--No,
+please don’t speak just yet. I think I know what you would say. I knew
+that you meant all you urged upon me; that you liked me. I was once
+worthy of men’s liking, perhaps, and I had good comrades; but that is
+all over. You have not come near me lately, but it wasn’t because you
+felt any neglect, or wished to take back your words; but--because of
+something else.... I understand it all. She has great power. She always
+had. She is very beautiful. I remember when--but I will not call it
+back before you, though, God knows, I go over it all every day and every
+night, until it seems that only the memory of her is real, and that she
+herself is a ghost. I ought not to have crossed her path again, even
+unknown to her. But I have done it, and now I cannot go out of that path
+without kneeling before her once again, as I did long ago. Having seen
+her, breathed the same air, I must speak or die; perhaps it will be
+both. That is a power she has: she can bend one to her will, although
+she often, involuntarily, wills things that are death to others. One
+MUST care for her, you understand; it is natural, even when it is
+torture to do so.”
+
+He put his hand on his side and moved as if in pain. I reached over and
+felt his pulse, then took his hand and pressed it, saying: “I will be
+your friend now, Madras, in so far as I can.”
+
+He looked up at me gratefully, and replied: “I know that--I know that.
+It is more than I deserve.”
+
+Then he began to speak of his past. He told me of Hungerford’s kindness
+to him on the ‘Dancing Kate’, of his luckless days at Port Darwin, of
+his search for his wife, his writing to her, and her refusal to see
+him. He did not rail against her. He apologised for her, and reproached
+himself. “She is most singular,” he continued, “and different from
+most women. She never said she loved me, and she never did, I know. Her
+father urged her to marry me; he thought I was a good man.”
+
+Here he laughed a little bitterly. “But it was a bad day for her. She
+never loved any one, I think, and she cannot understand what love
+is, though many have cared for her. She is silent where herself is
+concerned. I think there was some trouble--not love, I am sure of
+that--which vexed her, and made her a little severe at times; something
+connected with her life, or her father’s life, in Samoa. One can only
+guess, but white men take what are called native wives there very
+often--and who can tell? Her father--but that is her secret!... While I
+was right before the world, she was a good wife to me in her way. When I
+went wrong, she treated me as if I were dead, and took her old name. But
+if I could speak to her quietly once more, perhaps she would listen.
+It would be no good at all to write. Perhaps she would never begin the
+world with me again, but I should like to hear her say, ‘I forgive you.
+Good-bye.’ There would be some comfort in a kind farewell from her. You
+can see that, Dr. Marmion?”
+
+He paused, waiting for me to speak. “Yes, I can see that,” I said; and
+then I added: “Why did you not speak to her before you both came on
+board at Colombo?”
+
+“I had no chance. I only saw her in the street, an hour before the ship
+sailed. I had scarcely time to take my passage.”
+
+Pain here checked his utterance, and when he recovered, he turned again
+to me, and continued: “To-morrow night there is to be a fancy-dress ball
+on board. I have been thinking. I could go in a good disguise. I could
+speak to her, and attract no notice; and if she will not listen to me,
+why, then, that ends it. I shall know the worst, and to know the worst
+is good.”
+
+“Yes,” said I; “and what do you wish me to do?”
+
+“I wish to go in a disguise, of course; to dress in your cabin, if you
+will let me. I cannot dress here, it would attract attention; and I am
+not a first-class passenger.”
+
+“I fear,” I replied, “that it is impossible for me to assist you to the
+privileges of a first-class passenger. You see, I am an officer of the
+ship. But still I can help you. You shall leave this cabin to-night. I
+will arrange so that you may transfer yourself to one in the first-class
+section.... No, not a word; it must be as I wish in this. You are ill;
+I can do you that kindness at least, and then, by right, you can attend
+the ball, and, after it, your being among the first-class passengers can
+make little difference; for you will have met and spoken then, either to
+peace or otherwise.”
+
+I had very grave doubts of any reconciliation; the substance of my
+notable conversation with Mrs. Falchion was so prominent in my mind. I
+feared she would only reproduce the case of Anson and his wife. I was
+also afraid of a possible scene--which showed that I was not yet able to
+judge of her resources. After a time, in which we sat silent, I said to
+Madras: “But suppose she should be frightened?--should--should make a
+scene?”
+
+He raised himself to a sitting posture. “I feel better,” he said. Then,
+answering my question: “You do not know her quite. She will not stir a
+muscle. She has nerve. I have seen her in positions of great peril and
+trial. She is not emotional, though I truly think she will wake one day
+and find her heart all fire but not for me. Still, I say that all
+will be quite comfortable, so far as any demonstration on her part is
+concerned. She will not be melodramatic, I do assure you.”
+
+“And the disguise--your dress?” inquired I.
+
+He rose from the berth slowly, and, opening a portmanteau, drew from
+it a cloth of white and red, fringed with gold. It was of beautiful
+texture, and made into the form of a toga or mantle. He said: “I was a
+seller of such stuffs in Colombo, and these I brought with me, because
+I could not dispose of them without sacrifice when I left hurriedly. I
+have made them into a mantle. I could go as--a noble Roman, perhaps!”
+ Then a slight, ironical smile crossed his lips, and he stretched out his
+thin but shapely arms, as if in derision of himself.
+
+“You will go as Menelaus the Greek,” said I.
+
+“I as Menelaus the Greek?” The smile became a little grim.
+
+“Yes, as Menelaus; and I will go as Paris.” I doubt not that my voice
+showed a good deal of self-scorn at the moment; but there was a kind of
+luxury in self-abasement before him. “Your wife, I know, intends to go
+as Helen of Troy. It is all mumming. Let it stand so, as Menelaus and
+Helen and Paris before there was any Trojan war, and as if there never
+could be any--as if Paris went back discomfited, and the other two were
+reconciled.”
+
+His voice was low and broken. “I know you exaggerate matters, and
+condemn yourself beyond reason,” he replied. “I will do as you say. But,
+Dr. Marmion, it will not be all mumming, as you shall see.”
+
+A strange look came upon his face at this. I could not construe it;
+and, after a few words of explanation regarding his transference to
+the forward part of the ship, I left him. I found the purser, made the
+necessary arrangements for him, and then sought my cabin, humbled in
+many ways. I went troubled to bed. After a long wakefulness, I dozed
+away into that disturbed vestibule of sleep where the world’s happenings
+mingle with the visions of unconsciousness. I seemed to see a man’s
+heart beating in his bosom in growing agonies, until, with one last
+immense palpitation, it burst, and life was gone. Then the dream
+changed, and I saw a man in the sea, drowning, who seemed never to
+drown entirely, his hands ever beating the air and the mocking water.
+I thought that I tried many times to throw him a lighted buoy in the
+half-shadow, but some one held me back, and I knew that a woman’s arms
+were round me.
+
+But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with
+a last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight. When he was gone, the
+woman’s arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her,
+she, too, had gone.
+
+I awoke.
+
+Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, “She’ll
+get under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the ‘Porcupine’ to
+Aden. How the engines are kicking below!”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. MUMMERS ALL
+
+The next day was beautiful, if not enjoyable. Stirring preparations
+were being made for the ball. Boyd Madras was transferred to a cabin far
+forward, but he did not appear at any meal in the saloon, or on deck.
+In the morning I was busy in the dispensary. While I was there, Justine
+Caron came to get some medicine that I had before given her. Her hand
+was now nearly well. Justine had nerves, and it appeared to me that
+her efforts to please her mistress, and her occasional failures, were
+wearing her unduly. I said to her: “You have been worried, Miss Caron?”
+
+“Oh, no, Doctor,” she quickly replied.
+
+I looked at her a little sceptically, and she said at last: “Well,
+perhaps a little. You see, madame did not sleep well last night, and I
+read to her. It was a little difficult, and there was not much choice of
+books.”
+
+“What did you read?” I asked mechanically, as I prepared her medicine.
+
+“Oh, some French novel first--De Maupassant’s; but madame said he was
+impertinent--that he made women fools and men devils. Then I tried some
+modern English tales, but she said they were silly. I knew not what to
+do. But there was Shakespeare. I read Antony and Cleopatra, and she said
+that the play was grand, but the people were foolish except when they
+died--their deaths were magnificent. Madame is a great critic; she is
+very clever.”
+
+“Yes, yes, I know that; but when did she fall asleep?”
+
+“About four o’clock in the morning. I was glad, because she is very
+beautiful when she has much sleep.”
+
+“And you--does not sleep concern you in this matter of madame?”
+
+“For me,” she said, looking away, “it is no matter. I have no beauty.
+Besides, I am madame’s servant,”--she blushed slightly at this,”--and
+she is generous with money.”
+
+“Yes, and you like money so much?”
+
+Her eyes flashed a little defiantly as she looked me in the face. “It is
+everything to me.”
+
+She paused as if to see the effect upon me, or to get an artificial
+(I knew it was artificial) strength to go on, then she added: “I love
+money. I work for it; I would bear all for it--all that a woman could
+bear. I--” But here she paused again, and, though the eyes still
+flashed, the lips quivered. Hers was not the face of cupidity. It was
+sensitive, yet firm, as with some purpose deep as her nature was by
+creation and experience, and always deepening that nature. I suddenly
+got the conviction that this girl had a sorrow of some kind in her life,
+and that this unreal affection for money was connected with it. Perhaps
+she saw my look of interest, for she hurriedly continued: “But, pardon
+me, I am foolish. I shall be better when the pain is gone. Madame is
+kind; she will let me sleep this afternoon, perhaps.”
+
+I handed her the medicine, and then asked: “How long have you known Mrs.
+Falchion, Miss Caron?”
+
+“Only one year.”
+
+“Where did you join her?”
+
+“In Australia.”
+
+“In Australia? You lived there?”
+
+“No, monsieur, I did not live there.”
+
+A thought came to my mind--the nearness of New Caledonia to Australia,
+and New Caledonia was a French colony--a French penal colony! I smiled
+as I said the word penal to myself. Of course the word could have no
+connection with a girl like her, but still she might have lived in the
+colony. So I added quietly: “You perhaps had come from New Caledonia?”
+
+Her look was candid, if sorrowful. “Yes, from New Caledonia.”
+
+Was she, thought I, the good wife of some convict--some political
+prisoner?--the relative of some refugee of misfortune? Whatever she was,
+I was sure that she was free from any fault. She evidently thought that
+I might suspect something uncomplimentary of her, for she said: “My
+brother was an officer at Noumea. He is dead. I am going to France, when
+I can.”
+
+I tried to speak gently to her. I saw that her present position must
+be a trial. I advised her to take more rest, or she would break down
+altogether, for she was weak and nervous; I hinted that she might have
+to give up entirely, if she continued to tax herself heedlessly; and,
+finally, that I would speak to Mrs. Falchion about her. I was scarcely
+prepared for her action then. Tears came to her eyes, and she said to
+me, her hand involuntarily clasping my arm: “Oh no, no! I ask you not to
+speak to madame. I will sleep--I will rest. Indeed, I will. This service
+is so much to me. She is most generous. It is because I am so altogether
+hers, night and day, that she pays me well. And the money is so much. It
+is my honour--my dead brother’s honour. You are kind at heart; you will
+make me strong with medicine, and I will ask God to bless you. I could
+not suffer such poverty again. And then, it is my honour!”
+
+I felt that she would not have given way thus had not her nerves been
+shaken, had she not lived so much alone, and irregularly, so far as her
+own rest and comfort were concerned, and at such perpetual cost to her
+energy. Mrs. Falchion, I knew, was selfish, and would not, or could
+not, see that she was hard upon the girl, by such exactions as midnight
+reading and loss of sleep. She demanded not merely physical but mental
+energy--a complete submission of both; and when this occurred with a
+sensitive, high-strung girl, she was literally feeding on another’s
+life-blood. If she had been told this, she, no doubt, would have been
+very much surprised.
+
+I reassured Justine. I told her that I should say nothing directly
+to Mrs. Falchion, for I saw she was afraid of unpleasantness; but I
+impressed upon her that she must spare herself, or she would break
+down, and extorted a promise that she would object to sitting up after
+midnight to read to Mrs. Falchion.
+
+When this was done, she said: “But, you see, it is not madame’s fault
+that I am troubled.”
+
+“I do not wish,” I said, “to know any secret,--I am a doctor, not a
+priest,--but if there is anything you can tell me, in which I might
+be able to help you, you may command me in so far as is possible.”
+ Candidly, I think I was too inquiring in those days.
+
+She smiled wistfully, and replied: “I will think of what you say so
+kindly, and perhaps, some day soon, I will tell you of such trouble as
+I have. But, believe me, it is no question of wrong at all, by any
+one--now. The wrong is over. It is simply that a debt of honour must be
+satisfied; it concerns my poor dead brother.”
+
+“Are you going to relatives in France?” I asked.
+
+“No; I have no relatives, no near friends. I am alone in the world. My
+mother I cannot remember; she died when I was very young. My father had
+riches, but they went before he died. Still, France is home, and I must
+go there.” She turned her head away to the long wastes of sea.
+
+Little more passed between us. I advised her to come often on deck,
+and mingle with the passengers; and told her that, when she pleased, I
+should be glad to do any service that lay in my power. Her last words
+were that, after we put into Aden, she would possibly take me at my
+word.
+
+After she had gone, I found myself wondering at my presentiment that
+Aden was to be associated with critical points in the history of some of
+us; and from that moment I began to connect Justine Caron with certain
+events which, I felt sure, were marshalling to an unhappy conclusion. I
+wondered, too, what part I should play in the development of the comedy,
+tragedy, or whatever it was to be. In this connection I thought of Belle
+Treherne, and of how I should appear in her eyes if that little scene
+with Mrs. Falchion, now always staring me in the face, were rehearsed
+before her. I came quickly to my feet, with a half-imprecation at
+myself; and a verse of a crude sea-song was in my ears:
+
+       “You can batten down cargo, live and dead,
+        But you can’t put memory out of sight;
+        You can paint the full sails overhead,
+        But you can’t make a black deed white....”
+
+Angry, I said to myself: “It wasn’t a black deed; it was foolish, it was
+infatuation, it was not right, but it is common to shipboard; and I lost
+my head, that was all.”
+
+Some time later I was still at work in the dispensary, when I heard Mr.
+Treherne’s voice calling to me from outside. I drew back the curtain. He
+was leaning on his daughter’s arm, while in one hand he carried a stick.
+“Ah, Doctor, Doctor,” cried he, “my old enemy, sciatica, has me in its
+grip, and why, in this warm climate, I can’t understand. I’m afraid I
+shall have to heave-to, like the ‘Fulvia’, and lay up for repairs. And,
+by the way, I’m glad we are on our course again.” He entered, and sat
+down. Belle Treherne bowed to me gravely, and smiled slightly. The smile
+was not peculiarly hospitable. I knew perfectly well that to convince
+her of the reality of my growing admiration for her would be no easy
+task; but I was determined to base my new religion of the affections
+upon unassailable canons, and I felt that now I could do best by waiting
+and proving myself.
+
+While I was arranging some medicine for Mr. Treherne, and advising him
+on care against chills in a hot climate, he suddenly broke in with: “Dr.
+Marmion, Captain Ascott tells me that we shall get to Aden by Tuesday
+morning next. Now, I was asked by a friend of mine in London to visit
+the grave of a son of his--a newspaper correspondent--who was killed in
+one of the expeditions against the native tribes, and was buried in the
+general cemetery at Aden. On the way out I was not able to fulfil the
+commission, because we passed Aden in the night. But there will be
+plenty of time to do so on Tuesday, I am told. This, however, is my
+difficulty: I cannot go unless I am better, and I’m afraid there is no
+such luck as that in store for me. These attacks last a week, at least.
+I wish my daughter, however, to go. One of the ladies on board will go
+with her--Mrs. Callendar, I believe; and I am going to be so bold as
+to ask you to accompany them, if you will. I know you better than any
+officer on board; and, besides, I should feel safer and better satisfied
+if she went under the protection of an officer,--these barbarous places,
+you know!--though, of course, it may be asking too much of you, or what
+is impossible.”
+
+I assented with pleasure. Belle Treherne was looking at the Latin names
+on the bottles at the time, and her face showed no expression either of
+pleasure or displeasure. Mr. Treherne said bluffly: “Dr. Marmion, you
+are kind--very kind, and, upon my word, I’m much obliged.” He then
+looked at his daughter as if expecting her to speak.
+
+She looked up and said conventionally: “You are very kind, Dr. Marmion,
+and I am much obliged.” Then I thought her eyes twinkled with amusement
+at her own paraphrase of her father’s speech, and she added: “Mrs.
+Callendar and myself will be much honoured indeed, and feel very
+important in having an officer to attend us. Of course everybody else
+will be envious, and, again of course, that will add to our vanity.”
+
+At this she would have gone; but her father, who was suffering just
+enough pain to enjoy anything that would divert his attention from it,
+fell into conversation upon a subject of mutual interest, in which his
+daughter joined on occasion, but not with enthusiasm. Yet, when they
+came to go, she turned and said kindly, almost softly, as her fingers
+touched mine: “I almost envy you your profession, Dr. Marmion. It opens
+doors to so much of humanity and life.”
+
+“There is no sin,” I laughingly said, “in such a covetousness, and,
+believe me, it can do no harm to me, at least.” Then I added gravely: “I
+should like my profession, in so far as I am concerned, to be worth your
+envy.” She had passed through the door before the last words were said,
+but I saw that her look was not forbidding.
+
+       .........................
+
+Is there unhappiness anywhere? There is not a vexing toss of the sea,
+not a cloud in the sky. Is not catastrophe dead, and the arrows of
+tragedy spilled? Peace broadens into deep, perfumed dusk towards Arabia;
+languor spreads towards the unknown lands of the farthest south. No
+anxious soul leans out from the casement of life; the time is heavy with
+delightful ease. There is no sound that troubles; the world goes by and
+no one heeds; for it is all beyond this musky twilight and this pleasant
+hour. In this palace on the sea Mirth trails in and out with airy and
+harmonious footsteps. Even the clang-clang of eight bells has music--not
+boisterous nor disturbing, but muffled in the velvety air. Then, through
+this hemisphere of jocund quiet, there sounds the “All’s well” of the
+watch.
+
+But, look! Did you see a star fall just then, and the long avenue of
+expiring flame behind it?--Do not shudder; it is nothing. No cry of pain
+came through that brightness. There was only the “All’s well” from the
+watchers.
+
+The thud of the engines falls on a padded atmosphere, and the lascars
+move like ghosts along the decks. The long, smooth promenade is canopied
+and curtained, and hung with banners, and gay devices of the gorgeous
+East are contributing to the federation of pleasure.
+
+And now, through a festooned doorway, there come the people of many
+lands to inhabit the gay court. Music follows their footsteps: Hamlet
+and Esther; Caractacus and Iphigenia; Napoleon and Hermione; The Man
+in the Iron Mask and Sappho; Garibaldi and Boadicea; an Arab sheikh
+and Joan of Arc; Mahomet and Casablanca; Cleopatra and Hannibal--a
+resurrected world. But the illusion is short and slight. This world
+is very sordid--of shreds and patches, after all. It is but a
+pretty masquerade, in which feminine vanity beats hard against
+strangely-clothed bosoms; and masculine conceit is shown in the work of
+the barber’s curling-irons and the ship-carpenter’s wooden swords
+and paper helmets. The pride of these folk is not diminished because
+Hamlet’s wig gets awry, or a Roman has trouble with his foolish garters.
+Few men or women can resist mumming; they fancy themselves as somebody
+else, dead or living. Yet these seem happy in this nonsense. The
+indolent days appear to have deadened hatred, malice, and all
+uncharitableness. They shall strut and fret their hour upon this little
+stage. Let that sprightly girl forget the sudden death which made her an
+orphan; the nervous broker his faithless wife; the grey-haired soldier
+his silly and haunting sins; the bankrupt his creditors.
+
+“On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!” For the captain is on the
+bridge, the engineer is beneath; we have stout walls, and a ceaseless
+sentry-go. In the intervals of the dance wine passes, and idle things
+are said beside the draped and cushioned capstan or in the friendly
+gloom of a boat, which, in the name of safety, hangs taut between its
+davits. Let this imitation Cleopatra use the Cleopatra’s arts; this
+mellow Romeo (sometime an Irish landlord) vow to this coy Juliet; this
+Helen of Troy--Of all who walked these decks, mantled and wigged
+in characters not their own, Mrs. Falchion was the handsomest, most
+convincing. With a graceful swaying movement she passed along the
+promenade, and even envy praised her. Her hand lay lightly on the arm
+of a brown stalwart native of the Indian hills, fierce and savage
+in attire. Against his wild picturesqueness and brawny strength, her
+perfectness of animal beauty, curbed and rendered delicate by her inner
+coldness, showed in fine contrast; and yet both were matched in the fine
+natural prowess of form.
+
+With a singular affirmation of what had been, after all, but
+a sadly-humourous proposal, I had attired myself in a Greek
+costume--quickly made by my steward, who had been a tailor--and was
+about to leave my cabin, when Hungerford entered, and exclaimed, as he
+took his pipe from his mouth in surprise: “Marmion, what does this
+mean? Don’t you know your duties better? No officer may appear at these
+flare-ups in costume other than his uniform. You’re the finest example
+of suburban innocence and original sin I’ve seen this last quarter of
+a century, wherein I’ve kept the world--and you--from tottering to
+destruction.” He reached for one of my cigars.
+
+Without a word, and annoyed at my own stupidity, I slowly divested
+myself of the clothes of Greece; while Hungerford smoked on, humming to
+himself occasionally a few bars of The Buccaneer’s Bride, but evidently
+occupied with something in his mind. At length he said: “Marmion, I said
+suburban innocence and original sin, but you’ve a grip on the law of
+square and compass too. I’ll say that for you, old chap--and I hope you
+don’t think I’m a miserable prig.”
+
+Still I replied nothing, but offered him one of my best cigars, taking
+the other one from him, and held the match while he lighted it--which,
+between men, is sufficient evidence of good-feeling. He understood, and
+continued: “Of course you’ll keep your eye on Mrs. Falchion and Madras
+to-night: if he is determined that they shall meet, and you have
+arranged it. I’d like to know how it goes before you turn in, if you
+don’t mind. And, I say, Marmion, ask Miss Treherne to keep a dance for
+me--a waltz--towards the close of the evening, will you? Excuse me, but
+she is the thorough-bred of the ship. And if I have only one hop down
+the promenade, I want it to be with a girl who’ll remind me of some one
+that is making West Kensington worth inhabiting. Only think, Marmion, of
+a girl like her--a graduate in arts, whose name and picture have been in
+all the papers--being willing to make up with me, Dick Hungerford! She
+is as natural and simple as a girl can be, and doesn’t throw Greek roots
+at you, nor try to convince you of the difference between the songs
+of the troubadours and the sonnets of Petrarch. She doesn’t care a rap
+whether Dante’s Beatrice was a real woman or a principle; whether James
+the First poisoned his son; or what’s the margin between a sine and a
+cosine. She can take a fence in the hunting-field like a bird--! Oh, all
+right, just hold still, and I’ll unfasten it.” And he struggled with a
+recalcitrant buckle. “Well, you’ll not forget about Miss Treherne, will
+you? She ought to go just as she is. Fancy-dress on her would be gilding
+the gold; for, though she isn’t surpassingly beautiful, she is very
+fine, very fine indeed. There, now, you’re yourself again, and look all
+the better for it.”
+
+By this time I was again in my uniform, and I sat down, and smoked, and
+looked at Hungerford. His long gossip had been more or less detached,
+and I had said nothing. I understood that he was trying, in his blunt,
+honest way, to turn my thoughts definitely from Mrs. Falchion to Belle
+Treherne; and he never seemed to me such a good fellow as at that
+moment. I replied at last: “All right, Hungerford; I’ll be your
+deputation, your ambassador, to Miss Treherne. What time shall we see
+you on deck?”
+
+“About 11.40--just in time to trip a waltz on the edge of eight bells.”
+
+“On the edge of Sunday, my boy.”
+
+“Yes. Do you know, it is just four years ago tomorrow since I found Boyd
+Madras on the No Man’s Sea?”
+
+“Let us not talk of it,” said I.
+
+“All right. I merely stated the fact because it came to me. I’m
+mum henceforth. And I want to talk about something else. The first
+officer,--I don’t know whether you have noticed him lately, but I tell
+you this: if we ever get into any trouble with this ship he’ll go to
+pieces. Why, the other night, when the engine got tangled, he was as
+timid as a woman. That shock he had with the coal, as I said before, has
+broken his nerve, big man as he is.”
+
+“Hungerford,” I said, “you do not generally croak, but you are earning
+the character of the raven for yourself to-night. The thing is growing
+on you. What IS the use of bringing up unpleasant subjects? You are an
+old woman.” I fear there was the slightest irritation in my voice; but,
+truth is, the last few days’ experiences had left their mark on me, and
+Hungerford’s speech and manner had suddenly grown trying.
+
+He stood for a moment looking at me with direct earnestness from under
+his strong brows, and then he stepped forward, and, laying his hand
+upon my arm, rejoined: “Do not be raw, Marmion. I’m only a blunt, stupid
+sailor; and, to tell you God’s truth, as I have told you before, every
+sailor is superstitious--every real sailor. He can’t help it--I can’t. I
+have a special fit on me now. Why don’t I keep it to myself? Because
+I’m selfish, and it does me good to talk. You and I are in one secret
+together, and it has made me feel like sharing this thing with a pal, I
+suppose.”
+
+I seized his hand and begged his pardon, and called myself unpleasant
+names, which he on the instant stopped, and said: “That’s all right,
+Marmy; shake till the knuckles crack! I’m off. Don’t forget the dance.”
+ He disappeared down the passage.
+
+Then I went on deck, and the scene which I have so imperfectly described
+passed before me. Mrs. Falchion was surrounded with admirers all the
+evening, both men and women; and two of the very stately English ladies
+of title, to whom I before referred, were particularly gracious to her;
+while she, in turn, bore herself with becoming dignity. I danced with
+her once, and was down on her programme for another dance. I had also
+danced with Belle Treherne, who appeared as Miriam, and was chaperoned
+by one of the ladies of title; and I had also “sat out” one dance
+with her. Chancing to pass her as the evening wore on, I saw her
+in conversation with Mrs. Falchion, who had dismissed her cavalier,
+preferring to talk, she said, for dancing was tiresome work on the
+Indian Ocean. Belle Treherne, who up to that moment had never quite
+liked her, yielded to the agreeable charm of her conversation and her
+frank applausive remarks upon the costumes of the dancers. She had a
+good word for every one, and she drew her companion out to make the most
+of herself, as women less often do before women than in the presence
+of men. I am certain that her interest in Belle Treherne was real, and
+likewise certain that she cherished no pique against her because I
+had transferred my allegiance. Indeed, I am sure that she had no deep
+feeling of injured pride where I was concerned. Such after acidity as
+she sometimes showed was directed against the foolish part I had played
+with her and my action in subsequent events; it did not proceed from
+personal feeling or self-value.
+
+Some time after this meeting I saw Boyd Madras issue from the
+companion-way dressed as a Greek. He wore a false beard, and carried
+off well his garments of white and scarlet and gold--a very striking
+and presentable man. He came slowly forward, looking about him steadily,
+and, seeing me, moved towards me. But for his manner I should scarcely
+have recognised him. A dance was beginning; but many eyes were turned
+curiously, and even admiringly, to him; for he looked singular and
+impressive and his face was given fulness by a beard and flesh paints.
+I motioned him aside where there was shadow, and said: “Well, you have
+determined to see her?”
+
+“Yes,” he said; “and I wish you, if you will, to introduce me to her as
+Mr. Charles Boyd.
+
+“You still think this wise?” I asked.
+
+“It is my earnest wish. I must have an understanding to-night.” He
+spoke very firmly, and showed no excitement. His manner was calm and
+gentlemanly.
+
+He had a surprising air of decision. Supporting an antique character, he
+seemed for the moment to have put on also something of antique strength
+of mind, and to be no longer the timid invalid. “Then, come with me,” I
+answered.
+
+We walked in silence for a few minutes, and then, seeing where Mrs.
+Falchion was, we advanced to her. The next dance on her programme was
+mine. In my previous dance with her we had talked as we now did at
+table--as we did the first hour I met her--impersonally, sometimes (I
+am bold to say) amusingly. Now I approached her with apologies for being
+late. The man beside her took his leave. She had only just glanced at
+me at first, but now she looked at my companion, and the look stayed,
+curious, bewildered.
+
+“It is fitting,” I said, “that Greek meet Greek--that Menelaus should be
+introduced to Helen. May I say that when Helen is not Helen she is Mrs.
+Falchion, and when Menelaus is not Menelaus he is--Mr. Charles Boyd.”
+
+I am afraid my voice faltered slightly, because there came over me
+suddenly a nervousness as unexpected as it was inconvenient, and my
+words, which began lightly, ended huskily. Had Madras miscalculated this
+woman?
+
+Her eyes were afire, and her face was as pale as marble; all its slight
+but healthy glow had fled. A very faint gasp came from her lips. I saw
+that she recognised him, as he bowed and mentioned her name, following
+my introduction. I knew not what might occur, for I saw danger in her
+eyes in reply to the beseeching look in his. Would melodrama supervene
+after all? She merely bowed towards me, as if to dismiss me, and then
+she rose, took his arm, and moved away. The interview that follows came
+to me from Boyd Madras afterwards.
+
+When they had reached the semi-darkness of the forward part of the ship,
+she drew her hand quickly away, and, turning to him, said: “What is the
+name by which you are called? One does not always hear distinctly when
+being introduced.”
+
+He did not understand what she was about to do, but he felt the deadly
+coldness in her voice. “My name is known to you,” he replied. He
+steadied himself.
+
+“No, pardon me, I do not know it, for I do not know you.... I never saw
+you before.” She leaned her hand carelessly on the bulwarks.
+
+He was shocked, but he drew himself together. Their eyes were intent
+on each other. “You do know me! Need I tell you that I am Boyd Madras?”
+ “Boyd Madras,” she said, musing coldly. “A peculiar name.”
+
+“Mercy Madras was your name until you called yourself Mrs. Falchion,” he
+urged indignantly, yet anxiously too.
+
+“It suits you to be mysterious, Mr.--ah yes, Mr. Boyd Madras;
+but, really, you might be less exacting in your demands upon one’s
+imagination.” Her look was again on him casually.
+
+He spoke breathlessly. “Mercy--Mercy--for God’s sake, don’t treat me
+like this! Oh, my wife, I have wronged you every way, but I loved you
+always--love you now. I have only followed you to ask you to forgive
+me, after all these years. I saw you in Colombo just before you came
+on board, and I felt that I must come also. You never loved me. Perhaps
+that is better for you, but you do not know what I suffer. If you could
+give me a chance, and come with me to America--anywhere, and let me
+start the world again? I can--travel straight now, and I will work hard,
+and be honest. I will--” But here sudden pain brought back the doubt
+concerning his life and its possibilities.
+
+He leaned against the bulwarks, and made a helpless, despairing motion
+with his hand. “No, no!” he said; and added with a bitter laugh: “Not
+to begin the world again, but to end it as profitably and silently as I
+can. ... But you will listen to me, my wife? You will say at least that
+you forgive me the blight and ill I brought upon you?”
+
+She had listened to him unmoved outwardly. Her reply was instant. “You
+are more melodramatic than I thought you capable of being--from your
+appearance,” she said in a hard tone. “Your acting is very good, but not
+convincing. I cannot respond as would become the unity and sequence of
+the play.... I have no husband. My husband is dead--I buried him years
+ago. I have forgotten his name--I buried that too.”
+
+All the suffering and endured scorn of years came to revolt in him. He
+leaned forward now, and caught her wrist. “Have you no human feeling?”
+ he said “no heart in you at all? Look. I have it in me here suddenly to
+kill you as you stand. You have turned my love to hate. From your smooth
+skin there I could strip those rags, and call upon them all to look at
+you--my wife--a felon’s wife; mine to have and to hold--to hold, you
+hear!--as it was sworn at the altar. I bare my heart to you, repenting,
+and you mock it, torture it, with your undying hate and cruelty. You
+have no heart, no life. This white bosom is all of you--all of your
+power to make men love you--this, and your beauty. All else, by God, is
+cruel as the grave!”
+
+His voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper. She had not sought to remove
+his hand, nor struggled in the least; and once it seemed as if this new
+development of his character, this animal fierceness, would conquer her:
+she admired courage. It was not so. He trembled with weakness before he
+had finished. He stopped too soon; he lost.
+
+“You will find such parts exhausting to play,” she murmured, as he let
+her arm fall. “It needs a strong physique to endure exaggerated, nervous
+sentiment. And now, please, let us perform less trying scenes.” Then,
+with a low, cold anger, she continued: “It is only a coward that will
+dog a woman who finds his presence insupportable to her. This woman
+cannot, if she would, endure this man’s presence; it is her nature.
+Well, why rush blindly at the impossible? She wishes to live her spoiled
+life alone. The man can have no part in it--never, never! But she has
+money. If in that way--”
+
+He stretched out his hand protestingly, the fingers spread in
+excitement. “No more--not another word!” he said. “I ask for
+forgiveness, for one word of kindness--and I am offered money! the fire
+that burned me to eat, instead of bread! I had a wife once,” he added in
+a kind of troubled dream, looking at her as if she were very far away,
+“and her name was Mercy--her name was Mercy--Mercy Madras. I loved her.
+I sinned for her sake. A message came that she was dead to me; but I
+could not believe that it was so altogether, for I had knelt at her feet
+and worshipped her. I went to her, but she sent me away angrily. Years
+passed. ‘She will have relented now,’ I said, and I followed her, and
+found her as I thought. But it was not she; it was a wicked ghost in
+her beautiful body--nothing more. And then I turned away and cursed
+all things, because I knew that I should never see my wife again. Mercy
+Madras was dead. ... Can you not hear the curses?”
+
+Still she was unmoved. She said with a cruel impatience in her voice:
+“Yes, Mercy Madras is dead. How then can she forgive? What could her
+ghost--as you call her--do, but offer the thing which her husband--when
+he was living--loved so well that he sold himself into bondage,
+and wrecked his world and hers for it--Money? Well, money is at his
+disposal, as she said before--”
+
+But she spoke no more. The man in him straight way shamed her into
+silence with a look. She bowed her head, yet not quite in shame, for
+there was that in her eyes which made her appear as if his suffering was
+a gratuitous infliction. But at this moment he was stronger, and he drew
+her eyes up by the sheer force of his will. “I need no money now,” he
+coldly declared. “I need nothing--not even you; and can you fancy that,
+after waiting all these years for this hour, money would satisfy me?
+Do you know,” he continued slowly and musingly, “I can look upon you
+now--yes, at this moment--with more indifference than you ever showed to
+me? A moment ago I loved you: now I think you horrible; because you are
+no woman; you have a savage heart. And some day you will suffer as I do,
+so terribly that even the brazen serpent could not cure you. Then you
+will remember me.”
+
+He was about to leave her, but he had not taken two steps before he
+turned, with all the anger and the passion softened in his eyes, and
+said, putting his hand out towards yet not to touch her, “Good-bye--for
+the last time.” And then the look was such as might be turned upon a
+forgiven executioner.
+
+“Good-night,” she replied, and she did not look into his eyes, but out
+to sea. Her eyes remained fixed upon its furtive gloom. She too was
+furtive and gloomy at this moment. They were both sleek, silent, and
+remorseless. There was a slight rustle to her dress as she changed her
+position. It was in grim keeping with the pitiless rustle of the sea.
+
+And so they parted. I saw him move on towards the companion-way, and
+though I felt instinctively that all had gone ill with him, I was
+surprised to see how erect he walked. After a minute I approached her.
+She heard me coming, and presently turned to me with a curious smile.
+“Who is Mr. Charles Boyd?” she asked. “I did not pierce his disguise.
+I could not tell whether I had met him on board before. Have I? But my
+impression is that I had not seen him on the ship.”
+
+“No, you had not seen him,” I replied. “He had a fancy to travel, until
+yesterday, with the second-class passengers. Now he has a first-class
+cabin--in his proper place, in fact.”
+
+“You think so--in his proper place?” The suggestion was not pleasant.
+
+“Assuredly. Why do you speak in that way?” was my indignant reply.
+
+She took my arm as we moved on. “Because he was slightly rude to me.”
+
+I grew bold, and determined to bring her to some sort of reckoning.
+
+“How rude were you to him?”
+
+“Not rude at all. It is not worth while being so--to anybody,” was her
+chilly answer.
+
+“I was under the impression you had met him before,” I said gravely.
+
+“Indeed? And why?” She raised her eyebrows at me. I pushed the matter
+to a conclusion. “He was ill the other day--he has heart trouble. It was
+necessary for me to open the clothes about his neck. On his breast I saw
+a little ivory portrait of a woman’s head.”
+
+“A woman’s head,” she repeated absently, and her fingers idly toyed with
+a jingling ornament in her belt. In an idle moment I had sketched the
+head, as I remembered it, on a sheet of paper, and now I took it from
+my pocket and handed it to her. We were standing near a port-hole of the
+music saloon, from which light streamed.
+
+“That is the head,” said I.
+
+She deliberately placed the paper in the belt of light, and, looking
+at it, remarked mechanically: “This is the head, is it?” She showed no
+change of countenance, and handed it back to me as if she had seen no
+likeness. “It is very interesting,” she said, “but one would think you
+might make better use of your time than by surreptitiously sketching
+portraits from sick men’s breasts. One must have plenty of leisure to do
+that sort of thing, I should think. Be careful that you do not get into
+mischief, Dr. Marmion.” She laughed. “Besides, where was the special
+peculiarity in that portrait that you should treasure it in pencil
+so conventionally?--Your drawing is not good.--Where was the point or
+need?”
+
+“I have no right to reply to that directly,” I responded. “But this
+man’s life is not for always, and if anything happened to him it would
+seem curious to strangers to find that on his breast--because, of
+course, more than I would see it there.”
+
+“If anything happened? What should happen? You mean, on board ship?”
+ There was a little nervousness in her tone now.
+
+“I am only hinting at an awkward possibility,” I replied.
+
+She looked at me scornfully. “When did you see that picture on his
+breast?” I told her. “Ah! before THAT day?” she rejoined. I knew
+that she referred to the evening when I had yielded foolishly to the
+fascination of her presence. The blood swam hotly in my face. “Men are
+not noble creatures,” she continued.
+
+“I am afraid you would not give many their patents of nobility if you
+had power to bestow them,” I answered.
+
+“Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble
+creatures. Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my
+prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them. Vanity would
+accomplish that much. Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not
+radical virtue--since we are beginning to be bookish again.”
+
+“To what do you reduce honour and right?” returned I.
+
+“As I said to you on a memorable occasion,” she answered very drily, “to
+a code.”
+
+“That is,” rejoined I, “a man does a good action, lives an honourable
+life, to satisfy a social canon--to gratify, say, a wife or mother, who
+believes in him, and loves him?”
+
+“Yes.” She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father. She
+drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could
+not tell.
+
+“But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?” I urged. “That
+he shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be
+fed, might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?”
+
+“Yes, it is true either way--pleasure or misery. Please come to the
+saloon and get me an ice before the next dance.”
+
+I was perplexed. Was she altogether soulless? Even now, as we passed
+among the dancers, she replied to congratulations on her make-up and
+appearance with evident pleasure.
+
+An hour later, I was taking Belle Treherne from the arm of Hungerford
+for the last waltz, and, in reply to an inquiring glance from him, I
+shook my head mournfully. His face showed solicitude as he walked away.
+Perhaps it did not gratify my vanity that Belle Treherne, as her father
+limped forward at the stroke of eight bells to take her below, said
+to me: “How downright and thorough Mr. Hungerford is!” But I frankly
+admitted that he was all she might say good of him, and more.
+
+The deck was quickly dismantled, the lights went out, and all the
+dancers disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the
+darkness, rose the plaintive “All’s well!” And it kept ringing in my
+ears until it became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free.
+It was like the voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: “Never,
+never, never, never, never!”
+
+Something of Hungerford’s superstitious feeling possessed me. I went
+below, and involuntarily made my way to Boyd Madras’s cabin.
+
+Though the night was not hot, the door was drawn to. I tapped. His voice
+at once asked who was there, and when I told him, and inquired how he
+was, he said he was not ill, and asked me to come to his cabin in the
+morning, if I would. I promised, and bade him good-night. He responded,
+and then, as I turned away from the door, I heard him repeat the
+good-night cordially and calmly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+
+The next morning I was up early, and went on deck. The sun had risen,
+and in the moist atmosphere the tints of sky and sea were beautiful.
+Everywhere was the warm ocean undulating lazily to the vague horizon. A
+few lascars were still cleansing the decks; others were seated on
+their haunches between decks, eating curry from a calabash; a couple of
+passengers were indolently munching oranges; and Stone the quartermaster
+was inspecting the work lately done by the lascars. Stone gave me a
+pleasant good-morning, and we walked together the length of the deck
+forward. I had got about three-fourths of the length back again, when I
+heard a cry from aft--a sharp call of “Man overboard!” In a moment I had
+travelled the intermediate deck, and was at the stern, looking below,
+where, in the swirling waters, was the head of a man. With cries of
+“Man overboard!” I threw two or three buoys after the disappearing head,
+above which a bare arm thrust itself. I heard the rush of feet behind
+me, and in a moment Hungerford and Stone were beside me. The signal was
+given for the engines to stop; stewards and lascars came running on deck
+in response to Hungerford’s call, and the first officer now appeared.
+Very soon a crew was gathered on the after-deck, about a boat on the
+port side.
+
+Passengers by this time showed in various stages of dressing--women
+wringing their hands, men gesticulating. If there is anything calculated
+to send a thrill of awe through a crowd, it is the cry of “Man
+overboard!” And when one looked below, and saw above the drowning head
+two white arms thrust from the sea, a horrible thing was brought home to
+each of us. Besides, the scene before us on the deck was not reassuring.
+There was trouble in getting the boat lowered. The first officer was
+excited, the lascars were dazed, the stewards were hurried without being
+confident; only Hungerford, Stone, and the gunner were collected. The
+boat should have been launched in a minute, but still it hung between
+its davits; its course downward was interrupted; something was wrong
+with the ropes, “A false start, by---!” said the bookmaker, looking
+through his eye-glass. Colonel Ryder’s face was stern, Clovelly was pale
+and anxious, as moment after moment went, and the boat was not yet free.
+Ages seemed to pass before the boat was let down even with the bulwarks,
+and a crew of ten, with Hungerford in command, were in it, ready to
+be lowered. Whether the word was given to lower, or whether it was any
+one’s fault, may never perhaps be known; but, as the boat hung there,
+suddenly it shot down at the stern, some one having let go the ropes at
+that end; and the bow being still fast, it had fallen like a trap-door.
+It seemed, on the instant, as if the whole crew were tossed into
+the water; but some had successfully clutched the boat’s side, and
+Hungerford hung by a rope with one hand. In the eddying water, however,
+about the reversing screw, were two heads, and farther off was a man
+struggling. The face of one of the men near the screw was upturned for a
+moment; it was that of Stone the quartermaster.
+
+A cry went up from the passengers, and they swayed forward to the
+suspended boat; but Colonel Ryder turned almost savagely upon them.
+“Keep quiet!” he said. “Stand back! What can you do? Give the officers a
+chance.” He knew that there had been a false start, and bad work indeed;
+but he also saw that the task of the officers must not be made harder.
+His sternness had effect. The excited passengers drew back, and I took
+his place in front of them. When the first effort had been made to lower
+the boat, I asked the first officer if I could accompany the crew, but
+he said no. I could, therefore, do nothing but wait. A change came on
+the crowd. It became painfully silent, none speaking save in whispers,
+and all watching with anxious faces either the receding heads in the
+water or the unfortunate boat’s crew. Hungerford showed himself a
+thorough sailor. Hanging to the davit, he quietly, reassuringly, gave
+the order for righting the boat, virtually taking the command out of
+the hands of the first officer, who was trembling with nervousness.
+Hungerford was right; this man’s days as a sailor were over. The
+accident from which he had suffered had broken his nerve, stalwart as he
+was. But Hungerford was as cool as if this were ordinary boat-practice.
+Soon the boat was drawn up again, and others took the place of those who
+had disappeared. Then it was lowered safely, and, with Hungerford erect
+in the bows, it was pulled swiftly along the path we had come.
+
+At length, too, the great ship turned round, but not in her tracks. It
+is a pleasant fiction that these great steamers are easily managed. They
+can go straight ahead, but their huge proportions are not adapted for
+rapid movement. However, the work of rescue was begun. Sailors were
+aloft on watch, Captain Ascott was on the bridge, sweeping the sea with
+his glass; order was restored. But the ship had the feeling of a home
+from which some familiar inmate had been taken, to return no more.
+Children clasped their mothers’ hands and said, “Mother, was it the poor
+quartermaster?” and men who the day before had got help from the petty
+officers in the preparation of costumes, said mournfully: “Fife the
+gunner was one of them.”
+
+But who was the man first to go overboard--and who was it first gave the
+alarm? There were rumours, but no one was sure. All at once I remembered
+something peculiar in that cry of “Man overboard!” and it shocked me. I
+hurried below, and went to the cabin of Boyd Madras. It was empty; but
+on a shelf lay a large envelope, addressed to Hungerford and myself.
+I tore it open. There was a small packet, which I knew contained the
+portrait he had worn on his bosom, addressed to Mrs. Falchion; and the
+other was a single sheet directed to me, fully written upon, and marked
+in the corner: “To be made public.”
+
+So, he had disappeared from the play? He had made his exit? He had
+satisfied the code at last? Before opening the letter addressed to me,
+I looked round. His clothes were folded upon one of the berths; but the
+garments of masquerade were not in the cabin. Had he then gone out of
+the world in the garb of a mummer? Not altogether, for the false beard
+he had worn the night before lay beside the clothes. But this terrible
+earnestness of his would look strange in last night’s disguise.
+
+I opened the packet addressed to Hungerford and myself, and saw that it
+contained a full and detailed account of his last meeting with his
+wife. The personal letter was short. He said that his gratitude was
+unspeakable, and now must be so for ever. He begged us not to let the
+world know who he was, nor his relationship to Mrs. Falchion, unless she
+wished it; he asked me to hand privately to her the packet bearing her
+name. Lastly, he requested that the paper for the public be given to the
+captain of the ‘Fulvia’.
+
+Going out into the passage, I found a steward, who hurriedly told me
+that just before the alarm was given he had seen Boyd Madras going aft
+in that strange costume, which he mistook for a dressing-gown, and he
+had come to see if, by any chance, it was he who had gone overboard. I
+told him that it was. He disappeared, and soon the whole ship knew it.
+I went to the captain, gave him the letter, and told him only what was
+necessary to tell. He was on the bridge, and was occupied with giving
+directions, so he asked me the substance of the letter, and handed it
+back to me, requesting me to make a copy of it soon and leave it in his
+cabin. I then took all the papers to my cabin, and locked them up. I
+give here the substance of the letter which was to be made public:
+
+   Because you know how much I have suffered physically while on board
+   this ship, and because you have been kind to me, I wish, through
+   you, to say my last word to the world: though, indeed, this may seem
+   a strange form for gratitude to take. Dying men, however, make few
+   apologies, and I shall make none. My existence, as you know, is an
+   uncertain quantity, and may be cut short at any moment in the
+   ordinary course of things. But I have no future in the active
+   concerns of life; no past on which to dwell with satisfaction; no
+   friends to mourn for my misfortunes in life, nor for my death,
+   whether it be peaceful or violent; therefore, I have fewer
+   compunctions in ending a mistaken career and a worthless life.
+
+   Some one will profit by my death: who it is matters not, for it is
+   no friend of mine. My death adjusts a balance, perhaps not nicely,
+   yet it does it. And this is all I have to say.... I am
+   going. Farewell....
+
+After a brief farewell to me added, there came the subscription “Charles
+Boyd;” and that was all. Why he cried out “Man overboard” (for now I
+recognised that it was his voice which gave the alarm), I do not know,
+except that he wished his body to be recovered, and to receive burial.
+
+Just here, some one came fumbling at the curtain of my cabin. I heard a
+gasp--“Doctor--my head! quick!”
+
+I looked out. As I drew the curtain a worthless lascar sailor fell
+fainting into my cabin. He had been drinking a good deal, and the horror
+and excitement of the accident had brought on an apoplectic fit. This in
+a very hot climate is suddenly fatal. In three minutes, in spite of me,
+he was dead. Postponing report of the matter, I went on deck again among
+the passengers.
+
+I expected that Mrs. Falchion would be among them, for the news must
+have gone to every part of the ship; but she was not there. On the
+outskirts of one of the groups, however, I saw Justine Caron. I went
+to her, and asked her if Mrs. Falchion had risen. She said that she had
+not: that she had been told of the disaster, and had appeared shocked;
+but had complained of a headache, and had not risen. I then asked
+Justine if Mrs. Falchion had been told who the suicide was, and was
+answered in the negative. At that moment a lady came to me and said in
+an awed whisper: “Dr. Marmion, is it true that the man who committed
+suicide was a second-class passenger, and that he appeared at the ball
+last night, and danced with Mrs. Falchion?”
+
+I knew that my reply would soon become common property, so I said:
+
+“He was a first-class passenger, though until yesterday he travelled
+second-class. I knew him. His name was Charles Boyd. I introduced him to
+Mrs. Falchion last night, but he did not stay long on deck, because
+he felt ill. He had heart trouble. You may guess that he was tired of
+life.” Then I told her of the paper which was for the public, and she
+left me.
+
+The search for the unfortunate men went on. No one could be seen near
+the floating buoys which were here and there picked up by Hungerford’s
+boat. The long undulations of the water had been broken up in a large
+area about the ship, but the sea was still comparatively smooth. We were
+steaming back along the track we had come. There was less excitement
+on board than might be expected. The tropical stillness of the air,
+the quiet suddenness of the tragedy itself, the grim decisiveness of
+Hungerford, the watchful silence of a few men like Colonel Ryder and
+Clovelly, had effect upon even the emotion of those women, everywhere
+found, who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery.
+
+Nearly all were watching the rescue boat, though a few looked over the
+sides of the ship as if they expected to find bodies floating about.
+They saw sharks, instead, and a trail of blood, and this sent them away
+sickened from the bulwarks. Then they turned their attention again
+upon the rescue party. It was impossible not to note what a fine figure
+Hungerford made, as he stood erect in the bow, his hand over his eyes,
+searching the water. Presently we saw him stop the boat, and something
+was drawn in. He signalled the ship. He had found one man--but dead or
+alive? The boat was rapidly rowed back to the ship, Hungerford making
+efforts for resuscitation. Arrived at the vessel, the body was passed up
+to me.
+
+It was that of Stone the quartermaster. I worked to bring back life, but
+it was of no avail. A minute after, a man in the yards signalled that he
+saw another. It was not a hundred yards away, and was floating near the
+surface. It was a strange sight, for the water was a vivid green, and
+the man wore garments of white and scarlet, and looked a part of some
+strange mosaic: as one has seen astonishing figures set in balls of
+solid glass. This figure framed in the sea was Boyd Madras. The boat
+was signalled, it drew near, and two men dragged the body in, as a shark
+darted forward, just too late, to seize it. The boat drew alongside the
+‘Fulvia’. I stood at the gangway to receive this castaway. I felt his
+wrist and heart. As I did so I chanced to glance up at the passengers,
+who were looking at this painful scene from the upper deck. There,
+leaning over the railing, stood Mrs. Falchion, her eyes fixed with a
+shocking wonder at the drooping, weird figure. Her lips parted, but
+at first they made no sound. Then, she suddenly drew herself up with a
+shudder. “Horrible! horrible!” she said, and turned away.
+
+I had Boyd Madras taken to an empty cabin next to mine, which I used for
+operations, and there Hungerford and myself worked to resuscitate him.
+We allowed no one to come near. I had not much hope of bringing life
+back, but still we worked with a kind of desperation, for it seemed to
+Hungerford and myself that somehow we were responsible to humanity for
+him. His heart had been weak, but there had been no organic trouble:
+only some functional disorder, which open-air life and freedom from
+anxiety might have overcome. Hungerford worked with an almost fierce
+persistence. Once he said: “By God, I will bring him back, Marmion, to
+face that woman down when she thinks she has got the world on the hip!”
+
+I cannot tell what delight we felt when, after a little time, I saw
+a quiver of the eyelids and a slight motion of the chest. Presently a
+longer breath came, and the eyes opened; at first without recognition.
+Then, in a few moments, I knew that he was safe--desperately against his
+will, but safe.
+
+His first sentient words startled me. He gasped, “Does she think I am
+drowned?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Then she must continue to do so!”
+
+“Why?”
+
+“Because”--here he spoke faintly, as if sudden fear had produced
+additional weakness--“because I had rather die a thousand deaths than
+meet her now; because she hates me. I must begin the world again. You
+have saved my life against my will: I demand that you give that life its
+only chance of happiness.”
+
+As his words came to me, I remembered with a start the dead lascar, and,
+leading Hungerford to my cabin, I pointed to the body, and whispered
+that the sailor’s death was only known to me. “Then this is the
+corpse of Boyd Madras, and we’ll bury it for him,” he said with quick
+bluntness. “Do not report this death to Captain Ascott--he would only
+raise objections to the idea. This lascar was in my watch. It will be
+supposed he fell overboard during the accident to the boat. Perhaps some
+day the funeral of this nigger will be a sensation and surprise to her
+blessed ladyship on deck.”
+
+I suggested that it seemed underhand and unprofessional, but the
+entreating words of the resuscitated man in the next room conquered my
+objections.
+
+It was arranged that Madras should remain in the present cabin, of which
+I had a key, until we reached Aden; then he should, by Hungerford’s aid,
+disappear.
+
+We were conspirators, but we meant harm to nobody. I covered up the face
+of the dead lascar and wrapped round him the scarlet and gold cloth
+that Madras had worn. Then I got a sailor, who supposed Boyd Madras
+was before him, and the body was soon sewed in its shotted shroud and
+carried to where Stone the quartermaster lay.
+
+At this day I cannot suppose I would do these things, but then it seemed
+right to do as Madras wished: he was, under a new name, to begin life
+afresh.
+
+After giving directions for the disposition of the bodies, I went on
+deck. Mrs. Falchion was still there. Some one said to her: “Did you know
+the man who committed suicide?”
+
+“He was introduced to me last night by Dr. Marmion,” she replied, and
+she shuddered again, though her face showed no remarkable emotion. She
+had had a shock to the senses, not to the heart.
+
+When I came to her on the deck, Justine was saying to her: “Madame, you
+should not have come. You should not see such painful things when you
+are not well.”
+
+She did not reply to this. She looked up at me and said: “A strange
+whim, to die in those fanciful rags. It is dreadful to see; but he had
+the courage.”
+
+I replied: “They have as much courage who make men do such things and
+then live on.”
+
+Then I told her briefly that I held the packet for her, that I guessed
+what was in it, and that I would hand it to her later. I also said that
+he had written to me the record of last night’s meeting with her, and
+that he had left a letter which was to be made public. As I said these
+things we were walking the decks, and, because eyes were on both of us,
+I tried to show nothing more unusual in manner than the bare tragedy
+might account for.
+
+“Well,” she said, with a curious coldness, “what use shall you make of
+your special knowledge?”
+
+“I intend,” I said, “to respect his wish, that your relationship to him
+be kept unknown, unless you declare otherwise.”
+
+“That is reasonable. If he had always been as reasonable! And,” she
+continued, “I do not wish the relationship to be known: practically
+there is none.... Oh! oh!” she added, with a sudden change in her
+voice, “why did he do as he did, and make everything else
+impossible--impossible!... Send me, or give me the packet, when you
+wish: and now please leave me, Dr. Marmion.”
+
+The last few words were spoken with some apparent feeling, but I knew
+she was thinking of herself most, and I went from her angry.
+
+I did not see her again before the hour that afternoon when we should
+give the bodies of the two men to the ocean. No shroud could be prepared
+for gunner Fife and able-seaman Winter, whose bodies had no Christian
+burial, but were swallowed by the eager sea, not to be yielded up even
+for a few hours. We were now steaming far beyond the place where they
+were lost.
+
+The burial was an impressive sight, as burials at sea mostly are. The
+lonely waters stretching to the horizon helped to make it so. There was
+a melancholy majesty in the ceremony.
+
+The clanging bell had stopped. Captain Ascott was in his place at the
+head of the rude draped bier. In the silence one only heard the swish of
+water against the ‘Fulvia’s’ side, as we sped on towards Aden. People do
+not know how beautiful, how powerful, is the burial service in the Book
+of Common Prayer, who have only heard it recited by a clergyman. To hear
+it read by a hardy man, whose life is among stern duties, is to receive
+a new impression. He knows nothing of lethargic monotone; he interprets
+as he reads. And when the man is the home-spun captain of a ship, who
+sees before him the poor shell of one that served him for ten years,
+“The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the
+Lord,” has a strange significance. It is only men who have borne
+the shock of toil and danger, and have beaten up against the world’s
+buffetings, that are fit to say last words over those gone down in the
+storm or translated in the fiery chariot of duty.
+
+The engines suddenly stopped. The effect was weird. Captain Ascott’s
+fingers trembled, and he paused for an instant and looked down upon
+the dead, then out sorrowfully to the waiting sea, before he spoke the
+words, “We therefore commit their bodies to the deep.” But, the moment
+they were uttered, the bier was lifted, there was a swift plunge, and
+only the flag and the empty boards were left. The sobbing of women now
+seemed almost unnatural; for around us was the bright sunlight, the gay
+dresses of the lascars, the sound of the bell striking the hours, and
+children playing on the deck. The ship moved on.
+
+And Mrs. Falchion? As the burial service was read, she had stood, and
+looked, not at the bier, but straight out to sea, calm and apparently
+unsympathetic, though, as she thought, her husband was being buried.
+When, however, the weighted body divided the water with a swingeing
+sound, her face suddenly suffused, as though shame had touched her
+or some humiliating idea had come. But she turned to Justine almost
+immediately, and soon after said calmly: “Bring a play of Moliere, and
+read to me, Justine.”
+
+I had the packet her supposed dead husband had left for her in my
+pocket. I joined her, and we paced the deck, at first scarcely speaking,
+while the passengers dispersed, some below, some to the smoking-rooms,
+some upon deck-chairs to doze through the rest of the lazy afternoon.
+The world had taken up its orderly course again. At last, in an
+unfrequented corner of the deck, I took the packet from my pocket and
+handed it to her. “You understand?” I asked.
+
+“Yes, I understand. And now, may I beg that for the rest of your natural
+life”--here she paused, and bit her lip in vexation that the unlucky
+phrase had escaped her--“you will speak of this no more?”
+
+“Mrs. Boyd Madras,” I said (here she coloured indignantly),--“pardon me
+for using the name, but it is only this once,--I shall never speak of
+the matter to you again, nor to any one else, unless there is grave
+reason.”
+
+We walked again in silence. Passing the captain’s cabin, we saw a number
+of gentlemen gathered about the door, while others were inside. We
+paused, to find what the incident was. Captain Ascott was reading the
+letter which Boyd Madras had wished to be made public. (I had given it
+to him just before the burial, and he was acting as though Boyd Madras
+was really dead--he was quite ignorant of our conspiracy.) I was about
+to move on, but Mrs. Falchion touched my arm. “Wait,” she said. She
+stood and heard the letter through. Then we walked on, she musing.
+Presently she said: “It is a pity--a pity.”
+
+I looked at her inquiringly, but she offered no explanation of the
+enigmatical words. But, at this moment, seeing Justine waiting, she
+excused herself, and soon I saw her listening to Moliere. Later in the
+day I saw her talking with Miss Treherne, and it struck me that she
+had never looked so beautiful as then, and that Miss Treherne had never
+seemed so perfect a product of a fine convention. But, watching them
+together, one who had had any standard of good life could never have
+hesitated between the two. It was plain to me that Mrs. Falchion was
+bent upon making a conquest of this girl who so delicately withstood
+her; and Belle Treherne has told me since, that, when in her presence,
+and listening to her, she was irresistibly drawn to her; though at the
+same time she saw there was some significant lack in her nature; some
+hardness impossible to any one who had ever known love. She also told me
+that on this occasion Mrs. Falchion did not mention my name, nor did
+she ever in their acquaintance, save in the most casual fashion. Her
+conversation with Miss Treherne was always far from petty gossip or that
+smart comedy in which some women tell much personal history, with the
+guise of badinage and bright cynicism. I confess, though, it struck me
+unpleasantly at the time, that this fresh, high-hearted creature should
+be in familiar conversation with a woman who, it seemed to me, was the
+incarnation of cruelty.
+
+Mrs. Falchion subscribed most liberally to the fund raised for the
+children of the quartermaster and munificently to that for the crew
+which had, under Hungerford, performed the rescue work. The only effect
+of this was to deepen the belief that she was very wealthy, and could
+spend her money without affectation; for it was noticeable that she,
+of all on board, showed the least outward excitement at the time of the
+disaster. It occurred to me that once or twice I had seen her eyes
+fixed on Hungerford inquisitively, and not free from antipathy. It was
+something behind her usual equanimity. Her intuitive observation had led
+her to trace his hand in recent events. Yet I know she admired him too
+for his brave conduct. The day following the tragedy we were seated
+at dinner. The captain and most of the officers had risen, but Mrs.
+Falchion, having come in late, was still eating, and I remained seated
+also. Hungerford approached me, apologising for the interruption. He
+remarked that he was going on the bridge, and wished to say something
+to me before he went. It was an official matter, to which Mrs. Falchion
+apparently did not listen. When he was about to turn away, he bowed
+to her rather distantly; but she looked up at him and said, with an
+equivocal smile:
+
+“Mr. Hungerford, we often respect brave men whom we do not like.”
+
+Then he, understanding her, but refusing to recognise the compliment,
+not altogether churlishly replied: “And I might say the same of women,
+Mrs. Falchion; but there are many women we dislike who are not brave.”
+
+“I think I could recognise a brave man without seeing his bravery,” she
+urged.
+
+“But I am a blundering sailor,” he rejoined, “who only believes his
+eyes.”
+
+“You are young yet,” she replied.
+
+“I shall be older to-morrow,” was his retort.
+
+“Well, perhaps you will see better to-morrow,” she rejoined, with
+indolent irony.
+
+“If I do, I’ll acknowledge it,” he added. Then Hungerford smiled at me
+inscrutably. We two held a strange secret.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+
+No more delightful experience may be had than to wake up in the harbour
+of Aden some fine morning--it is always fine there--and get the first
+impression of that mighty fortress, with its thousand iron eyes, in
+strong repose by the Arabian Sea. Overhead was the cloudless sun, and
+everywhere the tremulous glare of a sandy shore and the creamy wash of
+the sea, like fusing opals. A tiny Mohammedan mosque stood gracefully
+where the ocean almost washed its steps, and the Resident’s house,
+far up the hard hillside, looked down upon the harbour from a green
+coolness. The place had a massive, war-like character. Here was
+a battery with earthworks; there, a fort; beyond, a signal-staff.
+Hospitals, hotels, and stores were incidents in the picture. Beyond the
+mountain-wall and lofty Jebel Shamsan, rising in fine pink and bronze,
+and at the end of a high-walled path between the great hills, lay the
+town of Aden proper. Above the town again were the mighty Tanks,
+formed out of clefts in the mountains, and built in the times when the
+Phoenicians made Aden a great mart, the richest spot in all Arabia.
+
+Over to the left, on the opposite side of the harbour, were wide
+bungalows shining in the sun, and flanking the side of the ancient
+aqueduct, the gigantic tomb of an Arab sheikh. In the harbour were the
+men-of-war of all nations, and Arab dhows sailed slowly in, laden with
+pilgrims for Mecca--masses of picturesque sloth and dirt--and disease
+also; for more than one vessel flew the yellow flag. As we looked, a
+British man-of-war entered the gates of the harbour in the rosy light.
+It was bringing back the disabled and wounded from a battle, in which a
+handful of British soldiers were set to punish thirty times their number
+in an unknown country. But there was another man-of-war in port with
+which we were familiar. We passed it far out on the Indian Ocean. It
+again passed us, and reached Aden before we did. The ‘Porcupine’ lay not
+far from the ‘Fulvia’, and as I leaned over the bulwarks, idly looking
+at her, a boat shot away from her side, and came towards us. As it drew
+near, I saw that it was filled with luggage--a naval officer’s, I knew
+it to be. As the sailors hauled it up, I noticed that the initials upon
+the portmanteaus were G. R. The owner was evidently an officer going
+home on leave, or invalided. It did not, however, concern me, as I
+thought, and I turned away to look for Mr. Treherne, that I might fulfil
+my promise to escort his daughter and Mrs. Callendar to the general
+cemetery at Aden; for I knew he was not fit to do the journey, and there
+was nothing to prevent my going.
+
+A few hours later I stood with Miss Treherne and Mrs. Callendar in
+the graveyard beside the fortress-wall, placing wreaths of artificial
+flowers and one or two natural roses--a chance purchase from a shop
+at the port--on the grave of the young journalist. Miss Treherne had
+brought some sketching materials, and both of us (for, as has been
+suggested, I had a slight gift for drawing) made sketches of the
+burial-place. Having done this, we moved away to other parts of the
+cemetery, looking at the tombstones, many of which told sad tales enough
+of those who died far away from home and friends. As we wandered on, I
+noticed a woman kneeling beside a grave. It grew upon me that the figure
+was familiar. Presently I saw who it was, for the face lifted. I excused
+myself, went over to her, and said:--“Miss Caron, you are in trouble?”
+
+She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and pointed to the
+tombstone. On it I read:
+
+            Sacred to the Memory of
+               HECTOR CARON,
+            Ensign in the French Navy.
+
+         Erected by his friend, Galt Roscoe,
+                H.B.M.N.
+
+Beneath this was the simple line:
+
+           “Why, what evil hath he done?”
+
+“He was your brother?” I asked.
+
+“Yes, monsieur, my one brother.” Her tears dropped slowly.
+
+“And Galt Roscoe, who was he?” asked I.
+
+Through her grief her face was eloquent. “I never saw him--never knew
+him,” she said. “He saved my poor Hector from much suffering; he nursed
+him, and buried him here when he died, and then--that!” pointing to the
+tombstone. “He made me love the English,” she said. “Some day I shall
+find him, and I shall have money to pay him back all he spent--all.” Now
+I guessed the meaning of the scene on board the ‘Fulvia’, when she had
+been so anxious to preserve her present relations with Mrs. Falchion.
+This was the secret--a beautiful one. She rose. “They disgraced Hector
+in New Caledonia,” she said, “because he refused to punish a convict
+at Ile Nou who did not deserve it. He determined to go to France to
+represent his case. He left me behind, because we were poor. He went to
+Sydney. There he came to know this good man,”--her finger gently felt
+his name upon the stone,--“who made him a guest upon his ship; and so he
+came on towards England. In the Indian Ocean he was taken ill: and this
+was the end.”
+
+She mournfully sank again beside the grave, but she was no longer
+weeping.
+
+“What was this officer’s vessel?” I said presently. She drew from her
+dress a letter. “It is here. Please read it all. He wrote that to me
+when Hector died.”
+
+The superscription to the letter was--H.B.M.S. Porcupine.
+
+I might have told her then that the ‘Porcupine’ was in the harbour
+at Aden, but I felt that things would work out to due ends without my
+help--which, indeed, they began to do immediately. As we stood there
+in silence, I reading over and over again the line upon the pedestal, I
+heard footsteps behind, and, turning, I saw a man approaching us, who,
+from his manner, though he was dressed in civilian’s clothes, I guessed
+to be an officer of the navy. He was of more than middle height, had
+black hair, dark blue eyes, straight, strongly-marked brows, and was
+clean-shaven. He was a little ascetic-looking, and rather interesting
+and uncommon, and yet he was unmistakably a sea-going man. It was a face
+that one would turn to look at again and again--a singular personality.
+And yet my first glance told me that he was not one who had seen much
+happiness. Perhaps that was not unattractive in itself, since people who
+are very happy, and show it, are often most selfish too, and repel where
+they should attract. He was now standing near the grave, and his eyes
+were turned from one to the other of us, at last resting on Justine.
+
+Presently I saw a look of recognition. He stepped quickly forward.
+“Mademoiselle, will you pardon me?” he said very gently, “but you remind
+me of one whose grave I came to see.” His hand made a slight motion
+toward Hector Caron’s resting-place. Her eyes were on him with an
+inquiring earnestness. “Oh, monsieur, is it possible that you are my
+brother’s friend and rescuer?”
+
+“I am Roscoe. He was my good friend,” he said to her, and he held out
+his hand. She took it, and kissed it impulsively. He flushed, and drew
+it back quickly and shyly.
+
+“Some day I shall be able to repay you for all your goodness,” she said.
+“I am only grateful now--grateful altogether. And you will tell me all
+you knew of him--all that he said and did before he died?”
+
+“I will gladly tell you all I know,” he answered, and he looked at her
+compassionately, and yet with a little scrutiny, as though to know more
+of her and how she came to be in Aden. He turned to me inquiringly.
+
+I interpreted his thought by saying: “I am the surgeon of the ‘Fulvia’.
+I chanced upon Miss Caron here. She is travelling by the ‘Fulvia’.”
+
+With a faint voice, Justine here said: “Travelling--with my mistress.”
+
+“As companion to a lady,” I preferred to add in explanation, for I
+wished not to see her humble herself so. A look of understanding came
+into Roscoe’s face. Then he said: “I am glad that I shall see more of
+you; I am to travel by the ‘Fulvia’ also to London.”
+
+“Yet I am afraid I shall see very little of you,” she quietly replied.
+
+He was about to say something to her, but she suddenly swayed and would
+have fallen, but that he caught her and supported her. The weakness
+lasted only for a moment, and then, steadying herself, she said to both
+of us: “I hope you will say nothing of this to madame? She is kind, most
+kind, but she hates illness--and such things.”
+
+Galt Roscoe looked at me to reply, his face showing clearly that he
+thought “madame” an extraordinary woman. I assured Justine that we would
+say nothing. Then Roscoe cordially parted from us, saying that he would
+look forward to seeing us both on the ship; but before he finally went,
+he put on the grave a small bouquet from his buttonhole. Then I excused
+myself from Justine, and, going over to Miss Treherne, explained to
+her the circumstances, and asked her if she would go and speak to the
+afflicted girl. She and Mrs. Callendar had been watching the incident,
+and they eagerly listened to me. I think this was the moment that
+I first stood really well with Belle Treherne. Her sympathy for the
+bereaved girl flooded many barriers between herself and me.
+
+“Oh,” she said quickly, “indeed I will go to her, poor girl! Will you
+come also, Mrs. Callendar?”
+
+But Mrs. Callendar timidly said she would rather Miss Treherne went
+without her; and so it was. While Miss Treherne was comforting the
+bereaved girl, I talked to Mrs. Callendar. I fear that Mrs. Callendar
+was but a shallow woman; for, after a moment of excitable interest in
+Justine, she rather naively turned the talk upon the charms of Europe.
+And, I fear, not without some slight cynicism, I followed her where she
+led; for, as I said to myself, it did not matter what direction our idle
+tongues took, so long as I kept my mind upon the two beside that grave:
+but it gave my speech a spice of malice. I dwelt upon Mrs. Callendar’s
+return to her native heath--that is, the pavements of Bond Street and
+Piccadilly, although I knew that she was a native of Tasmania. At this
+she smiled egregiously.
+
+At length Miss Treherne came to us and said that Justine insisted she
+was well enough to go back to the vessel alone, and wished not to be
+accompanied. So we left her there.
+
+A score of times I have stopped when preparing my notes for this tale
+from my diary and those of Mrs. Falchion and Galt Roscoe, to think how,
+all through the events recorded here, and many others omitted, Justine
+Caron was like those devoted and, often, beautiful attendants of the
+heroes and heroines of tragedy, who, when all is over, close the eyes,
+compose the bodies, and cover the faces of the dead, pronouncing with
+just lips the benediction, fittest in their mouths. Their loves, their
+deeds, their lives, however good and worthy, were clothed in modesty and
+kept far up the stage, to be, even when everything was over, not always
+given the privilege to die as did their masters, but, like Horatio, bade
+to live and be still the loyal servant:
+
+     “But in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
+        To tell my story.”
+
+There was no reason why we should go to the ship immediately, and I
+proposed that we should first explore the port-town, and then visit the
+city of Aden--five miles away beyond the hills--and the Tanks. To this
+the ladies consented.
+
+Somauli policemen patrolled the streets; Somauli, Arab, and Turkish
+guides impeded the way; Arabs in plain white, Arab sheikhs in blue and
+white, and gold, lounged languidly about, or drank their coffee in the
+shade of the bazaars. Children of the desert, nearly naked, sprinkled
+water before the doors of the bazaars and stores and upon the hot
+thoroughfare, from long leather bottles; caravans of camels, with dusty
+stride, swung up the hillside and beyond into the desert; the Jewish
+water-carrier with his donkey trudged down the pass from the cool
+fountains in the volcanic hills; a guard of eunuchs marched by with the
+harem of a Mohammedan; in the doorways of the houses goats and donkeys
+fed. Jews, with greasy faces, red-hemmed skirt, and hungry look, moved
+about, offering ostrich feathers for sale, everywhere treated worse than
+the Chinaman in Oregon or at Port Darwin. We saw English and Australian
+passengers of the ‘Fulvia’ pelting the miserable members of a despised
+race with green fruit about the streets, and afterwards from the deck of
+the ship. A number of these raised their hats to us as they passed; but
+Belle Treherne’s acknowledgment was chilly.
+
+“It is hard to be polite to cowards,” she said.
+
+After having made some ruinous bargains in fezes, Turkish cloths and
+perfume, I engaged a trap, and we started for Aden. The journey was not
+one of beauty, but it had singular interest. Every turn of the wheels
+carried us farther and farther away from a familiar world to one of
+yesterday. White-robed warriors of the desert, with lances, bent their
+brows upon us as they rode away towards the endless sands, and vagabonds
+of Egypt begged for alms. In about three-quarters of an hour we had
+passed the lofty barriers of Jebel Shamsan and its comrades, and
+were making clouds of dust in the streets of Aden. In spite of the
+cantonments, the British Government House, and the European Church,
+it was an Oriental town pure and simple, where the slow-footed hours
+wandered by, leaving apathy in their train; where sloth and surfeit sat
+in the market-places; idle women gossiped in their doorways; and naked
+children rolled in the sun. Yet how, in the most unfamiliar places, does
+one wake suddenly to hear or see some most familiar thing, and learn
+again that the ways of all people and nations are not, after all, so far
+apart! Here three naked youths, with trays upon their heads, cried aloud
+at each doorway what, interpreted, was: “Pies! Hot pies! Pies all hot!”
+ or, “Crum-pet! Crumpet! Won’t you buy-uy a crum-pet!”
+
+One sees the same thing in Kandy, in Calcutta, in Tokio, in Istamboul,
+in Teheran, in Queensland, in London.
+
+To us the great Tanks overlooking the place were more interesting than
+the town itself, and we drove thither. At Government House and here were
+the only bits of green that we had seen; they were, in fact, the only
+spots of verdure on the peninsula of Aden. It was a very sickly green,
+from which wan and dusty fig trees rose. In their scant shadow, or in
+the shelter of an overhanging ledge of rock, Arabs offered us draughts
+of cool water, and oranges. There were people in the sickly gardens, and
+others were inspecting the Tanks. Passengers from the ship had brought
+luncheon-baskets to this sad oasis.
+
+As we stood at the edge of one of the Tanks, Miss Treherne remarked with
+astonishment that they were empty. I explained to her that Aden did not
+have the benefits conferred even on the land of the seven fat and seven
+lean kine--that there had not been rain there for years, and that when
+it did come it was neither prolonged nor plentiful. Then came questions
+as to how long ago the Tanks were built.
+
+“Thirteen hundred years!” she exclaimed. “How strange to feel it so! It
+is like looking at old graves. And how high the walls are, closing up
+the gorge between the hills.”
+
+At that moment Mrs. Callendar drew our attention to Mrs. Falchion and a
+party from the ship. Mrs. Falchion was but a few paces from us, smiling
+agreeably as she acknowledged our greetings. Presently two of her party
+came to us and asked us to share their lunch. I would have objected,
+and I am certain Belle Treherne would gladly have done so, but Mrs.
+Callendar was anxious to accept, therefore we expressed our gratitude
+and joined the group. On second thoughts I was glad that we did so,
+because, otherwise, my party must have been without refreshments
+until they returned to the ship--the restaurants at Aden are not to be
+trusted. To me Mrs. Falchion was pleasantly impersonal, to Miss Treherne
+delicately and actively personal. At the time I had a kind of fear of
+her interest in the girl, but I know now that it was quite sincere,
+though it began with a motive not very lofty--to make Belle Treherne her
+friend, and so annoy me, and also to study, as would an anatomist, the
+girl’s life.
+
+We all moved into the illusive shade of the fig and magnolia trees, and
+lunch was soon spread. As we ate, conversation turned upon the annoying
+persistency of Eastern guides, and reference was made to the exciting
+circumstances attending the engagement of Amshar, the guide of Mrs.
+Falchion’s party. Among a score of claimants, Amshar had had one
+particular opponent--a personal enemy--who would not desist even when
+the choice had been made. He, indeed, had been the first to solicit the
+party, and was rejected because of his disagreeable looks. He had even
+followed the trap from the Port of Aden. As one of the gentlemen was
+remarking on the muttered anger of the disappointed Arab, Mrs. Falchion.
+said: “There he is now at the gate of the garden.”
+
+His look was sullenly turned upon our party. Blackburn, the Queenslander
+said, “Amshar, the other fellow is following up the game,” and pointed
+to the gate.
+
+Amshar understood the gesture at least, and though he gave a toss of the
+head, I noticed that his hand trembled as he handed me a cup of water,
+and that he kept his eyes turned on his opponent.
+
+“One always feels unsafe with these cut-throat races,” said Colonel
+Ryder, “as some of us know, who have had to deal with the nigger of
+South America. They think no more of killing a man--”
+
+“Than an Australian squatter does of dispersing a mob of aboriginals or
+kangaroos,” said Clovelly.
+
+Here Mrs. Callendar spoke up briskly. “I don’t know what you mean by
+‘dispersing.’”
+
+“You know what a kangaroo battue is, don’t you?”
+
+“But that is killing, slaughtering kangaroos by the hundred.”
+
+“Well, and that is aboriginal dispersion,” said the novelist. “That is
+the aristocratic method of legislating the native out of existence.”
+
+Blackburn here vigorously protested. “Yes, it’s very like a novelist,
+on the hunt for picturesque events, to spend his forensic soul upon ‘the
+poor native,’--upon the dirty nigger, I choose to call him: the
+meanest, cruellest, most cowardly, and murderous--by Jove, what a lot of
+adjectives!--of native races. But we fellows, who have lost some of
+the best friends we ever had--chums with whom we’ve shared blanket and
+tucker--by the crack of a nulla-nulla in the dark, or a spear from the
+scrub, can’t find a place for Exeter Hall and its ‘poor native’ in our
+hard hearts. We stand in such a case for justice. It is a new country.
+Not once in fifty times would law reach them. Reprisal and dispersion
+were the only things possible to men whose friends had been massacred,
+and--well, they punished tribes for the acts of individuals.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion here interposed. “That is just what England does. A
+British trader is killed. She sweeps a native town out of existence with
+Hotchkiss guns--leaves it naked and dead. That is dispersion too; I have
+seen it, and I know how far niggers as a race can be trusted, and how
+much they deserve sympathy. I agree with Mr. Blackburn.”
+
+Blackburn raised his glass. “Mrs. Falchion,” he said, “I need no further
+evidence to prove my case. Experience is the best teacher.”
+
+“As I wish to join the chorus to so notable a compliment, will somebody
+pass the claret?” said Colonel Ryder, shaking the crumbs of a pate
+from his coat-collar. When his glass was filled, he turned towards Mrs.
+Falchion, and continued: “I drink to the health of the best teacher.”
+ And every one laughingly responded. This impromptu toast would have been
+drunk with more warmth, if we could have foreseen an immediate event.
+Not less peculiar were Mrs. Falchion’s words to Hungerford the evening
+before, recorded in the last sentence of the preceding chapter.
+
+Cigars were passed, and the men rose and strolled away. We wandered
+outside the gardens, passing the rejected guide as we did so. “I don’t
+like the look in his eye,” said Clovelly.
+
+Colonel Ryder laughed. “You’ve always got a fine vision for the
+dramatic.”
+
+We passed on. I suppose about twenty minutes had gone when, as we were
+entering the garden again, we heard loud cries. Hurrying forward towards
+the Tanks, we saw a strange sight.
+
+There, on a narrow wall dividing two great tanks, were three
+people--Mrs. Falchion, Amshar, and the rejected Arab guide. Amshar was
+crouching behind Mrs. Falchion, and clinging to her skirts in abject
+fear. The Arab threatened with a knife. He could not get at Amshar
+without thrusting Mrs. Falchion aside, and, as I said, the wall was
+narrow. He was bent like a tiger about to spring.
+
+Seeing Mrs. Falchion and Amshar apart from the others,--Mrs. Falchion
+having insisted on crossing this narrow and precipitous wall,--he had
+suddenly rushed after them. As he did so, Miss Treherne saw him, and
+cried out. Mrs. Falchion faced round swiftly, and then came this tragic
+situation.
+
+Some one must die.
+
+Seeing that Mrs. Falchion made no effort to dislodge Amshar from her
+skirts, the Arab presently leaped forward. Mrs. Falchion’s arms went out
+suddenly, and she caught the wrist that held the dagger. Then there
+was an instant’s struggle. It was Mrs. Falchion’s life now, as well as
+Amshar’s. They swayed. They hung on the edge of the rocky chasm. Then
+we lost the gleam of the knife, and the Arab shivered, and toppled over.
+Mrs. Falchion would have gone with him, but Amshar caught her about
+the waist, and saved her from the fall which would have killed her as
+certainly as it killed the Arab lying at the bottom of the tank. She had
+managed to turn the knife in the Arab’s hand against his own breast, and
+then suddenly pressed her body against it; but the impulse of the act
+came near carrying her over also.
+
+Amshar was kneeling at her feet, and kissing her gown gratefully. She
+pushed him away with her foot, and, coolly turning aside, began to
+arrange her hair. As I approached her, she glanced down at the Arab.
+“Horrible! horrible!” she said. I remembered that these were her words
+when her husband was lifted from the sea to the ‘Fulvia’.
+
+Not ungently, she refused my hand or any assistance, and came down among
+the rest of the party. I could not but feel a strange wonder at the
+powerful side of her character just shown--her courage, her cool daring.
+In her face now there was a look of annoyance, and possibly disgust, as
+well as of triumph--so natural in cases of physical prowess. Everybody
+offered congratulations, but she only showed real pleasure, and that
+mutely, at those of Miss Treherne. To the rest of us she said: “One had
+to save one’s self, and Amshar was a coward.”
+
+And so this woman, whose hardness of heart and excessive cruelty
+Hungerford and I were keeping from the world, was now made into a
+heroine, around whom a halo of romance would settle whenever her name
+should be mentioned. Now, men, eligible and ineligible, would increase
+their homage. It seemed as if the stars had stopped in their courses to
+give her special fortune.
+
+That morning I had thought her appearance at this luncheon-party was
+little less than scandalous, for she knew, if others did not, who Boyd
+Madras was. After the occurrence with the Arab, the other event was
+certainly much less prominent, and here, after many years, I can see
+that the act was less in her than it would have been in others. For,
+behind her outward hardness, there was a sort of justice working, an
+iron thing, but still not unnatural in her.
+
+Belle Treherne awakened also to a new perception of her character, and
+a kind of awe possessed her, so masculine seemed her courage, yet
+so womanly and feminine her manner. Mrs. Callendar was loud in her
+exclamations of delight and wonder at Mrs. Falchion’s coolness; and the
+bookmaker, with his usual impetuosity, offered to take bets at four to
+one that we should all be detained to give evidence in the matter.
+
+Clovelly was silent. He occasionally adjusted his glasses, and looked at
+Mrs. Falchion as if he had suddenly come to a full stop in his opinions
+regarding her. This, I think, was noticed by her, and enjoyed too, for
+she doubtless remembered her conversation with me, in which she had said
+that Clovelly thought he understood her perfectly. Colonel Ryder, who
+was loyal at all times, said she had the nerve of a woman from Kentucky.
+Moreover, he had presence of mind, for he had immediately sent off a
+native to inform the authorities of what had occurred; so that before
+we had got half-way to the town we were met by policemen running towards
+us, followed by a small detachment of Indian soldiers. The officer in
+command of the detachment stopped us, and said that the governor would
+be glad if we would come to Government House for an hour, while an
+inquiry was being held.
+
+To this we cheerfully consented, of course; and, in a room where punkahs
+waved and cool claret-cup awaited us, we were received by the governor,
+who was full of admiration of Mrs. Falchion. It was plain, however, that
+he was surprised at her present equanimity. Had she no nerves at all?
+
+“I can only regret exceedingly,” said the governor, “that your visit to
+Aden has had such a tragical interruption; but since it has occurred,
+I am glad to have the privilege of meeting a lady so brave as Mrs.
+Falchion.”--The bookmaker had introduced us all with a naivete that, I
+am sure, amused the governor, as it certainly did his aide-de-camp. “We
+should not need to fear the natives if we had soldiers as fearless,” his
+excellency continued.
+
+At this point the inquiry began, and, after it was over, the governor
+said that there the matter ended so far as we were concerned, and then
+he remarked gallantly that the Government of Aden would always remain
+Mrs. Falchion’s debtor. She replied that it was a debt she would be
+glad to preserve unsettled for ever. After this pretty exchange of
+compliments, the governor smiled, and offered her his arm to the door,
+where our ‘char a bans’ awaited us.
+
+So impressed was the bookmaker with the hospitable reception the
+governor had given us, that he offered him his cigar-case with its
+contents, said he hoped they would meet again, and asked his excellency
+if he thought of coming to Australia. The governor declined the cigars
+graciously, ignored the hoped-for pleasure of another meeting, and
+trusted that it might fall to his lot to visit Australia some day.
+Thereupon the bookmaker insisted on the aide-de-camp accepting the
+cigar-case, and gave him his visiting-card. The aide-de-camp lost
+nothing by his good-humoured acceptance, if he smoked, because, as I
+knew, the cigars were very good indeed. Bookmakers, gamblers and Jews
+are good judges of tobacco. And the governor’s party lost nothing in
+dignity because, as the traps wheeled away, they gave a polite little
+cheer for Mrs. Falchion. I, at first, was fearful how Belle Treherne
+would regard the gaucheries of the bookmaker, but I saw that he was
+rather an object of interest to her than otherwise; for he was certainly
+amusing.
+
+As we drove through Aden, a Somauli lad ran from the door of a house,
+and handed up a letter to the driver of my trap. It bore my name, and
+was handed over to me. I recognised the handwriting. It was that of Boyd
+Madras. He had come ashore by Hungerford’s aid in the night. The letter
+simply gave an address in England that would always find him, and stated
+that he intended to take another name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. “THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS”
+
+News of the event had preceded us to the ‘Fulvia’, and, as we scrambled
+out on the ship’s stairs, cheers greeted us. Glancing up, I saw
+Hungerford, among others, leaning over the side, and looking at Mrs.
+Falchion in a curious cogitating fashion, not unusual to him. The look
+was non-committal, yet earnest. If it was not approval, it was not
+condemnation; but it might have been slightly ironical, and that annoyed
+me. It seemed impossible for him--and it was so always, I believe--to
+get out of his mind the thought of the man he had rescued on No Man’s
+Sea. I am sure it jarred upon him that the band foolishly played a
+welcome when Mrs. Falchion stepped on the deck. As I delivered Miss
+Treherne into the hands of her father, who was anxiously awaiting us,
+Hungerford said in my ear: “A tragedy queen, Marmion.” He said it so
+distinctly that Mrs. Falchion heard it, and she gave him a searching
+look. Their eyes met and warred for a moment, and then he added: “I
+remember! Yes, I can respect the bravery of a woman whom I do not like.”
+
+“And this is to-morrow,” she said, “and a man may change his mind, and
+that may be fate--or a woman’s whim.” She bowed, turned away, and went
+below, evidently disliking the reception she had had, and anxious to
+escape inquiries and congratulations. Nor did she appear again until the
+‘Fulvia’ got under way about six o’clock in the evening. As we moved out
+of the harbour we passed close to the ‘Porcupine’ and saw its officers
+grouped on the deck, waving adieus to some one on our deck, whom I
+guessed, of course, to be Galt Roscoe.
+
+At this time Mrs. Falchion was standing near me. “For whom is that
+demonstration?” she said.
+
+“For one of her officers, who is a passenger by the ‘Fulvia’,” I
+replied. “You remember we passed the ‘Porcupine’ in the Indian Ocean?”
+
+“Yes, I know that very well,” she said, with a shade of meaning.
+“But”--here I thought her voice had a touch of breathlessness--“but who
+is the officer? I mean, what is his name?”
+
+“He stands in the group near the door of the captain’s cabin, there. His
+name is Galt Roscoe, I think.”
+
+A slight exclamation escaped her. There was a chilly smile on her lips,
+and her eyes sought the group until it rested on Galt Roscoe. In a
+moment she said “You have met him?”
+
+“In the cemetery this morning, for the first time.”
+
+“Everybody seems to have had business this morning at the cemetery.
+Justine Caron spent hours there. To me it is so foolish, heaping up a
+mound, and erecting a tombstone over--what?--a dead thing, which, if one
+could see it, would be dreadful.”
+
+“You would prefer complete absorption--as of the ocean?” I brutally
+retorted.
+
+She appeared not to notice the innuendo. “Yes, what is gone is gone.
+Graves are idolatry. Gravestones are ghostly. It is people without
+imagination who need these things, together with crape and black-edged
+paper. It is all barbaric ritual. I know you think I am callous, but I
+cannot help that. For myself, I wish the earth close about me, and level
+green grass above me, and no one knowing of the place; or else, fire or
+the sea.”
+
+“Mrs. Falchion,” said I, “between us there need be no delicate words.
+You appear to have neither imagination, nor idolatry, nor remembrances,
+nor common womanly kindness.”
+
+“Indeed!” she said. “Yet you might know me better.” Here she touched
+my arm with the tips of her fingers, and, in spite of myself, I felt
+my pulse beat faster. It seemed to me that in her presence, even now, I
+could not quite trust myself. “Indeed!” she repeated. “And who made
+you omniscient, Dr. Marmion? You hardly do yourself justice. You hold
+a secret. You insist on reminding me of the fact. Is that in perfect
+gallantry? Do you know me altogether, from your knowledge of that
+one thing? You are vain. Or does the secret wear on you, and--Mr.
+Hungerford? Was it necessary to seek HIS help in keeping it?”
+
+I told her then the true history of Hungerford’s connection with Boyd
+Madras, and also begged her pardon for showing just now my knowledge of
+her secret. At this she said, “I suppose I should be grateful,” and was
+there a slightly softer cadence to her voice?
+
+“No, you need not be grateful,” I said. “We are silent, first, because
+he wished it; then because you are a woman.”
+
+“You define your reasons with astonishing care and taste,” she replied.
+
+“Oh, as to taste!--” said I; but then I bit my tongue.
+
+At that she said, her lips very firm and pale, “I could not pretend to
+a grief I did not feel. I acted no lie. He died as we had
+lived--estranged. I put up no memorials.”
+
+But I, thinking of my mother lying in her grave, a woman after God’s own
+heart, who loved me more than I deserved, repeated almost unconsciously
+these lines (clipped from a magazine):
+
+       “Sacred the ring, the faded glove,
+        Once worn by one we used to love;
+        Dead warriors in their armour live,
+        And in their relics saints survive.
+
+       “Oh, Mother Earth, henceforth defend
+        All thou hast garnered of my friend,
+        From winter’s wind and driving sleet,
+        From summer’s sun and scorching heat.
+
+       “Within thine all-embracing breast
+        Is hid one more forsaken nest;
+        While, in the sky, with folded wings,
+        The bird that left it sits and sings.”
+
+I paused; the occasion seemed so little suited to the sentiment, for
+around us was the idle excitement of leaving port. I was annoyed with
+myself for my share in the conversation so far. Mrs. Falchion’s eyes
+had scarcely left that group around the captain’s door, although she had
+appeared acutely interested in what I was saying. Now she said:
+
+“You recite very well. I feel impressed, but I fancy it is more your
+voice than those fine sentiments; for, after all, you cannot glorify
+the dead body. Look at the mummy of Thothmes at Boulak, and think what
+Cleopatra must look like now. And please let us talk about something
+else. Let us--” She paused.
+
+I followed the keen, shaded glance of her eyes, and saw, coming from
+the group by the captain’s door, Galt Roscoe. He moved in our direction.
+Suddenly he paused. His look was fixed upon Mrs. Falchion. A flush
+passed over his face, not exactly confusing, but painful, and again
+it left him pale, and for a moment he stood motionless. Then he came
+forward to us. He bowed to me, then looked hard at her. She held out her
+hand.
+
+“Mr. Roscoe, I think?” she said. “An old friend,” she added, turning to
+me. He gravely took her extended hand and said:
+
+“I did not think to see you here, Miss--”
+
+“MRS. Falchion,” she interrupted clearly.
+
+“MRS. Falchion!” he said, with surprise. “It is so many years since we
+had met, and--”
+
+“And it is so easy to forget things? But it isn’t so many, really--only
+seven, the cycle for constitutional renewal. Dear me, how erudite that
+sounds!... So, I suppose, we meet the same, yet not the same.”
+
+“The same, yet not the same,” he repeated after her, with an attempt at
+lightness, yet abstractedly.
+
+“I think you gentlemen know each other?” she said.
+
+“Yes; we met in the cemetery this morning. I was visiting the grave of a
+young French officer.”
+
+“I know,” she said--“Justine Caron’s brother. She has told me; but she
+did not tell me your name.”
+
+“She has told you?” he said.
+
+“Yes. She is--my companion.” I saw that she did not use the word that
+first came to her.
+
+“How strangely things occur! And yet,” he added musingly, “I suppose,
+after all, coincidence is not so strange in these days of much travel,
+particularly with people whose lives are connected--more or less.”
+
+“Whose lives are connected--more or less,” she repeated after him, in a
+steely tone.
+
+It seemed to me that I had received my cue to leave. I bowed myself
+away, and went about my duties. As we steamed bravely through the
+Straits of Babelmandeb, with Perim on our left, rising lovely through
+the milky haze, I came on deck again, and they were still near where I
+had left them an hour before. I passed, glancing at them as I did so.
+They did not look towards me. His eyes were turned to the shore, and
+hers were fixed on him. I saw an expression on her lips that gave
+her face new character. She was speaking, as I thought, clearly and
+mercilessly. I could not help hearing her words as I passed them.
+
+“You are going to be that--you!” There was a ring of irony in her
+tone. I heard nothing more in words, but I saw him turn to her somewhat
+sharply, and I caught the deep notes of his voice as he answered her.
+When, a moment after, I looked back, she had gone below.
+
+Galt Roscoe had a seat at Captain Ascott’s table, and I did not see
+anything of him at meal-times, but elsewhere I soon saw him a great
+deal. He appeared to seek my company. I was glad of this, for I found
+that he was an agreeable man, and had distinct originality of ideas,
+besides being possessed of very considerable culture. He also had that
+social aplomb so much a characteristic of the naval officer. Yet, man of
+the world as he was, he had a strain of asceticism which puzzled me. It
+did not make him eccentric, but it was not a thing usual with the naval
+man. Again, he wished to be known simply as Mr. Roscoe, not as Captain
+Roscoe, which was his rank. He said nothing about having retired, yet
+I guessed he had done so. One evening, however, soon after we had left
+Aden, we were sitting in my cabin, and the conversation turned upon a
+recent novel dealing with the defection of a clergyman of the Church of
+England through agnosticism. The keenness with which he threw himself
+into the discussion and the knowledge he showed, surprised me. I knew
+(as most medical students get to know, until they know better) some
+scientific objections to Christianity, and I put them forward. He
+clearly and powerfully met them. I said at last, laughingly: “Why, you
+ought to take holy orders.”
+
+“That is what I am going to do,” he said very seriously, “when I get to
+England. I am resigning the navy.” At that instant there flashed through
+my mind Mrs. Falchion’s words: “You are going to be that--you!”
+
+Then he explained to me that he had been studying for two years, and
+expected to go up for deacon’s orders soon after his return to England.
+I cannot say that I was greatly surprised, for I had known a few, and
+had heard of many, men who had exchanged the navy for the Church. It
+struck me, however, that Galt Roscoe appeared to view the matter from
+a stand-point not professional; the more so, that he expressed his
+determination to go to the newest part of a new country, to do the
+pioneer work of the Church. I asked him where he was going, and he said
+to the Rocky Mountains of Canada. I told him that my destination was
+Canada also. He warmly expressed the hope that we should see something
+of each other there. This friendship of ours may seem to have been
+hastily hatched, but it must be remembered that the sea is a great
+breeder of friendship. Two men who have known each other for twenty
+years find that twenty days at sea bring them nearer than ever they were
+before, or else estrange them.
+
+It was on this evening that, in a lull of the conversation, I casually
+asked him when he had known Mrs. Falchion. His face was inscrutable, but
+he said somewhat hurriedly, “In the South Sea Islands,” and then changed
+the subject. So, there was some mystery again? Was this woman never to
+be dissociated from enigma? In those days I never could think of her
+save in connection with some fatal incident in which she was scathless,
+and some one else suffered.
+
+It may have been fancy, but I thought that, during the first day or
+two after leaving Aden, Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion were very little
+together. Then the impression grew that this was his doing, and again
+that she waited with confident patience for the time when he would seek
+her--because he could not help himself. Often when other men were paying
+her devoted court I caught her eyes turned in his direction, and I
+thought I read in her smile a consciousness of power. And it so was.
+Very soon he was at her side. But I also noticed that he began to look
+worn, that his conversation with me lagged. I think that at this time
+I was so much occupied with tracing personal appearances to personal
+influences that I lost to some degree the physician’s practical
+keenness. My eyes were to be opened. He appeared to be suffering, and
+she seemed to unbend to him more than she ever unbent to me, or any one
+else on board. Hungerford, seeing this, said to me one day in his blunt
+way: “Marmion, old Ulysses knew what he was about when he tied himself
+to the mast.”
+
+But the routine of the ship went on as before. Fortunately, Mrs.
+Falchion’s heroism at Aden had taken the place of the sensation
+attending Boyd Madras’s suicide. Those who tired of thinking of both
+became mildly interested in Red Sea history. Chief among these was the
+bookmaker. As an historian the bookmaker was original. He cavalierly
+waved aside all such confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet
+contemporaneous, incidentally referred to King Solomon’s visits
+to Cleopatra, and with sad irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the
+destruction of Pharaoh’s horses and chariots as “the big handicap.”
+ He did not mean to be irreverent or unhistorical. He merely wished
+to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he was very original, and quite
+clever at history. His really startling points, however, were his
+remarks upon the colours of the mountains of Egypt and the sunset tints
+to be seen on the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. To him the grey, and
+pink, and melancholy gold only brought up visions of a race at Epsom or
+Flemington--generally Flemington, where the staring Australian sun
+pours down on an emerald course, on a score of horses straining upon
+the start, the colours of the jockeys’ coats and caps changing in the
+struggle like a kaleidoscope, and making strange harmonies of colour.
+The comparison between the mountains of Egypt and a race-course might
+seem most absurd, if one did not remember that the bookmaker had his own
+standards, and that he thought he was paying unusual honour to the
+land of the Fellah. Clovelly plaintively said, as he drank his hock
+and seltzer, that the bookmaker was hourly saving his life; and Colonel
+Ryder admitted at last that Kentucky never produced anything quite like
+him.
+
+The evening before we came to the Suez Canal I was walking with Miss
+Treherne and her father. I had seen Galt Roscoe in conversation with
+Mrs. Falchion. Presently I saw him rise to go away. A moment after,
+in passing, I was near her. She sprang up, caught my arm, and pointed
+anxiously. I looked, and saw Galt Roscoe swaying as he walked.
+
+“He is ill--ill,” she said.
+
+I ran forward and caught him as he was falling. Ill?
+
+Of course he was ill. What a fool I had been! Five minutes with him
+assured me that he had fever. I had set his haggard appearance down
+to some mental trouble--and I was going to be a professor in a medical
+college!
+
+Yet I know now that a troubled mind hastened the fever.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+
+From the beginning Galt Roscoe’s fever was violent. It had been hanging
+about him for a long time, and was the result of malarial poisoning.
+I devoutly wished that we were in the Mediterranean instead of the Red
+Sea, where the heat was so great; but fortunately we should soon be
+there. There was no other case of sickness on board, and I could devote
+plenty of time to him. Offers of assistance in nursing were numerous,
+but I only encouraged those of the bookmaker, strange as this may seem;
+yet he was as gentle and considerate as a woman in the sick-room. This
+was on the first evening of his attack. After that I had reasons for
+dispensing with his generous services. The night after Roscoe was taken
+ill we were passing through the canal, the search-light of the ‘Fulvia’
+sweeping the path ahead of it and glorifying everything it touched. Mud
+barges were fairy palaces; Arab punts beautiful gondolas; the ragged
+Egyptians on the banks became picturesque; and the desolate country
+behind them had a wide vestibule of splendour. I stood for half an hour
+watching this scene, then I went below to Roscoe’s cabin and relieved
+the bookmaker. The sick man was sleeping from the effects of a sedative
+draught. The bookmaker had scarcely gone when I heard a step behind me,
+and I turned and saw Justine Caron standing timidly at the door, her
+eyes upon the sleeper. She spoke quietly. “Is he very ill?”
+
+I answered that he was, but also that for some days I could not tell how
+dangerous his illness might be. She went to the berth where he lay, the
+reflected light from without playing weirdly on his face, and smoothed
+the pillow gently.
+
+“If you are willing, I will watch for a time,” she said. “Everybody is
+on deck. Madame said she would not need me for a couple of hours. I will
+send a steward for you if he wakes; you need rest yourself.”
+
+That I needed rest was quite true, for I had been up all the night
+before; still I hesitated. She saw my hesitation, and added:
+
+“It is not much that I can do, still I should like to do it. I can at
+least watch.” Then, very earnestly: “He watched beside Hector.”
+
+I left her with him, her fingers moving the small bag of ice about his
+forehead to allay the fever and her eyes patiently regarding him. I went
+on deck again. I met Miss Treherne and her father. They both inquired
+for the sick man, and I told Belle--for she seemed much interested--the
+nature of such malarial fevers, the acute forms they sometimes take, and
+the kind of treatment required. She asked several questions, showing
+a keen understanding of my explanations, and then, after a moment’s
+silence, said meditatively: “I think I like men better when they are
+doing responsible work; it is difficult to be idle--and important too.”
+
+I saw very well that, with her, I should have to contend for a long time
+against those first few weeks of dalliance on the ‘Fulvia’.
+
+Clovelly joined us, and for the first time--if I had not been so
+egotistical it had appeared to me before--I guessed that his somewhat
+professional interest in Belle Treherne had developed into a very
+personal thing. And with that thought came also the conception of what
+a powerful antagonist he would be. For it improves some men to wear
+glasses; and Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue. It was
+allusive, contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet
+playful, bold yet reverential. Many a time I have longed for Clovelly’s
+tongue. Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without
+his art; and of this I am occasionally reminded at this day. A man like
+Clovelly is dangerous as a rival when he is not in earnest; when he IS
+in earnest, it becomes a lonely time for the other man--unless the girl
+is perverse.
+
+I left the two together, and moved about the deck, trying to think
+closely about Roscoe’s case, and to drive Clovelly’s invasion from my
+mind. I succeeded, and was only roused by Mrs. Falchion’s voice beside
+me.
+
+“Does he suffer much?” she murmured.
+
+When answered, she asked nervously how he looked--it was impossible that
+she should consider misery without shrinking. I told her that he was
+only flushed and haggard as yet and that he was little wasted. A thought
+flashed to her face. She was about to speak, but paused. After a moment,
+however, she remarked evenly: “He is likely to be delirious?”
+
+“It is probable,” I replied.
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the search-light. The look in them was
+inscrutable. She continued quietly: “I will go and see him, if you will
+let me. Justine will go with me.”
+
+“Not now,” I replied. “He is sleeping. To-morrow, if you will.”
+
+I did not think it necessary to tell her that Justine was at that moment
+watching beside him. We walked the deck together in silence.
+
+“I wonder,” she said, “that you care to walk with me. Please do not make
+the matter a burden.”
+
+She did not say this with any invitation to courteous protest on my
+part, but rather with a cold frankness--for which, I confess, I always
+admired her. I said now: “Mrs. Falchion, you have suggested what might
+easily be possible in the circumstances, but I candidly admit that I
+have never yet found your presence disagreeable; and I suppose that is a
+comment upon my weakness. Though, to speak again with absolute truth, I
+think I do not like you at this present.”
+
+“Yes, I fancy I can understand that,” she said. “I can understand how,
+for instance, one might feel a just and great resentment, and have in
+one’s hand the instrument of punishment, and yet withhold one’s hand and
+protect where one should injure.”
+
+At this moment these words had no particular significance to me, but
+there chanced a time when they came home with great force. I think,
+indeed, that she was speaking more to herself than to me. Suddenly she
+turned to me.
+
+“I wonder,” she said, “if I am as cruel as you think me--for, indeed, I
+do not know. But I have been through many things.”
+
+Here her eyes grew cold and hard. The words that followed seemed in
+no sequence. “Yet,” she said, “I will go and see him to-morrow....
+Good-night.” After about an hour I went below to Galt Roscoe’s cabin.
+I drew aside the curtain quietly. Justine Caron evidently had not heard
+me. She was sitting beside the sick man, her fingers still smoothing
+away the pillow from his fevered face and her eyes fixed on him. I spoke
+to her. She rose. “He has slept well,” she said. And she moved to the
+door.
+
+“Miss Caron,” I said, “if Mrs. Falchion is willing, you could help me to
+nurse Mr. Roscoe?”
+
+A light sprang to her eyes. “Indeed, yes,” she said.
+
+“I will speak to her about it, if you will let me?” She bowed her head,
+and her look was eloquent of thanks. After a word of good-night we
+parted.
+
+I knew that nothing better could occur to my patient than that Justine
+Caron should help to nurse him. This would do far more for him than
+medicine--the tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias.
+
+Hungerford had insisted on relieving me for a couple of hours at
+midnight. He said it would be a good preparation for going on the bridge
+at three o’clock in the morning. About half-past two he came to my cabin
+and waked me, saying: “He is worse--delirious; you had better come.”
+
+He was indeed delirious. Hungerford laid his hand on my shoulder.
+“Marmion,” he said, “that woman is in it. Like the devil, she is
+ubiquitous. Mr. Roscoe’s past is mixed up with hers somehow. I don’t
+suppose men talk absolute history in delirium, but there is no reason,
+I fancy, why they shouldn’t paraphrase. I should reduce the number of
+nurses to a minimum if I were you.”
+
+A determined fierceness possessed me at the moment. I said to him: “She
+shall nurse him, Hungerford--she, and Justine Caron, and myself.”
+
+“Plus Dick Hungerford,” he added. “I don’t know quite how you intend to
+work this thing, but you have the case in your hands, and what you’ve
+told me about the French girl shows that she is to be trusted. But as
+for myself, Marmion M.D., I’m sick--sick--sick of this woman, and all
+her words and works. I believe that she has brought bad luck to this
+ship; and it’s my last voyage on it; and--and I begin to think you’re a
+damned good fellow--excuse the insolence of it; and--good-night.”
+
+For the rest of the night I listened to Galt Roscoe’s wild words. He
+tossed from side to side, and murmured brokenly. Taken separately, and
+as they were spoken, his words might not be very significant, but pieced
+together, arranged, and interpreted through even scant knowledge of
+circumstances, they were sufficient to give me a key to difficulties
+which, afterwards, were to cause much distress. I arrange some of
+the sentences here to show how startling were the fancies--or
+remembrances--that vexed him.
+
+“But I was coming back--I was coming back--I tell you I should have
+stayed with her for ever.... See how she trembles!--Now her breath
+is gone--There is no pulse--Her heart is still--My God, her heart
+is still!--Hush! cover her face.... Row hard, you devils!--A hundred
+dollars if you make the point in time.... Whereaway?--Whereaway?--Steady
+now!--Let them have it across the bows!--Low! low!--fire low!... She is
+dead--she is dead!”
+
+These things he would say over and over again breathlessly, then he
+would rest a while, and the trouble would begin again. “It was not I
+that did it--no, it was not I. She did it herself!--She plunged it in,
+deep, deep, deep! You made me a devil!... Hush! I WILL tell!--I know
+you--yet--Mercy--Mercy--Falchion--”
+
+Yes, it was best that few should enter his cabin. The ravings of a sick
+man are not always counted ravings, no more than the words of a well man
+are always reckoned sane. At last I got him into a sound sleep, and by
+that time I was thoroughly tired out. I called my own steward, and asked
+him to watch for a couple of hours while I rested. I threw myself down
+and slept soundly for an hour beyond that time, the steward having
+hesitated to wake me.
+
+By that time we had passed into the fresher air of the Mediterranean,
+and the sea was delightfully smooth. Galt Roscoe still slept, though his
+temperature was high.
+
+My conference with Mrs. Falchion after breakfast was brief, but
+satisfactory. I told her frankly that Roscoe had been delirious, that he
+had mentioned her name, and that I thought it best to reduce the number
+of nurses and watchers. I made my proposition about Justine Caron. She
+shook her head a little impatiently, and said that Justine had told her,
+and that she was quite willing. Then I asked her if she would not also
+assist. She answered immediately that she wished to do so. As if to make
+me understand why she did it, she added: “If I did not hear the wild
+things he says, some one else would; and the difference is that I
+understand them, and the some one else would interpret them with the
+genius of the writer of a fairy book.”
+
+And so it happened that Mrs. Falchion came to sit many hours a day
+beside the sick couch of Galt Roscoe, moistening his lips, cooling his
+brow, giving him his medicine. After the first day, when she was,
+I thought, alternating between innate disgust of misery and her
+womanliness and humanity,--in these days more a reality to me,--she
+grew watchful and silently solicitous at every turn of the malady. What
+impressed me most was that she was interested and engrossed more, it
+seemed, in the malady than in the man himself.
+
+And yet she baffled me even when I had come to this conclusion.
+
+During most of his delirium she remained almost impassive, as if she had
+schooled herself to be calm and strong in nerve; but one afternoon she
+did a thing that upset all my opinions of her for a moment. Looking
+straight at her with staring, unconscious eyes, he half rose in his bed,
+and said in a low, bitter tone: “I hate you. I once loved you--but I
+hate you now!” Then he laughed scornfully, and fell back on the
+pillow. She had been sitting very quietly, musing. His action had been
+unexpected, and had broken upon a silence. She rose to her feet quickly,
+gave a sharp indrawn breath, and pressed her hand against her side, as
+though a sudden pain had seized her. The next moment, however, she was
+composed again, and said in explanation that she had been half asleep,
+and he had startled her. But I had seen her under what seemed to me more
+trying conditions, and she had not shown any nervousness such as this.
+
+The passengers, of course, talked. Many “true histories” of Mrs.
+Falchion’s devotion to the sick man were abroad; but it must be said,
+however, that all of them were romantically creditable to her. She
+had become a rare product even in the eyes of Miss Treherne, and more
+particularly her father, since the matter at the Tanks. Justine Caron
+was slyly besieged by the curious, but they went away empty; for
+Justine, if very simple and single-minded, was yet too much concerned
+for both Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion to give the inquiring the
+slightest clue. She knew, indeed, little herself, whatever she may have
+guessed. As for Hungerford, he was dumb. He refused to consider the
+matter. But he roundly maintained once or twice, without any apparent
+relevance, that a woman was like a repeating decimal--you could follow
+her, but you never could reach her. He usually added to this: “Minus
+one, Marmion,” meaning thus to exclude the girl who preferred him to any
+one else. When I ventured to suggest that Miss Treherne might also be
+excepted, he said, with maddening suggestion: “She lets Mrs. Falchion
+fool her, doesn’t she? And she isn’t quite sure the splendour of a
+medical professor’s position is superior to that of an author.”
+
+In these moments, although I tried to smile on him, I hated him a
+little. I sought to revenge myself on him by telling him to help
+himself to a cigar, having first placed the box of Mexicans near him. He
+invariably declined them, and said he would take one of the others
+from the tea-box--my very best, kept in tea for sake of dryness. If
+I reversed the process he reversed his action. His instinct regarding
+cigars was supernatural, and I almost believe that he had--like the
+Black Dwarf’s cat--the “poo’er” of reading character and interpreting
+events--an uncanny divination.
+
+I knew by the time we reached Valetta that Roscoe would get well; but he
+recognised none of us until we arrived at Gibraltar. Justine Caron and
+myself had been watching beside him. As the bells clanged to “slow
+down” on entering the harbour, his eyes opened with a gaze of sanity and
+consciousness. He looked at me, then at Justine.
+
+“I have been ill?” he said.
+
+Justine’s eyes were not entirely to be trusted. She turned her head
+away.
+
+“Yes, you have been very ill,” I replied, “but you are better.”
+
+He smiled feebly, adding: “At least, I am grateful that I did not die at
+sea.” Then he closed his eyes. After a moment he opened them, and said,
+looking at Justine: “You have helped to nurse me, have you not?” His
+wasted fingers moved over the counterpane towards her.
+
+“I could do so little,” she murmured.
+
+“You have more than paid your debt to me,” he gently replied. “For I
+live, you see, and poor Hector died.”
+
+She shook her head gravely, and rejoined: “Ah no, I can never pay the
+debt I owe to you and to God--now.” He did not understand this, I know.
+But I did. “You must not talk any more,” I said to him.
+
+But Justine interposed. “He must be told that the nurse who has done
+most for him is Mrs. Falchion.” His brows contracted as if he were
+trying to remember something. He moved his head wearily.
+
+“Yes, I think I remember,” he said, “about her being with me, but
+nothing clearly--nothing clearly. She is very kind.”
+
+Justine here murmured: “Shall I tell her?”
+
+I was about to say no; but Roscoe nodded, and said quietly, “Yes, yes.”
+
+Then I made no objection, but urged that the meeting should only be for
+a moment. I determined not to leave them alone even for that moment.
+I did not know what things connected with their past--whatever it
+was--might be brought up, and I knew that entire freedom from excitement
+was necessary. I might have spared myself any anxiety on the point. When
+she came she was perfectly self-composed, and more as she seemed when
+I first knew her, though I will admit that I thought her face more
+possible to emotion than in the past.
+
+It seems strange to write of a few weeks before as the past; but so much
+had occurred that the days might easily have been months and the weeks
+years.
+
+She sat down beside him and held out her hand. And as she did so, I
+thought of Boyd Madras and of that long last night of his life, and of
+her refusal to say to him one comforting word, or to touch his hand in
+forgiveness and friendship. And was this man so much better than Boyd
+Madras? His wild words in delirium might mean nothing, but if they meant
+anything, and she knew of that anything, she was still a heartless,
+unnatural woman, as I had once called her.
+
+Roscoe took her hand and held it briefly. “Dr. Marmion says that you
+have helped to nurse me through my illness,” he whispered. “I am most
+grateful.”
+
+I thought she replied with the slightest constraint in her voice. “One
+could not let an old acquaintance die without making an effort to save
+him.”
+
+At that instant I grew scornful, and longed to tell him of her husband.
+But then a husband was not an acquaintance. I ventured instead: “I am
+sorry, but I must cut short all conversation for the present. When he
+is a little better, he will be benefited by your brightest gossip, Mrs.
+Falchion.”
+
+She rose smiling, but she did not again take his hand, though I thought
+he made a motion to that end. But she looked down at him steadily for
+a moment. Beneath her look his face flushed, and his eyes grew hot with
+light; then they dropped, and the eyelids closed on them. At that she
+said, with an incomprehensible airiness: “Good-night. I am going now to
+play the music of ‘La Grande Duchesse’ as a farewell to Gibraltar. They
+have a concert on to-night.”
+
+And she was gone.
+
+At the mention of La Grande Duchesse he sighed, and turned his head away
+from her. What it all meant I did not know, and she had annoyed me
+as much as she had perplexed me; her moods were like the chameleon’s
+colours. He lay silent for a long time, then he turned to me and said:
+“Do you remember that tale in the Bible about David and the well of
+Bethlehem?” I had to confess my ignorance.
+
+“I think I can remember it,” he continued. And though I urged him not to
+tax himself, he spoke slowly thus:
+
+   “And David was in an hold, and the garrison of the Philistines was
+   then in Bethlehem.
+
+   “And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me to drink of
+   the water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate!
+
+   “And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew
+   water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate, and took
+   and brought it to David; nevertheless, he would not drink thereof,
+   but poured it out unto the Lord.
+
+   “And he said, My God forbid it me that I should do this; is not this
+   the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?
+   Therefore he would not drink it.”
+
+He paused a moment, and then added: “One always buys back the past at a
+tremendous price. Resurrections give ghosts only.”
+
+“But you must sleep now,” I urged. And then, because I knew not what
+else more fitting, I added: “Sleep, and
+
+        “‘Let the dead past bury its dead.’”
+
+“Yes, I will sleep,” he answered.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II. THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+
+“Your letters, sir,” said my servant, on the last evening of the college
+year. Examinations were over at last, and I was wondering where I should
+spend my holidays. The choice was very wide; ranging from the Muskoka
+lakes to the Yosemite Valley. Because it was my first year in Canada, I
+really preferred not to go beyond the Dominion. With these thoughts
+in my mind I opened my letters. The first two did not interest me;
+tradesmen’s bills seldom do. The third brought a thumping sensation of
+pleasure--though it was not from Miss Treherne. I had had one from her
+that morning, and this was a pleasure which never came twice in one day,
+for Prince’s College, Toronto, was a long week’s journey from London,
+S.W. Considering, however, that I did receive letters from her once a
+week, it may be concluded that Clovelly did not; and that, if he had, it
+would have been by a serious infringement of my rights. But, indeed, as
+I have learned since, Clovelly took his defeat in a very characteristic
+fashion, and said on an important occasion some generous things about
+me.
+
+The letter that pleased me so much was from Galt Roscoe, who, as he
+had intended, was settled in a new but thriving district of British
+Columbia, near the Cascade Mountains. Soon after his complete recovery
+he had been ordained in England, had straightway sailed for Canada,
+and had gone to work at once. This note was an invitation to spend the
+holiday months with him, where, as he said, a man “summering high among
+the hills of God” could see visions and dream dreams, and hunt and fish
+too--especially fish. He urged that he would not talk parish concerns
+at me; that I should not be asked to be godfather to any young
+mountaineers; and that the only drawback, so far as my own predilections
+were concerned, was the monotonous health of the people. He described
+his summer cottage of red pine as being built on the edge of a lovely
+ravine; he said that he had the Cascades on one hand with their big
+glacier fields, and mighty pine forests on the other; while the
+balmiest breezes of June awaited “the professor of pathology and
+genial saw-bones.” At the end of the letter he hinted something about a
+pleasant little secret for my ear when I came; and remarked immediately
+afterwards that there were one or two delightful families at Sunburst
+and Viking, villages in his parish. One naturally associated the little
+secret with some member of one of these delightful families. Finally, he
+said he would like to show me how it was possible to transform a naval
+man into a parson.
+
+My mind was made up. I wrote to him that I would start at once. Then I
+began to make preparations, and meanwhile fell to thinking again about
+him who was now the Reverend Galt Roscoe. After the ‘Fulvia’ reached
+London I had only seen him a few times, he having gone at once into the
+country to prepare for ordination. Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron I had
+met several times, but Mrs. Falchion forbore inquiring for Galt Roscoe:
+from which, and from other slight but significant matters, I gathered
+that she knew of his doings and whereabouts. Before I started for
+Toronto she said that she might see me there some day, for she was going
+to San Francisco to inspect the property her uncle had left her, and in
+all probability would make a sojourn in Canada. I gave her my address,
+and she then said she understood that Mr. Roscoe intended taking a
+missionary parish in the wilds. In his occasional letters to me while we
+all were in England Roscoe seldom spoke of her, but, when he did, showed
+that he knew of her movements. This did not strike me at the time as
+anything more than natural. It did later.
+
+Within a couple of weeks I reached Viking, a lumbering town with great
+saw-mills, by way of San Francisco and Vancouver. Roscoe met me at the
+coach, and I was taken at once to the house among the hills. It stood on
+the edge of a ravine, and the end of the verandah looked over a verdant
+precipice, beautiful but terrible too. It was uniquely situated; a nest
+among the hills, suitable either for work or play. In one’s ears was
+the low, continuous din of the rapids, with the music of a neighbouring
+waterfall.
+
+On the way up the hills I had a chance to observe Roscoe closely. His
+face had not that sturdy buoyancy which his letter suggested. Still, if
+it was pale, it had a glow which it did not possess before, and even
+a stronger humanity than of old. A new look had come into his eyes,
+a certain absorbing earnestness, refining the past asceticism. A more
+amiable and unselfish comrade man never had.
+
+The second day I was there he took me to call upon a family at Viking,
+the town with a great saw-mill and two smaller ones, owned by James
+Devlin, an enterprising man who had grown rich at lumbering, and who
+lived here in the mountains many months in each year.
+
+Mr. James Devlin had a daughter who had had some advantages in the East
+after her father had become rich, though her earlier life was spent
+altogether in the mountains. I soon saw where Roscoe’s secret was to
+be found. Ruth Devlin was a tall girl of sensitive features, beautiful
+eyes, and rare personality. Her life, as I came to know, had been one of
+great devotion and self-denial. Before her father had made his fortune,
+she had nursed a frail-bodied, faint-hearted mother, and had cared for,
+and been a mother to, her younger sisters. With wealth and ease came
+a brighter bloom to her cheek, but it had a touch of care which would
+never quite disappear, though it became in time a beautiful wistfulness
+rather than anxiety. Had this responsibility come to her in a city, it
+might have spoiled her beauty and robbed her of her youth altogether;
+but in the sustaining virtue of a life in the mountains, warm hues
+remained on her cheek and a wonderful freshness in her nature. Her
+family worshipped her--as she deserved.
+
+That evening Roscoe confided to me that he had not asked Ruth Devlin to
+be his wife, nor had he, indeed, given her definite tokens of his love.
+But the thing was in his mind as a happy possibility of the future. We
+talked till midnight, sitting at the end of the verandah overlooking the
+ravine. This corner, called the coping, became consecrated to our many
+conversations. We painted and sketched there in the morning (when we
+were not fishing or he was not at his duties), received visitors, and
+smoked in the evening, inhaling the balsam from the pines. An old man
+and his wife kept the house for us, and gave us to eat of simple but
+comfortable fare. The trout-fishing was good, and many a fine trout was
+broiled for our evening meal; and many a fine string of trout found its
+way to the tables of Roscoe’s poorest parishioners, or else to furnish
+the more fashionable table at which Ruth Devlin presided. There were
+excursions up the valley, and picnics on the hill-sides, and occasional
+lunches and evening parties at the summer hotel, a mile from us farther
+down the valley, at which tourists were beginning to assemble.
+
+Yet, all the time, Roscoe was abundantly faithful to his duties at
+Viking and in the settlement called Sunburst, which was devoted to
+salmon-fishing. Between Viking and Sunburst there was a great jealousy
+and rivalry; for the salmon-fishers thought that the mills, though on a
+tributary stream, interfered, by the sawdust spilled in the river, with
+the travel and spawning of the salmon. It needed all the tact of both
+Mr. Devlin and Roscoe to keep the places from open fighting. As it was,
+the fire smouldered. When Sunday came, however, there seemed to be truce
+between the villages. It appeared to me that one touched the primitive
+and idyllic side of life: lively, sturdy, and simple, with nature about
+us at once benignant and austere. It is impossible to tell how fresh,
+bracing, and inspiring was the climate of this new land. It seemed
+to glorify humanity, to make all who breathed it stalwart, and almost
+pardonable even in wrong-doing. Roscoe was always received respectfully,
+and even cordially, among the salmon-fishers of Sunburst, as among the
+mill-men and river-drivers of Viking: not the less so, because he had an
+excellent faculty for machinery, and could talk to the people in their
+own colloquialisms. He had, besides, though there was little exuberance
+in his nature, a gift of dry humour, which did more than anything else,
+perhaps, to make his presence among them unrestrained.
+
+His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well
+attended--often filled to overflowing--and the people gave liberally to
+the offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did
+not view such a proceeding with a degree of complacency. In the pulpit
+Roscoe was almost powerful. His knowledge of the world, his habits of
+directness, his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but
+original statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and
+unusual tact, might have made him distinguished in a more cultured
+community. Yet there was something to modify all this: an occasional
+indefinable sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning. It struck
+me that I never had met a man whose words and manner were at times so
+charged with pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity. There
+was some unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any
+occurrence of his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled
+with a very strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.
+
+One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and
+watch-dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered
+him thirty dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than
+Roscoe had paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the
+opportunity of getting the best of a game. He said he did not doubt but
+that he would do the same with one of the archangels. He afterwards sold
+Roscoe a watch at cost, but confessed to me that the works of the watch
+had been smuggled. He said he was so fond of the parson that he felt he
+had to give him a chance of good things. It was not uncommon for him to
+discourse of Roscoe’s quality in the bar-rooms of Sunburst and
+Viking, in which he was ably seconded by Phil Boldrick, an eccentric,
+warm-hearted fellow, who was so occupied in the affairs of the villages
+generally, and so much an advisory board to the authorities, that he had
+little time left to progress industrially himself.
+
+Once when a noted bully came to Viking, and, out of sheer bravado and
+meanness, insulted Roscoe in the streets, two or three river-drivers
+came forward to avenge the insult. It was quite needless, for the
+clergyman had promptly taken the case in his own hands. Waving them
+back, he said to the bully: “I have no weapon, and if I had, I could not
+take your life, nor try to take it; and you know that very well. But I
+propose to meet your insolence--the first shown me in this town.”
+
+Here murmurs of approbation went round.
+
+“You will, of course, take the revolver from your pocket, and throw it
+on the ground.”
+
+A couple of other revolvers were looking the bully in the face, and he
+sullenly did as he was asked.
+
+“You have a knife: throw that down.”
+
+This also was done under the most earnest emphasis of the revolvers.
+Roscoe calmly took off his coat. “I have met such scoundrels as you on
+the quarter-deck,” he said, “and I know what stuff is in you. They call
+you beachcombers in the South Seas. You never fight fair. You bully
+women, knife natives, and never meet any one in fair fight. You have
+mistaken your man this time.”
+
+He walked close up to the bully, his face like steel, his thumbs caught
+lightly in his waistcoat pockets; but it was noticeable that his hands
+were shut.
+
+“Now,” he said, “we are even as to opportunity. Repeat, if you please,
+what you said a moment ago.”
+
+The bully’s eye quailed, and he answered nothing. “Then, as I said, you
+are a coward and a cur, who insults peaceable men and weak women. If I
+know Viking right, it has no room for you.” Then he picked up his coat,
+and put it on.
+
+“Now,” he added, “I think you had better go; but I leave that to the
+citizens of Viking.”
+
+What they thought is easily explained. Phil Boldrick, speaking for all,
+said: “Yes, you had better go--quick; but on the hop like a cur, mind
+you: on your hands and knees, jumping all the way.”
+
+And, with weapons menacing him, this visitor to Viking departed,
+swallowing as he went the red dust disturbed by his hands and feet.
+
+This established Roscoe’s position finally. Yet, with all his popularity
+and the solid success of his work, he showed no vanity or egotism, nor
+ever traded on the position he held in Viking and Sunburst. He seemed
+to have no ambition further than to do good work; no desire to be known
+beyond his own district; no fancy, indeed, for the communications of his
+labours to mission papers and benevolent ladies in England--so much the
+habit of his order. He was free from professional mannerisms.
+
+One evening we were sitting in the accustomed spot--that is, the coping.
+We had been silent for a long time. At last Roscoe rose, and walked up
+and down the verandah nervously.
+
+“Marmion,” said he, “I am disturbed to-day, I cannot tell you how: a
+sense of impending evil, an anxiety.”
+
+I looked up at him inquiringly, and, of purpose, a little sceptically.
+
+He smiled something sadly and continued: “Oh, I know you think
+it foolishness. But remember that all sailors are more or less
+superstitious: it is bred in them; it is constitutional, and I am afraid
+there’s a good deal of the sailor in me yet.”
+
+Remembering Hungerford, I said: “I know that sailors are superstitious,
+the most seasoned of them are that. But it means nothing. I may think
+or feel that there is going to be a plague, but I should not enlarge the
+insurance on my life because of it.”
+
+He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me earnestly. “But,
+Marmion, these things, I assure you, are not matters of will, nor yet
+morbidness. They occur at the most unexpected times. I have had such
+sensations before, and they were followed by strange matters.”
+
+I nodded, but said nothing. I was still thinking of Hungerford. After a
+slight pause he continued somewhat hesitatingly:
+
+“I dreamed last night, three times, of events that occurred in my
+past; events which I hoped would never disturb me in the life I am now
+leading.”
+
+“A life of self-denial,” ventured I. I waited a minute, and then added:
+“Roscoe, I think it only fair to tell you--I don’t know why I haven’t
+done so before--that when you were ill you were delirious, and talked of
+things that may or may not have had to do with your past.”
+
+He started, and looked at me earnestly. “They were unpleasant things?”
+
+“Trying things; though all was vague and disconnected,” I replied.
+
+“I am glad you tell me this,” he remarked quietly. “And Mrs. Falchion
+and Justine Caron--did they hear?” He looked off to the hills.
+
+“To a certain extent, I am sure. Mrs. Falchion’s name was generally
+connected with--your fancies.... But really no one could place any
+weight on what a man said in delirium, and I only mention the fact to
+let you see exactly on what ground I stand with you.”
+
+“Can you give me an idea--of the thing I raved about?”
+
+“Chiefly about a girl called Alo, not your wife, I should judge--who was
+killed.”
+
+At that he spoke in a cheerless voice: “Marmion, I will tell you all the
+story some day; but not now. I hoped that I had been able to bury it,
+even in memory, but I was wrong. Some things--such things--never die.
+They stay; and in our cheerfulest, most peaceful moments confront us,
+and mock the new life we are leading. There is no refuge from memory and
+remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with
+or without repentance.” He turned again from me and set a sombre face
+towards the ravine. “Roscoe,” I said, taking his arm, “I cannot believe
+that you have any sin on your conscience so dark that it is not wiped
+out now.”
+
+“God bless you for your confidence. But there is one woman who, I fear,
+could, if she would, disgrace me before the world. You understand,” he
+added, “that there are things we repent of which cannot be repaired. One
+thinks a sin is dead, and starts upon a new life, locking up the past,
+not deceitfully, but believing that the book is closed, and that no
+good can come of publishing it; when suddenly it all flames out like the
+letters in Faust’s book of conjurations.”
+
+“Wait,” I said. “You need not tell me more, you must not--now; not until
+there is any danger. Keep your secret. If the woman--if THAT woman--ever
+places you in danger, then tell me all. But keep it to yourself now. And
+don’t fret because you have had dreams.”
+
+“Well, as you wish,” he replied after a long time. As he sat in silence,
+I smoking hard, and he buried in thought, I heard the laughter of people
+some distance below us in the hills. I guessed it to be some tourists
+from the summer hotel. The voices came nearer.
+
+A singular thought occurred to me. I looked at Roscoe. I saw that he was
+brooding, and was not noticing the voices, which presently died away.
+This was a relief to me. We were then silent again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+
+Next day we had a picnic on the Whi-Whi River, which, rising in the far
+north, comes in varied moods to join the Long Cloud River at Viking.
+
+   [Dr. Marmion, in a note of his MSS., says that he has purposely
+   changed the names of the rivers and towns mentioned in the second
+   part of the book, because he does not wish the locale to be too
+   definite.]
+
+Ruth Devlin, her young sister, and her aunt Mrs. Revel, with Galt Roscoe
+and myself, constituted the party. The first part of the excursion
+had many delights. The morning was fresh and sweet, and we were all in
+excellent spirits. Roscoe’s depression had vanished; but there was an
+amiable seriousness in his manner which, to me, portended that the faint
+roses in Ruth Devlin’s cheeks would deepen before the day was done,
+unless something inopportune happened.
+
+As we trudged gaily up the canon to the spot where we were to take a big
+skiff, and cross the Whi-Whi to our camping-ground, Ruth Devlin, who
+was walking with me, said: “A large party of tourists arrived at Viking
+yesterday, and have gone to the summer hotel; so I expect you will be
+gay up here for some time to come. Prepare, then, to rejoice.”
+
+“Don’t you think it is gay enough as it is?” I answered. “Behold this
+festive throng.”
+
+“Oh, it is nothing to what there might be. This could never make Viking
+and ‘surrounding country’ notorious as a pleasure resort. To
+attract tourists you must have enough people to make romances and
+tragedies,--without loss of life, of course,--merely catastrophes
+of broken hearts, and hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing
+and shooting achievements, such as men know how to invent,”--it was
+delightful to hear her voice soften to an amusing suggestiveness, “and
+broken bridges and land-slides, with many other things which you can
+supply, Dr. Marmion. No, I am afraid that Viking is too humdrum to be
+notable.”
+
+She laughed then very lightly and quaintly. She had a sense of humour.
+
+“Well, but, Miss Devlin,” said I, “you cannot have all things at once.
+Climaxes like these take time. We have a few joyful things. We have
+splendid fishing achievements,--please do not forget that basket
+of trout I sent you the other morning,--and broken hearts and such
+tragedies are not impossible; as, for instance, if I do not send you as
+good a basket of trout to-morrow evening; or if you should remark that
+there was nothing in a basket of trout to--”
+
+“Now,” she said, “you are becoming involved and--inconsiderate.
+Remember, I am only a mountain girl.”
+
+“Then let us only talk of the other tragedies. But are you not a
+little callous to speak of such things as if you thirsted for their
+occurrence?”
+
+“I am afraid you are rather silly,” she replied. “You see, some of the
+land up here belongs to me. I am anxious that it should ‘boom’--that
+is the correct term, is it not?--and a sensation is good for ‘booming.’
+What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an American
+millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud, and a
+rough but honest fellow--a foreman on the river, maybe a young member
+of the English aristocracy in disguise--perilled his life for her! The
+place of peril would, of course, be named Lover’s Eddy, or the Maiden’s
+Gate--very much prettier, I assure you, than such cold-blooded things as
+the Devil’s Slide, where we are going now, and much more attractive to
+tourists.”
+
+“Miss Devlin,” laughed I, “you have all the eagerness of the incipient
+millionaire. May I hope to see you in Lombard Street some day, a very
+Katherine among capitalists?--for, from your remarks, I judge that you
+would--I say it pensively--‘wade through slaughter to a throne.’”
+
+Galt Roscoe, who was just ahead with Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin, turned
+and said: “Who is that quoting so dramatically? Now, this is a picnic
+party, and any one who introduces elegies, epics, sonnets, ‘and such,’
+is guilty of breaking the peace at Viking and its environs. Besides,
+such things should always be left to the parson. He must not be
+outflanked, his thunder must not be stolen. The scientist has unlimited
+resources; all he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious; but the
+parson must have his poetry as a monopoly, or he is lost to sight, and
+memory.”
+
+“Then,” said I, “I shall leave you to deal with Miss Devlin yourself,
+because she is the direct cause of my wrong-doing. She has expressed the
+most sinister sentiments about Viking and your very extensive parish.
+Miss Devlin,” I added, turning to her, “I leave you to your fate, and I
+cannot recommend you to mercy, for what Heaven made fair should remain
+tender and merciful, and--”
+
+“‘So young and so untender!’” she interjected, with a rippling
+laugh. “Yet Cordelia was misjudged very wickedly, and traduced very
+ungallantly, and so am I. And I bid you good-day, sir.”
+
+Her delicate laugh rings in my ears as I write. I think that sun
+and clear skies and hills go far to make us cheerful and harmonious.
+Somehow, I always remember her as she was that morning.
+
+She was standing then on the brink of a new and beautiful experience, at
+the threshold of an acknowledged love. And that is a remarkable time to
+the young.
+
+There was something thrilling about the experiences of that morning,
+and I think we all felt it. Even the great frowning precipices seemed
+to have lost their ordinary gloom, and when some young white eagles rose
+from a crag and flew away, growing smaller as they passed, until they
+were one with the snow of the glacier on Mount Trinity, or a wapiti
+peeped out from the underwood and stole away with glancing feet down the
+valley; we could scarcely refrain from doing some foolish thing out of
+sheer delight. At length we emerged from a thicket of Douglas pine upon
+the shore of the Whi-Whi, and, loosening our boat, were soon moving
+slowly on the cool current. For an hour or more we rowed down the river
+towards the Long Cloud, and then drew into the shade of a little
+island for lunch. When we came to the rendezvous, where picnic parties
+generally feasted, we found a fire still smoking and the remnants of a
+lunch scattered about. A party of picnickers had evidently been there
+just before us. Ruth suggested that it might be some of the tourists
+from the hotel. This seemed very probable.
+
+There were scraps of newspaper on the ground, and among them was
+an empty envelope. Mechanically I picked it up, and read the
+superscription. What I saw there I did not think necessary to disclose
+to the other members of the party; but, as unconcernedly as
+possible, for Ruth Devlin’s eyes were on me, I used it to light a
+cigar--inappropriately, for lunch would soon be ready.
+
+“What was the name on the envelope?” she said. “Was there one?”
+
+I guessed she had seen my slight start. I said evasively: “I fancy there
+was, but a man who is immensely interested in a new brand of cigar--”
+
+“You are a most deceitful man,” she said. “And, at the least, you are
+selfish in holding your cigar more important than a woman’s curiosity.
+Who can tell what romance was in the address on that envelope--”
+
+“What elements of noble tragedy, what advertisement for a certain
+property in the Whi-Whi Valley,” interrupted Roscoe, breaking off the
+thread of a sailor’s song he was humming, as he tended the water-kettle
+on the fire.
+
+This said, he went on with the song again. I was struck by the wonderful
+change in him now. Presentiments were far from him, yet I, having read
+that envelope, knew that they were not without cause. Indeed, I had an
+inkling of that the night before, when I heard the voices on the hill.
+Ruth Devlin stopped for a moment in the preparations to ask Roscoe
+what he was humming. I, answering for him, told her that it was an old
+sentimental sea-song of common sailors, often sung by officers at
+their jovial gatherings. At this she pretended to look shocked, and
+straightway demanded to hear the words, so that she could pronounce
+judgment on her spiritual pastor and master.
+
+He good-naturedly said that many of these old sailor songs were amusing,
+and that he often found himself humming them. To this I could testify,
+and he sang them very well indeed--quietly, but with the rolling tone of
+the sailor, jovial yet fascinating. At our united request, his humming
+became distinct. Three of the verses I give here:
+
+       “The ‘Lovely Jane’ went sailing down
+         To anchor at the Spicy Isles;
+        And the wind was fair as ever was blown,
+         For the matter of a thousand miles.
+
+       “Then a storm arose as she crossed the line,
+         Which it caused her masts to crack;
+        And she gulped her fill of the whooping brine,
+         And she likewise sprained her back.
+
+       “And the capting cried, ‘If it’s Davy Jones,
+         Then it’s Davy Jones,’ says he,
+       ‘Though I don’t aspire to leave my bones
+         In the equatorial sea.’”
+
+What the further history of the ‘Lovely Jane’ was we were not informed,
+for Ruth Devlin announced that the song must wait, though it appeared to
+be innocuous and child-like in its sentiments, and that lunch would be
+served between the acts of the touching tragedy. When lunch was over,
+and we had again set forth upon the Whi-Whi, I asked Ruth to sing an old
+French-Canadian song which she had once before sung to us. Many a time
+the woods of the West had resounded to the notes of ‘En Roulant ma
+Boule’, as the ‘voyageurs’ traversed the long paths of the Ottawa, St.
+Lawrence, and Mississippi; brave light-hearted fellows, whose singing
+days were over.
+
+By the light of coming events there was something weird and pathetic in
+this Arcadian air, sung as it was by her. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano
+of rare bracing quality, and she had enough natural sensibility to
+give the antique refinement of the words a wistful charm, particularly
+apparent in these verses:
+
+       “Ah, cruel Prince, my heart you break,
+        In killing thus my snow-white drake.
+
+       “My snow-white drake, my love, my King,
+        The crimson life-blood stains his wing.
+
+       “His golden bill sinks on his breast,
+        His plumes go floating east and west--
+
+       “En roulant ma boule:
+         Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,
+        En roulant ma boule roulant,
+         En roulant ma boule!”
+
+As she finished the song we rounded an angle in the Whi-Whi. Ahead of
+us lay the Snow Rapids and the swift channel at one side of the rapids
+which, hurrying through a rocky archway, was known as the Devil’s Slide.
+There was one channel through the rapids by which it was perfectly safe
+to pass, but that sweep of water through the Devil’s Slide was sometimes
+a trap of death to even the most expert river-men. A half-mile below the
+rapids was the confluence of the two rivers. The sight of the tumbling
+mass of white water, and the gloomy and colossal grandeur of the Devil’s
+Slide, a buttress of the hills, was very fine.
+
+But there was more than scenery to interest us here, for, moving
+quickly towards the Slide, was a boat with three people in it. They
+were evidently intending to attempt that treacherous passage, which
+culminated in a series of eddies, a menace to even the best oarsman
+ship. They certainly were not aware of their danger, for there came over
+the water the sound of a man’s laughing voice, and the two women in the
+boat were in unconcerned attitudes. Roscoe shouted to them, and motioned
+them back, but they did not appear to understand.
+
+The man waved his hat to us, and rowed on. There was but one thing for
+us to do: to make the passage quickly through the safe channel of the
+rapids, and to be of what service we could on the other side of the
+Slide, if necessary. We bent to the oars, and the boat shot through the
+water. Ruth held the rudder firmly, and her young sister and Mrs. Revel
+sat perfectly still. But the man in the other boat, thinking, doubtless,
+that we were attempting a race, added his efforts to the current of the
+channel. I am afraid that I said some words below my breath scarcely
+proper to be spoken in the presence of maidens and a clerk in holy
+orders. Roscoe was here, however, a hundred times more sailor than
+parson. He spoke in low, firm tones, as he now and then suggested a
+direction to Ruth Devlin or myself. Our boat tossed and plunged in the
+rapids, and the water washed over us lightly once or twice, but we went
+through the passage safely, and had turned towards the Slide before the
+other boat got to the rocky archway.
+
+We rowed hard. The next minute was one of suspense, for we saw the boat
+shoot beneath the archway. Presently it emerged, a whirling plaything in
+treacherous eddies. The man wildly waved his arm, and shouted to us.
+The women were grasping the sides of the boat, but making no outcry. We
+could not see the faces of the women plainly yet. The boat ran forward
+like a race-horse; it plunged hither and thither. An oar snapped in the
+rocks, and the other one shot from the man’s hand. Now the boat swung
+round and round, and dipped towards the hollow of a whirlpool. When we
+were within a few rods of them, it appeared to rise from the water,
+was hurled on a rock, and overturned. Mrs. Revel buried her face in her
+hands, and Ruth gave a little groan, but she held the rudder firmly,
+as we swiftly approached the forms struggling in the water. All,
+fortunately, had grasped the swamped boat, and were being carried down
+the stream towards us. The man was caring resolutely for himself,
+but one, of the women had her arm round the other, supporting her. We
+brought our skiff close to the swirling current. I called out words of
+encouragement, and was preparing to jump into the water, when Roscoe
+exclaimed in a husky voice: “Marmion, it is Mrs. Falchion.”
+
+Yes, it was Mrs. Falchion; but I had known that before. We heard her
+words to her companion: “Justine, do not look so. Your face is like
+death. It is hateful.”
+
+Then the craft veered towards the smoother water where we were. This
+was my opportunity. Roscoe threw me a rope, and I plunged in and swam
+towards the boat. I saw that Mrs. Falchion recognised me; but she made
+no exclamation, nor did Justine Caron. Their companion, however, on the
+other side of the boat, was eloquent in prayers to be rescued. I caught
+the bow of the boat as it raced past me, and with all my strength swung
+it towards the smoother water. I ran the rope I had brought, through
+the iron ring at the bow, and was glad enough of that; for their lives
+perhaps depended on being able to do it. It had been a nice calculation
+of chances, but it was done. Roscoe immediately bent to the oars, I
+threw an arm around Justine, and in a moment Roscoe had towed us into
+safer quarters. Then he drew in the rope. As he did so, Mrs. Falchion
+said: “Justine would drown so easily if one would let her.”
+
+These were her first words to me. I am sure I never can sufficiently
+admire the mere courage of the woman and her presence of mind in danger.
+Immediately afterwards she said--and subsequently it seemed to me
+marvellous: “You are something more than the chorus to the play this
+time, Dr. Marmion.”
+
+A minute after, and Justine was dragged into our boat, and was followed
+by Mrs. Falchion, whose first words to Roscoe were: “It is not such a
+meeting as one would plan.”
+
+And he replied: “I am glad no harm has come to you.”
+
+The man was duly helped in. A poor creature he was, to pass from this
+tale as he entered it, ignominiously and finally here. I even hide
+his nationality, for his race are generally more gallant. But he was
+wealthy, had an intense admiration for Mrs. Falchion, and had managed
+to secure her in his boat, to separate from the rest of the picnic
+party--chiefly through his inefficient rowing.
+
+Dripping with water as Mrs. Falchion was, she did not, strange to say,
+appear at serious disadvantage. Almost any other woman would have
+done so. She was a little pale, she must have felt miserable, but she
+accepted Ruth Devlin’s good offices--as did Justine Caron those of Mrs.
+Revel--with much self-possession, scanning her face and form critically
+the while, and occasionally turning a glance on Roscoe, who was now cold
+and impassive. I never knew a man who could so banish expression
+from his countenance when necessary. Speaking to Belle Treherne long
+afterwards of Mrs. Falchion’s self-possessed manner on this occasion,
+and of how she rose superior to the situation, I was told that I must
+have regarded the thing poetically and dramatically, for no woman could
+possibly look self-possessed in draggled skirts. She said that I always
+magnified certain of Mrs. Falchion’s qualities.
+
+That may be so, and yet it must be remembered that I was not predisposed
+towards her, and that I wished her well away from where Roscoe was.
+
+As for Justine Caron, she lay with her head on Mrs. Revel’s lap,
+and looked from beneath heavy eyelids at Roscoe with such gratitude
+and--but, no, she is only a subordinate in the story, and not a chief
+factor, and what she said or did here is of no vital consequence at this
+moment! We rowed to a point near the confluence of the two rivers, where
+we could leave our boats to be poled back through the rapids or portaged
+past them.
+
+On the way Mrs. Falchion said to Roscoe: “I knew you were somewhere in
+the Rockies; and at Vancouver, when I came from San Francisco, I heard
+of your being here. I had intended spending a month somewhere in the
+mountains, so I came to Viking, and on to the summer hotel: but really
+this is too exciting for recreation.”
+
+This was spoken with almost gay outward manner, but there was a note in
+her words which I did not like, nor did I think that her eye was very
+kind, especially when she looked at Ruth Devlin and afterwards at
+Roscoe.
+
+We had several miles to go, and it was nightfall--for which Mrs.
+Falchion expressed herself as profoundly grateful--when we arrived at
+the hotel. Our parting words were as brief as, of necessity, they had
+been on our journey through the mountains, for the ladies had ridden
+the horses which we had sent over for ourselves from Viking, and we men
+walked in front. Besides, the thoughts of some of us were not at all
+free from misgiving. The spirit possessing Roscoe the night before
+seemed to enter into all of us, even into Mrs. Falchion, who had lost,
+somewhat, the aplomb with which she had held the situation in the
+boat. But at the door of the hotel she said cheerfully: “Of course, Dr.
+Marmion will find it necessary to call on his patients to-morrow--and
+the clergyman also on his new parishoners.”
+
+The reply was left to me. I said gravely: “Let us be thankful that both
+doctor and clergyman are called upon to use their functions; it might
+easily have been only the latter.”
+
+“Oh, do not be funereal!” she replied. “I knew that we were not to drown
+at the Devil’s Slide. The drama is not ended yet, and the chief actors
+cannot go until ‘the curtain.’--Though I am afraid that is not quite
+orthodox, is it, Mr. Roscoe?”
+
+Roscoe looked at her gravely. “It may not be orthodox as it is said, but
+it is orthodox, I fancy, if we exchange God for fate, and Providence for
+chance.... Good-night.”
+
+He said this wearily. She looked up at him with an ironical look, then
+held out her hand, and quickly bade him good-night. Partings all round
+were made, and, after some injunctions to Mrs. Falchion and Justine
+Caron from myself as to preventives against illness, the rest of us
+started for Sunburst.
+
+As we went, I could not help but contrast Ruth and Amy Devlin, these
+two gentle yet strong mountain girls, with the woman we had left. Their
+lives were far from that dolorous tide which, sweeping through a selfish
+world, leaves behind it the stain of corroding passions; of cruelties,
+ingratitude, hate, and catastrophe. We are all ambitious, in one way or
+another. We climb mountains over scoria that frays and lava that burns.
+We try to call down the stars, and when, now and then, our conjuring
+succeeds, we find that our stars are only blasting meteors. One moral
+mishap lames character for ever. A false start robs us of our natural
+strength, and a misplaced or unrighteous love deadens the soul and
+shipwrecks just conceptions of life.
+
+A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains; it has found
+its place in his constitution, and it cannot be displaced by mere
+penitence, nor yet forgiveness. A man errs, and he must suffer; his
+father erred, and he must endure; or some one sinned against the man,
+and he hid the sin--But here a hand touched my shoulder! I was startled,
+for my thoughts had been far away. Roscoe’s voice spoke in my ear: “It
+is as she said; the actors come together for ‘the curtain.’”
+
+Then his eyes met those of Ruth Devlin turned to him earnestly and
+inquiringly. And I felt for a moment hard against Roscoe, that he should
+even indirectly and involuntarily, bring suffering into her life. In
+youth, in early manhood, we do wrong. At the time we seem to be injuring
+no one but ourselves; but, as we live on, we find that we were wronging
+whomsoever should come into our lives in the future. At the instant I
+said angrily to myself: “What right has he to love a girl like that,
+when he has anything in his life that might make her unhappy, or
+endanger her in ever so little!”
+
+But I bit my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I
+wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were
+the girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous. I tried not to think
+further of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,--Gait Roscoe walked with
+Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin,--but I found I could not drive it from my
+mind. This was not unnatural, for was not I the “chorus to the play”?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. THE SONG OF THE SAW
+
+There was still a subdued note to Roscoe’s manner the next morning.
+He was pale. He talked freely however of the affairs of Viking and
+Sunburst, and spoke of business which called him to Mr. Devlin’s great
+saw mill that day. A few moments after breakfast we were standing in the
+doorway. “Well,” he said, “shall we go?”
+
+I was not quite sure where he meant to go, but I took my hat and joined
+him. I wondered if it would be to the summer hotel or the great mill. My
+duty lay in the direction of the hotel. When we stepped out, he added:
+“Let us take the bridle-path along the edge of the ravine to the hotel.”
+
+The morning was beautiful. The atmosphere of the woods was of soft,
+diffusive green--the sunlight filtering through the transparent leaves.
+Bowers of delicate ferns and vines flanked the path, and an occasional
+clump of giant cedars invited us: the world was eloquent.
+
+Several tourists upon the verandah of the hotel remarked us with
+curiosity as we entered. A servant said that Mrs. Falchion would be glad
+to see us; and we were ushered into her sitting-room. She carried no
+trace of yesterday’s misadventure. She appeared superbly well. And yet,
+when I looked again, when I had time to think upon and observe detail,
+I saw signs of change. There was excitement in the eyes, and a slight
+nervous darkness beneath them, which added to their charm. She rose,
+smiling, and said: “I fear I am hardly entitled to this visit, for I am
+beyond convalescence, and Justine is not in need of shrift or diagnosis,
+as you see.”
+
+I was not so sure of Justine Caron as she was, and when I had paid my
+respects to her, I said a little priggishly (for I was young), still not
+too solemnly: “I cannot allow you to pronounce for me upon my patients,
+Mrs. Falchion; I must make my own inquiries.”
+
+But Mrs. Falchion was right. Justine Caron was not suffering much from
+her immersion; though, speaking professionally, her temperature was
+higher than the normal. But that might be from some impulse of the
+moment, for Justine was naturally a little excitable.
+
+We walked aside, and, looking at me with a flush of happiness in her
+face, she said: “You remember one day on the ‘Fulvia’ when I told you
+that money was everything to me; that I would do all I honourably could
+to get it?”
+
+I nodded. She continued: “It was that I might pay a debt--you know it.
+Well, money is my god no longer, for I can pay all I owe. That is, I
+can pay the money, but not the goodness, the noble kindness. He is
+most good, is he not? The world is better that such men as Captain Galt
+Roscoe live--ah, you see I cannot quite think of him as a clergyman. I
+wonder if I ever shall!” She grew suddenly silent and abstracted, and,
+in the moment’s pause, some ironical words in Mrs. Falchion’s voice
+floated across the room to me: “It is so strange to see you so. And you
+preach, and baptise; and marry, and bury, and care for the poor and--ah,
+what is it?--‘all those who, in this transitory life, are in sorrow,
+need, sickness, or any other adversity’?... And do you never long for
+the flesh-pots of Egypt? Never long for”--here her voice was not quite
+so clear--“for the past?”
+
+I was sure that, whatever she was doing, he had been trying to keep the
+talk, as it were, on the surface. I was equally sure that, to her last
+question, he would make no reply. Though I was now speaking to Justine
+Caron, I heard him say quite calmly and firmly: “Yes, I preach, baptise,
+marry, and bury, and do all I can for those who need help.”
+
+“The people about here say that you are good and charitable. You have
+won the hearts of the mountaineers. But you always had a gift that
+way.”--I did not like her tone.--“One would almost think you had
+founded a new dispensation. And if I had drowned yesterday, you would,
+I suppose, have buried me, and have preached a little sermon about
+me.--You could have done that better than any one else!... What would
+you have said in such a case?”
+
+There was an earnest, almost a bitter, protest in the reply.
+
+“Pardon me, if I cannot answer your question. Your life was saved, and
+that is all we have to consider, except to be grateful to Providence.
+The duties of my office have nothing to do with possibilities.”
+
+She was evidently torturing him, and I longed to say a word that would
+torture her. She continued: “And the flesh-pots--you have not answered
+about them: do you not long for them--occasionally?”
+
+“They are of a period,” he answered, “too distant for regret.”
+
+“And yet,” she replied softly, “I fancied sometimes in London last year,
+that you had not outgrown that antique time--those lotos-days.”
+
+He made no reply at once, and in the pause Justine and I passed out to
+the verandah.
+
+“How long does Mrs. Falchion intend remaining here, Miss Caron?” I said.
+
+Her reply was hesitating: “I do not quite know; but I think some time.
+She likes the place; it seems to amuse her.”
+
+“And you--does it amuse you?”
+
+“It does not matter about me. I am madame’s servant; but, indeed, it
+does not amuse me particularly.”
+
+“Do you like the place?”
+
+The reply was somewhat hurried, and she glanced at me a little
+nervously. “Oh yes,” she said, “I like the place, but--”
+
+Here Roscoe appeared at the door and said, “Mrs. Falchion wishes to see
+Viking and Mr. Devlin’s mills, Marmion. She will go with us.”
+
+In a little time we were on our way to Viking. I walked with Mrs.
+Falchion, and Roscoe with Justine. I was aware of a new element in Mrs.
+Falchion’s manner. She seemed less powerfully attractive to me than in
+the old days, yet she certainly was more beautiful. It was hard to trace
+the new characteristic. But at last I thought I saw it in a decrease of
+that cold composure, that impassiveness, so fascinating in the past. In
+its place had come an allusive, restless something, to be found in
+words of troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased
+sensitiveness of mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness--she
+was emotional at last! She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits in
+her: one pitiless as of old; the other human, anxious, not unlovely.
+
+At length we became silent, and walked so side by side for a time. Then,
+with that old delightful egotism and selfishness--delightful in its very
+daring--she said: “Well, amuse me!”
+
+“And is it still the end of your existence,” I rejoined--“to be amused?”
+
+“What is there else to do?” she replied with raillery.
+
+“Much. To amuse others, for instance; to regard human beings as
+something more than automata.”
+
+“Has Mr. Roscoe made you a preaching curate? I helped Amshar at the
+Tanks.”
+
+“One does not forget that. Yet you pushed Amshar with your foot.”
+
+“Did you expect me to kiss the black coward? Then, I nursed Mr. Roscoe
+in his illness.”
+
+“And before that?”
+
+“And before that I was born into the world, and grew to years of
+knowledge, and learned what fools we mortals be, and--and there--is that
+Mr. Devlin’s big sawmill?”
+
+We had suddenly emerged on a shelf of the mountainside, and were looking
+down into the Long Cloud Valley. It was a noble sight. Far to the north
+were foothills covered with the glorious Norfolk pine, rising in steppes
+till they seemed to touch white plateaus of snow, which again billowed
+to glacier fields whose austere bosoms man’s hand had never touched; and
+these suddenly lifted up huge, unapproachable shoulders, crowned with
+majestic peaks that took in their teeth the sun, the storm, and the
+whirlwinds of the north, never changing countenance from day to year and
+from year to age.
+
+Facing this long line of glory, running irregularly on towards that
+sea where Franklin and M’Clintock led their gay adventurers,--the bold
+ships,--was another shore, not so high or superior, but tall and sombre
+and warm, through whose endless coverts of pine there crept and idled
+the generous Chinook winds--the soothing breath of the friendly Pacific.
+Between these shores the Long Cloud River ran; now boisterous, now soft,
+now wallowing away through long channels, washing gorges always dark as
+though shaded by winter, and valleys always green as favoured by summer.
+Creeping along a lofty narrow path upon that farther shore was a mule
+train, bearing packs which would not be opened till, through the great
+passes of the mountain, they were spilled upon the floors of fort and
+post on the east side of the Rockies.
+
+Not far from where the mule train crept along was a great hole in the
+mountain-side, as though antique giants of the hills had tunnelled
+through to make themselves a home or to find the eternal secret of the
+mountains. Near to this vast dark cavity was a hut--a mere playhouse, it
+seemed, so small was it, viewed from where we stood. From the edge of a
+cliff just in front of this hut, there swung a long cable, which reached
+almost to the base of the shore beneath us; and, even as we looked,
+we saw what seemed a tiny bucket go swinging slowly down that strange
+hypotenuse. We watched it till we saw it get to the end of its journey
+in the valley beneath, not far from the great mill to which we were
+bound.
+
+“How mysterious!” said Mrs. Falchion. “What does it mean? I never saw
+anything like that before. What a wonderful thing!”
+
+Roscoe explained. “Up there in that hut,” he said, “there lives a man
+called Phil Boldrick. He is a unique fellow, with a strange history.
+He has been miner, sailor, woodsman, river-driver, trapper,
+salmon-fisher;--expert at the duties of each of these, persistent at
+none. He has a taste for the ingenious and the unusual. For a time he
+worked in Mr. Devlin’s mill. It was too tame for him. He conceived the
+idea of supplying the valley with certain necessaries, by intercepting
+the mule trains as they passed across the hills, and getting them down
+to Viking by means of that cable. The valley laughed at him; men said
+it was impossible. He went to Mr. Devlin, and Mr. Devlin came to me.
+I have, as you know, some knowledge of machinery and engineering.
+I thought the thing feasible but expensive, and told Mr. Devlin so.
+However, the ingenuity of the thing pleased Mr. Devlin, and, with that
+singular enterprise which in other directions has made him a rich man,
+he determined on its completion. Between us we managed it. Boldrick
+carries on his aerial railway with considerable success, as you see.”
+
+“A singular man,” said Mrs. Falchion. “I should like to see him. Come,
+sit down here and tell me all you know about him, will you not?”
+
+Roscoe assented. I arranged a seat for us, and we all sat.
+
+Roscoe was about to begin, when Mrs. Falchion said, “Wait a minute. Let
+us take in this scene first.”
+
+We were silent. After a moment I turned to Mrs. Falchion, and said: “It
+is beautiful, is it not?”
+
+She drew in a long breath, her eyes lighted up, and she said, with a
+strange abandon of gaiety: “Yes, it is delightful to live.”
+
+It seemed so, in spite of the forebodings of my friend and my own
+uneasiness concerning him, Ruth Devlin, and Mrs. Falchion. The place
+was all peace: a very monotony of toil and pleasure. The heat drained
+through the valley back and forth in visible palpitations upon the roofs
+of the houses, the mills, and the vast piles of lumber: all these seemed
+breathing. It looked a busy Arcady. From beneath us life vibrated with
+the regularity of a pulse: distance gave a kind of delighted ease to
+toil. Event appeared asleep.
+
+But when I look back now, after some years, at the experiences of
+that day, I am astonished by the running fire of events, which,
+unfortunately, were not all joy.
+
+As I write I can hear that keen wild singing of the saw come to us
+distantly, with a pleasant, weird elation. The big mill hung above the
+river, its sides all open, humming with labour, as I had seen it many a
+time during my visit to Roscoe. The sun beat in upon it, making a
+broad piazza of light about its sides. Beyond it were pleasant shadows,
+through which men passed and repassed at their work. Life was busy all
+about it. Yet the picture was bold, open, and strong. Great iron hands
+reached down into the water, clamped a massive log or huge timber,
+lightly drew it up the slide from the water, where, guided by the
+hand-spikes of the men, it was laid upon its cradle and carried slowly
+to the devouring teeth of the saws: there to be sliced through rib and
+bone in moist sandwiched layers, oozing the sweet sap of its fibre; and
+carried out again into the open to be drained to dry bones under the
+exhaust-pipes of the sun: piles upon piles; houses with wide chinks
+through which the winds wandered, looking for tenants and finding none.
+
+To the north were booms of logs, swilling in the current, waiting for
+their devourer. Here and there were groups of river-drivers and their
+foremen, prying twisted heaps of logs from the rocks or the shore into
+the water. Other groups of river-drivers were scattered upon the banks,
+lifting their huge red canoes high up on the platforms, the spring’s
+and summer’s work of river-driving done; while others lounged upon
+the grass, or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the
+Chinamen, or chaffing the Indian idling in the sun--a garish figure
+stoically watching the inroads of civilisation. The town itself was
+squat but amiable: small houses and large huts; the only place of note
+and dignity, the new town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the
+big mill, and even by the two smaller ones flanking it north and south.
+
+But Viking was full of men who had breathed the strong life of the
+hills, had stolen from Nature some of her brawny strength, and set
+themselves up before her as though a man were as great as a mountain
+and as good a thing to see. It was of such a man that Galt Roscoe was to
+tell us. His own words I will not give, but will speak of Phil Boldrick
+as I remember him and as Roscoe described him to us.
+
+Of all the men in the valley, none was so striking as Phil Boldrick.
+Of all faces his was the most singular; of all characters his the most
+unique; of all men he was the most unlucky, save in one thing--the
+regard of his fellows. Others might lay up treasures, not he; others
+lose money at gambling, not he--he never had much to lose. But yet he
+did all things magniloquently. The wave of his hand was expansive, his
+stride was swaying and decisive, his over-ruling, fraternal faculty was
+always in full swing. Viking was his adopted child; so much so that a
+gentleman river-driver called it Philippi; and by that name it sometimes
+went, and continues still so among those who knew it in the old days.
+
+Others might have doubts as to the proper course to pursue under certain
+circumstances; it was not so with Phil. They might argue a thing out
+orally, he did so mentally, and gave judgment on it orally. He was
+final, not oracular. One of his eyes was of glass, and blue; the other
+had an eccentricity, and was of a deep and meditative grey. It was a
+wise and knowing eye. It was trained to many things--like one servant in
+a large family. One side of his face was solemn, because of the gay but
+unchanging blue eye, the other was gravely humourous, shrewdly playful.
+His fellow citizens respected him; so much so, that they intended to
+give him an office in the new-formed corporation; which means that
+he had courage and downrightness, and that the rough, straightforward
+gospel of the West was properly interpreted by him.
+
+If a stranger came to the place, Phil was sent first to reconnoitre; if
+any function was desirable, Phil was requested to arrange it; if justice
+was to be meted out, Phil’s opinion had considerable weight--for he had
+much greater leisure than other more prosperous men; if a man was taken
+ill (this was in the days before a doctor came), Phil was asked to
+declare if he would “shy from the finish.”
+
+I heard Roscoe more than once declare that Phil was as good as two
+curates to him. Not that Phil was at all pious, nor yet possessed of
+those abstemious qualities in language and appetite by which good men
+are known; but he had a gift of civic virtue--important in a
+wicked world, and of unusual importance in Viking. He had neither
+self-consciousness nor fear; and while not possessed of absolute tact
+in a social way, he had a knack of doing the right thing bluntly, or
+the wrong thing with an air of rightness. He envied no man, he coveted
+nothing; had once or twice made other men’s fortunes by prospecting, but
+was poor himself. And in all he was content, and loved life and Viking.
+
+Immediately after Roscoe had reached the mountains Phil had become his
+champion, declaring that there was not any reason why a man should
+not be treated sociably because he was a parson. Phil had been a great
+traveller, as had many who settled at last in these valleys to the
+exciting life of the river: salmon-catching or driving logs. He had
+lived for a time in Lower California and Mexico, and had given Roscoe
+the name of The Padre: which suited the genius and temper of the rude
+population. And so it was that Roscoe was called The Padre by every one,
+though he did not look the character.
+
+As he told his story of Phil’s life I could not help but contrast him
+with most of the clergymen I knew or had seen. He had the admirable ease
+and tact of a cultured man of the world, and the frankness and warmth of
+a hearty nature, which had, however, some inherent strain of melancholy.
+Wherever I had gone with him I had noticed that he was received with
+good-humoured deference by his rough parishioners and others who were
+such only in the broadest sense. Perhaps he would not have succeeded so
+well if he had worn clerical clothes. As it was, of a week day, he could
+not be distinguished from any respectable layman. The clerical uniform
+attracts women more than men, who, if they spoke truly, would resent it.
+Roscoe did not wear it, because he thought more of men than of function,
+of manliness than clothes; and though this sometimes got him into
+trouble with his clerical brethren who dearly love Roman collar, and
+coloured stole, and the range of ritual from a lofty intoning to the
+eastward position, he managed to live and himself be none the worse,
+while those who knew him were certainly the better.
+
+When Roscoe had finished his tale, Mrs. Falchion said: “Mr. Boldrick
+must be a very interesting man;” and her eyes wandered up to the great
+hole in the mountain-side, and lingered there. “As I said, I must meet
+him,” she added; “men of individuality are rare.” Then: “That great
+‘hole in the wall’ is, of course, a natural formation.”
+
+“Yes,” said Roscoe. “Nature seems to have made it for Boldrick. He uses
+it as a storehouse.”
+
+“Who watches it while he is away?” she said. “There is no door to the
+place, of course.”
+
+Roscoe smiled enigmatically. “Men do not steal up here: that is the
+unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it.”
+
+The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion. “I might have known!” she
+said. “It is the same in the South Seas among the natives--Samoans,
+Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can--as you know, Mr. Roscoe,”--her
+voice had a subterranean meaning,--“travel from end to end of those
+places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case
+of stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white
+man corrupts them. But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end.”
+
+Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had
+no purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath,
+I could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently
+turned on Roscoe, then withdrawn again. On him the effect was so far
+disturbing that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her
+glance unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I
+had been affected by her speech. I think I confessed to nothing in my
+face.
+
+Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us. She had, I fancy,
+scarcely heard half that had been said. Roscoe said to her presently:
+“You like it, do you not?”
+
+“Like it?” she said. “I never saw anything so wonderful.”
+
+“And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there,” rejoined
+Mrs. Falchion. “Nature is never complete without man. All that would be
+splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick’s cable, but
+it would not be perfect: it needs man--Phil Boldrick and Company in
+the foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and
+sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and
+the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is. It always
+seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley. There is
+a tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and
+built an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl--though no one ever knew
+quite why: for there the tradition ends.”
+
+I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe
+remained perfectly still. It seemed to me that I was little by little
+getting the threads of his story. That there was a native girl; that the
+girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way--innocently
+I dared hope--connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key to
+the mystery, I was certain. That it was in her mind to use the mystery,
+I was also certain. But for what end I could not tell. What had passed
+between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed
+evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the ‘Fulvia’,
+had again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of
+pique or anger, or because she really cared for him. It might be that
+she cared.
+
+She added after a moment: “Add man to nature, and it stops sulking:
+which goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at
+all.”
+
+She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told
+me once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set
+her laughing at herself, even when it was greatest. It was this
+characteristic which made her conversation very striking, it was so
+sharply contrasted in its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against
+the most serious and acute statements. One never knew when she would
+turn her own or her interlocutor’s gravity into mirth.
+
+Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: “If I
+were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights
+were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined. There
+is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the
+thing. Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less
+intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr.
+Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll;
+or that The Padre there--how amusing they should call him that!--should
+cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I
+do not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of
+immortalising himself.”
+
+Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her
+words by a wave of his hand. I also was silent for a moment; for there
+had come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the
+scene, something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the
+‘Fulvia’. “Marmion,” said he, “when everything at sea appears so
+absolutely beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you’re itching
+to write poetry, look out. There’s trouble ahead. It’s only the pretty
+pause in the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and
+tumbles things about. When I’ve been on the bridge,” he continued, “of
+a night that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil
+playing his silent overture. Don’t you take in the twaddle about God
+sending thunderbolts; it’s that old war-horse down below.--And then
+I’ve kept a sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of
+waterspouts would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch
+us broadsides. And what’s gospel for sea is good for land, and you’ll
+find it so, my son.”
+
+I was possessed of the same feeling now as I looked at the scene before
+us, and I suppose I seemed moody, for immediately Mrs. Falchion said:
+“Why, now my words have come true; the scene can be made perfect. Pray
+step down to the valley, Dr. Marmion, and complete the situation, for
+you are trying to seem serious, and it is irresistibly amusing--and
+professional, I suppose; one must not forget that you teach the young
+‘sawbones’ how to saw.”
+
+I was piqued, annoyed. I said, though I admit it was not cleverly said:
+“Mrs. Falchion, I am willing to go and complete that situation, if you
+will go with me; for you would provide the tragedy--plenty of it; there
+would be the full perihelion of elements; your smile is the incarnation
+of the serious.”
+
+She looked at me full in the eyes. “Now that,” she said, “is a very good
+‘quid pro quo’--is that right?--and I have no doubt that it is more or
+less true; and for a doctor to speak truth and a professor to be under
+stood is a matter for angels. And I actually believe that, in time,
+you will be free from priggishness, and become a brilliant
+conversationalist; and--suppose we wander on to our proper places in the
+scene.... Besides, I want to see that strange man, Mr. Boldrick.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+
+We travelled slowly down the hillside into the village, and were about
+to turn towards the big mill when we saw Mr. Devlin and Ruth riding
+towards us. We halted and waited for them. Mr. Devlin was introduced
+to Mrs. Falchion by his daughter, who was sweetly solicitous concerning
+Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron, and seemed surprised at finding them
+abroad after the accident of the day before. Ruth said that her father
+and herself had just come from the summer hotel, where they had gone
+to call upon Mrs. Falchion. Mrs. Falchion heartily acknowledged the
+courtesy. She seemed to be playing no part, but was apparently grateful
+all round; yet I believe that even already Ruth had caught at something
+in her presence threatening Roscoe’s peace; whilst she, from the
+beginning, had, with her more trained instincts, seen the relations
+between the clergyman and his young parishioner.--But what had that to
+do with her?
+
+Between Roscoe and Ruth there was the slightest constraint, and
+I thought that it gave a troubled look to the face of the girl.
+Involuntarily, the eyes of both were attracted to Mrs. Falchion. I
+believe in that moment there was a kind of revelation among the three.
+While I talked to Mr. Devlin I watched them, standing a little apart,
+Justine Caron with us. It must have been a painful situation for them;
+to the young girl because a shadow was trailing across the light of her
+first love; to Roscoe because the shadow came out of his past; to Mrs.
+Falchion because she was the shadow. I felt that trouble was at hand.
+In this trouble I knew that I was to play a part; for, if Roscoe had his
+secret and Mrs. Falchion had the key to it, I also held a secret which,
+in case of desperate need, I should use. I did not wish to use it, for
+though it was mine it was also another’s. I did not like the look in
+Mrs. Falchion’s eyes as she glanced at Ruth: I was certain that she
+resented Roscoe’s regard for Ruth and Ruth’s regard for Roscoe; but,
+up to that moment, I had not thought it possible that she cared for him
+deeply. Once she had influenced me, but she had never cared for me.
+
+I could see a change in her. Out of it came that glance at Ruth, which
+seemed to me the talon-like hatred that shot from the eyes of Goneril
+and Regan: and I was sure that if she loved Roscoe there would be mad
+trouble for him and for the girl. Heretofore she had been passionless,
+but there was a dormant power in her which had only to be wickedly
+aroused to wreck her own and others’ happiness. Hers was one of those
+volcanic natures, defying calculation and ordinary conceptions of life;
+having the fullest capacity for all the elementary passions--hatred,
+love, cruelty, delight, loyalty, revolt, jealousy. She had never from
+her birth until now felt love for any one. She had never been awakened.
+Even her affection for her father had been dutiful rather than
+instinctive. She had provoked love, but had never given it. She had been
+self-centred, compulsive, unrelenting. She had unmoved seen and let her
+husband go to his doom--it was his doom and death so far as she knew.
+
+Yet, as I thought of this, I found myself again admiring her. She was
+handsome, independent, distinctly original, and possessing capacity
+for great things. Besides, so far, she had not been actively
+vindictive--simply passively indifferent to the sufferings of others.
+She seemed to regard results more than means. All she did not like she
+could empty into the mill of the destroying gods: just as General Grant
+poured hundreds of thousands of men into the valley of the James, not
+thinking of lives but victory, not of blood but triumph. She too, even
+in her cruelty, seemed to have a sense of wild justice which disregarded
+any incidental suffering.
+
+I could see that Mr. Devlin was attracted by her, as every man had
+been who had ever met her; for, after all, man is but a common slave
+to beauty: virtue he respects, but beauty is man’s valley of suicide.
+Presently she turned to Mr. Devlin, having, as it seemed to me,
+made Roscoe and Ruth sufficiently uncomfortable. With that cheerful
+insouciance which was always possible to her on the most trying
+occasions, she immediately said, as she had often said to me, that she
+had come to Mr. Devlin to be amused for the morning, perhaps the whole
+day. It was her way, her selfish way, to make men her slaves.
+
+Mr. Devlin gallantly said that he was at her disposal, and with a kind
+of pride added that there was plenty in the valley which would interest
+her; for he was a frank, bluff man, who would as quickly have spoken
+disparagingly of what belonged to himself, if it was not worthy, as have
+praised it.
+
+“Where shall we go first?” he said. “To the mill?”
+
+“To the mill, by all means,” Mrs. Falchion replied; “I have never been
+in a great saw-mill, and I believe this is very fine. Then,” she added,
+with a little wave of the hand towards the cable running down from Phil
+Boldrick’s eyrie in the mountains, “then I want to see all that cable
+can do--all, remember.”
+
+Mr. Devlin laughed. “Well, it hasn’t many tricks, but what it does it
+does cleverly, thanks to The Padre.”
+
+“Oh yes,” responded Mrs. Falchion, still looking at the cable; “The
+Padre, I know, is very clever.”
+
+“He is more than clever,” bluffly replied Mr. Devlin, who was not keen
+enough to see the faint irony in her tones.
+
+“Yes,” responded Mrs. Falchion in the same tone of voice, “he is more
+than clever. I have been told that he was once very brave. I have been
+told that once in the South Seas he did his country a great service.”
+
+She paused. I could see Ruth’s eyes glisten and her face suffuse, for
+though she read the faint irony in the tone, still she saw that the
+tale which Mrs. Falchion was evidently about to tell, must be to Galt
+Roscoe’s credit. Mrs. Falchion turned idly upon Ruth and saw the look in
+her face. An almost imperceptible smile came upon her lips. She looked
+again at the cable and Phil Boldrick’s eyrie, which seemed to have a
+wonderful attraction for her. Not turning away from it, save now and
+then to glance indolently at Mr. Devlin or Ruth, and once enigmatically
+at myself, she said:
+
+“Once upon a time--that is the way, I believe, to begin a pretty
+story--there were four men-of-war idling about a certain harbour of
+Samoa. One of the vessels was the flag-ship, with its admiral on board.
+On one of the other vessels was an officer who had years before explored
+this harbour. It was the hurricane season. He advised the admiral not to
+enter the harbour, for the indications foretold a gale, and himself was
+not sure that his chart was in all respects correct, for the harbour had
+been hurriedly explored and sounded. But the admiral gave orders, and
+they sailed in.
+
+“That day a tremendous hurricane came crying down upon Samoa. It swept
+across the island, levelled forests of cocoa palms, battered villages to
+pieces, caught that little fleet in the harbour, and played with it in
+a horrible madness. To right and left were reefs, behind was the shore,
+with a monstrous surf rolling in; before was a narrow passage. One
+vessel made its way out--on it was the officer who had surveyed the
+harbour. In the open sea there was safety. He brought his vessel down
+the coast a little distance, put a rope about him and in the wild surf
+made for the shore. I believe he could have been court-martialled for
+leaving his ship, but he was a man who had taken a great many risks of
+one kind and another in his time. It was one chance out of a hundred;
+but he made it--he got to the shore, travelled down to the harbour where
+the men-of-war were careening towards the reefs, unable to make the
+passage out, and once again he tied a rope about him and plunged into
+the surf to try for the admiral’s ship. He got there terribly battered.
+They tell how a big wave lifted him and landed him upon the quarter-deck
+just as big waves are not expected to do. Well, like the hero in any
+melodrama of the kind, he very prettily piloted monsieur the admiral and
+his fleet out to the open sea.”
+
+She paused, smiling in an inscrutable sort of way, then turned and said
+with a sudden softness in her voice, though still with the air of one
+who wished not to be taken with too great a seriousness: “And,
+ladies and gentlemen, the name of the ship that led the way was the
+‘Porcupine’; and the name of the hero was Commander Galt Roscoe, R.N.;
+and ‘of such is the kingdom of heaven!’”
+
+There was silence for a moment. The tale had been told adroitly, and
+with such tact as to words that Roscoe could not take offence--need
+not, indeed, as he did not, I believe, feel any particular
+self-consciousness. I am not sure but he was a little glad that such
+evidence should have been given at the moment, when a kind of restraint
+had come between him and Ruth, by one who he had reason to think was
+not wholly his friend might be his enemy. It was a kind of offset to his
+premonitions and to the peril over which he might stumble at any moment.
+
+To me the situation was almost inexplicable; but the woman herself was
+inexplicable: at this moment the evil genius of us all, at that doing us
+all a kind of crude, superior justice. I was the first to speak.
+
+“Roscoe,” I said, “I never had heard of this, although I remember the
+circumstance as told in the newspapers. But I am glad and proud that I
+have a friend with such a record.”
+
+“And, only think,” said Mrs. Falchion, “he actually was not
+court-martialled for abandoning his ship to save an admiral and a fleet.
+But the ways of the English Admiralty are wonderful. They go out of
+their way to avoid a court-martial sometimes, and they go out of their
+way to establish it sometimes.”
+
+By this time we had started towards the mill. Roscoe walked ahead with
+Ruth Devlin. Mr. Devlin, Mrs. Falchion, Justine Caron and myself walked
+together.
+
+Mrs. Falchion presently continued, talking, as it seemed to me, at the
+back of Roscoe’s head:
+
+“I have known the Admiralty to force an officer to resign the navy
+because he had married a native wife. But I never knew the Admiralty to
+court-martial an officer because he did not marry a native wife whom
+he OUGHT to have married: but, as I said, the ways of the Admiralty are
+past admiration.”
+
+I could see Roscoe’s hand clinch at his side, and presently he said over
+his shoulder at her: “Your memory and your philosophy are as wonderful
+as the Admiralty are inscrutable.”
+
+She laughed. “You have not lost your old gift of retort,” she said. “You
+are still amusing.”
+
+“Well, come,” said Mr. Devlin cheerfully, “let’s see if there isn’t
+something even more amusing than Mr. Roscoe in Viking. I will show you,
+Mrs. Falchion, the biggest saw that ever ate the heart out of a Norfolk
+pine.”
+
+At the mill Mrs. Falchion was interested. She asked questions concerning
+the machinery which mightily pleased Mr. Devlin, they were so apt and
+intelligent; and herself assisted in giving an immense log to the teeth
+of the largest saw, which, with its six upright blades, ate, and was
+never satisfied. She stooped and ran her ungloved hand into the sawdust,
+as sweet before the sun has dried it as the scent of a rose. The rich
+smell of the fresh-cut lumber filled the air, and suggested all kinds of
+remote and pleasant things. The industry itself is one of the first that
+comes with the invasion of new territory, and makes one think of man’s
+first work in the world: to fell the tree and till the soil. It is
+impossible to describe that fierce, jubilant song of the saw, which
+even when we were near was never shrill or shrieking: never drowning our
+voices, but vibrant and delightful. To Mrs. Falchion it was new; she was
+impressed.
+
+“I have seen,” she said to Mr. Devlin, “all sorts of enterprises,
+but never anything like this. It all has a kind of rough music. It is
+enjoyable.”
+
+Mr. Devlin beamed. “I have just added something to the mill that will
+please you,” he said.
+
+She looked interested. We all gathered round. I stood between Mrs.
+Falchion and Ruth Devlin, and Roscoe beside Justine Caron.
+
+“It is the greatest mill-whistle in the country,” he continued. “It will
+be heard from twelve to twenty-five miles, according to the condition of
+the atmosphere. I want big things all round, and this is a masterpiece,
+I guess. Now, I’ll let you hear it if you like. I didn’t expect to use
+it until to-night at nine o’clock, when, also for the first time, I am
+to light the mills by electricity; a thing that’s not been attempted yet
+in any saw-mill on the Continent. We’re going to work night and day for
+a couple of months.”
+
+“This is all very wonderful. And are you indebted to Mr. Roscoe in these
+things too?--Everybody seems to need him here.”
+
+“Well,” said the mill-owner, laughing, “the whistle is my own. It’s the
+sort of thing I would propose--to blow my trumpet, as it were; but the
+electricity and the first experiments in it I owe to The Padre.”
+
+“As I thought,” she said, and turned to Roscoe. “I remember,” she added,
+“that you had an electrical search-light on the ‘Porcupine’, and that
+you were fond of electricity. Do you ever use search-lights here? I
+should think they might be of use in your parish. Then, for a change,
+you could let the parish turn it upon you, for the sake of contrast and
+edification.”
+
+For the moment I was exceedingly angry. Her sarcasm was well veiled,
+but I could feel the sardonic touch beneath the smiling surface. This
+innuendo seemed so gratuitous. I said to her, almost beneath my breath,
+that none of the others could hear: “How womanly!”
+
+She did no more than lift her eyebrows in acknowledgment, and went on
+talking lightly to Mr. Devlin. Roscoe was cool, but I could see now
+in his eyes a kind of smouldering anger; which was quite to my wish. I
+hoped he would be meek no longer.
+
+Presently Ruth Devlin said: “Would it not be better to wait till
+to-night, when the place is lighted, before the whistle is blown? Then
+you can get a better first impression. And if Mrs. Falchion will come
+over to our home at Sunburst, we will try and amuse her for the rest of
+the day--that is, after she has seen all here.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion seemed struck by the frankness of the girl, and for an
+instant debated, but presently said: “No, thank you. When all is seen
+now, I will go to the hotel, and then will join you all here in the
+evening, if that seems feasible. Perhaps Dr. Marmion will escort me
+here. Mr. Roscoe, of course, has other duties.”
+
+“I shall be happy,” I said, maliciously smiling, “to guide you to the
+sacrifice of the saw.”
+
+She was not disturbed. She touched Mr. Devlin’s arm, and, looking archly
+at him, nodded backwards towards me. “‘Beware the anaconda!’” she said.
+
+It was impossible not to be amused; her repartee was always so
+unrestrained. She disarmed one by what would have been, in a man,
+insolent sang-froid: in her it was piquancy, daring.
+
+Presently she added: “But if we are to have no colossal whistle and no
+electric light till evening, there is one thing I must have: and that is
+your remarkable Phil Boldrick, who seems to hold you all in the palm of
+his hand, and lives up there like a god on his Olympus.”
+
+“Well, suppose you go and call on him,” said Roscoe, with a touch of dry
+humour, his eye on the cable that reached to Boldrick’s perch.
+
+She saw her opportunity, and answered promptly: “Yes, I will call on
+him immediately,”--here she turned towards Ruth,--“if Miss Devlin and
+yourself will go with me.”
+
+“Nonsense,” interposed Mr. Devlin. “Besides, the cage will only hold two
+easily. Anyhow, it’s absurd.”
+
+“Why is it absurd? Is there any danger?” queried Mrs. Falchion.
+
+“Not unless there’s an idiot at the machinery.”
+
+“I should expect you to manage it,” she persisted.
+
+“But no woman has ever done it.”
+
+“I will make the record.” And, turning to Ruth: “You are not afraid?”
+
+“No, I am not afraid,” said the girl bravely, though she acknowledged
+to me afterwards that while she was not afraid of anything where her
+own skill was called in question, such as mountain-climbing, or even
+puma-hunting, she did not joyfully anticipate swinging between heaven
+and earth on that incline. “I will go,” she added, “if my father will
+let me. ... May I?” she continued, turning to him.
+
+Perhaps something of the father’s pride came up in him, perhaps he had
+just got some suspicion that between his daughter and Mrs. Falchion
+there was a subterranean rivalry. However it was, he gave a quick,
+quizzical look at both of them, then glanced at Roscoe, and said: “I’ll
+make no objections, if Ruth would like to introduce you to Phil. And, as
+Mrs. Falchion suggested, I’ll ‘turn the crank.’”
+
+I could see that Roscoe had a bad moment. But presently he appeared to
+me perfectly willing that Ruth should go. Maybe he was as keen that
+she should not appear at a disadvantage beside Mrs. Falchion as was her
+father.
+
+A signal was given, and the cage came slowly down the cable to the mill.
+We could see Boldrick, looking little bigger than a child at the other
+end, watching our movements. At the last moment Mr. Devlin and Roscoe
+seemed apprehensive, but the women were cool and determined. I noticed
+Mrs. Falchion look at Ruth curiously once or twice after they entered
+the cage, and before they started, and what she saw evidently gave her
+a higher opinion of the girl, for she laid her hand on Ruth’s arm
+suddenly, and said: “We will show these mere men what nerve is.”
+
+Ruth nodded, then ‘bon voyage’ was said, and the signal was given. The
+cage ascended at first quickly, then more slowly, swaying up and down a
+little on the cable, and climbing higher and higher through the air to
+the mountain-side. What Boldrick thought when he saw the two ascending
+towards him, he expressed to Mr. Devlin later in the day in vigorous
+language: what occurred at his but Ruth Devlin told me afterwards. When
+the cage reached him, he helped the two passengers out, and took them to
+his hut. With Ruth he had always been a favourite, and he welcomed her
+with admiring and affectionate respect.
+
+“Never b’lieved you could have done it, Miss Devlin--never! Not but what
+I knew you weren’t afraid of anything on the earth below, or the waters
+under the earth; but when you get swinging there over the world, and not
+high enough to get a hold on heaven, it makes you feel as if things
+was droppin’ away from you like. But, by gracious! you did it like an
+eagle--you and your friend.”
+
+By this time he was introduced, and at the name of Mrs. Falchion,
+he cocked his head, and looked quizzically, as if trying to remember
+something, then drew his hand once or twice across his forehead. After a
+moment he said: “Strange, now, ma’am, how your name strikes me. It isn’t
+a common name, and I’ve heerd it before somewhere--somewhere. It isn’t
+your face that I’ve seen before--for I’d have remembered it if it was a
+thousand years ago,” he added admiringly. “But I’ve heard some one use
+it; and I can’t tell where.”
+
+She looked curiously at him, and said: “Don’t try to remember, and it
+will come to you in good time. But show us everything about your place
+before we go back, won’t you, please?”
+
+He showed them his hut, where he lived, quite alone. It was supplied
+with bare necessaries, and with a counter, behind which were cups and a
+few bottles. In reference to this, Boldrick said: “Temperance drinks for
+the muleteers, tobacco and tea and sugar and postage stamps and things.
+They don’t gargle their throats with anything stronger than coffee at
+this tavern.”
+
+Then he took them to the cave in which puma, bear, and wapiti skins were
+piled, together with a few stores and the kits of travellers who had
+left their belongings in Boldrick’s keeping till they should come
+again. After Mrs. Falchion and Ruth had seen all, they came out upon
+the mountain-side and waved their handkerchiefs to us, who were still
+watching from below. Then Boldrick hoisted a flag on his hut, which he
+used on gala occasions, to celebrate the event, and, not content with
+this, fired a ‘feu de joie’, managed in this way: He took two anvils
+used by the muleteers and expressmen to shoe their animals, and placed
+one on the other, putting powder between. Then Mrs. Falchion thrust
+a red-hot iron into the powder, and an explosion ensued. I was for
+a moment uneasy, but Mr. Devlin reassured me, and instantly a shrill
+whistle from the little mills answered the salute.
+
+Just before they got into the cage, Mrs. Falchion turned to Boldrick,
+and said: “You have not been trying to remember where you heard my name
+before? Well, can you not recall it now?”
+
+Boldrick shook his head. “Perhaps you will recall it before I see you
+again,” she said.
+
+They started. As they did so, Mrs. Falchion said suddenly, looking at
+Boldrick keenly: “Were you ever in the South Seas?”
+
+Boldrick stood for an instant open-mouthed, and then exclaimed loudly,
+as the cage swung down the incline: “By Jingo! No, ma’am, I was never
+there, but I had a pal who come from Samoa.”
+
+She called back at him: “Tell me of him when we meet again. What was his
+name?”
+
+They were too far down the cable now for Boldrick’s reply to reach them
+distinctly. The descent seemed even more adventurous than the ascent,
+and, in spite of myself, I could not help a thrill of keen excitement.
+But they were both smiling when the cage reached us, and both had a very
+fine colour.
+
+“A delightful journey, a remarkable reception, and a very singular man
+is your Mr. Boldrick,” said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+“Yes,” replied Mr. Devlin, “you’ll know Boldrick a long time before you
+find his limits. He is about the most curious character I ever knew,
+and does the most curious things. But straight--straight as a die, Mrs.
+Falchion!”
+
+“I fancy that Mr. Boldrick and I would be very good friends indeed,”
+ said Mrs. Falchion; “and I purpose visiting him again. It is quite
+probable that we shall find we have had mutual acquaintances.” She
+looked at Roscoe meaningly as she said this, but he was occupied with
+Ruth.
+
+“You were not afraid?” Roscoe said to Ruth. “Was it not a strange
+sensation?”
+
+“Frankly, at first I was a little afraid, because the cage swings on the
+cable, and it makes you uncomfortable. But I enjoyed it before we got to
+the end.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion turned to Mr. Devlin. “I find plenty here to amuse me,”
+ she said, “and I am glad I came. To-night I want to go up that cable and
+call on Mr. Boldrick again, and see the mills and the electric light,
+and hear your whistle, from up there. Then, of course, you must show us
+the mill working at night, and afterwards--may I ask it?--you must all
+come and have supper with me at the summer hotel.”
+
+Ruth dropped her eyes. I saw she did not wish to go. Fortunately
+Mr. Devlin extricated her. “I’m afraid that will be impossible, Mrs.
+Falchion,” he said: “much obliged to you all the same. But I am going to
+be at the mill pretty near all night, and shouldn’t be able to go, and I
+don’t want Ruth to go without me.”
+
+“Then it must be another time,” said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+“Oh, whenever it’s convenient for Ruth, after a day or two, I’ll be
+ready and glad. But I tell you what: if you want to see something fine,
+you must go down as soon as possible to Sunburst. We live there, you
+know, not here at Viking. It’s funny, too, because, you see, there’s a
+feud between Viking and Sunburst--we are all river-men and mill-hands at
+Viking, and they’re all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst. By
+rights I ought to live here, but when I started I thought I’d build
+my mills at Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there. My wife and the
+girls got attached to the place, and though the mills were built at
+Viking, and I made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend
+my shekels there. I guess if I didn’t happen to live at Sunburst, people
+would be trailing their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other
+day between these two towns. But that’s neither here nor there. Take my
+advice, Mrs. Falchion, and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers
+at work, both day and night. It is about the biggest thing in the way
+of natural picturesqueness that you’ll see--outside my mills. Indians,
+half-breeds, white men, Chinamen--they are all at it in weirs and cages,
+or in the nets, and spearing by torch-light!--Don’t you think I would do
+to run a circus, Mrs. Falchion?--Stand at the door, and shout: ‘Here’s
+where you get the worth of your money’?”
+
+Mrs. Falchion laughed. “I am sure you and I will be good friends; you
+are amusing. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of
+trying to live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion--and The
+Padre.”
+
+I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety. It had almost a kind
+of feverishness--as if she relished fully the position she held towards
+Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I think
+was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe’s
+old allegiance. That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would
+never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus
+in the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment,
+one of the principal actors--from which position I had declined one day
+when humiliated before Mrs. Falchion on the ‘Fulvia’. Boyd Madras was in
+my mind.
+
+After a few minutes we parted, agreeing to meet again in the valley in
+the evening. I had promised, as Mrs. Falchion had suggested, to escort
+her and Justine Caron from the summer hotel to the mill. Roscoe had
+duties at both Viking and Sunburst and would not join us until we all
+met in the evening. Mr. Devlin and Ruth rode away towards Sunburst. Mrs.
+Falchion, Justine, and myself travelled slowly up the hillside, talking
+chiefly upon the events of the morning. Mrs. Falchion appeared to
+admire greatly the stalwart character of Mr. Devlin; in a few swift,
+complimentary words disposed of Ruth; and then made many inquiries
+concerning Roscoe’s work, my own position, and the length of my stay
+in the mountains; and talked upon many trivial matters, never once
+referring--as it seemed to me, purposely--to our past experiences on
+the ‘Fulvia’, nor making any inquiry concerning any one except Belle
+Treherne.
+
+She showed no surprise when I told her that I expected to marry Miss
+Treherne. She congratulated me with apparent frankness, and asked for
+Miss Treherne’s address, saying she would write to her. As soon as she
+had left Roscoe’s presence she had dropped all enigmatical words
+and phrases, and, during this hour I was with her, was the tactful,
+accomplished woman of the world, with the one present object: to make
+her conversation agreeable, and to keep things on the surface. Justine
+Caron scarcely spoke during the whole of our walk, although I addressed
+myself to her frequently. But I could see that she watched Mrs.
+Falchion’s face curiously; and I believe that at this time her instinct
+was keener by far to read what was in Mrs. Falchion’s mind than my own,
+though I knew much more of the hidden chain of events connecting Mrs.
+Falchion’s life and Galt Roscoe’s.
+
+I parted from them at the door of the hotel, made my way down to
+Roscoe’s house at the ravine, and busied myself for the greater part of
+the day in writing letters, and reading on the coping. About sunset
+I called for Mrs. Falchion, and found her and Justine Caron ready and
+waiting. There was nothing eventful in our talk as we came down the
+mountain-side towards Viking--Justine Caron’s presence prevented that.
+It was dusk when we reached the valley. As yet the mills were all dark.
+The only lights visible were in the low houses lining the banks of the
+river. Against the mountainside there seemed to hang one bunch of flame
+like a star, large, red, and weird. It was a torch burning in front of
+Phil Boldrick’s hut. We made our way slowly to the mill, and found
+Mr. Devlin, Ruth, and Roscoe, with Ruth’s sister, and one or two other
+friends, expecting us.
+
+“Well,” said Mr. Devlin heartily, “I have kept the show waiting for you.
+The house is all dark, but I guess you’ll see a transformation scene
+pretty quick. Come out,” he continued, “and let us get the front seats.
+They are all stalls here; nobody has a box except Boldrick, and it is up
+in the flies.”
+
+“Mr. Devlin,” said Mrs. Falchion, “I purpose to see this show not only
+from the stalls, but from the box in the flies. Therefore, during the
+first act, I shall be here in front of the foot-lights. During the
+second act I shall be aloft like Tom Bowling--”
+
+“In other words--” began Mr. Devlin.
+
+“In other words,” added Mrs. Falchion, “I am going to see the valley and
+hear your great horn blow from up there!” She pointed towards the star
+in front of Phil’s hut.
+
+“All right,” said Mr. Devlin; “but you will excuse me if I say that I
+don’t particularly want anybody to see this performance from where Tom
+Bowling bides.”
+
+We left the office and went out upon the platform, a little distance
+from the mill. Mr. Devlin gave a signal, touched a wire, and immediately
+it seemed as if the whole valley was alight. The mill itself was in a
+blaze of white. It was transfigured--a fairy palace, just as the mud
+barges in the Suez Canal had been transformed by the search-light of
+the ‘Fulvia’. For the moment, in the wonder of change from darkness to
+light, the valley became the picture of a dream. Every man was at his
+post in the mill, and in an instant work was going on as we had seen it
+in the morning. Then, all at once, there came a great roar, as it were,
+from the very heart of the mill--a deep diapason, dug out of the throat
+of the hills: the big whistle.
+
+“It sounds mournful--like a great animal in pain,” said Mrs. Falchion.
+“You might have got one more cheerful.”
+
+“Wait till it gets tuned up,” said Mr. Devlin. “It hasn’t had a chance
+to get the burs out of its throat. It will be very fine as soon as the
+engine-man knows how to manage it.”
+
+“Yes,” said Ruth, interposing, “a little toning down would do it
+good--it is shaking the windows in your office; feel this platform
+tremble!”
+
+“Well, I bargained for a big whistle and I’ve got it: and I guess
+they’ll know if ever there’s a fire in the town!” Just as he said this,
+Roscoe gave a cry and pointed.
+
+We all turned, and saw a sight that made Ruth Devlin cover her face with
+her hands and Mrs. Falchion stand horror-stricken. There, coming
+down the cable with the speed of lightning, was the cage. In it was a
+man--Phil Boldrick. With a cry and a smothered oath, Mr. Devlin sprang
+towards the machinery, Roscoe with him. There was nobody near it, but
+they saw a boy whose duty it was that night to manage the cable, running
+towards it. Roscoe was the first to reach the lever; but it was too
+late. He partially stopped the cage, but only partially. It came with a
+dull, sickening thud to the ground, and Phil Boldrick--Phil Boldrick’s
+broken, battered body--was thrown out.
+
+A few minutes later Boldrick was lying in Mr. Devlin’s office.
+
+Ill luck for Viking in the hour of her success. Phil’s shattered hulk is
+drifting. The masts have gone by the board, the pilot from the captain’s
+side. Only the man’s “unconquerable soul” is on the bridge, watching
+the craft dip at the bow till the waters, their sport out, should hugely
+swallow it.
+
+We were all gathered round. Phil had asked to see the lad who, by
+neglecting the machinery for a moment, had wrecked his life. “My boy,”
+ he said, “you played an ugly game. It was a big mistake. I haven’t
+any grudge agen you, but be glad I’m not one that’d haunt you for your
+cussed foolishness.... There, now, I feel better; that’s off my mind!”
+
+“If you’re wanting to show remorse or anything,” he continued, “there’s
+my friend, Mr. Roscoe, The Padre--he’s all right, you understand!--Are
+you there?... Why don’t you speak?” He stretched out his hand. The lad
+took it, but he could not speak: he held it and sobbed.
+
+Then Phil understood. His brow wrinkled with a sudden trouble. He said:
+“There, never mind. I’m dying, but it isn’t what I expected. It doesn’t
+smart nor tear much; not more than river-rheumatism. P’r’aps I wouldn’t
+mind it at all if I could see.”
+
+For Phil was entirely blind now. The accident had destroyed his
+remaining eye. Being blind, he had already passed that first corridor
+of death--darkness. Roscoe stooped over him, took his hand, and spoke
+quietly to him. Phil knew the voice, and said with a faint smile: “Do
+you think they’d plant me with municipal honours--honours to pardners?”
+
+“We’ll see to that, Phil,” said Mr. Devlin from behind the clergyman.
+
+Phil recognised the voice. “You think that nobody’ll kick at making it
+official?”
+
+“Not one, Phil.”
+
+“And maybe they wouldn’t mind firin’ a volley--Lights out, as it were:
+and blow the big whistle? It’d look sociable, wouldn’t it?”
+
+“There’ll be a volley and the whistle, Phil--if you have to go,” said
+Mr. Devlin.
+
+There was a silence, then the reply came musingly: “I guess I hev to go.
+... I’d hev liked to see the corporation runnin’ longer, but maybe I can
+trust the boys.”
+
+A river-driver at the door said in a deep voice: “By the holy! yes, you
+can trust us.”
+
+“Thank you kindly.... If it doesn’t make any difference to the rest,
+I’d like to be alone with The Padre for a little--not for religion, you
+understand, for I go as I stayed, and I hev my views,--but for private
+business.”
+
+Slowly, awkwardly, the few river-drivers passed out--Devlin and Mrs.
+Falchion and Ruth and I with them--for I could do nothing now for
+him--he was broken all to pieces. Roscoe told me afterwards what
+happened then.
+
+“Padre,” he said to Roscoe, “are we alone?”
+
+“Quite alone, Phil.”
+
+“Well, I hevn’t any crime to tell, and the business isn’t weighty; but I
+hev a pal at Danger Mountain--” He paused.
+
+“Yes, Phil?”
+
+“He’s low down in s’ciety; but he’s square, and we’ve had the same
+blanket for many a day together. I crossed him first on the Panama
+level. I was broke--stony broke. He’d been shipwrecked, and was ditto.
+He’d been in the South Seas; I in Nicaragua. We travelled up through
+Mexico and Arizona, and then through California to the Canadian Rockies.
+At last we camped at Danger Mountain, a Hudson’s Bay fort, and stayed
+there. It was a roughish spot, but we didn’t mind that. Every place
+isn’t Viking. One night we had a difference--not a quarrel, mind you,
+but a difference. He was for lynchin’ a fellow called Piccadilly, a
+swell that’d come down in the world, bringin’ the worst tricks of
+his tribe with him. He’d never been a bony fidy gentleman--just an
+imitation. He played sneak with the daughter of Five Fingers, an Injin
+chief. We’d set store by that girl. There wasn’t one of us rough nuts
+but respected her. She was one of the few beautiful Injin women I’ve
+seen. Well, it come out that Piccadilly had ruined her, and one morning
+she was found dead. It drove my pal well-nigh crazy. Not that she was
+anything partik’ler to him; but the thing took hold of him unusual.”
+
+Now that I know all concerning Roscoe’s past life, I can imagine that
+this recital must have been swords at his heart. The whole occurrence is
+put down minutely in his diary, but there is no word of comment upon it.
+
+Phil had been obliged to stop for pain, and, after Roscoe had adjusted
+the bandages, he continued:
+
+“My pal and the others made up their minds they’d lynch Piccadilly; they
+wouldn’t give him the benefit of the doubt--for it wasn’t certain that
+the girl hadn’t killed herself.... Well, I went to Piccadilly, and give
+him the benefit. He left, and skipped the rope. Not, p’r’aps, that
+he ought to hev got away, but once he’d showed me a letter from his
+mother,--he was drunk too, at the time,--and I remembered when my
+brother Rodney was killed in the Black Hills, and how my mother took it;
+so I give him the tip to travel quick.”
+
+He paused and rested. Then presently continued: “Now, Padre, I’ve got
+four hundred dollars--the most I ever had at one time in my life. And
+I’d like it to go to my old pal--though we had that difference, and
+parted. I guess we respect each other about the same as we ever did. And
+I wish you’d write it down so that the thing would be municipal.”
+
+Roscoe took pencil and paper and said: “What’s his name, Phil?”
+
+“Sam--Tonga Sam.”
+
+“But that isn’t all his name?”
+
+“No, I s’pose not, but it’s all he ever had in general use. He’d got it
+because he’d been to the Tonga Islands and used to yarn about them. Put
+‘Tonga Sam, Phil Boldrick’s Pal at Danger Mountain, ult’--add the ‘ult,’
+it’s c’rrect.--That’ll find him. And write him these words, and if
+you ever see him say them to him--‘Phil Boldrick never had a pal that
+crowded Tonga Sam.’”
+
+When the document was written, Roscoe read it aloud, then both signed
+it, Roscoe guiding the battered hand over the paper.
+
+This done, there was a moment’s pause, and then Phil said: “I’d like to
+be in the open. I was born in the open--on the Madawaska. Take me out,
+Padre.”
+
+Roscoe stepped to the door, and silently beckoned to Devlin and myself.
+We carried him out, and put him beside a pine tree.
+
+“Where am I now?” he said. “Under the white pine, Phil.” “That’s right.
+Face me to the north.”
+
+We did so. Minutes passed in silence. Only the song of the saw was
+heard, and the welting of the river. “Padre,” he said at last hurriedly,
+“lift me up, so’s I can breathe.”
+
+This was done.
+
+“Am I facin’ the big mill?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“That’s c’rrect. And the ‘lectric light is burnin’ in the mill and in
+the town, an’ the saws are all goin’?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“By gracious, yes--you can hear ‘em! Don’t they scrunch the stuff,
+though!” He laughed a little. “Mr. Devlin an’ you and me hev been pretty
+smart, hevn’t we?”
+
+Then a spasm caught him, and after a painful pause he called: “It’s
+the biggest thing in cables.... Stand close in the cage.... Feel her
+swing!--Safe, you bet, if he stands by the lever....”
+
+His face lighted with the last gleam of living, and he said slowly: “I
+hev a pal--at Danger Mountain.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+
+The three days following the events recorded in the preceding chapter
+were notable to us all. Because my own affairs and experiences are of
+the least account, I shall record them first: they will at least throw
+a little light on the history of people who appeared previously in this
+tale, and disappeared suddenly when the ‘Fulvia’ reached London, to make
+room for others.
+
+The day after Phil Boldrick’s death I received a letter from Hungerford,
+and also one from Belle Treherne. Hungerford had left the Occidental
+Company’s service, and had been fortunate enough to get the position of
+first officer on a line of steamers running between England and the West
+Indies. The letter was brusque, incisive, and forceful, and declared
+that, once he got his foot firmly planted in his new position, he would
+get married and be done with it. He said that Clovelly the novelist had
+given a little dinner at his chambers in Piccadilly, and that the guests
+were all our fellow-passengers by the ‘Fulvia’; among them Colonel
+Ryder, the bookmaker, Blackburn the Queenslander, and himself.
+
+This is extracted from the letter:
+
+    ... Clovelly was in rare form.--Don’t run away with the idea
+   that he’s eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the
+   race for Miss Treherne. For my part--but, never mind!--You had
+   phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don’t
+   arrange for an early marriage. You are a perfect baby in some
+   things. Don’t you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man
+   is when she has refused him? And Clovelly is here on the ground,
+   and they are in the same set, and though I’d take my oath she would
+   be loyal to you if you were ten thousand miles from here for ten
+   years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise
+   and a fancy are two different things. We may do what’s right for
+   the fear o’ God, and not love Him either. Marmion, let the marriage
+   bells be rung early--a maiden’s heart is a ticklish thing....
+
+   But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who
+   had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it,
+   and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with
+   laughter. At first every one stared aghast (“stared aghast!”--how
+   is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
+   haw-hawed till he couldn’t lift his champagne, the rest of us
+   followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
+   earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
+   gently smile. “See here,” he said ever so candidly of Clovelly’s
+   best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
+   figure in the book--“I liked the way you drew that muff. He was
+   such an awful outsider, wasn’t he? All talk, and hypocrite down to
+   his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
+   food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went ‘slumming’
+   and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!”--
+   [This was Clovelly’s heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
+   himself, “with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
+   and a sweet creation altogether.”] “I said, that’s poetic justice,
+   that’s the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would
+   have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
+   a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
+   He said, ‘Go to blazes,’ and he fixed up that marriage--and there
+   you are! Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!”
+
+   Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing
+   about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then
+   complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London
+   (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming
+   marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow. What he said of
+   myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round,
+   with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.
+
+   How is Roscoe? I didn’t see as much of him as you did, but I liked
+   him. Take my tip for it, that woman will make trouble for him some
+   day. She is the biggest puzzle I ever met. I never could tell
+   whether she liked him or hated him; but it seems to me that either
+   would be the ruin of any “Christom man.” I know she saw something
+   of him while she was in London, because her quarters were next to
+   those of my aunt the dowager (whose heart the gods soften at my
+   wedding!) in Queen Anne’s Mansions, S.W., and who actually liked
+   Mrs. F., called on her, and asked her to dinner, and Roscoe too,
+   whom she met at her place. I believe my aunt would have used her
+   influence to get him a good living, if he had played his cards
+   properly; but I expect he wouldn’t be patronised, and he went for a
+   “mickonaree,” as they say in the South Seas.... Well, I’m off
+   to the Spicy Isles, then back again to marry a wife. “Go thou and
+   do likewise.”
+
+   By the way, have you ever heard of or seen Boyd Madras since he
+   slipped our cable at Aden and gave the world another chance?
+   I trust he will spoil her wedding--if she ever tries to have one.
+   May I be there to see!
+
+Because we shall see nothing more of Hungerford till we finally dismiss
+the drama, I should like to say that this voyage of his to the West
+Indies made his fortune--that is, it gave him command of one of the
+finest ships in the English merchant service. In a storm a disaster
+occurred to his vessel, his captain was washed overboard, and he was
+obliged to take command. His skill, fortitude, and great manliness,
+under tragical circumstances, sent his name booming round the world;
+and, coupled, as it was, with a singular act of personal valour, he
+had his pick of all vacancies and possible vacancies in the merchant
+service, boy (or little more) as he was. I am glad to say that he is now
+a happy husband and father too.
+
+The letter from Belle Treherne mentioned having met Clovelly several
+times of late, and, with Hungerford’s words hot in my mind, I
+determined, though I had perfect confidence in her, as in myself, to be
+married at Christmas-time. Her account of the courtship of Blackburn and
+Mrs. Callendar was as amusing as her description of an evening which the
+bookmaker had spent with her father, when he said he was going to marry
+an actress whom he had seen at Drury Lane Theatre in a racing drama.
+This he subsequently did, and she ran him a break-neck race for many a
+day, but never making him unhappy or less resourceful. His verdict, and
+his only verdict, upon Mrs. Falchion had been confided to Blackburn, who
+in turn confided it to Clovelly, who passed it on to me.
+
+He said: “A woman is like a horse. Make her beautiful, give her a high
+temper and a bit of bad luck in her youth, and she’ll take her revenge
+out of life; even though she runs straight, and wins straight every
+time; till she breaks her heart one day over a lost race. After that
+she is good to live with for ever. A heart-break for that kind is their
+salvation: without it they go on breaking the hearts of others.”
+
+As I read Belle’s and Hungerford’s letters my thoughts went back
+again--as they did so often indeed--to the voyage of the ‘Fulvia’, and
+then to Mrs. Falchion’s presence in the Rocky Mountains. There was a
+strange destiny in it all, and I had no pleasant anticipations about
+the end; for, even if she could or did do Roscoe no harm, so far as his
+position was concerned, I saw that she had already begun to make trouble
+between him and Ruth.
+
+That day which saw poor Boldrick’s death put her in a conflicting light
+to me. Now I thought I saw in her unusual gentleness, again an unusual
+irony, an almost flippant and cruel worldliness; and though at the time
+she was most touched by the accident, I think her feeling of horror at
+it made her appear to speak in a way which showed her unpleasantly to
+Mr. Devlin and his daughter. It may be, however, that Ruth Devlin saw
+further into her character than I guessed, and understood the strange
+contradictions of her nature. But I shall, I suppose, never know
+absolutely about that; nor does it matter much now.
+
+The day succeeding Phil’s death was Sunday, and the little church
+at Viking was full. Many fishers had come over from Sunburst. It was
+evident that people expected Roscoe to make some reference to
+Phil’s death in his sermon, or, at least, have a part of the service
+appropriate. By a singular chance the first morning lesson was David’s
+lamentation for Saul and Jonathan. Roscoe had a fine voice. He read
+easily, naturally--like a cultivated layman, not like a clergyman;
+like a man who wished to convey the simple meaning of what he read,
+reverently, honestly. On the many occasions when I heard him read the
+service, I noticed that he never changed the opening sentence, though
+there were, of course, others from which to choose. He drew the people
+to their feet always with these words, spoken as it were directly to
+them:
+
+   “When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness that he hath
+   committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save
+   his soul alive.”
+
+I noticed this morning that he instantly attracted the attention of
+every one, and held it, with the first words of the lesson:
+
+   “The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
+   mighty fallen!”
+
+It seemed to me as if the people at first almost tried to stop
+breathing, so intense was the feeling. Mrs. Falchion was sitting very
+near me, and though she had worn her veil up at first, as I uncharitably
+put it then, to disconcert him, she drew it rather quickly down as his
+reading proceeded; but, so far as I could see, she never took her
+eyes off his face through the whole service; and, impelled in spite of
+myself, I watched her closely. Though Ruth Devlin was sitting not far
+from her, she scarcely looked that way.
+
+Evidently the text of the sermon was not chosen that it might have some
+association with Phil’s death, but there was a kind of simple grandeur,
+and certainly cheerful stalwartness, in his interpretation and practical
+rendering of the text:
+
+   “Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?
+    ... travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak
+   in righteousness, mighty to save.”
+
+A man was talking to men sensibly, directly, quietly. It was impossible
+to resist the wholesome eloquence of his temperament; he was a
+revelation of humanity: what he said had life.
+
+I said to myself, as I had before, Is it possible that this man ever did
+anything unmanly?
+
+After the service, James Devlin--with Ruth--came to Roscoe and myself,
+and asked us to lunch at his house. Roscoe hesitated, but I knew it was
+better for him not to walk up the hills and back again immediately after
+luncheon; so I accepted for us both; and Ruth gave me a grateful look.
+Roscoe seemed almost anxious not to be alone with Ruth--not from any
+cowardly feeling, but because he was perplexed by the old sense of
+coming catastrophe, which, indeed, poor fellow, he had some cause to
+feel. He and Mr. Devlin talked of Phil’s funeral and the arrangements
+that had been made, and during the general conversation Ruth and I
+dropped behind.
+
+Quite abruptly she said to me: “Who is Mrs. Falchion?”
+
+“A widow--it is said--rich, unencumbered,” I as abruptly answered.
+
+“But I suppose even widows may have pedigrees, and be conjugated in the
+past tense,” was the cool reply. She drew herself up a little proudly.
+
+I was greatly astonished. Here was a girl living most of her life in
+these mountains, having only had a few years of social life in the East,
+practising with considerable skill those arts of conversation so much
+cultivated in metropolitan drawing-rooms. But I was a very dull fellow
+then, and had yet to learn that women may develop in a day to wonderful
+things.
+
+“Well,” I said in reply, “I suppose not. But I fear I cannot answer
+regarding the pedigree, nor a great deal about the past, for I only met
+her under two years ago.”
+
+“And yet I have imagined that you knew her pretty well, and that Mr.
+Roscoe knew her even better--perhaps,” she said suggestively.
+
+“That is so,” I tried to say with apparent frankness, “for she lived in
+the South Seas with her father, and Roscoe knew her there.”
+
+“She is a strange woman, and quite heartless in some ways; and yet, do
+you know, I like her while I dislike her; and I cannot tell why.”
+
+“Do not try to tell,” I answered, “for she has the gift of making people
+do both.--I think she likes and dislikes herself--as well as others.”
+
+“As well--as others,” she replied slowly. “Yes, I think I have noticed
+that. You see,” she added, “I do not look at people as most girls of
+my age: and perhaps I am no better for that. But Mrs. Falchion’s
+introduction to me occurred in such peculiar circumstances, and the
+coincidence of your knowing her was so strange, that my interest is not
+unnatural, I suppose.”
+
+“On the contrary,” I said, “I am only surprised that you have restrained
+your curiosity so much and so long. It was all very strange; though the
+meeting was quite to be expected, as Mrs. Falchion herself explained
+that day. She had determined on coming over to the Pacific Coast; this
+place was in her way; it is a fashionable resort; and she stood a good
+chance of finding old friends.”
+
+“Yes--of finding--old friends,” was the abstracted reply. “I like Miss
+Caron, her companion, very much better than--most women I have met.”
+
+This was not what she was going to say, but she checked herself, lest
+she might be suspected of thinking uncharitably of Mrs. Falchion. I,
+of course, agreed with her, and told her the story of Galt Roscoe and
+Hector Caron, and of Justine’s earnestness regarding her fancied debt to
+Roscoe.
+
+I saw that the poison of anxiety had entered the girl’s mind; and it
+might, perhaps, bear fruit of no engaging quality. In her own home,
+however, it was a picture to see her with her younger sisters and
+brothers, and invalid mother. She went about very brightly and sweetly
+among them, speaking to them as if she was mother to them all, angel
+of them all, domestic court for them all; as indeed she was. Here there
+seemed no disturbing element in her; a close observer might even have
+said (and in this case I fancy I was that) that she had no mind or heart
+for anything or anybody but these few of her blood and race. Hers was a
+fine nature--high, wholesome, unselfish. Yet it struck me sadly also, to
+see how the child-like in her, and her young spirit, had been so early
+set to the task of defence and protection: a mother at whose breasts
+a child had never hung; maternal, but without the relieving joys of
+maternity.
+
+I knew that she would carry through her life that too watchful, too
+anxious tenderness; that to her last day she would look back and not
+remember that she had a childhood once; because while yet a child she
+had been made into a woman.
+
+Such of the daughters of men make life beautiful; but themselves are
+selfish who do not see the almost intolerable pathos of unselfishness
+and sacrifice. At the moment I was bitter with the thought that, if Mrs.
+Falchion intended anything which could steal away this girl’s happiness
+from her, even for a time, I should myself seek to retaliate--which was,
+as may appear, in my power. But I could not go to Mrs. Falchion now
+and say: “You intend some harm to these two: for God’s sake go away
+and leave them alone!” I had no real ground for making such a request.
+Besides, if there was any catastrophe, any trouble, coming, or possible,
+that might hasten it, or, at least, give it point.
+
+I could only wait. I had laid another plan, and from a telegram I had
+received in answer to one I had sent, I believed it was working. I did
+not despair. I had, indeed, sent a cable to my agent in England, which
+was to be forwarded to the address given me by Boyd Madras at Aden. I
+had got a reply saying that Boyd Madras had sailed for Canada by the
+Allan Line of steamers. I had then telegraphed to a lawyer I knew in
+Montreal, and he had replied that he was on the track of the wanderer.
+
+All Viking and Sunburst turned out to Phil Boldrick’s funeral.
+Everything was done that he had requested. The great whistle roared
+painfully, revolvers and guns were fired over his grave, and the
+new-formed corporation appeared. He was buried on the top of a
+foot-hill, which, to this day, is known as Boldricks’ Own. The grave was
+covered by an immense flat stone bearing his name. But a flagstaff was
+erected near, no stouter one stands on Beachy Head or elsewhere,--and on
+it was engraved:
+
+               PHIL BOLDRICK,
+
+          Buried with Municipal Honours on
+          the Thirtieth day of June 1883.
+
+        This to his Memory, and for the honour of
+             Viking and Sunburst.
+
+“Padre,” said a river-driver to Galt Roscoe after the rites were
+finished, “that was a man you could trust.”
+
+“Padre,” added another, “that was a man you could bank on, and draw your
+interest reg’lar. He never done a mean thing, and he never pal’d with
+a mean man. He wasn’t for getting his teeth on edge like some in the
+valley. He didn’t always side with the majority, and he had a gift of
+doin’ things on the square.”
+
+Others spoke in similar fashion, and then Viking went back to work, and
+we to our mountain cottage.
+
+Many days passed quietly. I saw that Galt Roscoe wished to speak to me
+on the subject perplexing him, but I did not help him. I knew that
+it would come in good time, and the farther off it was the better. I
+dreaded to hear what he had to tell, lest, in spite of my confidence in
+him, it should really be a thing which, if made public, must bring ruin.
+During the evenings of these days he wrote much in his diary--the very
+book that lies by me now. Writing seemed a relief to him, for he was
+more cheerful afterwards. I know that he had received letters from the
+summer hotel, but whether they were from Mrs. Falchion or Justine Caron
+I was not then aware, though I afterwards came to know that one of them
+was from Justine, asking him if she might call on him. He guessed that
+the request was connected with Hector Caron’s death; and, of course,
+gave his consent. During this time he did not visit Ruth Devlin, nor did
+he mention her name. As for myself, I was sick of the whole business,
+and wished it well over, whatever the result.
+
+I make here a few extracts from Roscoe’s diary, to show the state of his
+mind at this period:
+
+   Can a man never get away from the consequences of his wickedness,
+   even though he repents?... Restitution is necessary as well
+   as repentance; but when one cannot make restitution, when it is
+   impossible--what then? I suppose one has to reply, Well, you have
+   to suffer, that is all.... Poor Alo! To think that after all
+   these years, you can strike me!
+
+   There is something malicious in the way Mercy Falchion crosses my
+   path. What she knows, she knows; and what she can do if she
+   chooses, I must endure. I cannot love Mercy Falchion again, and
+   that, I suppose, is the last thing she would wish now. I cannot
+   bring Alo back. But how does that concern her! Why does she hate
+   me so? For, underneath her kindest words,--and they are kind
+   sometimes,--I can detect the note of enmity, of calculating scorn.
+   ... I wish I could go to Ruth and tell her all, and ask her to
+   decide if she can take a man with such a past.... What a
+   thing it is to have had a clean record of unflinching manliness at
+   one’s back!
+
+I add another extract:
+
+   Phil’s story of Danger Mountain struck like ice at my heart. There
+   was a horrible irony in the thing: that it should be told to me, of
+   all the world, and at such a time. Some would say, I suppose, that
+   it was the arrangement of Providence. Not to speak it profanely, it
+   seems to be the achievement of the devil. The torture was too
+   malicious for God....
+
+   Phil’s letter has gone to his pal at Danger Mountain....
+
+The fourth day after the funeral Justine Caron came to see Galt Roscoe.
+This was the substance of their conversation, as I came to know long
+afterwards.
+
+“Monsieur,” she said, “I have come to pay something of a debt which I
+owe to you. It is a long time since you gave my poor Hector burial, but
+I have never forgotten, and I have brought you at last--you must not
+shake your head so--the money you spent.... But you MUST take it. I
+should be miserable if you did not. The money is all that I can repay;
+the kindness is for memory and gratitude always.”
+
+He looked at her wonderingly, earnestly, she seemed so unworldly,
+standing there, her life’s ambition not stirring beyond duty to her
+dead. If goodness makes beauty, she was beautiful; and yet, besides
+all that, she had a warm, absorbing eye, a soft, rounded cheek, and she
+carried in her face the light of a cheerful, engaging spirit.
+
+“Will it make you happier if I take the money?” he said at last, and his
+voice showed how she had moved him.
+
+“So much happier!” she answered, and she put a roll of notes into his
+hand.
+
+“Then I will take it,” he replied, with a manner not too serious, and
+he looked at the notes carefully; “but only what I actually spent,
+remember; what I told you when you wrote me at Hector’s death; not
+this ample interest. You forget, Miss Caron, that your brother was my
+friend.”
+
+“No I cannot forget that. It lives with me,” she rejoined softly. But
+she took back the surplus notes. “And I have my gratitude left still,”
+ she added, smiling.
+
+“Believe me, there is no occasion for gratitude. Why, what less could
+one do?”
+
+“One could pass by on the other side.”
+
+“He was not fallen among thieves,” was his reply; “he was among
+Englishmen, the old allies of the French.”
+
+“But the Priests and the Levites, people of his own
+country--Frenchmen--passed him by. They were infamous in falsehood,
+cruel to him and to me.--You are an Englishman; you have heart and
+kindness.”
+
+He hesitated, then he gravely said: “Do not trust Englishmen more than
+you trust your own countrymen. We are selfish even in our friendships
+often. We stick to one person, and to benefit that one we sacrifice
+others. Have you found all Englishmen--and WOMEN unselfish?” He
+looked at her steadily; but immediately repented that he had asked the
+question, for he had in his mind one whom they both knew, too well,
+perhaps; and he added quickly: “You see, I am not kind.”
+
+They were standing now in the sunlight just outside the house. His hands
+were thrust down in the pockets of his linen coat; her hands opening and
+shutting her parasol slightly. They might, from their appearance, have
+been talking of very inconsequent things.
+
+Her eyes lifted sorrowfully to his. “Ah, monsieur,” she rejoined, “there
+are two times when one must fear a woman.” She answered his question
+more directly than he could have conjectured. But she felt that she must
+warn him.
+
+“I do not understand,” he said.
+
+“Of course you do not. Only women themselves understand that the two
+times when one must fear a woman are when she hates, and when she
+loves--after a kind. When she gets wicked or mad enough to hate, either
+through jealousy or because she cannot love where she would, she is
+merciless. She does not know the honour of the game. She has no pity.
+Then, sometimes when she loves in a way, she is, as you say, most
+selfish. I mean a love which--is not possible. Then she does some mad
+act--all women are a little mad sometimes. Most of us wish to be good,
+but we are quicksilver....”
+
+Roscoe’s mind had been working fast. He saw she meant to warn him
+against Mrs. Falchion. His face flushed slightly. He knew that Justine
+had thought well of him, and now he knew also that she suspected
+something not creditable or, at least, hazardous in his life.
+
+“And the man--the man whom the woman hates?”
+
+“When the woman hates--and loves too, the man is in danger.”
+
+“Do you know of such a man?” he almost shrinkingly said.
+
+“If I did I would say to him, The world is wide. There is no glory in
+fighting a woman who will not be fair in battle. She will say what
+may appear to be true, but what she knows in her own heart to be
+false--false and bad.”
+
+Roscoe now saw that Justine had more than an inkling of his story.
+
+He said calmly: “You would advise that man to flee from danger?”
+
+“Yes, to flee,” she replied hurriedly, with a strange anxiety in her
+eyes; “for sometimes a woman is not satisfied with words that kill. She
+becomes less than human, and is like Jael.”
+
+Justine knew that Mrs. Falchion held a sword over Roscoe’s career; she
+guessed that Mrs. Falchion both cared for him and hated him too; but
+she did not know the true reason of the hatred--that only came out
+afterwards. Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move
+him; but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping
+with the facts of life.
+
+“The man’s life even might be in danger?” he asked.
+
+“It might.”
+
+“But surely that is not so dreadful,” he still said calmly.
+
+“Death is not the worst of evils.”
+
+“No, not the worst; one has to think of the evil word as well. The evil
+word can be outlived; but the man must think of those who really love
+him--who would die to save him--and whose hearts would break if he
+were killed. Love can outlive slander, but it is bitter when it has to
+outlive both slander and death. It is easy to love with joy so long as
+both live, though there are worlds between. Thoughts fly and meet; but
+Death makes the great division.... Love can only live in the pleasant
+world.”
+
+Very abstractedly he said: “Is it a pleasant world to you?”
+
+She did not reply directly to that, but answered: “Monsieur, if you know
+of such a man as I speak of, warn him to fly.” And she raised her eyes
+from the ground and looked earnestly at him. Now her face was slightly
+flushed, she looked almost beautiful.
+
+“I know of such a man,” he replied, “but he will not go. He has to
+answer to his own soul and his conscience. He is not without fear, but
+it is only fear for those who care for him, be they ever so few. And
+he hopes that they will be brave enough to face his misery, if it must
+come. For we know that courage has its hour of comfort.... When such a
+man as you speak of has his dark hour he will stand firm.”
+
+Then with a great impulse he added: “This man whom I know did wrong, but
+he was falsely accused of doing a still greater. The consequence of the
+first thing followed him. He could never make restitution. Years went
+by. Some one knew that dark spot in his life--his Nemesis.”
+
+“The worst Nemesis in this life, monsieur, is always a woman,” she
+interrupted.
+
+“Perhaps she is the surest,” he continued. “The woman faced him in the
+hour of his peace and--” he paused. His voice was husky.
+
+“Yes, ‘and,’ monsieur?”
+
+“And he knows that she would ruin him, and kill his heart and destroy
+his life.”
+
+“The waters of Marah are bitter,” she murmured, and she turned her face
+away from him to the woods. There was no trouble there. The birds were
+singing, black squirrels were jumping from bough to bough, and they
+could hear the tapping of the woodpecker. She slowly drew on her gloves,
+as if for occupation.
+
+He spoke at length as though thinking aloud: “But he knows that,
+whatever comes, life has had for him more compensations than he
+deserves. For, in his trouble, a woman came, and said kind words, and
+would have helped him if she could.”
+
+“There were TWO women,” she said solemnly.
+
+“Two women?” he repeated slowly.
+
+“The one stayed in her home and prayed, and the other came.”
+
+“I do not understand,” he said: and he spoke truly.
+
+“Love is always praying for its own, therefore one woman prayed at home.
+The other woman who came was full of gratitude, for the man was noble,
+she owed him a great debt, and she believed in him always. She knew that
+if at any time in his life he had done wrong, the sin was without malice
+or evil.”
+
+“The woman is gentle and pitiful with him, God knows.”
+
+She spoke quietly now, and her gravity looked strange in one so young.
+
+“God knows she is just, and would see him fairly treated. She is so far
+beneath him! and yet one can serve a friend though one is humble and
+poor.”
+
+“How strange,” he rejoined, “that the man should think himself miserable
+who is befriended in such a way! Mademoiselle, he will carry to his
+grave the kindness of this woman.”
+
+“Monsieur,” she added humbly, yet with a brave light in her eyes, “it is
+good to care whether the wind blows bitter or kind. Every true woman is
+a mother, though she have no child. She longs to protect the suffering,
+because to protect is in her so far as God is.... Well, this woman
+cares that way....” She held out her hand to say good-bye. Her look was
+simple, direct, and kind. Their parting words were few and unremarkable.
+
+Roscoe watched Justine Caron as she passed out into the shade of the
+woods, and he said to himself: “Gratitude like that is a wonderful
+thing.” He should have said something else, but he did not know, and she
+did not wish him to know: and he never knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. A DUEL IN ARCADY
+
+The more I thought of Mrs. Falchion’s attitude towards Roscoe, the more
+I was puzzled. But I had at last reduced the position to this: Years
+ago Roscoe had cared for her and she had not cared for him. Angered
+or indignant at her treatment of him, Roscoe’s affections declined
+unworthily elsewhere. Then came a catastrophe of some kind, in which
+Alo (whoever she was) suffered. The secret of this catastrophe Mrs.
+Falchion, as I believe, held. There was a parting, a lapse of years, and
+then the meeting on the ‘Fulvia’: with it, partial restoration of Mrs.
+Falchion’s influence, then its decline, and then a complete change of
+position. It was now Mrs. Falchion that cared, and Roscoe that shunned.
+It perplexed me that there seemed to be behind Mrs. Falchion’s present
+regard for Roscoe some weird expression of vengeance, as though somehow
+she had been wronged, and it was her duty to punish. In no other way was
+the position definable. That Roscoe would never marry her was certain to
+my mind. That he could not marry her now was also certain--to me; I had
+the means to prevent it. That she wished to marry him I was not
+sure, though she undoubtedly cared for him. Remained, therefore, the
+supposition that if he cared for her she would do him no harm, as to his
+position. But if he married Ruth, disaster would come--Roscoe himself
+acknowledged that she held the key of his fortunes.
+
+Upon an impulse, and as a last resort, I had taken action whereby
+in some critical moment I might be able to wield a power over Mrs.
+Falchion. I was playing a blind game, but it was the only card I held.
+I had heard from the lawyer in Montreal that Madras, under another name,
+had gone to the prairie country to enter the mounted police. I had then
+telegraphed to Winnipeg, but had got no answer.
+
+I had seen her many times, but we had never, except very remotely,
+touched upon the matter which was uppermost in both our minds. It was
+not my wish to force the situation. I knew that my opportunity would
+come wherein to spy upon the mind of the enemy. It came. On the evening
+that Justine Caron called upon Roscoe, I accidentally met Mrs. Falchion
+in the grounds of the hotel. She was with several people, and as I
+spoke to her she made a little gesture of invitation. I went over, was
+introduced to her companions, and then she said:
+
+“Dr. Marmion, I have not yet made that visit to the salmon-fishers at
+Sunburst. Unfortunately, on the days when I called on Miss Devlin, my
+time was limited. But now I have a thirst for adventure, and time hangs
+heavy. Will you perform your old office of escort, and join a party,
+which we can make up here, to go there to-morrow?”
+
+I had little love for Mrs. Falchion, but I consented, because it
+seemed to me the chance had come for an effective talk with her; and I
+suggested that we should go late in the afternoon of the next day,
+and remain till night and see the Indians, the half-breeds, and white
+fishermen working by torch-light on the river. The proposition was
+accepted with delight.
+
+Then the conversation turned upon the feud that existed between Viking
+and Sunburst, the river-drivers and the fishers. During the last few
+days, owing to the fact that there were a great many idle river-men
+about, the river-driving for the season being done, there had been more
+than one quarrel of a serious nature at Sunburst. It had needed a great
+deal of watchfulness on the part of Mr. Devlin and his supporters to
+prevent fighting. In Sunburst itself, Mr. Devlin had much personal
+influence. He was a man of exceedingly strong character, bold, powerful,
+persuasive. But this year there had been a large number of rough,
+adventurous characters among the river-men, and they seemed to
+take delight in making sport of, and even interfering with, the
+salmon-fishers. We talked of these things for some time, and then I took
+my leave. As I went, Mrs. Falchion stepped after me, tapped me on the
+arm, and said in a slow, indolent tone:
+
+“Whenever you and I meet, Dr. Marmion, something happens--something
+strange. What particular catastrophe have you arranged for to-morrow?
+For you are, you know, the chorus to the drama.”
+
+“Do not spoil the play by anticipation,” I said.
+
+“One gets very weary of tragedy,” she retorted. “Comedy would be a
+relief. Could you not manage it?”
+
+“I do not know about to-morrow,” I said, “as to a comedy. But I promise
+you that one of these days I will present to you the very finest comedy
+imaginable.”
+
+“You speak oracularly,” she said; “still you are a professor, and
+professors always pose. But now, to be perfectly frank with you, I do
+not believe that any comedy you could arrange would be as effective as
+your own.”
+
+“You have read ‘Much Ado about Nothing’,” I said.
+
+“Oh, it is as good as that, is it?” she asked.
+
+“Well, it has just as good a final situation,” I answered. She seemed
+puzzled, for she saw I spoke with some undercurrent of meaning. “Mrs.
+Falchion,” I said to her suddenly and earnestly, “I wish you to think
+between now and to-morrow of what I am just going to say to you.”
+
+“It sounds like the task set an undergraduate, but go on,” she said.
+
+“I wish you to think,” said I, “of the fact that I helped to save your
+life.”
+
+She flushed; an indignant look shot into her face, and her voice
+vibrating, she said:
+
+“What man would have done less?” Then, almost immediately after, as
+though repenting of what she had said, she continued in a lower tone and
+with a kind of impulsiveness uncommon to her: “But you had courage, and
+I appreciate that; still, do not ask too much. Good-night.”
+
+We parted at that, and did not meet again until the next afternoon, when
+I joined her and her party at the summer hotel. Together we journeyed
+down to Sunburst.
+
+It was the height of the salmon-fishing season. Sunburst lay cloyed
+among the products of field and forest and stream. At Viking one got the
+impression of a strong pioneer life, vibrant, eager, and with a touch of
+Arcady. But viewed from a distance Sunburst seemed Arcady itself. It was
+built in green pastures, which stretched back on one side of the river,
+smooth, luscious, undulating to the foot-hills. This was on one side
+of the Whi-Whi River. On the other side was a narrow margin, and then a
+sheer wall of hills in exquisite verdure. The houses were of wood, and
+chiefly painted white, sweet and cool in the vast greenness. Cattle
+wandered shoulders deep in the rich grass, and fruit of all kinds was
+to be had for the picking. The population was strangely mixed. Men had
+drifted here from all parts of the world, sometimes with their families,
+sometimes without them. Many of them had settled here after mining
+at the Caribou field and other places on the Frazer River. Mexican,
+Portuguese, Canadian, Californian, Australian, Chinaman, and coolie
+lived here, side by side, at ease in the quiet land, following a
+primitive occupation with primitive methods.
+
+One could pick out the Indian section of the village, because not far
+from it was the Indian graveyard, with its scaffolding of poles and
+brush and its offerings for the dead. There were almost interminable
+rows of scaffolding on the river’s edge and upon the high bank where
+hung the salmon drying in the sun. The river, as it ambled along, here
+over shallows, there over rapids and tiny waterfalls, was the pathway
+for millions and millions of salmon upon a pilgrimage to the West and
+North--to the happy hunting grounds of spawn. They came in droves so
+thick at times that, crowding up the little creeks which ran into the
+river, they filled them so completely as to dam up the water and make
+the courses a solid mass of living and dead fish. In the river itself
+they climbed the rapids and leaped the little waterfalls with incredible
+certainty; except where man had prepared his traps for them. Sometimes
+these traps were weirs or by-washes, made of long lateral tanks of
+wicker-work. Down among the boulders near the shore, scaffoldings were
+raised, and from these the fishermen with nets and wicker-work baskets
+caught the fish as they came up.
+
+We wandered about during the afternoon immensely interested in all
+that we saw. During that time the party was much together, and my
+conversation with Mrs. Falchion was general. We had supper at a quiet
+little tavern, idled away an hour in drinking in the pleasant scene; and
+when dusk came went out again to the banks of the river.
+
+From the time we left the tavern to wander by the river I managed to be
+a good deal alone with Mrs. Falchion. I do not know whether she saw that
+I was anxious to speak with her privately, but I fancy she did. Whatever
+we had to say must, in the circumstances, however serious, be kept
+superficially unimportant. And, as it happened, our serious conference
+was carried on with an air of easy gossip, combined with a not
+artificial interest in all we saw. And there was much to see. Far up and
+down the river the fragrant dusk was spotted with the smoky red light
+of torches, and the atmosphere shook with shadows, through which ran the
+song of the river, more amiable than the song of the saw, and the low,
+weird cry of the Indians and white men as they toiled for salmon in the
+glare of the torches. Here upon a scaffolding a half-dozen swung their
+nets and baskets in the swift river, hauling up with their very long
+poles thirty or forty splendid fish in an hour; there at a small
+cascade, in great baskets sunk into the water, a couple of Indians
+caught and killed the salmon that, in trying to leap the fall, plumped
+into the wicker cage; beyond, others, more idle and less enterprising,
+speared the finny travellers, thus five hundred miles from home--the
+brave Pacific.
+
+Upon the banks the cleaning and curing went on, the women and children
+assisting, and as the Indians and half-breeds worked they sang either
+the wild Indian melodies, snatches of brave old songs of the ‘voyageurs’
+of a past century, or hymns taught by the Jesuit missionaries in the
+persons of such noble men as Pere Lacombe and Pere Durieu, who have
+wandered up and down the vast plains of both sides of the Rockies
+telling an old story in a picturesque, heroic way. These old hymns were
+written in Chinook, that strange language,--French, English, Spanish,
+Indian, arranged by the Hudson’s Bay Company, which is, like the
+wampum-belt, a common tongue for tribes and peoples not speaking any
+language but their own. They were set to old airs--lullabies, chansons,
+barcarolles, serenades, taken out of the folk-lore of many lands. Time
+and again had these simple arcadian airs been sung as a prelude to some
+tribal act that would not bear the search-light of civilisation--little
+by the Indians east of the Rockies, for they have hard hearts and fierce
+tongues, but much by the Shuswaps, Siwashes, and other tribes of the
+Pacific slope, whose natures are for peace more than for war; who, one
+antique day, drifted across from Japan or the Corea, and never, even in
+their wild, nomadic state, forgot their skill and craft in wood and gold
+and silver.
+
+We sat on the shore and watched the scene for a time, saying nothing.
+Now and again, as from scaffolding to scaffolding, from boat to boat,
+and from house to house, the Chinook song rang and was caught up in a
+slow monotone, so not interfering with the toil, there came the sound
+of an Indian drum beaten indolently, or the rattle of dry hard sticks--a
+fantastic accompaniment.
+
+“Does it remind you of the South Seas?” I asked Mrs. Falchion, as, with
+her chin on her hand, she watched the scene.
+
+She drew herself up, almost with an effort, as though she had been lost
+in thought, and looked at me curiously for a moment. She seemed trying
+to call back her mind to consider my question. Presently she answered
+me: “Very little. There is something finer, stronger here. The
+atmosphere has more nerve, the life more life. This is not a land for
+the idle or vicious, pleasant as it is.”
+
+“What a thinker you are, Mrs. Falchion!”
+
+She seemed to recollect herself suddenly. Her voice took on an
+inflection of satire. “You say it with the air of a discoverer. With
+Columbus and Hervey and you, the world--” She stopped, laughing softly
+at the thrust, and moved the dust about with her foot.
+
+“In spite of the sarcasm, I am going to add that I feel a personal
+satisfaction in your being a woman who does think, and acts more on
+thought than impulse.”
+
+“‘Personal satisfaction’ sounds very royal and august. It is long, I
+imagine, since you took a--personal satisfaction--in me.”
+
+I was not to be daunted. “People who think a good deal and live a fresh,
+outdoor life--you do that--naturally act most fairly and wisely in time
+of difficulty--and contretemps.”
+
+“But I had the impression that you thought I acted unfairly and
+unwisely--at such times.”
+
+We had come exactly where I wanted. In our minds we were both looking at
+those miserable scenes on the ‘Fulvia’, when Madras sought to adjust the
+accounts of life and sorely muddled them.
+
+“But,” said I, “you are not the same woman that you were.”
+
+“Indeed, Sir Oracle,” she answered: “and by what necromancy do you
+know?”
+
+“By none. I think you are sorry now--I hope you are--for what--”
+
+She interrupted me indignantly. “You go too far. You are
+almost--unbearable. You said once that the matter should be buried, and
+yet here you work for an opportunity, Heaven knows why, to place me at a
+disadvantage!”
+
+“Pardon me,” I answered; “I said that I would never bring up those
+wretched scenes unless there was cause. There is cause.”
+
+She got to her feet. “What cause--what possible cause can there be?”
+
+I met her eye firmly. “I am bound to stand by my friend,” I said. “I can
+and I will stand by him.”
+
+“If it is a game of drawn swords, beware!” she retorted. “You speak to
+me as if I were a common adventuress. You mistake me, and forget
+that you--of all men--have little margin of high morality on which to
+speculate.”
+
+“No, I do not forget that,” I said, “nor do I think of you as an
+adventuress. But I am sure you hold a power over my friend, and--”
+
+She stopped me. “Not one word more on the subject. You are not to
+suppose this or that. Be wise do not irritate and annoy a woman like me.
+It were better to please me than to preach to me.”
+
+“Mrs. Falchion,” I said firmly, “I wish to please you--so well that some
+day you will feel that I have been a good friend to you as well as to
+him--”
+
+Again she interrupted me. “You talk in foolish riddles. No good can come
+of this.”
+
+“I cannot believe that,” I urged; “for when once your heart is moved by
+the love of a man, you will be just, and then the memory of another man
+who loved you and sinned for you--”
+
+“Oh, you coward!” she broke out scornfully--“you coward to persist in
+this!”
+
+I made a little motion of apology with my hand, and was silent. I was
+satisfied. I felt that I had touched her as no words of mine had ever
+touched her before. If she became emotional, was vulnerable in her
+feelings, I knew that Roscoe’s peace might be assured. That she loved
+Roscoe now I was quite certain. Through the mists I could see a
+way, even if I failed to find Madras and arrange another surprising
+situation. She was breathing hard with excitement.
+
+Presently she said with incredible quietness, “Do not force me to do
+hard things. I have a secret.”
+
+“I have a secret too,” I answered. “Let us compromise.”
+
+“I do not fear your secret,” she answered. She thought I was referring
+to her husband’s death. “Well,” I replied, “I honestly hope you never
+will. That would be a good day for you.”
+
+“Let us go,” she said; then, presently: “No, let us sit here and forget
+that we have been talking.”
+
+I was satisfied. We sat down. She watched the scene silently, and I
+watched her. I felt that it would be my lot to see stranger things
+happen to her than I had seen before; but all in a different fashion. I
+had more hope for my friend, for Ruth Devlin, for--!
+
+I then became silent even to myself. The weltering river, the fishers
+and their labour and their songs, the tall dark hills, the deep gloomy
+pastures, the flaring lights, were then in a dream before me; but I was
+thinking, planning.
+
+As we sat there, we heard noises, not very harmonious, interrupting the
+song of the salmon-fishers. We got up to see. A score of river-drivers
+were marching down through the village, mocking the fishers and making
+wild mirth. The Indians took little notice, but the half-breeds and
+white fishers were restless.
+
+“There will be trouble here one day,” said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+“A free fight which will clear the air,” I said.
+
+“I should like to see it--it would be picturesque, at least,” she added
+cheerfully; “for I suppose no lives would be lost.”
+
+“One cannot tell,” I answered; “lives do not count so much in new
+lands.”
+
+“Killing is hateful, but I like to see courage.”
+
+And she did see it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. RIDING THE REEFS
+
+The next afternoon Roscoe was sitting on the coping deep in thought,
+when Ruth rode up with her father, dismounted, and came upon him so
+quietly that he did not hear her. I was standing in the trees a little
+distance away.
+
+She spoke to him once, but he did not seem to hear. She touched his arm.
+He got to his feet.
+
+“You were so engaged that you did not hear me,” she said.
+
+“The noise of the rapids!” he answered, after a strange pause, “and your
+footstep is very light.”
+
+She leaned her chin on her hand, rested against the rail of the coping,
+looked meditatively into the torrent below, and replied: “Is it so
+light?” Then after a pause: “You have not asked me how I came, who came
+with me, or why I am here.”
+
+“It was first necessary for me to conceive the delightful fact that you
+are here,” he said in a dazed, and, therefore, not convincing tone.
+
+She looked him full in the eyes. “Please do not pay me the ill
+compliment of a compliment,” she said. “Was it the sailor who spoke then
+or the--or yourself? It is not like you.”
+
+“I did not mean it as a compliment,” he replied. “I was thinking about
+critical and important things.”
+
+“‘Critical and important’ sounds large,” she returned.
+
+“And the awakening was sudden,” he continued. “You must make allowance,
+please, for--”
+
+“For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and
+undreamlike person? I do. And now, since you will not put me quite at my
+ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly ‘chaperoned’ here,
+I must inform you that my father waits hard by--is, as my riotous young
+brother says, ‘without on the mat.’”
+
+“I am very glad,” he replied with more politeness than exactness.
+
+“That I was duly escorted, or that my father is ‘without on the mat’?
+... However, you do not appear glad one way or the other. And now I must
+explain our business. It is to ask your company at dinner (do consider
+yourself honoured--actually a formal dinner party in the Rockies!) to
+meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our famous Viking
+and Sunburst.... But you are expected to go out where my father feeds
+his--there, see--his horse on your ‘trim parterre.’ And now that I have
+done my duty as page and messenger without a word of assistance, Mr.
+Roscoe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that you will be
+vis-a-vis to his excellency?” She lightly beat the air with her whip,
+while I took a good look at the charming scene.
+
+Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant. He understood too
+well the source of such gay social banter. He knew it covered a hurt. He
+said to her: “Is this Ruth Devlin or another?”
+
+And she replied very gravely: “It is Ruth Devlin and another too,” and
+she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes
+were troubled.
+
+He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but,
+after a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he
+came. “And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?”
+ she said; “and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and
+field?”
+
+His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch
+of mock irony: “The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of
+the house of Devlin.”
+
+“Oh,” she said, “you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished
+satire on a woman.” And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
+them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with
+which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had
+ever happened to her.
+
+“No, indeed no,” he replied, “though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am
+malicious--just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: ‘Rome turned
+upon itself.’”
+
+“But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of
+it. Yours did not seem applied to yourself,” was her slow answer, and
+she seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.
+
+“No?” Then he said with a playful sadness: “A moment ago you were not
+completely innocent of irony, were you?”
+
+“But a man is big and broad, and should not--he should be magnanimous,
+leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things, to be
+guilty of littlenesses. But see how daring I am--speaking like this
+to you who know so much more than I do.... Surely, you are still only
+humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself--the irony so icy
+to your friends?”
+
+She had developed greatly. Her mind had been sharpened by pain. The
+edge of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and
+allusive. Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her
+had been achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion
+came, Ruth had awakened sharply to a distress not exactly definable. She
+felt that though he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right to
+share his troubles. The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and
+something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter. For there
+was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and
+unwritten. They had vowed without priest or witness. The heart speaks
+eloquently in symbols first, and afterwards in stumbling words.
+
+It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time,
+that the words would never be spoken. And was this all that had troubled
+her--the belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life? Or had
+she knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his
+past?
+
+This possibility filled him with bitterness. The old Adam in him awoke,
+and he said within himself “God in heaven, must one folly, one sin,
+kill me and her too? Why me more than another!... And I love her, I love
+her!”
+
+His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew
+straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern.... There
+came swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with
+her--anywhere: to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over
+again, admitting that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have
+his conscience clear of secret, and trust her kindness. For now he
+was sure that Mrs. Falchion meant to make his position as a clergyman
+impossible; to revenge herself on him for no wrong that, as far as he
+knew, he ever did directly to her. But to tell this girl, or even
+her father or mother, that he had been married, after a shameful,
+unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what came after, and the awful
+thing that happened--he who ministered at the altar! Now that he looked
+the thing in the face it shocked him. No, he could not do it.
+
+She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her
+through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful
+possibility beyond her:
+
+“Why do you look so? You are stern. You are critical. Have
+I--disimproved so?”
+
+The words were full of a sudden and natural womanly fear, that something
+in herself had fallen in value. They had a pathos so much the more
+moving because she sought to hide it.
+
+There swam before his eyes the picture of happiness from which she
+herself had roused him when she came. He involuntarily, passionately,
+caught her hand and pressed it to his lips twice; but spoke nothing.
+
+“Oh! oh!--please!” she said. Her voice was low and broken, and she spoke
+appealingly. Could he not see that he was breaking her heart, while
+filling it also with unbearable joy? Why did he not speak and make this
+possible, and not leave it a thing to flush her cheeks, and cause her to
+feel he had acted on a knowledge he had no right to possess till he had
+declared himself in speech? Could he not have spared her that?--This
+Christian gentleman, whose worth had compassed these mountains and won
+the dwellers among them--it was bitter. Her pride and injured heart rose
+up and choked her.
+
+He let go her hand. Now his face was partly turned from her, and she saw
+how thin and pale it was. She saw, too, what I had seen during the past
+week, that his hair had become almost white about the temples; and the
+moveless sadness of his position struck her with unnatural force, so
+that, in spite of herself, tears came suddenly to her eyes, and a slight
+moan broke from her. She would have run away; but it was too late.
+
+He saw the tears, the look of pity, indignation, pride, and love in her
+face.
+
+“My love!” he cried passionately. He opened his arms to her.
+
+But she stood still. He came very close to her, spoke quickly, and
+almost despairingly: “Ruth, I love you, and I have wronged you; but here
+is your place, if you will come.”
+
+At first she seemed stunned, and her face was turned to her mountains,
+as though the echo of his words were coming back to her from them, but
+the thing crept into her heart and flooded it. She seemed to wake, and
+then all her affection carried her into his arms, and she dried her eyes
+upon his breast.
+
+After a time he whispered, “My dear, I have wronged you. I should not
+have made you care for me.”
+
+She did not seem to notice that he spoke of wrong. She said: “I was
+yours, Galt, even from the beginning, I think, though I did not quite
+know it. I remember what you read in church the first Sunday you came,
+and it has always helped me; for I wanted to be good.”
+
+She paused and raised her eyes to his, and then with sweet solemnity she
+said: “The words were:
+
+   “‘The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds’
+   feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.’”
+
+“Ruth,” he answered, “you have always walked on the high places. You
+have never failed. And you are as safe as the nest of the eagle, a noble
+work of God.”
+
+“No, I am not noble; but I should like to be so. Most women like
+goodness. It is instinct with us, I suppose. We had rather be good than
+evil, and when we love we can do good things; but we quiver like the
+compass-needle between two poles. Oh, believe me! we are weak; but we
+are loving.”
+
+“Your worst, Ruth, is as much higher than my best as the heaven is--”
+
+“Galt, you hurt my fingers!” she interrupted.
+
+He had not noticed the almost fierce strength of his clasp. But his life
+was desperately hungry for her. “Forgive me, dearest.--As I said, better
+than my best; for, Ruth, my life was--wicked, long ago. You cannot
+understand how wicked!”
+
+“You are a clergyman and a good man,” she said, with pathetic negation.
+
+“You give me a heart unsoiled, unspotted of the world. I have been in
+some ways worse than the worst men in the valley there below.”
+
+“Galt, Galt, you shock me!” she said.
+
+“Why did I speak? Why did I kiss your hand as I did? Because at the
+moment it was the only honest thing to do; because it was due you that
+I should say: ‘Ruth, I love you, love you so much’”--here she nestled
+close to him--“‘so well, that everything else in life is as nothing
+beside it--nothing! so well that I could not let you share my
+wretchedness.’”
+
+She ran her hand along his breast and looked up at him with swimming
+eyes.
+
+“And you think that this is fair to me? that a woman gives the heart for
+pleasant weather only? I do not know what your sorrow may be, but it is
+my right to share it. I am only a woman; but a woman can be strong
+for those she loves. Remember that I have always had to care for
+others--always; and I can bear much. I will not ask what your trouble
+is, I only ask you”--here she spoke slowly and earnestly, and rested her
+hand on his shoulder--“to say to me that you love no other woman; and
+that--that no other woman has a claim upon you. Then I shall be content
+to pity you, to help you, to love you. God gives women many pains, but
+none so great as the love that will not trust utterly; for trust is our
+bread of life. Yes, indeed, indeed!”
+
+“I dare not say,” he said, “that it is your misfortune to love me, for
+in this you show how noble a woman can be. But I will say that the cup
+is bitter-sweet for you.... I cannot tell you now what my trouble is;
+but I can say that no other living woman has a claim upon me.... My
+reckoning is with the dead.”
+
+“That is with God,” she whispered, “and He is just and merciful too....
+Can it not be repaired here?” She smoothed back his hair, then let her
+fingers stray lightly on his cheek.
+
+It hurt him like death to reply. “No, but there can be punishment here.”
+
+She shuddered slightly. “Punishment, punishment,” she repeated
+fearfully--“what punishment?”
+
+“I do not quite know.” Lines of pain grew deeper in his face.... “Ruth,
+how much can a woman forgive?”
+
+“A mother, everything.” But she would say no more. He looked at her long
+and earnestly, and said at last: “Will you believe in me no matter what
+happens?”
+
+“Always, always.” Her smile was most winning.
+
+“If things should appear dark against me?”
+
+“Yes, if you give me your word.”
+
+“If I said to you that I did a wrong; that I broke the law of God,
+though not the laws of man?”
+
+There was a pause in which she drew back, trembling slightly, and looked
+at him timidly and then steadily, but immediately put her hands bravely
+in his, and said: “Yes.”
+
+“I did not break the laws of man.”
+
+“It was when you were in the navy?” she inquired, in an awe-stricken
+tone.
+
+“Yes, years ago.”
+
+“I know. I feel it. You must not tell me. It was a woman, and this
+other woman, this Mrs. Falchion knows, and she would try to ruin you,
+or”--here she seemed to be moved suddenly by a new thought--“or have
+you love her. But she shall not, she shall not--neither! For I will love
+you, and God will listen to me, and answer me.”
+
+“Would to Heaven I were worthy of you! I dare not think of where you
+might be called to follow me, Ruth.”
+
+“‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
+thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,’” she rejoined in a
+low voice.
+
+“‘Thy God my God!’” he repeated after her slowly. He suddenly wondered
+if his God was her God; whether now, in his trouble, he had that comfort
+which his creed and profession should give him. For the first time he
+felt acutely that his choice of this new life might have been more a
+reaction from the past, a desire for expiation, than radical belief that
+this was the right and only thing for him to do. And when, some time
+after, he bade Ruth good-bye, as she went with her father, it came to
+him with appalling conviction that his life had been a mistake. The
+twist of a great wrong in a man’s character distorts his vision; and if
+he has a tender conscience he magnifies his misdeeds.
+
+In silence Roscoe and I watched the two ride down the slope. I guessed
+what had happened: afterwards I was told all. I was glad of it, though
+the end was not yet promising. When we turned to go towards the house
+again, a man lounged out of the trees towards us. He looked at me, then
+at Roscoe, and said:
+
+“I’m Phil Boldrick’s pal from Danger Mountain.” Roscoe held out his
+hand, and the man took it, saying: “You’re The Padre, I suppose, and
+Phil was soft on you. Didn’t turn religious, did he? He always had a
+streak of God A’mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head
+chap; friend o’ the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust
+with a pal. I got your letter, and come over here straight to see that
+he’s been tombed accordin’ to his virtues; to lay out the dollars
+he left me on the people he had on his visitin’ list; no loafers, no
+gophers, not one; but to them that stayed by him I stay, while prog and
+liquor last.”
+
+I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not
+reply, I said: “Phil had many friends and no enemies.” Then I told him
+the tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.
+
+While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and
+listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as
+abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe’s face. When I had finished he
+drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind
+his fingers. But he did not speak.
+
+Then I suggested quietly that Phil’s dollars could be put to a better
+use than for prog and liquor.
+
+He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment’s pause, in which
+he seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he
+rubbed his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said:
+“I never had but two pals that was pals through and through. And one was
+Phil and the other was Jo--Jo Brackenbury.”
+
+Here Roscoe’s hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar,
+twitched suddenly.
+
+The man continued: “Poor Jo went down in the ‘Fly Away’ when she swung
+with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon
+the bloody reefs at Apia.... God, how they gnawed her! And never a rag
+holdin’ nor a stick standin’, and her pretty figger broke like a tin
+whistle in a Corliss engine. And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip,
+the noisiest pal that ever said ‘Here’s how!’ went out to heaven on a
+tearing sea.”
+
+“Jo Brackenbury--” Roscoe repeated musingly. His head was turned away
+from us.
+
+“Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me” (I wonder that
+I did not start then) “when I told him how the ‘Fly Away’ went down to
+Davy, and her lovers went aloft, reefed close afore the wind--‘Then,’
+says he, ‘they’ve got a damned sound seaman on the Jordan, and so help
+me! him that’s good enough to row my girl from open sea, gales poundin’
+and breakers showin’ teeth across the bar to Maita Point, is good enough
+for use where seas is still and reefs ain’t fashionable.’”
+
+Roscoe’s face looked haggard as it now turned towards us. “If you will
+meet me,” he said to the stranger, “to-morrow morning, in Mr. Devlin’s
+office at Viking, I will hand you over Phil Boldrick’s legacy.”
+
+The man made as if he would shake hands with Roscoe, who appeared not to
+notice the motion, and then said: “I’ll be there. You can bank on that;
+and, as we used to say down in the Spicy Isles, where neither of you
+have been, I s’pose, Talofa!”
+
+He swung away down the hillside.
+
+Roscoe turned to me. “You see, Marmion, all things circle to a centre.
+The trail seems long, but the fox gets killed an arm’s length from his
+hole.”
+
+“Not always. You take it too seriously,” I said. “You are no fox.”
+
+“That man will be in at the death,” he persisted.
+
+“Nonsense, Roscoe. He does not know you. What has he to do with you?
+This is overwrought nerves. You are killing yourself with worry.”
+
+He was motionless and silent for a minute. Then he said very quietly:
+“No, I do not think that I really worry now. I have known”--here he laid
+his hand upon my shoulder and his eyes had a shining look--“what it is
+to be happy, unspeakably happy, for a moment; and that stays with me. I
+am a coward no longer.”
+
+He drew his finger tips slowly across his forehead. Then he continued:
+“To-morrow I shall be angry with myself, no doubt, for having that
+moment’s joy, but I cannot feel so now. I shall probably condemn myself
+for cruel selfishness; but I have touched life’s highest point this
+afternoon, Marmion.”
+
+I drew his hand down from my shoulder and pressed it. It was cold.
+He withdrew his eyes from the mountain, and said: “I have had dreams,
+Marmion, and they are over. I lived in one: to expiate--to wipe out--a
+past, by spending my life for others. The expiation is not enough. I
+lived in another: to win a woman’s love; and I have, and was caught
+up by it for a moment, and it was wonderful. But it is over now, quite
+over. ... And now for her sake renunciation must be made, before I have
+another dream--a long one, Marmion.”
+
+I had forebodings, but I pulled myself together and said firmly:
+“Roscoe, these are fancies. Stop it, man. You are moody. Come, let us
+walk, and talk of other things.”
+
+“No, we will not walk,” he said, “but let us sit there on the coping
+and be quiet--quiet in that roar between the hills.” Suddenly he swung
+round, caught me by the shoulders and held me gently so.
+
+“I have a pain at my heart, Marmion, as if I’d heard my death sentence;
+such as a soldier feels who knows that Death looks out at him from iron
+eyes. You smile: I suppose you think I am mad.”
+
+I saw that it was best to let him speak his mind. So I answered: “Not
+mad, my friend. Say on what you like. Tell me all you feel. Only, for
+God’s sake be brave, and don’t give up until there’s occasion. I am sure
+you exaggerate your danger, whatever it is.”
+
+“Listen for a minute,” said he: “I had a brother Edward, as good a lad
+as ever was; a boisterous, healthy fellow. We had an old nurse in our
+family who came from Irish hills, faithful and kind to us both. There
+came a change over Edward. He appeared not to take the same interest in
+his sports. One day he came to me, looking a bit pale, and said: ‘Galt,
+I think I should like to study for the Church.’ I laughed at it, yet
+it troubled me in a way, for I saw he was not well. I told Martha,
+the nurse. She shook her head sadly, and said: ‘Edward is not for the
+Church, but you, my lad. He is for heaven.’
+
+“‘For heaven, Martha?’ laughed I.
+
+“‘In truth for heaven,’ she replied, ‘and that soon. The look of his eye
+is doom. I’ve seen it since I swaddled him, and he will go suddenly.’
+
+“I was angry, and I said to her,--though she thought she spoke the
+truth,--‘This is only Irish croaking. We’ll have the banshee next.’
+
+“She got up from her chair and answered me solemnly: ‘Galt Roscoe, I
+HAVE heard the banshee wail, and sorrow falls upon your home. And don’t
+you be so hard with me that have loved you, and who suffers for the lad
+that often and often lay upon my breast. Don’t be so hard; for your day
+of trouble comes too. You, not he, will be priest at the altar. Death
+will come to him like a swift and easy sleep; but you will feel its
+hand upon your heart and know its hate for many a day, and bear the slow
+pangs of it until your life is all crushed, and you go from the world
+alone, Love crying after you and not able to save you, not even the love
+of woman--weaker than death.... And, in my grave, when that day comes
+beside a great mountain in a strange land, I will weep and pray for you;
+for I was mother to you too, when yours left you alone bewhiles, never,
+in this world, to come back.’
+
+“And, Marmion, that night towards morning, as I lay in the same room
+with Edward, I heard his breath stop sharply. I jumped up and drew aside
+the curtains to let in the light, and then I knew that the old woman
+spoke true.... And now!... Well, I am like Hamlet--and I can say with
+him: ‘But thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart--but
+it is no matter!”’....
+
+I tried to laugh and talk away his brooding, but there was little
+use, his convictions were so strong. Besides, what can you do with a
+morbidness which has its origin in fateful circumstances?
+
+I devoutly wished that a telegram would come from Winnipeg to let me
+know if Boyd Madras, under his new name, could be found. I was a hunter
+on a faint trail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+
+When Phil’s pal left us he went wandering down the hillside, talking
+to himself. Long afterwards he told me how he felt, and I reproduce his
+phrases as nearly as I can.
+
+“Knocked ‘em, I guess,” he said, “with that about Jo Brackenbury....
+Poor Jo! Stuck together, him and me did, after she got the steel in her
+heart.”... He pulled himself together, shuddering.... “Went back on me,
+she did, and took up with a cursed swell, and got it cold--cold. And I?
+By Judas! I never was shut of that. I’ve known women, many of ‘em, all
+countries, but she was different. I expect now, after all these years,
+that if I got my hand on the devil that done for her, I’d rattle
+his breath in his throat. There’s things that clings. She clings, Jo
+Brackenbury clings, and Phil Boldrick clings; and they’re gone, and I’m
+left to go it alone. To play the single hand--what!--by Jiminy!”
+
+He exclaimed thus on seeing two women approach from the direction of
+the valley. He stood still, mouth open, staring. They drew near, almost
+passed him. But one of them, struck by his intense gaze, suddenly turned
+and came towards him.
+
+“Miss Falchion! Miss Falchion!” he cried. Then, when she hesitated as if
+with an effort of memory, he added: “Don’t you know me?”
+
+“Ah,” she replied abruptly, “Sam Kilby! Are you Sam Kilby, Jo
+Brackenbury’s friend, from Samoa?”
+
+“Yes, miss, I’m Jo Brackenbury’s friend; and I’ve rowed you across the
+reefs with him more than once I guess so! But it’s a long way from Apia
+to the Rockies, and it’s funny to meet here.”
+
+“When did you come here--and from where?”
+
+“I come to-day from the Hudson’s Bay post at Danger Mountain. I’m Phil
+Boldrick’s pal.”
+
+“Ah,” she said again, with a look in her eyes not pleasant to see, “and
+what brings you up here in the hills?” Hers was more than an ordinary
+curiosity.
+
+“I come to see the Padre who was with Phil--when he left. And the
+Padre’s a fair square sort, as I reckon him, but melancholy, almighty
+melancholy.”
+
+“Yes, melancholy, I suppose,” she said, “and fair square, as you say.
+And what did you say and do?”
+
+“Why, we yarned about Phil, and where I’d get the legacy to-morrow; and
+I s’pose I had a strong breeze on the quarter, for I talked as free as
+if we’d grubbed out of the same dough-pan since we was kiddies.”
+
+“Yes?”
+
+“Yes siree; I don’t know how it was, but I got to reelin’ off about
+Jo--queer, wasn’t it? And I told ‘em how he went down in the ‘Fly
+Away’, and how the lovely ladies--you remember how we used to call the
+whitecaps lovely ladies--fondled him out to sea and on to heaven.”
+
+“And what did--the Padre--think of that?”
+
+“Well, he’s got a heart, I should say, and that’s why Phil cottoned to
+him, maybe,--for he looked as if he’d seen ghosts. I guess he’d never
+had a craft runnin’ ‘tween a sand-bar and a ragged coral bank; nor seen
+a girl like the ‘Fly Away’ take a buster in her teeth; nor a man-of-war
+come bundlin’ down upon a nasty glacis, the captain on the bridge,
+engines goin’ for all they’re worth, every man below battened in,
+and every Jack above watchin’ the fight between the engines and the
+hurricane.... Here she rolls six fathoms from the glacis that’ll rip her
+copper garments off, and the quiverin’ engines pull her back; and she
+swings and struggles and trembles between hell in the hurricane and God
+A’mighty in the engines; till at last she gets her nose at the neck of
+the open sea and crawls out safe and sound.... I guess he’d have more
+marble in his cheeks, if he saw likes o’ that, Miss Falchion?”
+
+Kilby paused and wiped his forehead.
+
+She had listened calmly. She did not answer his question. She said:
+“Kilby, I am staying at the summer hotel up there. Will you call on
+me--let me see.... say, to-morrow afternoon?--Some one will tell you the
+way, if you do not know it.... Ask for MRS. Falchion, Kilby, not Miss
+Falchion.... You will come?”
+
+“Why, yes,” he replied, “you can count on me; for I’d like to hear of
+things that happened after I left Apia--and how it is that you are Mrs.
+Falchion, for that’s mighty queer.”
+
+“You shall hear all that and more.” She held out her hand to him and
+smiled. He took it, and she knew that now she was gathering up the
+strings of destiny.
+
+They parted.
+
+The two passed on, looking, in their cool elegance, as if life were the
+most pleasant thing; as though the very perfume of their garments would
+preserve them from that plague called trouble.
+
+“Justine,” said Mrs. Falchion, “there is one law stranger than all; the
+law of coincidence. Perhaps the convenience of modern travel assists
+it, but fate is in it also. Events run in circles. People connected with
+them travel that way also. We pass and re-pass each other many times,
+but on different paths, until we come close and see each other face to
+face.”
+
+She was speaking almost the very words which Roscoe had spoken to me.
+But perhaps there was nothing strange in that.
+
+“Yes, madame,” replied Justine; “it is so, but there is a law greater
+than coincidence.”
+
+“What, Justine?”
+
+“The law of love, which is just and merciful, and would give peace
+instead of trouble.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion looked closely at Justine, and, after a moment, evidently
+satisfied, said: “What do you know of love?”
+
+Justine tried hard for composure, and answered gently: “I loved my
+brother Hector.”
+
+“And did it make you just and merciful and--an angel?”
+
+“Madame, you could answer that better. But it has not made me be at war;
+it has made me patient.”
+
+“Your love--for your brother--has made you that?” Again she looked
+keenly, but Justine now showed nothing but earnestness.
+
+“Yes, madame.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion paused for a moment, and seemed intent on the beauty of
+the pine-belted hills, capped by snowy peaks, and wrapped in a most
+hearty yet delicate colour. The red of her parasol threw a warm soft
+ness upon her face. She spoke now without looking at Justine.
+
+“Justine, did you ever love any one besides your brother?--I mean
+another man.”
+
+Justine was silent for a moment, and then she said: “Yes, once.” She was
+looking at the hills now, and Mrs. Falchion at her.
+
+“And you were happy?” Here Mrs. Falchion abstractedly toyed with a piece
+of lace on Justine’s arm. Such acts were unusual with her.
+
+“I was happy--in loving.”
+
+“Why did you not marry?”
+
+“Madame--it was impossible--quite.” This, with hesitation and the
+slightest accent of pain.
+
+“Why impossible? You have good looks, you were born a lady; you have a
+foolish heart--the fond are foolish.” She watched the girl keenly,
+the hand ceased to toy with the lace, and caught the arm itself--“Why
+impossible?”
+
+“Madame, he did not love me, he never could.”
+
+“Did he know of your love?”
+
+“Oh no, no!” This with trouble in her voice.
+
+“And you have never forgotten?”
+
+The catechism was merciless; but Mrs. Falchion was not merely malicious.
+She was inquiring of a thing infinitely important to her. She was
+searching the heart of another, not only because she was suspicious, but
+because she wanted to know herself better.
+
+“It is easy to remember.”
+
+“Is it long since you saw him?”
+
+The question almost carried terror with it, for she was not quite sure
+why Mrs. Falchion questioned her. She lifted her eyes slowly, and there
+was in them anxiety and joy. “It seems,” she said, “like years.”
+
+“He loves some one else, perhaps?”
+
+“Yes, I think so, madame.”
+
+“Did you hate her?”
+
+“Oh no; I am glad for him.”
+
+Here Mrs. Falchion spoke sharply, almost bitterly. Even through her soft
+colour a hardness appeared. “You are glad for him? You would see another
+woman in his arms and not be full of anger?”
+
+“Quite.”
+
+“Justine, you are a fool.”
+
+“Madame, there is no commandment against being a fool.”
+
+“Oh, you make me angry with your meekness!” Here Mrs. Falchion caught a
+twig from a tree by her, snapped it in her fingers, and petulantly threw
+its pieces to the ground. “Suppose that the man had once loved you, and
+afterwards loved another--then again another?”
+
+“Madame, that would be my great misfortune, but it might be no wrong in
+him.”
+
+“How not a wrong in him?”
+
+“It may have been my fault. There must be love in both--great love, for
+it to last.”
+
+“And if the woman loved him not at all?”
+
+“Where, then, could be the wrong in him?”
+
+“And if he went from you,”--here her voice grew dry and her words were
+sharp,--“and took a woman from the depths of--oh, no matter what! and
+made her commit--crime--and was himself a criminal?”
+
+“It is horrible to think of; but I should ask myself how much I was to
+blame.... What would you ask yourself, madame?”
+
+“You have a strain of the angel in you, Justine. You would forgive Judas
+if he said, ‘Peccavi.’ I have a strain of Satan--it was born in me--I
+would say, You have sinned, now suffer.”
+
+“God give you a softer heart,” said Justine, with tender boldness and
+sincerity.
+
+At this Mrs. Falchion started slightly, and trouble covered her face.
+She assumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and
+unimportant.
+
+“There, that will do, thank you.... We have become serious and
+incomprehensible. Let us talk of other things. I want to be gay....
+Amuse me.”
+
+Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed
+till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room. There she sat
+and thought, as she had never done in her life before. She thought upon
+everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on
+the ‘Fulvia’; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders,
+when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers,
+that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart
+grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she
+determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius
+she would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil’s Slide,
+and the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on
+that she paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by
+conflicting emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick’s
+death and funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock
+him, and, instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all
+that Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with
+which Galt Roscoe was associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for
+a thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after
+year till now.
+
+Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she
+had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished
+her as a friend, and that on no man’s breast had she ever laid her head
+in trust and love. She had been loved, but it had never brought her
+satisfaction. From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she
+thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy.
+And if she saw now in Justine’s eyes a look of friendship, a note of
+personal allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more
+human.
+
+Her nature had been stirred. Her natural heart was struggling against
+her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth
+Devlin. Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him. Then, on a
+bitter day for him, he did a mad thing. The thing became--though neither
+of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to her, and
+this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the power to
+use. But all had not happened as she expected; for something called Love
+had been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being born, and sent,
+trembling for its timid life, into the world.
+
+She closed her eyes with weariness, and pressed her hands to her
+temples.
+
+She wondered why she could not be all evil or all good. She spoke and
+acted against Ruth Devlin, and yet she pitied her. She had the nettle to
+sting Roscoe to death, and yet she hesitated to use it. She had said to
+herself that she would wait till the happiest moment of his life, and
+then do so. Well, his happiest moment had come. Ruth Devlin’s heart was
+all out, all blossomed--beside Mrs. Falchion’s like some wild flower
+to the aloe.... Only now she had come to know that she had a heart.
+Something had chilled her at her birth, and when her mother died, a
+stranger’s kiss closed up all the ways to love, and left her an icicle.
+She was twenty-eight years old, and yet she had never kissed a face
+in joy or to give joy. And now, when she had come to know herself, and
+understand what others understand when they are little children in
+their mother’s arms, she had to bow to the spirit that denies. She drew
+herself up with a quiver of the body.
+
+“O God!” she said, “do I hate him or love him!” Her head dropped in her
+hands. She sat regardless of time, now scarcely stirring, desperately
+quiet. The door opened softly and Justine entered. “Madame,” she said,
+“pardon me; I am so sorry, but Miss Devlin has come to see you, and I
+thought--”
+
+“You thought, Justine, that I would see her.” There was unmistakable
+irony in her voice. “Very well.... Show her in.”
+
+She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden,
+smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just
+falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold. She chanced
+to look down at them. A strange memory came to her: words that she
+had heard Roscoe read in church. The thing was almost grotesque in its
+association. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who
+bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!”
+
+Ruth Devlin entered, saying, “I have come, to ask you if you will dine
+with us next Monday evening?”
+
+Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: “You see,
+though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;” and she added
+as neutrally and as lightly as she could--“Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion
+have been good enough to say that they will come. Of course, a dinner
+party as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a
+lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can--with the help
+of our friends.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial
+matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip
+more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for. At last she
+said, in the course of the formal talk: “You have travelled much?”
+
+“Yes, that has been my lot,” was the reply; and she leaned back in the
+gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.
+
+“I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean,” said Ruth,
+“but here I remain--what shall I say?--a rustic in a bandbox, seeing the
+world through a pin-hole. That is the way my father puts it. Except, of
+course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful
+mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of
+companions.”
+
+Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively.
+The notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their
+talk, varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet
+in singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words. It was almost
+sardonic in its monotonous persistence.
+
+“Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin,” was the indolent reply.
+“Perhaps the simpler life is the happier. The bandbox is not the worst
+that may come to one--when one is born to it. I am not sure but it is
+the best. I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the
+world, the bandbox is permanently habitable again.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.
+
+On the result of this duel, if Ruth Devlin but knew it, depends her own
+and another’s happiness. It is not improbable, however, that something
+of this was in her mind. She shifted her chair so that her face was not
+so much in the light. But the belt of sunlight was broadening from Mrs.
+Falchion’s feet to her dress.
+
+“You think not?” Ruth asked slowly.
+
+The reply was not important in tone. Mrs. Falchion had picked up a paper
+knife and was bending it to and fro between her fingers.
+
+“I think not. Particularly with a man, who is, we will say, by
+nature, adventurous and explorative. I think if, in some mad moment, I
+determined to write a novel, it should be of such a man. He flies wide
+and far; he sees all; he feeds on novelty; he passes from experience to
+experience--liberal pleasures of mind and sense all the way. Well, he
+tires of Egypt and its flesh-pots. He has seen as he hurried on--I hope
+I am not growing too picturesque--too much of women, too many men. He
+has been unwise--most men are. Perhaps he has been more than unwise; he
+has made a great mistake, a social mistake--or crime--less or more.
+If it is a small one, the remedy is not so difficult. Money, friends,
+adroitness, absence, long retirement, are enough. If a great one, and he
+is sensitive--and sated--he flies, he seeks seclusion. He is afflicted
+with remorse. He is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and
+unadorned life; he is satisfied with simple people. The snuff of the
+burnt candle of enjoyment he calls regret, repentance. He gives himself
+the delights of introspection, and wishes he were a child again--yes,
+indeed it is so, dear Miss Devlin.”
+
+Ruth sat regarding her, her deep eyes glowing. Mrs. Falchion continued:
+“In short, he finds the bandbox, as you call it, suited to his
+renunciations. Its simplicities, which he thinks is regeneration, are
+only new sensations. But--you have often noticed the signification of
+a ‘but,’” she added, smiling, tapping her cheek lightly with the ivory
+knife--“but the hour arrives when the bandbox becomes a prison, when
+the simple hours cloy. Then the ordinary incident is merely gauche, and
+expiation a bore.
+
+“I see by your face that you understand quite what I mean.... Well,
+these things occasionally happen. The great mistake follows the man,
+and, by a greater misery, breaks the misery of the bandbox; or the man
+himself, hating his captivity, becomes reckless, does some mad thing,
+and has a miserable end. Or again, some one who holds the key to his
+mistake comes in from the world he has left, and considers--considers,
+you understand!--whether to leave him to work out his servitude, or,
+mercifully--if he is not altogether blind--permit him the means of
+escape to his old world, to the life to which he was born--away from
+the bandbox and all therein.... I hope I have not tired you--I am sure I
+have.”
+
+Ruth saw the full meaning of Mrs. Falchion’s words. She realised
+that her happiness, his happiness--everything--was at stake. All Mrs.
+Falchion’s old self was battling with her new self. She had determined
+to abide by the result of this meeting. She had spoken in a half gay
+tone, but her words were not everything; the woman herself was there,
+speaking in every feature and glance. Ruth had listened with an
+occasional change of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she
+seemed suddenly to have grown. But her heart was sick and miserable. How
+could it be otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in a
+kind, of allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance? But she
+detected, too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion’s lips,
+a kind of trouble in the face. She noticed it at first vaguely as she
+listened to the music in the other room; but at length she interpreted
+it aright, and she did not despair. She did not then follow her first
+impulse to show that she saw the real meaning of that speech, and rise
+and say, “You are insulting,” and bid her good-day.
+
+After all, where was the ground for the charge of insult? The words had
+been spoken impersonally. So, after a moment, she said, as she drew a
+glove from a hand slightly trembling: “And you honestly think it is the
+case: that one having lived such a life as you describe so unusually,
+would never be satisfied with a simple life?”
+
+“My dear, never--not such a man as I describe. I know the world.”
+
+“But suppose not quite such an one; suppose one that had not been
+so--intense; so much the social gladiator; who had business of life as
+well,”--here the girl grew pale, for this was a kind of talk unfamiliar
+and painful to her, but to be endured for her cause,--“as well as
+‘the flesh-pots of Egypt;’ who had made no wicked mistakes--would he
+necessarily end as you say?”
+
+“I am speaking of the kind of man who had made such mistakes, and he
+would end as I say. Few men, if any, would leave the world for--the
+bandbox, shall I still say? without having a Nemesis.”
+
+“But the Nemesis need not, as you say yourself, be inevitable.
+The person who holds the key of his life, the impersonation of his
+mistake--”
+
+“His CRIMINAL mistake,” Mrs. Falchion interrupted, her hand with the
+ivory knife now moveless in that belt of sunlight across her knees.
+
+“His criminal mistake,” Ruth repeated, wincing--“might not it become
+changed into mercy, and the man be safe?”
+
+“Safe? Perhaps. But he would tire of the pin-hole just the same.... My
+dear, you do not know life.”
+
+“But, Mrs. Falchion,” said the girl, now very bravely, “I know the
+crude elements of justice. That is one plain thing taught here in the
+mountains. We have swift reward and punishment--no hateful things called
+Nemesis. The meanest wretch here in the West, if he has a quarrel,
+avenges himself openly and at once. Actions are rough and ready,
+perhaps, but that is our simple way. Hate is manly--and womanly
+too--when it is open and brave. But when it haunts and shadows, it is
+not understood here.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion sat during this speech, the fingers of one hand idly
+drumming the arm of her chair, as idly as when on board the ‘Fulvia’ she
+listened to me telling that story of Anson and his wife. Outwardly her
+coolness was remarkable. But she was really admiring, and amazed at
+Ruth’s adroitness and courage. She appreciated fully the skilful duel
+that had kept things on the surface, and had committed neither of
+them to anything personal. It was a battle--the tragical battle of a
+drawing-room.
+
+When Ruth had ended, she said slowly: “You speak very earnestly. You do
+your mountains justice; but each world has its code. It is good for some
+men to be followed by a slow hatred--it all depends on themselves. There
+are some who wish to meet their fate and its worst, and others who would
+forget it. The latter are in the most danger always.”
+
+Ruth rose.
+
+She stepped forward slightly, so that her feet also were within
+the sunlight. The other saw this; it appeared to interest her. Ruth
+looked--as such a girl can look--with incredible sincerity into Mrs.
+Falchion’s eyes, and said: “Oh, if I knew such a man, I would be
+sorry--sorry for him; and if I also knew that his was only a mistake and
+not a crime, or, if the crime itself had been repented of, and atonement
+made, I would beg some one--some one better than I--to pray for him. And
+I would go to the person who had his life and career at disposal, and
+would say to her, if it were a woman, oh, remember that it is not he
+alone who would suffer! I would beg that woman--if it were a woman--to
+be merciful, as she one day must ask for mercy.”
+
+The girl as she stood there, all pale, yet glowing with the white light
+of her pain, was beautiful, noble, compelling. Mrs. Falchion now rose
+also. She was altogether in the sunlight now. From the piano in the
+next room came a quick change of accompaniment, and a voice was heard
+singing, as if to the singer’s self, ‘Il balen del suo sorris’. It is
+hard to tell how far such little incidents affected her in what she
+did that afternoon; but they had their influence. She said: “You are
+altruistic--or are you selfish, or both?... And should the woman--if it
+were a woman--yield, and spare the man, what would you do?”
+
+“I would say that she had been merciful and kind, and that one in this
+world would pray for her when she needed prayers most.”
+
+“You mean when she was old,”--Mrs. Falchion shrank a little at the sound
+of her own words. Now her careless abandon was gone; she seemed to be
+following her emotions. “When she was old,” she continued, “and came
+to die? It is horrible to grow old, except one has been a saint--and
+a mother.... And even then--have you ever seen them, the women of
+that Egypt of which we spoke--powdered, smirking over their champagne,
+because they feel for an instant a false pulse of their past?--See how
+eloquent your mountains make me!--I think that would make one hard and
+cruel; and one would need the prayers of a churchful of good women, even
+as good--as you.”
+
+She could not resist a touch of irony in the last words, and Ruth, who
+had been ready to take her hand impulsively, was stung. But she
+replied nothing; and the other, after waiting, added, with a sudden
+and wonderful kindness: “I say what is quite true. Women might dislike
+you--many of them would--though you could not understand why; but you
+are good, and that, I suppose, is the best thing in the world. Yes, you
+are good,” she said musingly, and then she leaned forward and quickly
+kissed the girl’s cheek. “Good-bye,” she said, and then she turned her
+head resolutely away.
+
+They stood there both in the sunlight, both very quiet, but their hearts
+were throbbing with new sensations. Ruth knew that she had conquered,
+and, with her eyes all tearful, she looked steadily, yearningly at the
+woman before her; but she knew it was better she should say little now,
+and, with a motion of the hand in good-bye,--she could do no more,--she
+slowly went to the door. There she paused and looked back, but the other
+was still turned away.
+
+For a minute Mrs. Falchion stood looking at the door through which the
+girl had passed, then she caught close the curtains of the window, and
+threw herself upon the sofa with a sobbing laugh.
+
+“To her--I played the game of mercy to her!” she cried. “And she has his
+love, the love which I rejected once, and which I want now--to my shame!
+A hateful and terrible love. I, who ought to say to him, as I so long
+determined: ‘You shall be destroyed. You killed my sister, poor Alo;
+if not with a knife yourself you killed her heart, and that is just the
+same.’ I never knew until now what a heart is when killed.”
+
+She caught her breast as though it hurt her, and, after a moment,
+continued: “Do hearts always ache so when they love? I was the wife of a
+good man oh! he WAS a good man, who sinned for me. I see it now!--and I
+let him die--die alone!” She shuddered. “Oh, now I see, and I know
+what love such as his can be! I am punished--punished! for my love is
+impossible, horrible.”
+
+There was a long silence, in which she sat looking at the floor, her
+face all grey with pain. At last the door of the room softly opened, and
+Justine entered.
+
+“May I come in, madame?” she said.
+
+“Yes, come, Justine.” The voice was subdued, and there was in it what
+drew the girl swiftly to the side of Mrs. Falchion. She spoke no word,
+but gently undid the other’s hair, and smoothed and brushed it softly.
+
+At last Mrs. Falchion said: “Justine, on Monday we will leave here.”
+
+The girl was surprised, but she replied without comment: “Yes, madame;
+where do we go?”
+
+There was a pause; then: “I do not know. I want to go where I shall get
+rested. A village in Italy or--” she paused.
+
+“Or France, madame?” Justine was eager.
+
+Mrs. Falchion made a gesture of helplessness. “Yes, France will do....
+The way around the world is long, and I am tired.” Minutes passed, and
+then she slowly said: “Justine, we will go to-morrow night.”
+
+“Yes, madame, to-morrow night--and not next Monday.”
+
+There was a strange only half-veiled melancholy in Mrs. Falchion’s next
+words: “Do you think, Justine, that I could be happy anywhere?”
+
+“I think anywhere but here, madame.”
+
+Mrs. Falchion rose to a sitting posture, and looked at the girl fixedly,
+almost fiercely. A crisis was at hand. The pity, gentleness, and honest
+solicitude of Justine’s face conquered her, and her look changed to one
+of understanding and longing for companionship: sorrow swiftly welded
+their friendship.
+
+Before Mrs. Falchion slept that night, she said again: “We will leave
+here to-morrow, Justine, for ever.”
+
+And Justine replied: “Yes, madame, for ever.”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. THE SENTENCE
+
+The next morning Roscoe was quiet and calm, but he looked ten years
+older than when I had first seen him. After breakfast he said to me: “I
+have to go to the valley to pay Phil Boldrick’s friend the money, and to
+see Mr. Devlin. I shall be back, perhaps, by lunchtime. Will you go with
+me, or stay here?”
+
+“I shall try to get some fishing this morning, I fancy,” I said.
+“And possibly I shall idle a good deal, for my time with you here is
+shortening, and I want to have a great store of laziness behind me for
+memory, when I’ve got my nose to the grindstone.”
+
+He turned to the door, and said: “Marmion, I wish you weren’t going. I
+wish that we might be comrades under the same roof till--” He paused and
+smiled strangely.
+
+“Till the finish,” I added, “when we should amble grey-headed, sans
+everything, out of the mad old world? I imagine Miss Belle Treherne
+would scarcely fancy that.... Still, we can be friends just the same.
+Our wives won’t object to an occasional bout of loafing together, will
+they?”
+
+I was determined not to take him too seriously. He said nothing, and in
+a moment he was gone.
+
+I passed the morning idly enough, yet thinking, too, very much about
+my friend. I was anxiously hoping that the telegram from Winnipeg would
+come. About noon it came. It was not known quite in what part of the
+North-west, Madras (under his new name) was, for the corps of mounted
+police had been changed about recently. My letter had, however, been
+forwarded into the wilds.
+
+I saw no immediate way but to go to Mrs. Falchion and make a bold bid
+for his peace. I had promised Madras never to let her know that he was
+alive, but I would break the promise if Madras himself did not come.
+After considerable hesitation I started. It must be remembered that the
+events of the preceding chapter were only known to me afterwards.
+
+Justine Caron was passing through the hall of the hotel when I arrived.
+After greetings, she said that Mrs. Falchion might see me, but that they
+were very busy; they were leaving in the evening for the coast. Here
+was a pleasant revelation! I was so confused with delight at the
+information, that I could think of nothing more sensible to say than
+that the unexpected always happens. By this time we were within Mrs.
+Falchion’s sitting-room. And to my remark, Justine replied “Yes, it is
+so. One has to reckon most with the accidents of life. The expected is
+either pleasant or unpleasant; there is no middle place.”
+
+“You are growing philosophic,” said I playfully. “Monsieur,” she said
+gravely, “I hope as I live and travel, I grow a little wiser.” Still she
+lingered, her hand upon the door.
+
+“I had thought that you were always wise.”
+
+“Oh no, no! How can you say so? I have been very foolish sometimes.”...
+She came back towards me. “If I am wiser I am also happier,” she added.
+
+In that moment we understood each other; that is, I read how unselfish
+this girl could be, and she knew thoroughly the source of my anxiety,
+and was glad that she could remove it.
+
+“I would not speak to any one save you,” she said, “but do you not also
+think that it is good we go?”
+
+“I have been thinking so, but I hesitated to say so,” was my reply.
+
+“You need not hesitate,” she said earnestly. “We have both understood,
+and I know that you are to be trusted.”
+
+“Not always,” I said, remembering that one experience of mine with
+Mrs. Falchion on the ‘Fulvia’. Holding the back of a chair, and looking
+earnestly at me, she continued: “Once, on the vessel, you remember, in
+a hint so very little, I made it appear that madame was selfish.... I
+am sorry. Her heart was asleep. Now, it is awake. She is unselfish. The
+accident of our going away is hers. She goes to leave peace behind.” “I
+am most glad,” said I. “And you think there will be peace?”
+
+“Surely, since this has come, that will come also.”
+
+“And you--Mademoiselle?” I should not have asked that question had I
+known more of the world. It was tactless and unkind.
+
+“For me it is no matter at all. I do not come in anywhere. As I said, I
+am happy.”
+
+And turning quickly, yet not so quickly but that I saw her cheeks were
+flushed, she passed out of the room. In a moment Mrs. Falchion entered.
+There was something new in her carriage, in her person. She came towards
+me, held out her hand, and said, with the same old half-quizzical tone:
+“Have you, with your unerring instinct, guessed that I was leaving, and
+so come to say good-bye?”
+
+“You credit me too highly. No, I came to see you because I had an
+inclination. I did not guess that you were going until Miss Caron told
+me.”
+
+“An inclination to see me is not your usual instinct, is it? Was it some
+special impulse, based on a scientific calculation--at which, I suppose,
+you are an adeptor curiosity? Or had it a purpose? Or were you bored,
+and therefore sought the most startling experience you could conceive?”
+ She deftly rearranged some flowers in a jar.
+
+“I can plead innocence of all directly; I am guilty of all indirectly:
+I was impelled to come. I reasoned--if that is scientific--on what I
+should say if I did come, knowing how inclined I was to--”
+
+“To get beyond my depth,” she interrupted, and she motioned me to a
+chair.
+
+“Well, let it be so,” said I. “I was curious to know what kept you in
+this sylvan, and I fear, to you, half-barbaric spot. I was bored with
+myself; and I had some purpose in coming, or I should not have had the
+impulse.”
+
+She was leaning back in her chair easily, not languidly. She seemed
+reposeful, yet alert.
+
+“How wonderfully you talk!” she said, with good-natured mockery. “You
+are scientifically frank. You were bored with yourself.--Then there
+is some hope for your future wife.... We have had many talks in our
+acquaintance, Dr. Marmion, but none so interesting as this promises to
+be. But now tell me what your purpose was in coming. ‘Purpose’ seems
+portentous, but quite in keeping.”
+
+I noticed here the familiar, almost imperceptible click of the small
+white teeth.
+
+Was I so glad she was going that I was playful, elated? “My purpose,”
+ said I, “has no point now; for even if I were to propose to amuse
+you--I believe that was the old formula--by an idle day somewhere, by an
+excursion, an--”
+
+“An autobiography,” she broke in soothingly.
+
+“Or an autobiography,” I repeated stolidly, “you would not, I fancy, be
+prepared to accept my services. There would be no chance--now that you
+are going away--for me to play the harlequin--”
+
+“Whose office you could do pleasantly if it suited you--these adaptable
+natures!”
+
+“Quite so. But it is all futile now, as I say.”
+
+“Yes, you mentioned that before.--Well?”
+
+“It is well,” I replied, dropping into a more meaning tone.
+
+“You say it patriarchally, but yet flatteringly.” Here she casually
+offered me a flower. I mechanically placed it in my buttonhole. She
+seemed delighted at confusing me. But I kept on firmly.
+
+“I do not think,” I rejoined gravely now, “that there need be any
+flattery between us.”
+
+“Why?--We are not married.”
+
+“That is as radically true as it is epigrammatic,” blurted I.
+
+“And truth is more than epigram?”
+
+“One should delight in truth; I do delight in epigram; there seems
+little chance for choice here.”
+
+It seemed to me that I had said quite what I wished there, but she only
+looked at me enigmatically.
+
+She arranged a flower in her dress as she almost idly replied, though
+she did not look me full in the face as she had done before: “Well,
+then, let me add to your present delight by saying that you may go play
+till doomsday, Dr. Marmion. Your work is done.”
+
+“I do not understand.”
+
+Her eyes were on me now with the directness she could so well use at
+need.
+
+“I did not suppose you would, despite your many lessons at my hands. You
+have been altruistic, Dr. Marmion; I fear critical people would say that
+you meddled. I shall only say that you are inquiring--scientific,
+or feminine--what you please!... You can now yield up your portfolio
+of--foreign affairs--of war--shall I say? and retire into sedative
+habitations, which, believe me, you become best.... What concerns
+me need concern you no longer. The enemy retreats. She offers
+truce--without conditions. She retires.... Is that enough for even you,
+Professor Marmion?”
+
+“Mrs. Falchion,” I said, finding it impossible to understand why she
+had so suddenly determined to go away (for I did not know all the truth
+until afterwards--some of it long afterwards), “it is more than I dared
+to hope for, though less, I know, than you have heart to do if you
+willed so. I know that you hold some power over my friend.”
+
+“Do not think,” she said, “that you have had the least influence. What
+you might think, or may have intended to do, has not moved me in the
+least. I have had wrongs that you do not know. I have changed--that is
+all. I admit I intended to do Galt Roscoe harm.
+
+“I thought he deserved it. That is over. After to-night, it is not
+probable that we shall meet again. I hope that we shall not; as,
+doubtless, is your own mind.”
+
+She kept looking at me with that new deep look which I had seen when she
+first entered the room.
+
+I was moved, and I saw that just at the last she had spoken under
+considerable strain. “Mrs. Falchion,” said I, “I have THOUGHT harder
+things of you than I ever SAID to any one. Pray believe that, and
+believe, also, that I never tried to injure you. For the rest, I can
+make no complaint. You do not like me. I liked you once, and do now,
+when you do not depreciate yourself of purpose.... Pardon me, but I say
+this very humbly too.... I suppose I always shall like you, in spite of
+myself. You are one of the most gifted and fascinating women that I ever
+met. I have been anxious for my friend. I was concerned to make peace
+between you and your husband--”
+
+“The man who WAS my husband,” she interrupted musingly.
+
+“Your husband--whom you so cruelly treated. But I confess I have found
+it impossible to withhold admiration of you.”
+
+For a long time she did not reply, but she never took her eyes off my
+face, as she leaned slightly forward. Then at last she spoke more gently
+than I had ever heard her, and a glow came upon her face.
+
+“I am only human. You have me at advantage. What woman could reply
+unkindly to a speech like that? I admit I thought you held me utterly
+bad and heartless, and it made me bitter.... I had no heart--once. I had
+only a wrong, an injury, which was in my mind; not mine, but another’s,
+and yet mine. Then strange things occurred.... At last I relented. I
+saw that I had better go. Yesterday I saw that; and I am going--that is
+all.... I wished to keep the edge of my intercourse with you sharp
+and uncompanionable to the end; but you have forced me at my weakest
+point....” Here she smiled somewhat painfully.... “Believe me, that is
+the way to turn a woman’s weapon upon herself. You have learned much
+since we first met.... Here is my hand in friendliness, if you care to
+take it; and in good-bye, should we not meet again more formally before
+I go.”
+
+“I wish now that your husband, Boyd Madras, were here,” I said.
+
+She answered nothing, but she did not resent it, only shuddered a
+little.
+
+Our hands grasped silently. I was too choked to speak, and I left her.
+At that moment she blinded me to all her faults. She was a wonderful
+woman.
+
+       .....................
+
+Galt Roscoe had walked slowly along the forest-road towards the valley,
+his mind in that state of calm which, in some, might be thought numbness
+of sensation, in others fortitude--the prerogative of despair. He came
+to the point of land jutting out over the valley, where he had stood
+with Mrs. Falchion, Justine, and myself, on the morning of Phil
+Boldrick’s death.
+
+He looked for a long time, and then, slowly descending the hillside,
+made his way to Mr. Devlin’s office. He found Phil’s pal awaiting him
+there. After a few preliminaries, the money was paid over, and Kilby
+said:
+
+“I’ve been to see his camping-ground. It’s right enough. Viking has done
+it noble.... Now, here’s what I’m goin’ to do: I’m goin’ to open bottles
+for all that’ll drink success to Viking. A place that’s stood by my
+pal, I stand by--but not with his money, mind you! No, that goes to you,
+Padre, for hospital purposes. My gift an’ his.... So, sit down and write
+a receipt, or whatever it’s called, accordin’ to Hoyle, and you’ll do me
+proud.”
+
+Roscoe did as he requested, and handed the money over to Mr. Devlin for
+safe keeping, remarking, at the same time, that the matter should be
+announced on a bulletin outside the office at once.
+
+As Kilby stood chewing the end of a cigar and listening to the brief
+conversation between Roscoe and Mr. Devlin, perplexity crossed his face.
+He said, as Roscoe turned round: “There’s something catchy about your
+voice, Padre. I don’t know what; but it’s familiar like. You never was
+on the Panama level, of course?”
+
+“Never.”
+
+“Nor in Australia?”
+
+“Yes, in 1876.”
+
+“I wasn’t there then.”
+
+Roscoe grew a shade paler, but he was firm and composed. He was
+determined to answer truthfully any question that was asked him,
+wherever it might lead.
+
+“Nor in Samoa?”
+
+There was the slightest pause, and then the reply came:
+
+“Yes, in Samoa.”
+
+“Not a missionary, by gracious! Not a mickonaree in Samoa?”
+
+“No.” He said nothing further. He did not feel bound to incriminate
+himself.
+
+“No? Well, you wasn’t a beachcomber, nor trader, I’ll swear. Was you
+there in the last half of the Seventies? That’s when I was there.”
+
+“Yes.” The reply was quiet.
+
+“By Jingo!” The man’s face was puzzled. He was about to speak again; but
+at that moment two river-drivers--boon companions, who had been hanging
+about the door--urged him to come to the tavern. This distracted him. He
+laughed, and said that he was coming, and then again, though with less
+persistency, questioned Roscoe.. “You don’t remember me, I suppose?”
+
+“No, I never saw you, so far as I know, until yesterday.”
+
+“No? Still, I’ve heard your voice. It keeps swingin’ in my ears; and I
+can’t remember.... I can’t remember!... But we’ll have a spin about it
+again, Padre.” He turned to the impatient men. “All right, bully-boys,
+I’m comin’.”
+
+At the door he turned and looked again at Roscoe with a sharp,
+half-amused scrutiny, then the two parted. Kilby kept his word. He was
+liberal to Viking; and Phil’s memory was drunk, not in silence, many
+times that day. So that when, in the afternoon, he made up his mind
+to keep his engagement with Mrs. Falchion, and left the valley for the
+hills, he was not entirely sober. But he was apparently good-natured. As
+he idled along he talked to himself, and finally broke out into singing:
+
+       “‘Then swing the long boat down the drink,
+        For the lads as pipe to go;
+        But I sink when the ‘Lovely Jane’ does sink,
+        To the mermaids down below.’
+
+       “‘The long boat bides on its strings,’ says we,
+        ‘An’ we bides where the long boat bides;
+        An’ we’ll bluff this equatorial sea,
+        Or swallow its hurricane tides.’
+
+       “But the ‘Lovely Jane’ she didn’t go down,
+        An’ she anchored at the Spicy Isles;
+        An’ she sailed again to Wellington Town--
+        A matter of a thousand miles.”
+
+It will be remembered that this was part of the song sung by Galt Roscoe
+on the Whi-Whi River, the day we rescued Mrs. Falchion and Justine
+Caron. Kilby sang the whole song over to himself until he reached a
+point overlooking the valley. Then he stood silent for a time, his
+glance upon the town. The walk had sobered him a little. “Phil, old
+pal,” he said at last, “you ain’t got the taste of raw whiskey with you
+now. When a man loses a pal he loses a grip on the world equal to all
+that pal’s grip was worth.... I’m drunk, and Phil’s down there among the
+worms--among the worms!... Ah!” he added in disgust, and, dashing his
+hand across his eyes, struck off into the woods again, making his way
+to the summer hotel, where he had promised to meet Mrs. Falchion. He
+inquired for her, creating some astonishment by his uncouth appearance
+and unsteady manner.
+
+He learned from Justine that Mrs. Falchion had gone to see Roscoe, and
+that he would probably meet her if he went that way. This he did. He was
+just about to issue into a partly open space by a ravine near the
+house, when he heard voices, and his own name mentioned. He stilled and
+listened.
+
+“Yes, Galt Roscoe,” said a voice, “Sam Kilby is the man that loved
+Alo--loved her not as you did. He would have given her a home, have made
+her happy, perhaps. You, when Kilby was away, married her--in native
+fashion--which is no marriage--and KILLED her.”
+
+“No, no, I did not kill her--that is not so. As God is my Judge, that is
+not so.”
+
+“You did not kill her with the knife?... Well, I will be honest now, and
+say that I believe that, whatever I may have hinted or said before. But
+you killed her just the same when you left her.”
+
+“Mercy Falchion,” he said desperately, “I will not try to palliate my
+sin. But still I must set myself right with you in so far as I can. The
+very night Alo killed herself I had made up my mind to leave the navy. I
+was going to send in my papers, and come back to Apia, and marry her as
+Englishmen are married. While I remained in the navy I could not, as
+you know, marry her. It would be impossible to an English officer. I
+intended to come back and be regularly married to her.”
+
+“You say that now,” was the cold reply.
+
+“But it is the truth, the truth indeed. Nothing that you might say could
+make me despise myself more than I do; but I have told you all, as I
+shall have to tell it one day before a just God. You have spared me: He
+will not.”
+
+“Gait Roscoe,” she replied, “I am not merciful, nor am I just. I
+intended to injure you, though you will remember I saved your life that
+night by giving you a boat for escape across the bay to the ‘Porcupine’,
+which was then under way. The band on board, you also remember, was
+playing the music of La Grande Duchesse. You fired on the natives who
+followed. Well, Sam Kilby was with them. Your brother officers did
+not know the cause of the trouble. It was not known to any one in Apia
+exactly who it was that Kilby and the natives had tracked from Alo’s
+hut.”
+
+He drew his hand across his forehead dazedly.
+
+“Oh, yes I remember!” he said. “I wish I had faced the matter there and
+then. It would have been better.”
+
+“I doubt that,” she replied. “The natives who saw you coming from
+Alo’s hut did not know you. You wisely came straight to the Consul’s
+office--my father’s house. And I helped you, though Alo, half-caste Alo,
+was--my sister!”
+
+Roscoe started back. “Alo--your--sister!” he exclaimed in horror.
+
+“Yes, though I did not know it till afterwards, not till just before
+my father died. Alo’s father was my father; and her mother had been
+honestly married to my father by a missionary; though for my sake it
+had never been made known. You remember, also, that you carried on your
+relations with Alo secretly, and my father never suspected it was you.”
+
+“Your sister!” Roscoe was white and sick.
+
+“Yes. And now you understand my reason for wishing you ill, and for
+hating you to the end.”
+
+“Yes,” he said despairingly, “I see.”
+
+She was determined to preserve before him the outer coldness of her
+nature to the last.
+
+“Let us reckon together,” she said. “I helped to--in fact, I saved your
+life at Apia. You helped to save my life at the Devil’s Slide. That is
+balanced. You did me--the honour to say that you loved me once. Well,
+one of my race loved you. That is balanced also. My sister’s death
+came through you. There is no balance to that. What shall balance Alo’s
+death? ... I leave you to think that over. It is worth thinking about.
+I shall keep your secret, too. Kilby does not know you. I doubt that he
+ever saw you, though, as I said, he followed you with the natives that
+night in Apia. He was to come to see me to-day. I think I intended to
+tell him all, and shift--the duty--of punishment on his shoulders, which
+I do not doubt he would fulfil. But he shall not know. Do not ask why. I
+have changed my mind, that is all. But still the account remains a
+long one. You will have your lifetime to reckon with it, free from any
+interference on my part; for, if I can help it, we shall never meet
+again in this world--never.... And now, good-bye.”
+
+Without a gesture of farewell she turned and left him standing there, in
+misery and bitterness, but in a thankfulness too, more for Ruth’s sake
+than his own. He raised his arms with a despairing motion, then let them
+drop heavily to his side....
+
+And then two strong hands caught his throat, a body pressed hard against
+him, and he was borne backward--backward--to the cliff!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. AFTER THE STORM
+
+I was sitting on the verandah, writing a letter to Belle Treherne. The
+substantial peace of a mountain evening was on me. The air was clear,
+and full of the scent of the pines and cedars, and the rumble of the
+rapids came musically down the canon. I lifted my head and saw an eagle
+sailing away to the snow-topped peak of Trinity, and then turned to
+watch the orioles in the trees. The hour was delightful. It made me
+feel how grave mere living is, how noble even the meanest of us becomes
+sometimes--in those big moments when we think the world was built for
+us. It is half egotism, half divinity; but why quarrel with it?
+
+I was young, ambitious; and Love and I were at that moment the only
+figures in the universe really deserving attention! I looked on down
+a lane of cedars before me, seeing in imagination a long procession of
+pleasant things; of--As I looked, another procession moved through the
+creatures of my dreams, so that they shrank away timidly, then utterly,
+and this new procession came on and on, until--I suddenly rose, and
+started forward fearfully, to see--unhappy reality!--the body of Galt
+Roscoe carried towards me.
+
+Then a cold wind seemed to blow from the glacier above and killed all
+the summer. A man whispered to me: “We found him at the bottom of the
+ravine yonder. He’d fallen over, I suppose.”
+
+I felt his heart. “He is not dead, thank God!” I said.
+
+“No, sir,” said the other, “but he’s all smashed.” They brought him
+in and laid him on his bed. I sent one of the party for the doctor at
+Viking, and myself set to work, with what appliances I had, to deal with
+the dreadful injuries. When the doctor came, together we made him into
+the semblance of a man again. His face was but slightly injured, though
+his head had received severe hurts. I think that I alone saw the marks
+on his throat; and I hid them. I guessed the cause, but held my peace.
+
+I had sent round at once to James Devlin (but asked him not to come till
+morning), and also to Mrs. Falchion; but I begged her not to come at
+all. I might have spared her that; for, as I afterwards knew, she had
+no intention of coming. She had learned of the accident on her way to
+Viking, and had turned back; but only to wait and know the worst or the
+best.
+
+About midnight I was left alone with Roscoe. Once, earlier in the
+evening, he had recognised me and smiled faintly, but I had shaken
+my head, and he had said nothing. Now, however, he was looking at me
+earnestly. I did not speak. What he had to tell me was best told in his
+own time.
+
+At last he said faintly: “Marmion, shall I die soon?”
+
+I knew that frankness was best, and I replied: “I cannot tell, Roscoe.
+There is a chance of your living.”
+
+He moved his head sadly. “A very faint chance?”
+
+“Yes, a faint one, but--”
+
+“Yes? ‘But’?” He looked at me as though he wished it over.
+
+“But it rests with you whether the chance is worth anything. If you are
+content to die, it is gone.”
+
+“I am content to die,” he replied.
+
+“And there,” said I, “you are wrong and selfish. You have Ruth to live
+for. Besides, if you are given the chance, you commit suicide if you do
+not take it.”
+
+There was a long pause, and then he said: “You are right; I will live if
+I can, Marmion.”
+
+“And now YOU are right.” I nodded soothingly to him, and then asked him
+to talk no more; for I knew that fever would soon come on.
+
+He lay for a moment silent, but at length whispered: “Did you know
+it was not a fall I had?” He raised his chin and stretched his throat
+slightly, with a kind of trembling.
+
+“I thought it was not a fall,” I replied.
+
+“It was Phil’s pal--Kilby.”
+
+“I thought that.”
+
+“How could you--think it? Did--others--think so?” he asked anxiously.
+
+“No, not others; I alone. They thought it accident; they could have no
+ground for suspicion. But I had; and, besides, there were marks on your
+throat.”
+
+“Nothing must happen to him, you understand. He had been drinking,
+and--and he was justified. I wronged him in Samoa, him and Mrs.
+Falchion.”
+
+I nodded and put my fingers on my lips.
+
+Again there was silence. I sat and watched him, his eyes closed, his
+body was motionless. He slept for hours so, and then he waked rather
+sharply, and said half deliriously: “I could have dragged him with me,
+Marmion.”
+
+“But you did not. Yes, I understand. Go to sleep again, Roscoe.”
+
+Later on the fever came, and he moaned and moved his head about his
+pillow. He could not move his body--it was too much injured.
+
+There was a source of fear in Kilby. Would he recklessly announce what
+he had done, and the cause of it? After thinking it over and over, I
+concluded that he would not disclose his crimes. My conclusions were
+right, as after events showed.
+
+As for Roscoe, I feared that if he lived he must go through life maimed.
+He had a private income; therefore if he determined to work no more in
+the ministry, he would, at least, have the comforts of life.
+
+Ruth Devlin came. I went to Roscoe and told him that she wished to
+see him. He smiled sorrowfully and said: “To what end, Marmion? I am a
+drifting wreck. It will only shock her.” I think he thought she would
+not love him now if he lived--a crippled man.
+
+“But is this noble? Is it just to her?” said I.
+
+After a long time he answered: “You are right again, quite right. I am
+selfish. When one is shaking between life and death, one thinks most of
+one’s self.”
+
+“She will help to bring you back from those places, Roscoe.”
+
+“If I am delirious ever, do not let her come, will you, Marmion? Promise
+me that.” I promised.
+
+I went to her. She was very calm and womanly. She entered the room, went
+quietly to his bedside, and, sitting down, took his hand. Her smile was
+pitiful and anxious, but her words were brave.
+
+“My dearest,” she said, “I am so sorry. But you will soon be well, so we
+must be as patient and cheerful as we can.”
+
+His eyes answered, but he did not speak. She leaned over and kissed his
+cheek. Then he said: “I hope I may get well.”
+
+“This was the shadow over you,” she ventured. “This was your
+presentiment of trouble--this accident.”
+
+“Yes, this was the shadow.”
+
+Some sharp thought seemed to move her, for her eyes grew suddenly hard,
+and she stooped and whispered: “Was SHE there--when--it happened, Galt?”
+
+He shrank from the question, but he said immediately: “No, she was not
+there.”
+
+“I am glad,” she added, “that it was only an accident.”
+
+Her eyes grew clear of their momentary hardness. There is nothing in
+life like the anger of one woman against another concerning a man.
+
+Justine Caron came to the house, pale and anxious, to inquire. Mrs.
+Falchion, she said, was not going away until she knew how Mr. Roscoe’s
+illness would turn.
+
+“Miss Caron,” I said to her, “do you not think it better that she should
+go?”
+
+“Yes, for him; but she grieves now.”
+
+“For him?”
+
+“Not alone for him,” was the reply. There was a pause, and then she
+continued: “Madame told me to say to you that she did not wish Mr.
+Roscoe to know that she was still here.”
+
+I assured her that I understood, and then she added mournfully: “I
+cannot help you now, monsieur, as I did on board the ‘Fulvia’. But he
+will be better cared for in Miss Devlin’s hands, the poor lady!... Do
+you think that he will live?”
+
+“I hope so. I am not sure.”
+
+Her eyes went to tears; and then I tried to speak more encouragingly.
+
+All day people came to inquire, chief among them Mr. Devlin, whose big
+heart split itself in humanity and compassion. “The price of the big
+mill for the guarantee of his life!” he said over and over again. “We
+can’t afford to let him go.”
+
+Although I should have been on my way back to Toronto, I determined to
+stay until Roscoe was entirely out of danger. It was singular, but in
+this illness, though the fever was high, he never was delirious. It
+would almost seem as if, having paid his penalty, the brain was at rest.
+
+While Roscoe hovered between life and death, Mr. Devlin, who persisted
+that he would not die, was planning for a new hospital and a new church,
+of which Roscoe should be president and padre respectively. But the
+suspense to us all, for many days, was very great; until, one morning
+when the birds were waking the cedars, and the snow on Mount Trinity
+was flashing coolness down the hot valley, he waked and said to me:
+“Marmion, old friend; it is morning at last.”
+
+“Yes, it is morning,” said I. “And you are going to live now? You are
+going to be reasonable and give the earth another chance?”
+
+“Yes, I believe I shall live now.”
+
+To cheer him, I told him what Mr. Devlin intended and had planned;
+how river-drivers and salmon-fishers came every day from the valley to
+inquire after him. I did not tell him that there had been one or two
+disturbances between the river-drivers and the salmon-fishers. I tried
+to let him see that there need be no fresh change in his life. At length
+he interrupted me.
+
+“Marmion,” he said, “I understand what you mean. It would be cowardly of
+me to leave here now if I were a whole man. I am true in intention, God
+knows, but I must carry a crippled arm for the rest of my life, must
+I not?.... and a crippled Padre is not the kind of man for this place.
+They want men straight on their feet.”
+
+“Do you think,” I answered, “that they will not be able to stand the
+test? You gave them--shall I say it?--a crippled mind before; you give
+them a crippled body now. Well, where do you think the odds lie? I
+should fancy with you as you are.”
+
+There was a long silence in which neither of us moved. At last he turned
+his face towards the window, and, not looking at me, said lingeringly:
+“This is a pleasant place.”
+
+I knew that he would remain.
+
+I had not seen Mrs. Falchion during Roscoe’s illness; but every day
+Justine came and inquired, or a messenger was sent. And when, this
+fortunate day, Justine herself came, and I told her that the crisis was
+past, she seemed infinitely relieved and happy. Then she said:
+
+“Madame has been ill these three days also; but now I think she will be
+better; and we shall go soon.”
+
+“Ask her,” said I, “not to go yet for a few days. Press it as a favour
+to me.” Then, on second thought, I sat down and wrote Mrs. Falchion a
+note, hinting that there were grave reasons why she should stay a
+little longer: things connected with her own happiness. Truth is, I had
+received a note that morning which had excited me. It referred to Mrs.
+Falchion. For I was an arch-plotter--or had been.
+
+I received a note in reply which said that she would do as I wished.
+Meanwhile I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of some one.
+
+That night a letter came to Roscoe. After reading it shrinkingly he
+handed it to me. It said briefly:
+
+   I’m not sorry I did it, but I’m glad I hevn’t killed you. I was
+   drunk and mad. If I hadn’t hurt you, I’d never hev forgive myself.
+   I reckon now, there’s no need to do any forgivin’ either side.
+   We’re square--though maybe you didn’t kill her after all. Mrs.
+   Falchion says you didn’t. But you hurt her. Well, I’ve hurt you.
+   And you will never hear no more of Phil’s pal from Danger Mountain.
+
+Immediately after sunset of this night, a storm swept suddenly down the
+mountains, and prevented Ruth and her father from going to Viking. I
+left them talking to Roscoe, he wearing such a look on his face as I
+like to remember now, free from distress of mind--so much more painful
+than distress of body. As I was leaving the room, I looked back and saw
+Ruth sitting on a stool beside Roscoe’s chair, holding the unmaimed hand
+in hers; the father’s face shining with pleasure and pride. Before I
+went out, I turned again to look at them, and, as I did so, my eye fell
+on the window against which the wind and rain were beating. And through
+the wet there appeared a face, shocking in its paleness and misery--the
+face of Mrs. Falchion. Only for an instant, and then it was gone.
+
+I opened the door and went out upon the verandah. As I did so, there
+was a flash of lightning, and in that flash a figure hurried by me. One
+moment, and there was another flash; and I saw the figure in the beating
+rain, making toward the precipice.
+
+Then I heard a cry, not loud, but full of entreaty and sorrow. I moved
+quickly toward it. In another white gleam I saw Justine with her
+arms about the figure, holding it back from the abyss. She said with
+incredible pleading:
+
+“No, no, madame, not that! It is wicked--wicked.”
+
+I came and stood beside them.
+
+The figure sank upon the ground and buried a pitiful face in the wet
+grass.
+
+Justine leaned over her.
+
+She sobbed as one whose harvest of the past is all tears. Nothing human
+could comfort her yet.
+
+I think she did not know that I was there. Justine lifted her face to
+me, appealing.
+
+I turned and stole silently away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. IN PORT
+
+That night I could not rest. It was impossible to rid myself of the
+picture of Mrs. Falchion as I had seen her by the precipice in the
+storm. What I had dared to hope for had come. She had been awakened; and
+with the awakening had risen a new understanding of her own life and
+the lives of others. The storm of wind and rain that had swept down the
+ravine was not wilder than her passions when I left her with Justine in
+the dark night.
+
+All had gone well where the worst might have been. Roscoe’s happiness
+was saved to him. He felt that the accident to him was the penalty
+he paid for the error of his past; but in the crash of penalties Mrs.
+Falchion, too, was suffering; and, so far as she knew, must carry with
+her the remorse of having seen, without mercy, her husband sink to a
+suicide’s grave. I knew that she was paying a great price now for a
+mistaken past. I wished that I might make her remorse and sorrow less.
+There was a way, but I was not sure that all would be as I wished. Since
+a certain dreadful day on the ‘Fulvia’, Hungerford and I had held a
+secret in our hands. When it seemed that Mrs. Falchion would bring a
+great trouble and shame into Roscoe’s life, I determined to use the
+secret. It must be used now only for Mrs. Falchion’s good. As I said
+in the last chapter, I had received word that somebody was coming whose
+presence must take a large place in the drama of these events: and I
+hoped the best.
+
+Until morning I lay and planned the best way to bring things to a
+successful issue. The morning came--beautiful after a mad night. Soon
+after I got up I received a note, brought by a boy from Viking, which
+gave me a thrill of excitement. The note requested me to go to Sunburst.
+But first I sent a note to Mrs. Falchion, begging her in the name of our
+new friendship not to leave the mountains that day. I also asked that
+she would meet me in Sunburst that evening at eight o’clock, at a place
+indicated by me. I asked for a reply by the messenger I sent, and urged
+her to ask no questions, but to trust me as one who only wished to do
+her a great service, as I hoped her compliance would make possible. I
+waited for the reply, and it bore but the one word--“Yes.”
+
+Greatly pleased, I started down the valley. It was still early when I
+reached Sunburst. I went directly to the little tavern from whence the
+note had come, and remained an hour or more. The result of that hour’s
+conversation with the writer of the note was memorable, as was the hour
+itself. I began to hope fondly for the success of my scheme.
+
+From the tavern I went to the village, with an elation hardly disturbed
+by the fact that many of the salmon-fishers were sullen, because of
+foolish depredations committed the evening before by idle river-men and
+mill-hands of Viking. Had I not been so occupied with Mrs. Falchion and
+an event wherein she must figure, I should have taken more seriously the
+mutterings of the half-breeds, the moroseness of the Indians, and the
+nervous threatenings of the white fishers: the more so because I knew
+that Mr. Devlin had started early that morning for the Pacific Coast,
+and would not be back for some days.
+
+No two classes of people could be more unlike than the salmon-fishers of
+Sunburst and the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking. The life of the
+river-men was exciting, hardy, and perilous; tending to boisterousness,
+recklessness, daring, and wild humour: that of the salmon-fishers was
+cheerful, picturesque, infrequently dangerous, mostly simple and
+quiet. The river-driver chose to spend his idle hours in crude, rough
+sprightliness; the salmon-fisher loved to lie upon the shore and listen
+to the village story-teller,--almost official when successful,--who
+played upon the credulity and imagination of his listeners. The
+river-driver loved excitement for its own sake, and behind his
+boisterousness there was little evil. When the salmon-fisher was roused,
+his anger became desperately serious. It was not his practice to be
+boisterous for the sake of boisterousness.
+
+All this worked for a crisis.
+
+From Sunburst I went over to Viking, and for a time watched a handful of
+river-drivers upon a little island in the centre of the river, working
+to loosen some logs and timber and foist them into the water, to be
+driven down to the mill. I stood interested, because I had nothing to
+do of any moment for a couple of hours. I asked an Indian on the bank
+to take his canoe and paddle me over to the island. He did so. I do not
+know why I did not go alone; but the Indian was near me, his canoe was
+at his hand, and I did the thing almost mechanically. I landed on the
+island and watched with great interest the men as they pried, twisted
+and tumbled the pile to get at the key-log which, found and loosened,
+would send the heap into the water.
+
+I was sorry I brought the Indian with me, for though the river-drivers
+stopped their wild sing-song cry for a moment to call a “How!” at me,
+they presently began to toss jeering words at the Indian. They had
+recognised him--I had not--as a salmon-fisher and one of the Siwash
+tribe from Sunburst. He remained perfectly silent, but I could see
+sullenness growing on his face. He appeared to take no notice of his
+scornful entertainers, but, instead of edging away, came nearer and
+nearer to the tangle of logs--came, indeed, very close to me, as I stood
+watching four or five men, with the foreman close by, working at a huge
+timber. At a certain moment the foreman was in a kind of hollow. Just
+behind him, near to the Indian, was a great log, which, if loosened by
+a slight impulse, must fall into the hollow where the foreman stood.
+The foreman had his face to us; the backs of the other men were on
+us. Suddenly the foreman gave a frightened cry, and I saw at the same
+instant the Indian’s foot thrust out upon the big log. Before the
+foreman had time to get out of the hollow, it slid down, caught him just
+above the ankle and broke the leg.
+
+I wheeled, to see the Indian in his canoe making for the shore. He was
+followed by the curses of the foreman and the gang. The foreman was
+very quiet, but I could see that there was danger in his eye, and
+the exclamations of the men satisfied me that they were planning an
+inter-municipal difficulty.
+
+I improvised bandages, set the leg directly, and in a little while we
+got to the shore on a hastily constructed raft. After seeing the foreman
+safely cared for, and giving Mr. Devlin’s manager the facts of the
+occurrence, more than sated with my morning’s experience, I climbed the
+mountain side, and took refuge from the heat in the coolness of Roscoe’s
+rooms.
+
+In the afternoon I received a note from Mrs. Falchion, saying that on
+the following day she would start for the coast; that her luggage
+would be taken to Sunburst at once; and that, her engagement with me
+fulfilled, she would spend a night there, not returning again to the
+hills. I was preparing for my own departure, and was kept very busy
+until evening. Then I went quickly down into the valley,--for I was
+late,--and trudged eagerly on to Sunburst. As I neared the village I
+saw that there were fewer lights--torches and fires--than usual on the
+river. I noticed also that there were very few fishers on the banks or
+in the river. But still the village seemed noisy, and, although it
+was dusk, I could make out much stir in the one street along which the
+cottages and huts ambled for nearly a mile.
+
+All at once it came to me strongly that the friction between the two
+villages had consummated in the foreman’s injury, and was here coming to
+a painful crisis. My suspicions had good grounds. As I hurried on I saw
+that the lights usually set on the banks of the river were scattered
+through the town. Bonfires were being lighted, and torches were flaring
+in front of the Indian huts. Coming closer, I saw excited groups of
+Indians, half-breeds, and white men moving here and there; and then, all
+at once, there came a cry--a kind of roar--from farther up the village,
+and the men gathered themselves together, seizing guns, sticks, irons,
+and other weapons, and ran up the street. I understood. I was moderately
+swift of foot those days. I came quickly after them, and passed them. As
+I did so I inquired of one or two fishers what was the trouble.
+
+They told me, as I had guessed, that they expected an attack on the
+village by the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.
+
+The situation was critical. I could foresee a catastrophe which would
+for ever unsettle the two towns, and give the valley an unenviable
+reputation. I was certain that, if Roscoe or Mr. Devlin were present, a
+prohibitive influence could be brought to bear; that some one of strong
+will could stand, as it were, in the gap between them, and prevent a
+pitched battle, and, possibly, bloodshed. I was sure that at Viking the
+river-drivers had laid their plans so secretly that the news of them
+would scarcely reach the ears of the manager of the mill, and that,
+therefore, his influence, as Mr. Devlin’s, would not be available.
+
+Remained only myself--as I first thought. I was unknown to a great
+number of the men of both villages, and familiar with but very
+few--chiefly those with whom I had a gossiping acquaintance. Yet,
+somehow, I felt that if I could but get a half-dozen men to take a firm
+stand with me, I might hold the rioters in check.
+
+As I ran by the side of the excitable fishers, I urged upon one or
+two of them the wisdom and duty of preventing a conflict. Their reply
+was--and it was very convincing--that they were not forcing a struggle,
+but were being attacked, and in the case would fight. My hasty
+persuasion produced but little result. But I kept thinking hard.
+Suddenly it came to me that I could place my hand upon a man whose
+instincts in the matter would be the same as mine; who had authority;
+knew the world; had been in dangerous positions in his lifetime; and
+owed me something. I was sure that I could depend upon him: the more so
+that once frail of body he had developed into a strong, well-controlled
+man.
+
+Even as I thought of him, I was within a few rods of the house where he
+was. I looked, and saw him standing in the doorway. I ran and called
+to him. He instantly joined me, and we ran on together: the fishermen
+shouting loudly as they watched the river-drivers come armed down the
+hill-slope into the village.
+
+I hastily explained the situation to my friend, and told him what we
+must do. A word or two assured me of all I wished to know. We reached
+the scene of the disorder. The fishermen were bunched together,
+the river on the one side, the houses and hills on the other. The
+river-drivers had halted not many yards away, cool, determined and
+quiet, save for a little muttering. In their red shirts, top boots,
+many of them with long black hair and brass earrings, they looked a most
+formidable crowd. They had evidently taken the matter seriously, and
+were come with the intention of carrying their point, whatever it might
+be. Just as we reached the space between the two parties, the massive
+leader of the river-drivers stepped forward, and in a rough but
+collected voice said that they had come determined to fight, if fighting
+were necessary, but that they knew what the end of the conflict would
+be, and they did not wish to obliterate Sunburst entirely if Sunburst
+accepted the conditions of peace.
+
+There seemed no leader to the fishermen.
+
+My friend said to me quickly: “You speak first.” Instantly I stepped
+forward and demanded to know what the terms of peace were. As soon as I
+did so, there were harsh mutterings among the river-drivers. I explained
+at once, waving back some of the fisher-men who were clamouring about
+me, that I had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel; that I happened
+to be where I was by accident, as I had happened by accident to see the
+difficulty of the morning. But I said that it was the duty of every man
+who was a good citizen and respected the laws of his country, to see, in
+so far as it was possible, that there should be no breach of those laws.
+I spoke in a clear strong voice, and I think I produced some effect
+upon both parties to the quarrel. The reply of the leader was almost
+immediate. He said that all they demanded was the Indian who had so
+treacherously injured the foreman of their gangs. I saw the position at
+once, and was dumfounded. For a moment I did not speak.
+
+I was not prepared for the scene that immediately followed. Some one
+broke through the crowd at my back, rushed past me, and stood between
+the two forces. It was the Indian who had injured the foreman. He was
+naked to the waist, and painted and feathered after the manner of his
+tribe going to battle. There was a wild light in his eye, but he had no
+weapon. He folded his arms across his breast, and said:
+
+“Well, you want me. Here I am. I will fight with any man all alone,
+without a gun or arrow or anything. I will fight with my arms--to kill.”
+
+I saw revolvers raised at him instantly, but at that the man, my friend,
+who stood beside me, sprang in front of the Indian.
+
+“Stop--stop!” he cried. “In the name of the law! I am a sergeant of
+the mounted police of Canada. My jurisdiction extends from Winnipeg to
+Vancouver. You cannot have this man except over my body: and for my body
+every one of you will pay with your lives; for every blow struck this
+night, there will be a hundred blows struck upon the river-drivers
+and mill-hands of this valley. Take care! Behind me is the law of the
+land--her police and her soldiery.”
+
+He paused. There was almost complete silence. He continued:
+
+“This man is my prisoner; I arrest him.”--He put his hand upon the
+Indian’s shoulder.--“For the crime he committed this morning he shall
+pay: but to the law, not to you. Put up your revolvers, men. Go back to
+Viking. Don’t risk your lives; don’t break the law and make yourselves
+criminals and outlaws. Is it worth it? Be men. You have been the
+aggressors. There isn’t one of you but feels that justice which is the
+boast of every man of the West. You wanted to avenge the crime of this
+morning. But the vengeance is the law’s.--Stand back--Stand back!” he
+said, and drew his revolver, as the leader of the river-drivers stepped
+forward. “I will kill the first man that tries to lay his hand upon my
+prisoner. Don’t be mad. I am not one man, I am a whole country.”
+
+I shall never forget the thrill that passed through me as I saw a man
+who, but a handful of months before, was neck deep in his grave, now
+blossomed out into a strong, defiant soldier.
+
+There was a pause. At last the leader of the river-drivers spoke. “See,”
+ he said, “Sergeant, I guess you’re right. You’re a man, so help me! Say,
+boys,” he continued, turning to his followers, “let him have the Injin.
+I guess he’s earned him.”
+
+So saying he wheeled, the men with him, and they tramped up the slope
+again on their way back to Viking. The man who had achieved this turned
+upon the fishers.
+
+“Back to your homes!” he said. “Be thankful that blood was not shed here
+to-night, and let this be a lesson to you. Now, go.”
+
+The crowd turned, slowly shambled down the riverside, and left us three
+standing there.
+
+But not alone. Out of the shadow of one of the houses came two women.
+They stepped forward into the light of the bonfire burning near us. One
+of the women was very pale.
+
+It was Mrs. Falchion.
+
+I touched the arm of the man standing beside me. He wheeled and saw her
+also. A cry broke from his lips, but he stood still. A whole life-time
+of sorrow, trouble, and love looked out of his eyes. Mrs. Falchion came
+nearer. Clasping her hands upon her breast, she peered up into his face,
+and gasped:
+
+“Oh--oh--I thought that you were drowned--and dead! I saw you buried
+in the sea. No--no--it cannot be you! I have heard and seen all within
+these past few minutes. YOU are so strong and brave, so great a man!...
+Oh, tell me, tell me, are you in truth my husband?”
+
+He spoke.
+
+“I was your husband, Mercy Falchion. I was drowned, but this man”--he
+turned and touched my shoulder--“this man brought me back to life.
+I wanted to be dead to the world. I begged him to keep my secret. A
+sailor’s corpse was buried in my shroud, and I lived. At Aden I stole
+from the boat in the night. I came to America--to Canada--to begin a new
+life under a new name, never to see you again.... Do not, do not speak
+to me--unless I am not to lose you again; unless I am to know that now
+you forgive me--that you forgive me--and wish me to live--my wife!”
+
+She put both her hands out, a strange, sorrowful look in her eyes, and
+said: “I have sinned--I have sinned.”
+
+He took her hands in his.
+
+“I know,” he said, “that you do not love me yet; but you may some day.”
+
+“No,” she said, “I do not love you; but.... I am glad you live. Let
+us--go home.”
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A heart-break for that kind is their salvation
+     A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains
+     A man you could bank on, and draw your interest reg’lar
+     Aboriginal dispersion
+     All he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious (Scientist)
+     And even envy praised her
+     Audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or window
+     But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!
+     Death is a magnificent ally; it untangles knots
+     Death is not the worst of evils
+     Engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady than in the man
+     Every true woman is a mother, though she have no child
+     Fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves
+     For a man having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks
+     He didn’t always side with the majority
+     He had neither self-consciousness nor fear
+     Her own suffering always set her laughing at herself
+     It is difficult to be idle--and important too
+     It is hard to be polite to cowards
+     Jews everywhere treated worse than the Chinaman
+     Learned what fools we mortals be
+     Love can outlive slander
+     Men do not steal up here: that is the unpardonable crime
+     One always buys back the past at a tremendous price
+     One doesn’t choose to worry
+     Saying uncomfortable things in a deferential way
+     She had provoked love, but had never given it
+     Slow-footed hours wandered by, leaving apathy in their train
+     “Still the end of your existence,” I rejoined--“to be amused?”
+      That anxious civility which beauty can inspire
+     The happy scene of the play before the villain comes in
+     The ravings of a sick man are not always counted ravings
+     The sea is a great breeder of friendship
+     The tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias
+     The threshold of an acknowledged love
+     There are things we repent of which cannot be repaired
+     There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world
+     Think that a woman gives the heart for pleasant weather only?
+     Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart
+     Time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him
+     Vanity; and from this much feminine hatred springs
+     Very severe on those who do not pretend to be good
+     What is gone is gone Graves are idolatry
+     Who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery
+     Would look back and not remember that she had a childhood
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Mrs. Falchion, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
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diff --git a/6194-0.zip b/6194-0.zip
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Mrs. Falchion, by Gilbert Parker
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd7; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    pre     { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mrs. Falchion, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
+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: Mrs. Falchion, Complete
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+
+Release Date: October 17, 2006 [EBook #6194]
+Last Updated: August 26, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. FALCHION, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger and Andrew Sly
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <h1>
+      MRS. FALCHION
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      By Gilbert Parker
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_INTR" id="link2H_INTR">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      INTRODUCTION
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      This novel was written in the days of the three-decker, and it went out to
+      sea as such. Every novel of mine written until 1893 was published in two
+      or three volumes, and the sale to the libraries was greater than the sale
+      to the general public. This book was begun in 1892 at the time when the
+      Pierre stories were being written, and it was finished in the summer of
+      1893. It did not appear serially; indeed, I made no attempt at serial
+      publication. I had a feeling that as it was to be my first novel, it
+      should be judged as a whole and taken at a gasp, as it were. I believe
+      that the reader of Messrs. Methuen &amp; Company was not disposed to
+      publish the book, but Mr. Methuen himself (or Mr. Stedman as he was then
+      called) was impressed by it and gave it his friendly confidence. He was
+      certain that it would arrest the attention of the critics and of the
+      public, whether it became popular or not. I have not a set of those
+      original three volumes. I wish I had, because they won for me an almost
+      unhoped-for pleasure. The &lsquo;Daily Chronicle&rsquo; gave the volumes over a column
+      of review, and headed the notice, &ldquo;A Coming Novelist.&rdquo; The &lsquo;Athenaeum&rsquo; 
+      said that &lsquo;Mrs. Falchion&rsquo; was a splendid study of character; &lsquo;The Pall
+      Mall Gazette&rsquo; said that the writing was as good as anything that had been
+      done in our time, while at the same time it took rather a dark view of my
+      future as a novelist, because it said I had not probed deep enough into
+      the wounds of character which I had inflicted. The article was written by
+      Mr. George W. Stevens, and he was right in saying that I had not probed
+      deep enough. Few very young men&mdash;and I was very young then&mdash;do
+      probe very deeply. At the appearance of &lsquo;When Valmond Came to Pontiac&rsquo;,
+      however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my future was assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
+      &lsquo;Mrs. Falchion&rsquo; was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
+      been preceded by a short novel called &lsquo;The Chief Factor&rsquo;, since rescued
+      from publication and never published in book form in England. I realised
+      when I had written &lsquo;Mrs. Falchion&rsquo; that I had not found my metier, and I
+      was fearful of complete failure. I had come but a few years before from
+      the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
+      write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
+      still in me was the life which &lsquo;Pierre and His People&rsquo;, &lsquo;The Seats of the
+      Mighty&rsquo;, &lsquo;The Trail of the Sword&rsquo;, &lsquo;The Lane That Had no Turning&rsquo;, and
+      &lsquo;The Right of Way&rsquo; portrayed. That life was destined to give me an assured
+      place and public, while &lsquo;Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;, and the South Sea stories
+      published in various journals before the time of its production, and
+      indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
+      attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
+      as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
+      study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
+      to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the mind
+      of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central figure
+      in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge of being a mere
+      novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, &ldquo;an impudent melodrama,
+      which has its own fascinations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise in it
+      an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of treatment&mdash;to
+      combine analysis of character and motive with arresting episode. It is a
+      difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done on my part wholly
+      by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that this tendency has
+      run through all my works. It represents the elements of romanticism and of
+      realism in one, and that kind of representation has its dangers, to say
+      nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes alienates the reader, who by
+      instinct and preference is a realist, and it troubles the reader who wants
+      to read for a story alone, who cares for what a character does, and not
+      for what a character is or says, except in so far as it emphasises what it
+      does. One has to work, however, in one&rsquo;s own way, after one&rsquo;s own
+      idiosyncrasies, and here is the book that represents one of my own
+      idiosyncrasies in its most primitive form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p class="toc">
+        <big><b>CONTENTS</b></big>
+      </p>
+      <p>
+        <br /> <a href="#link2H_INTR"> INTRODUCTION </a><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>BOOK I.</b> </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<b>BELOW THE SUN
+        LINE</b> <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER I. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        GATES OF THE SEA <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER II. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"MOTLEY
+        IS YOUR ONLY WEAR&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER III. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;A
+        TALE OF NO MAN&rsquo;S SEA <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER IV.
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER V. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;ACCUSING FACES <br /><br />
+        <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER VI. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;MUMMERS ALL <br /><br />
+        <a href="#link2HCH0007"> CHAPTER VII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE WHEEL COMES
+        FULL CIRCLE <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0008"> CHAPTER VIII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;A
+        BRIDGE OF PERIL <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0009"> CHAPTER IX. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;"THE
+        PROGRESS OF THE SUNS&rdquo; <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0010"> CHAPTER X.
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;BETWEEN DAY AND DARK <br /><br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2H_4_0013"> <b>BOOK II.</b> </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<b>THE SLOPE OF
+        THE PACIFIC</b> <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0011"> CHAPTER XI. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;AMONG
+        THE HILLS OF GOD <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0012"> CHAPTER XII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        WHIRLIGIG OF TIME <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0013"> CHAPTER XIII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        SONG OF THE SAW <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0014"> CHAPTER XIV. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        PATH OF THE EAGLE <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0015"> CHAPTER XV. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN
+        THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0016"> CHAPTER XVI.
+        </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;A DUEL IN ARCADY <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0017">
+        CHAPTER XVII. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;RIDING THE REEFS <br /><br /> <a
+        href="#link2HCH0018"> CHAPTER XVIII. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        STRINGS OF DESTINY <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0019"> CHAPTER XIX. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;THE
+        SENTENCE <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0020"> CHAPTER XX. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;AFTER
+        THE STORM <br /><br /> <a href="#link2HCH0021"> CHAPTER XXI. </a>&nbsp;&nbsp;IN
+        PORT <br /><br />
+      </p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      BOOK I. BELOW THE SUN LINE
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER I. THE GATES OF THE SEA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The part I played in Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s career was not very noble, but I
+      shall set it forth plainly here, else I could not have the boldness to
+      write of her faults or those of others. Of my own history little need be
+      said in preface. Soon after graduating with honours as a physician, I was
+      offered a professional post in a college of medicine in Canada. It was
+      difficult to establish a practice in medicine without some capital, else I
+      had remained in London; and, being in need of instant means, I gladly
+      accepted the offer. But six months were to intervene before the beginning
+      of my duties&mdash;how to fill that time profitably was the question. I
+      longed to travel, having scarcely been out of England during my life. Some
+      one suggested the position of surgeon on one of the great steamers running
+      between England and Australia. The idea of a long sea-voyage was
+      seductive, for I had been suffering from over-study, though the position
+      itself was not very distinguished. But in those days I cared more for
+      pleasing myself than for what might become a newly-made professor, and I
+      was prepared to say with a renowned Irish dean: &ldquo;Dignity and I might be
+      married, for all the relations we are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I secured the position with humiliating ease and humiliating smallness of
+      pay. The steamer&rsquo;s name was the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. It was one of the largest
+      belonging to the Occidental Company. It carried no emigrants and had a
+      passenger list of fashionable folk. On the voyage out to Australia the
+      weather was pleasant, save in the Bay of Biscay; there was no sickness on
+      board, and there were many opportunities for social gaiety, the
+      cultivation of pleasant acquaintances, and the encouragement of that brisk
+      idleness which aids to health. This was really the first holiday in my
+      life, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Nothing of unusual interest occurred on
+      the outward voyage; for one thing, because there were no unusual people
+      among the passengers; for another, because the vessel behaved admirably.
+      The same cannot be said of the return voyage: and with it my story really
+      begins. Misfortune followed us out of Sydney harbour. We broke a
+      crank-shaft between there and Port Phillip, Melbourne; a fire in the hold
+      occurred at Adelaide; and at Albany we buried a passenger who had died of
+      consumption one day out from King George&rsquo;s Sound. At Colombo, also, we had
+      a misfortune, but it was of a peculiar kind, and did not obtrude itself at
+      once; it was found in an addition to our passenger list. I had spent a day
+      in exploring Colombo&mdash;visiting Arabi Pasha, inspecting Hindu temples,
+      watching the jugglers and snake-charmers, evading guides and the sellers
+      of brummagem jewellery, and idling in the Cinnamon Gardens. I returned to
+      the ship tired out. After I had done some official duties, I sauntered to
+      the gangway, and, leaning against the bulwarks, idly watched the
+      passengers come on board from the tender. Two of these made an impression
+      on me. One was a handsome and fashionably-dressed woman, who was followed
+      by a maid or companion (as I fancied), carrying parcels; the other, a
+      shabbily-dressed man, who was the last to come up from the tender. The
+      woman was going down the companion-way when he stepped on deck with a
+      single bag in his hand, and I noticed that he watched her with a strange
+      look in his eyes. He stood still as he gazed, and remained so for a moment
+      after she had gone; then he seemed to recover himself, and started, as I
+      thought, almost guiltily, when he saw that my attention was attracted. He
+      nervously shifted his bag from one hand to the other, and looked round as
+      though not certain of where he should go. A steward came to him
+      officiously, and patronisingly too,&mdash;which is the bearing of servants
+      to shabbily-dressed people,&mdash;but he shook his head, caught his bag
+      smartly away from the steward&rsquo;s fingers, and moved towards the after part
+      of the ship, reserved for intermediate passengers. As he went he
+      hesitated, came to the side of the vessel, looked down at the tender for a
+      moment, cast his eyes to where the anchor was being weighed, made as if he
+      would go back to the tender, then, seeing that the ladder was now drawn
+      up, sighed, and passed on to the second-class companion-way, through which
+      he disappeared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stood commenting idly to myself upon this incident, which, slight though
+      it was, appeared to have significance of a kind, when Hungerford, the
+      fifth officer, caught me slyly by the arm and said, &ldquo;Lucky fellow! Nothing
+      to do but watch the world go by. I wish I had you in the North Atlantic on
+      a whaler, or in the No Man&rsquo;s Sea on a pearl-smack for a matter of thirty
+      days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would come of that, Hungerford?&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An exchange of matter for mind, Marmion; muscle for meditation, physics
+      for philosophy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do me too much honour; at present I&rsquo;ve neither mind, meditation, nor
+      philosophy; I am simply vegetating.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Which proves you to be demoralised. I never saw a surgeon on a ship who
+      wasn&rsquo;t. They began with mind&mdash;more or less&mdash;they ate the fruits
+      of indolence, got precious near being sinful as well as indolent, and
+      ended with cheap cynicism, with the old &lsquo;quid refert&rsquo;&mdash;the thing
+      Hamlet plagiarised in his, &lsquo;But it is no matter.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t this an unusual occupation for you, Hungerford&mdash;this
+      Swift-like criticism?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Swift-like, is it? You see, I&rsquo;ve practised on many of your race, Marmion,
+      and I have it pat now. You are all of two classes&mdash;those who sicken
+      in soul and leave after one trip, and those who make another trip and are
+      lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lost? How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford pressed his fingers hard on my breastbone, looked at me
+      enigmatically from under his well-hung brows, and replied: &ldquo;Brains put out
+      to seed, morals put out to vegetate&mdash;that&rsquo;s &lsquo;lost.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What about fifth officers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fifth officers work like navvies, and haven&rsquo;t time for foolishness.
+      They&rsquo;ve got to walk the bridge, and practise the boats, and be responsible
+      for luggage&mdash;and here I am talking to you like an infallible
+      undergraduate, while the lascars are in endless confusion with a
+      half-dozen pieces of baggage, and the first officer foams because I&rsquo;m not
+      there to set them right. I leave you to your dreams. Good-bye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford was younger than myself, but he knew the world, and I was
+      flattered by these uncommon remarks, because he talked to no one else on
+      the ship in the same way. He never sought to make friends, had a thorough
+      contempt for social trifling, and shrugged his shoulders at the &ldquo;swagger&rdquo;
+       of some of the other officers. I think he longed for a different kind of
+      sea-life, so accustomed had he been to adventurous and hardy ways. He had
+      entered the Occidental service because he had fallen in love with a pretty
+      girl, and thought it his duty to become a &ldquo;regular,&rdquo; and thus have the
+      chance of seeing her every three months in London. He had conceived a
+      liking for me, reciprocated on my part; the more so, because I knew that
+      behind his blunt exterior there was a warm and manly heart. When he left
+      me I went to my cabin and prepared for dinner, laughing as I did so at his
+      keen, uncompromising criticism, which I knew was correct enough; for of
+      all official posts that of a ship-surgeon is least calculated to make a
+      man take a pride in existence. At its best, it is assisting in the
+      movement of a panorama; at its worst, worse than a vegetation.
+      Hungerford&rsquo;s solicitude for myself, however, was misplaced, because this
+      one voyage would end my career as ship-surgeon, and, besides, I had not
+      vegetated, but had been interested in everything that had occurred,
+      humdrum as it was. With these thoughts, I looked out of the port-hole, to
+      see the shores of Colombo, Galle Face, and Mount Lavinia fading in the
+      distance, and heard seven bells&mdash;the time for dinner. When I took my
+      seat at the table of which I was the head, my steward handed to me a slip
+      of paper, saying that the chief steward had given a new passenger, a lady,
+      the seat at my right hand, which had been vacated at Colombo. The name on
+      the paper was &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion.&rdquo; The seat was still empty, and I wondered if
+      this was the beautiful passenger who had attracted me and interested the
+      Intermediate Passenger. I was selfish enough to wish so: and it was so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had finished the soup before she entered. The chief steward, with that
+      anxious civility which beauty can inspire in even so great a personage,
+      conducted her to her seat beside me. I confess that though I was at once
+      absorbed in this occurrence, I noticed also that some of the ladies
+      present smiled significantly when they saw at whose table Mrs. Falchion
+      was placed, and looked not a little ironically at the purser, who, as it
+      was known, always tried to get for his table the newest addition to the
+      passenger list&mdash;when it was a pretty woman. I believe that one or two
+      rude people chaffed the chief steward about &ldquo;favouring the doctor&rdquo;; but he
+      had a habit of saying uncomfortable things in a deferential way, and they
+      did not pursue the subject. Then they commiserated the purser, who was an
+      unpleasant little Jew of an envious turn of mind; and he, as I was told,
+      likened me to Sir John Falstaff. I was sensitive in those days, and this
+      annoyed me, particularly that I had had nothing to do with placing Mrs.
+      Falchion at my table. We are always most sensitive when guilty concerning
+      the spirit and not the letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One who has lived the cosmopolitan life of London should be quick at
+      detecting nationalities, but I found it difficult, even after I heard her
+      speak, to guess at Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s native land. There were good reasons
+      for this, as may be duly seen. Her appearance in the saloon caused an
+      instant buzz of admiration and interest, of which she seemed oblivious. If
+      it was acting, it was good acting; if it was lack of self-consciousness,
+      it was remarkable. As I soon came to know, it was the latter&mdash;which,
+      in such a woman, increased the remarkableness. I was inclined at first to
+      venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I discovered that she
+      possessed the attracting power of an actress without the calculated manner
+      of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was proof of this
+      emancipation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When she sat down, I immediately welcomed her by name to my table. The
+      only surprise she showed at my knowledge of her name and my
+      self-introduction was to lift her head slightly and look at me, as if
+      wondering whether I was likely to be an inquisitive and troublesome host;
+      and also, as I thought, to measure me according to her measure. It was a
+      quick look, and the interest she showed was of a passive kind. She asked
+      me as she might an old acquaintance&mdash;or a waiter&mdash;if the soup
+      was good, and what the fish was like; decided on my recommendation to wait
+      for the entrees; requested her next neighbour to pass the olives; in an
+      impersonal way began to talk about the disadvantages of life at sea;
+      regretted that all ship food tasted alike; wondered if the cook knew how
+      to make a Russian salad; and added that the menu was a national
+      compromise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that she was close to me, I could see that her beauty was real and
+      notable. Her features were regular, her eyes of a greyish violet, her chin
+      strong, yet not too strong&mdash;the chin of a singer; her hands had that
+      charming quiet certainty of movement possessed by so few; and her colour
+      was of the most delightful health. In this delightful health, in her
+      bountiful yet perfect physical eloquence, her attractiveness, as it seemed
+      to me, chiefly lay. For no one would ever have guessed her to possess an
+      emotional temperament. All that was outer was fascinating, all that was
+      inner suggested coldness. After experience assured me that all who came to
+      know her shared this estimate, even in those days when every man on the
+      ship was willing to be her slave. She had a compelling atmosphere, a
+      possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time was unemotional&mdash;like
+      Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, &ldquo;of a cold conversation.&rdquo; She was
+      striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well within convention and
+      &ldquo;good form.&rdquo; Her dress was simply and modestly worn, and had little
+      touches of grace and taste which, I understand, many ladies on board
+      sought to imitate, when they recovered from the first feeling of envy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was an example of splendid life. I cared to look at her as one would
+      dwell on the sleek beauty of a deer&mdash;as, indeed, I have many a time
+      since then, in India, watched a tigress asleep on her chain, claws hidden,
+      wild life latent but slumbering. I could have staked my life that Mrs.
+      Falchion was insensible to love or passion, and unimpeachable in the broad
+      scheme of right and wrong; imperious in requiring homage, incapable of
+      giving it. I noticed when she laughed, as she did once at table, that her
+      teeth were very white and small and square; and, like a schoolgirl, she
+      had a habit of clicking them together very lightly, but not conspicuously,
+      as if trying their quality. This suggested, however, something a little
+      cruel. Her appetite was very good. She was coolly anxious about the
+      amusements; she asked me if I could get her a list of the passengers, said
+      that she was never sea-sick, and took a languid interest in the ladies
+      present. Her glance at the men was keen at first, then neutral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once again, during the meal, she slowly turned and flashed an inquiring
+      glance at me. I caught her eyes. She did not show the least embarrassment,
+      and asked me if the band insisted on playing every day. Before she left
+      the saloon, one could see that many present were talking about her. Even
+      the grim old captain followed her with his eyes as she went. When she
+      rose, I asked her if she was going on deck. I did it casually, as though
+      it was her usual custom to appear there after dinner. In like fashion she
+      replied that her maid had some unpacking to do, she had some things to
+      superintend, and, when this was done, she intended to spend a time on
+      deck. Then, with a peculiar smile, she passed out.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   [Note by Dr. Marmion appended to his MSS.:&mdash;&ldquo;Many of the
+   conversations and monologues in this history, not heard by myself
+   when they occurred, were told to me afterwards, or got from the
+   diaries and notes of the persons concerned. Only a few are purely
+   imaginary.&rdquo;]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER II. &ldquo;MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      I went to my cabin, took a book, sat down, and began to smoke. My thoughts
+      drifted from the book, and then occurred a strange, incongruous thing. It
+      was a remembered incident. It came like a vision as I was lighting a fresh
+      cigar:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A boy and a girl in a village chemist&rsquo;s shop; he with a boy&rsquo;s love for
+      her, she responding in terms, but not in fact. He passed near her carrying
+      a measure of sulphuric acid. She put out her hand suddenly and playfully,
+      as though to bar his way. His foot slipped on the oily floor, and the acid
+      spilled on his hands and the skirt of her dress. He turned instantly and
+      plunged his hands into a measure of alcohol standing near before the acid
+      had more than slightly scalded them. She glanced at his startled face;
+      hers was without emotion. She looked down, and said petulantly: &ldquo;You have
+      spoiled my dress; I cannot go into the street.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy&rsquo;s clothes were burnt also. He was poor, and to replace them must
+      be a trial to him; her father owned the shop, and was well-to-do. Still,
+      he grieved most that she should be annoyed, though he saw her injustice.
+      But she turned away and left him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another scene then crossed the disc of smoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The boy and girl, now man and woman, standing alone in the chemist&rsquo;s shop.
+      He had come out of the big working world, after travel in many countries.
+      His fame had come with him. She was to be married the next day to a seller
+      of purple and fine linen. He was smiling a good-bye, and there was nothing
+      of the old past in the smile. The flame now was in her eyes, and she put
+      out both her hands to stop him as he turned to go; but his face was
+      passionless. &ldquo;You have spoiled my heart,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;I cannot go into the
+      world so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is too late; the measures are empty,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love you to-day, I will loathe you to-morrow,&rdquo; was the answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he turned and left her, and she blindly stretched out her hands and
+      followed him into the darkness, weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it the scent of the chemicals in my cabin, coupled with some
+      subterranean association of things, which brought these scenes vividly
+      before me at this moment? What had they to do with Mrs. Falchion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A time came when the occurrence appeared to me in the light of prescience,
+      but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all reason and
+      philosophy, are the result of outer impression. The primal language of our
+      minds is in the concrete. Afterwards it becomes the cypher, and even at
+      its highest it is expressed by angles, lines, and geometrical forms&mdash;substances
+      and allusive shapes. But now, as the scene shifted by, I had involuntarily
+      thrust forward my hands as did the girl when she passed out into the
+      night, and, in doing so, touched the curtain of my cabin door swinging in
+      towards me. I recovered myself, and a man timidly stepped inside, knocking
+      as he did so. It was the Intermediate Passenger. His face was pale; he
+      looked ill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor as his dress was, I saw that he had known the influences and
+      practised the graces of good society, though his manner was hesitating and
+      anxious now. I knew at a glance that he was suffering from both physical
+      pain and mental worry. Without a word, I took his wrist and felt his
+      pulse, and he said: &ldquo;I thought I might venture to come&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I motioned him not to speak. I counted the irregular pulse-beats, then
+      listened to the action of his heart, with my ear to his breast. There lay
+      his physical trouble. I poured out a dose of digitalis, and, handing it to
+      him, asked him to sit down. As he sat and drank the medicine, I rapidly
+      studied him. The chin was firm, and the eyes had a dogged, persistent look
+      that, when turned on you, saw not you, but something beyond you. The head
+      was thrown slightly forward, the eyes looking up at an angle. This last
+      action was habitual with him. It gave him a peculiar earnestness. As I
+      noted these peculiarities, my mind was also with his case; I saw that his
+      life was threatened. Perhaps he guessed what was going on in me, for he
+      said in a low, cultured voice: &ldquo;The wheels will stop too long some time,
+      and there will be no rebound;&rdquo;&mdash;referring to the irregular action of
+      his heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps that is true,&rdquo; I said; &ldquo;yet it depends a good deal upon yourself
+      when it will be. Men can die if they wish without committing suicide. Look
+      at the Maori, the Tongan, the Malay. They can also prolong life (not
+      indefinitely, but in a case like yours considerably), if they choose. You
+      can lengthen your days if you do not brood on fatal things&mdash;fatal to
+      you; if you do not worry yourself into the grave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such a
+      man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed. I was aware
+      also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or
+      constitutional thing, but springs from some extraneous cause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled faintly, raised his head a little higher, and said: &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;s
+      just it, I suppose; but then we do not order our own constitutions; and I
+      believe, Doctor, that you must kill a nerve before it ceases to hurt. One
+      doesn&rsquo;t choose to worry, I think, any more than one chooses to lay bare a
+      nerve.&rdquo; And then his eyes dropped, as if he thought he had already said
+      too much.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again I studied him, repeating my definitions in my mind. He was not a
+      drunkard; he might have had no vice, so free was his face from any sign of
+      dissipation or indulgence; but there was suffering, possibly the marks of
+      some endured shame. The suffering and shadows showed the more because his
+      features were refined enough for a woman. And altogether it struck me that
+      he was possessed by some one idea, which gave his looks a kind of
+      sorrowful eloquence, such as one sees on occasion in the face of a great
+      actor like Salvini, on the forehead of a devout Buddhist, or in the eyes
+      of a Jesuit missionary who martyrs himself in the wilds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt at once for the man a sympathy, a brotherliness, the causes of
+      which I should be at a loss to trace. Most people have this experience at
+      one time or another in their lives. It is not a matter of sex; it may be
+      between an old man and a little child, a great man and a labourer, a
+      schoolgirl and an old native woman. There is in such companionships less
+      self-interest than in any other. As I have said, I thought that this man
+      had a trouble, and I wished to know it; not from curiosity,&mdash;though
+      my mind had a selfish, inquiring strain,&mdash;but because I hoped I might
+      be able to help him in some way. I put my hand on his shoulder, and
+      replied: &ldquo;You will never be better unless you get rid of your worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew in a sharp breath, and said: &ldquo;I know that. I am afraid I shall
+      never be better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence in which we looked at each other steadily, and then he
+      added, with an intense but quiet misery: &ldquo;Never&mdash;never!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that he moved his hand across his forehead wearily, rose, and turned
+      toward the door. He swayed as he did so, and would have fallen, but I
+      caught him as he lost consciousness, and laid him on the cabin sofa. I
+      chafed his hands, unloosed his collar, and opened the bosom of his shirt.
+      As the linen dropped away from his throat, a small portrait on ivory was
+      exposed on his breast. I did not look closely at it then, but it struck me
+      that the woman&rsquo;s head in the portrait was familiar, though the artistic
+      work was not recent, and the fashion of the hair was of years before. When
+      his eyes opened, and he felt his neck bare, he hurriedly put up his hand
+      and drew the collar close, and at the same time sent a startled and
+      inquiring look at me. After a few moments I helped him to his feet, and,
+      thanking me more with a look than with words, he turned towards the door
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;until I give you some medicine, and then you shall take
+      my arm to your cabin.&rdquo; With a motion of the hand, signifying the
+      uselessness of remedies, he sat down again. As I handed him the phial, I
+      continued: &ldquo;I know that it is none of my business, but you are suffering.
+      To help your body, your mind should be helped also. Can&rsquo;t you tell me your
+      trouble? Perhaps I should be able to serve you. I would if I could.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It may be that I spoke with a little feeling and an apparent honesty; for
+      his eyes searched mine in a kind of earnest bewilderment, as if this could
+      not be true&mdash;as if, indeed, life had gone so hard with him that he
+      had forgotten the way of kindness. Then he stretched out his hand and said
+      brokenly: &ldquo;I am grateful, believe me. I cannot tell you just now, but I
+      will soon, perhaps.&rdquo; His hand was upon the curtain of the door, when my
+      steward&rsquo;s voice was heard outside, calling my name. The man himself
+      entered immediately, and said that Mrs. Falchion sent her compliments, and
+      would I come at once to see her companion, Miss Caron, who had injured
+      herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Intermediate Passenger turned towards me a strange look; his lips
+      opened as if about to speak, but he said nothing. At the instant there
+      came to my mind whom the picture on his breast resembled: it was Mrs.
+      Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think he saw this new intelligence in my face, and a meaning smile took
+      the place of words, as he slowly left the cabin, mutely refusing
+      assistance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s cabin, and met her outside the door. She looked
+      displeased. &ldquo;Justine has hurt herself,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Please attend to her; I
+      am going on deck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The unfeeling nature of this remark held me to the spot for a moment; then
+      I entered the cabin. Justine Caron, a delicate but warm-faced girl of
+      little more than twenty, was sitting on the cabin sofa, her head supported
+      against the wall, and her hand wound in a handkerchief soaked in blood.
+      Her dress and the floor were also stained. I undid the handkerchief and
+      found an ugly wound in the palm of the hand. I called the steward, and
+      sent him to my dispensary for some necessaries; then I asked her how it
+      happened. At the moment I saw the cause&mdash;a broken bottle lying on the
+      floor. &ldquo;The ship rolled,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;The bottle fell from the shelf upon
+      the marble washstand, and, breaking, from there to the floor. Madame
+      caught at my arm to save herself from falling; but I slipped, and was cut
+      on the bottle&mdash;so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As she ended there was a knock, but the curtain was not drawn, and Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s voice was heard. &ldquo;My dress is stained, Justine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The half-fainting girl weakly replied: &ldquo;I am very sorry, madame, indeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this Mrs. Falchion rejoined: &ldquo;When you have been attended to, you may
+      go to bed, Justine. I shall not want you again to-night. But I shall
+      change my dress. It is so unpleasant; I hate blood. I hope you will be
+      well in the morning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To this Justine replied: &ldquo;Ah, madame, I am sorry. I could not help it; but
+      I shall be quite well in the morning, I am sure.&rdquo; Then she added quietly
+      to me: &ldquo;The poor madame! She will not see suffering. She hates pain.
+      Sickness troubles her. Shall I be able to use my hand very soon,
+      monsieur?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a wistful look in her eyes, and guessing why it was there, I
+      said: &ldquo;Yes, soon, I hope&mdash;in a few days, no doubt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face lighted up, and she said: &ldquo;Madame likes about her people who are
+      happy and well.&rdquo; Then, as if she might have said too much, she hurriedly
+      added: &ldquo;But she is very kind;&rdquo; and, stooping down quickly, her face
+      whitening with the effort, she caught up the broken glass and threw it
+      through the port-hole into the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A half-hour later I went on deck, and found Mrs. Falchion comfortably
+      seated in her deck-chair. I brought a stool over, and sat down beside her.
+      To this hour the quickness with which I got upon friendly terms with her
+      astonishes me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Justine is better?&rdquo; she said, and her hand made a slight motion of
+      disgust.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She was not dangerously hurt, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us change the subject, please. They are going to have a fancy-dress
+      ball on board, I believe, before we get to Aden. How tiresome! Isn&rsquo;t it a
+      little affectation on the part of the stage-struck committee? Isn&rsquo;t it&mdash;inconsequent?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That depends,&rdquo; I said vaguely, inviting a question. She idled with a book
+      in her lap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On those who go, what costumes are worn, and how much beauty and art
+      appear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the trouble! Does it pay? What return does one get?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If all admire, half are envious, some are jealous, and one is devoted&mdash;isn&rsquo;t
+      that enough?&rdquo; I think I was a fool that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to understand women,&rdquo; she said, with a puzzling and not quite
+      satisfactory smile. &ldquo;Yes, all that is something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Though I was looking at the sea rather than at her, I saw again that
+      inquiring look in her eyes&mdash;such a measuring look as a recruiting
+      sergeant might give a victim of the Queen&rsquo;s shilling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a moment&rsquo;s pause she continued, I thought, abstractedly: &ldquo;As what
+      should you go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered lightly and without premeditation, &ldquo;As Caius Cassius. Why
+      should you not appear as Portia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She lifted her eyebrows at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As Portia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As Portia, the wife of Brutus,&rdquo; I blundered on, at the same time
+      receiving her permission, by a nod, to light my cigar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The pious, love-sick wife of Brutus!&rdquo; This in a disdainful tone, and the
+      white teeth clicked softly together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a good disguise,&rdquo; I said banteringly, though I fancy somewhat
+      tentatively also, and certainly with a touch of rudeness. I was thinking
+      at that moment of the Intermediate Passenger, and I was curious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you think of going in the disguise of a gentleman? Caius Cassius was
+      that, wasn&rsquo;t he?&rdquo; she retorted in an ironical tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose he was, though he was punished once for rudeness,&rdquo; I replied
+      apologetically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so,&rdquo; was the decisive reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that she was perfectly cool, while I was a little confused, and
+      ashamed too, that I had attempted to be playfully satirical. And so,
+      wondering what I should say next, I remarked in desperation: &ldquo;Do you like
+      the sea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am never ill at sea,&rdquo; was her reply. &ldquo;But I do not really like it; it
+      is treacherous. The land would satisfy me if&mdash;&rdquo; She paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Mrs. Falchion&mdash;&lsquo;if&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I did not wish to travel,&rdquo; she vaguely added, looking blandly at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have travelled much?&rdquo; I ventured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A great deal;&rdquo; and again I saw that scrutiny in her eyes. It occurred to
+      me at the moment that she might think I possessed some previous knowledge
+      of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My mind became occupied again with the Intermediate Passenger and the
+      portrait that he wore at his neck. I almost laughed to think of the
+      melodramatic turn which my first conversation with this woman might chance
+      to take. I felt that I was dealing with one who was able to meet cleverly
+      any advance of mine, but I determined to lead the talk into as deep waters
+      as possible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose, too, you are a good practical sailor&mdash;that is, you
+      understand seamanship, if you have travelled much?&rdquo; I do not know why I
+      said that, for it sounded foolish to me afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty well,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I can manage a sail; I know the argot, I
+      could tell the shrouds from the bulwarks, and I&rsquo;ve rowed a boat in a
+      choppy sea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not an accomplishment usual to your sex.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was ordinary enough where I spent the early part of my life,&rdquo; was the
+      idle reply; and she settled herself more comfortably in her chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes? May I ask where that was?&rdquo; and as I said this, it occurred to me
+      that she was, perhaps, leading me on, instead of my leading her; to betray
+      me as to anything I knew about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the South Seas,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;My father was a British consul in the
+      Islands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have not come from the Islands now, I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said a little more softly; &ldquo;it is years since I was in Samoa.
+      ... My father is buried there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must have found it a romantic life in those half-barbaric places?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shifted in her chair. &ldquo;Romantic!&rdquo; Her tone conveyed a very slight
+      uneasiness and vagueness. &ldquo;I am afraid you must ask some one else about
+      that sort of thing. I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that was
+      half-barbaric.&rdquo; Here she laughed slightly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just then I saw the lights of a vessel far off. &ldquo;See&mdash;a vessel!&rdquo; I
+      said; and I watched the lights in silence, but thinking. I saw that she
+      too was watching idly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: &ldquo;Yes, I suppose life
+      must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like the
+      Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, then,&rdquo; she replied decisively, &ldquo;you are not to suppose anything
+      of the kind. The danger is not alone for the white people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this I appeared, as I really was, interested, and begged her to explain
+      what she meant. She thought a moment, and then briefly, but clearly,
+      sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of missionary
+      labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim of
+      civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were
+      protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns;
+      how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the
+      crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest and
+      purest, the valour of nationality. These phrases are my own&mdash;the
+      substance, not the fashion, of her speech.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not, then,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;believe wholly in the unselfishness of
+      missionaries, the fair dealing of traders, the perfect impartiality of
+      justice, as shown through steel-clad cruisers?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have seen too much to be quite fair in judgment, I fear, even to
+      men-of-war&rsquo;s men;&rdquo; and she paused, listening to a song which came from the
+      after-part of the ship. The air was very still, and a few of the words of
+      the droll, plaintive ditty came to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quartermaster Stone, as he passed us, hummed it, and some voices of the
+      first-class passengers near joined in the refrain:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+          And the old world!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Some days later I got all of the song from one of the intermediate
+      passengers, and the last verse of it I give here:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a-sailing, I&rsquo;m a-sailing on the sea,
+         To a harbour where the wind is still;
+        Oh, my dearie, do you wait for me?
+         Oh, my dearie, do you love me still?
+        Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+          And the old world!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I noticed that Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s brow contracted as the song proceeded,
+      making a deep vertical line between the eyes, and that the fingers of the
+      hand nearest me closed on the chair-arm firmly. The hand attracted me. It
+      was long, the fingers were shapely, but not markedly tapering, and
+      suggested firmness. I remarked afterward, when I chanced to shake hands
+      with her, that her fingers enclosed one&rsquo;s hand; it was not a mere touch or
+      pressure, but an unemotional and possessive clasp. I felt sure that she
+      had heard the song before, else it had not produced even this so slight
+      effect on her nerves. I said: &ldquo;It is a quaint song. I suppose you are
+      familiar with it and all of its kind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fancy I have heard it somewhere,&rdquo; she answered in a cold voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am aware that my next question was not justified by our very short
+      acquaintance; but this acquaintance had been singular from its beginning,
+      and it did not seem at that moment as it looks on paper; besides, I had
+      the Intermediate Passenger in my mind. &ldquo;Perhaps your husband is a naval
+      man?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A faint flush passed over her face, and then, looking at me with a neutral
+      expression and some reserve of manner, she replied: &ldquo;My husband was not a
+      naval man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She said &ldquo;was not.&rdquo; That implied his death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no trouble in her manner; I could detect no sign of excitement.
+      I turned to look at the lights of the approaching vessel, and there,
+      leaning against the railing that divided the two decks, was the
+      Intermediate Passenger. He was looking at us intently. A moment after he
+      disappeared. Beyond doubt there was some intimate association between
+      these two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My thoughts were, however, distracted by our vessel signalling the other.
+      Hungerford was passing just then, and I said: &ldquo;Have you any idea what
+      vessel it is, Hungerford?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, man-of-war &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo;, bound for Aden, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion at this laughed strangely, as she leaned forward looking,
+      and then, rising quickly, said: &ldquo;I prefer to walk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I accompany you?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She inclined her head, and we joined the promenaders. The band was
+      playing, and, for a ship-band, playing very well, the ballet music of
+      Delibes&rsquo; &lsquo;Sylvia&rsquo;. The musicians had caught that unaccentuated and
+      sensuous swing of the melody which the soft, tropical atmosphere rendered
+      still more languorous. With Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s hand upon my arm, I felt a
+      sense of capitulation to the music and to her, uncanny in its suddenness.
+      At this distance of time it seems to me absurd. I had once experienced
+      something of the same feeling with the hand of a young medical student,
+      who, skilled in thought-reading, discovered the number of a bank-note that
+      was in my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This woman had an attractiveness compelling and delightful, at least in
+      its earlier application to me. Both professionally and socially I have
+      been brought into contact with women of beauty and grace, but never one
+      who, like Mrs. Falchion, being beautiful, seemed so unconscious of the
+      fact, so indifferent to those about her, so untouched by another&rsquo;s
+      emotion, so lacking in sensitiveness of heart; and who still drew people
+      to her. I am speaking now of the earlier portion of our acquaintance; of
+      her as she was up to this period in her life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not alone in this opinion of her, for, as time went on, every
+      presentable man and woman on the boat was introduced to her; and if some
+      women criticised and some disliked her, all acknowledged her talent and
+      her imperial attraction. Among the men her name was never spoken but with
+      reserve and respect, and her afternoon teas were like a little court. She
+      had no compromising tenderness of manner for man or woman; she ruled, yet
+      was unapproachable through any avenues of sentiment. She had a quiet
+      aplomb, which would be called &lsquo;sang-froid&rsquo; in a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you ever see a Spanish-Mexican woman dance?&rdquo; she asked in one of the
+      pauses of the music.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never: never any good dancing, save what one gets at a London theatre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is graceful,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but not dancing. You have heard of music
+      stirring the blood; of savage races&mdash;and others&mdash;working
+      themselves up to ecstatic fury? Maybe you have seen the Dervishes, or the
+      Fijians, or the Australian aboriginals? No? Well, I have, and I have seen&mdash;which
+      is so much more&mdash;those Spanish-Mexican women dance. Did you ever see
+      anything so thrilling, so splendid, that you felt you must possess it?&rdquo;&mdash;She
+      asked me that with her hand upon my arm!&mdash;&ldquo;Well, that is it. I have
+      felt that way towards a horse which has won a great race, and to a woman
+      who has carried me with her through the fantastic drama of her dance,
+      until she stood at the climax, head thrown back, face glowing&mdash;a
+      statue. It is grand to be eloquent like that, not in words, but in
+      person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In this was the key to her own nature. Body and mind she was free from
+      ordinary morbidness, unless her dislike of all suffering was morbid. With
+      her this was a dislike of any shock to the senses. She was selfish at all
+      points.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These conclusions were pursued at the expense of speech on my part. At
+      first she did not appear to regard my silence. She seemed to have thoughts
+      of her own; but she shook them off with a little firm motion of the
+      shoulders, and, with the assumption of a demureness of manner and an airy
+      petulance, said: &ldquo;Well, amuse me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amuse you?&rdquo; was my reply. &ldquo;Delighted to do so if I can. How?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Talk to me,&rdquo; was the quick response.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would that accomplish the purpose?&rdquo; This in a tone of mock protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Please don&rsquo;t be foolish, Dr. Marmion. I dislike having to explain. Tell
+      me things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, about yourself&mdash;about people you have met, and all that; for I
+      suppose you have seen a good deal and lived a good deal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About hospital cases?&rdquo; I said a little maliciously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, please, no! I abhor everything that is sick and poor and miserable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said I, at idle venture, &ldquo;if not a hospital, what about a gaol?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt the hand on my arm twitch slightly, and then her reply came.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I said I hated everything that was wretched and wicked. You are either
+      dense, or purposely irritating.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, then, a college?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A college? Yes, that sounds better. But I do not wish descriptions of
+      being &lsquo;gated,&rsquo; or &lsquo;sent down,&rsquo; or &lsquo;ploughed,&rsquo; and that kind of
+      commonplace. I should prefer, unless your vanity leads you irresistibly in
+      that direction, something with mature life and amusement; or, at least,
+      life and incident, and good sport&mdash;if you do not dwell on the horrors
+      of killing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant there came to me the remembrance of Professor Valiant&rsquo;s
+      wife. I think it was not what she wanted; but I had a purpose, and I
+      began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every one at St. Luke&rsquo;s admired and respected Professor Valiant&rsquo;s wife,
+      she was so frank and cordial and prettily downright. In our rooms we all
+      called her a good chap, and a dashed good chap when her husband happened
+      to be rustier than usual. He was our professor in science. It was the
+      general belief that he chose science for his life-work because it gave
+      unusual opportunities for torture. He was believed to be a devoted
+      vivisectionist; he certainly had methods of cruelty, masterly in their
+      ingenuity. He could make a whole class raw with punishment in a few words;
+      and many a scorching bit of Latin verse was written about his hooked nose
+      and fishy eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But his highest talents in this direction were reserved for his wife. His
+      distorted idea of his own importance made him view her as a chattel, an
+      inferior being; the more so, I believe, because she brought him little
+      money when he married her. She was too much the woman to pretend to kneel
+      to him, and because she would not be his slave, she had a hard time of it.
+      He began by insisting that she should learn science, that she might assist
+      him in his experiments. She knew that she had no taste for it, that it was
+      no part of her wifely duty, and she did what suited her better&mdash;followed
+      the hounds. It was a picture to see her riding across country. She could
+      take a fence with a sound hunter like a bird. And so it happened that,
+      after a time, they went their own ways pretty well; he ignoring her,
+      neglecting her, deprecating her by manner, if not by speech, and making
+      her life more than uncomfortable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was always kind to me. I was the youngest chap in the college, and
+      was known as &lsquo;Marmy&rsquo; by every one; and because I was fonder of science
+      than most other men in the different years, Valiant was more gracious to
+      me than the rest, though I did not like him. One day, when I called, I
+      heard her say to him, not knowing that I was near: &lsquo;Whatever you feel, or
+      however you act towards me in private, I will have respect when others are
+      present.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the custom for the professors to invite each student to luncheon
+      or dinner once during term-time. Being somewhat of a favourite of both
+      Professor and Mrs. Valiant however, I lunched with them often. I need
+      hardly say that I should not have exceeded the regulation once had it not
+      been for Mrs. Valiant. The last time I went is as clear in my memory as if
+      it were yesterday. Valiant was more satirical and cold-blooded than usual.
+      I noticed a kind of shining hardness in his wife&rsquo;s eyes, which gave me a
+      strange feeling; yet she was talkative and even gay, I thought, while I
+      more than once clinched my fist under the table, so much did I want to
+      pummel him; for I was a lover of hers, in a deferential, boyish way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At last, knowing that she liked the hunt, I asked her if she was going to
+      the meet on the following Saturday, saying that I intended to follow,
+      having been offered a horse. With a steely ring to her voice, and a
+      further brightening of the eyes, she said: &lsquo;You are a stout little
+      sportsman, Marmy. Yes, I am going on Major Karney&rsquo;s big horse, Carbine.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Valiant looked up, half sneering, half doubtful, I thought, and rejoined:
+      &lsquo;Carbine is a valuable horse, and the fences are stiff in the Garston
+      country.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She smiled gravely, then, with her eyes fixed on her husband, said:
+      &lsquo;Carbine is a perfect gentleman. He will do what I ask him. I have ridden
+      him.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;The devil you have!&rsquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;I am sure,&rsquo; said I, as I hoped, bravely, and not a little
+      enthusiastically, &lsquo;that Carbine would take any fence you asked him.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Or not, as the case might be. Thank you, Marmy, for the compliment,&rsquo; she
+      said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;A Triton among minnows,&rsquo; remarked Valiant, not entirely under his
+      breath; &lsquo;horses obey, and students admire, and there is no end to her
+      greatness.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;There is an end to everything, Edward,&rsquo; she remarked a shade sadly and
+      quietly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He turned to me and said: &lsquo;Science is a great study, Marmion, but it is
+      sardonic too; for you shall find that when you reduce even a Triton to its
+      original elements&mdash;&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Oh, please let me finish,&rsquo; she interrupted softly. &lsquo;I know the lecture
+      so well. It reads this way: &ldquo;The place of generation must break to give
+      place to the generated; but the influence spreads out beyond the
+      fragments, and is greater thus than in the mass&mdash;neither matter nor
+      mind can be destroyed. The earth was molten before it became cold rock and
+      quiet world.&rdquo; There, you see, Marmy, that I am a fellow-student of yours.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Valiant&rsquo;s eyes were ugly to watch; for she had quoted from a lecture of
+      his, delivered to us that week. After an instant he said, with slow
+      maliciousness: &lsquo;Oh, ye gods, render me worthy of this Portia, and teach
+      her to do as Brutus&rsquo;s Portia did, ad eternum!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She shuddered a little, then said very graciously, and as if he had meant
+      nothing but kindness: &lsquo;Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.&rsquo; I will
+      leave you now to your cigarettes; and because I must go out soon, and
+      shall not, I fear, see you again this afternoon, good-bye, Marmy, till
+      Saturday&mdash;till Saturday.&rsquo; And she left us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was white and trembling with anger. He smiled coolly, and was careful
+      to choose me one of his best cigars, saying as he handed it: &lsquo;Conversation
+      is a science, Marmion. Study it; there is solid satisfaction in it; it is
+      the only art that brings instant pleasure. Like the stage, it gets its
+      immediate applause.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Mrs. Valiant did ride Carbine on that Saturday. Such a scene it
+      was! I see it now&mdash;the mottled plump of hounds upon the scent, the
+      bright sun showing up the scarlet coats of the whips gloriously, the long
+      stride of the hunters, ears back and quarters down! She rode Carbine, and
+      the fences WERE stiff&mdash;so stiff that I couldn&rsquo;t have taken half of
+      them. Afterward I was not sorry that I couldn&rsquo;t; for she rode for a fall
+      that day on Carbine, her own horse, she had bought him of Major Karney a
+      few days before,&mdash;and I heard her last words as she lay beside him,
+      smiling through the dreadful whiteness of her lips. &lsquo;Goodbye, Marmy,&rsquo; she
+      whispered. &lsquo;Carbine and I go together. It is better so, in the full cry
+      and a big field. Tell the men at Luke&rsquo;s that I hope they will pass at the
+      coming exams.... I am going up&mdash;for my final&mdash;Marmy.&mdash;I
+      wonder&mdash;if I&rsquo;ll&mdash;pass.&rsquo; And then the words froze on her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was persecution that did it&mdash;diabolical persecution and
+      selfishness. That was the worst day the college ever knew. At the funeral,
+      when the provost read, &lsquo;For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our
+      sister out of the miseries of this sinful world,&rsquo; Big Wallington, the
+      wildest chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we
+      all followed. And that gold-spectacled sneak stood there, with a lying
+      white handkerchief at his eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I laid myself out to make the college too hot for him. In a week I had
+      every man in the place with me, and things came to such a pass that all of
+      us must be sent down, or Valiant resign. He resigned. He found another
+      professorship; but the thing followed him, and he was obliged to leave the
+      country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When I finished the story, Mrs. Falchion was silent for a time, then, with
+      a slight air of surprise, and in a quite critical way, she said: &ldquo;I should
+      think you would act very well, if you used less emotion. Mrs. Valiant had
+      a kind of courage, but she was foolish to die. She should have stayed and
+      fought him&mdash;fought him every way, until she was his master. She could
+      have done it; she was clever, I should think. Still, if she had to die, it
+      was better to go with a good horse that way. I think I should prefer to go
+      swiftly, suddenly, but without the horror of blood and bruises, and that
+      sort of thing.... I should like to meet Professor Valiant. He was hard,
+      but he was able too.... But haven&rsquo;t we had enough of horror? I asked you
+      to amuse me, and you have merely interested me instead. Oh!&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This exclamation, I thought, was caused by the voice of the quartermaster
+      humming:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;I&rsquo;m a-sailing, I&rsquo;m a-sailing on the sea,
+         To a harbour where the wind is still&rdquo;&mdash;
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Almost immediately she said: &ldquo;I think I will go below.&rdquo; Then, after a
+      slight pause: &ldquo;This is a liberal acquaintance for one day, Dr. Marmion;
+      and, you know, we were not introduced.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Mrs. Falchion, we were not introduced; but I am in some regards your
+      host, and I fear we should all be very silent if we waited for regular
+      introductions here. The acquaintance gives me pleasure, but it is not
+      nearly so liberal as I hope it may become.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not answer, but smiled at me over her shoulder as she passed down
+      the staircase, and the next instant I could have bitten my tongue for
+      playing the cavalier as I had done; for showing, as I think I did, that
+      she had an influence over me&mdash;an influence peculiar to herself, and
+      difficult to account for when not in her presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I sat down, lit a cigar, and went over in my mind all that had been said
+      between us; all that had occurred in my cabin after dinner; every minute
+      since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail. Lascars
+      slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near
+      alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon there
+      came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly. Under the
+      influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted. My
+      eyes shifted to the lights of the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; in the distance, and from
+      them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck. The &ldquo;All&rsquo;s
+      well&rdquo; of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance; the swish
+      of water against the dividing hull of the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; sounded like a call to
+      silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming through the
+      jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and dreams. These dreams
+      grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on my shoulder, and I saw
+      that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English novelist, had dropped out
+      from the promenade to talk with me. He saw my mood, however, and said
+      quietly: &ldquo;Give me a light for my cigar, will you? Then, astride this
+      stool, I&rsquo;ll help you to make inventory of the rest of them. A pretty
+      study; for, at our best, &lsquo;What fools we mortals be!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Motley is your only wear,&rsquo;&rdquo; was my reply; and for a full half-hour,
+      which, even for a man, is considerable, we spoke no word, but only nodded
+      when some one of the promenaders noticed us. There was a bookmaker fresh
+      from the Melbourne races; an American, Colonel Ryder, whose eloquence had
+      carried him round the world; a stalwart squatter from Queensland; a pretty
+      widow, who had left her husband under the sods of Tasmania; a brace of
+      girls going to join their lovers and be married in England; a few officers
+      fleeing from India with their livers and their lives; a family of four
+      lanky lasses travelling &ldquo;home&rdquo; to school; a row of affable ladies, who
+      alternated between envy and gaiety and delight in, and criticism of, their
+      husbands; a couple of missionaries, preparing to give us lectures on the
+      infamous gods of the heathen,&mdash;gods which, poor harmless little
+      creatures! might be bought at a few annas a pint at Aden or Colombo,&mdash;and
+      on the Exodus and the Pharaohs&mdash;pleasures reserved for the Red Sea; a
+      commercial traveller, who arranged theatricals, and cast himself for all
+      the principal parts; a humorous and naive person who industriously hinted
+      at the opulence of his estates in Ireland; two stately English ladies of
+      title; a cheerful array of colonial knights and judges off to Europe for a
+      holiday; and many others, who made little worlds unto themselves, called
+      cliques by blunt people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To my mind, the most interesting persons on the ship,&rdquo; said Clovelly at
+      last, &ldquo;are the bookmaker, Miss Treherne, and the lady with whom you have
+      just been talking&mdash;an exceptional type.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An unusual woman, I fancy,&rdquo; was my reply. &ldquo;But which is Miss Treherne? I
+      am afraid I am not quite sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He described her and her father, with whom I had talked&mdash;a London
+      Q.C., travelling for his health, a notable man with a taste for science,
+      who spent his idle hours in reading astronomy and the plays of Euripides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not include the father in the list of the most interesting persons?&rdquo;
+       I questioned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because I have met many men like him, but no one quite like his daughter,
+      or Mrs.&mdash;what is her name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or Mrs. Falchion or the bookmaker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is there so uncommon about Miss Treherne? She had not struck me as
+      being remarkable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No? Well, of course, she is not striking after the fashion of Mrs.
+      Falchion. But watch her, study her, and you will find her to be the
+      perfection of a type&mdash;the finest expression of a decorous convention,
+      a perfect product of social conservatism; unaffected, cheerful, sensitive,
+      composed, very talented, altogether companionable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Excuse me,&rdquo; I said, laughing, though I was impressed; &ldquo;that sounds as if
+      you had been writing about her, and applying to her the novelist&rsquo;s system
+      of analysis, which makes an imperfect individual a perfect type. Now,
+      frankly, are you speaking of Miss Treherne, or of some one of whom she is
+      the outline, as it were?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Clovelly turned and looked at me steadily. &ldquo;When you consider a patient,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;do you arrange a diagnosis of a type or of a person?&mdash;And,
+      by the way, &lsquo;type&rsquo; is a priggish word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I consider the type in connection with the person.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly. The person is the thing. That clears up the matter of business
+      and art. But now, as to Miss Treherne: I want to say that, having been
+      admitted to her acquaintance and that of her father, I have thought of
+      them only as friends, and not as &lsquo;characters&rsquo; or &lsquo;copy.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I beg your pardon, Clovelly,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;I might have known.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, to prove how magnanimous I am, I shall introduce you to Miss
+      Treherne, if you will let me. You&rsquo;ve met her father, I suppose?&rdquo; he added,
+      and tossed his cigar overboard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I have talked with him. He is a courteous and able man, I should
+      think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We rose. Presently he continued: &ldquo;See, Miss Treherne is sitting there with
+      the Tasmanian widow&mdash;what is HER name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Callendar,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;Blackburn, the Queenslander, is joining
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So much the better,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Come on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As we passed the music saloon, we paused for an instant to look through
+      the port-hole at a pale-faced girl with big eyes and a wonderful bright
+      red dress, singing &ldquo;The Angels&rsquo; Serenade,&rdquo; while an excitable bear-leader
+      turned her music for her. Near her stood a lanky girl who adored actors
+      and tenors, and lived in the hope of meeting some of those gentlemen of
+      the footlights, who plough their way so calmly through the hearts of
+      maidens fresh from school.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We drew back to go on towards Miss Treherne, when Hungerford touched me on
+      the arm, and said: &ldquo;I want to see you for a little while, Marmion, if Mr.
+      Clovelly will excuse you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw by Hungerford&rsquo;s face that he had something of importance to say,
+      and, linking my arm in his, I went with him to his cabin, which was near
+      those of the intermediate passengers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER III. A TALE OF NO MAN&rsquo;S SEA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Inside the cabin Hungerford closed the door, gripped me by the arm, and
+      then handed me a cheroot, with the remark: &ldquo;My pater gave them to me last
+      voyage home. Have kept &lsquo;em in tea.&rdquo; And then he added, with no appearance
+      of consecutiveness: &ldquo;Hang the bally ship, anyhow!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall not attempt to tone down the crudeness of Hungerford&rsquo;s language.
+      It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth
+      will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will
+      certainly be seen in his acts;&mdash;he was sound at heart and true as
+      steel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is the matter, Hungerford?&rdquo; I asked lighting the cheroot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everything&rsquo;s the matter. Captain, with his nose in the air, and trusting
+      all round to his officers. First officer, no good&mdash;never any use
+      since they poured the coal on him. Purser, ought to be on a Chinese junk.
+      Second, third, fourth officers, first-rate chaps, but so-so sailors.
+      Doctor, frivolling with a lovely filly, pedigree not known. Why, confound
+      it! nobody takes this business seriously except the captain, and he sits
+      on a golden throne. He doesn&rsquo;t know that in any real danger this swagger
+      craft would be filled with foolishness. There isn&rsquo;t more than one good
+      boat&rsquo;s crew on board&mdash;sailors, lascars, stewards, and all. As for the
+      officers, if the surgeon would leave the lovely ladies to themselves, he&rsquo;d
+      find cases worth treating, and duties worth doing. He should keep himself
+      fit for shocks. And he can take my word for it&mdash;for I&rsquo;ve been at sea
+      since I was a kid, worse luck!&mdash;that a man with anything to do on a
+      ship ought to travel every day nose out for shipwreck next day, and so on,
+      port to port. Ship-surgeons, as well as all other officers, weren&rsquo;t
+      ordained to follow after cambric skirts and lace handkerchiefs at sea.
+      Believe me or not as you like, but, for a man having work to do, woman,
+      lovely woman, is rocks. Now, I suppose you&rsquo;ll think I&rsquo;m insolent, for I&rsquo;m
+      younger than you are, Marmion, but you know what a rough-and-tumble fellow
+      I am, and you&rsquo;ll not mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Hungerford,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to what does this lead?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To Number 116 Intermediate, for one thing. It&rsquo;s letting off steam for
+      another. I tell you, Marmion, these big ships are too big. There are those
+      canvas boats. They won&rsquo;t work; you can&rsquo;t get them together. You couldn&rsquo;t
+      launch one in an hour. And as for the use of the others, the lascars would
+      melt like snow in any real danger. There&rsquo;s about one decent boat&rsquo;s crew on
+      the ship, that&rsquo;s all. There! I&rsquo;ve unburdened myself; I feel better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently he added, with a shake of the head: &ldquo;See here: now-a-days we
+      trust too much to machinery and chance, and not enough to skill of hand
+      and brain stuff. I&rsquo;d like to show you some of the crews I&rsquo;ve had in the
+      Pacific and the China Sea&mdash;but I&rsquo;m at it again! I&rsquo;ll now come,
+      Marmion, to the real reason why I brought you here.... Number 116
+      Intermediate is under the weather; I found him fainting in the passage. I
+      helped him into his cabin. He said he&rsquo;d been to you to get medicine, and
+      you&rsquo;d given him some. Now, the strange part of the business is, I know
+      him. He didn&rsquo;t remember me, however&mdash;perhaps because he didn&rsquo;t get a
+      good look at me. Coincidence is a strange thing. I can point to a dozen in
+      my short life, every one as remarkable, if not as startling, as this.
+      Here, I&rsquo;ll spin you a yarn:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It happened four years ago. I had no moustache then, was fat like a
+      whale, and first mate on the &lsquo;Dancing Kate&rsquo;, a pearler in the Indian
+      Ocean, between Java and Australia. That was sailing, mind you&mdash;real
+      seamanship, no bally nonsense; a fight every weather, interesting all
+      round. If it wasn&rsquo;t a deadly calm, it was a typhoon; if it wasn&rsquo;t either,
+      it was want of food and water. I&rsquo;ve seen us with pearls on board worth a
+      thousand quid, and not a drop of water nor three square meals in the
+      caboose. But that was life for men and not Miss Nancys. If they weren&rsquo;t
+      saints, they were sailors, afraid of nothing but God Almighty&mdash;and
+      they do respect Him, even when they curse the winds and the sea. Well, one
+      day we were lying in the open sea, about two hundred and fifty miles from
+      Port Darwin. There wasn&rsquo;t a breath of air. The sea was like glass; the sun
+      was drawing turpentine out of every inch of the &lsquo;Dancing Kate&rsquo;. The world
+      was one wild blister. There wasn&rsquo;t a comfortable spot in the craft, and
+      all round us was that staring, oily sea. It was too hot to smoke, and I
+      used to make a Sede boy do my smoking for me. I got the benefit of the
+      smell without any work. I was lying under the droop of a dingey, making
+      the Sede boy call on all his gods for wind, with interludes of smoke, when
+      he chucked his deities and tobacco, and, pointing, shouted, &lsquo;Man! man!&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I snatched a spy-glass. Sure enough, there was a boat on the water. It
+      was moving ever so slowly. It seemed to stop, and we saw something lifted
+      and waved, and then all was still again. I got a boat&rsquo;s crew together, and
+      away we went in that deadly smother. An hour&rsquo;s row and we got within hail
+      of the derelict&mdash;as one of the crew said, &lsquo;feelin&rsquo; as if the immortal
+      life was jerked out of us.&rsquo; The dingey lay there on the glassy surface,
+      not a sign of life about her. Yet I had, as I said, seen something waved.
+      The water didn&rsquo;t even lap its sides. It was ghostly, I can tell you. Our
+      oars licked the water; they didn&rsquo;t attack it. Now, I&rsquo;m going to tell you
+      something, Marmion, that&rsquo;ll make you laugh. I don&rsquo;t think I&rsquo;ve got any
+      poetry in me, but just then I thought of some verses I learned when I was
+      a little cove at Wellington&mdash;a devilishly weird thing. It came to me
+      at that moment like a word in my ear. It made me feel awkward for a
+      second. All sailors are superstitious, you know. I&rsquo;m superstitious about
+      this ship. Never mind; I&rsquo;ll tell you the verses, to show you what a queer
+      thing memory is. The thing was called &lsquo;No Man&rsquo;s Sea&rsquo;:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;The days are dead in the No Man&rsquo;s Sea,
+         And God has left it alone;
+        The angels cover their heads and flee,
+         And the wild four winds have flown.
+
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;There&rsquo;s never a ripple upon the tide,
+         There&rsquo;s never a word or sound;
+        But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+         To look for the souls of the drowned.
+
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;The No Man&rsquo;s Sea is a gaol of souls,
+         And its gate is a burning sun,
+        And deep beneath it a great bell tolls
+         For a death that never is done.
+
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;Alas! for any that comes anear,
+         That lies on its moveless breast;
+        The grumbling water shall be his bier,
+         And never a place of rest.&rdquo;&rsquo; 
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are four of the verses. Well, I made a motion to stop the rowing,
+      and was mum for a minute. The men got nervous. They looked at the boat in
+      front of us, and then turned round, as though to see if the &lsquo;Dancing Kate&rsquo; 
+      was still in sight. I spoke, and they got more courage. I stood up in the
+      boat, but could see nothing in the dingey. I gave a sign to go on, and
+      soon we were alongside. In the bottom of the dingey lay a man, apparently
+      dead, wearing the clothes of a convict. One of the crew gave a grunt of
+      disgust, the others said nothing. I don&rsquo;t take to men often, and to
+      convicts precious seldom; but there was a look in this man&rsquo;s face which
+      the prison clothes couldn&rsquo;t demoralise&mdash;a damned pathetic look, which
+      seemed to say, &lsquo;Not guilty.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a minute I was beside him, and found he wasn&rsquo;t dead. Brandy brought
+      him round a little; but he was a bit gone in the head, and muttered all
+      the way back to the ship. I had unbuttoned his shirt, and I saw on his
+      breast a little ivory portrait of a woman. I didn&rsquo;t let the crew see it;
+      for the fellow, even in his delirium, appeared to know I had exposed the
+      thing, and drew the linen close in his fingers, and for a long time held
+      it at his throat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the woman&rsquo;s face like, Hungerford?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He parried, remarking only that she had the face of a lady, and was
+      handsome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I pressed him. &ldquo;But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t ask foolish questions,
+      Marmion. Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life. He wouldn&rsquo;t have
+      lived at all, if a breeze hadn&rsquo;t come up and let us get away to the coast.
+      It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went bowling down towards Port
+      Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake. However, the poor beggar
+      thought he was going to die, and one night he told me his story. He was an
+      escaped convict from Freemantle, Western Australia. He had, with others,
+      been taken up to the northern coast to do some Government work, and had
+      escaped in the dingey. His crime was stealing funds belonging to a
+      Squatting and Mining Company. There was this extenuating circumstance: he
+      could have replaced the money, which, as he said, he&rsquo;d only intended to
+      use for a few weeks. But a personal enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts
+      were examined, and though he showed he&rsquo;d only used the money while more of
+      his own was on the way to him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him.
+      For two reasons: because it was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this
+      trial to divert public attention from its own dirty position; and because
+      he had against him not only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to
+      hit the Company through him. He&rsquo;d filched to be able to meet the large
+      expenses of his wife&rsquo;s establishment. Into this he didn&rsquo;t enter minutely,
+      and he didn&rsquo;t blame her for having so big a menage; he only said he was
+      sorry that he hadn&rsquo;t been able to support it without having to come, even
+      for a day, to the stupidity of stealing. After two years he escaped. He
+      asked me to write a letter to his wife, which he&rsquo;d dictate. Marmion, you
+      or I couldn&rsquo;t have dictated that letter if we&rsquo;d taken a year to do it.
+      There was no religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full
+      of sorrow for what he&rsquo;d done, and for the disgrace he&rsquo;d brought on her. I
+      remember the last few sentences as if I&rsquo;d seen them yesterday. &lsquo;I am dying
+      on the open sea, disgraced, but free,&rsquo; he said. &lsquo;I am not innocent in act,
+      but I was not guilty of intentional wrong. I did what I did that you
+      should have all you wished, all you ought to have. I ask but this&mdash;and
+      I shall soon ask for nothing&mdash;that you will have a kind thought, now
+      and then, for the man who always loved you, and loves you yet. I have
+      never blamed you that you did not come near me in my trouble; but I wish
+      you were here for a moment before I go away for ever. You must forgive me
+      now, for you will be free. If I were a better man I would say, God bless
+      you. In my last conscious moments I will think of you, and speak your
+      name. And now good-bye&mdash;an everlasting good-bye. I was your loving
+      husband, and am your lover until death.&rsquo; And it was signed, &lsquo;Boyd Madras.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;However, he didn&rsquo;t die. Between the captain and myself, we kept life in
+      him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and crew,
+      swearing to let no one know he was a convict. And I&rsquo;ll say this for the
+      crew of the &lsquo;Dancing Kate&rsquo; that, so far as I know, they kept their word.
+      That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne bankers, I gave back
+      to him before we landed. We made him up a purse of fifty pounds,&mdash;for
+      the crew got to like him,&mdash;and left him at Port Darwin, sailing away
+      again in a few days to another pearl-field farther east. What happened to
+      him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don&rsquo;t know; but one day I found him on
+      a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean, looking almost as near to
+      Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey on No Man&rsquo;s Sea. As I said
+      before, I think he didn&rsquo;t recognise me; and he&rsquo;s lying now in 116
+      Intermediate, with a look on him that I&rsquo;ve seen in the face of a man
+      condemned to death by the devils of cholera or equatorial fever. And
+      that&rsquo;s the story, Marmion, which I brought you to hear&mdash;told, as you
+      notice, in fine classical style.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why do you tell ME this, Hungerford&mdash;a secret you&rsquo;ve kept all
+      these years? Knowledge of that man&rsquo;s crime wasn&rsquo;t necessary before giving
+      him belladonna or a hot bath.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford kept back the whole truth for reasons of his own. He said:
+      &ldquo;Chiefly because I want you to take a decent interest in the chap. He
+      looks as if he might go off on the long voyage any tick o&rsquo; the clock. You
+      are doctor, parson, and everything else of the kind on board. I like the
+      poor devil, but anyhow I&rsquo;m not in a position to be going around with
+      ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,&mdash;very good
+      things. Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as
+      the body, and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras&rsquo;s mind is as
+      sick as his torso. By the way, he calls himself &lsquo;Charles Boyd,&rsquo; so I
+      suppose we needn&rsquo;t recall to him his former experiences by adding the
+      &lsquo;Madras.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford squeezed my arm again violently, and added: &ldquo;Look here,
+      Marmion, we understand each other in this, don&rsquo;t we? To do what we can for
+      the fellow, and be mum.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some of this looks rough and blunt, but as it was spoken there was that in
+      it which softened it to my ear. I knew he had told all he thought I ought
+      to know, and that he wished me to question him no more, nor to refer to
+      Mrs. Falchion, whose relationship to Boyd Madras&mdash;or Charles Boyd&mdash;both
+      of us suspected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was funny about those verses coming to my mind, wasn&rsquo;t it, Marmion?&rdquo;
+       he continued. And he began to repeat one of them, keeping time to the
+      wave-like metre with his cheroot, winding up with a quick, circular
+      movement, and putting it again between his lips:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;There&rsquo;s never a ripple upon the tide,
+         There&rsquo;s never a breath or sound;
+        But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+         To look for the souls of the drowned.&rdquo;&rsquo; 
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Then he jumped off the berth where he had been sitting, put on his jacket,
+      said it was time to take his turn on the bridge, and prepared to go out,
+      having apparently dismissed Number 116 Intermediate from his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to Charles Boyd&rsquo;s cabin, and knocked gently. There was no response.
+      I entered. He lay sleeping soundly&mdash;the sleep that comes after
+      nervous exhaustion. I had a good chance to study him as he lay there. The
+      face was sensitive and well fashioned, but not strong; the hands were
+      delicate, yet firmly made. One hand was clinched upon that portion of his
+      breast where the portrait hung.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IV. THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I went on deck again, and found Clovelly in the smoking-room. The
+      bookmaker was engaged in telling tales of the turf, alternated with comic
+      songs by Blackburn&mdash;an occupation which lasted throughout the voyage,
+      and was associated with electric appeals to the steward to fill the
+      flowing bowl. Clovelly came with me, and we joined Miss Treherne and her
+      father. Mr. Treherne introduced me to his daughter, and Clovelly amiably
+      drew the father into a discussion of communism as found in the South Sea
+      Islands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not think my conversation with Miss Treherne was brilliant. She has
+      since told me that I appeared self-conscious and preoccupied. This being
+      no compliment to her, I was treated accordingly. I could have endorsed
+      Clovelly&rsquo;s estimate of her so far as her reserve and sedateness were
+      concerned. It seemed impossible to talk naturally. The events of the day
+      were interrupting the ordinary run of thought, and I felt at a miserable
+      disadvantage. I saw, however, that the girl was gifted and clear of mind,
+      and possessed of great physical charm, but of that fine sort which must be
+      seen in suitable surroundings to be properly appreciated. Here on board
+      ship a sweet gravity and a proud decorum&mdash;not altogether unnecessary&mdash;prevented
+      her from being seen at once to the best advantage. Even at this moment I
+      respected her the more for it, and was not surprised, nor exactly
+      displeased, that she adroitly drew her father and Clovelly into the
+      conversation. With Clovelly she seemed to find immediate ground for naive
+      and pleasant talk; on his part, deferential, original, and attentive; on
+      hers, easy, allusive, and warmed with piquant humour. I admired her; saw
+      how cleverly Clovelly was making the most of her; guessed at the
+      solicitude, studious care, and affection of her bringing-up; watched the
+      fond pleasure of the father as he listened; and was angry with myself that
+      Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s voice rang in my ears at the same moment as hers. But it
+      did ring there, and the real value of that smart tournament of ideas was
+      partially lost to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next morning I went to Boyd Madras&rsquo;s cabin. He welcomed me gratefully,
+      and said that he was much better; as he seemed; but he carried a hectic
+      flush, such as comes to a consumptive person. I said little to him beyond
+      what was necessary for the discussion of his case. I cautioned him about
+      any unusual exertion, and was about to leave, when an impulse came to me,
+      and I returned and said: &ldquo;You will not let me help you in any other way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he answered; &ldquo;I shall be very glad of your help, but not just yet.
+      And, Doctor, believe me, I think medicines can do very little. Though I am
+      thankful to you for visiting me, you need not take the trouble, unless I
+      am worse, and then I will send a steward to you, or go to you myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What lay behind this request, unless it was sensitiveness, I could not
+      tell; but I determined to take my own course, and to visit him when I
+      thought fit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, I saw him but once or twice on the after-deck in the succeeding
+      days. He evidently wished to keep out of sight as much as possible. I am
+      ashamed to say there was a kind of satisfaction in this to me; for, when a
+      man&rsquo;s wife&mdash;and I believed she was Boyd Madras&rsquo;s wife&mdash;hangs on
+      your arm, and he himself is denied that privilege, and fares poorly beside
+      her sumptuousness, and lives as a stranger to her, you can scarcely regard
+      his presence with pleasure. And from the sheer force of circumstances, as
+      it seemed to me then, Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s hand was often on my arm; and her
+      voice was always in my ear at meal-times and when I visited Justine Caron
+      to attend to her wound, or joined in the chattering recreations of the
+      music saloon. It was impossible not to feel her influence; and if I did
+      not yield entirely to it, I was more possessed by it than I was aware. I
+      was inquisitive to know beyond doubt that she was the wife of this man. I
+      think it was in my mind at the time that, perhaps, by being with her much,
+      I should be able to do him a service. But there came a time when I was
+      sufficiently undeceived. It was all a game of misery in which some one
+      stood to lose all round. Who was it: she, or I, or the refugee of
+      misfortune, Number 116 Intermediate? She seemed safe enough. He or I would
+      suffer in the crash of penalties.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a strange situation. I, the acquaintance of a day, was welcome
+      within the circle of this woman&rsquo;s favour&mdash;though it was an
+      unemotional favour on her side; he, the husband, as I believed, though
+      only half the length of the ship away, was as distant from her as the
+      north star. When I sat with her on deck at night, I seemed to feel Boyd
+      Madras&rsquo;s face looking at me from the half-darkness of the after-deck; and
+      Mrs. Falchion, whose keen eyes missed little, remarked once on my gaze in
+      that direction. Thereafter I was more careful, but the idea haunted me.
+      Yet, I was not the only person who sat with her. Other men paid her
+      attentive court. The difference was, however, that with me she assumed
+      ever so delicate, yet palpable an air of proprietorship, none the less
+      alluring because there was no heart in it. So far as the other passengers
+      were concerned, there was nothing jarring to propriety in our
+      companionship. They did not know of Number 116 Intermediate. She had been
+      announced as a widow; and she had told Mrs. Callendar that her father&rsquo;s
+      brother, who, years before, had gone to California, had died within the
+      past two years and left her his property; and, because all Californians
+      are supposed to be millionaires, her wealth was counted fabulous. She was
+      going now to England, and from there to California in the following year.
+      People said that Dr. Marmion knew on which side his bread was buttered.
+      They may have said more unpleasant things, but I did not hear them, or of
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the time I was conscious of a kind of dishonour, and perhaps it was
+      that which prompted me (I had fallen away from my intention of visiting
+      him freely) to send my steward to see how Boyd Madras came on, rather than
+      go myself. I was, however, conscious that the position could not&mdash;should
+      not&mdash;be maintained long. The practical outcome of this knowledge was
+      not tardy. A new influence came into my life which was to affect it
+      permanently: but not without a struggle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A series of concerts and lectures had been arranged for the voyage, and
+      the fancy-dress ball was to close the first part of the journey&mdash;that
+      is, at Aden. One night a concert was on in the music saloon. I had just
+      come from seeing a couple of passengers who had been suffering from the
+      heat, and was debating whether to find Mrs. Falchion, who, I knew, was on
+      the other side of the deck, go in to the concert, or join Colonel Ryder
+      and Clovelly, who had asked me to come to the smoking-room when I could. I
+      am afraid I was balancing heavily in favour of Mrs. Falchion, when I heard
+      a voice that was new to me, singing a song I had known years before, when
+      life was ardent, and love first came&mdash;halcyon days in country lanes,
+      in lilac thickets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our footsteps met a
+      small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze, along the green
+      common that sloped to the village. I thought of all this, and of HER
+      everlasting quiet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a different voice the words of the song would have sent me out of
+      hearing; now I stood rooted to the spot, as the notes floated out past me
+      to the nervelessness of the Indian Ocean, every one of them a commandment
+      from behind the curtain of a sanctuary.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The voice was a warm, full contralto of exquisite culture. It suggested
+      depths of rich sound behind, from which the singer, if she chose, might
+      draw, until the room and the deck and the sea ached with sweetness. I
+      scarcely dared to look in to see who it was, lest I should find it a
+      dream. I stood with my head turned away towards the dusky ocean. When, at
+      last, with the closing notes of the song, I went to the port-hole and
+      looked in, I saw that the singer was Miss Treherne. There was an
+      abstracted look in her eyes as she raised them, and she seemed unconscious
+      of the applause following the last chords of the accompaniment. She stood
+      up, folding the music as she did so, and unconsciously raised her eyes
+      toward the port-hole where I was. Her glance caught mine, and instantly a
+      change passed over her face. The effect of the song upon her was broken;
+      she flushed slightly, and, as I thought, with faint annoyance. I know of
+      nothing so little complimentary to a singer as the audience that
+      patronisingly listens outside a room or window,&mdash;not bound by any
+      sense of duty as an audience,&mdash;between whom and the artists an
+      unnatural barrier is raised. But I have reason to think now that Belle
+      Treherne was not wholly moved by annoyance&mdash;that she had seen
+      something unusual, maybe oppressive, in my look. She turned to her father.
+      He adjusted his glasses as if, in his pride, to see her better. Then he
+      fondly took her arm, and they left the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I saw Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s face at the port-hole opposite. Her eyes were
+      on me. An instant before, I had intended following Miss Treherne and her
+      father; now some spirit of defiance, some unaccountable revolution, took
+      possession of me, so that I flashed back to her a warm recognition. I
+      could not have believed it possible, if it had been told of me, that, one
+      minute affected by beautiful and sacred remembrances, the next I should be
+      yielding to the unimpassioned tyranny of a woman who could never be
+      anything but a stumbling-block and an evil influence. I had yet to learn
+      that in times of mental and moral struggle the mixed fighting forces in us
+      resolve themselves into two cohesive powers, and strive for mastery; that
+      no past thought or act goes for nothing at such a time, but creeps out
+      from the darkness where we thought it had gone for ever, and does battle
+      with its kind against the common foe. There moved before my sight three
+      women: one, sweet and unsubstantial, wistful and mute and very young, not
+      of the earth earthy; one, lissom, grave, with gracious body and warm
+      abstracted eyes, all delicacy, strength, reserve; the other and last,
+      daring, cold, beautiful, with irresistible charm, silent and compelling.
+      And these are the three women who have influenced my life, who fought in
+      me then for mastery; one from out the unchangeable past, the others in the
+      tangible and delible present. Most of us have to pass through such ordeals
+      before character and conviction receive their final bias; before human
+      nature has its wild trouble, and then settles into &ldquo;cold rock and quiet
+      world;&rdquo; which any lesser after-shocks may modify, but cannot radically
+      change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to think. I felt that to be wholly a man I should turn from those
+      eyes drawing me on. I recalled the words of Clovelly, who had said to me
+      that afternoon, half laughingly: &ldquo;Dr. Marmion, I wonder how many of us
+      wish ourselves transported permanently to that time when we didn&rsquo;t know
+      champagne from &lsquo;alter feiner madeira&rsquo; or dry hock from sweet sauterne;
+      when a pretty face made us feel ready to abjure all the sinful lusts of
+      the flesh and become inheritors of the kingdom of heaven? Egad! I should
+      like to feel it once again. But how can we, when we have been intoxicated
+      with many things; when we are drunk with success and experience; have hung
+      on the fringe of unrighteousness; and know the world backward, and
+      ourselves mercilessly?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was I, like the drunkard, coming surely to the time when I could no longer
+      say yes to my wisdom, or no to my weakness? I knew that, an hour before,
+      in filling a phial with medicine, I found I was doing it mechanically, and
+      had to begin over again, making an effort to keep my mind to my task. I
+      think it is an axiom that no man can properly perform the business of life
+      who indulges in emotional preoccupation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These thoughts, which take so long to write, passed then through my mind
+      swiftly; but her eyes were on me with a peculiar and confident insistence&mdash;and
+      I yielded. On my way to her I met Clovelly and Colonel Ryder. Hungerford
+      was walking between them. Colonel Ryder said: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been saving that story
+      for you, Doctor; better come and get it while it&rsquo;s hot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was a promised tale of the taking of Mobile in the American Civil
+      War.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any other time the invitation would have pleased me mightily; for,
+      apart from the other two, Hungerford&rsquo;s brusque and original conversation
+      was always a pleasure&mdash;so were his cheroots; but now I was under an
+      influence selfish in its source. At the same time I felt that Hungerford
+      was storing up some acute criticism of me, and that he might let me hear
+      it any moment. I knew, numbering the order of his duties, that he could
+      have but a very short time to spare for gossip at this juncture, yet I
+      said that I could not join them for half an hour or so. Hungerford had a
+      fashion of looking at me searchingly from under his heavy brows, and I saw
+      that he did so now with impatience, perhaps contempt. I was certain that
+      he longed to thrash me. That was his idea of punishment and penalty. He
+      linked his arm in those of the other two men, and they moved on, Colonel
+      Ryder saying that he would keep the story till I came and would wait in
+      the smoking-room for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The concert was still on when I sat down beside Mrs. Falchion. &ldquo;You seemed
+      to enjoy Miss Treherne&rsquo;s singing?&rdquo; she said cordially enough as she folded
+      her hands in her lap.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I thought it beautiful. Didn&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pretty, most pretty; and admirable in technique and tone; but she has too
+      much feeling to be really artistic. She felt the thing, instead of
+      pretending to feel it&mdash;which makes all the difference. She belongs to
+      a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls
+      good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.
+      Still, all of that pleasant race will read their husband&rsquo;s letters and
+      smuggle. They have no civic virtues. Yet they would be shocked to bathe on
+      the beach without a machine, as American women do,&mdash;and they look for
+      a new fall of Jerusalem when one of their sex smokes a cigarette after
+      dinner. Now, I do not smoke cigarettes after dinner, so I can speak
+      freely. But, at the same time, I do not smuggle, and I do bathe on the
+      beach without a machine&mdash;when I am in a land where there are no
+      sharks and no taboo. If morally consumptive people were given a few years
+      in the South Seas, where they could not get away from nature, there would
+      be more strength and less scandal in society.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I laughed. &ldquo;There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
+      the world and my sex thoroughly. He says as much in his books.&mdash;Have
+      you read his &lsquo;A Sweet Apocalypse&rsquo;? He said more than as much to me. But he
+      knows a mere nothing about women&mdash;their amusing inconsistencies;
+      their infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their
+      self-torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods
+      of religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints of
+      a woman&rsquo;s position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
+      really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you. He has only got two or
+      three kinds of women in his mind, and the representatives of these fooled
+      him, as far as he went with them, to their hearts&rsquo; content. Believe me,
+      there is no one quite so foolish as the professional student of character.
+      He sees things with a glamour; he is impressionable; he immediately begins
+      to make a woman what he wishes her to be for his book, not what she is;
+      and women laugh at him when they read his books, or pity him if they know
+      him personally. I venture to say that I could make Mr. Clovelly use me in
+      a novel&mdash;not &lsquo;A Sweet Apocalypse&rsquo;&mdash;as a placid lover of fancy
+      bazaars and Dorcas societies, instead of a very practical person, who has
+      seen life without the romantic eye, and knows as well the working of a
+      buccaneering craft&mdash;through consular papers and magisterial trials,
+      of course&mdash;as of a colonial Government House. But it is not worth
+      while trying to make him falsify my character. Besides, you are here to
+      amuse me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This speech, as she made it, was pleasantly audacious and clever. I
+      laughed, and made a gesture of mock dissent, and she added: &ldquo;Now I have
+      finished my lecture. Please tie my shoe-lace there, and then, as I said,
+      amuse me. Oh, you can, if you choose! You are clever when you like to be.
+      Only, this time, do not let it be a professor&rsquo;s wife who foolishly
+      destroys herself, and cuts short what might have been a brilliant career.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On the instant I determined to probe deeper into her life, and try her
+      nerve, by telling a story with enough likeness to her own (if she was the
+      wife of Boyd Madras) to affect her acutely; though I was not sure I could
+      succeed. A woman who triumphs over sea-sickness, whom steam from the
+      boilers never affects, nor the propeller-screw disturbs, has little to
+      fear from the words of a man who is neither adroit, eloquent, nor
+      dramatic. However, I determined to try what I could do. I said: &ldquo;I fancy
+      you would like something in the line of adventure; but my career has not
+      run in that direction, so I shall resort to less exciting fields, and, I
+      fear, also, a not very cheerful subject.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, never mind!&rdquo; said she. &ldquo;What you wish, so long as it is not
+      conventional and hackneyed. But I know you will not be prosy, so go on,
+      please.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I began, &ldquo;once, in the hospital, I attended a man&mdash;Anson was
+      his name&mdash;who, when he thought he was going to die, confided to me
+      his life&rsquo;s secret. I liked the man; he was good-looking, amiable, but
+      hopelessly melancholy. He was dying as much from trouble as disease. No
+      counsel or encouragement had any effect upon him; he did, as I have seen
+      so many do&mdash;he resigned himself to the out-going tide. Well, for the
+      secret. He had been a felon. His crime had been committed through
+      ministering to his wife&rsquo;s vanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here I paused. I felt Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s eyes searching me. I raised mine
+      steadily to hers with an impersonal glance, and saw that she had not
+      changed colour in the least. But her eyes were busy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I proceeded: &ldquo;When he was disgraced she did not come near him. When he
+      went to her, after he was released&rdquo; (here I thought it best to depart from
+      any close resemblance to Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s own story), &ldquo;and was admitted to
+      her, she treated him as an absolute stranger&mdash;as one who had
+      intruded, and might be violent. She said that she and her maid were alone
+      in the house, and hinted that he had come to disturb them. She bade him
+      go, or she must herself go. He called her by his own name, and begged her,
+      by the memory of their dead child, to speak kindly to him. She said he was
+      quite mistaken in her name, that she was Mrs. Glave, not Mrs. Anson, and
+      again insisted that he should go. He left her, and at last,
+      broken-hearted, found his way, in illness and poverty to the hospital,
+      where, toward the last, he was cared for by a noble girl, a companion of
+      his boyhood and his better days, who urged his wife to visit him. She left
+      him alone, said unpleasant things to the girl, did not come to see her
+      husband when he was dead, and provided nothing for his burial. You see
+      that, like you, she hated suffering and misery&mdash;and criminals. The
+      girl and her mother paid the expenses of the funeral, and, with myself,
+      were the only mourners. I am doubtful if the wife knows even where he
+      lies. I admit that the story sounds melodramatic; but truth is more drama
+      than comedy, I fancy. Now, what do you think of it all, Mrs. Falchion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had felt her shrink a little at the earlier part of my story, as if she
+      feared that her own tale was to be brutally bared before her; but that
+      soon passed, and she languidly tapped the chair-arm as the narrative
+      continued. When it was finished, she leaned over slightly, and with these
+      same fingers tapped my arm. I thrilled involuntarily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He died, did he?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;That was the most graceful thing he could
+      do. So far as my knowledge of the world is concerned, men of his class do
+      NOT die. They live, and they never rise above their degradation. They had
+      not brains or courage enough to keep them out of gaol, and they have not
+      pluck or brains enough to succeed&mdash;afterwards. Your friend Anson was
+      quite gentlemanly in his action at the last. He had some sense of the
+      fitness of things. He could not find a place in the world without making
+      other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble. If he had lived, he would
+      always have added to the blight on his wife&rsquo;s career, and have been an
+      arrow&mdash;not a thorn&mdash;in her side. Very likely he would have
+      created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him. He made the
+      false step, and compelled society to reject him. It did not want to do so;
+      it never does. It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and acknowledge
+      things until the culprit himself forces it to take action. Then it says:
+      &lsquo;Now you have openly and inconsiderately broken our bond of mutual
+      forbearance. You make me send you away. Go, then, behind stone walls, and
+      please do not come to me again. If you do, you will only be a troublesome
+      ghost. You will cause awkwardness and distress.&rsquo; So, Mr. Anson&mdash;I
+      must be polite to him&mdash;did the most reasonable and proper thing. He
+      disappeared from the play before it actually became tragedy. There was no
+      tragedy in his death&mdash;death is a magnificent ally; it untangles
+      knots. The tragedy was in his living&mdash;in the perpetual ruin of his
+      wife&rsquo;s life, renewed every morning. He disappeared. Then the play became
+      drama, with only a little shadow of tragedy behind it. Now, frankly, am I
+      not right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;your argument is clever, but it is only
+      incidentally true. You draw life, society and men no more correctly than
+      the author of &lsquo;A Sweet Apocalypse&rsquo; would draw you. The social law you
+      sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless. It does not
+      provide for repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
+      It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair of
+      priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final so
+      far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned. What
+      his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his fellow-men
+      require of him is another. The world says, You shall have latitude enough
+      to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code. As soon as you
+      break the law openly, and set the machinery of public penalty in motion,
+      there is an end of you, so far as this world is concerned. You may live
+      on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and broken you always will be.
+      It is not a question of right or wrong, of kindness or cruelty, but of
+      general expediency and inevitableness. To all effect, Mr. Anson was dead
+      before he breathed his last. He died when he passed within the walls of a
+      gaol&mdash;condemned for theft.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did from
+      her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
+      downrightness&mdash;enchanted by the glow of her face. To this hour,
+      knowing all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid
+      achievement of nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents
+      with the general sense and the straitest interpretation of life;
+      convincing even in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be
+      acting not so much by impulse as by the law of her nature. Her emotions
+      were apparently rationalised at birth&mdash;to be derationalised and
+      broken up by a power greater than herself before her life had worked
+      itself out. I had counted her clever; I had not reckoned with her powers
+      of reasoning. Influenced as I was by emotion when in her presence, I
+      resorted to a personal application of my opinions&mdash;the last and most
+      unfair resort of a disputant. I said I would rather be Anson dead than
+      Mrs. Anson living; I would rather be the active than the passive sinner;
+      the victim, than a part of that great and cruel machine of penalty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The passive sinner!&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;Why, what wrong did she do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The highest moral conceptions worked dully in her. Yet she seemed then, as
+      she always appeared to be, free from any action that should set the
+      machine of penalty going against herself. She was inexorable, but she had
+      never, knowingly, so much as slashed the hem of the moral code.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was to give his wife pleasure that Anson made the false step,&rdquo; I
+      urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think she would have had the pleasure at the price? The man was
+      vain and selfish to run any risk, to do anything that might endanger her
+      safety&mdash;that is, her happiness and comfort.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose he knew that she loved ease and pleasure?&mdash;that he
+      feared her anger or disdain if he did not minister to her luxuries?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then he ought not to have married that kind of a woman.&rdquo; The hardness in
+      her voice was matched at that moment by the coldness of her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is begging the question,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;What would such a selfish
+      woman do in such a case, if her pleasure could not be gratified?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must ask that kind of woman,&rdquo; was her ironical answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I rashly felt that her castle of strength was crumbling. I ventured
+      farther.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have done so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned slightly toward me, yet not nervously, as I had expected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did she say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She declined to answer directly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause, in which I felt her eyes searching my face. I fear I
+      must have learned dissimulation well; for, after a minute, I looked at
+      her, and saw, from the absence of any curious anxiety, that I had betrayed
+      nothing. She looked me straight in the eyes and said: &ldquo;Dr. Marmion, a man
+      must not expect to be forgiven, who has brought shame on a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not even when he has repented and atoned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Atoned! How mad you are! How can there be atonement? You cannot wipe
+      things out&mdash;on earth. We are of the earth. Records remain. If a man
+      plays the fool, the coward, and the criminal, he must expect to wear the
+      fool&rsquo;s cap, the white feather, and the leg-chain until his life&rsquo;s end. And
+      now, please, let us change the subject. We have been bookish long enough.&rdquo;
+       She rose with a gesture of impatience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not rise. &ldquo;Pardon me, Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; I urged, &ldquo;but this interests
+      me so. I have thought much of Anson lately. Please, let us talk a little
+      longer. Do sit down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down again with an air of concession rather than of pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am interested,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;in looking at this question from a woman&rsquo;s
+      standpoint. You see, I am apt to side with the miserable fellow who made a
+      false step&mdash;foolish, if you like&mdash;all for love of a selfish and
+      beautiful woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She was beautiful?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, as you are.&rdquo; She did not blush at that rank compliment, any more
+      than a lioness would, if you praised the astonishing sleekness and beauty
+      of its skin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she had been a true wife to him before that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, in all that concerned the code.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&mdash;Well, was not that enough? She did what she could, as long as
+      she could.&rdquo; She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think&mdash;as a woman, not as a theorist&mdash;that Mrs. Anson
+      might at least have come to him when he was dying?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would only have been uncomfortable for her. She had no part in his
+      life; she could not feel with him. She could do nothing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose she had loved him? By that memory, then, of the time when
+      they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
+      them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
+      free world into a cage. Besides, we are talking about people marrying, not
+      about their loving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will admit,&rdquo; I said, with a little raw irony, &ldquo;that I was not exact in
+      definition.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not so
+      marvellous to me as they might seem to others. She thought a moment quite
+      indolently, and then continued: &ldquo;You make one moralise like George Eliot.
+      Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action. The one is a
+      contract, the other is complete possession, a principle&mdash;that is, if
+      it exists at all. I do not know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them was
+      a wedding-ring! Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now she
+      seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the humming
+      darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a boatswain&rsquo;s
+      whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous hour in the
+      smoking-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am now about to record an act of madness, of folly, on my part. I
+      suppose most men have such moments of temptation, but I suppose, also,
+      that they act more sensibly and honourably than I did then. Her hand had
+      dropped gently on the chair-arm, near to my own, and though our fingers
+      did not touch, I felt mine thrilled and impelled toward hers. I do not
+      seek to palliate my action. Though the man I believed to be her husband
+      was below, I yielded myself to an imagined passion for her. In that moment
+      I was a captive. I caught her hand and kissed it hotly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you might know what love is,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You might learn&mdash;learn of
+      me. You&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Abruptly and with surprise she withdrew her hand, and, without any visible
+      emotion save a quicker pulsation of her breast, which might have been
+      indignation, spoke. &ldquo;But even if I might learn, Dr. Marmion, be sure that
+      neither your college nor Heaven gave you the knowledge to instruct me....
+      There: pardon me, if I speak harshly; but this is most inconsiderate of
+      you, most impulsive&mdash;and compromising. You are capable of singular
+      contrasts. Please let us be friends, friends simply. You are too
+      interesting for a lover, really you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her words were a cold shock to my emotion&mdash;my superficial emotion;
+      though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me. Without any
+      apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
+      were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
+      &ldquo;I do not wonder now!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You do not wonder at what?&rdquo; she questioned; and she laid her hand kindly
+      on my arm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, &ldquo;At men going to the
+      devil.&rdquo; But this was not what I thought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That does not sound complimentary to somebody. May I ask you what you
+      mean?&rdquo; she said calmly. &ldquo;I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did not
+      love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant? You are not my husband&mdash;not
+      my slave. But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson&rsquo;s wife was not responsible
+      for his loving her. Love, as I take it, is a voluntary thing. It pleased
+      him to love her&mdash;he would not have done it if it did not please him;
+      probably his love was an inconvenient thing domestically&mdash;if he had
+      no tact.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of that,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;neither you nor I can know with any certainty. But, to
+      be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where she
+      had not strawed. If she did not make the man love her,&mdash;I believe she
+      did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,&mdash;she used his
+      love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire her. She
+      was richer in personal power for that experience; but she was not grateful
+      for it nor for his devotion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean, in fact, that I&mdash;for you make the personal application&mdash;shall
+      be better able henceforth to win men&rsquo;s love, because&mdash;ah, surely, Dr.
+      Marmion, you do not dignify this impulse, this foolishness of yours, by
+      the name of love!&rdquo; She smiled a little satirically at the fingers I had
+      kissed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was humiliated, and annoyed with her and with myself, though, down in my
+      mind, I knew that she was right. &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;that I can understand
+      how men have committed suicide because of just such things. My wonder is
+      that Anson, poor devil! did not do it.&rdquo; I knew I was talking foolishly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He hadn&rsquo;t the courage, my dear sir. He was gentlemanly enough to die, but
+      not to be heroic to that extent. For it does need a strong dash of heroism
+      to take one&rsquo;s own life. As I conceive it, suicide would have been the best
+      thing for him when he sinned against the code. The world would have pitied
+      him then, would have said, He spared us the trial of punishing him. But to
+      pay the vulgar penalty of prison&mdash;ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered and then almost coldly continued: &ldquo;Suicide is an act of
+      importance; it shows that a man recognises, at least, the worthlessness of
+      his life. He does one dramatic and powerful thing; he has an instant of
+      great courage, and all is over. If it had been a duel in which, of
+      intention, he would fire wide, and his assailant would fire to kill, so
+      much the better; so much the more would the world pity. But either is
+      superior, as a final situation, than death with a broken heart&mdash;I
+      suppose that is possible?&mdash;and disgrace, in a hospital.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You seem to think only of the present, only of the code and the world;
+      and as if there were no heroism in a man living down his shame, righting
+      himself heroically at all points possible, bearing his penalty, and
+      showing the courage of daily wearing the sackcloth of remorse and
+      restitution.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she persisted, &ldquo;you make me angry. I know what you wish to express;
+      I know that you consider it a sin to take one&rsquo;s life, even in &lsquo;the high
+      Roman fashion.&rsquo; But, frankly, I do not, and I fear&mdash;or rather, I
+      fancy&mdash;that I never shall. After all, your belief is a pitiless one;
+      for, as I have tried to say, the man has not himself alone to consider,
+      but those to whom his living is a perpetual shame and menace and cruelty
+      insupportable&mdash;insupportable! Now, please, let us change the subject
+      finally; and&rdquo;&mdash;here she softly laughed&mdash;&ldquo;forgive me if I have
+      treated your fancied infatuation lightly or indifferently. I want you for
+      a friend&mdash;at least, for a friendly acquaintance. I do not want you
+      for a lover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We both rose. I was not quite content with her nor with myself yet. I felt
+      sure that while she did not wish me for a lover, she was not averse to my
+      playing the devoted cavalier, who should give all, while she should give
+      nothing. I knew that my punishment had already begun. We paced the deck in
+      silence; and once, as we walked far aft, I saw, leaning upon the railing
+      of the intermediate deck, and looking towards us&mdash;Boyd Madras; and
+      the words of that letter which he wrote on the No Man&rsquo;s Sea came to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length she said: &ldquo;You have made no reply to my last remark. Are we to
+      be friends, and not lovers? Or shall you cherish enmity against me? Or,
+      worse still,&rdquo;&mdash;and here she laughed, I thought, a little ironically,&mdash;&ldquo;avoid
+      me, and be as icy as you have been&mdash;fervid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;your enemy I do not wish to be&mdash;I could not
+      be if I wished; but, for the rest, you must please let me see what I may
+      think of myself to-morrow. There is much virtue in to-morrow,&rdquo; I added.
+      &ldquo;It enables one to get perspective.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand,&rdquo; she said; and then was silent. We walked the deck slowly
+      for several minutes. Then we were accosted by two ladies of a committee
+      that had the fancy-dress ball in hand. They wished to consult Mrs.
+      Falchion in certain matters of costume and decoration, for which, it had
+      been discovered, she had a peculiar faculty. She turned to me half
+      inquiringly, and I bade her good-night, inwardly determined (how easy it
+      is after having failed to gratify ourselves!) that the touch of her
+      fingers should never again make my heart beat faster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I joined Colonel Ryder and Clovelly in the smoking-room. Hungerford, as I
+      guessed gladly, was gone. I was too much the coward to meet his eye just
+      then. Colonel Ryder was estimating the amount he would wager&mdash;if he
+      were in the habit of betting&mdash;that the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; could not turn round
+      in her tracks in twenty minutes, while he parenthetically endorsed
+      Hungerford&rsquo;s remarks to me&mdash;though he was ignorant of them&mdash;that
+      lascars should not be permitted on English passenger ships. He was
+      supported by Sir Hayes Craven, a shipowner, who further said that not one
+      out of ten British sailors could swim, while not five out of ten could row
+      a boat properly. Ryder&rsquo;s anger was great, because Clovelly remarked with
+      mock seriousness that the lascars were picturesque, and asked the American
+      if he had watched them listlessly eating rice and curry as they squatted
+      between decks; whether he had observed the Serang, with his silver
+      whistle, who ruled them, and despised us &ldquo;poor white trash;&rdquo; and if he did
+      not think it was a good thing to have fatalists like them as sailors&mdash;they
+      would be cool in time of danger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Ryder&rsquo;s indignation was curbed, however, by the bookmaker, who,
+      having no views, but seeing an opportunity for fun, brought up
+      reinforcements of chaff and slang, easily construable into profanity, and
+      impregnated with terse humour. Many of the ladies had spoken of the
+      bookmaker as one of the best-mannered men on board. So he was to all
+      appearance. None dressed with better taste, nor carried himself with such
+      an air. There was even a deferential tone in his strong language, a
+      hesitating quaintness, which made it irresistible. He was at the service
+      of any person on board needing championship. His talents were varied. He
+      could suggest harmonies in colour to the ladies at one moment, and at the
+      next, in the seclusion of the bar counter, arrange deadly harmonies in
+      liquor. He was an authority on acting; he knew how to edit a newspaper; he
+      picked out the really nice points in the sermons delivered by the
+      missionaries in the saloon; he had some marvellous theories about
+      navigation; and his trick with a salad was superb. He now convulsed the
+      idlers in the smoking-room with laughter, and soon deftly drew off the
+      discussion to the speed of the vessel, arranging a sweep-stake
+      immediately, upon the possibilities of the run. He instantly proposed to
+      sell the numbers by auction. He was the auctioneer. With his eye-glass at
+      his eye, and Bohemian pleasantry falling from his lips, he ran the prices
+      up. He was selling Clovelly&rsquo;s number, and had advanced it beyond the
+      novelist&rsquo;s own bidding, when suddenly the screw stopped, the engines
+      ceased working, and the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; slowed down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The numbers remained unsold. Word came to us that an accident had happened
+      to the machinery, and that we should be hove-to for a day, or longer, to
+      accomplish necessary repairs. How serious the accident to the machinery
+      was no one knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER V. ACCUSING FACES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      While we were hove-to, the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; passed us. In all probability it
+      would now get to Aden ahead of us; and herein lay a development of the
+      history of Mrs. Falchion. I was standing beside Belle Treherne as the ship
+      came within hail of us and signalled to see what was the matter. Mrs.
+      Falchion was not far from us. She was looking intently at the vessel
+      through marine-glasses, and she did not put them down until it had passed.
+      Then she turned away with an abstracted light in her eyes and a wintry
+      smile; and the look and the smile continued when she sat down in her
+      deck-chair and leaned her cheek meditatively on the marine-glass. But I
+      saw now that something was added to the expression of her face&mdash;a
+      suggestion of brooding or wonder. Belle Treherne, noticing the direction
+      of my glances, said: &ldquo;Have you known Mrs. Falchion long?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not long,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;Only since she came on board.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is very clever, I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt my face flushing, though, reasonably, there was no occasion for it,
+      and I said: &ldquo;Yes, she is one of the ablest women I have ever met.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is beautiful, too&mdash;very beautiful.&rdquo; This very frankly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you talked with her?&rdquo; asked I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a little this morning, for the first time. She did not speak much,
+      however.&rdquo; Here Miss Treherne paused, and then added meditatively: &ldquo;Do you
+      know, she impressed me as having singular frankness and singular reserve
+      as well? I think I admired it. There is no feeling in her speech, and yet
+      it has great candour. I never before met any one like her. She does not
+      wear her heart upon her sleeve, I imagine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A moment of irony came over me; that desire to say what one really does
+      not believe (a feminine trait), and I replied: &ldquo;Are both those articles
+      necessary to any one? A sleeve?&mdash;well, one must be clothed. But a
+      heart?&mdash;a cumbrous thing, as I take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Belle Treherne turned, and looked me steadily in the eyes for an instant,
+      as if she had suddenly awakened from abstraction, and slowly said, while
+      she drew back slightly: &ldquo;Dr. Marmion, I am only a girl, I know, and
+      inexperienced, but I hoped most people of education and knowledge of life
+      were free from that kind of cynicism to be read of in books.&rdquo; Then
+      something in her thoughts seemed to chill her words and manner, and her
+      father coming up a moment after, she took his arm, and walked away with a
+      not very cordial bow to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fact is, with a woman&rsquo;s quick intuition, she had read in my tone
+      something suggestive of my recent experience with Mrs. Falchion. Her fine
+      womanliness awoke; the purity of her thoughts, rose in opposition to my
+      flippancy and to me; and I knew that I had raised a prejudice not easy to
+      destroy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was on a Friday afternoon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the Saturday evening following, the fancy-dress ball was to occur. The
+      accident to the machinery and our delay were almost forgotten in the
+      preparations therefor. I had little to do; there was only one sick man on
+      board, and my hand could not cure his sickness. How he fared, my
+      uncomfortable mind, now bitterly alive to a sense of duty, almost
+      hesitated to inquire. Yet a change had come. A reaction had set in for me.
+      Would it be permanent? I dared scarcely answer that question, with Mrs.
+      Falchion at my right hand at table, with her voice at my ear. I was not
+      quite myself yet; I was struggling, as it were, with the effects of a
+      fantastic dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Still, I had determined upon my course. I had made resolutions. I had
+      ended the chapter of dalliance. I had wished to go to 116 Intermediate and
+      let its occupant demand what satisfaction he would. I wanted to say to
+      Hungerford that I was an ass; but that was even harder still. He was so
+      thorough and uncompromising in nature, so strong in moral fibre, that I
+      felt his sarcasm would be too outspoken for me just at present. In this,
+      however, I did not give him credit for a fine sense of consideration, as
+      after events showed. Although there had been no spoken understanding
+      between us that Mrs. Falchion was the wife of Boyd Madras, the mind of one
+      was the other&rsquo;s also. I understood exactly why he told me Boyd Madras&rsquo;s
+      story: it was a warning. He was not the man to harp on things. He gave the
+      hint, and there the matter ended, so far as he was concerned, until a time
+      might come when he should think it his duty to refer to the subject again.
+      Some time before, he had shown me the portrait of the girl who had
+      promised to be his wife. She, of course, could trust HIM anywhere,
+      everywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion had seen the change in me, and, I am sure, guessed the new
+      direction of my thoughts, and knew that I wished to take refuge in a new
+      companionship&mdash;a thing, indeed, not easily to be achieved, as I felt
+      now; for no girl of delicate and proud temper would complacently regard a
+      hasty transference of attention from another to herself. Besides, it would
+      be neither courteous nor reasonable to break with Mrs. Falchion abruptly.
+      The error was mine, not hers. She had not my knowledge of the immediate
+      circumstances, which made my position morally untenable. She showed
+      unembarrassed ignorance of the change. At the same time I caught a tone of
+      voice and a manner which showed she was not actually oblivious, but was
+      touched in that nerve called vanity; and from this much feminine hatred
+      springs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I made up my mind to begin a course of scientific reading, and was seated
+      in my cabin, vainly trying to digest a treatise on the pathology of the
+      nervous system, when Hungerford appeared at the door. With a nod, he
+      entered, threw himself down on the cabin sofa, and asked for a match.
+      After a pause, he said: &ldquo;Marmion, Boyd Madras, alias Charles Boyd, has
+      recognised me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I rose to get a cigar, thus turning my face from him, and said: &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, there isn&rsquo;t anything very startling. I suppose he wishes I had left
+      him in the dingey on No Man&rsquo;s Sea. He&rsquo;s a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marmion, are your brains softening? Why does he shadow a woman who
+      wouldn&rsquo;t lift her finger to save him from battle, murder, or sudden
+      death?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From the code,&rdquo; I said, in half soliloquy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;From the what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, never mind, Hungerford. I suppose he is shadowing&mdash;Mrs.
+      Falchion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He eyed me closely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean the woman that chucked his name; that turned her back on him when
+      he was in trouble; that hopes he is dead, if she doesn&rsquo;t believe that he
+      is actually; that would, no doubt, treat him as a burglar if he went to
+      her, got down on his knees, and said: &lsquo;Mercy, my girl, I&rsquo;ve come back to
+      you a penitent prodigal. Henceforth I shall be as straight as the sun, so
+      help me Heaven and your love and forgiveness!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford paused, as if expecting me to reply; but, leaning forward on my
+      knees and smoking hard, I remained silent. This seemed to anger him, for
+      he said a little roughly: &ldquo;Why doesn&rsquo;t he come out and give you blazes on
+      the promenade deck, and corner her down with a mighty cheek, and levy on
+      her for a thousand pounds? Both you and she would think more of him. Women
+      don&rsquo;t dislike being bullied, if it is done in the right way&mdash;haven&rsquo;t
+      I seen it the world over, from lubra to dowager? I tell you, man&mdash;sinning
+      or not&mdash;was meant to be woman&rsquo;s master and lover, and just as much
+      one as the other.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point Hungerford&rsquo;s manner underwent a slight change, and he
+      continued: &ldquo;Marmion, I wouldn&rsquo;t have come near you, only I noticed you
+      have altered your course, and are likely to go on a fresh tack. It isn&rsquo;t
+      my habit to worry a man. I gave you a signal, and you didn&rsquo;t respond at
+      first. Well, we have come within hail again; and now, don&rsquo;t you think that
+      you might help to straighten this tangle, and try to arrange a
+      reconciliation between those two?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The scheme is worth trying. Nobody need know but you and me. It wouldn&rsquo;t
+      be much of a sacrifice to her to give him a taste of the thing she swore
+      to do&mdash;how does it run?&mdash;&lsquo;to have and to hold from this day
+      forward&rsquo;?&mdash;I can&rsquo;t recall it; but it&rsquo;s whether the wind blows fair or
+      foul, or the keel scrapes the land or gives to the rock, till the sea
+      gulps one of &lsquo;em down for ever. That&rsquo;s the sense of the thing, Marmion,
+      and the contract holds between the two, straight on into the eternal
+      belly. Whatever happens, a husband is a husband, and a wife a wife. It
+      seems to me that, in the sight of Heaven, it&rsquo;s he that&rsquo;s running fair in
+      the teeth of the wind, every timber straining, and she that&rsquo;s riding with
+      it, well coaled, flags flying, in an open channel, and passing the
+      derelict without so much as, &lsquo;Ahoy there!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, at this distance of time, I look back, and see Hungerford, &ldquo;the rowdy
+      sailor,&rdquo; as he called himself, lying there, his dark grey eyes turned full
+      on me; and I am convinced that no honester, more sturdy-minded man ever
+      reefed a sail, took his turn upon the bridge, or walked the dry land in
+      the business of life. It did not surprise me, a year after, when I saw in
+      public prints that he was the hero of&mdash;but that must be told
+      elsewhere. I was about to answer him then as I knew he would wish, when a
+      steward appeared and said: &ldquo;Mr. Boyd, 116 Intermediate, wishes you would
+      come to him, sir, if you would be so kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford rose, and, as I made ready to go, urged quietly: &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve got
+      the charts and soundings, Marmion, steam ahead!&rdquo; and, with a swift but
+      kindly clench of my shoulder, he left me. In that moment there came a
+      cowardly feeling, a sense of shamefacedness, and then, hard upon it, and
+      overwhelming it, a determination to serve Boyd Madras so far as lay in my
+      power, and to be a man, and not a coward or an idler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I found him he was prostrate. In his eyes there was no anger, no
+      indignation, nor sullenness&mdash;all of which he might reasonably have
+      felt; and instantly I was ashamed of the thought which, as I came to him,
+      flashed through my mind, that he might do some violent thing. Not that I
+      had any fear of violence; but I had an active dislike of awkward
+      circumstances. I felt his fluttering pulse, and noted the blue line on his
+      warped lips. I gave him some medicine, and then sat down. There was a
+      silence. What could I say? A dozen thoughts came to my mind, but I
+      rejected them. It was difficult to open up the subject. At last he put his
+      hand upon my arm and spoke:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You told me one night that you would help me if you could. I ought to
+      have accepted your offer at first; it would have been better.&mdash;No,
+      please don&rsquo;t speak just yet. I think I know what you would say. I knew
+      that you meant all you urged upon me; that you liked me. I was once worthy
+      of men&rsquo;s liking, perhaps, and I had good comrades; but that is all over.
+      You have not come near me lately, but it wasn&rsquo;t because you felt any
+      neglect, or wished to take back your words; but&mdash;because of something
+      else.... I understand it all. She has great power. She always had. She is
+      very beautiful. I remember when&mdash;but I will not call it back before
+      you, though, God knows, I go over it all every day and every night, until
+      it seems that only the memory of her is real, and that she herself is a
+      ghost. I ought not to have crossed her path again, even unknown to her.
+      But I have done it, and now I cannot go out of that path without kneeling
+      before her once again, as I did long ago. Having seen her, breathed the
+      same air, I must speak or die; perhaps it will be both. That is a power
+      she has: she can bend one to her will, although she often, involuntarily,
+      wills things that are death to others. One MUST care for her, you
+      understand; it is natural, even when it is torture to do so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand on his side and moved as if in pain. I reached over and
+      felt his pulse, then took his hand and pressed it, saying: &ldquo;I will be your
+      friend now, Madras, in so far as I can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked up at me gratefully, and replied: &ldquo;I know that&mdash;I know
+      that. It is more than I deserve.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he began to speak of his past. He told me of Hungerford&rsquo;s kindness to
+      him on the &lsquo;Dancing Kate&rsquo;, of his luckless days at Port Darwin, of his
+      search for his wife, his writing to her, and her refusal to see him. He
+      did not rail against her. He apologised for her, and reproached himself.
+      &ldquo;She is most singular,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and different from most women. She
+      never said she loved me, and she never did, I know. Her father urged her
+      to marry me; he thought I was a good man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here he laughed a little bitterly. &ldquo;But it was a bad day for her. She
+      never loved any one, I think, and she cannot understand what love is,
+      though many have cared for her. She is silent where herself is concerned.
+      I think there was some trouble&mdash;not love, I am sure of that&mdash;which
+      vexed her, and made her a little severe at times; something connected with
+      her life, or her father&rsquo;s life, in Samoa. One can only guess, but white
+      men take what are called native wives there very often&mdash;and who can
+      tell? Her father&mdash;but that is her secret!... While I was right before
+      the world, she was a good wife to me in her way. When I went wrong, she
+      treated me as if I were dead, and took her old name. But if I could speak
+      to her quietly once more, perhaps she would listen. It would be no good at
+      all to write. Perhaps she would never begin the world with me again, but I
+      should like to hear her say, &lsquo;I forgive you. Good-bye.&rsquo; There would be
+      some comfort in a kind farewell from her. You can see that, Dr. Marmion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused, waiting for me to speak. &ldquo;Yes, I can see that,&rdquo; I said; and
+      then I added: &ldquo;Why did you not speak to her before you both came on board
+      at Colombo?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had no chance. I only saw her in the street, an hour before the ship
+      sailed. I had scarcely time to take my passage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Pain here checked his utterance, and when he recovered, he turned again to
+      me, and continued: &ldquo;To-morrow night there is to be a fancy-dress ball on
+      board. I have been thinking. I could go in a good disguise. I could speak
+      to her, and attract no notice; and if she will not listen to me, why,
+      then, that ends it. I shall know the worst, and to know the worst is
+      good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said I; &ldquo;and what do you wish me to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish to go in a disguise, of course; to dress in your cabin, if you
+      will let me. I cannot dress here, it would attract attention; and I am not
+      a first-class passenger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fear,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;that it is impossible for me to assist you to the
+      privileges of a first-class passenger. You see, I am an officer of the
+      ship. But still I can help you. You shall leave this cabin to-night. I
+      will arrange so that you may transfer yourself to one in the first-class
+      section.... No, not a word; it must be as I wish in this. You are ill; I
+      can do you that kindness at least, and then, by right, you can attend the
+      ball, and, after it, your being among the first-class passengers can make
+      little difference; for you will have met and spoken then, either to peace
+      or otherwise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had very grave doubts of any reconciliation; the substance of my notable
+      conversation with Mrs. Falchion was so prominent in my mind. I feared she
+      would only reproduce the case of Anson and his wife. I was also afraid of
+      a possible scene&mdash;which showed that I was not yet able to judge of
+      her resources. After a time, in which we sat silent, I said to Madras:
+      &ldquo;But suppose she should be frightened?&mdash;should&mdash;should make a
+      scene?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised himself to a sitting posture. &ldquo;I feel better,&rdquo; he said. Then,
+      answering my question: &ldquo;You do not know her quite. She will not stir a
+      muscle. She has nerve. I have seen her in positions of great peril and
+      trial. She is not emotional, though I truly think she will wake one day
+      and find her heart all fire but not for me. Still, I say that all will be
+      quite comfortable, so far as any demonstration on her part is concerned.
+      She will not be melodramatic, I do assure you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the disguise&mdash;your dress?&rdquo; inquired I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He rose from the berth slowly, and, opening a portmanteau, drew from it a
+      cloth of white and red, fringed with gold. It was of beautiful texture,
+      and made into the form of a toga or mantle. He said: &ldquo;I was a seller of
+      such stuffs in Colombo, and these I brought with me, because I could not
+      dispose of them without sacrifice when I left hurriedly. I have made them
+      into a mantle. I could go as&mdash;a noble Roman, perhaps!&rdquo; Then a slight,
+      ironical smile crossed his lips, and he stretched out his thin but shapely
+      arms, as if in derision of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will go as Menelaus the Greek,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I as Menelaus the Greek?&rdquo; The smile became a little grim.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, as Menelaus; and I will go as Paris.&rdquo; I doubt not that my voice
+      showed a good deal of self-scorn at the moment; but there was a kind of
+      luxury in self-abasement before him. &ldquo;Your wife, I know, intends to go as
+      Helen of Troy. It is all mumming. Let it stand so, as Menelaus and Helen
+      and Paris before there was any Trojan war, and as if there never could be
+      any&mdash;as if Paris went back discomfited, and the other two were
+      reconciled.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice was low and broken. &ldquo;I know you exaggerate matters, and condemn
+      yourself beyond reason,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I will do as you say. But, Dr.
+      Marmion, it will not be all mumming, as you shall see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A strange look came upon his face at this. I could not construe it; and,
+      after a few words of explanation regarding his transference to the forward
+      part of the ship, I left him. I found the purser, made the necessary
+      arrangements for him, and then sought my cabin, humbled in many ways. I
+      went troubled to bed. After a long wakefulness, I dozed away into that
+      disturbed vestibule of sleep where the world&rsquo;s happenings mingle with the
+      visions of unconsciousness. I seemed to see a man&rsquo;s heart beating in his
+      bosom in growing agonies, until, with one last immense palpitation, it
+      burst, and life was gone. Then the dream changed, and I saw a man in the
+      sea, drowning, who seemed never to drown entirely, his hands ever beating
+      the air and the mocking water. I thought that I tried many times to throw
+      him a lighted buoy in the half-shadow, but some one held me back, and I
+      knew that a woman&rsquo;s arms were round me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with a
+      last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight. When he was gone, the woman&rsquo;s
+      arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her, she, too,
+      had gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I awoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, &ldquo;She&rsquo;ll get
+      under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; to Aden.
+      How the engines are kicking below!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VI. MUMMERS ALL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The next day was beautiful, if not enjoyable. Stirring preparations were
+      being made for the ball. Boyd Madras was transferred to a cabin far
+      forward, but he did not appear at any meal in the saloon, or on deck. In
+      the morning I was busy in the dispensary. While I was there, Justine Caron
+      came to get some medicine that I had before given her. Her hand was now
+      nearly well. Justine had nerves, and it appeared to me that her efforts to
+      please her mistress, and her occasional failures, were wearing her unduly.
+      I said to her: &ldquo;You have been worried, Miss Caron?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, no, Doctor,&rdquo; she quickly replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at her a little sceptically, and she said at last: &ldquo;Well, perhaps
+      a little. You see, madame did not sleep well last night, and I read to
+      her. It was a little difficult, and there was not much choice of books.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What did you read?&rdquo; I asked mechanically, as I prepared her medicine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, some French novel first&mdash;De Maupassant&rsquo;s; but madame said he was
+      impertinent&mdash;that he made women fools and men devils. Then I tried
+      some modern English tales, but she said they were silly. I knew not what
+      to do. But there was Shakespeare. I read Antony and Cleopatra, and she
+      said that the play was grand, but the people were foolish except when they
+      died&mdash;their deaths were magnificent. Madame is a great critic; she is
+      very clever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, yes, I know that; but when did she fall asleep?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About four o&rsquo;clock in the morning. I was glad, because she is very
+      beautiful when she has much sleep.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&mdash;does not sleep concern you in this matter of madame?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me,&rdquo; she said, looking away, &ldquo;it is no matter. I have no beauty.
+      Besides, I am madame&rsquo;s servant,&rdquo;&mdash;she blushed slightly at this,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      she is generous with money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, and you like money so much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes flashed a little defiantly as she looked me in the face. &ldquo;It is
+      everything to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused as if to see the effect upon me, or to get an artificial (I
+      knew it was artificial) strength to go on, then she added: &ldquo;I love money.
+      I work for it; I would bear all for it&mdash;all that a woman could bear.
+      I&mdash;&rdquo; But here she paused again, and, though the eyes still flashed,
+      the lips quivered. Hers was not the face of cupidity. It was sensitive,
+      yet firm, as with some purpose deep as her nature was by creation and
+      experience, and always deepening that nature. I suddenly got the
+      conviction that this girl had a sorrow of some kind in her life, and that
+      this unreal affection for money was connected with it. Perhaps she saw my
+      look of interest, for she hurriedly continued: &ldquo;But, pardon me, I am
+      foolish. I shall be better when the pain is gone. Madame is kind; she will
+      let me sleep this afternoon, perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I handed her the medicine, and then asked: &ldquo;How long have you known Mrs.
+      Falchion, Miss Caron?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only one year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where did you join her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Australia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Australia? You lived there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, monsieur, I did not live there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A thought came to my mind&mdash;the nearness of New Caledonia to
+      Australia, and New Caledonia was a French colony&mdash;a French penal
+      colony! I smiled as I said the word penal to myself. Of course the word
+      could have no connection with a girl like her, but still she might have
+      lived in the colony. So I added quietly: &ldquo;You perhaps had come from New
+      Caledonia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her look was candid, if sorrowful. &ldquo;Yes, from New Caledonia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Was she, thought I, the good wife of some convict&mdash;some political
+      prisoner?&mdash;the relative of some refugee of misfortune? Whatever she
+      was, I was sure that she was free from any fault. She evidently thought
+      that I might suspect something uncomplimentary of her, for she said: &ldquo;My
+      brother was an officer at Noumea. He is dead. I am going to France, when I
+      can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to speak gently to her. I saw that her present position must be a
+      trial. I advised her to take more rest, or she would break down
+      altogether, for she was weak and nervous; I hinted that she might have to
+      give up entirely, if she continued to tax herself heedlessly; and,
+      finally, that I would speak to Mrs. Falchion about her. I was scarcely
+      prepared for her action then. Tears came to her eyes, and she said to me,
+      her hand involuntarily clasping my arm: &ldquo;Oh no, no! I ask you not to speak
+      to madame. I will sleep&mdash;I will rest. Indeed, I will. This service is
+      so much to me. She is most generous. It is because I am so altogether
+      hers, night and day, that she pays me well. And the money is so much. It
+      is my honour&mdash;my dead brother&rsquo;s honour. You are kind at heart; you
+      will make me strong with medicine, and I will ask God to bless you. I
+      could not suffer such poverty again. And then, it is my honour!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that she would not have given way thus had not her nerves been
+      shaken, had she not lived so much alone, and irregularly, so far as her
+      own rest and comfort were concerned, and at such perpetual cost to her
+      energy. Mrs. Falchion, I knew, was selfish, and would not, or could not,
+      see that she was hard upon the girl, by such exactions as midnight reading
+      and loss of sleep. She demanded not merely physical but mental energy&mdash;a
+      complete submission of both; and when this occurred with a sensitive,
+      high-strung girl, she was literally feeding on another&rsquo;s life-blood. If
+      she had been told this, she, no doubt, would have been very much
+      surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I reassured Justine. I told her that I should say nothing directly to Mrs.
+      Falchion, for I saw she was afraid of unpleasantness; but I impressed upon
+      her that she must spare herself, or she would break down, and extorted a
+      promise that she would object to sitting up after midnight to read to Mrs.
+      Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When this was done, she said: &ldquo;But, you see, it is not madame&rsquo;s fault that
+      I am troubled.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not wish,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to know any secret,&mdash;I am a doctor, not a
+      priest,&mdash;but if there is anything you can tell me, in which I might
+      be able to help you, you may command me in so far as is possible.&rdquo;
+       Candidly, I think I was too inquiring in those days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She smiled wistfully, and replied: &ldquo;I will think of what you say so
+      kindly, and perhaps, some day soon, I will tell you of such trouble as I
+      have. But, believe me, it is no question of wrong at all, by any one&mdash;now.
+      The wrong is over. It is simply that a debt of honour must be satisfied;
+      it concerns my poor dead brother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you going to relatives in France?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No; I have no relatives, no near friends. I am alone in the world. My
+      mother I cannot remember; she died when I was very young. My father had
+      riches, but they went before he died. Still, France is home, and I must go
+      there.&rdquo; She turned her head away to the long wastes of sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Little more passed between us. I advised her to come often on deck, and
+      mingle with the passengers; and told her that, when she pleased, I should
+      be glad to do any service that lay in my power. Her last words were that,
+      after we put into Aden, she would possibly take me at my word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After she had gone, I found myself wondering at my presentiment that Aden
+      was to be associated with critical points in the history of some of us;
+      and from that moment I began to connect Justine Caron with certain events
+      which, I felt sure, were marshalling to an unhappy conclusion. I wondered,
+      too, what part I should play in the development of the comedy, tragedy, or
+      whatever it was to be. In this connection I thought of Belle Treherne, and
+      of how I should appear in her eyes if that little scene with Mrs.
+      Falchion, now always staring me in the face, were rehearsed before her. I
+      came quickly to my feet, with a half-imprecation at myself; and a verse of
+      a crude sea-song was in my ears:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;You can batten down cargo, live and dead,
+        But you can&rsquo;t put memory out of sight;
+        You can paint the full sails overhead,
+        But you can&rsquo;t make a black deed white....&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Angry, I said to myself: &ldquo;It wasn&rsquo;t a black deed; it was foolish, it was
+      infatuation, it was not right, but it is common to shipboard; and I lost
+      my head, that was all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some time later I was still at work in the dispensary, when I heard Mr.
+      Treherne&rsquo;s voice calling to me from outside. I drew back the curtain. He
+      was leaning on his daughter&rsquo;s arm, while in one hand he carried a stick.
+      &ldquo;Ah, Doctor, Doctor,&rdquo; cried he, &ldquo;my old enemy, sciatica, has me in its
+      grip, and why, in this warm climate, I can&rsquo;t understand. I&rsquo;m afraid I
+      shall have to heave-to, like the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, and lay up for repairs. And, by
+      the way, I&rsquo;m glad we are on our course again.&rdquo; He entered, and sat down.
+      Belle Treherne bowed to me gravely, and smiled slightly. The smile was not
+      peculiarly hospitable. I knew perfectly well that to convince her of the
+      reality of my growing admiration for her would be no easy task; but I was
+      determined to base my new religion of the affections upon unassailable
+      canons, and I felt that now I could do best by waiting and proving myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While I was arranging some medicine for Mr. Treherne, and advising him on
+      care against chills in a hot climate, he suddenly broke in with: &ldquo;Dr.
+      Marmion, Captain Ascott tells me that we shall get to Aden by Tuesday
+      morning next. Now, I was asked by a friend of mine in London to visit the
+      grave of a son of his&mdash;a newspaper correspondent&mdash;who was killed
+      in one of the expeditions against the native tribes, and was buried in the
+      general cemetery at Aden. On the way out I was not able to fulfil the
+      commission, because we passed Aden in the night. But there will be plenty
+      of time to do so on Tuesday, I am told. This, however, is my difficulty: I
+      cannot go unless I am better, and I&rsquo;m afraid there is no such luck as that
+      in store for me. These attacks last a week, at least. I wish my daughter,
+      however, to go. One of the ladies on board will go with her&mdash;Mrs.
+      Callendar, I believe; and I am going to be so bold as to ask you to
+      accompany them, if you will. I know you better than any officer on board;
+      and, besides, I should feel safer and better satisfied if she went under
+      the protection of an officer,&mdash;these barbarous places, you know!&mdash;though,
+      of course, it may be asking too much of you, or what is impossible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I assented with pleasure. Belle Treherne was looking at the Latin names on
+      the bottles at the time, and her face showed no expression either of
+      pleasure or displeasure. Mr. Treherne said bluffly: &ldquo;Dr. Marmion, you are
+      kind&mdash;very kind, and, upon my word, I&rsquo;m much obliged.&rdquo; He then looked
+      at his daughter as if expecting her to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up and said conventionally: &ldquo;You are very kind, Dr. Marmion,
+      and I am much obliged.&rdquo; Then I thought her eyes twinkled with amusement at
+      her own paraphrase of her father&rsquo;s speech, and she added: &ldquo;Mrs. Callendar
+      and myself will be much honoured indeed, and feel very important in having
+      an officer to attend us. Of course everybody else will be envious, and,
+      again of course, that will add to our vanity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this she would have gone; but her father, who was suffering just enough
+      pain to enjoy anything that would divert his attention from it, fell into
+      conversation upon a subject of mutual interest, in which his daughter
+      joined on occasion, but not with enthusiasm. Yet, when they came to go,
+      she turned and said kindly, almost softly, as her fingers touched mine: &ldquo;I
+      almost envy you your profession, Dr. Marmion. It opens doors to so much of
+      humanity and life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no sin,&rdquo; I laughingly said, &ldquo;in such a covetousness, and,
+      believe me, it can do no harm to me, at least.&rdquo; Then I added gravely: &ldquo;I
+      should like my profession, in so far as I am concerned, to be worth your
+      envy.&rdquo; She had passed through the door before the last words were said,
+      but I saw that her look was not forbidding.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       .........................
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Is there unhappiness anywhere? There is not a vexing toss of the sea, not
+      a cloud in the sky. Is not catastrophe dead, and the arrows of tragedy
+      spilled? Peace broadens into deep, perfumed dusk towards Arabia; languor
+      spreads towards the unknown lands of the farthest south. No anxious soul
+      leans out from the casement of life; the time is heavy with delightful
+      ease. There is no sound that troubles; the world goes by and no one heeds;
+      for it is all beyond this musky twilight and this pleasant hour. In this
+      palace on the sea Mirth trails in and out with airy and harmonious
+      footsteps. Even the clang-clang of eight bells has music&mdash;not
+      boisterous nor disturbing, but muffled in the velvety air. Then, through
+      this hemisphere of jocund quiet, there sounds the &ldquo;All&rsquo;s well&rdquo; of the
+      watch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, look! Did you see a star fall just then, and the long avenue of
+      expiring flame behind it?&mdash;Do not shudder; it is nothing. No cry of
+      pain came through that brightness. There was only the &ldquo;All&rsquo;s well&rdquo; from
+      the watchers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thud of the engines falls on a padded atmosphere, and the lascars move
+      like ghosts along the decks. The long, smooth promenade is canopied and
+      curtained, and hung with banners, and gay devices of the gorgeous East are
+      contributing to the federation of pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, through a festooned doorway, there come the people of many lands
+      to inhabit the gay court. Music follows their footsteps: Hamlet and
+      Esther; Caractacus and Iphigenia; Napoleon and Hermione; The Man in the
+      Iron Mask and Sappho; Garibaldi and Boadicea; an Arab sheikh and Joan of
+      Arc; Mahomet and Casablanca; Cleopatra and Hannibal&mdash;a resurrected
+      world. But the illusion is short and slight. This world is very sordid&mdash;of
+      shreds and patches, after all. It is but a pretty masquerade, in which
+      feminine vanity beats hard against strangely-clothed bosoms; and masculine
+      conceit is shown in the work of the barber&rsquo;s curling-irons and the
+      ship-carpenter&rsquo;s wooden swords and paper helmets. The pride of these folk
+      is not diminished because Hamlet&rsquo;s wig gets awry, or a Roman has trouble
+      with his foolish garters. Few men or women can resist mumming; they fancy
+      themselves as somebody else, dead or living. Yet these seem happy in this
+      nonsense. The indolent days appear to have deadened hatred, malice, and
+      all uncharitableness. They shall strut and fret their hour upon this
+      little stage. Let that sprightly girl forget the sudden death which made
+      her an orphan; the nervous broker his faithless wife; the grey-haired
+      soldier his silly and haunting sins; the bankrupt his creditors.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!&rdquo; For the captain is on the
+      bridge, the engineer is beneath; we have stout walls, and a ceaseless
+      sentry-go. In the intervals of the dance wine passes, and idle things are
+      said beside the draped and cushioned capstan or in the friendly gloom of a
+      boat, which, in the name of safety, hangs taut between its davits. Let
+      this imitation Cleopatra use the Cleopatra&rsquo;s arts; this mellow Romeo
+      (sometime an Irish landlord) vow to this coy Juliet; this Helen of Troy&mdash;Of
+      all who walked these decks, mantled and wigged in characters not their
+      own, Mrs. Falchion was the handsomest, most convincing. With a graceful
+      swaying movement she passed along the promenade, and even envy praised
+      her. Her hand lay lightly on the arm of a brown stalwart native of the
+      Indian hills, fierce and savage in attire. Against his wild
+      picturesqueness and brawny strength, her perfectness of animal beauty,
+      curbed and rendered delicate by her inner coldness, showed in fine
+      contrast; and yet both were matched in the fine natural prowess of form.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a singular affirmation of what had been, after all, but a
+      sadly-humourous proposal, I had attired myself in a Greek costume&mdash;quickly
+      made by my steward, who had been a tailor&mdash;and was about to leave my
+      cabin, when Hungerford entered, and exclaimed, as he took his pipe from
+      his mouth in surprise: &ldquo;Marmion, what does this mean? Don&rsquo;t you know your
+      duties better? No officer may appear at these flare-ups in costume other
+      than his uniform. You&rsquo;re the finest example of suburban innocence and
+      original sin I&rsquo;ve seen this last quarter of a century, wherein I&rsquo;ve kept
+      the world&mdash;and you&mdash;from tottering to destruction.&rdquo; He reached
+      for one of my cigars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a word, and annoyed at my own stupidity, I slowly divested myself
+      of the clothes of Greece; while Hungerford smoked on, humming to himself
+      occasionally a few bars of The Buccaneer&rsquo;s Bride, but evidently occupied
+      with something in his mind. At length he said: &ldquo;Marmion, I said suburban
+      innocence and original sin, but you&rsquo;ve a grip on the law of square and
+      compass too. I&rsquo;ll say that for you, old chap&mdash;and I hope you don&rsquo;t
+      think I&rsquo;m a miserable prig.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still I replied nothing, but offered him one of my best cigars, taking the
+      other one from him, and held the match while he lighted it&mdash;which,
+      between men, is sufficient evidence of good-feeling. He understood, and
+      continued: &ldquo;Of course you&rsquo;ll keep your eye on Mrs. Falchion and Madras
+      to-night: if he is determined that they shall meet, and you have arranged
+      it. I&rsquo;d like to know how it goes before you turn in, if you don&rsquo;t mind.
+      And, I say, Marmion, ask Miss Treherne to keep a dance for me&mdash;a
+      waltz&mdash;towards the close of the evening, will you? Excuse me, but she
+      is the thorough-bred of the ship. And if I have only one hop down the
+      promenade, I want it to be with a girl who&rsquo;ll remind me of some one that
+      is making West Kensington worth inhabiting. Only think, Marmion, of a girl
+      like her&mdash;a graduate in arts, whose name and picture have been in all
+      the papers&mdash;being willing to make up with me, Dick Hungerford! She is
+      as natural and simple as a girl can be, and doesn&rsquo;t throw Greek roots at
+      you, nor try to convince you of the difference between the songs of the
+      troubadours and the sonnets of Petrarch. She doesn&rsquo;t care a rap whether
+      Dante&rsquo;s Beatrice was a real woman or a principle; whether James the First
+      poisoned his son; or what&rsquo;s the margin between a sine and a cosine. She
+      can take a fence in the hunting-field like a bird&mdash;! Oh, all right,
+      just hold still, and I&rsquo;ll unfasten it.&rdquo; And he struggled with a
+      recalcitrant buckle. &ldquo;Well, you&rsquo;ll not forget about Miss Treherne, will
+      you? She ought to go just as she is. Fancy-dress on her would be gilding
+      the gold; for, though she isn&rsquo;t surpassingly beautiful, she is very fine,
+      very fine indeed. There, now, you&rsquo;re yourself again, and look all the
+      better for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time I was again in my uniform, and I sat down, and smoked, and
+      looked at Hungerford. His long gossip had been more or less detached, and
+      I had said nothing. I understood that he was trying, in his blunt, honest
+      way, to turn my thoughts definitely from Mrs. Falchion to Belle Treherne;
+      and he never seemed to me such a good fellow as at that moment. I replied
+      at last: &ldquo;All right, Hungerford; I&rsquo;ll be your deputation, your ambassador,
+      to Miss Treherne. What time shall we see you on deck?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About 11.40&mdash;just in time to trip a waltz on the edge of eight
+      bells.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the edge of Sunday, my boy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Do you know, it is just four years ago tomorrow since I found Boyd
+      Madras on the No Man&rsquo;s Sea?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us not talk of it,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right. I merely stated the fact because it came to me. I&rsquo;m mum
+      henceforth. And I want to talk about something else. The first officer,&mdash;I
+      don&rsquo;t know whether you have noticed him lately, but I tell you this: if we
+      ever get into any trouble with this ship he&rsquo;ll go to pieces. Why, the
+      other night, when the engine got tangled, he was as timid as a woman. That
+      shock he had with the coal, as I said before, has broken his nerve, big
+      man as he is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hungerford,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;you do not generally croak, but you are earning the
+      character of the raven for yourself to-night. The thing is growing on you.
+      What IS the use of bringing up unpleasant subjects? You are an old woman.&rdquo;
+       I fear there was the slightest irritation in my voice; but, truth is, the
+      last few days&rsquo; experiences had left their mark on me, and Hungerford&rsquo;s
+      speech and manner had suddenly grown trying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood for a moment looking at me with direct earnestness from under his
+      strong brows, and then he stepped forward, and, laying his hand upon my
+      arm, rejoined: &ldquo;Do not be raw, Marmion. I&rsquo;m only a blunt, stupid sailor;
+      and, to tell you God&rsquo;s truth, as I have told you before, every sailor is
+      superstitious&mdash;every real sailor. He can&rsquo;t help it&mdash;I can&rsquo;t. I
+      have a special fit on me now. Why don&rsquo;t I keep it to myself? Because I&rsquo;m
+      selfish, and it does me good to talk. You and I are in one secret
+      together, and it has made me feel like sharing this thing with a pal, I
+      suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I seized his hand and begged his pardon, and called myself unpleasant
+      names, which he on the instant stopped, and said: &ldquo;That&rsquo;s all right,
+      Marmy; shake till the knuckles crack! I&rsquo;m off. Don&rsquo;t forget the dance.&rdquo; He
+      disappeared down the passage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I went on deck, and the scene which I have so imperfectly described
+      passed before me. Mrs. Falchion was surrounded with admirers all the
+      evening, both men and women; and two of the very stately English ladies of
+      title, to whom I before referred, were particularly gracious to her; while
+      she, in turn, bore herself with becoming dignity. I danced with her once,
+      and was down on her programme for another dance. I had also danced with
+      Belle Treherne, who appeared as Miriam, and was chaperoned by one of the
+      ladies of title; and I had also &ldquo;sat out&rdquo; one dance with her. Chancing to
+      pass her as the evening wore on, I saw her in conversation with Mrs.
+      Falchion, who had dismissed her cavalier, preferring to talk, she said,
+      for dancing was tiresome work on the Indian Ocean. Belle Treherne, who up
+      to that moment had never quite liked her, yielded to the agreeable charm
+      of her conversation and her frank applausive remarks upon the costumes of
+      the dancers. She had a good word for every one, and she drew her companion
+      out to make the most of herself, as women less often do before women than
+      in the presence of men. I am certain that her interest in Belle Treherne
+      was real, and likewise certain that she cherished no pique against her
+      because I had transferred my allegiance. Indeed, I am sure that she had no
+      deep feeling of injured pride where I was concerned. Such after acidity as
+      she sometimes showed was directed against the foolish part I had played
+      with her and my action in subsequent events; it did not proceed from
+      personal feeling or self-value.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some time after this meeting I saw Boyd Madras issue from the
+      companion-way dressed as a Greek. He wore a false beard, and carried off
+      well his garments of white and scarlet and gold&mdash;a very striking and
+      presentable man. He came slowly forward, looking about him steadily, and,
+      seeing me, moved towards me. But for his manner I should scarcely have
+      recognised him. A dance was beginning; but many eyes were turned
+      curiously, and even admiringly, to him; for he looked singular and
+      impressive and his face was given fulness by a beard and flesh paints. I
+      motioned him aside where there was shadow, and said: &ldquo;Well, you have
+      determined to see her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;and I wish you, if you will, to introduce me to her as
+      Mr. Charles Boyd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You still think this wise?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is my earnest wish. I must have an understanding to-night.&rdquo; He spoke
+      very firmly, and showed no excitement. His manner was calm and
+      gentlemanly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a surprising air of decision. Supporting an antique character, he
+      seemed for the moment to have put on also something of antique strength of
+      mind, and to be no longer the timid invalid. &ldquo;Then, come with me,&rdquo; I
+      answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked in silence for a few minutes, and then, seeing where Mrs.
+      Falchion was, we advanced to her. The next dance on her programme was
+      mine. In my previous dance with her we had talked as we now did at table&mdash;as
+      we did the first hour I met her&mdash;impersonally, sometimes (I am bold
+      to say) amusingly. Now I approached her with apologies for being late. The
+      man beside her took his leave. She had only just glanced at me at first,
+      but now she looked at my companion, and the look stayed, curious,
+      bewildered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is fitting,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;that Greek meet Greek&mdash;that Menelaus should
+      be introduced to Helen. May I say that when Helen is not Helen she is Mrs.
+      Falchion, and when Menelaus is not Menelaus he is&mdash;Mr. Charles Boyd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I am afraid my voice faltered slightly, because there came over me
+      suddenly a nervousness as unexpected as it was inconvenient, and my words,
+      which began lightly, ended huskily. Had Madras miscalculated this woman?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were afire, and her face was as pale as marble; all its slight
+      but healthy glow had fled. A very faint gasp came from her lips. I saw
+      that she recognised him, as he bowed and mentioned her name, following my
+      introduction. I knew not what might occur, for I saw danger in her eyes in
+      reply to the beseeching look in his. Would melodrama supervene after all?
+      She merely bowed towards me, as if to dismiss me, and then she rose, took
+      his arm, and moved away. The interview that follows came to me from Boyd
+      Madras afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When they had reached the semi-darkness of the forward part of the ship,
+      she drew her hand quickly away, and, turning to him, said: &ldquo;What is the
+      name by which you are called? One does not always hear distinctly when
+      being introduced.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not understand what she was about to do, but he felt the deadly
+      coldness in her voice. &ldquo;My name is known to you,&rdquo; he replied. He steadied
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, pardon me, I do not know it, for I do not know you.... I never saw
+      you before.&rdquo; She leaned her hand carelessly on the bulwarks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was shocked, but he drew himself together. Their eyes were intent on
+      each other. &ldquo;You do know me! Need I tell you that I am Boyd Madras?&rdquo; &ldquo;Boyd
+      Madras,&rdquo; she said, musing coldly. &ldquo;A peculiar name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mercy Madras was your name until you called yourself Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; he
+      urged indignantly, yet anxiously too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It suits you to be mysterious, Mr.&mdash;ah yes, Mr. Boyd Madras; but,
+      really, you might be less exacting in your demands upon one&rsquo;s
+      imagination.&rdquo; Her look was again on him casually.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke breathlessly. &ldquo;Mercy&mdash;Mercy&mdash;for God&rsquo;s sake, don&rsquo;t
+      treat me like this! Oh, my wife, I have wronged you every way, but I loved
+      you always&mdash;love you now. I have only followed you to ask you to
+      forgive me, after all these years. I saw you in Colombo just before you
+      came on board, and I felt that I must come also. You never loved me.
+      Perhaps that is better for you, but you do not know what I suffer. If you
+      could give me a chance, and come with me to America&mdash;anywhere, and
+      let me start the world again? I can&mdash;travel straight now, and I will
+      work hard, and be honest. I will&mdash;&rdquo; But here sudden pain brought back
+      the doubt concerning his life and its possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He leaned against the bulwarks, and made a helpless, despairing motion
+      with his hand. &ldquo;No, no!&rdquo; he said; and added with a bitter laugh: &ldquo;Not to
+      begin the world again, but to end it as profitably and silently as I can.
+      ... But you will listen to me, my wife? You will say at least that you
+      forgive me the blight and ill I brought upon you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had listened to him unmoved outwardly. Her reply was instant. &ldquo;You are
+      more melodramatic than I thought you capable of being&mdash;from your
+      appearance,&rdquo; she said in a hard tone. &ldquo;Your acting is very good, but not
+      convincing. I cannot respond as would become the unity and sequence of the
+      play.... I have no husband. My husband is dead&mdash;I buried him years
+      ago. I have forgotten his name&mdash;I buried that too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      All the suffering and endured scorn of years came to revolt in him. He
+      leaned forward now, and caught her wrist. &ldquo;Have you no human feeling?&rdquo; he
+      said &ldquo;no heart in you at all? Look. I have it in me here suddenly to kill
+      you as you stand. You have turned my love to hate. From your smooth skin
+      there I could strip those rags, and call upon them all to look at you&mdash;my
+      wife&mdash;a felon&rsquo;s wife; mine to have and to hold&mdash;to hold, you
+      hear!&mdash;as it was sworn at the altar. I bare my heart to you,
+      repenting, and you mock it, torture it, with your undying hate and
+      cruelty. You have no heart, no life. This white bosom is all of you&mdash;all
+      of your power to make men love you&mdash;this, and your beauty. All else,
+      by God, is cruel as the grave!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper. She had not sought to remove his
+      hand, nor struggled in the least; and once it seemed as if this new
+      development of his character, this animal fierceness, would conquer her:
+      she admired courage. It was not so. He trembled with weakness before he
+      had finished. He stopped too soon; he lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will find such parts exhausting to play,&rdquo; she murmured, as he let her
+      arm fall. &ldquo;It needs a strong physique to endure exaggerated, nervous
+      sentiment. And now, please, let us perform less trying scenes.&rdquo; Then, with
+      a low, cold anger, she continued: &ldquo;It is only a coward that will dog a
+      woman who finds his presence insupportable to her. This woman cannot, if
+      she would, endure this man&rsquo;s presence; it is her nature. Well, why rush
+      blindly at the impossible? She wishes to live her spoiled life alone. The
+      man can have no part in it&mdash;never, never! But she has money. If in
+      that way&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stretched out his hand protestingly, the fingers spread in excitement.
+      &ldquo;No more&mdash;not another word!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I ask for forgiveness, for one
+      word of kindness&mdash;and I am offered money! the fire that burned me to
+      eat, instead of bread! I had a wife once,&rdquo; he added in a kind of troubled
+      dream, looking at her as if she were very far away, &ldquo;and her name was
+      Mercy&mdash;her name was Mercy&mdash;Mercy Madras. I loved her. I sinned
+      for her sake. A message came that she was dead to me; but I could not
+      believe that it was so altogether, for I had knelt at her feet and
+      worshipped her. I went to her, but she sent me away angrily. Years passed.
+      &lsquo;She will have relented now,&rsquo; I said, and I followed her, and found her as
+      I thought. But it was not she; it was a wicked ghost in her beautiful body&mdash;nothing
+      more. And then I turned away and cursed all things, because I knew that I
+      should never see my wife again. Mercy Madras was dead. ... Can you not
+      hear the curses?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Still she was unmoved. She said with a cruel impatience in her voice:
+      &ldquo;Yes, Mercy Madras is dead. How then can she forgive? What could her ghost&mdash;as
+      you call her&mdash;do, but offer the thing which her husband&mdash;when he
+      was living&mdash;loved so well that he sold himself into bondage, and
+      wrecked his world and hers for it&mdash;Money? Well, money is at his
+      disposal, as she said before&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But she spoke no more. The man in him straight way shamed her into silence
+      with a look. She bowed her head, yet not quite in shame, for there was
+      that in her eyes which made her appear as if his suffering was a
+      gratuitous infliction. But at this moment he was stronger, and he drew her
+      eyes up by the sheer force of his will. &ldquo;I need no money now,&rdquo; he coldly
+      declared. &ldquo;I need nothing&mdash;not even you; and can you fancy that,
+      after waiting all these years for this hour, money would satisfy me? Do
+      you know,&rdquo; he continued slowly and musingly, &ldquo;I can look upon you now&mdash;yes,
+      at this moment&mdash;with more indifference than you ever showed to me? A
+      moment ago I loved you: now I think you horrible; because you are no
+      woman; you have a savage heart. And some day you will suffer as I do, so
+      terribly that even the brazen serpent could not cure you. Then you will
+      remember me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was about to leave her, but he had not taken two steps before he
+      turned, with all the anger and the passion softened in his eyes, and said,
+      putting his hand out towards yet not to touch her, &ldquo;Good-bye&mdash;for the
+      last time.&rdquo; And then the look was such as might be turned upon a forgiven
+      executioner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; she replied, and she did not look into his eyes, but out to
+      sea. Her eyes remained fixed upon its furtive gloom. She too was furtive
+      and gloomy at this moment. They were both sleek, silent, and remorseless.
+      There was a slight rustle to her dress as she changed her position. It was
+      in grim keeping with the pitiless rustle of the sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so they parted. I saw him move on towards the companion-way, and
+      though I felt instinctively that all had gone ill with him, I was
+      surprised to see how erect he walked. After a minute I approached her. She
+      heard me coming, and presently turned to me with a curious smile. &ldquo;Who is
+      Mr. Charles Boyd?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I did not pierce his disguise. I could not
+      tell whether I had met him on board before. Have I? But my impression is
+      that I had not seen him on the ship.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you had not seen him,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;He had a fancy to travel, until
+      yesterday, with the second-class passengers. Now he has a first-class
+      cabin&mdash;in his proper place, in fact.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think so&mdash;in his proper place?&rdquo; The suggestion was not pleasant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Assuredly. Why do you speak in that way?&rdquo; was my indignant reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took my arm as we moved on. &ldquo;Because he was slightly rude to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I grew bold, and determined to bring her to some sort of reckoning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How rude were you to him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not rude at all. It is not worth while being so&mdash;to anybody,&rdquo; was
+      her chilly answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was under the impression you had met him before,&rdquo; I said gravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed? And why?&rdquo; She raised her eyebrows at me. I pushed the matter to a
+      conclusion. &ldquo;He was ill the other day&mdash;he has heart trouble. It was
+      necessary for me to open the clothes about his neck. On his breast I saw a
+      little ivory portrait of a woman&rsquo;s head.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman&rsquo;s head,&rdquo; she repeated absently, and her fingers idly toyed with a
+      jingling ornament in her belt. In an idle moment I had sketched the head,
+      as I remembered it, on a sheet of paper, and now I took it from my pocket
+      and handed it to her. We were standing near a port-hole of the music
+      saloon, from which light streamed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is the head,&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She deliberately placed the paper in the belt of light, and, looking at
+      it, remarked mechanically: &ldquo;This is the head, is it?&rdquo; She showed no change
+      of countenance, and handed it back to me as if she had seen no likeness.
+      &ldquo;It is very interesting,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but one would think you might make
+      better use of your time than by surreptitiously sketching portraits from
+      sick men&rsquo;s breasts. One must have plenty of leisure to do that sort of
+      thing, I should think. Be careful that you do not get into mischief, Dr.
+      Marmion.&rdquo; She laughed. &ldquo;Besides, where was the special peculiarity in that
+      portrait that you should treasure it in pencil so conventionally?&mdash;Your
+      drawing is not good.&mdash;Where was the point or need?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have no right to reply to that directly,&rdquo; I responded. &ldquo;But this man&rsquo;s
+      life is not for always, and if anything happened to him it would seem
+      curious to strangers to find that on his breast&mdash;because, of course,
+      more than I would see it there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If anything happened? What should happen? You mean, on board ship?&rdquo; There
+      was a little nervousness in her tone now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am only hinting at an awkward possibility,&rdquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at me scornfully. &ldquo;When did you see that picture on his
+      breast?&rdquo; I told her. &ldquo;Ah! before THAT day?&rdquo; she rejoined. I knew that she
+      referred to the evening when I had yielded foolishly to the fascination of
+      her presence. The blood swam hotly in my face. &ldquo;Men are not noble
+      creatures,&rdquo; she continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid you would not give many their patents of nobility if you had
+      power to bestow them,&rdquo; I answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble
+      creatures. Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my
+      prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them. Vanity would
+      accomplish that much. Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not radical
+      virtue&mdash;since we are beginning to be bookish again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To what do you reduce honour and right?&rdquo; returned I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I said to you on a memorable occasion,&rdquo; she answered very drily, &ldquo;to a
+      code.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is,&rdquo; rejoined I, &ldquo;a man does a good action, lives an honourable
+      life, to satisfy a social canon&mdash;to gratify, say, a wife or mother,
+      who believes in him, and loves him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father. She
+      drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could
+      not tell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?&rdquo; I urged. &ldquo;That he
+      shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be fed,
+      might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is true either way&mdash;pleasure or misery. Please come to the
+      saloon and get me an ice before the next dance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was perplexed. Was she altogether soulless? Even now, as we passed among
+      the dancers, she replied to congratulations on her make-up and appearance
+      with evident pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour later, I was taking Belle Treherne from the arm of Hungerford for
+      the last waltz, and, in reply to an inquiring glance from him, I shook my
+      head mournfully. His face showed solicitude as he walked away. Perhaps it
+      did not gratify my vanity that Belle Treherne, as her father limped
+      forward at the stroke of eight bells to take her below, said to me: &ldquo;How
+      downright and thorough Mr. Hungerford is!&rdquo; But I frankly admitted that he
+      was all she might say good of him, and more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The deck was quickly dismantled, the lights went out, and all the dancers
+      disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness,
+      rose the plaintive &ldquo;All&rsquo;s well!&rdquo; And it kept ringing in my ears until it
+      became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free. It was like the
+      voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: &ldquo;Never, never, never,
+      never, never!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Something of Hungerford&rsquo;s superstitious feeling possessed me. I went
+      below, and involuntarily made my way to Boyd Madras&rsquo;s cabin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though the night was not hot, the door was drawn to. I tapped. His voice
+      at once asked who was there, and when I told him, and inquired how he was,
+      he said he was not ill, and asked me to come to his cabin in the morning,
+      if I would. I promised, and bade him good-night. He responded, and then,
+      as I turned away from the door, I heard him repeat the good-night
+      cordially and calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0007" id="link2HCH0007">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VII. THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The next morning I was up early, and went on deck. The sun had risen, and
+      in the moist atmosphere the tints of sky and sea were beautiful.
+      Everywhere was the warm ocean undulating lazily to the vague horizon. A
+      few lascars were still cleansing the decks; others were seated on their
+      haunches between decks, eating curry from a calabash; a couple of
+      passengers were indolently munching oranges; and Stone the quartermaster
+      was inspecting the work lately done by the lascars. Stone gave me a
+      pleasant good-morning, and we walked together the length of the deck
+      forward. I had got about three-fourths of the length back again, when I
+      heard a cry from aft&mdash;a sharp call of &ldquo;Man overboard!&rdquo; In a moment I
+      had travelled the intermediate deck, and was at the stern, looking below,
+      where, in the swirling waters, was the head of a man. With cries of &ldquo;Man
+      overboard!&rdquo; I threw two or three buoys after the disappearing head, above
+      which a bare arm thrust itself. I heard the rush of feet behind me, and in
+      a moment Hungerford and Stone were beside me. The signal was given for the
+      engines to stop; stewards and lascars came running on deck in response to
+      Hungerford&rsquo;s call, and the first officer now appeared. Very soon a crew
+      was gathered on the after-deck, about a boat on the port side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Passengers by this time showed in various stages of dressing&mdash;women
+      wringing their hands, men gesticulating. If there is anything calculated
+      to send a thrill of awe through a crowd, it is the cry of &ldquo;Man overboard!&rdquo;
+       And when one looked below, and saw above the drowning head two white arms
+      thrust from the sea, a horrible thing was brought home to each of us.
+      Besides, the scene before us on the deck was not reassuring. There was
+      trouble in getting the boat lowered. The first officer was excited, the
+      lascars were dazed, the stewards were hurried without being confident;
+      only Hungerford, Stone, and the gunner were collected. The boat should
+      have been launched in a minute, but still it hung between its davits; its
+      course downward was interrupted; something was wrong with the ropes, &ldquo;A
+      false start, by&mdash;-!&rdquo; said the bookmaker, looking through his
+      eye-glass. Colonel Ryder&rsquo;s face was stern, Clovelly was pale and anxious,
+      as moment after moment went, and the boat was not yet free. Ages seemed to
+      pass before the boat was let down even with the bulwarks, and a crew of
+      ten, with Hungerford in command, were in it, ready to be lowered. Whether
+      the word was given to lower, or whether it was any one&rsquo;s fault, may never
+      perhaps be known; but, as the boat hung there, suddenly it shot down at
+      the stern, some one having let go the ropes at that end; and the bow being
+      still fast, it had fallen like a trap-door. It seemed, on the instant, as
+      if the whole crew were tossed into the water; but some had successfully
+      clutched the boat&rsquo;s side, and Hungerford hung by a rope with one hand. In
+      the eddying water, however, about the reversing screw, were two heads, and
+      farther off was a man struggling. The face of one of the men near the
+      screw was upturned for a moment; it was that of Stone the quartermaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cry went up from the passengers, and they swayed forward to the
+      suspended boat; but Colonel Ryder turned almost savagely upon them. &ldquo;Keep
+      quiet!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Stand back! What can you do? Give the officers a
+      chance.&rdquo; He knew that there had been a false start, and bad work indeed;
+      but he also saw that the task of the officers must not be made harder. His
+      sternness had effect. The excited passengers drew back, and I took his
+      place in front of them. When the first effort had been made to lower the
+      boat, I asked the first officer if I could accompany the crew, but he said
+      no. I could, therefore, do nothing but wait. A change came on the crowd.
+      It became painfully silent, none speaking save in whispers, and all
+      watching with anxious faces either the receding heads in the water or the
+      unfortunate boat&rsquo;s crew. Hungerford showed himself a thorough sailor.
+      Hanging to the davit, he quietly, reassuringly, gave the order for
+      righting the boat, virtually taking the command out of the hands of the
+      first officer, who was trembling with nervousness. Hungerford was right;
+      this man&rsquo;s days as a sailor were over. The accident from which he had
+      suffered had broken his nerve, stalwart as he was. But Hungerford was as
+      cool as if this were ordinary boat-practice. Soon the boat was drawn up
+      again, and others took the place of those who had disappeared. Then it was
+      lowered safely, and, with Hungerford erect in the bows, it was pulled
+      swiftly along the path we had come.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length, too, the great ship turned round, but not in her tracks. It is
+      a pleasant fiction that these great steamers are easily managed. They can
+      go straight ahead, but their huge proportions are not adapted for rapid
+      movement. However, the work of rescue was begun. Sailors were aloft on
+      watch, Captain Ascott was on the bridge, sweeping the sea with his glass;
+      order was restored. But the ship had the feeling of a home from which some
+      familiar inmate had been taken, to return no more. Children clasped their
+      mothers&rsquo; hands and said, &ldquo;Mother, was it the poor quartermaster?&rdquo; and men
+      who the day before had got help from the petty officers in the preparation
+      of costumes, said mournfully: &ldquo;Fife the gunner was one of them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But who was the man first to go overboard&mdash;and who was it first gave
+      the alarm? There were rumours, but no one was sure. All at once I
+      remembered something peculiar in that cry of &ldquo;Man overboard!&rdquo; and it
+      shocked me. I hurried below, and went to the cabin of Boyd Madras. It was
+      empty; but on a shelf lay a large envelope, addressed to Hungerford and
+      myself. I tore it open. There was a small packet, which I knew contained
+      the portrait he had worn on his bosom, addressed to Mrs. Falchion; and the
+      other was a single sheet directed to me, fully written upon, and marked in
+      the corner: &ldquo;To be made public.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So, he had disappeared from the play? He had made his exit? He had
+      satisfied the code at last? Before opening the letter addressed to me, I
+      looked round. His clothes were folded upon one of the berths; but the
+      garments of masquerade were not in the cabin. Had he then gone out of the
+      world in the garb of a mummer? Not altogether, for the false beard he had
+      worn the night before lay beside the clothes. But this terrible
+      earnestness of his would look strange in last night&rsquo;s disguise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opened the packet addressed to Hungerford and myself, and saw that it
+      contained a full and detailed account of his last meeting with his wife.
+      The personal letter was short. He said that his gratitude was unspeakable,
+      and now must be so for ever. He begged us not to let the world know who he
+      was, nor his relationship to Mrs. Falchion, unless she wished it; he asked
+      me to hand privately to her the packet bearing her name. Lastly, he
+      requested that the paper for the public be given to the captain of the
+      &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Going out into the passage, I found a steward, who hurriedly told me that
+      just before the alarm was given he had seen Boyd Madras going aft in that
+      strange costume, which he mistook for a dressing-gown, and he had come to
+      see if, by any chance, it was he who had gone overboard. I told him that
+      it was. He disappeared, and soon the whole ship knew it. I went to the
+      captain, gave him the letter, and told him only what was necessary to
+      tell. He was on the bridge, and was occupied with giving directions, so he
+      asked me the substance of the letter, and handed it back to me, requesting
+      me to make a copy of it soon and leave it in his cabin. I then took all
+      the papers to my cabin, and locked them up. I give here the substance of
+      the letter which was to be made public:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   Because you know how much I have suffered physically while on board
+   this ship, and because you have been kind to me, I wish, through
+   you, to say my last word to the world: though, indeed, this may seem
+   a strange form for gratitude to take. Dying men, however, make few
+   apologies, and I shall make none. My existence, as you know, is an
+   uncertain quantity, and may be cut short at any moment in the
+   ordinary course of things. But I have no future in the active
+   concerns of life; no past on which to dwell with satisfaction; no
+   friends to mourn for my misfortunes in life, nor for my death,
+   whether it be peaceful or violent; therefore, I have fewer
+   compunctions in ending a mistaken career and a worthless life.
+
+   Some one will profit by my death: who it is matters not, for it is
+   no friend of mine. My death adjusts a balance, perhaps not nicely,
+   yet it does it. And this is all I have to say.... I am
+   going. Farewell....
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      After a brief farewell to me added, there came the subscription &ldquo;Charles
+      Boyd;&rdquo; and that was all. Why he cried out &ldquo;Man overboard&rdquo; (for now I
+      recognised that it was his voice which gave the alarm), I do not know,
+      except that he wished his body to be recovered, and to receive burial.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just here, some one came fumbling at the curtain of my cabin. I heard a
+      gasp&mdash;&ldquo;Doctor&mdash;my head! quick!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked out. As I drew the curtain a worthless lascar sailor fell
+      fainting into my cabin. He had been drinking a good deal, and the horror
+      and excitement of the accident had brought on an apoplectic fit. This in a
+      very hot climate is suddenly fatal. In three minutes, in spite of me, he
+      was dead. Postponing report of the matter, I went on deck again among the
+      passengers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I expected that Mrs. Falchion would be among them, for the news must have
+      gone to every part of the ship; but she was not there. On the outskirts of
+      one of the groups, however, I saw Justine Caron. I went to her, and asked
+      her if Mrs. Falchion had risen. She said that she had not: that she had
+      been told of the disaster, and had appeared shocked; but had complained of
+      a headache, and had not risen. I then asked Justine if Mrs. Falchion had
+      been told who the suicide was, and was answered in the negative. At that
+      moment a lady came to me and said in an awed whisper: &ldquo;Dr. Marmion, is it
+      true that the man who committed suicide was a second-class passenger, and
+      that he appeared at the ball last night, and danced with Mrs. Falchion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that my reply would soon become common property, so I said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was a first-class passenger, though until yesterday he travelled
+      second-class. I knew him. His name was Charles Boyd. I introduced him to
+      Mrs. Falchion last night, but he did not stay long on deck, because he
+      felt ill. He had heart trouble. You may guess that he was tired of life.&rdquo;
+       Then I told her of the paper which was for the public, and she left me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The search for the unfortunate men went on. No one could be seen near the
+      floating buoys which were here and there picked up by Hungerford&rsquo;s boat.
+      The long undulations of the water had been broken up in a large area about
+      the ship, but the sea was still comparatively smooth. We were steaming
+      back along the track we had come. There was less excitement on board than
+      might be expected. The tropical stillness of the air, the quiet suddenness
+      of the tragedy itself, the grim decisiveness of Hungerford, the watchful
+      silence of a few men like Colonel Ryder and Clovelly, had effect upon even
+      the emotion of those women, everywhere found, who get a morbid enjoyment
+      out of misery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly all were watching the rescue boat, though a few looked over the
+      sides of the ship as if they expected to find bodies floating about. They
+      saw sharks, instead, and a trail of blood, and this sent them away
+      sickened from the bulwarks. Then they turned their attention again upon
+      the rescue party. It was impossible not to note what a fine figure
+      Hungerford made, as he stood erect in the bow, his hand over his eyes,
+      searching the water. Presently we saw him stop the boat, and something was
+      drawn in. He signalled the ship. He had found one man&mdash;but dead or
+      alive? The boat was rapidly rowed back to the ship, Hungerford making
+      efforts for resuscitation. Arrived at the vessel, the body was passed up
+      to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was that of Stone the quartermaster. I worked to bring back life, but
+      it was of no avail. A minute after, a man in the yards signalled that he
+      saw another. It was not a hundred yards away, and was floating near the
+      surface. It was a strange sight, for the water was a vivid green, and the
+      man wore garments of white and scarlet, and looked a part of some strange
+      mosaic: as one has seen astonishing figures set in balls of solid glass.
+      This figure framed in the sea was Boyd Madras. The boat was signalled, it
+      drew near, and two men dragged the body in, as a shark darted forward,
+      just too late, to seize it. The boat drew alongside the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. I stood
+      at the gangway to receive this castaway. I felt his wrist and heart. As I
+      did so I chanced to glance up at the passengers, who were looking at this
+      painful scene from the upper deck. There, leaning over the railing, stood
+      Mrs. Falchion, her eyes fixed with a shocking wonder at the drooping,
+      weird figure. Her lips parted, but at first they made no sound. Then, she
+      suddenly drew herself up with a shudder. &ldquo;Horrible! horrible!&rdquo; she said,
+      and turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had Boyd Madras taken to an empty cabin next to mine, which I used for
+      operations, and there Hungerford and myself worked to resuscitate him. We
+      allowed no one to come near. I had not much hope of bringing life back,
+      but still we worked with a kind of desperation, for it seemed to
+      Hungerford and myself that somehow we were responsible to humanity for
+      him. His heart had been weak, but there had been no organic trouble: only
+      some functional disorder, which open-air life and freedom from anxiety
+      might have overcome. Hungerford worked with an almost fierce persistence.
+      Once he said: &ldquo;By God, I will bring him back, Marmion, to face that woman
+      down when she thinks she has got the world on the hip!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot tell what delight we felt when, after a little time, I saw a
+      quiver of the eyelids and a slight motion of the chest. Presently a longer
+      breath came, and the eyes opened; at first without recognition. Then, in a
+      few moments, I knew that he was safe&mdash;desperately against his will,
+      but safe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first sentient words startled me. He gasped, &ldquo;Does she think I am
+      drowned?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then she must continue to do so!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&rdquo;&mdash;here he spoke faintly, as if sudden fear had produced
+      additional weakness&mdash;&ldquo;because I had rather die a thousand deaths than
+      meet her now; because she hates me. I must begin the world again. You have
+      saved my life against my will: I demand that you give that life its only
+      chance of happiness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As his words came to me, I remembered with a start the dead lascar, and,
+      leading Hungerford to my cabin, I pointed to the body, and whispered that
+      the sailor&rsquo;s death was only known to me. &ldquo;Then this is the corpse of Boyd
+      Madras, and we&rsquo;ll bury it for him,&rdquo; he said with quick bluntness. &ldquo;Do not
+      report this death to Captain Ascott&mdash;he would only raise objections
+      to the idea. This lascar was in my watch. It will be supposed he fell
+      overboard during the accident to the boat. Perhaps some day the funeral of
+      this nigger will be a sensation and surprise to her blessed ladyship on
+      deck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I suggested that it seemed underhand and unprofessional, but the
+      entreating words of the resuscitated man in the next room conquered my
+      objections.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was arranged that Madras should remain in the present cabin, of which I
+      had a key, until we reached Aden; then he should, by Hungerford&rsquo;s aid,
+      disappear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were conspirators, but we meant harm to nobody. I covered up the face
+      of the dead lascar and wrapped round him the scarlet and gold cloth that
+      Madras had worn. Then I got a sailor, who supposed Boyd Madras was before
+      him, and the body was soon sewed in its shotted shroud and carried to
+      where Stone the quartermaster lay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this day I cannot suppose I would do these things, but then it seemed
+      right to do as Madras wished: he was, under a new name, to begin life
+      afresh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After giving directions for the disposition of the bodies, I went on deck.
+      Mrs. Falchion was still there. Some one said to her: &ldquo;Did you know the man
+      who committed suicide?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was introduced to me last night by Dr. Marmion,&rdquo; she replied, and she
+      shuddered again, though her face showed no remarkable emotion. She had had
+      a shock to the senses, not to the heart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When I came to her on the deck, Justine was saying to her: &ldquo;Madame, you
+      should not have come. You should not see such painful things when you are
+      not well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not reply to this. She looked up at me and said: &ldquo;A strange whim,
+      to die in those fanciful rags. It is dreadful to see; but he had the
+      courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I replied: &ldquo;They have as much courage who make men do such things and then
+      live on.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I told her briefly that I held the packet for her, that I guessed
+      what was in it, and that I would hand it to her later. I also said that he
+      had written to me the record of last night&rsquo;s meeting with her, and that he
+      had left a letter which was to be made public. As I said these things we
+      were walking the decks, and, because eyes were on both of us, I tried to
+      show nothing more unusual in manner than the bare tragedy might account
+      for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said, with a curious coldness, &ldquo;what use shall you make of
+      your special knowledge?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I intend,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;to respect his wish, that your relationship to him be
+      kept unknown, unless you declare otherwise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is reasonable. If he had always been as reasonable! And,&rdquo; she
+      continued, &ldquo;I do not wish the relationship to be known: practically there
+      is none.... Oh! oh!&rdquo; she added, with a sudden change in her voice, &ldquo;why
+      did he do as he did, and make everything else impossible&mdash;impossible!...
+      Send me, or give me the packet, when you wish: and now please leave me,
+      Dr. Marmion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The last few words were spoken with some apparent feeling, but I knew she
+      was thinking of herself most, and I went from her angry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not see her again before the hour that afternoon when we should give
+      the bodies of the two men to the ocean. No shroud could be prepared for
+      gunner Fife and able-seaman Winter, whose bodies had no Christian burial,
+      but were swallowed by the eager sea, not to be yielded up even for a few
+      hours. We were now steaming far beyond the place where they were lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The burial was an impressive sight, as burials at sea mostly are. The
+      lonely waters stretching to the horizon helped to make it so. There was a
+      melancholy majesty in the ceremony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The clanging bell had stopped. Captain Ascott was in his place at the head
+      of the rude draped bier. In the silence one only heard the swish of water
+      against the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;s&rsquo; side, as we sped on towards Aden. People do not
+      know how beautiful, how powerful, is the burial service in the Book of
+      Common Prayer, who have only heard it recited by a clergyman. To hear it
+      read by a hardy man, whose life is among stern duties, is to receive a new
+      impression. He knows nothing of lethargic monotone; he interprets as he
+      reads. And when the man is the home-spun captain of a ship, who sees
+      before him the poor shell of one that served him for ten years, &ldquo;The Lord
+      gave and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord,&rdquo; has a
+      strange significance. It is only men who have borne the shock of toil and
+      danger, and have beaten up against the world&rsquo;s buffetings, that are fit to
+      say last words over those gone down in the storm or translated in the
+      fiery chariot of duty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The engines suddenly stopped. The effect was weird. Captain Ascott&rsquo;s
+      fingers trembled, and he paused for an instant and looked down upon the
+      dead, then out sorrowfully to the waiting sea, before he spoke the words,
+      &ldquo;We therefore commit their bodies to the deep.&rdquo; But, the moment they were
+      uttered, the bier was lifted, there was a swift plunge, and only the flag
+      and the empty boards were left. The sobbing of women now seemed almost
+      unnatural; for around us was the bright sunlight, the gay dresses of the
+      lascars, the sound of the bell striking the hours, and children playing on
+      the deck. The ship moved on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Mrs. Falchion? As the burial service was read, she had stood, and
+      looked, not at the bier, but straight out to sea, calm and apparently
+      unsympathetic, though, as she thought, her husband was being buried. When,
+      however, the weighted body divided the water with a swingeing sound, her
+      face suddenly suffused, as though shame had touched her or some
+      humiliating idea had come. But she turned to Justine almost immediately,
+      and soon after said calmly: &ldquo;Bring a play of Moliere, and read to me,
+      Justine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had the packet her supposed dead husband had left for her in my pocket.
+      I joined her, and we paced the deck, at first scarcely speaking, while the
+      passengers dispersed, some below, some to the smoking-rooms, some upon
+      deck-chairs to doze through the rest of the lazy afternoon. The world had
+      taken up its orderly course again. At last, in an unfrequented corner of
+      the deck, I took the packet from my pocket and handed it to her. &ldquo;You
+      understand?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I understand. And now, may I beg that for the rest of your natural
+      life&rdquo;&mdash;here she paused, and bit her lip in vexation that the unlucky
+      phrase had escaped her&mdash;&ldquo;you will speak of this no more?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Boyd Madras,&rdquo; I said (here she coloured indignantly),&mdash;&ldquo;pardon
+      me for using the name, but it is only this once,&mdash;I shall never speak
+      of the matter to you again, nor to any one else, unless there is grave
+      reason.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked again in silence. Passing the captain&rsquo;s cabin, we saw a number
+      of gentlemen gathered about the door, while others were inside. We paused,
+      to find what the incident was. Captain Ascott was reading the letter which
+      Boyd Madras had wished to be made public. (I had given it to him just
+      before the burial, and he was acting as though Boyd Madras was really dead&mdash;he
+      was quite ignorant of our conspiracy.) I was about to move on, but Mrs.
+      Falchion touched my arm. &ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; she said. She stood and heard the letter
+      through. Then we walked on, she musing. Presently she said: &ldquo;It is a pity&mdash;a
+      pity.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked at her inquiringly, but she offered no explanation of the
+      enigmatical words. But, at this moment, seeing Justine waiting, she
+      excused herself, and soon I saw her listening to Moliere. Later in the day
+      I saw her talking with Miss Treherne, and it struck me that she had never
+      looked so beautiful as then, and that Miss Treherne had never seemed so
+      perfect a product of a fine convention. But, watching them together, one
+      who had had any standard of good life could never have hesitated between
+      the two. It was plain to me that Mrs. Falchion was bent upon making a
+      conquest of this girl who so delicately withstood her; and Belle Treherne
+      has told me since, that, when in her presence, and listening to her, she
+      was irresistibly drawn to her; though at the same time she saw there was
+      some significant lack in her nature; some hardness impossible to any one
+      who had ever known love. She also told me that on this occasion Mrs.
+      Falchion did not mention my name, nor did she ever in their acquaintance,
+      save in the most casual fashion. Her conversation with Miss Treherne was
+      always far from petty gossip or that smart comedy in which some women tell
+      much personal history, with the guise of badinage and bright cynicism. I
+      confess, though, it struck me unpleasantly at the time, that this fresh,
+      high-hearted creature should be in familiar conversation with a woman who,
+      it seemed to me, was the incarnation of cruelty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion subscribed most liberally to the fund raised for the
+      children of the quartermaster and munificently to that for the crew which
+      had, under Hungerford, performed the rescue work. The only effect of this
+      was to deepen the belief that she was very wealthy, and could spend her
+      money without affectation; for it was noticeable that she, of all on
+      board, showed the least outward excitement at the time of the disaster. It
+      occurred to me that once or twice I had seen her eyes fixed on Hungerford
+      inquisitively, and not free from antipathy. It was something behind her
+      usual equanimity. Her intuitive observation had led her to trace his hand
+      in recent events. Yet I know she admired him too for his brave conduct.
+      The day following the tragedy we were seated at dinner. The captain and
+      most of the officers had risen, but Mrs. Falchion, having come in late,
+      was still eating, and I remained seated also. Hungerford approached me,
+      apologising for the interruption. He remarked that he was going on the
+      bridge, and wished to say something to me before he went. It was an
+      official matter, to which Mrs. Falchion apparently did not listen. When he
+      was about to turn away, he bowed to her rather distantly; but she looked
+      up at him and said, with an equivocal smile:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Hungerford, we often respect brave men whom we do not like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he, understanding her, but refusing to recognise the compliment, not
+      altogether churlishly replied: &ldquo;And I might say the same of women, Mrs.
+      Falchion; but there are many women we dislike who are not brave.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I could recognise a brave man without seeing his bravery,&rdquo; she
+      urged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am a blundering sailor,&rdquo; he rejoined, &ldquo;who only believes his eyes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are young yet,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be older to-morrow,&rdquo; was his retort.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, perhaps you will see better to-morrow,&rdquo; she rejoined, with indolent
+      irony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I do, I&rsquo;ll acknowledge it,&rdquo; he added. Then Hungerford smiled at me
+      inscrutably. We two held a strange secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0008" id="link2HCH0008">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      No more delightful experience may be had than to wake up in the harbour of
+      Aden some fine morning&mdash;it is always fine there&mdash;and get the
+      first impression of that mighty fortress, with its thousand iron eyes, in
+      strong repose by the Arabian Sea. Overhead was the cloudless sun, and
+      everywhere the tremulous glare of a sandy shore and the creamy wash of the
+      sea, like fusing opals. A tiny Mohammedan mosque stood gracefully where
+      the ocean almost washed its steps, and the Resident&rsquo;s house, far up the
+      hard hillside, looked down upon the harbour from a green coolness. The
+      place had a massive, war-like character. Here was a battery with
+      earthworks; there, a fort; beyond, a signal-staff. Hospitals, hotels, and
+      stores were incidents in the picture. Beyond the mountain-wall and lofty
+      Jebel Shamsan, rising in fine pink and bronze, and at the end of a
+      high-walled path between the great hills, lay the town of Aden proper.
+      Above the town again were the mighty Tanks, formed out of clefts in the
+      mountains, and built in the times when the Phoenicians made Aden a great
+      mart, the richest spot in all Arabia.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Over to the left, on the opposite side of the harbour, were wide bungalows
+      shining in the sun, and flanking the side of the ancient aqueduct, the
+      gigantic tomb of an Arab sheikh. In the harbour were the men-of-war of all
+      nations, and Arab dhows sailed slowly in, laden with pilgrims for Mecca&mdash;masses
+      of picturesque sloth and dirt&mdash;and disease also; for more than one
+      vessel flew the yellow flag. As we looked, a British man-of-war entered
+      the gates of the harbour in the rosy light. It was bringing back the
+      disabled and wounded from a battle, in which a handful of British soldiers
+      were set to punish thirty times their number in an unknown country. But
+      there was another man-of-war in port with which we were familiar. We
+      passed it far out on the Indian Ocean. It again passed us, and reached
+      Aden before we did. The &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; lay not far from the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, and as
+      I leaned over the bulwarks, idly looking at her, a boat shot away from her
+      side, and came towards us. As it drew near, I saw that it was filled with
+      luggage&mdash;a naval officer&rsquo;s, I knew it to be. As the sailors hauled it
+      up, I noticed that the initials upon the portmanteaus were G. R. The owner
+      was evidently an officer going home on leave, or invalided. It did not,
+      however, concern me, as I thought, and I turned away to look for Mr.
+      Treherne, that I might fulfil my promise to escort his daughter and Mrs.
+      Callendar to the general cemetery at Aden; for I knew he was not fit to do
+      the journey, and there was nothing to prevent my going.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few hours later I stood with Miss Treherne and Mrs. Callendar in the
+      graveyard beside the fortress-wall, placing wreaths of artificial flowers
+      and one or two natural roses&mdash;a chance purchase from a shop at the
+      port&mdash;on the grave of the young journalist. Miss Treherne had brought
+      some sketching materials, and both of us (for, as has been suggested, I
+      had a slight gift for drawing) made sketches of the burial-place. Having
+      done this, we moved away to other parts of the cemetery, looking at the
+      tombstones, many of which told sad tales enough of those who died far away
+      from home and friends. As we wandered on, I noticed a woman kneeling
+      beside a grave. It grew upon me that the figure was familiar. Presently I
+      saw who it was, for the face lifted. I excused myself, went over to her,
+      and said:&mdash;&ldquo;Miss Caron, you are in trouble?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and pointed to the tombstone.
+      On it I read:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+            Sacred to the Memory of
+               HECTOR CARON,
+            Ensign in the French Navy.
+
+         Erected by his friend, Galt Roscoe,
+                H.B.M.N.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Beneath this was the simple line:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+           &ldquo;Why, what evil hath he done?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was your brother?&rdquo; I asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, monsieur, my one brother.&rdquo; Her tears dropped slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And Galt Roscoe, who was he?&rdquo; asked I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through her grief her face was eloquent. &ldquo;I never saw him&mdash;never knew
+      him,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He saved my poor Hector from much suffering; he nursed
+      him, and buried him here when he died, and then&mdash;that!&rdquo; pointing to
+      the tombstone. &ldquo;He made me love the English,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Some day I shall
+      find him, and I shall have money to pay him back all he spent&mdash;all.&rdquo;
+       Now I guessed the meaning of the scene on board the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, when she had
+      been so anxious to preserve her present relations with Mrs. Falchion. This
+      was the secret&mdash;a beautiful one. She rose. &ldquo;They disgraced Hector in
+      New Caledonia,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;because he refused to punish a convict at Ile
+      Nou who did not deserve it. He determined to go to France to represent his
+      case. He left me behind, because we were poor. He went to Sydney. There he
+      came to know this good man,&rdquo;&mdash;her finger gently felt his name upon
+      the stone,&mdash;&ldquo;who made him a guest upon his ship; and so he came on
+      towards England. In the Indian Ocean he was taken ill: and this was the
+      end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She mournfully sank again beside the grave, but she was no longer weeping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was this officer&rsquo;s vessel?&rdquo; I said presently. She drew from her
+      dress a letter. &ldquo;It is here. Please read it all. He wrote that to me when
+      Hector died.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The superscription to the letter was&mdash;H.B.M.S. Porcupine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I might have told her then that the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; was in the harbour at
+      Aden, but I felt that things would work out to due ends without my help&mdash;which,
+      indeed, they began to do immediately. As we stood there in silence, I
+      reading over and over again the line upon the pedestal, I heard footsteps
+      behind, and, turning, I saw a man approaching us, who, from his manner,
+      though he was dressed in civilian&rsquo;s clothes, I guessed to be an officer of
+      the navy. He was of more than middle height, had black hair, dark blue
+      eyes, straight, strongly-marked brows, and was clean-shaven. He was a
+      little ascetic-looking, and rather interesting and uncommon, and yet he
+      was unmistakably a sea-going man. It was a face that one would turn to
+      look at again and again&mdash;a singular personality. And yet my first
+      glance told me that he was not one who had seen much happiness. Perhaps
+      that was not unattractive in itself, since people who are very happy, and
+      show it, are often most selfish too, and repel where they should attract.
+      He was now standing near the grave, and his eyes were turned from one to
+      the other of us, at last resting on Justine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently I saw a look of recognition. He stepped quickly forward.
+      &ldquo;Mademoiselle, will you pardon me?&rdquo; he said very gently, &ldquo;but you remind
+      me of one whose grave I came to see.&rdquo; His hand made a slight motion toward
+      Hector Caron&rsquo;s resting-place. Her eyes were on him with an inquiring
+      earnestness. &ldquo;Oh, monsieur, is it possible that you are my brother&rsquo;s
+      friend and rescuer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am Roscoe. He was my good friend,&rdquo; he said to her, and he held out his
+      hand. She took it, and kissed it impulsively. He flushed, and drew it back
+      quickly and shyly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some day I shall be able to repay you for all your goodness,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;I am only grateful now&mdash;grateful altogether. And you will tell me
+      all you knew of him&mdash;all that he said and did before he died?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will gladly tell you all I know,&rdquo; he answered, and he looked at her
+      compassionately, and yet with a little scrutiny, as though to know more of
+      her and how she came to be in Aden. He turned to me inquiringly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I interpreted his thought by saying: &ldquo;I am the surgeon of the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. I
+      chanced upon Miss Caron here. She is travelling by the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      With a faint voice, Justine here said: &ldquo;Travelling&mdash;with my
+      mistress.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As companion to a lady,&rdquo; I preferred to add in explanation, for I wished
+      not to see her humble herself so. A look of understanding came into
+      Roscoe&rsquo;s face. Then he said: &ldquo;I am glad that I shall see more of you; I am
+      to travel by the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; also to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yet I am afraid I shall see very little of you,&rdquo; she quietly replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was about to say something to her, but she suddenly swayed and would
+      have fallen, but that he caught her and supported her. The weakness lasted
+      only for a moment, and then, steadying herself, she said to both of us: &ldquo;I
+      hope you will say nothing of this to madame? She is kind, most kind, but
+      she hates illness&mdash;and such things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Galt Roscoe looked at me to reply, his face showing clearly that he
+      thought &ldquo;madame&rdquo; an extraordinary woman. I assured Justine that we would
+      say nothing. Then Roscoe cordially parted from us, saying that he would
+      look forward to seeing us both on the ship; but before he finally went, he
+      put on the grave a small bouquet from his buttonhole. Then I excused
+      myself from Justine, and, going over to Miss Treherne, explained to her
+      the circumstances, and asked her if she would go and speak to the
+      afflicted girl. She and Mrs. Callendar had been watching the incident, and
+      they eagerly listened to me. I think this was the moment that I first
+      stood really well with Belle Treherne. Her sympathy for the bereaved girl
+      flooded many barriers between herself and me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she said quickly, &ldquo;indeed I will go to her, poor girl! Will you come
+      also, Mrs. Callendar?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mrs. Callendar timidly said she would rather Miss Treherne went
+      without her; and so it was. While Miss Treherne was comforting the
+      bereaved girl, I talked to Mrs. Callendar. I fear that Mrs. Callendar was
+      but a shallow woman; for, after a moment of excitable interest in Justine,
+      she rather naively turned the talk upon the charms of Europe. And, I fear,
+      not without some slight cynicism, I followed her where she led; for, as I
+      said to myself, it did not matter what direction our idle tongues took, so
+      long as I kept my mind upon the two beside that grave: but it gave my
+      speech a spice of malice. I dwelt upon Mrs. Callendar&rsquo;s return to her
+      native heath&mdash;that is, the pavements of Bond Street and Piccadilly,
+      although I knew that she was a native of Tasmania. At this she smiled
+      egregiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length Miss Treherne came to us and said that Justine insisted she was
+      well enough to go back to the vessel alone, and wished not to be
+      accompanied. So we left her there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A score of times I have stopped when preparing my notes for this tale from
+      my diary and those of Mrs. Falchion and Galt Roscoe, to think how, all
+      through the events recorded here, and many others omitted, Justine Caron
+      was like those devoted and, often, beautiful attendants of the heroes and
+      heroines of tragedy, who, when all is over, close the eyes, compose the
+      bodies, and cover the faces of the dead, pronouncing with just lips the
+      benediction, fittest in their mouths. Their loves, their deeds, their
+      lives, however good and worthy, were clothed in modesty and kept far up
+      the stage, to be, even when everything was over, not always given the
+      privilege to die as did their masters, but, like Horatio, bade to live and
+      be still the loyal servant:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;But in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
+        To tell my story.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      There was no reason why we should go to the ship immediately, and I
+      proposed that we should first explore the port-town, and then visit the
+      city of Aden&mdash;five miles away beyond the hills&mdash;and the Tanks.
+      To this the ladies consented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Somauli policemen patrolled the streets; Somauli, Arab, and Turkish guides
+      impeded the way; Arabs in plain white, Arab sheikhs in blue and white, and
+      gold, lounged languidly about, or drank their coffee in the shade of the
+      bazaars. Children of the desert, nearly naked, sprinkled water before the
+      doors of the bazaars and stores and upon the hot thoroughfare, from long
+      leather bottles; caravans of camels, with dusty stride, swung up the
+      hillside and beyond into the desert; the Jewish water-carrier with his
+      donkey trudged down the pass from the cool fountains in the volcanic
+      hills; a guard of eunuchs marched by with the harem of a Mohammedan; in
+      the doorways of the houses goats and donkeys fed. Jews, with greasy faces,
+      red-hemmed skirt, and hungry look, moved about, offering ostrich feathers
+      for sale, everywhere treated worse than the Chinaman in Oregon or at Port
+      Darwin. We saw English and Australian passengers of the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; pelting
+      the miserable members of a despised race with green fruit about the
+      streets, and afterwards from the deck of the ship. A number of these
+      raised their hats to us as they passed; but Belle Treherne&rsquo;s
+      acknowledgment was chilly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is hard to be polite to cowards,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After having made some ruinous bargains in fezes, Turkish cloths and
+      perfume, I engaged a trap, and we started for Aden. The journey was not
+      one of beauty, but it had singular interest. Every turn of the wheels
+      carried us farther and farther away from a familiar world to one of
+      yesterday. White-robed warriors of the desert, with lances, bent their
+      brows upon us as they rode away towards the endless sands, and vagabonds
+      of Egypt begged for alms. In about three-quarters of an hour we had passed
+      the lofty barriers of Jebel Shamsan and its comrades, and were making
+      clouds of dust in the streets of Aden. In spite of the cantonments, the
+      British Government House, and the European Church, it was an Oriental town
+      pure and simple, where the slow-footed hours wandered by, leaving apathy
+      in their train; where sloth and surfeit sat in the market-places; idle
+      women gossiped in their doorways; and naked children rolled in the sun.
+      Yet how, in the most unfamiliar places, does one wake suddenly to hear or
+      see some most familiar thing, and learn again that the ways of all people
+      and nations are not, after all, so far apart! Here three naked youths,
+      with trays upon their heads, cried aloud at each doorway what,
+      interpreted, was: &ldquo;Pies! Hot pies! Pies all hot!&rdquo; or, &ldquo;Crum-pet! Crumpet!
+      Won&rsquo;t you buy-uy a crum-pet!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      One sees the same thing in Kandy, in Calcutta, in Tokio, in Istamboul, in
+      Teheran, in Queensland, in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To us the great Tanks overlooking the place were more interesting than the
+      town itself, and we drove thither. At Government House and here were the
+      only bits of green that we had seen; they were, in fact, the only spots of
+      verdure on the peninsula of Aden. It was a very sickly green, from which
+      wan and dusty fig trees rose. In their scant shadow, or in the shelter of
+      an overhanging ledge of rock, Arabs offered us draughts of cool water, and
+      oranges. There were people in the sickly gardens, and others were
+      inspecting the Tanks. Passengers from the ship had brought
+      luncheon-baskets to this sad oasis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we stood at the edge of one of the Tanks, Miss Treherne remarked with
+      astonishment that they were empty. I explained to her that Aden did not
+      have the benefits conferred even on the land of the seven fat and seven
+      lean kine&mdash;that there had not been rain there for years, and that
+      when it did come it was neither prolonged nor plentiful. Then came
+      questions as to how long ago the Tanks were built.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thirteen hundred years!&rdquo; she exclaimed. &ldquo;How strange to feel it so! It is
+      like looking at old graves. And how high the walls are, closing up the
+      gorge between the hills.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment Mrs. Callendar drew our attention to Mrs. Falchion and a
+      party from the ship. Mrs. Falchion was but a few paces from us, smiling
+      agreeably as she acknowledged our greetings. Presently two of her party
+      came to us and asked us to share their lunch. I would have objected, and I
+      am certain Belle Treherne would gladly have done so, but Mrs. Callendar
+      was anxious to accept, therefore we expressed our gratitude and joined the
+      group. On second thoughts I was glad that we did so, because, otherwise,
+      my party must have been without refreshments until they returned to the
+      ship&mdash;the restaurants at Aden are not to be trusted. To me Mrs.
+      Falchion was pleasantly impersonal, to Miss Treherne delicately and
+      actively personal. At the time I had a kind of fear of her interest in the
+      girl, but I know now that it was quite sincere, though it began with a
+      motive not very lofty&mdash;to make Belle Treherne her friend, and so
+      annoy me, and also to study, as would an anatomist, the girl&rsquo;s life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all moved into the illusive shade of the fig and magnolia trees, and
+      lunch was soon spread. As we ate, conversation turned upon the annoying
+      persistency of Eastern guides, and reference was made to the exciting
+      circumstances attending the engagement of Amshar, the guide of Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s party. Among a score of claimants, Amshar had had one
+      particular opponent&mdash;a personal enemy&mdash;who would not desist even
+      when the choice had been made. He, indeed, had been the first to solicit
+      the party, and was rejected because of his disagreeable looks. He had even
+      followed the trap from the Port of Aden. As one of the gentlemen was
+      remarking on the muttered anger of the disappointed Arab, Mrs. Falchion.
+      said: &ldquo;There he is now at the gate of the garden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His look was sullenly turned upon our party. Blackburn, the Queenslander
+      said, &ldquo;Amshar, the other fellow is following up the game,&rdquo; and pointed to
+      the gate.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amshar understood the gesture at least, and though he gave a toss of the
+      head, I noticed that his hand trembled as he handed me a cup of water, and
+      that he kept his eyes turned on his opponent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One always feels unsafe with these cut-throat races,&rdquo; said Colonel Ryder,
+      &ldquo;as some of us know, who have had to deal with the nigger of South
+      America. They think no more of killing a man&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Than an Australian squatter does of dispersing a mob of aboriginals or
+      kangaroos,&rdquo; said Clovelly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Mrs. Callendar spoke up briskly. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know what you mean by
+      &lsquo;dispersing.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know what a kangaroo battue is, don&rsquo;t you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that is killing, slaughtering kangaroos by the hundred.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, and that is aboriginal dispersion,&rdquo; said the novelist. &ldquo;That is the
+      aristocratic method of legislating the native out of existence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Blackburn here vigorously protested. &ldquo;Yes, it&rsquo;s very like a novelist, on
+      the hunt for picturesque events, to spend his forensic soul upon &lsquo;the poor
+      native,&rsquo;&mdash;upon the dirty nigger, I choose to call him: the meanest,
+      cruellest, most cowardly, and murderous&mdash;by Jove, what a lot of
+      adjectives!&mdash;of native races. But we fellows, who have lost some of
+      the best friends we ever had&mdash;chums with whom we&rsquo;ve shared blanket
+      and tucker&mdash;by the crack of a nulla-nulla in the dark, or a spear
+      from the scrub, can&rsquo;t find a place for Exeter Hall and its &lsquo;poor native&rsquo; 
+      in our hard hearts. We stand in such a case for justice. It is a new
+      country. Not once in fifty times would law reach them. Reprisal and
+      dispersion were the only things possible to men whose friends had been
+      massacred, and&mdash;well, they punished tribes for the acts of
+      individuals.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion here interposed. &ldquo;That is just what England does. A British
+      trader is killed. She sweeps a native town out of existence with Hotchkiss
+      guns&mdash;leaves it naked and dead. That is dispersion too; I have seen
+      it, and I know how far niggers as a race can be trusted, and how much they
+      deserve sympathy. I agree with Mr. Blackburn.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Blackburn raised his glass. &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I need no further
+      evidence to prove my case. Experience is the best teacher.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I wish to join the chorus to so notable a compliment, will somebody
+      pass the claret?&rdquo; said Colonel Ryder, shaking the crumbs of a pate from
+      his coat-collar. When his glass was filled, he turned towards Mrs.
+      Falchion, and continued: &ldquo;I drink to the health of the best teacher.&rdquo; And
+      every one laughingly responded. This impromptu toast would have been drunk
+      with more warmth, if we could have foreseen an immediate event. Not less
+      peculiar were Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s words to Hungerford the evening before,
+      recorded in the last sentence of the preceding chapter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Cigars were passed, and the men rose and strolled away. We wandered
+      outside the gardens, passing the rejected guide as we did so. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t
+      like the look in his eye,&rdquo; said Clovelly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Colonel Ryder laughed. &ldquo;You&rsquo;ve always got a fine vision for the dramatic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We passed on. I suppose about twenty minutes had gone when, as we were
+      entering the garden again, we heard loud cries. Hurrying forward towards
+      the Tanks, we saw a strange sight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There, on a narrow wall dividing two great tanks, were three people&mdash;Mrs.
+      Falchion, Amshar, and the rejected Arab guide. Amshar was crouching behind
+      Mrs. Falchion, and clinging to her skirts in abject fear. The Arab
+      threatened with a knife. He could not get at Amshar without thrusting Mrs.
+      Falchion aside, and, as I said, the wall was narrow. He was bent like a
+      tiger about to spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing Mrs. Falchion and Amshar apart from the others,&mdash;Mrs. Falchion
+      having insisted on crossing this narrow and precipitous wall,&mdash;he had
+      suddenly rushed after them. As he did so, Miss Treherne saw him, and cried
+      out. Mrs. Falchion faced round swiftly, and then came this tragic
+      situation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some one must die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Seeing that Mrs. Falchion made no effort to dislodge Amshar from her
+      skirts, the Arab presently leaped forward. Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s arms went out
+      suddenly, and she caught the wrist that held the dagger. Then there was an
+      instant&rsquo;s struggle. It was Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s life now, as well as Amshar&rsquo;s.
+      They swayed. They hung on the edge of the rocky chasm. Then we lost the
+      gleam of the knife, and the Arab shivered, and toppled over. Mrs. Falchion
+      would have gone with him, but Amshar caught her about the waist, and saved
+      her from the fall which would have killed her as certainly as it killed
+      the Arab lying at the bottom of the tank. She had managed to turn the
+      knife in the Arab&rsquo;s hand against his own breast, and then suddenly pressed
+      her body against it; but the impulse of the act came near carrying her
+      over also.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amshar was kneeling at her feet, and kissing her gown gratefully. She
+      pushed him away with her foot, and, coolly turning aside, began to arrange
+      her hair. As I approached her, she glanced down at the Arab. &ldquo;Horrible!
+      horrible!&rdquo; she said. I remembered that these were her words when her
+      husband was lifted from the sea to the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not ungently, she refused my hand or any assistance, and came down among
+      the rest of the party. I could not but feel a strange wonder at the
+      powerful side of her character just shown&mdash;her courage, her cool
+      daring. In her face now there was a look of annoyance, and possibly
+      disgust, as well as of triumph&mdash;so natural in cases of physical
+      prowess. Everybody offered congratulations, but she only showed real
+      pleasure, and that mutely, at those of Miss Treherne. To the rest of us
+      she said: &ldquo;One had to save one&rsquo;s self, and Amshar was a coward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so this woman, whose hardness of heart and excessive cruelty
+      Hungerford and I were keeping from the world, was now made into a heroine,
+      around whom a halo of romance would settle whenever her name should be
+      mentioned. Now, men, eligible and ineligible, would increase their homage.
+      It seemed as if the stars had stopped in their courses to give her special
+      fortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That morning I had thought her appearance at this luncheon-party was
+      little less than scandalous, for she knew, if others did not, who Boyd
+      Madras was. After the occurrence with the Arab, the other event was
+      certainly much less prominent, and here, after many years, I can see that
+      the act was less in her than it would have been in others. For, behind her
+      outward hardness, there was a sort of justice working, an iron thing, but
+      still not unnatural in her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Belle Treherne awakened also to a new perception of her character, and a
+      kind of awe possessed her, so masculine seemed her courage, yet so womanly
+      and feminine her manner. Mrs. Callendar was loud in her exclamations of
+      delight and wonder at Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s coolness; and the bookmaker, with
+      his usual impetuosity, offered to take bets at four to one that we should
+      all be detained to give evidence in the matter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clovelly was silent. He occasionally adjusted his glasses, and looked at
+      Mrs. Falchion as if he had suddenly come to a full stop in his opinions
+      regarding her. This, I think, was noticed by her, and enjoyed too, for she
+      doubtless remembered her conversation with me, in which she had said that
+      Clovelly thought he understood her perfectly. Colonel Ryder, who was loyal
+      at all times, said she had the nerve of a woman from Kentucky. Moreover,
+      he had presence of mind, for he had immediately sent off a native to
+      inform the authorities of what had occurred; so that before we had got
+      half-way to the town we were met by policemen running towards us, followed
+      by a small detachment of Indian soldiers. The officer in command of the
+      detachment stopped us, and said that the governor would be glad if we
+      would come to Government House for an hour, while an inquiry was being
+      held.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To this we cheerfully consented, of course; and, in a room where punkahs
+      waved and cool claret-cup awaited us, we were received by the governor,
+      who was full of admiration of Mrs. Falchion. It was plain, however, that
+      he was surprised at her present equanimity. Had she no nerves at all?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can only regret exceedingly,&rdquo; said the governor, &ldquo;that your visit to
+      Aden has had such a tragical interruption; but since it has occurred, I am
+      glad to have the privilege of meeting a lady so brave as Mrs. Falchion.&rdquo;&mdash;The
+      bookmaker had introduced us all with a naivete that, I am sure, amused the
+      governor, as it certainly did his aide-de-camp. &ldquo;We should not need to
+      fear the natives if we had soldiers as fearless,&rdquo; his excellency
+      continued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point the inquiry began, and, after it was over, the governor said
+      that there the matter ended so far as we were concerned, and then he
+      remarked gallantly that the Government of Aden would always remain Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s debtor. She replied that it was a debt she would be glad to
+      preserve unsettled for ever. After this pretty exchange of compliments,
+      the governor smiled, and offered her his arm to the door, where our &lsquo;char
+      a bans&rsquo; awaited us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So impressed was the bookmaker with the hospitable reception the governor
+      had given us, that he offered him his cigar-case with its contents, said
+      he hoped they would meet again, and asked his excellency if he thought of
+      coming to Australia. The governor declined the cigars graciously, ignored
+      the hoped-for pleasure of another meeting, and trusted that it might fall
+      to his lot to visit Australia some day. Thereupon the bookmaker insisted
+      on the aide-de-camp accepting the cigar-case, and gave him his
+      visiting-card. The aide-de-camp lost nothing by his good-humoured
+      acceptance, if he smoked, because, as I knew, the cigars were very good
+      indeed. Bookmakers, gamblers and Jews are good judges of tobacco. And the
+      governor&rsquo;s party lost nothing in dignity because, as the traps wheeled
+      away, they gave a polite little cheer for Mrs. Falchion. I, at first, was
+      fearful how Belle Treherne would regard the gaucheries of the bookmaker,
+      but I saw that he was rather an object of interest to her than otherwise;
+      for he was certainly amusing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we drove through Aden, a Somauli lad ran from the door of a house, and
+      handed up a letter to the driver of my trap. It bore my name, and was
+      handed over to me. I recognised the handwriting. It was that of Boyd
+      Madras. He had come ashore by Hungerford&rsquo;s aid in the night. The letter
+      simply gave an address in England that would always find him, and stated
+      that he intended to take another name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0009" id="link2HCH0009">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER IX. &ldquo;THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS&rdquo;
+     </h2>
+    <p>
+      News of the event had preceded us to the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, and, as we scrambled
+      out on the ship&rsquo;s stairs, cheers greeted us. Glancing up, I saw
+      Hungerford, among others, leaning over the side, and looking at Mrs.
+      Falchion in a curious cogitating fashion, not unusual to him. The look was
+      non-committal, yet earnest. If it was not approval, it was not
+      condemnation; but it might have been slightly ironical, and that annoyed
+      me. It seemed impossible for him&mdash;and it was so always, I believe&mdash;to
+      get out of his mind the thought of the man he had rescued on No Man&rsquo;s Sea.
+      I am sure it jarred upon him that the band foolishly played a welcome when
+      Mrs. Falchion stepped on the deck. As I delivered Miss Treherne into the
+      hands of her father, who was anxiously awaiting us, Hungerford said in my
+      ear: &ldquo;A tragedy queen, Marmion.&rdquo; He said it so distinctly that Mrs.
+      Falchion heard it, and she gave him a searching look. Their eyes met and
+      warred for a moment, and then he added: &ldquo;I remember! Yes, I can respect
+      the bravery of a woman whom I do not like.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And this is to-morrow,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and a man may change his mind, and
+      that may be fate&mdash;or a woman&rsquo;s whim.&rdquo; She bowed, turned away, and
+      went below, evidently disliking the reception she had had, and anxious to
+      escape inquiries and congratulations. Nor did she appear again until the
+      &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; got under way about six o&rsquo;clock in the evening. As we moved out
+      of the harbour we passed close to the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; and saw its officers
+      grouped on the deck, waving adieus to some one on our deck, whom I
+      guessed, of course, to be Galt Roscoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this time Mrs. Falchion was standing near me. &ldquo;For whom is that
+      demonstration?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For one of her officers, who is a passenger by the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;,&rdquo; I replied.
+      &ldquo;You remember we passed the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo; in the Indian Ocean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I know that very well,&rdquo; she said, with a shade of meaning. &ldquo;But&rdquo;&mdash;here
+      I thought her voice had a touch of breathlessness&mdash;&ldquo;but who is the
+      officer? I mean, what is his name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He stands in the group near the door of the captain&rsquo;s cabin, there. His
+      name is Galt Roscoe, I think.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A slight exclamation escaped her. There was a chilly smile on her lips,
+      and her eyes sought the group until it rested on Galt Roscoe. In a moment
+      she said &ldquo;You have met him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the cemetery this morning, for the first time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody seems to have had business this morning at the cemetery.
+      Justine Caron spent hours there. To me it is so foolish, heaping up a
+      mound, and erecting a tombstone over&mdash;what?&mdash;a dead thing,
+      which, if one could see it, would be dreadful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would prefer complete absorption&mdash;as of the ocean?&rdquo; I brutally
+      retorted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She appeared not to notice the innuendo. &ldquo;Yes, what is gone is gone.
+      Graves are idolatry. Gravestones are ghostly. It is people without
+      imagination who need these things, together with crape and black-edged
+      paper. It is all barbaric ritual. I know you think I am callous, but I
+      cannot help that. For myself, I wish the earth close about me, and level
+      green grass above me, and no one knowing of the place; or else, fire or
+      the sea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;between us there need be no delicate words. You
+      appear to have neither imagination, nor idolatry, nor remembrances, nor
+      common womanly kindness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yet you might know me better.&rdquo; Here she touched my
+      arm with the tips of her fingers, and, in spite of myself, I felt my pulse
+      beat faster. It seemed to me that in her presence, even now, I could not
+      quite trust myself. &ldquo;Indeed!&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;And who made you omniscient,
+      Dr. Marmion? You hardly do yourself justice. You hold a secret. You insist
+      on reminding me of the fact. Is that in perfect gallantry? Do you know me
+      altogether, from your knowledge of that one thing? You are vain. Or does
+      the secret wear on you, and&mdash;Mr. Hungerford? Was it necessary to seek
+      HIS help in keeping it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I told her then the true history of Hungerford&rsquo;s connection with Boyd
+      Madras, and also begged her pardon for showing just now my knowledge of
+      her secret. At this she said, &ldquo;I suppose I should be grateful,&rdquo; and was
+      there a slightly softer cadence to her voice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you need not be grateful,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;We are silent, first, because he
+      wished it; then because you are a woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You define your reasons with astonishing care and taste,&rdquo; she replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, as to taste!&mdash;&rdquo; said I; but then I bit my tongue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that she said, her lips very firm and pale, &ldquo;I could not pretend to a
+      grief I did not feel. I acted no lie. He died as we had lived&mdash;estranged.
+      I put up no memorials.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I, thinking of my mother lying in her grave, a woman after God&rsquo;s own
+      heart, who loved me more than I deserved, repeated almost unconsciously
+      these lines (clipped from a magazine):
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;Sacred the ring, the faded glove,
+        Once worn by one we used to love;
+        Dead warriors in their armour live,
+        And in their relics saints survive.
+
+       &ldquo;Oh, Mother Earth, henceforth defend
+        All thou hast garnered of my friend,
+        From winter&rsquo;s wind and driving sleet,
+        From summer&rsquo;s sun and scorching heat.
+
+       &ldquo;Within thine all-embracing breast
+        Is hid one more forsaken nest;
+        While, in the sky, with folded wings,
+        The bird that left it sits and sings.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I paused; the occasion seemed so little suited to the sentiment, for
+      around us was the idle excitement of leaving port. I was annoyed with
+      myself for my share in the conversation so far. Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s eyes had
+      scarcely left that group around the captain&rsquo;s door, although she had
+      appeared acutely interested in what I was saying. Now she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You recite very well. I feel impressed, but I fancy it is more your voice
+      than those fine sentiments; for, after all, you cannot glorify the dead
+      body. Look at the mummy of Thothmes at Boulak, and think what Cleopatra
+      must look like now. And please let us talk about something else. Let us&mdash;&rdquo;
+       She paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I followed the keen, shaded glance of her eyes, and saw, coming from the
+      group by the captain&rsquo;s door, Galt Roscoe. He moved in our direction.
+      Suddenly he paused. His look was fixed upon Mrs. Falchion. A flush passed
+      over his face, not exactly confusing, but painful, and again it left him
+      pale, and for a moment he stood motionless. Then he came forward to us. He
+      bowed to me, then looked hard at her. She held out her hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Roscoe, I think?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;An old friend,&rdquo; she added, turning to
+      me. He gravely took her extended hand and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not think to see you here, Miss&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MRS. Falchion,&rdquo; she interrupted clearly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MRS. Falchion!&rdquo; he said, with surprise. &ldquo;It is so many years since we had
+      met, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is so easy to forget things? But it isn&rsquo;t so many, really&mdash;only
+      seven, the cycle for constitutional renewal. Dear me, how erudite that
+      sounds!... So, I suppose, we meet the same, yet not the same.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The same, yet not the same,&rdquo; he repeated after her, with an attempt at
+      lightness, yet abstractedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think you gentlemen know each other?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes; we met in the cemetery this morning. I was visiting the grave of a
+      young French officer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; she said&mdash;&ldquo;Justine Caron&rsquo;s brother. She has told me; but
+      she did not tell me your name.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She has told you?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. She is&mdash;my companion.&rdquo; I saw that she did not use the word that
+      first came to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strangely things occur! And yet,&rdquo; he added musingly, &ldquo;I suppose,
+      after all, coincidence is not so strange in these days of much travel,
+      particularly with people whose lives are connected&mdash;more or less.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose lives are connected&mdash;more or less,&rdquo; she repeated after him, in
+      a steely tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that I had received my cue to leave. I bowed myself away,
+      and went about my duties. As we steamed bravely through the Straits of
+      Babelmandeb, with Perim on our left, rising lovely through the milky haze,
+      I came on deck again, and they were still near where I had left them an
+      hour before. I passed, glancing at them as I did so. They did not look
+      towards me. His eyes were turned to the shore, and hers were fixed on him.
+      I saw an expression on her lips that gave her face new character. She was
+      speaking, as I thought, clearly and mercilessly. I could not help hearing
+      her words as I passed them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are going to be that&mdash;you!&rdquo; There was a ring of irony in her
+      tone. I heard nothing more in words, but I saw him turn to her somewhat
+      sharply, and I caught the deep notes of his voice as he answered her.
+      When, a moment after, I looked back, she had gone below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Galt Roscoe had a seat at Captain Ascott&rsquo;s table, and I did not see
+      anything of him at meal-times, but elsewhere I soon saw him a great deal.
+      He appeared to seek my company. I was glad of this, for I found that he
+      was an agreeable man, and had distinct originality of ideas, besides being
+      possessed of very considerable culture. He also had that social aplomb so
+      much a characteristic of the naval officer. Yet, man of the world as he
+      was, he had a strain of asceticism which puzzled me. It did not make him
+      eccentric, but it was not a thing usual with the naval man. Again, he
+      wished to be known simply as Mr. Roscoe, not as Captain Roscoe, which was
+      his rank. He said nothing about having retired, yet I guessed he had done
+      so. One evening, however, soon after we had left Aden, we were sitting in
+      my cabin, and the conversation turned upon a recent novel dealing with the
+      defection of a clergyman of the Church of England through agnosticism. The
+      keenness with which he threw himself into the discussion and the knowledge
+      he showed, surprised me. I knew (as most medical students get to know,
+      until they know better) some scientific objections to Christianity, and I
+      put them forward. He clearly and powerfully met them. I said at last,
+      laughingly: &ldquo;Why, you ought to take holy orders.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is what I am going to do,&rdquo; he said very seriously, &ldquo;when I get to
+      England. I am resigning the navy.&rdquo; At that instant there flashed through
+      my mind Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s words: &ldquo;You are going to be that&mdash;you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he explained to me that he had been studying for two years, and
+      expected to go up for deacon&rsquo;s orders soon after his return to England. I
+      cannot say that I was greatly surprised, for I had known a few, and had
+      heard of many, men who had exchanged the navy for the Church. It struck
+      me, however, that Galt Roscoe appeared to view the matter from a
+      stand-point not professional; the more so, that he expressed his
+      determination to go to the newest part of a new country, to do the pioneer
+      work of the Church. I asked him where he was going, and he said to the
+      Rocky Mountains of Canada. I told him that my destination was Canada also.
+      He warmly expressed the hope that we should see something of each other
+      there. This friendship of ours may seem to have been hastily hatched, but
+      it must be remembered that the sea is a great breeder of friendship. Two
+      men who have known each other for twenty years find that twenty days at
+      sea bring them nearer than ever they were before, or else estrange them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was on this evening that, in a lull of the conversation, I casually
+      asked him when he had known Mrs. Falchion. His face was inscrutable, but
+      he said somewhat hurriedly, &ldquo;In the South Sea Islands,&rdquo; and then changed
+      the subject. So, there was some mystery again? Was this woman never to be
+      dissociated from enigma? In those days I never could think of her save in
+      connection with some fatal incident in which she was scathless, and some
+      one else suffered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It may have been fancy, but I thought that, during the first day or two
+      after leaving Aden, Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion were very little
+      together. Then the impression grew that this was his doing, and again that
+      she waited with confident patience for the time when he would seek her&mdash;because
+      he could not help himself. Often when other men were paying her devoted
+      court I caught her eyes turned in his direction, and I thought I read in
+      her smile a consciousness of power. And it so was. Very soon he was at her
+      side. But I also noticed that he began to look worn, that his conversation
+      with me lagged. I think that at this time I was so much occupied with
+      tracing personal appearances to personal influences that I lost to some
+      degree the physician&rsquo;s practical keenness. My eyes were to be opened. He
+      appeared to be suffering, and she seemed to unbend to him more than she
+      ever unbent to me, or any one else on board. Hungerford, seeing this, said
+      to me one day in his blunt way: &ldquo;Marmion, old Ulysses knew what he was
+      about when he tied himself to the mast.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the routine of the ship went on as before. Fortunately, Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s heroism at Aden had taken the place of the sensation attending
+      Boyd Madras&rsquo;s suicide. Those who tired of thinking of both became mildly
+      interested in Red Sea history. Chief among these was the bookmaker. As an
+      historian the bookmaker was original. He cavalierly waved aside all such
+      confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet contemporaneous,
+      incidentally referred to King Solomon&rsquo;s visits to Cleopatra, and with sad
+      irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the destruction of Pharaoh&rsquo;s horses
+      and chariots as &ldquo;the big handicap.&rdquo; He did not mean to be irreverent or
+      unhistorical. He merely wished to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he
+      was very original, and quite clever at history. His really startling
+      points, however, were his remarks upon the colours of the mountains of
+      Egypt and the sunset tints to be seen on the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
+      To him the grey, and pink, and melancholy gold only brought up visions of
+      a race at Epsom or Flemington&mdash;generally Flemington, where the
+      staring Australian sun pours down on an emerald course, on a score of
+      horses straining upon the start, the colours of the jockeys&rsquo; coats and
+      caps changing in the struggle like a kaleidoscope, and making strange
+      harmonies of colour. The comparison between the mountains of Egypt and a
+      race-course might seem most absurd, if one did not remember that the
+      bookmaker had his own standards, and that he thought he was paying unusual
+      honour to the land of the Fellah. Clovelly plaintively said, as he drank
+      his hock and seltzer, that the bookmaker was hourly saving his life; and
+      Colonel Ryder admitted at last that Kentucky never produced anything quite
+      like him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The evening before we came to the Suez Canal I was walking with Miss
+      Treherne and her father. I had seen Galt Roscoe in conversation with Mrs.
+      Falchion. Presently I saw him rise to go away. A moment after, in passing,
+      I was near her. She sprang up, caught my arm, and pointed anxiously. I
+      looked, and saw Galt Roscoe swaying as he walked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is ill&mdash;ill,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran forward and caught him as he was falling. Ill?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course he was ill. What a fool I had been! Five minutes with him
+      assured me that he had fever. I had set his haggard appearance down to
+      some mental trouble&mdash;and I was going to be a professor in a medical
+      college!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet I know now that a troubled mind hastened the fever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0010" id="link2HCH0010">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER X. BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      From the beginning Galt Roscoe&rsquo;s fever was violent. It had been hanging
+      about him for a long time, and was the result of malarial poisoning. I
+      devoutly wished that we were in the Mediterranean instead of the Red Sea,
+      where the heat was so great; but fortunately we should soon be there.
+      There was no other case of sickness on board, and I could devote plenty of
+      time to him. Offers of assistance in nursing were numerous, but I only
+      encouraged those of the bookmaker, strange as this may seem; yet he was as
+      gentle and considerate as a woman in the sick-room. This was on the first
+      evening of his attack. After that I had reasons for dispensing with his
+      generous services. The night after Roscoe was taken ill we were passing
+      through the canal, the search-light of the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; sweeping the path
+      ahead of it and glorifying everything it touched. Mud barges were fairy
+      palaces; Arab punts beautiful gondolas; the ragged Egyptians on the banks
+      became picturesque; and the desolate country behind them had a wide
+      vestibule of splendour. I stood for half an hour watching this scene, then
+      I went below to Roscoe&rsquo;s cabin and relieved the bookmaker. The sick man
+      was sleeping from the effects of a sedative draught. The bookmaker had
+      scarcely gone when I heard a step behind me, and I turned and saw Justine
+      Caron standing timidly at the door, her eyes upon the sleeper. She spoke
+      quietly. &ldquo;Is he very ill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I answered that he was, but also that for some days I could not tell how
+      dangerous his illness might be. She went to the berth where he lay, the
+      reflected light from without playing weirdly on his face, and smoothed the
+      pillow gently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are willing, I will watch for a time,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Everybody is on
+      deck. Madame said she would not need me for a couple of hours. I will send
+      a steward for you if he wakes; you need rest yourself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That I needed rest was quite true, for I had been up all the night before;
+      still I hesitated. She saw my hesitation, and added:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is not much that I can do, still I should like to do it. I can at
+      least watch.&rdquo; Then, very earnestly: &ldquo;He watched beside Hector.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I left her with him, her fingers moving the small bag of ice about his
+      forehead to allay the fever and her eyes patiently regarding him. I went
+      on deck again. I met Miss Treherne and her father. They both inquired for
+      the sick man, and I told Belle&mdash;for she seemed much interested&mdash;the
+      nature of such malarial fevers, the acute forms they sometimes take, and
+      the kind of treatment required. She asked several questions, showing a
+      keen understanding of my explanations, and then, after a moment&rsquo;s silence,
+      said meditatively: &ldquo;I think I like men better when they are doing
+      responsible work; it is difficult to be idle&mdash;and important too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw very well that, with her, I should have to contend for a long time
+      against those first few weeks of dalliance on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Clovelly joined us, and for the first time&mdash;if I had not been so
+      egotistical it had appeared to me before&mdash;I guessed that his somewhat
+      professional interest in Belle Treherne had developed into a very personal
+      thing. And with that thought came also the conception of what a powerful
+      antagonist he would be. For it improves some men to wear glasses; and
+      Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue. It was allusive,
+      contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet playful, bold
+      yet reverential. Many a time I have longed for Clovelly&rsquo;s tongue.
+      Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without his art; and
+      of this I am occasionally reminded at this day. A man like Clovelly is
+      dangerous as a rival when he is not in earnest; when he IS in earnest, it
+      becomes a lonely time for the other man&mdash;unless the girl is perverse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I left the two together, and moved about the deck, trying to think closely
+      about Roscoe&rsquo;s case, and to drive Clovelly&rsquo;s invasion from my mind. I
+      succeeded, and was only roused by Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s voice beside me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does he suffer much?&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When answered, she asked nervously how he looked&mdash;it was impossible
+      that she should consider misery without shrinking. I told her that he was
+      only flushed and haggard as yet and that he was little wasted. A thought
+      flashed to her face. She was about to speak, but paused. After a moment,
+      however, she remarked evenly: &ldquo;He is likely to be delirious?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is probable,&rdquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were fixed on the search-light. The look in them was inscrutable.
+      She continued quietly: &ldquo;I will go and see him, if you will let me. Justine
+      will go with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not now,&rdquo; I replied. &ldquo;He is sleeping. To-morrow, if you will.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not think it necessary to tell her that Justine was at that moment
+      watching beside him. We walked the deck together in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that you care to walk with me. Please do not make
+      the matter a burden.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not say this with any invitation to courteous protest on my part,
+      but rather with a cold frankness&mdash;for which, I confess, I always
+      admired her. I said now: &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion, you have suggested what might
+      easily be possible in the circumstances, but I candidly admit that I have
+      never yet found your presence disagreeable; and I suppose that is a
+      comment upon my weakness. Though, to speak again with absolute truth, I
+      think I do not like you at this present.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I fancy I can understand that,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I can understand how, for
+      instance, one might feel a just and great resentment, and have in one&rsquo;s
+      hand the instrument of punishment, and yet withhold one&rsquo;s hand and protect
+      where one should injure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At this moment these words had no particular significance to me, but there
+      chanced a time when they came home with great force. I think, indeed, that
+      she was speaking more to herself than to me. Suddenly she turned to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if I am as cruel as you think me&mdash;for, indeed,
+      I do not know. But I have been through many things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here her eyes grew cold and hard. The words that followed seemed in no
+      sequence. &ldquo;Yet,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I will go and see him to-morrow....
+      Good-night.&rdquo; After about an hour I went below to Galt Roscoe&rsquo;s cabin. I
+      drew aside the curtain quietly. Justine Caron evidently had not heard me.
+      She was sitting beside the sick man, her fingers still smoothing away the
+      pillow from his fevered face and her eyes fixed on him. I spoke to her.
+      She rose. &ldquo;He has slept well,&rdquo; she said. And she moved to the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Caron,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;if Mrs. Falchion is willing, you could help me to
+      nurse Mr. Roscoe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A light sprang to her eyes. &ldquo;Indeed, yes,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will speak to her about it, if you will let me?&rdquo; She bowed her head,
+      and her look was eloquent of thanks. After a word of good-night we parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that nothing better could occur to my patient than that Justine
+      Caron should help to nurse him. This would do far more for him than
+      medicine&mdash;the tender care of a woman&mdash;than many pharmacopoeias.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Hungerford had insisted on relieving me for a couple of hours at midnight.
+      He said it would be a good preparation for going on the bridge at three
+      o&rsquo;clock in the morning. About half-past two he came to my cabin and waked
+      me, saying: &ldquo;He is worse&mdash;delirious; you had better come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was indeed delirious. Hungerford laid his hand on my shoulder.
+      &ldquo;Marmion,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that woman is in it. Like the devil, she is
+      ubiquitous. Mr. Roscoe&rsquo;s past is mixed up with hers somehow. I don&rsquo;t
+      suppose men talk absolute history in delirium, but there is no reason, I
+      fancy, why they shouldn&rsquo;t paraphrase. I should reduce the number of nurses
+      to a minimum if I were you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A determined fierceness possessed me at the moment. I said to him: &ldquo;She
+      shall nurse him, Hungerford&mdash;she, and Justine Caron, and myself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Plus Dick Hungerford,&rdquo; he added. &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t know quite how you intend to
+      work this thing, but you have the case in your hands, and what you&rsquo;ve told
+      me about the French girl shows that she is to be trusted. But as for
+      myself, Marmion M.D., I&rsquo;m sick&mdash;sick&mdash;sick of this woman, and
+      all her words and works. I believe that she has brought bad luck to this
+      ship; and it&rsquo;s my last voyage on it; and&mdash;and I begin to think you&rsquo;re
+      a damned good fellow&mdash;excuse the insolence of it; and&mdash;good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the rest of the night I listened to Galt Roscoe&rsquo;s wild words. He
+      tossed from side to side, and murmured brokenly. Taken separately, and as
+      they were spoken, his words might not be very significant, but pieced
+      together, arranged, and interpreted through even scant knowledge of
+      circumstances, they were sufficient to give me a key to difficulties
+      which, afterwards, were to cause much distress. I arrange some of the
+      sentences here to show how startling were the fancies&mdash;or
+      remembrances&mdash;that vexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I was coming back&mdash;I was coming back&mdash;I tell you I should
+      have stayed with her for ever.... See how she trembles!&mdash;Now her
+      breath is gone&mdash;There is no pulse&mdash;Her heart is still&mdash;My
+      God, her heart is still!&mdash;Hush! cover her face.... Row hard, you
+      devils!&mdash;A hundred dollars if you make the point in time....
+      Whereaway?&mdash;Whereaway?&mdash;Steady now!&mdash;Let them have it
+      across the bows!&mdash;Low! low!&mdash;fire low!... She is dead&mdash;she
+      is dead!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These things he would say over and over again breathlessly, then he would
+      rest a while, and the trouble would begin again. &ldquo;It was not I that did it&mdash;no,
+      it was not I. She did it herself!&mdash;She plunged it in, deep, deep,
+      deep! You made me a devil!... Hush! I WILL tell!&mdash;I know you&mdash;yet&mdash;Mercy&mdash;Mercy&mdash;Falchion&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, it was best that few should enter his cabin. The ravings of a sick
+      man are not always counted ravings, no more than the words of a well man
+      are always reckoned sane. At last I got him into a sound sleep, and by
+      that time I was thoroughly tired out. I called my own steward, and asked
+      him to watch for a couple of hours while I rested. I threw myself down and
+      slept soundly for an hour beyond that time, the steward having hesitated
+      to wake me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By that time we had passed into the fresher air of the Mediterranean, and
+      the sea was delightfully smooth. Galt Roscoe still slept, though his
+      temperature was high.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My conference with Mrs. Falchion after breakfast was brief, but
+      satisfactory. I told her frankly that Roscoe had been delirious, that he
+      had mentioned her name, and that I thought it best to reduce the number of
+      nurses and watchers. I made my proposition about Justine Caron. She shook
+      her head a little impatiently, and said that Justine had told her, and
+      that she was quite willing. Then I asked her if she would not also assist.
+      She answered immediately that she wished to do so. As if to make me
+      understand why she did it, she added: &ldquo;If I did not hear the wild things
+      he says, some one else would; and the difference is that I understand
+      them, and the some one else would interpret them with the genius of the
+      writer of a fairy book.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so it happened that Mrs. Falchion came to sit many hours a day beside
+      the sick couch of Galt Roscoe, moistening his lips, cooling his brow,
+      giving him his medicine. After the first day, when she was, I thought,
+      alternating between innate disgust of misery and her womanliness and
+      humanity,&mdash;in these days more a reality to me,&mdash;she grew
+      watchful and silently solicitous at every turn of the malady. What
+      impressed me most was that she was interested and engrossed more, it
+      seemed, in the malady than in the man himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet she baffled me even when I had come to this conclusion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During most of his delirium she remained almost impassive, as if she had
+      schooled herself to be calm and strong in nerve; but one afternoon she did
+      a thing that upset all my opinions of her for a moment. Looking straight
+      at her with staring, unconscious eyes, he half rose in his bed, and said
+      in a low, bitter tone: &ldquo;I hate you. I once loved you&mdash;but I hate you
+      now!&rdquo; Then he laughed scornfully, and fell back on the pillow. She had
+      been sitting very quietly, musing. His action had been unexpected, and had
+      broken upon a silence. She rose to her feet quickly, gave a sharp indrawn
+      breath, and pressed her hand against her side, as though a sudden pain had
+      seized her. The next moment, however, she was composed again, and said in
+      explanation that she had been half asleep, and he had startled her. But I
+      had seen her under what seemed to me more trying conditions, and she had
+      not shown any nervousness such as this.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The passengers, of course, talked. Many &ldquo;true histories&rdquo; of Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s devotion to the sick man were abroad; but it must be said,
+      however, that all of them were romantically creditable to her. She had
+      become a rare product even in the eyes of Miss Treherne, and more
+      particularly her father, since the matter at the Tanks. Justine Caron was
+      slyly besieged by the curious, but they went away empty; for Justine, if
+      very simple and single-minded, was yet too much concerned for both Galt
+      Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion to give the inquiring the slightest clue. She
+      knew, indeed, little herself, whatever she may have guessed. As for
+      Hungerford, he was dumb. He refused to consider the matter. But he roundly
+      maintained once or twice, without any apparent relevance, that a woman was
+      like a repeating decimal&mdash;you could follow her, but you never could
+      reach her. He usually added to this: &ldquo;Minus one, Marmion,&rdquo; meaning thus to
+      exclude the girl who preferred him to any one else. When I ventured to
+      suggest that Miss Treherne might also be excepted, he said, with maddening
+      suggestion: &ldquo;She lets Mrs. Falchion fool her, doesn&rsquo;t she? And she isn&rsquo;t
+      quite sure the splendour of a medical professor&rsquo;s position is superior to
+      that of an author.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In these moments, although I tried to smile on him, I hated him a little.
+      I sought to revenge myself on him by telling him to help himself to a
+      cigar, having first placed the box of Mexicans near him. He invariably
+      declined them, and said he would take one of the others from the tea-box&mdash;my
+      very best, kept in tea for sake of dryness. If I reversed the process he
+      reversed his action. His instinct regarding cigars was supernatural, and I
+      almost believe that he had&mdash;like the Black Dwarf&rsquo;s cat&mdash;the
+      &ldquo;poo&rsquo;er&rdquo; of reading character and interpreting events&mdash;an uncanny
+      divination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew by the time we reached Valetta that Roscoe would get well; but he
+      recognised none of us until we arrived at Gibraltar. Justine Caron and
+      myself had been watching beside him. As the bells clanged to &ldquo;slow down&rdquo;
+       on entering the harbour, his eyes opened with a gaze of sanity and
+      consciousness. He looked at me, then at Justine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been ill?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine&rsquo;s eyes were not entirely to be trusted. She turned her head away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you have been very ill,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;but you are better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled feebly, adding: &ldquo;At least, I am grateful that I did not die at
+      sea.&rdquo; Then he closed his eyes. After a moment he opened them, and said,
+      looking at Justine: &ldquo;You have helped to nurse me, have you not?&rdquo; His
+      wasted fingers moved over the counterpane towards her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could do so little,&rdquo; she murmured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have more than paid your debt to me,&rdquo; he gently replied. &ldquo;For I live,
+      you see, and poor Hector died.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shook her head gravely, and rejoined: &ldquo;Ah no, I can never pay the debt
+      I owe to you and to God&mdash;now.&rdquo; He did not understand this, I know.
+      But I did. &ldquo;You must not talk any more,&rdquo; I said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Justine interposed. &ldquo;He must be told that the nurse who has done most
+      for him is Mrs. Falchion.&rdquo; His brows contracted as if he were trying to
+      remember something. He moved his head wearily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think I remember,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;about her being with me, but nothing
+      clearly&mdash;nothing clearly. She is very kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine here murmured: &ldquo;Shall I tell her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was about to say no; but Roscoe nodded, and said quietly, &ldquo;Yes, yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I made no objection, but urged that the meeting should only be for a
+      moment. I determined not to leave them alone even for that moment. I did
+      not know what things connected with their past&mdash;whatever it was&mdash;might
+      be brought up, and I knew that entire freedom from excitement was
+      necessary. I might have spared myself any anxiety on the point. When she
+      came she was perfectly self-composed, and more as she seemed when I first
+      knew her, though I will admit that I thought her face more possible to
+      emotion than in the past.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seems strange to write of a few weeks before as the past; but so much
+      had occurred that the days might easily have been months and the weeks
+      years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down beside him and held out her hand. And as she did so, I
+      thought of Boyd Madras and of that long last night of his life, and of her
+      refusal to say to him one comforting word, or to touch his hand in
+      forgiveness and friendship. And was this man so much better than Boyd
+      Madras? His wild words in delirium might mean nothing, but if they meant
+      anything, and she knew of that anything, she was still a heartless,
+      unnatural woman, as I had once called her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe took her hand and held it briefly. &ldquo;Dr. Marmion says that you have
+      helped to nurse me through my illness,&rdquo; he whispered. &ldquo;I am most
+      grateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I thought she replied with the slightest constraint in her voice. &ldquo;One
+      could not let an old acquaintance die without making an effort to save
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that instant I grew scornful, and longed to tell him of her husband.
+      But then a husband was not an acquaintance. I ventured instead: &ldquo;I am
+      sorry, but I must cut short all conversation for the present. When he is a
+      little better, he will be benefited by your brightest gossip, Mrs.
+      Falchion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose smiling, but she did not again take his hand, though I thought he
+      made a motion to that end. But she looked down at him steadily for a
+      moment. Beneath her look his face flushed, and his eyes grew hot with
+      light; then they dropped, and the eyelids closed on them. At that she
+      said, with an incomprehensible airiness: &ldquo;Good-night. I am going now to
+      play the music of &lsquo;La Grande Duchesse&rsquo; as a farewell to Gibraltar. They
+      have a concert on to-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the mention of La Grande Duchesse he sighed, and turned his head away
+      from her. What it all meant I did not know, and she had annoyed me as much
+      as she had perplexed me; her moods were like the chameleon&rsquo;s colours. He
+      lay silent for a long time, then he turned to me and said: &ldquo;Do you
+      remember that tale in the Bible about David and the well of Bethlehem?&rdquo; I
+      had to confess my ignorance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I can remember it,&rdquo; he continued. And though I urged him not to
+      tax himself, he spoke slowly thus:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;And David was in an hold, and the garrison of the Philistines was
+   then in Bethlehem.
+
+   &ldquo;And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me to drink of
+   the water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate!
+
+   &ldquo;And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew
+   water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate, and took
+   and brought it to David; nevertheless, he would not drink thereof,
+   but poured it out unto the Lord.
+
+   &ldquo;And he said, My God forbid it me that I should do this; is not this
+   the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?
+   Therefore he would not drink it.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He paused a moment, and then added: &ldquo;One always buys back the past at a
+      tremendous price. Resurrections give ghosts only.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must sleep now,&rdquo; I urged. And then, because I knew not what else
+      more fitting, I added: &ldquo;Sleep, and
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;&lsquo;Let the dead past bury its dead.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I will sleep,&rdquo; he answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      BOOK II. THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0011" id="link2HCH0011">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XI. AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your letters, sir,&rdquo; said my servant, on the last evening of the college
+      year. Examinations were over at last, and I was wondering where I should
+      spend my holidays. The choice was very wide; ranging from the Muskoka
+      lakes to the Yosemite Valley. Because it was my first year in Canada, I
+      really preferred not to go beyond the Dominion. With these thoughts in my
+      mind I opened my letters. The first two did not interest me; tradesmen&rsquo;s
+      bills seldom do. The third brought a thumping sensation of pleasure&mdash;though
+      it was not from Miss Treherne. I had had one from her that morning, and
+      this was a pleasure which never came twice in one day, for Prince&rsquo;s
+      College, Toronto, was a long week&rsquo;s journey from London, S.W. Considering,
+      however, that I did receive letters from her once a week, it may be
+      concluded that Clovelly did not; and that, if he had, it would have been
+      by a serious infringement of my rights. But, indeed, as I have learned
+      since, Clovelly took his defeat in a very characteristic fashion, and said
+      on an important occasion some generous things about me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter that pleased me so much was from Galt Roscoe, who, as he had
+      intended, was settled in a new but thriving district of British Columbia,
+      near the Cascade Mountains. Soon after his complete recovery he had been
+      ordained in England, had straightway sailed for Canada, and had gone to
+      work at once. This note was an invitation to spend the holiday months with
+      him, where, as he said, a man &ldquo;summering high among the hills of God&rdquo;
+       could see visions and dream dreams, and hunt and fish too&mdash;especially
+      fish. He urged that he would not talk parish concerns at me; that I should
+      not be asked to be godfather to any young mountaineers; and that the only
+      drawback, so far as my own predilections were concerned, was the
+      monotonous health of the people. He described his summer cottage of red
+      pine as being built on the edge of a lovely ravine; he said that he had
+      the Cascades on one hand with their big glacier fields, and mighty pine
+      forests on the other; while the balmiest breezes of June awaited &ldquo;the
+      professor of pathology and genial saw-bones.&rdquo; At the end of the letter he
+      hinted something about a pleasant little secret for my ear when I came;
+      and remarked immediately afterwards that there were one or two delightful
+      families at Sunburst and Viking, villages in his parish. One naturally
+      associated the little secret with some member of one of these delightful
+      families. Finally, he said he would like to show me how it was possible to
+      transform a naval man into a parson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My mind was made up. I wrote to him that I would start at once. Then I
+      began to make preparations, and meanwhile fell to thinking again about him
+      who was now the Reverend Galt Roscoe. After the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; reached London I
+      had only seen him a few times, he having gone at once into the country to
+      prepare for ordination. Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron I had met several
+      times, but Mrs. Falchion forbore inquiring for Galt Roscoe: from which,
+      and from other slight but significant matters, I gathered that she knew of
+      his doings and whereabouts. Before I started for Toronto she said that she
+      might see me there some day, for she was going to San Francisco to inspect
+      the property her uncle had left her, and in all probability would make a
+      sojourn in Canada. I gave her my address, and she then said she understood
+      that Mr. Roscoe intended taking a missionary parish in the wilds. In his
+      occasional letters to me while we all were in England Roscoe seldom spoke
+      of her, but, when he did, showed that he knew of her movements. This did
+      not strike me at the time as anything more than natural. It did later.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Within a couple of weeks I reached Viking, a lumbering town with great
+      saw-mills, by way of San Francisco and Vancouver. Roscoe met me at the
+      coach, and I was taken at once to the house among the hills. It stood on
+      the edge of a ravine, and the end of the verandah looked over a verdant
+      precipice, beautiful but terrible too. It was uniquely situated; a nest
+      among the hills, suitable either for work or play. In one&rsquo;s ears was the
+      low, continuous din of the rapids, with the music of a neighbouring
+      waterfall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way up the hills I had a chance to observe Roscoe closely. His face
+      had not that sturdy buoyancy which his letter suggested. Still, if it was
+      pale, it had a glow which it did not possess before, and even a stronger
+      humanity than of old. A new look had come into his eyes, a certain
+      absorbing earnestness, refining the past asceticism. A more amiable and
+      unselfish comrade man never had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second day I was there he took me to call upon a family at Viking, the
+      town with a great saw-mill and two smaller ones, owned by James Devlin, an
+      enterprising man who had grown rich at lumbering, and who lived here in
+      the mountains many months in each year.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. James Devlin had a daughter who had had some advantages in the East
+      after her father had become rich, though her earlier life was spent
+      altogether in the mountains. I soon saw where Roscoe&rsquo;s secret was to be
+      found. Ruth Devlin was a tall girl of sensitive features, beautiful eyes,
+      and rare personality. Her life, as I came to know, had been one of great
+      devotion and self-denial. Before her father had made his fortune, she had
+      nursed a frail-bodied, faint-hearted mother, and had cared for, and been a
+      mother to, her younger sisters. With wealth and ease came a brighter bloom
+      to her cheek, but it had a touch of care which would never quite
+      disappear, though it became in time a beautiful wistfulness rather than
+      anxiety. Had this responsibility come to her in a city, it might have
+      spoiled her beauty and robbed her of her youth altogether; but in the
+      sustaining virtue of a life in the mountains, warm hues remained on her
+      cheek and a wonderful freshness in her nature. Her family worshipped her&mdash;as
+      she deserved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That evening Roscoe confided to me that he had not asked Ruth Devlin to be
+      his wife, nor had he, indeed, given her definite tokens of his love. But
+      the thing was in his mind as a happy possibility of the future. We talked
+      till midnight, sitting at the end of the verandah overlooking the ravine.
+      This corner, called the coping, became consecrated to our many
+      conversations. We painted and sketched there in the morning (when we were
+      not fishing or he was not at his duties), received visitors, and smoked in
+      the evening, inhaling the balsam from the pines. An old man and his wife
+      kept the house for us, and gave us to eat of simple but comfortable fare.
+      The trout-fishing was good, and many a fine trout was broiled for our
+      evening meal; and many a fine string of trout found its way to the tables
+      of Roscoe&rsquo;s poorest parishioners, or else to furnish the more fashionable
+      table at which Ruth Devlin presided. There were excursions up the valley,
+      and picnics on the hill-sides, and occasional lunches and evening parties
+      at the summer hotel, a mile from us farther down the valley, at which
+      tourists were beginning to assemble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet, all the time, Roscoe was abundantly faithful to his duties at Viking
+      and in the settlement called Sunburst, which was devoted to
+      salmon-fishing. Between Viking and Sunburst there was a great jealousy and
+      rivalry; for the salmon-fishers thought that the mills, though on a
+      tributary stream, interfered, by the sawdust spilled in the river, with
+      the travel and spawning of the salmon. It needed all the tact of both Mr.
+      Devlin and Roscoe to keep the places from open fighting. As it was, the
+      fire smouldered. When Sunday came, however, there seemed to be truce
+      between the villages. It appeared to me that one touched the primitive and
+      idyllic side of life: lively, sturdy, and simple, with nature about us at
+      once benignant and austere. It is impossible to tell how fresh, bracing,
+      and inspiring was the climate of this new land. It seemed to glorify
+      humanity, to make all who breathed it stalwart, and almost pardonable even
+      in wrong-doing. Roscoe was always received respectfully, and even
+      cordially, among the salmon-fishers of Sunburst, as among the mill-men and
+      river-drivers of Viking: not the less so, because he had an excellent
+      faculty for machinery, and could talk to the people in their own
+      colloquialisms. He had, besides, though there was little exuberance in his
+      nature, a gift of dry humour, which did more than anything else, perhaps,
+      to make his presence among them unrestrained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well attended&mdash;often
+      filled to overflowing&mdash;and the people gave liberally to the
+      offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did not view
+      such a proceeding with a degree of complacency. In the pulpit Roscoe was
+      almost powerful. His knowledge of the world, his habits of directness, his
+      eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but original statements
+      of things, his occasional literary felicity and unusual tact, might have
+      made him distinguished in a more cultured community. Yet there was
+      something to modify all this: an occasional indefinable sadness, a
+      constant note of pathetic warning. It struck me that I never had met a man
+      whose words and manner were at times so charged with pathos; it was
+      artistic in its searching simplicity. There was some unfathomable fount in
+      his nature which was even beyond any occurrence of his past; some radical,
+      constitutional sorrow, coupled with a very strong, practical, and even
+      vigorous nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and
+      watch-dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered him
+      thirty dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than Roscoe
+      had paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the opportunity
+      of getting the best of a game. He said he did not doubt but that he would
+      do the same with one of the archangels. He afterwards sold Roscoe a watch
+      at cost, but confessed to me that the works of the watch had been
+      smuggled. He said he was so fond of the parson that he felt he had to give
+      him a chance of good things. It was not uncommon for him to discourse of
+      Roscoe&rsquo;s quality in the bar-rooms of Sunburst and Viking, in which he was
+      ably seconded by Phil Boldrick, an eccentric, warm-hearted fellow, who was
+      so occupied in the affairs of the villages generally, and so much an
+      advisory board to the authorities, that he had little time left to
+      progress industrially himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once when a noted bully came to Viking, and, out of sheer bravado and
+      meanness, insulted Roscoe in the streets, two or three river-drivers came
+      forward to avenge the insult. It was quite needless, for the clergyman had
+      promptly taken the case in his own hands. Waving them back, he said to the
+      bully: &ldquo;I have no weapon, and if I had, I could not take your life, nor
+      try to take it; and you know that very well. But I propose to meet your
+      insolence&mdash;the first shown me in this town.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here murmurs of approbation went round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will, of course, take the revolver from your pocket, and throw it on
+      the ground.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A couple of other revolvers were looking the bully in the face, and he
+      sullenly did as he was asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a knife: throw that down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This also was done under the most earnest emphasis of the revolvers.
+      Roscoe calmly took off his coat. &ldquo;I have met such scoundrels as you on the
+      quarter-deck,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I know what stuff is in you. They call you
+      beachcombers in the South Seas. You never fight fair. You bully women,
+      knife natives, and never meet any one in fair fight. You have mistaken
+      your man this time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked close up to the bully, his face like steel, his thumbs caught
+      lightly in his waistcoat pockets; but it was noticeable that his hands
+      were shut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we are even as to opportunity. Repeat, if you please,
+      what you said a moment ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The bully&rsquo;s eye quailed, and he answered nothing. &ldquo;Then, as I said, you
+      are a coward and a cur, who insults peaceable men and weak women. If I
+      know Viking right, it has no room for you.&rdquo; Then he picked up his coat,
+      and put it on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; he added, &ldquo;I think you had better go; but I leave that to the
+      citizens of Viking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What they thought is easily explained. Phil Boldrick, speaking for all,
+      said: &ldquo;Yes, you had better go&mdash;quick; but on the hop like a cur, mind
+      you: on your hands and knees, jumping all the way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And, with weapons menacing him, this visitor to Viking departed,
+      swallowing as he went the red dust disturbed by his hands and feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This established Roscoe&rsquo;s position finally. Yet, with all his popularity
+      and the solid success of his work, he showed no vanity or egotism, nor
+      ever traded on the position he held in Viking and Sunburst. He seemed to
+      have no ambition further than to do good work; no desire to be known
+      beyond his own district; no fancy, indeed, for the communications of his
+      labours to mission papers and benevolent ladies in England&mdash;so much
+      the habit of his order. He was free from professional mannerisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One evening we were sitting in the accustomed spot&mdash;that is, the
+      coping. We had been silent for a long time. At last Roscoe rose, and
+      walked up and down the verandah nervously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marmion,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;I am disturbed to-day, I cannot tell you how: a sense
+      of impending evil, an anxiety.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I looked up at him inquiringly, and, of purpose, a little sceptically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He smiled something sadly and continued: &ldquo;Oh, I know you think it
+      foolishness. But remember that all sailors are more or less superstitious:
+      it is bred in them; it is constitutional, and I am afraid there&rsquo;s a good
+      deal of the sailor in me yet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Remembering Hungerford, I said: &ldquo;I know that sailors are superstitious,
+      the most seasoned of them are that. But it means nothing. I may think or
+      feel that there is going to be a plague, but I should not enlarge the
+      insurance on my life because of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me earnestly. &ldquo;But,
+      Marmion, these things, I assure you, are not matters of will, nor yet
+      morbidness. They occur at the most unexpected times. I have had such
+      sensations before, and they were followed by strange matters.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded, but said nothing. I was still thinking of Hungerford. After a
+      slight pause he continued somewhat hesitatingly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dreamed last night, three times, of events that occurred in my past;
+      events which I hoped would never disturb me in the life I am now leading.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A life of self-denial,&rdquo; ventured I. I waited a minute, and then added:
+      &ldquo;Roscoe, I think it only fair to tell you&mdash;I don&rsquo;t know why I haven&rsquo;t
+      done so before&mdash;that when you were ill you were delirious, and talked
+      of things that may or may not have had to do with your past.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He started, and looked at me earnestly. &ldquo;They were unpleasant things?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Trying things; though all was vague and disconnected,&rdquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad you tell me this,&rdquo; he remarked quietly. &ldquo;And Mrs. Falchion and
+      Justine Caron&mdash;did they hear?&rdquo; He looked off to the hills.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To a certain extent, I am sure. Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s name was generally
+      connected with&mdash;your fancies.... But really no one could place any
+      weight on what a man said in delirium, and I only mention the fact to let
+      you see exactly on what ground I stand with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Can you give me an idea&mdash;of the thing I raved about?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Chiefly about a girl called Alo, not your wife, I should judge&mdash;who
+      was killed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that he spoke in a cheerless voice: &ldquo;Marmion, I will tell you all the
+      story some day; but not now. I hoped that I had been able to bury it, even
+      in memory, but I was wrong. Some things&mdash;such things&mdash;never die.
+      They stay; and in our cheerfulest, most peaceful moments confront us, and
+      mock the new life we are leading. There is no refuge from memory and
+      remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with or
+      without repentance.&rdquo; He turned again from me and set a sombre face towards
+      the ravine. &ldquo;Roscoe,&rdquo; I said, taking his arm, &ldquo;I cannot believe that you
+      have any sin on your conscience so dark that it is not wiped out now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God bless you for your confidence. But there is one woman who, I fear,
+      could, if she would, disgrace me before the world. You understand,&rdquo; he
+      added, &ldquo;that there are things we repent of which cannot be repaired. One
+      thinks a sin is dead, and starts upon a new life, locking up the past, not
+      deceitfully, but believing that the book is closed, and that no good can
+      come of publishing it; when suddenly it all flames out like the letters in
+      Faust&rsquo;s book of conjurations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You need not tell me more, you must not&mdash;now; not
+      until there is any danger. Keep your secret. If the woman&mdash;if THAT
+      woman&mdash;ever places you in danger, then tell me all. But keep it to
+      yourself now. And don&rsquo;t fret because you have had dreams.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, as you wish,&rdquo; he replied after a long time. As he sat in silence, I
+      smoking hard, and he buried in thought, I heard the laughter of people
+      some distance below us in the hills. I guessed it to be some tourists from
+      the summer hotel. The voices came nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A singular thought occurred to me. I looked at Roscoe. I saw that he was
+      brooding, and was not noticing the voices, which presently died away. This
+      was a relief to me. We were then silent again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0012" id="link2HCH0012">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XII. THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Next day we had a picnic on the Whi-Whi River, which, rising in the far
+      north, comes in varied moods to join the Long Cloud River at Viking.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   [Dr. Marmion, in a note of his MSS., says that he has purposely
+   changed the names of the rivers and towns mentioned in the second
+   part of the book, because he does not wish the locale to be too
+   definite.]
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Ruth Devlin, her young sister, and her aunt Mrs. Revel, with Galt Roscoe
+      and myself, constituted the party. The first part of the excursion had
+      many delights. The morning was fresh and sweet, and we were all in
+      excellent spirits. Roscoe&rsquo;s depression had vanished; but there was an
+      amiable seriousness in his manner which, to me, portended that the faint
+      roses in Ruth Devlin&rsquo;s cheeks would deepen before the day was done, unless
+      something inopportune happened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we trudged gaily up the canon to the spot where we were to take a big
+      skiff, and cross the Whi-Whi to our camping-ground, Ruth Devlin, who was
+      walking with me, said: &ldquo;A large party of tourists arrived at Viking
+      yesterday, and have gone to the summer hotel; so I expect you will be gay
+      up here for some time to come. Prepare, then, to rejoice.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you think it is gay enough as it is?&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Behold this
+      festive throng.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it is nothing to what there might be. This could never make Viking
+      and &lsquo;surrounding country&rsquo; notorious as a pleasure resort. To attract
+      tourists you must have enough people to make romances and tragedies,&mdash;without
+      loss of life, of course,&mdash;merely catastrophes of broken hearts, and
+      hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing and shooting achievements, such
+      as men know how to invent,&rdquo;&mdash;it was delightful to hear her voice
+      soften to an amusing suggestiveness, &ldquo;and broken bridges and land-slides,
+      with many other things which you can supply, Dr. Marmion. No, I am afraid
+      that Viking is too humdrum to be notable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed then very lightly and quaintly. She had a sense of humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, but, Miss Devlin,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;you cannot have all things at once.
+      Climaxes like these take time. We have a few joyful things. We have
+      splendid fishing achievements,&mdash;please do not forget that basket of
+      trout I sent you the other morning,&mdash;and broken hearts and such
+      tragedies are not impossible; as, for instance, if I do not send you as
+      good a basket of trout to-morrow evening; or if you should remark that
+      there was nothing in a basket of trout to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you are becoming involved and&mdash;inconsiderate.
+      Remember, I am only a mountain girl.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then let us only talk of the other tragedies. But are you not a little
+      callous to speak of such things as if you thirsted for their occurrence?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am afraid you are rather silly,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;You see, some of the
+      land up here belongs to me. I am anxious that it should &lsquo;boom&rsquo;&mdash;that
+      is the correct term, is it not?&mdash;and a sensation is good for
+      &lsquo;booming.&rsquo; What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an
+      American millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud,
+      and a rough but honest fellow&mdash;a foreman on the river, maybe a young
+      member of the English aristocracy in disguise&mdash;perilled his life for
+      her! The place of peril would, of course, be named Lover&rsquo;s Eddy, or the
+      Maiden&rsquo;s Gate&mdash;very much prettier, I assure you, than such
+      cold-blooded things as the Devil&rsquo;s Slide, where we are going now, and much
+      more attractive to tourists.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Devlin,&rdquo; laughed I, &ldquo;you have all the eagerness of the incipient
+      millionaire. May I hope to see you in Lombard Street some day, a very
+      Katherine among capitalists?&mdash;for, from your remarks, I judge that
+      you would&mdash;I say it pensively&mdash;&lsquo;wade through slaughter to a
+      throne.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Galt Roscoe, who was just ahead with Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin, turned and
+      said: &ldquo;Who is that quoting so dramatically? Now, this is a picnic party,
+      and any one who introduces elegies, epics, sonnets, &lsquo;and such,&rsquo; is guilty
+      of breaking the peace at Viking and its environs. Besides, such things
+      should always be left to the parson. He must not be outflanked, his
+      thunder must not be stolen. The scientist has unlimited resources; all he
+      has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious; but the parson must have
+      his poetry as a monopoly, or he is lost to sight, and memory.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;I shall leave you to deal with Miss Devlin yourself,
+      because she is the direct cause of my wrong-doing. She has expressed the
+      most sinister sentiments about Viking and your very extensive parish. Miss
+      Devlin,&rdquo; I added, turning to her, &ldquo;I leave you to your fate, and I cannot
+      recommend you to mercy, for what Heaven made fair should remain tender and
+      merciful, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;So young and so untender!&rsquo;&rdquo; she interjected, with a rippling laugh. &ldquo;Yet
+      Cordelia was misjudged very wickedly, and traduced very ungallantly, and
+      so am I. And I bid you good-day, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her delicate laugh rings in my ears as I write. I think that sun and clear
+      skies and hills go far to make us cheerful and harmonious. Somehow, I
+      always remember her as she was that morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was standing then on the brink of a new and beautiful experience, at
+      the threshold of an acknowledged love. And that is a remarkable time to
+      the young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was something thrilling about the experiences of that morning, and I
+      think we all felt it. Even the great frowning precipices seemed to have
+      lost their ordinary gloom, and when some young white eagles rose from a
+      crag and flew away, growing smaller as they passed, until they were one
+      with the snow of the glacier on Mount Trinity, or a wapiti peeped out from
+      the underwood and stole away with glancing feet down the valley; we could
+      scarcely refrain from doing some foolish thing out of sheer delight. At
+      length we emerged from a thicket of Douglas pine upon the shore of the
+      Whi-Whi, and, loosening our boat, were soon moving slowly on the cool
+      current. For an hour or more we rowed down the river towards the Long
+      Cloud, and then drew into the shade of a little island for lunch. When we
+      came to the rendezvous, where picnic parties generally feasted, we found a
+      fire still smoking and the remnants of a lunch scattered about. A party of
+      picnickers had evidently been there just before us. Ruth suggested that it
+      might be some of the tourists from the hotel. This seemed very probable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were scraps of newspaper on the ground, and among them was an empty
+      envelope. Mechanically I picked it up, and read the superscription. What I
+      saw there I did not think necessary to disclose to the other members of
+      the party; but, as unconcernedly as possible, for Ruth Devlin&rsquo;s eyes were
+      on me, I used it to light a cigar&mdash;inappropriately, for lunch would
+      soon be ready.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was the name on the envelope?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Was there one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I guessed she had seen my slight start. I said evasively: &ldquo;I fancy there
+      was, but a man who is immensely interested in a new brand of cigar&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a most deceitful man,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;And, at the least, you are
+      selfish in holding your cigar more important than a woman&rsquo;s curiosity. Who
+      can tell what romance was in the address on that envelope&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What elements of noble tragedy, what advertisement for a certain property
+      in the Whi-Whi Valley,&rdquo; interrupted Roscoe, breaking off the thread of a
+      sailor&rsquo;s song he was humming, as he tended the water-kettle on the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This said, he went on with the song again. I was struck by the wonderful
+      change in him now. Presentiments were far from him, yet I, having read
+      that envelope, knew that they were not without cause. Indeed, I had an
+      inkling of that the night before, when I heard the voices on the hill.
+      Ruth Devlin stopped for a moment in the preparations to ask Roscoe what he
+      was humming. I, answering for him, told her that it was an old sentimental
+      sea-song of common sailors, often sung by officers at their jovial
+      gatherings. At this she pretended to look shocked, and straightway
+      demanded to hear the words, so that she could pronounce judgment on her
+      spiritual pastor and master.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He good-naturedly said that many of these old sailor songs were amusing,
+      and that he often found himself humming them. To this I could testify, and
+      he sang them very well indeed&mdash;quietly, but with the rolling tone of
+      the sailor, jovial yet fascinating. At our united request, his humming
+      became distinct. Three of the verses I give here:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;The &lsquo;Lovely Jane&rsquo; went sailing down
+         To anchor at the Spicy Isles;
+        And the wind was fair as ever was blown,
+         For the matter of a thousand miles.
+
+       &ldquo;Then a storm arose as she crossed the line,
+         Which it caused her masts to crack;
+        And she gulped her fill of the whooping brine,
+         And she likewise sprained her back.
+
+       &ldquo;And the capting cried, &lsquo;If it&rsquo;s Davy Jones,
+         Then it&rsquo;s Davy Jones,&rsquo; says he,
+       &lsquo;Though I don&rsquo;t aspire to leave my bones
+         In the equatorial sea.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      What the further history of the &lsquo;Lovely Jane&rsquo; was we were not informed,
+      for Ruth Devlin announced that the song must wait, though it appeared to
+      be innocuous and child-like in its sentiments, and that lunch would be
+      served between the acts of the touching tragedy. When lunch was over, and
+      we had again set forth upon the Whi-Whi, I asked Ruth to sing an old
+      French-Canadian song which she had once before sung to us. Many a time the
+      woods of the West had resounded to the notes of &lsquo;En Roulant ma Boule&rsquo;, as
+      the &lsquo;voyageurs&rsquo; traversed the long paths of the Ottawa, St. Lawrence, and
+      Mississippi; brave light-hearted fellows, whose singing days were over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      By the light of coming events there was something weird and pathetic in
+      this Arcadian air, sung as it was by her. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano of
+      rare bracing quality, and she had enough natural sensibility to give the
+      antique refinement of the words a wistful charm, particularly apparent in
+      these verses:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;Ah, cruel Prince, my heart you break,
+        In killing thus my snow-white drake.
+
+       &ldquo;My snow-white drake, my love, my King,
+        The crimson life-blood stains his wing.
+
+       &ldquo;His golden bill sinks on his breast,
+        His plumes go floating east and west&mdash;
+
+       &ldquo;En roulant ma boule:
+         Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,
+        En roulant ma boule roulant,
+         En roulant ma boule!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      As she finished the song we rounded an angle in the Whi-Whi. Ahead of us
+      lay the Snow Rapids and the swift channel at one side of the rapids which,
+      hurrying through a rocky archway, was known as the Devil&rsquo;s Slide. There
+      was one channel through the rapids by which it was perfectly safe to pass,
+      but that sweep of water through the Devil&rsquo;s Slide was sometimes a trap of
+      death to even the most expert river-men. A half-mile below the rapids was
+      the confluence of the two rivers. The sight of the tumbling mass of white
+      water, and the gloomy and colossal grandeur of the Devil&rsquo;s Slide, a
+      buttress of the hills, was very fine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was more than scenery to interest us here, for, moving quickly
+      towards the Slide, was a boat with three people in it. They were evidently
+      intending to attempt that treacherous passage, which culminated in a
+      series of eddies, a menace to even the best oarsman ship. They certainly
+      were not aware of their danger, for there came over the water the sound of
+      a man&rsquo;s laughing voice, and the two women in the boat were in unconcerned
+      attitudes. Roscoe shouted to them, and motioned them back, but they did
+      not appear to understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man waved his hat to us, and rowed on. There was but one thing for us
+      to do: to make the passage quickly through the safe channel of the rapids,
+      and to be of what service we could on the other side of the Slide, if
+      necessary. We bent to the oars, and the boat shot through the water. Ruth
+      held the rudder firmly, and her young sister and Mrs. Revel sat perfectly
+      still. But the man in the other boat, thinking, doubtless, that we were
+      attempting a race, added his efforts to the current of the channel. I am
+      afraid that I said some words below my breath scarcely proper to be spoken
+      in the presence of maidens and a clerk in holy orders. Roscoe was here,
+      however, a hundred times more sailor than parson. He spoke in low, firm
+      tones, as he now and then suggested a direction to Ruth Devlin or myself.
+      Our boat tossed and plunged in the rapids, and the water washed over us
+      lightly once or twice, but we went through the passage safely, and had
+      turned towards the Slide before the other boat got to the rocky archway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We rowed hard. The next minute was one of suspense, for we saw the boat
+      shoot beneath the archway. Presently it emerged, a whirling plaything in
+      treacherous eddies. The man wildly waved his arm, and shouted to us. The
+      women were grasping the sides of the boat, but making no outcry. We could
+      not see the faces of the women plainly yet. The boat ran forward like a
+      race-horse; it plunged hither and thither. An oar snapped in the rocks,
+      and the other one shot from the man&rsquo;s hand. Now the boat swung round and
+      round, and dipped towards the hollow of a whirlpool. When we were within a
+      few rods of them, it appeared to rise from the water, was hurled on a
+      rock, and overturned. Mrs. Revel buried her face in her hands, and Ruth
+      gave a little groan, but she held the rudder firmly, as we swiftly
+      approached the forms struggling in the water. All, fortunately, had
+      grasped the swamped boat, and were being carried down the stream towards
+      us. The man was caring resolutely for himself, but one, of the women had
+      her arm round the other, supporting her. We brought our skiff close to the
+      swirling current. I called out words of encouragement, and was preparing
+      to jump into the water, when Roscoe exclaimed in a husky voice: &ldquo;Marmion,
+      it is Mrs. Falchion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, it was Mrs. Falchion; but I had known that before. We heard her words
+      to her companion: &ldquo;Justine, do not look so. Your face is like death. It is
+      hateful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the craft veered towards the smoother water where we were. This was
+      my opportunity. Roscoe threw me a rope, and I plunged in and swam towards
+      the boat. I saw that Mrs. Falchion recognised me; but she made no
+      exclamation, nor did Justine Caron. Their companion, however, on the other
+      side of the boat, was eloquent in prayers to be rescued. I caught the bow
+      of the boat as it raced past me, and with all my strength swung it towards
+      the smoother water. I ran the rope I had brought, through the iron ring at
+      the bow, and was glad enough of that; for their lives perhaps depended on
+      being able to do it. It had been a nice calculation of chances, but it was
+      done. Roscoe immediately bent to the oars, I threw an arm around Justine,
+      and in a moment Roscoe had towed us into safer quarters. Then he drew in
+      the rope. As he did so, Mrs. Falchion said: &ldquo;Justine would drown so easily
+      if one would let her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      These were her first words to me. I am sure I never can sufficiently
+      admire the mere courage of the woman and her presence of mind in danger.
+      Immediately afterwards she said&mdash;and subsequently it seemed to me
+      marvellous: &ldquo;You are something more than the chorus to the play this time,
+      Dr. Marmion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A minute after, and Justine was dragged into our boat, and was followed by
+      Mrs. Falchion, whose first words to Roscoe were: &ldquo;It is not such a meeting
+      as one would plan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he replied: &ldquo;I am glad no harm has come to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man was duly helped in. A poor creature he was, to pass from this tale
+      as he entered it, ignominiously and finally here. I even hide his
+      nationality, for his race are generally more gallant. But he was wealthy,
+      had an intense admiration for Mrs. Falchion, and had managed to secure her
+      in his boat, to separate from the rest of the picnic party&mdash;chiefly
+      through his inefficient rowing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Dripping with water as Mrs. Falchion was, she did not, strange to say,
+      appear at serious disadvantage. Almost any other woman would have done so.
+      She was a little pale, she must have felt miserable, but she accepted Ruth
+      Devlin&rsquo;s good offices&mdash;as did Justine Caron those of Mrs. Revel&mdash;with
+      much self-possession, scanning her face and form critically the while, and
+      occasionally turning a glance on Roscoe, who was now cold and impassive. I
+      never knew a man who could so banish expression from his countenance when
+      necessary. Speaking to Belle Treherne long afterwards of Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s
+      self-possessed manner on this occasion, and of how she rose superior to
+      the situation, I was told that I must have regarded the thing poetically
+      and dramatically, for no woman could possibly look self-possessed in
+      draggled skirts. She said that I always magnified certain of Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s qualities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That may be so, and yet it must be remembered that I was not predisposed
+      towards her, and that I wished her well away from where Roscoe was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Justine Caron, she lay with her head on Mrs. Revel&rsquo;s lap, and
+      looked from beneath heavy eyelids at Roscoe with such gratitude and&mdash;but,
+      no, she is only a subordinate in the story, and not a chief factor, and
+      what she said or did here is of no vital consequence at this moment! We
+      rowed to a point near the confluence of the two rivers, where we could
+      leave our boats to be poled back through the rapids or portaged past them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the way Mrs. Falchion said to Roscoe: &ldquo;I knew you were somewhere in the
+      Rockies; and at Vancouver, when I came from San Francisco, I heard of your
+      being here. I had intended spending a month somewhere in the mountains, so
+      I came to Viking, and on to the summer hotel: but really this is too
+      exciting for recreation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was spoken with almost gay outward manner, but there was a note in
+      her words which I did not like, nor did I think that her eye was very
+      kind, especially when she looked at Ruth Devlin and afterwards at Roscoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had several miles to go, and it was nightfall&mdash;for which Mrs.
+      Falchion expressed herself as profoundly grateful&mdash;when we arrived at
+      the hotel. Our parting words were as brief as, of necessity, they had been
+      on our journey through the mountains, for the ladies had ridden the horses
+      which we had sent over for ourselves from Viking, and we men walked in
+      front. Besides, the thoughts of some of us were not at all free from
+      misgiving. The spirit possessing Roscoe the night before seemed to enter
+      into all of us, even into Mrs. Falchion, who had lost, somewhat, the
+      aplomb with which she had held the situation in the boat. But at the door
+      of the hotel she said cheerfully: &ldquo;Of course, Dr. Marmion will find it
+      necessary to call on his patients to-morrow&mdash;and the clergyman also
+      on his new parishoners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reply was left to me. I said gravely: &ldquo;Let us be thankful that both
+      doctor and clergyman are called upon to use their functions; it might
+      easily have been only the latter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, do not be funereal!&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;I knew that we were not to drown
+      at the Devil&rsquo;s Slide. The drama is not ended yet, and the chief actors
+      cannot go until &lsquo;the curtain.&rsquo;&mdash;Though I am afraid that is not quite
+      orthodox, is it, Mr. Roscoe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe looked at her gravely. &ldquo;It may not be orthodox as it is said, but
+      it is orthodox, I fancy, if we exchange God for fate, and Providence for
+      chance.... Good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He said this wearily. She looked up at him with an ironical look, then
+      held out her hand, and quickly bade him good-night. Partings all round
+      were made, and, after some injunctions to Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron
+      from myself as to preventives against illness, the rest of us started for
+      Sunburst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we went, I could not help but contrast Ruth and Amy Devlin, these two
+      gentle yet strong mountain girls, with the woman we had left. Their lives
+      were far from that dolorous tide which, sweeping through a selfish world,
+      leaves behind it the stain of corroding passions; of cruelties,
+      ingratitude, hate, and catastrophe. We are all ambitious, in one way or
+      another. We climb mountains over scoria that frays and lava that burns. We
+      try to call down the stars, and when, now and then, our conjuring
+      succeeds, we find that our stars are only blasting meteors. One moral
+      mishap lames character for ever. A false start robs us of our natural
+      strength, and a misplaced or unrighteous love deadens the soul and
+      shipwrecks just conceptions of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains; it has found its
+      place in his constitution, and it cannot be displaced by mere penitence,
+      nor yet forgiveness. A man errs, and he must suffer; his father erred, and
+      he must endure; or some one sinned against the man, and he hid the sin&mdash;But
+      here a hand touched my shoulder! I was startled, for my thoughts had been
+      far away. Roscoe&rsquo;s voice spoke in my ear: &ldquo;It is as she said; the actors
+      come together for &lsquo;the curtain.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then his eyes met those of Ruth Devlin turned to him earnestly and
+      inquiringly. And I felt for a moment hard against Roscoe, that he should
+      even indirectly and involuntarily, bring suffering into her life. In
+      youth, in early manhood, we do wrong. At the time we seem to be injuring
+      no one but ourselves; but, as we live on, we find that we were wronging
+      whomsoever should come into our lives in the future. At the instant I said
+      angrily to myself: &ldquo;What right has he to love a girl like that, when he
+      has anything in his life that might make her unhappy, or endanger her in
+      ever so little!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But I bit my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I
+      wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were the
+      girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous. I tried not to think further
+      of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,&mdash;Gait Roscoe walked with Mrs.
+      Revel and Amy Devlin,&mdash;but I found I could not drive it from my mind.
+      This was not unnatural, for was not I the &ldquo;chorus to the play&rdquo;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0013" id="link2HCH0013">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIII. THE SONG OF THE SAW
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      There was still a subdued note to Roscoe&rsquo;s manner the next morning. He was
+      pale. He talked freely however of the affairs of Viking and Sunburst, and
+      spoke of business which called him to Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s great saw mill that
+      day. A few moments after breakfast we were standing in the doorway.
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;shall we go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not quite sure where he meant to go, but I took my hat and joined
+      him. I wondered if it would be to the summer hotel or the great mill. My
+      duty lay in the direction of the hotel. When we stepped out, he added:
+      &ldquo;Let us take the bridle-path along the edge of the ravine to the hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning was beautiful. The atmosphere of the woods was of soft,
+      diffusive green&mdash;the sunlight filtering through the transparent
+      leaves. Bowers of delicate ferns and vines flanked the path, and an
+      occasional clump of giant cedars invited us: the world was eloquent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Several tourists upon the verandah of the hotel remarked us with curiosity
+      as we entered. A servant said that Mrs. Falchion would be glad to see us;
+      and we were ushered into her sitting-room. She carried no trace of
+      yesterday&rsquo;s misadventure. She appeared superbly well. And yet, when I
+      looked again, when I had time to think upon and observe detail, I saw
+      signs of change. There was excitement in the eyes, and a slight nervous
+      darkness beneath them, which added to their charm. She rose, smiling, and
+      said: &ldquo;I fear I am hardly entitled to this visit, for I am beyond
+      convalescence, and Justine is not in need of shrift or diagnosis, as you
+      see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not so sure of Justine Caron as she was, and when I had paid my
+      respects to her, I said a little priggishly (for I was young), still not
+      too solemnly: &ldquo;I cannot allow you to pronounce for me upon my patients,
+      Mrs. Falchion; I must make my own inquiries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mrs. Falchion was right. Justine Caron was not suffering much from her
+      immersion; though, speaking professionally, her temperature was higher
+      than the normal. But that might be from some impulse of the moment, for
+      Justine was naturally a little excitable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We walked aside, and, looking at me with a flush of happiness in her face,
+      she said: &ldquo;You remember one day on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; when I told you that money
+      was everything to me; that I would do all I honourably could to get it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded. She continued: &ldquo;It was that I might pay a debt&mdash;you know
+      it. Well, money is my god no longer, for I can pay all I owe. That is, I
+      can pay the money, but not the goodness, the noble kindness. He is most
+      good, is he not? The world is better that such men as Captain Galt Roscoe
+      live&mdash;ah, you see I cannot quite think of him as a clergyman. I
+      wonder if I ever shall!&rdquo; She grew suddenly silent and abstracted, and, in
+      the moment&rsquo;s pause, some ironical words in Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s voice floated
+      across the room to me: &ldquo;It is so strange to see you so. And you preach,
+      and baptise; and marry, and bury, and care for the poor and&mdash;ah, what
+      is it?&mdash;&lsquo;all those who, in this transitory life, are in sorrow, need,
+      sickness, or any other adversity&rsquo;?... And do you never long for the
+      flesh-pots of Egypt? Never long for&rdquo;&mdash;here her voice was not quite so
+      clear&mdash;&ldquo;for the past?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sure that, whatever she was doing, he had been trying to keep the
+      talk, as it were, on the surface. I was equally sure that, to her last
+      question, he would make no reply. Though I was now speaking to Justine
+      Caron, I heard him say quite calmly and firmly: &ldquo;Yes, I preach, baptise,
+      marry, and bury, and do all I can for those who need help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The people about here say that you are good and charitable. You have won
+      the hearts of the mountaineers. But you always had a gift that way.&rdquo;&mdash;I
+      did not like her tone.&mdash;&ldquo;One would almost think you had founded a new
+      dispensation. And if I had drowned yesterday, you would, I suppose, have
+      buried me, and have preached a little sermon about me.&mdash;You could
+      have done that better than any one else!... What would you have said in
+      such a case?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was an earnest, almost a bitter, protest in the reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me, if I cannot answer your question. Your life was saved, and
+      that is all we have to consider, except to be grateful to Providence. The
+      duties of my office have nothing to do with possibilities.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was evidently torturing him, and I longed to say a word that would
+      torture her. She continued: &ldquo;And the flesh-pots&mdash;you have not
+      answered about them: do you not long for them&mdash;occasionally?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are of a period,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;too distant for regret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet,&rdquo; she replied softly, &ldquo;I fancied sometimes in London last year,
+      that you had not outgrown that antique time&mdash;those lotos-days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no reply at once, and in the pause Justine and I passed out to the
+      verandah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How long does Mrs. Falchion intend remaining here, Miss Caron?&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her reply was hesitating: &ldquo;I do not quite know; but I think some time. She
+      likes the place; it seems to amuse her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&mdash;does it amuse you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It does not matter about me. I am madame&rsquo;s servant; but, indeed, it does
+      not amuse me particularly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you like the place?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The reply was somewhat hurried, and she glanced at me a little nervously.
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I like the place, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Roscoe appeared at the door and said, &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion wishes to see
+      Viking and Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s mills, Marmion. She will go with us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In a little time we were on our way to Viking. I walked with Mrs.
+      Falchion, and Roscoe with Justine. I was aware of a new element in Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s manner. She seemed less powerfully attractive to me than in the
+      old days, yet she certainly was more beautiful. It was hard to trace the
+      new characteristic. But at last I thought I saw it in a decrease of that
+      cold composure, that impassiveness, so fascinating in the past. In its
+      place had come an allusive, restless something, to be found in words of
+      troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased sensitiveness of
+      mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness&mdash;she was emotional
+      at last! She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits in her: one
+      pitiless as of old; the other human, anxious, not unlovely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At length we became silent, and walked so side by side for a time. Then,
+      with that old delightful egotism and selfishness&mdash;delightful in its
+      very daring&mdash;she said: &ldquo;Well, amuse me!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And is it still the end of your existence,&rdquo; I rejoined&mdash;&ldquo;to be
+      amused?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is there else to do?&rdquo; she replied with raillery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Much. To amuse others, for instance; to regard human beings as something
+      more than automata.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has Mr. Roscoe made you a preaching curate? I helped Amshar at the
+      Tanks.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One does not forget that. Yet you pushed Amshar with your foot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you expect me to kiss the black coward? Then, I nursed Mr. Roscoe in
+      his illness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And before that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And before that I was born into the world, and grew to years of
+      knowledge, and learned what fools we mortals be, and&mdash;and there&mdash;is
+      that Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s big sawmill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We had suddenly emerged on a shelf of the mountainside, and were looking
+      down into the Long Cloud Valley. It was a noble sight. Far to the north
+      were foothills covered with the glorious Norfolk pine, rising in steppes
+      till they seemed to touch white plateaus of snow, which again billowed to
+      glacier fields whose austere bosoms man&rsquo;s hand had never touched; and
+      these suddenly lifted up huge, unapproachable shoulders, crowned with
+      majestic peaks that took in their teeth the sun, the storm, and the
+      whirlwinds of the north, never changing countenance from day to year and
+      from year to age.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Facing this long line of glory, running irregularly on towards that sea
+      where Franklin and M&rsquo;Clintock led their gay adventurers,&mdash;the bold
+      ships,&mdash;was another shore, not so high or superior, but tall and
+      sombre and warm, through whose endless coverts of pine there crept and
+      idled the generous Chinook winds&mdash;the soothing breath of the friendly
+      Pacific. Between these shores the Long Cloud River ran; now boisterous,
+      now soft, now wallowing away through long channels, washing gorges always
+      dark as though shaded by winter, and valleys always green as favoured by
+      summer. Creeping along a lofty narrow path upon that farther shore was a
+      mule train, bearing packs which would not be opened till, through the
+      great passes of the mountain, they were spilled upon the floors of fort
+      and post on the east side of the Rockies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not far from where the mule train crept along was a great hole in the
+      mountain-side, as though antique giants of the hills had tunnelled through
+      to make themselves a home or to find the eternal secret of the mountains.
+      Near to this vast dark cavity was a hut&mdash;a mere playhouse, it seemed,
+      so small was it, viewed from where we stood. From the edge of a cliff just
+      in front of this hut, there swung a long cable, which reached almost to
+      the base of the shore beneath us; and, even as we looked, we saw what
+      seemed a tiny bucket go swinging slowly down that strange hypotenuse. We
+      watched it till we saw it get to the end of its journey in the valley
+      beneath, not far from the great mill to which we were bound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How mysterious!&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion. &ldquo;What does it mean? I never saw
+      anything like that before. What a wonderful thing!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe explained. &ldquo;Up there in that hut,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there lives a man
+      called Phil Boldrick. He is a unique fellow, with a strange history. He
+      has been miner, sailor, woodsman, river-driver, trapper, salmon-fisher;&mdash;expert
+      at the duties of each of these, persistent at none. He has a taste for the
+      ingenious and the unusual. For a time he worked in Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s mill. It
+      was too tame for him. He conceived the idea of supplying the valley with
+      certain necessaries, by intercepting the mule trains as they passed across
+      the hills, and getting them down to Viking by means of that cable. The
+      valley laughed at him; men said it was impossible. He went to Mr. Devlin,
+      and Mr. Devlin came to me. I have, as you know, some knowledge of
+      machinery and engineering. I thought the thing feasible but expensive, and
+      told Mr. Devlin so. However, the ingenuity of the thing pleased Mr.
+      Devlin, and, with that singular enterprise which in other directions has
+      made him a rich man, he determined on its completion. Between us we
+      managed it. Boldrick carries on his aerial railway with considerable
+      success, as you see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A singular man,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion. &ldquo;I should like to see him. Come, sit
+      down here and tell me all you know about him, will you not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe assented. I arranged a seat for us, and we all sat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe was about to begin, when Mrs. Falchion said, &ldquo;Wait a minute. Let us
+      take in this scene first.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We were silent. After a moment I turned to Mrs. Falchion, and said: &ldquo;It is
+      beautiful, is it not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew in a long breath, her eyes lighted up, and she said, with a
+      strange abandon of gaiety: &ldquo;Yes, it is delightful to live.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed so, in spite of the forebodings of my friend and my own
+      uneasiness concerning him, Ruth Devlin, and Mrs. Falchion. The place was
+      all peace: a very monotony of toil and pleasure. The heat drained through
+      the valley back and forth in visible palpitations upon the roofs of the
+      houses, the mills, and the vast piles of lumber: all these seemed
+      breathing. It looked a busy Arcady. From beneath us life vibrated with the
+      regularity of a pulse: distance gave a kind of delighted ease to toil.
+      Event appeared asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when I look back now, after some years, at the experiences of that
+      day, I am astonished by the running fire of events, which, unfortunately,
+      were not all joy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I write I can hear that keen wild singing of the saw come to us
+      distantly, with a pleasant, weird elation. The big mill hung above the
+      river, its sides all open, humming with labour, as I had seen it many a
+      time during my visit to Roscoe. The sun beat in upon it, making a broad
+      piazza of light about its sides. Beyond it were pleasant shadows, through
+      which men passed and repassed at their work. Life was busy all about it.
+      Yet the picture was bold, open, and strong. Great iron hands reached down
+      into the water, clamped a massive log or huge timber, lightly drew it up
+      the slide from the water, where, guided by the hand-spikes of the men, it
+      was laid upon its cradle and carried slowly to the devouring teeth of the
+      saws: there to be sliced through rib and bone in moist sandwiched layers,
+      oozing the sweet sap of its fibre; and carried out again into the open to
+      be drained to dry bones under the exhaust-pipes of the sun: piles upon
+      piles; houses with wide chinks through which the winds wandered, looking
+      for tenants and finding none.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To the north were booms of logs, swilling in the current, waiting for
+      their devourer. Here and there were groups of river-drivers and their
+      foremen, prying twisted heaps of logs from the rocks or the shore into the
+      water. Other groups of river-drivers were scattered upon the banks,
+      lifting their huge red canoes high up on the platforms, the spring&rsquo;s and
+      summer&rsquo;s work of river-driving done; while others lounged upon the grass,
+      or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the Chinamen, or
+      chaffing the Indian idling in the sun&mdash;a garish figure stoically
+      watching the inroads of civilisation. The town itself was squat but
+      amiable: small houses and large huts; the only place of note and dignity,
+      the new town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the big mill, and
+      even by the two smaller ones flanking it north and south.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Viking was full of men who had breathed the strong life of the hills,
+      had stolen from Nature some of her brawny strength, and set themselves up
+      before her as though a man were as great as a mountain and as good a thing
+      to see. It was of such a man that Galt Roscoe was to tell us. His own
+      words I will not give, but will speak of Phil Boldrick as I remember him
+      and as Roscoe described him to us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of all the men in the valley, none was so striking as Phil Boldrick. Of
+      all faces his was the most singular; of all characters his the most
+      unique; of all men he was the most unlucky, save in one thing&mdash;the
+      regard of his fellows. Others might lay up treasures, not he; others lose
+      money at gambling, not he&mdash;he never had much to lose. But yet he did
+      all things magniloquently. The wave of his hand was expansive, his stride
+      was swaying and decisive, his over-ruling, fraternal faculty was always in
+      full swing. Viking was his adopted child; so much so that a gentleman
+      river-driver called it Philippi; and by that name it sometimes went, and
+      continues still so among those who knew it in the old days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Others might have doubts as to the proper course to pursue under certain
+      circumstances; it was not so with Phil. They might argue a thing out
+      orally, he did so mentally, and gave judgment on it orally. He was final,
+      not oracular. One of his eyes was of glass, and blue; the other had an
+      eccentricity, and was of a deep and meditative grey. It was a wise and
+      knowing eye. It was trained to many things&mdash;like one servant in a
+      large family. One side of his face was solemn, because of the gay but
+      unchanging blue eye, the other was gravely humourous, shrewdly playful.
+      His fellow citizens respected him; so much so, that they intended to give
+      him an office in the new-formed corporation; which means that he had
+      courage and downrightness, and that the rough, straightforward gospel of
+      the West was properly interpreted by him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If a stranger came to the place, Phil was sent first to reconnoitre; if
+      any function was desirable, Phil was requested to arrange it; if justice
+      was to be meted out, Phil&rsquo;s opinion had considerable weight&mdash;for he
+      had much greater leisure than other more prosperous men; if a man was
+      taken ill (this was in the days before a doctor came), Phil was asked to
+      declare if he would &ldquo;shy from the finish.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I heard Roscoe more than once declare that Phil was as good as two curates
+      to him. Not that Phil was at all pious, nor yet possessed of those
+      abstemious qualities in language and appetite by which good men are known;
+      but he had a gift of civic virtue&mdash;important in a wicked world, and
+      of unusual importance in Viking. He had neither self-consciousness nor
+      fear; and while not possessed of absolute tact in a social way, he had a
+      knack of doing the right thing bluntly, or the wrong thing with an air of
+      rightness. He envied no man, he coveted nothing; had once or twice made
+      other men&rsquo;s fortunes by prospecting, but was poor himself. And in all he
+      was content, and loved life and Viking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after Roscoe had reached the mountains Phil had become his
+      champion, declaring that there was not any reason why a man should not be
+      treated sociably because he was a parson. Phil had been a great traveller,
+      as had many who settled at last in these valleys to the exciting life of
+      the river: salmon-catching or driving logs. He had lived for a time in
+      Lower California and Mexico, and had given Roscoe the name of The Padre:
+      which suited the genius and temper of the rude population. And so it was
+      that Roscoe was called The Padre by every one, though he did not look the
+      character.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he told his story of Phil&rsquo;s life I could not help but contrast him with
+      most of the clergymen I knew or had seen. He had the admirable ease and
+      tact of a cultured man of the world, and the frankness and warmth of a
+      hearty nature, which had, however, some inherent strain of melancholy.
+      Wherever I had gone with him I had noticed that he was received with
+      good-humoured deference by his rough parishioners and others who were such
+      only in the broadest sense. Perhaps he would not have succeeded so well if
+      he had worn clerical clothes. As it was, of a week day, he could not be
+      distinguished from any respectable layman. The clerical uniform attracts
+      women more than men, who, if they spoke truly, would resent it. Roscoe did
+      not wear it, because he thought more of men than of function, of manliness
+      than clothes; and though this sometimes got him into trouble with his
+      clerical brethren who dearly love Roman collar, and coloured stole, and
+      the range of ritual from a lofty intoning to the eastward position, he
+      managed to live and himself be none the worse, while those who knew him
+      were certainly the better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Roscoe had finished his tale, Mrs. Falchion said: &ldquo;Mr. Boldrick must
+      be a very interesting man;&rdquo; and her eyes wandered up to the great hole in
+      the mountain-side, and lingered there. &ldquo;As I said, I must meet him,&rdquo; she
+      added; &ldquo;men of individuality are rare.&rdquo; Then: &ldquo;That great &lsquo;hole in the
+      wall&rsquo; is, of course, a natural formation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Roscoe. &ldquo;Nature seems to have made it for Boldrick. He uses it
+      as a storehouse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who watches it while he is away?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;There is no door to the
+      place, of course.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe smiled enigmatically. &ldquo;Men do not steal up here: that is the
+      unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion. &ldquo;I might have known!&rdquo; she
+      said. &ldquo;It is the same in the South Seas among the natives&mdash;Samoans,
+      Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can&mdash;as you know, Mr. Roscoe,&rdquo;&mdash;her
+      voice had a subterranean meaning,&mdash;&ldquo;travel from end to end of those
+      places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case of
+      stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white man
+      corrupts them. But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had no
+      purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath, I
+      could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently turned
+      on Roscoe, then withdrawn again. On him the effect was so far disturbing
+      that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her glance
+      unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I had been
+      affected by her speech. I think I confessed to nothing in my face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us. She had, I fancy, scarcely
+      heard half that had been said. Roscoe said to her presently: &ldquo;You like it,
+      do you not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like it?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I never saw anything so wonderful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there,&rdquo; rejoined
+      Mrs. Falchion. &ldquo;Nature is never complete without man. All that would be
+      splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick&rsquo;s cable, but it
+      would not be perfect: it needs man&mdash;Phil Boldrick and Company in the
+      foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and
+      sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and
+      the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is. It always
+      seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley. There is a
+      tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and built
+      an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl&mdash;though no one ever knew quite
+      why: for there the tradition ends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe
+      remained perfectly still. It seemed to me that I was little by little
+      getting the threads of his story. That there was a native girl; that the
+      girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way&mdash;innocently
+      I dared hope&mdash;connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key
+      to the mystery, I was certain. That it was in her mind to use the mystery,
+      I was also certain. But for what end I could not tell. What had passed
+      between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed
+      evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, had
+      again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of pique or
+      anger, or because she really cared for him. It might be that she cared.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She added after a moment: &ldquo;Add man to nature, and it stops sulking: which
+      goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told me
+      once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set her
+      laughing at herself, even when it was greatest. It was this characteristic
+      which made her conversation very striking, it was so sharply contrasted in
+      its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against the most serious and
+      acute statements. One never knew when she would turn her own or her
+      interlocutor&rsquo;s gravity into mirth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: &ldquo;If I
+      were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights
+      were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined. There
+      is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the
+      thing. Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less
+      intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr.
+      Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll; or
+      that The Padre there&mdash;how amusing they should call him that!&mdash;should
+      cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I do
+      not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of
+      immortalising himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her
+      words by a wave of his hand. I also was silent for a moment; for there had
+      come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the scene,
+      something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;.
+      &ldquo;Marmion,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;when everything at sea appears so absolutely
+      beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you&rsquo;re itching to write
+      poetry, look out. There&rsquo;s trouble ahead. It&rsquo;s only the pretty pause in the
+      happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles things
+      about. When I&rsquo;ve been on the bridge,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;of a night that set
+      my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing his silent
+      overture. Don&rsquo;t you take in the twaddle about God sending thunderbolts;
+      it&rsquo;s that old war-horse down below.&mdash;And then I&rsquo;ve kept a sharp
+      lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts would
+      be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch us broadsides. And
+      what&rsquo;s gospel for sea is good for land, and you&rsquo;ll find it so, my son.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was possessed of the same feeling now as I looked at the scene before
+      us, and I suppose I seemed moody, for immediately Mrs. Falchion said:
+      &ldquo;Why, now my words have come true; the scene can be made perfect. Pray
+      step down to the valley, Dr. Marmion, and complete the situation, for you
+      are trying to seem serious, and it is irresistibly amusing&mdash;and
+      professional, I suppose; one must not forget that you teach the young
+      &lsquo;sawbones&rsquo; how to saw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was piqued, annoyed. I said, though I admit it was not cleverly said:
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion, I am willing to go and complete that situation, if you
+      will go with me; for you would provide the tragedy&mdash;plenty of it;
+      there would be the full perihelion of elements; your smile is the
+      incarnation of the serious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked at me full in the eyes. &ldquo;Now that,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;is a very good
+      &lsquo;quid pro quo&rsquo;&mdash;is that right?&mdash;and I have no doubt that it is
+      more or less true; and for a doctor to speak truth and a professor to be
+      under stood is a matter for angels. And I actually believe that, in time,
+      you will be free from priggishness, and become a brilliant
+      conversationalist; and&mdash;suppose we wander on to our proper places in
+      the scene.... Besides, I want to see that strange man, Mr. Boldrick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0014" id="link2HCH0014">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIV. THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      We travelled slowly down the hillside into the village, and were about to
+      turn towards the big mill when we saw Mr. Devlin and Ruth riding towards
+      us. We halted and waited for them. Mr. Devlin was introduced to Mrs.
+      Falchion by his daughter, who was sweetly solicitous concerning Mrs.
+      Falchion and Justine Caron, and seemed surprised at finding them abroad
+      after the accident of the day before. Ruth said that her father and
+      herself had just come from the summer hotel, where they had gone to call
+      upon Mrs. Falchion. Mrs. Falchion heartily acknowledged the courtesy. She
+      seemed to be playing no part, but was apparently grateful all round; yet I
+      believe that even already Ruth had caught at something in her presence
+      threatening Roscoe&rsquo;s peace; whilst she, from the beginning, had, with her
+      more trained instincts, seen the relations between the clergyman and his
+      young parishioner.&mdash;But what had that to do with her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Between Roscoe and Ruth there was the slightest constraint, and I thought
+      that it gave a troubled look to the face of the girl. Involuntarily, the
+      eyes of both were attracted to Mrs. Falchion. I believe in that moment
+      there was a kind of revelation among the three. While I talked to Mr.
+      Devlin I watched them, standing a little apart, Justine Caron with us. It
+      must have been a painful situation for them; to the young girl because a
+      shadow was trailing across the light of her first love; to Roscoe because
+      the shadow came out of his past; to Mrs. Falchion because she was the
+      shadow. I felt that trouble was at hand. In this trouble I knew that I was
+      to play a part; for, if Roscoe had his secret and Mrs. Falchion had the
+      key to it, I also held a secret which, in case of desperate need, I should
+      use. I did not wish to use it, for though it was mine it was also
+      another&rsquo;s. I did not like the look in Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s eyes as she glanced
+      at Ruth: I was certain that she resented Roscoe&rsquo;s regard for Ruth and
+      Ruth&rsquo;s regard for Roscoe; but, up to that moment, I had not thought it
+      possible that she cared for him deeply. Once she had influenced me, but
+      she had never cared for me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see a change in her. Out of it came that glance at Ruth, which
+      seemed to me the talon-like hatred that shot from the eyes of Goneril and
+      Regan: and I was sure that if she loved Roscoe there would be mad trouble
+      for him and for the girl. Heretofore she had been passionless, but there
+      was a dormant power in her which had only to be wickedly aroused to wreck
+      her own and others&rsquo; happiness. Hers was one of those volcanic natures,
+      defying calculation and ordinary conceptions of life; having the fullest
+      capacity for all the elementary passions&mdash;hatred, love, cruelty,
+      delight, loyalty, revolt, jealousy. She had never from her birth until now
+      felt love for any one. She had never been awakened. Even her affection for
+      her father had been dutiful rather than instinctive. She had provoked
+      love, but had never given it. She had been self-centred, compulsive,
+      unrelenting. She had unmoved seen and let her husband go to his doom&mdash;it
+      was his doom and death so far as she knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet, as I thought of this, I found myself again admiring her. She was
+      handsome, independent, distinctly original, and possessing capacity for
+      great things. Besides, so far, she had not been actively vindictive&mdash;simply
+      passively indifferent to the sufferings of others. She seemed to regard
+      results more than means. All she did not like she could empty into the
+      mill of the destroying gods: just as General Grant poured hundreds of
+      thousands of men into the valley of the James, not thinking of lives but
+      victory, not of blood but triumph. She too, even in her cruelty, seemed to
+      have a sense of wild justice which disregarded any incidental suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that Mr. Devlin was attracted by her, as every man had been
+      who had ever met her; for, after all, man is but a common slave to beauty:
+      virtue he respects, but beauty is man&rsquo;s valley of suicide. Presently she
+      turned to Mr. Devlin, having, as it seemed to me, made Roscoe and Ruth
+      sufficiently uncomfortable. With that cheerful insouciance which was
+      always possible to her on the most trying occasions, she immediately said,
+      as she had often said to me, that she had come to Mr. Devlin to be amused
+      for the morning, perhaps the whole day. It was her way, her selfish way,
+      to make men her slaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Devlin gallantly said that he was at her disposal, and with a kind of
+      pride added that there was plenty in the valley which would interest her;
+      for he was a frank, bluff man, who would as quickly have spoken
+      disparagingly of what belonged to himself, if it was not worthy, as have
+      praised it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where shall we go first?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;To the mill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To the mill, by all means,&rdquo; Mrs. Falchion replied; &ldquo;I have never been in
+      a great saw-mill, and I believe this is very fine. Then,&rdquo; she added, with
+      a little wave of the hand towards the cable running down from Phil
+      Boldrick&rsquo;s eyrie in the mountains, &ldquo;then I want to see all that cable can
+      do&mdash;all, remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Devlin laughed. &ldquo;Well, it hasn&rsquo;t many tricks, but what it does it does
+      cleverly, thanks to The Padre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh yes,&rdquo; responded Mrs. Falchion, still looking at the cable; &ldquo;The Padre,
+      I know, is very clever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is more than clever,&rdquo; bluffly replied Mr. Devlin, who was not keen
+      enough to see the faint irony in her tones.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; responded Mrs. Falchion in the same tone of voice, &ldquo;he is more than
+      clever. I have been told that he was once very brave. I have been told
+      that once in the South Seas he did his country a great service.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused. I could see Ruth&rsquo;s eyes glisten and her face suffuse, for
+      though she read the faint irony in the tone, still she saw that the tale
+      which Mrs. Falchion was evidently about to tell, must be to Galt Roscoe&rsquo;s
+      credit. Mrs. Falchion turned idly upon Ruth and saw the look in her face.
+      An almost imperceptible smile came upon her lips. She looked again at the
+      cable and Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s eyrie, which seemed to have a wonderful
+      attraction for her. Not turning away from it, save now and then to glance
+      indolently at Mr. Devlin or Ruth, and once enigmatically at myself, she
+      said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once upon a time&mdash;that is the way, I believe, to begin a pretty
+      story&mdash;there were four men-of-war idling about a certain harbour of
+      Samoa. One of the vessels was the flag-ship, with its admiral on board. On
+      one of the other vessels was an officer who had years before explored this
+      harbour. It was the hurricane season. He advised the admiral not to enter
+      the harbour, for the indications foretold a gale, and himself was not sure
+      that his chart was in all respects correct, for the harbour had been
+      hurriedly explored and sounded. But the admiral gave orders, and they
+      sailed in.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That day a tremendous hurricane came crying down upon Samoa. It swept
+      across the island, levelled forests of cocoa palms, battered villages to
+      pieces, caught that little fleet in the harbour, and played with it in a
+      horrible madness. To right and left were reefs, behind was the shore, with
+      a monstrous surf rolling in; before was a narrow passage. One vessel made
+      its way out&mdash;on it was the officer who had surveyed the harbour. In
+      the open sea there was safety. He brought his vessel down the coast a
+      little distance, put a rope about him and in the wild surf made for the
+      shore. I believe he could have been court-martialled for leaving his ship,
+      but he was a man who had taken a great many risks of one kind and another
+      in his time. It was one chance out of a hundred; but he made it&mdash;he
+      got to the shore, travelled down to the harbour where the men-of-war were
+      careening towards the reefs, unable to make the passage out, and once
+      again he tied a rope about him and plunged into the surf to try for the
+      admiral&rsquo;s ship. He got there terribly battered. They tell how a big wave
+      lifted him and landed him upon the quarter-deck just as big waves are not
+      expected to do. Well, like the hero in any melodrama of the kind, he very
+      prettily piloted monsieur the admiral and his fleet out to the open sea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused, smiling in an inscrutable sort of way, then turned and said
+      with a sudden softness in her voice, though still with the air of one who
+      wished not to be taken with too great a seriousness: &ldquo;And, ladies and
+      gentlemen, the name of the ship that led the way was the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo;; and
+      the name of the hero was Commander Galt Roscoe, R.N.; and &lsquo;of such is the
+      kingdom of heaven!&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was silence for a moment. The tale had been told adroitly, and with
+      such tact as to words that Roscoe could not take offence&mdash;need not,
+      indeed, as he did not, I believe, feel any particular self-consciousness.
+      I am not sure but he was a little glad that such evidence should have been
+      given at the moment, when a kind of restraint had come between him and
+      Ruth, by one who he had reason to think was not wholly his friend might be
+      his enemy. It was a kind of offset to his premonitions and to the peril
+      over which he might stumble at any moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To me the situation was almost inexplicable; but the woman herself was
+      inexplicable: at this moment the evil genius of us all, at that doing us
+      all a kind of crude, superior justice. I was the first to speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Roscoe,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I never had heard of this, although I remember the
+      circumstance as told in the newspapers. But I am glad and proud that I
+      have a friend with such a record.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, only think,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion, &ldquo;he actually was not
+      court-martialled for abandoning his ship to save an admiral and a fleet.
+      But the ways of the English Admiralty are wonderful. They go out of their
+      way to avoid a court-martial sometimes, and they go out of their way to
+      establish it sometimes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time we had started towards the mill. Roscoe walked ahead with
+      Ruth Devlin. Mr. Devlin, Mrs. Falchion, Justine Caron and myself walked
+      together.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion presently continued, talking, as it seemed to me, at the
+      back of Roscoe&rsquo;s head:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have known the Admiralty to force an officer to resign the navy because
+      he had married a native wife. But I never knew the Admiralty to
+      court-martial an officer because he did not marry a native wife whom he
+      OUGHT to have married: but, as I said, the ways of the Admiralty are past
+      admiration.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see Roscoe&rsquo;s hand clinch at his side, and presently he said over
+      his shoulder at her: &ldquo;Your memory and your philosophy are as wonderful as
+      the Admiralty are inscrutable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laughed. &ldquo;You have not lost your old gift of retort,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You
+      are still amusing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, come,&rdquo; said Mr. Devlin cheerfully, &ldquo;let&rsquo;s see if there isn&rsquo;t
+      something even more amusing than Mr. Roscoe in Viking. I will show you,
+      Mrs. Falchion, the biggest saw that ever ate the heart out of a Norfolk
+      pine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the mill Mrs. Falchion was interested. She asked questions concerning
+      the machinery which mightily pleased Mr. Devlin, they were so apt and
+      intelligent; and herself assisted in giving an immense log to the teeth of
+      the largest saw, which, with its six upright blades, ate, and was never
+      satisfied. She stooped and ran her ungloved hand into the sawdust, as
+      sweet before the sun has dried it as the scent of a rose. The rich smell
+      of the fresh-cut lumber filled the air, and suggested all kinds of remote
+      and pleasant things. The industry itself is one of the first that comes
+      with the invasion of new territory, and makes one think of man&rsquo;s first
+      work in the world: to fell the tree and till the soil. It is impossible to
+      describe that fierce, jubilant song of the saw, which even when we were
+      near was never shrill or shrieking: never drowning our voices, but vibrant
+      and delightful. To Mrs. Falchion it was new; she was impressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have seen,&rdquo; she said to Mr. Devlin, &ldquo;all sorts of enterprises, but
+      never anything like this. It all has a kind of rough music. It is
+      enjoyable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mr. Devlin beamed. &ldquo;I have just added something to the mill that will
+      please you,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked interested. We all gathered round. I stood between Mrs.
+      Falchion and Ruth Devlin, and Roscoe beside Justine Caron.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the greatest mill-whistle in the country,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;It will
+      be heard from twelve to twenty-five miles, according to the condition of
+      the atmosphere. I want big things all round, and this is a masterpiece, I
+      guess. Now, I&rsquo;ll let you hear it if you like. I didn&rsquo;t expect to use it
+      until to-night at nine o&rsquo;clock, when, also for the first time, I am to
+      light the mills by electricity; a thing that&rsquo;s not been attempted yet in
+      any saw-mill on the Continent. We&rsquo;re going to work night and day for a
+      couple of months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is all very wonderful. And are you indebted to Mr. Roscoe in these
+      things too?&mdash;Everybody seems to need him here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said the mill-owner, laughing, &ldquo;the whistle is my own. It&rsquo;s the
+      sort of thing I would propose&mdash;to blow my trumpet, as it were; but
+      the electricity and the first experiments in it I owe to The Padre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As I thought,&rdquo; she said, and turned to Roscoe. &ldquo;I remember,&rdquo; she added,
+      &ldquo;that you had an electrical search-light on the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo;, and that you
+      were fond of electricity. Do you ever use search-lights here? I should
+      think they might be of use in your parish. Then, for a change, you could
+      let the parish turn it upon you, for the sake of contrast and
+      edification.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the moment I was exceedingly angry. Her sarcasm was well veiled, but I
+      could feel the sardonic touch beneath the smiling surface. This innuendo
+      seemed so gratuitous. I said to her, almost beneath my breath, that none
+      of the others could hear: &ldquo;How womanly!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did no more than lift her eyebrows in acknowledgment, and went on
+      talking lightly to Mr. Devlin. Roscoe was cool, but I could see now in his
+      eyes a kind of smouldering anger; which was quite to my wish. I hoped he
+      would be meek no longer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Ruth Devlin said: &ldquo;Would it not be better to wait till to-night,
+      when the place is lighted, before the whistle is blown? Then you can get a
+      better first impression. And if Mrs. Falchion will come over to our home
+      at Sunburst, we will try and amuse her for the rest of the day&mdash;that
+      is, after she has seen all here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion seemed struck by the frankness of the girl, and for an
+      instant debated, but presently said: &ldquo;No, thank you. When all is seen now,
+      I will go to the hotel, and then will join you all here in the evening, if
+      that seems feasible. Perhaps Dr. Marmion will escort me here. Mr. Roscoe,
+      of course, has other duties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall be happy,&rdquo; I said, maliciously smiling, &ldquo;to guide you to the
+      sacrifice of the saw.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was not disturbed. She touched Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s arm, and, looking archly
+      at him, nodded backwards towards me. &ldquo;&lsquo;Beware the anaconda!&rsquo;&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was impossible not to be amused; her repartee was always so
+      unrestrained. She disarmed one by what would have been, in a man, insolent
+      sang-froid: in her it was piquancy, daring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she added: &ldquo;But if we are to have no colossal whistle and no
+      electric light till evening, there is one thing I must have: and that is
+      your remarkable Phil Boldrick, who seems to hold you all in the palm of
+      his hand, and lives up there like a god on his Olympus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, suppose you go and call on him,&rdquo; said Roscoe, with a touch of dry
+      humour, his eye on the cable that reached to Boldrick&rsquo;s perch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She saw her opportunity, and answered promptly: &ldquo;Yes, I will call on him
+      immediately,&rdquo;&mdash;here she turned towards Ruth,&mdash;&ldquo;if Miss Devlin
+      and yourself will go with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; interposed Mr. Devlin. &ldquo;Besides, the cage will only hold two
+      easily. Anyhow, it&rsquo;s absurd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why is it absurd? Is there any danger?&rdquo; queried Mrs. Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not unless there&rsquo;s an idiot at the machinery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should expect you to manage it,&rdquo; she persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no woman has ever done it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will make the record.&rdquo; And, turning to Ruth: &ldquo;You are not afraid?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I am not afraid,&rdquo; said the girl bravely, though she acknowledged to
+      me afterwards that while she was not afraid of anything where her own
+      skill was called in question, such as mountain-climbing, or even
+      puma-hunting, she did not joyfully anticipate swinging between heaven and
+      earth on that incline. &ldquo;I will go,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;if my father will let me.
+      ... May I?&rdquo; she continued, turning to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps something of the father&rsquo;s pride came up in him, perhaps he had
+      just got some suspicion that between his daughter and Mrs. Falchion there
+      was a subterranean rivalry. However it was, he gave a quick, quizzical
+      look at both of them, then glanced at Roscoe, and said: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll make no
+      objections, if Ruth would like to introduce you to Phil. And, as Mrs.
+      Falchion suggested, I&rsquo;ll &lsquo;turn the crank.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I could see that Roscoe had a bad moment. But presently he appeared to me
+      perfectly willing that Ruth should go. Maybe he was as keen that she
+      should not appear at a disadvantage beside Mrs. Falchion as was her
+      father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A signal was given, and the cage came slowly down the cable to the mill.
+      We could see Boldrick, looking little bigger than a child at the other
+      end, watching our movements. At the last moment Mr. Devlin and Roscoe
+      seemed apprehensive, but the women were cool and determined. I noticed
+      Mrs. Falchion look at Ruth curiously once or twice after they entered the
+      cage, and before they started, and what she saw evidently gave her a
+      higher opinion of the girl, for she laid her hand on Ruth&rsquo;s arm suddenly,
+      and said: &ldquo;We will show these mere men what nerve is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth nodded, then &lsquo;bon voyage&rsquo; was said, and the signal was given. The
+      cage ascended at first quickly, then more slowly, swaying up and down a
+      little on the cable, and climbing higher and higher through the air to the
+      mountain-side. What Boldrick thought when he saw the two ascending towards
+      him, he expressed to Mr. Devlin later in the day in vigorous language:
+      what occurred at his but Ruth Devlin told me afterwards. When the cage
+      reached him, he helped the two passengers out, and took them to his hut.
+      With Ruth he had always been a favourite, and he welcomed her with
+      admiring and affectionate respect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never b&rsquo;lieved you could have done it, Miss Devlin&mdash;never! Not but
+      what I knew you weren&rsquo;t afraid of anything on the earth below, or the
+      waters under the earth; but when you get swinging there over the world,
+      and not high enough to get a hold on heaven, it makes you feel as if
+      things was droppin&rsquo; away from you like. But, by gracious! you did it like
+      an eagle&mdash;you and your friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By this time he was introduced, and at the name of Mrs. Falchion, he
+      cocked his head, and looked quizzically, as if trying to remember
+      something, then drew his hand once or twice across his forehead. After a
+      moment he said: &ldquo;Strange, now, ma&rsquo;am, how your name strikes me. It isn&rsquo;t a
+      common name, and I&rsquo;ve heerd it before somewhere&mdash;somewhere. It isn&rsquo;t
+      your face that I&rsquo;ve seen before&mdash;for I&rsquo;d have remembered it if it was
+      a thousand years ago,&rdquo; he added admiringly. &ldquo;But I&rsquo;ve heard some one use
+      it; and I can&rsquo;t tell where.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked curiously at him, and said: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t try to remember, and it will
+      come to you in good time. But show us everything about your place before
+      we go back, won&rsquo;t you, please?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He showed them his hut, where he lived, quite alone. It was supplied with
+      bare necessaries, and with a counter, behind which were cups and a few
+      bottles. In reference to this, Boldrick said: &ldquo;Temperance drinks for the
+      muleteers, tobacco and tea and sugar and postage stamps and things. They
+      don&rsquo;t gargle their throats with anything stronger than coffee at this
+      tavern.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he took them to the cave in which puma, bear, and wapiti skins were
+      piled, together with a few stores and the kits of travellers who had left
+      their belongings in Boldrick&rsquo;s keeping till they should come again. After
+      Mrs. Falchion and Ruth had seen all, they came out upon the mountain-side
+      and waved their handkerchiefs to us, who were still watching from below.
+      Then Boldrick hoisted a flag on his hut, which he used on gala occasions,
+      to celebrate the event, and, not content with this, fired a &lsquo;feu de joie&rsquo;,
+      managed in this way: He took two anvils used by the muleteers and
+      expressmen to shoe their animals, and placed one on the other, putting
+      powder between. Then Mrs. Falchion thrust a red-hot iron into the powder,
+      and an explosion ensued. I was for a moment uneasy, but Mr. Devlin
+      reassured me, and instantly a shrill whistle from the little mills
+      answered the salute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just before they got into the cage, Mrs. Falchion turned to Boldrick, and
+      said: &ldquo;You have not been trying to remember where you heard my name
+      before? Well, can you not recall it now?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Boldrick shook his head. &ldquo;Perhaps you will recall it before I see you
+      again,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They started. As they did so, Mrs. Falchion said suddenly, looking at
+      Boldrick keenly: &ldquo;Were you ever in the South Seas?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Boldrick stood for an instant open-mouthed, and then exclaimed loudly, as
+      the cage swung down the incline: &ldquo;By Jingo! No, ma&rsquo;am, I was never there,
+      but I had a pal who come from Samoa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She called back at him: &ldquo;Tell me of him when we meet again. What was his
+      name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were too far down the cable now for Boldrick&rsquo;s reply to reach them
+      distinctly. The descent seemed even more adventurous than the ascent, and,
+      in spite of myself, I could not help a thrill of keen excitement. But they
+      were both smiling when the cage reached us, and both had a very fine
+      colour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A delightful journey, a remarkable reception, and a very singular man is
+      your Mr. Boldrick,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied Mr. Devlin, &ldquo;you&rsquo;ll know Boldrick a long time before you
+      find his limits. He is about the most curious character I ever knew, and
+      does the most curious things. But straight&mdash;straight as a die, Mrs.
+      Falchion!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I fancy that Mr. Boldrick and I would be very good friends indeed,&rdquo; said
+      Mrs. Falchion; &ldquo;and I purpose visiting him again. It is quite probable
+      that we shall find we have had mutual acquaintances.&rdquo; She looked at Roscoe
+      meaningly as she said this, but he was occupied with Ruth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were not afraid?&rdquo; Roscoe said to Ruth. &ldquo;Was it not a strange
+      sensation?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Frankly, at first I was a little afraid, because the cage swings on the
+      cable, and it makes you uncomfortable. But I enjoyed it before we got to
+      the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion turned to Mr. Devlin. &ldquo;I find plenty here to amuse me,&rdquo; she
+      said, &ldquo;and I am glad I came. To-night I want to go up that cable and call
+      on Mr. Boldrick again, and see the mills and the electric light, and hear
+      your whistle, from up there. Then, of course, you must show us the mill
+      working at night, and afterwards&mdash;may I ask it?&mdash;you must all
+      come and have supper with me at the summer hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth dropped her eyes. I saw she did not wish to go. Fortunately Mr.
+      Devlin extricated her. &ldquo;I&rsquo;m afraid that will be impossible, Mrs.
+      Falchion,&rdquo; he said: &ldquo;much obliged to you all the same. But I am going to
+      be at the mill pretty near all night, and shouldn&rsquo;t be able to go, and I
+      don&rsquo;t want Ruth to go without me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then it must be another time,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, whenever it&rsquo;s convenient for Ruth, after a day or two, I&rsquo;ll be ready
+      and glad. But I tell you what: if you want to see something fine, you must
+      go down as soon as possible to Sunburst. We live there, you know, not here
+      at Viking. It&rsquo;s funny, too, because, you see, there&rsquo;s a feud between
+      Viking and Sunburst&mdash;we are all river-men and mill-hands at Viking,
+      and they&rsquo;re all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst. By rights I
+      ought to live here, but when I started I thought I&rsquo;d build my mills at
+      Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there. My wife and the girls got
+      attached to the place, and though the mills were built at Viking, and I
+      made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend my shekels there.
+      I guess if I didn&rsquo;t happen to live at Sunburst, people would be trailing
+      their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other day between these two
+      towns. But that&rsquo;s neither here nor there. Take my advice, Mrs. Falchion,
+      and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers at work, both day and
+      night. It is about the biggest thing in the way of natural picturesqueness
+      that you&rsquo;ll see&mdash;outside my mills. Indians, half-breeds, white men,
+      Chinamen&mdash;they are all at it in weirs and cages, or in the nets, and
+      spearing by torch-light!&mdash;Don&rsquo;t you think I would do to run a circus,
+      Mrs. Falchion?&mdash;Stand at the door, and shout: &lsquo;Here&rsquo;s where you get
+      the worth of your money&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion laughed. &ldquo;I am sure you and I will be good friends; you are
+      amusing. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of trying to
+      live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion&mdash;and The Padre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety. It had almost a kind
+      of feverishness&mdash;as if she relished fully the position she held
+      towards Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I
+      think was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe&rsquo;s
+      old allegiance. That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would
+      never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus in
+      the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment, one
+      of the principal actors&mdash;from which position I had declined one day
+      when humiliated before Mrs. Falchion on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. Boyd Madras was in
+      my mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a few minutes we parted, agreeing to meet again in the valley in the
+      evening. I had promised, as Mrs. Falchion had suggested, to escort her and
+      Justine Caron from the summer hotel to the mill. Roscoe had duties at both
+      Viking and Sunburst and would not join us until we all met in the evening.
+      Mr. Devlin and Ruth rode away towards Sunburst. Mrs. Falchion, Justine,
+      and myself travelled slowly up the hillside, talking chiefly upon the
+      events of the morning. Mrs. Falchion appeared to admire greatly the
+      stalwart character of Mr. Devlin; in a few swift, complimentary words
+      disposed of Ruth; and then made many inquiries concerning Roscoe&rsquo;s work,
+      my own position, and the length of my stay in the mountains; and talked
+      upon many trivial matters, never once referring&mdash;as it seemed to me,
+      purposely&mdash;to our past experiences on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, nor making any
+      inquiry concerning any one except Belle Treherne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She showed no surprise when I told her that I expected to marry Miss
+      Treherne. She congratulated me with apparent frankness, and asked for Miss
+      Treherne&rsquo;s address, saying she would write to her. As soon as she had left
+      Roscoe&rsquo;s presence she had dropped all enigmatical words and phrases, and,
+      during this hour I was with her, was the tactful, accomplished woman of
+      the world, with the one present object: to make her conversation
+      agreeable, and to keep things on the surface. Justine Caron scarcely spoke
+      during the whole of our walk, although I addressed myself to her
+      frequently. But I could see that she watched Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s face
+      curiously; and I believe that at this time her instinct was keener by far
+      to read what was in Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s mind than my own, though I knew much
+      more of the hidden chain of events connecting Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s life and
+      Galt Roscoe&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I parted from them at the door of the hotel, made my way down to Roscoe&rsquo;s
+      house at the ravine, and busied myself for the greater part of the day in
+      writing letters, and reading on the coping. About sunset I called for Mrs.
+      Falchion, and found her and Justine Caron ready and waiting. There was
+      nothing eventful in our talk as we came down the mountain-side towards
+      Viking&mdash;Justine Caron&rsquo;s presence prevented that. It was dusk when we
+      reached the valley. As yet the mills were all dark. The only lights
+      visible were in the low houses lining the banks of the river. Against the
+      mountainside there seemed to hang one bunch of flame like a star, large,
+      red, and weird. It was a torch burning in front of Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s hut. We
+      made our way slowly to the mill, and found Mr. Devlin, Ruth, and Roscoe,
+      with Ruth&rsquo;s sister, and one or two other friends, expecting us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Mr. Devlin heartily, &ldquo;I have kept the show waiting for you.
+      The house is all dark, but I guess you&rsquo;ll see a transformation scene
+      pretty quick. Come out,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;and let us get the front seats.
+      They are all stalls here; nobody has a box except Boldrick, and it is up
+      in the flies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Devlin,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion, &ldquo;I purpose to see this show not only
+      from the stalls, but from the box in the flies. Therefore, during the
+      first act, I shall be here in front of the foot-lights. During the second
+      act I shall be aloft like Tom Bowling&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In other words&mdash;&rdquo; began Mr. Devlin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In other words,&rdquo; added Mrs. Falchion, &ldquo;I am going to see the valley and
+      hear your great horn blow from up there!&rdquo; She pointed towards the star in
+      front of Phil&rsquo;s hut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All right,&rdquo; said Mr. Devlin; &ldquo;but you will excuse me if I say that I
+      don&rsquo;t particularly want anybody to see this performance from where Tom
+      Bowling bides.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We left the office and went out upon the platform, a little distance from
+      the mill. Mr. Devlin gave a signal, touched a wire, and immediately it
+      seemed as if the whole valley was alight. The mill itself was in a blaze
+      of white. It was transfigured&mdash;a fairy palace, just as the mud barges
+      in the Suez Canal had been transformed by the search-light of the
+      &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. For the moment, in the wonder of change from darkness to light,
+      the valley became the picture of a dream. Every man was at his post in the
+      mill, and in an instant work was going on as we had seen it in the
+      morning. Then, all at once, there came a great roar, as it were, from the
+      very heart of the mill&mdash;a deep diapason, dug out of the throat of the
+      hills: the big whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds mournful&mdash;like a great animal in pain,&rdquo; said Mrs.
+      Falchion. &ldquo;You might have got one more cheerful.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wait till it gets tuned up,&rdquo; said Mr. Devlin. &ldquo;It hasn&rsquo;t had a chance to
+      get the burs out of its throat. It will be very fine as soon as the
+      engine-man knows how to manage it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Ruth, interposing, &ldquo;a little toning down would do it good&mdash;it
+      is shaking the windows in your office; feel this platform tremble!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I bargained for a big whistle and I&rsquo;ve got it: and I guess they&rsquo;ll
+      know if ever there&rsquo;s a fire in the town!&rdquo; Just as he said this, Roscoe
+      gave a cry and pointed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We all turned, and saw a sight that made Ruth Devlin cover her face with
+      her hands and Mrs. Falchion stand horror-stricken. There, coming down the
+      cable with the speed of lightning, was the cage. In it was a man&mdash;Phil
+      Boldrick. With a cry and a smothered oath, Mr. Devlin sprang towards the
+      machinery, Roscoe with him. There was nobody near it, but they saw a boy
+      whose duty it was that night to manage the cable, running towards it.
+      Roscoe was the first to reach the lever; but it was too late. He partially
+      stopped the cage, but only partially. It came with a dull, sickening thud
+      to the ground, and Phil Boldrick&mdash;Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s broken, battered
+      body&mdash;was thrown out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few minutes later Boldrick was lying in Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s office.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ill luck for Viking in the hour of her success. Phil&rsquo;s shattered hulk is
+      drifting. The masts have gone by the board, the pilot from the captain&rsquo;s
+      side. Only the man&rsquo;s &ldquo;unconquerable soul&rdquo; is on the bridge, watching the
+      craft dip at the bow till the waters, their sport out, should hugely
+      swallow it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We were all gathered round. Phil had asked to see the lad who, by
+      neglecting the machinery for a moment, had wrecked his life. &ldquo;My boy,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;you played an ugly game. It was a big mistake. I haven&rsquo;t any grudge
+      agen you, but be glad I&rsquo;m not one that&rsquo;d haunt you for your cussed
+      foolishness.... There, now, I feel better; that&rsquo;s off my mind!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you&rsquo;re wanting to show remorse or anything,&rdquo; he continued, &ldquo;there&rsquo;s my
+      friend, Mr. Roscoe, The Padre&mdash;he&rsquo;s all right, you understand!&mdash;Are
+      you there?... Why don&rsquo;t you speak?&rdquo; He stretched out his hand. The lad
+      took it, but he could not speak: he held it and sobbed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Phil understood. His brow wrinkled with a sudden trouble. He said:
+      &ldquo;There, never mind. I&rsquo;m dying, but it isn&rsquo;t what I expected. It doesn&rsquo;t
+      smart nor tear much; not more than river-rheumatism. P&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps I wouldn&rsquo;t
+      mind it at all if I could see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For Phil was entirely blind now. The accident had destroyed his remaining
+      eye. Being blind, he had already passed that first corridor of death&mdash;darkness.
+      Roscoe stooped over him, took his hand, and spoke quietly to him. Phil
+      knew the voice, and said with a faint smile: &ldquo;Do you think they&rsquo;d plant me
+      with municipal honours&mdash;honours to pardners?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We&rsquo;ll see to that, Phil,&rdquo; said Mr. Devlin from behind the clergyman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Phil recognised the voice. &ldquo;You think that nobody&rsquo;ll kick at making it
+      official?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not one, Phil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And maybe they wouldn&rsquo;t mind firin&rsquo; a volley&mdash;Lights out, as it
+      were: and blow the big whistle? It&rsquo;d look sociable, wouldn&rsquo;t it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There&rsquo;ll be a volley and the whistle, Phil&mdash;if you have to go,&rdquo; said
+      Mr. Devlin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a silence, then the reply came musingly: &ldquo;I guess I hev to go.
+      ... I&rsquo;d hev liked to see the corporation runnin&rsquo; longer, but maybe I can
+      trust the boys.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A river-driver at the door said in a deep voice: &ldquo;By the holy! yes, you
+      can trust us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thank you kindly.... If it doesn&rsquo;t make any difference to the rest, I&rsquo;d
+      like to be alone with The Padre for a little&mdash;not for religion, you
+      understand, for I go as I stayed, and I hev my views,&mdash;but for
+      private business.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Slowly, awkwardly, the few river-drivers passed out&mdash;Devlin and Mrs.
+      Falchion and Ruth and I with them&mdash;for I could do nothing now for him&mdash;he
+      was broken all to pieces. Roscoe told me afterwards what happened then.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Padre,&rdquo; he said to Roscoe, &ldquo;are we alone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite alone, Phil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I hevn&rsquo;t any crime to tell, and the business isn&rsquo;t weighty; but I
+      hev a pal at Danger Mountain&mdash;&rdquo; He paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Phil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He&rsquo;s low down in s&rsquo;ciety; but he&rsquo;s square, and we&rsquo;ve had the same blanket
+      for many a day together. I crossed him first on the Panama level. I was
+      broke&mdash;stony broke. He&rsquo;d been shipwrecked, and was ditto. He&rsquo;d been
+      in the South Seas; I in Nicaragua. We travelled up through Mexico and
+      Arizona, and then through California to the Canadian Rockies. At last we
+      camped at Danger Mountain, a Hudson&rsquo;s Bay fort, and stayed there. It was a
+      roughish spot, but we didn&rsquo;t mind that. Every place isn&rsquo;t Viking. One
+      night we had a difference&mdash;not a quarrel, mind you, but a difference.
+      He was for lynchin&rsquo; a fellow called Piccadilly, a swell that&rsquo;d come down
+      in the world, bringin&rsquo; the worst tricks of his tribe with him. He&rsquo;d never
+      been a bony fidy gentleman&mdash;just an imitation. He played sneak with
+      the daughter of Five Fingers, an Injin chief. We&rsquo;d set store by that girl.
+      There wasn&rsquo;t one of us rough nuts but respected her. She was one of the
+      few beautiful Injin women I&rsquo;ve seen. Well, it come out that Piccadilly had
+      ruined her, and one morning she was found dead. It drove my pal well-nigh
+      crazy. Not that she was anything partik&rsquo;ler to him; but the thing took
+      hold of him unusual.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that I know all concerning Roscoe&rsquo;s past life, I can imagine that this
+      recital must have been swords at his heart. The whole occurrence is put
+      down minutely in his diary, but there is no word of comment upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Phil had been obliged to stop for pain, and, after Roscoe had adjusted the
+      bandages, he continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My pal and the others made up their minds they&rsquo;d lynch Piccadilly; they
+      wouldn&rsquo;t give him the benefit of the doubt&mdash;for it wasn&rsquo;t certain
+      that the girl hadn&rsquo;t killed herself.... Well, I went to Piccadilly, and
+      give him the benefit. He left, and skipped the rope. Not, p&rsquo;r&rsquo;aps, that he
+      ought to hev got away, but once he&rsquo;d showed me a letter from his mother,&mdash;he
+      was drunk too, at the time,&mdash;and I remembered when my brother Rodney
+      was killed in the Black Hills, and how my mother took it; so I give him
+      the tip to travel quick.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and rested. Then presently continued: &ldquo;Now, Padre, I&rsquo;ve got four
+      hundred dollars&mdash;the most I ever had at one time in my life. And I&rsquo;d
+      like it to go to my old pal&mdash;though we had that difference, and
+      parted. I guess we respect each other about the same as we ever did. And I
+      wish you&rsquo;d write it down so that the thing would be municipal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe took pencil and paper and said: &ldquo;What&rsquo;s his name, Phil?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sam&mdash;Tonga Sam.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that isn&rsquo;t all his name?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I s&rsquo;pose not, but it&rsquo;s all he ever had in general use. He&rsquo;d got it
+      because he&rsquo;d been to the Tonga Islands and used to yarn about them. Put
+      &lsquo;Tonga Sam, Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s Pal at Danger Mountain, ult&rsquo;&mdash;add the
+      &lsquo;ult,&rsquo; it&rsquo;s c&rsquo;rrect.&mdash;That&rsquo;ll find him. And write him these words,
+      and if you ever see him say them to him&mdash;&lsquo;Phil Boldrick never had a
+      pal that crowded Tonga Sam.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When the document was written, Roscoe read it aloud, then both signed it,
+      Roscoe guiding the battered hand over the paper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This done, there was a moment&rsquo;s pause, and then Phil said: &ldquo;I&rsquo;d like to be
+      in the open. I was born in the open&mdash;on the Madawaska. Take me out,
+      Padre.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe stepped to the door, and silently beckoned to Devlin and myself. We
+      carried him out, and put him beside a pine tree.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where am I now?&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Under the white pine, Phil.&rdquo; &ldquo;That&rsquo;s right.
+      Face me to the north.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We did so. Minutes passed in silence. Only the song of the saw was heard,
+      and the welting of the river. &ldquo;Padre,&rdquo; he said at last hurriedly, &ldquo;lift me
+      up, so&rsquo;s I can breathe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Am I facin&rsquo; the big mill?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That&rsquo;s c&rsquo;rrect. And the &lsquo;lectric light is burnin&rsquo; in the mill and in the
+      town, an&rsquo; the saws are all goin&rsquo;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By gracious, yes&mdash;you can hear &lsquo;em! Don&rsquo;t they scrunch the stuff,
+      though!&rdquo; He laughed a little. &ldquo;Mr. Devlin an&rsquo; you and me hev been pretty
+      smart, hevn&rsquo;t we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then a spasm caught him, and after a painful pause he called: &ldquo;It&rsquo;s the
+      biggest thing in cables.... Stand close in the cage.... Feel her swing!&mdash;Safe,
+      you bet, if he stands by the lever....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face lighted with the last gleam of living, and he said slowly: &ldquo;I hev
+      a pal&mdash;at Danger Mountain.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0015" id="link2HCH0015">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XV. IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The three days following the events recorded in the preceding chapter were
+      notable to us all. Because my own affairs and experiences are of the least
+      account, I shall record them first: they will at least throw a little
+      light on the history of people who appeared previously in this tale, and
+      disappeared suddenly when the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; reached London, to make room for
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day after Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s death I received a letter from Hungerford,
+      and also one from Belle Treherne. Hungerford had left the Occidental
+      Company&rsquo;s service, and had been fortunate enough to get the position of
+      first officer on a line of steamers running between England and the West
+      Indies. The letter was brusque, incisive, and forceful, and declared that,
+      once he got his foot firmly planted in his new position, he would get
+      married and be done with it. He said that Clovelly the novelist had given
+      a little dinner at his chambers in Piccadilly, and that the guests were
+      all our fellow-passengers by the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;; among them Colonel Ryder, the
+      bookmaker, Blackburn the Queenslander, and himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is extracted from the letter:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+    ... Clovelly was in rare form.&mdash;Don&rsquo;t run away with the idea
+   that he&rsquo;s eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the
+   race for Miss Treherne. For my part&mdash;but, never mind!&mdash;You had
+   phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don&rsquo;t
+   arrange for an early marriage. You are a perfect baby in some
+   things. Don&rsquo;t you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man
+   is when she has refused him? And Clovelly is here on the ground,
+   and they are in the same set, and though I&rsquo;d take my oath she would
+   be loyal to you if you were ten thousand miles from here for ten
+   years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise
+   and a fancy are two different things. We may do what&rsquo;s right for
+   the fear o&rsquo; God, and not love Him either. Marmion, let the marriage
+   bells be rung early&mdash;a maiden&rsquo;s heart is a ticklish thing....
+
+   But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who
+   had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it,
+   and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with
+   laughter. At first every one stared aghast (&ldquo;stared aghast!&rdquo;&mdash;how
+   is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
+   haw-hawed till he couldn&rsquo;t lift his champagne, the rest of us
+   followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
+   earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
+   gently smile. &ldquo;See here,&rdquo; he said ever so candidly of Clovelly&rsquo;s
+   best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
+   figure in the book&mdash;&ldquo;I liked the way you drew that muff. He was
+   such an awful outsider, wasn&rsquo;t he? All talk, and hypocrite down to
+   his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
+   food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went &lsquo;slumming&rsquo; 
+   and made shoulder-strings for the parson&mdash;oh, I know the kind!&rdquo;&mdash;
+   [This was Clovelly&rsquo;s heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
+   himself, &ldquo;with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
+   and a sweet creation altogether.&rdquo;] &ldquo;I said, that&rsquo;s poetic justice,
+   that&rsquo;s the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would
+   have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
+   a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
+   He said, &lsquo;Go to blazes,&rsquo; and he fixed up that marriage&mdash;and there
+   you are! Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!&rdquo;
+ 
+   Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing
+   about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then
+   complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London
+   (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming
+   marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow. What he said of
+   myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round,
+   with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.
+
+   How is Roscoe? I didn&rsquo;t see as much of him as you did, but I liked
+   him. Take my tip for it, that woman will make trouble for him some
+   day. She is the biggest puzzle I ever met. I never could tell
+   whether she liked him or hated him; but it seems to me that either
+   would be the ruin of any &ldquo;Christom man.&rdquo; I know she saw something
+   of him while she was in London, because her quarters were next to
+   those of my aunt the dowager (whose heart the gods soften at my
+   wedding!) in Queen Anne&rsquo;s Mansions, S.W., and who actually liked
+   Mrs. F., called on her, and asked her to dinner, and Roscoe too,
+   whom she met at her place. I believe my aunt would have used her
+   influence to get him a good living, if he had played his cards
+   properly; but I expect he wouldn&rsquo;t be patronised, and he went for a
+   &ldquo;mickonaree,&rdquo; as they say in the South Seas.... Well, I&rsquo;m off
+   to the Spicy Isles, then back again to marry a wife. &ldquo;Go thou and
+   do likewise.&rdquo;
+ 
+   By the way, have you ever heard of or seen Boyd Madras since he
+   slipped our cable at Aden and gave the world another chance?
+   I trust he will spoil her wedding&mdash;if she ever tries to have one.
+   May I be there to see!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Because we shall see nothing more of Hungerford till we finally dismiss
+      the drama, I should like to say that this voyage of his to the West Indies
+      made his fortune&mdash;that is, it gave him command of one of the finest
+      ships in the English merchant service. In a storm a disaster occurred to
+      his vessel, his captain was washed overboard, and he was obliged to take
+      command. His skill, fortitude, and great manliness, under tragical
+      circumstances, sent his name booming round the world; and, coupled, as it
+      was, with a singular act of personal valour, he had his pick of all
+      vacancies and possible vacancies in the merchant service, boy (or little
+      more) as he was. I am glad to say that he is now a happy husband and
+      father too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The letter from Belle Treherne mentioned having met Clovelly several times
+      of late, and, with Hungerford&rsquo;s words hot in my mind, I determined, though
+      I had perfect confidence in her, as in myself, to be married at
+      Christmas-time. Her account of the courtship of Blackburn and Mrs.
+      Callendar was as amusing as her description of an evening which the
+      bookmaker had spent with her father, when he said he was going to marry an
+      actress whom he had seen at Drury Lane Theatre in a racing drama. This he
+      subsequently did, and she ran him a break-neck race for many a day, but
+      never making him unhappy or less resourceful. His verdict, and his only
+      verdict, upon Mrs. Falchion had been confided to Blackburn, who in turn
+      confided it to Clovelly, who passed it on to me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said: &ldquo;A woman is like a horse. Make her beautiful, give her a high
+      temper and a bit of bad luck in her youth, and she&rsquo;ll take her revenge out
+      of life; even though she runs straight, and wins straight every time; till
+      she breaks her heart one day over a lost race. After that she is good to
+      live with for ever. A heart-break for that kind is their salvation:
+      without it they go on breaking the hearts of others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      As I read Belle&rsquo;s and Hungerford&rsquo;s letters my thoughts went back again&mdash;as
+      they did so often indeed&mdash;to the voyage of the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, and then to
+      Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s presence in the Rocky Mountains. There was a strange
+      destiny in it all, and I had no pleasant anticipations about the end; for,
+      even if she could or did do Roscoe no harm, so far as his position was
+      concerned, I saw that she had already begun to make trouble between him
+      and Ruth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That day which saw poor Boldrick&rsquo;s death put her in a conflicting light to
+      me. Now I thought I saw in her unusual gentleness, again an unusual irony,
+      an almost flippant and cruel worldliness; and though at the time she was
+      most touched by the accident, I think her feeling of horror at it made her
+      appear to speak in a way which showed her unpleasantly to Mr. Devlin and
+      his daughter. It may be, however, that Ruth Devlin saw further into her
+      character than I guessed, and understood the strange contradictions of her
+      nature. But I shall, I suppose, never know absolutely about that; nor does
+      it matter much now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day succeeding Phil&rsquo;s death was Sunday, and the little church at
+      Viking was full. Many fishers had come over from Sunburst. It was evident
+      that people expected Roscoe to make some reference to Phil&rsquo;s death in his
+      sermon, or, at least, have a part of the service appropriate. By a
+      singular chance the first morning lesson was David&rsquo;s lamentation for Saul
+      and Jonathan. Roscoe had a fine voice. He read easily, naturally&mdash;like
+      a cultivated layman, not like a clergyman; like a man who wished to convey
+      the simple meaning of what he read, reverently, honestly. On the many
+      occasions when I heard him read the service, I noticed that he never
+      changed the opening sentence, though there were, of course, others from
+      which to choose. He drew the people to their feet always with these words,
+      spoken as it were directly to them:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness that he hath
+   committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save
+   his soul alive.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      I noticed this morning that he instantly attracted the attention of every
+      one, and held it, with the first words of the lesson:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
+   mighty fallen!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me as if the people at first almost tried to stop breathing,
+      so intense was the feeling. Mrs. Falchion was sitting very near me, and
+      though she had worn her veil up at first, as I uncharitably put it then,
+      to disconcert him, she drew it rather quickly down as his reading
+      proceeded; but, so far as I could see, she never took her eyes off his
+      face through the whole service; and, impelled in spite of myself, I
+      watched her closely. Though Ruth Devlin was sitting not far from her, she
+      scarcely looked that way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Evidently the text of the sermon was not chosen that it might have some
+      association with Phil&rsquo;s death, but there was a kind of simple grandeur,
+      and certainly cheerful stalwartness, in his interpretation and practical
+      rendering of the text:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?
+    ... travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak
+   in righteousness, mighty to save.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      A man was talking to men sensibly, directly, quietly. It was impossible to
+      resist the wholesome eloquence of his temperament; he was a revelation of
+      humanity: what he said had life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I said to myself, as I had before, Is it possible that this man ever did
+      anything unmanly?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the service, James Devlin&mdash;with Ruth&mdash;came to Roscoe and
+      myself, and asked us to lunch at his house. Roscoe hesitated, but I knew
+      it was better for him not to walk up the hills and back again immediately
+      after luncheon; so I accepted for us both; and Ruth gave me a grateful
+      look. Roscoe seemed almost anxious not to be alone with Ruth&mdash;not
+      from any cowardly feeling, but because he was perplexed by the old sense
+      of coming catastrophe, which, indeed, poor fellow, he had some cause to
+      feel. He and Mr. Devlin talked of Phil&rsquo;s funeral and the arrangements that
+      had been made, and during the general conversation Ruth and I dropped
+      behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite abruptly she said to me: &ldquo;Who is Mrs. Falchion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A widow&mdash;it is said&mdash;rich, unencumbered,&rdquo; I as abruptly
+      answered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I suppose even widows may have pedigrees, and be conjugated in the
+      past tense,&rdquo; was the cool reply. She drew herself up a little proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was greatly astonished. Here was a girl living most of her life in these
+      mountains, having only had a few years of social life in the East,
+      practising with considerable skill those arts of conversation so much
+      cultivated in metropolitan drawing-rooms. But I was a very dull fellow
+      then, and had yet to learn that women may develop in a day to wonderful
+      things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I said in reply, &ldquo;I suppose not. But I fear I cannot answer
+      regarding the pedigree, nor a great deal about the past, for I only met
+      her under two years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet I have imagined that you knew her pretty well, and that Mr.
+      Roscoe knew her even better&mdash;perhaps,&rdquo; she said suggestively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is so,&rdquo; I tried to say with apparent frankness, &ldquo;for she lived in
+      the South Seas with her father, and Roscoe knew her there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She is a strange woman, and quite heartless in some ways; and yet, do you
+      know, I like her while I dislike her; and I cannot tell why.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not try to tell,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;for she has the gift of making people
+      do both.&mdash;I think she likes and dislikes herself&mdash;as well as
+      others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;As well&mdash;as others,&rdquo; she replied slowly. &ldquo;Yes, I think I have
+      noticed that. You see,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;I do not look at people as most girls
+      of my age: and perhaps I am no better for that. But Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s
+      introduction to me occurred in such peculiar circumstances, and the
+      coincidence of your knowing her was so strange, that my interest is not
+      unnatural, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the contrary,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;I am only surprised that you have restrained
+      your curiosity so much and so long. It was all very strange; though the
+      meeting was quite to be expected, as Mrs. Falchion herself explained that
+      day. She had determined on coming over to the Pacific Coast; this place
+      was in her way; it is a fashionable resort; and she stood a good chance of
+      finding old friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes&mdash;of finding&mdash;old friends,&rdquo; was the abstracted reply. &ldquo;I
+      like Miss Caron, her companion, very much better than&mdash;most women I
+      have met.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This was not what she was going to say, but she checked herself, lest she
+      might be suspected of thinking uncharitably of Mrs. Falchion. I, of
+      course, agreed with her, and told her the story of Galt Roscoe and Hector
+      Caron, and of Justine&rsquo;s earnestness regarding her fancied debt to Roscoe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw that the poison of anxiety had entered the girl&rsquo;s mind; and it
+      might, perhaps, bear fruit of no engaging quality. In her own home,
+      however, it was a picture to see her with her younger sisters and
+      brothers, and invalid mother. She went about very brightly and sweetly
+      among them, speaking to them as if she was mother to them all, angel of
+      them all, domestic court for them all; as indeed she was. Here there
+      seemed no disturbing element in her; a close observer might even have said
+      (and in this case I fancy I was that) that she had no mind or heart for
+      anything or anybody but these few of her blood and race. Hers was a fine
+      nature&mdash;high, wholesome, unselfish. Yet it struck me sadly also, to
+      see how the child-like in her, and her young spirit, had been so early set
+      to the task of defence and protection: a mother at whose breasts a child
+      had never hung; maternal, but without the relieving joys of maternity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that she would carry through her life that too watchful, too
+      anxious tenderness; that to her last day she would look back and not
+      remember that she had a childhood once; because while yet a child she had
+      been made into a woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such of the daughters of men make life beautiful; but themselves are
+      selfish who do not see the almost intolerable pathos of unselfishness and
+      sacrifice. At the moment I was bitter with the thought that, if Mrs.
+      Falchion intended anything which could steal away this girl&rsquo;s happiness
+      from her, even for a time, I should myself seek to retaliate&mdash;which
+      was, as may appear, in my power. But I could not go to Mrs. Falchion now
+      and say: &ldquo;You intend some harm to these two: for God&rsquo;s sake go away and
+      leave them alone!&rdquo; I had no real ground for making such a request.
+      Besides, if there was any catastrophe, any trouble, coming, or possible,
+      that might hasten it, or, at least, give it point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could only wait. I had laid another plan, and from a telegram I had
+      received in answer to one I had sent, I believed it was working. I did not
+      despair. I had, indeed, sent a cable to my agent in England, which was to
+      be forwarded to the address given me by Boyd Madras at Aden. I had got a
+      reply saying that Boyd Madras had sailed for Canada by the Allan Line of
+      steamers. I had then telegraphed to a lawyer I knew in Montreal, and he
+      had replied that he was on the track of the wanderer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All Viking and Sunburst turned out to Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s funeral. Everything
+      was done that he had requested. The great whistle roared painfully,
+      revolvers and guns were fired over his grave, and the new-formed
+      corporation appeared. He was buried on the top of a foot-hill, which, to
+      this day, is known as Boldricks&rsquo; Own. The grave was covered by an immense
+      flat stone bearing his name. But a flagstaff was erected near, no stouter
+      one stands on Beachy Head or elsewhere,&mdash;and on it was engraved:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+               PHIL BOLDRICK,
+
+          Buried with Municipal Honours on
+          the Thirtieth day of June 1883.
+
+        This to his Memory, and for the honour of
+             Viking and Sunburst.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Padre,&rdquo; said a river-driver to Galt Roscoe after the rites were finished,
+      &ldquo;that was a man you could trust.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Padre,&rdquo; added another, &ldquo;that was a man you could bank on, and draw your
+      interest reg&rsquo;lar. He never done a mean thing, and he never pal&rsquo;d with a
+      mean man. He wasn&rsquo;t for getting his teeth on edge like some in the valley.
+      He didn&rsquo;t always side with the majority, and he had a gift of doin&rsquo; things
+      on the square.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Others spoke in similar fashion, and then Viking went back to work, and we
+      to our mountain cottage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Many days passed quietly. I saw that Galt Roscoe wished to speak to me on
+      the subject perplexing him, but I did not help him. I knew that it would
+      come in good time, and the farther off it was the better. I dreaded to
+      hear what he had to tell, lest, in spite of my confidence in him, it
+      should really be a thing which, if made public, must bring ruin. During
+      the evenings of these days he wrote much in his diary&mdash;the very book
+      that lies by me now. Writing seemed a relief to him, for he was more
+      cheerful afterwards. I know that he had received letters from the summer
+      hotel, but whether they were from Mrs. Falchion or Justine Caron I was not
+      then aware, though I afterwards came to know that one of them was from
+      Justine, asking him if she might call on him. He guessed that the request
+      was connected with Hector Caron&rsquo;s death; and, of course, gave his consent.
+      During this time he did not visit Ruth Devlin, nor did he mention her
+      name. As for myself, I was sick of the whole business, and wished it well
+      over, whatever the result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I make here a few extracts from Roscoe&rsquo;s diary, to show the state of his
+      mind at this period:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   Can a man never get away from the consequences of his wickedness,
+   even though he repents?... Restitution is necessary as well
+   as repentance; but when one cannot make restitution, when it is
+   impossible&mdash;what then? I suppose one has to reply, Well, you have
+   to suffer, that is all.... Poor Alo! To think that after all
+   these years, you can strike me!
+
+   There is something malicious in the way Mercy Falchion crosses my
+   path. What she knows, she knows; and what she can do if she
+   chooses, I must endure. I cannot love Mercy Falchion again, and
+   that, I suppose, is the last thing she would wish now. I cannot
+   bring Alo back. But how does that concern her! Why does she hate
+   me so? For, underneath her kindest words,&mdash;and they are kind
+   sometimes,&mdash;I can detect the note of enmity, of calculating scorn.
+   ... I wish I could go to Ruth and tell her all, and ask her to
+   decide if she can take a man with such a past.... What a
+   thing it is to have had a clean record of unflinching manliness at
+   one&rsquo;s back!
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      I add another extract:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   Phil&rsquo;s story of Danger Mountain struck like ice at my heart. There
+   was a horrible irony in the thing: that it should be told to me, of
+   all the world, and at such a time. Some would say, I suppose, that
+   it was the arrangement of Providence. Not to speak it profanely, it
+   seems to be the achievement of the devil. The torture was too
+   malicious for God....
+
+   Phil&rsquo;s letter has gone to his pal at Danger Mountain....
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      The fourth day after the funeral Justine Caron came to see Galt Roscoe.
+      This was the substance of their conversation, as I came to know long
+      afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I have come to pay something of a debt which I owe
+      to you. It is a long time since you gave my poor Hector burial, but I have
+      never forgotten, and I have brought you at last&mdash;you must not shake
+      your head so&mdash;the money you spent.... But you MUST take it. I should
+      be miserable if you did not. The money is all that I can repay; the
+      kindness is for memory and gratitude always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at her wonderingly, earnestly, she seemed so unworldly, standing
+      there, her life&rsquo;s ambition not stirring beyond duty to her dead. If
+      goodness makes beauty, she was beautiful; and yet, besides all that, she
+      had a warm, absorbing eye, a soft, rounded cheek, and she carried in her
+      face the light of a cheerful, engaging spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Will it make you happier if I take the money?&rdquo; he said at last, and his
+      voice showed how she had moved him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So much happier!&rdquo; she answered, and she put a roll of notes into his
+      hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I will take it,&rdquo; he replied, with a manner not too serious, and he
+      looked at the notes carefully; &ldquo;but only what I actually spent, remember;
+      what I told you when you wrote me at Hector&rsquo;s death; not this ample
+      interest. You forget, Miss Caron, that your brother was my friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No I cannot forget that. It lives with me,&rdquo; she rejoined softly. But she
+      took back the surplus notes. &ldquo;And I have my gratitude left still,&rdquo; she
+      added, smiling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Believe me, there is no occasion for gratitude. Why, what less could one
+      do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One could pass by on the other side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was not fallen among thieves,&rdquo; was his reply; &ldquo;he was among
+      Englishmen, the old allies of the French.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the Priests and the Levites, people of his own country&mdash;Frenchmen&mdash;passed
+      him by. They were infamous in falsehood, cruel to him and to me.&mdash;You
+      are an Englishman; you have heart and kindness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He hesitated, then he gravely said: &ldquo;Do not trust Englishmen more than you
+      trust your own countrymen. We are selfish even in our friendships often.
+      We stick to one person, and to benefit that one we sacrifice others. Have
+      you found all Englishmen&mdash;and WOMEN unselfish?&rdquo; He looked at her
+      steadily; but immediately repented that he had asked the question, for he
+      had in his mind one whom they both knew, too well, perhaps; and he added
+      quickly: &ldquo;You see, I am not kind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They were standing now in the sunlight just outside the house. His hands
+      were thrust down in the pockets of his linen coat; her hands opening and
+      shutting her parasol slightly. They might, from their appearance, have
+      been talking of very inconsequent things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes lifted sorrowfully to his. &ldquo;Ah, monsieur,&rdquo; she rejoined, &ldquo;there
+      are two times when one must fear a woman.&rdquo; She answered his question more
+      directly than he could have conjectured. But she felt that she must warn
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not understand,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course you do not. Only women themselves understand that the two times
+      when one must fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves&mdash;after
+      a kind. When she gets wicked or mad enough to hate, either through
+      jealousy or because she cannot love where she would, she is merciless. She
+      does not know the honour of the game. She has no pity. Then, sometimes
+      when she loves in a way, she is, as you say, most selfish. I mean a love
+      which&mdash;is not possible. Then she does some mad act&mdash;all women
+      are a little mad sometimes. Most of us wish to be good, but we are
+      quicksilver....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe&rsquo;s mind had been working fast. He saw she meant to warn him against
+      Mrs. Falchion. His face flushed slightly. He knew that Justine had thought
+      well of him, and now he knew also that she suspected something not
+      creditable or, at least, hazardous in his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the man&mdash;the man whom the woman hates?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When the woman hates&mdash;and loves too, the man is in danger.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know of such a man?&rdquo; he almost shrinkingly said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I did I would say to him, The world is wide. There is no glory in
+      fighting a woman who will not be fair in battle. She will say what may
+      appear to be true, but what she knows in her own heart to be false&mdash;false
+      and bad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe now saw that Justine had more than an inkling of his story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He said calmly: &ldquo;You would advise that man to flee from danger?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, to flee,&rdquo; she replied hurriedly, with a strange anxiety in her eyes;
+      &ldquo;for sometimes a woman is not satisfied with words that kill. She becomes
+      less than human, and is like Jael.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine knew that Mrs. Falchion held a sword over Roscoe&rsquo;s career; she
+      guessed that Mrs. Falchion both cared for him and hated him too; but she
+      did not know the true reason of the hatred&mdash;that only came out
+      afterwards. Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move him;
+      but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping with the
+      facts of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man&rsquo;s life even might be in danger?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It might.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But surely that is not so dreadful,&rdquo; he still said calmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Death is not the worst of evils.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not the worst; one has to think of the evil word as well. The evil
+      word can be outlived; but the man must think of those who really love him&mdash;who
+      would die to save him&mdash;and whose hearts would break if he were
+      killed. Love can outlive slander, but it is bitter when it has to outlive
+      both slander and death. It is easy to love with joy so long as both live,
+      though there are worlds between. Thoughts fly and meet; but Death makes
+      the great division.... Love can only live in the pleasant world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Very abstractedly he said: &ldquo;Is it a pleasant world to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not reply directly to that, but answered: &ldquo;Monsieur, if you know
+      of such a man as I speak of, warn him to fly.&rdquo; And she raised her eyes
+      from the ground and looked earnestly at him. Now her face was slightly
+      flushed, she looked almost beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know of such a man,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;but he will not go. He has to answer
+      to his own soul and his conscience. He is not without fear, but it is only
+      fear for those who care for him, be they ever so few. And he hopes that
+      they will be brave enough to face his misery, if it must come. For we know
+      that courage has its hour of comfort.... When such a man as you speak of
+      has his dark hour he will stand firm.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then with a great impulse he added: &ldquo;This man whom I know did wrong, but
+      he was falsely accused of doing a still greater. The consequence of the
+      first thing followed him. He could never make restitution. Years went by.
+      Some one knew that dark spot in his life&mdash;his Nemesis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The worst Nemesis in this life, monsieur, is always a woman,&rdquo; she
+      interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps she is the surest,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;The woman faced him in the
+      hour of his peace and&mdash;&rdquo; he paused. His voice was husky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, &lsquo;and,&rsquo; monsieur?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And he knows that she would ruin him, and kill his heart and destroy his
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The waters of Marah are bitter,&rdquo; she murmured, and she turned her face
+      away from him to the woods. There was no trouble there. The birds were
+      singing, black squirrels were jumping from bough to bough, and they could
+      hear the tapping of the woodpecker. She slowly drew on her gloves, as if
+      for occupation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke at length as though thinking aloud: &ldquo;But he knows that, whatever
+      comes, life has had for him more compensations than he deserves. For, in
+      his trouble, a woman came, and said kind words, and would have helped him
+      if she could.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There were TWO women,&rdquo; she said solemnly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two women?&rdquo; he repeated slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The one stayed in her home and prayed, and the other came.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not understand,&rdquo; he said: and he spoke truly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Love is always praying for its own, therefore one woman prayed at home.
+      The other woman who came was full of gratitude, for the man was noble, she
+      owed him a great debt, and she believed in him always. She knew that if at
+      any time in his life he had done wrong, the sin was without malice or
+      evil.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The woman is gentle and pitiful with him, God knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke quietly now, and her gravity looked strange in one so young.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows she is just, and would see him fairly treated. She is so far
+      beneath him! and yet one can serve a friend though one is humble and
+      poor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How strange,&rdquo; he rejoined, &ldquo;that the man should think himself miserable
+      who is befriended in such a way! Mademoiselle, he will carry to his grave
+      the kindness of this woman.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; she added humbly, yet with a brave light in her eyes, &ldquo;it is
+      good to care whether the wind blows bitter or kind. Every true woman is a
+      mother, though she have no child. She longs to protect the suffering,
+      because to protect is in her so far as God is.... Well, this woman cares
+      that way....&rdquo; She held out her hand to say good-bye. Her look was simple,
+      direct, and kind. Their parting words were few and unremarkable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe watched Justine Caron as she passed out into the shade of the
+      woods, and he said to himself: &ldquo;Gratitude like that is a wonderful thing.&rdquo;
+       He should have said something else, but he did not know, and she did not
+      wish him to know: and he never knew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0016" id="link2HCH0016">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVI. A DUEL IN ARCADY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The more I thought of Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s attitude towards Roscoe, the more I
+      was puzzled. But I had at last reduced the position to this: Years ago
+      Roscoe had cared for her and she had not cared for him. Angered or
+      indignant at her treatment of him, Roscoe&rsquo;s affections declined unworthily
+      elsewhere. Then came a catastrophe of some kind, in which Alo (whoever she
+      was) suffered. The secret of this catastrophe Mrs. Falchion, as I believe,
+      held. There was a parting, a lapse of years, and then the meeting on the
+      &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;: with it, partial restoration of Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s influence, then
+      its decline, and then a complete change of position. It was now Mrs.
+      Falchion that cared, and Roscoe that shunned. It perplexed me that there
+      seemed to be behind Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s present regard for Roscoe some weird
+      expression of vengeance, as though somehow she had been wronged, and it
+      was her duty to punish. In no other way was the position definable. That
+      Roscoe would never marry her was certain to my mind. That he could not
+      marry her now was also certain&mdash;to me; I had the means to prevent it.
+      That she wished to marry him I was not sure, though she undoubtedly cared
+      for him. Remained, therefore, the supposition that if he cared for her she
+      would do him no harm, as to his position. But if he married Ruth, disaster
+      would come&mdash;Roscoe himself acknowledged that she held the key of his
+      fortunes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon an impulse, and as a last resort, I had taken action whereby in some
+      critical moment I might be able to wield a power over Mrs. Falchion. I was
+      playing a blind game, but it was the only card I held. I had heard from
+      the lawyer in Montreal that Madras, under another name, had gone to the
+      prairie country to enter the mounted police. I had then telegraphed to
+      Winnipeg, but had got no answer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had seen her many times, but we had never, except very remotely, touched
+      upon the matter which was uppermost in both our minds. It was not my wish
+      to force the situation. I knew that my opportunity would come wherein to
+      spy upon the mind of the enemy. It came. On the evening that Justine Caron
+      called upon Roscoe, I accidentally met Mrs. Falchion in the grounds of the
+      hotel. She was with several people, and as I spoke to her she made a
+      little gesture of invitation. I went over, was introduced to her
+      companions, and then she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dr. Marmion, I have not yet made that visit to the salmon-fishers at
+      Sunburst. Unfortunately, on the days when I called on Miss Devlin, my time
+      was limited. But now I have a thirst for adventure, and time hangs heavy.
+      Will you perform your old office of escort, and join a party, which we can
+      make up here, to go there to-morrow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had little love for Mrs. Falchion, but I consented, because it seemed to
+      me the chance had come for an effective talk with her; and I suggested
+      that we should go late in the afternoon of the next day, and remain till
+      night and see the Indians, the half-breeds, and white fishermen working by
+      torch-light on the river. The proposition was accepted with delight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the conversation turned upon the feud that existed between Viking and
+      Sunburst, the river-drivers and the fishers. During the last few days,
+      owing to the fact that there were a great many idle river-men about, the
+      river-driving for the season being done, there had been more than one
+      quarrel of a serious nature at Sunburst. It had needed a great deal of
+      watchfulness on the part of Mr. Devlin and his supporters to prevent
+      fighting. In Sunburst itself, Mr. Devlin had much personal influence. He
+      was a man of exceedingly strong character, bold, powerful, persuasive. But
+      this year there had been a large number of rough, adventurous characters
+      among the river-men, and they seemed to take delight in making sport of,
+      and even interfering with, the salmon-fishers. We talked of these things
+      for some time, and then I took my leave. As I went, Mrs. Falchion stepped
+      after me, tapped me on the arm, and said in a slow, indolent tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whenever you and I meet, Dr. Marmion, something happens&mdash;something
+      strange. What particular catastrophe have you arranged for to-morrow? For
+      you are, you know, the chorus to the drama.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not spoil the play by anticipation,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One gets very weary of tragedy,&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;Comedy would be a relief.
+      Could you not manage it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know about to-morrow,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;as to a comedy. But I promise
+      you that one of these days I will present to you the very finest comedy
+      imaginable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You speak oracularly,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;still you are a professor, and
+      professors always pose. But now, to be perfectly frank with you, I do not
+      believe that any comedy you could arrange would be as effective as your
+      own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have read &lsquo;Much Ado about Nothing&rsquo;,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, it is as good as that, is it?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, it has just as good a final situation,&rdquo; I answered. She seemed
+      puzzled, for she saw I spoke with some undercurrent of meaning. &ldquo;Mrs.
+      Falchion,&rdquo; I said to her suddenly and earnestly, &ldquo;I wish you to think
+      between now and to-morrow of what I am just going to say to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It sounds like the task set an undergraduate, but go on,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you to think,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;of the fact that I helped to save your
+      life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She flushed; an indignant look shot into her face, and her voice
+      vibrating, she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What man would have done less?&rdquo; Then, almost immediately after, as though
+      repenting of what she had said, she continued in a lower tone and with a
+      kind of impulsiveness uncommon to her: &ldquo;But you had courage, and I
+      appreciate that; still, do not ask too much. Good-night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We parted at that, and did not meet again until the next afternoon, when I
+      joined her and her party at the summer hotel. Together we journeyed down
+      to Sunburst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the height of the salmon-fishing season. Sunburst lay cloyed among
+      the products of field and forest and stream. At Viking one got the
+      impression of a strong pioneer life, vibrant, eager, and with a touch of
+      Arcady. But viewed from a distance Sunburst seemed Arcady itself. It was
+      built in green pastures, which stretched back on one side of the river,
+      smooth, luscious, undulating to the foot-hills. This was on one side of
+      the Whi-Whi River. On the other side was a narrow margin, and then a sheer
+      wall of hills in exquisite verdure. The houses were of wood, and chiefly
+      painted white, sweet and cool in the vast greenness. Cattle wandered
+      shoulders deep in the rich grass, and fruit of all kinds was to be had for
+      the picking. The population was strangely mixed. Men had drifted here from
+      all parts of the world, sometimes with their families, sometimes without
+      them. Many of them had settled here after mining at the Caribou field and
+      other places on the Frazer River. Mexican, Portuguese, Canadian,
+      Californian, Australian, Chinaman, and coolie lived here, side by side, at
+      ease in the quiet land, following a primitive occupation with primitive
+      methods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One could pick out the Indian section of the village, because not far from
+      it was the Indian graveyard, with its scaffolding of poles and brush and
+      its offerings for the dead. There were almost interminable rows of
+      scaffolding on the river&rsquo;s edge and upon the high bank where hung the
+      salmon drying in the sun. The river, as it ambled along, here over
+      shallows, there over rapids and tiny waterfalls, was the pathway for
+      millions and millions of salmon upon a pilgrimage to the West and North&mdash;to
+      the happy hunting grounds of spawn. They came in droves so thick at times
+      that, crowding up the little creeks which ran into the river, they filled
+      them so completely as to dam up the water and make the courses a solid
+      mass of living and dead fish. In the river itself they climbed the rapids
+      and leaped the little waterfalls with incredible certainty; except where
+      man had prepared his traps for them. Sometimes these traps were weirs or
+      by-washes, made of long lateral tanks of wicker-work. Down among the
+      boulders near the shore, scaffoldings were raised, and from these the
+      fishermen with nets and wicker-work baskets caught the fish as they came
+      up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We wandered about during the afternoon immensely interested in all that we
+      saw. During that time the party was much together, and my conversation
+      with Mrs. Falchion was general. We had supper at a quiet little tavern,
+      idled away an hour in drinking in the pleasant scene; and when dusk came
+      went out again to the banks of the river.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the time we left the tavern to wander by the river I managed to be a
+      good deal alone with Mrs. Falchion. I do not know whether she saw that I
+      was anxious to speak with her privately, but I fancy she did. Whatever we
+      had to say must, in the circumstances, however serious, be kept
+      superficially unimportant. And, as it happened, our serious conference was
+      carried on with an air of easy gossip, combined with a not artificial
+      interest in all we saw. And there was much to see. Far up and down the
+      river the fragrant dusk was spotted with the smoky red light of torches,
+      and the atmosphere shook with shadows, through which ran the song of the
+      river, more amiable than the song of the saw, and the low, weird cry of
+      the Indians and white men as they toiled for salmon in the glare of the
+      torches. Here upon a scaffolding a half-dozen swung their nets and baskets
+      in the swift river, hauling up with their very long poles thirty or forty
+      splendid fish in an hour; there at a small cascade, in great baskets sunk
+      into the water, a couple of Indians caught and killed the salmon that, in
+      trying to leap the fall, plumped into the wicker cage; beyond, others,
+      more idle and less enterprising, speared the finny travellers, thus five
+      hundred miles from home&mdash;the brave Pacific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Upon the banks the cleaning and curing went on, the women and children
+      assisting, and as the Indians and half-breeds worked they sang either the
+      wild Indian melodies, snatches of brave old songs of the &lsquo;voyageurs&rsquo; of a
+      past century, or hymns taught by the Jesuit missionaries in the persons of
+      such noble men as Pere Lacombe and Pere Durieu, who have wandered up and
+      down the vast plains of both sides of the Rockies telling an old story in
+      a picturesque, heroic way. These old hymns were written in Chinook, that
+      strange language,&mdash;French, English, Spanish, Indian, arranged by the
+      Hudson&rsquo;s Bay Company, which is, like the wampum-belt, a common tongue for
+      tribes and peoples not speaking any language but their own. They were set
+      to old airs&mdash;lullabies, chansons, barcarolles, serenades, taken out
+      of the folk-lore of many lands. Time and again had these simple arcadian
+      airs been sung as a prelude to some tribal act that would not bear the
+      search-light of civilisation&mdash;little by the Indians east of the
+      Rockies, for they have hard hearts and fierce tongues, but much by the
+      Shuswaps, Siwashes, and other tribes of the Pacific slope, whose natures
+      are for peace more than for war; who, one antique day, drifted across from
+      Japan or the Corea, and never, even in their wild, nomadic state, forgot
+      their skill and craft in wood and gold and silver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sat on the shore and watched the scene for a time, saying nothing. Now
+      and again, as from scaffolding to scaffolding, from boat to boat, and from
+      house to house, the Chinook song rang and was caught up in a slow
+      monotone, so not interfering with the toil, there came the sound of an
+      Indian drum beaten indolently, or the rattle of dry hard sticks&mdash;a
+      fantastic accompaniment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it remind you of the South Seas?&rdquo; I asked Mrs. Falchion, as, with
+      her chin on her hand, she watched the scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She drew herself up, almost with an effort, as though she had been lost in
+      thought, and looked at me curiously for a moment. She seemed trying to
+      call back her mind to consider my question. Presently she answered me:
+      &ldquo;Very little. There is something finer, stronger here. The atmosphere has
+      more nerve, the life more life. This is not a land for the idle or
+      vicious, pleasant as it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What a thinker you are, Mrs. Falchion!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to recollect herself suddenly. Her voice took on an inflection
+      of satire. &ldquo;You say it with the air of a discoverer. With Columbus and Hervey
+      and you, the world&mdash;&rdquo; She stopped, laughing softly at the thrust, and
+      moved the dust about with her foot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In spite of the sarcasm, I am going to add that I feel a personal
+      satisfaction in your being a woman who does think, and acts more on
+      thought than impulse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Personal satisfaction&rsquo; sounds very royal and august. It is long, I
+      imagine, since you took a&mdash;personal satisfaction&mdash;in me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not to be daunted. &ldquo;People who think a good deal and live a fresh,
+      outdoor life&mdash;you do that&mdash;naturally act most fairly and wisely
+      in time of difficulty&mdash;and contretemps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I had the impression that you thought I acted unfairly and unwisely&mdash;at
+      such times.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We had come exactly where I wanted. In our minds we were both looking at
+      those miserable scenes on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, when Madras sought to adjust the
+      accounts of life and sorely muddled them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;you are not the same woman that you were.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Indeed, Sir Oracle,&rdquo; she answered: &ldquo;and by what necromancy do you know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By none. I think you are sorry now&mdash;I hope you are&mdash;for what&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She interrupted me indignantly. &ldquo;You go too far. You are almost&mdash;unbearable.
+      You said once that the matter should be buried, and yet here you work for
+      an opportunity, Heaven knows why, to place me at a disadvantage!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pardon me,&rdquo; I answered; &ldquo;I said that I would never bring up those
+      wretched scenes unless there was cause. There is cause.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She got to her feet. &ldquo;What cause&mdash;what possible cause can there be?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I met her eye firmly. &ldquo;I am bound to stand by my friend,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;I can
+      and I will stand by him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If it is a game of drawn swords, beware!&rdquo; she retorted. &ldquo;You speak to me
+      as if I were a common adventuress. You mistake me, and forget that you&mdash;of
+      all men&mdash;have little margin of high morality on which to speculate.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I do not forget that,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;nor do I think of you as an
+      adventuress. But I am sure you hold a power over my friend, and&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped me. &ldquo;Not one word more on the subject. You are not to suppose
+      this or that. Be wise do not irritate and annoy a woman like me. It were
+      better to please me than to preach to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; I said firmly, &ldquo;I wish to please you&mdash;so well that
+      some day you will feel that I have been a good friend to you as well as to
+      him&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Again she interrupted me. &ldquo;You talk in foolish riddles. No good can come
+      of this.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I cannot believe that,&rdquo; I urged; &ldquo;for when once your heart is moved by
+      the love of a man, you will be just, and then the memory of another man
+      who loved you and sinned for you&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you coward!&rdquo; she broke out scornfully&mdash;&ldquo;you coward to persist in
+      this!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I made a little motion of apology with my hand, and was silent. I was
+      satisfied. I felt that I had touched her as no words of mine had ever
+      touched her before. If she became emotional, was vulnerable in her
+      feelings, I knew that Roscoe&rsquo;s peace might be assured. That she loved
+      Roscoe now I was quite certain. Through the mists I could see a way, even
+      if I failed to find Madras and arrange another surprising situation. She
+      was breathing hard with excitement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently she said with incredible quietness, &ldquo;Do not force me to do hard
+      things. I have a secret.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a secret too,&rdquo; I answered. &ldquo;Let us compromise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not fear your secret,&rdquo; she answered. She thought I was referring to
+      her husband&rsquo;s death. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; I replied, &ldquo;I honestly hope you never will.
+      That would be a good day for you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us go,&rdquo; she said; then, presently: &ldquo;No, let us sit here and forget
+      that we have been talking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was satisfied. We sat down. She watched the scene silently, and I
+      watched her. I felt that it would be my lot to see stranger things happen
+      to her than I had seen before; but all in a different fashion. I had more
+      hope for my friend, for Ruth Devlin, for&mdash;!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I then became silent even to myself. The weltering river, the fishers and
+      their labour and their songs, the tall dark hills, the deep gloomy
+      pastures, the flaring lights, were then in a dream before me; but I was
+      thinking, planning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As we sat there, we heard noises, not very harmonious, interrupting the
+      song of the salmon-fishers. We got up to see. A score of river-drivers
+      were marching down through the village, mocking the fishers and making
+      wild mirth. The Indians took little notice, but the half-breeds and white
+      fishers were restless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There will be trouble here one day,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A free fight which will clear the air,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I should like to see it&mdash;it would be picturesque, at least,&rdquo; she
+      added cheerfully; &ldquo;for I suppose no lives would be lost.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One cannot tell,&rdquo; I answered; &ldquo;lives do not count so much in new lands.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Killing is hateful, but I like to see courage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she did see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0017" id="link2HCH0017">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVII. RIDING THE REEFS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The next afternoon Roscoe was sitting on the coping deep in thought, when
+      Ruth rode up with her father, dismounted, and came upon him so quietly
+      that he did not hear her. I was standing in the trees a little distance
+      away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She spoke to him once, but he did not seem to hear. She touched his arm.
+      He got to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were so engaged that you did not hear me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The noise of the rapids!&rdquo; he answered, after a strange pause, &ldquo;and your
+      footstep is very light.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She leaned her chin on her hand, rested against the rail of the coping,
+      looked meditatively into the torrent below, and replied: &ldquo;Is it so light?&rdquo;
+       Then after a pause: &ldquo;You have not asked me how I came, who came with me,
+      or why I am here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was first necessary for me to conceive the delightful fact that you
+      are here,&rdquo; he said in a dazed, and, therefore, not convincing tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She looked him full in the eyes. &ldquo;Please do not pay me the ill compliment
+      of a compliment,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Was it the sailor who spoke then or the&mdash;or
+      yourself? It is not like you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not mean it as a compliment,&rdquo; he replied. &ldquo;I was thinking about
+      critical and important things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Critical and important&rsquo; sounds large,&rdquo; she returned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And the awakening was sudden,&rdquo; he continued. &ldquo;You must make allowance,
+      please, for&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and
+      undreamlike person? I do. And now, since you will not put me quite at my
+      ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly &lsquo;chaperoned&rsquo; here, I
+      must inform you that my father waits hard by&mdash;is, as my riotous young
+      brother says, &lsquo;without on the mat.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am very glad,&rdquo; he replied with more politeness than exactness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That I was duly escorted, or that my father is &lsquo;without on the mat&rsquo;? ...
+      However, you do not appear glad one way or the other. And now I must
+      explain our business. It is to ask your company at dinner (do consider
+      yourself honoured&mdash;actually a formal dinner party in the Rockies!) to
+      meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our famous Viking and
+      Sunburst.... But you are expected to go out where my father feeds his&mdash;there,
+      see&mdash;his horse on your &lsquo;trim parterre.&rsquo; And now that I have done my
+      duty as page and messenger without a word of assistance, Mr. Roscoe, will
+      you go and encourage my father to hope that you will be vis-a-vis to his
+      excellency?&rdquo; She lightly beat the air with her whip, while I took a good
+      look at the charming scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant. He understood too well
+      the source of such gay social banter. He knew it covered a hurt. He said
+      to her: &ldquo;Is this Ruth Devlin or another?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she replied very gravely: &ldquo;It is Ruth Devlin and another too,&rdquo; and she
+      looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes were
+      troubled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but, after
+      a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he came.
+      &ldquo;And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?&rdquo; she said;
+      &ldquo;and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and field?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch of
+      mock irony: &ldquo;The sailor shall play his part&mdash;the obedient retainer of
+      the house of Devlin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished
+      satire on a woman.&rdquo; And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
+      them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with which
+      she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had ever
+      happened to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, indeed no,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am
+      malicious&mdash;just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: &lsquo;Rome
+      turned upon itself.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of it.
+      Yours did not seem applied to yourself,&rdquo; was her slow answer, and she
+      seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No?&rdquo; Then he said with a playful sadness: &ldquo;A moment ago you were not
+      completely innocent of irony, were you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a man is big and broad, and should not&mdash;he should be
+      magnanimous, leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things,
+      to be guilty of littlenesses. But see how daring I am&mdash;speaking like
+      this to you who know so much more than I do.... Surely, you are still only
+      humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself&mdash;the irony so
+      icy to your friends?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had developed greatly. Her mind had been sharpened by pain. The edge
+      of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and allusive.
+      Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her had been
+      achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion came, Ruth had
+      awakened sharply to a distress not exactly definable. She felt that though
+      he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right to share his troubles.
+      The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and something in his manner,
+      made her uneasy and a little bitter. For there was an understanding
+      between them, though it had been unspoken and unwritten. They had vowed
+      without priest or witness. The heart speaks eloquently in symbols first,
+      and afterwards in stumbling words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time, that
+      the words would never be spoken. And was this all that had troubled her&mdash;the
+      belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life? Or had she
+      knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his past?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This possibility filled him with bitterness. The old Adam in him awoke,
+      and he said within himself &ldquo;God in heaven, must one folly, one sin, kill
+      me and her too? Why me more than another!... And I love her, I love her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew
+      straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern.... There came
+      swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with her&mdash;anywhere:
+      to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over again, admitting
+      that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have his conscience clear
+      of secret, and trust her kindness. For now he was sure that Mrs. Falchion
+      meant to make his position as a clergyman impossible; to revenge herself
+      on him for no wrong that, as far as he knew, he ever did directly to her.
+      But to tell this girl, or even her father or mother, that he had been
+      married, after a shameful, unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what
+      came after, and the awful thing that happened&mdash;he who ministered at
+      the altar! Now that he looked the thing in the face it shocked him. No, he
+      could not do it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her
+      through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful
+      possibility beyond her:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why do you look so? You are stern. You are critical. Have I&mdash;disimproved
+      so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words were full of a sudden and natural womanly fear, that something
+      in herself had fallen in value. They had a pathos so much the more moving
+      because she sought to hide it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There swam before his eyes the picture of happiness from which she herself
+      had roused him when she came. He involuntarily, passionately, caught her
+      hand and pressed it to his lips twice; but spoke nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! oh!&mdash;please!&rdquo; she said. Her voice was low and broken, and she
+      spoke appealingly. Could he not see that he was breaking her heart, while
+      filling it also with unbearable joy? Why did he not speak and make this
+      possible, and not leave it a thing to flush her cheeks, and cause her to
+      feel he had acted on a knowledge he had no right to possess till he had
+      declared himself in speech? Could he not have spared her that?&mdash;This
+      Christian gentleman, whose worth had compassed these mountains and won the
+      dwellers among them&mdash;it was bitter. Her pride and injured heart rose
+      up and choked her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He let go her hand. Now his face was partly turned from her, and she saw
+      how thin and pale it was. She saw, too, what I had seen during the past
+      week, that his hair had become almost white about the temples; and the
+      moveless sadness of his position struck her with unnatural force, so that,
+      in spite of herself, tears came suddenly to her eyes, and a slight moan
+      broke from her. She would have run away; but it was too late.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw the tears, the look of pity, indignation, pride, and love in her
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My love!&rdquo; he cried passionately. He opened his arms to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But she stood still. He came very close to her, spoke quickly, and almost
+      despairingly: &ldquo;Ruth, I love you, and I have wronged you; but here is your
+      place, if you will come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At first she seemed stunned, and her face was turned to her mountains, as
+      though the echo of his words were coming back to her from them, but the
+      thing crept into her heart and flooded it. She seemed to wake, and then
+      all her affection carried her into his arms, and she dried her eyes upon
+      his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a time he whispered, &ldquo;My dear, I have wronged you. I should not have
+      made you care for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not seem to notice that he spoke of wrong. She said: &ldquo;I was yours,
+      Galt, even from the beginning, I think, though I did not quite know it. I
+      remember what you read in church the first Sunday you came, and it has
+      always helped me; for I wanted to be good.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She paused and raised her eyes to his, and then with sweet solemnity she
+      said: &ldquo;The words were:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   &ldquo;&lsquo;The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds&rsquo; 
+   feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ruth,&rdquo; he answered, &ldquo;you have always walked on the high places. You have
+      never failed. And you are as safe as the nest of the eagle, a noble work
+      of God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I am not noble; but I should like to be so. Most women like goodness.
+      It is instinct with us, I suppose. We had rather be good than evil, and
+      when we love we can do good things; but we quiver like the compass-needle
+      between two poles. Oh, believe me! we are weak; but we are loving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your worst, Ruth, is as much higher than my best as the heaven is&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Galt, you hurt my fingers!&rdquo; she interrupted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not noticed the almost fierce strength of his clasp. But his life
+      was desperately hungry for her. &ldquo;Forgive me, dearest.&mdash;As I said,
+      better than my best; for, Ruth, my life was&mdash;wicked, long ago. You
+      cannot understand how wicked!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are a clergyman and a good man,&rdquo; she said, with pathetic negation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You give me a heart unsoiled, unspotted of the world. I have been in some
+      ways worse than the worst men in the valley there below.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Galt, Galt, you shock me!&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did I speak? Why did I kiss your hand as I did? Because at the moment
+      it was the only honest thing to do; because it was due you that I should
+      say: &lsquo;Ruth, I love you, love you so much&rsquo;&rdquo;&mdash;here she nestled close to
+      him&mdash;&ldquo;&lsquo;so well, that everything else in life is as nothing beside it&mdash;nothing!
+      so well that I could not let you share my wretchedness.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She ran her hand along his breast and looked up at him with swimming eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you think that this is fair to me? that a woman gives the heart for
+      pleasant weather only? I do not know what your sorrow may be, but it is my
+      right to share it. I am only a woman; but a woman can be strong for those
+      she loves. Remember that I have always had to care for others&mdash;always;
+      and I can bear much. I will not ask what your trouble is, I only ask you&rdquo;&mdash;here
+      she spoke slowly and earnestly, and rested her hand on his shoulder&mdash;&ldquo;to
+      say to me that you love no other woman; and that&mdash;that no other woman
+      has a claim upon you. Then I shall be content to pity you, to help you, to
+      love you. God gives women many pains, but none so great as the love that
+      will not trust utterly; for trust is our bread of life. Yes, indeed,
+      indeed!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I dare not say,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that it is your misfortune to love me, for in
+      this you show how noble a woman can be. But I will say that the cup is
+      bitter-sweet for you.... I cannot tell you now what my trouble is; but I
+      can say that no other living woman has a claim upon me.... My reckoning is
+      with the dead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is with God,&rdquo; she whispered, &ldquo;and He is just and merciful too....
+      Can it not be repaired here?&rdquo; She smoothed back his hair, then let her
+      fingers stray lightly on his cheek.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It hurt him like death to reply. &ldquo;No, but there can be punishment here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She shuddered slightly. &ldquo;Punishment, punishment,&rdquo; she repeated fearfully&mdash;&ldquo;what
+      punishment?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not quite know.&rdquo; Lines of pain grew deeper in his face.... &ldquo;Ruth,
+      how much can a woman forgive?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mother, everything.&rdquo; But she would say no more. He looked at her long
+      and earnestly, and said at last: &ldquo;Will you believe in me no matter what
+      happens?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Always, always.&rdquo; Her smile was most winning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If things should appear dark against me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, if you give me your word.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I said to you that I did a wrong; that I broke the law of God, though
+      not the laws of man?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause in which she drew back, trembling slightly, and looked
+      at him timidly and then steadily, but immediately put her hands bravely in
+      his, and said: &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not break the laws of man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was when you were in the navy?&rdquo; she inquired, in an awe-stricken tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, years ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know. I feel it. You must not tell me. It was a woman, and this other
+      woman, this Mrs. Falchion knows, and she would try to ruin you, or&rdquo;&mdash;here
+      she seemed to be moved suddenly by a new thought&mdash;&ldquo;or have you love
+      her. But she shall not, she shall not&mdash;neither! For I will love you,
+      and God will listen to me, and answer me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would to Heaven I were worthy of you! I dare not think of where you might
+      be called to follow me, Ruth.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy
+      people shall be my people, and thy God my God,&rsquo;&rdquo; she rejoined in a low
+      voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;Thy God my God!&rsquo;&rdquo; he repeated after her slowly. He suddenly wondered if
+      his God was her God; whether now, in his trouble, he had that comfort
+      which his creed and profession should give him. For the first time he felt
+      acutely that his choice of this new life might have been more a reaction
+      from the past, a desire for expiation, than radical belief that this was
+      the right and only thing for him to do. And when, some time after, he bade
+      Ruth good-bye, as she went with her father, it came to him with appalling
+      conviction that his life had been a mistake. The twist of a great wrong in
+      a man&rsquo;s character distorts his vision; and if he has a tender conscience
+      he magnifies his misdeeds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In silence Roscoe and I watched the two ride down the slope. I guessed
+      what had happened: afterwards I was told all. I was glad of it, though the
+      end was not yet promising. When we turned to go towards the house again, a
+      man lounged out of the trees towards us. He looked at me, then at Roscoe,
+      and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;m Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s pal from Danger Mountain.&rdquo; Roscoe held out his hand,
+      and the man took it, saying: &ldquo;You&rsquo;re The Padre, I suppose, and Phil was
+      soft on you. Didn&rsquo;t turn religious, did he? He always had a streak of God
+      A&rsquo;mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head chap; friend o&rsquo; 
+      the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust with a pal. I got
+      your letter, and come over here straight to see that he&rsquo;s been tombed
+      accordin&rsquo; to his virtues; to lay out the dollars he left me on the people
+      he had on his visitin&rsquo; list; no loafers, no gophers, not one; but to them
+      that stayed by him I stay, while prog and liquor last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not
+      reply, I said: &ldquo;Phil had many friends and no enemies.&rdquo; Then I told him the
+      tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and
+      listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as
+      abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe&rsquo;s face. When I had finished he
+      drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind his
+      fingers. But he did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I suggested quietly that Phil&rsquo;s dollars could be put to a better use
+      than for prog and liquor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment&rsquo;s pause, in which he
+      seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he rubbed
+      his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said: &ldquo;I never
+      had but two pals that was pals through and through. And one was Phil and
+      the other was Jo&mdash;Jo Brackenbury.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Roscoe&rsquo;s hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar,
+      twitched suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man continued: &ldquo;Poor Jo went down in the &lsquo;Fly Away&rsquo; when she swung
+      with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon the
+      bloody reefs at Apia.... God, how they gnawed her! And never a rag holdin&rsquo; 
+      nor a stick standin&rsquo;, and her pretty figger broke like a tin whistle in a
+      Corliss engine. And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip, the noisiest pal
+      that ever said &lsquo;Here&rsquo;s how!&rsquo; went out to heaven on a tearing sea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Jo Brackenbury&mdash;&rdquo; Roscoe repeated musingly. His head was turned away
+      from us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me&rdquo; (I wonder that I
+      did not start then) &ldquo;when I told him how the &lsquo;Fly Away&rsquo; went down to Davy,
+      and her lovers went aloft, reefed close afore the wind&mdash;&lsquo;Then,&rsquo; says
+      he, &lsquo;they&rsquo;ve got a damned sound seaman on the Jordan, and so help me! him
+      that&rsquo;s good enough to row my girl from open sea, gales poundin&rsquo; and
+      breakers showin&rsquo; teeth across the bar to Maita Point, is good enough for
+      use where seas is still and reefs ain&rsquo;t fashionable.&rsquo;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe&rsquo;s face looked haggard as it now turned towards us. &ldquo;If you will
+      meet me,&rdquo; he said to the stranger, &ldquo;to-morrow morning, in Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s
+      office at Viking, I will hand you over Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s legacy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The man made as if he would shake hands with Roscoe, who appeared not to
+      notice the motion, and then said: &ldquo;I&rsquo;ll be there. You can bank on that;
+      and, as we used to say down in the Spicy Isles, where neither of you have
+      been, I s&rsquo;pose, Talofa!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He swung away down the hillside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe turned to me. &ldquo;You see, Marmion, all things circle to a centre. The
+      trail seems long, but the fox gets killed an arm&rsquo;s length from his hole.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not always. You take it too seriously,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;You are no fox.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man will be in at the death,&rdquo; he persisted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense, Roscoe. He does not know you. What has he to do with you? This
+      is overwrought nerves. You are killing yourself with worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was motionless and silent for a minute. Then he said very quietly: &ldquo;No,
+      I do not think that I really worry now. I have known&rdquo;&mdash;here he laid
+      his hand upon my shoulder and his eyes had a shining look&mdash;&ldquo;what it
+      is to be happy, unspeakably happy, for a moment; and that stays with me. I
+      am a coward no longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew his finger tips slowly across his forehead. Then he continued:
+      &ldquo;To-morrow I shall be angry with myself, no doubt, for having that
+      moment&rsquo;s joy, but I cannot feel so now. I shall probably condemn myself
+      for cruel selfishness; but I have touched life&rsquo;s highest point this
+      afternoon, Marmion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I drew his hand down from my shoulder and pressed it. It was cold. He
+      withdrew his eyes from the mountain, and said: &ldquo;I have had dreams,
+      Marmion, and they are over. I lived in one: to expiate&mdash;to wipe out&mdash;a
+      past, by spending my life for others. The expiation is not enough. I lived
+      in another: to win a woman&rsquo;s love; and I have, and was caught up by it for
+      a moment, and it was wonderful. But it is over now, quite over. ... And
+      now for her sake renunciation must be made, before I have another dream&mdash;a
+      long one, Marmion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I had forebodings, but I pulled myself together and said firmly: &ldquo;Roscoe,
+      these are fancies. Stop it, man. You are moody. Come, let us walk, and
+      talk of other things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, we will not walk,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but let us sit there on the coping and
+      be quiet&mdash;quiet in that roar between the hills.&rdquo; Suddenly he swung
+      round, caught me by the shoulders and held me gently so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have a pain at my heart, Marmion, as if I&rsquo;d heard my death sentence;
+      such as a soldier feels who knows that Death looks out at him from iron
+      eyes. You smile: I suppose you think I am mad.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw that it was best to let him speak his mind. So I answered: &ldquo;Not mad,
+      my friend. Say on what you like. Tell me all you feel. Only, for God&rsquo;s
+      sake be brave, and don&rsquo;t give up until there&rsquo;s occasion. I am sure you
+      exaggerate your danger, whatever it is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listen for a minute,&rdquo; said he: &ldquo;I had a brother Edward, as good a lad as
+      ever was; a boisterous, healthy fellow. We had an old nurse in our family
+      who came from Irish hills, faithful and kind to us both. There came a
+      change over Edward. He appeared not to take the same interest in his
+      sports. One day he came to me, looking a bit pale, and said: &lsquo;Galt, I
+      think I should like to study for the Church.&rsquo; I laughed at it, yet it
+      troubled me in a way, for I saw he was not well. I told Martha, the nurse.
+      She shook her head sadly, and said: &lsquo;Edward is not for the Church, but
+      you, my lad. He is for heaven.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;For heaven, Martha?&rsquo; laughed I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;&lsquo;In truth for heaven,&rsquo; she replied, &lsquo;and that soon. The look of his eye
+      is doom. I&rsquo;ve seen it since I swaddled him, and he will go suddenly.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry, and I said to her,&mdash;though she thought she spoke the
+      truth,&mdash;&lsquo;This is only Irish croaking. We&rsquo;ll have the banshee next.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She got up from her chair and answered me solemnly: &lsquo;Galt Roscoe, I HAVE
+      heard the banshee wail, and sorrow falls upon your home. And don&rsquo;t you be
+      so hard with me that have loved you, and who suffers for the lad that
+      often and often lay upon my breast. Don&rsquo;t be so hard; for your day of
+      trouble comes too. You, not he, will be priest at the altar. Death will
+      come to him like a swift and easy sleep; but you will feel its hand upon
+      your heart and know its hate for many a day, and bear the slow pangs of it
+      until your life is all crushed, and you go from the world alone, Love
+      crying after you and not able to save you, not even the love of woman&mdash;weaker
+      than death.... And, in my grave, when that day comes beside a great
+      mountain in a strange land, I will weep and pray for you; for I was mother
+      to you too, when yours left you alone bewhiles, never, in this world, to
+      come back.&rsquo; 
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, Marmion, that night towards morning, as I lay in the same room with
+      Edward, I heard his breath stop sharply. I jumped up and drew aside the
+      curtains to let in the light, and then I knew that the old woman spoke
+      true.... And now!... Well, I am like Hamlet&mdash;and I can say with him:
+      &lsquo;But thou wouldst not think how ill all&rsquo;s here about my heart&mdash;but it
+      is no matter!&rdquo;&rsquo;....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I tried to laugh and talk away his brooding, but there was little use, his
+      convictions were so strong. Besides, what can you do with a morbidness
+      which has its origin in fateful circumstances?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I devoutly wished that a telegram would come from Winnipeg to let me know
+      if Boyd Madras, under his new name, could be found. I was a hunter on a
+      faint trail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0018" id="link2HCH0018">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XVIII. THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      When Phil&rsquo;s pal left us he went wandering down the hillside, talking to
+      himself. Long afterwards he told me how he felt, and I reproduce his
+      phrases as nearly as I can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Knocked &lsquo;em, I guess,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;with that about Jo Brackenbury.... Poor
+      Jo! Stuck together, him and me did, after she got the steel in her
+      heart.&rdquo;... He pulled himself together, shuddering.... &ldquo;Went back on me,
+      she did, and took up with a cursed swell, and got it cold&mdash;cold. And
+      I? By Judas! I never was shut of that. I&rsquo;ve known women, many of &lsquo;em, all
+      countries, but she was different. I expect now, after all these years,
+      that if I got my hand on the devil that done for her, I&rsquo;d rattle his
+      breath in his throat. There&rsquo;s things that clings. She clings, Jo
+      Brackenbury clings, and Phil Boldrick clings; and they&rsquo;re gone, and I&rsquo;m
+      left to go it alone. To play the single hand&mdash;what!&mdash;by Jiminy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He exclaimed thus on seeing two women approach from the direction of the
+      valley. He stood still, mouth open, staring. They drew near, almost passed
+      him. But one of them, struck by his intense gaze, suddenly turned and came
+      towards him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Falchion! Miss Falchion!&rdquo; he cried. Then, when she hesitated as if
+      with an effort of memory, he added: &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you know me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; she replied abruptly, &ldquo;Sam Kilby! Are you Sam Kilby, Jo
+      Brackenbury&rsquo;s friend, from Samoa?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, miss, I&rsquo;m Jo Brackenbury&rsquo;s friend; and I&rsquo;ve rowed you across the
+      reefs with him more than once I guess so! But it&rsquo;s a long way from Apia to
+      the Rockies, and it&rsquo;s funny to meet here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When did you come here&mdash;and from where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come to-day from the Hudson&rsquo;s Bay post at Danger Mountain. I&rsquo;m Phil
+      Boldrick&rsquo;s pal.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; she said again, with a look in her eyes not pleasant to see, &ldquo;and
+      what brings you up here in the hills?&rdquo; Hers was more than an ordinary
+      curiosity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I come to see the Padre who was with Phil&mdash;when he left. And the
+      Padre&rsquo;s a fair square sort, as I reckon him, but melancholy, almighty
+      melancholy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, melancholy, I suppose,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and fair square, as you say. And
+      what did you say and do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, we yarned about Phil, and where I&rsquo;d get the legacy to-morrow; and I
+      s&rsquo;pose I had a strong breeze on the quarter, for I talked as free as if
+      we&rsquo;d grubbed out of the same dough-pan since we was kiddies.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes siree; I don&rsquo;t know how it was, but I got to reelin&rsquo; off about Jo&mdash;queer,
+      wasn&rsquo;t it? And I told &lsquo;em how he went down in the &lsquo;Fly Away&rsquo;, and how the
+      lovely ladies&mdash;you remember how we used to call the whitecaps lovely
+      ladies&mdash;fondled him out to sea and on to heaven.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what did&mdash;the Padre&mdash;think of that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he&rsquo;s got a heart, I should say, and that&rsquo;s why Phil cottoned to
+      him, maybe,&mdash;for he looked as if he&rsquo;d seen ghosts. I guess he&rsquo;d never
+      had a craft runnin&rsquo; &lsquo;tween a sand-bar and a ragged coral bank; nor seen a
+      girl like the &lsquo;Fly Away&rsquo; take a buster in her teeth; nor a man-of-war come
+      bundlin&rsquo; down upon a nasty glacis, the captain on the bridge, engines
+      goin&rsquo; for all they&rsquo;re worth, every man below battened in, and every Jack
+      above watchin&rsquo; the fight between the engines and the hurricane.... Here
+      she rolls six fathoms from the glacis that&rsquo;ll rip her copper garments off,
+      and the quiverin&rsquo; engines pull her back; and she swings and struggles and
+      trembles between hell in the hurricane and God A&rsquo;mighty in the engines;
+      till at last she gets her nose at the neck of the open sea and crawls out
+      safe and sound.... I guess he&rsquo;d have more marble in his cheeks, if he saw
+      likes o&rsquo; that, Miss Falchion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Kilby paused and wiped his forehead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had listened calmly. She did not answer his question. She said:
+      &ldquo;Kilby, I am staying at the summer hotel up there. Will you call on me&mdash;let
+      me see.... say, to-morrow afternoon?&mdash;Some one will tell you the way,
+      if you do not know it.... Ask for MRS. Falchion, Kilby, not Miss
+      Falchion.... You will come?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why, yes,&rdquo; he replied, &ldquo;you can count on me; for I&rsquo;d like to hear of
+      things that happened after I left Apia&mdash;and how it is that you are
+      Mrs. Falchion, for that&rsquo;s mighty queer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shall hear all that and more.&rdquo; She held out her hand to him and
+      smiled. He took it, and she knew that now she was gathering up the strings
+      of destiny.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They parted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two passed on, looking, in their cool elegance, as if life were the
+      most pleasant thing; as though the very perfume of their garments would
+      preserve them from that plague called trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Justine,&rdquo; said Mrs. Falchion, &ldquo;there is one law stranger than all; the
+      law of coincidence. Perhaps the convenience of modern travel assists it,
+      but fate is in it also. Events run in circles. People connected with them
+      travel that way also. We pass and re-pass each other many times, but on
+      different paths, until we come close and see each other face to face.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was speaking almost the very words which Roscoe had spoken to me. But
+      perhaps there was nothing strange in that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, madame,&rdquo; replied Justine; &ldquo;it is so, but there is a law greater than
+      coincidence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What, Justine?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The law of love, which is just and merciful, and would give peace instead
+      of trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion looked closely at Justine, and, after a moment, evidently
+      satisfied, said: &ldquo;What do you know of love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine tried hard for composure, and answered gently: &ldquo;I loved my brother
+      Hector.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And did it make you just and merciful and&mdash;an angel?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame, you could answer that better. But it has not made me be at war;
+      it has made me patient.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your love&mdash;for your brother&mdash;has made you that?&rdquo; Again she
+      looked keenly, but Justine now showed nothing but earnestness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, madame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion paused for a moment, and seemed intent on the beauty of the
+      pine-belted hills, capped by snowy peaks, and wrapped in a most hearty yet
+      delicate colour. The red of her parasol threw a warm soft ness upon her
+      face. She spoke now without looking at Justine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Justine, did you ever love any one besides your brother?&mdash;I mean
+      another man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine was silent for a moment, and then she said: &ldquo;Yes, once.&rdquo; She was
+      looking at the hills now, and Mrs. Falchion at her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you were happy?&rdquo; Here Mrs. Falchion abstractedly toyed with a piece
+      of lace on Justine&rsquo;s arm. Such acts were unusual with her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was happy&mdash;in loving.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you not marry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame&mdash;it was impossible&mdash;quite.&rdquo; This, with hesitation and
+      the slightest accent of pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why impossible? You have good looks, you were born a lady; you have a
+      foolish heart&mdash;the fond are foolish.&rdquo; She watched the girl keenly,
+      the hand ceased to toy with the lace, and caught the arm itself&mdash;&ldquo;Why
+      impossible?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame, he did not love me, he never could.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did he know of your love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no, no!&rdquo; This with trouble in her voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have never forgotten?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The catechism was merciless; but Mrs. Falchion was not merely malicious.
+      She was inquiring of a thing infinitely important to her. She was
+      searching the heart of another, not only because she was suspicious, but
+      because she wanted to know herself better.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is easy to remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is it long since you saw him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The question almost carried terror with it, for she was not quite sure why
+      Mrs. Falchion questioned her. She lifted her eyes slowly, and there was in
+      them anxiety and joy. &ldquo;It seems,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;like years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He loves some one else, perhaps?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I think so, madame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you hate her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no; I am glad for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Here Mrs. Falchion spoke sharply, almost bitterly. Even through her soft
+      colour a hardness appeared. &ldquo;You are glad for him? You would see another
+      woman in his arms and not be full of anger?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Justine, you are a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame, there is no commandment against being a fool.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, you make me angry with your meekness!&rdquo; Here Mrs. Falchion caught a
+      twig from a tree by her, snapped it in her fingers, and petulantly threw
+      its pieces to the ground. &ldquo;Suppose that the man had once loved you, and
+      afterwards loved another&mdash;then again another?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame, that would be my great misfortune, but it might be no wrong in
+      him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How not a wrong in him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It may have been my fault. There must be love in both&mdash;great love,
+      for it to last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if the woman loved him not at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where, then, could be the wrong in him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And if he went from you,&rdquo;&mdash;here her voice grew dry and her words
+      were sharp,&mdash;&ldquo;and took a woman from the depths of&mdash;oh, no matter
+      what! and made her commit&mdash;crime&mdash;and was himself a criminal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is horrible to think of; but I should ask myself how much I was to
+      blame.... What would you ask yourself, madame?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have a strain of the angel in you, Justine. You would forgive Judas
+      if he said, &lsquo;Peccavi.&rsquo; I have a strain of Satan&mdash;it was born in me&mdash;I
+      would say, You have sinned, now suffer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God give you a softer heart,&rdquo; said Justine, with tender boldness and
+      sincerity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this Mrs. Falchion started slightly, and trouble covered her face. She
+      assumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and
+      unimportant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There, that will do, thank you.... We have become serious and
+      incomprehensible. Let us talk of other things. I want to be gay.... Amuse
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed till
+      near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room. There she sat and
+      thought, as she had never done in her life before. She thought upon
+      everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on the
+      &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders, when he
+      told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers, that she
+      was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart grew hard, as
+      she had once said it should always be to him, and she determined again,
+      after faltering many times, that just such a genius she would be; of the
+      strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil&rsquo;s Slide, and the irony of it;
+      and the fact that he had saved her life&mdash;on that she paused a while;
+      of Ruth Devlin&mdash;and here she was swayed by conflicting emotions; of
+      the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s death and funeral; of the
+      service in the church where she meant to mock him, and, instead, mocked
+      herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all that Justine had said to
+      her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with which Galt Roscoe was
+      associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for a thing he had done;
+      and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after year till now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she
+      had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished
+      her as a friend, and that on no man&rsquo;s breast had she ever laid her head in
+      trust and love. She had been loved, but it had never brought her
+      satisfaction. From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she thought,
+      been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy. And if she saw
+      now in Justine&rsquo;s eyes a look of friendship, a note of personal allegiance,
+      she knew it was because she herself had grown more human.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her nature had been stirred. Her natural heart was struggling against her
+      old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth Devlin.
+      Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him. Then, on a bitter
+      day for him, he did a mad thing. The thing became&mdash;though neither of
+      them knew it at the time, and he not yet&mdash;a great injury to her, and
+      this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the power to use.
+      But all had not happened as she expected; for something called Love had
+      been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being born, and sent,
+      trembling for its timid life, into the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She closed her eyes with weariness, and pressed her hands to her temples.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She wondered why she could not be all evil or all good. She spoke and
+      acted against Ruth Devlin, and yet she pitied her. She had the nettle to
+      sting Roscoe to death, and yet she hesitated to use it. She had said to
+      herself that she would wait till the happiest moment of his life, and then
+      do so. Well, his happiest moment had come. Ruth Devlin&rsquo;s heart was all
+      out, all blossomed&mdash;beside Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s like some wild flower to
+      the aloe.... Only now she had come to know that she had a heart. Something
+      had chilled her at her birth, and when her mother died, a stranger&rsquo;s kiss
+      closed up all the ways to love, and left her an icicle. She was
+      twenty-eight years old, and yet she had never kissed a face in joy or to
+      give joy. And now, when she had come to know herself, and understand what
+      others understand when they are little children in their mother&rsquo;s arms,
+      she had to bow to the spirit that denies. She drew herself up with a
+      quiver of the body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O God!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;do I hate him or love him!&rdquo; Her head dropped in her
+      hands. She sat regardless of time, now scarcely stirring, desperately
+      quiet. The door opened softly and Justine entered. &ldquo;Madame,&rdquo; she said,
+      &ldquo;pardon me; I am so sorry, but Miss Devlin has come to see you, and I
+      thought&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You thought, Justine, that I would see her.&rdquo; There was unmistakable irony
+      in her voice. &ldquo;Very well.... Show her in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden,
+      smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just
+      falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold. She chanced
+      to look down at them. A strange memory came to her: words that she had
+      heard Roscoe read in church. The thing was almost grotesque in its
+      association. &ldquo;How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who
+      bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth Devlin entered, saying, &ldquo;I have come, to ask you if you will dine
+      with us next Monday evening?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: &ldquo;You see,
+      though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;&rdquo; and she added as
+      neutrally and as lightly as she could&mdash;&ldquo;Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion
+      have been good enough to say that they will come. Of course, a dinner
+      party as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a
+      lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can&mdash;with the
+      help of our friends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial
+      matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip
+      more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for. At last she
+      said, in the course of the formal talk: &ldquo;You have travelled much?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, that has been my lot,&rdquo; was the reply; and she leaned back in the
+      gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean,&rdquo; said Ruth, &ldquo;but
+      here I remain&mdash;what shall I say?&mdash;a rustic in a bandbox, seeing
+      the world through a pin-hole. That is the way my father puts it. Except,
+      of course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful
+      mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of
+      companions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively. The
+      notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their talk,
+      varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet in
+      singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words. It was almost
+      sardonic in its monotonous persistence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin,&rdquo; was the indolent reply.
+      &ldquo;Perhaps the simpler life is the happier. The bandbox is not the worst
+      that may come to one&mdash;when one is born to it. I am not sure but it is
+      the best. I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the world,
+      the bandbox is permanently habitable again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the result of this duel, if Ruth Devlin but knew it, depends her own
+      and another&rsquo;s happiness. It is not improbable, however, that something of
+      this was in her mind. She shifted her chair so that her face was not so
+      much in the light. But the belt of sunlight was broadening from Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s feet to her dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You think not?&rdquo; Ruth asked slowly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The reply was not important in tone. Mrs. Falchion had picked up a paper
+      knife and was bending it to and fro between her fingers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think not. Particularly with a man, who is, we will say, by nature,
+      adventurous and explorative. I think if, in some mad moment, I determined
+      to write a novel, it should be of such a man. He flies wide and far; he
+      sees all; he feeds on novelty; he passes from experience to experience&mdash;liberal
+      pleasures of mind and sense all the way. Well, he tires of Egypt and its
+      flesh-pots. He has seen as he hurried on&mdash;I hope I am not growing too
+      picturesque&mdash;too much of women, too many men. He has been unwise&mdash;most
+      men are. Perhaps he has been more than unwise; he has made a great
+      mistake, a social mistake&mdash;or crime&mdash;less or more. If it is a
+      small one, the remedy is not so difficult. Money, friends, adroitness,
+      absence, long retirement, are enough. If a great one, and he is sensitive&mdash;and
+      sated&mdash;he flies, he seeks seclusion. He is afflicted with remorse. He
+      is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and unadorned life; he
+      is satisfied with simple people. The snuff of the burnt candle of
+      enjoyment he calls regret, repentance. He gives himself the delights of
+      introspection, and wishes he were a child again&mdash;yes, indeed it is
+      so, dear Miss Devlin.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth sat regarding her, her deep eyes glowing. Mrs. Falchion continued:
+      &ldquo;In short, he finds the bandbox, as you call it, suited to his
+      renunciations. Its simplicities, which he thinks is regeneration, are only
+      new sensations. But&mdash;you have often noticed the signification of a
+      &lsquo;but,&rsquo;&rdquo; she added, smiling, tapping her cheek lightly with the ivory knife&mdash;&ldquo;but
+      the hour arrives when the bandbox becomes a prison, when the simple hours
+      cloy. Then the ordinary incident is merely gauche, and expiation a bore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see by your face that you understand quite what I mean.... Well, these
+      things occasionally happen. The great mistake follows the man, and, by a
+      greater misery, breaks the misery of the bandbox; or the man himself,
+      hating his captivity, becomes reckless, does some mad thing, and has a
+      miserable end. Or again, some one who holds the key to his mistake comes
+      in from the world he has left, and considers&mdash;considers, you
+      understand!&mdash;whether to leave him to work out his servitude, or,
+      mercifully&mdash;if he is not altogether blind&mdash;permit him the means
+      of escape to his old world, to the life to which he was born&mdash;away
+      from the bandbox and all therein.... I hope I have not tired you&mdash;I
+      am sure I have.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth saw the full meaning of Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s words. She realised that her
+      happiness, his happiness&mdash;everything&mdash;was at stake. All Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s old self was battling with her new self. She had determined to
+      abide by the result of this meeting. She had spoken in a half gay tone,
+      but her words were not everything; the woman herself was there, speaking
+      in every feature and glance. Ruth had listened with an occasional change
+      of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she seemed suddenly to
+      have grown. But her heart was sick and miserable. How could it be
+      otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in a kind, of
+      allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance? But she detected,
+      too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s lips, a kind of
+      trouble in the face. She noticed it at first vaguely as she listened to
+      the music in the other room; but at length she interpreted it aright, and
+      she did not despair. She did not then follow her first impulse to show
+      that she saw the real meaning of that speech, and rise and say, &ldquo;You are
+      insulting,&rdquo; and bid her good-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all, where was the ground for the charge of insult? The words had
+      been spoken impersonally. So, after a moment, she said, as she drew a
+      glove from a hand slightly trembling: &ldquo;And you honestly think it is the
+      case: that one having lived such a life as you describe so unusually,
+      would never be satisfied with a simple life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dear, never&mdash;not such a man as I describe. I know the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But suppose not quite such an one; suppose one that had not been so&mdash;intense;
+      so much the social gladiator; who had business of life as well,&rdquo;&mdash;here
+      the girl grew pale, for this was a kind of talk unfamiliar and painful to
+      her, but to be endured for her cause,&mdash;&ldquo;as well as &lsquo;the flesh-pots of
+      Egypt;&rsquo; who had made no wicked mistakes&mdash;would he necessarily end as
+      you say?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am speaking of the kind of man who had made such mistakes, and he would
+      end as I say. Few men, if any, would leave the world for&mdash;the
+      bandbox, shall I still say? without having a Nemesis.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the Nemesis need not, as you say yourself, be inevitable. The person
+      who holds the key of his life, the impersonation of his mistake&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His CRIMINAL mistake,&rdquo; Mrs. Falchion interrupted, her hand with the ivory
+      knife now moveless in that belt of sunlight across her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His criminal mistake,&rdquo; Ruth repeated, wincing&mdash;&ldquo;might not it become
+      changed into mercy, and the man be safe?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Safe? Perhaps. But he would tire of the pin-hole just the same.... My
+      dear, you do not know life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; said the girl, now very bravely, &ldquo;I know the crude
+      elements of justice. That is one plain thing taught here in the mountains.
+      We have swift reward and punishment&mdash;no hateful things called
+      Nemesis. The meanest wretch here in the West, if he has a quarrel, avenges
+      himself openly and at once. Actions are rough and ready, perhaps, but that
+      is our simple way. Hate is manly&mdash;and womanly too&mdash;when it is
+      open and brave. But when it haunts and shadows, it is not understood
+      here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion sat during this speech, the fingers of one hand idly
+      drumming the arm of her chair, as idly as when on board the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo; she
+      listened to me telling that story of Anson and his wife. Outwardly her
+      coolness was remarkable. But she was really admiring, and amazed at Ruth&rsquo;s
+      adroitness and courage. She appreciated fully the skilful duel that had
+      kept things on the surface, and had committed neither of them to anything
+      personal. It was a battle&mdash;the tragical battle of a drawing-room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Ruth had ended, she said slowly: &ldquo;You speak very earnestly. You do
+      your mountains justice; but each world has its code. It is good for some
+      men to be followed by a slow hatred&mdash;it all depends on themselves.
+      There are some who wish to meet their fate and its worst, and others who
+      would forget it. The latter are in the most danger always.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth rose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stepped forward slightly, so that her feet also were within the
+      sunlight. The other saw this; it appeared to interest her. Ruth looked&mdash;as
+      such a girl can look&mdash;with incredible sincerity into Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s
+      eyes, and said: &ldquo;Oh, if I knew such a man, I would be sorry&mdash;sorry
+      for him; and if I also knew that his was only a mistake and not a crime,
+      or, if the crime itself had been repented of, and atonement made, I would
+      beg some one&mdash;some one better than I&mdash;to pray for him. And I
+      would go to the person who had his life and career at disposal, and would
+      say to her, if it were a woman, oh, remember that it is not he alone who
+      would suffer! I would beg that woman&mdash;if it were a woman&mdash;to be
+      merciful, as she one day must ask for mercy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl as she stood there, all pale, yet glowing with the white light of
+      her pain, was beautiful, noble, compelling. Mrs. Falchion now rose also.
+      She was altogether in the sunlight now. From the piano in the next room
+      came a quick change of accompaniment, and a voice was heard singing, as if
+      to the singer&rsquo;s self, &lsquo;Il balen del suo sorris&rsquo;. It is hard to tell how
+      far such little incidents affected her in what she did that afternoon; but
+      they had their influence. She said: &ldquo;You are altruistic&mdash;or are you
+      selfish, or both?... And should the woman&mdash;if it were a woman&mdash;yield,
+      and spare the man, what would you do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would say that she had been merciful and kind, and that one in this
+      world would pray for her when she needed prayers most.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean when she was old,&rdquo;&mdash;Mrs. Falchion shrank a little at the
+      sound of her own words. Now her careless abandon was gone; she seemed to
+      be following her emotions. &ldquo;When she was old,&rdquo; she continued, &ldquo;and came to
+      die? It is horrible to grow old, except one has been a saint&mdash;and a
+      mother.... And even then&mdash;have you ever seen them, the women of that
+      Egypt of which we spoke&mdash;powdered, smirking over their champagne,
+      because they feel for an instant a false pulse of their past?&mdash;See
+      how eloquent your mountains make me!&mdash;I think that would make one
+      hard and cruel; and one would need the prayers of a churchful of good
+      women, even as good&mdash;as you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She could not resist a touch of irony in the last words, and Ruth, who had
+      been ready to take her hand impulsively, was stung. But she replied
+      nothing; and the other, after waiting, added, with a sudden and wonderful
+      kindness: &ldquo;I say what is quite true. Women might dislike you&mdash;many of
+      them would&mdash;though you could not understand why; but you are good,
+      and that, I suppose, is the best thing in the world. Yes, you are good,&rdquo;
+       she said musingly, and then she leaned forward and quickly kissed the
+      girl&rsquo;s cheek. &ldquo;Good-bye,&rdquo; she said, and then she turned her head
+      resolutely away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They stood there both in the sunlight, both very quiet, but their hearts
+      were throbbing with new sensations. Ruth knew that she had conquered, and,
+      with her eyes all tearful, she looked steadily, yearningly at the woman
+      before her; but she knew it was better she should say little now, and,
+      with a motion of the hand in good-bye,&mdash;she could do no more,&mdash;she
+      slowly went to the door. There she paused and looked back, but the other
+      was still turned away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a minute Mrs. Falchion stood looking at the door through which the
+      girl had passed, then she caught close the curtains of the window, and
+      threw herself upon the sofa with a sobbing laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To her&mdash;I played the game of mercy to her!&rdquo; she cried. &ldquo;And she has
+      his love, the love which I rejected once, and which I want now&mdash;to my
+      shame! A hateful and terrible love. I, who ought to say to him, as I so
+      long determined: &lsquo;You shall be destroyed. You killed my sister, poor Alo;
+      if not with a knife yourself you killed her heart, and that is just the
+      same.&rsquo; I never knew until now what a heart is when killed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught her breast as though it hurt her, and, after a moment,
+      continued: &ldquo;Do hearts always ache so when they love? I was the wife of a
+      good man oh! he WAS a good man, who sinned for me. I see it now!&mdash;and
+      I let him die&mdash;die alone!&rdquo; She shuddered. &ldquo;Oh, now I see, and I know
+      what love such as his can be! I am punished&mdash;punished! for my love is
+      impossible, horrible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long silence, in which she sat looking at the floor, her face
+      all grey with pain. At last the door of the room softly opened, and
+      Justine entered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I come in, madame?&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, come, Justine.&rdquo; The voice was subdued, and there was in it what drew
+      the girl swiftly to the side of Mrs. Falchion. She spoke no word, but
+      gently undid the other&rsquo;s hair, and smoothed and brushed it softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last Mrs. Falchion said: &ldquo;Justine, on Monday we will leave here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl was surprised, but she replied without comment: &ldquo;Yes, madame;
+      where do we go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause; then: &ldquo;I do not know. I want to go where I shall get
+      rested. A village in Italy or&mdash;&rdquo; she paused.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or France, madame?&rdquo; Justine was eager.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion made a gesture of helplessness. &ldquo;Yes, France will do.... The
+      way around the world is long, and I am tired.&rdquo; Minutes passed, and then
+      she slowly said: &ldquo;Justine, we will go to-morrow night.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, madame, to-morrow night&mdash;and not next Monday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a strange only half-veiled melancholy in Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s next
+      words: &ldquo;Do you think, Justine, that I could be happy anywhere?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think anywhere but here, madame.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Mrs. Falchion rose to a sitting posture, and looked at the girl fixedly,
+      almost fiercely. A crisis was at hand. The pity, gentleness, and honest
+      solicitude of Justine&rsquo;s face conquered her, and her look changed to one of
+      understanding and longing for companionship: sorrow swiftly welded their
+      friendship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Mrs. Falchion slept that night, she said again: &ldquo;We will leave here
+      to-morrow, Justine, for ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And Justine replied: &ldquo;Yes, madame, for ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0019" id="link2HCH0019">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XIX. THE SENTENCE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The next morning Roscoe was quiet and calm, but he looked ten years older
+      than when I had first seen him. After breakfast he said to me: &ldquo;I have to
+      go to the valley to pay Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s friend the money, and to see Mr.
+      Devlin. I shall be back, perhaps, by lunchtime. Will you go with me, or
+      stay here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall try to get some fishing this morning, I fancy,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;And
+      possibly I shall idle a good deal, for my time with you here is
+      shortening, and I want to have a great store of laziness behind me for
+      memory, when I&rsquo;ve got my nose to the grindstone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned to the door, and said: &ldquo;Marmion, I wish you weren&rsquo;t going. I
+      wish that we might be comrades under the same roof till&mdash;&rdquo; He paused
+      and smiled strangely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Till the finish,&rdquo; I added, &ldquo;when we should amble grey-headed, sans
+      everything, out of the mad old world? I imagine Miss Belle Treherne would
+      scarcely fancy that.... Still, we can be friends just the same. Our wives
+      won&rsquo;t object to an occasional bout of loafing together, will they?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I was determined not to take him too seriously. He said nothing, and in a
+      moment he was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I passed the morning idly enough, yet thinking, too, very much about my
+      friend. I was anxiously hoping that the telegram from Winnipeg would come.
+      About noon it came. It was not known quite in what part of the North-west,
+      Madras (under his new name) was, for the corps of mounted police had been
+      changed about recently. My letter had, however, been forwarded into the
+      wilds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw no immediate way but to go to Mrs. Falchion and make a bold bid for
+      his peace. I had promised Madras never to let her know that he was alive,
+      but I would break the promise if Madras himself did not come. After
+      considerable hesitation I started. It must be remembered that the events
+      of the preceding chapter were only known to me afterwards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine Caron was passing through the hall of the hotel when I arrived.
+      After greetings, she said that Mrs. Falchion might see me, but that they
+      were very busy; they were leaving in the evening for the coast. Here was a
+      pleasant revelation! I was so confused with delight at the information,
+      that I could think of nothing more sensible to say than that the
+      unexpected always happens. By this time we were within Mrs. Falchion&rsquo;s
+      sitting-room. And to my remark, Justine replied &ldquo;Yes, it is so. One has to
+      reckon most with the accidents of life. The expected is either pleasant or
+      unpleasant; there is no middle place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You are growing philosophic,&rdquo; said I playfully. &ldquo;Monsieur,&rdquo; she said
+      gravely, &ldquo;I hope as I live and travel, I grow a little wiser.&rdquo; Still she
+      lingered, her hand upon the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had thought that you were always wise.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh no, no! How can you say so? I have been very foolish sometimes.&rdquo;...
+      She came back towards me. &ldquo;If I am wiser I am also happier,&rdquo; she added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that moment we understood each other; that is, I read how unselfish
+      this girl could be, and she knew thoroughly the source of my anxiety, and
+      was glad that she could remove it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not speak to any one save you,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;but do you not also
+      think that it is good we go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have been thinking so, but I hesitated to say so,&rdquo; was my reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You need not hesitate,&rdquo; she said earnestly. &ldquo;We have both understood, and
+      I know that you are to be trusted.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not always,&rdquo; I said, remembering that one experience of mine with Mrs.
+      Falchion on the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. Holding the back of a chair, and looking
+      earnestly at me, she continued: &ldquo;Once, on the vessel, you remember, in a
+      hint so very little, I made it appear that madame was selfish.... I am
+      sorry. Her heart was asleep. Now, it is awake. She is unselfish. The
+      accident of our going away is hers. She goes to leave peace behind.&rdquo; &ldquo;I am
+      most glad,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;And you think there will be peace?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Surely, since this has come, that will come also.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you&mdash;Mademoiselle?&rdquo; I should not have asked that question had I
+      known more of the world. It was tactless and unkind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For me it is no matter at all. I do not come in anywhere. As I said, I am
+      happy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And turning quickly, yet not so quickly but that I saw her cheeks were
+      flushed, she passed out of the room. In a moment Mrs. Falchion entered.
+      There was something new in her carriage, in her person. She came towards
+      me, held out her hand, and said, with the same old half-quizzical tone:
+      &ldquo;Have you, with your unerring instinct, guessed that I was leaving, and so
+      come to say good-bye?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You credit me too highly. No, I came to see you because I had an
+      inclination. I did not guess that you were going until Miss Caron told
+      me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An inclination to see me is not your usual instinct, is it? Was it some
+      special impulse, based on a scientific calculation&mdash;at which, I
+      suppose, you are an adeptor curiosity? Or had it a purpose? Or were you
+      bored, and therefore sought the most startling experience you could
+      conceive?&rdquo; She deftly rearranged some flowers in a jar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can plead innocence of all directly; I am guilty of all indirectly: I
+      was impelled to come. I reasoned&mdash;if that is scientific&mdash;on what
+      I should say if I did come, knowing how inclined I was to&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To get beyond my depth,&rdquo; she interrupted, and she motioned me to a chair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, let it be so,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;I was curious to know what kept you in this
+      sylvan, and I fear, to you, half-barbaric spot. I was bored with myself;
+      and I had some purpose in coming, or I should not have had the impulse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was leaning back in her chair easily, not languidly. She seemed
+      reposeful, yet alert.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How wonderfully you talk!&rdquo; she said, with good-natured mockery. &ldquo;You are
+      scientifically frank. You were bored with yourself.&mdash;Then there is
+      some hope for your future wife.... We have had many talks in our
+      acquaintance, Dr. Marmion, but none so interesting as this promises to be.
+      But now tell me what your purpose was in coming. &lsquo;Purpose&rsquo; seems
+      portentous, but quite in keeping.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I noticed here the familiar, almost imperceptible click of the small white
+      teeth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was I so glad she was going that I was playful, elated? &ldquo;My purpose,&rdquo; said
+      I, &ldquo;has no point now; for even if I were to propose to amuse you&mdash;I
+      believe that was the old formula&mdash;by an idle day somewhere, by an
+      excursion, an&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An autobiography,&rdquo; she broke in soothingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or an autobiography,&rdquo; I repeated stolidly, &ldquo;you would not, I fancy, be
+      prepared to accept my services. There would be no chance&mdash;now that
+      you are going away&mdash;for me to play the harlequin&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whose office you could do pleasantly if it suited you&mdash;these
+      adaptable natures!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite so. But it is all futile now, as I say.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you mentioned that before.&mdash;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is well,&rdquo; I replied, dropping into a more meaning tone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say it patriarchally, but yet flatteringly.&rdquo; Here she casually
+      offered me a flower. I mechanically placed it in my buttonhole. She seemed
+      delighted at confusing me. But I kept on firmly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not think,&rdquo; I rejoined gravely now, &ldquo;that there need be any flattery
+      between us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&mdash;We are not married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is as radically true as it is epigrammatic,&rdquo; blurted I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And truth is more than epigram?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One should delight in truth; I do delight in epigram; there seems little
+      chance for choice here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to me that I had said quite what I wished there, but she only
+      looked at me enigmatically.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She arranged a flower in her dress as she almost idly replied, though she
+      did not look me full in the face as she had done before: &ldquo;Well, then, let
+      me add to your present delight by saying that you may go play till
+      doomsday, Dr. Marmion. Your work is done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes were on me now with the directness she could so well use at need.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not suppose you would, despite your many lessons at my hands. You
+      have been altruistic, Dr. Marmion; I fear critical people would say that
+      you meddled. I shall only say that you are inquiring&mdash;scientific, or
+      feminine&mdash;what you please!... You can now yield up your portfolio of&mdash;foreign
+      affairs&mdash;of war&mdash;shall I say? and retire into sedative
+      habitations, which, believe me, you become best.... What concerns me need
+      concern you no longer. The enemy retreats. She offers truce&mdash;without
+      conditions. She retires.... Is that enough for even you, Professor
+      Marmion?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; I said, finding it impossible to understand why she had
+      so suddenly determined to go away (for I did not know all the truth until
+      afterwards&mdash;some of it long afterwards), &ldquo;it is more than I dared to
+      hope for, though less, I know, than you have heart to do if you willed so.
+      I know that you hold some power over my friend.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do not think,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;that you have had the least influence. What you
+      might think, or may have intended to do, has not moved me in the least. I
+      have had wrongs that you do not know. I have changed&mdash;that is all. I
+      admit I intended to do Galt Roscoe harm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought he deserved it. That is over. After to-night, it is not
+      probable that we shall meet again. I hope that we shall not; as,
+      doubtless, is your own mind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept looking at me with that new deep look which I had seen when she
+      first entered the room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was moved, and I saw that just at the last she had spoken under
+      considerable strain. &ldquo;Mrs. Falchion,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;I have THOUGHT harder
+      things of you than I ever SAID to any one. Pray believe that, and believe,
+      also, that I never tried to injure you. For the rest, I can make no
+      complaint. You do not like me. I liked you once, and do now, when you do
+      not depreciate yourself of purpose.... Pardon me, but I say this very
+      humbly too.... I suppose I always shall like you, in spite of myself. You
+      are one of the most gifted and fascinating women that I ever met. I have
+      been anxious for my friend. I was concerned to make peace between you and
+      your husband&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man who WAS my husband,&rdquo; she interrupted musingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your husband&mdash;whom you so cruelly treated. But I confess I have
+      found it impossible to withhold admiration of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a long time she did not reply, but she never took her eyes off my
+      face, as she leaned slightly forward. Then at last she spoke more gently
+      than I had ever heard her, and a glow came upon her face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am only human. You have me at advantage. What woman could reply
+      unkindly to a speech like that? I admit I thought you held me utterly bad
+      and heartless, and it made me bitter.... I had no heart&mdash;once. I had
+      only a wrong, an injury, which was in my mind; not mine, but another&rsquo;s,
+      and yet mine. Then strange things occurred.... At last I relented. I saw
+      that I had better go. Yesterday I saw that; and I am going&mdash;that is
+      all.... I wished to keep the edge of my intercourse with you sharp and
+      uncompanionable to the end; but you have forced me at my weakest
+      point....&rdquo; Here she smiled somewhat painfully.... &ldquo;Believe me, that is the
+      way to turn a woman&rsquo;s weapon upon herself. You have learned much since we
+      first met.... Here is my hand in friendliness, if you care to take it; and
+      in good-bye, should we not meet again more formally before I go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish now that your husband, Boyd Madras, were here,&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She answered nothing, but she did not resent it, only shuddered a little.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our hands grasped silently. I was too choked to speak, and I left her. At
+      that moment she blinded me to all her faults. She was a wonderful woman.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       .....................
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Galt Roscoe had walked slowly along the forest-road towards the valley,
+      his mind in that state of calm which, in some, might be thought numbness
+      of sensation, in others fortitude&mdash;the prerogative of despair. He
+      came to the point of land jutting out over the valley, where he had stood
+      with Mrs. Falchion, Justine, and myself, on the morning of Phil Boldrick&rsquo;s
+      death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked for a long time, and then, slowly descending the hillside, made
+      his way to Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s office. He found Phil&rsquo;s pal awaiting him there.
+      After a few preliminaries, the money was paid over, and Kilby said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve been to see his camping-ground. It&rsquo;s right enough. Viking has done
+      it noble.... Now, here&rsquo;s what I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to do: I&rsquo;m goin&rsquo; to open bottles
+      for all that&rsquo;ll drink success to Viking. A place that&rsquo;s stood by my pal, I
+      stand by&mdash;but not with his money, mind you! No, that goes to you,
+      Padre, for hospital purposes. My gift an&rsquo; his.... So, sit down and write a
+      receipt, or whatever it&rsquo;s called, accordin&rsquo; to Hoyle, and you&rsquo;ll do me
+      proud.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe did as he requested, and handed the money over to Mr. Devlin for
+      safe keeping, remarking, at the same time, that the matter should be
+      announced on a bulletin outside the office at once.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Kilby stood chewing the end of a cigar and listening to the brief
+      conversation between Roscoe and Mr. Devlin, perplexity crossed his face.
+      He said, as Roscoe turned round: &ldquo;There&rsquo;s something catchy about your
+      voice, Padre. I don&rsquo;t know what; but it&rsquo;s familiar like. You never was on
+      the Panama level, of course?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor in Australia?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, in 1876.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn&rsquo;t there then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe grew a shade paler, but he was firm and composed. He was determined
+      to answer truthfully any question that was asked him, wherever it might
+      lead.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nor in Samoa?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the slightest pause, and then the reply came:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, in Samoa.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a missionary, by gracious! Not a mickonaree in Samoa?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; He said nothing further. He did not feel bound to incriminate
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No? Well, you wasn&rsquo;t a beachcomber, nor trader, I&rsquo;ll swear. Was you there
+      in the last half of the Seventies? That&rsquo;s when I was there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo; The reply was quiet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By Jingo!&rdquo; The man&rsquo;s face was puzzled. He was about to speak again; but
+      at that moment two river-drivers&mdash;boon companions, who had been
+      hanging about the door&mdash;urged him to come to the tavern. This
+      distracted him. He laughed, and said that he was coming, and then again,
+      though with less persistency, questioned Roscoe.. &ldquo;You don&rsquo;t remember me,
+      I suppose?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I never saw you, so far as I know, until yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No? Still, I&rsquo;ve heard your voice. It keeps swingin&rsquo; in my ears; and I
+      can&rsquo;t remember.... I can&rsquo;t remember!... But we&rsquo;ll have a spin about it
+      again, Padre.&rdquo; He turned to the impatient men. &ldquo;All right, bully-boys, I&rsquo;m
+      comin&rsquo;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the door he turned and looked again at Roscoe with a sharp, half-amused
+      scrutiny, then the two parted. Kilby kept his word. He was liberal to
+      Viking; and Phil&rsquo;s memory was drunk, not in silence, many times that day.
+      So that when, in the afternoon, he made up his mind to keep his engagement
+      with Mrs. Falchion, and left the valley for the hills, he was not entirely
+      sober. But he was apparently good-natured. As he idled along he talked to
+      himself, and finally broke out into singing:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;Then swing the long boat down the drink,
+        For the lads as pipe to go;
+        But I sink when the &lsquo;Lovely Jane&rsquo; does sink,
+        To the mermaids down below.&rsquo; 
+
+       &ldquo;&lsquo;The long boat bides on its strings,&rsquo; says we,
+        &lsquo;An&rsquo; we bides where the long boat bides;
+        An&rsquo; we&rsquo;ll bluff this equatorial sea,
+        Or swallow its hurricane tides.&rsquo; 
+
+       &ldquo;But the &lsquo;Lovely Jane&rsquo; she didn&rsquo;t go down,
+        An&rsquo; she anchored at the Spicy Isles;
+        An&rsquo; she sailed again to Wellington Town&mdash;
+        A matter of a thousand miles.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      It will be remembered that this was part of the song sung by Galt Roscoe
+      on the Whi-Whi River, the day we rescued Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron.
+      Kilby sang the whole song over to himself until he reached a point
+      overlooking the valley. Then he stood silent for a time, his glance upon
+      the town. The walk had sobered him a little. &ldquo;Phil, old pal,&rdquo; he said at
+      last, &ldquo;you ain&rsquo;t got the taste of raw whiskey with you now. When a man
+      loses a pal he loses a grip on the world equal to all that pal&rsquo;s grip was
+      worth.... I&rsquo;m drunk, and Phil&rsquo;s down there among the worms&mdash;among the
+      worms!... Ah!&rdquo; he added in disgust, and, dashing his hand across his eyes,
+      struck off into the woods again, making his way to the summer hotel, where
+      he had promised to meet Mrs. Falchion. He inquired for her, creating some
+      astonishment by his uncouth appearance and unsteady manner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He learned from Justine that Mrs. Falchion had gone to see Roscoe, and
+      that he would probably meet her if he went that way. This he did. He was
+      just about to issue into a partly open space by a ravine near the house,
+      when he heard voices, and his own name mentioned. He stilled and listened.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, Galt Roscoe,&rdquo; said a voice, &ldquo;Sam Kilby is the man that loved Alo&mdash;loved
+      her not as you did. He would have given her a home, have made her happy,
+      perhaps. You, when Kilby was away, married her&mdash;in native fashion&mdash;which
+      is no marriage&mdash;and KILLED her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, I did not kill her&mdash;that is not so. As God is my Judge, that
+      is not so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You did not kill her with the knife?... Well, I will be honest now, and
+      say that I believe that, whatever I may have hinted or said before. But
+      you killed her just the same when you left her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mercy Falchion,&rdquo; he said desperately, &ldquo;I will not try to palliate my sin.
+      But still I must set myself right with you in so far as I can. The very
+      night Alo killed herself I had made up my mind to leave the navy. I was
+      going to send in my papers, and come back to Apia, and marry her as
+      Englishmen are married. While I remained in the navy I could not, as you
+      know, marry her. It would be impossible to an English officer. I intended
+      to come back and be regularly married to her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say that now,&rdquo; was the cold reply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it is the truth, the truth indeed. Nothing that you might say could
+      make me despise myself more than I do; but I have told you all, as I shall
+      have to tell it one day before a just God. You have spared me: He will
+      not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gait Roscoe,&rdquo; she replied, &ldquo;I am not merciful, nor am I just. I intended
+      to injure you, though you will remember I saved your life that night by
+      giving you a boat for escape across the bay to the &lsquo;Porcupine&rsquo;, which was
+      then under way. The band on board, you also remember, was playing the
+      music of La Grande Duchesse. You fired on the natives who followed. Well,
+      Sam Kilby was with them. Your brother officers did not know the cause of
+      the trouble. It was not known to any one in Apia exactly who it was that
+      Kilby and the natives had tracked from Alo&rsquo;s hut.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He drew his hand across his forehead dazedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, yes I remember!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I wish I had faced the matter there and
+      then. It would have been better.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I doubt that,&rdquo; she replied. &ldquo;The natives who saw you coming from Alo&rsquo;s
+      hut did not know you. You wisely came straight to the Consul&rsquo;s office&mdash;my
+      father&rsquo;s house. And I helped you, though Alo, half-caste Alo, was&mdash;my
+      sister!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Roscoe started back. &ldquo;Alo&mdash;your&mdash;sister!&rdquo; he exclaimed in
+      horror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, though I did not know it till afterwards, not till just before my
+      father died. Alo&rsquo;s father was my father; and her mother had been honestly
+      married to my father by a missionary; though for my sake it had never been
+      made known. You remember, also, that you carried on your relations with
+      Alo secretly, and my father never suspected it was you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your sister!&rdquo; Roscoe was white and sick.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And now you understand my reason for wishing you ill, and for hating
+      you to the end.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said despairingly, &ldquo;I see.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was determined to preserve before him the outer coldness of her nature
+      to the last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Let us reckon together,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I helped to&mdash;in fact, I saved
+      your life at Apia. You helped to save my life at the Devil&rsquo;s Slide. That
+      is balanced. You did me&mdash;the honour to say that you loved me once.
+      Well, one of my race loved you. That is balanced also. My sister&rsquo;s death
+      came through you. There is no balance to that. What shall balance Alo&rsquo;s
+      death? ... I leave you to think that over. It is worth thinking about. I
+      shall keep your secret, too. Kilby does not know you. I doubt that he ever
+      saw you, though, as I said, he followed you with the natives that night in
+      Apia. He was to come to see me to-day. I think I intended to tell him all,
+      and shift&mdash;the duty&mdash;of punishment on his shoulders, which I do
+      not doubt he would fulfil. But he shall not know. Do not ask why. I have
+      changed my mind, that is all. But still the account remains a long one.
+      You will have your lifetime to reckon with it, free from any interference
+      on my part; for, if I can help it, we shall never meet again in this world&mdash;never....
+      And now, good-bye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Without a gesture of farewell she turned and left him standing there, in
+      misery and bitterness, but in a thankfulness too, more for Ruth&rsquo;s sake
+      than his own. He raised his arms with a despairing motion, then let them
+      drop heavily to his side....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then two strong hands caught his throat, a body pressed hard against
+      him, and he was borne backward&mdash;backward&mdash;to the cliff!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0020" id="link2HCH0020">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XX. AFTER THE STORM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I was sitting on the verandah, writing a letter to Belle Treherne. The
+      substantial peace of a mountain evening was on me. The air was clear, and
+      full of the scent of the pines and cedars, and the rumble of the rapids
+      came musically down the canon. I lifted my head and saw an eagle sailing
+      away to the snow-topped peak of Trinity, and then turned to watch the
+      orioles in the trees. The hour was delightful. It made me feel how grave
+      mere living is, how noble even the meanest of us becomes sometimes&mdash;in
+      those big moments when we think the world was built for us. It is half
+      egotism, half divinity; but why quarrel with it?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was young, ambitious; and Love and I were at that moment the only
+      figures in the universe really deserving attention! I looked on down a
+      lane of cedars before me, seeing in imagination a long procession of
+      pleasant things; of&mdash;As I looked, another procession moved through
+      the creatures of my dreams, so that they shrank away timidly, then
+      utterly, and this new procession came on and on, until&mdash;I suddenly
+      rose, and started forward fearfully, to see&mdash;unhappy reality!&mdash;the
+      body of Galt Roscoe carried towards me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then a cold wind seemed to blow from the glacier above and killed all the
+      summer. A man whispered to me: &ldquo;We found him at the bottom of the ravine
+      yonder. He&rsquo;d fallen over, I suppose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt his heart. &ldquo;He is not dead, thank God!&rdquo; I said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, sir,&rdquo; said the other, &ldquo;but he&rsquo;s all smashed.&rdquo; They brought him in and
+      laid him on his bed. I sent one of the party for the doctor at Viking, and
+      myself set to work, with what appliances I had, to deal with the dreadful
+      injuries. When the doctor came, together we made him into the semblance of
+      a man again. His face was but slightly injured, though his head had
+      received severe hurts. I think that I alone saw the marks on his throat;
+      and I hid them. I guessed the cause, but held my peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had sent round at once to James Devlin (but asked him not to come till
+      morning), and also to Mrs. Falchion; but I begged her not to come at all.
+      I might have spared her that; for, as I afterwards knew, she had no
+      intention of coming. She had learned of the accident on her way to Viking,
+      and had turned back; but only to wait and know the worst or the best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About midnight I was left alone with Roscoe. Once, earlier in the evening,
+      he had recognised me and smiled faintly, but I had shaken my head, and he
+      had said nothing. Now, however, he was looking at me earnestly. I did not
+      speak. What he had to tell me was best told in his own time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last he said faintly: &ldquo;Marmion, shall I die soon?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that frankness was best, and I replied: &ldquo;I cannot tell, Roscoe.
+      There is a chance of your living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He moved his head sadly. &ldquo;A very faint chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, a faint one, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes? &lsquo;But&rsquo;?&rdquo; He looked at me as though he wished it over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it rests with you whether the chance is worth anything. If you are
+      content to die, it is gone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am content to die,&rdquo; he replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And there,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;you are wrong and selfish. You have Ruth to live
+      for. Besides, if you are given the chance, you commit suicide if you do
+      not take it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long pause, and then he said: &ldquo;You are right; I will live if I
+      can, Marmion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now YOU are right.&rdquo; I nodded soothingly to him, and then asked him to
+      talk no more; for I knew that fever would soon come on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lay for a moment silent, but at length whispered: &ldquo;Did you know it was
+      not a fall I had?&rdquo; He raised his chin and stretched his throat slightly,
+      with a kind of trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought it was not a fall,&rdquo; I replied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was Phil&rsquo;s pal&mdash;Kilby.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could you&mdash;think it? Did&mdash;others&mdash;think so?&rdquo; he asked
+      anxiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not others; I alone. They thought it accident; they could have no
+      ground for suspicion. But I had; and, besides, there were marks on your
+      throat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing must happen to him, you understand. He had been drinking, and&mdash;and
+      he was justified. I wronged him in Samoa, him and Mrs. Falchion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I nodded and put my fingers on my lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Again there was silence. I sat and watched him, his eyes closed, his body
+      was motionless. He slept for hours so, and then he waked rather sharply,
+      and said half deliriously: &ldquo;I could have dragged him with me, Marmion.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you did not. Yes, I understand. Go to sleep again, Roscoe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Later on the fever came, and he moaned and moved his head about his
+      pillow. He could not move his body&mdash;it was too much injured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a source of fear in Kilby. Would he recklessly announce what he
+      had done, and the cause of it? After thinking it over and over, I
+      concluded that he would not disclose his crimes. My conclusions were
+      right, as after events showed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As for Roscoe, I feared that if he lived he must go through life maimed.
+      He had a private income; therefore if he determined to work no more in the
+      ministry, he would, at least, have the comforts of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ruth Devlin came. I went to Roscoe and told him that she wished to see
+      him. He smiled sorrowfully and said: &ldquo;To what end, Marmion? I am a
+      drifting wreck. It will only shock her.&rdquo; I think he thought she would not
+      love him now if he lived&mdash;a crippled man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is this noble? Is it just to her?&rdquo; said I.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a long time he answered: &ldquo;You are right again, quite right. I am
+      selfish. When one is shaking between life and death, one thinks most of
+      one&rsquo;s self.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She will help to bring you back from those places, Roscoe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I am delirious ever, do not let her come, will you, Marmion? Promise
+      me that.&rdquo; I promised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I went to her. She was very calm and womanly. She entered the room, went
+      quietly to his bedside, and, sitting down, took his hand. Her smile was
+      pitiful and anxious, but her words were brave.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My dearest,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I am so sorry. But you will soon be well, so we
+      must be as patient and cheerful as we can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eyes answered, but he did not speak. She leaned over and kissed his
+      cheek. Then he said: &ldquo;I hope I may get well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This was the shadow over you,&rdquo; she ventured. &ldquo;This was your presentiment
+      of trouble&mdash;this accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, this was the shadow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Some sharp thought seemed to move her, for her eyes grew suddenly hard,
+      and she stooped and whispered: &ldquo;Was SHE there&mdash;when&mdash;it
+      happened, Galt?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrank from the question, but he said immediately: &ldquo;No, she was not
+      there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am glad,&rdquo; she added, &ldquo;that it was only an accident.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes grew clear of their momentary hardness. There is nothing in life
+      like the anger of one woman against another concerning a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine Caron came to the house, pale and anxious, to inquire. Mrs.
+      Falchion, she said, was not going away until she knew how Mr. Roscoe&rsquo;s
+      illness would turn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Miss Caron,&rdquo; I said to her, &ldquo;do you not think it better that she should
+      go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, for him; but she grieves now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;For him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not alone for him,&rdquo; was the reply. There was a pause, and then she
+      continued: &ldquo;Madame told me to say to you that she did not wish Mr. Roscoe
+      to know that she was still here.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I assured her that I understood, and then she added mournfully: &ldquo;I cannot
+      help you now, monsieur, as I did on board the &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;. But he will be
+      better cared for in Miss Devlin&rsquo;s hands, the poor lady!... Do you think
+      that he will live?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hope so. I am not sure.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes went to tears; and then I tried to speak more encouragingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All day people came to inquire, chief among them Mr. Devlin, whose big
+      heart split itself in humanity and compassion. &ldquo;The price of the big mill
+      for the guarantee of his life!&rdquo; he said over and over again. &ldquo;We can&rsquo;t
+      afford to let him go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Although I should have been on my way back to Toronto, I determined to
+      stay until Roscoe was entirely out of danger. It was singular, but in this
+      illness, though the fever was high, he never was delirious. It would
+      almost seem as if, having paid his penalty, the brain was at rest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While Roscoe hovered between life and death, Mr. Devlin, who persisted
+      that he would not die, was planning for a new hospital and a new church,
+      of which Roscoe should be president and padre respectively. But the
+      suspense to us all, for many days, was very great; until, one morning when
+      the birds were waking the cedars, and the snow on Mount Trinity was
+      flashing coolness down the hot valley, he waked and said to me: &ldquo;Marmion,
+      old friend; it is morning at last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it is morning,&rdquo; said I. &ldquo;And you are going to live now? You are
+      going to be reasonable and give the earth another chance?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I believe I shall live now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To cheer him, I told him what Mr. Devlin intended and had planned; how
+      river-drivers and salmon-fishers came every day from the valley to inquire
+      after him. I did not tell him that there had been one or two disturbances
+      between the river-drivers and the salmon-fishers. I tried to let him see
+      that there need be no fresh change in his life. At length he interrupted
+      me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marmion,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I understand what you mean. It would be cowardly of
+      me to leave here now if I were a whole man. I am true in intention, God
+      knows, but I must carry a crippled arm for the rest of my life, must I
+      not?.... and a crippled Padre is not the kind of man for this place. They
+      want men straight on their feet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think,&rdquo; I answered, &ldquo;that they will not be able to stand the test?
+      You gave them&mdash;shall I say it?&mdash;a crippled mind before; you give
+      them a crippled body now. Well, where do you think the odds lie? I should
+      fancy with you as you are.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a long silence in which neither of us moved. At last he turned
+      his face towards the window, and, not looking at me, said lingeringly:
+      &ldquo;This is a pleasant place.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I knew that he would remain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had not seen Mrs. Falchion during Roscoe&rsquo;s illness; but every day
+      Justine came and inquired, or a messenger was sent. And when, this
+      fortunate day, Justine herself came, and I told her that the crisis was
+      past, she seemed infinitely relieved and happy. Then she said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Madame has been ill these three days also; but now I think she will be
+      better; and we shall go soon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask her,&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;not to go yet for a few days. Press it as a favour to
+      me.&rdquo; Then, on second thought, I sat down and wrote Mrs. Falchion a note,
+      hinting that there were grave reasons why she should stay a little longer:
+      things connected with her own happiness. Truth is, I had received a note
+      that morning which had excited me. It referred to Mrs. Falchion. For I was
+      an arch-plotter&mdash;or had been.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I received a note in reply which said that she would do as I wished.
+      Meanwhile I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of some one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night a letter came to Roscoe. After reading it shrinkingly he handed
+      it to me. It said briefly:
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+   I&rsquo;m not sorry I did it, but I&rsquo;m glad I hevn&rsquo;t killed you. I was
+   drunk and mad. If I hadn&rsquo;t hurt you, I&rsquo;d never hev forgive myself.
+   I reckon now, there&rsquo;s no need to do any forgivin&rsquo; either side.
+   We&rsquo;re square&mdash;though maybe you didn&rsquo;t kill her after all. Mrs.
+   Falchion says you didn&rsquo;t. But you hurt her. Well, I&rsquo;ve hurt you.
+   And you will never hear no more of Phil&rsquo;s pal from Danger Mountain.
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      Immediately after sunset of this night, a storm swept suddenly down the
+      mountains, and prevented Ruth and her father from going to Viking. I left
+      them talking to Roscoe, he wearing such a look on his face as I like to
+      remember now, free from distress of mind&mdash;so much more painful than
+      distress of body. As I was leaving the room, I looked back and saw Ruth
+      sitting on a stool beside Roscoe&rsquo;s chair, holding the unmaimed hand in
+      hers; the father&rsquo;s face shining with pleasure and pride. Before I went
+      out, I turned again to look at them, and, as I did so, my eye fell on the
+      window against which the wind and rain were beating. And through the wet
+      there appeared a face, shocking in its paleness and misery&mdash;the face
+      of Mrs. Falchion. Only for an instant, and then it was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I opened the door and went out upon the verandah. As I did so, there was a
+      flash of lightning, and in that flash a figure hurried by me. One moment,
+      and there was another flash; and I saw the figure in the beating rain,
+      making toward the precipice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then I heard a cry, not loud, but full of entreaty and sorrow. I moved
+      quickly toward it. In another white gleam I saw Justine with her arms
+      about the figure, holding it back from the abyss. She said with incredible
+      pleading:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, no, madame, not that! It is wicked&mdash;wicked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I came and stood beside them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The figure sank upon the ground and buried a pitiful face in the wet
+      grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Justine leaned over her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sobbed as one whose harvest of the past is all tears. Nothing human
+      could comfort her yet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think she did not know that I was there. Justine lifted her face to me,
+      appealing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I turned and stole silently away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0021" id="link2HCH0021">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER XXI. IN PORT
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      That night I could not rest. It was impossible to rid myself of the
+      picture of Mrs. Falchion as I had seen her by the precipice in the storm.
+      What I had dared to hope for had come. She had been awakened; and with the
+      awakening had risen a new understanding of her own life and the lives of
+      others. The storm of wind and rain that had swept down the ravine was not
+      wilder than her passions when I left her with Justine in the dark night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All had gone well where the worst might have been. Roscoe&rsquo;s happiness was
+      saved to him. He felt that the accident to him was the penalty he paid for
+      the error of his past; but in the crash of penalties Mrs. Falchion, too,
+      was suffering; and, so far as she knew, must carry with her the remorse of
+      having seen, without mercy, her husband sink to a suicide&rsquo;s grave. I knew
+      that she was paying a great price now for a mistaken past. I wished that I
+      might make her remorse and sorrow less. There was a way, but I was not
+      sure that all would be as I wished. Since a certain dreadful day on the
+      &lsquo;Fulvia&rsquo;, Hungerford and I had held a secret in our hands. When it seemed
+      that Mrs. Falchion would bring a great trouble and shame into Roscoe&rsquo;s
+      life, I determined to use the secret. It must be used now only for Mrs.
+      Falchion&rsquo;s good. As I said in the last chapter, I had received word that
+      somebody was coming whose presence must take a large place in the drama of
+      these events: and I hoped the best.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Until morning I lay and planned the best way to bring things to a
+      successful issue. The morning came&mdash;beautiful after a mad night. Soon
+      after I got up I received a note, brought by a boy from Viking, which gave
+      me a thrill of excitement. The note requested me to go to Sunburst. But
+      first I sent a note to Mrs. Falchion, begging her in the name of our new
+      friendship not to leave the mountains that day. I also asked that she
+      would meet me in Sunburst that evening at eight o&rsquo;clock, at a place
+      indicated by me. I asked for a reply by the messenger I sent, and urged
+      her to ask no questions, but to trust me as one who only wished to do her
+      a great service, as I hoped her compliance would make possible. I waited
+      for the reply, and it bore but the one word&mdash;&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Greatly pleased, I started down the valley. It was still early when I
+      reached Sunburst. I went directly to the little tavern from whence the
+      note had come, and remained an hour or more. The result of that hour&rsquo;s
+      conversation with the writer of the note was memorable, as was the hour
+      itself. I began to hope fondly for the success of my scheme.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From the tavern I went to the village, with an elation hardly disturbed by
+      the fact that many of the salmon-fishers were sullen, because of foolish
+      depredations committed the evening before by idle river-men and mill-hands
+      of Viking. Had I not been so occupied with Mrs. Falchion and an event
+      wherein she must figure, I should have taken more seriously the mutterings
+      of the half-breeds, the moroseness of the Indians, and the nervous
+      threatenings of the white fishers: the more so because I knew that Mr.
+      Devlin had started early that morning for the Pacific Coast, and would not
+      be back for some days.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No two classes of people could be more unlike than the salmon-fishers of
+      Sunburst and the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking. The life of the
+      river-men was exciting, hardy, and perilous; tending to boisterousness,
+      recklessness, daring, and wild humour: that of the salmon-fishers was
+      cheerful, picturesque, infrequently dangerous, mostly simple and quiet.
+      The river-driver chose to spend his idle hours in crude, rough
+      sprightliness; the salmon-fisher loved to lie upon the shore and listen to
+      the village story-teller,&mdash;almost official when successful,&mdash;who
+      played upon the credulity and imagination of his listeners. The
+      river-driver loved excitement for its own sake, and behind his
+      boisterousness there was little evil. When the salmon-fisher was roused,
+      his anger became desperately serious. It was not his practice to be
+      boisterous for the sake of boisterousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this worked for a crisis.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From Sunburst I went over to Viking, and for a time watched a handful of
+      river-drivers upon a little island in the centre of the river, working to
+      loosen some logs and timber and foist them into the water, to be driven
+      down to the mill. I stood interested, because I had nothing to do of any
+      moment for a couple of hours. I asked an Indian on the bank to take his
+      canoe and paddle me over to the island. He did so. I do not know why I did
+      not go alone; but the Indian was near me, his canoe was at his hand, and I
+      did the thing almost mechanically. I landed on the island and watched with
+      great interest the men as they pried, twisted and tumbled the pile to get
+      at the key-log which, found and loosened, would send the heap into the
+      water.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was sorry I brought the Indian with me, for though the river-drivers
+      stopped their wild sing-song cry for a moment to call a &ldquo;How!&rdquo; at me, they
+      presently began to toss jeering words at the Indian. They had recognised
+      him&mdash;I had not&mdash;as a salmon-fisher and one of the Siwash tribe
+      from Sunburst. He remained perfectly silent, but I could see sullenness
+      growing on his face. He appeared to take no notice of his scornful
+      entertainers, but, instead of edging away, came nearer and nearer to the
+      tangle of logs&mdash;came, indeed, very close to me, as I stood watching
+      four or five men, with the foreman close by, working at a huge timber. At
+      a certain moment the foreman was in a kind of hollow. Just behind him,
+      near to the Indian, was a great log, which, if loosened by a slight
+      impulse, must fall into the hollow where the foreman stood. The foreman
+      had his face to us; the backs of the other men were on us. Suddenly the
+      foreman gave a frightened cry, and I saw at the same instant the Indian&rsquo;s
+      foot thrust out upon the big log. Before the foreman had time to get out
+      of the hollow, it slid down, caught him just above the ankle and broke the
+      leg.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wheeled, to see the Indian in his canoe making for the shore. He was
+      followed by the curses of the foreman and the gang. The foreman was very
+      quiet, but I could see that there was danger in his eye, and the
+      exclamations of the men satisfied me that they were planning an
+      inter-municipal difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I improvised bandages, set the leg directly, and in a little while we got
+      to the shore on a hastily constructed raft. After seeing the foreman
+      safely cared for, and giving Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s manager the facts of the
+      occurrence, more than sated with my morning&rsquo;s experience, I climbed the
+      mountain side, and took refuge from the heat in the coolness of Roscoe&rsquo;s
+      rooms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the afternoon I received a note from Mrs. Falchion, saying that on the
+      following day she would start for the coast; that her luggage would be
+      taken to Sunburst at once; and that, her engagement with me fulfilled, she
+      would spend a night there, not returning again to the hills. I was
+      preparing for my own departure, and was kept very busy until evening. Then
+      I went quickly down into the valley,&mdash;for I was late,&mdash;and
+      trudged eagerly on to Sunburst. As I neared the village I saw that there
+      were fewer lights&mdash;torches and fires&mdash;than usual on the river. I
+      noticed also that there were very few fishers on the banks or in the
+      river. But still the village seemed noisy, and, although it was dusk, I
+      could make out much stir in the one street along which the cottages and
+      huts ambled for nearly a mile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All at once it came to me strongly that the friction between the two
+      villages had consummated in the foreman&rsquo;s injury, and was here coming to a
+      painful crisis. My suspicions had good grounds. As I hurried on I saw that
+      the lights usually set on the banks of the river were scattered through
+      the town. Bonfires were being lighted, and torches were flaring in front
+      of the Indian huts. Coming closer, I saw excited groups of Indians,
+      half-breeds, and white men moving here and there; and then, all at once,
+      there came a cry&mdash;a kind of roar&mdash;from farther up the village,
+      and the men gathered themselves together, seizing guns, sticks, irons, and
+      other weapons, and ran up the street. I understood. I was moderately swift
+      of foot those days. I came quickly after them, and passed them. As I did
+      so I inquired of one or two fishers what was the trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They told me, as I had guessed, that they expected an attack on the
+      village by the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The situation was critical. I could foresee a catastrophe which would for
+      ever unsettle the two towns, and give the valley an unenviable reputation.
+      I was certain that, if Roscoe or Mr. Devlin were present, a prohibitive
+      influence could be brought to bear; that some one of strong will could
+      stand, as it were, in the gap between them, and prevent a pitched battle,
+      and, possibly, bloodshed. I was sure that at Viking the river-drivers had
+      laid their plans so secretly that the news of them would scarcely reach
+      the ears of the manager of the mill, and that, therefore, his influence,
+      as Mr. Devlin&rsquo;s, would not be available.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Remained only myself&mdash;as I first thought. I was unknown to a great
+      number of the men of both villages, and familiar with but very few&mdash;chiefly
+      those with whom I had a gossiping acquaintance. Yet, somehow, I felt that
+      if I could but get a half-dozen men to take a firm stand with me, I might
+      hold the rioters in check.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I ran by the side of the excitable fishers, I urged upon one or two of
+      them the wisdom and duty of preventing a conflict. Their reply was&mdash;and
+      it was very convincing&mdash;that they were not forcing a struggle, but
+      were being attacked, and in the case would fight. My hasty persuasion
+      produced but little result. But I kept thinking hard. Suddenly it came to
+      me that I could place my hand upon a man whose instincts in the matter
+      would be the same as mine; who had authority; knew the world; had been in
+      dangerous positions in his lifetime; and owed me something. I was sure
+      that I could depend upon him: the more so that once frail of body he had
+      developed into a strong, well-controlled man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even as I thought of him, I was within a few rods of the house where he
+      was. I looked, and saw him standing in the doorway. I ran and called to
+      him. He instantly joined me, and we ran on together: the fishermen
+      shouting loudly as they watched the river-drivers come armed down the
+      hill-slope into the village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hastily explained the situation to my friend, and told him what we must
+      do. A word or two assured me of all I wished to know. We reached the scene
+      of the disorder. The fishermen were bunched together, the river on the one
+      side, the houses and hills on the other. The river-drivers had halted not
+      many yards away, cool, determined and quiet, save for a little muttering.
+      In their red shirts, top boots, many of them with long black hair and
+      brass earrings, they looked a most formidable crowd. They had evidently
+      taken the matter seriously, and were come with the intention of carrying
+      their point, whatever it might be. Just as we reached the space between
+      the two parties, the massive leader of the river-drivers stepped forward,
+      and in a rough but collected voice said that they had come determined to
+      fight, if fighting were necessary, but that they knew what the end of the
+      conflict would be, and they did not wish to obliterate Sunburst entirely
+      if Sunburst accepted the conditions of peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There seemed no leader to the fishermen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My friend said to me quickly: &ldquo;You speak first.&rdquo; Instantly I stepped
+      forward and demanded to know what the terms of peace were. As soon as I
+      did so, there were harsh mutterings among the river-drivers. I explained
+      at once, waving back some of the fisher-men who were clamouring about me,
+      that I had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel; that I happened to be
+      where I was by accident, as I had happened by accident to see the
+      difficulty of the morning. But I said that it was the duty of every man
+      who was a good citizen and respected the laws of his country, to see, in
+      so far as it was possible, that there should be no breach of those laws. I
+      spoke in a clear strong voice, and I think I produced some effect upon
+      both parties to the quarrel. The reply of the leader was almost immediate.
+      He said that all they demanded was the Indian who had so treacherously
+      injured the foreman of their gangs. I saw the position at once, and was
+      dumfounded. For a moment I did not speak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was not prepared for the scene that immediately followed. Some one broke
+      through the crowd at my back, rushed past me, and stood between the two
+      forces. It was the Indian who had injured the foreman. He was naked to the
+      waist, and painted and feathered after the manner of his tribe going to
+      battle. There was a wild light in his eye, but he had no weapon. He folded
+      his arms across his breast, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you want me. Here I am. I will fight with any man all alone,
+      without a gun or arrow or anything. I will fight with my arms&mdash;to
+      kill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I saw revolvers raised at him instantly, but at that the man, my friend,
+      who stood beside me, sprang in front of the Indian.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop&mdash;stop!&rdquo; he cried. &ldquo;In the name of the law! I am a sergeant of
+      the mounted police of Canada. My jurisdiction extends from Winnipeg to
+      Vancouver. You cannot have this man except over my body: and for my body
+      every one of you will pay with your lives; for every blow struck this
+      night, there will be a hundred blows struck upon the river-drivers and
+      mill-hands of this valley. Take care! Behind me is the law of the land&mdash;her
+      police and her soldiery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. There was almost complete silence. He continued:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This man is my prisoner; I arrest him.&rdquo;&mdash;He put his hand upon the
+      Indian&rsquo;s shoulder.&mdash;&ldquo;For the crime he committed this morning he shall
+      pay: but to the law, not to you. Put up your revolvers, men. Go back to
+      Viking. Don&rsquo;t risk your lives; don&rsquo;t break the law and make yourselves
+      criminals and outlaws. Is it worth it? Be men. You have been the
+      aggressors. There isn&rsquo;t one of you but feels that justice which is the
+      boast of every man of the West. You wanted to avenge the crime of this
+      morning. But the vengeance is the law&rsquo;s.&mdash;Stand back&mdash;Stand
+      back!&rdquo; he said, and drew his revolver, as the leader of the river-drivers
+      stepped forward. &ldquo;I will kill the first man that tries to lay his hand
+      upon my prisoner. Don&rsquo;t be mad. I am not one man, I am a whole country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall never forget the thrill that passed through me as I saw a man who,
+      but a handful of months before, was neck deep in his grave, now blossomed
+      out into a strong, defiant soldier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause. At last the leader of the river-drivers spoke. &ldquo;See,&rdquo;
+       he said, &ldquo;Sergeant, I guess you&rsquo;re right. You&rsquo;re a man, so help me! Say,
+      boys,&rdquo; he continued, turning to his followers, &ldquo;let him have the Injin. I
+      guess he&rsquo;s earned him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So saying he wheeled, the men with him, and they tramped up the slope
+      again on their way back to Viking. The man who had achieved this turned
+      upon the fishers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Back to your homes!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Be thankful that blood was not shed here
+      to-night, and let this be a lesson to you. Now, go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The crowd turned, slowly shambled down the riverside, and left us three
+      standing there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But not alone. Out of the shadow of one of the houses came two women. They
+      stepped forward into the light of the bonfire burning near us. One of the
+      women was very pale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was Mrs. Falchion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I touched the arm of the man standing beside me. He wheeled and saw her
+      also. A cry broke from his lips, but he stood still. A whole life-time of
+      sorrow, trouble, and love looked out of his eyes. Mrs. Falchion came
+      nearer. Clasping her hands upon her breast, she peered up into his face,
+      and gasped:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh&mdash;oh&mdash;I thought that you were drowned&mdash;and dead! I saw
+      you buried in the sea. No&mdash;no&mdash;it cannot be you! I have heard
+      and seen all within these past few minutes. YOU are so strong and brave,
+      so great a man!... Oh, tell me, tell me, are you in truth my husband?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was your husband, Mercy Falchion. I was drowned, but this man&rdquo;&mdash;he
+      turned and touched my shoulder&mdash;&ldquo;this man brought me back to life. I
+      wanted to be dead to the world. I begged him to keep my secret. A sailor&rsquo;s
+      corpse was buried in my shroud, and I lived. At Aden I stole from the boat
+      in the night. I came to America&mdash;to Canada&mdash;to begin a new life
+      under a new name, never to see you again.... Do not, do not speak to me&mdash;unless
+      I am not to lose you again; unless I am to know that now you forgive me&mdash;that
+      you forgive me&mdash;and wish me to live&mdash;my wife!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She put both her hands out, a strange, sorrowful look in her eyes, and
+      said: &ldquo;I have sinned&mdash;I have sinned.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He took her hands in his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that you do not love me yet; but you may some day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I do not love you; but.... I am glad you live. Let us&mdash;go
+      home.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      THE END. <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     ETEXT EDITOR&rsquo;S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A heart-break for that kind is their salvation
+     A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains
+     A man you could bank on, and draw your interest reg&rsquo;lar
+     Aboriginal dispersion
+     All he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious (Scientist)
+     And even envy praised her
+     Audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or window
+     But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison&mdash;ah!
+     Death is a magnificent ally; it untangles knots
+     Death is not the worst of evils
+     Engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady than in the man
+     Every true woman is a mother, though she have no child
+     Fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves
+     For a man having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks
+     He didn&rsquo;t always side with the majority
+     He had neither self-consciousness nor fear
+     Her own suffering always set her laughing at herself
+     It is difficult to be idle&mdash;and important too
+     It is hard to be polite to cowards
+     Jews everywhere treated worse than the Chinaman
+     Learned what fools we mortals be
+     Love can outlive slander
+     Men do not steal up here: that is the unpardonable crime
+     One always buys back the past at a tremendous price
+     One doesn&rsquo;t choose to worry
+     Saying uncomfortable things in a deferential way
+     She had provoked love, but had never given it
+     Slow-footed hours wandered by, leaving apathy in their train
+     &ldquo;Still the end of your existence,&rdquo; I rejoined&mdash;&ldquo;to be amused?&rdquo;
+      That anxious civility which beauty can inspire
+     The happy scene of the play before the villain comes in
+     The ravings of a sick man are not always counted ravings
+     The sea is a great breeder of friendship
+     The tender care of a woman&mdash;than many pharmacopoeias
+     The threshold of an acknowledged love
+     There are things we repent of which cannot be repaired
+     There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world
+     Think that a woman gives the heart for pleasant weather only?
+     Thou wouldst not think how ill all&rsquo;s here about my heart
+     Time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him
+     Vanity; and from this much feminine hatred springs
+     Very severe on those who do not pretend to be good
+     What is gone is gone Graves are idolatry
+     Who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery
+     Would look back and not remember that she had a childhood
+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg&rsquo;s Mrs. Falchion, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
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+</pre>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </p>
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+</html>
diff --git a/6194.txt b/6194.txt
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mrs. Falchion, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
+
+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: Mrs. Falchion, Complete
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+Last Updated: March 12, 2009
+Release Date: October 17, 2006 [EBook #6194]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. FALCHION, COMPLETE ***
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger and Andrew Sly
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. FALCHION
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This novel was written in the days of the three-decker, and it went out
+to sea as such. Every novel of mine written until 1893 was published in
+two or three volumes, and the sale to the libraries was greater than the
+sale to the general public. This book was begun in 1892 at the time when
+the Pierre stories were being written, and it was finished in the summer
+of 1893. It did not appear serially; indeed, I made no attempt at serial
+publication. I had a feeling that as it was to be my first novel, it
+should be judged as a whole and taken at a gasp, as it were. I believe
+that the reader of Messrs. Methuen & Company was not disposed to publish
+the book, but Mr. Methuen himself (or Mr. Stedman as he was then called)
+was impressed by it and gave it his friendly confidence. He was certain
+that it would arrest the attention of the critics and of the public,
+whether it became popular or not. I have not a set of those original
+three volumes. I wish I had, because they won for me an almost
+unhoped-for pleasure. The 'Daily Chronicle' gave the volumes over
+a column of review, and headed the notice, "A Coming Novelist." The
+'Athenaeum' said that 'Mrs. Falchion' was a splendid study of character;
+'The Pall Mall Gazette' said that the writing was as good as anything
+that had been done in our time, while at the same time it took rather a
+dark view of my future as a novelist, because it said I had not probed
+deep enough into the wounds of character which I had inflicted. The
+article was written by Mr. George W. Stevens, and he was right in saying
+that I had not probed deep enough. Few very young men--and I was very
+young then--do probe very deeply. At the appearance of 'When Valmond
+Came to Pontiac', however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my
+future was assured.
+
+I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
+'Mrs. Falchion' was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
+been preceded by a short novel called 'The Chief Factor', since rescued
+from publication and never published in book form in England. I realised
+when I had written 'Mrs. Falchion' that I had not found my metier, and I
+was fearful of complete failure. I had come but a few years before from
+the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
+write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
+still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of
+the Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning',
+and 'The Right of Way' portrayed. That life was destined to give me
+an assured place and public, while 'Mrs. Falchion', and the South Sea
+stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
+and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
+attention.
+
+Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
+as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
+study of character. There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
+to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the
+mind of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central
+figure in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge
+of being a mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an
+impudent melodrama, which has its own fascinations."
+
+Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise
+in it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of
+treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting
+episode. It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found. It was not done
+on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine that
+this tendency has run through all my works. It represents the elements
+of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of representation
+has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties. It sometimes
+alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a realist, and
+it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone, who cares
+for what a character does, and not for what a character is or says,
+except in so far as it emphasises what it does. One has to work,
+however, in one's own way, after one's own idiosyncrasies, and here
+is the book that represents one of my own idiosyncrasies in its most
+primitive form.
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+     BOOK I
+
+     BELOW THE SUN LINE
+
+          I.     THE GATES OF THE SEA
+          II.    "MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR"
+          III.   A TALE OF NO MAN'S SEA
+          IV.    THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+          V.     ACCUSING FACES
+          VI.    MUMMERS ALL
+          VII.   THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+          VIII.  A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+          IX.    "THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS"
+          X.     BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+
+
+     BOOK II
+
+     THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+
+          XI.    AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+          XII.   THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+          XIII.   THE SONG OF THE SAW
+          XIV.   THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+          XV.    IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+          XVI.   A DUEL IN ARCADY
+          XVII.   RIDING THE REEFS
+          XVIII.  THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+          XIX.   THE SENTENCE
+          XX.    AFTER THE STORM
+          XXI.   IN PORT
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I. BELOW THE SUN LINE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I. THE GATES OF THE SEA
+
+The part I played in Mrs. Falchion's career was not very noble, but I
+shall set it forth plainly here, else I could not have the boldness to
+write of her faults or those of others. Of my own history little need
+be said in preface. Soon after graduating with honours as a physician,
+I was offered a professional post in a college of medicine in Canada. It
+was difficult to establish a practice in medicine without some capital,
+else I had remained in London; and, being in need of instant means, I
+gladly accepted the offer. But six months were to intervene before
+the beginning of my duties--how to fill that time profitably was the
+question. I longed to travel, having scarcely been out of England during
+my life. Some one suggested the position of surgeon on one of the great
+steamers running between England and Australia. The idea of a long
+sea-voyage was seductive, for I had been suffering from over-study,
+though the position itself was not very distinguished. But in those days
+I cared more for pleasing myself than for what might become a newly-made
+professor, and I was prepared to say with a renowned Irish dean:
+"Dignity and I might be married, for all the relations we are."
+
+I secured the position with humiliating ease and humiliating smallness
+of pay. The steamer's name was the 'Fulvia'. It was one of the largest
+belonging to the Occidental Company. It carried no emigrants and had a
+passenger list of fashionable folk. On the voyage out to Australia the
+weather was pleasant, save in the Bay of Biscay; there was no sickness
+on board, and there were many opportunities for social gaiety, the
+cultivation of pleasant acquaintances, and the encouragement of that
+brisk idleness which aids to health. This was really the first holiday
+in my life, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Nothing of unusual interest
+occurred on the outward voyage; for one thing, because there were no
+unusual people among the passengers; for another, because the vessel
+behaved admirably. The same cannot be said of the return voyage: and
+with it my story really begins. Misfortune followed us out of Sydney
+harbour. We broke a crank-shaft between there and Port Phillip,
+Melbourne; a fire in the hold occurred at Adelaide; and at Albany we
+buried a passenger who had died of consumption one day out from King
+George's Sound. At Colombo, also, we had a misfortune, but it was of a
+peculiar kind, and did not obtrude itself at once; it was found in
+an addition to our passenger list. I had spent a day in exploring
+Colombo--visiting Arabi Pasha, inspecting Hindu temples, watching the
+jugglers and snake-charmers, evading guides and the sellers of brummagem
+jewellery, and idling in the Cinnamon Gardens. I returned to the ship
+tired out. After I had done some official duties, I sauntered to the
+gangway, and, leaning against the bulwarks, idly watched the passengers
+come on board from the tender. Two of these made an impression on me.
+One was a handsome and fashionably-dressed woman, who was followed by
+a maid or companion (as I fancied), carrying parcels; the other, a
+shabbily-dressed man, who was the last to come up from the tender. The
+woman was going down the companion-way when he stepped on deck with a
+single bag in his hand, and I noticed that he watched her with a strange
+look in his eyes. He stood still as he gazed, and remained so for
+a moment after she had gone; then he seemed to recover himself, and
+started, as I thought, almost guiltily, when he saw that my attention
+was attracted. He nervously shifted his bag from one hand to the other,
+and looked round as though not certain of where he should go. A steward
+came to him officiously, and patronisingly too,--which is the bearing of
+servants to shabbily-dressed people,--but he shook his head, caught his
+bag smartly away from the steward's fingers, and moved towards the after
+part of the ship, reserved for intermediate passengers. As he went he
+hesitated, came to the side of the vessel, looked down at the tender for
+a moment, cast his eyes to where the anchor was being weighed, made as
+if he would go back to the tender, then, seeing that the ladder was
+now drawn up, sighed, and passed on to the second-class companion-way,
+through which he disappeared.
+
+I stood commenting idly to myself upon this incident, which, slight
+though it was, appeared to have significance of a kind, when Hungerford,
+the fifth officer, caught me slyly by the arm and said, "Lucky fellow!
+Nothing to do but watch the world go by. I wish I had you in the North
+Atlantic on a whaler, or in the No Man's Sea on a pearl-smack for a
+matter of thirty days."
+
+"What would come of that, Hungerford?" said I.
+
+"An exchange of matter for mind, Marmion; muscle for meditation, physics
+for philosophy."
+
+"You do me too much honour; at present I've neither mind, meditation,
+nor philosophy; I am simply vegetating."
+
+"Which proves you to be demoralised. I never saw a surgeon on a ship
+who wasn't. They began with mind--more or less--they ate the fruits of
+indolence, got precious near being sinful as well as indolent, and
+ended with cheap cynicism, with the old 'quid refert'--the thing Hamlet
+plagiarised in his, 'But it is no matter.'"
+
+"Isn't this an unusual occupation for you, Hungerford--this Swift-like
+criticism?"
+
+"Swift-like, is it? You see, I've practised on many of your race,
+Marmion, and I have it pat now. You are all of two classes--those who
+sicken in soul and leave after one trip, and those who make another trip
+and are lost."
+
+"Lost? How?"
+
+Hungerford pressed his fingers hard on my breastbone, looked at me
+enigmatically from under his well-hung brows, and replied: "Brains put
+out to seed, morals put out to vegetate--that's 'lost.'"
+
+"What about fifth officers?"
+
+"Fifth officers work like navvies, and haven't time for foolishness.
+They've got to walk the bridge, and practise the boats, and be
+responsible for luggage--and here I am talking to you like an infallible
+undergraduate, while the lascars are in endless confusion with a
+half-dozen pieces of baggage, and the first officer foams because I'm
+not there to set them right. I leave you to your dreams. Good-bye."
+
+Hungerford was younger than myself, but he knew the world, and I was
+flattered by these uncommon remarks, because he talked to no one else
+on the ship in the same way. He never sought to make friends, had a
+thorough contempt for social trifling, and shrugged his shoulders at
+the "swagger" of some of the other officers. I think he longed for a
+different kind of sea-life, so accustomed had he been to adventurous and
+hardy ways. He had entered the Occidental service because he had
+fallen in love with a pretty girl, and thought it his duty to become a
+"regular," and thus have the chance of seeing her every three months in
+London. He had conceived a liking for me, reciprocated on my part; the
+more so, because I knew that behind his blunt exterior there was a warm
+and manly heart. When he left me I went to my cabin and prepared for
+dinner, laughing as I did so at his keen, uncompromising criticism,
+which I knew was correct enough; for of all official posts that of
+a ship-surgeon is least calculated to make a man take a pride in
+existence. At its best, it is assisting in the movement of a panorama;
+at its worst, worse than a vegetation. Hungerford's solicitude for
+myself, however, was misplaced, because this one voyage would end my
+career as ship-surgeon, and, besides, I had not vegetated, but had been
+interested in everything that had occurred, humdrum as it was. With
+these thoughts, I looked out of the port-hole, to see the shores of
+Colombo, Galle Face, and Mount Lavinia fading in the distance, and heard
+seven bells--the time for dinner. When I took my seat at the table of
+which I was the head, my steward handed to me a slip of paper, saying
+that the chief steward had given a new passenger, a lady, the seat at my
+right hand, which had been vacated at Colombo. The name on the paper was
+"Mrs. Falchion." The seat was still empty, and I wondered if this
+was the beautiful passenger who had attracted me and interested the
+Intermediate Passenger. I was selfish enough to wish so: and it was so.
+
+We had finished the soup before she entered. The chief steward, with
+that anxious civility which beauty can inspire in even so great a
+personage, conducted her to her seat beside me. I confess that though I
+was at once absorbed in this occurrence, I noticed also that some of the
+ladies present smiled significantly when they saw at whose table Mrs.
+Falchion was placed, and looked not a little ironically at the purser,
+who, as it was known, always tried to get for his table the newest
+addition to the passenger list--when it was a pretty woman. I believe
+that one or two rude people chaffed the chief steward about "favouring
+the doctor"; but he had a habit of saying uncomfortable things in
+a deferential way, and they did not pursue the subject. Then they
+commiserated the purser, who was an unpleasant little Jew of an envious
+turn of mind; and he, as I was told, likened me to Sir John Falstaff.
+I was sensitive in those days, and this annoyed me, particularly that
+I had had nothing to do with placing Mrs. Falchion at my table. We are
+always most sensitive when guilty concerning the spirit and not the
+letter.
+
+One who has lived the cosmopolitan life of London should be quick at
+detecting nationalities, but I found it difficult, even after I heard
+her speak, to guess at Mrs. Falchion's native land. There were good
+reasons for this, as may be duly seen. Her appearance in the saloon
+caused an instant buzz of admiration and interest, of which she seemed
+oblivious. If it was acting, it was good acting; if it was lack of
+self-consciousness, it was remarkable. As I soon came to know, it was
+the latter--which, in such a woman, increased the remarkableness. I was
+inclined at first to venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I
+discovered that she possessed the attracting power of an actress without
+the calculated manner of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was
+proof of this emancipation.
+
+When she sat down, I immediately welcomed her by name to my table.
+The only surprise she showed at my knowledge of her name and my
+self-introduction was to lift her head slightly and look at me, as if
+wondering whether I was likely to be an inquisitive and troublesome
+host; and also, as I thought, to measure me according to her measure. It
+was a quick look, and the interest she showed was of a passive kind. She
+asked me as she might an old acquaintance--or a waiter--if the soup was
+good, and what the fish was like; decided on my recommendation to wait
+for the entrees; requested her next neighbour to pass the olives; in
+an impersonal way began to talk about the disadvantages of life at sea;
+regretted that all ship food tasted alike; wondered if the cook knew
+how to make a Russian salad; and added that the menu was a national
+compromise.
+
+Now that she was close to me, I could see that her beauty was real and
+notable. Her features were regular, her eyes of a greyish violet, her
+chin strong, yet not too strong--the chin of a singer; her hands had
+that charming quiet certainty of movement possessed by so few; and her
+colour was of the most delightful health. In this delightful health, in
+her bountiful yet perfect physical eloquence, her attractiveness, as
+it seemed to me, chiefly lay. For no one would ever have guessed her to
+possess an emotional temperament. All that was outer was fascinating,
+all that was inner suggested coldness. After experience assured me that
+all who came to know her shared this estimate, even in those days when
+every man on the ship was willing to be her slave. She had a compelling
+atmosphere, a possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time
+was unemotional--like Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, "of a cold
+conversation." She was striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well
+within convention and "good form." Her dress was simply and modestly
+worn, and had little touches of grace and taste which, I understand,
+many ladies on board sought to imitate, when they recovered from the
+first feeling of envy.
+
+She was an example of splendid life. I cared to look at her as one would
+dwell on the sleek beauty of a deer--as, indeed, I have many a time
+since then, in India, watched a tigress asleep on her chain, claws
+hidden, wild life latent but slumbering. I could have staked my life
+that Mrs. Falchion was insensible to love or passion, and unimpeachable
+in the broad scheme of right and wrong; imperious in requiring homage,
+incapable of giving it. I noticed when she laughed, as she did once at
+table, that her teeth were very white and small and square; and, like a
+schoolgirl, she had a habit of clicking them together very lightly, but
+not conspicuously, as if trying their quality. This suggested, however,
+something a little cruel. Her appetite was very good. She was coolly
+anxious about the amusements; she asked me if I could get her a list
+of the passengers, said that she was never sea-sick, and took a languid
+interest in the ladies present. Her glance at the men was keen at first,
+then neutral.
+
+Once again, during the meal, she slowly turned and flashed an
+inquiring glance at me. I caught her eyes. She did not show the least
+embarrassment, and asked me if the band insisted on playing every day.
+Before she left the saloon, one could see that many present were talking
+about her. Even the grim old captain followed her with his eyes as she
+went. When she rose, I asked her if she was going on deck. I did it
+casually, as though it was her usual custom to appear there after
+dinner. In like fashion she replied that her maid had some unpacking
+to do, she had some things to superintend, and, when this was done,
+she intended to spend a time on deck. Then, with a peculiar smile, she
+passed out.
+
+   [Note by Dr. Marmion appended to his MSS.:--"Many of the
+   conversations and monologues in this history, not heard by myself
+   when they occurred, were told to me afterwards, or got from the
+   diaries and notes of the persons concerned. Only a few are purely
+   imaginary."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II. "MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR"
+
+I went to my cabin, took a book, sat down, and began to smoke. My
+thoughts drifted from the book, and then occurred a strange, incongruous
+thing. It was a remembered incident. It came like a vision as I was
+lighting a fresh cigar:
+
+A boy and a girl in a village chemist's shop; he with a boy's love
+for her, she responding in terms, but not in fact. He passed near her
+carrying a measure of sulphuric acid. She put out her hand suddenly and
+playfully, as though to bar his way. His foot slipped on the oily floor,
+and the acid spilled on his hands and the skirt of her dress. He turned
+instantly and plunged his hands into a measure of alcohol standing near
+before the acid had more than slightly scalded them. She glanced at
+his startled face; hers was without emotion. She looked down, and said
+petulantly: "You have spoiled my dress; I cannot go into the street."
+
+The boy's clothes were burnt also. He was poor, and to replace them must
+be a trial to him; her father owned the shop, and was well-to-do. Still,
+he grieved most that she should be annoyed, though he saw her injustice.
+But she turned away and left him.
+
+Another scene then crossed the disc of smoke:
+
+The boy and girl, now man and woman, standing alone in the chemist's
+shop. He had come out of the big working world, after travel in many
+countries. His fame had come with him. She was to be married the next
+day to a seller of purple and fine linen. He was smiling a good-bye, and
+there was nothing of the old past in the smile. The flame now was in her
+eyes, and she put out both her hands to stop him as he turned to go;
+but his face was passionless. "You have spoiled my heart," she said; "I
+cannot go into the world so."
+
+"It is too late; the measures are empty," he replied.
+
+"I love you to-day, I will loathe you to-morrow," was the answer.
+
+But he turned and left her, and she blindly stretched out her hands and
+followed him into the darkness, weeping.
+
+Was it the scent of the chemicals in my cabin, coupled with some
+subterranean association of things, which brought these scenes vividly
+before me at this moment? What had they to do with Mrs. Falchion?
+
+A time came when the occurrence appeared to me in the light of
+prescience, but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all
+reason and philosophy, are the result of outer impression. The primal
+language of our minds is in the concrete. Afterwards it becomes the
+cypher, and even at its highest it is expressed by angles, lines, and
+geometrical forms--substances and allusive shapes. But now, as the scene
+shifted by, I had involuntarily thrust forward my hands as did the
+girl when she passed out into the night, and, in doing so, touched the
+curtain of my cabin door swinging in towards me. I recovered myself,
+and a man timidly stepped inside, knocking as he did so. It was the
+Intermediate Passenger. His face was pale; he looked ill.
+
+Poor as his dress was, I saw that he had known the influences and
+practised the graces of good society, though his manner was hesitating
+and anxious now. I knew at a glance that he was suffering from both
+physical pain and mental worry. Without a word, I took his wrist and
+felt his pulse, and he said: "I thought I might venture to come--"
+
+I motioned him not to speak. I counted the irregular pulse-beats, then
+listened to the action of his heart, with my ear to his breast. There
+lay his physical trouble. I poured out a dose of digitalis, and, handing
+it to him, asked him to sit down. As he sat and drank the medicine,
+I rapidly studied him. The chin was firm, and the eyes had a dogged,
+persistent look that, when turned on you, saw not you, but something
+beyond you. The head was thrown slightly forward, the eyes looking up at
+an angle. This last action was habitual with him. It gave him a peculiar
+earnestness. As I noted these peculiarities, my mind was also with his
+case; I saw that his life was threatened. Perhaps he guessed what was
+going on in me, for he said in a low, cultured voice: "The wheels will
+stop too long some time, and there will be no rebound;"--referring to
+the irregular action of his heart.
+
+"Perhaps that is true," I said; "yet it depends a good deal upon
+yourself when it will be. Men can die if they wish without committing
+suicide. Look at the Maori, the Tongan, the Malay. They can also prolong
+life (not indefinitely, but in a case like yours considerably), if
+they choose. You can lengthen your days if you do not brood on fatal
+things--fatal to you; if you do not worry yourself into the grave."
+
+I knew that something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such
+a man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed. I was
+aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or
+constitutional thing, but springs from some extraneous cause.
+
+He smiled faintly, raised his head a little higher, and said:
+"Yes, that's just it, I suppose; but then we do not order our own
+constitutions; and I believe, Doctor, that you must kill a nerve before
+it ceases to hurt. One doesn't choose to worry, I think, any more than
+one chooses to lay bare a nerve." And then his eyes dropped, as if he
+thought he had already said too much.
+
+Again I studied him, repeating my definitions in my mind. He was not a
+drunkard; he might have had no vice, so free was his face from any sign
+of dissipation or indulgence; but there was suffering, possibly the
+marks of some endured shame. The suffering and shadows showed the more
+because his features were refined enough for a woman. And altogether it
+struck me that he was possessed by some one idea, which gave his looks a
+kind of sorrowful eloquence, such as one sees on occasion in the face of
+a great actor like Salvini, on the forehead of a devout Buddhist, or in
+the eyes of a Jesuit missionary who martyrs himself in the wilds.
+
+I felt at once for the man a sympathy, a brotherliness, the causes of
+which I should be at a loss to trace. Most people have this experience
+at one time or another in their lives. It is not a matter of sex; it may
+be between an old man and a little child, a great man and a labourer, a
+schoolgirl and an old native woman. There is in such companionships less
+self-interest than in any other. As I have said, I thought that this man
+had a trouble, and I wished to know it; not from curiosity,--though my
+mind had a selfish, inquiring strain,--but because I hoped I might
+be able to help him in some way. I put my hand on his shoulder, and
+replied: "You will never be better unless you get rid of your worry."
+
+He drew in a sharp breath, and said: "I know that. I am afraid I shall
+never be better."
+
+There was a silence in which we looked at each other steadily, and then
+he added, with an intense but quiet misery: "Never--never!"
+
+At that he moved his hand across his forehead wearily, rose, and turned
+toward the door. He swayed as he did so, and would have fallen, but I
+caught him as he lost consciousness, and laid him on the cabin sofa.
+I chafed his hands, unloosed his collar, and opened the bosom of his
+shirt. As the linen dropped away from his throat, a small portrait on
+ivory was exposed on his breast. I did not look closely at it then, but
+it struck me that the woman's head in the portrait was familiar, though
+the artistic work was not recent, and the fashion of the hair was
+of years before. When his eyes opened, and he felt his neck bare, he
+hurriedly put up his hand and drew the collar close, and at the same
+time sent a startled and inquiring look at me. After a few moments I
+helped him to his feet, and, thanking me more with a look than with
+words, he turned towards the door again.
+
+"Wait," I said, "until I give you some medicine, and then you shall
+take my arm to your cabin." With a motion of the hand, signifying the
+uselessness of remedies, he sat down again. As I handed him the phial,
+I continued: "I know that it is none of my business, but you are
+suffering. To help your body, your mind should be helped also. Can't you
+tell me your trouble? Perhaps I should be able to serve you. I would if
+I could."
+
+It may be that I spoke with a little feeling and an apparent honesty;
+for his eyes searched mine in a kind of earnest bewilderment, as if this
+could not be true--as if, indeed, life had gone so hard with him that
+he had forgotten the way of kindness. Then he stretched out his hand and
+said brokenly: "I am grateful, believe me. I cannot tell you just now,
+but I will soon, perhaps." His hand was upon the curtain of the door,
+when my steward's voice was heard outside, calling my name. The man
+himself entered immediately, and said that Mrs. Falchion sent her
+compliments, and would I come at once to see her companion, Miss Caron,
+who had injured herself.
+
+The Intermediate Passenger turned towards me a strange look; his lips
+opened as if about to speak, but he said nothing. At the instant there
+came to my mind whom the picture on his breast resembled: it was Mrs.
+Falchion.
+
+I think he saw this new intelligence in my face, and a meaning smile
+took the place of words, as he slowly left the cabin, mutely refusing
+assistance.
+
+I went to Mrs. Falchion's cabin, and met her outside the door. She
+looked displeased. "Justine has hurt herself," she said. "Please attend
+to her; I am going on deck."
+
+The unfeeling nature of this remark held me to the spot for a moment;
+then I entered the cabin. Justine Caron, a delicate but warm-faced girl
+of little more than twenty, was sitting on the cabin sofa, her head
+supported against the wall, and her hand wound in a handkerchief
+soaked in blood. Her dress and the floor were also stained. I undid the
+handkerchief and found an ugly wound in the palm of the hand. I called
+the steward, and sent him to my dispensary for some necessaries; then
+I asked her how it happened. At the moment I saw the cause--a broken
+bottle lying on the floor. "The ship rolled," she said. "The bottle fell
+from the shelf upon the marble washstand, and, breaking, from there to
+the floor. Madame caught at my arm to save herself from falling; but I
+slipped, and was cut on the bottle--so."
+
+As she ended there was a knock, but the curtain was not drawn, and Mrs.
+Falchion's voice was heard. "My dress is stained, Justine."
+
+The half-fainting girl weakly replied: "I am very sorry, madame,
+indeed."
+
+To this Mrs. Falchion rejoined: "When you have been attended to, you
+may go to bed, Justine. I shall not want you again to-night. But I shall
+change my dress. It is so unpleasant; I hate blood. I hope you will be
+well in the morning."
+
+To this Justine replied: "Ah, madame, I am sorry. I could not help it;
+but I shall be quite well in the morning, I am sure." Then she added
+quietly to me: "The poor madame! She will not see suffering. She hates
+pain. Sickness troubles her. Shall I be able to use my hand very soon,
+monsieur?"
+
+There was a wistful look in her eyes, and guessing why it was there, I
+said: "Yes, soon, I hope--in a few days, no doubt."
+
+Her face lighted up, and she said: "Madame likes about her people who
+are happy and well." Then, as if she might have said too much, she
+hurriedly added: "But she is very kind;" and, stooping down quickly, her
+face whitening with the effort, she caught up the broken glass and threw
+it through the port-hole into the sea.
+
+A half-hour later I went on deck, and found Mrs. Falchion comfortably
+seated in her deck-chair. I brought a stool over, and sat down beside
+her. To this hour the quickness with which I got upon friendly terms
+with her astonishes me.
+
+"Justine is better?" she said, and her hand made a slight motion of
+disgust.
+
+"Yes. She was not dangerously hurt, of course."
+
+"Let us change the subject, please. They are going to have a fancy-dress
+ball on board, I believe, before we get to Aden. How tiresome! Isn't it
+a little affectation on the part of the stage-struck committee? Isn't
+it--inconsequent?"
+
+"That depends," I said vaguely, inviting a question. She idled with a
+book in her lap.
+
+"On what?"
+
+"On those who go, what costumes are worn, and how much beauty and art
+appear."
+
+"But the trouble! Does it pay? What return does one get?"
+
+"If all admire, half are envious, some are jealous, and one is
+devoted--isn't that enough?" I think I was a fool that night.
+
+"You seem to understand women," she said, with a puzzling and not quite
+satisfactory smile. "Yes, all that is something."
+
+Though I was looking at the sea rather than at her, I saw again that
+inquiring look in her eyes--such a measuring look as a recruiting
+sergeant might give a victim of the Queen's shilling.
+
+After a moment's pause she continued, I thought, abstractedly: "As what
+should you go?"
+
+I answered lightly and without premeditation, "As Caius Cassius. Why
+should you not appear as Portia?"
+
+She lifted her eyebrows at me.
+
+"As Portia?"
+
+"As Portia, the wife of Brutus," I blundered on, at the same time
+receiving her permission, by a nod, to light my cigar.
+
+"The pious, love-sick wife of Brutus!" This in a disdainful tone, and
+the white teeth clicked softly together.
+
+"Yes, a good disguise," I said banteringly, though I fancy somewhat
+tentatively also, and certainly with a touch of rudeness. I was thinking
+at that moment of the Intermediate Passenger, and I was curious.
+
+"And you think of going in the disguise of a gentleman? Caius Cassius
+was that, wasn't he?" she retorted in an ironical tone.
+
+"I suppose he was, though he was punished once for rudeness," I replied
+apologetically.
+
+"Quite so," was the decisive reply.
+
+I felt that she was perfectly cool, while I was a little confused, and
+ashamed too, that I had attempted to be playfully satirical. And so,
+wondering what I should say next, I remarked in desperation: "Do you
+like the sea?"
+
+"I am never ill at sea," was her reply. "But I do not really like it; it
+is treacherous. The land would satisfy me if--" She paused.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Falchion--'if'?"
+
+"If I did not wish to travel," she vaguely added, looking blandly at me.
+
+"You have travelled much?" I ventured.
+
+"A great deal;" and again I saw that scrutiny in her eyes. It occurred
+to me at the moment that she might think I possessed some previous
+knowledge of her.
+
+My mind became occupied again with the Intermediate Passenger and the
+portrait that he wore at his neck. I almost laughed to think of the
+melodramatic turn which my first conversation with this woman might
+chance to take. I felt that I was dealing with one who was able to meet
+cleverly any advance of mine, but I determined to lead the talk into as
+deep waters as possible.
+
+"I suppose, too, you are a good practical sailor--that is, you
+understand seamanship, if you have travelled much?" I do not know why I
+said that, for it sounded foolish to me afterwards.
+
+"Pretty well," she replied. "I can manage a sail; I know the argot, I
+could tell the shrouds from the bulwarks, and I've rowed a boat in a
+choppy sea."
+
+"It is not an accomplishment usual to your sex."
+
+"It was ordinary enough where I spent the early part of my life," was
+the idle reply; and she settled herself more comfortably in her chair.
+
+"Yes? May I ask where that was?" and as I said this, it occurred to
+me that she was, perhaps, leading me on, instead of my leading her; to
+betray me as to anything I knew about her.
+
+"In the South Seas," she replied. "My father was a British consul in the
+Islands."
+
+"You have not come from the Islands now, I suppose?"
+
+"No," she said a little more softly; "it is years since I was in Samoa.
+... My father is buried there."
+
+"You must have found it a romantic life in those half-barbaric places?"
+
+She shifted in her chair. "Romantic!" Her tone conveyed a very slight
+uneasiness and vagueness. "I am afraid you must ask some one else about
+that sort of thing. I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that
+was half-barbaric." Here she laughed slightly.
+
+Just then I saw the lights of a vessel far off. "See--a vessel!" I said;
+and I watched the lights in silence, but thinking. I saw that she too
+was watching idly.
+
+At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: "Yes, I suppose
+life must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like
+the Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?"
+
+"Indeed, then," she replied decisively, "you are not to suppose anything
+of the kind. The danger is not alone for the white people."
+
+At this I appeared, as I really was, interested, and begged her to
+explain what she meant. She thought a moment, and then briefly, but
+clearly, sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of
+missionary labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim
+of civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were
+protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns;
+how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the
+crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest
+and purest, the valour of nationality. These phrases are my own--the
+substance, not the fashion, of her speech.
+
+"You do not, then," I said, "believe wholly in the unselfishness of
+missionaries, the fair dealing of traders, the perfect impartiality of
+justice, as shown through steel-clad cruisers?"
+
+"I have seen too much to be quite fair in judgment, I fear, even to
+men-of-war's men;" and she paused, listening to a song which came from
+the after-part of the ship. The air was very still, and a few of the
+words of the droll, plaintive ditty came to us.
+
+Quartermaster Stone, as he passed us, hummed it, and some voices of the
+first-class passengers near joined in the refrain:
+
+        "Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+          And the old world!"
+
+Some days later I got all of the song from one of the intermediate
+passengers, and the last verse of it I give here:
+
+       "I'm a-sailing, I'm a-sailing on the sea,
+         To a harbour where the wind is still;
+        Oh, my dearie, do you wait for me?
+         Oh, my dearie, do you love me still?
+        Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+          And the old world!"
+
+I noticed that Mrs. Falchion's brow contracted as the song proceeded,
+making a deep vertical line between the eyes, and that the fingers of
+the hand nearest me closed on the chair-arm firmly. The hand attracted
+me. It was long, the fingers were shapely, but not markedly tapering,
+and suggested firmness. I remarked afterward, when I chanced to shake
+hands with her, that her fingers enclosed one's hand; it was not a mere
+touch or pressure, but an unemotional and possessive clasp. I felt sure
+that she had heard the song before, else it had not produced even this
+so slight effect on her nerves. I said: "It is a quaint song. I suppose
+you are familiar with it and all of its kind?"
+
+"I fancy I have heard it somewhere," she answered in a cold voice.
+
+I am aware that my next question was not justified by our very
+short acquaintance; but this acquaintance had been singular from its
+beginning, and it did not seem at that moment as it looks on paper;
+besides, I had the Intermediate Passenger in my mind. "Perhaps your
+husband is a naval man?" I asked.
+
+A faint flush passed over her face, and then, looking at me with a
+neutral expression and some reserve of manner, she replied: "My husband
+was not a naval man."
+
+She said "was not." That implied his death.
+
+There was no trouble in her manner; I could detect no sign of
+excitement. I turned to look at the lights of the approaching vessel,
+and there, leaning against the railing that divided the two decks, was
+the Intermediate Passenger. He was looking at us intently. A moment
+after he disappeared. Beyond doubt there was some intimate association
+between these two.
+
+My thoughts were, however, distracted by our vessel signalling the
+other. Hungerford was passing just then, and I said: "Have you any idea
+what vessel it is, Hungerford?"
+
+"Yes, man-of-war 'Porcupine', bound for Aden, I think."
+
+Mrs. Falchion at this laughed strangely, as she leaned forward looking,
+and then, rising quickly, said: "I prefer to walk."
+
+"May I accompany you?" I asked.
+
+She inclined her head, and we joined the promenaders. The band was
+playing, and, for a ship-band, playing very well, the ballet music
+of Delibes' 'Sylvia'. The musicians had caught that unaccentuated
+and sensuous swing of the melody which the soft, tropical atmosphere
+rendered still more languorous. With Mrs. Falchion's hand upon my arm,
+I felt a sense of capitulation to the music and to her, uncanny in its
+suddenness. At this distance of time it seems to me absurd. I had once
+experienced something of the same feeling with the hand of a young
+medical student, who, skilled in thought-reading, discovered the number
+of a bank-note that was in my mind.
+
+This woman had an attractiveness compelling and delightful, at least in
+its earlier application to me. Both professionally and socially I have
+been brought into contact with women of beauty and grace, but never one
+who, like Mrs. Falchion, being beautiful, seemed so unconscious of
+the fact, so indifferent to those about her, so untouched by another's
+emotion, so lacking in sensitiveness of heart; and who still drew people
+to her. I am speaking now of the earlier portion of our acquaintance; of
+her as she was up to this period in her life.
+
+I was not alone in this opinion of her, for, as time went on, every
+presentable man and woman on the boat was introduced to her; and if some
+women criticised and some disliked her, all acknowledged her talent and
+her imperial attraction. Among the men her name was never spoken but
+with reserve and respect, and her afternoon teas were like a little
+court. She had no compromising tenderness of manner for man or woman;
+she ruled, yet was unapproachable through any avenues of sentiment. She
+had a quiet aplomb, which would be called 'sang-froid' in a man.
+
+"Did you ever see a Spanish-Mexican woman dance?" she asked in one of
+the pauses of the music.
+
+"Never: never any good dancing, save what one gets at a London theatre."
+
+"That is graceful," she said, "but not dancing. You have heard of music
+stirring the blood; of savage races--and others--working themselves up
+to ecstatic fury? Maybe you have seen the Dervishes, or the Fijians, or
+the Australian aboriginals? No? Well, I have, and I have seen--which
+is so much more--those Spanish-Mexican women dance. Did you ever see
+anything so thrilling, so splendid, that you felt you must possess
+it?"--She asked me that with her hand upon my arm!--"Well, that is it. I
+have felt that way towards a horse which has won a great race, and to
+a woman who has carried me with her through the fantastic drama of her
+dance, until she stood at the climax, head thrown back, face glowing--a
+statue. It is grand to be eloquent like that, not in words, but in
+person."
+
+In this was the key to her own nature. Body and mind she was free from
+ordinary morbidness, unless her dislike of all suffering was morbid.
+With her this was a dislike of any shock to the senses. She was selfish
+at all points.
+
+These conclusions were pursued at the expense of speech on my part.
+At first she did not appear to regard my silence. She seemed to have
+thoughts of her own; but she shook them off with a little firm motion of
+the shoulders, and, with the assumption of a demureness of manner and an
+airy petulance, said: "Well, amuse me."
+
+"Amuse you?" was my reply. "Delighted to do so if I can. How?"
+
+"Talk to me," was the quick response.
+
+"Would that accomplish the purpose?" This in a tone of mock protest.
+
+"Please don't be foolish, Dr. Marmion. I dislike having to explain. Tell
+me things."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"Oh, about yourself--about people you have met, and all that; for I
+suppose you have seen a good deal and lived a good deal."
+
+"About hospital cases?" I said a little maliciously.
+
+"No, please, no! I abhor everything that is sick and poor and
+miserable."
+
+"Well," said I, at idle venture, "if not a hospital, what about a gaol?"
+
+I felt the hand on my arm twitch slightly, and then her reply came.
+
+"I said I hated everything that was wretched and wicked. You are either
+dense, or purposely irritating."
+
+"Well, then, a college?"
+
+"A college? Yes, that sounds better. But I do not wish descriptions
+of being 'gated,' or 'sent down,' or 'ploughed,' and that kind of
+commonplace. I should prefer, unless your vanity leads you irresistibly
+in that direction, something with mature life and amusement; or, at
+least, life and incident, and good sport--if you do not dwell on the
+horrors of killing."
+
+On the instant there came to me the remembrance of Professor Valiant's
+wife. I think it was not what she wanted; but I had a purpose, and I
+began:
+
+"Every one at St. Luke's admired and respected Professor Valiant's wife,
+she was so frank and cordial and prettily downright. In our rooms we all
+called her a good chap, and a dashed good chap when her husband happened
+to be rustier than usual. He was our professor in science. It was the
+general belief that he chose science for his life-work because it gave
+unusual opportunities for torture. He was believed to be a devoted
+vivisectionist; he certainly had methods of cruelty, masterly in their
+ingenuity. He could make a whole class raw with punishment in a few
+words; and many a scorching bit of Latin verse was written about his
+hooked nose and fishy eye.
+
+"But his highest talents in this direction were reserved for his wife.
+His distorted idea of his own importance made him view her as a chattel,
+an inferior being; the more so, I believe, because she brought him
+little money when he married her. She was too much the woman to pretend
+to kneel to him, and because she would not be his slave, she had a hard
+time of it. He began by insisting that she should learn science, that
+she might assist him in his experiments. She knew that she had no taste
+for it, that it was no part of her wifely duty, and she did what suited
+her better--followed the hounds. It was a picture to see her riding
+across country. She could take a fence with a sound hunter like a bird.
+And so it happened that, after a time, they went their own ways pretty
+well; he ignoring her, neglecting her, deprecating her by manner, if not
+by speech, and making her life more than uncomfortable.
+
+"She was always kind to me. I was the youngest chap in the college, and
+was known as 'Marmy' by every one; and because I was fonder of science
+than most other men in the different years, Valiant was more gracious to
+me than the rest, though I did not like him. One day, when I called, I
+heard her say to him, not knowing that I was near: 'Whatever you feel,
+or however you act towards me in private, I will have respect when
+others are present.'
+
+"It was the custom for the professors to invite each student to luncheon
+or dinner once during term-time. Being somewhat of a favourite of both
+Professor and Mrs. Valiant however, I lunched with them often. I need
+hardly say that I should not have exceeded the regulation once had it
+not been for Mrs. Valiant. The last time I went is as clear in my memory
+as if it were yesterday. Valiant was more satirical and cold-blooded
+than usual. I noticed a kind of shining hardness in his wife's eyes,
+which gave me a strange feeling; yet she was talkative and even gay,
+I thought, while I more than once clinched my fist under the table,
+so much did I want to pummel him; for I was a lover of hers, in a
+deferential, boyish way.
+
+"At last, knowing that she liked the hunt, I asked her if she was going
+to the meet on the following Saturday, saying that I intended to follow,
+having been offered a horse. With a steely ring to her voice, and a
+further brightening of the eyes, she said: 'You are a stout little
+sportsman, Marmy. Yes, I am going on Major Karney's big horse, Carbine.'
+
+"Valiant looked up, half sneering, half doubtful, I thought, and
+rejoined: 'Carbine is a valuable horse, and the fences are stiff in the
+Garston country.'
+
+"She smiled gravely, then, with her eyes fixed on her husband, said:
+'Carbine is a perfect gentleman. He will do what I ask him. I have
+ridden him.'
+
+"'The devil you have!' he replied.
+
+"'I am sure,' said I, as I hoped, bravely, and not a little
+enthusiastically, 'that Carbine would take any fence you asked him.'
+
+"'Or not, as the case might be. Thank you, Marmy, for the compliment,'
+she said.
+
+"'A Triton among minnows,' remarked Valiant, not entirely under his
+breath; 'horses obey, and students admire, and there is no end to her
+greatness.'
+
+"'There is an end to everything, Edward,' she remarked a shade sadly and
+quietly.
+
+"He turned to me and said: 'Science is a great study, Marmion, but it is
+sardonic too; for you shall find that when you reduce even a Triton to
+its original elements--'
+
+"'Oh, please let me finish,' she interrupted softly. 'I know the lecture
+so well. It reads this way: "The place of generation must break to
+give place to the generated; but the influence spreads out beyond the
+fragments, and is greater thus than in the mass--neither matter nor mind
+can be destroyed. The earth was molten before it became cold rock and
+quiet world." There, you see, Marmy, that I am a fellow-student of
+yours.'
+
+"Valiant's eyes were ugly to watch; for she had quoted from a lecture
+of his, delivered to us that week. After an instant he said, with slow
+maliciousness: 'Oh, ye gods, render me worthy of this Portia, and teach
+her to do as Brutus's Portia did, ad eternum!'
+
+"She shuddered a little, then said very graciously, and as if he
+had meant nothing but kindness: 'Beggar that I am, I am even poor in
+thanks.' I will leave you now to your cigarettes; and because I must go
+out soon, and shall not, I fear, see you again this afternoon, good-bye,
+Marmy, till Saturday--till Saturday.' And she left us.
+
+"I was white and trembling with anger. He smiled coolly, and was
+careful to choose me one of his best cigars, saying as he handed
+it: 'Conversation is a science, Marmion. Study it; there is solid
+satisfaction in it; it is the only art that brings instant pleasure.
+Like the stage, it gets its immediate applause.'
+
+"Well, Mrs. Valiant did ride Carbine on that Saturday. Such a scene
+it was! I see it now--the mottled plump of hounds upon the scent, the
+bright sun showing up the scarlet coats of the whips gloriously, the
+long stride of the hunters, ears back and quarters down! She rode
+Carbine, and the fences WERE stiff--so stiff that I couldn't have taken
+half of them. Afterward I was not sorry that I couldn't; for she rode
+for a fall that day on Carbine, her own horse, she had bought him of
+Major Karney a few days before,--and I heard her last words as she
+lay beside him, smiling through the dreadful whiteness of her lips.
+'Goodbye, Marmy,' she whispered. 'Carbine and I go together. It is
+better so, in the full cry and a big field. Tell the men at Luke's that
+I hope they will pass at the coming exams.... I am going up--for my
+final--Marmy.--I wonder--if I'll--pass.' And then the words froze on her
+lips.
+
+"It was persecution that did it--diabolical persecution and selfishness.
+That was the worst day the college ever knew. At the funeral, when the
+provost read, 'For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister
+out of the miseries of this sinful world,' Big Wallington, the wildest
+chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we all
+followed. And that gold-spectacled sneak stood there, with a lying white
+handkerchief at his eyes.
+
+"I laid myself out to make the college too hot for him. In a week I had
+every man in the place with me, and things came to such a pass that
+all of us must be sent down, or Valiant resign. He resigned. He found
+another professorship; but the thing followed him, and he was obliged to
+leave the country."
+
+When I finished the story, Mrs. Falchion was silent for a time, then,
+with a slight air of surprise, and in a quite critical way, she said:
+"I should think you would act very well, if you used less emotion. Mrs.
+Valiant had a kind of courage, but she was foolish to die. She should
+have stayed and fought him--fought him every way, until she was his
+master. She could have done it; she was clever, I should think. Still,
+if she had to die, it was better to go with a good horse that way. I
+think I should prefer to go swiftly, suddenly, but without the horror
+of blood and bruises, and that sort of thing.... I should like to meet
+Professor Valiant. He was hard, but he was able too.... But haven't
+we had enough of horror? I asked you to amuse me, and you have merely
+interested me instead. Oh!--"
+
+This exclamation, I thought, was caused by the voice of the
+quartermaster humming:
+
+       "I'm a-sailing, I'm a-sailing on the sea,
+         To a harbour where the wind is still"--
+
+Almost immediately she said: "I think I will go below." Then, after a
+slight pause: "This is a liberal acquaintance for one day, Dr. Marmion;
+and, you know, we were not introduced."
+
+"No, Mrs. Falchion, we were not introduced; but I am in some regards
+your host, and I fear we should all be very silent if we waited for
+regular introductions here. The acquaintance gives me pleasure, but it
+is not nearly so liberal as I hope it may become."
+
+She did not answer, but smiled at me over her shoulder as she passed
+down the staircase, and the next instant I could have bitten my tongue
+for playing the cavalier as I had done; for showing, as I think I did,
+that she had an influence over me--an influence peculiar to herself, and
+difficult to account for when not in her presence.
+
+I sat down, lit a cigar, and went over in my mind all that had been said
+between us; all that had occurred in my cabin after dinner; every minute
+since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail. Lascars
+slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near
+alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon
+there came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly. Under the
+influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted. My
+eyes shifted to the lights of the 'Porcupine' in the distance, and from
+them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck. The
+"All's well" of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance;
+the swish of water against the dividing hull of the 'Fulvia' sounded
+like a call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming
+through the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and
+dreams. These dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on
+my shoulder, and I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English
+novelist, had dropped out from the promenade to talk with me. He saw
+my mood, however, and said quietly: "Give me a light for my cigar, will
+you? Then, astride this stool, I'll help you to make inventory of the
+rest of them. A pretty study; for, at our best, 'What fools we mortals
+be!'"
+
+"'Motley is your only wear,'" was my reply; and for a full half-hour,
+which, even for a man, is considerable, we spoke no word, but only
+nodded when some one of the promenaders noticed us. There was a
+bookmaker fresh from the Melbourne races; an American, Colonel Ryder,
+whose eloquence had carried him round the world; a stalwart squatter
+from Queensland; a pretty widow, who had left her husband under the sods
+of Tasmania; a brace of girls going to join their lovers and be married
+in England; a few officers fleeing from India with their livers and
+their lives; a family of four lanky lasses travelling "home" to school;
+a row of affable ladies, who alternated between envy and gaiety and
+delight in, and criticism of, their husbands; a couple of missionaries,
+preparing to give us lectures on the infamous gods of the heathen,--gods
+which, poor harmless little creatures! might be bought at a few annas a
+pint at Aden or Colombo,--and on the Exodus and the Pharaohs--pleasures
+reserved for the Red Sea; a commercial traveller, who arranged
+theatricals, and cast himself for all the principal parts; a humorous
+and naive person who industriously hinted at the opulence of his estates
+in Ireland; two stately English ladies of title; a cheerful array
+of colonial knights and judges off to Europe for a holiday; and many
+others, who made little worlds unto themselves, called cliques by blunt
+people.
+
+"To my mind, the most interesting persons on the ship," said Clovelly at
+last, "are the bookmaker, Miss Treherne, and the lady with whom you have
+just been talking--an exceptional type."
+
+"An unusual woman, I fancy," was my reply. "But which is Miss Treherne?
+I am afraid I am not quite sure."
+
+He described her and her father, with whom I had talked--a London Q.C.,
+travelling for his health, a notable man with a taste for science, who
+spent his idle hours in reading astronomy and the plays of Euripides.
+
+"Why not include the father in the list of the most interesting
+persons?" I questioned.
+
+"Because I have met many men like him, but no one quite like his
+daughter, or Mrs.--what is her name?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion."
+
+"Or Mrs. Falchion or the bookmaker."
+
+"What is there so uncommon about Miss Treherne? She had not struck me as
+being remarkable."
+
+"No? Well, of course, she is not striking after the fashion of Mrs.
+Falchion. But watch her, study her, and you will find her to be the
+perfection of a type--the finest expression of a decorous convention, a
+perfect product of social conservatism; unaffected, cheerful, sensitive,
+composed, very talented, altogether companionable."
+
+"Excuse me," I said, laughing, though I was impressed; "that sounds as
+if you had been writing about her, and applying to her the novelist's
+system of analysis, which makes an imperfect individual a perfect type.
+Now, frankly, are you speaking of Miss Treherne, or of some one of whom
+she is the outline, as it were?"
+
+Clovelly turned and looked at me steadily. "When you consider a
+patient," he said, "do you arrange a diagnosis of a type or of a
+person?--And, by the way, 'type' is a priggish word."
+
+"I consider the type in connection with the person."
+
+"Exactly. The person is the thing. That clears up the matter of business
+and art. But now, as to Miss Treherne: I want to say that, having been
+admitted to her acquaintance and that of her father, I have thought of
+them only as friends, and not as 'characters' or 'copy.'"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Clovelly," said I. "I might have known."
+
+"Now, to prove how magnanimous I am, I shall introduce you to Miss
+Treherne, if you will let me. You've met her father, I suppose?" he
+added, and tossed his cigar overboard.
+
+"Yes, I have talked with him. He is a courteous and able man, I should
+think."
+
+We rose. Presently he continued: "See, Miss Treherne is sitting there
+with the Tasmanian widow--what is HER name?"
+
+"Mrs. Callendar," I replied. "Blackburn, the Queenslander, is joining
+them."
+
+"So much the better," he said. "Come on."
+
+As we passed the music saloon, we paused for an instant to look through
+the port-hole at a pale-faced girl with big eyes and a wonderful
+bright red dress, singing "The Angels' Serenade," while an excitable
+bear-leader turned her music for her. Near her stood a lanky girl who
+adored actors and tenors, and lived in the hope of meeting some of those
+gentlemen of the footlights, who plough their way so calmly through the
+hearts of maidens fresh from school.
+
+We drew back to go on towards Miss Treherne, when Hungerford touched me
+on the arm, and said: "I want to see you for a little while, Marmion, if
+Mr. Clovelly will excuse you."
+
+I saw by Hungerford's face that he had something of importance to say,
+and, linking my arm in his, I went with him to his cabin, which was near
+those of the intermediate passengers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. A TALE OF NO MAN'S SEA
+
+Inside the cabin Hungerford closed the door, gripped me by the arm, and
+then handed me a cheroot, with the remark: "My pater gave them to me
+last voyage home. Have kept 'em in tea." And then he added, with no
+appearance of consecutiveness: "Hang the bally ship, anyhow!"
+
+I shall not attempt to tone down the crudeness of Hungerford's language.
+It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth
+will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will
+certainly be seen in his acts;--he was sound at heart and true as steel.
+
+"What is the matter, Hungerford?" I asked lighting the cheroot.
+
+"Everything's the matter. Captain, with his nose in the air, and
+trusting all round to his officers. First officer, no good--never any
+use since they poured the coal on him. Purser, ought to be on a Chinese
+junk. Second, third, fourth officers, first-rate chaps, but so-so
+sailors. Doctor, frivolling with a lovely filly, pedigree not known.
+Why, confound it! nobody takes this business seriously except the
+captain, and he sits on a golden throne. He doesn't know that in any
+real danger this swagger craft would be filled with foolishness.
+There isn't more than one good boat's crew on board--sailors, lascars,
+stewards, and all. As for the officers, if the surgeon would leave the
+lovely ladies to themselves, he'd find cases worth treating, and duties
+worth doing. He should keep himself fit for shocks. And he can take my
+word for it--for I've been at sea since I was a kid, worse luck!--that a
+man with anything to do on a ship ought to travel every day nose out for
+shipwreck next day, and so on, port to port. Ship-surgeons, as well as
+all other officers, weren't ordained to follow after cambric skirts and
+lace handkerchiefs at sea. Believe me or not as you like, but, for a man
+having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks. Now, I suppose you'll
+think I'm insolent, for I'm younger than you are, Marmion, but you know
+what a rough-and-tumble fellow I am, and you'll not mind."
+
+"Well, Hungerford," I said, "to what does this lead?"
+
+"To Number 116 Intermediate, for one thing. It's letting off steam for
+another. I tell you, Marmion, these big ships are too big. There are
+those canvas boats. They won't work; you can't get them together. You
+couldn't launch one in an hour. And as for the use of the others, the
+lascars would melt like snow in any real danger. There's about one
+decent boat's crew on the ship, that's all. There! I've unburdened
+myself; I feel better."
+
+Presently he added, with a shake of the head: "See here: now-a-days we
+trust too much to machinery and chance, and not enough to skill of hand
+and brain stuff. I'd like to show you some of the crews I've had in the
+Pacific and the China Sea--but I'm at it again! I'll now come, Marmion,
+to the real reason why I brought you here.... Number 116 Intermediate
+is under the weather; I found him fainting in the passage. I helped
+him into his cabin. He said he'd been to you to get medicine, and you'd
+given him some. Now, the strange part of the business is, I know him. He
+didn't remember me, however--perhaps because he didn't get a good look
+at me. Coincidence is a strange thing. I can point to a dozen in my
+short life, every one as remarkable, if not as startling, as this. Here,
+I'll spin you a yarn:
+
+"It happened four years ago. I had no moustache then, was fat like a
+whale, and first mate on the 'Dancing Kate', a pearler in the Indian
+Ocean, between Java and Australia. That was sailing, mind you--real
+seamanship, no bally nonsense; a fight every weather, interesting
+all round. If it wasn't a deadly calm, it was a typhoon; if it wasn't
+either, it was want of food and water. I've seen us with pearls on board
+worth a thousand quid, and not a drop of water nor three square meals
+in the caboose. But that was life for men and not Miss Nancys. If
+they weren't saints, they were sailors, afraid of nothing but God
+Almighty--and they do respect Him, even when they curse the winds and
+the sea. Well, one day we were lying in the open sea, about two hundred
+and fifty miles from Port Darwin. There wasn't a breath of air. The sea
+was like glass; the sun was drawing turpentine out of every inch of
+the 'Dancing Kate'. The world was one wild blister. There wasn't a
+comfortable spot in the craft, and all round us was that staring,
+oily sea. It was too hot to smoke, and I used to make a Sede boy do my
+smoking for me. I got the benefit of the smell without any work. I was
+lying under the droop of a dingey, making the Sede boy call on all his
+gods for wind, with interludes of smoke, when he chucked his deities and
+tobacco, and, pointing, shouted, 'Man! man!'
+
+"I snatched a spy-glass. Sure enough, there was a boat on the water.
+It was moving ever so slowly. It seemed to stop, and we saw something
+lifted and waved, and then all was still again. I got a boat's crew
+together, and away we went in that deadly smother. An hour's row and we
+got within hail of the derelict--as one of the crew said, 'feelin' as
+if the immortal life was jerked out of us.' The dingey lay there on the
+glassy surface, not a sign of life about her. Yet I had, as I said, seen
+something waved. The water didn't even lap its sides. It was ghostly, I
+can tell you. Our oars licked the water; they didn't attack it. Now, I'm
+going to tell you something, Marmion, that'll make you laugh. I don't
+think I've got any poetry in me, but just then I thought of some verses
+I learned when I was a little cove at Wellington--a devilishly weird
+thing. It came to me at that moment like a word in my ear. It made me
+feel awkward for a second. All sailors are superstitious, you know. I'm
+superstitious about this ship. Never mind; I'll tell you the verses, to
+show you what a queer thing memory is. The thing was called 'No Man's
+Sea':
+
+       "'The days are dead in the No Man's Sea,
+         And God has left it alone;
+        The angels cover their heads and flee,
+         And the wild four winds have flown.
+
+       "'There's never a ripple upon the tide,
+         There's never a word or sound;
+        But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+         To look for the souls of the drowned.
+
+       "'The No Man's Sea is a gaol of souls,
+         And its gate is a burning sun,
+        And deep beneath it a great bell tolls
+         For a death that never is done.
+
+       "'Alas! for any that comes anear,
+         That lies on its moveless breast;
+        The grumbling water shall be his bier,
+         And never a place of rest."'
+
+"There are four of the verses. Well, I made a motion to stop the rowing,
+and was mum for a minute. The men got nervous. They looked at the boat
+in front of us, and then turned round, as though to see if the 'Dancing
+Kate' was still in sight. I spoke, and they got more courage. I stood
+up in the boat, but could see nothing in the dingey. I gave a sign to go
+on, and soon we were alongside. In the bottom of the dingey lay a man,
+apparently dead, wearing the clothes of a convict. One of the crew gave
+a grunt of disgust, the others said nothing. I don't take to men often,
+and to convicts precious seldom; but there was a look in this man's face
+which the prison clothes couldn't demoralise--a damned pathetic look,
+which seemed to say, 'Not guilty.'
+
+"In a minute I was beside him, and found he wasn't dead. Brandy brought
+him round a little; but he was a bit gone in the head, and muttered all
+the way back to the ship. I had unbuttoned his shirt, and I saw on his
+breast a little ivory portrait of a woman. I didn't let the crew see it;
+for the fellow, even in his delirium, appeared to know I had exposed the
+thing, and drew the linen close in his fingers, and for a long time held
+it at his throat."
+
+"What was the woman's face like, Hungerford?" I asked.
+
+He parried, remarking only that she had the face of a lady, and was
+handsome.
+
+I pressed him. "But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?"
+
+With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: "Don't ask foolish
+questions, Marmion. Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life. He
+wouldn't have lived at all, if a breeze hadn't come up and let us get
+away to the coast. It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went
+bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake.
+However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he
+told me his story. He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western
+Australia. He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to
+do some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey. His crime was
+stealing funds belonging to a Squatting and Mining Company. There was
+this extenuating circumstance: he could have replaced the money, which,
+as he said, he'd only intended to use for a few weeks. But a personal
+enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts were examined, and though he
+showed he'd only used the money while more of his own was on the way to
+him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him. For two reasons: because
+it was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this trial to divert public
+attention from its own dirty position; and because he had against him
+not only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to hit the Company
+through him. He'd filched to be able to meet the large expenses of his
+wife's establishment. Into this he didn't enter minutely, and he didn't
+blame her for having so big a menage; he only said he was sorry that he
+hadn't been able to support it without having to come, even for a day,
+to the stupidity of stealing. After two years he escaped. He asked me
+to write a letter to his wife, which he'd dictate. Marmion, you or I
+couldn't have dictated that letter if we'd taken a year to do it. There
+was no religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full of
+sorrow for what he'd done, and for the disgrace he'd brought on her.
+I remember the last few sentences as if I'd seen them yesterday. 'I am
+dying on the open sea, disgraced, but free,' he said. 'I am not innocent
+in act, but I was not guilty of intentional wrong. I did what I did
+that you should have all you wished, all you ought to have. I ask
+but this--and I shall soon ask for nothing--that you will have a kind
+thought, now and then, for the man who always loved you, and loves
+you yet. I have never blamed you that you did not come near me in my
+trouble; but I wish you were here for a moment before I go away for
+ever. You must forgive me now, for you will be free. If I were a better
+man I would say, God bless you. In my last conscious moments I will
+think of you, and speak your name. And now good-bye--an everlasting
+good-bye. I was your loving husband, and am your lover until death.' And
+it was signed, 'Boyd Madras.'
+
+"However, he didn't die. Between the captain and myself, we kept life
+in him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and
+crew, swearing to let no one know he was a convict. And I'll say this
+for the crew of the 'Dancing Kate' that, so far as I know, they kept
+their word. That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne
+bankers, I gave back to him before we landed. We made him up a purse
+of fifty pounds,--for the crew got to like him,--and left him at Port
+Darwin, sailing away again in a few days to another pearl-field farther
+east. What happened to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don't know;
+but one day I found him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean,
+looking almost as near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey
+on No Man's Sea. As I said before, I think he didn't recognise me; and
+he's lying now in 116 Intermediate, with a look on him that I've seen
+in the face of a man condemned to death by the devils of cholera or
+equatorial fever. And that's the story, Marmion, which I brought you to
+hear--told, as you notice, in fine classical style."
+
+"And why do you tell ME this, Hungerford--a secret you've kept all these
+years? Knowledge of that man's crime wasn't necessary before giving him
+belladonna or a hot bath."
+
+Hungerford kept back the whole truth for reasons of his own. He said:
+"Chiefly because I want you to take a decent interest in the chap. He
+looks as if he might go off on the long voyage any tick o' the clock.
+You are doctor, parson, and everything else of the kind on board. I like
+the poor devil, but anyhow I'm not in a position to be going around with
+ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,--very good things.
+Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the
+body, and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras's mind is as sick
+as his torso. By the way, he calls himself 'Charles Boyd,' so I suppose
+we needn't recall to him his former experiences by adding the 'Madras.'"
+
+Hungerford squeezed my arm again violently, and added: "Look here,
+Marmion, we understand each other in this, don't we? To do what we can
+for the fellow, and be mum."
+
+Some of this looks rough and blunt, but as it was spoken there was that
+in it which softened it to my ear. I knew he had told all he thought
+I ought to know, and that he wished me to question him no more, nor to
+refer to Mrs. Falchion, whose relationship to Boyd Madras--or Charles
+Boyd--both of us suspected.
+
+"It was funny about those verses coming to my mind, wasn't it, Marmion?"
+he continued. And he began to repeat one of them, keeping time to the
+wave-like metre with his cheroot, winding up with a quick, circular
+movement, and putting it again between his lips:
+
+       "'There's never a ripple upon the tide,
+         There's never a breath or sound;
+        But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+         To look for the souls of the drowned."'
+
+Then he jumped off the berth where he had been sitting, put on his
+jacket, said it was time to take his turn on the bridge, and prepared
+to go out, having apparently dismissed Number 116 Intermediate from his
+mind.
+
+I went to Charles Boyd's cabin, and knocked gently. There was no
+response. I entered. He lay sleeping soundly--the sleep that comes after
+nervous exhaustion. I had a good chance to study him as he lay there.
+The face was sensitive and well fashioned, but not strong; the hands
+were delicate, yet firmly made. One hand was clinched upon that portion
+of his breast where the portrait hung.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV. THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+
+I went on deck again, and found Clovelly in the smoking-room. The
+bookmaker was engaged in telling tales of the turf, alternated with
+comic songs by Blackburn--an occupation which lasted throughout the
+voyage, and was associated with electric appeals to the steward to fill
+the flowing bowl. Clovelly came with me, and we joined Miss Treherne
+and her father. Mr. Treherne introduced me to his daughter, and Clovelly
+amiably drew the father into a discussion of communism as found in the
+South Sea Islands.
+
+I do not think my conversation with Miss Treherne was brilliant. She has
+since told me that I appeared self-conscious and preoccupied. This being
+no compliment to her, I was treated accordingly. I could have endorsed
+Clovelly's estimate of her so far as her reserve and sedateness were
+concerned. It seemed impossible to talk naturally. The events of the day
+were interrupting the ordinary run of thought, and I felt at a miserable
+disadvantage. I saw, however, that the girl was gifted and clear of
+mind, and possessed of great physical charm, but of that fine sort which
+must be seen in suitable surroundings to be properly appreciated.
+Here on board ship a sweet gravity and a proud decorum--not altogether
+unnecessary--prevented her from being seen at once to the best
+advantage. Even at this moment I respected her the more for it, and was
+not surprised, nor exactly displeased, that she adroitly drew her father
+and Clovelly into the conversation. With Clovelly she seemed to find
+immediate ground for naive and pleasant talk; on his part, deferential,
+original, and attentive; on hers, easy, allusive, and warmed with
+piquant humour. I admired her; saw how cleverly Clovelly was making the
+most of her; guessed at the solicitude, studious care, and affection of
+her bringing-up; watched the fond pleasure of the father as he listened;
+and was angry with myself that Mrs. Falchion's voice rang in my ears at
+the same moment as hers. But it did ring there, and the real value of
+that smart tournament of ideas was partially lost to me.
+
+The next morning I went to Boyd Madras's cabin. He welcomed me
+gratefully, and said that he was much better; as he seemed; but he
+carried a hectic flush, such as comes to a consumptive person. I said
+little to him beyond what was necessary for the discussion of his case.
+I cautioned him about any unusual exertion, and was about to leave, when
+an impulse came to me, and I returned and said: "You will not let me
+help you in any other way?"
+
+"Yes," he answered; "I shall be very glad of your help, but not just
+yet. And, Doctor, believe me, I think medicines can do very little.
+Though I am thankful to you for visiting me, you need not take the
+trouble, unless I am worse, and then I will send a steward to you, or go
+to you myself."
+
+What lay behind this request, unless it was sensitiveness, I could not
+tell; but I determined to take my own course, and to visit him when I
+thought fit.
+
+Still, I saw him but once or twice on the after-deck in the succeeding
+days. He evidently wished to keep out of sight as much as possible. I am
+ashamed to say there was a kind of satisfaction in this to me; for, when
+a man's wife--and I believed she was Boyd Madras's wife--hangs on your
+arm, and he himself is denied that privilege, and fares poorly beside
+her sumptuousness, and lives as a stranger to her, you can scarcely
+regard his presence with pleasure. And from the sheer force of
+circumstances, as it seemed to me then, Mrs. Falchion's hand was often
+on my arm; and her voice was always in my ear at meal-times and when
+I visited Justine Caron to attend to her wound, or joined in the
+chattering recreations of the music saloon. It was impossible not to
+feel her influence; and if I did not yield entirely to it, I was more
+possessed by it than I was aware. I was inquisitive to know beyond doubt
+that she was the wife of this man. I think it was in my mind at the
+time that, perhaps, by being with her much, I should be able to do him
+a service. But there came a time when I was sufficiently undeceived. It
+was all a game of misery in which some one stood to lose all round.
+Who was it: she, or I, or the refugee of misfortune, Number 116
+Intermediate? She seemed safe enough. He or I would suffer in the crash
+of penalties.
+
+It was a strange situation. I, the acquaintance of a day, was welcome
+within the circle of this woman's favour--though it was an unemotional
+favour on her side; he, the husband, as I believed, though only half the
+length of the ship away, was as distant from her as the north star. When
+I sat with her on deck at night, I seemed to feel Boyd Madras's face
+looking at me from the half-darkness of the after-deck; and Mrs.
+Falchion, whose keen eyes missed little, remarked once on my gaze in
+that direction. Thereafter I was more careful, but the idea haunted
+me. Yet, I was not the only person who sat with her. Other men paid her
+attentive court. The difference was, however, that with me she assumed
+ever so delicate, yet palpable an air of proprietorship, none the
+less alluring because there was no heart in it. So far as the other
+passengers were concerned, there was nothing jarring to propriety in
+our companionship. They did not know of Number 116 Intermediate. She
+had been announced as a widow; and she had told Mrs. Callendar that her
+father's brother, who, years before, had gone to California, had died
+within the past two years and left her his property; and, because all
+Californians are supposed to be millionaires, her wealth was counted
+fabulous. She was going now to England, and from there to California in
+the following year. People said that Dr. Marmion knew on which side his
+bread was buttered. They may have said more unpleasant things, but I did
+not hear them, or of them.
+
+All the time I was conscious of a kind of dishonour, and perhaps it was
+that which prompted me (I had fallen away from my intention of visiting
+him freely) to send my steward to see how Boyd Madras came on, rather
+than go myself. I was, however, conscious that the position could
+not--should not--be maintained long. The practical outcome of this
+knowledge was not tardy. A new influence came into my life which was to
+affect it permanently: but not without a struggle.
+
+A series of concerts and lectures had been arranged for the voyage, and
+the fancy-dress ball was to close the first part of the journey--that
+is, at Aden. One night a concert was on in the music saloon. I had just
+come from seeing a couple of passengers who had been suffering from the
+heat, and was debating whether to find Mrs. Falchion, who, I knew, was
+on the other side of the deck, go in to the concert, or join Colonel
+Ryder and Clovelly, who had asked me to come to the smoking-room when I
+could. I am afraid I was balancing heavily in favour of Mrs. Falchion,
+when I heard a voice that was new to me, singing a song I had known
+years before, when life was ardent, and love first came--halcyon days in
+country lanes, in lilac thickets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our
+footsteps met a small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze,
+along the green common that sloped to the village. I thought of all
+this, and of HER everlasting quiet.
+
+With a different voice the words of the song would have sent me out of
+hearing; now I stood rooted to the spot, as the notes floated out
+past me to the nervelessness of the Indian Ocean, every one of them a
+commandment from behind the curtain of a sanctuary.
+
+The voice was a warm, full contralto of exquisite culture. It suggested
+depths of rich sound behind, from which the singer, if she chose, might
+draw, until the room and the deck and the sea ached with sweetness. I
+scarcely dared to look in to see who it was, lest I should find it a
+dream. I stood with my head turned away towards the dusky ocean. When,
+at last, with the closing notes of the song, I went to the port-hole
+and looked in, I saw that the singer was Miss Treherne. There was
+an abstracted look in her eyes as she raised them, and she seemed
+unconscious of the applause following the last chords of the
+accompaniment. She stood up, folding the music as she did so, and
+unconsciously raised her eyes toward the port-hole where I was. Her
+glance caught mine, and instantly a change passed over her face. The
+effect of the song upon her was broken; she flushed slightly, and, as I
+thought, with faint annoyance. I know of nothing so little complimentary
+to a singer as the audience that patronisingly listens outside a room
+or window,--not bound by any sense of duty as an audience,--between whom
+and the artists an unnatural barrier is raised. But I have reason to
+think now that Belle Treherne was not wholly moved by annoyance--that
+she had seen something unusual, maybe oppressive, in my look. She turned
+to her father. He adjusted his glasses as if, in his pride, to see her
+better. Then he fondly took her arm, and they left the room.
+
+Then I saw Mrs. Falchion's face at the port-hole opposite. Her eyes were
+on me. An instant before, I had intended following Miss Treherne and her
+father; now some spirit of defiance, some unaccountable revolution, took
+possession of me, so that I flashed back to her a warm recognition. I
+could not have believed it possible, if it had been told of me, that,
+one minute affected by beautiful and sacred remembrances, the next I
+should be yielding to the unimpassioned tyranny of a woman who could
+never be anything but a stumbling-block and an evil influence. I had yet
+to learn that in times of mental and moral struggle the mixed fighting
+forces in us resolve themselves into two cohesive powers, and strive for
+mastery; that no past thought or act goes for nothing at such a time,
+but creeps out from the darkness where we thought it had gone for ever,
+and does battle with its kind against the common foe. There moved before
+my sight three women: one, sweet and unsubstantial, wistful and mute and
+very young, not of the earth earthy; one, lissom, grave, with gracious
+body and warm abstracted eyes, all delicacy, strength, reserve; the
+other and last, daring, cold, beautiful, with irresistible charm, silent
+and compelling. And these are the three women who have influenced my
+life, who fought in me then for mastery; one from out the unchangeable
+past, the others in the tangible and delible present. Most of us have to
+pass through such ordeals before character and conviction receive their
+final bias; before human nature has its wild trouble, and then settles
+into "cold rock and quiet world;" which any lesser after-shocks may
+modify, but cannot radically change.
+
+I tried to think. I felt that to be wholly a man I should turn from
+those eyes drawing me on. I recalled the words of Clovelly, who had said
+to me that afternoon, half laughingly: "Dr. Marmion, I wonder how many
+of us wish ourselves transported permanently to that time when we
+didn't know champagne from 'alter feiner madeira' or dry hock from sweet
+sauterne; when a pretty face made us feel ready to abjure all the sinful
+lusts of the flesh and become inheritors of the kingdom of heaven? Egad!
+I should like to feel it once again. But how can we, when we have
+been intoxicated with many things; when we are drunk with success and
+experience; have hung on the fringe of unrighteousness; and know the
+world backward, and ourselves mercilessly?"
+
+Was I, like the drunkard, coming surely to the time when I could no
+longer say yes to my wisdom, or no to my weakness? I knew that, an
+hour before, in filling a phial with medicine, I found I was doing it
+mechanically, and had to begin over again, making an effort to keep my
+mind to my task. I think it is an axiom that no man can properly perform
+the business of life who indulges in emotional preoccupation.
+
+These thoughts, which take so long to write, passed then through my
+mind swiftly; but her eyes were on me with a peculiar and confident
+insistence--and I yielded. On my way to her I met Clovelly and Colonel
+Ryder. Hungerford was walking between them. Colonel Ryder said: "I've
+been saving that story for you, Doctor; better come and get it while
+it's hot."
+
+This was a promised tale of the taking of Mobile in the American Civil
+War.
+
+At any other time the invitation would have pleased me mightily; for,
+apart from the other two, Hungerford's brusque and original conversation
+was always a pleasure--so were his cheroots; but now I was under an
+influence selfish in its source. At the same time I felt that Hungerford
+was storing up some acute criticism of me, and that he might let me hear
+it any moment. I knew, numbering the order of his duties, that he could
+have but a very short time to spare for gossip at this juncture, yet I
+said that I could not join them for half an hour or so. Hungerford had
+a fashion of looking at me searchingly from under his heavy brows, and I
+saw that he did so now with impatience, perhaps contempt. I was certain
+that he longed to thrash me. That was his idea of punishment and
+penalty. He linked his arm in those of the other two men, and they moved
+on, Colonel Ryder saying that he would keep the story till I came and
+would wait in the smoking-room for me.
+
+The concert was still on when I sat down beside Mrs. Falchion. "You
+seemed to enjoy Miss Treherne's singing?" she said cordially enough as
+she folded her hands in her lap.
+
+"Yes, I thought it beautiful. Didn't you?"
+
+"Pretty, most pretty; and admirable in technique and tone; but she has
+too much feeling to be really artistic. She felt the thing, instead of
+pretending to feel it--which makes all the difference. She belongs to
+a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls
+good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.
+Still, all of that pleasant race will read their husband's letters and
+smuggle. They have no civic virtues. Yet they would be shocked to bathe
+on the beach without a machine, as American women do,--and they look for
+a new fall of Jerusalem when one of their sex smokes a cigarette after
+dinner. Now, I do not smoke cigarettes after dinner, so I can speak
+freely. But, at the same time, I do not smuggle, and I do bathe on the
+beach without a machine--when I am in a land where there are no sharks
+and no taboo. If morally consumptive people were given a few years in
+the South Seas, where they could not get away from nature, there would
+be more strength and less scandal in society."
+
+I laughed. "There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
+the world and my sex thoroughly. He says as much in his books.--Have you
+read his 'A Sweet Apocalypse'? He said more than as much to me. But he
+knows a mere nothing about women--their amusing inconsistencies;
+their infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their
+self-torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods
+of religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints
+of a woman's position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
+really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you. He has only got two
+or three kinds of women in his mind, and the representatives of these
+fooled him, as far as he went with them, to their hearts' content.
+Believe me, there is no one quite so foolish as the professional student
+of character. He sees things with a glamour; he is impressionable; he
+immediately begins to make a woman what he wishes her to be for his
+book, not what she is; and women laugh at him when they read his books,
+or pity him if they know him personally. I venture to say that I could
+make Mr. Clovelly use me in a novel--not 'A Sweet Apocalypse'--as a
+placid lover of fancy bazaars and Dorcas societies, instead of a very
+practical person, who has seen life without the romantic eye, and knows
+as well the working of a buccaneering craft--through consular papers and
+magisterial trials, of course--as of a colonial Government House. But it
+is not worth while trying to make him falsify my character. Besides, you
+are here to amuse me."
+
+This speech, as she made it, was pleasantly audacious and clever. I
+laughed, and made a gesture of mock dissent, and she added: "Now I have
+finished my lecture. Please tie my shoe-lace there, and then, as I said,
+amuse me. Oh, you can, if you choose! You are clever when you like to
+be. Only, this time, do not let it be a professor's wife who foolishly
+destroys herself, and cuts short what might have been a brilliant
+career."
+
+On the instant I determined to probe deeper into her life, and try her
+nerve, by telling a story with enough likeness to her own (if she was
+the wife of Boyd Madras) to affect her acutely; though I was not sure I
+could succeed. A woman who triumphs over sea-sickness, whom steam from
+the boilers never affects, nor the propeller-screw disturbs, has little
+to fear from the words of a man who is neither adroit, eloquent, nor
+dramatic. However, I determined to try what I could do. I said: "I fancy
+you would like something in the line of adventure; but my career has not
+run in that direction, so I shall resort to less exciting fields, and, I
+fear, also, a not very cheerful subject."
+
+"Oh, never mind!" said she. "What you wish, so long as it is not
+conventional and hackneyed. But I know you will not be prosy, so go on,
+please."
+
+"Well," I began, "once, in the hospital, I attended a man--Anson was
+his name--who, when he thought he was going to die, confided to me
+his life's secret. I liked the man; he was good-looking, amiable, but
+hopelessly melancholy. He was dying as much from trouble as disease. No
+counsel or encouragement had any effect upon him; he did, as I have seen
+so many do--he resigned himself to the out-going tide. Well, for the
+secret. He had been a felon. His crime had been committed through
+ministering to his wife's vanity."
+
+Here I paused. I felt Mrs. Falchion's eyes searching me. I raised mine
+steadily to hers with an impersonal glance, and saw that she had not
+changed colour in the least. But her eyes were busy.
+
+I proceeded: "When he was disgraced she did not come near him. When he
+went to her, after he was released" (here I thought it best to depart
+from any close resemblance to Mrs. Falchion's own story), "and was
+admitted to her, she treated him as an absolute stranger--as one who
+had intruded, and might be violent. She said that she and her maid were
+alone in the house, and hinted that he had come to disturb them. She
+bade him go, or she must herself go. He called her by his own name, and
+begged her, by the memory of their dead child, to speak kindly to him.
+She said he was quite mistaken in her name, that she was Mrs. Glave, not
+Mrs. Anson, and again insisted that he should go. He left her, and
+at last, broken-hearted, found his way, in illness and poverty to the
+hospital, where, toward the last, he was cared for by a noble girl,
+a companion of his boyhood and his better days, who urged his wife to
+visit him. She left him alone, said unpleasant things to the girl, did
+not come to see her husband when he was dead, and provided nothing for
+his burial. You see that, like you, she hated suffering and misery--and
+criminals. The girl and her mother paid the expenses of the funeral,
+and, with myself, were the only mourners. I am doubtful if the wife
+knows even where he lies. I admit that the story sounds melodramatic;
+but truth is more drama than comedy, I fancy. Now, what do you think of
+it all, Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+I had felt her shrink a little at the earlier part of my story, as if
+she feared that her own tale was to be brutally bared before her;
+but that soon passed, and she languidly tapped the chair-arm as the
+narrative continued. When it was finished, she leaned over slightly, and
+with these same fingers tapped my arm. I thrilled involuntarily.
+
+"He died, did he?" she said. "That was the most graceful thing he could
+do. So far as my knowledge of the world is concerned, men of his class
+do NOT die. They live, and they never rise above their degradation. They
+had not brains or courage enough to keep them out of gaol, and they have
+not pluck or brains enough to succeed--afterwards. Your friend Anson was
+quite gentlemanly in his action at the last. He had some sense of the
+fitness of things. He could not find a place in the world without making
+other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble. If he had lived, he
+would always have added to the blight on his wife's career, and have
+been an arrow--not a thorn--in her side. Very likely he would have
+created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him. He made the
+false step, and compelled society to reject him. It did not want to
+do so; it never does. It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and
+acknowledge things until the culprit himself forces it to take action.
+Then it says: 'Now you have openly and inconsiderately broken our bond
+of mutual forbearance. You make me send you away. Go, then, behind stone
+walls, and please do not come to me again. If you do, you will only be
+a troublesome ghost. You will cause awkwardness and distress.' So,
+Mr. Anson--I must be polite to him--did the most reasonable and proper
+thing. He disappeared from the play before it actually became tragedy.
+There was no tragedy in his death--death is a magnificent ally; it
+untangles knots. The tragedy was in his living--in the perpetual ruin
+of his wife's life, renewed every morning. He disappeared. Then the
+play became drama, with only a little shadow of tragedy behind it. Now,
+frankly, am I not right?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your argument is clever, but it is only
+incidentally true. You draw life, society and men no more correctly than
+the author of 'A Sweet Apocalypse' would draw you. The social law you
+sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless. It does not
+provide for repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
+It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable."
+
+"Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair
+of priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final
+so far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned.
+What his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his
+fellow-men require of him is another. The world says, You shall have
+latitude enough to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code.
+As soon as you break the law openly, and set the machinery of public
+penalty in motion, there is an end of you, so far as this world is
+concerned. You may live on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and
+broken you always will be. It is not a question of right or wrong, of
+kindness or cruelty, but of general expediency and inevitableness. To
+all effect, Mr. Anson was dead before he breathed his last. He died when
+he passed within the walls of a gaol--condemned for theft."
+
+There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did
+from her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
+downrightness--enchanted by the glow of her face. To this hour, knowing
+all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid achievement
+of nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents with the
+general sense and the straitest interpretation of life; convincing even
+in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be acting not
+so much by impulse as by the law of her nature. Her emotions were
+apparently rationalised at birth--to be derationalised and broken up by
+a power greater than herself before her life had worked itself out. I
+had counted her clever; I had not reckoned with her powers of reasoning.
+Influenced as I was by emotion when in her presence, I resorted to a
+personal application of my opinions--the last and most unfair resort of
+a disputant. I said I would rather be Anson dead than Mrs. Anson living;
+I would rather be the active than the passive sinner; the victim, than a
+part of that great and cruel machine of penalty.
+
+"The passive sinner!" she replied. "Why, what wrong did she do?"
+
+The highest moral conceptions worked dully in her. Yet she seemed then,
+as she always appeared to be, free from any action that should set the
+machine of penalty going against herself. She was inexorable, but she
+had never, knowingly, so much as slashed the hem of the moral code.
+
+"It was to give his wife pleasure that Anson made the false step," I
+urged.
+
+"Do you think she would have had the pleasure at the price? The man was
+vain and selfish to run any risk, to do anything that might endanger her
+safety--that is, her happiness and comfort."
+
+"But suppose he knew that she loved ease and pleasure?--that he feared
+her anger or disdain if he did not minister to her luxuries?"
+
+"Then he ought not to have married that kind of a woman." The hardness
+in her voice was matched at that moment by the coldness of her face.
+
+"That is begging the question," I replied. "What would such a selfish
+woman do in such a case, if her pleasure could not be gratified?"
+
+"You must ask that kind of woman," was her ironical answer.
+
+I rashly felt that her castle of strength was crumbling. I ventured
+farther.
+
+"I have done so."
+
+She turned slightly toward me, yet not nervously, as I had expected.
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"She declined to answer directly."
+
+There was a pause, in which I felt her eyes searching my face. I fear I
+must have learned dissimulation well; for, after a minute, I looked
+at her, and saw, from the absence of any curious anxiety, that I had
+betrayed nothing. She looked me straight in the eyes and said: "Dr.
+Marmion, a man must not expect to be forgiven, who has brought shame on
+a woman."
+
+"Not even when he has repented and atoned?"
+
+"Atoned! How mad you are! How can there be atonement? You cannot wipe
+things out--on earth. We are of the earth. Records remain. If a man
+plays the fool, the coward, and the criminal, he must expect to wear the
+fool's cap, the white feather, and the leg-chain until his life's end.
+And now, please, let us change the subject. We have been bookish long
+enough." She rose with a gesture of impatience.
+
+I did not rise. "Pardon me, Mrs. Falchion," I urged, "but this interests
+me so. I have thought much of Anson lately. Please, let us talk a little
+longer. Do sit down."
+
+She sat down again with an air of concession rather than of pleasure.
+
+"I am interested," I said, "in looking at this question from a woman's
+standpoint. You see, I am apt to side with the miserable fellow who
+made a false step--foolish, if you like--all for love of a selfish and
+beautiful woman."
+
+"She was beautiful?"
+
+"Yes, as you are." She did not blush at that rank compliment, any more
+than a lioness would, if you praised the astonishing sleekness and
+beauty of its skin.
+
+"And she had been a true wife to him before that?"
+
+"Yes, in all that concerned the code."
+
+"Well?--Well, was not that enough? She did what she could, as long as
+she could." She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.
+
+"Don't you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs. Anson might
+at least have come to him when he was dying?"
+
+"It would only have been uncomfortable for her. She had no part in his
+life; she could not feel with him. She could do nothing."
+
+"But suppose she had loved him? By that memory, then, of the time when
+they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
+them?"
+
+"Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
+free world into a cage. Besides, we are talking about people marrying,
+not about their loving."
+
+"I will admit," I said, with a little raw irony, "that I was not exact
+in definition."
+
+Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not
+so marvellous to me as they might seem to others. She thought a moment
+quite indolently, and then continued: "You make one moralise like George
+Eliot. Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action. The one is a
+contract, the other is complete possession, a principle--that is, if it
+exists at all. I do not know."
+
+She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them
+was a wedding-ring! Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now
+she seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the
+humming darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a
+boatswain's whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous
+hour in the smoking-room.
+
+I am now about to record an act of madness, of folly, on my part. I
+suppose most men have such moments of temptation, but I suppose, also,
+that they act more sensibly and honourably than I did then. Her hand had
+dropped gently on the chair-arm, near to my own, and though our fingers
+did not touch, I felt mine thrilled and impelled toward hers. I do not
+seek to palliate my action. Though the man I believed to be her husband
+was below, I yielded myself to an imagined passion for her. In that
+moment I was a captive. I caught her hand and kissed it hotly.
+
+"But you might know what love is," I said. "You might learn--learn of
+me. You--"
+
+Abruptly and with surprise she withdrew her hand, and, without any
+visible emotion save a quicker pulsation of her breast, which might have
+been indignation, spoke. "But even if I might learn, Dr. Marmion, be
+sure that neither your college nor Heaven gave you the knowledge to
+instruct me.... There: pardon me, if I speak harshly; but this is most
+inconsiderate of you, most impulsive--and compromising. You are capable
+of singular contrasts. Please let us be friends, friends simply. You are
+too interesting for a lover, really you are."
+
+Her words were a cold shock to my emotion--my superficial emotion;
+though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me. Without any
+apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
+were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
+"I do not wonder now!"
+
+"You do not wonder at what?" she questioned; and she laid her hand
+kindly on my arm.
+
+I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, "At men going to
+the devil." But this was not what I thought.
+
+"That does not sound complimentary to somebody. May I ask you what you
+mean?" she said calmly. "I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did
+not love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same
+time."
+
+"Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant? You are not my
+husband--not my slave. But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson's wife was
+not responsible for his loving her. Love, as I take it, is a voluntary
+thing. It pleased him to love her--he would not have done it if it
+did not please him; probably his love was an inconvenient thing
+domestically--if he had no tact."
+
+"Of that," I said, "neither you nor I can know with any certainty. But,
+to be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where
+she had not strawed. If she did not make the man love her,--I believe
+she did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,--she used
+his love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire
+her. She was richer in personal power for that experience; but she was
+not grateful for it nor for his devotion."
+
+"You mean, in fact, that I--for you make the personal application--shall
+be better able henceforth to win men's love, because--ah, surely, Dr.
+Marmion, you do not dignify this impulse, this foolishness of yours, by
+the name of love!" She smiled a little satirically at the fingers I had
+kissed.
+
+I was humiliated, and annoyed with her and with myself, though, down
+in my mind, I knew that she was right. "I mean," said I, "that I can
+understand how men have committed suicide because of just such things.
+My wonder is that Anson, poor devil! did not do it." I knew I was
+talking foolishly.
+
+"He hadn't the courage, my dear sir. He was gentlemanly enough to die,
+but not to be heroic to that extent. For it does need a strong dash of
+heroism to take one's own life. As I conceive it, suicide would have
+been the best thing for him when he sinned against the code. The world
+would have pitied him then, would have said, He spared us the trial of
+punishing him. But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!"
+
+She shuddered and then almost coldly continued: "Suicide is an act of
+importance; it shows that a man recognises, at least, the worthlessness
+of his life. He does one dramatic and powerful thing; he has an instant
+of great courage, and all is over. If it had been a duel in which, of
+intention, he would fire wide, and his assailant would fire to kill, so
+much the better; so much the more would the world pity. But either
+is superior, as a final situation, than death with a broken heart--I
+suppose that is possible?--and disgrace, in a hospital."
+
+"You seem to think only of the present, only of the code and the world;
+and as if there were no heroism in a man living down his shame, righting
+himself heroically at all points possible, bearing his penalty, and
+showing the courage of daily wearing the sackcloth of remorse and
+restitution."
+
+"Oh," she persisted, "you make me angry. I know what you wish to
+express; I know that you consider it a sin to take one's life, even in
+'the high Roman fashion.' But, frankly, I do not, and I fear--or rather,
+I fancy--that I never shall. After all, your belief is a pitiless one;
+for, as I have tried to say, the man has not himself alone to consider,
+but those to whom his living is a perpetual shame and menace and cruelty
+insupportable--insupportable! Now, please, let us change the subject
+finally; and"--here she softly laughed--"forgive me if I have treated
+your fancied infatuation lightly or indifferently. I want you for a
+friend--at least, for a friendly acquaintance. I do not want you for a
+lover."
+
+We both rose. I was not quite content with her nor with myself yet. I
+felt sure that while she did not wish me for a lover, she was not averse
+to my playing the devoted cavalier, who should give all, while she
+should give nothing. I knew that my punishment had already begun.
+We paced the deck in silence; and once, as we walked far aft, I saw,
+leaning upon the railing of the intermediate deck, and looking towards
+us--Boyd Madras; and the words of that letter which he wrote on the No
+Man's Sea came to me.
+
+At length she said: "You have made no reply to my last remark. Are we to
+be friends, and not lovers? Or shall you cherish enmity against me?
+Or, worse still,"--and here she laughed, I thought, a little
+ironically,--"avoid me, and be as icy as you have been--fervid?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your enemy I do not wish to be--I could not
+be if I wished; but, for the rest, you must please let me see what I may
+think of myself to-morrow. There is much virtue in to-morrow," I added.
+"It enables one to get perspective."
+
+"I understand," she said; and then was silent. We walked the deck slowly
+for several minutes. Then we were accosted by two ladies of a committee
+that had the fancy-dress ball in hand. They wished to consult Mrs.
+Falchion in certain matters of costume and decoration, for which, it
+had been discovered, she had a peculiar faculty. She turned to me half
+inquiringly, and I bade her good-night, inwardly determined (how easy
+it is after having failed to gratify ourselves!) that the touch of her
+fingers should never again make my heart beat faster.
+
+I joined Colonel Ryder and Clovelly in the smoking-room. Hungerford, as
+I guessed gladly, was gone. I was too much the coward to meet his eye
+just then. Colonel Ryder was estimating the amount he would wager--if he
+were in the habit of betting--that the 'Fulvia' could not turn round
+in her tracks in twenty minutes, while he parenthetically endorsed
+Hungerford's remarks to me--though he was ignorant of them--that lascars
+should not be permitted on English passenger ships. He was supported by
+Sir Hayes Craven, a shipowner, who further said that not one out of ten
+British sailors could swim, while not five out of ten could row a boat
+properly. Ryder's anger was great, because Clovelly remarked with mock
+seriousness that the lascars were picturesque, and asked the American
+if he had watched them listlessly eating rice and curry as they squatted
+between decks; whether he had observed the Serang, with his silver
+whistle, who ruled them, and despised us "poor white trash;" and if
+he did not think it was a good thing to have fatalists like them as
+sailors--they would be cool in time of danger.
+
+Colonel Ryder's indignation was curbed, however, by the bookmaker,
+who, having no views, but seeing an opportunity for fun, brought up
+reinforcements of chaff and slang, easily construable into profanity,
+and impregnated with terse humour. Many of the ladies had spoken of the
+bookmaker as one of the best-mannered men on board. So he was to all
+appearance. None dressed with better taste, nor carried himself with
+such an air. There was even a deferential tone in his strong language, a
+hesitating quaintness, which made it irresistible. He was at the service
+of any person on board needing championship. His talents were varied.
+He could suggest harmonies in colour to the ladies at one moment, and at
+the next, in the seclusion of the bar counter, arrange deadly harmonies
+in liquor. He was an authority on acting; he knew how to edit a
+newspaper; he picked out the really nice points in the sermons delivered
+by the missionaries in the saloon; he had some marvellous theories about
+navigation; and his trick with a salad was superb. He now convulsed the
+idlers in the smoking-room with laughter, and soon deftly drew off
+the discussion to the speed of the vessel, arranging a sweep-stake
+immediately, upon the possibilities of the run. He instantly proposed to
+sell the numbers by auction. He was the auctioneer. With his eye-glass
+at his eye, and Bohemian pleasantry falling from his lips, he ran the
+prices up. He was selling Clovelly's number, and had advanced it beyond
+the novelist's own bidding, when suddenly the screw stopped, the engines
+ceased working, and the 'Fulvia' slowed down.
+
+The numbers remained unsold. Word came to us that an accident had
+happened to the machinery, and that we should be hove-to for a day, or
+longer, to accomplish necessary repairs. How serious the accident to the
+machinery was no one knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V. ACCUSING FACES
+
+While we were hove-to, the 'Porcupine' passed us. In all probability it
+would now get to Aden ahead of us; and herein lay a development of the
+history of Mrs. Falchion. I was standing beside Belle Treherne as the
+ship came within hail of us and signalled to see what was the matter.
+Mrs. Falchion was not far from us. She was looking intently at the
+vessel through marine-glasses, and she did not put them down until it
+had passed. Then she turned away with an abstracted light in her eyes
+and a wintry smile; and the look and the smile continued when she
+sat down in her deck-chair and leaned her cheek meditatively on the
+marine-glass. But I saw now that something was added to the expression
+of her face--a suggestion of brooding or wonder. Belle Treherne,
+noticing the direction of my glances, said: "Have you known Mrs.
+Falchion long?"
+
+"No, not long," I replied. "Only since she came on board."
+
+"She is very clever, I believe."
+
+I felt my face flushing, though, reasonably, there was no occasion for
+it, and I said: "Yes, she is one of the ablest women I have ever met."
+
+"She is beautiful, too--very beautiful." This very frankly.
+
+"Have you talked with her?" asked I.
+
+"Yes, a little this morning, for the first time. She did not speak much,
+however." Here Miss Treherne paused, and then added meditatively: "Do
+you know, she impressed me as having singular frankness and singular
+reserve as well? I think I admired it. There is no feeling in her
+speech, and yet it has great candour. I never before met any one like
+her. She does not wear her heart upon her sleeve, I imagine."
+
+A moment of irony came over me; that desire to say what one really does
+not believe (a feminine trait), and I replied: "Are both those articles
+necessary to any one? A sleeve?--well, one must be clothed. But a
+heart?--a cumbrous thing, as I take it."
+
+Belle Treherne turned, and looked me steadily in the eyes for an
+instant, as if she had suddenly awakened from abstraction, and slowly
+said, while she drew back slightly: "Dr. Marmion, I am only a girl,
+I know, and inexperienced, but I hoped most people of education and
+knowledge of life were free from that kind of cynicism to be read of
+in books." Then something in her thoughts seemed to chill her words and
+manner, and her father coming up a moment after, she took his arm, and
+walked away with a not very cordial bow to me.
+
+The fact is, with a woman's quick intuition, she had read in my tone
+something suggestive of my recent experience with Mrs. Falchion. Her
+fine womanliness awoke; the purity of her thoughts, rose in opposition
+to my flippancy and to me; and I knew that I had raised a prejudice not
+easy to destroy.
+
+This was on a Friday afternoon.
+
+On the Saturday evening following, the fancy-dress ball was to occur.
+The accident to the machinery and our delay were almost forgotten in the
+preparations therefor. I had little to do; there was only one sick man
+on board, and my hand could not cure his sickness. How he fared, my
+uncomfortable mind, now bitterly alive to a sense of duty, almost
+hesitated to inquire. Yet a change had come. A reaction had set in for
+me. Would it be permanent? I dared scarcely answer that question, with
+Mrs. Falchion at my right hand at table, with her voice at my ear. I was
+not quite myself yet; I was struggling, as it were, with the effects of
+a fantastic dream.
+
+Still, I had determined upon my course. I had made resolutions. I had
+ended the chapter of dalliance. I had wished to go to 116 Intermediate
+and let its occupant demand what satisfaction he would. I wanted to say
+to Hungerford that I was an ass; but that was even harder still. He was
+so thorough and uncompromising in nature, so strong in moral fibre, that
+I felt his sarcasm would be too outspoken for me just at present.
+In this, however, I did not give him credit for a fine sense of
+consideration, as after events showed. Although there had been no spoken
+understanding between us that Mrs. Falchion was the wife of Boyd Madras,
+the mind of one was the other's also. I understood exactly why he told
+me Boyd Madras's story: it was a warning. He was not the man to harp on
+things. He gave the hint, and there the matter ended, so far as he was
+concerned, until a time might come when he should think it his duty
+to refer to the subject again. Some time before, he had shown me the
+portrait of the girl who had promised to be his wife. She, of course,
+could trust HIM anywhere, everywhere.
+
+Mrs. Falchion had seen the change in me, and, I am sure, guessed the new
+direction of my thoughts, and knew that I wished to take refuge in a
+new companionship--a thing, indeed, not easily to be achieved, as I felt
+now; for no girl of delicate and proud temper would complacently regard
+a hasty transference of attention from another to herself. Besides, it
+would be neither courteous nor reasonable to break with Mrs. Falchion
+abruptly. The error was mine, not hers. She had not my knowledge of the
+immediate circumstances, which made my position morally untenable. She
+showed unembarrassed ignorance of the change. At the same time I
+caught a tone of voice and a manner which showed she was not actually
+oblivious, but was touched in that nerve called vanity; and from this
+much feminine hatred springs.
+
+I made up my mind to begin a course of scientific reading, and was
+seated in my cabin, vainly trying to digest a treatise on the pathology
+of the nervous system, when Hungerford appeared at the door. With a nod,
+he entered, threw himself down on the cabin sofa, and asked for a match.
+After a pause, he said: "Marmion, Boyd Madras, alias Charles Boyd, has
+recognised me."
+
+I rose to get a cigar, thus turning my face from him, and said: "Well?"
+
+"Well, there isn't anything very startling. I suppose he wishes I had
+left him in the dingey on No Man's Sea. He's a fool."
+
+"Indeed, why?"
+
+"Marmion, are your brains softening? Why does he shadow a woman who
+wouldn't lift her finger to save him from battle, murder, or sudden
+death?"
+
+"From the code," I said, in half soliloquy.
+
+"From the what?"
+
+"Oh, never mind, Hungerford. I suppose he is shadowing--Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+He eyed me closely.
+
+"I mean the woman that chucked his name; that turned her back on him
+when he was in trouble; that hopes he is dead, if she doesn't believe
+that he is actually; that would, no doubt, treat him as a burglar if he
+went to her, got down on his knees, and said: 'Mercy, my girl, I've come
+back to you a penitent prodigal. Henceforth I shall be as straight as
+the sun, so help me Heaven and your love and forgiveness!'"
+
+Hungerford paused, as if expecting me to reply; but, leaning forward on
+my knees and smoking hard, I remained silent. This seemed to anger him,
+for he said a little roughly: "Why doesn't he come out and give you
+blazes on the promenade deck, and corner her down with a mighty cheek,
+and levy on her for a thousand pounds? Both you and she would think more
+of him. Women don't dislike being bullied, if it is done in the right
+way--haven't I seen it the world over, from lubra to dowager? I tell
+you, man--sinning or not--was meant to be woman's master and lover, and
+just as much one as the other."
+
+At this point Hungerford's manner underwent a slight change, and he
+continued: "Marmion, I wouldn't have come near you, only I noticed you
+have altered your course, and are likely to go on a fresh tack. It isn't
+my habit to worry a man. I gave you a signal, and you didn't respond at
+first. Well, we have come within hail again; and now, don't you think
+that you might help to straighten this tangle, and try to arrange a
+reconciliation between those two?
+
+"The scheme is worth trying. Nobody need know but you and me. It
+wouldn't be much of a sacrifice to her to give him a taste of the thing
+she swore to do--how does it run?--'to have and to hold from this day
+forward'?--I can't recall it; but it's whether the wind blows fair or
+foul, or the keel scrapes the land or gives to the rock, till the sea
+gulps one of 'em down for ever. That's the sense of the thing, Marmion,
+and the contract holds between the two, straight on into the eternal
+belly. Whatever happens, a husband is a husband, and a wife a wife. It
+seems to me that, in the sight of Heaven, it's he that's running fair
+in the teeth of the wind, every timber straining, and she that's riding
+with it, well coaled, flags flying, in an open channel, and passing the
+derelict without so much as, 'Ahoy there!'"
+
+Now, at this distance of time, I look back, and see Hungerford, "the
+rowdy sailor," as he called himself, lying there, his dark grey
+eyes turned full on me; and I am convinced that no honester, more
+sturdy-minded man ever reefed a sail, took his turn upon the bridge, or
+walked the dry land in the business of life. It did not surprise me,
+a year after, when I saw in public prints that he was the hero of--but
+that must be told elsewhere. I was about to answer him then as I knew
+he would wish, when a steward appeared and said: "Mr. Boyd, 116
+Intermediate, wishes you would come to him, sir, if you would be so
+kind."
+
+Hungerford rose, and, as I made ready to go, urged quietly: "You've got
+the charts and soundings, Marmion, steam ahead!" and, with a swift but
+kindly clench of my shoulder, he left me. In that moment there came a
+cowardly feeling, a sense of shamefacedness, and then, hard upon it, and
+overwhelming it, a determination to serve Boyd Madras so far as lay in
+my power, and to be a man, and not a coward or an idler.
+
+When I found him he was prostrate. In his eyes there was no anger, no
+indignation, nor sullenness--all of which he might reasonably have felt;
+and instantly I was ashamed of the thought which, as I came to him,
+flashed through my mind, that he might do some violent thing. Not that
+I had any fear of violence; but I had an active dislike of awkward
+circumstances. I felt his fluttering pulse, and noted the blue line on
+his warped lips. I gave him some medicine, and then sat down. There was
+a silence. What could I say? A dozen thoughts came to my mind, but I
+rejected them. It was difficult to open up the subject. At last he put
+his hand upon my arm and spoke:
+
+"You told me one night that you would help me if you could. I ought
+to have accepted your offer at first; it would have been better.--No,
+please don't speak just yet. I think I know what you would say. I knew
+that you meant all you urged upon me; that you liked me. I was once
+worthy of men's liking, perhaps, and I had good comrades; but that is
+all over. You have not come near me lately, but it wasn't because you
+felt any neglect, or wished to take back your words; but--because of
+something else.... I understand it all. She has great power. She always
+had. She is very beautiful. I remember when--but I will not call it
+back before you, though, God knows, I go over it all every day and every
+night, until it seems that only the memory of her is real, and that she
+herself is a ghost. I ought not to have crossed her path again, even
+unknown to her. But I have done it, and now I cannot go out of that path
+without kneeling before her once again, as I did long ago. Having seen
+her, breathed the same air, I must speak or die; perhaps it will be
+both. That is a power she has: she can bend one to her will, although
+she often, involuntarily, wills things that are death to others. One
+MUST care for her, you understand; it is natural, even when it is
+torture to do so."
+
+He put his hand on his side and moved as if in pain. I reached over and
+felt his pulse, then took his hand and pressed it, saying: "I will be
+your friend now, Madras, in so far as I can."
+
+He looked up at me gratefully, and replied: "I know that--I know that.
+It is more than I deserve."
+
+Then he began to speak of his past. He told me of Hungerford's kindness
+to him on the 'Dancing Kate', of his luckless days at Port Darwin, of
+his search for his wife, his writing to her, and her refusal to see
+him. He did not rail against her. He apologised for her, and reproached
+himself. "She is most singular," he continued, "and different from
+most women. She never said she loved me, and she never did, I know. Her
+father urged her to marry me; he thought I was a good man."
+
+Here he laughed a little bitterly. "But it was a bad day for her. She
+never loved any one, I think, and she cannot understand what love
+is, though many have cared for her. She is silent where herself is
+concerned. I think there was some trouble--not love, I am sure of
+that--which vexed her, and made her a little severe at times; something
+connected with her life, or her father's life, in Samoa. One can only
+guess, but white men take what are called native wives there very
+often--and who can tell? Her father--but that is her secret!... While I
+was right before the world, she was a good wife to me in her way. When I
+went wrong, she treated me as if I were dead, and took her old name. But
+if I could speak to her quietly once more, perhaps she would listen.
+It would be no good at all to write. Perhaps she would never begin the
+world with me again, but I should like to hear her say, 'I forgive you.
+Good-bye.' There would be some comfort in a kind farewell from her. You
+can see that, Dr. Marmion?"
+
+He paused, waiting for me to speak. "Yes, I can see that," I said; and
+then I added: "Why did you not speak to her before you both came on
+board at Colombo?"
+
+"I had no chance. I only saw her in the street, an hour before the ship
+sailed. I had scarcely time to take my passage."
+
+Pain here checked his utterance, and when he recovered, he turned again
+to me, and continued: "To-morrow night there is to be a fancy-dress ball
+on board. I have been thinking. I could go in a good disguise. I could
+speak to her, and attract no notice; and if she will not listen to me,
+why, then, that ends it. I shall know the worst, and to know the worst
+is good."
+
+"Yes," said I; "and what do you wish me to do?"
+
+"I wish to go in a disguise, of course; to dress in your cabin, if you
+will let me. I cannot dress here, it would attract attention; and I am
+not a first-class passenger."
+
+"I fear," I replied, "that it is impossible for me to assist you to the
+privileges of a first-class passenger. You see, I am an officer of the
+ship. But still I can help you. You shall leave this cabin to-night. I
+will arrange so that you may transfer yourself to one in the first-class
+section.... No, not a word; it must be as I wish in this. You are ill;
+I can do you that kindness at least, and then, by right, you can attend
+the ball, and, after it, your being among the first-class passengers can
+make little difference; for you will have met and spoken then, either to
+peace or otherwise."
+
+I had very grave doubts of any reconciliation; the substance of my
+notable conversation with Mrs. Falchion was so prominent in my mind. I
+feared she would only reproduce the case of Anson and his wife. I was
+also afraid of a possible scene--which showed that I was not yet able to
+judge of her resources. After a time, in which we sat silent, I said to
+Madras: "But suppose she should be frightened?--should--should make a
+scene?"
+
+He raised himself to a sitting posture. "I feel better," he said. Then,
+answering my question: "You do not know her quite. She will not stir a
+muscle. She has nerve. I have seen her in positions of great peril and
+trial. She is not emotional, though I truly think she will wake one day
+and find her heart all fire but not for me. Still, I say that all
+will be quite comfortable, so far as any demonstration on her part is
+concerned. She will not be melodramatic, I do assure you."
+
+"And the disguise--your dress?" inquired I.
+
+He rose from the berth slowly, and, opening a portmanteau, drew from
+it a cloth of white and red, fringed with gold. It was of beautiful
+texture, and made into the form of a toga or mantle. He said: "I was a
+seller of such stuffs in Colombo, and these I brought with me, because
+I could not dispose of them without sacrifice when I left hurriedly. I
+have made them into a mantle. I could go as--a noble Roman, perhaps!"
+Then a slight, ironical smile crossed his lips, and he stretched out his
+thin but shapely arms, as if in derision of himself.
+
+"You will go as Menelaus the Greek," said I.
+
+"I as Menelaus the Greek?" The smile became a little grim.
+
+"Yes, as Menelaus; and I will go as Paris." I doubt not that my voice
+showed a good deal of self-scorn at the moment; but there was a kind of
+luxury in self-abasement before him. "Your wife, I know, intends to go
+as Helen of Troy. It is all mumming. Let it stand so, as Menelaus and
+Helen and Paris before there was any Trojan war, and as if there never
+could be any--as if Paris went back discomfited, and the other two were
+reconciled."
+
+His voice was low and broken. "I know you exaggerate matters, and
+condemn yourself beyond reason," he replied. "I will do as you say. But,
+Dr. Marmion, it will not be all mumming, as you shall see."
+
+A strange look came upon his face at this. I could not construe it;
+and, after a few words of explanation regarding his transference to
+the forward part of the ship, I left him. I found the purser, made the
+necessary arrangements for him, and then sought my cabin, humbled in
+many ways. I went troubled to bed. After a long wakefulness, I dozed
+away into that disturbed vestibule of sleep where the world's happenings
+mingle with the visions of unconsciousness. I seemed to see a man's
+heart beating in his bosom in growing agonies, until, with one last
+immense palpitation, it burst, and life was gone. Then the dream
+changed, and I saw a man in the sea, drowning, who seemed never to
+drown entirely, his hands ever beating the air and the mocking water.
+I thought that I tried many times to throw him a lighted buoy in the
+half-shadow, but some one held me back, and I knew that a woman's arms
+were round me.
+
+But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with
+a last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight. When he was gone, the
+woman's arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her,
+she, too, had gone.
+
+I awoke.
+
+Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, "She'll
+get under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the 'Porcupine' to
+Aden. How the engines are kicking below!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI. MUMMERS ALL
+
+The next day was beautiful, if not enjoyable. Stirring preparations
+were being made for the ball. Boyd Madras was transferred to a cabin far
+forward, but he did not appear at any meal in the saloon, or on deck.
+In the morning I was busy in the dispensary. While I was there, Justine
+Caron came to get some medicine that I had before given her. Her hand
+was now nearly well. Justine had nerves, and it appeared to me that
+her efforts to please her mistress, and her occasional failures, were
+wearing her unduly. I said to her: "You have been worried, Miss Caron?"
+
+"Oh, no, Doctor," she quickly replied.
+
+I looked at her a little sceptically, and she said at last: "Well,
+perhaps a little. You see, madame did not sleep well last night, and I
+read to her. It was a little difficult, and there was not much choice of
+books."
+
+"What did you read?" I asked mechanically, as I prepared her medicine.
+
+"Oh, some French novel first--De Maupassant's; but madame said he was
+impertinent--that he made women fools and men devils. Then I tried some
+modern English tales, but she said they were silly. I knew not what to
+do. But there was Shakespeare. I read Antony and Cleopatra, and she said
+that the play was grand, but the people were foolish except when they
+died--their deaths were magnificent. Madame is a great critic; she is
+very clever."
+
+"Yes, yes, I know that; but when did she fall asleep?"
+
+"About four o'clock in the morning. I was glad, because she is very
+beautiful when she has much sleep."
+
+"And you--does not sleep concern you in this matter of madame?"
+
+"For me," she said, looking away, "it is no matter. I have no beauty.
+Besides, I am madame's servant,"--she blushed slightly at this,"--and
+she is generous with money."
+
+"Yes, and you like money so much?"
+
+Her eyes flashed a little defiantly as she looked me in the face. "It is
+everything to me."
+
+She paused as if to see the effect upon me, or to get an artificial
+(I knew it was artificial) strength to go on, then she added: "I love
+money. I work for it; I would bear all for it--all that a woman could
+bear. I--" But here she paused again, and, though the eyes still
+flashed, the lips quivered. Hers was not the face of cupidity. It was
+sensitive, yet firm, as with some purpose deep as her nature was by
+creation and experience, and always deepening that nature. I suddenly
+got the conviction that this girl had a sorrow of some kind in her life,
+and that this unreal affection for money was connected with it. Perhaps
+she saw my look of interest, for she hurriedly continued: "But, pardon
+me, I am foolish. I shall be better when the pain is gone. Madame is
+kind; she will let me sleep this afternoon, perhaps."
+
+I handed her the medicine, and then asked: "How long have you known Mrs.
+Falchion, Miss Caron?"
+
+"Only one year."
+
+"Where did you join her?"
+
+"In Australia."
+
+"In Australia? You lived there?"
+
+"No, monsieur, I did not live there."
+
+A thought came to my mind--the nearness of New Caledonia to Australia,
+and New Caledonia was a French colony--a French penal colony! I smiled
+as I said the word penal to myself. Of course the word could have no
+connection with a girl like her, but still she might have lived in the
+colony. So I added quietly: "You perhaps had come from New Caledonia?"
+
+Her look was candid, if sorrowful. "Yes, from New Caledonia."
+
+Was she, thought I, the good wife of some convict--some political
+prisoner?--the relative of some refugee of misfortune? Whatever she was,
+I was sure that she was free from any fault. She evidently thought that
+I might suspect something uncomplimentary of her, for she said: "My
+brother was an officer at Noumea. He is dead. I am going to France, when
+I can."
+
+I tried to speak gently to her. I saw that her present position must
+be a trial. I advised her to take more rest, or she would break down
+altogether, for she was weak and nervous; I hinted that she might have
+to give up entirely, if she continued to tax herself heedlessly; and,
+finally, that I would speak to Mrs. Falchion about her. I was scarcely
+prepared for her action then. Tears came to her eyes, and she said to
+me, her hand involuntarily clasping my arm: "Oh no, no! I ask you not to
+speak to madame. I will sleep--I will rest. Indeed, I will. This service
+is so much to me. She is most generous. It is because I am so altogether
+hers, night and day, that she pays me well. And the money is so much. It
+is my honour--my dead brother's honour. You are kind at heart; you will
+make me strong with medicine, and I will ask God to bless you. I could
+not suffer such poverty again. And then, it is my honour!"
+
+I felt that she would not have given way thus had not her nerves been
+shaken, had she not lived so much alone, and irregularly, so far as her
+own rest and comfort were concerned, and at such perpetual cost to her
+energy. Mrs. Falchion, I knew, was selfish, and would not, or could
+not, see that she was hard upon the girl, by such exactions as midnight
+reading and loss of sleep. She demanded not merely physical but mental
+energy--a complete submission of both; and when this occurred with a
+sensitive, high-strung girl, she was literally feeding on another's
+life-blood. If she had been told this, she, no doubt, would have been
+very much surprised.
+
+I reassured Justine. I told her that I should say nothing directly
+to Mrs. Falchion, for I saw she was afraid of unpleasantness; but I
+impressed upon her that she must spare herself, or she would break
+down, and extorted a promise that she would object to sitting up after
+midnight to read to Mrs. Falchion.
+
+When this was done, she said: "But, you see, it is not madame's fault
+that I am troubled."
+
+"I do not wish," I said, "to know any secret,--I am a doctor, not a
+priest,--but if there is anything you can tell me, in which I might
+be able to help you, you may command me in so far as is possible."
+Candidly, I think I was too inquiring in those days.
+
+She smiled wistfully, and replied: "I will think of what you say so
+kindly, and perhaps, some day soon, I will tell you of such trouble as
+I have. But, believe me, it is no question of wrong at all, by any
+one--now. The wrong is over. It is simply that a debt of honour must be
+satisfied; it concerns my poor dead brother."
+
+"Are you going to relatives in France?" I asked.
+
+"No; I have no relatives, no near friends. I am alone in the world. My
+mother I cannot remember; she died when I was very young. My father had
+riches, but they went before he died. Still, France is home, and I must
+go there." She turned her head away to the long wastes of sea.
+
+Little more passed between us. I advised her to come often on deck,
+and mingle with the passengers; and told her that, when she pleased, I
+should be glad to do any service that lay in my power. Her last words
+were that, after we put into Aden, she would possibly take me at my
+word.
+
+After she had gone, I found myself wondering at my presentiment that
+Aden was to be associated with critical points in the history of some of
+us; and from that moment I began to connect Justine Caron with certain
+events which, I felt sure, were marshalling to an unhappy conclusion. I
+wondered, too, what part I should play in the development of the comedy,
+tragedy, or whatever it was to be. In this connection I thought of Belle
+Treherne, and of how I should appear in her eyes if that little scene
+with Mrs. Falchion, now always staring me in the face, were rehearsed
+before her. I came quickly to my feet, with a half-imprecation at
+myself; and a verse of a crude sea-song was in my ears:
+
+       "You can batten down cargo, live and dead,
+        But you can't put memory out of sight;
+        You can paint the full sails overhead,
+        But you can't make a black deed white...."
+
+Angry, I said to myself: "It wasn't a black deed; it was foolish, it was
+infatuation, it was not right, but it is common to shipboard; and I lost
+my head, that was all."
+
+Some time later I was still at work in the dispensary, when I heard Mr.
+Treherne's voice calling to me from outside. I drew back the curtain. He
+was leaning on his daughter's arm, while in one hand he carried a stick.
+"Ah, Doctor, Doctor," cried he, "my old enemy, sciatica, has me in its
+grip, and why, in this warm climate, I can't understand. I'm afraid I
+shall have to heave-to, like the 'Fulvia', and lay up for repairs. And,
+by the way, I'm glad we are on our course again." He entered, and sat
+down. Belle Treherne bowed to me gravely, and smiled slightly. The smile
+was not peculiarly hospitable. I knew perfectly well that to convince
+her of the reality of my growing admiration for her would be no easy
+task; but I was determined to base my new religion of the affections
+upon unassailable canons, and I felt that now I could do best by waiting
+and proving myself.
+
+While I was arranging some medicine for Mr. Treherne, and advising him
+on care against chills in a hot climate, he suddenly broke in with: "Dr.
+Marmion, Captain Ascott tells me that we shall get to Aden by Tuesday
+morning next. Now, I was asked by a friend of mine in London to visit
+the grave of a son of his--a newspaper correspondent--who was killed in
+one of the expeditions against the native tribes, and was buried in the
+general cemetery at Aden. On the way out I was not able to fulfil the
+commission, because we passed Aden in the night. But there will be
+plenty of time to do so on Tuesday, I am told. This, however, is my
+difficulty: I cannot go unless I am better, and I'm afraid there is no
+such luck as that in store for me. These attacks last a week, at least.
+I wish my daughter, however, to go. One of the ladies on board will go
+with her--Mrs. Callendar, I believe; and I am going to be so bold as
+to ask you to accompany them, if you will. I know you better than any
+officer on board; and, besides, I should feel safer and better satisfied
+if she went under the protection of an officer,--these barbarous places,
+you know!--though, of course, it may be asking too much of you, or what
+is impossible."
+
+I assented with pleasure. Belle Treherne was looking at the Latin names
+on the bottles at the time, and her face showed no expression either of
+pleasure or displeasure. Mr. Treherne said bluffly: "Dr. Marmion, you
+are kind--very kind, and, upon my word, I'm much obliged." He then
+looked at his daughter as if expecting her to speak.
+
+She looked up and said conventionally: "You are very kind, Dr. Marmion,
+and I am much obliged." Then I thought her eyes twinkled with amusement
+at her own paraphrase of her father's speech, and she added: "Mrs.
+Callendar and myself will be much honoured indeed, and feel very
+important in having an officer to attend us. Of course everybody else
+will be envious, and, again of course, that will add to our vanity."
+
+At this she would have gone; but her father, who was suffering just
+enough pain to enjoy anything that would divert his attention from it,
+fell into conversation upon a subject of mutual interest, in which his
+daughter joined on occasion, but not with enthusiasm. Yet, when they
+came to go, she turned and said kindly, almost softly, as her fingers
+touched mine: "I almost envy you your profession, Dr. Marmion. It opens
+doors to so much of humanity and life."
+
+"There is no sin," I laughingly said, "in such a covetousness, and,
+believe me, it can do no harm to me, at least." Then I added gravely: "I
+should like my profession, in so far as I am concerned, to be worth your
+envy." She had passed through the door before the last words were said,
+but I saw that her look was not forbidding.
+
+       .........................
+
+Is there unhappiness anywhere? There is not a vexing toss of the sea,
+not a cloud in the sky. Is not catastrophe dead, and the arrows of
+tragedy spilled? Peace broadens into deep, perfumed dusk towards Arabia;
+languor spreads towards the unknown lands of the farthest south. No
+anxious soul leans out from the casement of life; the time is heavy with
+delightful ease. There is no sound that troubles; the world goes by and
+no one heeds; for it is all beyond this musky twilight and this pleasant
+hour. In this palace on the sea Mirth trails in and out with airy and
+harmonious footsteps. Even the clang-clang of eight bells has music--not
+boisterous nor disturbing, but muffled in the velvety air. Then, through
+this hemisphere of jocund quiet, there sounds the "All's well" of the
+watch.
+
+But, look! Did you see a star fall just then, and the long avenue of
+expiring flame behind it?--Do not shudder; it is nothing. No cry of pain
+came through that brightness. There was only the "All's well" from the
+watchers.
+
+The thud of the engines falls on a padded atmosphere, and the lascars
+move like ghosts along the decks. The long, smooth promenade is canopied
+and curtained, and hung with banners, and gay devices of the gorgeous
+East are contributing to the federation of pleasure.
+
+And now, through a festooned doorway, there come the people of many
+lands to inhabit the gay court. Music follows their footsteps: Hamlet
+and Esther; Caractacus and Iphigenia; Napoleon and Hermione; The Man
+in the Iron Mask and Sappho; Garibaldi and Boadicea; an Arab sheikh
+and Joan of Arc; Mahomet and Casablanca; Cleopatra and Hannibal--a
+resurrected world. But the illusion is short and slight. This world
+is very sordid--of shreds and patches, after all. It is but a
+pretty masquerade, in which feminine vanity beats hard against
+strangely-clothed bosoms; and masculine conceit is shown in the work of
+the barber's curling-irons and the ship-carpenter's wooden swords
+and paper helmets. The pride of these folk is not diminished because
+Hamlet's wig gets awry, or a Roman has trouble with his foolish garters.
+Few men or women can resist mumming; they fancy themselves as somebody
+else, dead or living. Yet these seem happy in this nonsense. The
+indolent days appear to have deadened hatred, malice, and all
+uncharitableness. They shall strut and fret their hour upon this little
+stage. Let that sprightly girl forget the sudden death which made her an
+orphan; the nervous broker his faithless wife; the grey-haired soldier
+his silly and haunting sins; the bankrupt his creditors.
+
+"On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!" For the captain is on the
+bridge, the engineer is beneath; we have stout walls, and a ceaseless
+sentry-go. In the intervals of the dance wine passes, and idle things
+are said beside the draped and cushioned capstan or in the friendly
+gloom of a boat, which, in the name of safety, hangs taut between its
+davits. Let this imitation Cleopatra use the Cleopatra's arts; this
+mellow Romeo (sometime an Irish landlord) vow to this coy Juliet; this
+Helen of Troy--Of all who walked these decks, mantled and wigged
+in characters not their own, Mrs. Falchion was the handsomest, most
+convincing. With a graceful swaying movement she passed along the
+promenade, and even envy praised her. Her hand lay lightly on the arm
+of a brown stalwart native of the Indian hills, fierce and savage
+in attire. Against his wild picturesqueness and brawny strength, her
+perfectness of animal beauty, curbed and rendered delicate by her inner
+coldness, showed in fine contrast; and yet both were matched in the fine
+natural prowess of form.
+
+With a singular affirmation of what had been, after all, but
+a sadly-humourous proposal, I had attired myself in a Greek
+costume--quickly made by my steward, who had been a tailor--and was
+about to leave my cabin, when Hungerford entered, and exclaimed, as he
+took his pipe from his mouth in surprise: "Marmion, what does this
+mean? Don't you know your duties better? No officer may appear at these
+flare-ups in costume other than his uniform. You're the finest example
+of suburban innocence and original sin I've seen this last quarter of
+a century, wherein I've kept the world--and you--from tottering to
+destruction." He reached for one of my cigars.
+
+Without a word, and annoyed at my own stupidity, I slowly divested
+myself of the clothes of Greece; while Hungerford smoked on, humming to
+himself occasionally a few bars of The Buccaneer's Bride, but evidently
+occupied with something in his mind. At length he said: "Marmion, I said
+suburban innocence and original sin, but you've a grip on the law of
+square and compass too. I'll say that for you, old chap--and I hope you
+don't think I'm a miserable prig."
+
+Still I replied nothing, but offered him one of my best cigars, taking
+the other one from him, and held the match while he lighted it--which,
+between men, is sufficient evidence of good-feeling. He understood, and
+continued: "Of course you'll keep your eye on Mrs. Falchion and Madras
+to-night: if he is determined that they shall meet, and you have
+arranged it. I'd like to know how it goes before you turn in, if you
+don't mind. And, I say, Marmion, ask Miss Treherne to keep a dance for
+me--a waltz--towards the close of the evening, will you? Excuse me, but
+she is the thorough-bred of the ship. And if I have only one hop down
+the promenade, I want it to be with a girl who'll remind me of some one
+that is making West Kensington worth inhabiting. Only think, Marmion, of
+a girl like her--a graduate in arts, whose name and picture have been in
+all the papers--being willing to make up with me, Dick Hungerford! She
+is as natural and simple as a girl can be, and doesn't throw Greek roots
+at you, nor try to convince you of the difference between the songs
+of the troubadours and the sonnets of Petrarch. She doesn't care a rap
+whether Dante's Beatrice was a real woman or a principle; whether James
+the First poisoned his son; or what's the margin between a sine and a
+cosine. She can take a fence in the hunting-field like a bird--! Oh, all
+right, just hold still, and I'll unfasten it." And he struggled with a
+recalcitrant buckle. "Well, you'll not forget about Miss Treherne, will
+you? She ought to go just as she is. Fancy-dress on her would be gilding
+the gold; for, though she isn't surpassingly beautiful, she is very
+fine, very fine indeed. There, now, you're yourself again, and look all
+the better for it."
+
+By this time I was again in my uniform, and I sat down, and smoked, and
+looked at Hungerford. His long gossip had been more or less detached,
+and I had said nothing. I understood that he was trying, in his blunt,
+honest way, to turn my thoughts definitely from Mrs. Falchion to Belle
+Treherne; and he never seemed to me such a good fellow as at that
+moment. I replied at last: "All right, Hungerford; I'll be your
+deputation, your ambassador, to Miss Treherne. What time shall we see
+you on deck?"
+
+"About 11.40--just in time to trip a waltz on the edge of eight bells."
+
+"On the edge of Sunday, my boy."
+
+"Yes. Do you know, it is just four years ago tomorrow since I found Boyd
+Madras on the No Man's Sea?"
+
+"Let us not talk of it," said I.
+
+"All right. I merely stated the fact because it came to me. I'm
+mum henceforth. And I want to talk about something else. The first
+officer,--I don't know whether you have noticed him lately, but I tell
+you this: if we ever get into any trouble with this ship he'll go to
+pieces. Why, the other night, when the engine got tangled, he was as
+timid as a woman. That shock he had with the coal, as I said before, has
+broken his nerve, big man as he is."
+
+"Hungerford," I said, "you do not generally croak, but you are earning
+the character of the raven for yourself to-night. The thing is growing
+on you. What IS the use of bringing up unpleasant subjects? You are an
+old woman." I fear there was the slightest irritation in my voice; but,
+truth is, the last few days' experiences had left their mark on me, and
+Hungerford's speech and manner had suddenly grown trying.
+
+He stood for a moment looking at me with direct earnestness from under
+his strong brows, and then he stepped forward, and, laying his hand
+upon my arm, rejoined: "Do not be raw, Marmion. I'm only a blunt, stupid
+sailor; and, to tell you God's truth, as I have told you before, every
+sailor is superstitious--every real sailor. He can't help it--I can't. I
+have a special fit on me now. Why don't I keep it to myself? Because
+I'm selfish, and it does me good to talk. You and I are in one secret
+together, and it has made me feel like sharing this thing with a pal, I
+suppose."
+
+I seized his hand and begged his pardon, and called myself unpleasant
+names, which he on the instant stopped, and said: "That's all right,
+Marmy; shake till the knuckles crack! I'm off. Don't forget the dance."
+He disappeared down the passage.
+
+Then I went on deck, and the scene which I have so imperfectly described
+passed before me. Mrs. Falchion was surrounded with admirers all the
+evening, both men and women; and two of the very stately English ladies
+of title, to whom I before referred, were particularly gracious to her;
+while she, in turn, bore herself with becoming dignity. I danced with
+her once, and was down on her programme for another dance. I had also
+danced with Belle Treherne, who appeared as Miriam, and was chaperoned
+by one of the ladies of title; and I had also "sat out" one dance
+with her. Chancing to pass her as the evening wore on, I saw her
+in conversation with Mrs. Falchion, who had dismissed her cavalier,
+preferring to talk, she said, for dancing was tiresome work on the
+Indian Ocean. Belle Treherne, who up to that moment had never quite
+liked her, yielded to the agreeable charm of her conversation and her
+frank applausive remarks upon the costumes of the dancers. She had a
+good word for every one, and she drew her companion out to make the most
+of herself, as women less often do before women than in the presence
+of men. I am certain that her interest in Belle Treherne was real, and
+likewise certain that she cherished no pique against her because I
+had transferred my allegiance. Indeed, I am sure that she had no deep
+feeling of injured pride where I was concerned. Such after acidity as
+she sometimes showed was directed against the foolish part I had played
+with her and my action in subsequent events; it did not proceed from
+personal feeling or self-value.
+
+Some time after this meeting I saw Boyd Madras issue from the
+companion-way dressed as a Greek. He wore a false beard, and carried
+off well his garments of white and scarlet and gold--a very striking
+and presentable man. He came slowly forward, looking about him steadily,
+and, seeing me, moved towards me. But for his manner I should scarcely
+have recognised him. A dance was beginning; but many eyes were turned
+curiously, and even admiringly, to him; for he looked singular and
+impressive and his face was given fulness by a beard and flesh paints.
+I motioned him aside where there was shadow, and said: "Well, you have
+determined to see her?"
+
+"Yes," he said; "and I wish you, if you will, to introduce me to her as
+Mr. Charles Boyd.
+
+"You still think this wise?" I asked.
+
+"It is my earnest wish. I must have an understanding to-night." He
+spoke very firmly, and showed no excitement. His manner was calm and
+gentlemanly.
+
+He had a surprising air of decision. Supporting an antique character, he
+seemed for the moment to have put on also something of antique strength
+of mind, and to be no longer the timid invalid. "Then, come with me," I
+answered.
+
+We walked in silence for a few minutes, and then, seeing where Mrs.
+Falchion was, we advanced to her. The next dance on her programme was
+mine. In my previous dance with her we had talked as we now did at
+table--as we did the first hour I met her--impersonally, sometimes (I
+am bold to say) amusingly. Now I approached her with apologies for being
+late. The man beside her took his leave. She had only just glanced at
+me at first, but now she looked at my companion, and the look stayed,
+curious, bewildered.
+
+"It is fitting," I said, "that Greek meet Greek--that Menelaus should be
+introduced to Helen. May I say that when Helen is not Helen she is Mrs.
+Falchion, and when Menelaus is not Menelaus he is--Mr. Charles Boyd."
+
+I am afraid my voice faltered slightly, because there came over me
+suddenly a nervousness as unexpected as it was inconvenient, and my
+words, which began lightly, ended huskily. Had Madras miscalculated this
+woman?
+
+Her eyes were afire, and her face was as pale as marble; all its slight
+but healthy glow had fled. A very faint gasp came from her lips. I saw
+that she recognised him, as he bowed and mentioned her name, following
+my introduction. I knew not what might occur, for I saw danger in her
+eyes in reply to the beseeching look in his. Would melodrama supervene
+after all? She merely bowed towards me, as if to dismiss me, and then
+she rose, took his arm, and moved away. The interview that follows came
+to me from Boyd Madras afterwards.
+
+When they had reached the semi-darkness of the forward part of the ship,
+she drew her hand quickly away, and, turning to him, said: "What is the
+name by which you are called? One does not always hear distinctly when
+being introduced."
+
+He did not understand what she was about to do, but he felt the deadly
+coldness in her voice. "My name is known to you," he replied. He
+steadied himself.
+
+"No, pardon me, I do not know it, for I do not know you.... I never saw
+you before." She leaned her hand carelessly on the bulwarks.
+
+He was shocked, but he drew himself together. Their eyes were intent
+on each other. "You do know me! Need I tell you that I am Boyd Madras?"
+"Boyd Madras," she said, musing coldly. "A peculiar name."
+
+"Mercy Madras was your name until you called yourself Mrs. Falchion," he
+urged indignantly, yet anxiously too.
+
+"It suits you to be mysterious, Mr.--ah yes, Mr. Boyd Madras;
+but, really, you might be less exacting in your demands upon one's
+imagination." Her look was again on him casually.
+
+He spoke breathlessly. "Mercy--Mercy--for God's sake, don't treat me
+like this! Oh, my wife, I have wronged you every way, but I loved you
+always--love you now. I have only followed you to ask you to forgive
+me, after all these years. I saw you in Colombo just before you came
+on board, and I felt that I must come also. You never loved me. Perhaps
+that is better for you, but you do not know what I suffer. If you could
+give me a chance, and come with me to America--anywhere, and let me
+start the world again? I can--travel straight now, and I will work hard,
+and be honest. I will--" But here sudden pain brought back the doubt
+concerning his life and its possibilities.
+
+He leaned against the bulwarks, and made a helpless, despairing motion
+with his hand. "No, no!" he said; and added with a bitter laugh: "Not
+to begin the world again, but to end it as profitably and silently as I
+can. ... But you will listen to me, my wife? You will say at least that
+you forgive me the blight and ill I brought upon you?"
+
+She had listened to him unmoved outwardly. Her reply was instant. "You
+are more melodramatic than I thought you capable of being--from your
+appearance," she said in a hard tone. "Your acting is very good, but not
+convincing. I cannot respond as would become the unity and sequence of
+the play.... I have no husband. My husband is dead--I buried him years
+ago. I have forgotten his name--I buried that too."
+
+All the suffering and endured scorn of years came to revolt in him. He
+leaned forward now, and caught her wrist. "Have you no human feeling?"
+he said "no heart in you at all? Look. I have it in me here suddenly to
+kill you as you stand. You have turned my love to hate. From your smooth
+skin there I could strip those rags, and call upon them all to look at
+you--my wife--a felon's wife; mine to have and to hold--to hold, you
+hear!--as it was sworn at the altar. I bare my heart to you, repenting,
+and you mock it, torture it, with your undying hate and cruelty. You
+have no heart, no life. This white bosom is all of you--all of your
+power to make men love you--this, and your beauty. All else, by God, is
+cruel as the grave!"
+
+His voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper. She had not sought to remove
+his hand, nor struggled in the least; and once it seemed as if this new
+development of his character, this animal fierceness, would conquer her:
+she admired courage. It was not so. He trembled with weakness before he
+had finished. He stopped too soon; he lost.
+
+"You will find such parts exhausting to play," she murmured, as he let
+her arm fall. "It needs a strong physique to endure exaggerated, nervous
+sentiment. And now, please, let us perform less trying scenes." Then,
+with a low, cold anger, she continued: "It is only a coward that will
+dog a woman who finds his presence insupportable to her. This woman
+cannot, if she would, endure this man's presence; it is her nature.
+Well, why rush blindly at the impossible? She wishes to live her spoiled
+life alone. The man can have no part in it--never, never! But she has
+money. If in that way--"
+
+He stretched out his hand protestingly, the fingers spread in
+excitement. "No more--not another word!" he said. "I ask for
+forgiveness, for one word of kindness--and I am offered money! the fire
+that burned me to eat, instead of bread! I had a wife once," he added in
+a kind of troubled dream, looking at her as if she were very far away,
+"and her name was Mercy--her name was Mercy--Mercy Madras. I loved her.
+I sinned for her sake. A message came that she was dead to me; but I
+could not believe that it was so altogether, for I had knelt at her feet
+and worshipped her. I went to her, but she sent me away angrily. Years
+passed. 'She will have relented now,' I said, and I followed her, and
+found her as I thought. But it was not she; it was a wicked ghost in
+her beautiful body--nothing more. And then I turned away and cursed
+all things, because I knew that I should never see my wife again. Mercy
+Madras was dead. ... Can you not hear the curses?"
+
+Still she was unmoved. She said with a cruel impatience in her voice:
+"Yes, Mercy Madras is dead. How then can she forgive? What could her
+ghost--as you call her--do, but offer the thing which her husband--when
+he was living--loved so well that he sold himself into bondage,
+and wrecked his world and hers for it--Money? Well, money is at his
+disposal, as she said before--"
+
+But she spoke no more. The man in him straight way shamed her into
+silence with a look. She bowed her head, yet not quite in shame, for
+there was that in her eyes which made her appear as if his suffering was
+a gratuitous infliction. But at this moment he was stronger, and he drew
+her eyes up by the sheer force of his will. "I need no money now," he
+coldly declared. "I need nothing--not even you; and can you fancy that,
+after waiting all these years for this hour, money would satisfy me?
+Do you know," he continued slowly and musingly, "I can look upon you
+now--yes, at this moment--with more indifference than you ever showed to
+me? A moment ago I loved you: now I think you horrible; because you are
+no woman; you have a savage heart. And some day you will suffer as I do,
+so terribly that even the brazen serpent could not cure you. Then you
+will remember me."
+
+He was about to leave her, but he had not taken two steps before he
+turned, with all the anger and the passion softened in his eyes, and
+said, putting his hand out towards yet not to touch her, "Good-bye--for
+the last time." And then the look was such as might be turned upon a
+forgiven executioner.
+
+"Good-night," she replied, and she did not look into his eyes, but out
+to sea. Her eyes remained fixed upon its furtive gloom. She too was
+furtive and gloomy at this moment. They were both sleek, silent, and
+remorseless. There was a slight rustle to her dress as she changed her
+position. It was in grim keeping with the pitiless rustle of the sea.
+
+And so they parted. I saw him move on towards the companion-way, and
+though I felt instinctively that all had gone ill with him, I was
+surprised to see how erect he walked. After a minute I approached her.
+She heard me coming, and presently turned to me with a curious smile.
+"Who is Mr. Charles Boyd?" she asked. "I did not pierce his disguise.
+I could not tell whether I had met him on board before. Have I? But my
+impression is that I had not seen him on the ship."
+
+"No, you had not seen him," I replied. "He had a fancy to travel, until
+yesterday, with the second-class passengers. Now he has a first-class
+cabin--in his proper place, in fact."
+
+"You think so--in his proper place?" The suggestion was not pleasant.
+
+"Assuredly. Why do you speak in that way?" was my indignant reply.
+
+She took my arm as we moved on. "Because he was slightly rude to me."
+
+I grew bold, and determined to bring her to some sort of reckoning.
+
+"How rude were you to him?"
+
+"Not rude at all. It is not worth while being so--to anybody," was her
+chilly answer.
+
+"I was under the impression you had met him before," I said gravely.
+
+"Indeed? And why?" She raised her eyebrows at me. I pushed the matter
+to a conclusion. "He was ill the other day--he has heart trouble. It was
+necessary for me to open the clothes about his neck. On his breast I saw
+a little ivory portrait of a woman's head."
+
+"A woman's head," she repeated absently, and her fingers idly toyed with
+a jingling ornament in her belt. In an idle moment I had sketched the
+head, as I remembered it, on a sheet of paper, and now I took it from
+my pocket and handed it to her. We were standing near a port-hole of the
+music saloon, from which light streamed.
+
+"That is the head," said I.
+
+She deliberately placed the paper in the belt of light, and, looking
+at it, remarked mechanically: "This is the head, is it?" She showed no
+change of countenance, and handed it back to me as if she had seen no
+likeness. "It is very interesting," she said, "but one would think you
+might make better use of your time than by surreptitiously sketching
+portraits from sick men's breasts. One must have plenty of leisure to do
+that sort of thing, I should think. Be careful that you do not get into
+mischief, Dr. Marmion." She laughed. "Besides, where was the special
+peculiarity in that portrait that you should treasure it in pencil
+so conventionally?--Your drawing is not good.--Where was the point or
+need?"
+
+"I have no right to reply to that directly," I responded. "But this
+man's life is not for always, and if anything happened to him it would
+seem curious to strangers to find that on his breast--because, of
+course, more than I would see it there."
+
+"If anything happened? What should happen? You mean, on board ship?"
+There was a little nervousness in her tone now.
+
+"I am only hinting at an awkward possibility," I replied.
+
+She looked at me scornfully. "When did you see that picture on his
+breast?" I told her. "Ah! before THAT day?" she rejoined. I knew
+that she referred to the evening when I had yielded foolishly to the
+fascination of her presence. The blood swam hotly in my face. "Men are
+not noble creatures," she continued.
+
+"I am afraid you would not give many their patents of nobility if you
+had power to bestow them," I answered.
+
+"Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble
+creatures. Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my
+prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them. Vanity would
+accomplish that much. Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not
+radical virtue--since we are beginning to be bookish again."
+
+"To what do you reduce honour and right?" returned I.
+
+"As I said to you on a memorable occasion," she answered very drily, "to
+a code."
+
+"That is," rejoined I, "a man does a good action, lives an honourable
+life, to satisfy a social canon--to gratify, say, a wife or mother, who
+believes in him, and loves him?"
+
+"Yes." She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father. She
+drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could
+not tell.
+
+"But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?" I urged. "That
+he shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be
+fed, might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?"
+
+"Yes, it is true either way--pleasure or misery. Please come to the
+saloon and get me an ice before the next dance."
+
+I was perplexed. Was she altogether soulless? Even now, as we passed
+among the dancers, she replied to congratulations on her make-up and
+appearance with evident pleasure.
+
+An hour later, I was taking Belle Treherne from the arm of Hungerford
+for the last waltz, and, in reply to an inquiring glance from him, I
+shook my head mournfully. His face showed solicitude as he walked away.
+Perhaps it did not gratify my vanity that Belle Treherne, as her father
+limped forward at the stroke of eight bells to take her below, said
+to me: "How downright and thorough Mr. Hungerford is!" But I frankly
+admitted that he was all she might say good of him, and more.
+
+The deck was quickly dismantled, the lights went out, and all the
+dancers disappeared. The masquerade was over; and again, through the
+darkness, rose the plaintive "All's well!" And it kept ringing in my
+ears until it became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free.
+It was like the voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never,
+never, never, never, never!"
+
+Something of Hungerford's superstitious feeling possessed me. I went
+below, and involuntarily made my way to Boyd Madras's cabin.
+
+Though the night was not hot, the door was drawn to. I tapped. His voice
+at once asked who was there, and when I told him, and inquired how he
+was, he said he was not ill, and asked me to come to his cabin in the
+morning, if I would. I promised, and bade him good-night. He responded,
+and then, as I turned away from the door, I heard him repeat the
+good-night cordially and calmly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII. THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+
+The next morning I was up early, and went on deck. The sun had risen,
+and in the moist atmosphere the tints of sky and sea were beautiful.
+Everywhere was the warm ocean undulating lazily to the vague horizon. A
+few lascars were still cleansing the decks; others were seated on
+their haunches between decks, eating curry from a calabash; a couple of
+passengers were indolently munching oranges; and Stone the quartermaster
+was inspecting the work lately done by the lascars. Stone gave me a
+pleasant good-morning, and we walked together the length of the deck
+forward. I had got about three-fourths of the length back again, when I
+heard a cry from aft--a sharp call of "Man overboard!" In a moment I had
+travelled the intermediate deck, and was at the stern, looking below,
+where, in the swirling waters, was the head of a man. With cries of
+"Man overboard!" I threw two or three buoys after the disappearing head,
+above which a bare arm thrust itself. I heard the rush of feet behind
+me, and in a moment Hungerford and Stone were beside me. The signal was
+given for the engines to stop; stewards and lascars came running on deck
+in response to Hungerford's call, and the first officer now appeared.
+Very soon a crew was gathered on the after-deck, about a boat on the
+port side.
+
+Passengers by this time showed in various stages of dressing--women
+wringing their hands, men gesticulating. If there is anything calculated
+to send a thrill of awe through a crowd, it is the cry of "Man
+overboard!" And when one looked below, and saw above the drowning head
+two white arms thrust from the sea, a horrible thing was brought home to
+each of us. Besides, the scene before us on the deck was not reassuring.
+There was trouble in getting the boat lowered. The first officer was
+excited, the lascars were dazed, the stewards were hurried without being
+confident; only Hungerford, Stone, and the gunner were collected. The
+boat should have been launched in a minute, but still it hung between
+its davits; its course downward was interrupted; something was wrong
+with the ropes, "A false start, by---!" said the bookmaker, looking
+through his eye-glass. Colonel Ryder's face was stern, Clovelly was pale
+and anxious, as moment after moment went, and the boat was not yet free.
+Ages seemed to pass before the boat was let down even with the bulwarks,
+and a crew of ten, with Hungerford in command, were in it, ready to
+be lowered. Whether the word was given to lower, or whether it was any
+one's fault, may never perhaps be known; but, as the boat hung there,
+suddenly it shot down at the stern, some one having let go the ropes at
+that end; and the bow being still fast, it had fallen like a trap-door.
+It seemed, on the instant, as if the whole crew were tossed into
+the water; but some had successfully clutched the boat's side, and
+Hungerford hung by a rope with one hand. In the eddying water, however,
+about the reversing screw, were two heads, and farther off was a man
+struggling. The face of one of the men near the screw was upturned for a
+moment; it was that of Stone the quartermaster.
+
+A cry went up from the passengers, and they swayed forward to the
+suspended boat; but Colonel Ryder turned almost savagely upon them.
+"Keep quiet!" he said. "Stand back! What can you do? Give the officers a
+chance." He knew that there had been a false start, and bad work indeed;
+but he also saw that the task of the officers must not be made harder.
+His sternness had effect. The excited passengers drew back, and I took
+his place in front of them. When the first effort had been made to lower
+the boat, I asked the first officer if I could accompany the crew, but
+he said no. I could, therefore, do nothing but wait. A change came on
+the crowd. It became painfully silent, none speaking save in whispers,
+and all watching with anxious faces either the receding heads in the
+water or the unfortunate boat's crew. Hungerford showed himself a
+thorough sailor. Hanging to the davit, he quietly, reassuringly, gave
+the order for righting the boat, virtually taking the command out of
+the hands of the first officer, who was trembling with nervousness.
+Hungerford was right; this man's days as a sailor were over. The
+accident from which he had suffered had broken his nerve, stalwart as he
+was. But Hungerford was as cool as if this were ordinary boat-practice.
+Soon the boat was drawn up again, and others took the place of those who
+had disappeared. Then it was lowered safely, and, with Hungerford erect
+in the bows, it was pulled swiftly along the path we had come.
+
+At length, too, the great ship turned round, but not in her tracks. It
+is a pleasant fiction that these great steamers are easily managed. They
+can go straight ahead, but their huge proportions are not adapted for
+rapid movement. However, the work of rescue was begun. Sailors were
+aloft on watch, Captain Ascott was on the bridge, sweeping the sea with
+his glass; order was restored. But the ship had the feeling of a home
+from which some familiar inmate had been taken, to return no more.
+Children clasped their mothers' hands and said, "Mother, was it the poor
+quartermaster?" and men who the day before had got help from the petty
+officers in the preparation of costumes, said mournfully: "Fife the
+gunner was one of them."
+
+But who was the man first to go overboard--and who was it first gave the
+alarm? There were rumours, but no one was sure. All at once I remembered
+something peculiar in that cry of "Man overboard!" and it shocked me. I
+hurried below, and went to the cabin of Boyd Madras. It was empty; but
+on a shelf lay a large envelope, addressed to Hungerford and myself.
+I tore it open. There was a small packet, which I knew contained the
+portrait he had worn on his bosom, addressed to Mrs. Falchion; and the
+other was a single sheet directed to me, fully written upon, and marked
+in the corner: "To be made public."
+
+So, he had disappeared from the play? He had made his exit? He had
+satisfied the code at last? Before opening the letter addressed to me,
+I looked round. His clothes were folded upon one of the berths; but the
+garments of masquerade were not in the cabin. Had he then gone out of
+the world in the garb of a mummer? Not altogether, for the false beard
+he had worn the night before lay beside the clothes. But this terrible
+earnestness of his would look strange in last night's disguise.
+
+I opened the packet addressed to Hungerford and myself, and saw that it
+contained a full and detailed account of his last meeting with his
+wife. The personal letter was short. He said that his gratitude was
+unspeakable, and now must be so for ever. He begged us not to let the
+world know who he was, nor his relationship to Mrs. Falchion, unless she
+wished it; he asked me to hand privately to her the packet bearing her
+name. Lastly, he requested that the paper for the public be given to the
+captain of the 'Fulvia'.
+
+Going out into the passage, I found a steward, who hurriedly told me
+that just before the alarm was given he had seen Boyd Madras going aft
+in that strange costume, which he mistook for a dressing-gown, and he
+had come to see if, by any chance, it was he who had gone overboard. I
+told him that it was. He disappeared, and soon the whole ship knew it.
+I went to the captain, gave him the letter, and told him only what was
+necessary to tell. He was on the bridge, and was occupied with giving
+directions, so he asked me the substance of the letter, and handed it
+back to me, requesting me to make a copy of it soon and leave it in his
+cabin. I then took all the papers to my cabin, and locked them up. I
+give here the substance of the letter which was to be made public:
+
+   Because you know how much I have suffered physically while on board
+   this ship, and because you have been kind to me, I wish, through
+   you, to say my last word to the world: though, indeed, this may seem
+   a strange form for gratitude to take. Dying men, however, make few
+   apologies, and I shall make none. My existence, as you know, is an
+   uncertain quantity, and may be cut short at any moment in the
+   ordinary course of things. But I have no future in the active
+   concerns of life; no past on which to dwell with satisfaction; no
+   friends to mourn for my misfortunes in life, nor for my death,
+   whether it be peaceful or violent; therefore, I have fewer
+   compunctions in ending a mistaken career and a worthless life.
+
+   Some one will profit by my death: who it is matters not, for it is
+   no friend of mine. My death adjusts a balance, perhaps not nicely,
+   yet it does it. And this is all I have to say.... I am
+   going. Farewell....
+
+After a brief farewell to me added, there came the subscription "Charles
+Boyd;" and that was all. Why he cried out "Man overboard" (for now I
+recognised that it was his voice which gave the alarm), I do not know,
+except that he wished his body to be recovered, and to receive burial.
+
+Just here, some one came fumbling at the curtain of my cabin. I heard a
+gasp--"Doctor--my head! quick!"
+
+I looked out. As I drew the curtain a worthless lascar sailor fell
+fainting into my cabin. He had been drinking a good deal, and the horror
+and excitement of the accident had brought on an apoplectic fit. This in
+a very hot climate is suddenly fatal. In three minutes, in spite of me,
+he was dead. Postponing report of the matter, I went on deck again among
+the passengers.
+
+I expected that Mrs. Falchion would be among them, for the news must
+have gone to every part of the ship; but she was not there. On the
+outskirts of one of the groups, however, I saw Justine Caron. I went
+to her, and asked her if Mrs. Falchion had risen. She said that she had
+not: that she had been told of the disaster, and had appeared shocked;
+but had complained of a headache, and had not risen. I then asked
+Justine if Mrs. Falchion had been told who the suicide was, and was
+answered in the negative. At that moment a lady came to me and said in
+an awed whisper: "Dr. Marmion, is it true that the man who committed
+suicide was a second-class passenger, and that he appeared at the ball
+last night, and danced with Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+I knew that my reply would soon become common property, so I said:
+
+"He was a first-class passenger, though until yesterday he travelled
+second-class. I knew him. His name was Charles Boyd. I introduced him to
+Mrs. Falchion last night, but he did not stay long on deck, because
+he felt ill. He had heart trouble. You may guess that he was tired of
+life." Then I told her of the paper which was for the public, and she
+left me.
+
+The search for the unfortunate men went on. No one could be seen near
+the floating buoys which were here and there picked up by Hungerford's
+boat. The long undulations of the water had been broken up in a large
+area about the ship, but the sea was still comparatively smooth. We were
+steaming back along the track we had come. There was less excitement
+on board than might be expected. The tropical stillness of the air,
+the quiet suddenness of the tragedy itself, the grim decisiveness of
+Hungerford, the watchful silence of a few men like Colonel Ryder and
+Clovelly, had effect upon even the emotion of those women, everywhere
+found, who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery.
+
+Nearly all were watching the rescue boat, though a few looked over the
+sides of the ship as if they expected to find bodies floating about.
+They saw sharks, instead, and a trail of blood, and this sent them away
+sickened from the bulwarks. Then they turned their attention again
+upon the rescue party. It was impossible not to note what a fine figure
+Hungerford made, as he stood erect in the bow, his hand over his eyes,
+searching the water. Presently we saw him stop the boat, and something
+was drawn in. He signalled the ship. He had found one man--but dead or
+alive? The boat was rapidly rowed back to the ship, Hungerford making
+efforts for resuscitation. Arrived at the vessel, the body was passed up
+to me.
+
+It was that of Stone the quartermaster. I worked to bring back life, but
+it was of no avail. A minute after, a man in the yards signalled that he
+saw another. It was not a hundred yards away, and was floating near the
+surface. It was a strange sight, for the water was a vivid green, and
+the man wore garments of white and scarlet, and looked a part of some
+strange mosaic: as one has seen astonishing figures set in balls of
+solid glass. This figure framed in the sea was Boyd Madras. The boat
+was signalled, it drew near, and two men dragged the body in, as a shark
+darted forward, just too late, to seize it. The boat drew alongside the
+'Fulvia'. I stood at the gangway to receive this castaway. I felt his
+wrist and heart. As I did so I chanced to glance up at the passengers,
+who were looking at this painful scene from the upper deck. There,
+leaning over the railing, stood Mrs. Falchion, her eyes fixed with a
+shocking wonder at the drooping, weird figure. Her lips parted, but
+at first they made no sound. Then, she suddenly drew herself up with a
+shudder. "Horrible! horrible!" she said, and turned away.
+
+I had Boyd Madras taken to an empty cabin next to mine, which I used for
+operations, and there Hungerford and myself worked to resuscitate him.
+We allowed no one to come near. I had not much hope of bringing life
+back, but still we worked with a kind of desperation, for it seemed to
+Hungerford and myself that somehow we were responsible to humanity for
+him. His heart had been weak, but there had been no organic trouble:
+only some functional disorder, which open-air life and freedom from
+anxiety might have overcome. Hungerford worked with an almost fierce
+persistence. Once he said: "By God, I will bring him back, Marmion, to
+face that woman down when she thinks she has got the world on the hip!"
+
+I cannot tell what delight we felt when, after a little time, I saw
+a quiver of the eyelids and a slight motion of the chest. Presently a
+longer breath came, and the eyes opened; at first without recognition.
+Then, in a few moments, I knew that he was safe--desperately against his
+will, but safe.
+
+His first sentient words startled me. He gasped, "Does she think I am
+drowned?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then she must continue to do so!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because"--here he spoke faintly, as if sudden fear had produced
+additional weakness--"because I had rather die a thousand deaths than
+meet her now; because she hates me. I must begin the world again. You
+have saved my life against my will: I demand that you give that life its
+only chance of happiness."
+
+As his words came to me, I remembered with a start the dead lascar, and,
+leading Hungerford to my cabin, I pointed to the body, and whispered
+that the sailor's death was only known to me. "Then this is the
+corpse of Boyd Madras, and we'll bury it for him," he said with quick
+bluntness. "Do not report this death to Captain Ascott--he would only
+raise objections to the idea. This lascar was in my watch. It will be
+supposed he fell overboard during the accident to the boat. Perhaps some
+day the funeral of this nigger will be a sensation and surprise to her
+blessed ladyship on deck."
+
+I suggested that it seemed underhand and unprofessional, but the
+entreating words of the resuscitated man in the next room conquered my
+objections.
+
+It was arranged that Madras should remain in the present cabin, of which
+I had a key, until we reached Aden; then he should, by Hungerford's aid,
+disappear.
+
+We were conspirators, but we meant harm to nobody. I covered up the face
+of the dead lascar and wrapped round him the scarlet and gold cloth
+that Madras had worn. Then I got a sailor, who supposed Boyd Madras
+was before him, and the body was soon sewed in its shotted shroud and
+carried to where Stone the quartermaster lay.
+
+At this day I cannot suppose I would do these things, but then it seemed
+right to do as Madras wished: he was, under a new name, to begin life
+afresh.
+
+After giving directions for the disposition of the bodies, I went on
+deck. Mrs. Falchion was still there. Some one said to her: "Did you know
+the man who committed suicide?"
+
+"He was introduced to me last night by Dr. Marmion," she replied, and
+she shuddered again, though her face showed no remarkable emotion. She
+had had a shock to the senses, not to the heart.
+
+When I came to her on the deck, Justine was saying to her: "Madame, you
+should not have come. You should not see such painful things when you
+are not well."
+
+She did not reply to this. She looked up at me and said: "A strange
+whim, to die in those fanciful rags. It is dreadful to see; but he had
+the courage."
+
+I replied: "They have as much courage who make men do such things and
+then live on."
+
+Then I told her briefly that I held the packet for her, that I guessed
+what was in it, and that I would hand it to her later. I also said that
+he had written to me the record of last night's meeting with her, and
+that he had left a letter which was to be made public. As I said these
+things we were walking the decks, and, because eyes were on both of us,
+I tried to show nothing more unusual in manner than the bare tragedy
+might account for.
+
+"Well," she said, with a curious coldness, "what use shall you make of
+your special knowledge?"
+
+"I intend," I said, "to respect his wish, that your relationship to him
+be kept unknown, unless you declare otherwise."
+
+"That is reasonable. If he had always been as reasonable! And," she
+continued, "I do not wish the relationship to be known: practically
+there is none.... Oh! oh!" she added, with a sudden change in her
+voice, "why did he do as he did, and make everything else
+impossible--impossible!... Send me, or give me the packet, when you
+wish: and now please leave me, Dr. Marmion."
+
+The last few words were spoken with some apparent feeling, but I knew
+she was thinking of herself most, and I went from her angry.
+
+I did not see her again before the hour that afternoon when we should
+give the bodies of the two men to the ocean. No shroud could be prepared
+for gunner Fife and able-seaman Winter, whose bodies had no Christian
+burial, but were swallowed by the eager sea, not to be yielded up even
+for a few hours. We were now steaming far beyond the place where they
+were lost.
+
+The burial was an impressive sight, as burials at sea mostly are. The
+lonely waters stretching to the horizon helped to make it so. There was
+a melancholy majesty in the ceremony.
+
+The clanging bell had stopped. Captain Ascott was in his place at the
+head of the rude draped bier. In the silence one only heard the swish of
+water against the 'Fulvia's' side, as we sped on towards Aden. People do
+not know how beautiful, how powerful, is the burial service in the Book
+of Common Prayer, who have only heard it recited by a clergyman. To hear
+it read by a hardy man, whose life is among stern duties, is to receive
+a new impression. He knows nothing of lethargic monotone; he interprets
+as he reads. And when the man is the home-spun captain of a ship, who
+sees before him the poor shell of one that served him for ten years,
+"The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the
+Lord," has a strange significance. It is only men who have borne
+the shock of toil and danger, and have beaten up against the world's
+buffetings, that are fit to say last words over those gone down in the
+storm or translated in the fiery chariot of duty.
+
+The engines suddenly stopped. The effect was weird. Captain Ascott's
+fingers trembled, and he paused for an instant and looked down upon
+the dead, then out sorrowfully to the waiting sea, before he spoke the
+words, "We therefore commit their bodies to the deep." But, the moment
+they were uttered, the bier was lifted, there was a swift plunge, and
+only the flag and the empty boards were left. The sobbing of women now
+seemed almost unnatural; for around us was the bright sunlight, the gay
+dresses of the lascars, the sound of the bell striking the hours, and
+children playing on the deck. The ship moved on.
+
+And Mrs. Falchion? As the burial service was read, she had stood, and
+looked, not at the bier, but straight out to sea, calm and apparently
+unsympathetic, though, as she thought, her husband was being buried.
+When, however, the weighted body divided the water with a swingeing
+sound, her face suddenly suffused, as though shame had touched her
+or some humiliating idea had come. But she turned to Justine almost
+immediately, and soon after said calmly: "Bring a play of Moliere, and
+read to me, Justine."
+
+I had the packet her supposed dead husband had left for her in my
+pocket. I joined her, and we paced the deck, at first scarcely speaking,
+while the passengers dispersed, some below, some to the smoking-rooms,
+some upon deck-chairs to doze through the rest of the lazy afternoon.
+The world had taken up its orderly course again. At last, in an
+unfrequented corner of the deck, I took the packet from my pocket and
+handed it to her. "You understand?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I understand. And now, may I beg that for the rest of your natural
+life"--here she paused, and bit her lip in vexation that the unlucky
+phrase had escaped her--"you will speak of this no more?"
+
+"Mrs. Boyd Madras," I said (here she coloured indignantly),--"pardon me
+for using the name, but it is only this once,--I shall never speak of
+the matter to you again, nor to any one else, unless there is grave
+reason."
+
+We walked again in silence. Passing the captain's cabin, we saw a number
+of gentlemen gathered about the door, while others were inside. We
+paused, to find what the incident was. Captain Ascott was reading the
+letter which Boyd Madras had wished to be made public. (I had given it
+to him just before the burial, and he was acting as though Boyd Madras
+was really dead--he was quite ignorant of our conspiracy.) I was about
+to move on, but Mrs. Falchion touched my arm. "Wait," she said. She
+stood and heard the letter through. Then we walked on, she musing.
+Presently she said: "It is a pity--a pity."
+
+I looked at her inquiringly, but she offered no explanation of the
+enigmatical words. But, at this moment, seeing Justine waiting, she
+excused herself, and soon I saw her listening to Moliere. Later in the
+day I saw her talking with Miss Treherne, and it struck me that she
+had never looked so beautiful as then, and that Miss Treherne had never
+seemed so perfect a product of a fine convention. But, watching them
+together, one who had had any standard of good life could never have
+hesitated between the two. It was plain to me that Mrs. Falchion was
+bent upon making a conquest of this girl who so delicately withstood
+her; and Belle Treherne has told me since, that, when in her presence,
+and listening to her, she was irresistibly drawn to her; though at the
+same time she saw there was some significant lack in her nature; some
+hardness impossible to any one who had ever known love. She also told me
+that on this occasion Mrs. Falchion did not mention my name, nor did
+she ever in their acquaintance, save in the most casual fashion. Her
+conversation with Miss Treherne was always far from petty gossip or that
+smart comedy in which some women tell much personal history, with the
+guise of badinage and bright cynicism. I confess, though, it struck me
+unpleasantly at the time, that this fresh, high-hearted creature should
+be in familiar conversation with a woman who, it seemed to me, was the
+incarnation of cruelty.
+
+Mrs. Falchion subscribed most liberally to the fund raised for the
+children of the quartermaster and munificently to that for the crew
+which had, under Hungerford, performed the rescue work. The only effect
+of this was to deepen the belief that she was very wealthy, and could
+spend her money without affectation; for it was noticeable that she,
+of all on board, showed the least outward excitement at the time of the
+disaster. It occurred to me that once or twice I had seen her eyes
+fixed on Hungerford inquisitively, and not free from antipathy. It was
+something behind her usual equanimity. Her intuitive observation had led
+her to trace his hand in recent events. Yet I know she admired him too
+for his brave conduct. The day following the tragedy we were seated
+at dinner. The captain and most of the officers had risen, but Mrs.
+Falchion, having come in late, was still eating, and I remained seated
+also. Hungerford approached me, apologising for the interruption. He
+remarked that he was going on the bridge, and wished to say something
+to me before he went. It was an official matter, to which Mrs. Falchion
+apparently did not listen. When he was about to turn away, he bowed
+to her rather distantly; but she looked up at him and said, with an
+equivocal smile:
+
+"Mr. Hungerford, we often respect brave men whom we do not like."
+
+Then he, understanding her, but refusing to recognise the compliment,
+not altogether churlishly replied: "And I might say the same of women,
+Mrs. Falchion; but there are many women we dislike who are not brave."
+
+"I think I could recognise a brave man without seeing his bravery," she
+urged.
+
+"But I am a blundering sailor," he rejoined, "who only believes his
+eyes."
+
+"You are young yet," she replied.
+
+"I shall be older to-morrow," was his retort.
+
+"Well, perhaps you will see better to-morrow," she rejoined, with
+indolent irony.
+
+"If I do, I'll acknowledge it," he added. Then Hungerford smiled at me
+inscrutably. We two held a strange secret.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII. A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+
+No more delightful experience may be had than to wake up in the harbour
+of Aden some fine morning--it is always fine there--and get the first
+impression of that mighty fortress, with its thousand iron eyes, in
+strong repose by the Arabian Sea. Overhead was the cloudless sun, and
+everywhere the tremulous glare of a sandy shore and the creamy wash of
+the sea, like fusing opals. A tiny Mohammedan mosque stood gracefully
+where the ocean almost washed its steps, and the Resident's house,
+far up the hard hillside, looked down upon the harbour from a green
+coolness. The place had a massive, war-like character. Here was
+a battery with earthworks; there, a fort; beyond, a signal-staff.
+Hospitals, hotels, and stores were incidents in the picture. Beyond the
+mountain-wall and lofty Jebel Shamsan, rising in fine pink and bronze,
+and at the end of a high-walled path between the great hills, lay the
+town of Aden proper. Above the town again were the mighty Tanks,
+formed out of clefts in the mountains, and built in the times when the
+Phoenicians made Aden a great mart, the richest spot in all Arabia.
+
+Over to the left, on the opposite side of the harbour, were wide
+bungalows shining in the sun, and flanking the side of the ancient
+aqueduct, the gigantic tomb of an Arab sheikh. In the harbour were the
+men-of-war of all nations, and Arab dhows sailed slowly in, laden with
+pilgrims for Mecca--masses of picturesque sloth and dirt--and disease
+also; for more than one vessel flew the yellow flag. As we looked, a
+British man-of-war entered the gates of the harbour in the rosy light.
+It was bringing back the disabled and wounded from a battle, in which a
+handful of British soldiers were set to punish thirty times their number
+in an unknown country. But there was another man-of-war in port with
+which we were familiar. We passed it far out on the Indian Ocean. It
+again passed us, and reached Aden before we did. The 'Porcupine' lay not
+far from the 'Fulvia', and as I leaned over the bulwarks, idly looking
+at her, a boat shot away from her side, and came towards us. As it drew
+near, I saw that it was filled with luggage--a naval officer's, I knew
+it to be. As the sailors hauled it up, I noticed that the initials upon
+the portmanteaus were G. R. The owner was evidently an officer going
+home on leave, or invalided. It did not, however, concern me, as I
+thought, and I turned away to look for Mr. Treherne, that I might fulfil
+my promise to escort his daughter and Mrs. Callendar to the general
+cemetery at Aden; for I knew he was not fit to do the journey, and there
+was nothing to prevent my going.
+
+A few hours later I stood with Miss Treherne and Mrs. Callendar in
+the graveyard beside the fortress-wall, placing wreaths of artificial
+flowers and one or two natural roses--a chance purchase from a shop
+at the port--on the grave of the young journalist. Miss Treherne had
+brought some sketching materials, and both of us (for, as has been
+suggested, I had a slight gift for drawing) made sketches of the
+burial-place. Having done this, we moved away to other parts of the
+cemetery, looking at the tombstones, many of which told sad tales enough
+of those who died far away from home and friends. As we wandered on, I
+noticed a woman kneeling beside a grave. It grew upon me that the figure
+was familiar. Presently I saw who it was, for the face lifted. I excused
+myself, went over to her, and said:--"Miss Caron, you are in trouble?"
+
+She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and pointed to the
+tombstone. On it I read:
+
+            Sacred to the Memory of
+               HECTOR CARON,
+            Ensign in the French Navy.
+
+         Erected by his friend, Galt Roscoe,
+                H.B.M.N.
+
+Beneath this was the simple line:
+
+           "Why, what evil hath he done?"
+
+"He was your brother?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, monsieur, my one brother." Her tears dropped slowly.
+
+"And Galt Roscoe, who was he?" asked I.
+
+Through her grief her face was eloquent. "I never saw him--never knew
+him," she said. "He saved my poor Hector from much suffering; he nursed
+him, and buried him here when he died, and then--that!" pointing to the
+tombstone. "He made me love the English," she said. "Some day I shall
+find him, and I shall have money to pay him back all he spent--all." Now
+I guessed the meaning of the scene on board the 'Fulvia', when she had
+been so anxious to preserve her present relations with Mrs. Falchion.
+This was the secret--a beautiful one. She rose. "They disgraced Hector
+in New Caledonia," she said, "because he refused to punish a convict
+at Ile Nou who did not deserve it. He determined to go to France to
+represent his case. He left me behind, because we were poor. He went to
+Sydney. There he came to know this good man,"--her finger gently felt
+his name upon the stone,--"who made him a guest upon his ship; and so he
+came on towards England. In the Indian Ocean he was taken ill: and this
+was the end."
+
+She mournfully sank again beside the grave, but she was no longer
+weeping.
+
+"What was this officer's vessel?" I said presently. She drew from her
+dress a letter. "It is here. Please read it all. He wrote that to me
+when Hector died."
+
+The superscription to the letter was--H.B.M.S. Porcupine.
+
+I might have told her then that the 'Porcupine' was in the harbour
+at Aden, but I felt that things would work out to due ends without my
+help--which, indeed, they began to do immediately. As we stood there
+in silence, I reading over and over again the line upon the pedestal, I
+heard footsteps behind, and, turning, I saw a man approaching us, who,
+from his manner, though he was dressed in civilian's clothes, I guessed
+to be an officer of the navy. He was of more than middle height, had
+black hair, dark blue eyes, straight, strongly-marked brows, and was
+clean-shaven. He was a little ascetic-looking, and rather interesting
+and uncommon, and yet he was unmistakably a sea-going man. It was a face
+that one would turn to look at again and again--a singular personality.
+And yet my first glance told me that he was not one who had seen much
+happiness. Perhaps that was not unattractive in itself, since people who
+are very happy, and show it, are often most selfish too, and repel where
+they should attract. He was now standing near the grave, and his eyes
+were turned from one to the other of us, at last resting on Justine.
+
+Presently I saw a look of recognition. He stepped quickly forward.
+"Mademoiselle, will you pardon me?" he said very gently, "but you remind
+me of one whose grave I came to see." His hand made a slight motion
+toward Hector Caron's resting-place. Her eyes were on him with an
+inquiring earnestness. "Oh, monsieur, is it possible that you are my
+brother's friend and rescuer?"
+
+"I am Roscoe. He was my good friend," he said to her, and he held out
+his hand. She took it, and kissed it impulsively. He flushed, and drew
+it back quickly and shyly.
+
+"Some day I shall be able to repay you for all your goodness," she said.
+"I am only grateful now--grateful altogether. And you will tell me all
+you knew of him--all that he said and did before he died?"
+
+"I will gladly tell you all I know," he answered, and he looked at her
+compassionately, and yet with a little scrutiny, as though to know more
+of her and how she came to be in Aden. He turned to me inquiringly.
+
+I interpreted his thought by saying: "I am the surgeon of the 'Fulvia'.
+I chanced upon Miss Caron here. She is travelling by the 'Fulvia'."
+
+With a faint voice, Justine here said: "Travelling--with my mistress."
+
+"As companion to a lady," I preferred to add in explanation, for I
+wished not to see her humble herself so. A look of understanding came
+into Roscoe's face. Then he said: "I am glad that I shall see more of
+you; I am to travel by the 'Fulvia' also to London."
+
+"Yet I am afraid I shall see very little of you," she quietly replied.
+
+He was about to say something to her, but she suddenly swayed and would
+have fallen, but that he caught her and supported her. The weakness
+lasted only for a moment, and then, steadying herself, she said to both
+of us: "I hope you will say nothing of this to madame? She is kind, most
+kind, but she hates illness--and such things."
+
+Galt Roscoe looked at me to reply, his face showing clearly that he
+thought "madame" an extraordinary woman. I assured Justine that we would
+say nothing. Then Roscoe cordially parted from us, saying that he would
+look forward to seeing us both on the ship; but before he finally went,
+he put on the grave a small bouquet from his buttonhole. Then I excused
+myself from Justine, and, going over to Miss Treherne, explained to
+her the circumstances, and asked her if she would go and speak to the
+afflicted girl. She and Mrs. Callendar had been watching the incident,
+and they eagerly listened to me. I think this was the moment that
+I first stood really well with Belle Treherne. Her sympathy for the
+bereaved girl flooded many barriers between herself and me.
+
+"Oh," she said quickly, "indeed I will go to her, poor girl! Will you
+come also, Mrs. Callendar?"
+
+But Mrs. Callendar timidly said she would rather Miss Treherne went
+without her; and so it was. While Miss Treherne was comforting the
+bereaved girl, I talked to Mrs. Callendar. I fear that Mrs. Callendar
+was but a shallow woman; for, after a moment of excitable interest in
+Justine, she rather naively turned the talk upon the charms of Europe.
+And, I fear, not without some slight cynicism, I followed her where she
+led; for, as I said to myself, it did not matter what direction our idle
+tongues took, so long as I kept my mind upon the two beside that grave:
+but it gave my speech a spice of malice. I dwelt upon Mrs. Callendar's
+return to her native heath--that is, the pavements of Bond Street and
+Piccadilly, although I knew that she was a native of Tasmania. At this
+she smiled egregiously.
+
+At length Miss Treherne came to us and said that Justine insisted she
+was well enough to go back to the vessel alone, and wished not to be
+accompanied. So we left her there.
+
+A score of times I have stopped when preparing my notes for this tale
+from my diary and those of Mrs. Falchion and Galt Roscoe, to think how,
+all through the events recorded here, and many others omitted, Justine
+Caron was like those devoted and, often, beautiful attendants of the
+heroes and heroines of tragedy, who, when all is over, close the eyes,
+compose the bodies, and cover the faces of the dead, pronouncing with
+just lips the benediction, fittest in their mouths. Their loves, their
+deeds, their lives, however good and worthy, were clothed in modesty and
+kept far up the stage, to be, even when everything was over, not always
+given the privilege to die as did their masters, but, like Horatio, bade
+to live and be still the loyal servant:
+
+     "But in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
+        To tell my story."
+
+There was no reason why we should go to the ship immediately, and I
+proposed that we should first explore the port-town, and then visit the
+city of Aden--five miles away beyond the hills--and the Tanks. To this
+the ladies consented.
+
+Somauli policemen patrolled the streets; Somauli, Arab, and Turkish
+guides impeded the way; Arabs in plain white, Arab sheikhs in blue and
+white, and gold, lounged languidly about, or drank their coffee in the
+shade of the bazaars. Children of the desert, nearly naked, sprinkled
+water before the doors of the bazaars and stores and upon the hot
+thoroughfare, from long leather bottles; caravans of camels, with dusty
+stride, swung up the hillside and beyond into the desert; the Jewish
+water-carrier with his donkey trudged down the pass from the cool
+fountains in the volcanic hills; a guard of eunuchs marched by with the
+harem of a Mohammedan; in the doorways of the houses goats and donkeys
+fed. Jews, with greasy faces, red-hemmed skirt, and hungry look, moved
+about, offering ostrich feathers for sale, everywhere treated worse than
+the Chinaman in Oregon or at Port Darwin. We saw English and Australian
+passengers of the 'Fulvia' pelting the miserable members of a despised
+race with green fruit about the streets, and afterwards from the deck of
+the ship. A number of these raised their hats to us as they passed; but
+Belle Treherne's acknowledgment was chilly.
+
+"It is hard to be polite to cowards," she said.
+
+After having made some ruinous bargains in fezes, Turkish cloths and
+perfume, I engaged a trap, and we started for Aden. The journey was not
+one of beauty, but it had singular interest. Every turn of the wheels
+carried us farther and farther away from a familiar world to one of
+yesterday. White-robed warriors of the desert, with lances, bent their
+brows upon us as they rode away towards the endless sands, and vagabonds
+of Egypt begged for alms. In about three-quarters of an hour we had
+passed the lofty barriers of Jebel Shamsan and its comrades, and
+were making clouds of dust in the streets of Aden. In spite of the
+cantonments, the British Government House, and the European Church,
+it was an Oriental town pure and simple, where the slow-footed hours
+wandered by, leaving apathy in their train; where sloth and surfeit sat
+in the market-places; idle women gossiped in their doorways; and naked
+children rolled in the sun. Yet how, in the most unfamiliar places, does
+one wake suddenly to hear or see some most familiar thing, and learn
+again that the ways of all people and nations are not, after all, so far
+apart! Here three naked youths, with trays upon their heads, cried aloud
+at each doorway what, interpreted, was: "Pies! Hot pies! Pies all hot!"
+or, "Crum-pet! Crumpet! Won't you buy-uy a crum-pet!"
+
+One sees the same thing in Kandy, in Calcutta, in Tokio, in Istamboul,
+in Teheran, in Queensland, in London.
+
+To us the great Tanks overlooking the place were more interesting than
+the town itself, and we drove thither. At Government House and here were
+the only bits of green that we had seen; they were, in fact, the only
+spots of verdure on the peninsula of Aden. It was a very sickly green,
+from which wan and dusty fig trees rose. In their scant shadow, or in
+the shelter of an overhanging ledge of rock, Arabs offered us draughts
+of cool water, and oranges. There were people in the sickly gardens, and
+others were inspecting the Tanks. Passengers from the ship had brought
+luncheon-baskets to this sad oasis.
+
+As we stood at the edge of one of the Tanks, Miss Treherne remarked with
+astonishment that they were empty. I explained to her that Aden did not
+have the benefits conferred even on the land of the seven fat and seven
+lean kine--that there had not been rain there for years, and that when
+it did come it was neither prolonged nor plentiful. Then came questions
+as to how long ago the Tanks were built.
+
+"Thirteen hundred years!" she exclaimed. "How strange to feel it so! It
+is like looking at old graves. And how high the walls are, closing up
+the gorge between the hills."
+
+At that moment Mrs. Callendar drew our attention to Mrs. Falchion and a
+party from the ship. Mrs. Falchion was but a few paces from us, smiling
+agreeably as she acknowledged our greetings. Presently two of her party
+came to us and asked us to share their lunch. I would have objected,
+and I am certain Belle Treherne would gladly have done so, but Mrs.
+Callendar was anxious to accept, therefore we expressed our gratitude
+and joined the group. On second thoughts I was glad that we did so,
+because, otherwise, my party must have been without refreshments
+until they returned to the ship--the restaurants at Aden are not to be
+trusted. To me Mrs. Falchion was pleasantly impersonal, to Miss Treherne
+delicately and actively personal. At the time I had a kind of fear of
+her interest in the girl, but I know now that it was quite sincere,
+though it began with a motive not very lofty--to make Belle Treherne her
+friend, and so annoy me, and also to study, as would an anatomist, the
+girl's life.
+
+We all moved into the illusive shade of the fig and magnolia trees, and
+lunch was soon spread. As we ate, conversation turned upon the annoying
+persistency of Eastern guides, and reference was made to the exciting
+circumstances attending the engagement of Amshar, the guide of Mrs.
+Falchion's party. Among a score of claimants, Amshar had had one
+particular opponent--a personal enemy--who would not desist even when
+the choice had been made. He, indeed, had been the first to solicit the
+party, and was rejected because of his disagreeable looks. He had even
+followed the trap from the Port of Aden. As one of the gentlemen was
+remarking on the muttered anger of the disappointed Arab, Mrs. Falchion.
+said: "There he is now at the gate of the garden."
+
+His look was sullenly turned upon our party. Blackburn, the Queenslander
+said, "Amshar, the other fellow is following up the game," and pointed
+to the gate.
+
+Amshar understood the gesture at least, and though he gave a toss of the
+head, I noticed that his hand trembled as he handed me a cup of water,
+and that he kept his eyes turned on his opponent.
+
+"One always feels unsafe with these cut-throat races," said Colonel
+Ryder, "as some of us know, who have had to deal with the nigger of
+South America. They think no more of killing a man--"
+
+"Than an Australian squatter does of dispersing a mob of aboriginals or
+kangaroos," said Clovelly.
+
+Here Mrs. Callendar spoke up briskly. "I don't know what you mean by
+'dispersing.'"
+
+"You know what a kangaroo battue is, don't you?"
+
+"But that is killing, slaughtering kangaroos by the hundred."
+
+"Well, and that is aboriginal dispersion," said the novelist. "That is
+the aristocratic method of legislating the native out of existence."
+
+Blackburn here vigorously protested. "Yes, it's very like a novelist,
+on the hunt for picturesque events, to spend his forensic soul upon 'the
+poor native,'--upon the dirty nigger, I choose to call him: the
+meanest, cruellest, most cowardly, and murderous--by Jove, what a lot of
+adjectives!--of native races. But we fellows, who have lost some of
+the best friends we ever had--chums with whom we've shared blanket and
+tucker--by the crack of a nulla-nulla in the dark, or a spear from the
+scrub, can't find a place for Exeter Hall and its 'poor native' in our
+hard hearts. We stand in such a case for justice. It is a new country.
+Not once in fifty times would law reach them. Reprisal and dispersion
+were the only things possible to men whose friends had been massacred,
+and--well, they punished tribes for the acts of individuals."
+
+Mrs. Falchion here interposed. "That is just what England does. A
+British trader is killed. She sweeps a native town out of existence with
+Hotchkiss guns--leaves it naked and dead. That is dispersion too; I have
+seen it, and I know how far niggers as a race can be trusted, and how
+much they deserve sympathy. I agree with Mr. Blackburn."
+
+Blackburn raised his glass. "Mrs. Falchion," he said, "I need no further
+evidence to prove my case. Experience is the best teacher."
+
+"As I wish to join the chorus to so notable a compliment, will somebody
+pass the claret?" said Colonel Ryder, shaking the crumbs of a pate
+from his coat-collar. When his glass was filled, he turned towards Mrs.
+Falchion, and continued: "I drink to the health of the best teacher."
+And every one laughingly responded. This impromptu toast would have been
+drunk with more warmth, if we could have foreseen an immediate event.
+Not less peculiar were Mrs. Falchion's words to Hungerford the evening
+before, recorded in the last sentence of the preceding chapter.
+
+Cigars were passed, and the men rose and strolled away. We wandered
+outside the gardens, passing the rejected guide as we did so. "I don't
+like the look in his eye," said Clovelly.
+
+Colonel Ryder laughed. "You've always got a fine vision for the
+dramatic."
+
+We passed on. I suppose about twenty minutes had gone when, as we were
+entering the garden again, we heard loud cries. Hurrying forward towards
+the Tanks, we saw a strange sight.
+
+There, on a narrow wall dividing two great tanks, were three
+people--Mrs. Falchion, Amshar, and the rejected Arab guide. Amshar was
+crouching behind Mrs. Falchion, and clinging to her skirts in abject
+fear. The Arab threatened with a knife. He could not get at Amshar
+without thrusting Mrs. Falchion aside, and, as I said, the wall was
+narrow. He was bent like a tiger about to spring.
+
+Seeing Mrs. Falchion and Amshar apart from the others,--Mrs. Falchion
+having insisted on crossing this narrow and precipitous wall,--he had
+suddenly rushed after them. As he did so, Miss Treherne saw him, and
+cried out. Mrs. Falchion faced round swiftly, and then came this tragic
+situation.
+
+Some one must die.
+
+Seeing that Mrs. Falchion made no effort to dislodge Amshar from her
+skirts, the Arab presently leaped forward. Mrs. Falchion's arms went out
+suddenly, and she caught the wrist that held the dagger. Then there
+was an instant's struggle. It was Mrs. Falchion's life now, as well as
+Amshar's. They swayed. They hung on the edge of the rocky chasm. Then
+we lost the gleam of the knife, and the Arab shivered, and toppled over.
+Mrs. Falchion would have gone with him, but Amshar caught her about
+the waist, and saved her from the fall which would have killed her as
+certainly as it killed the Arab lying at the bottom of the tank. She had
+managed to turn the knife in the Arab's hand against his own breast, and
+then suddenly pressed her body against it; but the impulse of the act
+came near carrying her over also.
+
+Amshar was kneeling at her feet, and kissing her gown gratefully. She
+pushed him away with her foot, and, coolly turning aside, began to
+arrange her hair. As I approached her, she glanced down at the Arab.
+"Horrible! horrible!" she said. I remembered that these were her words
+when her husband was lifted from the sea to the 'Fulvia'.
+
+Not ungently, she refused my hand or any assistance, and came down among
+the rest of the party. I could not but feel a strange wonder at the
+powerful side of her character just shown--her courage, her cool daring.
+In her face now there was a look of annoyance, and possibly disgust, as
+well as of triumph--so natural in cases of physical prowess. Everybody
+offered congratulations, but she only showed real pleasure, and that
+mutely, at those of Miss Treherne. To the rest of us she said: "One had
+to save one's self, and Amshar was a coward."
+
+And so this woman, whose hardness of heart and excessive cruelty
+Hungerford and I were keeping from the world, was now made into a
+heroine, around whom a halo of romance would settle whenever her name
+should be mentioned. Now, men, eligible and ineligible, would increase
+their homage. It seemed as if the stars had stopped in their courses to
+give her special fortune.
+
+That morning I had thought her appearance at this luncheon-party was
+little less than scandalous, for she knew, if others did not, who Boyd
+Madras was. After the occurrence with the Arab, the other event was
+certainly much less prominent, and here, after many years, I can see
+that the act was less in her than it would have been in others. For,
+behind her outward hardness, there was a sort of justice working, an
+iron thing, but still not unnatural in her.
+
+Belle Treherne awakened also to a new perception of her character, and
+a kind of awe possessed her, so masculine seemed her courage, yet
+so womanly and feminine her manner. Mrs. Callendar was loud in her
+exclamations of delight and wonder at Mrs. Falchion's coolness; and the
+bookmaker, with his usual impetuosity, offered to take bets at four to
+one that we should all be detained to give evidence in the matter.
+
+Clovelly was silent. He occasionally adjusted his glasses, and looked at
+Mrs. Falchion as if he had suddenly come to a full stop in his opinions
+regarding her. This, I think, was noticed by her, and enjoyed too, for
+she doubtless remembered her conversation with me, in which she had said
+that Clovelly thought he understood her perfectly. Colonel Ryder, who
+was loyal at all times, said she had the nerve of a woman from Kentucky.
+Moreover, he had presence of mind, for he had immediately sent off a
+native to inform the authorities of what had occurred; so that before
+we had got half-way to the town we were met by policemen running towards
+us, followed by a small detachment of Indian soldiers. The officer in
+command of the detachment stopped us, and said that the governor would
+be glad if we would come to Government House for an hour, while an
+inquiry was being held.
+
+To this we cheerfully consented, of course; and, in a room where punkahs
+waved and cool claret-cup awaited us, we were received by the governor,
+who was full of admiration of Mrs. Falchion. It was plain, however, that
+he was surprised at her present equanimity. Had she no nerves at all?
+
+"I can only regret exceedingly," said the governor, "that your visit to
+Aden has had such a tragical interruption; but since it has occurred,
+I am glad to have the privilege of meeting a lady so brave as Mrs.
+Falchion."--The bookmaker had introduced us all with a naivete that, I
+am sure, amused the governor, as it certainly did his aide-de-camp. "We
+should not need to fear the natives if we had soldiers as fearless," his
+excellency continued.
+
+At this point the inquiry began, and, after it was over, the governor
+said that there the matter ended so far as we were concerned, and then
+he remarked gallantly that the Government of Aden would always remain
+Mrs. Falchion's debtor. She replied that it was a debt she would be
+glad to preserve unsettled for ever. After this pretty exchange of
+compliments, the governor smiled, and offered her his arm to the door,
+where our 'char a bans' awaited us.
+
+So impressed was the bookmaker with the hospitable reception the
+governor had given us, that he offered him his cigar-case with its
+contents, said he hoped they would meet again, and asked his excellency
+if he thought of coming to Australia. The governor declined the cigars
+graciously, ignored the hoped-for pleasure of another meeting, and
+trusted that it might fall to his lot to visit Australia some day.
+Thereupon the bookmaker insisted on the aide-de-camp accepting the
+cigar-case, and gave him his visiting-card. The aide-de-camp lost
+nothing by his good-humoured acceptance, if he smoked, because, as I
+knew, the cigars were very good indeed. Bookmakers, gamblers and Jews
+are good judges of tobacco. And the governor's party lost nothing in
+dignity because, as the traps wheeled away, they gave a polite little
+cheer for Mrs. Falchion. I, at first, was fearful how Belle Treherne
+would regard the gaucheries of the bookmaker, but I saw that he was
+rather an object of interest to her than otherwise; for he was certainly
+amusing.
+
+As we drove through Aden, a Somauli lad ran from the door of a house,
+and handed up a letter to the driver of my trap. It bore my name, and
+was handed over to me. I recognised the handwriting. It was that of Boyd
+Madras. He had come ashore by Hungerford's aid in the night. The letter
+simply gave an address in England that would always find him, and stated
+that he intended to take another name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX. "THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS"
+
+News of the event had preceded us to the 'Fulvia', and, as we scrambled
+out on the ship's stairs, cheers greeted us. Glancing up, I saw
+Hungerford, among others, leaning over the side, and looking at Mrs.
+Falchion in a curious cogitating fashion, not unusual to him. The look
+was non-committal, yet earnest. If it was not approval, it was not
+condemnation; but it might have been slightly ironical, and that annoyed
+me. It seemed impossible for him--and it was so always, I believe--to
+get out of his mind the thought of the man he had rescued on No Man's
+Sea. I am sure it jarred upon him that the band foolishly played a
+welcome when Mrs. Falchion stepped on the deck. As I delivered Miss
+Treherne into the hands of her father, who was anxiously awaiting us,
+Hungerford said in my ear: "A tragedy queen, Marmion." He said it so
+distinctly that Mrs. Falchion heard it, and she gave him a searching
+look. Their eyes met and warred for a moment, and then he added: "I
+remember! Yes, I can respect the bravery of a woman whom I do not like."
+
+"And this is to-morrow," she said, "and a man may change his mind, and
+that may be fate--or a woman's whim." She bowed, turned away, and went
+below, evidently disliking the reception she had had, and anxious to
+escape inquiries and congratulations. Nor did she appear again until the
+'Fulvia' got under way about six o'clock in the evening. As we moved out
+of the harbour we passed close to the 'Porcupine' and saw its officers
+grouped on the deck, waving adieus to some one on our deck, whom I
+guessed, of course, to be Galt Roscoe.
+
+At this time Mrs. Falchion was standing near me. "For whom is that
+demonstration?" she said.
+
+"For one of her officers, who is a passenger by the 'Fulvia'," I
+replied. "You remember we passed the 'Porcupine' in the Indian Ocean?"
+
+"Yes, I know that very well," she said, with a shade of meaning.
+"But"--here I thought her voice had a touch of breathlessness--"but who
+is the officer? I mean, what is his name?"
+
+"He stands in the group near the door of the captain's cabin, there. His
+name is Galt Roscoe, I think."
+
+A slight exclamation escaped her. There was a chilly smile on her lips,
+and her eyes sought the group until it rested on Galt Roscoe. In a
+moment she said "You have met him?"
+
+"In the cemetery this morning, for the first time."
+
+"Everybody seems to have had business this morning at the cemetery.
+Justine Caron spent hours there. To me it is so foolish, heaping up a
+mound, and erecting a tombstone over--what?--a dead thing, which, if one
+could see it, would be dreadful."
+
+"You would prefer complete absorption--as of the ocean?" I brutally
+retorted.
+
+She appeared not to notice the innuendo. "Yes, what is gone is gone.
+Graves are idolatry. Gravestones are ghostly. It is people without
+imagination who need these things, together with crape and black-edged
+paper. It is all barbaric ritual. I know you think I am callous, but I
+cannot help that. For myself, I wish the earth close about me, and level
+green grass above me, and no one knowing of the place; or else, fire or
+the sea."
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," said I, "between us there need be no delicate words.
+You appear to have neither imagination, nor idolatry, nor remembrances,
+nor common womanly kindness."
+
+"Indeed!" she said. "Yet you might know me better." Here she touched
+my arm with the tips of her fingers, and, in spite of myself, I felt
+my pulse beat faster. It seemed to me that in her presence, even now, I
+could not quite trust myself. "Indeed!" she repeated. "And who made
+you omniscient, Dr. Marmion? You hardly do yourself justice. You hold
+a secret. You insist on reminding me of the fact. Is that in perfect
+gallantry? Do you know me altogether, from your knowledge of that
+one thing? You are vain. Or does the secret wear on you, and--Mr.
+Hungerford? Was it necessary to seek HIS help in keeping it?"
+
+I told her then the true history of Hungerford's connection with Boyd
+Madras, and also begged her pardon for showing just now my knowledge of
+her secret. At this she said, "I suppose I should be grateful," and was
+there a slightly softer cadence to her voice?
+
+"No, you need not be grateful," I said. "We are silent, first, because
+he wished it; then because you are a woman."
+
+"You define your reasons with astonishing care and taste," she replied.
+
+"Oh, as to taste!--" said I; but then I bit my tongue.
+
+At that she said, her lips very firm and pale, "I could not pretend to
+a grief I did not feel. I acted no lie. He died as we had
+lived--estranged. I put up no memorials."
+
+But I, thinking of my mother lying in her grave, a woman after God's own
+heart, who loved me more than I deserved, repeated almost unconsciously
+these lines (clipped from a magazine):
+
+       "Sacred the ring, the faded glove,
+        Once worn by one we used to love;
+        Dead warriors in their armour live,
+        And in their relics saints survive.
+
+       "Oh, Mother Earth, henceforth defend
+        All thou hast garnered of my friend,
+        From winter's wind and driving sleet,
+        From summer's sun and scorching heat.
+
+       "Within thine all-embracing breast
+        Is hid one more forsaken nest;
+        While, in the sky, with folded wings,
+        The bird that left it sits and sings."
+
+I paused; the occasion seemed so little suited to the sentiment, for
+around us was the idle excitement of leaving port. I was annoyed with
+myself for my share in the conversation so far. Mrs. Falchion's eyes
+had scarcely left that group around the captain's door, although she had
+appeared acutely interested in what I was saying. Now she said:
+
+"You recite very well. I feel impressed, but I fancy it is more your
+voice than those fine sentiments; for, after all, you cannot glorify
+the dead body. Look at the mummy of Thothmes at Boulak, and think what
+Cleopatra must look like now. And please let us talk about something
+else. Let us--" She paused.
+
+I followed the keen, shaded glance of her eyes, and saw, coming from
+the group by the captain's door, Galt Roscoe. He moved in our direction.
+Suddenly he paused. His look was fixed upon Mrs. Falchion. A flush
+passed over his face, not exactly confusing, but painful, and again
+it left him pale, and for a moment he stood motionless. Then he came
+forward to us. He bowed to me, then looked hard at her. She held out her
+hand.
+
+"Mr. Roscoe, I think?" she said. "An old friend," she added, turning to
+me. He gravely took her extended hand and said:
+
+"I did not think to see you here, Miss--"
+
+"MRS. Falchion," she interrupted clearly.
+
+"MRS. Falchion!" he said, with surprise. "It is so many years since we
+had met, and--"
+
+"And it is so easy to forget things? But it isn't so many, really--only
+seven, the cycle for constitutional renewal. Dear me, how erudite that
+sounds!... So, I suppose, we meet the same, yet not the same."
+
+"The same, yet not the same," he repeated after her, with an attempt at
+lightness, yet abstractedly.
+
+"I think you gentlemen know each other?" she said.
+
+"Yes; we met in the cemetery this morning. I was visiting the grave of a
+young French officer."
+
+"I know," she said--"Justine Caron's brother. She has told me; but she
+did not tell me your name."
+
+"She has told you?" he said.
+
+"Yes. She is--my companion." I saw that she did not use the word that
+first came to her.
+
+"How strangely things occur! And yet," he added musingly, "I suppose,
+after all, coincidence is not so strange in these days of much travel,
+particularly with people whose lives are connected--more or less."
+
+"Whose lives are connected--more or less," she repeated after him, in a
+steely tone.
+
+It seemed to me that I had received my cue to leave. I bowed myself
+away, and went about my duties. As we steamed bravely through the
+Straits of Babelmandeb, with Perim on our left, rising lovely through
+the milky haze, I came on deck again, and they were still near where I
+had left them an hour before. I passed, glancing at them as I did so.
+They did not look towards me. His eyes were turned to the shore, and
+hers were fixed on him. I saw an expression on her lips that gave
+her face new character. She was speaking, as I thought, clearly and
+mercilessly. I could not help hearing her words as I passed them.
+
+"You are going to be that--you!" There was a ring of irony in her
+tone. I heard nothing more in words, but I saw him turn to her somewhat
+sharply, and I caught the deep notes of his voice as he answered her.
+When, a moment after, I looked back, she had gone below.
+
+Galt Roscoe had a seat at Captain Ascott's table, and I did not see
+anything of him at meal-times, but elsewhere I soon saw him a great
+deal. He appeared to seek my company. I was glad of this, for I found
+that he was an agreeable man, and had distinct originality of ideas,
+besides being possessed of very considerable culture. He also had that
+social aplomb so much a characteristic of the naval officer. Yet, man of
+the world as he was, he had a strain of asceticism which puzzled me. It
+did not make him eccentric, but it was not a thing usual with the naval
+man. Again, he wished to be known simply as Mr. Roscoe, not as Captain
+Roscoe, which was his rank. He said nothing about having retired, yet
+I guessed he had done so. One evening, however, soon after we had left
+Aden, we were sitting in my cabin, and the conversation turned upon a
+recent novel dealing with the defection of a clergyman of the Church of
+England through agnosticism. The keenness with which he threw himself
+into the discussion and the knowledge he showed, surprised me. I knew
+(as most medical students get to know, until they know better) some
+scientific objections to Christianity, and I put them forward. He
+clearly and powerfully met them. I said at last, laughingly: "Why, you
+ought to take holy orders."
+
+"That is what I am going to do," he said very seriously, "when I get to
+England. I am resigning the navy." At that instant there flashed through
+my mind Mrs. Falchion's words: "You are going to be that--you!"
+
+Then he explained to me that he had been studying for two years, and
+expected to go up for deacon's orders soon after his return to England.
+I cannot say that I was greatly surprised, for I had known a few, and
+had heard of many, men who had exchanged the navy for the Church. It
+struck me, however, that Galt Roscoe appeared to view the matter from
+a stand-point not professional; the more so, that he expressed his
+determination to go to the newest part of a new country, to do the
+pioneer work of the Church. I asked him where he was going, and he said
+to the Rocky Mountains of Canada. I told him that my destination was
+Canada also. He warmly expressed the hope that we should see something
+of each other there. This friendship of ours may seem to have been
+hastily hatched, but it must be remembered that the sea is a great
+breeder of friendship. Two men who have known each other for twenty
+years find that twenty days at sea bring them nearer than ever they were
+before, or else estrange them.
+
+It was on this evening that, in a lull of the conversation, I casually
+asked him when he had known Mrs. Falchion. His face was inscrutable, but
+he said somewhat hurriedly, "In the South Sea Islands," and then changed
+the subject. So, there was some mystery again? Was this woman never to
+be dissociated from enigma? In those days I never could think of her
+save in connection with some fatal incident in which she was scathless,
+and some one else suffered.
+
+It may have been fancy, but I thought that, during the first day or
+two after leaving Aden, Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion were very little
+together. Then the impression grew that this was his doing, and again
+that she waited with confident patience for the time when he would seek
+her--because he could not help himself. Often when other men were paying
+her devoted court I caught her eyes turned in his direction, and I
+thought I read in her smile a consciousness of power. And it so was.
+Very soon he was at her side. But I also noticed that he began to look
+worn, that his conversation with me lagged. I think that at this time
+I was so much occupied with tracing personal appearances to personal
+influences that I lost to some degree the physician's practical
+keenness. My eyes were to be opened. He appeared to be suffering, and
+she seemed to unbend to him more than she ever unbent to me, or any one
+else on board. Hungerford, seeing this, said to me one day in his blunt
+way: "Marmion, old Ulysses knew what he was about when he tied himself
+to the mast."
+
+But the routine of the ship went on as before. Fortunately, Mrs.
+Falchion's heroism at Aden had taken the place of the sensation
+attending Boyd Madras's suicide. Those who tired of thinking of both
+became mildly interested in Red Sea history. Chief among these was the
+bookmaker. As an historian the bookmaker was original. He cavalierly
+waved aside all such confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet
+contemporaneous, incidentally referred to King Solomon's visits
+to Cleopatra, and with sad irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the
+destruction of Pharaoh's horses and chariots as "the big handicap."
+He did not mean to be irreverent or unhistorical. He merely wished
+to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he was very original, and quite
+clever at history. His really startling points, however, were his
+remarks upon the colours of the mountains of Egypt and the sunset tints
+to be seen on the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. To him the grey, and
+pink, and melancholy gold only brought up visions of a race at Epsom or
+Flemington--generally Flemington, where the staring Australian sun
+pours down on an emerald course, on a score of horses straining upon
+the start, the colours of the jockeys' coats and caps changing in the
+struggle like a kaleidoscope, and making strange harmonies of colour.
+The comparison between the mountains of Egypt and a race-course might
+seem most absurd, if one did not remember that the bookmaker had his own
+standards, and that he thought he was paying unusual honour to the
+land of the Fellah. Clovelly plaintively said, as he drank his hock
+and seltzer, that the bookmaker was hourly saving his life; and Colonel
+Ryder admitted at last that Kentucky never produced anything quite like
+him.
+
+The evening before we came to the Suez Canal I was walking with Miss
+Treherne and her father. I had seen Galt Roscoe in conversation with
+Mrs. Falchion. Presently I saw him rise to go away. A moment after,
+in passing, I was near her. She sprang up, caught my arm, and pointed
+anxiously. I looked, and saw Galt Roscoe swaying as he walked.
+
+"He is ill--ill," she said.
+
+I ran forward and caught him as he was falling. Ill?
+
+Of course he was ill. What a fool I had been! Five minutes with him
+assured me that he had fever. I had set his haggard appearance down
+to some mental trouble--and I was going to be a professor in a medical
+college!
+
+Yet I know now that a troubled mind hastened the fever.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X. BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+
+From the beginning Galt Roscoe's fever was violent. It had been hanging
+about him for a long time, and was the result of malarial poisoning.
+I devoutly wished that we were in the Mediterranean instead of the Red
+Sea, where the heat was so great; but fortunately we should soon be
+there. There was no other case of sickness on board, and I could devote
+plenty of time to him. Offers of assistance in nursing were numerous,
+but I only encouraged those of the bookmaker, strange as this may seem;
+yet he was as gentle and considerate as a woman in the sick-room. This
+was on the first evening of his attack. After that I had reasons for
+dispensing with his generous services. The night after Roscoe was taken
+ill we were passing through the canal, the search-light of the 'Fulvia'
+sweeping the path ahead of it and glorifying everything it touched. Mud
+barges were fairy palaces; Arab punts beautiful gondolas; the ragged
+Egyptians on the banks became picturesque; and the desolate country
+behind them had a wide vestibule of splendour. I stood for half an hour
+watching this scene, then I went below to Roscoe's cabin and relieved
+the bookmaker. The sick man was sleeping from the effects of a sedative
+draught. The bookmaker had scarcely gone when I heard a step behind me,
+and I turned and saw Justine Caron standing timidly at the door, her
+eyes upon the sleeper. She spoke quietly. "Is he very ill?"
+
+I answered that he was, but also that for some days I could not tell how
+dangerous his illness might be. She went to the berth where he lay, the
+reflected light from without playing weirdly on his face, and smoothed
+the pillow gently.
+
+"If you are willing, I will watch for a time," she said. "Everybody is
+on deck. Madame said she would not need me for a couple of hours. I will
+send a steward for you if he wakes; you need rest yourself."
+
+That I needed rest was quite true, for I had been up all the night
+before; still I hesitated. She saw my hesitation, and added:
+
+"It is not much that I can do, still I should like to do it. I can at
+least watch." Then, very earnestly: "He watched beside Hector."
+
+I left her with him, her fingers moving the small bag of ice about his
+forehead to allay the fever and her eyes patiently regarding him. I went
+on deck again. I met Miss Treherne and her father. They both inquired
+for the sick man, and I told Belle--for she seemed much interested--the
+nature of such malarial fevers, the acute forms they sometimes take, and
+the kind of treatment required. She asked several questions, showing
+a keen understanding of my explanations, and then, after a moment's
+silence, said meditatively: "I think I like men better when they are
+doing responsible work; it is difficult to be idle--and important too."
+
+I saw very well that, with her, I should have to contend for a long time
+against those first few weeks of dalliance on the 'Fulvia'.
+
+Clovelly joined us, and for the first time--if I had not been so
+egotistical it had appeared to me before--I guessed that his somewhat
+professional interest in Belle Treherne had developed into a very
+personal thing. And with that thought came also the conception of what
+a powerful antagonist he would be. For it improves some men to wear
+glasses; and Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue. It was
+allusive, contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet
+playful, bold yet reverential. Many a time I have longed for Clovelly's
+tongue. Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without
+his art; and of this I am occasionally reminded at this day. A man like
+Clovelly is dangerous as a rival when he is not in earnest; when he IS
+in earnest, it becomes a lonely time for the other man--unless the girl
+is perverse.
+
+I left the two together, and moved about the deck, trying to think
+closely about Roscoe's case, and to drive Clovelly's invasion from my
+mind. I succeeded, and was only roused by Mrs. Falchion's voice beside
+me.
+
+"Does he suffer much?" she murmured.
+
+When answered, she asked nervously how he looked--it was impossible that
+she should consider misery without shrinking. I told her that he was
+only flushed and haggard as yet and that he was little wasted. A thought
+flashed to her face. She was about to speak, but paused. After a moment,
+however, she remarked evenly: "He is likely to be delirious?"
+
+"It is probable," I replied.
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the search-light. The look in them was
+inscrutable. She continued quietly: "I will go and see him, if you will
+let me. Justine will go with me."
+
+"Not now," I replied. "He is sleeping. To-morrow, if you will."
+
+I did not think it necessary to tell her that Justine was at that moment
+watching beside him. We walked the deck together in silence.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "that you care to walk with me. Please do not make
+the matter a burden."
+
+She did not say this with any invitation to courteous protest on my
+part, but rather with a cold frankness--for which, I confess, I always
+admired her. I said now: "Mrs. Falchion, you have suggested what might
+easily be possible in the circumstances, but I candidly admit that I
+have never yet found your presence disagreeable; and I suppose that is a
+comment upon my weakness. Though, to speak again with absolute truth, I
+think I do not like you at this present."
+
+"Yes, I fancy I can understand that," she said. "I can understand how,
+for instance, one might feel a just and great resentment, and have in
+one's hand the instrument of punishment, and yet withhold one's hand and
+protect where one should injure."
+
+At this moment these words had no particular significance to me, but
+there chanced a time when they came home with great force. I think,
+indeed, that she was speaking more to herself than to me. Suddenly she
+turned to me.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if I am as cruel as you think me--for, indeed, I
+do not know. But I have been through many things."
+
+Here her eyes grew cold and hard. The words that followed seemed in
+no sequence. "Yet," she said, "I will go and see him to-morrow....
+Good-night." After about an hour I went below to Galt Roscoe's cabin.
+I drew aside the curtain quietly. Justine Caron evidently had not heard
+me. She was sitting beside the sick man, her fingers still smoothing
+away the pillow from his fevered face and her eyes fixed on him. I spoke
+to her. She rose. "He has slept well," she said. And she moved to the
+door.
+
+"Miss Caron," I said, "if Mrs. Falchion is willing, you could help me to
+nurse Mr. Roscoe?"
+
+A light sprang to her eyes. "Indeed, yes," she said.
+
+"I will speak to her about it, if you will let me?" She bowed her head,
+and her look was eloquent of thanks. After a word of good-night we
+parted.
+
+I knew that nothing better could occur to my patient than that Justine
+Caron should help to nurse him. This would do far more for him than
+medicine--the tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias.
+
+Hungerford had insisted on relieving me for a couple of hours at
+midnight. He said it would be a good preparation for going on the bridge
+at three o'clock in the morning. About half-past two he came to my cabin
+and waked me, saying: "He is worse--delirious; you had better come."
+
+He was indeed delirious. Hungerford laid his hand on my shoulder.
+"Marmion," he said, "that woman is in it. Like the devil, she is
+ubiquitous. Mr. Roscoe's past is mixed up with hers somehow. I don't
+suppose men talk absolute history in delirium, but there is no reason,
+I fancy, why they shouldn't paraphrase. I should reduce the number of
+nurses to a minimum if I were you."
+
+A determined fierceness possessed me at the moment. I said to him: "She
+shall nurse him, Hungerford--she, and Justine Caron, and myself."
+
+"Plus Dick Hungerford," he added. "I don't know quite how you intend to
+work this thing, but you have the case in your hands, and what you've
+told me about the French girl shows that she is to be trusted. But as
+for myself, Marmion M.D., I'm sick--sick--sick of this woman, and all
+her words and works. I believe that she has brought bad luck to this
+ship; and it's my last voyage on it; and--and I begin to think you're a
+damned good fellow--excuse the insolence of it; and--good-night."
+
+For the rest of the night I listened to Galt Roscoe's wild words. He
+tossed from side to side, and murmured brokenly. Taken separately, and
+as they were spoken, his words might not be very significant, but pieced
+together, arranged, and interpreted through even scant knowledge of
+circumstances, they were sufficient to give me a key to difficulties
+which, afterwards, were to cause much distress. I arrange some of
+the sentences here to show how startling were the fancies--or
+remembrances--that vexed him.
+
+"But I was coming back--I was coming back--I tell you I should have
+stayed with her for ever.... See how she trembles!--Now her breath
+is gone--There is no pulse--Her heart is still--My God, her heart
+is still!--Hush! cover her face.... Row hard, you devils!--A hundred
+dollars if you make the point in time.... Whereaway?--Whereaway?--Steady
+now!--Let them have it across the bows!--Low! low!--fire low!... She is
+dead--she is dead!"
+
+These things he would say over and over again breathlessly, then he
+would rest a while, and the trouble would begin again. "It was not I
+that did it--no, it was not I. She did it herself!--She plunged it in,
+deep, deep, deep! You made me a devil!... Hush! I WILL tell!--I know
+you--yet--Mercy--Mercy--Falchion--"
+
+Yes, it was best that few should enter his cabin. The ravings of a sick
+man are not always counted ravings, no more than the words of a well man
+are always reckoned sane. At last I got him into a sound sleep, and by
+that time I was thoroughly tired out. I called my own steward, and asked
+him to watch for a couple of hours while I rested. I threw myself down
+and slept soundly for an hour beyond that time, the steward having
+hesitated to wake me.
+
+By that time we had passed into the fresher air of the Mediterranean,
+and the sea was delightfully smooth. Galt Roscoe still slept, though his
+temperature was high.
+
+My conference with Mrs. Falchion after breakfast was brief, but
+satisfactory. I told her frankly that Roscoe had been delirious, that he
+had mentioned her name, and that I thought it best to reduce the number
+of nurses and watchers. I made my proposition about Justine Caron. She
+shook her head a little impatiently, and said that Justine had told her,
+and that she was quite willing. Then I asked her if she would not also
+assist. She answered immediately that she wished to do so. As if to make
+me understand why she did it, she added: "If I did not hear the wild
+things he says, some one else would; and the difference is that I
+understand them, and the some one else would interpret them with the
+genius of the writer of a fairy book."
+
+And so it happened that Mrs. Falchion came to sit many hours a day
+beside the sick couch of Galt Roscoe, moistening his lips, cooling his
+brow, giving him his medicine. After the first day, when she was,
+I thought, alternating between innate disgust of misery and her
+womanliness and humanity,--in these days more a reality to me,--she
+grew watchful and silently solicitous at every turn of the malady. What
+impressed me most was that she was interested and engrossed more, it
+seemed, in the malady than in the man himself.
+
+And yet she baffled me even when I had come to this conclusion.
+
+During most of his delirium she remained almost impassive, as if she had
+schooled herself to be calm and strong in nerve; but one afternoon she
+did a thing that upset all my opinions of her for a moment. Looking
+straight at her with staring, unconscious eyes, he half rose in his bed,
+and said in a low, bitter tone: "I hate you. I once loved you--but I
+hate you now!" Then he laughed scornfully, and fell back on the
+pillow. She had been sitting very quietly, musing. His action had been
+unexpected, and had broken upon a silence. She rose to her feet quickly,
+gave a sharp indrawn breath, and pressed her hand against her side, as
+though a sudden pain had seized her. The next moment, however, she was
+composed again, and said in explanation that she had been half asleep,
+and he had startled her. But I had seen her under what seemed to me more
+trying conditions, and she had not shown any nervousness such as this.
+
+The passengers, of course, talked. Many "true histories" of Mrs.
+Falchion's devotion to the sick man were abroad; but it must be said,
+however, that all of them were romantically creditable to her. She
+had become a rare product even in the eyes of Miss Treherne, and more
+particularly her father, since the matter at the Tanks. Justine Caron
+was slyly besieged by the curious, but they went away empty; for
+Justine, if very simple and single-minded, was yet too much concerned
+for both Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion to give the inquiring the
+slightest clue. She knew, indeed, little herself, whatever she may have
+guessed. As for Hungerford, he was dumb. He refused to consider the
+matter. But he roundly maintained once or twice, without any apparent
+relevance, that a woman was like a repeating decimal--you could follow
+her, but you never could reach her. He usually added to this: "Minus
+one, Marmion," meaning thus to exclude the girl who preferred him to any
+one else. When I ventured to suggest that Miss Treherne might also be
+excepted, he said, with maddening suggestion: "She lets Mrs. Falchion
+fool her, doesn't she? And she isn't quite sure the splendour of a
+medical professor's position is superior to that of an author."
+
+In these moments, although I tried to smile on him, I hated him a
+little. I sought to revenge myself on him by telling him to help
+himself to a cigar, having first placed the box of Mexicans near him. He
+invariably declined them, and said he would take one of the others
+from the tea-box--my very best, kept in tea for sake of dryness. If
+I reversed the process he reversed his action. His instinct regarding
+cigars was supernatural, and I almost believe that he had--like the
+Black Dwarf's cat--the "poo'er" of reading character and interpreting
+events--an uncanny divination.
+
+I knew by the time we reached Valetta that Roscoe would get well; but he
+recognised none of us until we arrived at Gibraltar. Justine Caron and
+myself had been watching beside him. As the bells clanged to "slow
+down" on entering the harbour, his eyes opened with a gaze of sanity and
+consciousness. He looked at me, then at Justine.
+
+"I have been ill?" he said.
+
+Justine's eyes were not entirely to be trusted. She turned her head
+away.
+
+"Yes, you have been very ill," I replied, "but you are better."
+
+He smiled feebly, adding: "At least, I am grateful that I did not die at
+sea." Then he closed his eyes. After a moment he opened them, and said,
+looking at Justine: "You have helped to nurse me, have you not?" His
+wasted fingers moved over the counterpane towards her.
+
+"I could do so little," she murmured.
+
+"You have more than paid your debt to me," he gently replied. "For I
+live, you see, and poor Hector died."
+
+She shook her head gravely, and rejoined: "Ah no, I can never pay the
+debt I owe to you and to God--now." He did not understand this, I know.
+But I did. "You must not talk any more," I said to him.
+
+But Justine interposed. "He must be told that the nurse who has done
+most for him is Mrs. Falchion." His brows contracted as if he were
+trying to remember something. He moved his head wearily.
+
+"Yes, I think I remember," he said, "about her being with me, but
+nothing clearly--nothing clearly. She is very kind."
+
+Justine here murmured: "Shall I tell her?"
+
+I was about to say no; but Roscoe nodded, and said quietly, "Yes, yes."
+
+Then I made no objection, but urged that the meeting should only be for
+a moment. I determined not to leave them alone even for that moment.
+I did not know what things connected with their past--whatever it
+was--might be brought up, and I knew that entire freedom from excitement
+was necessary. I might have spared myself any anxiety on the point. When
+she came she was perfectly self-composed, and more as she seemed when
+I first knew her, though I will admit that I thought her face more
+possible to emotion than in the past.
+
+It seems strange to write of a few weeks before as the past; but so much
+had occurred that the days might easily have been months and the weeks
+years.
+
+She sat down beside him and held out her hand. And as she did so, I
+thought of Boyd Madras and of that long last night of his life, and of
+her refusal to say to him one comforting word, or to touch his hand in
+forgiveness and friendship. And was this man so much better than Boyd
+Madras? His wild words in delirium might mean nothing, but if they meant
+anything, and she knew of that anything, she was still a heartless,
+unnatural woman, as I had once called her.
+
+Roscoe took her hand and held it briefly. "Dr. Marmion says that you
+have helped to nurse me through my illness," he whispered. "I am most
+grateful."
+
+I thought she replied with the slightest constraint in her voice. "One
+could not let an old acquaintance die without making an effort to save
+him."
+
+At that instant I grew scornful, and longed to tell him of her husband.
+But then a husband was not an acquaintance. I ventured instead: "I am
+sorry, but I must cut short all conversation for the present. When he
+is a little better, he will be benefited by your brightest gossip, Mrs.
+Falchion."
+
+She rose smiling, but she did not again take his hand, though I thought
+he made a motion to that end. But she looked down at him steadily for
+a moment. Beneath her look his face flushed, and his eyes grew hot with
+light; then they dropped, and the eyelids closed on them. At that she
+said, with an incomprehensible airiness: "Good-night. I am going now to
+play the music of 'La Grande Duchesse' as a farewell to Gibraltar. They
+have a concert on to-night."
+
+And she was gone.
+
+At the mention of La Grande Duchesse he sighed, and turned his head away
+from her. What it all meant I did not know, and she had annoyed me
+as much as she had perplexed me; her moods were like the chameleon's
+colours. He lay silent for a long time, then he turned to me and said:
+"Do you remember that tale in the Bible about David and the well of
+Bethlehem?" I had to confess my ignorance.
+
+"I think I can remember it," he continued. And though I urged him not to
+tax himself, he spoke slowly thus:
+
+   "And David was in an hold, and the garrison of the Philistines was
+   then in Bethlehem.
+
+   "And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me to drink of
+   the water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate!
+
+   "And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew
+   water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate, and took
+   and brought it to David; nevertheless, he would not drink thereof,
+   but poured it out unto the Lord.
+
+   "And he said, My God forbid it me that I should do this; is not this
+   the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?
+   Therefore he would not drink it."
+
+He paused a moment, and then added: "One always buys back the past at a
+tremendous price. Resurrections give ghosts only."
+
+"But you must sleep now," I urged. And then, because I knew not what
+else more fitting, I added: "Sleep, and
+
+        "'Let the dead past bury its dead.'"
+
+"Yes, I will sleep," he answered.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II. THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI. AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+
+"Your letters, sir," said my servant, on the last evening of the college
+year. Examinations were over at last, and I was wondering where I should
+spend my holidays. The choice was very wide; ranging from the Muskoka
+lakes to the Yosemite Valley. Because it was my first year in Canada, I
+really preferred not to go beyond the Dominion. With these thoughts
+in my mind I opened my letters. The first two did not interest me;
+tradesmen's bills seldom do. The third brought a thumping sensation of
+pleasure--though it was not from Miss Treherne. I had had one from her
+that morning, and this was a pleasure which never came twice in one day,
+for Prince's College, Toronto, was a long week's journey from London,
+S.W. Considering, however, that I did receive letters from her once a
+week, it may be concluded that Clovelly did not; and that, if he had, it
+would have been by a serious infringement of my rights. But, indeed, as
+I have learned since, Clovelly took his defeat in a very characteristic
+fashion, and said on an important occasion some generous things about
+me.
+
+The letter that pleased me so much was from Galt Roscoe, who, as he
+had intended, was settled in a new but thriving district of British
+Columbia, near the Cascade Mountains. Soon after his complete recovery
+he had been ordained in England, had straightway sailed for Canada,
+and had gone to work at once. This note was an invitation to spend the
+holiday months with him, where, as he said, a man "summering high among
+the hills of God" could see visions and dream dreams, and hunt and fish
+too--especially fish. He urged that he would not talk parish concerns
+at me; that I should not be asked to be godfather to any young
+mountaineers; and that the only drawback, so far as my own predilections
+were concerned, was the monotonous health of the people. He described
+his summer cottage of red pine as being built on the edge of a lovely
+ravine; he said that he had the Cascades on one hand with their big
+glacier fields, and mighty pine forests on the other; while the
+balmiest breezes of June awaited "the professor of pathology and
+genial saw-bones." At the end of the letter he hinted something about a
+pleasant little secret for my ear when I came; and remarked immediately
+afterwards that there were one or two delightful families at Sunburst
+and Viking, villages in his parish. One naturally associated the little
+secret with some member of one of these delightful families. Finally, he
+said he would like to show me how it was possible to transform a naval
+man into a parson.
+
+My mind was made up. I wrote to him that I would start at once. Then I
+began to make preparations, and meanwhile fell to thinking again about
+him who was now the Reverend Galt Roscoe. After the 'Fulvia' reached
+London I had only seen him a few times, he having gone at once into the
+country to prepare for ordination. Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron I had
+met several times, but Mrs. Falchion forbore inquiring for Galt Roscoe:
+from which, and from other slight but significant matters, I gathered
+that she knew of his doings and whereabouts. Before I started for
+Toronto she said that she might see me there some day, for she was going
+to San Francisco to inspect the property her uncle had left her, and in
+all probability would make a sojourn in Canada. I gave her my address,
+and she then said she understood that Mr. Roscoe intended taking a
+missionary parish in the wilds. In his occasional letters to me while we
+all were in England Roscoe seldom spoke of her, but, when he did, showed
+that he knew of her movements. This did not strike me at the time as
+anything more than natural. It did later.
+
+Within a couple of weeks I reached Viking, a lumbering town with great
+saw-mills, by way of San Francisco and Vancouver. Roscoe met me at the
+coach, and I was taken at once to the house among the hills. It stood on
+the edge of a ravine, and the end of the verandah looked over a verdant
+precipice, beautiful but terrible too. It was uniquely situated; a nest
+among the hills, suitable either for work or play. In one's ears was
+the low, continuous din of the rapids, with the music of a neighbouring
+waterfall.
+
+On the way up the hills I had a chance to observe Roscoe closely. His
+face had not that sturdy buoyancy which his letter suggested. Still, if
+it was pale, it had a glow which it did not possess before, and even
+a stronger humanity than of old. A new look had come into his eyes,
+a certain absorbing earnestness, refining the past asceticism. A more
+amiable and unselfish comrade man never had.
+
+The second day I was there he took me to call upon a family at Viking,
+the town with a great saw-mill and two smaller ones, owned by James
+Devlin, an enterprising man who had grown rich at lumbering, and who
+lived here in the mountains many months in each year.
+
+Mr. James Devlin had a daughter who had had some advantages in the East
+after her father had become rich, though her earlier life was spent
+altogether in the mountains. I soon saw where Roscoe's secret was to
+be found. Ruth Devlin was a tall girl of sensitive features, beautiful
+eyes, and rare personality. Her life, as I came to know, had been one of
+great devotion and self-denial. Before her father had made his fortune,
+she had nursed a frail-bodied, faint-hearted mother, and had cared for,
+and been a mother to, her younger sisters. With wealth and ease came
+a brighter bloom to her cheek, but it had a touch of care which would
+never quite disappear, though it became in time a beautiful wistfulness
+rather than anxiety. Had this responsibility come to her in a city, it
+might have spoiled her beauty and robbed her of her youth altogether;
+but in the sustaining virtue of a life in the mountains, warm hues
+remained on her cheek and a wonderful freshness in her nature. Her
+family worshipped her--as she deserved.
+
+That evening Roscoe confided to me that he had not asked Ruth Devlin to
+be his wife, nor had he, indeed, given her definite tokens of his love.
+But the thing was in his mind as a happy possibility of the future. We
+talked till midnight, sitting at the end of the verandah overlooking the
+ravine. This corner, called the coping, became consecrated to our many
+conversations. We painted and sketched there in the morning (when we
+were not fishing or he was not at his duties), received visitors, and
+smoked in the evening, inhaling the balsam from the pines. An old man
+and his wife kept the house for us, and gave us to eat of simple but
+comfortable fare. The trout-fishing was good, and many a fine trout was
+broiled for our evening meal; and many a fine string of trout found its
+way to the tables of Roscoe's poorest parishioners, or else to furnish
+the more fashionable table at which Ruth Devlin presided. There were
+excursions up the valley, and picnics on the hill-sides, and occasional
+lunches and evening parties at the summer hotel, a mile from us farther
+down the valley, at which tourists were beginning to assemble.
+
+Yet, all the time, Roscoe was abundantly faithful to his duties at
+Viking and in the settlement called Sunburst, which was devoted to
+salmon-fishing. Between Viking and Sunburst there was a great jealousy
+and rivalry; for the salmon-fishers thought that the mills, though on a
+tributary stream, interfered, by the sawdust spilled in the river, with
+the travel and spawning of the salmon. It needed all the tact of both
+Mr. Devlin and Roscoe to keep the places from open fighting. As it was,
+the fire smouldered. When Sunday came, however, there seemed to be truce
+between the villages. It appeared to me that one touched the primitive
+and idyllic side of life: lively, sturdy, and simple, with nature about
+us at once benignant and austere. It is impossible to tell how fresh,
+bracing, and inspiring was the climate of this new land. It seemed
+to glorify humanity, to make all who breathed it stalwart, and almost
+pardonable even in wrong-doing. Roscoe was always received respectfully,
+and even cordially, among the salmon-fishers of Sunburst, as among the
+mill-men and river-drivers of Viking: not the less so, because he had an
+excellent faculty for machinery, and could talk to the people in their
+own colloquialisms. He had, besides, though there was little exuberance
+in his nature, a gift of dry humour, which did more than anything else,
+perhaps, to make his presence among them unrestrained.
+
+His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well
+attended--often filled to overflowing--and the people gave liberally to
+the offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did
+not view such a proceeding with a degree of complacency. In the pulpit
+Roscoe was almost powerful. His knowledge of the world, his habits of
+directness, his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but
+original statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and
+unusual tact, might have made him distinguished in a more cultured
+community. Yet there was something to modify all this: an occasional
+indefinable sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning. It struck
+me that I never had met a man whose words and manner were at times so
+charged with pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity. There
+was some unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any
+occurrence of his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled
+with a very strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.
+
+One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and
+watch-dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered
+him thirty dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than
+Roscoe had paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the
+opportunity of getting the best of a game. He said he did not doubt but
+that he would do the same with one of the archangels. He afterwards sold
+Roscoe a watch at cost, but confessed to me that the works of the watch
+had been smuggled. He said he was so fond of the parson that he felt he
+had to give him a chance of good things. It was not uncommon for him to
+discourse of Roscoe's quality in the bar-rooms of Sunburst and
+Viking, in which he was ably seconded by Phil Boldrick, an eccentric,
+warm-hearted fellow, who was so occupied in the affairs of the villages
+generally, and so much an advisory board to the authorities, that he had
+little time left to progress industrially himself.
+
+Once when a noted bully came to Viking, and, out of sheer bravado and
+meanness, insulted Roscoe in the streets, two or three river-drivers
+came forward to avenge the insult. It was quite needless, for the
+clergyman had promptly taken the case in his own hands. Waving them
+back, he said to the bully: "I have no weapon, and if I had, I could not
+take your life, nor try to take it; and you know that very well. But I
+propose to meet your insolence--the first shown me in this town."
+
+Here murmurs of approbation went round.
+
+"You will, of course, take the revolver from your pocket, and throw it
+on the ground."
+
+A couple of other revolvers were looking the bully in the face, and he
+sullenly did as he was asked.
+
+"You have a knife: throw that down."
+
+This also was done under the most earnest emphasis of the revolvers.
+Roscoe calmly took off his coat. "I have met such scoundrels as you on
+the quarter-deck," he said, "and I know what stuff is in you. They call
+you beachcombers in the South Seas. You never fight fair. You bully
+women, knife natives, and never meet any one in fair fight. You have
+mistaken your man this time."
+
+He walked close up to the bully, his face like steel, his thumbs caught
+lightly in his waistcoat pockets; but it was noticeable that his hands
+were shut.
+
+"Now," he said, "we are even as to opportunity. Repeat, if you please,
+what you said a moment ago."
+
+The bully's eye quailed, and he answered nothing. "Then, as I said, you
+are a coward and a cur, who insults peaceable men and weak women. If I
+know Viking right, it has no room for you." Then he picked up his coat,
+and put it on.
+
+"Now," he added, "I think you had better go; but I leave that to the
+citizens of Viking."
+
+What they thought is easily explained. Phil Boldrick, speaking for all,
+said: "Yes, you had better go--quick; but on the hop like a cur, mind
+you: on your hands and knees, jumping all the way."
+
+And, with weapons menacing him, this visitor to Viking departed,
+swallowing as he went the red dust disturbed by his hands and feet.
+
+This established Roscoe's position finally. Yet, with all his popularity
+and the solid success of his work, he showed no vanity or egotism, nor
+ever traded on the position he held in Viking and Sunburst. He seemed
+to have no ambition further than to do good work; no desire to be known
+beyond his own district; no fancy, indeed, for the communications of his
+labours to mission papers and benevolent ladies in England--so much the
+habit of his order. He was free from professional mannerisms.
+
+One evening we were sitting in the accustomed spot--that is, the coping.
+We had been silent for a long time. At last Roscoe rose, and walked up
+and down the verandah nervously.
+
+"Marmion," said he, "I am disturbed to-day, I cannot tell you how: a
+sense of impending evil, an anxiety."
+
+I looked up at him inquiringly, and, of purpose, a little sceptically.
+
+He smiled something sadly and continued: "Oh, I know you think
+it foolishness. But remember that all sailors are more or less
+superstitious: it is bred in them; it is constitutional, and I am afraid
+there's a good deal of the sailor in me yet."
+
+Remembering Hungerford, I said: "I know that sailors are superstitious,
+the most seasoned of them are that. But it means nothing. I may think
+or feel that there is going to be a plague, but I should not enlarge the
+insurance on my life because of it."
+
+He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me earnestly. "But,
+Marmion, these things, I assure you, are not matters of will, nor yet
+morbidness. They occur at the most unexpected times. I have had such
+sensations before, and they were followed by strange matters."
+
+I nodded, but said nothing. I was still thinking of Hungerford. After a
+slight pause he continued somewhat hesitatingly:
+
+"I dreamed last night, three times, of events that occurred in my
+past; events which I hoped would never disturb me in the life I am now
+leading."
+
+"A life of self-denial," ventured I. I waited a minute, and then added:
+"Roscoe, I think it only fair to tell you--I don't know why I haven't
+done so before--that when you were ill you were delirious, and talked of
+things that may or may not have had to do with your past."
+
+He started, and looked at me earnestly. "They were unpleasant things?"
+
+"Trying things; though all was vague and disconnected," I replied.
+
+"I am glad you tell me this," he remarked quietly. "And Mrs. Falchion
+and Justine Caron--did they hear?" He looked off to the hills.
+
+"To a certain extent, I am sure. Mrs. Falchion's name was generally
+connected with--your fancies.... But really no one could place any
+weight on what a man said in delirium, and I only mention the fact to
+let you see exactly on what ground I stand with you."
+
+"Can you give me an idea--of the thing I raved about?"
+
+"Chiefly about a girl called Alo, not your wife, I should judge--who was
+killed."
+
+At that he spoke in a cheerless voice: "Marmion, I will tell you all the
+story some day; but not now. I hoped that I had been able to bury it,
+even in memory, but I was wrong. Some things--such things--never die.
+They stay; and in our cheerfulest, most peaceful moments confront us,
+and mock the new life we are leading. There is no refuge from memory and
+remorse in this world. The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with
+or without repentance." He turned again from me and set a sombre face
+towards the ravine. "Roscoe," I said, taking his arm, "I cannot believe
+that you have any sin on your conscience so dark that it is not wiped
+out now."
+
+"God bless you for your confidence. But there is one woman who, I fear,
+could, if she would, disgrace me before the world. You understand," he
+added, "that there are things we repent of which cannot be repaired. One
+thinks a sin is dead, and starts upon a new life, locking up the past,
+not deceitfully, but believing that the book is closed, and that no
+good can come of publishing it; when suddenly it all flames out like the
+letters in Faust's book of conjurations."
+
+"Wait," I said. "You need not tell me more, you must not--now; not until
+there is any danger. Keep your secret. If the woman--if THAT woman--ever
+places you in danger, then tell me all. But keep it to yourself now. And
+don't fret because you have had dreams."
+
+"Well, as you wish," he replied after a long time. As he sat in silence,
+I smoking hard, and he buried in thought, I heard the laughter of people
+some distance below us in the hills. I guessed it to be some tourists
+from the summer hotel. The voices came nearer.
+
+A singular thought occurred to me. I looked at Roscoe. I saw that he was
+brooding, and was not noticing the voices, which presently died away.
+This was a relief to me. We were then silent again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII. THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+
+Next day we had a picnic on the Whi-Whi River, which, rising in the far
+north, comes in varied moods to join the Long Cloud River at Viking.
+
+   [Dr. Marmion, in a note of his MSS., says that he has purposely
+   changed the names of the rivers and towns mentioned in the second
+   part of the book, because he does not wish the locale to be too
+   definite.]
+
+Ruth Devlin, her young sister, and her aunt Mrs. Revel, with Galt Roscoe
+and myself, constituted the party. The first part of the excursion
+had many delights. The morning was fresh and sweet, and we were all in
+excellent spirits. Roscoe's depression had vanished; but there was an
+amiable seriousness in his manner which, to me, portended that the faint
+roses in Ruth Devlin's cheeks would deepen before the day was done,
+unless something inopportune happened.
+
+As we trudged gaily up the canon to the spot where we were to take a big
+skiff, and cross the Whi-Whi to our camping-ground, Ruth Devlin, who
+was walking with me, said: "A large party of tourists arrived at Viking
+yesterday, and have gone to the summer hotel; so I expect you will be
+gay up here for some time to come. Prepare, then, to rejoice."
+
+"Don't you think it is gay enough as it is?" I answered. "Behold this
+festive throng."
+
+"Oh, it is nothing to what there might be. This could never make Viking
+and 'surrounding country' notorious as a pleasure resort. To
+attract tourists you must have enough people to make romances and
+tragedies,--without loss of life, of course,--merely catastrophes
+of broken hearts, and hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing
+and shooting achievements, such as men know how to invent,"--it was
+delightful to hear her voice soften to an amusing suggestiveness, "and
+broken bridges and land-slides, with many other things which you can
+supply, Dr. Marmion. No, I am afraid that Viking is too humdrum to be
+notable."
+
+She laughed then very lightly and quaintly. She had a sense of humour.
+
+"Well, but, Miss Devlin," said I, "you cannot have all things at once.
+Climaxes like these take time. We have a few joyful things. We have
+splendid fishing achievements,--please do not forget that basket
+of trout I sent you the other morning,--and broken hearts and such
+tragedies are not impossible; as, for instance, if I do not send you as
+good a basket of trout to-morrow evening; or if you should remark that
+there was nothing in a basket of trout to--"
+
+"Now," she said, "you are becoming involved and--inconsiderate.
+Remember, I am only a mountain girl."
+
+"Then let us only talk of the other tragedies. But are you not a
+little callous to speak of such things as if you thirsted for their
+occurrence?"
+
+"I am afraid you are rather silly," she replied. "You see, some of the
+land up here belongs to me. I am anxious that it should 'boom'--that
+is the correct term, is it not?--and a sensation is good for 'booming.'
+What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an American
+millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud, and a
+rough but honest fellow--a foreman on the river, maybe a young member
+of the English aristocracy in disguise--perilled his life for her! The
+place of peril would, of course, be named Lover's Eddy, or the Maiden's
+Gate--very much prettier, I assure you, than such cold-blooded things as
+the Devil's Slide, where we are going now, and much more attractive to
+tourists."
+
+"Miss Devlin," laughed I, "you have all the eagerness of the incipient
+millionaire. May I hope to see you in Lombard Street some day, a very
+Katherine among capitalists?--for, from your remarks, I judge that you
+would--I say it pensively--'wade through slaughter to a throne.'"
+
+Galt Roscoe, who was just ahead with Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin, turned
+and said: "Who is that quoting so dramatically? Now, this is a picnic
+party, and any one who introduces elegies, epics, sonnets, 'and such,'
+is guilty of breaking the peace at Viking and its environs. Besides,
+such things should always be left to the parson. He must not be
+outflanked, his thunder must not be stolen. The scientist has unlimited
+resources; all he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious; but the
+parson must have his poetry as a monopoly, or he is lost to sight, and
+memory."
+
+"Then," said I, "I shall leave you to deal with Miss Devlin yourself,
+because she is the direct cause of my wrong-doing. She has expressed the
+most sinister sentiments about Viking and your very extensive parish.
+Miss Devlin," I added, turning to her, "I leave you to your fate, and I
+cannot recommend you to mercy, for what Heaven made fair should remain
+tender and merciful, and--"
+
+"'So young and so untender!'" she interjected, with a rippling
+laugh. "Yet Cordelia was misjudged very wickedly, and traduced very
+ungallantly, and so am I. And I bid you good-day, sir."
+
+Her delicate laugh rings in my ears as I write. I think that sun
+and clear skies and hills go far to make us cheerful and harmonious.
+Somehow, I always remember her as she was that morning.
+
+She was standing then on the brink of a new and beautiful experience, at
+the threshold of an acknowledged love. And that is a remarkable time to
+the young.
+
+There was something thrilling about the experiences of that morning,
+and I think we all felt it. Even the great frowning precipices seemed
+to have lost their ordinary gloom, and when some young white eagles rose
+from a crag and flew away, growing smaller as they passed, until they
+were one with the snow of the glacier on Mount Trinity, or a wapiti
+peeped out from the underwood and stole away with glancing feet down the
+valley; we could scarcely refrain from doing some foolish thing out of
+sheer delight. At length we emerged from a thicket of Douglas pine upon
+the shore of the Whi-Whi, and, loosening our boat, were soon moving
+slowly on the cool current. For an hour or more we rowed down the river
+towards the Long Cloud, and then drew into the shade of a little
+island for lunch. When we came to the rendezvous, where picnic parties
+generally feasted, we found a fire still smoking and the remnants of a
+lunch scattered about. A party of picnickers had evidently been there
+just before us. Ruth suggested that it might be some of the tourists
+from the hotel. This seemed very probable.
+
+There were scraps of newspaper on the ground, and among them was
+an empty envelope. Mechanically I picked it up, and read the
+superscription. What I saw there I did not think necessary to disclose
+to the other members of the party; but, as unconcernedly as
+possible, for Ruth Devlin's eyes were on me, I used it to light a
+cigar--inappropriately, for lunch would soon be ready.
+
+"What was the name on the envelope?" she said. "Was there one?"
+
+I guessed she had seen my slight start. I said evasively: "I fancy there
+was, but a man who is immensely interested in a new brand of cigar--"
+
+"You are a most deceitful man," she said. "And, at the least, you are
+selfish in holding your cigar more important than a woman's curiosity.
+Who can tell what romance was in the address on that envelope--"
+
+"What elements of noble tragedy, what advertisement for a certain
+property in the Whi-Whi Valley," interrupted Roscoe, breaking off the
+thread of a sailor's song he was humming, as he tended the water-kettle
+on the fire.
+
+This said, he went on with the song again. I was struck by the wonderful
+change in him now. Presentiments were far from him, yet I, having read
+that envelope, knew that they were not without cause. Indeed, I had an
+inkling of that the night before, when I heard the voices on the hill.
+Ruth Devlin stopped for a moment in the preparations to ask Roscoe
+what he was humming. I, answering for him, told her that it was an old
+sentimental sea-song of common sailors, often sung by officers at
+their jovial gatherings. At this she pretended to look shocked, and
+straightway demanded to hear the words, so that she could pronounce
+judgment on her spiritual pastor and master.
+
+He good-naturedly said that many of these old sailor songs were amusing,
+and that he often found himself humming them. To this I could testify,
+and he sang them very well indeed--quietly, but with the rolling tone of
+the sailor, jovial yet fascinating. At our united request, his humming
+became distinct. Three of the verses I give here:
+
+       "The 'Lovely Jane' went sailing down
+         To anchor at the Spicy Isles;
+        And the wind was fair as ever was blown,
+         For the matter of a thousand miles.
+
+       "Then a storm arose as she crossed the line,
+         Which it caused her masts to crack;
+        And she gulped her fill of the whooping brine,
+         And she likewise sprained her back.
+
+       "And the capting cried, 'If it's Davy Jones,
+         Then it's Davy Jones,' says he,
+       'Though I don't aspire to leave my bones
+         In the equatorial sea.'"
+
+What the further history of the 'Lovely Jane' was we were not informed,
+for Ruth Devlin announced that the song must wait, though it appeared to
+be innocuous and child-like in its sentiments, and that lunch would be
+served between the acts of the touching tragedy. When lunch was over,
+and we had again set forth upon the Whi-Whi, I asked Ruth to sing an old
+French-Canadian song which she had once before sung to us. Many a time
+the woods of the West had resounded to the notes of 'En Roulant ma
+Boule', as the 'voyageurs' traversed the long paths of the Ottawa, St.
+Lawrence, and Mississippi; brave light-hearted fellows, whose singing
+days were over.
+
+By the light of coming events there was something weird and pathetic in
+this Arcadian air, sung as it was by her. Her voice was a mezzo-soprano
+of rare bracing quality, and she had enough natural sensibility to
+give the antique refinement of the words a wistful charm, particularly
+apparent in these verses:
+
+       "Ah, cruel Prince, my heart you break,
+        In killing thus my snow-white drake.
+
+       "My snow-white drake, my love, my King,
+        The crimson life-blood stains his wing.
+
+       "His golden bill sinks on his breast,
+        His plumes go floating east and west--
+
+       "En roulant ma boule:
+         Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,
+        En roulant ma boule roulant,
+         En roulant ma boule!"
+
+As she finished the song we rounded an angle in the Whi-Whi. Ahead of
+us lay the Snow Rapids and the swift channel at one side of the rapids
+which, hurrying through a rocky archway, was known as the Devil's Slide.
+There was one channel through the rapids by which it was perfectly safe
+to pass, but that sweep of water through the Devil's Slide was sometimes
+a trap of death to even the most expert river-men. A half-mile below the
+rapids was the confluence of the two rivers. The sight of the tumbling
+mass of white water, and the gloomy and colossal grandeur of the Devil's
+Slide, a buttress of the hills, was very fine.
+
+But there was more than scenery to interest us here, for, moving
+quickly towards the Slide, was a boat with three people in it. They
+were evidently intending to attempt that treacherous passage, which
+culminated in a series of eddies, a menace to even the best oarsman
+ship. They certainly were not aware of their danger, for there came over
+the water the sound of a man's laughing voice, and the two women in the
+boat were in unconcerned attitudes. Roscoe shouted to them, and motioned
+them back, but they did not appear to understand.
+
+The man waved his hat to us, and rowed on. There was but one thing for
+us to do: to make the passage quickly through the safe channel of the
+rapids, and to be of what service we could on the other side of the
+Slide, if necessary. We bent to the oars, and the boat shot through the
+water. Ruth held the rudder firmly, and her young sister and Mrs. Revel
+sat perfectly still. But the man in the other boat, thinking, doubtless,
+that we were attempting a race, added his efforts to the current of the
+channel. I am afraid that I said some words below my breath scarcely
+proper to be spoken in the presence of maidens and a clerk in holy
+orders. Roscoe was here, however, a hundred times more sailor than
+parson. He spoke in low, firm tones, as he now and then suggested a
+direction to Ruth Devlin or myself. Our boat tossed and plunged in the
+rapids, and the water washed over us lightly once or twice, but we went
+through the passage safely, and had turned towards the Slide before the
+other boat got to the rocky archway.
+
+We rowed hard. The next minute was one of suspense, for we saw the boat
+shoot beneath the archway. Presently it emerged, a whirling plaything in
+treacherous eddies. The man wildly waved his arm, and shouted to us.
+The women were grasping the sides of the boat, but making no outcry. We
+could not see the faces of the women plainly yet. The boat ran forward
+like a race-horse; it plunged hither and thither. An oar snapped in the
+rocks, and the other one shot from the man's hand. Now the boat swung
+round and round, and dipped towards the hollow of a whirlpool. When we
+were within a few rods of them, it appeared to rise from the water,
+was hurled on a rock, and overturned. Mrs. Revel buried her face in her
+hands, and Ruth gave a little groan, but she held the rudder firmly,
+as we swiftly approached the forms struggling in the water. All,
+fortunately, had grasped the swamped boat, and were being carried down
+the stream towards us. The man was caring resolutely for himself,
+but one, of the women had her arm round the other, supporting her. We
+brought our skiff close to the swirling current. I called out words of
+encouragement, and was preparing to jump into the water, when Roscoe
+exclaimed in a husky voice: "Marmion, it is Mrs. Falchion."
+
+Yes, it was Mrs. Falchion; but I had known that before. We heard her
+words to her companion: "Justine, do not look so. Your face is like
+death. It is hateful."
+
+Then the craft veered towards the smoother water where we were. This
+was my opportunity. Roscoe threw me a rope, and I plunged in and swam
+towards the boat. I saw that Mrs. Falchion recognised me; but she made
+no exclamation, nor did Justine Caron. Their companion, however, on the
+other side of the boat, was eloquent in prayers to be rescued. I caught
+the bow of the boat as it raced past me, and with all my strength swung
+it towards the smoother water. I ran the rope I had brought, through
+the iron ring at the bow, and was glad enough of that; for their lives
+perhaps depended on being able to do it. It had been a nice calculation
+of chances, but it was done. Roscoe immediately bent to the oars, I
+threw an arm around Justine, and in a moment Roscoe had towed us into
+safer quarters. Then he drew in the rope. As he did so, Mrs. Falchion
+said: "Justine would drown so easily if one would let her."
+
+These were her first words to me. I am sure I never can sufficiently
+admire the mere courage of the woman and her presence of mind in danger.
+Immediately afterwards she said--and subsequently it seemed to me
+marvellous: "You are something more than the chorus to the play this
+time, Dr. Marmion."
+
+A minute after, and Justine was dragged into our boat, and was followed
+by Mrs. Falchion, whose first words to Roscoe were: "It is not such a
+meeting as one would plan."
+
+And he replied: "I am glad no harm has come to you."
+
+The man was duly helped in. A poor creature he was, to pass from this
+tale as he entered it, ignominiously and finally here. I even hide
+his nationality, for his race are generally more gallant. But he was
+wealthy, had an intense admiration for Mrs. Falchion, and had managed
+to secure her in his boat, to separate from the rest of the picnic
+party--chiefly through his inefficient rowing.
+
+Dripping with water as Mrs. Falchion was, she did not, strange to say,
+appear at serious disadvantage. Almost any other woman would have
+done so. She was a little pale, she must have felt miserable, but she
+accepted Ruth Devlin's good offices--as did Justine Caron those of Mrs.
+Revel--with much self-possession, scanning her face and form critically
+the while, and occasionally turning a glance on Roscoe, who was now cold
+and impassive. I never knew a man who could so banish expression
+from his countenance when necessary. Speaking to Belle Treherne long
+afterwards of Mrs. Falchion's self-possessed manner on this occasion,
+and of how she rose superior to the situation, I was told that I must
+have regarded the thing poetically and dramatically, for no woman could
+possibly look self-possessed in draggled skirts. She said that I always
+magnified certain of Mrs. Falchion's qualities.
+
+That may be so, and yet it must be remembered that I was not predisposed
+towards her, and that I wished her well away from where Roscoe was.
+
+As for Justine Caron, she lay with her head on Mrs. Revel's lap,
+and looked from beneath heavy eyelids at Roscoe with such gratitude
+and--but, no, she is only a subordinate in the story, and not a chief
+factor, and what she said or did here is of no vital consequence at this
+moment! We rowed to a point near the confluence of the two rivers, where
+we could leave our boats to be poled back through the rapids or portaged
+past them.
+
+On the way Mrs. Falchion said to Roscoe: "I knew you were somewhere in
+the Rockies; and at Vancouver, when I came from San Francisco, I heard
+of your being here. I had intended spending a month somewhere in the
+mountains, so I came to Viking, and on to the summer hotel: but really
+this is too exciting for recreation."
+
+This was spoken with almost gay outward manner, but there was a note in
+her words which I did not like, nor did I think that her eye was very
+kind, especially when she looked at Ruth Devlin and afterwards at
+Roscoe.
+
+We had several miles to go, and it was nightfall--for which Mrs.
+Falchion expressed herself as profoundly grateful--when we arrived at
+the hotel. Our parting words were as brief as, of necessity, they had
+been on our journey through the mountains, for the ladies had ridden
+the horses which we had sent over for ourselves from Viking, and we men
+walked in front. Besides, the thoughts of some of us were not at all
+free from misgiving. The spirit possessing Roscoe the night before
+seemed to enter into all of us, even into Mrs. Falchion, who had lost,
+somewhat, the aplomb with which she had held the situation in the
+boat. But at the door of the hotel she said cheerfully: "Of course, Dr.
+Marmion will find it necessary to call on his patients to-morrow--and
+the clergyman also on his new parishoners."
+
+The reply was left to me. I said gravely: "Let us be thankful that both
+doctor and clergyman are called upon to use their functions; it might
+easily have been only the latter."
+
+"Oh, do not be funereal!" she replied. "I knew that we were not to drown
+at the Devil's Slide. The drama is not ended yet, and the chief actors
+cannot go until 'the curtain.'--Though I am afraid that is not quite
+orthodox, is it, Mr. Roscoe?"
+
+Roscoe looked at her gravely. "It may not be orthodox as it is said, but
+it is orthodox, I fancy, if we exchange God for fate, and Providence for
+chance.... Good-night."
+
+He said this wearily. She looked up at him with an ironical look, then
+held out her hand, and quickly bade him good-night. Partings all round
+were made, and, after some injunctions to Mrs. Falchion and Justine
+Caron from myself as to preventives against illness, the rest of us
+started for Sunburst.
+
+As we went, I could not help but contrast Ruth and Amy Devlin, these
+two gentle yet strong mountain girls, with the woman we had left. Their
+lives were far from that dolorous tide which, sweeping through a selfish
+world, leaves behind it the stain of corroding passions; of cruelties,
+ingratitude, hate, and catastrophe. We are all ambitious, in one way or
+another. We climb mountains over scoria that frays and lava that burns.
+We try to call down the stars, and when, now and then, our conjuring
+succeeds, we find that our stars are only blasting meteors. One moral
+mishap lames character for ever. A false start robs us of our natural
+strength, and a misplaced or unrighteous love deadens the soul and
+shipwrecks just conceptions of life.
+
+A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains; it has found
+its place in his constitution, and it cannot be displaced by mere
+penitence, nor yet forgiveness. A man errs, and he must suffer; his
+father erred, and he must endure; or some one sinned against the man,
+and he hid the sin--But here a hand touched my shoulder! I was startled,
+for my thoughts had been far away. Roscoe's voice spoke in my ear: "It
+is as she said; the actors come together for 'the curtain.'"
+
+Then his eyes met those of Ruth Devlin turned to him earnestly and
+inquiringly. And I felt for a moment hard against Roscoe, that he should
+even indirectly and involuntarily, bring suffering into her life. In
+youth, in early manhood, we do wrong. At the time we seem to be injuring
+no one but ourselves; but, as we live on, we find that we were wronging
+whomsoever should come into our lives in the future. At the instant I
+said angrily to myself: "What right has he to love a girl like that,
+when he has anything in his life that might make her unhappy, or
+endanger her in ever so little!"
+
+But I bit my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I
+wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were
+the girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous. I tried not to think
+further of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,--Gait Roscoe walked with
+Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin,--but I found I could not drive it from my
+mind. This was not unnatural, for was not I the "chorus to the play"?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII. THE SONG OF THE SAW
+
+There was still a subdued note to Roscoe's manner the next morning.
+He was pale. He talked freely however of the affairs of Viking and
+Sunburst, and spoke of business which called him to Mr. Devlin's great
+saw mill that day. A few moments after breakfast we were standing in the
+doorway. "Well," he said, "shall we go?"
+
+I was not quite sure where he meant to go, but I took my hat and joined
+him. I wondered if it would be to the summer hotel or the great mill. My
+duty lay in the direction of the hotel. When we stepped out, he added:
+"Let us take the bridle-path along the edge of the ravine to the hotel."
+
+The morning was beautiful. The atmosphere of the woods was of soft,
+diffusive green--the sunlight filtering through the transparent leaves.
+Bowers of delicate ferns and vines flanked the path, and an occasional
+clump of giant cedars invited us: the world was eloquent.
+
+Several tourists upon the verandah of the hotel remarked us with
+curiosity as we entered. A servant said that Mrs. Falchion would be glad
+to see us; and we were ushered into her sitting-room. She carried no
+trace of yesterday's misadventure. She appeared superbly well. And yet,
+when I looked again, when I had time to think upon and observe detail,
+I saw signs of change. There was excitement in the eyes, and a slight
+nervous darkness beneath them, which added to their charm. She rose,
+smiling, and said: "I fear I am hardly entitled to this visit, for I am
+beyond convalescence, and Justine is not in need of shrift or diagnosis,
+as you see."
+
+I was not so sure of Justine Caron as she was, and when I had paid my
+respects to her, I said a little priggishly (for I was young), still not
+too solemnly: "I cannot allow you to pronounce for me upon my patients,
+Mrs. Falchion; I must make my own inquiries."
+
+But Mrs. Falchion was right. Justine Caron was not suffering much from
+her immersion; though, speaking professionally, her temperature was
+higher than the normal. But that might be from some impulse of the
+moment, for Justine was naturally a little excitable.
+
+We walked aside, and, looking at me with a flush of happiness in her
+face, she said: "You remember one day on the 'Fulvia' when I told you
+that money was everything to me; that I would do all I honourably could
+to get it?"
+
+I nodded. She continued: "It was that I might pay a debt--you know it.
+Well, money is my god no longer, for I can pay all I owe. That is, I
+can pay the money, but not the goodness, the noble kindness. He is
+most good, is he not? The world is better that such men as Captain Galt
+Roscoe live--ah, you see I cannot quite think of him as a clergyman. I
+wonder if I ever shall!" She grew suddenly silent and abstracted, and,
+in the moment's pause, some ironical words in Mrs. Falchion's voice
+floated across the room to me: "It is so strange to see you so. And you
+preach, and baptise; and marry, and bury, and care for the poor and--ah,
+what is it?--'all those who, in this transitory life, are in sorrow,
+need, sickness, or any other adversity'?... And do you never long for
+the flesh-pots of Egypt? Never long for"--here her voice was not quite
+so clear--"for the past?"
+
+I was sure that, whatever she was doing, he had been trying to keep the
+talk, as it were, on the surface. I was equally sure that, to her last
+question, he would make no reply. Though I was now speaking to Justine
+Caron, I heard him say quite calmly and firmly: "Yes, I preach, baptise,
+marry, and bury, and do all I can for those who need help."
+
+"The people about here say that you are good and charitable. You have
+won the hearts of the mountaineers. But you always had a gift that
+way."--I did not like her tone.--"One would almost think you had
+founded a new dispensation. And if I had drowned yesterday, you would,
+I suppose, have buried me, and have preached a little sermon about
+me.--You could have done that better than any one else!... What would
+you have said in such a case?"
+
+There was an earnest, almost a bitter, protest in the reply.
+
+"Pardon me, if I cannot answer your question. Your life was saved, and
+that is all we have to consider, except to be grateful to Providence.
+The duties of my office have nothing to do with possibilities."
+
+She was evidently torturing him, and I longed to say a word that would
+torture her. She continued: "And the flesh-pots--you have not answered
+about them: do you not long for them--occasionally?"
+
+"They are of a period," he answered, "too distant for regret."
+
+"And yet," she replied softly, "I fancied sometimes in London last year,
+that you had not outgrown that antique time--those lotos-days."
+
+He made no reply at once, and in the pause Justine and I passed out to
+the verandah.
+
+"How long does Mrs. Falchion intend remaining here, Miss Caron?" I said.
+
+Her reply was hesitating: "I do not quite know; but I think some time.
+She likes the place; it seems to amuse her."
+
+"And you--does it amuse you?"
+
+"It does not matter about me. I am madame's servant; but, indeed, it
+does not amuse me particularly."
+
+"Do you like the place?"
+
+The reply was somewhat hurried, and she glanced at me a little
+nervously. "Oh yes," she said, "I like the place, but--"
+
+Here Roscoe appeared at the door and said, "Mrs. Falchion wishes to see
+Viking and Mr. Devlin's mills, Marmion. She will go with us."
+
+In a little time we were on our way to Viking. I walked with Mrs.
+Falchion, and Roscoe with Justine. I was aware of a new element in Mrs.
+Falchion's manner. She seemed less powerfully attractive to me than in
+the old days, yet she certainly was more beautiful. It was hard to trace
+the new characteristic. But at last I thought I saw it in a decrease of
+that cold composure, that impassiveness, so fascinating in the past. In
+its place had come an allusive, restless something, to be found in
+words of troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased
+sensitiveness of mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness--she
+was emotional at last! She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits in
+her: one pitiless as of old; the other human, anxious, not unlovely.
+
+At length we became silent, and walked so side by side for a time. Then,
+with that old delightful egotism and selfishness--delightful in its very
+daring--she said: "Well, amuse me!"
+
+"And is it still the end of your existence," I rejoined--"to be amused?"
+
+"What is there else to do?" she replied with raillery.
+
+"Much. To amuse others, for instance; to regard human beings as
+something more than automata."
+
+"Has Mr. Roscoe made you a preaching curate? I helped Amshar at the
+Tanks."
+
+"One does not forget that. Yet you pushed Amshar with your foot."
+
+"Did you expect me to kiss the black coward? Then, I nursed Mr. Roscoe
+in his illness."
+
+"And before that?"
+
+"And before that I was born into the world, and grew to years of
+knowledge, and learned what fools we mortals be, and--and there--is that
+Mr. Devlin's big sawmill?"
+
+We had suddenly emerged on a shelf of the mountainside, and were looking
+down into the Long Cloud Valley. It was a noble sight. Far to the north
+were foothills covered with the glorious Norfolk pine, rising in steppes
+till they seemed to touch white plateaus of snow, which again billowed
+to glacier fields whose austere bosoms man's hand had never touched; and
+these suddenly lifted up huge, unapproachable shoulders, crowned with
+majestic peaks that took in their teeth the sun, the storm, and the
+whirlwinds of the north, never changing countenance from day to year and
+from year to age.
+
+Facing this long line of glory, running irregularly on towards that
+sea where Franklin and M'Clintock led their gay adventurers,--the bold
+ships,--was another shore, not so high or superior, but tall and sombre
+and warm, through whose endless coverts of pine there crept and idled
+the generous Chinook winds--the soothing breath of the friendly Pacific.
+Between these shores the Long Cloud River ran; now boisterous, now soft,
+now wallowing away through long channels, washing gorges always dark as
+though shaded by winter, and valleys always green as favoured by summer.
+Creeping along a lofty narrow path upon that farther shore was a mule
+train, bearing packs which would not be opened till, through the great
+passes of the mountain, they were spilled upon the floors of fort and
+post on the east side of the Rockies.
+
+Not far from where the mule train crept along was a great hole in the
+mountain-side, as though antique giants of the hills had tunnelled
+through to make themselves a home or to find the eternal secret of the
+mountains. Near to this vast dark cavity was a hut--a mere playhouse, it
+seemed, so small was it, viewed from where we stood. From the edge of a
+cliff just in front of this hut, there swung a long cable, which reached
+almost to the base of the shore beneath us; and, even as we looked,
+we saw what seemed a tiny bucket go swinging slowly down that strange
+hypotenuse. We watched it till we saw it get to the end of its journey
+in the valley beneath, not far from the great mill to which we were
+bound.
+
+"How mysterious!" said Mrs. Falchion. "What does it mean? I never saw
+anything like that before. What a wonderful thing!"
+
+Roscoe explained. "Up there in that hut," he said, "there lives a man
+called Phil Boldrick. He is a unique fellow, with a strange history.
+He has been miner, sailor, woodsman, river-driver, trapper,
+salmon-fisher;--expert at the duties of each of these, persistent at
+none. He has a taste for the ingenious and the unusual. For a time he
+worked in Mr. Devlin's mill. It was too tame for him. He conceived the
+idea of supplying the valley with certain necessaries, by intercepting
+the mule trains as they passed across the hills, and getting them down
+to Viking by means of that cable. The valley laughed at him; men said
+it was impossible. He went to Mr. Devlin, and Mr. Devlin came to me.
+I have, as you know, some knowledge of machinery and engineering.
+I thought the thing feasible but expensive, and told Mr. Devlin so.
+However, the ingenuity of the thing pleased Mr. Devlin, and, with that
+singular enterprise which in other directions has made him a rich man,
+he determined on its completion. Between us we managed it. Boldrick
+carries on his aerial railway with considerable success, as you see."
+
+"A singular man," said Mrs. Falchion. "I should like to see him. Come,
+sit down here and tell me all you know about him, will you not?"
+
+Roscoe assented. I arranged a seat for us, and we all sat.
+
+Roscoe was about to begin, when Mrs. Falchion said, "Wait a minute. Let
+us take in this scene first."
+
+We were silent. After a moment I turned to Mrs. Falchion, and said: "It
+is beautiful, is it not?"
+
+She drew in a long breath, her eyes lighted up, and she said, with a
+strange abandon of gaiety: "Yes, it is delightful to live."
+
+It seemed so, in spite of the forebodings of my friend and my own
+uneasiness concerning him, Ruth Devlin, and Mrs. Falchion. The place
+was all peace: a very monotony of toil and pleasure. The heat drained
+through the valley back and forth in visible palpitations upon the roofs
+of the houses, the mills, and the vast piles of lumber: all these seemed
+breathing. It looked a busy Arcady. From beneath us life vibrated with
+the regularity of a pulse: distance gave a kind of delighted ease to
+toil. Event appeared asleep.
+
+But when I look back now, after some years, at the experiences of
+that day, I am astonished by the running fire of events, which,
+unfortunately, were not all joy.
+
+As I write I can hear that keen wild singing of the saw come to us
+distantly, with a pleasant, weird elation. The big mill hung above the
+river, its sides all open, humming with labour, as I had seen it many a
+time during my visit to Roscoe. The sun beat in upon it, making a
+broad piazza of light about its sides. Beyond it were pleasant shadows,
+through which men passed and repassed at their work. Life was busy all
+about it. Yet the picture was bold, open, and strong. Great iron hands
+reached down into the water, clamped a massive log or huge timber,
+lightly drew it up the slide from the water, where, guided by the
+hand-spikes of the men, it was laid upon its cradle and carried slowly
+to the devouring teeth of the saws: there to be sliced through rib and
+bone in moist sandwiched layers, oozing the sweet sap of its fibre; and
+carried out again into the open to be drained to dry bones under the
+exhaust-pipes of the sun: piles upon piles; houses with wide chinks
+through which the winds wandered, looking for tenants and finding none.
+
+To the north were booms of logs, swilling in the current, waiting for
+their devourer. Here and there were groups of river-drivers and their
+foremen, prying twisted heaps of logs from the rocks or the shore into
+the water. Other groups of river-drivers were scattered upon the banks,
+lifting their huge red canoes high up on the platforms, the spring's
+and summer's work of river-driving done; while others lounged upon
+the grass, or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the
+Chinamen, or chaffing the Indian idling in the sun--a garish figure
+stoically watching the inroads of civilisation. The town itself was
+squat but amiable: small houses and large huts; the only place of note
+and dignity, the new town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the
+big mill, and even by the two smaller ones flanking it north and south.
+
+But Viking was full of men who had breathed the strong life of the
+hills, had stolen from Nature some of her brawny strength, and set
+themselves up before her as though a man were as great as a mountain
+and as good a thing to see. It was of such a man that Galt Roscoe was to
+tell us. His own words I will not give, but will speak of Phil Boldrick
+as I remember him and as Roscoe described him to us.
+
+Of all the men in the valley, none was so striking as Phil Boldrick.
+Of all faces his was the most singular; of all characters his the most
+unique; of all men he was the most unlucky, save in one thing--the
+regard of his fellows. Others might lay up treasures, not he; others
+lose money at gambling, not he--he never had much to lose. But yet he
+did all things magniloquently. The wave of his hand was expansive, his
+stride was swaying and decisive, his over-ruling, fraternal faculty was
+always in full swing. Viking was his adopted child; so much so that a
+gentleman river-driver called it Philippi; and by that name it sometimes
+went, and continues still so among those who knew it in the old days.
+
+Others might have doubts as to the proper course to pursue under certain
+circumstances; it was not so with Phil. They might argue a thing out
+orally, he did so mentally, and gave judgment on it orally. He was
+final, not oracular. One of his eyes was of glass, and blue; the other
+had an eccentricity, and was of a deep and meditative grey. It was a
+wise and knowing eye. It was trained to many things--like one servant in
+a large family. One side of his face was solemn, because of the gay but
+unchanging blue eye, the other was gravely humourous, shrewdly playful.
+His fellow citizens respected him; so much so, that they intended to
+give him an office in the new-formed corporation; which means that
+he had courage and downrightness, and that the rough, straightforward
+gospel of the West was properly interpreted by him.
+
+If a stranger came to the place, Phil was sent first to reconnoitre; if
+any function was desirable, Phil was requested to arrange it; if justice
+was to be meted out, Phil's opinion had considerable weight--for he had
+much greater leisure than other more prosperous men; if a man was taken
+ill (this was in the days before a doctor came), Phil was asked to
+declare if he would "shy from the finish."
+
+I heard Roscoe more than once declare that Phil was as good as two
+curates to him. Not that Phil was at all pious, nor yet possessed of
+those abstemious qualities in language and appetite by which good men
+are known; but he had a gift of civic virtue--important in a
+wicked world, and of unusual importance in Viking. He had neither
+self-consciousness nor fear; and while not possessed of absolute tact
+in a social way, he had a knack of doing the right thing bluntly, or
+the wrong thing with an air of rightness. He envied no man, he coveted
+nothing; had once or twice made other men's fortunes by prospecting, but
+was poor himself. And in all he was content, and loved life and Viking.
+
+Immediately after Roscoe had reached the mountains Phil had become his
+champion, declaring that there was not any reason why a man should
+not be treated sociably because he was a parson. Phil had been a great
+traveller, as had many who settled at last in these valleys to the
+exciting life of the river: salmon-catching or driving logs. He had
+lived for a time in Lower California and Mexico, and had given Roscoe
+the name of The Padre: which suited the genius and temper of the rude
+population. And so it was that Roscoe was called The Padre by every one,
+though he did not look the character.
+
+As he told his story of Phil's life I could not help but contrast him
+with most of the clergymen I knew or had seen. He had the admirable ease
+and tact of a cultured man of the world, and the frankness and warmth of
+a hearty nature, which had, however, some inherent strain of melancholy.
+Wherever I had gone with him I had noticed that he was received with
+good-humoured deference by his rough parishioners and others who were
+such only in the broadest sense. Perhaps he would not have succeeded so
+well if he had worn clerical clothes. As it was, of a week day, he could
+not be distinguished from any respectable layman. The clerical uniform
+attracts women more than men, who, if they spoke truly, would resent it.
+Roscoe did not wear it, because he thought more of men than of function,
+of manliness than clothes; and though this sometimes got him into
+trouble with his clerical brethren who dearly love Roman collar, and
+coloured stole, and the range of ritual from a lofty intoning to the
+eastward position, he managed to live and himself be none the worse,
+while those who knew him were certainly the better.
+
+When Roscoe had finished his tale, Mrs. Falchion said: "Mr. Boldrick
+must be a very interesting man;" and her eyes wandered up to the great
+hole in the mountain-side, and lingered there. "As I said, I must meet
+him," she added; "men of individuality are rare." Then: "That great
+'hole in the wall' is, of course, a natural formation."
+
+"Yes," said Roscoe. "Nature seems to have made it for Boldrick. He uses
+it as a storehouse."
+
+"Who watches it while he is away?" she said. "There is no door to the
+place, of course."
+
+Roscoe smiled enigmatically. "Men do not steal up here: that is the
+unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it."
+
+The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion. "I might have known!" she
+said. "It is the same in the South Seas among the natives--Samoans,
+Tongans, Fijians, and others. You can--as you know, Mr. Roscoe,"--her
+voice had a subterranean meaning,--"travel from end to end of those
+places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case
+of stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white
+man corrupts them. But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end."
+
+Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had
+no purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath,
+I could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently
+turned on Roscoe, then withdrawn again. On him the effect was so far
+disturbing that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her
+glance unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I
+had been affected by her speech. I think I confessed to nothing in my
+face.
+
+Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us. She had, I fancy,
+scarcely heard half that had been said. Roscoe said to her presently:
+"You like it, do you not?"
+
+"Like it?" she said. "I never saw anything so wonderful."
+
+"And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there," rejoined
+Mrs. Falchion. "Nature is never complete without man. All that would be
+splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick's cable, but
+it would not be perfect: it needs man--Phil Boldrick and Company in
+the foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and
+sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and
+the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is. It always
+seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley. There is
+a tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and
+built an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl--though no one ever knew
+quite why: for there the tradition ends."
+
+I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe
+remained perfectly still. It seemed to me that I was little by little
+getting the threads of his story. That there was a native girl; that the
+girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way--innocently
+I dared hope--connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key to
+the mystery, I was certain. That it was in her mind to use the mystery,
+I was also certain. But for what end I could not tell. What had passed
+between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed
+evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the 'Fulvia',
+had again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of
+pique or anger, or because she really cared for him. It might be that
+she cared.
+
+She added after a moment: "Add man to nature, and it stops sulking:
+which goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at
+all."
+
+She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told
+me once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set
+her laughing at herself, even when it was greatest. It was this
+characteristic which made her conversation very striking, it was so
+sharply contrasted in its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against
+the most serious and acute statements. One never knew when she would
+turn her own or her interlocutor's gravity into mirth.
+
+Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: "If I
+were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights
+were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined. There
+is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the
+thing. Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less
+intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr.
+Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll;
+or that The Padre there--how amusing they should call him that!--should
+cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I
+do not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of
+immortalising himself."
+
+Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her
+words by a wave of his hand. I also was silent for a moment; for there
+had come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the
+scene, something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the
+'Fulvia'. "Marmion," said he, "when everything at sea appears so
+absolutely beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you're itching
+to write poetry, look out. There's trouble ahead. It's only the pretty
+pause in the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and
+tumbles things about. When I've been on the bridge," he continued, "of
+a night that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil
+playing his silent overture. Don't you take in the twaddle about God
+sending thunderbolts; it's that old war-horse down below.--And then
+I've kept a sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of
+waterspouts would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch
+us broadsides. And what's gospel for sea is good for land, and you'll
+find it so, my son."
+
+I was possessed of the same feeling now as I looked at the scene before
+us, and I suppose I seemed moody, for immediately Mrs. Falchion said:
+"Why, now my words have come true; the scene can be made perfect. Pray
+step down to the valley, Dr. Marmion, and complete the situation, for
+you are trying to seem serious, and it is irresistibly amusing--and
+professional, I suppose; one must not forget that you teach the young
+'sawbones' how to saw."
+
+I was piqued, annoyed. I said, though I admit it was not cleverly said:
+"Mrs. Falchion, I am willing to go and complete that situation, if you
+will go with me; for you would provide the tragedy--plenty of it; there
+would be the full perihelion of elements; your smile is the incarnation
+of the serious."
+
+She looked at me full in the eyes. "Now that," she said, "is a very good
+'quid pro quo'--is that right?--and I have no doubt that it is more or
+less true; and for a doctor to speak truth and a professor to be under
+stood is a matter for angels. And I actually believe that, in time,
+you will be free from priggishness, and become a brilliant
+conversationalist; and--suppose we wander on to our proper places in the
+scene.... Besides, I want to see that strange man, Mr. Boldrick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV. THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+
+We travelled slowly down the hillside into the village, and were about
+to turn towards the big mill when we saw Mr. Devlin and Ruth riding
+towards us. We halted and waited for them. Mr. Devlin was introduced
+to Mrs. Falchion by his daughter, who was sweetly solicitous concerning
+Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron, and seemed surprised at finding them
+abroad after the accident of the day before. Ruth said that her father
+and herself had just come from the summer hotel, where they had gone
+to call upon Mrs. Falchion. Mrs. Falchion heartily acknowledged the
+courtesy. She seemed to be playing no part, but was apparently grateful
+all round; yet I believe that even already Ruth had caught at something
+in her presence threatening Roscoe's peace; whilst she, from the
+beginning, had, with her more trained instincts, seen the relations
+between the clergyman and his young parishioner.--But what had that to
+do with her?
+
+Between Roscoe and Ruth there was the slightest constraint, and
+I thought that it gave a troubled look to the face of the girl.
+Involuntarily, the eyes of both were attracted to Mrs. Falchion. I
+believe in that moment there was a kind of revelation among the three.
+While I talked to Mr. Devlin I watched them, standing a little apart,
+Justine Caron with us. It must have been a painful situation for them;
+to the young girl because a shadow was trailing across the light of her
+first love; to Roscoe because the shadow came out of his past; to Mrs.
+Falchion because she was the shadow. I felt that trouble was at hand.
+In this trouble I knew that I was to play a part; for, if Roscoe had his
+secret and Mrs. Falchion had the key to it, I also held a secret which,
+in case of desperate need, I should use. I did not wish to use it, for
+though it was mine it was also another's. I did not like the look in
+Mrs. Falchion's eyes as she glanced at Ruth: I was certain that she
+resented Roscoe's regard for Ruth and Ruth's regard for Roscoe; but,
+up to that moment, I had not thought it possible that she cared for him
+deeply. Once she had influenced me, but she had never cared for me.
+
+I could see a change in her. Out of it came that glance at Ruth, which
+seemed to me the talon-like hatred that shot from the eyes of Goneril
+and Regan: and I was sure that if she loved Roscoe there would be mad
+trouble for him and for the girl. Heretofore she had been passionless,
+but there was a dormant power in her which had only to be wickedly
+aroused to wreck her own and others' happiness. Hers was one of those
+volcanic natures, defying calculation and ordinary conceptions of life;
+having the fullest capacity for all the elementary passions--hatred,
+love, cruelty, delight, loyalty, revolt, jealousy. She had never from
+her birth until now felt love for any one. She had never been awakened.
+Even her affection for her father had been dutiful rather than
+instinctive. She had provoked love, but had never given it. She had been
+self-centred, compulsive, unrelenting. She had unmoved seen and let her
+husband go to his doom--it was his doom and death so far as she knew.
+
+Yet, as I thought of this, I found myself again admiring her. She was
+handsome, independent, distinctly original, and possessing capacity
+for great things. Besides, so far, she had not been actively
+vindictive--simply passively indifferent to the sufferings of others.
+She seemed to regard results more than means. All she did not like she
+could empty into the mill of the destroying gods: just as General Grant
+poured hundreds of thousands of men into the valley of the James, not
+thinking of lives but victory, not of blood but triumph. She too, even
+in her cruelty, seemed to have a sense of wild justice which disregarded
+any incidental suffering.
+
+I could see that Mr. Devlin was attracted by her, as every man had
+been who had ever met her; for, after all, man is but a common slave
+to beauty: virtue he respects, but beauty is man's valley of suicide.
+Presently she turned to Mr. Devlin, having, as it seemed to me,
+made Roscoe and Ruth sufficiently uncomfortable. With that cheerful
+insouciance which was always possible to her on the most trying
+occasions, she immediately said, as she had often said to me, that she
+had come to Mr. Devlin to be amused for the morning, perhaps the whole
+day. It was her way, her selfish way, to make men her slaves.
+
+Mr. Devlin gallantly said that he was at her disposal, and with a kind
+of pride added that there was plenty in the valley which would interest
+her; for he was a frank, bluff man, who would as quickly have spoken
+disparagingly of what belonged to himself, if it was not worthy, as have
+praised it.
+
+"Where shall we go first?" he said. "To the mill?"
+
+"To the mill, by all means," Mrs. Falchion replied; "I have never been
+in a great saw-mill, and I believe this is very fine. Then," she added,
+with a little wave of the hand towards the cable running down from Phil
+Boldrick's eyrie in the mountains, "then I want to see all that cable
+can do--all, remember."
+
+Mr. Devlin laughed. "Well, it hasn't many tricks, but what it does it
+does cleverly, thanks to The Padre."
+
+"Oh yes," responded Mrs. Falchion, still looking at the cable; "The
+Padre, I know, is very clever."
+
+"He is more than clever," bluffly replied Mr. Devlin, who was not keen
+enough to see the faint irony in her tones.
+
+"Yes," responded Mrs. Falchion in the same tone of voice, "he is more
+than clever. I have been told that he was once very brave. I have been
+told that once in the South Seas he did his country a great service."
+
+She paused. I could see Ruth's eyes glisten and her face suffuse, for
+though she read the faint irony in the tone, still she saw that the
+tale which Mrs. Falchion was evidently about to tell, must be to Galt
+Roscoe's credit. Mrs. Falchion turned idly upon Ruth and saw the look in
+her face. An almost imperceptible smile came upon her lips. She looked
+again at the cable and Phil Boldrick's eyrie, which seemed to have a
+wonderful attraction for her. Not turning away from it, save now and
+then to glance indolently at Mr. Devlin or Ruth, and once enigmatically
+at myself, she said:
+
+"Once upon a time--that is the way, I believe, to begin a pretty
+story--there were four men-of-war idling about a certain harbour of
+Samoa. One of the vessels was the flag-ship, with its admiral on board.
+On one of the other vessels was an officer who had years before explored
+this harbour. It was the hurricane season. He advised the admiral not to
+enter the harbour, for the indications foretold a gale, and himself was
+not sure that his chart was in all respects correct, for the harbour had
+been hurriedly explored and sounded. But the admiral gave orders, and
+they sailed in.
+
+"That day a tremendous hurricane came crying down upon Samoa. It swept
+across the island, levelled forests of cocoa palms, battered villages to
+pieces, caught that little fleet in the harbour, and played with it in
+a horrible madness. To right and left were reefs, behind was the shore,
+with a monstrous surf rolling in; before was a narrow passage. One
+vessel made its way out--on it was the officer who had surveyed the
+harbour. In the open sea there was safety. He brought his vessel down
+the coast a little distance, put a rope about him and in the wild surf
+made for the shore. I believe he could have been court-martialled for
+leaving his ship, but he was a man who had taken a great many risks of
+one kind and another in his time. It was one chance out of a hundred;
+but he made it--he got to the shore, travelled down to the harbour where
+the men-of-war were careening towards the reefs, unable to make the
+passage out, and once again he tied a rope about him and plunged into
+the surf to try for the admiral's ship. He got there terribly battered.
+They tell how a big wave lifted him and landed him upon the quarter-deck
+just as big waves are not expected to do. Well, like the hero in any
+melodrama of the kind, he very prettily piloted monsieur the admiral and
+his fleet out to the open sea."
+
+She paused, smiling in an inscrutable sort of way, then turned and said
+with a sudden softness in her voice, though still with the air of one
+who wished not to be taken with too great a seriousness: "And,
+ladies and gentlemen, the name of the ship that led the way was the
+'Porcupine'; and the name of the hero was Commander Galt Roscoe, R.N.;
+and 'of such is the kingdom of heaven!'"
+
+There was silence for a moment. The tale had been told adroitly, and
+with such tact as to words that Roscoe could not take offence--need
+not, indeed, as he did not, I believe, feel any particular
+self-consciousness. I am not sure but he was a little glad that such
+evidence should have been given at the moment, when a kind of restraint
+had come between him and Ruth, by one who he had reason to think was
+not wholly his friend might be his enemy. It was a kind of offset to his
+premonitions and to the peril over which he might stumble at any moment.
+
+To me the situation was almost inexplicable; but the woman herself was
+inexplicable: at this moment the evil genius of us all, at that doing us
+all a kind of crude, superior justice. I was the first to speak.
+
+"Roscoe," I said, "I never had heard of this, although I remember the
+circumstance as told in the newspapers. But I am glad and proud that I
+have a friend with such a record."
+
+"And, only think," said Mrs. Falchion, "he actually was not
+court-martialled for abandoning his ship to save an admiral and a fleet.
+But the ways of the English Admiralty are wonderful. They go out of
+their way to avoid a court-martial sometimes, and they go out of their
+way to establish it sometimes."
+
+By this time we had started towards the mill. Roscoe walked ahead with
+Ruth Devlin. Mr. Devlin, Mrs. Falchion, Justine Caron and myself walked
+together.
+
+Mrs. Falchion presently continued, talking, as it seemed to me, at the
+back of Roscoe's head:
+
+"I have known the Admiralty to force an officer to resign the navy
+because he had married a native wife. But I never knew the Admiralty to
+court-martial an officer because he did not marry a native wife whom
+he OUGHT to have married: but, as I said, the ways of the Admiralty are
+past admiration."
+
+I could see Roscoe's hand clinch at his side, and presently he said over
+his shoulder at her: "Your memory and your philosophy are as wonderful
+as the Admiralty are inscrutable."
+
+She laughed. "You have not lost your old gift of retort," she said. "You
+are still amusing."
+
+"Well, come," said Mr. Devlin cheerfully, "let's see if there isn't
+something even more amusing than Mr. Roscoe in Viking. I will show you,
+Mrs. Falchion, the biggest saw that ever ate the heart out of a Norfolk
+pine."
+
+At the mill Mrs. Falchion was interested. She asked questions concerning
+the machinery which mightily pleased Mr. Devlin, they were so apt and
+intelligent; and herself assisted in giving an immense log to the teeth
+of the largest saw, which, with its six upright blades, ate, and was
+never satisfied. She stooped and ran her ungloved hand into the sawdust,
+as sweet before the sun has dried it as the scent of a rose. The rich
+smell of the fresh-cut lumber filled the air, and suggested all kinds of
+remote and pleasant things. The industry itself is one of the first that
+comes with the invasion of new territory, and makes one think of man's
+first work in the world: to fell the tree and till the soil. It is
+impossible to describe that fierce, jubilant song of the saw, which
+even when we were near was never shrill or shrieking: never drowning our
+voices, but vibrant and delightful. To Mrs. Falchion it was new; she was
+impressed.
+
+"I have seen," she said to Mr. Devlin, "all sorts of enterprises,
+but never anything like this. It all has a kind of rough music. It is
+enjoyable."
+
+Mr. Devlin beamed. "I have just added something to the mill that will
+please you," he said.
+
+She looked interested. We all gathered round. I stood between Mrs.
+Falchion and Ruth Devlin, and Roscoe beside Justine Caron.
+
+"It is the greatest mill-whistle in the country," he continued. "It will
+be heard from twelve to twenty-five miles, according to the condition of
+the atmosphere. I want big things all round, and this is a masterpiece,
+I guess. Now, I'll let you hear it if you like. I didn't expect to use
+it until to-night at nine o'clock, when, also for the first time, I am
+to light the mills by electricity; a thing that's not been attempted yet
+in any saw-mill on the Continent. We're going to work night and day for
+a couple of months."
+
+"This is all very wonderful. And are you indebted to Mr. Roscoe in these
+things too?--Everybody seems to need him here."
+
+"Well," said the mill-owner, laughing, "the whistle is my own. It's the
+sort of thing I would propose--to blow my trumpet, as it were; but the
+electricity and the first experiments in it I owe to The Padre."
+
+"As I thought," she said, and turned to Roscoe. "I remember," she added,
+"that you had an electrical search-light on the 'Porcupine', and that
+you were fond of electricity. Do you ever use search-lights here? I
+should think they might be of use in your parish. Then, for a change,
+you could let the parish turn it upon you, for the sake of contrast and
+edification."
+
+For the moment I was exceedingly angry. Her sarcasm was well veiled,
+but I could feel the sardonic touch beneath the smiling surface. This
+innuendo seemed so gratuitous. I said to her, almost beneath my breath,
+that none of the others could hear: "How womanly!"
+
+She did no more than lift her eyebrows in acknowledgment, and went on
+talking lightly to Mr. Devlin. Roscoe was cool, but I could see now
+in his eyes a kind of smouldering anger; which was quite to my wish. I
+hoped he would be meek no longer.
+
+Presently Ruth Devlin said: "Would it not be better to wait till
+to-night, when the place is lighted, before the whistle is blown? Then
+you can get a better first impression. And if Mrs. Falchion will come
+over to our home at Sunburst, we will try and amuse her for the rest of
+the day--that is, after she has seen all here."
+
+Mrs. Falchion seemed struck by the frankness of the girl, and for an
+instant debated, but presently said: "No, thank you. When all is seen
+now, I will go to the hotel, and then will join you all here in the
+evening, if that seems feasible. Perhaps Dr. Marmion will escort me
+here. Mr. Roscoe, of course, has other duties."
+
+"I shall be happy," I said, maliciously smiling, "to guide you to the
+sacrifice of the saw."
+
+She was not disturbed. She touched Mr. Devlin's arm, and, looking archly
+at him, nodded backwards towards me. "'Beware the anaconda!'" she said.
+
+It was impossible not to be amused; her repartee was always so
+unrestrained. She disarmed one by what would have been, in a man,
+insolent sang-froid: in her it was piquancy, daring.
+
+Presently she added: "But if we are to have no colossal whistle and no
+electric light till evening, there is one thing I must have: and that is
+your remarkable Phil Boldrick, who seems to hold you all in the palm of
+his hand, and lives up there like a god on his Olympus."
+
+"Well, suppose you go and call on him," said Roscoe, with a touch of dry
+humour, his eye on the cable that reached to Boldrick's perch.
+
+She saw her opportunity, and answered promptly: "Yes, I will call on
+him immediately,"--here she turned towards Ruth,--"if Miss Devlin and
+yourself will go with me."
+
+"Nonsense," interposed Mr. Devlin. "Besides, the cage will only hold two
+easily. Anyhow, it's absurd."
+
+"Why is it absurd? Is there any danger?" queried Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"Not unless there's an idiot at the machinery."
+
+"I should expect you to manage it," she persisted.
+
+"But no woman has ever done it."
+
+"I will make the record." And, turning to Ruth: "You are not afraid?"
+
+"No, I am not afraid," said the girl bravely, though she acknowledged
+to me afterwards that while she was not afraid of anything where her
+own skill was called in question, such as mountain-climbing, or even
+puma-hunting, she did not joyfully anticipate swinging between heaven
+and earth on that incline. "I will go," she added, "if my father will
+let me. ... May I?" she continued, turning to him.
+
+Perhaps something of the father's pride came up in him, perhaps he had
+just got some suspicion that between his daughter and Mrs. Falchion
+there was a subterranean rivalry. However it was, he gave a quick,
+quizzical look at both of them, then glanced at Roscoe, and said: "I'll
+make no objections, if Ruth would like to introduce you to Phil. And, as
+Mrs. Falchion suggested, I'll 'turn the crank.'"
+
+I could see that Roscoe had a bad moment. But presently he appeared to
+me perfectly willing that Ruth should go. Maybe he was as keen that
+she should not appear at a disadvantage beside Mrs. Falchion as was her
+father.
+
+A signal was given, and the cage came slowly down the cable to the mill.
+We could see Boldrick, looking little bigger than a child at the other
+end, watching our movements. At the last moment Mr. Devlin and Roscoe
+seemed apprehensive, but the women were cool and determined. I noticed
+Mrs. Falchion look at Ruth curiously once or twice after they entered
+the cage, and before they started, and what she saw evidently gave her
+a higher opinion of the girl, for she laid her hand on Ruth's arm
+suddenly, and said: "We will show these mere men what nerve is."
+
+Ruth nodded, then 'bon voyage' was said, and the signal was given. The
+cage ascended at first quickly, then more slowly, swaying up and down a
+little on the cable, and climbing higher and higher through the air to
+the mountain-side. What Boldrick thought when he saw the two ascending
+towards him, he expressed to Mr. Devlin later in the day in vigorous
+language: what occurred at his but Ruth Devlin told me afterwards. When
+the cage reached him, he helped the two passengers out, and took them to
+his hut. With Ruth he had always been a favourite, and he welcomed her
+with admiring and affectionate respect.
+
+"Never b'lieved you could have done it, Miss Devlin--never! Not but what
+I knew you weren't afraid of anything on the earth below, or the waters
+under the earth; but when you get swinging there over the world, and not
+high enough to get a hold on heaven, it makes you feel as if things
+was droppin' away from you like. But, by gracious! you did it like an
+eagle--you and your friend."
+
+By this time he was introduced, and at the name of Mrs. Falchion,
+he cocked his head, and looked quizzically, as if trying to remember
+something, then drew his hand once or twice across his forehead. After a
+moment he said: "Strange, now, ma'am, how your name strikes me. It isn't
+a common name, and I've heerd it before somewhere--somewhere. It isn't
+your face that I've seen before--for I'd have remembered it if it was a
+thousand years ago," he added admiringly. "But I've heard some one use
+it; and I can't tell where."
+
+She looked curiously at him, and said: "Don't try to remember, and it
+will come to you in good time. But show us everything about your place
+before we go back, won't you, please?"
+
+He showed them his hut, where he lived, quite alone. It was supplied
+with bare necessaries, and with a counter, behind which were cups and a
+few bottles. In reference to this, Boldrick said: "Temperance drinks for
+the muleteers, tobacco and tea and sugar and postage stamps and things.
+They don't gargle their throats with anything stronger than coffee at
+this tavern."
+
+Then he took them to the cave in which puma, bear, and wapiti skins were
+piled, together with a few stores and the kits of travellers who had
+left their belongings in Boldrick's keeping till they should come
+again. After Mrs. Falchion and Ruth had seen all, they came out upon
+the mountain-side and waved their handkerchiefs to us, who were still
+watching from below. Then Boldrick hoisted a flag on his hut, which he
+used on gala occasions, to celebrate the event, and, not content with
+this, fired a 'feu de joie', managed in this way: He took two anvils
+used by the muleteers and expressmen to shoe their animals, and placed
+one on the other, putting powder between. Then Mrs. Falchion thrust
+a red-hot iron into the powder, and an explosion ensued. I was for
+a moment uneasy, but Mr. Devlin reassured me, and instantly a shrill
+whistle from the little mills answered the salute.
+
+Just before they got into the cage, Mrs. Falchion turned to Boldrick,
+and said: "You have not been trying to remember where you heard my name
+before? Well, can you not recall it now?"
+
+Boldrick shook his head. "Perhaps you will recall it before I see you
+again," she said.
+
+They started. As they did so, Mrs. Falchion said suddenly, looking at
+Boldrick keenly: "Were you ever in the South Seas?"
+
+Boldrick stood for an instant open-mouthed, and then exclaimed loudly,
+as the cage swung down the incline: "By Jingo! No, ma'am, I was never
+there, but I had a pal who come from Samoa."
+
+She called back at him: "Tell me of him when we meet again. What was his
+name?"
+
+They were too far down the cable now for Boldrick's reply to reach them
+distinctly. The descent seemed even more adventurous than the ascent,
+and, in spite of myself, I could not help a thrill of keen excitement.
+But they were both smiling when the cage reached us, and both had a very
+fine colour.
+
+"A delightful journey, a remarkable reception, and a very singular man
+is your Mr. Boldrick," said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"Yes," replied Mr. Devlin, "you'll know Boldrick a long time before you
+find his limits. He is about the most curious character I ever knew,
+and does the most curious things. But straight--straight as a die, Mrs.
+Falchion!"
+
+"I fancy that Mr. Boldrick and I would be very good friends indeed,"
+said Mrs. Falchion; "and I purpose visiting him again. It is quite
+probable that we shall find we have had mutual acquaintances." She
+looked at Roscoe meaningly as she said this, but he was occupied with
+Ruth.
+
+"You were not afraid?" Roscoe said to Ruth. "Was it not a strange
+sensation?"
+
+"Frankly, at first I was a little afraid, because the cage swings on the
+cable, and it makes you uncomfortable. But I enjoyed it before we got to
+the end."
+
+Mrs. Falchion turned to Mr. Devlin. "I find plenty here to amuse me,"
+she said, "and I am glad I came. To-night I want to go up that cable and
+call on Mr. Boldrick again, and see the mills and the electric light,
+and hear your whistle, from up there. Then, of course, you must show us
+the mill working at night, and afterwards--may I ask it?--you must all
+come and have supper with me at the summer hotel."
+
+Ruth dropped her eyes. I saw she did not wish to go. Fortunately
+Mr. Devlin extricated her. "I'm afraid that will be impossible, Mrs.
+Falchion," he said: "much obliged to you all the same. But I am going to
+be at the mill pretty near all night, and shouldn't be able to go, and I
+don't want Ruth to go without me."
+
+"Then it must be another time," said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"Oh, whenever it's convenient for Ruth, after a day or two, I'll be
+ready and glad. But I tell you what: if you want to see something fine,
+you must go down as soon as possible to Sunburst. We live there, you
+know, not here at Viking. It's funny, too, because, you see, there's a
+feud between Viking and Sunburst--we are all river-men and mill-hands at
+Viking, and they're all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst. By
+rights I ought to live here, but when I started I thought I'd build
+my mills at Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there. My wife and the
+girls got attached to the place, and though the mills were built at
+Viking, and I made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend
+my shekels there. I guess if I didn't happen to live at Sunburst, people
+would be trailing their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other
+day between these two towns. But that's neither here nor there. Take my
+advice, Mrs. Falchion, and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers
+at work, both day and night. It is about the biggest thing in the way
+of natural picturesqueness that you'll see--outside my mills. Indians,
+half-breeds, white men, Chinamen--they are all at it in weirs and cages,
+or in the nets, and spearing by torch-light!--Don't you think I would do
+to run a circus, Mrs. Falchion?--Stand at the door, and shout: 'Here's
+where you get the worth of your money'?"
+
+Mrs. Falchion laughed. "I am sure you and I will be good friends; you
+are amusing. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of
+trying to live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion--and The
+Padre."
+
+I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety. It had almost a kind
+of feverishness--as if she relished fully the position she held towards
+Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I think
+was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe's
+old allegiance. That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would
+never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus
+in the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment,
+one of the principal actors--from which position I had declined one day
+when humiliated before Mrs. Falchion on the 'Fulvia'. Boyd Madras was in
+my mind.
+
+After a few minutes we parted, agreeing to meet again in the valley in
+the evening. I had promised, as Mrs. Falchion had suggested, to escort
+her and Justine Caron from the summer hotel to the mill. Roscoe had
+duties at both Viking and Sunburst and would not join us until we all
+met in the evening. Mr. Devlin and Ruth rode away towards Sunburst. Mrs.
+Falchion, Justine, and myself travelled slowly up the hillside, talking
+chiefly upon the events of the morning. Mrs. Falchion appeared to
+admire greatly the stalwart character of Mr. Devlin; in a few swift,
+complimentary words disposed of Ruth; and then made many inquiries
+concerning Roscoe's work, my own position, and the length of my stay
+in the mountains; and talked upon many trivial matters, never once
+referring--as it seemed to me, purposely--to our past experiences on
+the 'Fulvia', nor making any inquiry concerning any one except Belle
+Treherne.
+
+She showed no surprise when I told her that I expected to marry Miss
+Treherne. She congratulated me with apparent frankness, and asked for
+Miss Treherne's address, saying she would write to her. As soon as she
+had left Roscoe's presence she had dropped all enigmatical words
+and phrases, and, during this hour I was with her, was the tactful,
+accomplished woman of the world, with the one present object: to make
+her conversation agreeable, and to keep things on the surface. Justine
+Caron scarcely spoke during the whole of our walk, although I addressed
+myself to her frequently. But I could see that she watched Mrs.
+Falchion's face curiously; and I believe that at this time her instinct
+was keener by far to read what was in Mrs. Falchion's mind than my own,
+though I knew much more of the hidden chain of events connecting Mrs.
+Falchion's life and Galt Roscoe's.
+
+I parted from them at the door of the hotel, made my way down to
+Roscoe's house at the ravine, and busied myself for the greater part of
+the day in writing letters, and reading on the coping. About sunset
+I called for Mrs. Falchion, and found her and Justine Caron ready and
+waiting. There was nothing eventful in our talk as we came down the
+mountain-side towards Viking--Justine Caron's presence prevented that.
+It was dusk when we reached the valley. As yet the mills were all dark.
+The only lights visible were in the low houses lining the banks of the
+river. Against the mountainside there seemed to hang one bunch of flame
+like a star, large, red, and weird. It was a torch burning in front of
+Phil Boldrick's hut. We made our way slowly to the mill, and found
+Mr. Devlin, Ruth, and Roscoe, with Ruth's sister, and one or two other
+friends, expecting us.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Devlin heartily, "I have kept the show waiting for you.
+The house is all dark, but I guess you'll see a transformation scene
+pretty quick. Come out," he continued, "and let us get the front seats.
+They are all stalls here; nobody has a box except Boldrick, and it is up
+in the flies."
+
+"Mr. Devlin," said Mrs. Falchion, "I purpose to see this show not only
+from the stalls, but from the box in the flies. Therefore, during the
+first act, I shall be here in front of the foot-lights. During the
+second act I shall be aloft like Tom Bowling--"
+
+"In other words--" began Mr. Devlin.
+
+"In other words," added Mrs. Falchion, "I am going to see the valley and
+hear your great horn blow from up there!" She pointed towards the star
+in front of Phil's hut.
+
+"All right," said Mr. Devlin; "but you will excuse me if I say that I
+don't particularly want anybody to see this performance from where Tom
+Bowling bides."
+
+We left the office and went out upon the platform, a little distance
+from the mill. Mr. Devlin gave a signal, touched a wire, and immediately
+it seemed as if the whole valley was alight. The mill itself was in a
+blaze of white. It was transfigured--a fairy palace, just as the mud
+barges in the Suez Canal had been transformed by the search-light of
+the 'Fulvia'. For the moment, in the wonder of change from darkness to
+light, the valley became the picture of a dream. Every man was at his
+post in the mill, and in an instant work was going on as we had seen it
+in the morning. Then, all at once, there came a great roar, as it were,
+from the very heart of the mill--a deep diapason, dug out of the throat
+of the hills: the big whistle.
+
+"It sounds mournful--like a great animal in pain," said Mrs. Falchion.
+"You might have got one more cheerful."
+
+"Wait till it gets tuned up," said Mr. Devlin. "It hasn't had a chance
+to get the burs out of its throat. It will be very fine as soon as the
+engine-man knows how to manage it."
+
+"Yes," said Ruth, interposing, "a little toning down would do it
+good--it is shaking the windows in your office; feel this platform
+tremble!"
+
+"Well, I bargained for a big whistle and I've got it: and I guess
+they'll know if ever there's a fire in the town!" Just as he said this,
+Roscoe gave a cry and pointed.
+
+We all turned, and saw a sight that made Ruth Devlin cover her face with
+her hands and Mrs. Falchion stand horror-stricken. There, coming
+down the cable with the speed of lightning, was the cage. In it was a
+man--Phil Boldrick. With a cry and a smothered oath, Mr. Devlin sprang
+towards the machinery, Roscoe with him. There was nobody near it, but
+they saw a boy whose duty it was that night to manage the cable, running
+towards it. Roscoe was the first to reach the lever; but it was too
+late. He partially stopped the cage, but only partially. It came with a
+dull, sickening thud to the ground, and Phil Boldrick--Phil Boldrick's
+broken, battered body--was thrown out.
+
+A few minutes later Boldrick was lying in Mr. Devlin's office.
+
+Ill luck for Viking in the hour of her success. Phil's shattered hulk is
+drifting. The masts have gone by the board, the pilot from the captain's
+side. Only the man's "unconquerable soul" is on the bridge, watching
+the craft dip at the bow till the waters, their sport out, should hugely
+swallow it.
+
+We were all gathered round. Phil had asked to see the lad who, by
+neglecting the machinery for a moment, had wrecked his life. "My boy,"
+he said, "you played an ugly game. It was a big mistake. I haven't
+any grudge agen you, but be glad I'm not one that'd haunt you for your
+cussed foolishness.... There, now, I feel better; that's off my mind!"
+
+"If you're wanting to show remorse or anything," he continued, "there's
+my friend, Mr. Roscoe, The Padre--he's all right, you understand!--Are
+you there?... Why don't you speak?" He stretched out his hand. The lad
+took it, but he could not speak: he held it and sobbed.
+
+Then Phil understood. His brow wrinkled with a sudden trouble. He said:
+"There, never mind. I'm dying, but it isn't what I expected. It doesn't
+smart nor tear much; not more than river-rheumatism. P'r'aps I wouldn't
+mind it at all if I could see."
+
+For Phil was entirely blind now. The accident had destroyed his
+remaining eye. Being blind, he had already passed that first corridor
+of death--darkness. Roscoe stooped over him, took his hand, and spoke
+quietly to him. Phil knew the voice, and said with a faint smile: "Do
+you think they'd plant me with municipal honours--honours to pardners?"
+
+"We'll see to that, Phil," said Mr. Devlin from behind the clergyman.
+
+Phil recognised the voice. "You think that nobody'll kick at making it
+official?"
+
+"Not one, Phil."
+
+"And maybe they wouldn't mind firin' a volley--Lights out, as it were:
+and blow the big whistle? It'd look sociable, wouldn't it?"
+
+"There'll be a volley and the whistle, Phil--if you have to go," said
+Mr. Devlin.
+
+There was a silence, then the reply came musingly: "I guess I hev to go.
+... I'd hev liked to see the corporation runnin' longer, but maybe I can
+trust the boys."
+
+A river-driver at the door said in a deep voice: "By the holy! yes, you
+can trust us."
+
+"Thank you kindly.... If it doesn't make any difference to the rest,
+I'd like to be alone with The Padre for a little--not for religion, you
+understand, for I go as I stayed, and I hev my views,--but for private
+business."
+
+Slowly, awkwardly, the few river-drivers passed out--Devlin and Mrs.
+Falchion and Ruth and I with them--for I could do nothing now for
+him--he was broken all to pieces. Roscoe told me afterwards what
+happened then.
+
+"Padre," he said to Roscoe, "are we alone?"
+
+"Quite alone, Phil."
+
+"Well, I hevn't any crime to tell, and the business isn't weighty; but I
+hev a pal at Danger Mountain--" He paused.
+
+"Yes, Phil?"
+
+"He's low down in s'ciety; but he's square, and we've had the same
+blanket for many a day together. I crossed him first on the Panama
+level. I was broke--stony broke. He'd been shipwrecked, and was ditto.
+He'd been in the South Seas; I in Nicaragua. We travelled up through
+Mexico and Arizona, and then through California to the Canadian Rockies.
+At last we camped at Danger Mountain, a Hudson's Bay fort, and stayed
+there. It was a roughish spot, but we didn't mind that. Every place
+isn't Viking. One night we had a difference--not a quarrel, mind you,
+but a difference. He was for lynchin' a fellow called Piccadilly, a
+swell that'd come down in the world, bringin' the worst tricks of
+his tribe with him. He'd never been a bony fidy gentleman--just an
+imitation. He played sneak with the daughter of Five Fingers, an Injin
+chief. We'd set store by that girl. There wasn't one of us rough nuts
+but respected her. She was one of the few beautiful Injin women I've
+seen. Well, it come out that Piccadilly had ruined her, and one morning
+she was found dead. It drove my pal well-nigh crazy. Not that she was
+anything partik'ler to him; but the thing took hold of him unusual."
+
+Now that I know all concerning Roscoe's past life, I can imagine that
+this recital must have been swords at his heart. The whole occurrence is
+put down minutely in his diary, but there is no word of comment upon it.
+
+Phil had been obliged to stop for pain, and, after Roscoe had adjusted
+the bandages, he continued:
+
+"My pal and the others made up their minds they'd lynch Piccadilly; they
+wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt--for it wasn't certain that
+the girl hadn't killed herself.... Well, I went to Piccadilly, and give
+him the benefit. He left, and skipped the rope. Not, p'r'aps, that
+he ought to hev got away, but once he'd showed me a letter from his
+mother,--he was drunk too, at the time,--and I remembered when my
+brother Rodney was killed in the Black Hills, and how my mother took it;
+so I give him the tip to travel quick."
+
+He paused and rested. Then presently continued: "Now, Padre, I've got
+four hundred dollars--the most I ever had at one time in my life. And
+I'd like it to go to my old pal--though we had that difference, and
+parted. I guess we respect each other about the same as we ever did. And
+I wish you'd write it down so that the thing would be municipal."
+
+Roscoe took pencil and paper and said: "What's his name, Phil?"
+
+"Sam--Tonga Sam."
+
+"But that isn't all his name?"
+
+"No, I s'pose not, but it's all he ever had in general use. He'd got it
+because he'd been to the Tonga Islands and used to yarn about them. Put
+'Tonga Sam, Phil Boldrick's Pal at Danger Mountain, ult'--add the 'ult,'
+it's c'rrect.--That'll find him. And write him these words, and if
+you ever see him say them to him--'Phil Boldrick never had a pal that
+crowded Tonga Sam.'"
+
+When the document was written, Roscoe read it aloud, then both signed
+it, Roscoe guiding the battered hand over the paper.
+
+This done, there was a moment's pause, and then Phil said: "I'd like to
+be in the open. I was born in the open--on the Madawaska. Take me out,
+Padre."
+
+Roscoe stepped to the door, and silently beckoned to Devlin and myself.
+We carried him out, and put him beside a pine tree.
+
+"Where am I now?" he said. "Under the white pine, Phil." "That's right.
+Face me to the north."
+
+We did so. Minutes passed in silence. Only the song of the saw was
+heard, and the welting of the river. "Padre," he said at last hurriedly,
+"lift me up, so's I can breathe."
+
+This was done.
+
+"Am I facin' the big mill?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's c'rrect. And the 'lectric light is burnin' in the mill and in
+the town, an' the saws are all goin'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"By gracious, yes--you can hear 'em! Don't they scrunch the stuff,
+though!" He laughed a little. "Mr. Devlin an' you and me hev been pretty
+smart, hevn't we?"
+
+Then a spasm caught him, and after a painful pause he called: "It's
+the biggest thing in cables.... Stand close in the cage.... Feel her
+swing!--Safe, you bet, if he stands by the lever...."
+
+His face lighted with the last gleam of living, and he said slowly: "I
+hev a pal--at Danger Mountain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV. IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+
+The three days following the events recorded in the preceding chapter
+were notable to us all. Because my own affairs and experiences are of
+the least account, I shall record them first: they will at least throw
+a little light on the history of people who appeared previously in this
+tale, and disappeared suddenly when the 'Fulvia' reached London, to make
+room for others.
+
+The day after Phil Boldrick's death I received a letter from Hungerford,
+and also one from Belle Treherne. Hungerford had left the Occidental
+Company's service, and had been fortunate enough to get the position of
+first officer on a line of steamers running between England and the West
+Indies. The letter was brusque, incisive, and forceful, and declared
+that, once he got his foot firmly planted in his new position, he would
+get married and be done with it. He said that Clovelly the novelist had
+given a little dinner at his chambers in Piccadilly, and that the guests
+were all our fellow-passengers by the 'Fulvia'; among them Colonel
+Ryder, the bookmaker, Blackburn the Queenslander, and himself.
+
+This is extracted from the letter:
+
+    ... Clovelly was in rare form.--Don't run away with the idea
+   that he's eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the
+   race for Miss Treherne. For my part--but, never mind!--You had
+   phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don't
+   arrange for an early marriage. You are a perfect baby in some
+   things. Don't you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man
+   is when she has refused him? And Clovelly is here on the ground,
+   and they are in the same set, and though I'd take my oath she would
+   be loyal to you if you were ten thousand miles from here for ten
+   years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise
+   and a fancy are two different things. We may do what's right for
+   the fear o' God, and not love Him either. Marmion, let the marriage
+   bells be rung early--a maiden's heart is a ticklish thing....
+
+   But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who
+   had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it,
+   and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with
+   laughter. At first every one stared aghast ("stared aghast!"--how
+   is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
+   haw-hawed till he couldn't lift his champagne, the rest of us
+   followed in a double-quick. And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
+   earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
+   gently smile. "See here," he said ever so candidly of Clovelly's
+   best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
+   figure in the book--"I liked the way you drew that muff. He was
+   such an awful outsider, wasn't he? All talk, and hypocrite down to
+   his heels. And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
+   food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went 'slumming'
+   and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!"--
+   [This was Clovelly's heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
+   himself, "with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
+   and a sweet creation altogether."] "I said, that's poetic justice,
+   that's the refinement of retribution. Any other yarn-spinner would
+   have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
+   a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
+   He said, 'Go to blazes,' and he fixed up that marriage--and there
+   you are! Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!"
+
+   Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing
+   about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then
+   complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London
+   (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming
+   marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow. What he said of
+   myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round,
+   with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.
+
+   How is Roscoe? I didn't see as much of him as you did, but I liked
+   him. Take my tip for it, that woman will make trouble for him some
+   day. She is the biggest puzzle I ever met. I never could tell
+   whether she liked him or hated him; but it seems to me that either
+   would be the ruin of any "Christom man." I know she saw something
+   of him while she was in London, because her quarters were next to
+   those of my aunt the dowager (whose heart the gods soften at my
+   wedding!) in Queen Anne's Mansions, S.W., and who actually liked
+   Mrs. F., called on her, and asked her to dinner, and Roscoe too,
+   whom she met at her place. I believe my aunt would have used her
+   influence to get him a good living, if he had played his cards
+   properly; but I expect he wouldn't be patronised, and he went for a
+   "mickonaree," as they say in the South Seas.... Well, I'm off
+   to the Spicy Isles, then back again to marry a wife. "Go thou and
+   do likewise."
+
+   By the way, have you ever heard of or seen Boyd Madras since he
+   slipped our cable at Aden and gave the world another chance?
+   I trust he will spoil her wedding--if she ever tries to have one.
+   May I be there to see!
+
+Because we shall see nothing more of Hungerford till we finally dismiss
+the drama, I should like to say that this voyage of his to the West
+Indies made his fortune--that is, it gave him command of one of the
+finest ships in the English merchant service. In a storm a disaster
+occurred to his vessel, his captain was washed overboard, and he was
+obliged to take command. His skill, fortitude, and great manliness,
+under tragical circumstances, sent his name booming round the world;
+and, coupled, as it was, with a singular act of personal valour, he
+had his pick of all vacancies and possible vacancies in the merchant
+service, boy (or little more) as he was. I am glad to say that he is now
+a happy husband and father too.
+
+The letter from Belle Treherne mentioned having met Clovelly several
+times of late, and, with Hungerford's words hot in my mind, I
+determined, though I had perfect confidence in her, as in myself, to be
+married at Christmas-time. Her account of the courtship of Blackburn and
+Mrs. Callendar was as amusing as her description of an evening which the
+bookmaker had spent with her father, when he said he was going to marry
+an actress whom he had seen at Drury Lane Theatre in a racing drama.
+This he subsequently did, and she ran him a break-neck race for many a
+day, but never making him unhappy or less resourceful. His verdict, and
+his only verdict, upon Mrs. Falchion had been confided to Blackburn, who
+in turn confided it to Clovelly, who passed it on to me.
+
+He said: "A woman is like a horse. Make her beautiful, give her a high
+temper and a bit of bad luck in her youth, and she'll take her revenge
+out of life; even though she runs straight, and wins straight every
+time; till she breaks her heart one day over a lost race. After that
+she is good to live with for ever. A heart-break for that kind is their
+salvation: without it they go on breaking the hearts of others."
+
+As I read Belle's and Hungerford's letters my thoughts went back
+again--as they did so often indeed--to the voyage of the 'Fulvia', and
+then to Mrs. Falchion's presence in the Rocky Mountains. There was a
+strange destiny in it all, and I had no pleasant anticipations about
+the end; for, even if she could or did do Roscoe no harm, so far as his
+position was concerned, I saw that she had already begun to make trouble
+between him and Ruth.
+
+That day which saw poor Boldrick's death put her in a conflicting light
+to me. Now I thought I saw in her unusual gentleness, again an unusual
+irony, an almost flippant and cruel worldliness; and though at the time
+she was most touched by the accident, I think her feeling of horror at
+it made her appear to speak in a way which showed her unpleasantly to
+Mr. Devlin and his daughter. It may be, however, that Ruth Devlin saw
+further into her character than I guessed, and understood the strange
+contradictions of her nature. But I shall, I suppose, never know
+absolutely about that; nor does it matter much now.
+
+The day succeeding Phil's death was Sunday, and the little church
+at Viking was full. Many fishers had come over from Sunburst. It was
+evident that people expected Roscoe to make some reference to
+Phil's death in his sermon, or, at least, have a part of the service
+appropriate. By a singular chance the first morning lesson was David's
+lamentation for Saul and Jonathan. Roscoe had a fine voice. He read
+easily, naturally--like a cultivated layman, not like a clergyman;
+like a man who wished to convey the simple meaning of what he read,
+reverently, honestly. On the many occasions when I heard him read the
+service, I noticed that he never changed the opening sentence, though
+there were, of course, others from which to choose. He drew the people
+to their feet always with these words, spoken as it were directly to
+them:
+
+   "When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness that he hath
+   committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save
+   his soul alive."
+
+I noticed this morning that he instantly attracted the attention of
+every one, and held it, with the first words of the lesson:
+
+   "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
+   mighty fallen!"
+
+It seemed to me as if the people at first almost tried to stop
+breathing, so intense was the feeling. Mrs. Falchion was sitting very
+near me, and though she had worn her veil up at first, as I uncharitably
+put it then, to disconcert him, she drew it rather quickly down as his
+reading proceeded; but, so far as I could see, she never took her
+eyes off his face through the whole service; and, impelled in spite of
+myself, I watched her closely. Though Ruth Devlin was sitting not far
+from her, she scarcely looked that way.
+
+Evidently the text of the sermon was not chosen that it might have some
+association with Phil's death, but there was a kind of simple grandeur,
+and certainly cheerful stalwartness, in his interpretation and practical
+rendering of the text:
+
+   "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?
+    ... travelling in the greatness of his strength? I that speak
+   in righteousness, mighty to save."
+
+A man was talking to men sensibly, directly, quietly. It was impossible
+to resist the wholesome eloquence of his temperament; he was a
+revelation of humanity: what he said had life.
+
+I said to myself, as I had before, Is it possible that this man ever did
+anything unmanly?
+
+After the service, James Devlin--with Ruth--came to Roscoe and myself,
+and asked us to lunch at his house. Roscoe hesitated, but I knew it was
+better for him not to walk up the hills and back again immediately after
+luncheon; so I accepted for us both; and Ruth gave me a grateful look.
+Roscoe seemed almost anxious not to be alone with Ruth--not from any
+cowardly feeling, but because he was perplexed by the old sense of
+coming catastrophe, which, indeed, poor fellow, he had some cause to
+feel. He and Mr. Devlin talked of Phil's funeral and the arrangements
+that had been made, and during the general conversation Ruth and I
+dropped behind.
+
+Quite abruptly she said to me: "Who is Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+"A widow--it is said--rich, unencumbered," I as abruptly answered.
+
+"But I suppose even widows may have pedigrees, and be conjugated in the
+past tense," was the cool reply. She drew herself up a little proudly.
+
+I was greatly astonished. Here was a girl living most of her life in
+these mountains, having only had a few years of social life in the East,
+practising with considerable skill those arts of conversation so much
+cultivated in metropolitan drawing-rooms. But I was a very dull fellow
+then, and had yet to learn that women may develop in a day to wonderful
+things.
+
+"Well," I said in reply, "I suppose not. But I fear I cannot answer
+regarding the pedigree, nor a great deal about the past, for I only met
+her under two years ago."
+
+"And yet I have imagined that you knew her pretty well, and that Mr.
+Roscoe knew her even better--perhaps," she said suggestively.
+
+"That is so," I tried to say with apparent frankness, "for she lived in
+the South Seas with her father, and Roscoe knew her there."
+
+"She is a strange woman, and quite heartless in some ways; and yet, do
+you know, I like her while I dislike her; and I cannot tell why."
+
+"Do not try to tell," I answered, "for she has the gift of making people
+do both.--I think she likes and dislikes herself--as well as others."
+
+"As well--as others," she replied slowly. "Yes, I think I have noticed
+that. You see," she added, "I do not look at people as most girls of
+my age: and perhaps I am no better for that. But Mrs. Falchion's
+introduction to me occurred in such peculiar circumstances, and the
+coincidence of your knowing her was so strange, that my interest is not
+unnatural, I suppose."
+
+"On the contrary," I said, "I am only surprised that you have restrained
+your curiosity so much and so long. It was all very strange; though the
+meeting was quite to be expected, as Mrs. Falchion herself explained
+that day. She had determined on coming over to the Pacific Coast; this
+place was in her way; it is a fashionable resort; and she stood a good
+chance of finding old friends."
+
+"Yes--of finding--old friends," was the abstracted reply. "I like Miss
+Caron, her companion, very much better than--most women I have met."
+
+This was not what she was going to say, but she checked herself, lest
+she might be suspected of thinking uncharitably of Mrs. Falchion. I,
+of course, agreed with her, and told her the story of Galt Roscoe and
+Hector Caron, and of Justine's earnestness regarding her fancied debt to
+Roscoe.
+
+I saw that the poison of anxiety had entered the girl's mind; and it
+might, perhaps, bear fruit of no engaging quality. In her own home,
+however, it was a picture to see her with her younger sisters and
+brothers, and invalid mother. She went about very brightly and sweetly
+among them, speaking to them as if she was mother to them all, angel
+of them all, domestic court for them all; as indeed she was. Here there
+seemed no disturbing element in her; a close observer might even have
+said (and in this case I fancy I was that) that she had no mind or heart
+for anything or anybody but these few of her blood and race. Hers was a
+fine nature--high, wholesome, unselfish. Yet it struck me sadly also, to
+see how the child-like in her, and her young spirit, had been so early
+set to the task of defence and protection: a mother at whose breasts
+a child had never hung; maternal, but without the relieving joys of
+maternity.
+
+I knew that she would carry through her life that too watchful, too
+anxious tenderness; that to her last day she would look back and not
+remember that she had a childhood once; because while yet a child she
+had been made into a woman.
+
+Such of the daughters of men make life beautiful; but themselves are
+selfish who do not see the almost intolerable pathos of unselfishness
+and sacrifice. At the moment I was bitter with the thought that, if Mrs.
+Falchion intended anything which could steal away this girl's happiness
+from her, even for a time, I should myself seek to retaliate--which was,
+as may appear, in my power. But I could not go to Mrs. Falchion now
+and say: "You intend some harm to these two: for God's sake go away
+and leave them alone!" I had no real ground for making such a request.
+Besides, if there was any catastrophe, any trouble, coming, or possible,
+that might hasten it, or, at least, give it point.
+
+I could only wait. I had laid another plan, and from a telegram I had
+received in answer to one I had sent, I believed it was working. I did
+not despair. I had, indeed, sent a cable to my agent in England, which
+was to be forwarded to the address given me by Boyd Madras at Aden. I
+had got a reply saying that Boyd Madras had sailed for Canada by the
+Allan Line of steamers. I had then telegraphed to a lawyer I knew in
+Montreal, and he had replied that he was on the track of the wanderer.
+
+All Viking and Sunburst turned out to Phil Boldrick's funeral.
+Everything was done that he had requested. The great whistle roared
+painfully, revolvers and guns were fired over his grave, and the
+new-formed corporation appeared. He was buried on the top of a
+foot-hill, which, to this day, is known as Boldricks' Own. The grave was
+covered by an immense flat stone bearing his name. But a flagstaff was
+erected near, no stouter one stands on Beachy Head or elsewhere,--and on
+it was engraved:
+
+               PHIL BOLDRICK,
+
+          Buried with Municipal Honours on
+          the Thirtieth day of June 1883.
+
+        This to his Memory, and for the honour of
+             Viking and Sunburst.
+
+"Padre," said a river-driver to Galt Roscoe after the rites were
+finished, "that was a man you could trust."
+
+"Padre," added another, "that was a man you could bank on, and draw your
+interest reg'lar. He never done a mean thing, and he never pal'd with
+a mean man. He wasn't for getting his teeth on edge like some in the
+valley. He didn't always side with the majority, and he had a gift of
+doin' things on the square."
+
+Others spoke in similar fashion, and then Viking went back to work, and
+we to our mountain cottage.
+
+Many days passed quietly. I saw that Galt Roscoe wished to speak to me
+on the subject perplexing him, but I did not help him. I knew that
+it would come in good time, and the farther off it was the better. I
+dreaded to hear what he had to tell, lest, in spite of my confidence in
+him, it should really be a thing which, if made public, must bring ruin.
+During the evenings of these days he wrote much in his diary--the very
+book that lies by me now. Writing seemed a relief to him, for he was
+more cheerful afterwards. I know that he had received letters from the
+summer hotel, but whether they were from Mrs. Falchion or Justine Caron
+I was not then aware, though I afterwards came to know that one of them
+was from Justine, asking him if she might call on him. He guessed that
+the request was connected with Hector Caron's death; and, of course,
+gave his consent. During this time he did not visit Ruth Devlin, nor did
+he mention her name. As for myself, I was sick of the whole business,
+and wished it well over, whatever the result.
+
+I make here a few extracts from Roscoe's diary, to show the state of his
+mind at this period:
+
+   Can a man never get away from the consequences of his wickedness,
+   even though he repents?... Restitution is necessary as well
+   as repentance; but when one cannot make restitution, when it is
+   impossible--what then? I suppose one has to reply, Well, you have
+   to suffer, that is all.... Poor Alo! To think that after all
+   these years, you can strike me!
+
+   There is something malicious in the way Mercy Falchion crosses my
+   path. What she knows, she knows; and what she can do if she
+   chooses, I must endure. I cannot love Mercy Falchion again, and
+   that, I suppose, is the last thing she would wish now. I cannot
+   bring Alo back. But how does that concern her! Why does she hate
+   me so? For, underneath her kindest words,--and they are kind
+   sometimes,--I can detect the note of enmity, of calculating scorn.
+   ... I wish I could go to Ruth and tell her all, and ask her to
+   decide if she can take a man with such a past.... What a
+   thing it is to have had a clean record of unflinching manliness at
+   one's back!
+
+I add another extract:
+
+   Phil's story of Danger Mountain struck like ice at my heart. There
+   was a horrible irony in the thing: that it should be told to me, of
+   all the world, and at such a time. Some would say, I suppose, that
+   it was the arrangement of Providence. Not to speak it profanely, it
+   seems to be the achievement of the devil. The torture was too
+   malicious for God....
+
+   Phil's letter has gone to his pal at Danger Mountain....
+
+The fourth day after the funeral Justine Caron came to see Galt Roscoe.
+This was the substance of their conversation, as I came to know long
+afterwards.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, "I have come to pay something of a debt which I
+owe to you. It is a long time since you gave my poor Hector burial, but
+I have never forgotten, and I have brought you at last--you must not
+shake your head so--the money you spent.... But you MUST take it. I
+should be miserable if you did not. The money is all that I can repay;
+the kindness is for memory and gratitude always."
+
+He looked at her wonderingly, earnestly, she seemed so unworldly,
+standing there, her life's ambition not stirring beyond duty to her
+dead. If goodness makes beauty, she was beautiful; and yet, besides
+all that, she had a warm, absorbing eye, a soft, rounded cheek, and she
+carried in her face the light of a cheerful, engaging spirit.
+
+"Will it make you happier if I take the money?" he said at last, and his
+voice showed how she had moved him.
+
+"So much happier!" she answered, and she put a roll of notes into his
+hand.
+
+"Then I will take it," he replied, with a manner not too serious, and
+he looked at the notes carefully; "but only what I actually spent,
+remember; what I told you when you wrote me at Hector's death; not
+this ample interest. You forget, Miss Caron, that your brother was my
+friend."
+
+"No I cannot forget that. It lives with me," she rejoined softly. But
+she took back the surplus notes. "And I have my gratitude left still,"
+she added, smiling.
+
+"Believe me, there is no occasion for gratitude. Why, what less could
+one do?"
+
+"One could pass by on the other side."
+
+"He was not fallen among thieves," was his reply; "he was among
+Englishmen, the old allies of the French."
+
+"But the Priests and the Levites, people of his own
+country--Frenchmen--passed him by. They were infamous in falsehood,
+cruel to him and to me.--You are an Englishman; you have heart and
+kindness."
+
+He hesitated, then he gravely said: "Do not trust Englishmen more than
+you trust your own countrymen. We are selfish even in our friendships
+often. We stick to one person, and to benefit that one we sacrifice
+others. Have you found all Englishmen--and WOMEN unselfish?" He
+looked at her steadily; but immediately repented that he had asked the
+question, for he had in his mind one whom they both knew, too well,
+perhaps; and he added quickly: "You see, I am not kind."
+
+They were standing now in the sunlight just outside the house. His hands
+were thrust down in the pockets of his linen coat; her hands opening and
+shutting her parasol slightly. They might, from their appearance, have
+been talking of very inconsequent things.
+
+Her eyes lifted sorrowfully to his. "Ah, monsieur," she rejoined, "there
+are two times when one must fear a woman." She answered his question
+more directly than he could have conjectured. But she felt that she must
+warn him.
+
+"I do not understand," he said.
+
+"Of course you do not. Only women themselves understand that the two
+times when one must fear a woman are when she hates, and when she
+loves--after a kind. When she gets wicked or mad enough to hate, either
+through jealousy or because she cannot love where she would, she is
+merciless. She does not know the honour of the game. She has no pity.
+Then, sometimes when she loves in a way, she is, as you say, most
+selfish. I mean a love which--is not possible. Then she does some mad
+act--all women are a little mad sometimes. Most of us wish to be good,
+but we are quicksilver...."
+
+Roscoe's mind had been working fast. He saw she meant to warn him
+against Mrs. Falchion. His face flushed slightly. He knew that Justine
+had thought well of him, and now he knew also that she suspected
+something not creditable or, at least, hazardous in his life.
+
+"And the man--the man whom the woman hates?"
+
+"When the woman hates--and loves too, the man is in danger."
+
+"Do you know of such a man?" he almost shrinkingly said.
+
+"If I did I would say to him, The world is wide. There is no glory in
+fighting a woman who will not be fair in battle. She will say what
+may appear to be true, but what she knows in her own heart to be
+false--false and bad."
+
+Roscoe now saw that Justine had more than an inkling of his story.
+
+He said calmly: "You would advise that man to flee from danger?"
+
+"Yes, to flee," she replied hurriedly, with a strange anxiety in her
+eyes; "for sometimes a woman is not satisfied with words that kill. She
+becomes less than human, and is like Jael."
+
+Justine knew that Mrs. Falchion held a sword over Roscoe's career; she
+guessed that Mrs. Falchion both cared for him and hated him too; but
+she did not know the true reason of the hatred--that only came out
+afterwards. Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move
+him; but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping
+with the facts of life.
+
+"The man's life even might be in danger?" he asked.
+
+"It might."
+
+"But surely that is not so dreadful," he still said calmly.
+
+"Death is not the worst of evils."
+
+"No, not the worst; one has to think of the evil word as well. The evil
+word can be outlived; but the man must think of those who really love
+him--who would die to save him--and whose hearts would break if he
+were killed. Love can outlive slander, but it is bitter when it has to
+outlive both slander and death. It is easy to love with joy so long as
+both live, though there are worlds between. Thoughts fly and meet; but
+Death makes the great division.... Love can only live in the pleasant
+world."
+
+Very abstractedly he said: "Is it a pleasant world to you?"
+
+She did not reply directly to that, but answered: "Monsieur, if you know
+of such a man as I speak of, warn him to fly." And she raised her eyes
+from the ground and looked earnestly at him. Now her face was slightly
+flushed, she looked almost beautiful.
+
+"I know of such a man," he replied, "but he will not go. He has to
+answer to his own soul and his conscience. He is not without fear, but
+it is only fear for those who care for him, be they ever so few. And
+he hopes that they will be brave enough to face his misery, if it must
+come. For we know that courage has its hour of comfort.... When such a
+man as you speak of has his dark hour he will stand firm."
+
+Then with a great impulse he added: "This man whom I know did wrong, but
+he was falsely accused of doing a still greater. The consequence of the
+first thing followed him. He could never make restitution. Years went
+by. Some one knew that dark spot in his life--his Nemesis."
+
+"The worst Nemesis in this life, monsieur, is always a woman," she
+interrupted.
+
+"Perhaps she is the surest," he continued. "The woman faced him in the
+hour of his peace and--" he paused. His voice was husky.
+
+"Yes, 'and,' monsieur?"
+
+"And he knows that she would ruin him, and kill his heart and destroy
+his life."
+
+"The waters of Marah are bitter," she murmured, and she turned her face
+away from him to the woods. There was no trouble there. The birds were
+singing, black squirrels were jumping from bough to bough, and they
+could hear the tapping of the woodpecker. She slowly drew on her gloves,
+as if for occupation.
+
+He spoke at length as though thinking aloud: "But he knows that,
+whatever comes, life has had for him more compensations than he
+deserves. For, in his trouble, a woman came, and said kind words, and
+would have helped him if she could."
+
+"There were TWO women," she said solemnly.
+
+"Two women?" he repeated slowly.
+
+"The one stayed in her home and prayed, and the other came."
+
+"I do not understand," he said: and he spoke truly.
+
+"Love is always praying for its own, therefore one woman prayed at home.
+The other woman who came was full of gratitude, for the man was noble,
+she owed him a great debt, and she believed in him always. She knew that
+if at any time in his life he had done wrong, the sin was without malice
+or evil."
+
+"The woman is gentle and pitiful with him, God knows."
+
+She spoke quietly now, and her gravity looked strange in one so young.
+
+"God knows she is just, and would see him fairly treated. She is so far
+beneath him! and yet one can serve a friend though one is humble and
+poor."
+
+"How strange," he rejoined, "that the man should think himself miserable
+who is befriended in such a way! Mademoiselle, he will carry to his
+grave the kindness of this woman."
+
+"Monsieur," she added humbly, yet with a brave light in her eyes, "it is
+good to care whether the wind blows bitter or kind. Every true woman is
+a mother, though she have no child. She longs to protect the suffering,
+because to protect is in her so far as God is.... Well, this woman
+cares that way...." She held out her hand to say good-bye. Her look was
+simple, direct, and kind. Their parting words were few and unremarkable.
+
+Roscoe watched Justine Caron as she passed out into the shade of the
+woods, and he said to himself: "Gratitude like that is a wonderful
+thing." He should have said something else, but he did not know, and she
+did not wish him to know: and he never knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI. A DUEL IN ARCADY
+
+The more I thought of Mrs. Falchion's attitude towards Roscoe, the more
+I was puzzled. But I had at last reduced the position to this: Years
+ago Roscoe had cared for her and she had not cared for him. Angered
+or indignant at her treatment of him, Roscoe's affections declined
+unworthily elsewhere. Then came a catastrophe of some kind, in which
+Alo (whoever she was) suffered. The secret of this catastrophe Mrs.
+Falchion, as I believe, held. There was a parting, a lapse of years, and
+then the meeting on the 'Fulvia': with it, partial restoration of Mrs.
+Falchion's influence, then its decline, and then a complete change of
+position. It was now Mrs. Falchion that cared, and Roscoe that shunned.
+It perplexed me that there seemed to be behind Mrs. Falchion's present
+regard for Roscoe some weird expression of vengeance, as though somehow
+she had been wronged, and it was her duty to punish. In no other way was
+the position definable. That Roscoe would never marry her was certain to
+my mind. That he could not marry her now was also certain--to me; I had
+the means to prevent it. That she wished to marry him I was not
+sure, though she undoubtedly cared for him. Remained, therefore, the
+supposition that if he cared for her she would do him no harm, as to his
+position. But if he married Ruth, disaster would come--Roscoe himself
+acknowledged that she held the key of his fortunes.
+
+Upon an impulse, and as a last resort, I had taken action whereby
+in some critical moment I might be able to wield a power over Mrs.
+Falchion. I was playing a blind game, but it was the only card I held.
+I had heard from the lawyer in Montreal that Madras, under another name,
+had gone to the prairie country to enter the mounted police. I had then
+telegraphed to Winnipeg, but had got no answer.
+
+I had seen her many times, but we had never, except very remotely,
+touched upon the matter which was uppermost in both our minds. It was
+not my wish to force the situation. I knew that my opportunity would
+come wherein to spy upon the mind of the enemy. It came. On the evening
+that Justine Caron called upon Roscoe, I accidentally met Mrs. Falchion
+in the grounds of the hotel. She was with several people, and as I
+spoke to her she made a little gesture of invitation. I went over, was
+introduced to her companions, and then she said:
+
+"Dr. Marmion, I have not yet made that visit to the salmon-fishers at
+Sunburst. Unfortunately, on the days when I called on Miss Devlin, my
+time was limited. But now I have a thirst for adventure, and time hangs
+heavy. Will you perform your old office of escort, and join a party,
+which we can make up here, to go there to-morrow?"
+
+I had little love for Mrs. Falchion, but I consented, because it
+seemed to me the chance had come for an effective talk with her; and I
+suggested that we should go late in the afternoon of the next day,
+and remain till night and see the Indians, the half-breeds, and white
+fishermen working by torch-light on the river. The proposition was
+accepted with delight.
+
+Then the conversation turned upon the feud that existed between Viking
+and Sunburst, the river-drivers and the fishers. During the last few
+days, owing to the fact that there were a great many idle river-men
+about, the river-driving for the season being done, there had been more
+than one quarrel of a serious nature at Sunburst. It had needed a great
+deal of watchfulness on the part of Mr. Devlin and his supporters to
+prevent fighting. In Sunburst itself, Mr. Devlin had much personal
+influence. He was a man of exceedingly strong character, bold, powerful,
+persuasive. But this year there had been a large number of rough,
+adventurous characters among the river-men, and they seemed to
+take delight in making sport of, and even interfering with, the
+salmon-fishers. We talked of these things for some time, and then I took
+my leave. As I went, Mrs. Falchion stepped after me, tapped me on the
+arm, and said in a slow, indolent tone:
+
+"Whenever you and I meet, Dr. Marmion, something happens--something
+strange. What particular catastrophe have you arranged for to-morrow?
+For you are, you know, the chorus to the drama."
+
+"Do not spoil the play by anticipation," I said.
+
+"One gets very weary of tragedy," she retorted. "Comedy would be a
+relief. Could you not manage it?"
+
+"I do not know about to-morrow," I said, "as to a comedy. But I promise
+you that one of these days I will present to you the very finest comedy
+imaginable."
+
+"You speak oracularly," she said; "still you are a professor, and
+professors always pose. But now, to be perfectly frank with you, I do
+not believe that any comedy you could arrange would be as effective as
+your own."
+
+"You have read 'Much Ado about Nothing'," I said.
+
+"Oh, it is as good as that, is it?" she asked.
+
+"Well, it has just as good a final situation," I answered. She seemed
+puzzled, for she saw I spoke with some undercurrent of meaning. "Mrs.
+Falchion," I said to her suddenly and earnestly, "I wish you to think
+between now and to-morrow of what I am just going to say to you."
+
+"It sounds like the task set an undergraduate, but go on," she said.
+
+"I wish you to think," said I, "of the fact that I helped to save your
+life."
+
+She flushed; an indignant look shot into her face, and her voice
+vibrating, she said:
+
+"What man would have done less?" Then, almost immediately after, as
+though repenting of what she had said, she continued in a lower tone and
+with a kind of impulsiveness uncommon to her: "But you had courage, and
+I appreciate that; still, do not ask too much. Good-night."
+
+We parted at that, and did not meet again until the next afternoon, when
+I joined her and her party at the summer hotel. Together we journeyed
+down to Sunburst.
+
+It was the height of the salmon-fishing season. Sunburst lay cloyed
+among the products of field and forest and stream. At Viking one got the
+impression of a strong pioneer life, vibrant, eager, and with a touch of
+Arcady. But viewed from a distance Sunburst seemed Arcady itself. It was
+built in green pastures, which stretched back on one side of the river,
+smooth, luscious, undulating to the foot-hills. This was on one side
+of the Whi-Whi River. On the other side was a narrow margin, and then a
+sheer wall of hills in exquisite verdure. The houses were of wood, and
+chiefly painted white, sweet and cool in the vast greenness. Cattle
+wandered shoulders deep in the rich grass, and fruit of all kinds was
+to be had for the picking. The population was strangely mixed. Men had
+drifted here from all parts of the world, sometimes with their families,
+sometimes without them. Many of them had settled here after mining
+at the Caribou field and other places on the Frazer River. Mexican,
+Portuguese, Canadian, Californian, Australian, Chinaman, and coolie
+lived here, side by side, at ease in the quiet land, following a
+primitive occupation with primitive methods.
+
+One could pick out the Indian section of the village, because not far
+from it was the Indian graveyard, with its scaffolding of poles and
+brush and its offerings for the dead. There were almost interminable
+rows of scaffolding on the river's edge and upon the high bank where
+hung the salmon drying in the sun. The river, as it ambled along, here
+over shallows, there over rapids and tiny waterfalls, was the pathway
+for millions and millions of salmon upon a pilgrimage to the West and
+North--to the happy hunting grounds of spawn. They came in droves so
+thick at times that, crowding up the little creeks which ran into the
+river, they filled them so completely as to dam up the water and make
+the courses a solid mass of living and dead fish. In the river itself
+they climbed the rapids and leaped the little waterfalls with incredible
+certainty; except where man had prepared his traps for them. Sometimes
+these traps were weirs or by-washes, made of long lateral tanks of
+wicker-work. Down among the boulders near the shore, scaffoldings were
+raised, and from these the fishermen with nets and wicker-work baskets
+caught the fish as they came up.
+
+We wandered about during the afternoon immensely interested in all
+that we saw. During that time the party was much together, and my
+conversation with Mrs. Falchion was general. We had supper at a quiet
+little tavern, idled away an hour in drinking in the pleasant scene; and
+when dusk came went out again to the banks of the river.
+
+From the time we left the tavern to wander by the river I managed to be
+a good deal alone with Mrs. Falchion. I do not know whether she saw that
+I was anxious to speak with her privately, but I fancy she did. Whatever
+we had to say must, in the circumstances, however serious, be kept
+superficially unimportant. And, as it happened, our serious conference
+was carried on with an air of easy gossip, combined with a not
+artificial interest in all we saw. And there was much to see. Far up and
+down the river the fragrant dusk was spotted with the smoky red light
+of torches, and the atmosphere shook with shadows, through which ran the
+song of the river, more amiable than the song of the saw, and the low,
+weird cry of the Indians and white men as they toiled for salmon in the
+glare of the torches. Here upon a scaffolding a half-dozen swung their
+nets and baskets in the swift river, hauling up with their very long
+poles thirty or forty splendid fish in an hour; there at a small
+cascade, in great baskets sunk into the water, a couple of Indians
+caught and killed the salmon that, in trying to leap the fall, plumped
+into the wicker cage; beyond, others, more idle and less enterprising,
+speared the finny travellers, thus five hundred miles from home--the
+brave Pacific.
+
+Upon the banks the cleaning and curing went on, the women and children
+assisting, and as the Indians and half-breeds worked they sang either
+the wild Indian melodies, snatches of brave old songs of the 'voyageurs'
+of a past century, or hymns taught by the Jesuit missionaries in the
+persons of such noble men as Pere Lacombe and Pere Durieu, who have
+wandered up and down the vast plains of both sides of the Rockies
+telling an old story in a picturesque, heroic way. These old hymns were
+written in Chinook, that strange language,--French, English, Spanish,
+Indian, arranged by the Hudson's Bay Company, which is, like the
+wampum-belt, a common tongue for tribes and peoples not speaking any
+language but their own. They were set to old airs--lullabies, chansons,
+barcarolles, serenades, taken out of the folk-lore of many lands. Time
+and again had these simple arcadian airs been sung as a prelude to some
+tribal act that would not bear the search-light of civilisation--little
+by the Indians east of the Rockies, for they have hard hearts and fierce
+tongues, but much by the Shuswaps, Siwashes, and other tribes of the
+Pacific slope, whose natures are for peace more than for war; who, one
+antique day, drifted across from Japan or the Corea, and never, even in
+their wild, nomadic state, forgot their skill and craft in wood and gold
+and silver.
+
+We sat on the shore and watched the scene for a time, saying nothing.
+Now and again, as from scaffolding to scaffolding, from boat to boat,
+and from house to house, the Chinook song rang and was caught up in a
+slow monotone, so not interfering with the toil, there came the sound
+of an Indian drum beaten indolently, or the rattle of dry hard sticks--a
+fantastic accompaniment.
+
+"Does it remind you of the South Seas?" I asked Mrs. Falchion, as, with
+her chin on her hand, she watched the scene.
+
+She drew herself up, almost with an effort, as though she had been lost
+in thought, and looked at me curiously for a moment. She seemed trying
+to call back her mind to consider my question. Presently she answered
+me: "Very little. There is something finer, stronger here. The
+atmosphere has more nerve, the life more life. This is not a land for
+the idle or vicious, pleasant as it is."
+
+"What a thinker you are, Mrs. Falchion!"
+
+She seemed to recollect herself suddenly. Her voice took on an
+inflection of satire. "You say it with the air of a discoverer. With
+Columbus and Hervey and you, the world--" She stopped, laughing softly
+at the thrust, and moved the dust about with her foot.
+
+"In spite of the sarcasm, I am going to add that I feel a personal
+satisfaction in your being a woman who does think, and acts more on
+thought than impulse."
+
+"'Personal satisfaction' sounds very royal and august. It is long, I
+imagine, since you took a--personal satisfaction--in me."
+
+I was not to be daunted. "People who think a good deal and live a fresh,
+outdoor life--you do that--naturally act most fairly and wisely in time
+of difficulty--and contretemps."
+
+"But I had the impression that you thought I acted unfairly and
+unwisely--at such times."
+
+We had come exactly where I wanted. In our minds we were both looking at
+those miserable scenes on the 'Fulvia', when Madras sought to adjust the
+accounts of life and sorely muddled them.
+
+"But," said I, "you are not the same woman that you were."
+
+"Indeed, Sir Oracle," she answered: "and by what necromancy do you
+know?"
+
+"By none. I think you are sorry now--I hope you are--for what--"
+
+She interrupted me indignantly. "You go too far. You are
+almost--unbearable. You said once that the matter should be buried, and
+yet here you work for an opportunity, Heaven knows why, to place me at a
+disadvantage!"
+
+"Pardon me," I answered; "I said that I would never bring up those
+wretched scenes unless there was cause. There is cause."
+
+She got to her feet. "What cause--what possible cause can there be?"
+
+I met her eye firmly. "I am bound to stand by my friend," I said. "I can
+and I will stand by him."
+
+"If it is a game of drawn swords, beware!" she retorted. "You speak to
+me as if I were a common adventuress. You mistake me, and forget
+that you--of all men--have little margin of high morality on which to
+speculate."
+
+"No, I do not forget that," I said, "nor do I think of you as an
+adventuress. But I am sure you hold a power over my friend, and--"
+
+She stopped me. "Not one word more on the subject. You are not to
+suppose this or that. Be wise do not irritate and annoy a woman like me.
+It were better to please me than to preach to me."
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said firmly, "I wish to please you--so well that some
+day you will feel that I have been a good friend to you as well as to
+him--"
+
+Again she interrupted me. "You talk in foolish riddles. No good can come
+of this."
+
+"I cannot believe that," I urged; "for when once your heart is moved by
+the love of a man, you will be just, and then the memory of another man
+who loved you and sinned for you--"
+
+"Oh, you coward!" she broke out scornfully--"you coward to persist in
+this!"
+
+I made a little motion of apology with my hand, and was silent. I was
+satisfied. I felt that I had touched her as no words of mine had ever
+touched her before. If she became emotional, was vulnerable in her
+feelings, I knew that Roscoe's peace might be assured. That she loved
+Roscoe now I was quite certain. Through the mists I could see a
+way, even if I failed to find Madras and arrange another surprising
+situation. She was breathing hard with excitement.
+
+Presently she said with incredible quietness, "Do not force me to do
+hard things. I have a secret."
+
+"I have a secret too," I answered. "Let us compromise."
+
+"I do not fear your secret," she answered. She thought I was referring
+to her husband's death. "Well," I replied, "I honestly hope you never
+will. That would be a good day for you."
+
+"Let us go," she said; then, presently: "No, let us sit here and forget
+that we have been talking."
+
+I was satisfied. We sat down. She watched the scene silently, and I
+watched her. I felt that it would be my lot to see stranger things
+happen to her than I had seen before; but all in a different fashion. I
+had more hope for my friend, for Ruth Devlin, for--!
+
+I then became silent even to myself. The weltering river, the fishers
+and their labour and their songs, the tall dark hills, the deep gloomy
+pastures, the flaring lights, were then in a dream before me; but I was
+thinking, planning.
+
+As we sat there, we heard noises, not very harmonious, interrupting the
+song of the salmon-fishers. We got up to see. A score of river-drivers
+were marching down through the village, mocking the fishers and making
+wild mirth. The Indians took little notice, but the half-breeds and
+white fishers were restless.
+
+"There will be trouble here one day," said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"A free fight which will clear the air," I said.
+
+"I should like to see it--it would be picturesque, at least," she added
+cheerfully; "for I suppose no lives would be lost."
+
+"One cannot tell," I answered; "lives do not count so much in new
+lands."
+
+"Killing is hateful, but I like to see courage."
+
+And she did see it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII. RIDING THE REEFS
+
+The next afternoon Roscoe was sitting on the coping deep in thought,
+when Ruth rode up with her father, dismounted, and came upon him so
+quietly that he did not hear her. I was standing in the trees a little
+distance away.
+
+She spoke to him once, but he did not seem to hear. She touched his arm.
+He got to his feet.
+
+"You were so engaged that you did not hear me," she said.
+
+"The noise of the rapids!" he answered, after a strange pause, "and your
+footstep is very light."
+
+She leaned her chin on her hand, rested against the rail of the coping,
+looked meditatively into the torrent below, and replied: "Is it so
+light?" Then after a pause: "You have not asked me how I came, who came
+with me, or why I am here."
+
+"It was first necessary for me to conceive the delightful fact that you
+are here," he said in a dazed, and, therefore, not convincing tone.
+
+She looked him full in the eyes. "Please do not pay me the ill
+compliment of a compliment," she said. "Was it the sailor who spoke then
+or the--or yourself? It is not like you."
+
+"I did not mean it as a compliment," he replied. "I was thinking about
+critical and important things."
+
+"'Critical and important' sounds large," she returned.
+
+"And the awakening was sudden," he continued. "You must make allowance,
+please, for--"
+
+"For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and
+undreamlike person? I do. And now, since you will not put me quite at my
+ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly 'chaperoned' here,
+I must inform you that my father waits hard by--is, as my riotous young
+brother says, 'without on the mat.'"
+
+"I am very glad," he replied with more politeness than exactness.
+
+"That I was duly escorted, or that my father is 'without on the mat'?
+... However, you do not appear glad one way or the other. And now I must
+explain our business. It is to ask your company at dinner (do consider
+yourself honoured--actually a formal dinner party in the Rockies!) to
+meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our famous Viking
+and Sunburst.... But you are expected to go out where my father feeds
+his--there, see--his horse on your 'trim parterre.' And now that I have
+done my duty as page and messenger without a word of assistance, Mr.
+Roscoe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that you will be
+vis-a-vis to his excellency?" She lightly beat the air with her whip,
+while I took a good look at the charming scene.
+
+Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant. He understood too
+well the source of such gay social banter. He knew it covered a hurt. He
+said to her: "Is this Ruth Devlin or another?"
+
+And she replied very gravely: "It is Ruth Devlin and another too," and
+she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes
+were troubled.
+
+He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but,
+after a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he
+came. "And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?"
+she said; "and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and
+field?"
+
+His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch
+of mock irony: "The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of
+the house of Devlin."
+
+"Oh," she said, "you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished
+satire on a woman." And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
+them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with
+which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had
+ever happened to her.
+
+"No, indeed no," he replied, "though I am properly rebuked. I fear I am
+malicious--just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: 'Rome turned
+upon itself.'"
+
+"But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of
+it. Yours did not seem applied to yourself," was her slow answer, and
+she seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.
+
+"No?" Then he said with a playful sadness: "A moment ago you were not
+completely innocent of irony, were you?"
+
+"But a man is big and broad, and should not--he should be magnanimous,
+leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things, to be
+guilty of littlenesses. But see how daring I am--speaking like this
+to you who know so much more than I do.... Surely, you are still only
+humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself--the irony so icy
+to your friends?"
+
+She had developed greatly. Her mind had been sharpened by pain. The
+edge of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and
+allusive. Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her
+had been achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion
+came, Ruth had awakened sharply to a distress not exactly definable. She
+felt that though he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right to
+share his troubles. The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and
+something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter. For there
+was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and
+unwritten. They had vowed without priest or witness. The heart speaks
+eloquently in symbols first, and afterwards in stumbling words.
+
+It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time,
+that the words would never be spoken. And was this all that had troubled
+her--the belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life? Or had
+she knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his
+past?
+
+This possibility filled him with bitterness. The old Adam in him awoke,
+and he said within himself "God in heaven, must one folly, one sin,
+kill me and her too? Why me more than another!... And I love her, I love
+her!"
+
+His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew
+straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern.... There
+came swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with
+her--anywhere: to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over
+again, admitting that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have
+his conscience clear of secret, and trust her kindness. For now he
+was sure that Mrs. Falchion meant to make his position as a clergyman
+impossible; to revenge herself on him for no wrong that, as far as he
+knew, he ever did directly to her. But to tell this girl, or even
+her father or mother, that he had been married, after a shameful,
+unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what came after, and the awful
+thing that happened--he who ministered at the altar! Now that he looked
+the thing in the face it shocked him. No, he could not do it.
+
+She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her
+through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful
+possibility beyond her:
+
+"Why do you look so? You are stern. You are critical. Have
+I--disimproved so?"
+
+The words were full of a sudden and natural womanly fear, that something
+in herself had fallen in value. They had a pathos so much the more
+moving because she sought to hide it.
+
+There swam before his eyes the picture of happiness from which she
+herself had roused him when she came. He involuntarily, passionately,
+caught her hand and pressed it to his lips twice; but spoke nothing.
+
+"Oh! oh!--please!" she said. Her voice was low and broken, and she spoke
+appealingly. Could he not see that he was breaking her heart, while
+filling it also with unbearable joy? Why did he not speak and make this
+possible, and not leave it a thing to flush her cheeks, and cause her to
+feel he had acted on a knowledge he had no right to possess till he had
+declared himself in speech? Could he not have spared her that?--This
+Christian gentleman, whose worth had compassed these mountains and won
+the dwellers among them--it was bitter. Her pride and injured heart rose
+up and choked her.
+
+He let go her hand. Now his face was partly turned from her, and she saw
+how thin and pale it was. She saw, too, what I had seen during the past
+week, that his hair had become almost white about the temples; and the
+moveless sadness of his position struck her with unnatural force, so
+that, in spite of herself, tears came suddenly to her eyes, and a slight
+moan broke from her. She would have run away; but it was too late.
+
+He saw the tears, the look of pity, indignation, pride, and love in her
+face.
+
+"My love!" he cried passionately. He opened his arms to her.
+
+But she stood still. He came very close to her, spoke quickly, and
+almost despairingly: "Ruth, I love you, and I have wronged you; but here
+is your place, if you will come."
+
+At first she seemed stunned, and her face was turned to her mountains,
+as though the echo of his words were coming back to her from them, but
+the thing crept into her heart and flooded it. She seemed to wake, and
+then all her affection carried her into his arms, and she dried her eyes
+upon his breast.
+
+After a time he whispered, "My dear, I have wronged you. I should not
+have made you care for me."
+
+She did not seem to notice that he spoke of wrong. She said: "I was
+yours, Galt, even from the beginning, I think, though I did not quite
+know it. I remember what you read in church the first Sunday you came,
+and it has always helped me; for I wanted to be good."
+
+She paused and raised her eyes to his, and then with sweet solemnity she
+said: "The words were:
+
+   "'The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds'
+   feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.'"
+
+"Ruth," he answered, "you have always walked on the high places. You
+have never failed. And you are as safe as the nest of the eagle, a noble
+work of God."
+
+"No, I am not noble; but I should like to be so. Most women like
+goodness. It is instinct with us, I suppose. We had rather be good than
+evil, and when we love we can do good things; but we quiver like the
+compass-needle between two poles. Oh, believe me! we are weak; but we
+are loving."
+
+"Your worst, Ruth, is as much higher than my best as the heaven is--"
+
+"Galt, you hurt my fingers!" she interrupted.
+
+He had not noticed the almost fierce strength of his clasp. But his life
+was desperately hungry for her. "Forgive me, dearest.--As I said, better
+than my best; for, Ruth, my life was--wicked, long ago. You cannot
+understand how wicked!"
+
+"You are a clergyman and a good man," she said, with pathetic negation.
+
+"You give me a heart unsoiled, unspotted of the world. I have been in
+some ways worse than the worst men in the valley there below."
+
+"Galt, Galt, you shock me!" she said.
+
+"Why did I speak? Why did I kiss your hand as I did? Because at the
+moment it was the only honest thing to do; because it was due you that
+I should say: 'Ruth, I love you, love you so much'"--here she nestled
+close to him--"'so well, that everything else in life is as nothing
+beside it--nothing! so well that I could not let you share my
+wretchedness.'"
+
+She ran her hand along his breast and looked up at him with swimming
+eyes.
+
+"And you think that this is fair to me? that a woman gives the heart for
+pleasant weather only? I do not know what your sorrow may be, but it is
+my right to share it. I am only a woman; but a woman can be strong
+for those she loves. Remember that I have always had to care for
+others--always; and I can bear much. I will not ask what your trouble
+is, I only ask you"--here she spoke slowly and earnestly, and rested her
+hand on his shoulder--"to say to me that you love no other woman; and
+that--that no other woman has a claim upon you. Then I shall be content
+to pity you, to help you, to love you. God gives women many pains, but
+none so great as the love that will not trust utterly; for trust is our
+bread of life. Yes, indeed, indeed!"
+
+"I dare not say," he said, "that it is your misfortune to love me, for
+in this you show how noble a woman can be. But I will say that the cup
+is bitter-sweet for you.... I cannot tell you now what my trouble is;
+but I can say that no other living woman has a claim upon me.... My
+reckoning is with the dead."
+
+"That is with God," she whispered, "and He is just and merciful too....
+Can it not be repaired here?" She smoothed back his hair, then let her
+fingers stray lightly on his cheek.
+
+It hurt him like death to reply. "No, but there can be punishment here."
+
+She shuddered slightly. "Punishment, punishment," she repeated
+fearfully--"what punishment?"
+
+"I do not quite know." Lines of pain grew deeper in his face.... "Ruth,
+how much can a woman forgive?"
+
+"A mother, everything." But she would say no more. He looked at her long
+and earnestly, and said at last: "Will you believe in me no matter what
+happens?"
+
+"Always, always." Her smile was most winning.
+
+"If things should appear dark against me?"
+
+"Yes, if you give me your word."
+
+"If I said to you that I did a wrong; that I broke the law of God,
+though not the laws of man?"
+
+There was a pause in which she drew back, trembling slightly, and looked
+at him timidly and then steadily, but immediately put her hands bravely
+in his, and said: "Yes."
+
+"I did not break the laws of man."
+
+"It was when you were in the navy?" she inquired, in an awe-stricken
+tone.
+
+"Yes, years ago."
+
+"I know. I feel it. You must not tell me. It was a woman, and this
+other woman, this Mrs. Falchion knows, and she would try to ruin you,
+or"--here she seemed to be moved suddenly by a new thought--"or have
+you love her. But she shall not, she shall not--neither! For I will love
+you, and God will listen to me, and answer me."
+
+"Would to Heaven I were worthy of you! I dare not think of where you
+might be called to follow me, Ruth."
+
+"'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
+thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,'" she rejoined in a
+low voice.
+
+"'Thy God my God!'" he repeated after her slowly. He suddenly wondered
+if his God was her God; whether now, in his trouble, he had that comfort
+which his creed and profession should give him. For the first time he
+felt acutely that his choice of this new life might have been more a
+reaction from the past, a desire for expiation, than radical belief that
+this was the right and only thing for him to do. And when, some time
+after, he bade Ruth good-bye, as she went with her father, it came to
+him with appalling conviction that his life had been a mistake. The
+twist of a great wrong in a man's character distorts his vision; and if
+he has a tender conscience he magnifies his misdeeds.
+
+In silence Roscoe and I watched the two ride down the slope. I guessed
+what had happened: afterwards I was told all. I was glad of it, though
+the end was not yet promising. When we turned to go towards the house
+again, a man lounged out of the trees towards us. He looked at me, then
+at Roscoe, and said:
+
+"I'm Phil Boldrick's pal from Danger Mountain." Roscoe held out his
+hand, and the man took it, saying: "You're The Padre, I suppose, and
+Phil was soft on you. Didn't turn religious, did he? He always had a
+streak of God A'mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head
+chap; friend o' the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust
+with a pal. I got your letter, and come over here straight to see that
+he's been tombed accordin' to his virtues; to lay out the dollars
+he left me on the people he had on his visitin' list; no loafers, no
+gophers, not one; but to them that stayed by him I stay, while prog and
+liquor last."
+
+I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not
+reply, I said: "Phil had many friends and no enemies." Then I told him
+the tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.
+
+While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and
+listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as
+abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe's face. When I had finished he
+drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind
+his fingers. But he did not speak.
+
+Then I suggested quietly that Phil's dollars could be put to a better
+use than for prog and liquor.
+
+He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment's pause, in which
+he seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he
+rubbed his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said:
+"I never had but two pals that was pals through and through. And one was
+Phil and the other was Jo--Jo Brackenbury."
+
+Here Roscoe's hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar,
+twitched suddenly.
+
+The man continued: "Poor Jo went down in the 'Fly Away' when she swung
+with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon
+the bloody reefs at Apia.... God, how they gnawed her! And never a rag
+holdin' nor a stick standin', and her pretty figger broke like a tin
+whistle in a Corliss engine. And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip,
+the noisiest pal that ever said 'Here's how!' went out to heaven on a
+tearing sea."
+
+"Jo Brackenbury--" Roscoe repeated musingly. His head was turned away
+from us.
+
+"Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me" (I wonder that
+I did not start then) "when I told him how the 'Fly Away' went down to
+Davy, and her lovers went aloft, reefed close afore the wind--'Then,'
+says he, 'they've got a damned sound seaman on the Jordan, and so help
+me! him that's good enough to row my girl from open sea, gales poundin'
+and breakers showin' teeth across the bar to Maita Point, is good enough
+for use where seas is still and reefs ain't fashionable.'"
+
+Roscoe's face looked haggard as it now turned towards us. "If you will
+meet me," he said to the stranger, "to-morrow morning, in Mr. Devlin's
+office at Viking, I will hand you over Phil Boldrick's legacy."
+
+The man made as if he would shake hands with Roscoe, who appeared not to
+notice the motion, and then said: "I'll be there. You can bank on that;
+and, as we used to say down in the Spicy Isles, where neither of you
+have been, I s'pose, Talofa!"
+
+He swung away down the hillside.
+
+Roscoe turned to me. "You see, Marmion, all things circle to a centre.
+The trail seems long, but the fox gets killed an arm's length from his
+hole."
+
+"Not always. You take it too seriously," I said. "You are no fox."
+
+"That man will be in at the death," he persisted.
+
+"Nonsense, Roscoe. He does not know you. What has he to do with you?
+This is overwrought nerves. You are killing yourself with worry."
+
+He was motionless and silent for a minute. Then he said very quietly:
+"No, I do not think that I really worry now. I have known"--here he laid
+his hand upon my shoulder and his eyes had a shining look--"what it is
+to be happy, unspeakably happy, for a moment; and that stays with me. I
+am a coward no longer."
+
+He drew his finger tips slowly across his forehead. Then he continued:
+"To-morrow I shall be angry with myself, no doubt, for having that
+moment's joy, but I cannot feel so now. I shall probably condemn myself
+for cruel selfishness; but I have touched life's highest point this
+afternoon, Marmion."
+
+I drew his hand down from my shoulder and pressed it. It was cold.
+He withdrew his eyes from the mountain, and said: "I have had dreams,
+Marmion, and they are over. I lived in one: to expiate--to wipe out--a
+past, by spending my life for others. The expiation is not enough. I
+lived in another: to win a woman's love; and I have, and was caught
+up by it for a moment, and it was wonderful. But it is over now, quite
+over. ... And now for her sake renunciation must be made, before I have
+another dream--a long one, Marmion."
+
+I had forebodings, but I pulled myself together and said firmly:
+"Roscoe, these are fancies. Stop it, man. You are moody. Come, let us
+walk, and talk of other things."
+
+"No, we will not walk," he said, "but let us sit there on the coping
+and be quiet--quiet in that roar between the hills." Suddenly he swung
+round, caught me by the shoulders and held me gently so.
+
+"I have a pain at my heart, Marmion, as if I'd heard my death sentence;
+such as a soldier feels who knows that Death looks out at him from iron
+eyes. You smile: I suppose you think I am mad."
+
+I saw that it was best to let him speak his mind. So I answered: "Not
+mad, my friend. Say on what you like. Tell me all you feel. Only, for
+God's sake be brave, and don't give up until there's occasion. I am sure
+you exaggerate your danger, whatever it is."
+
+"Listen for a minute," said he: "I had a brother Edward, as good a lad
+as ever was; a boisterous, healthy fellow. We had an old nurse in our
+family who came from Irish hills, faithful and kind to us both. There
+came a change over Edward. He appeared not to take the same interest in
+his sports. One day he came to me, looking a bit pale, and said: 'Galt,
+I think I should like to study for the Church.' I laughed at it, yet
+it troubled me in a way, for I saw he was not well. I told Martha,
+the nurse. She shook her head sadly, and said: 'Edward is not for the
+Church, but you, my lad. He is for heaven.'
+
+"'For heaven, Martha?' laughed I.
+
+"'In truth for heaven,' she replied, 'and that soon. The look of his eye
+is doom. I've seen it since I swaddled him, and he will go suddenly.'
+
+"I was angry, and I said to her,--though she thought she spoke the
+truth,--'This is only Irish croaking. We'll have the banshee next.'
+
+"She got up from her chair and answered me solemnly: 'Galt Roscoe, I
+HAVE heard the banshee wail, and sorrow falls upon your home. And don't
+you be so hard with me that have loved you, and who suffers for the lad
+that often and often lay upon my breast. Don't be so hard; for your day
+of trouble comes too. You, not he, will be priest at the altar. Death
+will come to him like a swift and easy sleep; but you will feel its
+hand upon your heart and know its hate for many a day, and bear the slow
+pangs of it until your life is all crushed, and you go from the world
+alone, Love crying after you and not able to save you, not even the love
+of woman--weaker than death.... And, in my grave, when that day comes
+beside a great mountain in a strange land, I will weep and pray for you;
+for I was mother to you too, when yours left you alone bewhiles, never,
+in this world, to come back.'
+
+"And, Marmion, that night towards morning, as I lay in the same room
+with Edward, I heard his breath stop sharply. I jumped up and drew aside
+the curtains to let in the light, and then I knew that the old woman
+spoke true.... And now!... Well, I am like Hamlet--and I can say with
+him: 'But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart--but
+it is no matter!"'....
+
+I tried to laugh and talk away his brooding, but there was little
+use, his convictions were so strong. Besides, what can you do with a
+morbidness which has its origin in fateful circumstances?
+
+I devoutly wished that a telegram would come from Winnipeg to let me
+know if Boyd Madras, under his new name, could be found. I was a hunter
+on a faint trail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII. THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+
+When Phil's pal left us he went wandering down the hillside, talking
+to himself. Long afterwards he told me how he felt, and I reproduce his
+phrases as nearly as I can.
+
+"Knocked 'em, I guess," he said, "with that about Jo Brackenbury....
+Poor Jo! Stuck together, him and me did, after she got the steel in her
+heart."... He pulled himself together, shuddering.... "Went back on me,
+she did, and took up with a cursed swell, and got it cold--cold. And I?
+By Judas! I never was shut of that. I've known women, many of 'em, all
+countries, but she was different. I expect now, after all these years,
+that if I got my hand on the devil that done for her, I'd rattle
+his breath in his throat. There's things that clings. She clings, Jo
+Brackenbury clings, and Phil Boldrick clings; and they're gone, and I'm
+left to go it alone. To play the single hand--what!--by Jiminy!"
+
+He exclaimed thus on seeing two women approach from the direction of
+the valley. He stood still, mouth open, staring. They drew near, almost
+passed him. But one of them, struck by his intense gaze, suddenly turned
+and came towards him.
+
+"Miss Falchion! Miss Falchion!" he cried. Then, when she hesitated as if
+with an effort of memory, he added: "Don't you know me?"
+
+"Ah," she replied abruptly, "Sam Kilby! Are you Sam Kilby, Jo
+Brackenbury's friend, from Samoa?"
+
+"Yes, miss, I'm Jo Brackenbury's friend; and I've rowed you across the
+reefs with him more than once I guess so! But it's a long way from Apia
+to the Rockies, and it's funny to meet here."
+
+"When did you come here--and from where?"
+
+"I come to-day from the Hudson's Bay post at Danger Mountain. I'm Phil
+Boldrick's pal."
+
+"Ah," she said again, with a look in her eyes not pleasant to see, "and
+what brings you up here in the hills?" Hers was more than an ordinary
+curiosity.
+
+"I come to see the Padre who was with Phil--when he left. And the
+Padre's a fair square sort, as I reckon him, but melancholy, almighty
+melancholy."
+
+"Yes, melancholy, I suppose," she said, "and fair square, as you say.
+And what did you say and do?"
+
+"Why, we yarned about Phil, and where I'd get the legacy to-morrow; and
+I s'pose I had a strong breeze on the quarter, for I talked as free as
+if we'd grubbed out of the same dough-pan since we was kiddies."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes siree; I don't know how it was, but I got to reelin' off about
+Jo--queer, wasn't it? And I told 'em how he went down in the 'Fly
+Away', and how the lovely ladies--you remember how we used to call the
+whitecaps lovely ladies--fondled him out to sea and on to heaven."
+
+"And what did--the Padre--think of that?"
+
+"Well, he's got a heart, I should say, and that's why Phil cottoned to
+him, maybe,--for he looked as if he'd seen ghosts. I guess he'd never
+had a craft runnin' 'tween a sand-bar and a ragged coral bank; nor seen
+a girl like the 'Fly Away' take a buster in her teeth; nor a man-of-war
+come bundlin' down upon a nasty glacis, the captain on the bridge,
+engines goin' for all they're worth, every man below battened in,
+and every Jack above watchin' the fight between the engines and the
+hurricane.... Here she rolls six fathoms from the glacis that'll rip her
+copper garments off, and the quiverin' engines pull her back; and she
+swings and struggles and trembles between hell in the hurricane and God
+A'mighty in the engines; till at last she gets her nose at the neck of
+the open sea and crawls out safe and sound.... I guess he'd have more
+marble in his cheeks, if he saw likes o' that, Miss Falchion?"
+
+Kilby paused and wiped his forehead.
+
+She had listened calmly. She did not answer his question. She said:
+"Kilby, I am staying at the summer hotel up there. Will you call on
+me--let me see.... say, to-morrow afternoon?--Some one will tell you the
+way, if you do not know it.... Ask for MRS. Falchion, Kilby, not Miss
+Falchion.... You will come?"
+
+"Why, yes," he replied, "you can count on me; for I'd like to hear of
+things that happened after I left Apia--and how it is that you are Mrs.
+Falchion, for that's mighty queer."
+
+"You shall hear all that and more." She held out her hand to him and
+smiled. He took it, and she knew that now she was gathering up the
+strings of destiny.
+
+They parted.
+
+The two passed on, looking, in their cool elegance, as if life were the
+most pleasant thing; as though the very perfume of their garments would
+preserve them from that plague called trouble.
+
+"Justine," said Mrs. Falchion, "there is one law stranger than all; the
+law of coincidence. Perhaps the convenience of modern travel assists
+it, but fate is in it also. Events run in circles. People connected with
+them travel that way also. We pass and re-pass each other many times,
+but on different paths, until we come close and see each other face to
+face."
+
+She was speaking almost the very words which Roscoe had spoken to me.
+But perhaps there was nothing strange in that.
+
+"Yes, madame," replied Justine; "it is so, but there is a law greater
+than coincidence."
+
+"What, Justine?"
+
+"The law of love, which is just and merciful, and would give peace
+instead of trouble."
+
+Mrs. Falchion looked closely at Justine, and, after a moment, evidently
+satisfied, said: "What do you know of love?"
+
+Justine tried hard for composure, and answered gently: "I loved my
+brother Hector."
+
+"And did it make you just and merciful and--an angel?"
+
+"Madame, you could answer that better. But it has not made me be at war;
+it has made me patient."
+
+"Your love--for your brother--has made you that?" Again she looked
+keenly, but Justine now showed nothing but earnestness.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+Mrs. Falchion paused for a moment, and seemed intent on the beauty of
+the pine-belted hills, capped by snowy peaks, and wrapped in a most
+hearty yet delicate colour. The red of her parasol threw a warm soft
+ness upon her face. She spoke now without looking at Justine.
+
+"Justine, did you ever love any one besides your brother?--I mean
+another man."
+
+Justine was silent for a moment, and then she said: "Yes, once." She was
+looking at the hills now, and Mrs. Falchion at her.
+
+"And you were happy?" Here Mrs. Falchion abstractedly toyed with a piece
+of lace on Justine's arm. Such acts were unusual with her.
+
+"I was happy--in loving."
+
+"Why did you not marry?"
+
+"Madame--it was impossible--quite." This, with hesitation and the
+slightest accent of pain.
+
+"Why impossible? You have good looks, you were born a lady; you have a
+foolish heart--the fond are foolish." She watched the girl keenly,
+the hand ceased to toy with the lace, and caught the arm itself--"Why
+impossible?"
+
+"Madame, he did not love me, he never could."
+
+"Did he know of your love?"
+
+"Oh no, no!" This with trouble in her voice.
+
+"And you have never forgotten?"
+
+The catechism was merciless; but Mrs. Falchion was not merely malicious.
+She was inquiring of a thing infinitely important to her. She was
+searching the heart of another, not only because she was suspicious, but
+because she wanted to know herself better.
+
+"It is easy to remember."
+
+"Is it long since you saw him?"
+
+The question almost carried terror with it, for she was not quite sure
+why Mrs. Falchion questioned her. She lifted her eyes slowly, and there
+was in them anxiety and joy. "It seems," she said, "like years."
+
+"He loves some one else, perhaps?"
+
+"Yes, I think so, madame."
+
+"Did you hate her?"
+
+"Oh no; I am glad for him."
+
+Here Mrs. Falchion spoke sharply, almost bitterly. Even through her soft
+colour a hardness appeared. "You are glad for him? You would see another
+woman in his arms and not be full of anger?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"Justine, you are a fool."
+
+"Madame, there is no commandment against being a fool."
+
+"Oh, you make me angry with your meekness!" Here Mrs. Falchion caught a
+twig from a tree by her, snapped it in her fingers, and petulantly threw
+its pieces to the ground. "Suppose that the man had once loved you, and
+afterwards loved another--then again another?"
+
+"Madame, that would be my great misfortune, but it might be no wrong in
+him."
+
+"How not a wrong in him?"
+
+"It may have been my fault. There must be love in both--great love, for
+it to last."
+
+"And if the woman loved him not at all?"
+
+"Where, then, could be the wrong in him?"
+
+"And if he went from you,"--here her voice grew dry and her words were
+sharp,--"and took a woman from the depths of--oh, no matter what! and
+made her commit--crime--and was himself a criminal?"
+
+"It is horrible to think of; but I should ask myself how much I was to
+blame.... What would you ask yourself, madame?"
+
+"You have a strain of the angel in you, Justine. You would forgive Judas
+if he said, 'Peccavi.' I have a strain of Satan--it was born in me--I
+would say, You have sinned, now suffer."
+
+"God give you a softer heart," said Justine, with tender boldness and
+sincerity.
+
+At this Mrs. Falchion started slightly, and trouble covered her face.
+She assumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and
+unimportant.
+
+"There, that will do, thank you.... We have become serious and
+incomprehensible. Let us talk of other things. I want to be gay....
+Amuse me."
+
+Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed
+till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room. There she sat
+and thought, as she had never done in her life before. She thought upon
+everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on
+the 'Fulvia'; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders,
+when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers,
+that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart
+grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she
+determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius
+she would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil's Slide,
+and the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on
+that she paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by
+conflicting emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick's
+death and funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock
+him, and, instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all
+that Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with
+which Galt Roscoe was associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for
+a thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after
+year till now.
+
+Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she
+had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished
+her as a friend, and that on no man's breast had she ever laid her head
+in trust and love. She had been loved, but it had never brought her
+satisfaction. From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she
+thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy.
+And if she saw now in Justine's eyes a look of friendship, a note of
+personal allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more
+human.
+
+Her nature had been stirred. Her natural heart was struggling against
+her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth
+Devlin. Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him. Then, on a
+bitter day for him, he did a mad thing. The thing became--though neither
+of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to her, and
+this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the power to
+use. But all had not happened as she expected; for something called Love
+had been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being born, and sent,
+trembling for its timid life, into the world.
+
+She closed her eyes with weariness, and pressed her hands to her
+temples.
+
+She wondered why she could not be all evil or all good. She spoke and
+acted against Ruth Devlin, and yet she pitied her. She had the nettle to
+sting Roscoe to death, and yet she hesitated to use it. She had said to
+herself that she would wait till the happiest moment of his life, and
+then do so. Well, his happiest moment had come. Ruth Devlin's heart was
+all out, all blossomed--beside Mrs. Falchion's like some wild flower
+to the aloe.... Only now she had come to know that she had a heart.
+Something had chilled her at her birth, and when her mother died, a
+stranger's kiss closed up all the ways to love, and left her an icicle.
+She was twenty-eight years old, and yet she had never kissed a face
+in joy or to give joy. And now, when she had come to know herself, and
+understand what others understand when they are little children in
+their mother's arms, she had to bow to the spirit that denies. She drew
+herself up with a quiver of the body.
+
+"O God!" she said, "do I hate him or love him!" Her head dropped in her
+hands. She sat regardless of time, now scarcely stirring, desperately
+quiet. The door opened softly and Justine entered. "Madame," she said,
+"pardon me; I am so sorry, but Miss Devlin has come to see you, and I
+thought--"
+
+"You thought, Justine, that I would see her." There was unmistakable
+irony in her voice. "Very well.... Show her in."
+
+She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden,
+smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just
+falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold. She chanced
+to look down at them. A strange memory came to her: words that she
+had heard Roscoe read in church. The thing was almost grotesque in its
+association. "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who
+bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!"
+
+Ruth Devlin entered, saying, "I have come, to ask you if you will dine
+with us next Monday evening?"
+
+Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: "You see,
+though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;" and she added
+as neutrally and as lightly as she could--"Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion
+have been good enough to say that they will come. Of course, a dinner
+party as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a
+lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can--with the help
+of our friends."
+
+Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial
+matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip
+more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for. At last she
+said, in the course of the formal talk: "You have travelled much?"
+
+"Yes, that has been my lot," was the reply; and she leaned back in the
+gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.
+
+"I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean," said Ruth,
+"but here I remain--what shall I say?--a rustic in a bandbox, seeing the
+world through a pin-hole. That is the way my father puts it. Except, of
+course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful
+mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of
+companions."
+
+Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively.
+The notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their
+talk, varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet
+in singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words. It was almost
+sardonic in its monotonous persistence.
+
+"Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin," was the indolent reply.
+"Perhaps the simpler life is the happier. The bandbox is not the worst
+that may come to one--when one is born to it. I am not sure but it is
+the best. I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the
+world, the bandbox is permanently habitable again."
+
+Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.
+
+On the result of this duel, if Ruth Devlin but knew it, depends her own
+and another's happiness. It is not improbable, however, that something
+of this was in her mind. She shifted her chair so that her face was not
+so much in the light. But the belt of sunlight was broadening from Mrs.
+Falchion's feet to her dress.
+
+"You think not?" Ruth asked slowly.
+
+The reply was not important in tone. Mrs. Falchion had picked up a paper
+knife and was bending it to and fro between her fingers.
+
+"I think not. Particularly with a man, who is, we will say, by
+nature, adventurous and explorative. I think if, in some mad moment, I
+determined to write a novel, it should be of such a man. He flies wide
+and far; he sees all; he feeds on novelty; he passes from experience to
+experience--liberal pleasures of mind and sense all the way. Well, he
+tires of Egypt and its flesh-pots. He has seen as he hurried on--I hope
+I am not growing too picturesque--too much of women, too many men. He
+has been unwise--most men are. Perhaps he has been more than unwise; he
+has made a great mistake, a social mistake--or crime--less or more.
+If it is a small one, the remedy is not so difficult. Money, friends,
+adroitness, absence, long retirement, are enough. If a great one, and he
+is sensitive--and sated--he flies, he seeks seclusion. He is afflicted
+with remorse. He is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and
+unadorned life; he is satisfied with simple people. The snuff of the
+burnt candle of enjoyment he calls regret, repentance. He gives himself
+the delights of introspection, and wishes he were a child again--yes,
+indeed it is so, dear Miss Devlin."
+
+Ruth sat regarding her, her deep eyes glowing. Mrs. Falchion continued:
+"In short, he finds the bandbox, as you call it, suited to his
+renunciations. Its simplicities, which he thinks is regeneration, are
+only new sensations. But--you have often noticed the signification of
+a 'but,'" she added, smiling, tapping her cheek lightly with the ivory
+knife--"but the hour arrives when the bandbox becomes a prison, when
+the simple hours cloy. Then the ordinary incident is merely gauche, and
+expiation a bore.
+
+"I see by your face that you understand quite what I mean.... Well,
+these things occasionally happen. The great mistake follows the man,
+and, by a greater misery, breaks the misery of the bandbox; or the man
+himself, hating his captivity, becomes reckless, does some mad thing,
+and has a miserable end. Or again, some one who holds the key to his
+mistake comes in from the world he has left, and considers--considers,
+you understand!--whether to leave him to work out his servitude, or,
+mercifully--if he is not altogether blind--permit him the means of
+escape to his old world, to the life to which he was born--away from
+the bandbox and all therein.... I hope I have not tired you--I am sure I
+have."
+
+Ruth saw the full meaning of Mrs. Falchion's words. She realised
+that her happiness, his happiness--everything--was at stake. All Mrs.
+Falchion's old self was battling with her new self. She had determined
+to abide by the result of this meeting. She had spoken in a half gay
+tone, but her words were not everything; the woman herself was there,
+speaking in every feature and glance. Ruth had listened with an
+occasional change of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she
+seemed suddenly to have grown. But her heart was sick and miserable. How
+could it be otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in a
+kind, of allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance? But she
+detected, too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion's lips,
+a kind of trouble in the face. She noticed it at first vaguely as she
+listened to the music in the other room; but at length she interpreted
+it aright, and she did not despair. She did not then follow her first
+impulse to show that she saw the real meaning of that speech, and rise
+and say, "You are insulting," and bid her good-day.
+
+After all, where was the ground for the charge of insult? The words had
+been spoken impersonally. So, after a moment, she said, as she drew a
+glove from a hand slightly trembling: "And you honestly think it is the
+case: that one having lived such a life as you describe so unusually,
+would never be satisfied with a simple life?"
+
+"My dear, never--not such a man as I describe. I know the world."
+
+"But suppose not quite such an one; suppose one that had not been
+so--intense; so much the social gladiator; who had business of life as
+well,"--here the girl grew pale, for this was a kind of talk unfamiliar
+and painful to her, but to be endured for her cause,--"as well as
+'the flesh-pots of Egypt;' who had made no wicked mistakes--would he
+necessarily end as you say?"
+
+"I am speaking of the kind of man who had made such mistakes, and he
+would end as I say. Few men, if any, would leave the world for--the
+bandbox, shall I still say? without having a Nemesis."
+
+"But the Nemesis need not, as you say yourself, be inevitable.
+The person who holds the key of his life, the impersonation of his
+mistake--"
+
+"His CRIMINAL mistake," Mrs. Falchion interrupted, her hand with the
+ivory knife now moveless in that belt of sunlight across her knees.
+
+"His criminal mistake," Ruth repeated, wincing--"might not it become
+changed into mercy, and the man be safe?"
+
+"Safe? Perhaps. But he would tire of the pin-hole just the same.... My
+dear, you do not know life."
+
+"But, Mrs. Falchion," said the girl, now very bravely, "I know the
+crude elements of justice. That is one plain thing taught here in the
+mountains. We have swift reward and punishment--no hateful things called
+Nemesis. The meanest wretch here in the West, if he has a quarrel,
+avenges himself openly and at once. Actions are rough and ready,
+perhaps, but that is our simple way. Hate is manly--and womanly
+too--when it is open and brave. But when it haunts and shadows, it is
+not understood here."
+
+Mrs. Falchion sat during this speech, the fingers of one hand idly
+drumming the arm of her chair, as idly as when on board the 'Fulvia' she
+listened to me telling that story of Anson and his wife. Outwardly her
+coolness was remarkable. But she was really admiring, and amazed at
+Ruth's adroitness and courage. She appreciated fully the skilful duel
+that had kept things on the surface, and had committed neither of
+them to anything personal. It was a battle--the tragical battle of a
+drawing-room.
+
+When Ruth had ended, she said slowly: "You speak very earnestly. You do
+your mountains justice; but each world has its code. It is good for some
+men to be followed by a slow hatred--it all depends on themselves. There
+are some who wish to meet their fate and its worst, and others who would
+forget it. The latter are in the most danger always."
+
+Ruth rose.
+
+She stepped forward slightly, so that her feet also were within
+the sunlight. The other saw this; it appeared to interest her. Ruth
+looked--as such a girl can look--with incredible sincerity into Mrs.
+Falchion's eyes, and said: "Oh, if I knew such a man, I would be
+sorry--sorry for him; and if I also knew that his was only a mistake and
+not a crime, or, if the crime itself had been repented of, and atonement
+made, I would beg some one--some one better than I--to pray for him. And
+I would go to the person who had his life and career at disposal, and
+would say to her, if it were a woman, oh, remember that it is not he
+alone who would suffer! I would beg that woman--if it were a woman--to
+be merciful, as she one day must ask for mercy."
+
+The girl as she stood there, all pale, yet glowing with the white light
+of her pain, was beautiful, noble, compelling. Mrs. Falchion now rose
+also. She was altogether in the sunlight now. From the piano in the
+next room came a quick change of accompaniment, and a voice was heard
+singing, as if to the singer's self, 'Il balen del suo sorris'. It is
+hard to tell how far such little incidents affected her in what she
+did that afternoon; but they had their influence. She said: "You are
+altruistic--or are you selfish, or both?... And should the woman--if it
+were a woman--yield, and spare the man, what would you do?"
+
+"I would say that she had been merciful and kind, and that one in this
+world would pray for her when she needed prayers most."
+
+"You mean when she was old,"--Mrs. Falchion shrank a little at the sound
+of her own words. Now her careless abandon was gone; she seemed to be
+following her emotions. "When she was old," she continued, "and came
+to die? It is horrible to grow old, except one has been a saint--and
+a mother.... And even then--have you ever seen them, the women of
+that Egypt of which we spoke--powdered, smirking over their champagne,
+because they feel for an instant a false pulse of their past?--See how
+eloquent your mountains make me!--I think that would make one hard and
+cruel; and one would need the prayers of a churchful of good women, even
+as good--as you."
+
+She could not resist a touch of irony in the last words, and Ruth, who
+had been ready to take her hand impulsively, was stung. But she
+replied nothing; and the other, after waiting, added, with a sudden
+and wonderful kindness: "I say what is quite true. Women might dislike
+you--many of them would--though you could not understand why; but you
+are good, and that, I suppose, is the best thing in the world. Yes, you
+are good," she said musingly, and then she leaned forward and quickly
+kissed the girl's cheek. "Good-bye," she said, and then she turned her
+head resolutely away.
+
+They stood there both in the sunlight, both very quiet, but their hearts
+were throbbing with new sensations. Ruth knew that she had conquered,
+and, with her eyes all tearful, she looked steadily, yearningly at the
+woman before her; but she knew it was better she should say little now,
+and, with a motion of the hand in good-bye,--she could do no more,--she
+slowly went to the door. There she paused and looked back, but the other
+was still turned away.
+
+For a minute Mrs. Falchion stood looking at the door through which the
+girl had passed, then she caught close the curtains of the window, and
+threw herself upon the sofa with a sobbing laugh.
+
+"To her--I played the game of mercy to her!" she cried. "And she has his
+love, the love which I rejected once, and which I want now--to my shame!
+A hateful and terrible love. I, who ought to say to him, as I so long
+determined: 'You shall be destroyed. You killed my sister, poor Alo;
+if not with a knife yourself you killed her heart, and that is just the
+same.' I never knew until now what a heart is when killed."
+
+She caught her breast as though it hurt her, and, after a moment,
+continued: "Do hearts always ache so when they love? I was the wife of a
+good man oh! he WAS a good man, who sinned for me. I see it now!--and I
+let him die--die alone!" She shuddered. "Oh, now I see, and I know
+what love such as his can be! I am punished--punished! for my love is
+impossible, horrible."
+
+There was a long silence, in which she sat looking at the floor, her
+face all grey with pain. At last the door of the room softly opened, and
+Justine entered.
+
+"May I come in, madame?" she said.
+
+"Yes, come, Justine." The voice was subdued, and there was in it what
+drew the girl swiftly to the side of Mrs. Falchion. She spoke no word,
+but gently undid the other's hair, and smoothed and brushed it softly.
+
+At last Mrs. Falchion said: "Justine, on Monday we will leave here."
+
+The girl was surprised, but she replied without comment: "Yes, madame;
+where do we go?"
+
+There was a pause; then: "I do not know. I want to go where I shall get
+rested. A village in Italy or--" she paused.
+
+"Or France, madame?" Justine was eager.
+
+Mrs. Falchion made a gesture of helplessness. "Yes, France will do....
+The way around the world is long, and I am tired." Minutes passed, and
+then she slowly said: "Justine, we will go to-morrow night."
+
+"Yes, madame, to-morrow night--and not next Monday."
+
+There was a strange only half-veiled melancholy in Mrs. Falchion's next
+words: "Do you think, Justine, that I could be happy anywhere?"
+
+"I think anywhere but here, madame."
+
+Mrs. Falchion rose to a sitting posture, and looked at the girl fixedly,
+almost fiercely. A crisis was at hand. The pity, gentleness, and honest
+solicitude of Justine's face conquered her, and her look changed to one
+of understanding and longing for companionship: sorrow swiftly welded
+their friendship.
+
+Before Mrs. Falchion slept that night, she said again: "We will leave
+here to-morrow, Justine, for ever."
+
+And Justine replied: "Yes, madame, for ever."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX. THE SENTENCE
+
+The next morning Roscoe was quiet and calm, but he looked ten years
+older than when I had first seen him. After breakfast he said to me: "I
+have to go to the valley to pay Phil Boldrick's friend the money, and to
+see Mr. Devlin. I shall be back, perhaps, by lunchtime. Will you go with
+me, or stay here?"
+
+"I shall try to get some fishing this morning, I fancy," I said.
+"And possibly I shall idle a good deal, for my time with you here is
+shortening, and I want to have a great store of laziness behind me for
+memory, when I've got my nose to the grindstone."
+
+He turned to the door, and said: "Marmion, I wish you weren't going. I
+wish that we might be comrades under the same roof till--" He paused and
+smiled strangely.
+
+"Till the finish," I added, "when we should amble grey-headed, sans
+everything, out of the mad old world? I imagine Miss Belle Treherne
+would scarcely fancy that.... Still, we can be friends just the same.
+Our wives won't object to an occasional bout of loafing together, will
+they?"
+
+I was determined not to take him too seriously. He said nothing, and in
+a moment he was gone.
+
+I passed the morning idly enough, yet thinking, too, very much about
+my friend. I was anxiously hoping that the telegram from Winnipeg would
+come. About noon it came. It was not known quite in what part of the
+North-west, Madras (under his new name) was, for the corps of mounted
+police had been changed about recently. My letter had, however, been
+forwarded into the wilds.
+
+I saw no immediate way but to go to Mrs. Falchion and make a bold bid
+for his peace. I had promised Madras never to let her know that he was
+alive, but I would break the promise if Madras himself did not come.
+After considerable hesitation I started. It must be remembered that the
+events of the preceding chapter were only known to me afterwards.
+
+Justine Caron was passing through the hall of the hotel when I arrived.
+After greetings, she said that Mrs. Falchion might see me, but that they
+were very busy; they were leaving in the evening for the coast. Here
+was a pleasant revelation! I was so confused with delight at the
+information, that I could think of nothing more sensible to say than
+that the unexpected always happens. By this time we were within Mrs.
+Falchion's sitting-room. And to my remark, Justine replied "Yes, it is
+so. One has to reckon most with the accidents of life. The expected is
+either pleasant or unpleasant; there is no middle place."
+
+"You are growing philosophic," said I playfully. "Monsieur," she said
+gravely, "I hope as I live and travel, I grow a little wiser." Still she
+lingered, her hand upon the door.
+
+"I had thought that you were always wise."
+
+"Oh no, no! How can you say so? I have been very foolish sometimes."...
+She came back towards me. "If I am wiser I am also happier," she added.
+
+In that moment we understood each other; that is, I read how unselfish
+this girl could be, and she knew thoroughly the source of my anxiety,
+and was glad that she could remove it.
+
+"I would not speak to any one save you," she said, "but do you not also
+think that it is good we go?"
+
+"I have been thinking so, but I hesitated to say so," was my reply.
+
+"You need not hesitate," she said earnestly. "We have both understood,
+and I know that you are to be trusted."
+
+"Not always," I said, remembering that one experience of mine with
+Mrs. Falchion on the 'Fulvia'. Holding the back of a chair, and looking
+earnestly at me, she continued: "Once, on the vessel, you remember, in
+a hint so very little, I made it appear that madame was selfish.... I
+am sorry. Her heart was asleep. Now, it is awake. She is unselfish. The
+accident of our going away is hers. She goes to leave peace behind." "I
+am most glad," said I. "And you think there will be peace?"
+
+"Surely, since this has come, that will come also."
+
+"And you--Mademoiselle?" I should not have asked that question had I
+known more of the world. It was tactless and unkind.
+
+"For me it is no matter at all. I do not come in anywhere. As I said, I
+am happy."
+
+And turning quickly, yet not so quickly but that I saw her cheeks were
+flushed, she passed out of the room. In a moment Mrs. Falchion entered.
+There was something new in her carriage, in her person. She came towards
+me, held out her hand, and said, with the same old half-quizzical tone:
+"Have you, with your unerring instinct, guessed that I was leaving, and
+so come to say good-bye?"
+
+"You credit me too highly. No, I came to see you because I had an
+inclination. I did not guess that you were going until Miss Caron told
+me."
+
+"An inclination to see me is not your usual instinct, is it? Was it some
+special impulse, based on a scientific calculation--at which, I suppose,
+you are an adeptor curiosity? Or had it a purpose? Or were you bored,
+and therefore sought the most startling experience you could conceive?"
+She deftly rearranged some flowers in a jar.
+
+"I can plead innocence of all directly; I am guilty of all indirectly:
+I was impelled to come. I reasoned--if that is scientific--on what I
+should say if I did come, knowing how inclined I was to--"
+
+"To get beyond my depth," she interrupted, and she motioned me to a
+chair.
+
+"Well, let it be so," said I. "I was curious to know what kept you in
+this sylvan, and I fear, to you, half-barbaric spot. I was bored with
+myself; and I had some purpose in coming, or I should not have had the
+impulse."
+
+She was leaning back in her chair easily, not languidly. She seemed
+reposeful, yet alert.
+
+"How wonderfully you talk!" she said, with good-natured mockery. "You
+are scientifically frank. You were bored with yourself.--Then there
+is some hope for your future wife.... We have had many talks in our
+acquaintance, Dr. Marmion, but none so interesting as this promises to
+be. But now tell me what your purpose was in coming. 'Purpose' seems
+portentous, but quite in keeping."
+
+I noticed here the familiar, almost imperceptible click of the small
+white teeth.
+
+Was I so glad she was going that I was playful, elated? "My purpose,"
+said I, "has no point now; for even if I were to propose to amuse
+you--I believe that was the old formula--by an idle day somewhere, by an
+excursion, an--"
+
+"An autobiography," she broke in soothingly.
+
+"Or an autobiography," I repeated stolidly, "you would not, I fancy, be
+prepared to accept my services. There would be no chance--now that you
+are going away--for me to play the harlequin--"
+
+"Whose office you could do pleasantly if it suited you--these adaptable
+natures!"
+
+"Quite so. But it is all futile now, as I say."
+
+"Yes, you mentioned that before.--Well?"
+
+"It is well," I replied, dropping into a more meaning tone.
+
+"You say it patriarchally, but yet flatteringly." Here she casually
+offered me a flower. I mechanically placed it in my buttonhole. She
+seemed delighted at confusing me. But I kept on firmly.
+
+"I do not think," I rejoined gravely now, "that there need be any
+flattery between us."
+
+"Why?--We are not married."
+
+"That is as radically true as it is epigrammatic," blurted I.
+
+"And truth is more than epigram?"
+
+"One should delight in truth; I do delight in epigram; there seems
+little chance for choice here."
+
+It seemed to me that I had said quite what I wished there, but she only
+looked at me enigmatically.
+
+She arranged a flower in her dress as she almost idly replied, though
+she did not look me full in the face as she had done before: "Well,
+then, let me add to your present delight by saying that you may go play
+till doomsday, Dr. Marmion. Your work is done."
+
+"I do not understand."
+
+Her eyes were on me now with the directness she could so well use at
+need.
+
+"I did not suppose you would, despite your many lessons at my hands. You
+have been altruistic, Dr. Marmion; I fear critical people would say that
+you meddled. I shall only say that you are inquiring--scientific,
+or feminine--what you please!... You can now yield up your portfolio
+of--foreign affairs--of war--shall I say? and retire into sedative
+habitations, which, believe me, you become best.... What concerns
+me need concern you no longer. The enemy retreats. She offers
+truce--without conditions. She retires.... Is that enough for even you,
+Professor Marmion?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said, finding it impossible to understand why she
+had so suddenly determined to go away (for I did not know all the truth
+until afterwards--some of it long afterwards), "it is more than I dared
+to hope for, though less, I know, than you have heart to do if you
+willed so. I know that you hold some power over my friend."
+
+"Do not think," she said, "that you have had the least influence. What
+you might think, or may have intended to do, has not moved me in the
+least. I have had wrongs that you do not know. I have changed--that is
+all. I admit I intended to do Galt Roscoe harm.
+
+"I thought he deserved it. That is over. After to-night, it is not
+probable that we shall meet again. I hope that we shall not; as,
+doubtless, is your own mind."
+
+She kept looking at me with that new deep look which I had seen when she
+first entered the room.
+
+I was moved, and I saw that just at the last she had spoken under
+considerable strain. "Mrs. Falchion," said I, "I have THOUGHT harder
+things of you than I ever SAID to any one. Pray believe that, and
+believe, also, that I never tried to injure you. For the rest, I can
+make no complaint. You do not like me. I liked you once, and do now,
+when you do not depreciate yourself of purpose.... Pardon me, but I say
+this very humbly too.... I suppose I always shall like you, in spite of
+myself. You are one of the most gifted and fascinating women that I ever
+met. I have been anxious for my friend. I was concerned to make peace
+between you and your husband--"
+
+"The man who WAS my husband," she interrupted musingly.
+
+"Your husband--whom you so cruelly treated. But I confess I have found
+it impossible to withhold admiration of you."
+
+For a long time she did not reply, but she never took her eyes off my
+face, as she leaned slightly forward. Then at last she spoke more gently
+than I had ever heard her, and a glow came upon her face.
+
+"I am only human. You have me at advantage. What woman could reply
+unkindly to a speech like that? I admit I thought you held me utterly
+bad and heartless, and it made me bitter.... I had no heart--once. I had
+only a wrong, an injury, which was in my mind; not mine, but another's,
+and yet mine. Then strange things occurred.... At last I relented. I
+saw that I had better go. Yesterday I saw that; and I am going--that is
+all.... I wished to keep the edge of my intercourse with you sharp
+and uncompanionable to the end; but you have forced me at my weakest
+point...." Here she smiled somewhat painfully.... "Believe me, that is
+the way to turn a woman's weapon upon herself. You have learned much
+since we first met.... Here is my hand in friendliness, if you care to
+take it; and in good-bye, should we not meet again more formally before
+I go."
+
+"I wish now that your husband, Boyd Madras, were here," I said.
+
+She answered nothing, but she did not resent it, only shuddered a
+little.
+
+Our hands grasped silently. I was too choked to speak, and I left her.
+At that moment she blinded me to all her faults. She was a wonderful
+woman.
+
+       .....................
+
+Galt Roscoe had walked slowly along the forest-road towards the valley,
+his mind in that state of calm which, in some, might be thought numbness
+of sensation, in others fortitude--the prerogative of despair. He came
+to the point of land jutting out over the valley, where he had stood
+with Mrs. Falchion, Justine, and myself, on the morning of Phil
+Boldrick's death.
+
+He looked for a long time, and then, slowly descending the hillside,
+made his way to Mr. Devlin's office. He found Phil's pal awaiting him
+there. After a few preliminaries, the money was paid over, and Kilby
+said:
+
+"I've been to see his camping-ground. It's right enough. Viking has done
+it noble.... Now, here's what I'm goin' to do: I'm goin' to open bottles
+for all that'll drink success to Viking. A place that's stood by my
+pal, I stand by--but not with his money, mind you! No, that goes to you,
+Padre, for hospital purposes. My gift an' his.... So, sit down and write
+a receipt, or whatever it's called, accordin' to Hoyle, and you'll do me
+proud."
+
+Roscoe did as he requested, and handed the money over to Mr. Devlin for
+safe keeping, remarking, at the same time, that the matter should be
+announced on a bulletin outside the office at once.
+
+As Kilby stood chewing the end of a cigar and listening to the brief
+conversation between Roscoe and Mr. Devlin, perplexity crossed his face.
+He said, as Roscoe turned round: "There's something catchy about your
+voice, Padre. I don't know what; but it's familiar like. You never was
+on the Panama level, of course?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Nor in Australia?"
+
+"Yes, in 1876."
+
+"I wasn't there then."
+
+Roscoe grew a shade paler, but he was firm and composed. He was
+determined to answer truthfully any question that was asked him,
+wherever it might lead.
+
+"Nor in Samoa?"
+
+There was the slightest pause, and then the reply came:
+
+"Yes, in Samoa."
+
+"Not a missionary, by gracious! Not a mickonaree in Samoa?"
+
+"No." He said nothing further. He did not feel bound to incriminate
+himself.
+
+"No? Well, you wasn't a beachcomber, nor trader, I'll swear. Was you
+there in the last half of the Seventies? That's when I was there."
+
+"Yes." The reply was quiet.
+
+"By Jingo!" The man's face was puzzled. He was about to speak again; but
+at that moment two river-drivers--boon companions, who had been hanging
+about the door--urged him to come to the tavern. This distracted him. He
+laughed, and said that he was coming, and then again, though with less
+persistency, questioned Roscoe.. "You don't remember me, I suppose?"
+
+"No, I never saw you, so far as I know, until yesterday."
+
+"No? Still, I've heard your voice. It keeps swingin' in my ears; and I
+can't remember.... I can't remember!... But we'll have a spin about it
+again, Padre." He turned to the impatient men. "All right, bully-boys,
+I'm comin'."
+
+At the door he turned and looked again at Roscoe with a sharp,
+half-amused scrutiny, then the two parted. Kilby kept his word. He was
+liberal to Viking; and Phil's memory was drunk, not in silence, many
+times that day. So that when, in the afternoon, he made up his mind
+to keep his engagement with Mrs. Falchion, and left the valley for the
+hills, he was not entirely sober. But he was apparently good-natured. As
+he idled along he talked to himself, and finally broke out into singing:
+
+       "'Then swing the long boat down the drink,
+        For the lads as pipe to go;
+        But I sink when the 'Lovely Jane' does sink,
+        To the mermaids down below.'
+
+       "'The long boat bides on its strings,' says we,
+        'An' we bides where the long boat bides;
+        An' we'll bluff this equatorial sea,
+        Or swallow its hurricane tides.'
+
+       "But the 'Lovely Jane' she didn't go down,
+        An' she anchored at the Spicy Isles;
+        An' she sailed again to Wellington Town--
+        A matter of a thousand miles."
+
+It will be remembered that this was part of the song sung by Galt Roscoe
+on the Whi-Whi River, the day we rescued Mrs. Falchion and Justine
+Caron. Kilby sang the whole song over to himself until he reached a
+point overlooking the valley. Then he stood silent for a time, his
+glance upon the town. The walk had sobered him a little. "Phil, old
+pal," he said at last, "you ain't got the taste of raw whiskey with you
+now. When a man loses a pal he loses a grip on the world equal to all
+that pal's grip was worth.... I'm drunk, and Phil's down there among the
+worms--among the worms!... Ah!" he added in disgust, and, dashing his
+hand across his eyes, struck off into the woods again, making his way
+to the summer hotel, where he had promised to meet Mrs. Falchion. He
+inquired for her, creating some astonishment by his uncouth appearance
+and unsteady manner.
+
+He learned from Justine that Mrs. Falchion had gone to see Roscoe, and
+that he would probably meet her if he went that way. This he did. He was
+just about to issue into a partly open space by a ravine near the
+house, when he heard voices, and his own name mentioned. He stilled and
+listened.
+
+"Yes, Galt Roscoe," said a voice, "Sam Kilby is the man that loved
+Alo--loved her not as you did. He would have given her a home, have made
+her happy, perhaps. You, when Kilby was away, married her--in native
+fashion--which is no marriage--and KILLED her."
+
+"No, no, I did not kill her--that is not so. As God is my Judge, that is
+not so."
+
+"You did not kill her with the knife?... Well, I will be honest now, and
+say that I believe that, whatever I may have hinted or said before. But
+you killed her just the same when you left her."
+
+"Mercy Falchion," he said desperately, "I will not try to palliate my
+sin. But still I must set myself right with you in so far as I can. The
+very night Alo killed herself I had made up my mind to leave the navy. I
+was going to send in my papers, and come back to Apia, and marry her as
+Englishmen are married. While I remained in the navy I could not, as
+you know, marry her. It would be impossible to an English officer. I
+intended to come back and be regularly married to her."
+
+"You say that now," was the cold reply.
+
+"But it is the truth, the truth indeed. Nothing that you might say could
+make me despise myself more than I do; but I have told you all, as I
+shall have to tell it one day before a just God. You have spared me: He
+will not."
+
+"Gait Roscoe," she replied, "I am not merciful, nor am I just. I
+intended to injure you, though you will remember I saved your life that
+night by giving you a boat for escape across the bay to the 'Porcupine',
+which was then under way. The band on board, you also remember, was
+playing the music of La Grande Duchesse. You fired on the natives who
+followed. Well, Sam Kilby was with them. Your brother officers did
+not know the cause of the trouble. It was not known to any one in Apia
+exactly who it was that Kilby and the natives had tracked from Alo's
+hut."
+
+He drew his hand across his forehead dazedly.
+
+"Oh, yes I remember!" he said. "I wish I had faced the matter there and
+then. It would have been better."
+
+"I doubt that," she replied. "The natives who saw you coming from
+Alo's hut did not know you. You wisely came straight to the Consul's
+office--my father's house. And I helped you, though Alo, half-caste Alo,
+was--my sister!"
+
+Roscoe started back. "Alo--your--sister!" he exclaimed in horror.
+
+"Yes, though I did not know it till afterwards, not till just before
+my father died. Alo's father was my father; and her mother had been
+honestly married to my father by a missionary; though for my sake it
+had never been made known. You remember, also, that you carried on your
+relations with Alo secretly, and my father never suspected it was you."
+
+"Your sister!" Roscoe was white and sick.
+
+"Yes. And now you understand my reason for wishing you ill, and for
+hating you to the end."
+
+"Yes," he said despairingly, "I see."
+
+She was determined to preserve before him the outer coldness of her
+nature to the last.
+
+"Let us reckon together," she said. "I helped to--in fact, I saved your
+life at Apia. You helped to save my life at the Devil's Slide. That is
+balanced. You did me--the honour to say that you loved me once. Well,
+one of my race loved you. That is balanced also. My sister's death
+came through you. There is no balance to that. What shall balance Alo's
+death? ... I leave you to think that over. It is worth thinking about.
+I shall keep your secret, too. Kilby does not know you. I doubt that he
+ever saw you, though, as I said, he followed you with the natives that
+night in Apia. He was to come to see me to-day. I think I intended to
+tell him all, and shift--the duty--of punishment on his shoulders, which
+I do not doubt he would fulfil. But he shall not know. Do not ask why. I
+have changed my mind, that is all. But still the account remains a
+long one. You will have your lifetime to reckon with it, free from any
+interference on my part; for, if I can help it, we shall never meet
+again in this world--never.... And now, good-bye."
+
+Without a gesture of farewell she turned and left him standing there, in
+misery and bitterness, but in a thankfulness too, more for Ruth's sake
+than his own. He raised his arms with a despairing motion, then let them
+drop heavily to his side....
+
+And then two strong hands caught his throat, a body pressed hard against
+him, and he was borne backward--backward--to the cliff!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX. AFTER THE STORM
+
+I was sitting on the verandah, writing a letter to Belle Treherne. The
+substantial peace of a mountain evening was on me. The air was clear,
+and full of the scent of the pines and cedars, and the rumble of the
+rapids came musically down the canon. I lifted my head and saw an eagle
+sailing away to the snow-topped peak of Trinity, and then turned to
+watch the orioles in the trees. The hour was delightful. It made me
+feel how grave mere living is, how noble even the meanest of us becomes
+sometimes--in those big moments when we think the world was built for
+us. It is half egotism, half divinity; but why quarrel with it?
+
+I was young, ambitious; and Love and I were at that moment the only
+figures in the universe really deserving attention! I looked on down
+a lane of cedars before me, seeing in imagination a long procession of
+pleasant things; of--As I looked, another procession moved through the
+creatures of my dreams, so that they shrank away timidly, then utterly,
+and this new procession came on and on, until--I suddenly rose, and
+started forward fearfully, to see--unhappy reality!--the body of Galt
+Roscoe carried towards me.
+
+Then a cold wind seemed to blow from the glacier above and killed all
+the summer. A man whispered to me: "We found him at the bottom of the
+ravine yonder. He'd fallen over, I suppose."
+
+I felt his heart. "He is not dead, thank God!" I said.
+
+"No, sir," said the other, "but he's all smashed." They brought him
+in and laid him on his bed. I sent one of the party for the doctor at
+Viking, and myself set to work, with what appliances I had, to deal with
+the dreadful injuries. When the doctor came, together we made him into
+the semblance of a man again. His face was but slightly injured, though
+his head had received severe hurts. I think that I alone saw the marks
+on his throat; and I hid them. I guessed the cause, but held my peace.
+
+I had sent round at once to James Devlin (but asked him not to come till
+morning), and also to Mrs. Falchion; but I begged her not to come at
+all. I might have spared her that; for, as I afterwards knew, she had
+no intention of coming. She had learned of the accident on her way to
+Viking, and had turned back; but only to wait and know the worst or the
+best.
+
+About midnight I was left alone with Roscoe. Once, earlier in the
+evening, he had recognised me and smiled faintly, but I had shaken
+my head, and he had said nothing. Now, however, he was looking at me
+earnestly. I did not speak. What he had to tell me was best told in his
+own time.
+
+At last he said faintly: "Marmion, shall I die soon?"
+
+I knew that frankness was best, and I replied: "I cannot tell, Roscoe.
+There is a chance of your living."
+
+He moved his head sadly. "A very faint chance?"
+
+"Yes, a faint one, but--"
+
+"Yes? 'But'?" He looked at me as though he wished it over.
+
+"But it rests with you whether the chance is worth anything. If you are
+content to die, it is gone."
+
+"I am content to die," he replied.
+
+"And there," said I, "you are wrong and selfish. You have Ruth to live
+for. Besides, if you are given the chance, you commit suicide if you do
+not take it."
+
+There was a long pause, and then he said: "You are right; I will live if
+I can, Marmion."
+
+"And now YOU are right." I nodded soothingly to him, and then asked him
+to talk no more; for I knew that fever would soon come on.
+
+He lay for a moment silent, but at length whispered: "Did you know
+it was not a fall I had?" He raised his chin and stretched his throat
+slightly, with a kind of trembling.
+
+"I thought it was not a fall," I replied.
+
+"It was Phil's pal--Kilby."
+
+"I thought that."
+
+"How could you--think it? Did--others--think so?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"No, not others; I alone. They thought it accident; they could have no
+ground for suspicion. But I had; and, besides, there were marks on your
+throat."
+
+"Nothing must happen to him, you understand. He had been drinking,
+and--and he was justified. I wronged him in Samoa, him and Mrs.
+Falchion."
+
+I nodded and put my fingers on my lips.
+
+Again there was silence. I sat and watched him, his eyes closed, his
+body was motionless. He slept for hours so, and then he waked rather
+sharply, and said half deliriously: "I could have dragged him with me,
+Marmion."
+
+"But you did not. Yes, I understand. Go to sleep again, Roscoe."
+
+Later on the fever came, and he moaned and moved his head about his
+pillow. He could not move his body--it was too much injured.
+
+There was a source of fear in Kilby. Would he recklessly announce what
+he had done, and the cause of it? After thinking it over and over, I
+concluded that he would not disclose his crimes. My conclusions were
+right, as after events showed.
+
+As for Roscoe, I feared that if he lived he must go through life maimed.
+He had a private income; therefore if he determined to work no more in
+the ministry, he would, at least, have the comforts of life.
+
+Ruth Devlin came. I went to Roscoe and told him that she wished to
+see him. He smiled sorrowfully and said: "To what end, Marmion? I am a
+drifting wreck. It will only shock her." I think he thought she would
+not love him now if he lived--a crippled man.
+
+"But is this noble? Is it just to her?" said I.
+
+After a long time he answered: "You are right again, quite right. I am
+selfish. When one is shaking between life and death, one thinks most of
+one's self."
+
+"She will help to bring you back from those places, Roscoe."
+
+"If I am delirious ever, do not let her come, will you, Marmion? Promise
+me that." I promised.
+
+I went to her. She was very calm and womanly. She entered the room, went
+quietly to his bedside, and, sitting down, took his hand. Her smile was
+pitiful and anxious, but her words were brave.
+
+"My dearest," she said, "I am so sorry. But you will soon be well, so we
+must be as patient and cheerful as we can."
+
+His eyes answered, but he did not speak. She leaned over and kissed his
+cheek. Then he said: "I hope I may get well."
+
+"This was the shadow over you," she ventured. "This was your
+presentiment of trouble--this accident."
+
+"Yes, this was the shadow."
+
+Some sharp thought seemed to move her, for her eyes grew suddenly hard,
+and she stooped and whispered: "Was SHE there--when--it happened, Galt?"
+
+He shrank from the question, but he said immediately: "No, she was not
+there."
+
+"I am glad," she added, "that it was only an accident."
+
+Her eyes grew clear of their momentary hardness. There is nothing in
+life like the anger of one woman against another concerning a man.
+
+Justine Caron came to the house, pale and anxious, to inquire. Mrs.
+Falchion, she said, was not going away until she knew how Mr. Roscoe's
+illness would turn.
+
+"Miss Caron," I said to her, "do you not think it better that she should
+go?"
+
+"Yes, for him; but she grieves now."
+
+"For him?"
+
+"Not alone for him," was the reply. There was a pause, and then she
+continued: "Madame told me to say to you that she did not wish Mr.
+Roscoe to know that she was still here."
+
+I assured her that I understood, and then she added mournfully: "I
+cannot help you now, monsieur, as I did on board the 'Fulvia'. But he
+will be better cared for in Miss Devlin's hands, the poor lady!... Do
+you think that he will live?"
+
+"I hope so. I am not sure."
+
+Her eyes went to tears; and then I tried to speak more encouragingly.
+
+All day people came to inquire, chief among them Mr. Devlin, whose big
+heart split itself in humanity and compassion. "The price of the big
+mill for the guarantee of his life!" he said over and over again. "We
+can't afford to let him go."
+
+Although I should have been on my way back to Toronto, I determined to
+stay until Roscoe was entirely out of danger. It was singular, but in
+this illness, though the fever was high, he never was delirious. It
+would almost seem as if, having paid his penalty, the brain was at rest.
+
+While Roscoe hovered between life and death, Mr. Devlin, who persisted
+that he would not die, was planning for a new hospital and a new church,
+of which Roscoe should be president and padre respectively. But the
+suspense to us all, for many days, was very great; until, one morning
+when the birds were waking the cedars, and the snow on Mount Trinity
+was flashing coolness down the hot valley, he waked and said to me:
+"Marmion, old friend; it is morning at last."
+
+"Yes, it is morning," said I. "And you are going to live now? You are
+going to be reasonable and give the earth another chance?"
+
+"Yes, I believe I shall live now."
+
+To cheer him, I told him what Mr. Devlin intended and had planned;
+how river-drivers and salmon-fishers came every day from the valley to
+inquire after him. I did not tell him that there had been one or two
+disturbances between the river-drivers and the salmon-fishers. I tried
+to let him see that there need be no fresh change in his life. At length
+he interrupted me.
+
+"Marmion," he said, "I understand what you mean. It would be cowardly of
+me to leave here now if I were a whole man. I am true in intention, God
+knows, but I must carry a crippled arm for the rest of my life, must
+I not?.... and a crippled Padre is not the kind of man for this place.
+They want men straight on their feet."
+
+"Do you think," I answered, "that they will not be able to stand the
+test? You gave them--shall I say it?--a crippled mind before; you give
+them a crippled body now. Well, where do you think the odds lie? I
+should fancy with you as you are."
+
+There was a long silence in which neither of us moved. At last he turned
+his face towards the window, and, not looking at me, said lingeringly:
+"This is a pleasant place."
+
+I knew that he would remain.
+
+I had not seen Mrs. Falchion during Roscoe's illness; but every day
+Justine came and inquired, or a messenger was sent. And when, this
+fortunate day, Justine herself came, and I told her that the crisis was
+past, she seemed infinitely relieved and happy. Then she said:
+
+"Madame has been ill these three days also; but now I think she will be
+better; and we shall go soon."
+
+"Ask her," said I, "not to go yet for a few days. Press it as a favour
+to me." Then, on second thought, I sat down and wrote Mrs. Falchion a
+note, hinting that there were grave reasons why she should stay a
+little longer: things connected with her own happiness. Truth is, I had
+received a note that morning which had excited me. It referred to Mrs.
+Falchion. For I was an arch-plotter--or had been.
+
+I received a note in reply which said that she would do as I wished.
+Meanwhile I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of some one.
+
+That night a letter came to Roscoe. After reading it shrinkingly he
+handed it to me. It said briefly:
+
+   I'm not sorry I did it, but I'm glad I hevn't killed you. I was
+   drunk and mad. If I hadn't hurt you, I'd never hev forgive myself.
+   I reckon now, there's no need to do any forgivin' either side.
+   We're square--though maybe you didn't kill her after all. Mrs.
+   Falchion says you didn't. But you hurt her. Well, I've hurt you.
+   And you will never hear no more of Phil's pal from Danger Mountain.
+
+Immediately after sunset of this night, a storm swept suddenly down the
+mountains, and prevented Ruth and her father from going to Viking. I
+left them talking to Roscoe, he wearing such a look on his face as I
+like to remember now, free from distress of mind--so much more painful
+than distress of body. As I was leaving the room, I looked back and saw
+Ruth sitting on a stool beside Roscoe's chair, holding the unmaimed hand
+in hers; the father's face shining with pleasure and pride. Before I
+went out, I turned again to look at them, and, as I did so, my eye fell
+on the window against which the wind and rain were beating. And through
+the wet there appeared a face, shocking in its paleness and misery--the
+face of Mrs. Falchion. Only for an instant, and then it was gone.
+
+I opened the door and went out upon the verandah. As I did so, there
+was a flash of lightning, and in that flash a figure hurried by me. One
+moment, and there was another flash; and I saw the figure in the beating
+rain, making toward the precipice.
+
+Then I heard a cry, not loud, but full of entreaty and sorrow. I moved
+quickly toward it. In another white gleam I saw Justine with her
+arms about the figure, holding it back from the abyss. She said with
+incredible pleading:
+
+"No, no, madame, not that! It is wicked--wicked."
+
+I came and stood beside them.
+
+The figure sank upon the ground and buried a pitiful face in the wet
+grass.
+
+Justine leaned over her.
+
+She sobbed as one whose harvest of the past is all tears. Nothing human
+could comfort her yet.
+
+I think she did not know that I was there. Justine lifted her face to
+me, appealing.
+
+I turned and stole silently away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI. IN PORT
+
+That night I could not rest. It was impossible to rid myself of the
+picture of Mrs. Falchion as I had seen her by the precipice in the
+storm. What I had dared to hope for had come. She had been awakened; and
+with the awakening had risen a new understanding of her own life and
+the lives of others. The storm of wind and rain that had swept down the
+ravine was not wilder than her passions when I left her with Justine in
+the dark night.
+
+All had gone well where the worst might have been. Roscoe's happiness
+was saved to him. He felt that the accident to him was the penalty
+he paid for the error of his past; but in the crash of penalties Mrs.
+Falchion, too, was suffering; and, so far as she knew, must carry with
+her the remorse of having seen, without mercy, her husband sink to a
+suicide's grave. I knew that she was paying a great price now for a
+mistaken past. I wished that I might make her remorse and sorrow less.
+There was a way, but I was not sure that all would be as I wished. Since
+a certain dreadful day on the 'Fulvia', Hungerford and I had held a
+secret in our hands. When it seemed that Mrs. Falchion would bring a
+great trouble and shame into Roscoe's life, I determined to use the
+secret. It must be used now only for Mrs. Falchion's good. As I said
+in the last chapter, I had received word that somebody was coming whose
+presence must take a large place in the drama of these events: and I
+hoped the best.
+
+Until morning I lay and planned the best way to bring things to a
+successful issue. The morning came--beautiful after a mad night. Soon
+after I got up I received a note, brought by a boy from Viking, which
+gave me a thrill of excitement. The note requested me to go to Sunburst.
+But first I sent a note to Mrs. Falchion, begging her in the name of our
+new friendship not to leave the mountains that day. I also asked that
+she would meet me in Sunburst that evening at eight o'clock, at a place
+indicated by me. I asked for a reply by the messenger I sent, and urged
+her to ask no questions, but to trust me as one who only wished to do
+her a great service, as I hoped her compliance would make possible. I
+waited for the reply, and it bore but the one word--"Yes."
+
+Greatly pleased, I started down the valley. It was still early when I
+reached Sunburst. I went directly to the little tavern from whence the
+note had come, and remained an hour or more. The result of that hour's
+conversation with the writer of the note was memorable, as was the hour
+itself. I began to hope fondly for the success of my scheme.
+
+From the tavern I went to the village, with an elation hardly disturbed
+by the fact that many of the salmon-fishers were sullen, because of
+foolish depredations committed the evening before by idle river-men and
+mill-hands of Viking. Had I not been so occupied with Mrs. Falchion and
+an event wherein she must figure, I should have taken more seriously the
+mutterings of the half-breeds, the moroseness of the Indians, and the
+nervous threatenings of the white fishers: the more so because I knew
+that Mr. Devlin had started early that morning for the Pacific Coast,
+and would not be back for some days.
+
+No two classes of people could be more unlike than the salmon-fishers of
+Sunburst and the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking. The life of the
+river-men was exciting, hardy, and perilous; tending to boisterousness,
+recklessness, daring, and wild humour: that of the salmon-fishers was
+cheerful, picturesque, infrequently dangerous, mostly simple and
+quiet. The river-driver chose to spend his idle hours in crude, rough
+sprightliness; the salmon-fisher loved to lie upon the shore and listen
+to the village story-teller,--almost official when successful,--who
+played upon the credulity and imagination of his listeners. The
+river-driver loved excitement for its own sake, and behind his
+boisterousness there was little evil. When the salmon-fisher was roused,
+his anger became desperately serious. It was not his practice to be
+boisterous for the sake of boisterousness.
+
+All this worked for a crisis.
+
+From Sunburst I went over to Viking, and for a time watched a handful of
+river-drivers upon a little island in the centre of the river, working
+to loosen some logs and timber and foist them into the water, to be
+driven down to the mill. I stood interested, because I had nothing to
+do of any moment for a couple of hours. I asked an Indian on the bank
+to take his canoe and paddle me over to the island. He did so. I do not
+know why I did not go alone; but the Indian was near me, his canoe was
+at his hand, and I did the thing almost mechanically. I landed on the
+island and watched with great interest the men as they pried, twisted
+and tumbled the pile to get at the key-log which, found and loosened,
+would send the heap into the water.
+
+I was sorry I brought the Indian with me, for though the river-drivers
+stopped their wild sing-song cry for a moment to call a "How!" at me,
+they presently began to toss jeering words at the Indian. They had
+recognised him--I had not--as a salmon-fisher and one of the Siwash
+tribe from Sunburst. He remained perfectly silent, but I could see
+sullenness growing on his face. He appeared to take no notice of his
+scornful entertainers, but, instead of edging away, came nearer and
+nearer to the tangle of logs--came, indeed, very close to me, as I stood
+watching four or five men, with the foreman close by, working at a huge
+timber. At a certain moment the foreman was in a kind of hollow. Just
+behind him, near to the Indian, was a great log, which, if loosened by
+a slight impulse, must fall into the hollow where the foreman stood.
+The foreman had his face to us; the backs of the other men were on
+us. Suddenly the foreman gave a frightened cry, and I saw at the same
+instant the Indian's foot thrust out upon the big log. Before the
+foreman had time to get out of the hollow, it slid down, caught him just
+above the ankle and broke the leg.
+
+I wheeled, to see the Indian in his canoe making for the shore. He was
+followed by the curses of the foreman and the gang. The foreman was
+very quiet, but I could see that there was danger in his eye, and
+the exclamations of the men satisfied me that they were planning an
+inter-municipal difficulty.
+
+I improvised bandages, set the leg directly, and in a little while we
+got to the shore on a hastily constructed raft. After seeing the foreman
+safely cared for, and giving Mr. Devlin's manager the facts of the
+occurrence, more than sated with my morning's experience, I climbed the
+mountain side, and took refuge from the heat in the coolness of Roscoe's
+rooms.
+
+In the afternoon I received a note from Mrs. Falchion, saying that on
+the following day she would start for the coast; that her luggage
+would be taken to Sunburst at once; and that, her engagement with me
+fulfilled, she would spend a night there, not returning again to the
+hills. I was preparing for my own departure, and was kept very busy
+until evening. Then I went quickly down into the valley,--for I was
+late,--and trudged eagerly on to Sunburst. As I neared the village I
+saw that there were fewer lights--torches and fires--than usual on the
+river. I noticed also that there were very few fishers on the banks or
+in the river. But still the village seemed noisy, and, although it
+was dusk, I could make out much stir in the one street along which the
+cottages and huts ambled for nearly a mile.
+
+All at once it came to me strongly that the friction between the two
+villages had consummated in the foreman's injury, and was here coming to
+a painful crisis. My suspicions had good grounds. As I hurried on I saw
+that the lights usually set on the banks of the river were scattered
+through the town. Bonfires were being lighted, and torches were flaring
+in front of the Indian huts. Coming closer, I saw excited groups of
+Indians, half-breeds, and white men moving here and there; and then, all
+at once, there came a cry--a kind of roar--from farther up the village,
+and the men gathered themselves together, seizing guns, sticks, irons,
+and other weapons, and ran up the street. I understood. I was moderately
+swift of foot those days. I came quickly after them, and passed them. As
+I did so I inquired of one or two fishers what was the trouble.
+
+They told me, as I had guessed, that they expected an attack on the
+village by the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.
+
+The situation was critical. I could foresee a catastrophe which would
+for ever unsettle the two towns, and give the valley an unenviable
+reputation. I was certain that, if Roscoe or Mr. Devlin were present, a
+prohibitive influence could be brought to bear; that some one of strong
+will could stand, as it were, in the gap between them, and prevent a
+pitched battle, and, possibly, bloodshed. I was sure that at Viking the
+river-drivers had laid their plans so secretly that the news of them
+would scarcely reach the ears of the manager of the mill, and that,
+therefore, his influence, as Mr. Devlin's, would not be available.
+
+Remained only myself--as I first thought. I was unknown to a great
+number of the men of both villages, and familiar with but very
+few--chiefly those with whom I had a gossiping acquaintance. Yet,
+somehow, I felt that if I could but get a half-dozen men to take a firm
+stand with me, I might hold the rioters in check.
+
+As I ran by the side of the excitable fishers, I urged upon one or
+two of them the wisdom and duty of preventing a conflict. Their reply
+was--and it was very convincing--that they were not forcing a struggle,
+but were being attacked, and in the case would fight. My hasty
+persuasion produced but little result. But I kept thinking hard.
+Suddenly it came to me that I could place my hand upon a man whose
+instincts in the matter would be the same as mine; who had authority;
+knew the world; had been in dangerous positions in his lifetime; and
+owed me something. I was sure that I could depend upon him: the more so
+that once frail of body he had developed into a strong, well-controlled
+man.
+
+Even as I thought of him, I was within a few rods of the house where he
+was. I looked, and saw him standing in the doorway. I ran and called
+to him. He instantly joined me, and we ran on together: the fishermen
+shouting loudly as they watched the river-drivers come armed down the
+hill-slope into the village.
+
+I hastily explained the situation to my friend, and told him what we
+must do. A word or two assured me of all I wished to know. We reached
+the scene of the disorder. The fishermen were bunched together,
+the river on the one side, the houses and hills on the other. The
+river-drivers had halted not many yards away, cool, determined and
+quiet, save for a little muttering. In their red shirts, top boots,
+many of them with long black hair and brass earrings, they looked a most
+formidable crowd. They had evidently taken the matter seriously, and
+were come with the intention of carrying their point, whatever it might
+be. Just as we reached the space between the two parties, the massive
+leader of the river-drivers stepped forward, and in a rough but
+collected voice said that they had come determined to fight, if fighting
+were necessary, but that they knew what the end of the conflict would
+be, and they did not wish to obliterate Sunburst entirely if Sunburst
+accepted the conditions of peace.
+
+There seemed no leader to the fishermen.
+
+My friend said to me quickly: "You speak first." Instantly I stepped
+forward and demanded to know what the terms of peace were. As soon as I
+did so, there were harsh mutterings among the river-drivers. I explained
+at once, waving back some of the fisher-men who were clamouring about
+me, that I had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel; that I happened
+to be where I was by accident, as I had happened by accident to see the
+difficulty of the morning. But I said that it was the duty of every man
+who was a good citizen and respected the laws of his country, to see, in
+so far as it was possible, that there should be no breach of those laws.
+I spoke in a clear strong voice, and I think I produced some effect
+upon both parties to the quarrel. The reply of the leader was almost
+immediate. He said that all they demanded was the Indian who had so
+treacherously injured the foreman of their gangs. I saw the position at
+once, and was dumfounded. For a moment I did not speak.
+
+I was not prepared for the scene that immediately followed. Some one
+broke through the crowd at my back, rushed past me, and stood between
+the two forces. It was the Indian who had injured the foreman. He was
+naked to the waist, and painted and feathered after the manner of his
+tribe going to battle. There was a wild light in his eye, but he had no
+weapon. He folded his arms across his breast, and said:
+
+"Well, you want me. Here I am. I will fight with any man all alone,
+without a gun or arrow or anything. I will fight with my arms--to kill."
+
+I saw revolvers raised at him instantly, but at that the man, my friend,
+who stood beside me, sprang in front of the Indian.
+
+"Stop--stop!" he cried. "In the name of the law! I am a sergeant of
+the mounted police of Canada. My jurisdiction extends from Winnipeg to
+Vancouver. You cannot have this man except over my body: and for my body
+every one of you will pay with your lives; for every blow struck this
+night, there will be a hundred blows struck upon the river-drivers
+and mill-hands of this valley. Take care! Behind me is the law of the
+land--her police and her soldiery."
+
+He paused. There was almost complete silence. He continued:
+
+"This man is my prisoner; I arrest him."--He put his hand upon the
+Indian's shoulder.--"For the crime he committed this morning he shall
+pay: but to the law, not to you. Put up your revolvers, men. Go back to
+Viking. Don't risk your lives; don't break the law and make yourselves
+criminals and outlaws. Is it worth it? Be men. You have been the
+aggressors. There isn't one of you but feels that justice which is the
+boast of every man of the West. You wanted to avenge the crime of this
+morning. But the vengeance is the law's.--Stand back--Stand back!" he
+said, and drew his revolver, as the leader of the river-drivers stepped
+forward. "I will kill the first man that tries to lay his hand upon my
+prisoner. Don't be mad. I am not one man, I am a whole country."
+
+I shall never forget the thrill that passed through me as I saw a man
+who, but a handful of months before, was neck deep in his grave, now
+blossomed out into a strong, defiant soldier.
+
+There was a pause. At last the leader of the river-drivers spoke. "See,"
+he said, "Sergeant, I guess you're right. You're a man, so help me! Say,
+boys," he continued, turning to his followers, "let him have the Injin.
+I guess he's earned him."
+
+So saying he wheeled, the men with him, and they tramped up the slope
+again on their way back to Viking. The man who had achieved this turned
+upon the fishers.
+
+"Back to your homes!" he said. "Be thankful that blood was not shed here
+to-night, and let this be a lesson to you. Now, go."
+
+The crowd turned, slowly shambled down the riverside, and left us three
+standing there.
+
+But not alone. Out of the shadow of one of the houses came two women.
+They stepped forward into the light of the bonfire burning near us. One
+of the women was very pale.
+
+It was Mrs. Falchion.
+
+I touched the arm of the man standing beside me. He wheeled and saw her
+also. A cry broke from his lips, but he stood still. A whole life-time
+of sorrow, trouble, and love looked out of his eyes. Mrs. Falchion came
+nearer. Clasping her hands upon her breast, she peered up into his face,
+and gasped:
+
+"Oh--oh--I thought that you were drowned--and dead! I saw you buried
+in the sea. No--no--it cannot be you! I have heard and seen all within
+these past few minutes. YOU are so strong and brave, so great a man!...
+Oh, tell me, tell me, are you in truth my husband?"
+
+He spoke.
+
+"I was your husband, Mercy Falchion. I was drowned, but this man"--he
+turned and touched my shoulder--"this man brought me back to life.
+I wanted to be dead to the world. I begged him to keep my secret. A
+sailor's corpse was buried in my shroud, and I lived. At Aden I stole
+from the boat in the night. I came to America--to Canada--to begin a new
+life under a new name, never to see you again.... Do not, do not speak
+to me--unless I am not to lose you again; unless I am to know that now
+you forgive me--that you forgive me--and wish me to live--my wife!"
+
+She put both her hands out, a strange, sorrowful look in her eyes, and
+said: "I have sinned--I have sinned."
+
+He took her hands in his.
+
+"I know," he said, "that you do not love me yet; but you may some day."
+
+"No," she said, "I do not love you; but.... I am glad you live. Let
+us--go home."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+     ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+     A heart-break for that kind is their salvation
+     A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains
+     A man you could bank on, and draw your interest reg'lar
+     Aboriginal dispersion
+     All he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious (Scientist)
+     And even envy praised her
+     Audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or window
+     But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!
+     Death is a magnificent ally; it untangles knots
+     Death is not the worst of evils
+     Engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady than in the man
+     Every true woman is a mother, though she have no child
+     Fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves
+     For a man having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks
+     He didn't always side with the majority
+     He had neither self-consciousness nor fear
+     Her own suffering always set her laughing at herself
+     It is difficult to be idle--and important too
+     It is hard to be polite to cowards
+     Jews everywhere treated worse than the Chinaman
+     Learned what fools we mortals be
+     Love can outlive slander
+     Men do not steal up here: that is the unpardonable crime
+     One always buys back the past at a tremendous price
+     One doesn't choose to worry
+     Saying uncomfortable things in a deferential way
+     She had provoked love, but had never given it
+     Slow-footed hours wandered by, leaving apathy in their train
+     "Still the end of your existence," I rejoined--"to be amused?"
+     That anxious civility which beauty can inspire
+     The happy scene of the play before the villain comes in
+     The ravings of a sick man are not always counted ravings
+     The sea is a great breeder of friendship
+     The tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias
+     The threshold of an acknowledged love
+     There are things we repent of which cannot be repaired
+     There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world
+     Think that a woman gives the heart for pleasant weather only?
+     Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart
+     Time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him
+     Vanity; and from this much feminine hatred springs
+     Very severe on those who do not pretend to be good
+     What is gone is gone Graves are idolatry
+     Who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery
+     Would look back and not remember that she had a childhood
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Mrs. Falchion, Complete, by Gilbert Parker
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook Mrs. Falchion, by Gilbert Parker, Complete
+#22 in our series by Gilbert Parker
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
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+Title: Mrs. Falchion, Complete
+
+Author: Gilbert Parker
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2004  [Etext #6194]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on September 6, 2002]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. FALCHION, BY PARKER, ENTIRE ***
+
+
+
+
+This eBook was produced by David Widger [widger@cecomet.net]
+Extensive proofreading done by Andrew Sly
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. FALCHION
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+
+This novel was written in the days of the three-decker, and it went out
+to sea as such.  Every novel of mine written until 1893 was published in
+two or three volumes, and the sale to the libraries was greater than the
+sale to the general public.  This book was begun in 1892 at the time when
+the Pierre stories were being written, and it was finished in the summer
+of 1893.  It did not appear serially; indeed, I made no attempt at serial
+publication.  I had a feeling that as it was to be my first novel, it
+should be judged as a whole and taken at a gasp, as it were.  I believe
+that the reader of Messrs. Methuen & Company was not disposed to publish
+the book, but Mr. Methuen himself (or Mr. Stedman as he was then called)
+was impressed by it and gave it his friendly confidence.  He was certain
+that it would arrest the attention of the critics and of the public,
+whether it became popular or not.  I have not a set of those original
+three volumes.  I wish I had, because they won for me an almost unhoped-
+for pleasure.  The 'Daily Chronicle' gave the volumes over a column of
+review, and headed the notice, "A Coming Novelist."  The 'Athenaeum' said
+that 'Mrs. Falchion' was a splendid study of character; 'The Pall Mall
+Gazette' said that the writing was as good as anything that had been done
+in our time, while at the same time it took rather a dark view of my
+future as a novelist, because it said I had not probed deep enough into
+the wounds of character which I had inflicted.  The article was written
+by Mr. George W. Stevens, and he was right in saying that I had not
+probed deep enough.  Few very young men--and I was very young then--do
+probe very deeply.  At the appearance of 'When Valmond Came to Pontiac',
+however, Mr. Stevens came to the conclusion that my future was assured.
+
+I mention these things because they were burnt into my mind at the time.
+'Mrs. Falchion' was my first real novel, as I have said, though it had
+been preceded by a short novel called 'The Chief Factor', since rescued
+from publication and never published in book form in England.  I realised
+when I had written 'Mrs. Falchion' that I had not found my metier, and I
+was fearful of complete failure.  I had come but a few years before from
+the South Seas; I was full of what I had seen and felt; I was eager to
+write of it all, and I did write of it; but the thing which was deeper
+still in me was the life which 'Pierre and His People', 'The Seats of the
+Mighty', 'The Trail of the Sword', 'The Lane That Had no Turning', and
+'The Right of Way' portrayed.  That life was destined to give me an
+assured place and public, while 'Mrs. Falchion', and the South Sea
+stories published in various journals before the time of its production,
+and indeed anterior to the writing of the Pierre series, only assured me
+attention.
+
+Happily for the book, which has faults of construction, superficialities
+as to incident, and with some crudity of plot, it was, in the main, a
+study of character.  There was focus, there was illumination in the book,
+to what degree I will not try to say; and the attempt to fasten the mind
+of the reader upon the central figure, and to present that central figure
+in many aspects, safeguarded the narrative from the charge of being a
+mere novel of adventure, or, as one writer called it, "an impudent
+melodrama, which has its own fascinations."
+
+Reading Mrs. Falchion again after all these years, I seem to realise in
+it an attempt to combine the objective and subjective methods of
+treatment--to combine analysis of character and motive with arresting
+episode.  It is a difficult thing to do, as I have found.  It was not
+done on my part wholly by design, but rather by instinct, and I imagine
+that this tendency has run through all my works.  It represents the
+elements of romanticism and of realism in one, and that kind of
+representation has its dangers, to say nothing of its difficulties.
+It sometimes alienates the reader, who by instinct and preference is a
+realist, and it troubles the reader who wants to read for a story alone,
+who cares for what a character does, and not for what a character is or
+says, except in so far as it emphasises what it does.  One has to work,
+however, in one's own way, after one's own idiosyncrasies, and here is
+the book that represents one of my own idiosyncrasies in its most
+primitive form.
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+BOOK I
+
+BELOW THE SUN LINE
+
+I.        THE GATES OF THE SEA
+
+II.       "MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR"
+
+III.      A TALE OF NO MAN'S SEA
+
+IV.       THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+
+V.        ACCUSING FACES
+
+VI.       MUMMERS ALL
+
+VII.      THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+
+VIII.     A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+
+IX.       "THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS"
+
+X.        BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+
+XI.       AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+
+XII.      THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+
+XIII.     THE SONG OF THE SAW
+
+XIV.      THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+
+XV.       IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+
+XVI.      A DUEL IN ARCADY
+
+XVII.     RIDING THE REEFS
+
+XVIII.    THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+
+XIX.      THE SENTENCE
+
+XX.       AFTER THE STORM
+
+XXI.      IN PORT
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+BELOW THE SUN LINE
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE GATES OF THE SEA
+
+The part I played in Mrs. Falchion's career was not very noble, but I
+shall set it forth plainly here, else I could not have the boldness to
+write of her faults or those of others.  Of my own history little need be
+said in preface.  Soon after graduating with honours as a physician, I
+was offered a professional post in a college of medicine in Canada.  It
+was difficult to establish a practice in medicine without some capital,
+else I had remained in London; and, being in need of instant means, I
+gladly accepted the offer.  But six months were to intervene before the
+beginning of my duties--how to fill that time profitably was the
+question.  I longed to travel, having scarcely been out of England during
+my life.  Some one suggested the position of surgeon on one of the great
+steamers running between England and Australia.  The idea of a long sea-
+voyage was seductive, for I had been suffering from over-study, though
+the position itself was not very distinguished.  But in those days I
+cared more for pleasing myself than for what might become a newly-made
+professor, and I was prepared to say with a renowned Irish dean: "Dignity
+and I might be married, for all the relations we are."
+
+I secured the position with humiliating ease and humiliating smallness
+of pay.  The steamer's name was the 'Fulvia'.  It was one of the largest
+belonging to the Occidental Company.  It carried no emigrants and had a
+passenger list of fashionable folk.  On the voyage out to Australia the
+weather was pleasant, save in the Bay of Biscay; there was no sickness
+on board, and there were many opportunities for social gaiety, the
+cultivation of pleasant acquaintances, and the encouragement of that
+brisk idleness which aids to health.  This was really the first holiday
+in my life, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.  Nothing of unusual interest
+occurred on the outward voyage; for one thing, because there were no
+unusual people among the passengers; for another, because the vessel
+behaved admirably.  The same cannot be said of the return voyage: and
+with it my story really begins.  Misfortune followed us out of Sydney
+harbour.  We broke a crank-shaft between there and Port Phillip,
+Melbourne; a fire in the hold occurred at Adelaide; and at Albany we
+buried a passenger who had died of consumption one day out from King
+George's Sound.  At Colombo, also, we had a misfortune, but it was of a
+peculiar kind, and did not obtrude itself at once; it was found in an
+addition to our passenger list.  I had spent a day in exploring Colombo--
+visiting Arabi Pasha, inspecting Hindu temples, watching the jugglers and
+snake-charmers, evading guides and the sellers of brummagem jewellery,
+and idling in the Cinnamon Gardens.  I returned to the ship tired out.
+After I had done some official duties, I sauntered to the gangway, and,
+leaning against the bulwarks, idly watched the passengers come on board
+from the tender.  Two of these made an impression on me.  One was a
+handsome and fashionably-dressed woman, who was followed by a maid or
+companion (as I fancied), carrying parcels; the other, a shabbily-dressed
+man, who was the last to come up from the tender.  The woman was going
+down the companion-way when he stepped on deck with a single bag in his
+hand, and I noticed that he watched her with a strange look in his eyes.
+He stood still as he gazed, and remained so for a moment after she had
+gone; then he seemed to recover himself, and started, as I thought,
+almost guiltily, when he saw that my attention was attracted.  He
+nervously shifted his bag from one hand to the other, and looked round
+as though not certain of where he should go.  A steward came to him
+officiously, and patronisingly too,--which is the bearing of servants to
+shabbily-dressed people,--but he shook his head, caught his bag smartly
+away from the steward's fingers, and moved towards the after part of the
+ship, reserved for intermediate passengers.  As he went he hesitated,
+came to the side of the vessel, looked down at the tender for a moment,
+cast his eyes to where the anchor was being weighed, made as if he would
+go back to the tender, then, seeing that the ladder was now drawn up,
+sighed, and passed on to the second-class companion-way, through which he
+disappeared.
+
+I stood commenting idly to myself upon this incident, which, slight
+though it was, appeared to have significance of a kind, when Hungerford,
+the fifth officer, caught me slyly by the arm and said, "Lucky fellow!
+Nothing to do but watch the world go by.  I wish I had you in the North
+Atlantic on a whaler, or in the No Man's Sea on a pearl-smack for a
+matter of thirty days."
+
+"What would come of that, Hungerford?" said I.
+
+"An exchange of matter for mind, Marmion; muscle for meditation, physics
+for philosophy."
+
+"You do me too much honour; at present I've neither mind, meditation,
+nor philosophy; I am simply vegetating."
+
+"Which proves you to be demoralised.  I never saw a surgeon on a ship
+who wasn't.  They began with mind--more or less--they ate the fruits of
+indolence, got precious near being sinful as well as indolent, and ended
+with cheap cynicism, with the old 'quid refert'--the thing Hamlet
+plagiarised in his, 'But it is no matter.'"
+
+"Isn't this an unusual occupation for you, Hungerford--this Swift-like
+criticism?"
+
+"Swift-like, is it?  You see, I've practised on many of your race,
+Marmion, and I have it pat now.  You are all of two classes--those who
+sicken in soul and leave after one trip, and those who make another trip
+and are lost."
+
+"Lost?  How?"
+
+Hungerford pressed his fingers hard on my breastbone, looked at me
+enigmatically from under his well-hung brows, and replied: "Brains put
+out to seed, morals put out to vegetate--that's 'lost.'"
+
+"What about fifth officers?"
+
+"Fifth officers work like navvies, and haven't time for foolishness.
+They've got to walk the bridge, and practise the boats, and be
+responsible for luggage--and here I am talking to you like an infallible
+undergraduate, while the lascars are in endless confusion with a half-
+dozen pieces of baggage, and the first officer foams because I'm not
+there to set them right.  I leave you to your dreams.  Good-bye."
+
+Hungerford was younger than myself, but he knew the world, and I was
+flattered by these uncommon remarks, because he talked to no one else
+on the ship in the same way.  He never sought to make friends, had a
+thorough contempt for social trifling, and shrugged his shoulders at the
+"swagger" of some of the other officers.  I think he longed for a
+different kind of sea-life, so accustomed had he been to adventurous and
+hardy ways.  He had entered the Occidental service because he had fallen
+in love with a pretty girl, and thought it his duty to become a
+"regular," and thus have the chance of seeing her every three months in
+London.  He had conceived a liking for me, reciprocated on my part; the
+more so, because I knew that behind his blunt exterior there was a warm
+and manly heart.  When he left me I went to my cabin and prepared for
+dinner, laughing as I did so at his keen, uncompromising criticism, which
+I knew was correct enough; for of all official posts that of a ship-
+surgeon is least calculated to make a man take a pride in existence.
+At its best, it is assisting in the movement of a panorama; at its worst,
+worse than a vegetation.  Hungerford's solicitude for myself, however,
+was misplaced, because this one voyage would end my career as ship-
+surgeon, and, besides, I had not vegetated, but had been interested in
+everything that had occurred, humdrum as it was.  With these thoughts,
+I looked out of the port-hole, to see the shores of Colombo, Galle Face,
+and Mount Lavinia fading in the distance, and heard seven bells--the time
+for dinner.  When I took my seat at the table of which I was the head, my
+steward handed to me a slip of paper, saying that the chief steward had
+given a new passenger, a lady, the seat at my right hand, which had been
+vacated at Colombo.  The name on the paper was "Mrs. Falchion."  The seat
+was still empty, and I wondered if this was the beautiful passenger who
+had attracted me and interested the Intermediate Passenger.  I was
+selfish enough to wish so: and it was so.
+
+We had finished the soup before she entered.  The chief steward, with
+that anxious civility which beauty can inspire in even so great a
+personage, conducted her to her seat beside me.  I confess that though I
+was at once absorbed in this occurrence, I noticed also that some of the
+ladies present smiled significantly when they saw at whose table Mrs.
+Falchion was placed, and looked not a little ironically at the purser,
+who, as it was known, always tried to get for his table the newest
+addition to the passenger list--when it was a pretty woman.  I believe
+that one or two rude people chaffed the chief steward about "favouring
+the doctor"; but he had a habit of saying uncomfortable things in a
+deferential way, and they did not pursue the subject.  Then they
+commiserated the purser, who was an unpleasant little Jew of an envious
+turn of mind; and he, as I was told, likened me to Sir John Falstaff.  I
+was sensitive in those days, and this annoyed me, particularly that I had
+had nothing to do with placing Mrs. Falchion at my table.  We are always
+most sensitive when guilty concerning the spirit and not the letter.
+
+One who has lived the cosmopolitan life of London should be quick at
+detecting nationalities, but I found it difficult, even after I heard her
+speak, to guess at Mrs. Falchion's native land.  There were good reasons
+for this, as may be duly seen.  Her appearance in the saloon caused an
+instant buzz of admiration and interest, of which she seemed oblivious.
+If it was acting, it was good acting; if it was lack of self-
+consciousness, it was remarkable.  As I soon came to know, it was the
+latter--which, in such a woman, increased the remarkableness.  I was
+inclined at first to venture the opinion that she was an actress; but I
+discovered that she possessed the attracting power of an actress without
+the calculated manner of one; her very lack of self-consciousness was
+proof of this emancipation.
+
+When she sat down, I immediately welcomed her by name to my table.
+The only surprise she showed at my knowledge of her name and my self-
+introduction was to lift her head slightly and look at me, as if
+wondering whether I was likely to be an inquisitive and troublesome host;
+and also, as I thought, to measure me according to her measure.  It was a
+quick look, and the interest she showed was of a passive kind.  She asked
+me as she might an old acquaintance--or a waiter--if the soup was good,
+and what the fish was like; decided on my recommendation to wait for the
+entrees; requested her next neighbour to pass the olives; in an
+impersonal way began to talk about the disadvantages of life at sea;
+regretted that all ship food tasted alike; wondered if the cook knew how
+to make a Russian salad; and added that the menu was a national
+compromise.
+
+Now that she was close to me, I could see that her beauty was real and
+notable.  Her features were regular, her eyes of a greyish violet, her
+chin strong, yet not too strong--the chin of a singer; her hands had that
+charming quiet certainty of movement possessed by so few; and her colour
+was of the most delightful health.  In this delightful health, in her
+bountiful yet perfect physical eloquence, her attractiveness, as it
+seemed to me, chiefly lay.  For no one would ever have guessed her to
+possess an emotional temperament.  All that was outer was fascinating,
+all that was inner suggested coldness.  After experience assured me that
+all who came to know her shared this estimate, even in those days when
+every man on the ship was willing to be her slave.  She had a compelling
+atmosphere, a possessive presence; and yet her mind at this time was
+unemotional--like Octavia, the wife of Mark Antony, "of a cold
+conversation."  She was striking and unusual in appearance, and yet well
+within convention and "good form."  Her dress was simply and modestly
+worn, and had little touches of grace and taste which, I understand, many
+ladies on board sought to imitate, when they recovered from the first
+feeling of envy.
+
+She was an example of splendid life.  I cared to look at her as one would
+dwell on the sleek beauty of a deer--as, indeed, I have many a time since
+then, in India, watched a tigress asleep on her chain, claws hidden, wild
+life latent but slumbering.  I could have staked my life that Mrs.
+Falchion was insensible to love or passion, and unimpeachable in the
+broad scheme of right and wrong; imperious in requiring homage, incapable
+of giving it.  I noticed when she laughed, as she did once at table, that
+her teeth were very white and small and square; and, like a schoolgirl,
+she had a habit of clicking them together very lightly, but not
+conspicuously, as if trying their quality.  This suggested, however,
+something a little cruel.  Her appetite was very good.  She was coolly
+anxious about the amusements; she asked me if I could get her a list of
+the passengers, said that she was never sea-sick, and took a languid
+interest in the ladies present.  Her glance at the men was keen at first,
+then neutral.
+
+Once again, during the meal, she slowly turned and flashed an inquiring
+glance at me.  I caught her eyes.  She did not show the least
+embarrassment, and asked me if the band insisted on playing every day.
+Before she left the saloon, one could see that many present were talking
+about her.  Even the grim old captain followed her with his eyes as she
+went.  When she rose, I asked her if she was going on deck.  I did it
+casually, as though it was her usual custom to appear there after dinner.
+In like fashion she replied that her maid had some unpacking to do, she
+had some things to superintend, and, when this was done, she intended to
+spend a time on deck.  Then, with a peculiar smile, she passed out.
+
+     [Note by Dr. Marmion appended to his MSS.:--"Many of the
+     conversations and monologues in this history, not heard by myself
+     when they occurred, were told to me afterwards, or got from the
+     diaries and notes of the persons concerned.  Only a few are purely
+     imaginary."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+"MOTLEY IS YOUR ONLY WEAR"
+
+I went to my cabin, took a book, sat down, and began to smoke.  My
+thoughts drifted from the book, and then occurred a strange, incongruous
+thing.  It was a remembered incident.  It came like a vision as I was
+lighting a fresh cigar:
+
+A boy and a girl in a village chemist's shop; he with a boy's love for
+her, she responding in terms, but not in fact.  He passed near her
+carrying a measure of sulphuric acid.  She put out her hand suddenly and
+playfully, as though to bar his way.  His foot slipped on the oily floor,
+and the acid spilled on his hands and the skirt of her dress.  He turned
+instantly and plunged his hands into a measure of alcohol standing near
+before the acid had more than slightly scalded them.  She glanced at his
+startled face; hers was without emotion.  She looked down, and said
+petulantly: "You have spoiled my dress; I cannot go into the street."
+
+The boy's clothes were burnt also.  He was poor, and to replace them must
+be a trial to him; her father owned the shop, and was well-to-do.  Still,
+he grieved most that she should be annoyed, though he saw her injustice.
+But she turned away and left him.
+
+Another scene then crossed the disc of smoke:
+
+The boy and girl, now man and woman, standing alone in the chemist's
+shop.  He had come out of the big working world, after travel in many
+countries.  His fame had come with him.  She was to be married the next
+day to a seller of purple and fine linen.  He was smiling a good-bye, and
+there was nothing of the old past in the smile.  The flame now was in her
+eyes, and she put out both her hands to stop him as he turned to go;
+but his face was passionless.  "You have spoiled my heart," she said;
+"I cannot go into the world so."
+
+"It is too late; the measures are empty," he replied.
+
+"I love you to-day, I will loathe you to-morrow," was the answer.
+
+But he turned and left her, and she blindly stretched out her hands and
+followed him into the darkness, weeping.
+
+Was it the scent of the chemicals in my cabin, coupled with some
+subterranean association of things, which brought these scenes vividly
+before me at this moment?  What had they to do with Mrs. Falchion?
+
+A time came when the occurrence appeared to me in the light of
+prescience, but that was when I began to understand that all ideas, all
+reason and philosophy, are the result of outer impression.  The primal
+language of our minds is in the concrete.  Afterwards it becomes the
+cypher, and even at its highest it is expressed by angles, lines, and
+geometrical forms--substances and allusive shapes.  But now, as the scene
+shifted by, I had involuntarily thrust forward my hands as did the girl
+when she passed out into the night, and, in doing so, touched the curtain
+of my cabin door swinging in towards me.  I recovered myself, and a man
+timidly stepped inside, knocking as he did so.  It was the Intermediate
+Passenger.  His face was pale; he looked ill.
+
+Poor as his dress was, I saw that he had known the influences and
+practised the graces of good society, though his manner was hesitating
+and anxious now.  I knew at a glance that he was suffering from both
+physical pain and mental worry.  Without a word, I took his wrist and
+felt his pulse, and he said: "I thought I might venture to come--"
+
+I motioned him not to speak.  I counted the irregular pulse-beats,
+then listened to the action of his heart, with my ear to his breast.
+There lay his physical trouble.  I poured out a dose of digitalis, and,
+handing it to him, asked him to sit down.  As he sat and drank the
+medicine, I rapidly studied him.  The chin was firm, and the eyes had a
+dogged, persistent look that, when turned on you, saw not you, but
+something beyond you.  The head was thrown slightly forward, the eyes
+looking up at an angle.  This last action was habitual with him.  It gave
+him a peculiar earnestness.  As I noted these peculiarities, my mind was
+also with his case; I saw that his life was threatened.  Perhaps he
+guessed what was going on in me, for he said in a low, cultured voice:
+"The wheels will stop too long some time, and there will be no rebound;"
+--referring to the irregular action of his heart.
+
+"Perhaps that is true," I said; "yet it depends a good deal upon yourself
+when it will be.  Men can die if they wish without committing suicide.
+Look at the Maori, the Tongan, the Malay.  They can also prolong life
+(not indefinitely, but in a case like yours considerably), if they
+choose.  You can lengthen your days if you do not brood on fatal things
+--fatal to you; if you do not worry yourself into the grave."
+
+I knew that something of this was platitude, and that counsel to such a
+man must be of a more possible cast, if it is to be followed.  I was
+aware also that, in nine cases out of ten, worry is not a voluntary or
+constitutional thing, but springs from some extraneous cause.
+
+He smiled faintly, raised his head a little higher, and said:
+"Yes, that's just it, I suppose; but then we do not order our own
+constitutions; and I believe, Doctor, that you must kill a nerve before
+it ceases to hurt.  One doesn't choose to worry, I think, any more than
+one chooses to lay bare a nerve."  And then his eyes dropped, as if he
+thought he had already said too much.
+
+Again I studied him, repeating my definitions in my mind.  He was not a
+drunkard; he might have had no vice, so free was his face from any sign
+of dissipation or indulgence; but there was suffering, possibly the marks
+of some endured shame.  The suffering and shadows showed the more because
+his features were refined enough for a woman.  And altogether it struck
+me that he was possessed by some one idea, which gave his looks a kind of
+sorrowful eloquence, such as one sees on occasion in the face of a great
+actor like Salvini, on the forehead of a devout Buddhist, or in the eyes
+of a Jesuit missionary who martyrs himself in the wilds.
+
+I felt at once for the man a sympathy, a brotherliness, the causes of
+which I should be at a loss to trace.  Most people have this experience
+at one time or another in their lives.  It is not a matter of sex; it may
+be between an old man and a little child, a great man and a labourer, a
+schoolgirl and an old native woman.  There is in such companionships less
+self-interest than in any other.  As I have said, I thought that this man
+had a trouble, and I wished to know it; not from curiosity,--though my
+mind had a selfish, inquiring strain,--but because I hoped I might be
+able to help him in some way.  I put my hand on his shoulder, and
+replied: "You will never be better unless you get rid of your worry."
+
+He drew in a sharp breath, and said: "I know that.  I am afraid I shall
+never be better."
+
+There was a silence in which we looked at each other steadily, and then
+he added, with an intense but quiet misery: "Never--never!"
+
+At that he moved his hand across his forehead wearily, rose, and turned
+toward the door.  He swayed as he did so, and would have fallen, but I
+caught him as he lost consciousness, and laid him on the cabin sofa.  I
+chafed his hands, unloosed his collar, and opened the bosom of his shirt.
+As the linen dropped away from his throat, a small portrait on ivory was
+exposed on his breast.  I did not look closely at it then, but it struck
+me that the woman's head in the portrait was familiar, though the
+artistic work was not recent, and the fashion of the hair was of years
+before.  When his eyes opened, and he felt his neck bare, he hurriedly
+put up his hand and drew the collar close, and at the same time sent a
+startled and inquiring look at me.  After a few moments I helped him to
+his feet, and, thanking me more with a look than with words, he turned
+towards the door again.
+
+"Wait," I said, "until I give you some medicine, and then you shall take
+my arm to your cabin."  With a motion of the hand, signifying the
+uselessness of remedies, he sat down again.  As I handed him the phial, I
+continued: "I know that it is none of my business, but you are suffering.
+To help your body, your mind should be helped also.  Can't you tell me
+your trouble?  Perhaps I should be able to serve you.  I would if I
+could."
+
+It may be that I spoke with a little feeling and an apparent honesty;
+for his eyes searched mine in a kind of earnest bewilderment, as if this
+could not be true--as if, indeed, life had gone so hard with him that he
+had forgotten the way of kindness.  Then he stretched out his hand and
+said brokenly: "I am grateful, believe me.  I cannot tell you just now,
+but I will soon, perhaps."  His hand was upon the curtain of the door,
+when my steward's voice was heard outside, calling my name.  The man
+himself entered immediately, and said that Mrs. Falchion sent her
+compliments, and would I come at once to see her companion, Miss Caron,
+who had injured herself.
+
+The Intermediate Passenger turned towards me a strange look; his lips
+opened as if about to speak, but he said nothing.  At the instant there
+came to my mind whom the picture on his breast resembled: it was Mrs.
+Falchion.
+
+I think he saw this new intelligence in my face, and a meaning smile took
+the place of words, as he slowly left the cabin, mutely refusing
+assistance.
+
+I went to Mrs. Falchion's cabin, and met her outside the door.  She
+looked displeased.  "Justine has hurt herself," she said.  "Please attend
+to her; I am going on deck."
+
+The unfeeling nature of this remark held me to the spot for a moment;
+then I entered the cabin.  Justine Caron, a delicate but warm-faced girl
+of little more than twenty, was sitting on the cabin sofa, her head
+supported against the wall, and her hand wound in a handkerchief soaked
+in blood.  Her dress and the floor were also stained.  I undid the
+handkerchief and found an ugly wound in the palm of the hand.  I called
+the steward, and sent him to my dispensary for some necessaries; then I
+asked her how it happened.  At the moment I saw the cause--a broken
+bottle lying on the floor.  "The ship rolled," she said.  "The bottle
+fell from the shelf upon the marble washstand, and, breaking, from there
+to the floor.  Madame caught at my arm to save herself from falling; but
+I slipped, and was cut on the bottle--so."
+
+As she ended there was a knock, but the curtain was not drawn, and Mrs.
+Falchion's voice was heard.  "My dress is stained, Justine."
+
+The half-fainting girl weakly replied: "I am very sorry, madame, indeed."
+
+To this Mrs. Falchion rejoined: "When you have been attended to, you may
+go to bed, Justine.  I shall not want you again to-night.  But I shall
+change my dress.  It is so unpleasant; I hate blood.  I hope you will be
+well in the morning."
+
+To this Justine replied: "Ah, madame, I am sorry.  I could not help it;
+but I shall be quite well in the morning, I am sure."  Then she added
+quietly to me: "The poor madame!  She will not see suffering.  She hates
+pain.  Sickness troubles her.  Shall I be able to use my hand very soon,
+monsieur?"
+
+There was a wistful look in her eyes, and guessing why it was there, I
+said: "Yes, soon, I hope--in a few days, no doubt."
+
+Her face lighted up, and she said: "Madame likes about her people who are
+happy and well."  Then, as if she might have said too much, she hurriedly
+added: "But she is very kind;" and, stooping down quickly, her face
+whitening with the effort, she caught up the broken glass and threw it
+through the port-hole into the sea.
+
+A half-hour later I went on deck, and found Mrs. Falchion comfortably
+seated in her deck-chair.  I brought a stool over, and sat down beside
+her.  To this hour the quickness with which I got upon friendly terms
+with her astonishes me.
+
+"Justine is better?" she said, and her hand made a slight motion of
+disgust.
+
+"Yes.  She was not dangerously hurt, of course."
+
+"Let us change the subject, please.  They are going to have a fancy-dress
+ball on board, I believe, before we get to Aden.  How tiresome!  Isn't it
+a little affectation on the part of the stage-struck committee?  Isn't
+it--inconsequent?"
+
+"That depends," I said vaguely, inviting a question.  She idled with a
+book in her lap.
+
+"On what?"
+
+"On those who go, what costumes are worn, and how much beauty and art
+appear."
+
+"But the trouble!  Does it pay?  What return does one get?"
+
+"If all admire, half are envious, some are jealous, and one is devoted--
+isn't that enough?"  I think I was a fool that night.
+
+"You seem to understand women," she said, with a puzzling and not quite
+satisfactory smile.  "Yes, all that is something."
+
+Though I was looking at the sea rather than at her, I saw again that
+inquiring look in her eyes--such a measuring look as a recruiting
+sergeant might give a victim of the Queen's shilling.
+
+After a moment's pause she continued, I thought, abstractedly: "As what
+should you go?"
+
+I answered lightly and without premeditation, "As Caius Cassius.  Why
+should you not appear as Portia?"
+
+She lifted her eyebrows at me.
+
+"As Portia?"
+
+"As Portia, the wife of Brutus," I blundered on, at the same time
+receiving her permission, by a nod, to light my cigar.
+
+"The pious, love-sick wife of Brutus!"  This in a disdainful tone, and
+the white teeth clicked softly together.
+
+"Yes, a good disguise," I said banteringly, though I fancy somewhat
+tentatively also, and certainly with a touch of rudeness.  I was thinking
+at that moment of the Intermediate Passenger, and I was curious.
+
+"And you think of going in the disguise of a gentleman?  Caius Cassius
+was that, wasn't he?" she retorted in an ironical tone.
+
+"I suppose he was, though he was punished once for rudeness," I replied
+apologetically.
+
+"Quite so," was the decisive reply.
+
+I felt that she was perfectly cool, while I was a little confused, and
+ashamed too, that I had attempted to be playfully satirical.  And so,
+wondering what I should say next, I remarked in desperation: "Do you like
+the sea?"
+
+"I am never ill at sea," was her reply.  "But I do not really like it;
+it is treacherous.  The land would satisfy me if--"  She paused.
+
+"Yes, Mrs. Falchion--'if'?"
+
+"If I did not wish to travel," she vaguely added, looking blandly at me.
+
+"You have travelled much?" I ventured.
+
+"A great deal;" and again I saw that scrutiny in her eyes.  It occurred
+to me at the moment that she might think I possessed some previous
+knowledge of her.
+
+My mind became occupied again with the Intermediate Passenger and the
+portrait that he wore at his neck.  I almost laughed to think of the
+melodramatic turn which my first conversation with this woman might
+chance to take.  I felt that I was dealing with one who was able to meet
+cleverly any advance of mine, but I determined to lead the talk into as
+deep waters as possible.
+
+"I suppose, too, you are a good practical sailor--that is, you understand
+seamanship, if you have travelled much?"  I do not know why I said that,
+for it sounded foolish to me afterwards.
+
+"Pretty well," she replied.  "I can manage a sail; I know the argot,
+I could tell the shrouds from the bulwarks, and I've rowed a boat in
+a choppy sea."
+
+"It is not an accomplishment usual to your sex."
+
+"It was ordinary enough where I spent the early part of my life," was the
+idle reply; and she settled herself more comfortably in her chair.
+
+"Yes?  May I ask where that was?" and as I said this, it occurred to me
+that she was, perhaps, leading me on, instead of my leading her; to
+betray me as to anything I knew about her.
+
+"In the South Seas," she replied.  "My father was a British consul in the
+Islands."
+
+"You have not come from the Islands now, I suppose?"
+
+"No," she said a little more softly; "it is years since I was in Samoa.
+. . .  My father is buried there."
+
+"You must have found it a romantic life in those half-barbaric places?"
+
+She shifted in her chair.  "Romantic!"  Her tone conveyed a very slight
+uneasiness and vagueness.  "I am afraid you must ask some one else about
+that sort of thing.  I did not see much romance, but I saw plenty that
+was half-barbaric."  Here she laughed slightly.
+
+Just then I saw the lights of a vessel far off.  "See--a vessel!" I said;
+and I watched the lights in silence, but thinking.  I saw that she too
+was watching idly.
+
+At length, as if continuing the conversation, I said: "Yes, I suppose
+life must be somewhat adventurous and dangerous among savage people like
+the Samoans, Tongans, and Fijians?"
+
+"Indeed, then," she replied decisively, "you are not to suppose anything
+of the kind.  The danger is not alone for the white people."
+
+At this I appeared, as I really was, interested, and begged her to
+explain what she meant.  She thought a moment, and then briefly, but
+clearly, sketched the life of those islands, showing how, in spite of
+missionary labour selfish and unselfish, the native became the victim of
+civilisation, the prey of the white trader and beachcomber, who were
+protected by men-of-war with convincing Nordenfeldt and Hotchkiss guns;
+how the stalwart force of barbaric existence declined, and with it the
+crude sense of justice, the practice of communism at its simplest and
+purest, the valour of nationality.  These phrases are my own--the
+substance, not the fashion, of her speech.
+
+"You do not, then," I said, "believe wholly in the unselfishness of
+missionaries, the fair dealing of traders, the perfect impartiality of
+justice, as shown through steel-clad cruisers?"
+
+"I have seen too much to be quite fair in judgment, I fear, even to men-
+of-war's men;" and she paused, listening to a song which came from the
+after-part of the ship.  The air was very still, and a few of the words
+of the droll, plaintive ditty came to us.
+
+Quartermaster Stone, as he passed us, hummed it, and some voices of the
+first-class passengers near joined in the refrain:
+
+               "Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+                    And the old world!"
+
+Some days later I got all of the song from one of the intermediate
+passengers, and the last verse of it I give here:
+
+              "I'm a-sailing, I'm a-sailing on the sea,
+                  To a harbour where the wind is still;
+               Oh, my dearie, do you wait for me?
+                  Oh, my dearie, do you love me still?
+               Sing, hey, for a rover on the sea,
+                    And the old world!"
+
+I noticed that Mrs. Falchion's brow contracted as the song proceeded,
+making a deep vertical line between the eyes, and that the fingers of the
+hand nearest me closed on the chair-arm firmly.  The hand attracted me.
+It was long, the fingers were shapely, but not markedly tapering, and
+suggested firmness.  I remarked afterward, when I chanced to shake hands
+with her, that her fingers enclosed one's hand; it was not a mere touch
+or pressure, but an unemotional and possessive clasp.  I felt sure that
+she had heard the song before, else it had not produced even this so
+slight effect on her nerves.  I said: "It is a quaint song.  I suppose
+you are familiar with it and all of its kind?"
+
+"I fancy I have heard it somewhere," she answered in a cold voice.
+
+I am aware that my next question was not justified by our very short
+acquaintance; but this acquaintance had been singular from its beginning,
+and it did not seem at that moment as it looks on paper; besides, I had
+the Intermediate Passenger in my mind.  "Perhaps your husband is a naval
+man?" I asked.
+
+A faint flush passed over her face, and then, looking at me with a
+neutral expression and some reserve of manner, she replied: "My husband
+was not a naval man."
+
+She said "was not."  That implied his death.
+
+There was no trouble in her manner; I could detect no sign of excitement.
+I turned to look at the lights of the approaching vessel, and there,
+leaning against the railing that divided the two decks, was the
+Intermediate Passenger.  He was looking at us intently.  A moment after
+he disappeared.  Beyond doubt there was some intimate association between
+these two.
+
+My thoughts were, however, distracted by our vessel signalling the other.
+Hungerford was passing just then, and I said: "Have you any idea what
+vessel it is, Hungerford?"
+
+"Yes, man-of-war 'Porcupine', bound for Aden, I think."
+
+Mrs. Falchion at this laughed strangely, as she leaned forward looking,
+and then, rising quickly, said: "I prefer to walk."
+
+"May I accompany you?" I asked.
+
+She inclined her head, and we joined the promenaders.  The band was
+playing, and, for a ship-band, playing very well, the ballet music of
+Delibes' 'Sylvia'.  The musicians had caught that unaccentuated and
+sensuous swing of the melody which the soft, tropical atmosphere rendered
+still more languorous.  With Mrs. Falchion's hand upon my arm, I felt a
+sense of capitulation to the music and to her, uncanny in its suddenness.
+At this distance of time it seems to me absurd.  I had once experienced
+something of the same feeling with the hand of a young medical student,
+who, skilled in thought-reading, discovered the number of a bank-note
+that was in my mind.
+
+This woman had an attractiveness compelling and delightful, at least in
+its earlier application to me.  Both professionally and socially I have
+been brought into contact with women of beauty and grace, but never one
+who, like Mrs. Falchion, being beautiful, seemed so unconscious of the
+fact, so indifferent to those about her, so untouched by another's
+emotion, so lacking in sensitiveness of heart; and who still drew people
+to her.  I am speaking now of the earlier portion of our acquaintance;
+of her as she was up to this period in her life.
+
+I was not alone in this opinion of her, for, as time went on, every
+presentable man and woman on the boat was introduced to her; and if some
+women criticised and some disliked her, all acknowledged her talent and
+her imperial attraction.  Among the men her name was never spoken but
+with reserve and respect, and her afternoon teas were like a little
+court.  She had no compromising tenderness of manner for man or woman;
+she ruled, yet was unapproachable through any avenues of sentiment.  She
+had a quiet aplomb, which would be called 'sang-froid' in a man.
+
+"Did you ever see a Spanish-Mexican woman dance?" she asked in one of
+the pauses of the music.
+
+"Never: never any good dancing, save what one gets at a London theatre."
+
+"That is graceful," she said, "but not dancing.  You have heard of music
+stirring the blood; of savage races--and others--working themselves up to
+ecstatic fury?  Maybe you have seen the Dervishes, or the Fijians, or the
+Australian aboriginals?  No?  Well, I have, and I have seen--which is so
+much more--those Spanish-Mexican women dance.  Did you ever see anything
+so thrilling, so splendid, that you felt you must possess it?"--She asked
+me that with her hand upon my arm!--"Well, that is it.  I have felt that
+way towards a horse which has won a great race, and to a woman who has
+carried me with her through the fantastic drama of her dance, until she
+stood at the climax, head thrown back, face glowing--a statue.  It is
+grand to be eloquent like that, not in words, but in person."
+
+In this was the key to her own nature.  Body and mind she was free
+from ordinary morbidness, unless her dislike of all suffering was morbid.
+With her this was a dislike of any shock to the senses.  She was selfish
+at all points.
+
+These conclusions were pursued at the expense of speech on my part.  At
+first she did not appear to regard my silence.  She seemed to have
+thoughts of her own; but she shook them off with a little firm motion of
+the shoulders, and, with the assumption of a demureness of manner and an
+airy petulance, said: "Well, amuse me."
+
+"Amuse you?" was my reply.  "Delighted to do so if I can.  How?"
+
+"Talk to me," was the quick response.
+
+"Would that accomplish the purpose?"  This in a tone of mock protest.
+
+"Please don't be foolish, Dr. Marmion.  I dislike having to explain.
+Tell me things."
+
+"About what?"
+
+"Oh, about yourself--about people you have met, and all that; for I
+suppose you have seen a good deal and lived a good deal."
+
+"About hospital cases?" I said a little maliciously.
+
+"No, please, no! I abhor everything that is sick and poor and miserable."
+
+"Well," said I, at idle venture, "if not a hospital, what about a gaol?"
+
+I felt the hand on my arm twitch slightly, and then her reply came.
+
+"I said I hated everything that was wretched and wicked.  You are either
+dense, or purposely irritating."
+
+"Well, then, a college?"
+
+"A college?  Yes, that sounds better.  But I do not wish descriptions
+of being 'gated,' or 'sent down,' or 'ploughed,' and that kind of
+commonplace.  I should prefer, unless your vanity leads you irresistibly
+in that direction, something with mature life and amusement; or, at
+least, life and incident, and good sport--if you do not dwell on the
+horrors of killing."
+
+On the instant there came to me the remembrance of Professor Valiant's
+wife.  I think it was not what she wanted; but I had a purpose, and I
+began:
+
+"Every one at St. Luke's admired and respected Professor Valiant's wife,
+she was so frank and cordial and prettily downright.  In our rooms we all
+called her a good chap, and a dashed good chap when her husband happened
+to be rustier than usual.  He was our professor in science.  It was the
+general belief that he chose science for his life-work because it gave
+unusual opportunities for torture.  He was believed to be a devoted
+vivisectionist; he certainly had methods of cruelty, masterly in their
+ingenuity.  He could make a whole class raw with punishment in a few
+words; and many a scorching bit of Latin verse was written about his
+hooked nose and fishy eye.
+
+"But his highest talents in this direction were reserved for his wife.
+His distorted idea of his own importance made him view her as a chattel,
+an inferior being; the more so, I believe, because she brought him little
+money when he married her.  She was too much the woman to pretend to
+kneel to him, and because she would not be his slave, she had a hard time
+of it.  He began by insisting that she should learn science, that she
+might assist him in his experiments.  She knew that she had no taste for
+it, that it was no part of her wifely duty, and she did what suited her
+better--followed the hounds.  It was a picture to see her riding across
+country.  She could take a fence with a sound hunter like a bird.  And so
+it happened that, after a time, they went their own ways pretty well; he
+ignoring her, neglecting her, deprecating her by manner, if not by
+speech, and making her life more than uncomfortable.
+
+"She was always kind to me.  I was the youngest chap in the college, and
+was known as 'Marmy' by every one; and because I was fonder of science
+than most other men in the different years, Valiant was more gracious to
+me than the rest, though I did not like him.  One day, when I called,
+I heard her say to him, not knowing that I was near: 'Whatever you feel,
+or however you act towards me in private, I will have respect when others
+are present.'
+
+"It was the custom for the professors to invite each student to luncheon
+or dinner once during term-time.  Being somewhat of a favourite of both
+Professor and Mrs. Valiant however, I lunched with them often.  I need
+hardly say that I should not have exceeded the regulation once had it not
+been for Mrs. Valiant.  The last time I went is as clear in my memory as
+if it were yesterday.  Valiant was more satirical and cold-blooded than
+usual.  I noticed a kind of shining hardness in his wife's eyes, which
+gave me a strange feeling; yet she was talkative and even gay, I thought,
+while I more than once clinched my fist under the table, so much did I
+want to pummel him; for I was a lover of hers, in a deferential, boyish
+way.
+
+"At last, knowing that she liked the hunt, I asked her if she was going
+to the meet on the following Saturday, saying that I intended to follow,
+having been offered a horse.  With a steely ring to her voice, and a
+further brightening of the eyes, she said: 'You are a stout little
+sportsman, Marmy.  Yes, I am going on Major Karney's big horse, Carbine.'
+
+"Valiant looked up, half sneering, half doubtful, I thought, and
+rejoined: 'Carbine is a valuable horse, and the fences are stiff in the
+Garston country.'
+
+"She smiled gravely, then, with her eyes fixed on her husband, said:
+'Carbine is a perfect gentleman.  He will do what I ask him.  I have
+ridden him.'
+
+"'The devil you have!' he replied.
+
+"'I am sure,' said I, as I hoped, bravely, and not a little
+enthusiastically, 'that Carbine would take any fence you asked him.'
+
+"'Or not, as the case might be.  Thank you, Marmy, for the compliment,'
+she said.
+
+"'A Triton among minnows,' remarked Valiant, not entirely under his
+breath; 'horses obey, and students admire, and there is no end to her
+greatness.'
+
+"'There is an end to everything, Edward,' she remarked a shade sadly and
+quietly.
+
+"He turned to me and said: 'Science is a great study, Marmion, but it is
+sardonic too; for you shall find that when you reduce even a Triton to
+its original elements--'
+
+"'Oh, please let me finish,' she interrupted softly.  'I know the lecture
+so well.  It reads this way: "The place of generation must break to give
+place to the generated; but the influence spreads out beyond the
+fragments, and is greater thus than in the mass--neither matter nor mind
+can be destroyed.  The earth was molten before it became cold rock and
+quiet world."  There, you see, Marmy, that I am a fellow-student of
+yours.'
+
+"Valiant's eyes were ugly to watch; for she had quoted from a lecture of
+his, delivered to us that week.  After an instant he said, with slow
+maliciousness: 'Oh, ye gods, render me worthy of this Portia, and teach
+her to do as Brutus's Portia did, ad eternum!'
+
+"She shuddered a little, then said very graciously, and as if he had
+meant nothing but kindness: 'Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.'
+I will leave you now to your cigarettes; and because I must go out soon,
+and shall not, I fear, see you again this afternoon, good-bye, Marmy,
+till Saturday--till Saturday.'  And she left us.
+
+"I was white and trembling with anger.  He smiled coolly, and was
+careful to choose me one of his best cigars, saying as he handed it:
+'Conversation is a science, Marmion.  Study it; there is solid
+satisfaction in it; it is the only art that brings instant pleasure.
+Like the stage, it gets its immediate applause.'
+
+"Well, Mrs. Valiant did ride Carbine on that Saturday.  Such a scene it
+was!  I see it now--the mottled plump of hounds upon the scent, the
+bright sun showing up the scarlet coats of the whips gloriously, the long
+stride of the hunters, ears back and quarters down!  She rode Carbine,
+and the fences WERE stiff--so stiff that I couldn't have taken half of
+them.  Afterward I was not sorry that I couldn't; for she rode for a fall
+that day on Carbine, her own horse, she had bought him of Major Karney a
+few days before,--and I heard her last words as she lay beside him,
+smiling through the dreadful whiteness of her lips.  'Goodbye, Marmy,'
+she whispered.  'Carbine and I go together.  It is better so, in the full
+cry and a big field.  Tell the men at Luke's that I hope they will pass
+at the coming exams. . . .  I am going up--for my final--Marmy.--
+I wonder--if I'll--pass.'  And then the words froze on her lips.
+
+"It was persecution that did it--diabolical persecution and selfishness.
+That was the worst day the college ever knew.  At the funeral, when the
+provost read, 'For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister
+out of the miseries of this sinful world,' Big Wallington, the wildest
+chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we all
+followed.  And that gold-spectacled sneak stood there, with a lying
+white handkerchief at his eyes.
+
+"I laid myself out to make the college too hot for him.  In a week I had
+every man in the place with me, and things came to such a pass that all
+of us must be sent down, or Valiant resign.  He resigned.  He found
+another professorship; but the thing followed him, and he was obliged to
+leave the country."
+
+When I finished the story, Mrs. Falchion was silent for a time, then,
+with a slight air of surprise, and in a quite critical way, she said:
+"I should think you would act very well, if you used less emotion.  Mrs.
+Valiant had a kind of courage, but she was foolish to die.  She should
+have stayed and fought him--fought him every way, until she was his
+master.  She could have done it; she was clever, I should think.
+Still, if she had to die, it was better to go with a good horse that way.
+I think I should prefer to go swiftly, suddenly, but without the horror
+of blood and bruises, and that sort of thing. . . .  I should like to
+meet Professor Valiant.  He was hard, but he was able too. . . .  But
+haven't we had enough of horror?  I asked you to amuse me, and you have
+merely interested me instead.  Oh!--"
+
+This exclamation, I thought, was caused by the voice of the quartermaster
+humming:
+
+              "I'm a-sailing, I'm a-sailing on the sea,
+                 To a harbour where the wind is still"--
+
+Almost immediately she said: "I think I will go below."  Then, after a
+slight pause: "This is a liberal acquaintance for one day, Dr. Marmion;
+and, you know, we were not introduced."
+
+"No, Mrs. Falchion, we were not introduced; but I am in some regards
+your host, and I fear we should all be very silent if we waited for
+regular introductions here.  The acquaintance gives me pleasure, but it
+is not nearly so liberal as I hope it may become."
+
+She did not answer, but smiled at me over her shoulder as she passed down
+the staircase, and the next instant I could have bitten my tongue for
+playing the cavalier as I had done; for showing, as I think I did, that
+she had an influence over me--an influence peculiar to herself, and
+difficult to account for when not in her presence.
+
+I sat down, lit a cigar, and went over in my mind all that had been said
+between us; all that had occurred in my cabin after dinner; every minute
+since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail.  Lascars
+slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near
+alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon
+there came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly.  Under the
+influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted.  My
+eyes shifted to the lights of the 'Porcupine' in the distance, and from
+them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck.  The
+"All's well" of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance; the
+swish of water against the dividing hull of the 'Fulvia' sounded like a
+call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming through
+the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and dreams.  These
+dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on my shoulder, and
+I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English novelist, had
+dropped out from the promenade to talk with me.  He saw my mood, however,
+and said quietly: "Give me a light for my cigar, will you?  Then, astride
+this stool, I'll help you to make inventory of the rest of them.
+A pretty study; for, at our best, 'What fools we mortals be!'"
+
+"'Motley is your only wear,'" was my reply; and for a full half-hour,
+which, even for a man, is considerable, we spoke no word, but only nodded
+when some one of the promenaders noticed us.  There was a bookmaker fresh
+from the Melbourne races; an American, Colonel Ryder, whose eloquence had
+carried him round the world; a stalwart squatter from Queensland;
+a pretty widow, who had left her husband under the sods of Tasmania;
+a brace of girls going to join their lovers and be married in England;
+a few officers fleeing from India with their livers and their lives;
+a family of four lanky lasses travelling "home" to school; a row of
+affable ladies, who alternated between envy and gaiety and delight in,
+and criticism of, their husbands; a couple of missionaries, preparing
+to give us lectures on the infamous gods of the heathen,--gods which,
+poor harmless little creatures! might be bought at a few annas a pint at
+Aden or Colombo,--and on the Exodus and the Pharaohs--pleasures reserved
+for the Red Sea; a commercial traveller, who arranged theatricals, and
+cast himself for all the principal parts; a humorous and naive person who
+industriously hinted at the opulence of his estates in Ireland; two
+stately English ladies of title; a cheerful array of colonial knights and
+judges off to Europe for a holiday; and many others, who made little
+worlds unto themselves, called cliques by blunt people.
+
+"To my mind, the most interesting persons on the ship," said Clovelly at
+last, "are the bookmaker, Miss Treherne, and the lady with whom you have
+just been talking--an exceptional type."
+
+"An unusual woman, I fancy," was my reply.  "But which is Miss Treherne?
+I am afraid I am not quite sure."
+
+He described her and her father, with whom I had talked--a London Q.C.,
+travelling for his health, a notable man with a taste for science, who
+spent his idle hours in reading astronomy and the plays of Euripides.
+
+"Why not include the father in the list of the most interesting persons?"
+I questioned.
+
+"Because I have met many men like him, but no one quite like his
+daughter, or Mrs.--what is her name?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion."
+
+"Or Mrs. Falchion or the bookmaker."
+
+"What is there so uncommon about Miss Treherne?  She had not struck me as
+being remarkable."
+
+"No?  Well, of course, she is not striking after the fashion of Mrs.
+Falchion.  But watch her, study her, and you will find her to be the
+perfection of a type--the finest expression of a decorous convention, a
+perfect product of social conservatism; unaffected, cheerful, sensitive,
+composed, very talented, altogether companionable."
+
+"Excuse me," I said, laughing, though I was impressed; "that sounds as if
+you had been writing about her, and applying to her the novelist's system
+of analysis, which makes an imperfect individual a perfect type.  Now,
+frankly, are you speaking of Miss Treherne, or of some one of whom she is
+the outline, as it were?"
+
+Clovelly turned and looked at me steadily.  "When you consider a
+patient," he said, "do you arrange a diagnosis of a type or of a person?
+--And, by the way, 'type' is a priggish word."
+
+"I consider the type in connection with the person."
+
+"Exactly.  The person is the thing.  That clears up the matter of
+business and art.  But now, as to Miss Treherne: I want to say that,
+having been admitted to her acquaintance and that of her father, I have
+thought of them only as friends, and not as 'characters' or 'copy.'"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Clovelly," said I.  "I might have known."
+
+"Now, to prove how magnanimous I am, I shall introduce you to Miss
+Treherne, if you will let me.  You've met her father, I suppose?"
+he added, and tossed his cigar overboard.
+
+"Yes, I have talked with him.  He is a courteous and able man, I should
+think."
+
+We rose.  Presently he continued: "See, Miss Treherne is sitting there
+with the Tasmanian widow--what is HER name?"
+
+"Mrs. Callendar," I replied.  "Blackburn, the Queenslander, is joining
+them."
+
+"So much the better," he said.  "Come on."
+
+As we passed the music saloon, we paused for an instant to look through
+the port-hole at a pale-faced girl with big eyes and a wonderful bright
+red dress, singing "The Angels' Serenade," while an excitable bear-leader
+turned her music for her.  Near her stood a lanky girl who adored actors
+and tenors, and lived in the hope of meeting some of those gentlemen of
+the footlights, who plough their way so calmly through the hearts of
+maidens fresh from school.
+
+We drew back to go on towards Miss Treherne, when Hungerford touched me
+on the arm, and said: "I want to see you for a little while, Marmion, if
+Mr. Clovelly will excuse you."
+
+I saw by Hungerford's face that he had something of importance to say,
+and, linking my arm in his, I went with him to his cabin, which was near
+those of the intermediate passengers.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+A TALE OF NO MAN'S SEA
+
+Inside the cabin Hungerford closed the door, gripped me by the arm, and
+then handed me a cheroot, with the remark: "My pater gave them to me last
+voyage home.  Have kept 'em in tea."  And then he added, with no
+appearance of consecutiveness: "Hang the bally ship, anyhow!"
+
+I shall not attempt to tone down the crudeness of Hungerford's language.
+It contents me to think that the solidity of his character and his worth
+will appear even through the crust of free-and-easy idioms, as they will
+certainly be seen in his acts;--he was sound at heart and true as steel.
+
+"What is the matter, Hungerford?" I asked lighting the cheroot.
+
+"Everything's the matter.  Captain, with his nose in the air, and
+trusting all round to his officers.  First officer, no good--never any
+use since they poured the coal on him.  Purser, ought to be on a Chinese
+junk.  Second, third, fourth officers, first-rate chaps, but so-so
+sailors.  Doctor, frivolling with a lovely filly, pedigree not known.
+Why, confound it! nobody takes this business seriously except the
+captain, and he sits on a golden throne.  He doesn't know that in any
+real danger this swagger craft would be filled with foolishness.
+There isn't more than one good boat's crew on board--sailors, lascars,
+stewards, and all.  As for the officers, if the surgeon would leave the
+lovely ladies to themselves, he'd find cases worth treating, and duties
+worth doing.  He should keep himself fit for shocks.  And he can take my
+word for it--for I've been at sea since I was a kid, worse luck!--that a
+man with anything to do on a ship ought to travel every day nose out for
+shipwreck next day, and so on, port to port.  Ship-surgeons, as well as
+all other officers, weren't ordained to follow after cambric skirts and
+lace handkerchiefs at sea.  Believe me or not as you like, but, for a man
+having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks.  Now, I suppose you'll
+think I'm insolent, for I'm younger than you are, Marmion, but you know
+what a rough-and-tumble fellow I am, and you'll not mind."
+
+"Well, Hungerford," I said, "to what does this lead?"
+
+"To Number 116 Intermediate, for one thing.  It's letting off steam for
+another.  I tell you, Marmion, these big ships are too big.  There are
+those canvas boats.  They won't work; you can't get them together.
+You couldn't launch one in an hour.  And as for the use of the others,
+the lascars would melt like snow in any real danger.  There's about one
+decent boat's crew on the ship, that's all.  There!  I've unburdened
+myself; I feel better."
+
+Presently he added, with a shake of the head: "See here: now-a-days we
+trust too much to machinery and chance, and not enough to skill of hand
+and brain stuff.  I'd like to show you some of the crews I've had in the
+Pacific and the China Sea--but I'm at it again!  I'll now come, Marmion,
+to the real reason why I brought you here. . . .  Number 116
+Intermediate is under the weather; I found him fainting in the passage.
+I helped him into his cabin.  He said he'd been to you to get medicine,
+and you'd given him some.  Now, the strange part of the business is, I
+know him.  He didn't remember me, however--perhaps because he didn't get
+a good look at me.  Coincidence is a strange thing.  I can point to a
+dozen in my short life, every one as remarkable, if not as startling, as
+this.  Here, I'll spin you a yarn:
+
+"It happened four years ago.  I had no moustache then, was fat like a
+whale, and first mate on the 'Dancing Kate', a pearler in the Indian Ocean,
+between Java and Australia.  That was sailing, mind you--real seamanship,
+no bally nonsense; a fight every weather, interesting all round.  If it
+wasn't a deadly calm, it was a typhoon; if it wasn't either, it was want
+of food and water.  I've seen us with pearls on board worth a thousand
+quid, and not a drop of water nor three square meals in the caboose.  But
+that was life for men and not Miss Nancys.  If they weren't saints, they
+were sailors, afraid of nothing but God Almighty--and they do respect
+Him, even when they curse the winds and the sea.  Well, one day we were
+lying in the open sea, about two hundred and fifty miles from Port
+Darwin.  There wasn't a breath of air.  The sea was like glass; the sun
+was drawing turpentine out of every inch of the 'Dancing Kate'.  The world
+was one wild blister.  There wasn't a comfortable spot in the craft, and
+all round us was that staring, oily sea.  It was too hot to smoke, and I
+used to make a Sede boy do my smoking for me.  I got the benefit of the
+smell without any work.  I was lying under the droop of a dingey, making
+the Sede boy call on all his gods for wind, with interludes of smoke,
+when he chucked his deities and tobacco, and, pointing, shouted, 'Man!
+man!'
+
+"I snatched a spy-glass.  Sure enough, there was a boat on the water.
+It was moving ever so slowly.  It seemed to stop, and we saw something
+lifted and waved, and then all was still again.  I got a boat's crew
+together, and away we went in that deadly smother.  An hour's row and we
+got within hail of the derelict--as one of the crew said, 'feelin' as if
+the immortal life was jerked out of us.'  The dingey lay there on the
+glassy surface, not a sign of life about her.  Yet I had, as I said, seen
+something waved.  The water didn't even lap its sides.  It was ghostly,
+I can tell you.  Our oars licked the water; they didn't attack it.  Now,
+I'm going to tell you something, Marmion, that'll make you laugh.  I
+don't think I've got any poetry in me, but just then I thought of some
+verses I learned when I was a little cove at Wellington--a devilishly
+weird thing.  It came to me at that moment like a word in my ear.  It
+made me feel awkward for a second.  All sailors are superstitious, you
+know.  I'm superstitious about this ship.  Never mind; I'll tell you the
+verses, to show you what a queer thing memory is.  The thing was called
+'No Man's Sea':
+
+             "'The days are dead in the No Man's Sea,
+                 And God has left it alone;
+               The angels cover their heads and flee,
+                 And the wild four winds have flown.
+
+             "'There's never a ripple upon the tide,
+                 There's never a word or sound;
+               But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+                 To look for the souls of the drowned.
+
+             "'The No Man's Sea is a gaol of souls,
+                 And its gate is a burning sun,
+               And deep beneath it a great bell tolls
+                 For a death that never is done.
+
+             "'Alas! for any that comes anear,
+                 That lies on its moveless breast;
+               The grumbling water shall be his bier,
+                 And never a place of rest."'
+
+"There are four of the verses.  Well, I made a motion to stop the rowing,
+and was mum for a minute.  The men got nervous.  They looked at the boat
+in front of us, and then turned round, as though to see if the 'Dancing
+Kate' was still in sight.  I spoke, and they got more courage.  I stood up
+in the boat, but could see nothing in the dingey.  I gave a sign to go
+on, and soon we were alongside.  In the bottom of the dingey lay a man,
+apparently dead, wearing the clothes of a convict.  One of the crew gave
+a grunt of disgust, the others said nothing.  I don't take to men often,
+and to convicts precious seldom; but there was a look in this man's face
+which the prison clothes couldn't demoralise--a damned pathetic look,
+which seemed to say, 'Not guilty.'
+
+"In a minute I was beside him, and found he wasn't dead.  Brandy brought
+him round a little; but he was a bit gone in the head, and muttered all
+the way back to the ship.  I had unbuttoned his shirt, and I saw on his
+breast a little ivory portrait of a woman.  I didn't let the crew see it;
+for the fellow, even in his delirium, appeared to know I had exposed the
+thing, and drew the linen close in his fingers, and for a long time held
+it at his throat."
+
+"What was the woman's face like, Hungerford?" I asked.
+
+He parried, remarking only that she had the face of a lady, and was
+handsome.
+
+I pressed him.  "But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?"
+
+With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: "Don't ask foolish
+questions, Marmion.  Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life.  He
+wouldn't have lived at all, if a breeze hadn't come up and let us get
+away to the coast.  It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went
+bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake.
+However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he
+told me his story.  He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western
+Australia.  He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to
+do some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey.  His crime was
+stealing funds belonging to a Squatting and Mining Company.  There was
+this extenuating circumstance: he could have replaced the money, which,
+as he said, he'd only intended to use for a few weeks.  But a personal
+enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts were examined, and though he
+showed he'd only used the money while more of his own was on the way to
+him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him.  For two reasons: because
+it was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this trial to divert public
+attention from its own dirty position; and because he had against him not
+only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to hit the Company through
+him.  He'd filched to be able to meet the large expenses of his wife's
+establishment.  Into this he didn't enter minutely, and he didn't blame
+her for having so big a menage; he only said he was sorry that he hadn't
+been able to support it without having to come, even for a day, to the
+stupidity of stealing.  After two years he escaped.  He asked me to write
+a letter to his wife, which he'd dictate.  Marmion, you or I couldn't
+have dictated that letter if we'd taken a year to do it.  There was no
+religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full of sorrow
+for what he'd done, and for the disgrace he'd brought on her.  I remember
+the last few sentences as if I'd seen them yesterday.  'I am dying on the
+open sea, disgraced, but free,' he said.  'I am not innocent in act, but
+I was not guilty of intentional wrong.  I did what I did that you should
+have all you wished, all you ought to have.  I ask but this--and I shall
+soon ask for nothing--that you will have a kind thought, now and then,
+for the man who always loved you, and loves you yet.  I have never blamed
+you that you did not come near me in my trouble; but I wish you were here
+for a moment before I go away for ever.  You must forgive me now, for you
+will be free.  If I were a better man I would say, God bless you.  In my
+last conscious moments I will think of you, and speak your name.  And now
+good-bye--an everlasting good-bye.  I was your loving husband, and am your
+lover until death.'  And it was signed, 'Boyd Madras.'
+
+"However, he didn't die.  Between the captain and myself, we kept life in
+him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and crew,
+swearing to let no one know he was a convict.  And I'll say this for the
+crew of the 'Dancing Kate' that, so far as I know, they kept their word.
+That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne bankers, I gave
+back to him before we landed.  We made him up a purse of fifty pounds,--
+for the crew got to like him,--and left him at Port Darwin, sailing away
+again in a few days to another pearl-field farther east.  What happened
+to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don't know; but one day I found
+him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean, looking almost as
+near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey on No Man's Sea.
+As I said before, I think he didn't recognise me; and he's lying now in
+116 Intermediate, with a look on him that I've seen in the face of a man
+condemned to death by the devils of cholera or equatorial fever.  And
+that's the story, Marmion, which I brought you to hear--told, as you
+notice, in fine classical style."
+
+"And why do you tell ME this, Hungerford--a secret you've kept all these
+years?  Knowledge of that man's crime wasn't necessary before giving him
+belladonna or a hot bath."
+
+Hungerford kept back the whole truth for reasons of his own.  He said:
+"Chiefly because I want you to take a decent interest in the chap.  He
+looks as if he might go off on the long voyage any tick o' the clock.
+You are doctor, parson, and everything else of the kind on board.  I like
+the poor devil, but anyhow I'm not in a position to be going around with
+ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,--very good things.
+Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the body,
+and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras's mind is as sick as his
+torso.  By the way, he calls himself 'Charles Boyd,' so I suppose we
+needn't recall to him his former experiences by adding the 'Madras.'"
+
+Hungerford squeezed my arm again violently, and added: "Look here,
+Marmion, we understand each other in this, don't we?  To do what we can
+for the fellow, and be mum."
+
+Some of this looks rough and blunt, but as it was spoken there was that
+in it which softened it to my ear.  I knew he had told all he thought I
+ought to know, and that he wished me to question him no more, nor to
+refer to Mrs. Falchion, whose relationship to Boyd Madras--or Charles
+Boyd--both of us suspected.
+
+"It was funny about those verses coming to my mind, wasn't it, Marmion?"
+he continued.  And he began to repeat one of them, keeping time to the
+wave-like metre with his cheroot, winding up with a quick, circular
+movement, and putting it again between his lips:
+
+             "'There's never a ripple upon the tide,
+                 There's never a breath or sound;
+               But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
+                 To look for the souls of the drowned."'
+
+Then he jumped off the berth where he had been sitting, put on his
+jacket, said it was time to take his turn on the bridge, and prepared to
+go out, having apparently dismissed Number 116 Intermediate from his
+mind.
+
+I went to Charles Boyd's cabin, and knocked gently.  There was no
+response.  I entered.  He lay sleeping soundly--the sleep that comes
+after nervous exhaustion.  I had a good chance to study him as he lay
+there.  The face was sensitive and well fashioned, but not strong; the
+hands were delicate, yet firmly made.  One hand was clinched upon that
+portion of his breast where the portrait hung.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE TRAIL OF THE ISHMAELITE
+
+I went on deck again, and found Clovelly in the smoking-room.  The
+bookmaker was engaged in telling tales of the turf, alternated with comic
+songs by Blackburn--an occupation which lasted throughout the voyage, and
+was associated with electric appeals to the steward to fill the flowing
+bowl.  Clovelly came with me, and we joined Miss Treherne and her father.
+Mr. Treherne introduced me to his daughter, and Clovelly amiably drew the
+father into a discussion of communism as found in the South Sea Islands.
+
+I do not think my conversation with Miss Treherne was brilliant.  She has
+since told me that I appeared self-conscious and preoccupied.  This being
+no compliment to her, I was treated accordingly.  I could have endorsed
+Clovelly's estimate of her so far as her reserve and sedateness were
+concerned.  It seemed impossible to talk naturally.  The events of the
+day were interrupting the ordinary run of thought, and I felt at a
+miserable disadvantage.  I saw, however, that the girl was gifted and
+clear of mind, and possessed of great physical charm, but of that fine
+sort which must be seen in suitable surroundings to be properly
+appreciated.  Here on board ship a sweet gravity and a proud decorum--not
+altogether unnecessary--prevented her from being seen at once to the best
+advantage.  Even at this moment I respected her the more for it, and was
+not surprised, nor exactly displeased, that she adroitly drew her father
+and Clovelly into the conversation.  With Clovelly she seemed to find
+immediate ground for naive and pleasant talk; on his part, deferential,
+original, and attentive; on hers, easy, allusive, and warmed with piquant
+humour.  I admired her; saw how cleverly Clovelly was making the most of
+her; guessed at the solicitude, studious care, and affection of her
+bringing-up; watched the fond pleasure of the father as he listened; and
+was angry with myself that Mrs. Falchion's voice rang in my ears at the
+same moment as hers.  But it did ring there, and the real value of that
+smart tournament of ideas was partially lost to me.
+
+The next morning I went to Boyd Madras's cabin.  He welcomed me
+gratefully, and said that he was much better; as he seemed; but he
+carried a hectic flush, such as comes to a consumptive person.  I said
+little to him beyond what was necessary for the discussion of his case.
+I cautioned him about any unusual exertion, and was about to leave, when
+an impulse came to me, and I returned and said: "You will not let me help
+you in any other way?"
+
+"Yes," he answered; "I shall be very glad of your help, but not just yet.
+And, Doctor, believe me, I think medicines can do very little.  Though I
+am thankful to you for visiting me, you need not take the trouble, unless
+I am worse, and then I will send a steward to you, or go to you myself."
+
+What lay behind this request, unless it was sensitiveness, I could not
+tell; but I determined to take my own course, and to visit him when I
+thought fit.
+
+Still, I saw him but once or twice on the after-deck in the succeeding
+days.  He evidently wished to keep out of sight as much as possible.  I
+am ashamed to say there was a kind of satisfaction in this to me; for,
+when a man's wife--and I believed she was Boyd Madras's wife--hangs on
+your arm, and he himself is denied that privilege, and fares poorly
+beside her sumptuousness, and lives as a stranger to her, you can
+scarcely regard his presence with pleasure.  And from the sheer force of
+circumstances, as it seemed to me then, Mrs. Falchion's hand was often on
+my arm; and her voice was always in my ear at meal-times and when I
+visited Justine Caron to attend to her wound, or joined in the chattering
+recreations of the music saloon.  It was impossible not to feel her
+influence; and if I did not yield entirely to it, I was more possessed by
+it than I was aware.  I was inquisitive to know beyond doubt that she was
+the wife of this man.  I think it was in my mind at the time that,
+perhaps, by being with her much, I should be able to do him a service.
+But there came a time when I was sufficiently undeceived.  It was all a
+game of misery in which some one stood to lose all round.  Who was it:
+she, or I, or the refugee of misfortune, Number 116 Intermediate?  She
+seemed safe enough.  He or I would suffer in the crash of penalties.
+
+It was a strange situation.  I, the acquaintance of a day, was welcome
+within the circle of this woman's favour--though it was an unemotional
+favour on her side; he, the husband, as I believed, though only half
+the length of the ship away, was as distant from her as the north star.
+When I sat with her on deck at night, I seemed to feel Boyd Madras's
+face looking at me from the half-darkness of the after-deck; and Mrs.
+Falchion, whose keen eyes missed little, remarked once on my gaze in that
+direction.  Thereafter I was more careful, but the idea haunted me.  Yet,
+I was not the only person who sat with her.  Other men paid her attentive
+court.  The difference was, however, that with me she assumed ever so
+delicate, yet palpable an air of proprietorship, none the less alluring
+because there was no heart in it.  So far as the other passengers were
+concerned, there was nothing jarring to propriety in our companionship.
+They did not know of Number 116 Intermediate.  She had been announced as
+a widow; and she had told Mrs. Callendar that her father's brother, who,
+years before, had gone to California, had died within the past two years
+and left her his property; and, because all Californians are supposed to
+be millionaires, her wealth was counted fabulous.  She was going now to
+England, and from there to California in the following year.  People said
+that Dr. Marmion knew on which side his bread was buttered.  They may
+have said more unpleasant things, but I did not hear them, or of them.
+
+All the time I was conscious of a kind of dishonour, and perhaps it was
+that which prompted me (I had fallen away from my intention of visiting
+him freely) to send my steward to see how Boyd Madras came on, rather
+than go myself.  I was, however, conscious that the position could not--
+should not--be maintained long.  The practical outcome of this knowledge
+was not tardy.  A new influence came into my life which was to affect it
+permanently: but not without a struggle.
+
+A series of concerts and lectures had been arranged for the voyage, and
+the fancy-dress ball was to close the first part of the journey--that is,
+at Aden.  One night a concert was on in the music saloon.  I had just
+come from seeing a couple of passengers who had been suffering from the
+heat, and was debating whether to find Mrs. Falchion, who, I knew, was on
+the other side of the deck, go in to the concert, or join Colonel Ryder
+and Clovelly, who had asked me to come to the smoking-room when I could.
+I am afraid I was balancing heavily in favour of Mrs. Falchion, when I
+heard a voice that was new to me, singing a song I had known years
+before, when life was ardent, and love first came--halcyon days in
+country lanes, in lilac thickets, of pleasant Hertfordshire, where our
+footsteps met a small bombardment of bursting seed-pods of the furze,
+along the green common that sloped to the village.  I thought of all
+this, and of HER everlasting quiet.
+
+With a different voice the words of the song would have sent me out of
+hearing; now I stood rooted to the spot, as the notes floated out past
+me to the nervelessness of the Indian Ocean, every one of them a
+commandment from behind the curtain of a sanctuary.
+
+The voice was a warm, full contralto of exquisite culture.
+It suggested depths of rich sound behind, from which the singer, if she
+chose, might draw, until the room and the deck and the sea ached with
+sweetness.  I scarcely dared to look in to see who it was, lest I should
+find it a dream.  I stood with my head turned away towards the dusky
+ocean.  When, at last, with the closing notes of the song, I went to
+the port-hole and looked in, I saw that the singer was Miss Treherne.
+There was an abstracted look in her eyes as she raised them, and she
+seemed unconscious of the applause following the last chords of the
+accompaniment.  She stood up, folding the music as she did so, and
+unconsciously raised her eyes toward the port-hole where I was.  Her
+glance caught mine, and instantly a change passed over her face.  The
+effect of the song upon her was broken; she flushed slightly, and, as I
+thought, with faint annoyance.  I know of nothing so little complimentary
+to a singer as the audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or
+window,--not bound by any sense of duty as an audience,--between whom and
+the artists an unnatural barrier is raised.  But I have reason to think
+now that Belle Treherne was not wholly moved by annoyance--that she had
+seen something unusual, maybe oppressive, in my look.  She turned to her
+father.  He adjusted his glasses as if, in his pride, to see her better.
+Then he fondly took her arm, and they left the room.
+
+Then I saw Mrs. Falchion's face at the port-hole opposite.  Her eyes were
+on me.  An instant before, I had intended following Miss Treherne and her
+father; now some spirit of defiance, some unaccountable revolution,
+took possession of me, so that I flashed back to her a warm recognition.
+I could not have believed it possible, if it had been told of me, that,
+one minute affected by beautiful and sacred remembrances, the next I
+should be yielding to the unimpassioned tyranny of a woman who could
+never be anything but a stumbling-block and an evil influence.  I had yet
+to learn that in times of mental and moral struggle the mixed fighting
+forces in us resolve themselves into two cohesive powers, and strive for
+mastery; that no past thought or act goes for nothing at such a time, but
+creeps out from the darkness where we thought it had gone for ever, and
+does battle with its kind against the common foe.  There moved before my
+sight three women: one, sweet and unsubstantial, wistful and mute and
+very young, not of the earth earthy; one, lissom, grave, with gracious
+body and warm abstracted eyes, all delicacy, strength, reserve; the other
+and last, daring, cold, beautiful, with irresistible charm, silent and
+compelling.  And these are the three women who have influenced my life,
+who fought in me then for mastery; one from out the unchangeable past,
+the others in the tangible and delible present.  Most of us have to pass
+through such ordeals before character and conviction receive their final
+bias; before human nature has its wild trouble, and then settles into
+"cold rock and quiet world;" which any lesser after-shocks may modify,
+but cannot radically change.
+
+I tried to think.  I felt that to be wholly a man I should turn from
+those eyes drawing me on.  I recalled the words of Clovelly, who had said
+to me that afternoon, half laughingly: "Dr. Marmion, I wonder how many
+of us wish ourselves transported permanently to that time when we didn't
+know champagne from 'alter feiner madeira' or dry hock from sweet
+sauterne; when a pretty face made us feel ready to abjure all the sinful
+lusts of the flesh and become inheritors of the kingdom of heaven?  Egad!
+I should like to feel it once again.  But how can we, when we have been
+intoxicated with many things; when we are drunk with success and
+experience; have hung on the fringe of unrighteousness; and know the
+world backward, and ourselves mercilessly?"
+
+Was I, like the drunkard, coming surely to the time when I could
+no longer say yes to my wisdom, or no to my weakness?  I knew that,
+an hour before, in filling a phial with medicine, I found I was doing
+it mechanically, and had to begin over again, making an effort to keep my
+mind to my task.  I think it is an axiom that no man can properly perform
+the business of life who indulges in emotional preoccupation.
+
+These thoughts, which take so long to write, passed then through my mind
+swiftly; but her eyes were on me with a peculiar and confident
+insistence--and I yielded.  On my way to her I met Clovelly and Colonel
+Ryder.  Hungerford was walking between them.  Colonel Ryder said: "I've
+been saving that story for you, Doctor; better come and get it while it's
+hot."
+
+This was a promised tale of the taking of Mobile in the American Civil
+War.
+
+At any other time the invitation would have pleased me mightily; for,
+apart from the other two, Hungerford's brusque and original conversation
+was always a pleasure--so were his cheroots; but now I was under an
+influence selfish in its source.  At the same time I felt that Hungerford
+was storing up some acute criticism of me, and that he might let me hear
+it any moment.  I knew, numbering the order of his duties, that he could
+have but a very short time to spare for gossip at this juncture, yet I
+said that I could not join them for half an hour or so.  Hungerford had a
+fashion of looking at me searchingly from under his heavy brows, and I
+saw that he did so now with impatience, perhaps contempt.  I was certain
+that he longed to thrash me.  That was his idea of punishment and
+penalty.  He linked his arm in those of the other two men, and they moved
+on, Colonel Ryder saying that he would keep the story till I came and
+would wait in the smoking-room for me.
+
+The concert was still on when I sat down beside Mrs. Falchion.  "You
+seemed to enjoy Miss Treherne's singing?" she said cordially enough as
+she folded her hands in her lap.
+
+"Yes, I thought it beautiful.  Didn't you?"
+
+"Pretty, most pretty; and admirable in technique and tone; but she has
+too much feeling to be really artistic.  She felt the thing, instead of
+pretending to feel it--which makes all the difference.  She belongs to
+a race of delightful women, who never do any harm, whom everybody calls
+good, and who are very severe on those who do not pretend to be good.
+Still, all of that pleasant race will read their husband's letters and
+smuggle.  They have no civic virtues.  Yet they would be shocked to bathe
+on the beach without a machine, as American women do,--and they look for
+a new fall of Jerusalem when one of their sex smokes a cigarette after
+dinner.  Now, I do not smoke cigarettes after dinner, so I can speak
+freely.  But, at the same time, I do not smuggle, and I do bathe on the
+beach without a machine--when I am in a land where there are no sharks
+and no taboo.  If morally consumptive people were given a few years in
+the South Seas, where they could not get away from nature, there would
+be more strength and less scandal in society."
+
+I laughed.  "There is a frank note for Mr. Clovelly, who thinks he knows
+the world and my sex thoroughly.  He says as much in his books.--Have you
+read his 'A Sweet Apocalypse'?  He said more than as much to me.  But he
+knows a mere nothing about women--their amusing inconsistencies; their
+infidelity in little things and fidelity in big things; their self-
+torturings; their inability to comprehend themselves; their periods of
+religious insanity; their occasional revolts against the restraints of
+a woman's position, known only to themselves in their dark hours; ah,
+really, Dr. Marmion, he is ignorant, I assure you.  He has only got two
+or three kinds of women in his mind, and the representatives of these
+fooled him, as far as he went with them, to their hearts' content.
+Believe me, there is no one quite so foolish as the professional student
+of character.  He sees things with a glamour; he is impressionable; he
+immediately begins to make a woman what he wishes her to be for his book,
+not what she is; and women laugh at him when they read his books, or pity
+him if they know him personally.  I venture to say that I could make Mr.
+Clovelly use me in a novel--not 'A Sweet Apocalypse'--as a placid lover
+of fancy bazaars and Dorcas societies, instead of a very practical
+person, who has seen life without the romantic eye, and knows as well the
+working of a buccaneering craft--through consular papers and magisterial
+trials, of course--as of a colonial Government House.  But it is not
+worth while trying to make him falsify my character.  Besides, you are
+here to amuse me."
+
+This speech, as she made it, was pleasantly audacious and clever.  I
+laughed, and made a gesture of mock dissent, and she added: "Now I have
+finished my lecture.  Please tie my shoe-lace there, and then, as I said,
+amuse me.  Oh, you can, if you choose!  You are clever when you like to
+be.  Only, this time, do not let it be a professor's wife who foolishly
+destroys herself, and cuts short what might have been a brilliant
+career."
+
+On the instant I determined to probe deeper into her life, and try her
+nerve, by telling a story with enough likeness to her own (if she was the
+wife of Boyd Madras) to affect her acutely; though I was not sure I could
+succeed.  A woman who triumphs over sea-sickness, whom steam from the
+boilers never affects, nor the propeller-screw disturbs, has little to
+fear from the words of a man who is neither adroit, eloquent, nor
+dramatic.  However, I determined to try what I could do.  I said: "I
+fancy you would like something in the line of adventure; but my career
+has not run in that direction, so I shall resort to less exciting fields,
+and, I fear, also, a not very cheerful subject."
+
+"Oh, never mind!" said she.  "What you wish, so long as it is not
+conventional and hackneyed.  But I know you will not be prosy, so go on,
+please."
+
+"Well," I began, "once, in the hospital, I attended a man--Anson was his
+name--who, when he thought he was going to die, confided to me his life's
+secret.  I liked the man; he was good-looking, amiable, but hopelessly
+melancholy.  He was dying as much from trouble as disease.  No counsel
+or encouragement had any effect upon him; he did, as I have seen so many
+do--he resigned himself to the out-going tide.  Well, for the secret.
+He had been a felon.  His crime had been committed through ministering to
+his wife's vanity."
+
+Here I paused.  I felt Mrs. Falchion's eyes searching me.
+I raised mine steadily to hers with an impersonal glance, and saw
+that she had not changed colour in the least.  But her eyes were busy.
+
+I proceeded: "When he was disgraced she did not come near him.
+When he went to her, after he was released" (here I thought it best to
+depart from any close resemblance to Mrs. Falchion's own story), "and was
+admitted to her, she treated him as an absolute stranger--as one who had
+intruded, and might be violent.  She said that she and her maid were
+alone in the house, and hinted that he had come to disturb them.  She
+bade him go, or she must herself go.  He called her by his own name, and
+begged her, by the memory of their dead child, to speak kindly to him.
+She said he was quite mistaken in her name, that she was Mrs. Glave, not
+Mrs. Anson, and again insisted that he should go.  He left her, and at
+last, broken-hearted, found his way, in illness and poverty to the
+hospital, where, toward the last, he was cared for by a noble girl,
+a companion of his boyhood and his better days, who urged his wife to
+visit him.  She left him alone, said unpleasant things to the girl, did
+not come to see her husband when he was dead, and provided nothing for
+his burial.  You see that, like you, she hated suffering and misery--and
+criminals.  The girl and her mother paid the expenses of the funeral,
+and, with myself, were the only mourners.  I am doubtful if the wife
+knows even where he lies.  I admit that the story sounds melodramatic;
+but truth is more drama than comedy, I fancy.  Now, what do you think of
+it all, Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+I had felt her shrink a little at the earlier part of my story, as if
+she feared that her own tale was to be brutally bared before her; but
+that soon passed, and she languidly tapped the chair-arm as the narrative
+continued.  When it was finished, she leaned over slightly, and with
+these same fingers tapped my arm.  I thrilled involuntarily.
+
+"He died, did he?" she said.  "That was the most graceful thing he could
+do.  So far as my knowledge of the world is concerned, men of his class
+do NOT die.  They live, and they never rise above their degradation.
+They had not brains or courage enough to keep them out of gaol, and they
+have not pluck or brains enough to succeed--afterwards.  Your friend
+Anson was quite gentlemanly in his action at the last.  He had some sense
+of the fitness of things.  He could not find a place in the world without
+making other people uncomfortable, and causing trouble.  If he had lived,
+he would always have added to the blight on his wife's career, and have
+been an arrow--not a thorn--in her side.  Very likely he would have
+created a scandal for the good young girl who nursed him.  He made the
+false step, and compelled society to reject him.  It did not want to do
+so; it never does.  It is long-suffering; it tries not to see and
+acknowledge things until the culprit himself forces it to take action.
+Then it says: 'Now you have openly and inconsiderately broken our bond of
+mutual forbearance.  You make me send you away.  Go, then, behind stone
+walls, and please do not come to me again.  If you do, you will only be a
+troublesome ghost.  You will cause awkwardness and distress.'  So, Mr.
+Anson--I must be polite to him--did the most reasonable and proper thing.
+He disappeared from the play before it actually became tragedy.  There
+was no tragedy in his death--death is a magnificent ally; it untangles
+knots.  The tragedy was in his living--in the perpetual ruin of his
+wife's life, renewed every morning.  He disappeared.  Then the play
+became drama, with only a little shadow of tragedy behind it.  Now,
+frankly, am I not right?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your argument is clever, but it is only
+incidentally true.  You draw life, society and men no more correctly than
+the author of 'A Sweet Apocalypse' would draw you.  The social law you
+sketch when reduced to its bare elements, is remorseless.  It does not
+provide for repentance, for restitution, for recovering a lost paradise.
+It makes an act final, a sin irrevocable."
+
+"Well, since we are beginning to talk like a couple of books by a pair of
+priggish philosophers, I might as well say that I think sin is final so
+far as the domestic and social machinery of the world is concerned.  What
+his religious belief requires of a man is one thing, what his fellow-men
+require of him is another.  The world says, You shall have latitude
+enough to swing in freely, but you must keep within the code.  As soon
+as you break the law openly, and set the machinery of public penalty in
+motion, there is an end of you, so far as this world is concerned.  You
+may live on, but you have been broken on the wheel, and broken you always
+will be.  It is not a question of right or wrong, of kindness or cruelty,
+but of general expediency and inevitableness.  To all effect, Mr. Anson
+was dead before he breathed his last.  He died when he passed within the
+walls of a gaol--condemned for theft."
+
+There was singular scorn in her last few words, and, dissent as I did
+from her merciless theories, I was astonished at her adroitness and
+downrightness--enchanted by the glow of her face.  To this hour, knowing
+all her life as I do, I can only regard her as a splendid achievement of
+nature, convincing even when at the most awkward tangents with the
+general sense and the straitest interpretation of life; convincing even
+in those other and later incidents, which showed her to be acting not
+so much by impulse as by the law of her nature.  Her emotions were
+apparently rationalised at birth--to be derationalised and broken up by a
+power greater than herself before her life had worked itself out.  I had
+counted her clever; I had not reckoned with her powers of reasoning.
+Influenced as I was by emotion when in her presence, I resorted to a
+personal application of my opinions--the last and most unfair resort of
+a disputant.  I said I would rather be Anson dead than Mrs. Anson living;
+I would rather be the active than the passive sinner; the victim, than a
+part of that great and cruel machine of penalty.
+
+"The passive sinner!" she replied.  "Why, what wrong did she do?"
+
+The highest moral conceptions worked dully in her.  Yet she seemed then,
+as she always appeared to be, free from any action that should set the
+machine of penalty going against herself.  She was inexorable, but she
+had never, knowingly, so much as slashed the hem of the moral code.
+
+"It was to give his wife pleasure that Anson made the false step," I
+urged.
+
+"Do you think she would have had the pleasure at the price?  The man was
+vain and selfish to run any risk, to do anything that might endanger her
+safety--that is, her happiness and comfort."
+
+"But suppose he knew that she loved ease and pleasure?--that he feared
+her anger or disdain if he did not minister to her luxuries?"
+
+"Then he ought not to have married that kind of a woman."  The hardness
+in her voice was matched at that moment by the coldness of her face.
+
+"That is begging the question," I replied.  "What would such a selfish
+woman do in such a case, if her pleasure could not be gratified?"
+
+"You must ask that kind of woman," was her ironical answer.
+
+I rashly felt that her castle of strength was crumbling.  I ventured
+farther.
+
+"I have done so."
+
+She turned slightly toward me, yet not nervously, as I had expected.
+
+"What did she say?"
+
+"She declined to answer directly."
+
+There was a pause, in which I felt her eyes searching my face.  I fear
+I must have learned dissimulation well; for, after a minute, I looked
+at her, and saw, from the absence of any curious anxiety, that I had
+betrayed nothing.  She looked me straight in the eyes and said: "Dr.
+Marmion, a man must not expect to be forgiven, who has brought shame on a
+woman."
+
+"Not even when he has repented and atoned?"
+
+"Atoned!  How mad you are!  How can there be atonement?  You cannot wipe
+things out--on earth.  We are of the earth.  Records remain.  If a man
+plays the fool, the coward, and the criminal, he must expect to wear the
+fool's cap, the white feather, and the leg-chain until his life's end.
+And now, please, let us change the subject.  We have been bookish long
+enough."  She rose with a gesture of impatience.
+
+I did not rise.  "Pardon me, Mrs. Falchion," I urged, "but this interests
+me so.  I have thought much of Anson lately.  Please, let us talk a
+little longer.  Do sit down."
+
+She sat down again with an air of concession rather than of pleasure.
+
+"I am interested," I said, "in looking at this question from a woman's
+standpoint.  You see, I am apt to side with the miserable fellow who made
+a false step--foolish, if you like--all for love of a selfish and
+beautiful woman."
+
+"She was beautiful?"
+
+"Yes, as you are."  She did not blush at that rank compliment, any more
+than a lioness would, if you praised the astonishing sleekness and beauty
+of its skin.
+
+"And she had been a true wife to him before that?"
+
+"Yes, in all that concerned the code."
+
+"Well?--Well, was not that enough?  She did what she could, as long as
+she could."  She leaned far back in the chair, her eyes half shut.
+
+"Don't you think--as a woman, not as a theorist--that Mrs. Anson might
+at least have come to him when he was dying?"
+
+"It would only have been uncomfortable for her.  She had no part in his
+life; she could not feel with him.  She could do nothing."
+
+"But suppose she had loved him?  By that memory, then, of the time when
+they took each other for better or for worse, until death should part
+them?"
+
+"Death did part them when the code banished him; when he passed from a
+free world into a cage.  Besides, we are talking about people marrying,
+not about their loving."
+
+"I will admit," I said, with a little raw irony, "that I was not exact in
+definition."
+
+Here I got a glimpse into her nature which rendered after events not so
+marvellous to me as they might seem to others.  She thought a moment
+quite indolently, and then continued: "You make one moralise like George
+Eliot.  Marriage is a condition, but love must be an action.  The one is
+a contract, the other is complete possession, a principle--that is, if it
+exists at all.  I do not know."
+
+She turned the rings round mechanically on her finger; and among them was
+a wedding-ring!  Her voice had become low and abstracted, and now she
+seemed to have forgotten my presence, and was looking out upon the
+humming darkness round us, through which now and again there rang a
+boatswain's whistle, or the loud laugh of Blackburn, telling of a joyous
+hour in the smoking-room.
+
+I am now about to record an act of madness, of folly, on my part.  I
+suppose most men have such moments of temptation, but I suppose, also,
+that they act more sensibly and honourably than I did then.  Her hand had
+dropped gently on the chair-arm, near to my own, and though our fingers
+did not touch, I felt mine thrilled and impelled toward hers.  I do not
+seek to palliate my action.  Though the man I believed to be her husband
+was below, I yielded myself to an imagined passion for her.  In that
+moment I was a captive.  I caught her hand and kissed it hotly.
+
+"But you might know what love is," I said.  "You might learn--learn of
+me.  You--"
+
+Abruptly and with surprise she withdrew her hand, and, without any
+visible emotion save a quicker pulsation of her breast, which might have
+been indignation, spoke.  "But even if I might learn, Dr. Marmion, be
+sure that neither your college nor Heaven gave you the knowledge to
+instruct me. . . .  There: pardon me, if I speak harshly; but this is
+most inconsiderate of you, most impulsive--and compromising.  You are
+capable of singular contrasts.  Please let us be friends, friends simply.
+You are too interesting for a lover, really you are."
+
+Her words were a cold shock to my emotion--my superficial emotion;
+though, indeed, for that moment she seemed adorable to me.  Without any
+apparent relevancy, but certainly because my thoughts in self-reproach
+were hovering about cabin 116 Intermediate, I said, with a biting shame,
+"I do not wonder now!"
+
+"You do not wonder at what?" she questioned; and she laid her hand
+kindly on my arm.
+
+I put the hand away a little childishly, and replied, "At men going to
+the devil."  But this was not what I thought.
+
+"That does not sound complimentary to somebody.  May I ask you what you
+mean?" she said calmly.  "I mean that Anson loved his wife, and she did
+not love him; yet she held him like a slave, torturing him at the same
+time."
+
+"Does it not strike you that this is irrelevant?  You are not my husband
+--not my slave.  But, to be less personal, Mr. Anson's wife was not
+responsible for his loving her.  Love, as I take it, is a voluntary
+thing.  It pleased him to love her--he would not have done it if it did
+not please him; probably his love was an inconvenient thing domestically
+--if he had no tact."
+
+"Of that," I said, "neither you nor I can know with any certainty.  But,
+to be scriptural, she reaped where she had not sowed, and gathered where
+she had not strawed.  If she did not make the man love her,--I believe
+she did, as I believe you would, perhaps unconsciously, do,--she used his
+love, and was therefore better able to make all other men admire her.
+She was richer in personal power for that experience; but she was not
+grateful for it nor for his devotion."
+
+"You mean, in fact, that I--for you make the personal application--shall
+be better able henceforth to win men's love, because--ah, surely, Dr.
+Marmion, you do not dignify this impulse, this foolishness of yours, by
+the name of love!"  She smiled a little satirically at the fingers I had
+kissed.
+
+I was humiliated, and annoyed with her and with myself, though, down
+in my mind, I knew that she was right.  "I mean," said I, "that I can
+understand how men have committed suicide because of just such things.
+My wonder is that Anson, poor devil! did not do it."  I knew I was
+talking foolishly.
+
+"He hadn't the courage, my dear sir.  He was gentlemanly enough to die,
+but not to be heroic to that extent.  For it does need a strong dash of
+heroism to take one's own life.  As I conceive it, suicide would have
+been the best thing for him when he sinned against the code.  The world
+would have pitied him then, would have said, He spared us the trial of
+punishing him.  But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!"
+
+She shuddered and then almost coldly continued: "Suicide is an act of
+importance; it shows that a man recognises, at least, the worthlessness
+of his life.  He does one dramatic and powerful thing; he has an instant
+of great courage, and all is over.  If it had been a duel in which, of
+intention, he would fire wide, and his assailant would fire to kill, so
+much the better; so much the more would the world pity.  But either is
+superior, as a final situation, than death with a broken heart--I suppose
+that is possible?--and disgrace, in a hospital."
+
+"You seem to think only of the present, only of the code and the world;
+and as if there were no heroism in a man living down his shame, righting
+himself heroically at all points possible, bearing his penalty, and
+showing the courage of daily wearing the sackcloth of remorse and
+restitution."
+
+"Oh," she persisted, "you make me angry.  I know what you wish to
+express; I know that you consider it a sin to take one's life, even in
+'the high Roman fashion.'  But, frankly, I do not, and I fear--or rather,
+I fancy--that I never shall.  After all, your belief is a pitiless one;
+for, as I have tried to say, the man has not himself alone to consider,
+but those to whom his living is a perpetual shame and menace and cruelty
+insupportable--insupportable!  Now, please, let us change the subject
+finally; and"--here she softly laughed--"forgive me if I have treated
+your fancied infatuation lightly or indifferently.  I want you for a
+friend--at least, for a friendly acquaintance.  I do not want you for
+a lover."
+
+We both rose.  I was not quite content with her nor with myself yet.  I
+felt sure that while she did not wish me for a lover, she was not averse
+to my playing the devoted cavalier, who should give all, while she should
+give nothing.  I knew that my punishment had already begun.  We paced the
+deck in silence; and once, as we walked far aft, I saw, leaning upon the
+railing of the intermediate deck, and looking towards us--Boyd Madras;
+and the words of that letter which he wrote on the No Man's Sea came to
+me.
+
+At length she said: "You have made no reply to my last remark.  Are we
+to be friends, and not lovers?  Or shall you cherish enmity against me?
+Or, worse still,"--and here she laughed, I thought, a little ironically,
+--"avoid me, and be as icy as you have been--fervid?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said, "your enemy I do not wish to be--I could not be
+if I wished; but, for the rest, you must please let me see what I may
+think of myself to-morrow.  There is much virtue in to-morrow," I added.
+"It enables one to get perspective."
+
+"I understand," she said; and then was silent.  We walked the deck slowly
+for several minutes.  Then we were accosted by two ladies of a committee
+that had the fancy-dress ball in hand.  They wished to consult Mrs.
+Falchion in certain matters of costume and decoration, for which, it had
+been discovered, she had a peculiar faculty.  She turned to me half
+inquiringly, and I bade her good-night, inwardly determined (how easy it
+is after having failed to gratify ourselves!) that the touch of her
+fingers should never again make my heart beat faster.
+
+I joined Colonel Ryder and Clovelly in the smoking-room.  Hungerford,
+as I guessed gladly, was gone.  I was too much the coward to meet his eye
+just then.  Colonel Ryder was estimating the amount he would wager--if he
+were in the habit of betting--that the 'Fulvia' could not turn round in
+her tracks in twenty minutes, while he parenthetically endorsed
+Hungerford's remarks to me--though he was ignorant of them--that lascars
+should not be permitted on English passenger ships.  He was supported by
+Sir Hayes Craven, a shipowner, who further said that not one out of ten
+British sailors could swim, while not five out of ten could row a boat
+properly.  Ryder's anger was great, because Clovelly remarked with mock
+seriousness that the lascars were picturesque, and asked the American if
+he had watched them listlessly eating rice and curry as they squatted
+between decks; whether he had observed the Serang, with his silver
+whistle, who ruled them, and despised us "poor white trash;" and if he
+did not think it was a good thing to have fatalists like them as sailors
+--they would be cool in time of danger.
+
+Colonel Ryder's indignation was curbed, however, by the bookmaker,
+who, having no views, but seeing an opportunity for fun, brought up
+reinforcements of chaff and slang, easily construable into profanity,
+and impregnated with terse humour.  Many of the ladies had spoken of the
+bookmaker as one of the best-mannered men on board.  So he was to all
+appearance.  None dressed with better taste, nor carried himself with
+such an air.  There was even a deferential tone in his strong language, a
+hesitating quaintness, which made it irresistible.  He was at the service
+of any person on board needing championship.  His talents were varied.
+He could suggest harmonies in colour to the ladies at one moment, and at
+the next, in the seclusion of the bar counter, arrange deadly harmonies
+in liquor.  He was an authority on acting; he knew how to edit a
+newspaper; he picked out the really nice points in the sermons delivered
+by the missionaries in the saloon; he had some marvellous theories about
+navigation; and his trick with a salad was superb.  He now convulsed the
+idlers in the smoking-room with laughter, and soon deftly drew off the
+discussion to the speed of the vessel, arranging a sweep-stake
+immediately, upon the possibilities of the run.  He instantly proposed to
+sell the numbers by auction.  He was the auctioneer.  With his eye-glass
+at his eye, and Bohemian pleasantry falling from his lips, he ran the
+prices up.  He was selling Clovelly's number, and had advanced it beyond
+the novelist's own bidding, when suddenly the screw stopped, the engines
+ceased working, and the 'Fulvia' slowed down.
+
+The numbers remained unsold.  Word came to us that an accident had
+happened to the machinery, and that we should be hove-to for a day,
+or longer, to accomplish necessary repairs.  How serious the accident
+to the machinery was no one knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+ACCUSING FACES
+
+While we were hove-to, the 'Porcupine' passed us.  In all probability it
+would now get to Aden ahead of us; and herein lay a development of the
+history of Mrs. Falchion.  I was standing beside Belle Treherne as the
+ship came within hail of us and signalled to see what was the matter.
+Mrs. Falchion was not far from us.  She was looking intently at the
+vessel through marine-glasses, and she did not put them down until it had
+passed.  Then she turned away with an abstracted light in her eyes and a
+wintry smile; and the look and the smile continued when she sat down in
+her deck-chair and leaned her cheek meditatively on the marine-glass.
+But I saw now that something was added to the expression of her face--a
+suggestion of brooding or wonder.  Belle Treherne, noticing the direction
+of my glances, said: "Have you known Mrs. Falchion long?"
+
+"No, not long," I replied.  "Only since she came on board."
+
+"She is very clever, I believe."
+
+I felt my face flushing, though, reasonably, there was no occasion for
+it, and I said: "Yes, she is one of the ablest women I have ever met."
+
+"She is beautiful, too--very beautiful."  This very frankly.
+
+"Have you talked with her?" asked I.
+
+"Yes, a little this morning, for the first time.  She did not speak much,
+however."  Here Miss Treherne paused, and then added meditatively: "Do
+you know, she impressed me as having singular frankness and singular
+reserve as well?  I think I admired it.  There is no feeling in her
+speech, and yet it has great candour.  I never before met any one like
+her.  She does not wear her heart upon her sleeve, I imagine."
+
+A moment of irony came over me; that desire to say what one really does
+not believe (a feminine trait), and I replied: "Are both those articles
+necessary to any one?  A sleeve?--well, one must be clothed.  But a
+heart?--a cumbrous thing, as I take it."
+
+Belle Treherne turned, and looked me steadily in the eyes for an instant,
+as if she had suddenly awakened from abstraction, and slowly said, while
+she drew back slightly: "Dr. Marmion, I am only a girl, I know, and
+inexperienced, but I hoped most people of education and knowledge of
+life were free from that kind of cynicism to be read of in books."  Then
+something in her thoughts seemed to chill her words and manner, and her
+father coming up a moment after, she took his arm, and walked away with a
+not very cordial bow to me.
+
+The fact is, with a woman's quick intuition, she had read in my tone
+something suggestive of my recent experience with Mrs. Falchion.  Her
+fine womanliness awoke; the purity of her thoughts, rose in opposition to
+my flippancy and to me; and I knew that I had raised a prejudice not easy
+to destroy.
+
+This was on a Friday afternoon.
+
+On the Saturday evening following, the fancy-dress ball was to occur.
+The accident to the machinery and our delay were almost forgotten in the
+preparations therefor.  I had little to do; there was only one sick man
+on board, and my hand could not cure his sickness.  How he fared, my
+uncomfortable mind, now bitterly alive to a sense of duty, almost
+hesitated to inquire.  Yet a change had come.  A reaction had set in for
+me.  Would it be permanent?  I dared scarcely answer that question, with
+Mrs. Falchion at my right hand at table, with her voice at my ear.  I was
+not quite myself yet; I was struggling, as it were, with the effects of a
+fantastic dream.
+
+Still, I had determined upon my course.  I had made resolutions.  I had
+ended the chapter of dalliance.  I had wished to go to 116 Intermediate
+and let its occupant demand what satisfaction he would.  I wanted to say
+to Hungerford that I was an ass; but that was even harder still.  He was
+so thorough and uncompromising in nature, so strong in moral fibre, that
+I felt his sarcasm would be too outspoken for me just at present.
+In this, however, I did not give him credit for a fine sense of
+consideration, as after events showed.  Although there had been no spoken
+understanding between us that Mrs. Falchion was the wife of Boyd Madras,
+the mind of one was the other's also.  I understood exactly why he told
+me Boyd Madras's story: it was a warning.  He was not the man to harp on
+things.  He gave the hint, and there the matter ended, so far as he was
+concerned, until a time might come when he should think it his duty to
+refer to the subject again.  Some time before, he had shown me the
+portrait of the girl who had promised to be his wife.  She, of course,
+could trust HIM anywhere, everywhere.
+
+Mrs. Falchion had seen the change in me, and, I am sure, guessed the new
+direction of my thoughts, and knew that I wished to take refuge in a new
+companionship--a thing, indeed, not easily to be achieved, as I felt now;
+for no girl of delicate and proud temper would complacently regard a
+hasty transference of attention from another to herself.  Besides, it
+would be neither courteous nor reasonable to break with Mrs. Falchion
+abruptly.  The error was mine, not hers.  She had not my knowledge of the
+immediate circumstances, which made my position morally untenable.  She
+showed unembarrassed ignorance of the change.  At the same time I caught
+a tone of voice and a manner which showed she was not actually oblivious,
+but was touched in that nerve called vanity; and from this much feminine
+hatred springs.
+
+I made up my mind to begin a course of scientific reading, and was seated
+in my cabin, vainly trying to digest a treatise on the pathology of the
+nervous system, when Hungerford appeared at the door.  With a nod, he
+entered, threw himself down on the cabin sofa, and asked for a match.
+After a pause, he said: "Marmion, Boyd Madras, alias Charles Boyd, has
+recognised me."
+
+I rose to get a cigar, thus turning my face from him, and said: "Well?"
+
+"Well, there isn't anything very startling.  I suppose he wishes I had
+left him in the dingey on No Man's Sea.  He's a fool."
+
+"Indeed, why?"
+
+"Marmion, are your brains softening?  Why does he shadow a woman who
+wouldn't lift her finger to save him from battle, murder, or sudden
+death?"
+
+"From the code," I said, in half soliloquy.
+
+"From the what?"
+
+"Oh, never mind, Hungerford.  I suppose he is shadowing--Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+He eyed me closely.
+
+"I mean the woman that chucked his name; that turned her back on him when
+he was in trouble; that hopes he is dead, if she doesn't believe that he
+is actually; that would, no doubt, treat him as a burglar if he went to
+her, got down on his knees, and said: 'Mercy, my girl, I've come back to
+you a penitent prodigal.  Henceforth I shall be as straight as the sun,
+so help me Heaven and your love and forgiveness!'"
+
+Hungerford paused, as if expecting me to reply; but, leaning forward on
+my knees and smoking hard, I remained silent.  This seemed to anger him,
+for he said a little roughly: "Why doesn't he come out and give you
+blazes on the promenade deck, and corner her down with a mighty cheek,
+and levy on her for a thousand pounds?  Both you and she would think more
+of him.  Women don't dislike being bullied, if it is done in the right
+way--haven't I seen it the world over, from lubra to dowager?  I tell
+you, man--sinning or not--was meant to be woman's master and lover, and
+just as much one as the other."
+
+At this point Hungerford's manner underwent a slight change, and he
+continued: "Marmion, I wouldn't have come near you, only I noticed you
+have altered your course, and are likely to go on a fresh tack.  It isn't
+my habit to worry a man.  I gave you a signal, and you didn't respond at
+first.  Well, we have come within hail again; and now, don't you think
+that you might help to straighten this tangle, and try to arrange a
+reconciliation between those two?
+
+"The scheme is worth trying.  Nobody need know but you and me.  It
+wouldn't be much of a sacrifice to her to give him a taste of the thing
+she swore to do--how does it run?--'to have and to hold from this day
+forward'?--I can't recall it; but it's whether the wind blows fair or
+foul, or the keel scrapes the land or gives to the rock, till the sea
+gulps one of 'em down for ever.  That's the sense of the thing, Marmion,
+and the contract holds between the two, straight on into the eternal
+belly.  Whatever happens, a husband is a husband, and a wife a wife.  It
+seems to me that, in the sight of Heaven, it's he that's running fair in
+the teeth of the wind, every timber straining, and she that's riding with
+it, well coaled, flags flying, in an open channel, and passing the
+derelict without so much as, 'Ahoy there!'"
+
+Now, at this distance of time, I look back, and see Hungerford, "the
+rowdy sailor," as he called himself, lying there, his dark grey eyes
+turned full on me; and I am convinced that no honester, more sturdy-
+minded man ever reefed a sail, took his turn upon the bridge, or walked
+the dry land in the business of life.  It did not surprise me, a year
+after, when I saw in public prints that he was the hero of--but that must
+be told elsewhere.  I was about to answer him then as I knew he would
+wish, when a steward appeared and said: "Mr. Boyd, 116 Intermediate,
+wishes you would come to him, sir, if you would be so kind."
+
+Hungerford rose, and, as I made ready to go, urged quietly: "You've got
+the charts and soundings, Marmion, steam ahead!" and, with a swift but
+kindly clench of my shoulder, he left me.  In that moment there came a
+cowardly feeling, a sense of shamefacedness, and then, hard upon it, and
+overwhelming it, a determination to serve Boyd Madras so far as lay in my
+power, and to be a man, and not a coward or an idler.
+
+When I found him he was prostrate.  In his eyes there was no anger, no
+indignation, nor sullenness--all of which he might reasonably have felt;
+and instantly I was ashamed of the thought which, as I came to him,
+flashed through my mind, that he might do some violent thing.  Not that
+I had any fear of violence; but I had an active dislike of awkward
+circumstances.  I felt his fluttering pulse, and noted the blue line on
+his warped lips.  I gave him some medicine, and then sat down.  There was
+a silence.  What could I say?  A dozen thoughts came to my mind, but I
+rejected them.  It was difficult to open up the subject.  At last he put
+his hand upon my arm and spoke:
+
+"You told me one night that you would help me if you could.  I ought to
+have accepted your offer at first; it would have been better.--No, please
+don't speak just yet.  I think I know what you would say.  I knew that
+you meant all you urged upon me; that you liked me.  I was once worthy
+of men's liking, perhaps, and I had good comrades; but that is all over.
+You have not come near me lately, but it wasn't because you felt any
+neglect, or wished to take back your words; but--because of something
+else. . . .  I understand it all.  She has great power.  She always
+had.  She is very beautiful.  I remember when--but I will not call it
+back before you, though, God knows, I go over it all every day and every
+night, until it seems that only the memory of her is real, and that she
+herself is a ghost.  I ought not to have crossed her path again, even
+unknown to her.  But I have done it, and now I cannot go out of that path
+without kneeling before her once again, as I did long ago.  Having seen
+her, breathed the same air, I must speak or die; perhaps it will be both.
+That is a power she has: she can bend one to her will, although she
+often, involuntarily, wills things that are death to others.  One MUST
+care for her, you understand; it is natural, even when it is torture to
+do so."
+
+He put his hand on his side and moved as if in pain.  I reached over and
+felt his pulse, then took his hand and pressed it, saying: "I will be
+your friend now, Madras, in so far as I can."
+
+He looked up at me gratefully, and replied: "I know that--I know that.
+It is more than I deserve."
+
+Then he began to speak of his past.  He told me of Hungerford's kindness
+to him on the 'Dancing Kate', of his luckless days at Port Darwin, of his
+search for his wife, his writing to her, and her refusal to see him.  He
+did not rail against her.  He apologised for her, and reproached himself.
+"She is most singular," he continued, "and different from most women.
+She never said she loved me, and she never did, I know.  Her father urged
+her to marry me; he thought I was a good man."
+
+Here he laughed a little bitterly.  "But it was a bad day for her.
+She never loved any one, I think, and she cannot understand what love
+is, though many have cared for her.  She is silent where herself is
+concerned.  I think there was some trouble--not love, I am sure of that
+--which vexed her, and made her a little severe at times; something
+connected with her life, or her father's life, in Samoa.  One can only
+guess, but white men take what are called native wives there very often
+--and who can tell?  Her father--but that is her secret! . . .  While
+I was right before the world, she was a good wife to me in her way.  When
+I went wrong, she treated me as if I were dead, and took her old name.
+But if I could speak to her quietly once more, perhaps she would listen.
+It would be no good at all to write.  Perhaps she would never begin the
+world with me again, but I should like to hear her say, 'I forgive you.
+Good-bye.'  There would be some comfort in a kind farewell from her.
+You can see that, Dr. Marmion?"
+
+He paused, waiting for me to speak.  "Yes, I can see that," I said; and
+then I added: "Why did you not speak to her before you both came on board
+at Colombo?"
+
+"I had no chance.  I only saw her in the street, an hour before the ship
+sailed.  I had scarcely time to take my passage."
+
+Pain here checked his utterance, and when he recovered, he turned again
+to me, and continued: "To-morrow night there is to be a fancy-dress ball
+on board.  I have been thinking.  I could go in a good disguise.  I could
+speak to her, and attract no notice; and if she will not listen to me,
+why, then, that ends it.  I shall know the worst, and to know the worst
+is good."
+
+"Yes," said I; "and what do you wish me to do?"
+
+"I wish to go in a disguise, of course; to dress in your cabin, if you
+will let me.  I cannot dress here, it would attract attention; and I am
+not a first-class passenger."
+
+"I fear," I replied, "that it is impossible for me to assist you to the
+privileges of a first-class passenger.  You see, I am an officer of the
+ship.  But still I can help you.  You shall leave this cabin to-night.
+I will arrange so that you may transfer yourself to one in the first-
+class section. . . .  No, not a word; it must be as I wish in this.
+You are ill; I can do you that kindness at least, and then, by right, you
+can attend the ball, and, after it, your being among the first-class
+passengers can make little difference; for you will have met and spoken
+then, either to peace or otherwise."
+
+I had very grave doubts of any reconciliation; the substance of my
+notable conversation with Mrs. Falchion was so prominent in my mind.
+I feared she would only reproduce the case of Anson and his wife.  I was
+also afraid of a possible scene--which showed that I was not yet able to
+judge of her resources.  After a time, in which we sat silent, I said to
+Madras: "But suppose she should be frightened?--should--should make a
+scene?"
+
+He raised himself to a sitting posture.  "I feel better," he said.  Then,
+answering my question: "You do not know her quite.  She will not stir a
+muscle.  She has nerve.  I have seen her in positions of great peril and
+trial.  She is not emotional, though I truly think she will wake one day
+and find her heart all fire but not for me.  Still, I say that all will
+be quite comfortable, so far as any demonstration on her part is
+concerned.  She will not be melodramatic, I do assure you."
+
+"And the disguise--your dress?" inquired I.
+
+He rose from the berth slowly, and, opening a portmanteau, drew from it a
+cloth of white and red, fringed with gold.  It was of beautiful texture,
+and made into the form of a toga or mantle.  He said: "I was a seller of
+such stuffs in Colombo, and these I brought with me, because I could not
+dispose of them without sacrifice when I left hurriedly.  I have made
+them into a mantle.  I could go as--a noble Roman, perhaps!"  Then a
+slight, ironical smile crossed his lips, and he stretched out his thin
+but shapely arms, as if in derision of himself.
+
+"You will go as Menelaus the Greek," said I.
+
+"I as Menelaus the Greek?"  The smile became a little grim.
+
+"Yes, as Menelaus; and I will go as Paris."  I doubt not that my voice
+showed a good deal of self-scorn at the moment; but there was a kind of
+luxury in self-abasement before him.  "Your wife, I know, intends to go
+as Helen of Troy.  It is all mumming.  Let it stand so, as Menelaus and
+Helen and Paris before there was any Trojan war, and as if there never
+could be any--as if Paris went back discomfited, and the other two were
+reconciled."
+
+His voice was low and broken.  "I know you exaggerate matters, and
+condemn yourself beyond reason," he replied.  "I will do as you say.
+But, Dr. Marmion, it will not be all mumming, as you shall see."
+
+A strange look came upon his face at this.  I could not construe it;
+and, after a few words of explanation regarding his transference to the
+forward part of the ship, I left him.  I found the purser, made the
+necessary arrangements for him, and then sought my cabin, humbled in many
+ways.  I went troubled to bed.  After a long wakefulness, I dozed away
+into that disturbed vestibule of sleep where the world's happenings
+mingle with the visions of unconsciousness.  I seemed to see a man's
+heart beating in his bosom in growing agonies, until, with one last
+immense palpitation, it burst, and life was gone.  Then the dream
+changed, and I saw a man in the sea, drowning, who seemed never to drown
+entirely, his hands ever beating the air and the mocking water.  I
+thought that I tried many times to throw him a lighted buoy in the half-
+shadow, but some one held me back, and I knew that a woman's arms were
+round me.
+
+But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with a
+last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight.  When he was gone, the
+woman's arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her,
+she, too, had gone.
+
+I awoke.
+
+Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, "She'll get
+under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the 'Porcupine' to Aden.
+How the engines are kicking below!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+MUMMERS ALL
+
+The next day was beautiful, if not enjoyable.  Stirring preparations
+were being made for the ball.  Boyd Madras was transferred to a cabin far
+forward, but he did not appear at any meal in the saloon, or on deck.  In
+the morning I was busy in the dispensary.  While I was there, Justine
+Caron came to get some medicine that I had before given her.  Her hand
+was now nearly well.  Justine had nerves, and it appeared to me that her
+efforts to please her mistress, and her occasional failures, were wearing
+her unduly.  I said to her: "You have been worried, Miss Caron?"
+
+"Oh, no, Doctor," she quickly replied.
+
+I looked at her a little sceptically, and she said at last: "Well,
+perhaps a little.  You see, madame did not sleep well last night, and I
+read to her.  It was a little difficult, and there was not much choice of
+books."
+
+"What did you read?" I asked mechanically, as I prepared her medicine.
+
+"Oh, some French novel first--De Maupassant's; but madame said he was
+impertinent--that he made women fools and men devils.  Then I tried some
+modern English tales, but she said they were silly.  I knew not what to
+do.  But there was Shakespeare.  I read Antony and Cleopatra, and she
+said that the play was grand, but the people were foolish except when
+they died--their deaths were magnificent.  Madame is a great critic; she
+is very clever."
+
+"Yes, yes, I know that; but when did she fall asleep?"
+
+"About four o'clock in the morning.  I was glad, because she is very
+beautiful when she has much sleep."
+
+"And you--does not sleep concern you in this matter of madame?"
+
+"For me," she said, looking away, "it is no matter.  I have no beauty.
+Besides, I am madame's servant,"--she blushed slightly at this,"--and she
+is generous with money."
+
+"Yes, and you like money so much?"
+
+Her eyes flashed a little defiantly as she looked me in the face.  "It is
+everything to me."
+
+She paused as if to see the effect upon me, or to get an artificial
+(I knew it was artificial) strength to go on, then she added: "I love
+money.  I work for it; I would bear all for it--all that a woman could
+bear.  I--"  But here she paused again, and, though the eyes still
+flashed, the lips quivered.  Hers was not the face of cupidity.  It was
+sensitive, yet firm, as with some purpose deep as her nature was by
+creation and experience, and always deepening that nature.  I suddenly
+got the conviction that this girl had a sorrow of some kind in her life,
+and that this unreal affection for money was connected with it.  Perhaps
+she saw my look of interest, for she hurriedly continued: "But, pardon
+me, I am foolish.  I shall be better when the pain is gone.  Madame is
+kind; she will let me sleep this afternoon, perhaps."
+
+I handed her the medicine, and then asked: "How long have you known Mrs.
+Falchion, Miss Caron?"
+
+"Only one year."
+
+"Where did you join her?"
+
+"In Australia."
+
+"In Australia?  You lived there?"
+
+"No, monsieur, I did not live there."
+
+A thought came to my mind--the nearness of New Caledonia to Australia,
+and New Caledonia was a French colony--a French penal colony!  I smiled
+as I said the word penal to myself.  Of course the word could have no
+connection with a girl like her, but still she might have lived in the
+colony.  So I added quietly: "You perhaps had come from New Caledonia?"
+
+Her look was candid, if sorrowful.  "Yes, from New Caledonia."
+
+Was she, thought I, the good wife of some convict--some political
+prisoner?--the relative of some refugee of misfortune?  Whatever she was,
+I was sure that she was free from any fault.  She evidently thought that
+I might suspect something uncomplimentary of her, for she said: "My
+brother was an officer at Noumea.  He is dead.  I am going to France,
+when I can."
+
+I tried to speak gently to her.  I saw that her present position must
+be a trial.  I advised her to take more rest, or she would break down
+altogether, for she was weak and nervous; I hinted that she might have
+to give up entirely, if she continued to tax herself heedlessly; and,
+finally, that I would speak to Mrs. Falchion about her.  I was scarcely
+prepared for her action then.  Tears came to her eyes, and she said to
+me, her hand involuntarily clasping my arm: "Oh no, no!  I ask you not to
+speak to madame.  I will sleep--I will rest.  Indeed, I will.  This
+service is so much to me.  She is most generous.  It is because I am so
+altogether hers, night and day, that she pays me well.  And the money is
+so much.  It is my honour--my dead brother's honour.  You are kind at
+heart; you will make me strong with medicine, and I will ask God to bless
+you.  I could not suffer such poverty again.  And then, it is my honour!"
+
+I felt that she would not have given way thus had not her nerves been
+shaken, had she not lived so much alone, and irregularly, so far as her
+own rest and comfort were concerned, and at such perpetual cost to her
+energy.  Mrs. Falchion, I knew, was selfish, and would not, or could not,
+see that she was hard upon the girl, by such exactions as midnight
+reading and loss of sleep.  She demanded not merely physical but mental
+energy--a complete submission of both; and when this occurred with a
+sensitive, high-strung girl, she was literally feeding on another's life-
+blood.  If she had been told this, she, no doubt, would have been very
+much surprised.
+
+I reassured Justine.  I told her that I should say nothing directly
+to Mrs. Falchion, for I saw she was afraid of unpleasantness; but I
+impressed upon her that she must spare herself, or she would break down,
+and extorted a promise that she would object to sitting up after midnight
+to read to Mrs. Falchion.
+
+When this was done, she said: "But, you see, it is not madame's fault
+that I am troubled."
+
+"I do not wish," I said, "to know any secret,--I am a doctor, not a
+priest,--but if there is anything you can tell me, in which I might be
+able to help you, you may command me in so far as is possible."
+Candidly, I think I was too inquiring in those days.
+
+She smiled wistfully, and replied: "I will think of what you say so
+kindly, and perhaps, some day soon, I will tell you of such trouble as
+I have.  But, believe me, it is no question of wrong at all, by any one
+--now.  The wrong is over.  It is simply that a debt of honour must be
+satisfied; it concerns my poor dead brother."
+
+"Are you going to relatives in France?" I asked.
+
+"No; I have no relatives, no near friends.  I am alone in the world.  My
+mother I cannot remember; she died when I was very young.  My father had
+riches, but they went before he died.  Still, France is home, and I must
+go there."  She turned her head away to the long wastes of sea.
+
+Little more passed between us.  I advised her to come often on deck, and
+mingle with the passengers; and told her that, when she pleased, I should
+be glad to do any service that lay in my power.  Her last words were
+that, after we put into Aden, she would possibly take me at my word.
+
+After she had gone, I found myself wondering at my presentiment that Aden
+was to be associated with critical points in the history of some of us;
+and from that moment I began to connect Justine Caron with certain events
+which, I felt sure, were marshalling to an unhappy conclusion.  I
+wondered, too, what part I should play in the development of the comedy,
+tragedy, or whatever it was to be.  In this connection I thought of Belle
+Treherne, and of how I should appear in her eyes if that little scene
+with Mrs. Falchion, now always staring me in the face, were rehearsed
+before her.  I came quickly to my feet, with a half-imprecation at
+myself; and a verse of a crude sea-song was in my ears:
+
+              "You can batten down cargo, live and dead,
+               But you can't put memory out of sight;
+               You can paint the full sails overhead,
+               But you can't make a black deed white. . . ."
+
+Angry, I said to myself: "It wasn't a black deed; it was foolish, it was
+infatuation, it was not right, but it is common to shipboard; and I lost
+my head, that was all."
+
+Some time later I was still at work in the dispensary, when I heard Mr.
+Treherne's voice calling to me from outside.  I drew back the curtain.
+He was leaning on his daughter's arm, while in one hand he carried a
+stick.  "Ah, Doctor, Doctor," cried he, "my old enemy, sciatica, has me
+in its grip, and why, in this warm climate, I can't understand.  I'm
+afraid I shall have to heave-to, like the 'Fulvia', and lay up for repairs.
+And, by the way, I'm glad we are on our course again."  He entered, and
+sat down.  Belle Treherne bowed to me gravely, and smiled slightly.  The
+smile was not peculiarly hospitable.  I knew perfectly well that to
+convince her of the reality of my growing admiration for her would be no
+easy task; but I was determined to base my new religion of the affections
+upon unassailable canons, and I felt that now I could do best by waiting
+and proving myself.
+
+While I was arranging some medicine for Mr. Treherne, and advising him
+on care against chills in a hot climate, he suddenly broke in with: "Dr.
+Marmion, Captain Ascott tells me that we shall get to Aden by Tuesday
+morning next.  Now, I was asked by a friend of mine in London to visit
+the grave of a son of his--a newspaper correspondent--who was killed in
+one of the expeditions against the native tribes, and was buried in the
+general cemetery at Aden.  On the way out I was not able to fulfil the
+commission, because we passed Aden in the night.  But there will be
+plenty of time to do so on Tuesday, I am told.  This, however, is my
+difficulty: I cannot go unless I am better, and I'm afraid there is no
+such luck as that in store for me.  These attacks last a week, at least.
+I wish my daughter, however, to go.  One of the ladies on board will go
+with her--Mrs. Callendar, I believe; and I am going to be so bold as to
+ask you to accompany them, if you will.  I know you better than any
+officer on board; and, besides, I should feel safer and better satisfied
+if she went under the protection of an officer,--these barbarous places,
+you know!--though, of course, it may be asking too much of you, or what
+is impossible."
+
+I assented with pleasure.  Belle Treherne was looking at the Latin names
+on the bottles at the time, and her face showed no expression either of
+pleasure or displeasure.  Mr. Treherne said bluffly: "Dr. Marmion, you
+are kind--very kind, and, upon my word, I'm much obliged."  He then
+looked at his daughter as if expecting her to speak.
+
+She looked up and said conventionally: "You are very kind, Dr. Marmion,
+and I am much obliged."  Then I thought her eyes twinkled with amusement
+at her own paraphrase of her father's speech, and she added: "Mrs.
+Callendar and myself will be much honoured indeed, and feel very
+important in having an officer to attend us.  Of course everybody else
+will be envious, and, again of course, that will add to our vanity."
+
+At this she would have gone; but her father, who was suffering just
+enough pain to enjoy anything that would divert his attention from it,
+fell into conversation upon a subject of mutual interest, in which his
+daughter joined on occasion, but not with enthusiasm.  Yet, when they
+came to go, she turned and said kindly, almost softly, as her fingers
+touched mine: "I almost envy you your profession, Dr. Marmion.  It opens
+doors to so much of humanity and life."
+
+"There is no sin," I laughingly said, "in such a covetousness, and,
+believe me, it can do no harm to me, at least."  Then I added gravely:
+"I should like my profession, in so far as I am concerned, to be worth
+your envy."  She had passed through the door before the last words were
+said, but I saw that her look was not forbidding.
+
+                    .........................
+
+Is there unhappiness anywhere?  There is not a vexing toss of the sea,
+not a cloud in the sky.  Is not catastrophe dead, and the arrows of
+tragedy spilled?  Peace broadens into deep, perfumed dusk towards Arabia;
+languor spreads towards the unknown lands of the farthest south.  No
+anxious soul leans out from the casement of life; the time is heavy with
+delightful ease.  There is no sound that troubles; the world goes by and
+no one heeds; for it is all beyond this musky twilight and this pleasant
+hour.  In this palace on the sea Mirth trails in and out with airy and
+harmonious footsteps.  Even the clang-clang of eight bells has music--not
+boisterous nor disturbing, but muffled in the velvety air.  Then, through
+this hemisphere of jocund quiet, there sounds the "All's well" of the
+watch.
+
+But, look!  Did you see a star fall just then, and the long avenue of
+expiring flame behind it?--Do not shudder; it is nothing.  No cry of pain
+came through that brightness.  There was only the "All's well" from the
+watchers.
+
+The thud of the engines falls on a padded atmosphere, and the lascars
+move like ghosts along the decks.  The long, smooth promenade is canopied
+and curtained, and hung with banners, and gay devices of the gorgeous
+East are contributing to the federation of pleasure.
+
+And now, through a festooned doorway, there come the people of many lands
+to inhabit the gay court.  Music follows their footsteps: Hamlet and
+Esther; Caractacus and Iphigenia; Napoleon and Hermione; The Man in the
+Iron Mask and Sappho; Garibaldi and Boadicea; an Arab sheikh and Joan of
+Arc; Mahomet and Casablanca; Cleopatra and Hannibal--a resurrected world.
+But the illusion is short and slight.  This world is very sordid--of
+shreds and patches, after all.  It is but a pretty masquerade, in which
+feminine vanity beats hard against strangely-clothed bosoms; and
+masculine conceit is shown in the work of the barber's curling-irons and
+the ship-carpenter's wooden swords and paper helmets.  The pride of these
+folk is not diminished because Hamlet's wig gets awry, or a Roman has
+trouble with his foolish garters.  Few men or women can resist mumming;
+they fancy themselves as somebody else, dead or living.  Yet these seem
+happy in this nonsense.  The indolent days appear to have deadened
+hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness.  They shall strut and fret
+their hour upon this little stage.  Let that sprightly girl forget the
+sudden death which made her an orphan; the nervous broker his faithless
+wife; the grey-haired soldier his silly and haunting sins; the bankrupt
+his creditors.
+
+"On with the dance, let joy be unconfined!"  For the captain is on the
+bridge, the engineer is beneath; we have stout walls, and a ceaseless
+sentry-go.  In the intervals of the dance wine passes, and idle things
+are said beside the draped and cushioned capstan or in the friendly gloom
+of a boat, which, in the name of safety, hangs taut between its davits.
+Let this imitation Cleopatra use the Cleopatra's arts; this mellow Romeo
+(sometime an Irish landlord) vow to this coy Juliet; this Helen of Troy--
+Of all who walked these decks, mantled and wigged in characters not their
+own, Mrs. Falchion was the handsomest, most convincing.  With a graceful
+swaying movement she passed along the promenade, and even envy praised
+her.  Her hand lay lightly on the arm of a brown stalwart native of the
+Indian hills, fierce and savage in attire.  Against his wild
+picturesqueness and brawny strength, her perfectness of animal beauty,
+curbed and rendered delicate by her inner coldness, showed in fine
+contrast; and yet both were matched in the fine natural prowess of form.
+
+With a singular affirmation of what had been, after all, but a sadly-
+humourous proposal, I had attired myself in a Greek costume--quickly made
+by my steward, who had been a tailor--and was about to leave my cabin,
+when Hungerford entered, and exclaimed, as he took his pipe from his
+mouth in surprise: "Marmion, what does this mean?  Don't you know your
+duties better?  No officer may appear at these flare-ups in costume other
+than his uniform.  You're the finest example of suburban innocence and
+original sin I've seen this last quarter of a century, wherein I've kept
+the world--and you--from tottering to destruction."  He reached for one
+of my cigars.
+
+Without a word, and annoyed at my own stupidity, I slowly divested myself
+of the clothes of Greece; while Hungerford smoked on, humming to himself
+occasionally a few bars of The Buccaneer's Bride, but evidently occupied
+with something in his mind.  At length he said: "Marmion, I said suburban
+innocence and original sin, but you've a grip on the law of square and
+compass too.  I'll say that for you, old chap--and I hope you don't think
+I'm a miserable prig."
+
+Still I replied nothing, but offered him one of my best cigars, taking
+the other one from him, and held the match while he lighted it--which,
+between men, is sufficient evidence of good-feeling.  He understood, and
+continued: "Of course you'll keep your eye on Mrs. Falchion and Madras
+to-night: if he is determined that they shall meet, and you have arranged
+it.  I'd like to know how it goes before you turn in, if you don't mind.
+And, I say, Marmion, ask Miss Treherne to keep a dance for me--a waltz--
+towards the close of the evening, will you?  Excuse me, but she is the
+thorough-bred of the ship.  And if I have only one hop down the
+promenade, I want it to be with a girl who'll remind me of some one that
+is making West Kensington worth inhabiting.  Only think, Marmion, of a
+girl like her--a graduate in arts, whose name and picture have been in
+all the papers--being willing to make up with me, Dick Hungerford!  She
+is as natural and simple as a girl can be, and doesn't throw Greek roots
+at you, nor try to convince you of the difference between the songs of
+the troubadours and the sonnets of Petrarch.  She doesn't care a rap
+whether Dante's Beatrice was a real woman or a principle; whether James
+the First poisoned his son; or what's the margin between a sine and a
+cosine.  She can take a fence in the hunting-field like a bird--!  Oh,
+all right, just hold still, and I'll unfasten it."  And he struggled with
+a recalcitrant buckle.  "Well, you'll not forget about Miss Treherne,
+will you?  She ought to go just as she is.  Fancy-dress on her would be
+gilding the gold; for, though she isn't surpassingly beautiful, she is
+very fine, very fine indeed.  There, now, you're yourself again, and look
+all the better for it."
+
+By this time I was again in my uniform, and I sat down, and smoked, and
+looked at Hungerford.  His long gossip had been more or less detached,
+and I had said nothing.  I understood that he was trying, in his blunt,
+honest way, to turn my thoughts definitely from Mrs. Falchion to Belle
+Treherne; and he never seemed to me such a good fellow as at that moment.
+I replied at last: "All right, Hungerford; I'll be your deputation, your
+ambassador, to Miss Treherne.  What time shall we see you on deck?"
+
+"About 11.40--just in time to trip a waltz on the edge of eight bells."
+
+"On the edge of Sunday, my boy."
+
+"Yes.  Do you know, it is just four years ago tomorrow since I found Boyd
+Madras on the No Man's Sea?"
+
+"Let us not talk of it," said I.
+
+"All right.  I merely stated the fact because it came to me.  I'm mum
+henceforth.  And I want to talk about something else.  The first
+officer,--I don't know whether you have noticed him lately, but I tell
+you this: if we ever get into any trouble with this ship he'll go to
+pieces.  Why, the other night, when the engine got tangled, he was as
+timid as a woman.  That shock he had with the coal, as I said before,
+has broken his nerve, big man as he is."
+
+"Hungerford," I said, "you do not generally croak, but you are earning
+the character of the raven for yourself to-night.  The thing is growing
+on you.  What IS the use of bringing up unpleasant subjects?  You are an
+old woman."  I fear there was the slightest irritation in my voice; but,
+truth is, the last few days' experiences had left their mark on me, and
+Hungerford's speech and manner had suddenly grown trying.
+
+He stood for a moment looking at me with direct earnestness from under
+his strong brows, and then he stepped forward, and, laying his hand upon
+my arm, rejoined: "Do not be raw, Marmion.  I'm only a blunt, stupid
+sailor; and, to tell you God's truth, as I have told you before, every
+sailor is superstitious--every real sailor.  He can't help it--I can't.
+I have a special fit on me now.  Why don't I keep it to myself?  Because
+I'm selfish, and it does me good to talk.  You and I are in one secret
+together, and it has made me feel like sharing this thing with a pal, I
+suppose."
+
+I seized his hand and begged his pardon, and called myself unpleasant
+names, which he on the instant stopped, and said: "That's all right,
+Marmy; shake till the knuckles crack!  I'm off.  Don't forget the dance."
+He disappeared down the passage.
+
+Then I went on deck, and the scene which I have so imperfectly described
+passed before me.  Mrs. Falchion was surrounded with admirers all the
+evening, both men and women; and two of the very stately English ladies
+of title, to whom I before referred, were particularly gracious to her;
+while she, in turn, bore herself with becoming dignity.  I danced with
+her once, and was down on her programme for another dance.  I had also
+danced with Belle Treherne, who appeared as Miriam, and was chaperoned by
+one of the ladies of title; and I had also "sat out" one dance with her.
+Chancing to pass her as the evening wore on, I saw her in conversation
+with Mrs. Falchion, who had dismissed her cavalier, preferring to talk,
+she said, for dancing was tiresome work on the Indian Ocean.  Belle
+Treherne, who up to that moment had never quite liked her, yielded to the
+agreeable charm of her conversation and her frank applausive remarks upon
+the costumes of the dancers.  She had a good word for every one, and she
+drew her companion out to make the most of herself, as women less often
+do before women than in the presence of men.  I am certain that her
+interest in Belle Treherne was real, and likewise certain that she
+cherished no pique against her because I had transferred my allegiance.
+Indeed, I am sure that she had no deep feeling of injured pride where I
+was concerned.  Such after acidity as she sometimes showed was directed
+against the foolish part I had played with her and my action in
+subsequent events; it did not proceed from personal feeling or self-
+value.
+
+Some time after this meeting I saw Boyd Madras issue from the companion-
+way dressed as a Greek.  He wore a false beard, and carried off well his
+garments of white and scarlet and gold--a very striking and presentable
+man.  He came slowly forward, looking about him steadily, and, seeing me,
+moved towards me.  But for his manner I should scarcely have recognised
+him.  A dance was beginning; but many eyes were turned curiously, and
+even admiringly, to him; for he looked singular and impressive and his
+face was given fulness by a beard and flesh paints.  I motioned him aside
+where there was shadow, and said: "Well, you have determined to see her?"
+
+"Yes," he said; "and I wish you, if you will, to introduce me to her as
+Mr. Charles Boyd.
+
+"You still think this wise?" I asked.
+
+"It is my earnest wish.  I must have an understanding to-night."
+He spoke very firmly, and showed no excitement.  His manner was calm
+and gentlemanly.
+
+He had a surprising air of decision.  Supporting an antique character, he
+seemed for the moment to have put on also something of antique strength
+of mind, and to be no longer the timid invalid.  "Then, come with me," I
+answered.
+
+We walked in silence for a few minutes, and then, seeing where Mrs.
+Falchion was, we advanced to her.  The next dance on her programme was
+mine.  In my previous dance with her we had talked as we now did at
+table--as we did the first hour I met her--impersonally, sometimes (I am
+bold to say) amusingly.  Now I approached her with apologies for being
+late.  The man beside her took his leave.  She had only just glanced at
+me at first, but now she looked at my companion, and the look stayed,
+curious, bewildered.
+
+"It is fitting," I said, "that Greek meet Greek--that Menelaus should be
+introduced to Helen.  May I say that when Helen is not Helen she is Mrs.
+Falchion, and when Menelaus is not Menelaus he is--Mr. Charles Boyd."
+
+I am afraid my voice faltered slightly, because there came over me
+suddenly a nervousness as unexpected as it was inconvenient, and my
+words, which began lightly, ended huskily.  Had Madras miscalculated this
+woman?
+
+Her eyes were afire, and her face was as pale as marble; all its slight
+but healthy glow had fled.  A very faint gasp came from her lips.  I saw
+that she recognised him, as he bowed and mentioned her name, following my
+introduction.  I knew not what might occur, for I saw danger in her eyes
+in reply to the beseeching look in his.  Would melodrama supervene after
+all?  She merely bowed towards me, as if to dismiss me, and then she
+rose, took his arm, and moved away.  The interview that follows came to
+me from Boyd Madras afterwards.
+
+When they had reached the semi-darkness of the forward part of the ship,
+she drew her hand quickly away, and, turning to him, said: "What is the
+name by which you are called?  One does not always hear distinctly when
+being introduced."
+
+He did not understand what she was about to do, but he felt the deadly
+coldness in her voice.  "My name is known to you," he replied.  He
+steadied himself.
+
+"No, pardon me, I do not know it, for I do not know you. . . .  I
+never saw you before."  She leaned her hand carelessly on the bulwarks.
+
+He was shocked, but he drew himself together.  Their eyes were intent on
+each other.  "You do know me!  Need I tell you that I am Boyd Madras?"
+"Boyd Madras," she said, musing coldly.  "A peculiar name."
+
+"Mercy Madras was your name until you called yourself Mrs. Falchion," he
+urged indignantly, yet anxiously too.
+
+"It suits you to be mysterious, Mr.--ah yes, Mr. Boyd Madras; but,
+really, you might be less exacting in your demands upon one's
+imagination."  Her look was again on him casually.
+
+He spoke breathlessly.  "Mercy--Mercy--for God's sake, don't treat me
+like this!  Oh, my wife, I have wronged you every way, but I loved you
+always--love you now.  I have only followed you to ask you to forgive me,
+after all these years.  I saw you in Colombo just before you came on
+board, and I felt that I must come also.  You never loved me.  Perhaps
+that is better for you, but you do not know what I suffer.  If you could
+give me a chance, and come with me to America--anywhere, and let me start
+the world again?  I can--travel straight now, and I will work hard, and be
+honest.  I will--" But here sudden pain brought back the doubt concerning
+his life and its possibilities.
+
+He leaned against the bulwarks, and made a helpless, despairing motion
+with his hand.  "No, no!" he said; and added with a bitter laugh: "Not
+to begin the world again, but to end it as profitably and silently as I
+can. . . .  But you will listen to me, my wife?  You will say at least
+that you forgive me the blight and ill I brought upon you?"
+
+She had listened to him unmoved outwardly.  Her reply was instant.  "You
+are more melodramatic than I thought you capable of being--from your
+appearance," she said in a hard tone.  "Your acting is very good, but not
+convincing.  I cannot respond as would become the unity and sequence of
+the play. . . .  I have no husband.  My husband is dead--I buried him
+years ago.  I have forgotten his name--I buried that too."
+
+All the suffering and endured scorn of years came to revolt in him.  He
+leaned forward now, and caught her wrist.  "Have you no human feeling?"
+he said "no heart in you at all?  Look.  I have it in me here suddenly to
+kill you as you stand.  You have turned my love to hate.  From your
+smooth skin there I could strip those rags, and call upon them all to
+look at you--my wife--a felon's wife; mine to have and to hold--to hold,
+you hear!--as it was sworn at the altar.  I bare my heart to you,
+repenting, and you mock it, torture it, with your undying hate and
+cruelty.  You have no heart, no life.  This white bosom is all of you
+--all of your power to make men love you--this, and your beauty.  All
+else, by God, is cruel as the grave!"
+
+His voice had sunk to a hoarse whisper.  She had not sought to remove his
+hand, nor struggled in the least; and once it seemed as if this new
+development of his character, this animal fierceness, would conquer her:
+she admired courage.  It was not so.  He trembled with weakness before he
+had finished.  He stopped too soon; he lost.
+
+"You will find such parts exhausting to play," she murmured, as he let
+her arm fall.  "It needs a strong physique to endure exaggerated, nervous
+sentiment.  And now, please, let us perform less trying scenes."  Then,
+with a low, cold anger, she continued: "It is only a coward that will dog
+a woman who finds his presence insupportable to her.  This woman cannot,
+if she would, endure this man's presence; it is her nature.  Well, why
+rush blindly at the impossible?  She wishes to live her spoiled life
+alone.  The man can have no part in it--never, never!  But she has money.
+If in that way--"
+
+He stretched out his hand protestingly, the fingers spread in excitement.
+"No more--not another word!" he said.  "I ask for forgiveness, for one
+word of kindness--and I am offered money! the fire that burned me to eat,
+instead of bread!  I had a wife once," he added in a kind of troubled
+dream, looking at her as if she were very far away, "and her name was
+Mercy--her name was Mercy--Mercy Madras.  I loved her.  I sinned for her
+sake.  A message came that she was dead to me; but I could not believe
+that it was so altogether, for I had knelt at her feet and worshipped
+her.  I went to her, but she sent me away angrily.  Years passed.  'She
+will have relented now,' I said, and I followed her, and found her as I
+thought.  But it was not she; it was a wicked ghost in her beautiful
+body--nothing more.  And then I turned away and cursed all things,
+because I knew that I should never see my wife again.  Mercy Madras
+was dead. . . .  Can you not hear the curses?"
+
+Still she was unmoved.  She said with a cruel impatience in her voice:
+"Yes, Mercy Madras is dead.  How then can she forgive?  What could her
+ghost--as you call her--do, but offer the thing which her husband--when
+he was living--loved so well that he sold himself into bondage, and
+wrecked his world and hers for it--Money?  Well, money is at his
+disposal, as she said before--"
+
+But she spoke no more.  The man in him straight way shamed her into
+silence with a look.  She bowed her head, yet not quite in shame, for
+there was that in her eyes which made her appear as if his suffering was
+a gratuitous infliction.  But at this moment he was stronger, and he drew
+her eyes up by the sheer force of his will.  "I need no money now," he
+coldly declared.  "I need nothing--not even you; and can you fancy that,
+after waiting all these years for this hour, money would satisfy me?
+Do you know," he continued slowly and musingly, "I can look upon you now
+--yes, at this moment--with more indifference than you ever showed to me?
+A moment ago I loved you: now I think you horrible; because you are no
+woman; you have a savage heart.  And some day you will suffer as I do, so
+terribly that even the brazen serpent could not cure you.  Then you will
+remember me."
+
+He was about to leave her, but he had not taken two steps before he
+turned, with all the anger and the passion softened in his eyes, and
+said, putting his hand out towards yet not to touch her, "Good-bye--for
+the last time."  And then the look was such as might be turned upon a
+forgiven executioner.
+
+"Good-night," she replied, and she did not look into his eyes, but out to
+sea.  Her eyes remained fixed upon its furtive gloom.  She too was
+furtive and gloomy at this moment.  They were both sleek, silent, and
+remorseless.  There was a slight rustle to her dress as she changed her
+position.  It was in grim keeping with the pitiless rustle of the sea.
+
+And so they parted.  I saw him move on towards the companion-way, and
+though I felt instinctively that all had gone ill with him, I was
+surprised to see how erect he walked.  After a minute I approached her.
+She heard me coming, and presently turned to me with a curious smile.
+"Who is Mr. Charles Boyd?" she asked.  "I did not pierce his disguise.
+I could not tell whether I had met him on board before.  Have I?  But my
+impression is that I had not seen him on the ship."
+
+"No, you had not seen him," I replied.  "He had a fancy to travel, until
+yesterday, with the second-class passengers.  Now he has a first-class
+cabin--in his proper place, in fact."
+
+"You think so--in his proper place?"  The suggestion was not pleasant.
+
+"Assuredly.  Why do you speak in that way?" was my indignant reply.
+
+She took my arm as we moved on.  "Because he was slightly rude to me."
+
+I grew bold, and determined to bring her to some sort of reckoning.
+
+"How rude were you to him?"
+
+"Not rude at all.  It is not worth while being so--to anybody," was her
+chilly answer.
+
+"I was under the impression you had met him before," I said gravely.
+
+"Indeed?  And why?"  She raised her eyebrows at me.  I pushed the matter
+to a conclusion.  "He was ill the other day--he has heart trouble.  It
+was necessary for me to open the clothes about his neck.  On his breast
+I saw a little ivory portrait of a woman's head."
+
+"A woman's head," she repeated absently, and her fingers idly toyed with
+a jingling ornament in her belt.  In an idle moment I had sketched the
+head, as I remembered it, on a sheet of paper, and now I took it from my
+pocket and handed it to her.  We were standing near a port-hole of the
+music saloon, from which light streamed.
+
+"That is the head," said I.
+
+She deliberately placed the paper in the belt of light, and, looking at
+it, remarked mechanically: "This is the head, is it?"  She showed no
+change of countenance, and handed it back to me as if she had seen no
+likeness.  "It is very interesting," she said, "but one would think you
+might make better use of your time than by surreptitiously sketching
+portraits from sick men's breasts.  One must have plenty of leisure to do
+that sort of thing, I should think.  Be careful that you do not get into
+mischief, Dr. Marmion."  She laughed.  "Besides, where was the special
+peculiarity in that portrait that you should treasure it in pencil so
+conventionally?--Your drawing is not good.--Where was the point or need?"
+
+"I have no right to reply to that directly," I responded.  "But this
+man's life is not for always, and if anything happened to him it would
+seem curious to strangers to find that on his breast--because, of course,
+more than I would see it there."
+
+"If anything happened?  What should happen?  You mean, on board ship?"
+There was a little nervousness in her tone now.
+
+"I am only hinting at an awkward possibility," I replied.
+
+She looked at me scornfully.  "When did you see that picture on his
+breast?"  I told her.  "Ah! before THAT day?" she rejoined.  I knew
+that she referred to the evening when I had yielded foolishly to the
+fascination of her presence.  The blood swam hotly in my face.  "Men are
+not noble creatures," she continued.
+
+"I am afraid you would not give many their patents of nobility if you had
+power to bestow them," I answered.
+
+"Most men at the beginning, and very often ever after, are ignoble
+creatures.  Yet I should confer the patents of nobility, if it were my
+prerogative; for some would succeed in living up to them.  Vanity would
+accomplish that much.  Vanity is the secret of noblesse oblige; not
+radical virtue--since we are beginning to be bookish again."
+
+"To what do you reduce honour and right?" returned I.
+
+"As I said to you on a memorable occasion," she answered very drily, "to
+a code."
+
+"That is," rejoined I, "a man does a good action, lives an honourable
+life, to satisfy a social canon--to gratify, say, a wife or mother, who
+believes in him, and loves him?"
+
+"Yes."  She was watching Belle Treherne promenading with her father.  She
+drew my attention to it by a slight motion of the hand, but why I could
+not tell.
+
+"But might not a man fall by the same rule of vanity?" I urged.  "That
+he shall appear well in their eyes, that their vanity in turn should be
+fed, might he not commit a crime, and so bring misery?"
+
+"Yes, it is true either way--pleasure or misery.  Please come to the
+saloon and get me an ice before the next dance."
+
+I was perplexed.  Was she altogether soulless?  Even now, as we passed
+among the dancers, she replied to congratulations on her make-up and
+appearance with evident pleasure.
+
+An hour later, I was taking Belle Treherne from the arm of Hungerford for
+the last waltz, and, in reply to an inquiring glance from him, I shook my
+head mournfully.  His face showed solicitude as he walked away.  Perhaps
+it did not gratify my vanity that Belle Treherne, as her father limped
+forward at the stroke of eight bells to take her below, said to me: "How
+downright and thorough Mr. Hungerford is!"  But I frankly admitted that
+he was all she might say good of him, and more.
+
+The deck was quickly dismantled, the lights went out, and all the dancers
+disappeared.  The masquerade was over; and again, through the darkness,
+rose the plaintive "All's well!"  And it kept ringing in my ears until it
+became a mocking sound, from which I longed to be free.  It was like the
+voice of Lear crying over the body of Cordelia: "Never, never, never,
+never, never!"
+
+Something of Hungerford's superstitious feeling possessed me.  I went
+below, and involuntarily made my way to Boyd Madras's cabin.
+
+Though the night was not hot, the door was drawn to.  I tapped.  His
+voice at once asked who was there, and when I told him, and inquired how
+he was, he said he was not ill, and asked me to come to his cabin in the
+morning, if I would.  I promised, and bade him good-night.  He responded,
+and then, as I turned away from the door, I heard him repeat the good-
+night cordially and calmly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE WHEEL COMES FULL CIRCLE
+
+The next morning I was up early, and went on deck.  The sun had risen,
+and in the moist atmosphere the tints of sky and sea were beautiful.
+Everywhere was the warm ocean undulating lazily to the vague horizon.
+A few lascars were still cleansing the decks; others were seated on their
+haunches between decks, eating curry from a calabash; a couple of
+passengers were indolently munching oranges; and Stone the quartermaster
+was inspecting the work lately done by the lascars.  Stone gave me a
+pleasant good-morning, and we walked together the length of the deck
+forward.  I had got about three-fourths of the length back again, when I
+heard a cry from aft--a sharp call of "Man overboard!"  In a moment I had
+travelled the intermediate deck, and was at the stern, looking below,
+where, in the swirling waters, was the head of a man.  With cries of "Man
+overboard!"  I threw two or three buoys after the disappearing head,
+above which a bare arm thrust itself.  I heard the rush of feet behind
+me, and in a moment Hungerford and Stone were beside me.  The signal was
+given for the engines to stop; stewards and lascars came running on deck
+in response to Hungerford's call, and the first officer now appeared.
+Very soon a crew was gathered on the after-deck, about a boat on the port
+side.
+
+Passengers by this time showed in various stages of dressing--
+women wringing their hands, men gesticulating.  If there is anything
+calculated to send a thrill of awe through a crowd, it is the cry of "Man
+overboard!"  And when one looked below, and saw above the drowning head
+two white arms thrust from the sea, a horrible thing was brought home to
+each of us.  Besides, the scene before us on the deck was not reassuring.
+There was trouble in getting the boat lowered.  The first officer was
+excited, the lascars were dazed, the stewards were hurried without being
+confident; only Hungerford, Stone, and the gunner were collected.  The
+boat should have been launched in a minute, but still it hung between its
+davits; its course downward was interrupted; something was wrong with the
+ropes, "A false start, by --- !" said the bookmaker, looking through his
+eye-glass.  Colonel Ryder's face was stern, Clovelly was pale and
+anxious, as moment after moment went, and the boat was not yet free.
+Ages seemed to pass before the boat was let down even with the bulwarks,
+and a crew of ten, with Hungerford in command, were in it, ready to be
+lowered.  Whether the word was given to lower, or whether it was any
+one's fault, may never perhaps be known; but, as the boat hung there,
+suddenly it shot down at the stern, some one having let go the ropes at
+that end; and the bow being still fast, it had fallen like a trap-door.
+It seemed, on the instant, as if the whole crew were tossed into the
+water; but some had successfully clutched the boat's side, and Hungerford
+hung by a rope with one hand.  In the eddying water, however, about the
+reversing screw, were two heads, and farther off was a man struggling.
+The face of one of the men near the screw was upturned for a moment; it
+was that of Stone the quartermaster.
+
+A cry went up from the passengers, and they swayed forward to the
+suspended boat; but Colonel Ryder turned almost savagely upon them.
+"Keep quiet!" he said.  "Stand back!  What can you do?  Give the
+officers a chance."  He knew that there had been a false start, and bad
+work indeed; but he also saw that the task of the officers must not be
+made harder.  His sternness had effect.  The excited passengers drew
+back, and I took his place in front of them.  When the first effort had
+been made to lower the boat, I asked the first officer if I could
+accompany the crew, but he said no.  I could, therefore, do nothing but
+wait.  A change came on the crowd.  It became painfully silent, none
+speaking save in whispers, and all watching with anxious faces either the
+receding heads in the water or the unfortunate boat's crew.  Hungerford
+showed himself a thorough sailor.  Hanging to the davit, he quietly,
+reassuringly, gave the order for righting the boat, virtually taking the
+command out of the hands of the first officer, who was trembling with
+nervousness.  Hungerford was right; this man's days as a sailor were
+over.  The accident from which he had suffered had broken his nerve,
+stalwart as he was.  But Hungerford was as cool as if this were ordinary
+boat-practice.  Soon the boat was drawn up again, and others took the
+place of those who had disappeared.  Then it was lowered safely, and,
+with Hungerford erect in the bows, it was pulled swiftly along the path
+we had come.
+
+At length, too, the great ship turned round, but not in her tracks.  It
+is a pleasant fiction that these great steamers are easily managed.  They
+can go straight ahead, but their huge proportions are not adapted for
+rapid movement.  However, the work of rescue was begun.  Sailors were
+aloft on watch, Captain Ascott was on the bridge, sweeping the sea with
+his glass; order was restored.  But the ship had the feeling of a home
+from which some familiar inmate had been taken, to return no more.
+Children clasped their mothers' hands and said, "Mother, was it the poor
+quartermaster?" and men who the day before had got help from the petty
+officers in the preparation of costumes, said mournfully: "Fife the
+gunner was one of them."
+
+But who was the man first to go overboard--and who was it first gave
+the alarm?  There were rumours, but no one was sure.  All at once I
+remembered something peculiar in that cry of "Man overboard!" and it
+shocked me.  I hurried below, and went to the cabin of Boyd Madras.  It
+was empty; but on a shelf lay a large envelope, addressed to Hungerford
+and myself.  I tore it open.  There was a small packet, which I knew
+contained the portrait he had worn on his bosom, addressed to Mrs.
+Falchion; and the other was a single sheet directed to me, fully written
+upon, and marked in the corner: "To be made public."
+
+So, he had disappeared from the play?  He had made his exit?  He had
+satisfied the code at last?  Before opening the letter addressed to me,
+I looked round.  His clothes were folded upon one of the berths; but the
+garments of masquerade were not in the cabin.  Had he then gone out of
+the world in the garb of a mummer?  Not altogether, for the false beard
+he had worn the night before lay beside the clothes.  But this terrible
+earnestness of his would look strange in last night's disguise.
+
+I opened the packet addressed to Hungerford and myself, and saw that it
+contained a full and detailed account of his last meeting with his wife.
+The personal letter was short.  He said that his gratitude was
+unspeakable, and now must be so for ever.  He begged us not to let the
+world know who he was, nor his relationship to Mrs. Falchion, unless she
+wished it; he asked me to hand privately to her the packet bearing her
+name.  Lastly, he requested that the paper for the public be given to the
+captain of the 'Fulvia'.
+
+Going out into the passage, I found a steward, who hurriedly told me that
+just before the alarm was given he had seen Boyd Madras going aft in that
+strange costume, which he mistook for a dressing-gown, and he had come to
+see if, by any chance, it was he who had gone overboard.  I told him that
+it was.  He disappeared, and soon the whole ship knew it.  I went to the
+captain, gave him the letter, and told him only what was necessary to
+tell.  He was on the bridge, and was occupied with giving directions, so
+he asked me the substance of the letter, and handed it back to me,
+requesting me to make a copy of it soon and leave it in his cabin.  I
+then took all the papers to my cabin, and locked them up.  I give here
+the substance of the letter which was to be made public:
+
+     Because you know how much I have suffered physically while on board
+     this ship, and because you have been kind to me, I wish, through
+     you, to say my last word to the world: though, indeed, this may seem
+     a strange form for gratitude to take.  Dying men, however, make few
+     apologies, and I shall make none.  My existence, as you know, is an
+     uncertain quantity, and may be cut short at any moment in the
+     ordinary course of things.  But I have no future in the active
+     concerns of life; no past on which to dwell with satisfaction; no
+     friends to mourn for my misfortunes in life, nor for my death,
+     whether it be peaceful or violent; therefore, I have fewer
+     compunctions in ending a mistaken career and a worthless life.
+
+     Some one will profit by my death: who it is matters not, for it is
+     no friend of mine.  My death adjusts a balance, perhaps not nicely,
+     yet it does it.  And this is all I have to say. . . .  I am
+     going.  Farewell. . . .
+
+After a brief farewell to me added, there came the subscription "Charles
+Boyd;" and that was all.  Why he cried out "Man overboard" (for now I
+recognised that it was his voice which gave the alarm), I do not know,
+except that he wished his body to be recovered, and to receive burial.
+
+Just here, some one came fumbling at the curtain of my cabin.  I heard a
+gasp--"Doctor--my head! quick!"
+
+I looked out.  As I drew the curtain a worthless lascar sailor fell
+fainting into my cabin.  He had been drinking a good deal, and the horror
+and excitement of the accident had brought on an apoplectic fit.  This in
+a very hot climate is suddenly fatal.  In three minutes, in spite of me,
+he was dead.  Postponing report of the matter, I went on deck again among
+the passengers.
+
+I expected that Mrs. Falchion would be among them, for the news must have
+gone to every part of the ship; but she was not there.  On the outskirts
+of one of the groups, however, I saw Justine Caron.  I went to her, and
+asked her if Mrs. Falchion had risen.  She said that she had not: that
+she had been told of the disaster, and had appeared shocked; but had
+complained of a headache, and had not risen.  I then asked Justine if
+Mrs. Falchion had been told who the suicide was, and was answered in the
+negative.  At that moment a lady came to me and said in an awed whisper:
+"Dr. Marmion, is it true that the man who committed suicide was a second-
+class passenger, and that he appeared at the ball last night, and danced
+with Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+I knew that my reply would soon become common property, so I said:
+
+"He was a first-class passenger, though until yesterday he travelled
+second-class.  I knew him.  His name was Charles Boyd.  I introduced him
+to Mrs. Falchion last night, but he did not stay long on deck, because he
+felt ill.  He had heart trouble.  You may guess that he was tired of
+life."  Then I told her of the paper which was for the public, and she
+left me.
+
+The search for the unfortunate men went on.  No one could be seen near
+the floating buoys which were here and there picked up by Hungerford's
+boat.  The long undulations of the water had been broken up in a large
+area about the ship, but the sea was still comparatively smooth.  We were
+steaming back along the track we had come.  There was less excitement on
+board than might be expected.  The tropical stillness of the air, the
+quiet suddenness of the tragedy itself, the grim decisiveness of
+Hungerford, the watchful silence of a few men like Colonel Ryder and
+Clovelly, had effect upon even the emotion of those women, everywhere
+found, who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery.
+
+Nearly all were watching the rescue boat, though a few looked over the
+sides of the ship as if they expected to find bodies floating about.
+They saw sharks, instead, and a trail of blood, and this sent them away
+sickened from the bulwarks.  Then they turned their attention again upon
+the rescue party.  It was impossible not to note what a fine figure
+Hungerford made, as he stood erect in the bow, his hand over his eyes,
+searching the water.  Presently we saw him stop the boat, and something
+was drawn in.  He signalled the ship.  He had found one man--but dead or
+alive?  The boat was rapidly rowed back to the ship, Hungerford making
+efforts for resuscitation.  Arrived at the vessel, the body was passed up
+to me.
+
+It was that of Stone the quartermaster.  I worked to bring back life, but
+it was of no avail.  A minute after, a man in the yards signalled that he
+saw another.  It was not a hundred yards away, and was floating near the
+surface.  It was a strange sight, for the water was a vivid green, and
+the man wore garments of white and scarlet, and looked a part of some
+strange mosaic: as one has seen astonishing figures set in balls of solid
+glass.  This figure framed in the sea was Boyd Madras.  The boat was
+signalled, it drew near, and two men dragged the body in, as a shark
+darted forward, just too late, to seize it.  The boat drew alongside the
+'Fulvia'.  I stood at the gangway to receive this castaway.  I felt his
+wrist and heart.  As I did so I chanced to glance up at the passengers,
+who were looking at this painful scene from the upper deck.  There,
+leaning over the railing, stood Mrs. Falchion, her eyes fixed with a
+shocking wonder at the drooping, weird figure.  Her lips parted, but at
+first they made no sound.  Then, she suddenly drew herself up with a
+shudder.  "Horrible!  horrible!" she said, and turned away.
+
+I had Boyd Madras taken to an empty cabin next to mine, which I used for
+operations, and there Hungerford and myself worked to resuscitate him.
+We allowed no one to come near.  I had not much hope of bringing life
+back, but still we worked with a kind of desperation, for it seemed to
+Hungerford and myself that somehow we were responsible to humanity for
+him.  His heart had been weak, but there had been no organic trouble:
+only some functional disorder, which open-air life and freedom from
+anxiety might have overcome.  Hungerford worked with an almost fierce
+persistence.  Once he said: "By God, I will bring him back, Marmion, to
+face that woman down when she thinks she has got the world on the hip!"
+
+I cannot tell what delight we felt when, after a little time, I saw a
+quiver of the eyelids and a slight motion of the chest.  Presently a
+longer breath came, and the eyes opened; at first without recognition.
+Then, in a few moments, I knew that he was safe--desperately against his
+will, but safe.
+
+His first sentient words startled me.  He gasped, "Does she think I am
+drowned?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Then she must continue to do so!"
+
+"Why?"
+
+"Because"--here he spoke faintly, as if sudden fear had produced
+additional weakness--"because I had rather die a thousand deaths than
+meet her now; because she hates me.  I must begin the world again.  You
+have saved my life against my will: I demand that you give that life its
+only chance of happiness."
+
+As his words came to me, I remembered with a start the dead lascar, and,
+leading Hungerford to my cabin, I pointed to the body, and whispered that
+the sailor's death was only known to me.  "Then this is the corpse of
+Boyd Madras, and we'll bury it for him," he said with quick bluntness.
+"Do not report this death to Captain Ascott--he would only raise
+objections to the idea.  This lascar was in my watch.  It will be
+supposed he fell overboard during the accident to the boat.  Perhaps some
+day the funeral of this nigger will be a sensation and surprise to her
+blessed ladyship on deck."
+
+I suggested that it seemed underhand and unprofessional, but the
+entreating words of the resuscitated man in the next room conquered my
+objections.
+
+It was arranged that Madras should remain in the present cabin, of which
+I had a key, until we reached Aden; then he should, by Hungerford's aid,
+disappear.
+
+We were conspirators, but we meant harm to nobody.  I covered up the face
+of the dead lascar and wrapped round him the scarlet and gold cloth that
+Madras had worn.  Then I got a sailor, who supposed Boyd Madras was
+before him, and the body was soon sewed in its shotted shroud and carried
+to where Stone the quartermaster lay.
+
+At this day I cannot suppose I would do these things, but then it seemed
+right to do as Madras wished: he was, under a new name, to begin life
+afresh.
+
+After giving directions for the disposition of the bodies, I went on
+deck.  Mrs. Falchion was still there.  Some one said to her: "Did you
+know the man who committed suicide?"
+
+"He was introduced to me last night by Dr. Marmion," she replied, and she
+shuddered again, though her face showed no remarkable emotion.  She had
+had a shock to the senses, not to the heart.
+
+When I came to her on the deck, Justine was saying to her: "Madame, you
+should not have come.  You should not see such painful things when you
+are not well."
+
+She did not reply to this.  She looked up at me and said: "A strange
+whim, to die in those fanciful rags.  It is dreadful to see; but he had
+the courage."
+
+I replied: "They have as much courage who make men do such things and
+then live on."
+
+Then I told her briefly that I held the packet for her, that I guessed
+what was in it, and that I would hand it to her later.  I also said that
+he had written to me the record of last night's meeting with her, and
+that he had left a letter which was to be made public.  As I said these
+things we were walking the decks, and, because eyes were on both of us,
+I tried to show nothing more unusual in manner than the bare tragedy
+might account for.
+
+"Well," she said, with a curious coldness, "what use shall you make of
+your special knowledge?"
+
+"I intend," I said, "to respect his wish, that your relationship to him
+be kept unknown, unless you declare otherwise."
+
+"That is reasonable.  If he had always been as reasonable!  And," she
+continued, "I do not wish the relationship to be known: practically there
+is none. . . .  Oh!  oh!" she added, with a sudden change in her
+voice, "why did he do as he did, and make everything else impossible--
+impossible!  .  .  .  Send me, or give me the packet, when you wish: and
+now please leave me, Dr. Marmion."
+
+The last few words were spoken with some apparent feeling, but I knew she
+was thinking of herself most, and I went from her angry.
+
+I did not see her again before the hour that afternoon when we should
+give the bodies of the two men to the ocean.  No shroud could be prepared
+for gunner Fife and able-seaman Winter, whose bodies had no Christian
+burial, but were swallowed by the eager sea, not to be yielded up even
+for a few hours.  We were now steaming far beyond the place where they
+were lost.
+
+The burial was an impressive sight, as burials at sea mostly are.  The
+lonely waters stretching to the horizon helped to make it so.  There was
+a melancholy majesty in the ceremony.
+
+The clanging bell had stopped.  Captain Ascott was in his place at the
+head of the rude draped bier.  In the silence one only heard the swish of
+water against the 'Fulvia's' side, as we sped on towards Aden.  People do
+not know how beautiful, how powerful, is the burial service in the Book
+of Common Prayer, who have only heard it recited by a clergyman.  To hear
+it read by a hardy man, whose life is among stern duties, is to receive a
+new impression.  He knows nothing of lethargic monotone; he interprets as
+he reads.  And when the man is the home-spun captain of a ship, who sees
+before him the poor shell of one that served him for ten years, "The Lord
+gave and the Lord hath taken away; Blessed be the name of the Lord," has
+a strange significance.  It is only men who have borne the shock of toil
+and danger, and have beaten up against the world's buffetings, that are
+fit to say last words over those gone down in the storm or translated in
+the fiery chariot of duty.
+
+The engines suddenly stopped.  The effect was weird.  Captain Ascott's
+fingers trembled, and he paused for an instant and looked down upon the
+dead, then out sorrowfully to the waiting sea, before he spoke the words,
+"We therefore commit their bodies to the deep."  But, the moment they
+were uttered, the bier was lifted, there was a swift plunge, and only the
+flag and the empty boards were left.  The sobbing of women now seemed
+almost unnatural; for around us was the bright sunlight, the gay dresses
+of the lascars, the sound of the bell striking the hours, and children
+playing on the deck.  The ship moved on.
+
+And Mrs. Falchion?  As the burial service was read, she had stood, and
+looked, not at the bier, but straight out to sea, calm and apparently
+unsympathetic, though, as she thought, her husband was being buried.
+When, however, the weighted body divided the water with a swingeing
+sound, her face suddenly suffused, as though shame had touched her or
+some humiliating idea had come.  But she turned to Justine almost
+immediately, and soon after said calmly: "Bring a play of Moliere, and
+read to me, Justine."
+
+I had the packet her supposed dead husband had left for her in my pocket.
+I joined her, and we paced the deck, at first scarcely speaking, while
+the passengers dispersed, some below, some to the smoking-rooms, some
+upon deck-chairs to doze through the rest of the lazy afternoon.  The
+world had taken up its orderly course again.  At last, in an unfrequented
+corner of the deck, I took the packet from my pocket and handed it to
+her.  "You understand?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, I understand.  And now, may I beg that for the rest of your natural
+life"--here she paused, and bit her lip in vexation that the unlucky
+phrase had escaped her--"you will speak of this no more?"
+
+"Mrs. Boyd Madras," I said (here she coloured indignantly),--"pardon me
+for using the name, but it is only this once,--I shall never speak of the
+matter to you again, nor to any one else, unless there is grave reason."
+
+We walked again in silence.  Passing the captain's cabin, we saw a number
+of gentlemen gathered about the door, while others were inside.  We
+paused, to find what the incident was.  Captain Ascott was reading the
+letter which Boyd Madras had wished to be made public.  (I had given it
+to him just before the burial, and he was acting as though Boyd Madras
+was really dead--he was quite ignorant of our conspiracy.) I was about to
+move on, but Mrs. Falchion touched my arm.  "Wait," she said.  She stood
+and heard the letter through.  Then we walked on, she musing.  Presently
+she said: "It is a pity--a pity."
+
+I looked at her inquiringly, but she offered no explanation of the
+enigmatical words.  But, at this moment, seeing Justine waiting, she
+excused herself, and soon I saw her listening to Moliere.  Later in the
+day I saw her talking with Miss Treherne, and it struck me that she had
+never looked so beautiful as then, and that Miss Treherne had never
+seemed so perfect a product of a fine convention.  But, watching them
+together, one who had had any standard of good life could never have
+hesitated between the two.  It was plain to me that Mrs. Falchion was
+bent upon making a conquest of this girl who so delicately withstood her;
+and Belle Treherne has told me since, that, when in her presence, and
+listening to her, she was irresistibly drawn to her; though at the same
+time she saw there was some significant lack in her nature; some hardness
+impossible to any one who had ever known love.  She also told me that on
+this occasion Mrs. Falchion did not mention my name, nor did she ever in
+their acquaintance, save in the most casual fashion.  Her conversation
+with Miss Treherne was always far from petty gossip or that smart comedy
+in which some women tell much personal history, with the guise of
+badinage and bright cynicism.  I confess, though, it struck me
+unpleasantly at the time, that this fresh, high-hearted creature should
+be in familiar conversation with a woman who, it seemed to me, was the
+incarnation of cruelty.
+
+Mrs. Falchion subscribed most liberally to the fund raised for the
+children of the quartermaster and munificently to that for the crew which
+had, under Hungerford, performed the rescue work.  The only effect of
+this was to deepen the belief that she was very wealthy, and could spend
+her money without affectation; for it was noticeable that she, of all on
+board, showed the least outward excitement at the time of the disaster.
+It occurred to me that once or twice I had seen her eyes fixed on
+Hungerford inquisitively, and not free from antipathy.  It was something
+behind her usual equanimity.  Her intuitive observation had led her to
+trace his hand in recent events.  Yet I know she admired him too for his
+brave conduct.  The day following the tragedy we were seated at dinner.
+The captain and most of the officers had risen, but Mrs. Falchion, having
+come in late, was still eating, and I remained seated also.  Hungerford
+approached me, apologising for the interruption.  He remarked that he was
+going on the bridge, and wished to say something to me before he went.
+It was an official matter, to which Mrs. Falchion apparently did not
+listen.  When he was about to turn away, he bowed to her rather
+distantly; but she looked up at him and said, with an equivocal smile:
+
+"Mr. Hungerford, we often respect brave men whom we do not like."
+
+Then he, understanding her, but refusing to recognise the compliment, not
+altogether churlishly replied: "And I might say the same of women, Mrs.
+Falchion; but there are many women we dislike who are not brave."
+
+"I think I could recognise a brave man without seeing his bravery," she
+urged.
+
+"But I am a blundering sailor," he rejoined, "who only believes his
+eyes."
+
+"You are young yet," she replied.
+
+"I shall be older to-morrow," was his retort.
+
+"Well, perhaps you will see better to-morrow," she rejoined, with
+indolent irony.
+
+"If I do, I'll acknowledge it," he added.  Then Hungerford smiled at me
+inscrutably.  We two held a strange secret.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A BRIDGE OF PERIL
+
+No more delightful experience may be had than to wake up in the harbour
+of Aden some fine morning--it is always fine there--and get the first
+impression of that mighty fortress, with its thousand iron eyes, in
+strong repose by the Arabian Sea.  Overhead was the cloudless sun, and
+everywhere the tremulous glare of a sandy shore and the creamy wash of
+the sea, like fusing opals.  A tiny Mohammedan mosque stood gracefully
+where the ocean almost washed its steps, and the Resident's house, far up
+the hard hillside, looked down upon the harbour from a green coolness.
+The place had a massive, war-like character.  Here was a battery with
+earthworks; there, a fort; beyond, a signal-staff.  Hospitals, hotels,
+and stores were incidents in the picture.  Beyond the mountain-wall and
+lofty Jebel Shamsan, rising in fine pink and bronze, and at the end of a
+high-walled path between the great hills, lay the town of Aden proper.
+Above the town again were the mighty Tanks, formed out of clefts in the
+mountains, and built in the times when the Phoenicians made Aden a great
+mart, the richest spot in all Arabia.
+
+Over to the left, on the opposite side of the harbour, were wide
+bungalows shining in the sun, and flanking the side of the ancient
+aqueduct, the gigantic tomb of an Arab sheikh.  In the harbour were the
+men-of-war of all nations, and Arab dhows sailed slowly in, laden with
+pilgrims for Mecca--masses of picturesque sloth and dirt--and disease
+also; for more than one vessel flew the yellow flag.  As we looked, a
+British man-of-war entered the gates of the harbour in the rosy light.
+It was bringing back the disabled and wounded from a battle, in which a
+handful of British soldiers were set to punish thirty times their number
+in an unknown country.  But there was another man-of-war in port with
+which we were familiar.  We passed it far out on the Indian Ocean.  It
+again passed us, and reached Aden before we did.  The 'Porcupine' lay not
+far from the 'Fulvia', and as I leaned over the bulwarks, idly looking at
+her, a boat shot away from her side, and came towards us.  As it drew
+near, I saw that it was filled with luggage--a naval officer's, I knew it
+to be.  As the sailors hauled it up, I noticed that the initials upon the
+portmanteaus were G. R.  The owner was evidently an officer going home on
+leave, or invalided.  It did not, however, concern me, as I thought, and
+I turned away to look for Mr. Treherne, that I might fulfil my promise to
+escort his daughter and Mrs. Callendar to the general cemetery at Aden;
+for I knew he was not fit to do the journey, and there was nothing to
+prevent my going.
+
+A few hours later I stood with Miss Treherne and Mrs. Callendar in the
+graveyard beside the fortress-wall, placing wreaths of artificial flowers
+and one or two natural roses--a chance purchase from a shop at the port--
+on the grave of the young journalist.  Miss Treherne had brought some
+sketching materials, and both of us (for, as has been suggested, I had a
+slight gift for drawing) made sketches of the burial-place.  Having done
+this, we moved away to other parts of the cemetery, looking at the
+tombstones, many of which told sad tales enough of those who died far
+away from home and friends.  As we wandered on, I noticed a woman
+kneeling beside a grave.  It grew upon me that the figure was familiar.
+Presently I saw who it was, for the face lifted.  I excused myself, went
+over to her, and said:--"Miss Caron, you are in trouble?"
+
+She looked up, her eyes swimming with tears and pointed to the tombstone.
+On it I read:
+
+                        Sacred to the Memory of
+                             HECTOR CARON,
+                       Ensign in the French Navy.
+
+                  Erected by his friend, Galt Roscoe,
+                                H.B.M.N.
+
+Beneath this was the simple line:
+
+                      "Why, what evil hath he done?"
+
+"He was your brother?" I asked.
+
+"Yes, monsieur, my one brother."  Her tears dropped slowly.
+
+"And Galt Roscoe, who was he?" asked I.
+
+Through her grief her face was eloquent.  "I never saw him--never knew
+him," she said.  "He saved my poor Hector from much suffering; he nursed
+him, and buried him here when he died, and then--that!" pointing to the
+tombstone.  "He made me love the English," she said.  "Some day I shall
+find him, and I shall have money to pay him back all he spent--all."  Now
+I guessed the meaning of the scene on board the 'Fulvia', when she had been
+so anxious to preserve her present relations with Mrs. Falchion.  This
+was the secret--a beautiful one.  She rose.  "They disgraced Hector in
+New Caledonia," she said, "because he refused to punish a convict at Ile
+Nou who did not deserve it.  He determined to go to France to represent
+his case.  He left me behind, because we were poor.  He went to Sydney.
+There he came to know this good man,"--her finger gently felt his name
+upon the stone,--"who made him a guest upon his ship; and so he came on
+towards England.  In the Indian Ocean he was taken ill: and this was the
+end."
+
+She mournfully sank again beside the grave, but she was no longer
+weeping.
+
+"What was this officer's vessel?" I said presently.  She drew from her
+dress a letter.  "It is here.  Please read it all.  He wrote that to me
+when Hector died."
+
+The superscription to the letter was--H.B.M.S. Porcupine.
+
+I might have told her then that the 'Porcupine' was in the
+harbour at Aden, but I felt that things would work out to due ends
+without my help--which, indeed, they began to do immediately.  As we
+stood there in silence, I reading over and over again the line upon the
+pedestal, I heard footsteps behind, and, turning, I saw a man approaching
+us, who, from his manner, though he was dressed in civilian's clothes, I
+guessed to be an officer of the navy.  He was of more than middle height,
+had black hair, dark blue eyes, straight, strongly-marked brows, and was
+clean-shaven.  He was a little ascetic-looking, and rather interesting
+and uncommon, and yet he was unmistakably a sea-going man.  It was a face
+that one would turn to look at again and again--a singular personality.
+And yet my first glance told me that he was not one who had seen much
+happiness.  Perhaps that was not unattractive in itself, since people who
+are very happy, and show it, are often most selfish too, and repel where
+they should attract.  He was now standing near the grave, and his eyes
+were turned from one to the other of us, at last resting on Justine.
+
+Presently I saw a look of recognition.  He stepped quickly forward.
+"Mademoiselle, will you pardon me?" he said very gently, "but you remind
+me of one whose grave I came to see."  His hand made a slight motion
+toward Hector Caron's resting-place.  Her eyes were on him with an
+inquiring earnestness.  "Oh, monsieur, is it possible that you are my
+brother's friend and rescuer?"
+
+"I am Roscoe.  He was my good friend," he said to her, and he held out
+his hand.  She took it, and kissed it impulsively.  He flushed, and drew
+it back quickly and shyly.
+
+"Some day I shall be able to repay you for all your goodness," she said.
+"I am only grateful now--grateful altogether.  And you will tell me all
+you knew of him--all that he said and did before he died?"
+
+"I will gladly tell you all I know," he answered, and he looked at her
+compassionately, and yet with a little scrutiny, as though to know more
+of her and how she came to be in Aden.  He turned to me inquiringly.
+
+I interpreted his thought by saying: "I am the surgeon of the 'Fulvia'.
+I chanced upon Miss Caron here.  She is travelling by the 'Fulvia'."
+
+With a faint voice, Justine here said: "Travelling--with my mistress."
+
+"As companion to a lady," I preferred to add in explanation, for I wished
+not to see her humble herself so.  A look of understanding came into
+Roscoe's face.  Then he said: "I am glad that I shall see more of you; I
+am to travel by the 'Fulvia' also to London."
+
+"Yet I am afraid I shall see very little of you," she quietly replied.
+
+He was about to say something to her, but she suddenly swayed and would
+have fallen, but that he caught her and supported her.  The weakness
+lasted only for a moment, and then, steadying herself, she said to both
+of us: "I hope you will say nothing of this to madame?  She is kind, most
+kind, but she hates illness--and such things."
+
+Galt Roscoe looked at me to reply, his face showing clearly that he
+thought "madame" an extraordinary woman.  I assured Justine that we would
+say nothing.  Then Roscoe cordially parted from us, saying that he would
+look forward to seeing us both on the ship; but before he finally went,
+he put on the grave a small bouquet from his buttonhole.  Then I excused
+myself from Justine, and, going over to Miss Treherne, explained to her
+the circumstances, and asked her if she would go and speak to the
+afflicted girl.  She and Mrs. Callendar had been watching the incident,
+and they eagerly listened to me.  I think this was the moment that I
+first stood really well with Belle Treherne.  Her sympathy for the
+bereaved girl flooded many barriers between herself and me.
+
+"Oh," she said quickly, "indeed I will go to her, poor girl!  Will you
+come also, Mrs. Callendar?"
+
+But Mrs. Callendar timidly said she would rather Miss Treherne went
+without her; and so it was.  While Miss Treherne was comforting the
+bereaved girl, I talked to Mrs. Callendar.  I fear that Mrs. Callendar
+was but a shallow woman; for, after a moment of excitable interest in
+Justine, she rather naively turned the talk upon the charms of Europe.
+And, I fear, not without some slight cynicism, I followed her where she
+led; for, as I said to myself, it did not matter what direction our idle
+tongues took, so long as I kept my mind upon the two beside that grave:
+but it gave my speech a spice of malice.  I dwelt upon Mrs. Callendar's
+return to her native heath--that is, the pavements of Bond Street and
+Piccadilly, although I knew that she was a native of Tasmania.  At this
+she smiled egregiously.
+
+At length Miss Treherne came to us and said that Justine insisted she
+was well enough to go back to the vessel alone, and wished not to be
+accompanied.  So we left her there.
+
+A score of times I have stopped when preparing my notes for this tale
+from my diary and those of Mrs. Falchion and Galt Roscoe, to think how,
+all through the events recorded here, and many others omitted, Justine
+Caron was like those devoted and, often, beautiful attendants of the
+heroes and heroines of tragedy, who, when all is over, close the eyes,
+compose the bodies, and cover the faces of the dead, pronouncing with
+just lips the benediction, fittest in their mouths.  Their loves, their
+deeds, their lives, however good and worthy, were clothed in modesty and
+kept far up the stage, to be, even when everything was over, not always
+given the privilege to die as did their masters, but, like Horatio, bade
+to live and be still the loyal servant:
+
+          "But in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
+               To tell my story."
+
+There was no reason why we should go to the ship immediately, and I
+proposed that we should first explore the port-town, and then visit the
+city of Aden--five miles away beyond the hills--and the Tanks.  To this
+the ladies consented.
+
+Somauli policemen patrolled the streets; Somauli, Arab, and Turkish
+guides impeded the way; Arabs in plain white, Arab sheikhs in blue and
+white, and gold, lounged languidly about, or drank their coffee in the
+shade of the bazaars.  Children of the desert, nearly naked, sprinkled
+water before the doors of the bazaars and stores and upon the hot
+thoroughfare, from long leather bottles; caravans of camels, with dusty
+stride, swung up the hillside and beyond into the desert; the Jewish
+water-carrier with his donkey trudged down the pass from the cool
+fountains in the volcanic hills; a guard of eunuchs marched by with the
+harem of a Mohammedan; in the doorways of the houses goats and donkeys
+fed.  Jews, with greasy faces, red-hemmed skirt, and hungry look, moved
+about, offering ostrich feathers for sale, everywhere treated worse than
+the Chinaman in Oregon or at Port Darwin.  We saw English and Australian
+passengers of the 'Fulvia' pelting the miserable members of a despised race
+with green fruit about the streets, and afterwards from the deck of the
+ship.  A number of these raised their hats to us as they passed; but
+Belle Treherne's acknowledgment was chilly.
+
+"It is hard to be polite to cowards," she said.
+
+After having made some ruinous bargains in fezes, Turkish cloths and
+perfume, I engaged a trap, and we started for Aden.  The journey was not
+one of beauty, but it had singular interest.  Every turn of the wheels
+carried us farther and farther away from a familiar world to one of
+yesterday.  White-robed warriors of the desert, with lances, bent their
+brows upon us as they rode away towards the endless sands, and vagabonds
+of Egypt begged for alms.  In about three-quarters of an hour we had
+passed the lofty barriers of Jebel Shamsan and its comrades, and were
+making clouds of dust in the streets of Aden.  In spite of the
+cantonments, the British Government House, and the European Church, it
+was an Oriental town pure and simple, where the slow-footed hours
+wandered by, leaving apathy in their train; where sloth and surfeit sat
+in the market-places; idle women gossiped in their doorways; and naked
+children rolled in the sun.  Yet how, in the most unfamiliar places, does
+one wake suddenly to hear or see some most familiar thing, and learn
+again that the ways of all people and nations are not, after all, so far
+apart!  Here three naked youths, with trays upon their heads, cried aloud
+at each doorway what, interpreted, was: "Pies!  Hot pies!  Pies all hot!"
+or, "Crum-pet!  Crumpet!  Won't you buy-uy a crum-pet!"
+
+One sees the same thing in Kandy, in Calcutta, in Tokio, in Istamboul, in
+Teheran, in Queensland, in London.
+
+To us the great Tanks overlooking the place were more interesting than
+the town itself, and we drove thither.  At Government House and here were
+the only bits of green that we had seen; they were, in fact, the only
+spots of verdure on the peninsula of Aden.  It was a very sickly green,
+from which wan and dusty fig trees rose.  In their scant shadow, or in
+the shelter of an overhanging ledge of rock, Arabs offered us draughts
+of cool water, and oranges.  There were people in the sickly gardens, and
+others were inspecting the Tanks.  Passengers from the ship had brought
+luncheon-baskets to this sad oasis.
+
+As we stood at the edge of one of the Tanks, Miss Treherne remarked with
+astonishment that they were empty.  I explained to her that Aden did not
+have the benefits conferred even on the land of the seven fat and seven
+lean kine--that there had not been rain there for years, and that when it
+did come it was neither prolonged nor plentiful.  Then came questions as
+to how long ago the Tanks were built.
+
+"Thirteen hundred years!" she exclaimed.  "How strange to feel it so!
+It is like looking at old graves.  And how high the walls are, closing up
+the gorge between the hills."
+
+At that moment Mrs. Callendar drew our attention to Mrs. Falchion and a
+party from the ship.  Mrs. Falchion was but a few paces from us, smiling
+agreeably as she acknowledged our greetings.  Presently two of her party
+came to us and asked us to share their lunch.  I would have objected, and
+I am certain Belle Treherne would gladly have done so, but Mrs. Callendar
+was anxious to accept, therefore we expressed our gratitude and joined
+the group.  On second thoughts I was glad that we did so, because,
+otherwise, my party must have been without refreshments until they
+returned to the ship--the restaurants at Aden are not to be trusted.  To
+me Mrs. Falchion was pleasantly impersonal, to Miss Treherne delicately
+and actively personal.  At the time I had a kind of fear of her interest
+in the girl, but I know now that it was quite sincere, though it began
+with a motive not very lofty--to make Belle Treherne her friend, and so
+annoy me, and also to study, as would an anatomist, the girl's life.
+
+We all moved into the illusive shade of the fig and magnolia trees, and
+lunch was soon spread.  As we ate, conversation turned upon the annoying
+persistency of Eastern guides, and reference was made to the exciting
+circumstances attending the engagement of Amshar, the guide of Mrs.
+Falchion's party.  Among a score of claimants, Amshar had had one
+particular opponent--a personal enemy--who would not desist even when
+the choice had been made.  He, indeed, had been the first to solicit the
+party, and was rejected because of his disagreeable looks.  He had even
+followed the trap from the Port of Aden.  As one of the gentlemen was
+remarking on the muttered anger of the disappointed Arab, Mrs. Falchion.
+said: "There he is now at the gate of the garden."
+
+His look was sullenly turned upon our party.  Blackburn, the Queenslander
+said, "Amshar, the other fellow is following up the game," and pointed to
+the gate.
+
+Amshar understood the gesture at least, and though he gave a toss of the
+head, I noticed that his hand trembled as he handed me a cup of water,
+and that he kept his eyes turned on his opponent.
+
+"One always feels unsafe with these cut-throat races," said Colonel
+Ryder, "as some of us know, who have had to deal with the nigger of South
+America.  They think no more of killing a man--"
+
+"Than an Australian squatter does of dispersing a mob of aboriginals or
+kangaroos," said Clovelly.
+
+Here Mrs. Callendar spoke up briskly.  "I don't know what you mean by
+'dispersing.'"
+
+"You know what a kangaroo battue is, don't you?"
+
+"But that is killing, slaughtering kangaroos by the hundred."
+
+"Well, and that is aboriginal dispersion," said the novelist.  "That is
+the aristocratic method of legislating the native out of existence."
+
+Blackburn here vigorously protested.  "Yes, it's very like a novelist, on
+the hunt for picturesque events, to spend his forensic soul upon 'the
+poor native,'--upon the dirty nigger, I choose to call him: the meanest,
+cruellest, most cowardly, and murderous--by Jove, what a lot of
+adjectives!--of native races.  But we fellows, who have lost some of the
+best friends we ever had--chums with whom we've shared blanket and
+tucker--by the crack of a nulla-nulla in the dark, or a spear from the
+scrub, can't find a place for Exeter Hall and its 'poor native' in our
+hard hearts.  We stand in such a case for justice.  It is a new country.
+Not once in fifty times would law reach them.  Reprisal and dispersion
+were the only things possible to men whose friends had been massacred,
+and--well, they punished tribes for the acts of individuals."
+
+Mrs. Falchion here interposed.  "That is just what England does.  A
+British trader is killed.  She sweeps a native town out of existence with
+Hotchkiss guns--leaves it naked and dead.  That is dispersion too; I have
+seen it, and I know how far niggers as a race can be trusted, and how
+much they deserve sympathy.  I agree with Mr. Blackburn."
+
+Blackburn raised his glass.  "Mrs. Falchion," he said, "I need no further
+evidence to prove my case.  Experience is the best teacher."
+
+"As I wish to join the chorus to so notable a compliment, will somebody
+pass the claret?" said Colonel Ryder, shaking the crumbs of a pate from
+his coat-collar.  When his glass was filled, he turned towards Mrs.
+Falchion, and continued: "I drink to the health of the best teacher."
+And every one laughingly responded.  This impromptu toast would have been
+drunk with more warmth, if we could have foreseen an immediate event.
+Not less peculiar were Mrs. Falchion's words to Hungerford the evening
+before, recorded in the last sentence of the preceding chapter.
+
+Cigars were passed, and the men rose and strolled away.  We wandered
+outside the gardens, passing the rejected guide as we did so.  "I don't
+like the look in his eye," said Clovelly.
+
+Colonel Ryder laughed.  "You've always got a fine vision for the
+dramatic."
+
+We passed on.  I suppose about twenty minutes had gone when, as we were
+entering the garden again, we heard loud cries.  Hurrying forward towards
+the Tanks, we saw a strange sight.
+
+There, on a narrow wall dividing two great tanks, were three people--
+Mrs. Falchion, Amshar, and the rejected Arab guide.  Amshar was crouching
+behind Mrs. Falchion, and clinging to her skirts in abject fear.  The
+Arab threatened with a knife.  He could not get at Amshar without
+thrusting Mrs. Falchion aside, and, as I said, the wall was narrow.  He
+was bent like a tiger about to spring.
+
+Seeing Mrs. Falchion and Amshar apart from the others,--Mrs. Falchion
+having insisted on crossing this narrow and precipitous wall,--he had
+suddenly rushed after them.  As he did so, Miss Treherne saw him, and
+cried out.  Mrs. Falchion faced round swiftly, and then came this tragic
+situation.
+
+Some one must die.
+
+Seeing that Mrs. Falchion made no effort to dislodge Amshar from her
+skirts, the Arab presently leaped forward.  Mrs. Falchion's arms went out
+suddenly, and she caught the wrist that held the dagger.  Then there was
+an instant's struggle.  It was Mrs. Falchion's life now, as well as
+Amshar's.  They swayed.  They hung on the edge of the rocky chasm.  Then
+we lost the gleam of the knife, and the Arab shivered, and toppled over.
+Mrs. Falchion would have gone with him, but Amshar caught her about the
+waist, and saved her from the fall which would have killed her as
+certainly as it killed the Arab lying at the bottom of the tank.  She had
+managed to turn the knife in the Arab's hand against his own breast, and
+then suddenly pressed her body against it; but the impulse of the act
+came near carrying her over also.
+
+Amshar was kneeling at her feet, and kissing her gown gratefully.  She
+pushed him away with her foot, and, coolly turning aside, began to
+arrange her hair.  As I approached her, she glanced down at the Arab.
+"Horrible!  horrible!" she said.  I remembered that these were her words
+when her husband was lifted from the sea to the 'Fulvia'.
+
+Not ungently, she refused my hand or any assistance, and came down among
+the rest of the party.  I could not but feel a strange wonder at the
+powerful side of her character just shown--her courage, her cool daring.
+In her face now there was a look of annoyance, and possibly disgust, as
+well as of triumph--so natural in cases of physical prowess.  Everybody
+offered congratulations, but she only showed real pleasure, and that
+mutely, at those of Miss Treherne.  To the rest of us she said: "One had
+to save one's self, and Amshar was a coward."
+
+And so this woman, whose hardness of heart and excessive cruelty
+Hungerford and I were keeping from the world, was now made into a
+heroine, around whom a halo of romance would settle whenever her name
+should be mentioned.  Now, men, eligible and ineligible, would increase
+their homage.  It seemed as if the stars had stopped in their courses to
+give her special fortune.
+
+That morning I had thought her appearance at this luncheon-party was
+little less than scandalous, for she knew, if others did not, who Boyd
+Madras was.  After the occurrence with the Arab, the other event was
+certainly much less prominent, and here, after many years, I can see that
+the act was less in her than it would have been in others.  For, behind
+her outward hardness, there was a sort of justice working, an iron thing,
+but still not unnatural in her.
+
+Belle Treherne awakened also to a new perception of her character, and a
+kind of awe possessed her, so masculine seemed her courage, yet so
+womanly and feminine her manner.  Mrs. Callendar was loud in her
+exclamations of delight and wonder at Mrs. Falchion's coolness; and the
+bookmaker, with his usual impetuosity, offered to take bets at four to
+one that we should all be detained to give evidence in the matter.
+
+Clovelly was silent.  He occasionally adjusted his glasses, and looked at
+Mrs. Falchion as if he had suddenly come to a full stop in his opinions
+regarding her.  This, I think, was noticed by her, and enjoyed too, for
+she doubtless remembered her conversation with me, in which she had said
+that Clovelly thought he understood her perfectly.  Colonel Ryder, who
+was loyal at all times, said she had the nerve of a woman from Kentucky.
+Moreover, he had presence of mind, for he had immediately sent off a
+native to inform the authorities of what had occurred; so that before we
+had got half-way to the town we were met by policemen running towards us,
+followed by a small detachment of Indian soldiers.  The officer in
+command of the detachment stopped us, and said that the governor would be
+glad if we would come to Government House for an hour, while an inquiry
+was being held.
+
+To this we cheerfully consented, of course; and, in a room where punkahs
+waved and cool claret-cup awaited us, we were received by the governor,
+who was full of admiration of Mrs. Falchion.  It was plain, however, that
+he was surprised at her present equanimity.  Had she no nerves at all?
+
+"I can only regret exceedingly," said the governor, "that your visit to
+Aden has had such a tragical interruption; but since it has occurred,
+I am glad to have the privilege of meeting a lady so brave as Mrs.
+Falchion."--The bookmaker had introduced us all with a naivete that,
+I am sure, amused the governor, as it certainly did his aide-de-camp.
+"We should not need to fear the natives if we had soldiers as fearless,"
+his excellency continued.
+
+At this point the inquiry began, and, after it was over, the governor
+said that there the matter ended so far as we were concerned, and then he
+remarked gallantly that the Government of Aden would always remain Mrs.
+Falchion's debtor.  She replied that it was a debt she would be glad to
+preserve unsettled for ever.  After this pretty exchange of compliments,
+the governor smiled, and offered her his arm to the door, where our 'char
+a bans' awaited us.
+
+So impressed was the bookmaker with the hospitable reception the governor
+had given us, that he offered him his cigar-case with its contents, said
+he hoped they would meet again, and asked his excellency if he thought of
+coming to Australia.  The governor declined the cigars graciously,
+ignored the hoped-for pleasure of another meeting, and trusted that it
+might fall to his lot to visit Australia some day.  Thereupon the
+bookmaker insisted on the aide-de-camp accepting the cigar-case, and gave
+him his visiting-card.  The aide-de-camp lost nothing by his good-humoured
+acceptance, if he smoked, because, as I knew, the cigars were very good
+indeed.  Bookmakers, gamblers and Jews are good judges of tobacco.  And
+the governor's party lost nothing in dignity because, as the traps
+wheeled away, they gave a polite little cheer for Mrs. Falchion.  I, at
+first, was fearful how Belle Treherne would regard the gaucheries of the
+bookmaker, but I saw that he was rather an object of interest to her than
+otherwise; for he was certainly amusing.
+
+As we drove through Aden, a Somauli lad ran from the door of a house, and
+handed up a letter to the driver of my trap.  It bore my name, and was
+handed over to me.  I recognised the handwriting.  It was that of Boyd
+Madras.  He had come ashore by Hungerford's aid in the night.  The letter
+simply gave an address in England that would always find him, and stated
+that he intended to take another name.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+"THE PROGRESS OF THE SUNS"
+
+News of the event had preceded us to the 'Fulvia', and, as we scrambled out
+on the ship's stairs, cheers greeted us.  Glancing up, I saw Hungerford,
+among others, leaning over the side, and looking at Mrs. Falchion in a
+curious cogitating fashion, not unusual to him.  The look was non-
+committal, yet earnest.  If it was not approval, it was not condemnation;
+but it might have been slightly ironical, and that annoyed me.  It seemed
+impossible for him--and it was so always, I believe--to get out of his
+mind the thought of the man he had rescued on No Man's Sea.  I am sure
+it jarred upon him that the band foolishly played a welcome when Mrs.
+Falchion stepped on the deck.  As I delivered Miss Treherne into the
+hands of her father, who was anxiously awaiting us, Hungerford said in my
+ear: "A tragedy queen, Marmion."  He said it so distinctly that Mrs.
+Falchion heard it, and she gave him a searching look.  Their eyes met and
+warred for a moment, and then he added: "I remember!  Yes, I can respect
+the bravery of a woman whom I do not like."
+
+"And this is to-morrow," she said, "and a man may change his mind, and
+that may be fate--or a woman's whim."  She bowed, turned away, and went
+below, evidently disliking the reception she had had, and anxious to
+escape inquiries and congratulations.  Nor did she appear again until the
+'Fulvia' got under way about six o'clock in the evening.  As we moved out
+of the harbour we passed close to the 'Porcupine' and saw its officers
+grouped on the deck, waving adieus to some one on our deck, whom I
+guessed, of course, to be Galt Roscoe.
+
+At this time Mrs. Falchion was standing near me.  "For whom is that
+demonstration?" she said.
+
+"For one of her officers, who is a passenger by the 'Fulvia'," I replied.
+"You remember we passed the 'Porcupine' in the Indian Ocean?"
+
+"Yes, I know that very well," she said, with a shade of meaning.  "But"--
+here I thought her voice had a touch of breathlessness--"but who is the
+officer?  I mean, what is his name?"
+
+"He stands in the group near the door of the captain's cabin, there.  His
+name is Galt Roscoe, I think."
+
+A slight exclamation escaped her.  There was a chilly smile on her lips,
+and her eyes sought the group until it rested on Galt Roscoe.  In a
+moment she said "You have met him?"
+
+"In the cemetery this morning, for the first time."
+
+"Everybody seems to have had business this morning at the cemetery.
+Justine Caron spent hours there.  To me it is so foolish, heaping up a
+mound, and erecting a tombstone over--what?--a dead thing, which, if one
+could see it, would be dreadful."
+
+"You would prefer complete absorption--as of the ocean?" I brutally
+retorted.
+
+She appeared not to notice the innuendo.  "Yes, what is gone is gone.
+Graves are idolatry.  Gravestones are ghostly.  It is people without
+imagination who need these things, together with crape and black-edged
+paper.  It is all barbaric ritual.  I know you think I am callous, but I
+cannot help that.  For myself, I wish the earth close about me, and level
+green grass above me, and no one knowing of the place; or else, fire or
+the sea."
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," said I, "between us there need be no delicate words.
+You appear to have neither imagination, nor idolatry, nor remembrances,
+nor common womanly kindness."
+
+"Indeed!" she said.  "Yet you might know me better."  Here she touched
+my arm with the tips of her fingers, and, in spite of myself, I felt my
+pulse beat faster.  It seemed to me that in her presence, even now,
+I could not quite trust myself.  "Indeed!" she repeated.  "And who made
+you omniscient, Dr. Marmion?  You hardly do yourself justice.  You hold a
+secret.  You insist on reminding me of the fact.  Is that in perfect
+gallantry?  Do you know me altogether, from your knowledge of that one
+thing?  You are vain.  Or does the secret wear on you, and--Mr.
+Hungerford?  Was it necessary to seek HIS help in keeping it?"
+
+I told her then the true history of Hungerford's connection with Boyd
+Madras, and also begged her pardon for showing just now my knowledge of
+her secret.  At this she said, "I suppose I should be grateful," and was
+there a slightly softer cadence to her voice?
+
+"No, you need not be grateful," I said.  "We are silent, first, because
+he wished it; then because you are a woman."
+
+"You define your reasons with astonishing care and taste," she replied.
+
+"Oh, as to taste!--" said I; but then I bit my tongue.
+
+At that she said, her lips very firm and pale, "I could not pretend
+to a grief I did not feel.  I acted no lie.  He died as we had lived--
+estranged.  I put up no memorials."
+
+But I, thinking of my mother lying in her grave, a woman after God's own
+heart, who loved me more than I deserved, repeated almost unconsciously
+these lines (clipped from a magazine):
+
+              "Sacred the ring, the faded glove,
+               Once worn by one we used to love;
+               Dead warriors in their armour live,
+               And in their relics saints survive.
+
+              "Oh, Mother Earth, henceforth defend
+               All thou hast garnered of my friend,
+               From winter's wind and driving sleet,
+               From summer's sun and scorching heat.
+
+              "Within thine all-embracing breast
+               Is hid one more forsaken nest;
+               While, in the sky, with folded wings,
+               The bird that left it sits and sings."
+
+I paused; the occasion seemed so little suited to the sentiment, for
+around us was the idle excitement of leaving port.  I was annoyed with
+myself for my share in the conversation so far.  Mrs. Falchion's eyes had
+scarcely left that group around the captain's door, although she had
+appeared acutely interested in what I was saying.  Now she said:
+
+"You recite very well.  I feel impressed, but I fancy it is more your
+voice than those fine sentiments; for, after all, you cannot glorify the
+dead body.  Look at the mummy of Thothmes at Boulak, and think what
+Cleopatra must look like now.  And please let us talk about something
+else.  Let us--"  She paused.
+
+I followed the keen, shaded glance of her eyes, and saw, coming from the
+group by the captain's door, Galt Roscoe.  He moved in our direction.
+Suddenly he paused.  His look was fixed upon Mrs. Falchion.  A flush
+passed over his face, not exactly confusing, but painful, and again it
+left him pale, and for a moment he stood motionless.  Then he came
+forward to us.  He bowed to me, then looked hard at her.  She held out
+her hand.
+
+"Mr. Roscoe, I think?" she said.  "An old friend," she added, turning to
+me.  He gravely took her extended hand and said:
+
+"I did not think to see you here, Miss--"
+
+"MRS. Falchion," she interrupted clearly.
+
+"MRS. Falchion!" he said, with surprise.  "It is so many years since we
+had met, and--"
+
+"And it is so easy to forget things?  But it isn't so many, really--only
+seven, the cycle for constitutional renewal.  Dear me, how erudite that
+sounds! . . .  So, I suppose, we meet the same, yet not the same."
+
+"The same, yet not the same," he repeated after her, with an attempt at
+lightness, yet abstractedly.
+
+"I think you gentlemen know each other?" she said.
+
+"Yes; we met in the cemetery this morning.  I was visiting the grave of a
+young French officer."
+
+"I know," she said--"Justine Caron's brother.  She has told me; but she
+did not tell me your name."
+
+"She has told you?" he said.
+
+"Yes.  She is--my companion."  I saw that she did not use the word that
+first came to her.
+
+"How strangely things occur!  And yet," he added musingly, "I suppose,
+after all, coincidence is not so strange in these days of much travel,
+particularly with people whose lives are connected--more or less."
+
+"Whose lives are connected--more or less," she repeated after him, in a
+steely tone.
+
+It seemed to me that I had received my cue to leave.  I bowed myself
+away, and went about my duties.  As we steamed bravely through the
+Straits of Babelmandeb, with Perim on our left, rising lovely through the
+milky haze, I came on deck again, and they were still near where I had
+left them an hour before.  I passed, glancing at them as I did so.  They
+did not look towards me.  His eyes were turned to the shore, and hers
+were fixed on him.  I saw an expression on her lips that gave her face
+new character.  She was speaking, as I thought, clearly and mercilessly.
+I could not help hearing her words as I passed them.
+
+"You are going to be that--you!"  There was a ring of irony in her tone.
+I heard nothing more in words, but I saw him turn to her somewhat
+sharply, and I caught the deep notes of his voice as he answered her.
+When, a moment after, I looked back, she had gone below.
+
+Galt Roscoe had a seat at Captain Ascott's table, and I did not see
+anything of him at meal-times, but elsewhere I soon saw him a great deal.
+He appeared to seek my company.  I was glad of this, for I found that he
+was an agreeable man, and had distinct originality of ideas, besides
+being possessed of very considerable culture.  He also had that social
+aplomb so much a characteristic of the naval officer.  Yet, man of the
+world as he was, he had a strain of asceticism which puzzled me.  It did
+not make him eccentric, but it was not a thing usual with the naval man.
+Again, he wished to be known simply as Mr. Roscoe, not as Captain Roscoe,
+which was his rank.  He said nothing about having retired, yet I guessed
+he had done so.  One evening, however, soon after we had left Aden, we
+were sitting in my cabin, and the conversation turned upon a recent novel
+dealing with the defection of a clergyman of the Church of England
+through agnosticism.  The keenness with which he threw himself into the
+discussion and the knowledge he showed, surprised me.  I knew (as most
+medical students get to know, until they know better) some scientific
+objections to Christianity, and I put them forward.  He clearly and
+powerfully met them.  I said at last, laughingly: "Why, you ought to take
+holy orders."
+
+"That is what I am going to do," he said very seriously, "when I get to
+England.  I am resigning the navy."  At that instant there flashed
+through my mind Mrs. Falchion's words: "You are going to be that--you!"
+
+Then he explained to me that he had been studying for two years, and
+expected to go up for deacon's orders soon after his return to England.
+I cannot say that I was greatly surprised, for I had known a few, and had
+heard of many, men who had exchanged the navy for the Church.  It struck
+me, however, that Galt Roscoe appeared to view the matter from a stand-
+point not professional; the more so, that he expressed his determination
+to go to the newest part of a new country, to do the pioneer work of the
+Church.  I asked him where he was going, and he said to the Rocky
+Mountains of Canada.  I told him that my destination was Canada also.  He
+warmly expressed the hope that we should see something of each other
+there.  This friendship of ours may seem to have been hastily hatched,
+but it must be remembered that the sea is a great breeder of friendship.
+Two men who have known each other for twenty years find that twenty days
+at sea bring them nearer than ever they were before, or else estrange
+them.
+
+It was on this evening that, in a lull of the conversation, I casually
+asked him when he had known Mrs. Falchion.  His face was inscrutable, but
+he said somewhat hurriedly, "In the South Sea Islands," and then changed
+the subject.  So, there was some mystery again?  Was this woman never to
+be dissociated from enigma?  In those days I never could think of her
+save in connection with some fatal incident in which she was scathless,
+and some one else suffered.
+
+It may have been fancy, but I thought that, during the first day or two
+after leaving Aden, Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion were very little
+together.  Then the impression grew that this was his doing, and again
+that she waited with confident patience for the time when he would seek
+her--because he could not help himself.  Often when other men were paying
+her devoted court I caught her eyes turned in his direction, and I
+thought I read in her smile a consciousness of power.  And it so was.
+Very soon he was at her side.  But I also noticed that he began to look
+worn, that his conversation with me lagged.  I think that at this time
+I was so much occupied with tracing personal appearances to personal
+influences that I lost to some degree the physician's practical keenness.
+My eyes were to be opened.  He appeared to be suffering, and she seemed
+to unbend to him more than she ever unbent to me, or any one else on
+board.  Hungerford, seeing this, said to me one day in his blunt way:
+"Marmion, old Ulysses knew what he was about when he tied himself to the
+mast."
+
+But the routine of the ship went on as before.  Fortunately, Mrs.
+Falchion's heroism at Aden had taken the place of the sensation attending
+Boyd Madras's suicide.  Those who tired of thinking of both became mildly
+interested in Red Sea history.  Chief among these was the bookmaker.  As
+an historian the bookmaker was original.  He cavalierly waved aside all
+such confusing things as dates: made Moses and Mahomet contemporaneous,
+incidentally referred to King Solomon's visits to Cleopatra, and with sad
+irreverence spoke of the Exodus and the destruction of Pharaoh's horses
+and chariots as "the big handicap."  He did not mean to be irreverent or
+unhistorical.  He merely wished to enlighten Mrs. Callendar, who said he
+was very original, and quite clever at history.  His really startling
+points, however, were his remarks upon the colours of the mountains of
+Egypt and the sunset tints to be seen on the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
+To him the grey, and pink, and melancholy gold only brought up visions
+of a race at Epsom or Flemington--generally Flemington, where the staring
+Australian sun pours down on an emerald course, on a score of horses
+straining upon the start, the colours of the jockeys' coats and caps
+changing in the struggle like a kaleidoscope, and making strange
+harmonies of colour.  The comparison between the mountains of Egypt and
+a race-course might seem most absurd, if one did not remember that the
+bookmaker had his own standards, and that he thought he was paying
+unusual honour to the land of the Fellah.  Clovelly plaintively said,
+as he drank his hock and seltzer, that the bookmaker was hourly saving
+his life; and Colonel Ryder admitted at last that Kentucky never produced
+anything quite like him.
+
+The evening before we came to the Suez Canal I was walking with Miss
+Treherne and her father.  I had seen Galt Roscoe in conversation with
+Mrs. Falchion.  Presently I saw him rise to go away.  A moment after,
+in passing, I was near her.  She sprang up, caught my arm, and pointed
+anxiously.  I looked, and saw Galt Roscoe swaying as he walked.
+
+"He is ill--ill," she said.
+
+I ran forward and caught him as he was falling.  Ill?
+
+Of course he was ill.  What a fool I had been!  Five minutes with him
+assured me that he had fever.  I had set his haggard appearance down to
+some mental trouble--and I was going to be a professor in a medical
+college!
+
+Yet I know now that a troubled mind hastened the fever.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+BETWEEN DAY AND DARK
+
+From the beginning Galt Roscoe's fever was violent.  It had been hanging
+about him for a long time, and was the result of malarial poisoning.  I
+devoutly wished that we were in the Mediterranean instead of the Red Sea,
+where the heat was so great; but fortunately we should soon be there.
+There was no other case of sickness on board, and I could devote plenty
+of time to him.  Offers of assistance in nursing were numerous, but I
+only encouraged those of the bookmaker, strange as this may seem; yet he
+was as gentle and considerate as a woman in the sick-room.  This was on
+the first evening of his attack.  After that I had reasons for dispensing
+with his generous services.  The night after Roscoe was taken ill we were
+passing through the canal, the search-light of the 'Fulvia' sweeping the
+path ahead of it and glorifying everything it touched.  Mud barges were
+fairy palaces; Arab punts beautiful gondolas; the ragged Egyptians on the
+banks became picturesque; and the desolate country behind them had a wide
+vestibule of splendour.  I stood for half an hour watching this scene,
+then I went below to Roscoe's cabin and relieved the bookmaker.  The sick
+man was sleeping from the effects of a sedative draught.  The bookmaker
+had scarcely gone when I heard a step behind me, and I turned and saw
+Justine Caron standing timidly at the door, her eyes upon the sleeper.
+She spoke quietly.  "Is he very ill?"
+
+I answered that he was, but also that for some days I could not tell how
+dangerous his illness might be.  She went to the berth where he lay, the
+reflected light from without playing weirdly on his face, and smoothed
+the pillow gently.
+
+"If you are willing, I will watch for a time," she said.  "Everybody is
+on deck.  Madame said she would not need me for a couple of hours.  I
+will send a steward for you if he wakes; you need rest yourself."
+
+That I needed rest was quite true, for I had been up all the night
+before; still I hesitated.  She saw my hesitation, and added:
+
+"It is not much that I can do, still I should like to do it.  I can at
+least watch."  Then, very earnestly: "He watched beside Hector."
+
+I left her with him, her fingers moving the small bag of ice about his
+forehead to allay the fever and her eyes patiently regarding him.  I went
+on deck again.  I met Miss Treherne and her father.  They both inquired
+for the sick man, and I told Belle--for she seemed much interested--the
+nature of such malarial fevers, the acute forms they sometimes take, and
+the kind of treatment required.  She asked several questions, showing a
+keen understanding of my explanations, and then, after a moment's
+silence, said meditatively: "I think I like men better when they are
+doing responsible work; it is difficult to be idle--and important too."
+
+I saw very well that, with her, I should have to contend for a long time
+against those first few weeks of dalliance on the 'Fulvia'.
+
+Clovelly joined us, and for the first time--if I had not been so
+egotistical it had appeared to me before--I guessed that his somewhat
+professional interest in Belle Treherne had developed into a very
+personal thing.  And with that thought came also the conception of what
+a powerful antagonist he would be.  For it improves some men to wear
+glasses; and Clovelly had a delightful, wheedling tongue.  It was
+allusive, contradictory (a thing pleasing to women), respectful yet
+playful, bold yet reverential.  Many a time I have longed for Clovelly's
+tongue.  Unfortunately for me, I learned some of his methods without his
+art;  and of this I am occasionally reminded at this day.  A man like
+Clovelly is dangerous as a rival when he is not in earnest; when he IS in
+earnest, it becomes a lonely time for the other man--unless the girl is
+perverse.
+
+I left the two together, and moved about the deck, trying to think
+closely about Roscoe's case, and to drive Clovelly's invasion from my
+mind.  I succeeded, and was only roused by Mrs. Falchion's voice beside
+me.
+
+"Does he suffer much?" she murmured.
+
+When answered, she asked nervously how he looked--it was impossible that
+she should consider misery without shrinking.  I told her that he was
+only flushed and haggard as yet and that he was little wasted.  A thought
+flashed to her face.  She was about to speak, but paused.  After a
+moment, however, she remarked evenly: "He is likely to be delirious?"
+
+"It is probable," I replied.
+
+Her eyes were fixed on the search-light.  The look in them was
+inscrutable.  She continued quietly: "I will go and see him, if you will
+let me.  Justine will go with me."
+
+"Not now," I replied.  "He is sleeping.  To-morrow, if you will."
+
+I did not think it necessary to tell her that Justine was at that moment
+watching beside him.  We walked the deck together in silence.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "that you care to walk with me.  Please do not make
+the matter a burden."
+
+She did not say this with any invitation to courteous protest on my part,
+but rather with a cold frankness--for which, I confess, I always admired
+her.  I said now: "Mrs. Falchion, you have suggested what might easily be
+possible in the circumstances, but I candidly admit that I have never yet
+found your presence disagreeable; and I suppose that is a comment upon my
+weakness.  Though, to speak again with absolute truth, I think I do not
+like you at this present."
+
+"Yes, I fancy I can understand that," she said.  "I can understand how,
+for instance, one might feel a just and great resentment, and have in
+one's hand the instrument of punishment, and yet withhold one's hand
+and protect where one should injure."
+
+At this moment these words had no particular significance to me, but
+there chanced a time when they came home with great force.  I think,
+indeed, that she was speaking more to herself than to me.  Suddenly she
+turned to me.
+
+"I wonder," she said, "if I am as cruel as you think me--for, indeed,
+I do not know.  But I have been through many things."
+
+Here her eyes grew cold and hard.  The words that followed seemed in no
+sequence.  "Yet," she said, "I will go and see him to-morrow. . . .
+Good-night."  After about an hour I went below to Galt Roscoe's cabin.
+I drew aside the curtain quietly.  Justine Caron evidently had not heard
+me.  She was sitting beside the sick man, her fingers still smoothing
+away the pillow from his fevered face and her eyes fixed on him.  I spoke
+to her.  She rose.  "He has slept well," she said.  And she moved to the
+door.
+
+"Miss Caron," I said, "if Mrs. Falchion is willing, you could help me to
+nurse Mr. Roscoe?"
+
+A light sprang to her eyes.  "Indeed, yes," she said.
+
+"I will speak to her about it, if you will let me?"  She bowed her head,
+and her look was eloquent of thanks.  After a word of good-night we
+parted.
+
+I knew that nothing better could occur to my patient than that Justine
+Caron should help to nurse him.  This would do far more for him than
+medicine--the tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias.
+
+Hungerford had insisted on relieving me for a couple of hours at
+midnight.  He said it would be a good preparation for going on the bridge
+at three o'clock in the morning.  About half-past two he came to my cabin
+and waked me, saying: "He is worse--delirious; you had better come."
+
+He was indeed delirious.  Hungerford laid his hand on my shoulder.
+"Marmion," he said, "that woman is in it.  Like the devil, she is
+ubiquitous.  Mr. Roscoe's past is mixed up with hers somehow.  I don't
+suppose men talk absolute history in delirium, but there is no reason,
+I fancy, why they shouldn't paraphrase.  I should reduce the number of
+nurses to a minimum if I were you."
+
+A determined fierceness possessed me at the moment.  I said to him: "She
+shall nurse him, Hungerford--she, and Justine Caron, and myself."
+
+"Plus Dick Hungerford," he added.  "I don't know quite how you intend to
+work this thing, but you have the case in your hands, and what you've
+told me about the French girl shows that she is to be trusted.  But as
+for myself, Marmion M.D., I'm sick--sick--sick of this woman, and all her
+words and works.  I believe that she has brought bad luck to this ship;
+and it's my last voyage on it; and--and I begin to think you're a damned
+good fellow--excuse the insolence of it; and--good-night."
+
+For the rest of the night I listened to Galt Roscoe's wild words.  He
+tossed from side to side, and murmured brokenly.  Taken separately, and
+as they were spoken, his words might not be very significant, but pieced
+together, arranged, and interpreted through even scant knowledge of
+circumstances, they were sufficient to give me a key to difficulties
+which, afterwards, were to cause much distress.  I arrange some of the
+sentences here to show how startling were the fancies--or remembrances
+--that vexed him.
+
+"But I was coming back--I was coming back--I tell you I should have
+stayed with her for ever. . . .  See how she trembles!--Now her breath
+is gone--There is no pulse--Her heart is still--My God, her heart is
+still!--Hush! cover her face. . . .  Row hard, you devils!--A hundred
+dollars if you make the point in time. . . .  Whereaway?--Whereaway?--
+Steady now!--Let them have it across the bows!--Low! low!--fire low! . . .
+She is dead--she is dead!"
+
+These things he would say over and over again breathlessly, then he would
+rest a while, and the trouble would begin again.  "It was not I that did
+it--no, it was not I.  She did it herself!--She plunged it in, deep,
+deep, deep!  You made me a devil! . . .  Hush! I WILL tell!--I know
+you--yet--Mercy--Mercy--Falchion--"
+
+Yes, it was best that few should enter his cabin.  The ravings of a sick
+man are not always counted ravings, no more than the words of a well man
+are always reckoned sane.  At last I got him into a sound sleep, and
+by that time I was thoroughly tired out.  I called my own steward, and
+asked him to watch for a couple of hours while I rested.  I threw myself
+down and slept soundly for an hour beyond that time, the steward having
+hesitated to wake me.
+
+By that time we had passed into the fresher air of the Mediterranean, and
+the sea was delightfully smooth.  Galt Roscoe still slept, though his
+temperature was high.
+
+My conference with Mrs. Falchion after breakfast was brief, but
+satisfactory.  I told her frankly that Roscoe had been delirious, that he
+had mentioned her name, and that I thought it best to reduce the number
+of nurses and watchers.  I made my proposition about Justine Caron.  She
+shook her head a little impatiently, and said that Justine had told her,
+and that she was quite willing.  Then I asked her if she would not also
+assist.  She answered immediately that she wished to do so.  As if to
+make me understand why she did it, she added: "If I did not hear the
+wild things he says, some one else would; and the difference is that
+I understand them, and the some one else would interpret them with
+the genius of the writer of a fairy book."
+
+And so it happened that Mrs. Falchion came to sit many hours a day beside
+the sick couch of Galt Roscoe, moistening his lips, cooling his brow,
+giving him his medicine.  After the first day, when she was, I thought,
+alternating between innate disgust of misery and her womanliness and
+humanity,--in these days more a reality to me,--she grew watchful and
+silently solicitous at every turn of the malady.  What impressed me most
+was that she was interested and engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady
+than in the man himself.
+
+And yet she baffled me even when I had come to this conclusion.
+
+During most of his delirium she remained almost impassive, as if she had
+schooled herself to be calm and strong in nerve; but one afternoon she
+did a thing that upset all my opinions of her for a moment.  Looking
+straight at her with staring, unconscious eyes, he half rose in his bed,
+and said in a low, bitter tone: "I hate you.  I once loved you--but I
+hate you now!"  Then he laughed scornfully, and fell back on the pillow.
+She had been sitting very quietly, musing.  His action had been
+unexpected, and had broken upon a silence.  She rose to her feet quickly,
+gave a sharp indrawn breath, and pressed her hand against her side, as
+though a sudden pain had seized her.  The next moment, however, she was
+composed again, and said in explanation that she had been half asleep,
+and he had startled her.  But I had seen her under what seemed to me more
+trying conditions, and she had not shown any nervousness such as this.
+
+The passengers, of course, talked.  Many "true histories" of Mrs.
+Falchion's devotion to the sick man were abroad; but it must be said,
+however, that all of them were romantically creditable to her.  She had
+become a rare product even in the eyes of Miss Treherne, and more
+particularly her father, since the matter at the Tanks.  Justine Caron
+was slyly besieged by the curious, but they went away empty; for Justine,
+if very simple and single-minded, was yet too much concerned for both
+Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion to give the inquiring the slightest clue.
+She knew, indeed, little herself, whatever she may have guessed.  As for
+Hungerford, he was dumb.  He refused to consider the matter.  But he
+roundly maintained once or twice, without any apparent relevance, that
+a woman was like a repeating decimal--you could follow her, but you never
+could reach her.  He usually added to this: "Minus one, Marmion," meaning
+thus to exclude the girl who preferred him to any one else.  When I
+ventured to suggest that Miss Treherne might also be excepted, he said,
+with maddening suggestion: "She lets Mrs. Falchion fool her, doesn't she?
+And she isn't quite sure the splendour of a medical professor's position
+is superior to that of an author."
+
+In these moments, although I tried to smile on him, I hated him a little.
+I sought to revenge myself on him by telling him to help himself to a
+cigar, having first placed the box of Mexicans near him.  He invariably
+declined them, and said he would take one of the others from the tea-box
+--my very best, kept in tea for sake of dryness.  If I reversed the
+process he reversed his action.  His instinct regarding cigars was
+supernatural, and I almost believe that he had--like the Black Dwarf's
+cat--the "poo'er" of reading character and interpreting events--an uncanny
+divination.
+
+I knew by the time we reached Valetta that Roscoe would get well; but he
+recognised none of us until we arrived at Gibraltar.  Justine Caron and
+myself had been watching beside him.  As the bells clanged to "slow down"
+on entering the harbour, his eyes opened with a gaze of sanity and
+consciousness.  He looked at me, then at Justine.
+
+"I have been ill?" he said.
+
+Justine's eyes were not entirely to be trusted.  She turned her head
+away.
+
+"Yes, you have been very ill," I replied, "but you are better."
+
+He smiled feebly, adding: "At least, I am grateful that I did not die at
+sea."  Then he closed his eyes.  After a moment he opened them, and said,
+looking at Justine: "You have helped to nurse me, have you not?"  His
+wasted fingers moved over the counterpane towards her.
+
+"I could do so little," she murmured.
+
+"You have more than paid your debt to me," he gently replied.  "For I
+live, you see, and poor Hector died."
+
+She shook her head gravely, and rejoined: "Ah no, I can never pay the
+debt I owe to you and to God--now."  He did not understand this, I know.
+But I did.  "You must not talk any more," I said to him.
+
+But Justine interposed.  "He must be told that the nurse who has done
+most for him is Mrs. Falchion."  His brows contracted as if he were
+trying to remember something.  He moved his head wearily.
+
+"Yes, I think I remember," he said, "about her being with me, but nothing
+clearly--nothing clearly.  She is very kind."
+
+Justine here murmured: "Shall I tell her?"
+
+I was about to say no; but Roscoe nodded, and said quietly, "Yes, yes."
+
+Then I made no objection, but urged that the meeting should only be for
+a moment.  I determined not to leave them alone even for that moment.
+I did not know what things connected with their past--whatever it was--
+might be brought up, and I knew that entire freedom from excitement was
+necessary.  I might have spared myself any anxiety on the point.  When
+she came she was perfectly self-composed, and more as she seemed when I
+first knew her, though I will admit that I thought her face more possible
+to emotion than in the past.
+
+It seems strange to write of a few weeks before as the past; but so much
+had occurred that the days might easily have been months and the weeks
+years.
+
+She sat down beside him and held out her hand.  And as she did so,
+I thought of Boyd Madras and of that long last night of his life, and
+of her refusal to say to him one comforting word, or to touch his hand
+in forgiveness and friendship.  And was this man so much better than Boyd
+Madras?  His wild words in delirium might mean nothing, but if they meant
+anything, and she knew of that anything, she was still a heartless,
+unnatural woman, as I had once called her.
+
+Roscoe took her hand and held it briefly.  "Dr. Marmion says that you
+have helped to nurse me through my illness," he whispered.  "I am most
+grateful."
+
+I thought she replied with the slightest constraint in her voice.  "One
+could not let an old acquaintance die without making an effort to save
+him."
+
+At that instant I grew scornful, and longed to tell him of her husband.
+But then a husband was not an acquaintance.  I ventured instead: "I am
+sorry, but I must cut short all conversation for the present.  When he
+is a little better, he will be benefited by your brightest gossip,
+Mrs. Falchion."
+
+She rose smiling, but she did not again take his hand, though I thought
+he made a motion to that end.  But she looked down at him steadily for
+a moment.  Beneath her look his face flushed, and his eyes grew hot with
+light; then they dropped, and the eyelids closed on them.  At that she
+said, with an incomprehensible airiness: "Good-night.  I am going now to
+play the music of 'La Grande Duchesse' as a farewell to Gibraltar.  They
+have a concert on to-night."
+
+And she was gone.
+
+At the mention of La Grande Duchesse he sighed, and turned his head away
+from her.  What it all meant I did not know, and she had annoyed me as
+much as she had perplexed me; her moods were like the chameleon's
+colours.  He lay silent for a long time, then he turned to me and said:
+"Do you remember that tale in the Bible about David and the well of
+Bethlehem?"  I had to confess my ignorance.
+
+"I think I can remember it," he continued.  And though I urged him not to
+tax himself, he spoke slowly thus:
+
+     "And David was in an hold, and the garrison of the Philistines was
+     then in Bethlehem.
+
+     "And David longed, and said, Oh that one would give me to drink of
+     the water of the well of Bethlehem that is at the gate!
+
+     "And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and drew
+     water out of the well of Bethlehem that was by the gate, and took
+     and brought it to David; nevertheless, he would not drink thereof,
+     but poured it out unto the Lord.
+
+     "And he said, My God forbid it me that I should do this; is not this
+     the blood of the men that went in jeopardy of their lives?
+     Therefore he would not drink it."
+
+He paused a moment, and then added: "One always buys back the past at a
+tremendous price.  Resurrections give ghosts only."
+
+"But you must sleep now," I urged.  And then, because I knew not what
+else more fitting, I added: "Sleep, and
+
+               "'Let the dead past bury its dead.'"
+
+"Yes, I will sleep," he answered.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MRS. FALCHION
+
+By Gilbert Parker
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+THE SLOPE OF THE PACIFIC
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+AMONG THE HILLS OF GOD
+
+"Your letters, sir," said my servant, on the last evening of the college
+year.  Examinations were over at last, and I was wondering where I should
+spend my holidays.  The choice was very wide; ranging from the Muskoka
+lakes to the Yosemite Valley.  Because it was my first year in Canada, I
+really preferred not to go beyond the Dominion.  With these thoughts in
+my mind I opened my letters.  The first two did not interest me;
+tradesmen's bills seldom do.  The third brought a thumping sensation of
+pleasure--though it was not from Miss Treherne.  I had had one from her
+that morning, and this was a pleasure which never came twice in one day,
+for Prince's College, Toronto, was a long week's journey from London,
+S.W.  Considering, however, that I did receive letters from her once a
+week, it may be concluded that Clovelly did not; and that, if he had, it
+would have been by a serious infringement of my rights.  But, indeed, as
+I have learned since, Clovelly took his defeat in a very characteristic
+fashion, and said on an important occasion some generous things about me.
+
+The letter that pleased me so much was from Galt Roscoe, who, as he had
+intended, was settled in a new but thriving district of British Columbia,
+near the Cascade Mountains.  Soon after his complete recovery he had been
+ordained in England, had straightway sailed for Canada, and had gone to
+work at once.  This note was an invitation to spend the holiday months
+with him, where, as he said, a man "summering high among the hills of
+God" could see visions and dream dreams, and hunt and fish too--
+especially fish.  He urged that he would not talk parish concerns at me;
+that I should not be asked to be godfather to any young mountaineers; and
+that the only drawback, so far as my own predilections were concerned,
+was the monotonous health of the people.  He described his summer cottage
+of red pine as being built on the edge of a lovely ravine; he said that
+he had the Cascades on one hand with their big glacier fields, and mighty
+pine forests on the other; while the balmiest breezes of June awaited
+"the professor of pathology and genial saw-bones."  At the end of the
+letter he hinted something about a pleasant little secret for my ear when
+I came; and remarked immediately afterwards that there were one or two
+delightful families at Sunburst and Viking, villages in his parish.  One
+naturally associated the little secret with some member of one of these
+delightful families.  Finally, he said he would like to show me how it
+was possible to transform a naval man into a parson.
+
+My mind was made up.  I wrote to him that I would start at once.  Then
+I began to make preparations, and meanwhile fell to thinking again about
+him who was now the Reverend Galt Roscoe.  After the 'Fulvia' reached
+London I had only seen him a few times, he having gone at once into the
+country to prepare for ordination.  Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron I had
+met several times, but Mrs. Falchion forbore inquiring for Galt Roscoe:
+from which, and from other slight but significant matters, I gathered
+that she knew of his doings and whereabouts.  Before I started for
+Toronto she said that she might see me there some day, for she was going
+to San Francisco to inspect the property her uncle had left her, and in
+all probability would make a sojourn in Canada.  I gave her my address,
+and she then said she understood that Mr. Roscoe intended taking a
+missionary parish in the wilds.  In his occasional letters to me while we
+all were in England Roscoe seldom spoke of her, but, when he did, showed
+that he knew of her movements.  This did not strike me at the time as
+anything more than natural.  It did later.
+
+Within a couple of weeks I reached Viking, a lumbering town with great
+saw-mills, by way of San Francisco and Vancouver.  Roscoe met me at the
+coach, and I was taken at once to the house among the hills.  It stood on
+the edge of a ravine, and the end of the verandah looked over a verdant
+precipice, beautiful but terrible too.  It was uniquely situated; a nest
+among the hills, suitable either for work or play.  In one's ears was the
+low, continuous din of the rapids, with the music of a neighbouring
+waterfall.
+
+On the way up the hills I had a chance to observe Roscoe closely.
+His face had not that sturdy buoyancy which his letter suggested.  Still,
+if it was pale, it had a glow which it did not possess before, and even a
+stronger humanity than of old.  A new look had come into his eyes,
+a certain absorbing earnestness, refining the past asceticism.
+A more amiable and unselfish comrade man never had.
+
+The second day I was there he took me to call upon a family at Viking,
+the town with a great saw-mill and two smaller ones, owned by James
+Devlin, an enterprising man who had grown rich at lumbering, and who
+lived here in the mountains many months in each year.
+
+Mr. James Devlin had a daughter who had had some advantages in the East
+after her father had become rich, though her earlier life was spent
+altogether in the mountains.  I soon saw where Roscoe's secret was to
+be found.  Ruth Devlin was a tall girl of sensitive features, beautiful
+eyes, and rare personality.  Her life, as I came to know, had been one of
+great devotion and self-denial.  Before her father had made his fortune,
+she had nursed a frail-bodied, faint-hearted mother, and had cared for,
+and been a mother to, her younger sisters.  With wealth and ease came a
+brighter bloom to her cheek, but it had a touch of care which would never
+quite disappear, though it became in time a beautiful wistfulness rather
+than anxiety.  Had this responsibility come to her in a city, it might
+have spoiled her beauty and robbed her of her youth altogether; but in
+the sustaining virtue of a life in the mountains, warm hues remained on
+her cheek and a wonderful freshness in her nature.  Her family worshipped
+her--as she deserved.
+
+That evening Roscoe confided to me that he had not asked Ruth Devlin to
+be his wife, nor had he, indeed, given her definite tokens of his love.
+But the thing was in his mind as a happy possibility of the future.  We
+talked till midnight, sitting at the end of the verandah overlooking the
+ravine.  This corner, called the coping, became consecrated to our many
+conversations.  We painted and sketched there in the morning (when we
+were not fishing or he was not at his duties), received visitors, and
+smoked in the evening, inhaling the balsam from the pines.  An old man
+and his wife kept the house for us, and gave us to eat of simple but
+comfortable fare.  The trout-fishing was good, and many a fine trout was
+broiled for our evening meal; and many a fine string of trout found its
+way to the tables of Roscoe's poorest parishioners, or else to furnish
+the more fashionable table at which Ruth Devlin presided.  There were
+excursions up the valley, and picnics on the hill-sides, and occasional
+lunches and evening parties at the summer hotel, a mile from us farther
+down the valley, at which tourists were beginning to assemble.
+
+Yet, all the time, Roscoe was abundantly faithful to his duties at Viking
+and in the settlement called Sunburst, which was devoted to salmon-
+fishing.  Between Viking and Sunburst there was a great jealousy and
+rivalry; for the salmon-fishers thought that the mills, though on a
+tributary stream, interfered, by the sawdust spilled in the river, with
+the travel and spawning of the salmon.  It needed all the tact of both
+Mr. Devlin and Roscoe to keep the places from open fighting.  As it was,
+the fire smouldered.  When Sunday came, however, there seemed to be truce
+between the villages.  It appeared to me that one touched the primitive
+and idyllic side of life: lively, sturdy, and simple, with nature about
+us at once benignant and austere.  It is impossible to tell how fresh,
+bracing, and inspiring was the climate of this new land.  It seemed to
+glorify humanity, to make all who breathed it stalwart, and almost
+pardonable even in wrong-doing.  Roscoe was always received respectfully,
+and even cordially, among the salmon-fishers of Sunburst, as among the
+mill-men and river-drivers of Viking: not the less so, because he had an
+excellent faculty for machinery, and could talk to the people in their
+own colloquialisms.  He had, besides, though there was little exuberance
+in his nature, a gift of dry humour, which did more than anything else,
+perhaps, to make his presence among them unrestrained.
+
+His little churches at Viking and Sunburst were always well attended--
+often filled to overflowing--and the people gave liberally to the
+offertory: and I never knew any clergyman, however holy, who did not view
+such a proceeding with a degree of complacency.  In the pulpit Roscoe was
+almost powerful.  His knowledge of the world, his habits of directness,
+his eager but not hurried speech, his unconventional but original
+statements of things, his occasional literary felicity and unusual tact,
+might have made him distinguished in a more cultured community.  Yet
+there was something to modify all this: an occasional indefinable
+sadness, a constant note of pathetic warning.  It struck me that I never
+had met a man whose words and manner were at times so charged with
+pathos; it was artistic in its searching simplicity.  There was some
+unfathomable fount in his nature which was even beyond any occurrence of
+his past; some radical, constitutional sorrow, coupled with a very
+strong, practical, and even vigorous nature.
+
+One of his most ardent admirers was a gambler, horse-trader, and watch-
+dealer, who sold him a horse, and afterwards came and offered him thirty
+dollars, saying that the horse was worth that much less than Roscoe had
+paid for it, and protesting that he never could resist the opportunity of
+getting the best of a game.  He said he did not doubt but that he would
+do the same with one of the archangels.  He afterwards sold Roscoe a
+watch at cost, but confessed to me that the works of the watch had been
+smuggled.  He said he was so fond of the parson that he felt he had to
+give him a chance of good things.  It was not uncommon for him to
+discourse of Roscoe's quality in the bar-rooms of Sunburst and Viking,
+in which he was ably seconded by Phil Boldrick, an eccentric, warm-
+hearted fellow, who was so occupied in the affairs of the villages
+generally, and so much an advisory board to the authorities, that he
+had little time left to progress industrially himself.
+
+Once when a noted bully came to Viking, and, out of sheer bravado and
+meanness, insulted Roscoe in the streets, two or three river-drivers came
+forward to avenge the insult.  It was quite needless, for the clergyman
+had promptly taken the case in his own hands.  Waving them back, he said
+to the bully: "I have no weapon, and if I had, I could not take your
+life, nor try to take it; and you know that very well.  But I propose to
+meet your insolence--the first shown me in this town."
+
+Here murmurs of approbation went round.
+
+"You will, of course, take the revolver from your pocket, and throw it on
+the ground."
+
+A couple of other revolvers were looking the bully in the face, and he
+sullenly did as he was asked.
+
+"You have a knife: throw that down."
+
+This also was done under the most earnest emphasis of the revolvers.
+Roscoe calmly took off his coat.  "I have met such scoundrels as you on
+the quarter-deck," he said, "and I know what stuff is in you.  They call
+you beachcombers in the South Seas.  You never fight fair.  You bully
+women, knife natives, and never meet any one in fair fight.  You have
+mistaken your man this time."
+
+He walked close up to the bully, his face like steel, his thumbs caught
+lightly in his waistcoat pockets; but it was noticeable that his hands
+were shut.
+
+"Now," he said, "we are even as to opportunity.  Repeat, if you please,
+what you said a moment ago."
+
+The bully's eye quailed, and he answered nothing.  "Then, as I said, you
+are a coward and a cur, who insults peaceable men and weak women.  If I
+know Viking right, it has no room for you."  Then he picked up his coat,
+and put it on.
+
+"Now," he added, "I think you had better go; but I leave that to the
+citizens of Viking."
+
+What they thought is easily explained.  Phil Boldrick, speaking for all,
+said: "Yes, you had better go--quick; but on the hop like a cur, mind
+you: on your hands and knees, jumping all the way."
+
+And, with weapons menacing him, this visitor to Viking departed,
+swallowing as he went the red dust disturbed by his hands and feet.
+
+This established Roscoe's position finally.  Yet, with all his popularity
+and the solid success of his work, he showed no vanity or egotism, nor
+ever traded on the position he held in Viking and Sunburst.  He seemed to
+have no ambition further than to do good work; no desire to be known
+beyond his own district; no fancy, indeed, for the communications of his
+labours to mission papers and benevolent ladies in England--so much the
+habit of his order.  He was free from professional mannerisms.
+
+One evening we were sitting in the accustomed spot--that is, the coping.
+We had been silent for a long time.  At last Roscoe rose, and walked up
+and down the verandah nervously.
+
+"Marmion," said he, "I am disturbed to-day, I cannot tell you how:
+a sense of impending evil, an anxiety."
+
+I looked up at him inquiringly, and, of purpose, a little sceptically.
+
+He smiled something sadly and continued: "Oh, I know you think it
+foolishness.  But remember that all sailors are more or less
+superstitious: it is bred in them; it is constitutional, and
+I am afraid there's a good deal of the sailor in me yet."
+
+Remembering Hungerford, I said: "I know that sailors are superstitious,
+the most seasoned of them are that.  But it means nothing.  I may think
+or feel that there is going to be a plague, but I should not enlarge the
+insurance on my life because of it."
+
+He put his hand on my shoulder and looked down at me earnestly.  "But,
+Marmion, these things, I assure you, are not matters of will, nor yet
+morbidness.  They occur at the most unexpected times.  I have had such
+sensations before, and they were followed by strange matters."
+
+I nodded, but said nothing.  I was still thinking of Hungerford.  After a
+slight pause he continued somewhat hesitatingly:
+
+"I dreamed last night, three times, of events that occurred in my past;
+events which I hoped would never disturb me in the life I am now
+leading."
+
+"A life of self-denial," ventured I.  I waited a minute, and then added:
+"Roscoe, I think it only fair to tell you--I don't know why I haven't
+done so before--that when you were ill you were delirious, and talked of
+things that may or may not have had to do with your past."
+
+He started, and looked at me earnestly.  "They were unpleasant things?"
+
+"Trying things; though all was vague and disconnected," I replied.
+
+"I am glad you tell me this," he remarked quietly.  "And Mrs. Falchion and
+Justine Caron--did they hear?"  He looked off to the hills.
+
+"To a certain extent, I am sure.  Mrs. Falchion's name was generally
+connected with--your fancies....  But really no one could place any
+weight on what a man said in delirium, and I only mention the fact
+to let you see exactly on what ground I stand with you."
+
+"Can you give me an idea--of the thing I raved about?"
+
+"Chiefly about a girl called Alo, not your wife, I should judge--who was
+killed."
+
+At that he spoke in a cheerless voice: "Marmion, I will tell you all the
+story some day; but not now.  I hoped that I had been able to bury it,
+even in memory, but I was wrong.  Some things--such things--never die.
+They stay; and in our cheerfulest, most peaceful moments confront us,
+and mock the new life we are leading.  There is no refuge from memory and
+remorse in this world.  The spirits of our foolish deeds haunt us, with
+or without repentance."  He turned again from me and set a sombre face
+towards the ravine.  "Roscoe," I said, taking his arm, "I cannot believe
+that you have any sin on your conscience so dark that it is not wiped out
+now."
+
+"God bless you for your confidence.  But there is one woman who, I fear,
+could, if she would, disgrace me before the world.  You understand," he
+added, "that there are things we repent of which cannot be repaired.  One
+thinks a sin is dead, and starts upon a new life, locking up the past,
+not deceitfully, but believing that the book is closed, and that no good
+can come of publishing it; when suddenly it all flames out like the
+letters in Faust's book of conjurations."
+
+"Wait," I said.  "You need not tell me more, you must not--now; not until
+there is any danger.  Keep your secret.  If the woman--if THAT woman--
+ever places you in danger, then tell me all.  But keep it to yourself
+now.  And don't fret because you have had dreams."
+
+"Well, as you wish," he replied after a long time.  As he sat in silence,
+I smoking hard, and he buried in thought, I heard the laughter of people
+some distance below us in the hills.  I guessed it to be some tourists
+from the summer hotel.  The voices came nearer.
+
+A singular thought occurred to me.  I looked at Roscoe.  I saw that he
+was brooding, and was not noticing the voices, which presently died away.
+This was a relief to me.  We were then silent again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE WHIRLIGIG OF TIME
+
+Next day we had a picnic on the Whi-Whi River, which, rising in the far
+north, comes in varied moods to join the Long Cloud River at Viking.
+
+     [Dr. Marmion, in a note of his MSS., says that he has purposely
+     changed the names of the rivers and towns mentioned in the second
+     part of the book, because he does not wish the locale to be too
+     definite.]
+
+Ruth Devlin, her young sister, and her aunt Mrs. Revel, with Galt Roscoe
+and myself, constituted the party.  The first part of the excursion had
+many delights.  The morning was fresh and sweet, and we were all in
+excellent spirits.  Roscoe's depression had vanished; but there was an
+amiable seriousness in his manner which, to me, portended that the faint
+roses in Ruth Devlin's cheeks would deepen before the day was done,
+unless something inopportune happened.
+
+As we trudged gaily up the canon to the spot where we were to take a big
+skiff, and cross the Whi-Whi to our camping-ground, Ruth Devlin, who was
+walking with me, said: "A large party of tourists arrived at Viking
+yesterday, and have gone to the summer hotel; so I expect you will be gay
+up here for some time to come.  Prepare, then, to rejoice."
+
+"Don't you think it is gay enough as it is?" I answered.  "Behold this
+festive throng."
+
+"Oh, it is nothing to what there might be.  This could never make Viking
+and 'surrounding country' notorious as a pleasure resort.  To attract
+tourists you must have enough people to make romances and tragedies,--
+without loss of life, of course,--merely catastrophes of broken hearts,
+and hair-breadth escapes, and mammoth fishing and shooting achievements,
+such as men know how to invent,"--it was delightful to hear her voice
+soften to an amusing suggestiveness, "and broken bridges and land-slides,
+with many other things which you can supply, Dr. Marmion.  No, I am
+afraid that Viking is too humdrum to be notable."
+
+She laughed then very lightly and quaintly.  She had a sense of humour.
+
+"Well, but, Miss Devlin," said I, "you cannot have all things at once.
+Climaxes like these take time.  We have a few joyful things.  We have
+splendid fishing achievements,--please do not forget that basket of trout
+I sent you the other morning,--and broken hearts and such tragedies are
+not impossible; as, for instance, if I do not send you as good a basket
+of trout to-morrow evening; or if you should remark that there was
+nothing in a basket of trout to--"
+
+"Now," she said, "you are becoming involved and--inconsiderate.
+Remember, I am only a mountain girl."
+
+"Then let us only talk of the other tragedies.  But are you not a little
+callous to speak of such things as if you thirsted for their occurrence?"
+
+"I am afraid you are rather silly," she replied.  "You see, some of the
+land up here belongs to me.  I am anxious that it should 'boom'--that is
+the correct term, is it not?--and a sensation is good for 'booming.'
+What an advertisement would ensue if the lovely daughter of an American
+millionaire should be in danger of drowning in the Long Cloud, and a
+rough but honest fellow--a foreman on the river, maybe a young member of
+the English aristocracy in disguise--perilled his life for her!  The
+place of peril would, of course, be named Lover's Eddy, or the Maiden's
+Gate--very much prettier, I assure you, than such cold-blooded things as
+the Devil's Slide, where we are going now, and much more attractive to
+tourists."
+
+"Miss Devlin," laughed I, "you have all the eagerness of the incipient
+millionaire.  May I hope to see you in Lombard Street some day, a very
+Katherine among capitalists?--for, from your remarks, I judge that you
+would--I say it pensively--'wade through slaughter to a throne.'"
+
+Galt Roscoe, who was just ahead with Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin, turned
+and said: "Who is that quoting so dramatically?  Now, this is a picnic
+party, and any one who introduces elegies, epics, sonnets, 'and such,'
+is guilty of breaking the peace at Viking and its environs.  Besides,
+such things should always be left to the parson.  He must not be
+outflanked, his thunder must not be stolen.  The scientist has unlimited
+resources; all he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious; but the
+parson must have his poetry as a monopoly, or he is lost to sight, and
+memory."
+
+"Then," said I, "I shall leave you to deal with Miss Devlin yourself,
+because she is the direct cause of my wrong-doing.  She has expressed the
+most sinister sentiments about Viking and your very extensive parish.
+Miss Devlin," I added, turning to her, "I leave you to your fate, and I
+cannot recommend you to mercy, for what Heaven made fair should remain
+tender and merciful, and--"
+
+"'So young and so untender!'" she interjected, with a rippling laugh.
+"Yet Cordelia was misjudged very wickedly, and traduced very ungallantly,
+and so am I.  And I bid you good-day, sir."
+
+Her delicate laugh rings in my ears as I write.  I think that sun and
+clear skies and hills go far to make us cheerful and harmonious.
+Somehow, I always remember her as she was that morning.
+
+She was standing then on the brink of a new and beautiful experience, at
+the threshold of an acknowledged love.  And that is a remarkable time to
+the young.
+
+There was something thrilling about the experiences of that morning,
+and I think we all felt it.  Even the great frowning precipices seemed
+to have lost their ordinary gloom, and when some young white eagles rose
+from a crag and flew away, growing smaller as they passed, until they
+were one with the snow of the glacier on Mount Trinity, or a wapiti
+peeped out from the underwood and stole away with glancing feet down the
+valley; we could scarcely refrain from doing some foolish thing out of
+sheer delight.  At length we emerged from a thicket of Douglas pine upon
+the shore of the Whi-Whi, and, loosening our boat, were soon moving
+slowly on the cool current.  For an hour or more we rowed down the river
+towards the Long Cloud, and then drew into the shade of a little island
+for lunch.  When we came to the rendezvous, where picnic parties
+generally feasted, we found a fire still smoking and the remnants of a
+lunch scattered about.  A party of picnickers had evidently been there
+just before us.  Ruth suggested that it might be some of the tourists
+from the hotel.  This seemed very probable.
+
+There were scraps of newspaper on the ground, and among them was an empty
+envelope.  Mechanically I picked it up, and read the superscription.
+What I saw there I did not think necessary to disclose to the other
+members of the party; but, as unconcernedly as possible, for Ruth
+Devlin's eyes were on me, I used it to light a cigar--inappropriately,
+for lunch would soon be ready.
+
+"What was the name on the envelope?" she said.  "Was there one?"
+
+I guessed she had seen my slight start.  I said evasively: "I fancy there
+was, but a man who is immensely interested in a new brand of cigar--"
+
+"You are a most deceitful man," she said.  "And, at the least, you are
+selfish in holding your cigar more important than a woman's curiosity.
+Who can tell what romance was in the address on that envelope--"
+
+"What elements of noble tragedy, what advertisement for a certain
+property in the Whi-Whi Valley," interrupted Roscoe, breaking off the
+thread of a sailor's song he was humming, as he tended the water-kettle
+on the fire.
+
+This said, he went on with the song again.  I was struck by the wonderful
+change in him now.  Presentiments were far from him, yet I, having read
+that envelope, knew that they were not without cause.  Indeed, I had an
+inkling of that the night before, when I heard the voices on the hill.
+Ruth Devlin stopped for a moment in the preparations to ask Roscoe what
+he was humming.  I, answering for him, told her that it was an old
+sentimental sea-song of common sailors, often sung by officers at
+their jovial gatherings.  At this she pretended to look shocked, and
+straightway demanded to hear the words, so that she could pronounce
+judgment on her spiritual pastor and master.
+
+He good-naturedly said that many of these old sailor songs were amusing,
+and that he often found himself humming them.  To this I could testify,
+and he sang them very well indeed--quietly, but with the rolling tone of
+the sailor, jovial yet fascinating.  At our united request, his humming
+became distinct.  Three of the verses I give here:
+
+              "The 'Lovely Jane' went sailing down
+                 To anchor at the Spicy Isles;
+               And the wind was fair as ever was blown,
+                 For the matter of a thousand miles.
+
+              "Then a storm arose as she crossed the line,
+                 Which it caused her masts to crack;
+               And she gulped her fill of the whooping brine,
+                 And she likewise sprained her back.
+
+              "And the capting cried, 'If it's Davy Jones,
+                 Then it's Davy Jones,' says he,
+              'Though I don't aspire to leave my bones
+                 In the equatorial sea.'"
+
+What the further history of the 'Lovely Jane' was we were not informed,
+for Ruth Devlin announced that the song must wait, though it appeared to
+be innocuous and child-like in its sentiments, and that lunch would be
+served between the acts of the touching tragedy.  When lunch was over,
+and we had again set forth upon the Whi-Whi, I asked Ruth to sing an old
+French-Canadian song which she had once before sung to us.  Many a time
+the woods of the West had resounded to the notes of 'En Roulant ma
+Boule', as the 'voyageurs' traversed the long paths of the Ottawa, St.
+Lawrence, and Mississippi; brave light-hearted fellows, whose singing
+days were over.
+
+By the light of coming events there was something weird and pathetic in
+this Arcadian air, sung as it was by her.  Her voice was a mezzo-soprano
+of rare bracing quality, and she had enough natural sensibility to give
+the antique refinement of the words a wistful charm, particularly
+apparent in these verses:
+
+              "Ah, cruel Prince, my heart you break,
+               In killing thus my snow-white drake.
+
+              "My snow-white drake, my love, my King,
+               The crimson life-blood stains his wing.
+
+              "His golden bill sinks on his breast,
+               His plumes go floating east and west--
+
+              "En roulant ma boule:
+                 Rouli, roulant, ma boule roulant,
+               En roulant ma boule roulant,
+                 En roulant ma boule!"
+
+As she finished the song we rounded an angle in the Whi-Whi.  Ahead of
+us lay the Snow Rapids and the swift channel at one side of the rapids
+which, hurrying through a rocky archway, was known as the Devil's Slide.
+There was one channel through the rapids by which it was perfectly safe
+to pass, but that sweep of water through the Devil's Slide was sometimes
+a trap of death to even the most expert river-men.  A half-mile below the
+rapids was the confluence of the two rivers.  The sight of the tumbling
+mass of white water, and the gloomy and colossal grandeur of the Devil's
+Slide, a buttress of the hills, was very fine.
+
+But there was more than scenery to interest us here, for, moving quickly
+towards the Slide, was a boat with three people in it.  They were
+evidently intending to attempt that treacherous passage, which culminated
+in a series of eddies, a menace to even the best oarsman ship.  They
+certainly were not aware of their danger, for there came over the water
+the sound of a man's laughing voice, and the two women in the boat were
+in unconcerned attitudes.  Roscoe shouted to them, and motioned them
+back, but they did not appear to understand.
+
+The man waved his hat to us, and rowed on.  There was but one thing for
+us to do: to make the passage quickly through the safe channel of the
+rapids, and to be of what service we could on the other side of the
+Slide, if necessary.  We bent to the oars, and the boat shot through the
+water.  Ruth held the rudder firmly, and her young sister and Mrs. Revel
+sat perfectly still.  But the man in the other boat, thinking, doubtless,
+that we were attempting a race, added his efforts to the current of the
+channel.  I am afraid that I said some words below my breath scarcely
+proper to be spoken in the presence of maidens and a clerk in holy
+orders.  Roscoe was here, however, a hundred times more sailor than
+parson.  He spoke in low, firm tones, as he now and then suggested a
+direction to Ruth Devlin or myself.  Our boat tossed and plunged in the
+rapids, and the water washed over us lightly once or twice, but we went
+through the passage safely, and had turned towards the Slide before the
+other boat got to the rocky archway.
+
+We rowed hard.  The next minute was one of suspense, for we saw the boat
+shoot beneath the archway.  Presently it emerged, a whirling plaything in
+treacherous eddies.  The man wildly waved his arm, and shouted to us.
+The women were grasping the sides of the boat, but making no outcry.  We
+could not see the faces of the women plainly yet.  The boat ran forward
+like a race-horse; it plunged hither and thither.  An oar snapped in the
+rocks, and the other one shot from the man's hand.  Now the boat swung
+round and round, and dipped towards the hollow of a whirlpool.  When we
+were within a few rods of them, it appeared to rise from the water, was
+hurled on a rock, and overturned.  Mrs. Revel buried her face in her
+hands, and Ruth gave a little groan, but she held the rudder firmly, as
+we swiftly approached the forms struggling in the water.  All,
+fortunately, had grasped the swamped boat, and were being carried down
+the stream towards us.  The man was caring resolutely for himself, but
+one, of the women had her arm round the other, supporting her.  We
+brought our skiff close to the swirling current.  I called out words of
+encouragement, and was preparing to jump into the water, when Roscoe
+exclaimed in a husky voice: "Marmion, it is Mrs. Falchion."
+
+Yes, it was Mrs. Falchion; but I had known that before.  We heard her
+words to her companion: "Justine, do not look so.  Your face is like
+death.  It is hateful."
+
+Then the craft veered towards the smoother water where we were.  This was
+my opportunity.  Roscoe threw me a rope, and I plunged in and swam
+towards the boat.  I saw that Mrs. Falchion recognised me; but she made
+no exclamation, nor did Justine Caron.  Their companion, however, on the
+other side of the boat, was eloquent in prayers to be rescued.  I caught
+the bow of the boat as it raced past me, and with all my strength swung
+it towards the smoother water.  I ran the rope I had brought, through the
+iron ring at the bow, and was glad enough of that; for their lives
+perhaps depended on being able to do it.  It had been a nice calculation
+of chances, but it was done.  Roscoe immediately bent to the oars, I
+threw an arm around Justine, and in a moment Roscoe had towed us into
+safer quarters.  Then he drew in the rope.  As he did so, Mrs. Falchion
+said: "Justine would drown so easily if one would let her."
+
+These were her first words to me.  I am sure I never can sufficiently
+admire the mere courage of the woman and her presence of mind in danger.
+Immediately afterwards she said--and subsequently it seemed to me
+marvellous: "You are something more than the chorus to the play this
+time, Dr. Marmion."
+
+A minute after, and Justine was dragged into our boat, and was followed
+by Mrs. Falchion, whose first words to Roscoe were: "It is not such a
+meeting as one would plan."
+
+And he replied: "I am glad no harm has come to you."
+
+The man was duly helped in.  A poor creature he was, to pass from this
+tale as he entered it, ignominiously and finally here.  I even hide his
+nationality, for his race are generally more gallant.  But he was
+wealthy, had an intense admiration for Mrs. Falchion, and had managed to
+secure her in his boat, to separate from the rest of the picnic party--
+chiefly through his inefficient rowing.
+
+Dripping with water as Mrs. Falchion was, she did not, strange to say,
+appear at serious disadvantage.  Almost any other woman would have done
+so.  She was a little pale, she must have felt miserable, but she
+accepted Ruth Devlin's good offices--as did Justine Caron those of Mrs.
+Revel--with much self-possession, scanning her face and form critically
+the while, and occasionally turning a glance on Roscoe, who was now cold
+and impassive.  I never knew a man who could so banish expression from
+his countenance when necessary.  Speaking to Belle Treherne long
+afterwards of Mrs. Falchion's self-possessed manner on this occasion,
+and of how she rose superior to the situation, I was told that I must
+have regarded the thing poetically and dramatically, for no woman could
+possibly look self-possessed in draggled skirts.  She said that I always
+magnified certain of Mrs. Falchion's qualities.
+
+That may be so, and yet it must be remembered that I was not predisposed
+towards her, and that I wished her well away from where Roscoe was.
+
+As for Justine Caron, she lay with her head on Mrs. Revel's lap, and
+looked from beneath heavy eyelids at Roscoe with such gratitude and--but,
+no, she is only a subordinate in the story, and not a chief factor, and
+what she said or did here is of no vital consequence at this moment!  We
+rowed to a point near the confluence of the two rivers, where we could
+leave our boats to be poled back through the rapids or portaged past
+them.
+
+On the way Mrs. Falchion said to Roscoe: "I knew you were somewhere in
+the Rockies; and at Vancouver, when I came from San Francisco, I heard
+of your being here.  I had intended spending a month somewhere in the
+mountains, so I came to Viking, and on to the summer hotel: but really
+this is too exciting for recreation."
+
+This was spoken with almost gay outward manner, but there was a note in
+her words which I did not like, nor did I think that her eye was very
+kind, especially when she looked at Ruth Devlin and afterwards at Roscoe.
+
+We had several miles to go, and it was nightfall--for which Mrs. Falchion
+expressed herself as profoundly grateful--when we arrived at the hotel.
+Our parting words were as brief as, of necessity, they had been on our
+journey through the mountains, for the ladies had ridden the horses which
+we had sent over for ourselves from Viking, and we men walked in front.
+Besides, the thoughts of some of us were not at all free from misgiving.
+The spirit possessing Roscoe the night before seemed to enter into all
+of us, even into Mrs. Falchion, who had lost, somewhat, the aplomb with
+which she had held the situation in the boat.  But at the door of the
+hotel she said cheerfully: "Of course, Dr. Marmion will find it necessary
+to call on his patients to-morrow--and the clergyman also on his new
+parishoners."
+
+The reply was left to me.  I said gravely: "Let us be thankful that both
+doctor and clergyman are called upon to use their functions; it might
+easily have been only the latter."
+
+"Oh, do not be funereal!" she replied.  "I knew that we were not to
+drown at the Devil's Slide.  The drama is not ended yet, and the chief
+actors cannot go until 'the curtain.'--Though I am afraid that is not
+quite orthodox, is it, Mr. Roscoe?"
+
+Roscoe looked at her gravely.  "It may not be orthodox as it is said, but
+it is orthodox, I fancy, if we exchange God for fate, and Providence for
+chance. . . .  Good-night."
+
+He said this wearily.  She looked up at him with an ironical look, then
+held out her hand, and quickly bade him good-night.  Partings all round
+were made, and, after some injunctions to Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron
+from myself as to preventives against illness, the rest of us started for
+Sunburst.
+
+As we went, I could not help but contrast Ruth and Amy Devlin, these two
+gentle yet strong mountain girls, with the woman we had left.  Their
+lives were far from that dolorous tide which, sweeping through a selfish
+world, leaves behind it the stain of corroding passions; of cruelties,
+ingratitude, hate, and catastrophe.  We are all ambitious, in one way or
+another.  We climb mountains over scoria that frays and lava that burns.
+We try to call down the stars, and when, now and then, our conjuring
+succeeds, we find that our stars are only blasting meteors.  One moral
+mishap lames character for ever.  A false start robs us of our natural
+strength, and a misplaced or unrighteous love deadens the soul and
+shipwrecks just conceptions of life.
+
+A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains; it has found its
+place in his constitution, and it cannot be displaced by mere penitence,
+nor yet forgiveness.  A man errs, and he must suffer; his father erred,
+and he must endure; or some one sinned against the man, and he hid the
+sin--But here a hand touched my shoulder!  I was startled, for my
+thoughts had been far away.  Roscoe's voice spoke in my ear: "It is as
+she said; the actors come together for 'the curtain.'"
+
+Then his eyes met those of Ruth Devlin turned to him earnestly and
+inquiringly.  And I felt for a moment hard against Roscoe, that he should
+even indirectly and involuntarily, bring suffering into her life.  In
+youth, in early manhood, we do wrong.  At the time we seem to be injuring
+no one but ourselves; but, as we live on, we find that we were wronging
+whomsoever should come into our lives in the future.  At the instant I
+said angrily to myself: "What right has he to love a girl like that, when
+he has anything in his life that might make her unhappy, or endanger her
+in ever so little!"
+
+But I bit my tongue, for it seemed to me that I was pharisaical; and I
+wondered rather scornfully if I should have been so indignant were the
+girl not so beautiful, young, and ingenuous.  I tried not to think
+further of the matter, and talked much to Ruth,--Gait Roscoe walked with
+Mrs. Revel and Amy Devlin,--but I found I could not drive it from my mind.
+This was not unnatural, for was not I the "chorus to the play"?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE SONG OF THE SAW
+
+There was still a subdued note to Roscoe's manner the next morning.
+He was pale.  He talked freely however of the affairs of Viking and
+Sunburst, and spoke of business which called him to Mr. Devlin's great
+saw mill that day.  A few moments after breakfast we were standing in the
+doorway.  "Well," he said, "shall we go?"
+
+I was not quite sure where he meant to go, but I took my hat and joined
+him.  I wondered if it would be to the summer hotel or the great mill.
+My duty lay in the direction of the hotel.  When we stepped out, he
+added: "Let us take the bridle-path along the edge of the ravine to the
+hotel."
+
+The morning was beautiful.  The atmosphere of the woods was of soft,
+diffusive green--the sunlight filtering through the transparent leaves.
+Bowers of delicate ferns and vines flanked the path, and an occasional
+clump of giant cedars invited us: the world was eloquent.
+
+Several tourists upon the verandah of the hotel remarked us with
+curiosity as we entered.  A servant said that Mrs. Falchion would be glad
+to see us; and we were ushered into her sitting-room.  She carried no
+trace of yesterday's misadventure.  She appeared superbly well.  And yet,
+when I looked again, when I had time to think upon and observe detail,
+I saw signs of change.  There was excitement in the eyes, and a slight
+nervous darkness beneath them, which added to their charm.  She rose,
+smiling, and said: "I fear I am hardly entitled to this visit, for I am
+beyond convalescence, and Justine is not in need of shrift or diagnosis,
+as you see."
+
+I was not so sure of Justine Caron as she was, and when I had paid my
+respects to her, I said a little priggishly (for I was young), still not
+too solemnly: "I cannot allow you to pronounce for me upon my patients,
+Mrs. Falchion; I must make my own inquiries."
+
+But Mrs. Falchion was right.  Justine Caron was not suffering much from
+her immersion; though, speaking professionally, her temperature was
+higher than the normal.  But that might be from some impulse of the
+moment, for Justine was naturally a little excitable.
+
+We walked aside, and, looking at me with a flush of happiness in her
+face, she said: "You remember one day on the 'Fulvia' when I told you
+that money was everything to me; that I would do all I honourably could
+to get it?"
+
+I nodded.  She continued: "It was that I might pay a debt--you know it.
+Well, money is my god no longer, for I can pay all I owe.  That is, I can
+pay the money, but not the goodness, the noble kindness.  He is most
+good, is he not?  The world is better that such men as Captain Galt
+Roscoe live--ah, you see I cannot quite think of him as a clergyman.
+I wonder if I ever shall!"  She grew suddenly silent and abstracted, and,
+in the moment's pause, some ironical words in Mrs. Falchion's voice
+floated across the room to me: "It is so strange to see you so.  And you
+preach, and baptise; and marry, and bury, and care for the poor and--ah,
+what is it?--'all those who, in this transitory life, are in sorrow,
+need, sickness, or any other adversity'? . . . And do you never long for
+the flesh-pots of Egypt?  Never long for"--here her voice was not quite
+so clear--"for the past?"
+
+I was sure that, whatever she was doing, he had been trying to keep the
+talk, as it were, on the surface.  I was equally sure that, to her last
+question, he would make no reply.  Though I was now speaking to Justine
+Caron, I heard him say quite calmly and firmly: "Yes, I preach, baptise,
+marry, and bury, and do all I can for those who need help."
+
+"The people about here say that you are good and charitable.  You have
+won the hearts of the mountaineers.  But you always had a gift that
+way."--I did not like her tone.--"One would almost think you had founded
+a new dispensation.  And if I had drowned yesterday, you would,
+I suppose, have buried me, and have preached a little sermon about me.
+--You could have done that better than any one else! . . .  What
+would you have said in such a case?"
+
+There was an earnest, almost a bitter, protest in the reply.
+
+"Pardon me, if I cannot answer your question.  Your life was saved, and
+that is all we have to consider, except to be grateful to Providence.
+The duties of my office have nothing to do with possibilities."
+
+She was evidently torturing him, and I longed to say a word that would
+torture her.  She continued: "And the flesh-pots--you have not answered
+about them: do you not long for them--occasionally?"
+
+"They are of a period," he answered, "too distant for regret."
+
+"And yet," she replied softly, "I fancied sometimes in London last year,
+that you had not outgrown that antique time--those lotos-days."
+
+He made no reply at once, and in the pause Justine and I passed out to
+the verandah.
+
+"How long does Mrs. Falchion intend remaining here, Miss Caron?" I said.
+
+Her reply was hesitating: "I do not quite know; but I think some time.
+She likes the place; it seems to amuse her."
+
+"And you--does it amuse you?"
+
+"It does not matter about me.  I am madame's servant; but, indeed, it
+does not amuse me particularly."
+
+"Do you like the place?"
+
+The reply was somewhat hurried, and she glanced at me a little nervously.
+"Oh yes," she said, "I like the place, but--"
+
+Here Roscoe appeared at the door and said, "Mrs. Falchion wishes to see
+Viking and Mr. Devlin's mills, Marmion.  She will go with us."
+
+In a little time we were on our way to Viking.  I walked with Mrs.
+Falchion, and Roscoe with Justine.  I was aware of a new element in Mrs.
+Falchion's manner.  She seemed less powerfully attractive to me than in
+the old days, yet she certainly was more beautiful.  It was hard to trace
+the new characteristic.  But at last I thought I saw it in a decrease of
+that cold composure, that impassiveness, so fascinating in the past.
+In its place had come an allusive, restless something, to be found in
+words of troublesome vagueness, in variable moods, in an increased
+sensitiveness of mind and an undercurrent of emotional bitterness--she
+was emotional at last!  She puzzled me greatly, for I saw two spirits
+in her: one pitiless as of old; the other human, anxious, not unlovely.
+
+At length we became silent, and walked so side by side for a time.  Then,
+with that old delightful egotism and selfishness--delightful in its very
+daring--she said: "Well, amuse me!"
+
+"And is it still the end of your existence," I rejoined--"to be amused?"
+
+"What is there else to do?" she replied with raillery.
+
+"Much.  To amuse others, for instance; to regard human beings as
+something more than automata."
+
+"Has Mr. Roscoe made you a preaching curate?  I helped Amshar at the
+Tanks."
+
+"One does not forget that.  Yet you pushed Amshar with your foot."
+
+"Did you expect me to kiss the black coward?  Then, I nursed Mr. Roscoe
+in his illness."
+
+"And before that?"
+
+"And before that I was born into the world, and grew to years of
+knowledge, and learned what fools we mortals be, and--and there--is that
+Mr. Devlin's big sawmill?"
+
+We had suddenly emerged on a shelf of the mountainside, and were looking
+down into the Long Cloud Valley.  It was a noble sight.  Far to the north
+were foothills covered with the glorious Norfolk pine, rising in steppes
+till they seemed to touch white plateaus of snow, which again billowed to
+glacier fields whose austere bosoms man's hand had never touched; and
+these suddenly lifted up huge, unapproachable shoulders, crowned with
+majestic peaks that took in their teeth the sun, the storm, and the
+whirlwinds of the north, never changing countenance from day to year and
+from year to age.
+
+Facing this long line of glory, running irregularly on towards that sea
+where Franklin and M'Clintock led their gay adventurers,--the bold
+ships,--was another shore, not so high or superior, but tall and sombre
+and warm, through whose endless coverts of pine there crept and idled the
+generous Chinook winds--the soothing breath of the friendly Pacific.
+Between these shores the Long Cloud River ran; now boisterous, now soft,
+now wallowing away through long channels, washing gorges always dark as
+though shaded by winter, and valleys always green as favoured by summer.
+Creeping along a lofty narrow path upon that farther shore was a mule
+train, bearing packs which would not be opened till, through the great
+passes of the mountain, they were spilled upon the floors of fort and
+post on the east side of the Rockies.
+
+Not far from where the mule train crept along was a great hole in the
+mountain-side, as though antique giants of the hills had tunnelled
+through to make themselves a home or to find the eternal secret of the
+mountains.  Near to this vast dark cavity was a hut--a mere playhouse,
+it seemed, so small was it, viewed from where we stood.  From the edge
+of a cliff just in front of this hut, there swung a long cable, which
+reached almost to the base of the shore beneath us; and, even as we
+looked, we saw what seemed a tiny bucket go swinging slowly down that
+strange hypotenuse.  We watched it till we saw it get to the end of its
+journey in the valley beneath, not far from the great mill to which we
+were bound.
+
+"How mysterious!" said Mrs. Falchion.  "What does it mean?  I never saw
+anything like that before.  What a wonderful thing!"
+
+Roscoe explained.  "Up there in that hut," he said, "there lives a man
+called Phil Boldrick.  He is a unique fellow, with a strange history.  He
+has been miner, sailor, woodsman, river-driver, trapper, salmon-fisher;
+--expert at the duties of each of these, persistent at none.  He has a
+taste for the ingenious and the unusual.  For a time he worked in Mr.
+Devlin's mill.  It was too tame for him.  He conceived the idea of
+supplying the valley with certain necessaries, by intercepting the mule
+trains as they passed across the hills, and getting them down to Viking
+by means of that cable.  The valley laughed at him; men said it was
+impossible.  He went to Mr. Devlin, and Mr. Devlin came to me.  I have,
+as you know, some knowledge of machinery and engineering.  I thought the
+thing feasible but expensive, and told Mr. Devlin so.  However, the
+ingenuity of the thing pleased Mr. Devlin, and, with that singular
+enterprise which in other directions has made him a rich man, he
+determined on its completion.  Between us we managed it.  Boldrick
+carries on his aerial railway with considerable success, as you see."
+
+"A singular man," said Mrs. Falchion.  "I should like to see him.  Come,
+sit down here and tell me all you know about him, will you not?"
+
+Roscoe assented.  I arranged a seat for us, and we all sat.
+
+Roscoe was about to begin, when Mrs. Falchion said, "Wait a minute.  Let
+us take in this scene first."
+
+We were silent.  After a moment I turned to Mrs. Falchion, and said: "It
+is beautiful, is it not?"
+
+She drew in a long breath, her eyes lighted up, and she said, with a
+strange abandon of gaiety: "Yes, it is delightful to live."
+
+It seemed so, in spite of the forebodings of my friend and my own
+uneasiness concerning him, Ruth Devlin, and Mrs. Falchion.  The place was
+all peace: a very monotony of toil and pleasure.  The heat drained
+through the valley back and forth in visible palpitations upon the roofs
+of the houses, the mills, and the vast piles of lumber: all these seemed
+breathing.  It looked a busy Arcady.  From beneath us life vibrated with
+the regularity of a pulse: distance gave a kind of delighted ease to
+toil.  Event appeared asleep.
+
+But when I look back now, after some years, at the experiences of that
+day, I am astonished by the running fire of events, which, unfortunately,
+were not all joy.
+
+As I write I can hear that keen wild singing of the saw come to us
+distantly, with a pleasant, weird elation.  The big mill hung above the
+river, its sides all open, humming with labour, as I had seen it many a
+time during my visit to Roscoe.  The sun beat in upon it, making a broad
+piazza of light about its sides.  Beyond it were pleasant shadows,
+through which men passed and repassed at their work.  Life was busy all
+about it.  Yet the picture was bold, open, and strong.  Great iron hands
+reached down into the water, clamped a massive log or huge timber,
+lightly drew it up the slide from the water, where, guided by the hand-
+spikes of the men, it was laid upon its cradle and carried slowly to the
+devouring teeth of the saws: there to be sliced through rib and bone in
+moist sandwiched layers, oozing the sweet sap of its fibre; and carried
+out again into the open to be drained to dry bones under the exhaust-
+pipes of the sun: piles upon piles; houses with wide chinks through which
+the winds wandered, looking for tenants and finding none.
+
+To the north were booms of logs, swilling in the current, waiting for
+their devourer.  Here and there were groups of river-drivers and their
+foremen, prying twisted heaps of logs from the rocks or the shore into
+the water.  Other groups of river-drivers were scattered upon the banks,
+lifting their huge red canoes high up on the platforms, the spring's and
+summer's work of river-driving done; while others lounged upon the grass,
+or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the Chinamen, or
+chaffing the Indian idling in the sun--a garish figure stoically watching
+the inroads of civilisation.  The town itself was squat but amiable:
+small houses and large huts; the only place of note and dignity, the new
+town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the big mill, and even by
+the two smaller ones flanking it north and south.
+
+But Viking was full of men who had breathed the strong life of the hills,
+had stolen from Nature some of her brawny strength, and set themselves up
+before her as though a man were as great as a mountain and as good a
+thing to see.  It was of such a man that Galt Roscoe was to tell us.  His
+own words I will not give, but will speak of Phil Boldrick as I remember
+him and as Roscoe described him to us.
+
+Of all the men in the valley, none was so striking as Phil Boldrick.
+Of all faces his was the most singular; of all characters his the most
+unique; of all men he was the most unlucky, save in one thing--the regard
+of his fellows.  Others might lay up treasures, not he; others lose money
+at gambling, not he--he never had much to lose.  But yet he did all
+things magniloquently.  The wave of his hand was expansive, his stride
+was swaying and decisive, his over-ruling, fraternal faculty was always
+in full swing.  Viking was his adopted child; so much so that a gentleman
+river-driver called it Philippi; and by that name it sometimes went, and
+continues still so among those who knew it in the old days.
+
+Others might have doubts as to the proper course to pursue under certain
+circumstances; it was not so with Phil.  They might argue a thing out
+orally, he did so mentally, and gave judgment on it orally.  He was
+final, not oracular.  One of his eyes was of glass, and blue; the other
+had an eccentricity, and was of a deep and meditative grey.  It was a
+wise and knowing eye.  It was trained to many things--like one servant in
+a large family.  One side of his face was solemn, because of the gay but
+unchanging blue eye, the other was gravely humourous, shrewdly playful.
+His fellow citizens respected him; so much so, that they intended to give
+him an office in the new-formed corporation; which means that he had
+courage and downrightness, and that the rough, straightforward gospel
+of the West was properly interpreted by him.
+
+If a stranger came to the place, Phil was sent first to reconnoitre; if
+any function was desirable, Phil was requested to arrange it; if justice
+was to be meted out, Phil's opinion had considerable weight--for he had
+much greater leisure than other more prosperous men; if a man was taken
+ill (this was in the days before a doctor came), Phil was asked to
+declare if he would "shy from the finish."
+
+I heard Roscoe more than once declare that Phil was as good as two
+curates to him.  Not that Phil was at all pious, nor yet possessed of
+those abstemious qualities in language and appetite by which good men are
+known; but he had a gift of civic virtue--important in a wicked world,
+and of unusual importance in Viking.  He had neither self-consciousness
+nor fear; and while not possessed of absolute tact in a social way, he
+had a knack of doing the right thing bluntly, or the wrong thing with an
+air of rightness.  He envied no man, he coveted nothing; had once or
+twice made other men's fortunes by prospecting, but was poor himself.
+And in all he was content, and loved life and Viking.
+
+Immediately after Roscoe had reached the mountains Phil had become his
+champion, declaring that there was not any reason why a man should not
+be treated sociably because he was a parson.  Phil had been a great
+traveller, as had many who settled at last in these valleys to the
+exciting life of the river: salmon-catching or driving logs.  He had
+lived for a time in Lower California and Mexico, and had given Roscoe the
+name of The Padre: which suited the genius and temper of the rude
+population.  And so it was that Roscoe was called The Padre by every one,
+though he did not look the character.
+
+As he told his story of Phil's life I could not help but contrast him
+with most of the clergymen I knew or had seen.  He had the admirable ease
+and tact of a cultured man of the world, and the frankness and warmth of
+a hearty nature, which had, however, some inherent strain of melancholy.
+Wherever I had gone with him I had noticed that he was received with
+good-humoured deference by his rough parishioners and others who were
+such only in the broadest sense.  Perhaps he would not have succeeded so
+well if he had worn clerical clothes.  As it was, of a week day, he could
+not be distinguished from any respectable layman.  The clerical uniform
+attracts women more than men, who, if they spoke truly, would resent it.
+Roscoe did not wear it, because he thought more of men than of function,
+of manliness than clothes; and though this sometimes got him into trouble
+with his clerical brethren who dearly love Roman collar, and coloured
+stole, and the range of ritual from a lofty intoning to the eastward
+position, he managed to live and himself be none the worse, while those
+who knew him were certainly the better.
+
+When Roscoe had finished his tale, Mrs. Falchion said: "Mr. Boldrick must
+be a very interesting man;" and her eyes wandered up to the great hole in
+the mountain-side, and lingered there.  "As I said, I must meet him," she
+added; "men of individuality are rare."  Then: "That great 'hole in the
+wall' is, of course, a natural formation."
+
+"Yes," said Roscoe.  "Nature seems to have made it for Boldrick.  He uses
+it as a storehouse."
+
+"Who watches it while he is away?" she said.  "There is no door to the
+place, of course."
+
+Roscoe smiled enigmatically.  "Men do not steal up here: that is the
+unpardonable crime; any other may occur and go unpunished; not it."
+
+The thought seemed to strike Mrs. Falchion.  "I might have known!" she
+said.  "It is the same in the South Seas among the natives--Samoans,
+Tongans, Fijians, and others.  You can--as you know, Mr. Roscoe,"--her
+voice had a subterranean meaning,--" travel from end to end of those
+places, and, until the white man corrupts them, never meet with a case of
+stealing; you will find them moral too in other ways until the white man
+corrupts them.  But sometimes the white man pays for it in the end."
+
+Her last words were said with a kind of dreaminess, as though they had no
+purpose; but though she sat now idly looking into the valley beneath, I
+could see that her eyes had a peculiar glance, which was presently turned
+on Roscoe, then withdrawn again.  On him the effect was so far disturbing
+that he became a little pale, but I noticed that he met her glance
+unflinchingly and then looked at me, as if to see in how far I had been
+affected by her speech.  I think I confessed to nothing in my face.
+
+Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us.  She had, I fancy,
+scarcely heard half that had been said.  Roscoe said to her presently:
+"You like it, do you not?"
+
+"Like it?" she said.  "I never saw anything so wonderful."
+
+"And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there," rejoined
+Mrs. Falchion.  "Nature is never complete without man.  All that would
+be splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick's cable,
+but it would not be perfect: it needs man--Phil Boldrick and Company in
+the foreground.  Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and
+sorrowful.  You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and
+the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is.  It always
+seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley.  There is
+a tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and
+built an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl--though no one ever knew
+quite why: for there the tradition ends."
+
+I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe
+remained perfectly still.  It seemed to me that I was little by little
+getting the threads of his story.  That there was a native girl; that the
+girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way--innocently I
+dared hope--connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key to the
+mystery, I was certain.  That it was in her mind to use the mystery,
+I was also certain.  But for what end I could not tell.  What had passed
+between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed
+evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the 'Fulvia', had
+again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of pique or
+anger, or because she really cared for him.  It might be that she cared.
+
+She added after a moment: "Add man to nature, and it stops sulking: which
+goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at all."
+
+She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told
+me once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set her
+laughing at herself, even when it was greatest.  It was this
+characteristic which made her conversation very striking, it was so
+sharply contrasted in its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against
+the most serious and acute statements.  One never knew when she would
+turn her own or her interlocutor's gravity into mirth.
+
+Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: "If I
+were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights
+were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined.  There
+is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the
+thing.  Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less
+intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr.
+Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll;
+or that The Padre there--how amusing they should call him that!--should
+cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I do
+not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of
+immortalising himself."
+
+Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her
+words by a wave of his hand.  I also was silent for a moment; for there
+had come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the scene,
+something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the 'Fulvia'.
+"Marmion," said he, "when everything at sea appears so absolutely
+beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you're itching to write
+poetry, look out.  There's trouble ahead.  It's only the pretty pause in
+the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles
+things about.  When I've been on the bridge," he continued, "of a night
+that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing
+his silent overture.  Don't you take in the twaddle about God sending
+thunderbolts; it's that old war-horse down below.--And then I've kept a
+sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts
+would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch us
+broadsides.  And what's gospel for sea is good for land, and you'll find
+it so, my son."
+
+I was possessed of the same feeling now as I looked at the scene before
+us, and I suppose I seemed moody, for immediately Mrs. Falchion said:
+"Why, now my words have come true; the scene can be made perfect.  Pray
+step down to the valley, Dr. Marmion, and complete the situation, for you
+are trying to seem serious, and it is irresistibly amusing--and
+professional, I suppose; one must not forget that you teach the young
+'sawbones' how to saw."
+
+I was piqued, annoyed.  I said, though I admit it was not cleverly said:
+"Mrs. Falchion, I am willing to go and complete that situation, if you
+will go with me; for you would provide the tragedy--plenty of it; there
+would be the full perihelion of elements; your smile is the incarnation
+of the serious."
+
+She looked at me full in the eyes.  "Now that," she said, "is a very good
+'quid pro quo'--is that right?--and I have no doubt that it is more or
+less true; and for a doctor to speak truth and a professor to be under
+stood is a matter for angels.  And I actually believe that, in time, you
+will be free from priggishness, and become a brilliant conversationalist;
+and--suppose we wander on to our proper places in the scene. . . .
+Besides, I want to see that strange man, Mr. Boldrick."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE PATH OF THE EAGLE
+
+We travelled slowly down the hillside into the village, and were about to
+turn towards the big mill when we saw Mr. Devlin and Ruth riding towards
+us.  We halted and waited for them.  Mr. Devlin was introduced to Mrs.
+Falchion by his daughter, who was sweetly solicitous concerning Mrs.
+Falchion and Justine Caron, and seemed surprised at finding them abroad
+after the accident of the day before.  Ruth said that her father and
+herself had just come from the summer hotel, where they had gone to call
+upon Mrs. Falchion.  Mrs. Falchion heartily acknowledged the courtesy.
+She seemed to be playing no part, but was apparently grateful all round;
+yet I believe that even already Ruth had caught at something in her
+presence threatening Roscoe's peace; whilst she, from the beginning, had,
+with her more trained instincts, seen the relations between the clergyman
+and his young parishioner.--But what had that to do with her?
+
+Between Roscoe and Ruth there was the slightest constraint, and I thought
+that it gave a troubled look to the face of the girl.  Involuntarily, the
+eyes of both were attracted to Mrs. Falchion.  I believe in that moment
+there was a kind of revelation among the three.  While I talked to Mr.
+Devlin I watched them, standing a little apart, Justine Caron with us.
+It must have been a painful situation for them; to the young girl because
+a shadow was trailing across the light of her first love; to Roscoe
+because the shadow came out of his past; to Mrs. Falchion because she was
+the shadow.  I felt that trouble was at hand.  In this trouble I knew
+that I was to play a part; for, if Roscoe had his secret and Mrs.
+Falchion had the key to it, I also held a secret which, in case of
+desperate need, I should use.  I did not wish to use it, for though
+it was mine it was also another's.  I did not like the look in Mrs.
+Falchion's eyes as she glanced at Ruth: I was certain that she resented
+Roscoe's regard for Ruth and Ruth's regard for Roscoe; but, up to that
+moment, I had not thought it possible that she cared for him deeply.
+Once she had influenced me, but she had never cared for me.
+
+I could see a change in her.  Out of it came that glance at Ruth, which
+seemed to me the talon-like hatred that shot from the eyes of Goneril and
+Regan: and I was sure that if she loved Roscoe there would be mad trouble
+for him and for the girl.  Heretofore she had been passionless, but there
+was a dormant power in her which had only to be wickedly aroused to wreck
+her own and others' happiness.  Hers was one of those volcanic natures,
+defying calculation and ordinary conceptions of life; having the fullest
+capacity for all the elementary passions--hatred, love, cruelty, delight,
+loyalty, revolt, jealousy.  She had never from her birth until now felt
+love for any one.  She had never been awakened.  Even her affection for
+her father had been dutiful rather than instinctive.  She had provoked
+love, but had never given it.  She had been self-centred, compulsive,
+unrelenting.  She had unmoved seen and let her husband go to his doom--
+it was his doom and death so far as she knew.
+
+Yet, as I thought of this, I found myself again admiring her.  She was
+handsome, independent, distinctly original, and possessing capacity for
+great things.  Besides, so far, she had not been actively vindictive--
+simply passively indifferent to the sufferings of others.  She seemed to
+regard results more than means.  All she did not like she could empty
+into the mill of the destroying gods: just as General Grant poured
+hundreds of thousands of men into the valley of the James, not thinking
+of lives but victory, not of blood but triumph.  She too, even in her
+cruelty, seemed to have a sense of wild justice which disregarded any
+incidental suffering.
+
+I could see that Mr. Devlin was attracted by her, as every man had been
+who had ever met her; for, after all, man is but a common slave to
+beauty: virtue he respects, but beauty is man's valley of suicide.
+Presently she turned to Mr. Devlin, having, as it seemed to me, made
+Roscoe and Ruth sufficiently uncomfortable.  With that cheerful
+insouciance which was always possible to her on the most trying
+occasions, she immediately said, as she had often said to me, that she
+had come to Mr. Devlin to be amused for the morning, perhaps the whole
+day.  It was her way, her selfish way, to make men her slaves.
+
+Mr. Devlin gallantly said that he was at her disposal, and with a kind of
+pride added that there was plenty in the valley which would interest her;
+for he was a frank, bluff man, who would as quickly have spoken
+disparagingly of what belonged to himself, if it was not worthy,
+as have praised it.
+
+"Where shall we go first?" he said.  "To the mill?"
+
+"To the mill, by all means," Mrs. Falchion replied; "I have never been in
+a great saw-mill, and I believe this is very fine.  Then," she added,
+with a little wave of the hand towards the cable running down from Phil
+Boldrick's eyrie in the mountains, "then I want to see all that cable can
+do--all, remember."
+
+Mr. Devlin laughed.  "Well, it hasn't many tricks, but what it does it
+does cleverly, thanks to The Padre."
+
+"Oh yes," responded Mrs. Falchion, still looking at the cable; "The
+Padre, I know, is very clever."
+
+"He is more than clever," bluffly replied Mr. Devlin, who was not keen
+enough to see the faint irony in her tones.
+
+"Yes," responded Mrs. Falchion in the same tone of voice, "he is more
+than clever.  I have been told that he was once very brave.  I have been
+told that once in the South Seas he did his country a great service."
+
+She paused.  I could see Ruth's eyes glisten and her face suffuse, for
+though she read the faint irony in the tone, still she saw that the tale
+which Mrs. Falchion was evidently about to tell, must be to Galt Roscoe's
+credit.  Mrs. Falchion turned idly upon Ruth and saw the look in her
+face.  An almost imperceptible smile came upon her lips.  She looked
+again at the cable and Phil Boldrick's eyrie, which seemed to have a
+wonderful attraction for her.  Not turning away from it, save now and
+then to glance indolently at Mr. Devlin or Ruth, and once enigmatically
+at myself, she said:
+
+"Once upon a time--that is the way, I believe, to begin a pretty story--
+there were four men-of-war idling about a certain harbour of Samoa.  One
+of the vessels was the flag-ship, with its admiral on board.  On one of
+the other vessels was an officer who had years before explored this
+harbour.  It was the hurricane season.  He advised the admiral not to
+enter the harbour, for the indications foretold a gale, and himself was
+not sure that his chart was in all respects correct, for the harbour had
+been hurriedly explored and sounded.  But the admiral gave orders, and
+they sailed in.
+
+"That day a tremendous hurricane came crying down upon Samoa.  It swept
+across the island, levelled forests of cocoa palms, battered villages to
+pieces, caught that little fleet in the harbour, and played with it in a
+horrible madness.  To right and left were reefs, behind was the shore,
+with a monstrous surf rolling in; before was a narrow passage.  One
+vessel made its way out--on it was the officer who had surveyed the
+harbour.  In the open sea there was safety.  He brought his vessel down
+the coast a little distance, put a rope about him and in the wild surf
+made for the shore.  I believe he could have been court-martialled for
+leaving his ship, but he was a man who had taken a great many risks of
+one kind and another in his time.  It was one chance out of a hundred;
+but he made it--he got to the shore, travelled down to the harbour where
+the men-of-war were careening towards the reefs, unable to make the
+passage out, and once again he tied a rope about him and plunged into the
+surf to try for the admiral's ship.  He got there terribly battered.
+They tell how a big wave lifted him and landed him upon the quarter-deck
+just as big waves are not expected to do.  Well, like the hero in any
+melodrama of the kind, he very prettily piloted monsieur the admiral and
+his fleet out to the open sea."
+
+She paused, smiling in an inscrutable sort of way, then turned and said
+with a sudden softness in her voice, though still with the air of one who
+wished not to be taken with too great a seriousness: "And, ladies and
+gentlemen, the name of the ship that led the way was the 'Porcupine'; and
+the name of the hero was Commander Galt Roscoe, R.N.; and 'of such is the
+kingdom of heaven!'"
+
+There was silence for a moment.  The tale had been told adroitly, and
+with such tact as to words that Roscoe could not take offence--need not,
+indeed, as he did not, I believe, feel any particular self-consciousness.
+I am not sure but he was a little glad that such evidence should have
+been given at the moment, when a kind of restraint had come between him
+and Ruth, by one who he had reason to think was not wholly his friend
+might be his enemy.  It was a kind of offset to his premonitions and to
+the peril over which he might stumble at any moment.
+
+To me the situation was almost inexplicable; but the woman herself was
+inexplicable: at this moment the evil genius of us all, at that doing
+us all a kind of crude, superior justice.  I was the first to speak.
+
+"Roscoe," I said, "I never had heard of this, although I remember the
+circumstance as told in the newspapers.  But I am glad and proud that I
+have a friend with such a record."
+
+"And, only think," said Mrs. Falchion, "he actually was not court-
+martialled for abandoning his ship to save an admiral and a fleet.  But
+the ways of the English Admiralty are wonderful.  They go out of their
+way to avoid a court-martial sometimes, and they go out of their way to
+establish it sometimes."
+
+By this time we had started towards the mill.  Roscoe walked ahead with
+Ruth Devlin.  Mr. Devlin, Mrs. Falchion, Justine Caron and myself walked
+together.
+
+Mrs. Falchion presently continued, talking, as it seemed to me, at the
+back of Roscoe's head:
+
+"I have known the Admiralty to force an officer to resign the navy
+because he had married a native wife.  But I never knew the Admiralty to
+court-martial an officer because he did not marry a native wife whom he
+OUGHT to have married: but, as I said, the ways of the Admiralty are past
+admiration."
+
+I could see Roscoe's hand clinch at his side, and presently he said over
+his shoulder at her: "Your memory and your philosophy are as wonderful
+as the Admiralty are inscrutable."
+
+She laughed.  "You have not lost your old gift of retort," she said.
+"You are still amusing."
+
+"Well, come," said Mr. Devlin cheerfully, "let's see if there isn't
+something even more amusing than Mr. Roscoe in Viking.  I will show you,
+Mrs. Falchion, the biggest saw that ever ate the heart out of a Norfolk
+pine."
+
+At the mill Mrs. Falchion was interested.  She asked questions concerning
+the machinery which mightily pleased Mr. Devlin, they were so apt and
+intelligent; and herself assisted in giving an immense log to the teeth
+of the largest saw, which, with its six upright blades, ate, and was
+never satisfied.  She stooped and ran her ungloved hand into the sawdust,
+as sweet before the sun has dried it as the scent of a rose.  The rich
+smell of the fresh-cut lumber filled the air, and suggested all kinds of
+remote and pleasant things.  The industry itself is one of the first that
+comes with the invasion of new territory, and makes one think of man's
+first work in the world: to fell the tree and till the soil.  It is
+impossible to describe that fierce, jubilant song of the saw, which even
+when we were near was never shrill or shrieking: never drowning our
+voices, but vibrant and delightful.  To Mrs. Falchion it was new; she was
+impressed.
+
+"I have seen," she said to Mr. Devlin, "all sorts of enterprises, but
+never anything like this.  It all has a kind of rough music.  It is
+enjoyable."
+
+Mr. Devlin beamed.  "I have just added something to the mill that will
+please you," he said.
+
+She looked interested.  We all gathered round.  I stood between Mrs.
+Falchion and Ruth Devlin, and Roscoe beside Justine Caron.
+
+"It is the greatest mill-whistle in the country," he continued.  "It will
+be heard from twelve to twenty-five miles, according to the condition of
+the atmosphere.  I want big things all round, and this is a masterpiece,
+I guess.  Now, I'll let you hear it if you like.  I didn't expect to use
+it until to-night at nine o'clock, when, also for the first time, I am to
+light the mills by electricity; a thing that's not been attempted yet in
+any saw-mill on the Continent.  We're going to work night and day for a
+couple of months."
+
+"This is all very wonderful.  And are you indebted to Mr. Roscoe in these
+things too?--Everybody seems to need him here."
+
+"Well," said the mill-owner, laughing, "the whistle is my own.  It's the
+sort of thing I would propose--to blow my trumpet, as it were; but the
+electricity and the first experiments in it I owe to The Padre."
+
+"As I thought," she said, and turned to Roscoe.  "I remember," she added,
+"that you had an electrical search-light on the 'Porcupine', and that you
+were fond of electricity.  Do you ever use search-lights here?  I should
+think they might be of use in your parish.  Then, for a change, you could
+let the parish turn it upon you, for the sake of contrast and
+edification."
+
+For the moment I was exceedingly angry.  Her sarcasm was well veiled,
+but I could feel the sardonic touch beneath the smiling surface.  This
+innuendo seemed so gratuitous.  I said to her, almost beneath my breath,
+that none of the others could hear: "How womanly!"
+
+She did no more than lift her eyebrows in acknowledgment, and went on
+talking lightly to Mr. Devlin.  Roscoe was cool, but I could see now in
+his eyes a kind of smouldering anger; which was quite to my wish.
+I hoped he would be meek no longer.
+
+Presently Ruth Devlin said: "Would it not be better to wait till to-
+night, when the place is lighted, before the whistle is blown?  Then you
+can get a better first impression.  And if Mrs. Falchion will come over
+to our home at Sunburst, we will try and amuse her for the rest of the
+day--that is, after she has seen all here."
+
+Mrs. Falchion seemed struck by the frankness of the girl, and for an
+instant debated, but presently said: "No, thank you.  When all is seen
+now, I will go to the hotel, and then will join you all here in the
+evening, if that seems feasible.  Perhaps Dr. Marmion will escort me
+here.  Mr. Roscoe, of course, has other duties."
+
+"I shall be happy," I said, maliciously smiling, "to guide you to the
+sacrifice of the saw."
+
+She was not disturbed.  She touched Mr. Devlin's arm, and, looking archly
+at him, nodded backwards towards me.  "'Beware the anaconda!'" she said.
+
+It was impossible not to be amused; her repartee was always so
+unrestrained.  She disarmed one by what would have been, in a man,
+insolent sang-froid: in her it was piquancy, daring.
+
+Presently she added: "But if we are to have no colossal whistle and no
+electric light till evening, there is one thing I must have: and that is
+your remarkable Phil Boldrick, who seems to hold you all in the palm of
+his hand, and lives up there like a god on his Olympus."
+
+"Well, suppose you go and call on him," said Roscoe, with a touch of dry
+humour, his eye on the cable that reached to Boldrick's perch.
+
+She saw her opportunity, and answered promptly: "Yes, I will call on him
+immediately,"--here she turned towards Ruth,--"if Miss Devlin and
+yourself will go with me."
+
+"Nonsense," interposed Mr. Devlin.  "Besides, the cage will only hold two
+easily.  Anyhow, it's absurd."
+
+"Why is it absurd?  Is there any danger?" queried Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"Not unless there's an idiot at the machinery."
+
+"I should expect you to manage it," she persisted.
+
+"But no woman has ever done it."
+
+"I will make the record."  And, turning to Ruth: "You are not afraid?"
+
+"No, I am not afraid," said the girl bravely, though she acknowledged to
+me afterwards that while she was not afraid of anything where her own
+skill was called in question, such as mountain-climbing, or even puma-
+hunting, she did not joyfully anticipate swinging between heaven and
+earth on that incline.  "I will go," she added,  "if my father will let
+me. . . .  May I?" she continued, turning to him.
+
+Perhaps something of the father's pride came up in him, perhaps he had
+just got some suspicion that between his daughter and Mrs. Falchion there
+was a subterranean rivalry.  However it was, he gave a quick, quizzical
+look at both of them, then glanced at Roscoe, and said: "I'll make no
+objections, if Ruth would like to introduce you to Phil.  And, as Mrs.
+Falchion suggested, I'll 'turn the crank.'"
+
+I could see that Roscoe had a bad moment.  But presently he appeared to
+me perfectly willing that Ruth should go.  Maybe he was as keen that she
+should not appear at a disadvantage beside Mrs. Falchion as was her
+father.
+
+A signal was given, and the cage came slowly down the cable to the mill.
+We could see Boldrick, looking little bigger than a child at the other
+end, watching our movements.  At the last moment Mr. Devlin and Roscoe
+seemed apprehensive, but the women were cool and determined.  I noticed
+Mrs. Falchion look at Ruth curiously once or twice after they entered the
+cage, and before they started, and what she saw evidently gave her a
+higher opinion of the girl, for she laid her hand on Ruth's arm suddenly,
+and said: "We will show these mere men what nerve is."
+
+Ruth nodded, then 'bon voyage' was said, and the signal was given.  The
+cage ascended at first quickly, then more slowly, swaying up and down a
+little on the cable, and climbing higher and higher through the air to
+the mountain-side.  What Boldrick thought when he saw the two ascending
+towards him, he expressed to Mr. Devlin later in the day in vigorous
+language: what occurred at his but Ruth Devlin told me afterwards.  When
+the cage reached him, he helped the two passengers out, and took them to
+his hut.  With Ruth he had always been a favourite, and he welcomed her
+with admiring and affectionate respect.
+
+"Never b'lieved you could have done it, Miss Devlin--never!  Not but what
+I knew you weren't afraid of anything on the earth below, or the waters
+under the earth; but when you get swinging there over the world, and not
+high enough to get a hold on heaven, it makes you feel as if things was
+droppin' away from you like.  But, by gracious! you did it like an eagle--
+you and your friend."
+
+By this time he was introduced, and at the name of Mrs. Falchion,
+he cocked his head, and looked quizzically, as if trying to remember
+something, then drew his hand once or twice across his forehead.
+After a moment he said: "Strange, now, ma'am, how your name strikes me.
+It isn't a common name, and I've heerd it before somewhere--somewhere.
+It isn't your face that I've seen before--for I'd have remembered it if
+it was a thousand years ago," he added admiringly.  "But I've heard some
+one use it; and I can't tell where."
+
+She looked curiously at him, and said: "Don't try to remember, and it
+will come to you in good time.  But show us everything about your place
+before we go back, won't you, please?"
+
+He showed them his hut, where he lived, quite alone.  It was supplied
+with bare necessaries, and with a counter, behind which were cups and a
+few bottles.  In reference to this, Boldrick said: "Temperance drinks for
+the muleteers, tobacco and tea and sugar and postage stamps and things.
+They don't gargle their throats with anything stronger than coffee at
+this tavern."
+
+Then he took them to the cave in which puma, bear, and wapiti skins were
+piled, together with a few stores and the kits of travellers who had left
+their belongings in Boldrick's keeping till they should come again.
+After Mrs. Falchion and Ruth had seen all, they came out upon the
+mountain-side and waved their handkerchiefs to us, who were still
+watching from below.  Then Boldrick hoisted a flag on his hut, which he
+used on gala occasions, to celebrate the event, and, not content with
+this, fired a 'feu de joie', managed in this way:  He took two anvils
+used by the muleteers and expressmen to shoe their animals, and placed
+one on the other, putting powder between.  Then Mrs. Falchion thrust a
+red-hot iron into the powder, and an explosion ensued.  I was for a
+moment uneasy, but Mr. Devlin reassured me, and instantly a shrill
+whistle from the little mills answered the salute.
+
+Just before they got into the cage, Mrs. Falchion turned to Boldrick,
+and said: "You have not been trying to remember where you heard my name
+before?  Well, can you not recall it now?"
+
+Boldrick shook his head.  "Perhaps you will recall it before I see you
+again," she said.
+
+They started.  As they did so, Mrs. Falchion said suddenly, looking at
+Boldrick keenly: "Were you ever in the South Seas?"
+
+Boldrick stood for an instant open-mouthed, and then exclaimed loudly,
+as the cage swung down the incline: "By Jingo!  No, ma'am, I was never
+there, but I had a pal who come from Samoa."
+
+She called back at him: "Tell me of him when we meet again.  What was his
+name?"
+
+They were too far down the cable now for Boldrick's reply to reach them
+distinctly.  The descent seemed even more adventurous than the ascent,
+and, in spite of myself, I could not help a thrill of keen excitement.
+But they were both smiling when the cage reached us, and both had a very
+fine colour.
+
+"A delightful journey, a remarkable reception, and a very singular man
+is your Mr. Boldrick," said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"Yes," replied Mr. Devlin, "you'll know Boldrick a long time before you
+find his limits.  He is about the most curious character I ever knew, and
+does the most curious things.  But straight--straight as a die, Mrs.
+Falchion!"
+
+"I fancy that Mr. Boldrick and I would be very good friends indeed," said
+Mrs. Falchion; "and I purpose visiting him again.  It is quite probable
+that we shall find we have had mutual acquaintances."  She looked at
+Roscoe meaningly as she said this, but he was occupied with Ruth.
+
+"You were not afraid?" Roscoe said to Ruth.  "Was it not a strange
+sensation?"
+
+"Frankly, at first I was a little afraid, because the cage swings on the
+cable, and it makes you uncomfortable.  But I enjoyed it before we got to
+the end."
+
+Mrs. Falchion turned to Mr. Devlin.  "I find plenty here to amuse me,"
+she said, "and I am glad I came.  To-night I want to go up that cable and
+call on Mr. Boldrick again, and see the mills and the electric light, and
+hear your whistle, from up there.  Then, of course, you must show us the
+mill working at night, and afterwards--may I ask it?--you must all come
+and have supper with me at the summer hotel."
+
+Ruth dropped her eyes.  I saw she did not wish to go.  Fortunately
+Mr. Devlin extricated her.  "I'm afraid that will be impossible,
+Mrs. Falchion," he said: "much obliged to you all the same.  But I am
+going to be at the mill pretty near all night, and shouldn't be able
+to go, and I don't want Ruth to go without me."
+
+"Then it must be another time," said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"Oh, whenever it's convenient for Ruth, after a day or two, I'll be ready
+and glad.  But I tell you what: if you want to see something fine, you
+must go down as soon as possible to Sunburst.  We live there, you know,
+not here at Viking.  It's funny, too, because, you see, there's a feud
+between Viking and Sunburst--we are all river-men and mill-hands at
+Viking, and they're all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst.
+By rights I ought to live here, but when I started I thought I'd build my
+mills at Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there.  My wife and the
+girls got attached to the place, and though the mills were built at
+Viking, and I made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend my
+shekels there.  I guess if I didn't happen to live at Sunburst, people
+would be trailing their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other day
+between these two towns.  But that's neither here nor there.  Take my
+advice, Mrs. Falchion, and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers
+at work, both day and night.  It is about the biggest thing in the way
+of natural picturesqueness that you'll see--outside my mills.  Indians,
+half-breeds, white men, Chinamen--they are all at it in weirs and cages,
+or in the nets, and spearing by torch-light!--Don't you think I would do
+to run a circus, Mrs. Falchion?--Stand at the door, and shout: 'Here's
+where you get the worth of your money'?"
+
+Mrs. Falchion laughed.  "I am sure you and I will be good friends; you
+are amusing.  And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of
+trying to live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion--and The
+Padre."
+
+I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety.  It had almost a kind
+of feverishness--as if she relished fully the position she held towards
+Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I think
+was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe's old
+allegiance.  That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would
+never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus in
+the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment, one
+of the principal actors--from which position I had declined one day when
+humiliated before Mrs. Falchion on the 'Fulvia'.  Boyd Madras was in my
+mind.
+
+After a few minutes we parted, agreeing to meet again in the valley in
+the evening.  I had promised, as Mrs. Falchion had suggested, to escort
+her and Justine Caron from the summer hotel to the mill.  Roscoe had
+duties at both Viking and Sunburst and would not join us until we all met
+in the evening.  Mr. Devlin and Ruth rode away towards Sunburst.  Mrs.
+Falchion, Justine, and myself travelled slowly up the hillside, talking
+chiefly upon the events of the morning.  Mrs. Falchion appeared to
+admire greatly the stalwart character of Mr. Devlin; in a few swift,
+complimentary words disposed of Ruth; and then made many inquiries
+concerning Roscoe's work, my own position, and the length of my stay
+in the mountains; and talked upon many trivial matters, never once
+referring--as it seemed to me, purposely--to our past experiences on
+the 'Fulvia', nor making any inquiry concerning any one except Belle
+Treherne.
+
+She showed no surprise when I told her that I expected to marry Miss
+Treherne.  She congratulated me with apparent frankness, and asked for
+Miss Treherne's address, saying she would write to her.  As soon as she
+had left Roscoe's presence she had dropped all enigmatical words and
+phrases, and, during this hour I was with her, was the tactful,
+accomplished woman of the world, with the one present object: to make her
+conversation agreeable, and to keep things on the surface.  Justine Caron
+scarcely spoke during the whole of our walk, although I addressed myself
+to her frequently.  But I could see that she watched Mrs. Falchion's face
+curiously; and I believe that at this time her instinct was keener by far
+to read what was in Mrs. Falchion's mind than my own, though I knew much
+more of the hidden chain of events connecting Mrs. Falchion's life and
+Galt Roscoe's.
+
+I parted from them at the door of the hotel, made my way down to Roscoe's
+house at the ravine, and busied myself for the greater part of the day in
+writing letters, and reading on the coping.  About sunset I called for
+Mrs. Falchion, and found her and Justine Caron ready and waiting.  There
+was nothing eventful in our talk as we came down the mountain-side
+towards Viking--Justine Caron's presence prevented that.  It was dusk
+when we reached the valley.  As yet the mills were all dark.  The only
+lights visible were in the low houses lining the banks of the river.
+Against the mountainside there seemed to hang one bunch of flame like a
+star, large, red, and weird.  It was a torch burning in front of Phil
+Boldrick's hut.  We made our way slowly to the mill, and found Mr.
+Devlin, Ruth, and Roscoe, with Ruth's sister, and one or two other
+friends, expecting us.
+
+"Well," said Mr. Devlin heartily, "I have kept the show waiting for you.
+The house is all dark, but I guess you'll see a transformation scene
+pretty quick.  Come out," he continued, "and let us get the front seats.
+They are all stalls here; nobody has a box except Boldrick, and it is up
+in the flies."
+
+"Mr. Devlin," said Mrs. Falchion, "I purpose to see this show not only
+from the stalls, but from the box in the flies.  Therefore, during the
+first act, I shall be here in front of the foot-lights.  During the
+second act I shall be aloft like Tom Bowling--"
+
+"In other words--" began Mr. Devlin.
+
+"In other words," added Mrs. Falchion, "I am going to see the valley and
+hear your great horn blow from up there!"  She pointed towards the star
+in front of Phil's hut.
+
+"All right," said Mr. Devlin; "but you will excuse me if I say that I
+don't particularly want anybody to see this performance from where Tom
+Bowling bides."
+
+We left the office and went out upon the platform, a little distance from
+the mill.  Mr. Devlin gave a signal, touched a wire, and immediately it
+seemed as if the whole valley was alight.  The mill itself was in a blaze
+of white.  It was transfigured--a fairy palace, just as the mud barges in
+the Suez Canal had been transformed by the search-light of the 'Fulvia'.
+For the moment, in the wonder of change from darkness to light, the
+valley became the picture of a dream.  Every man was at his post in the
+mill, and in an instant work was going on as we had seen it in the
+morning.  Then, all at once, there came a great roar, as it were, from
+the very heart of the mill--a deep diapason, dug out of the throat of the
+hills: the big whistle.
+
+"It sounds mournful--like a great animal in pain," said Mrs. Falchion.
+"You might have got one more cheerful."
+
+"Wait till it gets tuned up," said Mr. Devlin.  "It hasn't had a chance
+to get the burs out of its throat.  It will be very fine as soon as the
+engine-man knows how to manage it."
+
+"Yes," said Ruth, interposing, "a little toning down would do it good--
+it is shaking the windows in your office; feel this platform tremble!"
+
+"Well, I bargained for a big whistle and I've got it: and I guess they'll
+know if ever there's a fire in the town!"  Just as he said this, Roscoe
+gave a cry and pointed.
+
+We all turned, and saw a sight that made Ruth Devlin cover her face with
+her hands and Mrs. Falchion stand horror-stricken.  There, coming down
+the cable with the speed of lightning, was the cage.  In it was a man--
+Phil Boldrick.  With a cry and a smothered oath, Mr. Devlin sprang
+towards the machinery, Roscoe with him.  There was nobody near it, but
+they saw a boy whose duty it was that night to manage the cable, running
+towards it.  Roscoe was the first to reach the lever; but it was too
+late.  He partially stopped the cage, but only partially.  It came with
+a dull, sickening thud to the ground, and Phil Boldrick--Phil Boldrick's
+broken, battered body--was thrown out.
+
+A few minutes later Boldrick was lying in Mr. Devlin's office.
+
+Ill luck for Viking in the hour of her success.  Phil's shattered hulk is
+drifting.  The masts have gone by the board, the pilot from the captain's
+side.  Only the man's "unconquerable soul" is on the bridge, watching the
+craft dip at the bow till the waters, their sport out, should hugely
+swallow it.
+
+We were all gathered round.  Phil had asked to see the lad who, by
+neglecting the machinery for a moment, had wrecked his life.  "My boy,"
+he said, "you played an ugly game.  It was a big mistake.  I haven't any
+grudge agen you, but be glad I'm not one that'd haunt you for your cussed
+foolishness. . . .  There, now, I feel better; that's off my mind!"
+
+"If you're wanting to show remorse or anything," he continued, "there's
+my friend, Mr. Roscoe, The Padre--he's all right, you understand!--Are
+you there? . . .  Why don't you speak?"  He stretched out his hand.
+The lad took it, but he could not speak: he held it and sobbed.
+
+Then Phil understood.  His brow wrinkled with a sudden trouble.  He said:
+"There, never mind.  I'm dying, but it isn't what I expected.  It doesn't
+smart nor tear much; not more than river-rheumatism.  P'r'aps I wouldn't
+mind it at all if I could see."
+
+For Phil was entirely blind now.  The accident had destroyed his
+remaining eye.  Being blind, he had already passed that first corridor
+of death--darkness.  Roscoe stooped over him, took his hand, and spoke
+quietly to him.  Phil knew the voice, and said with a faint smile: "Do
+you think they'd plant me with municipal honours--honours to pardners?"
+
+"We'll see to that, Phil," said Mr. Devlin from behind the clergyman.
+
+Phil recognised the voice.  "You think that nobody'll kick at making it
+official?"
+
+"Not one, Phil."
+
+"And maybe they wouldn't mind firin' a volley--Lights out, as it were:
+and blow the big whistle?  It'd look sociable, wouldn't it?"
+
+"There'll be a volley and the whistle, Phil--if you have to go," said Mr.
+Devlin.
+
+There was a silence, then the reply came musingly: "I guess I hev to go.
+. . . I'd hev liked to see the corporation runnin' longer, but maybe
+I can trust the boys."
+
+A river-driver at the door said in a deep voice: "By the holy! yes, you
+can trust us."
+
+"Thank you kindly. . . .  If it doesn't make any difference to the
+rest, I'd like to be alone with The Padre for a little--not for religion,
+you understand, for I go as I stayed, and I hev my views,--but for
+private business."
+
+Slowly, awkwardly, the few river-drivers passed out--Devlin and Mrs.
+Falchion and Ruth and I with them--for I could do nothing now for him--he
+was broken all to pieces.  Roscoe told me afterwards what happened then.
+
+"Padre," he said to Roscoe, "are we alone?"
+
+"Quite alone, Phil."
+
+"Well, I hevn't any crime to tell, and the business isn't weighty; but I
+hev a pal at Danger Mountain--"  He paused.
+
+"Yes, Phil?"
+
+"He's low down in s'ciety; but he's square, and we've had the same
+blanket for many a day together.  I crossed him first on the Panama
+level.  I was broke--stony broke.  He'd been shipwrecked, and was ditto.
+He'd been in the South Seas; I in Nicaragua.  We travelled up through
+Mexico and Arizona, and then through California to the Canadian Rockies.
+At last we camped at Danger Mountain, a Hudson's Bay fort, and stayed
+there.  It was a roughish spot, but we didn't mind that.  Every place
+isn't Viking.  One night we had a difference--not a quarrel, mind you,
+but a difference.  He was for lynchin' a fellow called Piccadilly,
+a swell that'd come down in the world, bringin' the worst tricks of
+his tribe with him.  He'd never been a bony fidy gentleman--just an
+imitation.  He played sneak with the daughter of Five Fingers, an Injin
+chief.  We'd set store by that girl.  There wasn't one of us rough nuts
+but respected her.  She was one of the few beautiful Injin women I've
+seen.  Well, it come out that Piccadilly had ruined her, and one morning
+she was found dead.  It drove my pal well-nigh crazy.  Not that she was
+anything partik'ler to him; but the thing took hold of him unusual."
+
+Now that I know all concerning Roscoe's past life, I can imagine that
+this recital must have been swords at his heart.  The whole occurrence is
+put down minutely in his diary, but there is no word of comment upon it.
+
+Phil had been obliged to stop for pain, and, after Roscoe had adjusted
+the bandages, he continued:
+
+"My pal and the others made up their minds they'd lynch Piccadilly; they
+wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt--for it wasn't certain that
+the girl hadn't killed herself. . . .  Well, I went to Piccadilly, and
+give him the benefit.  He left, and skipped the rope.  Not, p'r'aps, that
+he ought to hev got away, but once he'd showed me a letter from his
+mother,--he was drunk too, at the time,--and I remembered when my brother
+Rodney was killed in the Black Hills, and how my mother took it; so I
+give him the tip to travel quick."
+
+He paused and rested.  Then presently continued: "Now, Padre, I've got
+four hundred dollars--the most I ever had at one time in my life.  And
+I'd like it to go to my old pal--though we had that difference, and
+parted.  I guess we respect each other about the same as we ever did.
+And I wish you'd write it down so that the thing would be municipal."
+
+Roscoe took pencil and paper and said: "What's his name, Phil?"
+
+"Sam--Tonga Sam."
+
+"But that isn't all his name?"
+
+"No, I s'pose not, but it's all he ever had in general use.  He'd got it
+because he'd been to the Tonga Islands and used to yarn about them.  Put
+'Tonga Sam, Phil Boldrick's Pal at Danger Mountain, ult'--add the 'ult,'
+it's c'rrect.--That'll find him.  And write him these words, and if you
+ever see him say them to him--'Phil Boldrick never had a pal that crowded
+Tonga Sam.'"
+
+When the document was written, Roscoe read it aloud, then both signed it,
+Roscoe guiding the battered hand over the paper.
+
+This done, there was a moment's pause, and then Phil said: "I'd like to
+be in the open.  I was born in the open--on the Madawaska.  Take me out,
+Padre."
+
+Roscoe stepped to the door, and silently beckoned to Devlin and myself.
+We carried him out, and put him beside a pine tree.
+
+"Where am I now?" he said.  "Under the white pine, Phil."  "That's
+right.  Face me to the north."
+
+We did so.  Minutes passed in silence.  Only the song of the saw was
+heard, and the welting of the river.  "Padre," he said at last hurriedly,
+"lift me up, so's I can breathe."
+
+This was done.
+
+"Am I facin' the big mill?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's c'rrect.  And the 'lectric light is burnin' in the mill and in
+the town, an' the saws are all goin'?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"By gracious, yes--you can hear 'em!  Don't they scrunch the stuff,
+though!"  He laughed a little.  "Mr. Devlin an' you and me hev been
+pretty smart, hevn't we?"
+
+Then a spasm caught him, and after a painful pause he called: "It's the
+biggest thing in cables. . . .  Stand close in the cage. . . .  Feel
+her swing!--Safe, you bet, if he stands by the lever. . . ."
+
+His face lighted with the last gleam of living, and he said slowly: "I
+hev a pal--at Danger Mountain."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+IN THE TROUGH OF THE WINDS
+
+The three days following the events recorded in the preceding chapter
+were notable to us all.  Because my own affairs and experiences are of
+the least account, I shall record them first: they will at least throw
+a little light on the history of people who appeared previously in this
+tale, and disappeared suddenly when the 'Fulvia' reached London, to make
+room for others.
+
+The day after Phil Boldrick's death I received a letter from Hungerford,
+and also one from Belle Treherne.  Hungerford had left the Occidental
+Company's service, and had been fortunate enough to get the position of
+first officer on a line of steamers running between England and the West
+Indies.  The letter was brusque, incisive, and forceful, and declared
+that, once he got his foot firmly planted in his new position, he would
+get married and be done with it.  He said that Clovelly the novelist had
+given a little dinner at his chambers in Piccadilly, and that the guests
+were all our fellow-passengers by the 'Fulvia'; among them Colonel Ryder,
+the bookmaker, Blackburn the Queenslander, and himself.
+
+This is extracted from the letter:
+
+     . . . Clovelly was in rare form.--Don't run away with the idea
+     that he's eating his heart out because you came in just ahead in the
+     race for Miss Treherne.  For my part--but, never mind!--You had
+     phenomenal luck, and you will be a phenomenal fool if you don't
+     arrange for an early marriage.  You are a perfect baby in some
+     things.  Don't you know that the time a woman most yearns for a man
+     is when she has refused him?  And Clovelly is here on the ground,
+     and they are in the same set, and though I'd take my oath she would
+     be loyal to you if you were ten thousand miles from here for ten
+     years, so far as a promise is concerned, yet remember that a promise
+     and a fancy are two different things.  We may do what's right for
+     the fear o' God, and not love Him either.  Marmion, let the marriage
+     bells be rung early--a maiden's heart is a ticklish thing. . . .
+
+     But Clovelly was in rare form, as I said; and the bookmaker, who
+     had for the first time read a novel of his, amiably quoted from it,
+     and criticised it during the dinner, till the place reeked with
+     laughter.  At first every one stared aghast ("stared aghast!"--how
+     is that for literary form?); but when Clovelly gurgled, and then
+     haw-hawed till he couldn't lift his champagne, the rest of us
+     followed in a double-quick.  And the bookmaker simply sat calm and
+     earnest with his eye-glass in his eye, and never did more than
+     gently smile.  "See here," he said ever so candidly of Clovelly's
+     best character, a serious, inscrutable kind of a man, the dignified
+     figure in the book--"I liked the way you drew that muff.  He was
+     such an awful outsider, wasn't he?  All talk, and hypocrite down to
+     his heels.  And when you married him to that lady who nibbled her
+     food in public and gorged in the back pantry, and went 'slumming'
+     and made shoulder-strings for the parson--oh, I know the kind!"--
+     [This was Clovelly's heroine, whom he had tried to draw, as he said
+     himself, "with a perfect sincerity and a lovely worldly-mindedness,
+     and a sweet creation altogether."]  "I said, that's poetic justice,
+     that's the refinement of retribution.  Any other yarn-spinner would
+     have killed the male idiot by murder, or a drop from a precipice, or
+     a lingering fever; but Clovelly did the thing with delicate torture.
+     He said, 'Go to blazes,' and he fixed up that marriage--and there
+     you are!  Clovelly, I drink to you; you are a master!"
+
+     Clovelly acknowledged beautifully, and brought off a fine thing
+     about the bookmaker having pocketed L5000 at the Derby, then
+     complimented Colonel Ryder on his success as a lecturer in London
+     (pretty true, by the way), and congratulated Blackburn on his coming
+     marriage with Mrs. Callendar, the Tasmanian widow.  What he said of
+     myself I am not going to repeat; but it was salaaming all round,
+     with the liquor good, and fun bang over the bulwarks.
+
+     How is Roscoe?  I didn't see as much of him as you did, but I liked
+     him.  Take my tip for it, that woman will make trouble for him some
+     day.  She is the biggest puzzle I ever met.  I never could tell
+     whether she liked him or hated him; but it seems to me that either
+     would be the ruin of any "Christom man."  I know she saw something
+     of him while she was in London, because her quarters were next to
+     those of my aunt the dowager (whose heart the gods soften at my
+     wedding!) in Queen Anne's Mansions, S.W., and who actually liked
+     Mrs. F., called on her, and asked her to dinner, and Roscoe too,
+     whom she met at her place.  I believe my aunt would have used her
+     influence to get him a good living, if he had played his cards
+     properly; but I expect he wouldn't be patronised, and he went for a
+     "mickonaree," as they say in the South Seas. . . .  Well, I'm off
+     to the Spicy Isles, then back again to marry a wife.  "Go thou and
+     do likewise."
+
+     By the way, have you ever heard of or seen Boyd Madras since he
+     slipped our cable at Aden and gave the world another chance?
+     I trust he will spoil her wedding--if she ever tries to have one.
+     May I be there to see!
+
+Because we shall see nothing more of Hungerford till we finally dismiss
+the drama, I should like to say that this voyage of his to the West
+Indies made his fortune--that is, it gave him command of one of the
+finest ships in the English merchant service.  In a storm a disaster
+occurred to his vessel, his captain was washed overboard, and he was
+obliged to take command.  His skill, fortitude, and great manliness,
+under tragical circumstances, sent his name booming round the world; and,
+coupled, as it was, with a singular act of personal valour, he had his
+pick of all vacancies and possible vacancies in the merchant service, boy
+(or little more) as he was.  I am glad to say that he is now a happy
+husband and father too.
+
+The letter from Belle Treherne mentioned having met Clovelly several
+times of late, and, with Hungerford's words hot in my mind, I determined,
+though I had perfect confidence in her, as in myself, to be married at
+Christmas-time.  Her account of the courtship of Blackburn and Mrs.
+Callendar was as amusing as her description of an evening which the
+bookmaker had spent with her father, when he said he was going to marry
+an actress whom he had seen at Drury Lane Theatre in a racing drama.
+This he subsequently did, and she ran him a break-neck race for many a
+day, but never making him unhappy or less resourceful.  His verdict, and
+his only verdict, upon Mrs. Falchion had been confided to Blackburn, who
+in turn confided it to Clovelly, who passed it on to me.
+
+He said: "A woman is like a horse.  Make her beautiful, give her a high
+temper and a bit of bad luck in her youth, and she'll take her revenge
+out of life; even though she runs straight, and wins straight every time;
+till she breaks her heart one day over a lost race.  After that she is
+good to live with for ever.  A heart-break for that kind is their
+salvation: without it they go on breaking the hearts of others."
+
+As I read Belle's and Hungerford's letters my thoughts went back again
+--as they did so often indeed--to the voyage of the 'Fulvia', and then to
+Mrs. Falchion's presence in the Rocky Mountains.  There was a strange
+destiny in it all, and I had no pleasant anticipations about the end;
+for, even if she could or did do Roscoe no harm, so far as his position
+was concerned, I saw that she had already begun to make trouble between
+him and Ruth.
+
+That day which saw poor Boldrick's death put her in a conflicting light
+to me.  Now I thought I saw in her unusual gentleness, again an unusual
+irony, an almost flippant and cruel worldliness; and though at the time
+she was most touched by the accident, I think her feeling of horror at it
+made her appear to speak in a way which showed her unpleasantly to Mr.
+Devlin and his daughter.  It may be, however, that Ruth Devlin saw
+further into her character than I guessed, and understood the strange
+contradictions of her nature.  But I shall, I suppose, never know
+absolutely about that; nor does it matter much now.
+
+The day succeeding Phil's death was Sunday, and the little church at
+Viking was full.  Many fishers had come over from Sunburst.  It was
+evident that people expected Roscoe to make some reference to Phil's
+death in his sermon, or, at least, have a part of the service
+appropriate.  By a singular chance the first morning lesson was David's
+lamentation for Saul and Jonathan.  Roscoe had a fine voice.  He read
+easily, naturally--like a cultivated layman, not like a clergyman; like a
+man who wished to convey the simple meaning of what he read, reverently,
+honestly.  On the many occasions when I heard him read the service,
+I noticed that he never changed the opening sentence, though there were,
+of course, others from which to choose.  He drew the people to their feet
+always with these words, spoken as it were directly to them:
+
+     "When the wicked man turneth away from the wickedness that he hath
+     committed, and doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall save
+     his soul alive."
+
+I noticed this morning that he instantly attracted the attention of every
+one, and held it, with the first words of the lesson:
+
+     "The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the
+     mighty fallen!"
+
+It seemed to me as if the people at first almost tried to stop breathing,
+so intense was the feeling.  Mrs. Falchion was sitting very near me, and
+though she had worn her veil up at first, as I uncharitably put it then,
+to disconcert him, she drew it rather quickly down as his reading
+proceeded; but, so far as I could see, she never took her eyes off
+his face through the whole service; and, impelled in spite of myself,
+I watched her closely.  Though Ruth Devlin was sitting not far from her,
+she scarcely looked that way.
+
+Evidently the text of the sermon was not chosen that it might have some
+association with Phil's death, but there was a kind of simple grandeur,
+and certainly cheerful stalwartness, in his interpretation and practical
+rendering of the text:
+
+     "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah?
+     . . . travelling in the greatness of his strength?  I that speak
+     in righteousness, mighty to save."
+
+A man was talking to men sensibly, directly, quietly.  It was impossible
+to resist the wholesome eloquence of his temperament; he was a revelation
+of humanity: what he said had life.
+
+I said to myself, as I had before, Is it possible that this man ever did
+anything unmanly?
+
+After the service, James Devlin--with Ruth--came to Roscoe and myself,
+and asked us to lunch at his house.  Roscoe hesitated, but I knew it was
+better for him not to walk up the hills and back again immediately after
+luncheon; so I accepted for us both; and Ruth gave me a grateful look.
+Roscoe seemed almost anxious not to be alone with Ruth--not from any
+cowardly feeling, but because he was perplexed by the old sense of coming
+catastrophe, which, indeed, poor fellow, he had some cause to feel.  He
+and Mr. Devlin talked of Phil's funeral and the arrangements that had
+been made, and during the general conversation Ruth and I dropped behind.
+
+Quite abruptly she said to me: "Who is Mrs. Falchion?"
+
+"A widow--it is said--rich, unencumbered," I as abruptly answered.
+
+"But I suppose even widows may have pedigrees, and be conjugated in the
+past tense," was the cool reply.  She drew herself up a little proudly.
+
+I was greatly astonished.  Here was a girl living most of her life in
+these mountains, having only had a few years of social life in the East,
+practising with considerable skill those arts of conversation so much
+cultivated in metropolitan drawing-rooms.  But I was a very dull fellow
+then, and had yet to learn that women may develop in a day to wonderful
+things.
+
+"Well," I said in reply, "I suppose not.  But I fear I cannot answer
+regarding the pedigree, nor a great deal about the past, for I only met
+her under two years ago."
+
+"And yet I have imagined that you knew her pretty well, and that Mr.
+Roscoe knew her even better--perhaps," she said suggestively.
+
+"That is so," I tried to say with apparent frankness, "for she lived in
+the South Seas with her father, and Roscoe knew her there."
+
+"She is a strange woman, and quite heartless in some ways; and yet, do
+you know, I like her while I dislike her; and I cannot tell why."
+
+"Do not try to tell," I answered, "for she has the gift of making people
+do both.--I think she likes and dislikes herself--as well as others."
+
+"As well--as others," she replied slowly.  "Yes, I think I have noticed
+that.  You see," she added, "I do not look at people as most girls of my
+age: and perhaps I am no better for that.  But Mrs. Falchion's
+introduction to me occurred in such peculiar circumstances, and the
+coincidence of your knowing her was so strange, that my interest is
+not unnatural, I suppose."
+
+"On the contrary," I said, "I am only surprised that you have restrained
+your curiosity so much and so long.  It was all very strange; though the
+meeting was quite to be expected, as Mrs. Falchion herself explained that
+day.  She had determined on coming over to the Pacific Coast; this place
+was in her way; it is a fashionable resort; and she stood a good chance
+of finding old friends."
+
+"Yes--of finding--old friends," was the abstracted reply.  "I like Miss
+Caron, her companion, very much better than--most women I have met."
+
+This was not what she was going to say, but she checked herself, lest
+she might be suspected of thinking uncharitably of Mrs. Falchion.  I,
+of course, agreed with her, and told her the story of Galt Roscoe and
+Hector Caron, and of Justine's earnestness regarding her fancied debt
+to Roscoe.
+
+I saw that the poison of anxiety had entered the girl's mind; and it
+might, perhaps, bear fruit of no engaging quality.  In her own home,
+however, it was a picture to see her with her younger sisters and
+brothers, and invalid mother.  She went about very brightly and sweetly
+among them, speaking to them as if she was mother to them all, angel of
+them all, domestic court for them all; as indeed she was.  Here there
+seemed no disturbing element in her; a close observer might even have
+said (and in this case I fancy I was that) that she had no mind or heart
+for anything or anybody but these few of her blood and race.  Hers was a
+fine nature--high, wholesome, unselfish.  Yet it struck me sadly also,
+to see how the child-like in her, and her young spirit, had been so early
+set to the task of defence and protection: a mother at whose breasts
+a child had never hung; maternal, but without the relieving joys of
+maternity.
+
+I knew that she would carry through her life that too watchful, too
+anxious tenderness; that to her last day she would look back and not
+remember that she had a childhood once; because while yet a child she had
+been made into a woman.
+
+Such of the daughters of men make life beautiful; but themselves are
+selfish who do not see the almost intolerable pathos of unselfishness
+and sacrifice.  At the moment I was bitter with the thought that, if Mrs.
+Falchion intended anything which could steal away this girl's happiness
+from her, even for a time, I should myself seek to retaliate--which was,
+as may appear, in my power.  But I could not go to Mrs. Falchion now and
+say: "You intend some harm to these two: for God's sake go away and leave
+them alone!"  I had no real ground for making such a request.  Besides,
+if there was any catastrophe, any trouble, coming, or possible, that
+might hasten it, or, at least, give it point.
+
+I could only wait.  I had laid another plan, and from a telegram I had
+received in answer to one I had sent, I believed it was working.  I did
+not despair.  I had, indeed, sent a cable to my agent in England, which
+was to be forwarded to the address given me by Boyd Madras at Aden.
+I had got a reply saying that Boyd Madras had sailed for Canada by the
+Allan Line of steamers.  I had then telegraphed to a lawyer I knew in
+Montreal, and he had replied that he was on the track of the wanderer.
+
+All Viking and Sunburst turned out to Phil Boldrick's funeral.
+Everything was done that he had requested.  The great whistle roared
+painfully, revolvers and guns were fired over his grave, and the new-
+formed corporation appeared.  He was buried on the top of a foot-hill,
+which, to this day, is known as Boldricks' Own.  The grave was covered by
+an immense flat stone bearing his name.  But a flagstaff was erected
+near, no stouter one stands on Beachy Head or elsewhere,--and on it was
+engraved:
+
+                             PHIL BOLDRICK,
+
+                   Buried with Municipal Honours on
+                    the Thirtieth day of June 1883.
+
+               This to his Memory, and for the honour of
+                          Viking and Sunburst.
+
+"Padre," said a river-driver to Galt Roscoe after the rites were
+finished, "that was a man you could trust."
+
+"Padre," added another, "that was a man you could bank on, and draw your
+interest reg'lar.  He never done a mean thing, and he never pal'd with a
+mean man.  He wasn't for getting his teeth on edge like some in the valley.
+He didn't always side with the majority, and he had a gift of doin' things
+on the square."
+
+Others spoke in similar fashion, and then Viking went back to work, and
+we to our mountain cottage.
+
+Many days passed quietly.  I saw that Galt Roscoe wished to speak
+to me on the subject perplexing him, but I did not help him.  I knew
+that it would come in good time, and the farther off it was the better.
+I dreaded to hear what he had to tell, lest, in spite of my confidence in
+him, it should really be a thing which, if made public, must bring ruin.
+During the evenings of these days he wrote much in his diary--the very
+book that lies by me now.  Writing seemed a relief to him, for he was
+more cheerful afterwards.  I know that he had received letters from the
+summer hotel, but whether they were from Mrs. Falchion or Justine Caron I
+was not then aware, though I afterwards came to know that one of them was
+from Justine, asking him if she might call on him.  He guessed that the
+request was connected with Hector Caron's death; and, of course, gave his
+consent.  During this time he did not visit Ruth Devlin, nor did he
+mention her name.  As for myself, I was sick of the whole business,
+and wished it well over, whatever the result.
+
+I make here a few extracts from Roscoe's diary, to show the state of his
+mind at this period:
+
+     Can a man never get away from the consequences of his wickedness,
+     even though he repents?  . . . Restitution is necessary as well
+     as repentance; but when one cannot make restitution, when it is
+     impossible--what then?  I suppose one has to reply, Well, you have
+     to suffer, that is all. . . .  Poor Alo!  To think that after all
+     these years, you can strike me!
+
+     There is something malicious in the way Mercy Falchion crosses my
+     path.  What she knows, she knows; and what she can do if she
+     chooses, I must endure.  I cannot love Mercy Falchion again, and
+     that, I suppose, is the last thing she would wish now.  I cannot
+     bring Alo back.  But how does that concern her!  Why does she hate
+     me so?  For, underneath her kindest words,--and they are kind
+     sometimes,--I can detect the note of enmity, of calculating scorn.
+     . . . I wish I could go to Ruth and tell her all, and ask her to
+     decide if she can take a man with such a past. . . .  What a
+     thing it is to have had a clean record of unflinching manliness at
+     one's back!
+
+I add another extract:
+
+     Phil's story of Danger Mountain struck like ice at my heart.  There
+     was a horrible irony in the thing: that it should be told to me, of
+     all the world, and at such a time.  Some would say, I suppose, that
+     it was the arrangement of Providence.  Not to speak it profanely, it
+     seems to be the achievement of the devil.  The torture was too
+     malicious for God. . . .
+
+     Phil's letter has gone to his pal at Danger Mountain. . . .
+
+The fourth day after the funeral Justine Caron came to see Galt Roscoe.
+This was the substance of their conversation, as I came to know long
+afterwards.
+
+"Monsieur," she said, "I have come to pay something of a debt which I owe
+to you.  It is a long time since you gave my poor Hector burial, but I
+have never forgotten, and I have brought you at last--you must not shake
+your head so--the money you spent. . . .  But you MUST take it.  I
+should be miserable if you did not.  The money is all that I can repay;
+the kindness is for memory and gratitude always."
+
+He looked at her wonderingly, earnestly, she seemed so unworldly,
+standing there, her life's ambition not stirring beyond duty to her dead.
+If goodness makes beauty, she was beautiful; and yet, besides all that,
+she had a warm, absorbing eye, a soft, rounded cheek, and she carried in
+her face the light of a cheerful, engaging spirit.
+
+"Will it make you happier if I take the money?" he said at last, and his
+voice showed how she had moved him.
+
+"So much happier!" she answered, and she put a roll of notes into his
+hand.
+
+"Then I will take it," he replied, with a manner not too serious, and he
+looked at the notes carefully; "but only what I actually spent, remember;
+what I told you when you wrote me at Hector's death; not this ample
+interest.  You forget, Miss Caron, that your brother was my friend."
+
+"No I cannot forget that.  It lives with me," she rejoined softly.  But
+she took back the surplus notes.  "And I have my gratitude left still,"
+she added, smiling.
+
+"Believe me, there is no occasion for gratitude.  Why, what less could
+one do?"
+
+"One could pass by on the other side."
+
+"He was not fallen among thieves," was his reply; "he was among
+Englishmen, the old allies of the French."
+
+"But the Priests and the Levites, people of his own country--Frenchmen--
+passed him by.  They were infamous in falsehood, cruel to him and to me.
+--You are an Englishman; you have heart and kindness."
+
+He hesitated, then he gravely said: "Do not trust Englishmen more than
+you trust your own countrymen.  We are selfish even in our friendships
+often.  We stick to one person, and to benefit that one we sacrifice
+others.  Have you found all Englishmen--and WOMEN unselfish?"  He looked
+at her steadily; but immediately repented that he had asked the question,
+for he had in his mind one whom they both knew, too well, perhaps; and he
+added quickly: "You see, I am not kind."
+
+They were standing now in the sunlight just outside the house.  His hands
+were thrust down in the pockets of his linen coat; her hands opening and
+shutting her parasol slightly.  They might, from their appearance, have
+been talking of very inconsequent things.
+
+Her eyes lifted sorrowfully to his.  "Ah, monsieur," she rejoined, "there
+are two times when one must fear a woman."  She answered his question
+more directly than he could have conjectured.  But she felt that she must
+warn him.
+
+"I do not understand," he said.
+
+"Of course you do not.  Only women themselves understand that the two
+times when one must fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves--
+after a kind.  When she gets wicked or mad enough to hate, either through
+jealousy or because she cannot love where she would, she is merciless.
+She does not know the honour of the game.  She has no pity.  Then,
+sometimes when she loves in a way, she is, as you say, most selfish.
+I mean a love which--is not possible.  Then she does some mad act--all
+women are a little mad sometimes.  Most of us wish to be good, but we are
+quicksilver. . . ."
+
+Roscoe's mind had been working fast.  He saw she meant to warn him
+against Mrs. Falchion.  His face flushed slightly.  He knew that Justine
+had thought well of him, and now he knew also that she suspected
+something not creditable or, at least, hazardous in his life.
+
+"And the man--the man whom the woman hates?"
+
+"When the woman hates--and loves too, the man is in danger."
+
+"Do you know of such a man?" he almost shrinkingly said.
+
+"If I did I would say to him, The world is wide.  There is no glory in
+fighting a woman who will not be fair in battle.  She will say what may
+appear to be true, but what she knows in her own heart to be false--false
+and bad."
+
+Roscoe now saw that Justine had more than an inkling of his story.
+
+He said calmly: "You would advise that man to flee from danger?"
+
+"Yes, to flee," she replied hurriedly, with a strange anxiety in her
+eyes; "for sometimes a woman is not satisfied with words that kill.  She
+becomes less than human, and is like Jael."
+
+Justine knew that Mrs. Falchion held a sword over Roscoe's career;
+she guessed that Mrs. Falchion both cared for him and hated him too;
+but she did not know the true reason of the hatred--that only came out
+afterwards.  Woman-like, she exaggerated in order that she might move
+him; but her motive was good, and what she said was not out of keeping
+with the facts of life.
+
+"The man's life even might be in danger?" he asked.
+
+"It might."
+
+"But surely that is not so dreadful," he still said calmly.
+
+"Death is not the worst of evils."
+
+"No, not the worst; one has to think of the evil word as well.  The evil
+word can be outlived; but the man must think of those who really love
+him--who would die to save him--and whose hearts would break if he
+were killed.  Love can outlive slander, but it is bitter when it has to
+outlive both slander and death.  It is easy to love with joy so long as
+both live, though there are worlds between.  Thoughts fly and meet; but
+Death makes the great division. . . .  Love can only live in the
+pleasant world."
+
+Very abstractedly he said: "Is it a pleasant world to you?"
+
+She did not reply directly to that, but answered: "Monsieur, if you know
+of such a man as I speak of, warn him to fly."  And she raised her eyes
+from the ground and looked earnestly at him.  Now her face was slightly
+flushed, she looked almost beautiful.
+
+"I know of such a man," he replied, "but he will not go.  He has to
+answer to his own soul and his conscience.  He is not without fear, but
+it is only fear for those who care for him, be they ever so few.  And he
+hopes that they will be brave enough to face his misery, if it must come.
+For we know that courage has its hour of comfort. . . .  When such a
+man as you speak of has his dark hour he will stand firm."
+
+Then with a great impulse he added: "This man whom I know did wrong, but
+he was falsely accused of doing a still greater.  The consequence of the
+first thing followed him.  He could never make restitution.  Years went
+by.  Some one knew that dark spot in his life--his Nemesis."
+
+"The worst Nemesis in this life, monsieur, is always a woman," she
+interrupted.
+
+"Perhaps she is the surest," he continued.  "The woman faced him in the
+hour of his peace and--" he paused.  His voice was husky.
+
+"Yes, 'and,' monsieur?"
+
+"And he knows that she would ruin him, and kill his heart and destroy his
+life."
+
+"The waters of Marah are bitter," she murmured, and she turned her face
+away from him to the woods.  There was no trouble there.  The birds were
+singing, black squirrels were jumping from bough to bough, and they could
+hear the tapping of the woodpecker.  She slowly drew on her gloves, as if
+for occupation.
+
+He spoke at length as though thinking aloud: "But he knows that, whatever
+comes, life has had for him more compensations than he deserves.  For, in
+his trouble, a woman came, and said kind words, and would have helped him
+if she could."
+
+"There were TWO women," she said solemnly.
+
+"Two women?" he repeated slowly.
+
+"The one stayed in her home and prayed, and the other came."
+
+"I do not understand," he said: and he spoke truly.
+
+"Love is always praying for its own, therefore one woman prayed at home.
+The other woman who came was full of gratitude, for the man was noble,
+she owed him a great debt, and she believed in him always.  She knew that
+if at any time in his life he had done wrong, the sin was without malice
+or evil."
+
+"The woman is gentle and pitiful with him, God knows."
+
+She spoke quietly now, and her gravity looked strange in one so young.
+
+"God knows she is just, and would see him fairly treated.  She is so far
+beneath him! and yet one can serve a friend though one is humble and
+poor."
+
+"How strange," he rejoined, "that the man should think himself miserable
+who is befriended in such a way!  Mademoiselle, he will carry to his
+grave the kindness of this woman."
+
+"Monsieur," she added humbly, yet with a brave light in her eyes, "it is
+good to care whether the wind blows bitter or kind.  Every true woman is
+a mother, though she have no child.  She longs to protect the suffering,
+because to protect is in her so far as God is. . . .  Well, this woman
+cares that way. . . ."  She held out her hand to say good-bye.  Her
+look was simple, direct, and kind.  Their parting words were few and
+unremarkable.
+
+Roscoe watched Justine Caron as she passed out into the shade of the
+woods, and he said to himself: "Gratitude like that is a wonderful
+thing."  He should have said something else, but he did not know,
+and she did not wish him to know: and he never knew.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+A DUEL IN ARCADY
+
+The more I thought of Mrs. Falchion's attitude towards Roscoe, the more
+I was puzzled.  But I had at last reduced the position to this: Years
+ago Roscoe had cared for her and she had not cared for him.  Angered
+or indignant at her treatment of him, Roscoe's affections declined
+unworthily elsewhere.  Then came a catastrophe of some kind, in which
+Alo (whoever she was) suffered.  The secret of this catastrophe Mrs.
+Falchion, as I believe, held.  There was a parting, a lapse of years,
+and then the meeting on the 'Fulvia': with it, partial restoration of Mrs.
+Falchion's influence, then its decline, and then a complete change of
+position.  It was now Mrs. Falchion that cared, and Roscoe that shunned.
+It perplexed me that there seemed to be behind Mrs. Falchion's present
+regard for Roscoe some weird expression of vengeance, as though somehow
+she had been wronged, and it was her duty to punish.  In no other way was
+the position definable.  That Roscoe would never marry her was certain to
+my mind.  That he could not marry her now was also certain--to me; I had
+the means to prevent it.  That she wished to marry him I was not sure,
+though she undoubtedly cared for him.  Remained, therefore,
+the supposition that if he cared for her she would do him no harm,
+as to his position.  But if he married Ruth, disaster would come--
+Roscoe himself acknowledged that she held the key of his fortunes.
+
+Upon an impulse, and as a last resort, I had taken action whereby in
+some critical moment I might be able to wield a power over Mrs. Falchion.
+I was playing a blind game, but it was the only card I held.  I had heard
+from the lawyer in Montreal that Madras, under another name, had gone to
+the prairie country to enter the mounted police.  I had then telegraphed
+to Winnipeg, but had got no answer.
+
+I had seen her many times, but we had never, except very remotely,
+touched upon the matter which was uppermost in both our minds.  It was
+not my wish to force the situation.  I knew that my opportunity would
+come wherein to spy upon the mind of the enemy.  It came.  On the evening
+that Justine Caron called upon Roscoe, I accidentally met Mrs. Falchion
+in the grounds of the hotel.  She was with several people, and as I spoke
+to her she made a little gesture of invitation.  I went over, was
+introduced to her companions, and then she said:
+
+"Dr. Marmion, I have not yet made that visit to the salmon-fishers at
+Sunburst.  Unfortunately, on the days when I called on Miss Devlin, my
+time was limited.  But now I have a thirst for adventure, and time hangs
+heavy.  Will you perform your old office of escort, and join a party,
+which we can make up here, to go there to-morrow?"
+
+I had little love for Mrs. Falchion, but I consented, because it seemed
+to me the chance had come for an effective talk with her; and I suggested
+that we should go late in the afternoon of the next day, and remain till
+night and see the Indians, the half-breeds, and white fishermen working
+by torch-light on the river.  The proposition was accepted with delight.
+
+Then the conversation turned upon the feud that existed between Viking
+and Sunburst, the river-drivers and the fishers.  During the last few
+days, owing to the fact that there were a great many idle river-men
+about, the river-driving for the season being done, there had been more
+than one quarrel of a serious nature at Sunburst.  It had needed a great
+deal of watchfulness on the part of Mr. Devlin and his supporters to
+prevent fighting.  In Sunburst itself, Mr. Devlin had much personal
+influence.  He was a man of exceedingly strong character, bold, powerful,
+persuasive.  But this year there had been a large number of rough,
+adventurous characters among the river-men, and they seemed to take
+delight in making sport of, and even interfering with, the salmon-
+fishers.  We talked of these things for some time, and then I took my
+leave.  As I went, Mrs. Falchion stepped after me, tapped me on the arm,
+and said in a slow, indolent tone:
+
+"Whenever you and I meet, Dr. Marmion, something happens--something
+strange.  What particular catastrophe have you arranged for to-morrow?
+For you are, you know, the chorus to the drama."
+
+"Do not spoil the play by anticipation," I said.
+
+"One gets very weary of tragedy," she retorted.  "Comedy would be a
+relief.  Could you not manage it?"
+
+"I do not know about to-morrow," I said, "as to a comedy.  But I promise
+you that one of these days I will present to you the very finest comedy
+imaginable."
+
+"You speak oracularly," she said; "still you are a professor, and
+professors always pose.  But now, to be perfectly frank with you, I do
+not believe that any comedy you could arrange would be as effective as
+your own."
+
+"You have read 'Much Ado about Nothing'," I said.
+
+"Oh, it is as good as that, is it?" she asked.
+
+"Well, it has just as good a final situation," I answered.  She seemed
+puzzled, for she saw I spoke with some undercurrent of meaning.  "Mrs.
+Falchion," I said to her suddenly and earnestly, "I wish you to think
+between now and to-morrow of what I am just going to say to you."
+
+"It sounds like the task set an undergraduate, but go on," she said.
+
+"I wish you to think," said I, "of the fact that I helped to save your
+life."
+
+She flushed; an indignant look shot into her face, and her voice
+vibrating, she said:
+
+"What man would have done less?"  Then, almost immediately after, as
+though repenting of what she had said, she continued in a lower tone
+and with a kind of impulsiveness uncommon to her: "But you had courage,
+and I appreciate that; still, do not ask too much.  Good-night."
+
+We parted at that, and did not meet again until the next afternoon, when
+I joined her and her party at the summer hotel.  Together we journeyed
+down to Sunburst.
+
+It was the height of the salmon-fishing season.  Sunburst lay cloyed
+among the products of field and forest and stream.  At Viking one got the
+impression of a strong pioneer life, vibrant, eager, and with a touch of
+Arcady.  But viewed from a distance Sunburst seemed Arcady itself.  It
+was built in green pastures, which stretched back on one side of the
+river, smooth, luscious, undulating to the foot-hills.  This was on one
+side of the Whi-Whi River.  On the other side was a narrow margin, and
+then a sheer wall of hills in exquisite verdure.  The houses were of
+wood, and chiefly painted white, sweet and cool in the vast greenness.
+Cattle wandered shoulders deep in the rich grass, and fruit of all kinds
+was to be had for the picking.  The population was strangely mixed.
+Men had drifted here from all parts of the world, sometimes with their
+families, sometimes without them.  Many of them had settled here after
+mining at the Caribou field and other places on the Frazer River.
+Mexican, Portuguese, Canadian, Californian, Australian, Chinaman, and
+coolie lived here, side by side, at ease in the quiet land, following a
+primitive occupation with primitive methods.
+
+One could pick out the Indian section of the village, because not far
+from it was the Indian graveyard, with its scaffolding of poles and brush
+and its offerings for the dead.  There were almost interminable rows of
+scaffolding on the river's edge and upon the high bank where hung the
+salmon drying in the sun.  The river, as it ambled along, here over
+shallows, there over rapids and tiny waterfalls, was the pathway for
+millions and millions of salmon upon a pilgrimage to the West and North--
+to the happy hunting grounds of spawn.  They came in droves so thick at
+times that, crowding up the little creeks which ran into the river, they
+filled them so completely as to dam up the water and make the courses a
+solid mass of living and dead fish.  In the river itself they climbed the
+rapids and leaped the little waterfalls with incredible certainty; except
+where man had prepared his traps for them.  Sometimes these traps were
+weirs or by-washes, made of long lateral tanks of wicker-work.  Down
+among the boulders near the shore, scaffoldings were raised, and from
+these the fishermen with nets and wicker-work baskets caught the fish as
+they came up.
+
+We wandered about during the afternoon immensely interested in all
+that we saw.  During that time the party was much together, and my
+conversation with Mrs.  Falchion was general.  We had supper at a quiet
+little tavern, idled away an hour in drinking in the pleasant scene; and
+when dusk came went out again to the banks of the river.
+
+From the time we left the tavern to wander by the river I managed to be a
+good deal alone with Mrs. Falchion.  I do not know whether she saw that I
+was anxious to speak with her privately, but I fancy she did.  Whatever
+we had to say must, in the circumstances, however serious, be kept
+superficially unimportant.  And, as it happened, our serious conference
+was carried on with an air of easy gossip, combined with a not artificial
+interest in all we saw.  And there was much to see.  Far up and down the
+river the fragrant dusk was spotted with the smoky red light of torches,
+and the atmosphere shook with shadows, through which ran the song of the
+river, more amiable than the song of the saw, and the low, weird cry of
+the Indians and white men as they toiled for salmon in the glare of the
+torches.  Here upon a scaffolding a half-dozen swung their nets and
+baskets in the swift river, hauling up with their very long poles thirty
+or forty splendid fish in an hour; there at a small cascade, in great
+baskets sunk into the water, a couple of Indians caught and killed the
+salmon that, in trying to leap the fall, plumped into the wicker cage;
+beyond, others, more idle and less enterprising, speared the finny
+travellers, thus five hundred miles from home--the brave Pacific.
+
+Upon the banks the cleaning and curing went on, the women and children
+assisting, and as the Indians and half-breeds worked they sang either the
+wild Indian melodies, snatches of brave old songs of the 'voyageurs' of a
+past century, or hymns taught by the Jesuit missionaries in the persons
+of such noble men as Pere Lacombe and Pere Durieu, who have wandered up
+and down the vast plains of both sides of the Rockies telling an old
+story in a picturesque, heroic way.  These old hymns were written in
+Chinook, that strange language,--French, English, Spanish, Indian,
+arranged by the Hudson's Bay Company, which is, like the wampum-belt,
+a common tongue for tribes and peoples not speaking any language but
+their own.  They were set to old airs--lullabies, chansons, barcarolles,
+serenades, taken out of the folk-lore of many lands.  Time and again had
+these simple arcadian airs been sung as a prelude to some tribal act that
+would not bear the search-light of civilisation--little by the Indians
+east of the Rockies, for they have hard hearts and fierce tongues, but
+much by the Shuswaps, Siwashes, and other tribes of the Pacific slope,
+whose natures are for peace more than for war; who, one antique day,
+drifted across from Japan or the Corea, and never, even in their wild,
+nomadic state, forgot their skill and craft in wood and gold and silver.
+
+We sat on the shore and watched the scene for a time, saying nothing.
+Now and again, as from scaffolding to scaffolding, from boat to boat, and
+from house to house, the Chinook song rang and was caught up in a slow
+monotone, so not interfering with the toil, there came the sound of an
+Indian drum beaten indolently, or the rattle of dry hard sticks--a
+fantastic accompaniment.
+
+"Does it remind you of the South Seas?" I asked Mrs. Falchion, as, with
+her chin on her hand, she watched the scene.
+
+She drew herself up, almost with an effort, as though she had been lost
+in thought, and looked at me curiously for a moment.  She seemed trying
+to call back her mind to consider my question.  Presently she answered
+me: "Very little.  There is something finer, stronger here.  The
+atmosphere has more nerve, the life more life.  This is not a land for
+the idle or vicious, pleasant as it is."
+
+"What a thinker you are, Mrs. Falchion!"
+
+She seemed to recollect herself suddenly.  Her voice took on an
+inflection of satire.  "You say it with the air of a discoverer.  With
+Columbus and Hervey and you, the world--" She stopped, laughing softly
+at the thrust, and moved the dust about with her foot.
+
+"In spite of the sarcasm, I am going to add that I feel a personal
+satisfaction in your being a woman who does think, and acts more on
+thought than impulse."
+
+"'Personal satisfaction' sounds very royal and august.  It is long,
+I imagine, since you took a--personal satisfaction--in me."
+
+I was not to be daunted.  "People who think a good deal and live a fresh,
+outdoor life--you do that--naturally act most fairly and wisely in time
+of difficulty--and contretemps."
+
+"But I had the impression that you thought I acted unfairly and unwisely
+--at such times."
+
+We had come exactly where I wanted.  In our minds we were both looking at
+those miserable scenes on the 'Fulvia', when Madras sought to adjust the
+accounts of life and sorely muddled them.
+
+"But," said I, "you are not the same woman that you were."
+
+"Indeed, Sir Oracle," she answered: "and by what necromancy do you know?"
+
+"By none.  I think you are sorry now--I hope you are--for what--"
+
+She interrupted me indignantly.  "You go too far.  You are almost--
+unbearable.  You said once that the matter should be buried, and yet here
+you work for an opportunity, Heaven knows why, to place me at a
+disadvantage!"
+
+"Pardon me," I answered; "I said that I would never bring up those
+wretched scenes unless there was cause.  There is cause."
+
+She got to her feet.  "What cause--what possible cause can there be?"
+
+I met her eye firmly.  "I am bound to stand by my friend," I said.
+"I can and I will stand by him."
+
+"If it is a game of drawn swords, beware!" she retorted.  "You speak to
+me as if I were a common adventuress.  You mistake me, and forget that
+you--of all men--have little margin of high morality on which to
+speculate."
+
+"No, I do not forget that," I said, "nor do I think of you as an
+adventuress.  But I am sure you hold a power over my friend, and--"
+
+She stopped me.  "Not one word more on the subject.  You are not to
+suppose this or that.  Be wise do not irritate and annoy a woman like me.
+It were better to please me than to preach to me."
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said firmly, "I wish to please you--so well that some
+day you will feel that I have been a good friend to you as well as to
+him--"
+
+Again she interrupted me.  "You talk in foolish riddles.  No good can
+come of this."
+
+"I cannot believe that," I urged; "for when once your heart is moved by
+the love of a man, you will be just, and then the memory of another man
+who loved you and sinned for you--"
+
+"Oh, you coward!" she broke out scornfully--"you coward to persist in
+this!"
+
+I made a little motion of apology with my hand, and was silent.  I was
+satisfied.  I felt that I had touched her as no words of mine had ever
+touched her before.  If she became emotional, was vulnerable in her
+feelings, I knew that Roscoe's peace might be assured.  That she loved
+Roscoe now I was quite certain.  Through the mists I could see a way,
+even if I failed to find Madras and arrange another surprising situation.
+She was breathing hard with excitement.
+
+Presently she said with incredible quietness, "Do not force me to do hard
+things.  I have a secret."
+
+"I have a secret too," I answered.  "Let us compromise."
+
+"I do not fear your secret," she answered.  She thought I was referring
+to her husband's death.  "Well," I replied, "I honestly hope you never
+will.  That would be a good day for you."
+
+"Let us go," she said; then, presently: "No, let us sit here and forget
+that we have been talking."
+
+I was satisfied.  We sat down.  She watched the scene silently, and
+I watched her.  I felt that it would be my lot to see stranger things
+happen to her than I had seen before; but all in a different fashion.
+I had more hope for my friend, for Ruth Devlin, for--!
+
+I then became silent even to myself.  The weltering river, the fishers
+and their labour and their songs, the tall dark hills, the deep gloomy
+pastures, the flaring lights, were then in a dream before me; but I was
+thinking, planning.
+
+As we sat there, we heard noises, not very harmonious, interrupting the
+song of the salmon-fishers.  We got up to see.  A score of river-drivers
+were marching down through the village, mocking the fishers and making
+wild mirth.  The Indians took little notice, but the half-breeds and
+white fishers were restless.
+
+"There will be trouble here one day," said Mrs. Falchion.
+
+"A free fight which will clear the air," I said.
+
+"I should like to see it--it would be picturesque, at least," she added
+cheerfully; "for I suppose no lives would be lost."
+
+"One cannot tell," I answered; "lives do not count so much in new lands."
+
+"Killing is hateful, but I like to see courage."
+
+And she did see it.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+RIDING THE REEFS
+
+The next afternoon Roscoe was sitting on the coping deep in thought, when
+Ruth rode up with her father, dismounted, and came upon him so quietly
+that he did not hear her.  I was standing in the trees a little distance
+away.
+
+She spoke to him once, but he did not seem to hear.  She touched his arm.
+He got to his feet.
+
+"You were so engaged that you did not hear me," she said.
+
+"The noise of the rapids!" he answered, after a strange pause, "and your
+footstep is very light."
+
+She leaned her chin on her hand, rested against the rail of the coping,
+looked meditatively into the torrent below, and replied: "Is it so
+light?"  Then after a pause: "You have not asked me how I came,
+who came with me, or why I am here."
+
+"It was first necessary for me to conceive the delightful fact that you
+are here," he said in a dazed, and, therefore, not convincing tone.
+
+She looked him full in the eyes.  "Please do not pay me the ill
+compliment of a compliment," she said.  "Was it the sailor who spoke then
+or the--or yourself?  It is not like you."
+
+"I did not mean it as a compliment," he replied.  "I was thinking about
+critical and important things."
+
+"'Critical and important' sounds large," she returned.
+
+"And the awakening was sudden," he continued.  "You must make allowance,
+please, for--"
+
+"For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and
+undreamlike person?  I do.  And now, since you will not put me quite at
+my ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly 'chaperoned'
+here, I must inform you that my father waits hard by--is, as my riotous
+young brother says, 'without on the mat.'"
+
+"I am very glad," he replied with more politeness than exactness.
+
+"That I was duly escorted, or that my father is 'without on the mat'?
+. . . However, you do not appear glad one way or the other.  And now
+I must explain our business.  It is to ask your company at dinner (do
+consider yourself honoured--actually a formal dinner party in the
+Rockies!) to meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our
+famous Viking and Sunburst. . . .  But you are expected to go out
+where my father feeds his--there, see--his horse on your 'trim parterre.'
+And now that I have done my duty as page and messenger without a word of
+assistance, Mr. Roscoe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that
+you will be vis-a-vis to his excellency?"  She lightly beat the air with
+her whip, while I took a good look at the charming scene.
+
+Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant.  He understood too
+well the source of such gay social banter.  He knew it covered a hurt.
+He said to her: "Is this Ruth Devlin or another?"
+
+And she replied very gravely: "It is Ruth Devlin and another too," and
+she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes
+were troubled.
+
+He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but,
+after a moment, returned to Ruth.  Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he
+came.  "And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?" she
+said; "and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and field?"
+
+His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness.  He said with a touch
+of mock irony: "The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of
+the house of Devlin."
+
+"Oh," she said, "you are malicious now!  You turn your long accomplished
+satire on a woman."  And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell
+them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with
+which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had
+ever happened to her.
+
+"No, indeed no," he replied, "though I am properly rebuked.  I fear I am
+malicious--just a little, but it is all inner-self-malice: 'Rome turned
+upon itself.'"
+
+"But one cannot always tell when irony is intended for the speaker of it.
+Yours did not seem applied to yourself," was her slow answer, and she
+seemed more interested in Mount Trinity than in him.
+
+"No?"  Then he said with a playful sadness: "A moment ago you were not
+completely innocent of irony, were you?"
+
+"But a man is big and broad, and should not--he should be magnanimous,
+leaving it to woman, whose life is spent among little things, to be
+guilty of littlenesses.  But see how daring I am--speaking like this to
+you who know so much more than I do. . . .  Surely, you are still only
+humorous, when you speak of irony turned upon yourself--the irony so icy
+to your friends?"
+
+She had developed greatly.  Her mind had been sharpened by pain.  The
+edge of her wit had become poignant, her speech rendered logical and
+allusive.  Roscoe was wise enough to understand that the change in her
+had been achieved by the change in himself; that since Mrs. Falchion
+came, Ruth had awakened sharply to a distress not exactly definable.
+She felt that though he had never spoken of love to her, she had a right
+to share his troubles.  The infrequency of his visits to her of late, and
+something in his manner, made her uneasy and a little bitter.  For there
+was an understanding between them, though it had been unspoken and
+unwritten.  They had vowed without priest or witness.  The heart speaks
+eloquently in symbols first, and afterwards in stumbling words.
+
+It seemed to Roscoe at this moment, as it had seemed for some time, that
+the words would never be spoken.  And was this all that had troubled her
+--the belief that Mrs. Falchion had some claim upon his life?  Or had she
+knowledge, got in some strange way, of that wretched shadow in his past?
+
+This possibility filled him with bitterness.  The old Adam in him awoke,
+and he said within himself "God in heaven, must one folly, one sin, kill
+me and her too?  Why me more than another!  . . . And I love her, I
+love her!"
+
+His eyes flamed until their blue looked all black, and his brows grew
+straight over them sharply, making his face almost stern. . . .  There
+came swift visions of renouncing his present life; of going with her--
+anywhere: to tell her all, beg her forgiveness, and begin life over
+again, admitting that this attempt at expiation was a mistake; to have
+his conscience clear of secret, and trust her kindness.  For now he was
+sure that Mrs. Falchion meant to make his position as a clergyman
+impossible; to revenge herself on him for no wrong that, as far as he
+knew, he ever did directly to her.  But to tell this girl, or even
+her father or mother, that he had been married, after a shameful,
+unsanctified fashion, to a savage, with what came after, and the awful
+thing that happened--he who ministered at the altar!  Now that he looked
+the thing in the face it shocked him.  No, he could not do it.
+
+She said to him, while he looked at her as though he would read her
+through and through, though his mind was occupied with a dreadful
+possibility beyond her:
+
+"Why do you look so?  You are stern.  You are critical.  Have I--
+disimproved so?"
+
+The words were full of a sudden and natural womanly fear, that something
+in herself had fallen in value.  They had a pathos so much the more
+moving because she sought to hide it.
+
+There swam before his eyes the picture of happiness from which she
+herself had roused him when she came.  He involuntarily, passionately,
+caught her hand and pressed it to his lips twice; but spoke nothing.
+
+"Oh! oh!--please!" she said.  Her voice was low and broken, and she
+spoke appealingly.  Could he not see that he was breaking her heart,
+while filling it also with unbearable joy?  Why did he not speak and make
+this possible, and not leave it a thing to flush her cheeks, and cause
+her to feel he had acted on a knowledge he had no right to possess till
+he had declared himself in speech?  Could he not have spared her that?--
+This Christian gentleman, whose worth had compassed these mountains and
+won the dwellers among them--it was bitter.  Her pride and injured heart
+rose up and choked her.
+
+He let go her hand.  Now his face was partly turned from her, and she saw
+how thin and pale it was.  She saw, too, what I had seen during the past
+week, that his hair had become almost white about the temples; and the
+moveless sadness of his position struck her with unnatural force, so
+that, in spite of herself, tears came suddenly to her eyes, and a slight
+moan broke from her.  She would have run away; but it was too late.
+
+He saw the tears, the look of pity, indignation, pride, and love in her
+face.
+
+"My love!" he cried passionately.  He opened his arms to her.
+
+But she stood still.  He came very close to her, spoke quickly, and
+almost despairingly: "Ruth, I love you, and I have wronged you; but here
+is your place, if you will come."
+
+At first she seemed stunned, and her face was turned to her mountains,
+as though the echo of his words were coming back to her from them, but
+the thing crept into her heart and flooded it.  She seemed to wake, and
+then all her affection carried her into his arms, and she dried her eyes
+upon his breast.
+
+After a time he whispered, "My dear, I have wronged you.  I should not
+have made you care for me."
+
+She did not seem to notice that he spoke of wrong.  She said: "I was
+yours, Galt, even from the beginning, I think, though I did not quite
+know it.  I remember what you read in church the first Sunday you came,
+and it has always helped me; for I wanted to be good."
+
+She paused and raised her eyes to his, and then with sweet solemnity she
+said: "The words were:
+
+     "'The Lord God is my strength, and He will make my feet like hinds'
+     feet, and He will make me to walk upon mine high places.'"
+
+"Ruth," he answered, "you have always walked on the high places.  You
+have never failed.  And you are as safe as the nest of the eagle, a noble
+work of God."
+
+"No, I am not noble; but I should like to be so.  Most women like
+goodness.  It is instinct with us, I suppose.  We had rather be good than
+evil, and when we love we can do good things; but we quiver like the
+compass-needle between two poles.  Oh, believe me! we are weak; but we
+are loving."
+
+"Your worst, Ruth, is as much higher than my best as the heaven is--"
+
+"Galt, you hurt my fingers!" she interrupted.
+
+He had not noticed the almost fierce strength of his clasp.  But his life
+was desperately hungry for her.  "Forgive me, dearest.--As I said, better
+than my best; for, Ruth, my life was--wicked, long ago.  You cannot
+understand how wicked!"
+
+"You are a clergyman and a good man," she said, with pathetic negation.
+
+"You give me a heart unsoiled, unspotted of the world.  I have been in
+some ways worse than the worst men in the valley there below."
+
+"Galt, Galt, you shock me!" she said.
+
+"Why did I speak?  Why did I kiss your hand as I did?  Because at the
+moment it was the only honest thing to do; because it was due you that I
+should say: 'Ruth, I love you, love you so much'"--here she nestled close
+to him--"'so well, that everything else in life is as nothing beside it
+--nothing! so well that I could not let you share my wretchedness.'"
+
+She ran her hand along his breast and looked up at him with swimming
+eyes.
+
+"And you think that this is fair to me? that a woman gives the heart for
+pleasant weather only?  I do not know what your sorrow may be, but it is
+my right to share it.  I am only a woman; but a woman can be strong for
+those she loves.  Remember that I have always had to care for others--
+always; and I can bear much.  I will not ask what your trouble is, I only
+ask you"--here she spoke slowly and earnestly, and rested her hand on his
+shoulder--"to say to me that you love no other woman; and that--that no
+other woman has a claim upon you.  Then I shall be content to pity you,
+to help you, to love you.  God gives women many pains, but none so great
+as the love that will not trust utterly; for trust is our bread of life.
+Yes, indeed, indeed!"
+
+"I dare not say," he said, "that it is your misfortune to love me, for in
+this you show how noble a woman can be.  But I will say that the cup is
+bitter-sweet for you. . . .  I cannot tell you now what my trouble is;
+but I can say that no other living woman has a claim upon me. . . .
+My reckoning is with the dead."
+
+"That is with God," she whispered, "and He is just and merciful too. . . .
+Can it not be repaired here?"  She smoothed back his hair, then let her
+fingers stray lightly on his cheek.
+
+It hurt him like death to reply.  "No, but there can be punishment here."
+
+She shuddered slightly.  "Punishment, punishment," she repeated
+fearfully--"what punishment?"
+
+"I do not quite know."  Lines of pain grew deeper in his face. . . .
+"Ruth, how much can a woman forgive?"
+
+"A mother, everything."  But she would say no more.  He looked at her
+long and earnestly, and said at last: "Will you believe in me no matter
+what happens?"
+
+"Always, always."  Her smile was most winning.
+
+"If things should appear dark against me?"
+
+"Yes, if you give me your word."
+
+"If I said to you that I did a wrong; that I broke the law of God, though
+not the laws of man?"
+
+There was a pause in which she drew back, trembling slightly, and looked
+at him timidly and then steadily, but immediately put her hands bravely
+in his, and said: "Yes."
+
+"I did not break the laws of man."
+
+"It was when you were in the navy?" she inquired, in an awe-stricken
+tone.
+
+"Yes, years ago."
+
+"I know.  I feel it.  You must not tell me.  It was a woman, and this
+other woman, this Mrs. Falchion knows, and she would try to ruin you,
+or"--here she seemed to be moved suddenly by a new thought--"or have you
+love her.  But she shall not, she shall not--neither!  For I will love
+you, and God will listen to me, and answer me."
+
+"Would to Heaven I were worthy of you!  I dare not think of where you
+might be called to follow me, Ruth."
+
+"'Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge:
+thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,'" she rejoined in a
+low voice.
+
+"'Thy God my God!'" he repeated after her slowly.  He suddenly wondered
+if his God was her God; whether now, in his trouble, he had that comfort
+which his creed and profession should give him.  For the first time he
+felt acutely that his choice of this new life might have been more a
+reaction from the past, a desire for expiation, than radical belief that
+this was the right and only thing for him to do.  And when, some time
+after, he bade Ruth good-bye, as she went with her father, it came to him
+with appalling conviction that his life had been a mistake.  The twist of
+a great wrong in a man's character distorts his vision; and if he has a
+tender conscience he magnifies his misdeeds.
+
+In silence Roscoe and I watched the two ride down the slope.  I guessed
+what had happened: afterwards I was told all.  I was glad of it, though
+the end was not yet promising.  When we turned to go towards the house
+again, a man lounged out of the trees towards us.  He looked at me, then
+at Roscoe, and said:
+
+"I'm Phil Boldrick's pal from Danger Mountain."  Roscoe held out his
+hand, and the man took it, saying: "You're The Padre, I suppose, and Phil
+was soft on you.  Didn't turn religious, did he?  He always had a streak
+of God A'mighty in him; a kind of give-away-the-top-of-your-head chap;
+friend o' the widow and the orphan, and divvy to his last crust with a
+pal.  I got your letter, and come over here straight to see that he's
+been tombed accordin' to his virtues; to lay out the dollars he left me
+on the people he had on his visitin' list; no loafers, no gophers, not
+one; but to them that stayed by him I stay, while prog and liquor last."
+
+I saw Roscoe looking at him in an abstracted way, and, as he did not
+reply, I said: "Phil had many friends and no enemies."  Then I told him
+the tale of his death and funeral, and how the valley mourned for him.
+
+While I spoke he stood leaning against a tree, shaking his head and
+listening, his eyes occasionally resting on Roscoe with a look as
+abstracted and puzzled as that on Roscoe's face.  When I had finished he
+drew his hand slowly down his beard and a thick sound came from behind
+his fingers.  But he did not speak.
+
+Then I suggested quietly that Phil's dollars could be put to a better use
+than for prog and liquor.
+
+He did not reply to this at all; but after a moment's pause, in which he
+seemed to be studying the gambols of a squirrel in a pine tree, he rubbed
+his chin nervously, and more in soliloquy than conversation said: "I
+never had but two pals that was pals through and through.  And one was
+Phil and the other was Jo--Jo Brackenbury."
+
+Here Roscoe's hand, which had been picking at the bark of a poplar,
+twitched suddenly.
+
+The man continued: "Poor Jo went down in the 'Fly Away' when she swung
+with her bare ribs flat before the wind, and swamped and tore upon the
+bloody reefs at Apia. . . .  God, how they gnawed her!  And never a
+rag holdin' nor a stick standin', and her pretty figger broke like a tin
+whistle in a Corliss engine.  And Jo Brackenbury, the dandiest rip, the
+noisiest pal that ever said 'Here's how!' went out to heaven on a tearing
+sea."
+
+"Jo Brackenbury--" Roscoe repeated musingly.  His head was turned away
+from us.
+
+"Yes, Jo Brackenbury; and Captain Falchion said to me" (I wonder that I
+did not start then) "when I told him how the 'Fly Away' went down to Davy,
+and her lovers went aloft, reefed close afore the wind--'Then,' says he,
+'they've got a damned sound seaman on the Jordan, and so help me! him
+that's good enough to row my girl from open sea, gales poundin' and
+breakers showin' teeth across the bar to Maita Point, is good enough for
+use where seas is still and reefs ain't fashionable.'"
+
+Roscoe's face looked haggard as it now turned towards us.  "If you will
+meet me," he said to the stranger, "to-morrow morning, in Mr. Devlin's
+office at Viking, I will hand you over Phil Boldrick's legacy."
+
+The man made as if he would shake hands with Roscoe, who appeared not to
+notice the motion, and then said: "I'll be there.  You can bank on that;
+and, as we used to say down in the Spicy Isles, where neither of you have
+been, I s'pose, Talofa!"
+
+He swung away down the hillside.
+
+Roscoe turned to me.  "You see, Marmion, all things circle to a centre.
+The trail seems long, but the fox gets killed an arm's length from his
+hole."
+
+"Not always.  You take it too seriously," I said.  "You are no fox."
+
+"That man will be in at the death," he persisted.
+
+"Nonsense, Roscoe. He does not know you.  What has he to do with you?
+This is overwrought nerves.  You are killing yourself with worry."
+
+He was motionless and silent for a minute.  Then he said very quietly:
+"No, I do not think that I really worry now.  I have known"--here he laid
+his hand upon my shoulder and his eyes had a shining look--"what it is to
+be happy, unspeakably happy, for a moment; and that stays with me.  I am
+a coward no longer."
+
+He drew his finger tips slowly across his forehead.  Then he continued:
+"To-morrow I shall be angry with myself, no doubt, for having that
+moment's joy, but I cannot feel so now.  I shall probably condemn myself
+for cruel selfishness; but I have touched life's highest point this
+afternoon, Marmion."
+
+I drew his hand down from my shoulder and pressed it.  It was cold.
+He withdrew his eyes from the mountain, and said: "I have had dreams,
+Marmion, and they are over.  I lived in one: to expiate--to wipe out--
+a past, by spending my life for others.  The expiation is not enough.
+I lived in another: to win a woman's love; and I have, and was caught up
+by it for a moment, and it was wonderful.  But it is over now, quite
+over. . . .  And now for her sake renunciation must be made, before
+I have another dream--a long one, Marmion."
+
+I had forebodings, but I pulled myself together and said firmly: "Roscoe,
+these are fancies.  Stop it, man.  You are moody.  Come, let us walk, and
+talk of other things."
+
+"No, we will not walk," he said, "but let us sit there on the coping and
+be quiet--quiet in that roar between the hills."  Suddenly he swung
+round, caught me by the shoulders and held me gently so.
+
+"I have a pain at my heart, Marmion, as if I'd heard my death sentence;
+such as a soldier feels who knows that Death looks out at him from iron
+eyes.  You smile: I suppose you think I am mad."
+
+I saw that it was best to let him speak his mind.  So I answered: "Not
+mad, my friend.  Say on what you like.  Tell me all you feel.  Only, for
+God's sake be brave, and don't give up until there's occasion.  I am sure
+you exaggerate your danger, whatever it is."
+
+"Listen for a minute," said he: "I had a brother Edward, as good a lad
+as ever was; a boisterous, healthy fellow.  We had an old nurse in our
+family who came from Irish hills, faithful and kind to us both.  There
+came a change over Edward.  He appeared not to take the same interest in
+his sports.  One day he came to me, looking a bit pale, and said: 'Galt,
+I think I should like to study for the Church.'  I laughed at it, yet it
+troubled me in a way, for I saw he was not well.  I told Martha, the
+nurse.  She shook her head sadly, and said: 'Edward is not for the
+Church, but you, my lad.  He is for heaven.'
+
+"'For heaven, Martha?' laughed I.
+
+"'In truth for heaven,' she replied, 'and that soon.  The look of his eye
+is doom.  I've seen it since I swaddled him, and he will go suddenly.'
+
+"I was angry, and I said to her,--though she thought she spoke the
+truth,--'This is only Irish croaking.  We'll have the banshee next.'
+
+"She got up from her chair and answered me solemnly: 'Galt Roscoe, I HAVE
+heard the banshee wail, and sorrow falls upon your home.  And don't you
+be so hard with me that have loved you, and who suffers for the lad that
+often and often lay upon my breast.  Don't be so hard; for your day of
+trouble comes too.  You, not he, will be priest at the altar.  Death will
+come to him like a swift and easy sleep; but you will feel its hand upon
+your heart and know its hate for many a day, and bear the slow pangs of
+it until your life is all crushed, and you go from the world alone, Love
+crying after you and not able to save you, not even the love of woman--
+weaker than death. . . .  And, in my grave, when that day comes beside
+a great mountain in a strange land, I will weep and pray for you; for I
+was mother to you too, when yours left you alone bewhiles, never, in this
+world, to come back.'
+
+"And, Marmion, that night towards morning, as I lay in the same room with
+Edward, I heard his breath stop sharply.  I jumped up and drew aside the
+curtains to let in the light, and then I knew that the old woman spoke
+true. . . .  And now! . . .  Well, I am like Hamlet--and I can say
+with him: 'But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart
+--but it is no matter!"' . . . .
+
+I tried to laugh and talk away his brooding, but there was little use,
+his convictions were so strong.  Besides, what can you do with a
+morbidness which has its origin in fateful circumstances?
+
+I devoutly wished that a telegram would come from Winnipeg to let me know
+if Boyd Madras, under his new name, could be found.  I was a hunter on a
+faint trail.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+THE STRINGS OF DESTINY
+
+When Phil's pal left us he went wandering down the hillside, talking to
+himself.  Long afterwards he told me how he felt, and I reproduce his
+phrases as nearly as I can.
+
+"Knocked 'em, I guess," he said, "with that about Jo Brackenbury. . . .
+Poor Jo!  Stuck together, him and me did, after she got the steel in her
+heart."  . . . He pulled himself together, shuddering. . . .  "Went
+back on me, she did, and took up with a cursed swell, and got it cold--
+cold.  And I?  By Judas!  I never was shut of that.  I've known women,
+many of 'em, all countries, but she was different.  I expect now, after
+all these years, that if I got my hand on the devil that done for her,
+I'd rattle his breath in his throat.  There's things that clings.  She
+clings, Jo Brackenbury clings, and Phil Boldrick clings; and they're
+gone, and I'm left to go it alone.  To play the single hand--what!--by
+Jiminy!"
+
+He exclaimed thus on seeing two women approach from the direction of the
+valley.  He stood still, mouth open, staring.  They drew near, almost
+passed him.  But one of them, struck by his intense gaze, suddenly turned
+and came towards him.
+
+"Miss Falchion!  Miss Falchion!" he cried.  Then, when she hesitated as
+if with an effort of memory, he added: "Don't you know me?"
+
+"Ah," she replied abruptly, "Sam Kilby!  Are you Sam Kilby, Jo
+Brackenbury's friend, from Samoa?"
+
+"Yes, miss, I'm Jo Brackenbury's friend; and I've rowed you across the
+reefs with him more than once I guess so!  But it's a long way from Apia
+to the Rockies, and it's funny to meet here."
+
+"When did you come here--and from where?"
+
+"I come to-day from the Hudson's Bay post at Danger Mountain.  I'm Phil
+Boldrick's pal."
+
+"Ah," she said again, with a look in her eyes not pleasant to see, "and
+what brings you up here in the hills?"  Hers was more than an ordinary
+curiosity.
+
+"I come to see the Padre who was with Phil--when he left.  And the
+Padre's a fair square sort, as I reckon him, but melancholy, almighty
+melancholy."
+
+"Yes, melancholy, I suppose," she said, "and fair square, as you say.
+And what did you say and do?"
+
+"Why, we yarned about Phil, and where I'd get the legacy to-morrow; and
+I s'pose I had a strong breeze on the quarter, for I talked as free as if
+we'd grubbed out of the same dough-pan since we was kiddies."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Yes siree; I don't know how it was, but I got to reelin' off about Jo--
+queer, wasn't it?  And I told 'em how he went down in the 'Fly Away', and
+how the lovely ladies--you remember how we used to call the whitecaps
+lovely ladies--fondled him out to sea and on to heaven."
+
+"And what did--the Padre--think of that?"
+
+"Well, he's got a heart, I should say, and that's why Phil cottoned to
+him, maybe,--for he looked as if he'd seen ghosts.  I guess he'd never
+had a craft runnin' 'tween a sand-bar and a ragged coral bank; nor seen a
+girl like the 'Fly Away' take a buster in her teeth; nor a man-of-war
+come bundlin' down upon a nasty glacis, the captain on the bridge,
+engines goin' for all they're worth, every man below battened in, and
+every Jack above watchin' the fight between the engines and the
+hurricane. . . .  Here she rolls six fathoms from the glacis that'll
+rip her copper garments off, and the quiverin' engines pull her back; and
+she swings and struggles and trembles between hell in the hurricane and
+God A'mighty in the engines; till at last she gets her nose at the neck
+of the open sea and crawls out safe and sound. . . .  I guess he'd
+have more marble in his cheeks, if he saw likes o' that, Miss Falchion?"
+
+Kilby paused and wiped his forehead.
+
+She had listened calmly.  She did not answer his question.  She said:
+"Kilby, I am staying at the summer hotel up there.  Will you call on me--
+let me see . . . . say, to-morrow afternoon?--Some one will tell you the
+way, if you do not know it. . . .  Ask for MRS. Falchion, Kilby, not
+Miss Falchion. . . .  You will come?"
+
+"Why, yes," he replied, "you can count on me; for I'd like to hear of
+things that happened after I left Apia--and how it is that you are Mrs.
+Falchion, for that's mighty queer."
+
+"You shall hear all that and more."  She held out her hand to him and
+smiled.  He took it, and she knew that now she was gathering up the
+strings of destiny.
+
+They parted.
+
+The two passed on, looking, in their cool elegance, as if life were the
+most pleasant thing; as though the very perfume of their garments would
+preserve them from that plague called trouble.
+
+"Justine," said Mrs. Falchion, "there is one law stranger than all; the
+law of coincidence.  Perhaps the convenience of modern travel assists it,
+but fate is in it also.  Events run in circles.  People connected with
+them travel that way also.  We pass and re-pass each other many times,
+but on different paths, until we come close and see each other face to
+face."
+
+She was speaking almost the very words which Roscoe had spoken to me.
+But perhaps there was nothing strange in that.
+
+"Yes, madame," replied Justine; "it is so, but there is a law greater
+than coincidence."
+
+"What, Justine?"
+
+"The law of love, which is just and merciful, and would give peace
+instead of trouble."
+
+Mrs. Falchion looked closely at Justine, and, after a moment, evidently
+satisfied, said: "What do you know of love?"
+
+Justine tried hard for composure, and answered gently: "I loved my
+brother Hector."
+
+"And did it make you just and merciful and--an angel?"
+
+"Madame, you could answer that better.  But it has not made me be at war;
+it has made me patient."
+
+"Your love--for your brother--has made you that?"  Again she looked
+keenly, but Justine now showed nothing but earnestness.
+
+"Yes, madame."
+
+Mrs. Falchion paused for a moment, and seemed intent on the beauty of the
+pine-belted hills, capped by snowy peaks, and wrapped in a most hearty
+yet delicate colour.  The red of her parasol threw a warm soft ness upon
+her face.  She spoke now without looking at Justine.
+
+"Justine, did you ever love any one besides your brother?--I mean another
+man."
+
+Justine was silent for a moment, and then she said: "Yes, once."  She was
+looking at the hills now, and Mrs. Falchion at her.
+
+"And you were happy?"  Here Mrs. Falchion abstractedly toyed with a piece
+of lace on Justine's arm.  Such acts were unusual with her.
+
+"I was happy--in loving."
+
+"Why did you not marry?"
+
+"Madame--it was impossible--quite."  This, with hesitation and the
+slightest accent of pain.
+
+"Why impossible?  You have good looks, you were born a lady; you have a
+foolish heart--the fond are foolish."  She watched the girl keenly, the
+hand ceased to toy with the lace, and caught the arm itself--"Why
+impossible?"
+
+"Madame, he did not love me, he never could."
+
+"Did he know of your love?"
+
+"Oh no, no!"  This with trouble in her voice.
+
+"And you have never forgotten?"
+
+The catechism was merciless; but Mrs. Falchion was not merely malicious.
+She was inquiring of a thing infinitely important to her.  She was
+searching the heart of another, not only because she was suspicious, but
+because she wanted to know herself better.
+
+"It is easy to remember."
+
+"Is it long since you saw him?"
+
+The question almost carried terror with it, for she was not quite sure
+why Mrs. Falchion questioned her.  She lifted her eyes slowly, and there
+was in them anxiety and joy.  "It seems," she said, "like years."
+
+"He loves some one else, perhaps?"
+
+"Yes, I think so, madame."
+
+"Did you hate her?"
+
+"Oh no; I am glad for him."
+
+Here Mrs. Falchion spoke sharply, almost bitterly.  Even through her soft
+colour a hardness appeared.  "You are glad for him?  You would see
+another woman in his arms and not be full of anger?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"Justine, you are a fool."
+
+"Madame, there is no commandment against being a fool."
+
+"Oh, you make me angry with your meekness!"  Here Mrs. Falchion caught a
+twig from a tree by her, snapped it in her fingers, and petulantly threw
+its pieces to the ground.  "Suppose that the man had once loved you, and
+afterwards loved another--then again another?"
+
+"Madame, that would be my great misfortune, but it might be no wrong in
+him."
+
+"How not a wrong in him?"
+
+"It may have been my fault.  There must be love in both--great love, for
+it to last."
+
+"And if the woman loved him not at all?"
+
+"Where, then, could be the wrong in him?"
+
+"And if he went from you,"--here her voice grew dry and her words were
+sharp,--"and took a woman from the depths of--oh, no matter what! and
+made her commit--crime--and was himself a criminal?"
+
+"It is horrible to think of; but I should ask myself how much I was to
+blame. . . .  What would you ask yourself, madame?"
+
+"You have a strain of the angel in you, Justine.  You would forgive Judas
+if he said, 'Peccavi.'  I have a strain of Satan--it was born in me--
+I would say, You have sinned, now suffer."
+
+"God give you a softer heart," said Justine, with tender boldness and
+sincerity.
+
+At this Mrs. Falchion started slightly, and trouble covered her face.
+She assumed, however, a tone almost brusque, artificially airy and
+unimportant.
+
+"There, that will do, thank you. . . .  We have become serious and
+incomprehensible.  Let us talk of other things.  I want to be gay. . . .
+Amuse me."
+
+Arrived at the hotel, she told Justine that she must not be disturbed
+till near dinner-time, and withdrew to her sitting-room.  There she sat
+and thought, as she had never done in her life before.  She thought upon
+everything that had happened since the day when she met Galt Roscoe on
+the 'Fulvia'; of a certain evening in England, before he took orders,
+when he told her, in retort to some peculiarly cutting remark of hers,
+that she was the evil genius of his life: that evening when her heart
+grew hard, as she had once said it should always be to him, and she
+determined again, after faltering many times, that just such a genius she
+would be; of the strange meeting in the rapids at the Devil's Slide, and
+the irony of it; and the fact that he had saved her life--on that she
+paused a while; of Ruth Devlin--and here she was swayed by conflicting
+emotions; of the scene at the mill, and Phil Boldrick's death and
+funeral; of the service in the church where she meant to mock him, and,
+instead, mocked herself; of the meeting with Tonga Sam; of all that
+Justine had said to her: then again of the far past in Samoa, with which
+Galt Roscoe was associated, and of that first vow of vengeance for a
+thing he had done; and how she had hesitated to fulfil it year after year
+till now.
+
+Passing herself slowly back and forth before her eyes, she saw that she
+had lived her life almost wholly alone; that no woman had ever cherished
+her as a friend, and that on no man's breast had she ever laid her head
+in trust and love.  She had been loved, but it had never brought her
+satisfaction.  From Justine there was devotion; but it had, as she
+thought, been purchased, paid for, like the labour of a ploughboy.  And
+if she saw now in Justine's eyes a look of friendship, a note of personal
+allegiance, she knew it was because she herself had grown more human.
+
+Her nature had been stirred.  Her natural heart was struggling against
+her old bitterness towards Galt Roscoe and her partial hate of Ruth
+Devlin.  Once Roscoe had loved her, and she had not loved him.  Then, on
+a bitter day for him, he did a mad thing.  The thing became--though
+neither of them knew it at the time, and he not yet--a great injury to
+her, and this had called for the sharp retaliation which she had the
+power to use.  But all had not happened as she expected; for something
+called Love had been conceived in her very slowly, and was now being
+born, and sent, trembling for its timid life, into the world.
+
+She closed her eyes with weariness, and pressed her hands to her temples.
+
+She wondered why she could not be all evil or all good.  She spoke and
+acted against Ruth Devlin, and yet she pitied her.  She had the nettle to
+sting Roscoe to death, and yet she hesitated to use it.  She had said to
+herself that she would wait till the happiest moment of his life, and
+then do so.  Well, his happiest moment had come.  Ruth Devlin's heart was
+all out, all blossomed--beside Mrs. Falchion's like some wild flower to
+the aloe. . . .  Only now she had come to know that she had a heart.
+Something had chilled her at her birth, and when her mother died, a
+stranger's kiss closed up all the ways to love, and left her an icicle.
+She was twenty-eight years old, and yet she had never kissed a face in
+joy or to give joy.  And now, when she had come to know herself, and
+understand what others understand when they are little children in their
+mother's arms, she had to bow to the spirit that denies.  She drew
+herself up with a quiver of the body.
+
+"O God!" she said, "do I hate him or love him!"  Her head dropped in her
+hands.  She sat regardless of time, now scarcely stirring, desperately
+quiet.  The door opened softly and Justine entered.  "Madame," she said,
+"pardon me; I am so sorry, but Miss Devlin has come to see you, and I
+thought--"
+
+"You thought, Justine, that I would see her."  There was unmistakable
+irony in her voice.  "Very well. . . .  Show her in."
+
+She rose, stretched out her arms as if to free herself of a burden,
+smoothed her hair, composed herself, and waited, the afternoon sun just
+falling across her burnished shoes, giving her feet of gold.  She chanced
+to look down at them.  A strange memory came to her: words that she had
+heard Roscoe read in church.  The thing was almost grotesque in its
+association.  "How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who
+bringeth glad tidings, who publisheth peace!"
+
+Ruth Devlin entered, saying, "I have come, to ask you if you will dine
+with us next Monday evening?"
+
+Then she explained the occasion of the dinner party, and said: "You see,
+though it is formal, I am asking our guests informally;" and she added as
+neutrally and as lightly as she could--"Mr. Roscoe and Dr. Marmion have
+been good enough to say that they will come.  Of course, a dinner party
+as it should be is quite impossible to us simple folk, but when a
+lieutenant-governor commands, we must do the best we can--with the
+help of our friends."
+
+Mrs. Falchion was delighted, she said, and then they talked of trivial
+matters, Ruth smoothing out the folds of her riding-dress with her whip
+more earnestly, in preoccupation, than the act called for.  At last she
+said, in the course of the formal talk: "You have travelled much?"
+
+"Yes, that has been my lot," was the reply; and she leaned back in the
+gold-trimmed cane chair, her feet still in the belt of sunlight.
+
+"I have often wished that I might travel over the ocean," said Ruth, "but
+here I remain--what shall I say?--a rustic in a bandbox, seeing the world
+through a pin-hole.  That is the way my father puts it.  Except, of
+course, that I think it very inspiring to live out here among wonderful
+mountains, which, as Mr. Roscoe says, are the most aristocratic of
+companions."
+
+Some one in the next room was playing the piano idly yet expressively.
+The notes of Il Trovatore kept up a continuous accompaniment to their
+talk, varying, as if by design, with its meaning and importance, and yet
+in singular contrast at times to their thoughts and words.  It was almost
+sardonic in its monotonous persistence.
+
+"Travel is not all, believe me, Miss Devlin," was the indolent reply.
+"Perhaps the simpler life is the happier.  The bandbox is not the worst
+that may come to one--when one is born to it.  I am not sure but it is
+the best.  I doubt that when one has had the fever of travel and the
+world, the bandbox is permanently habitable again."
+
+Mrs. Falchion was keen; she had found her opportunity.
+
+On the result of this duel, if Ruth Devlin but knew it, depends her own
+and another's happiness.  It is not improbable, however, that something
+of this was in her mind.  She shifted her chair so that her face was not
+so much in the light.  But the belt of sunlight was broadening from Mrs.
+Falchion's feet to her dress.
+
+"You think not?" Ruth asked slowly.
+
+The reply was not important in tone.  Mrs. Falchion had picked up a paper
+knife and was bending it to and fro between her fingers.
+
+"I think not.  Particularly with a man, who is, we will say, by nature,
+adventurous and explorative.  I think if, in some mad moment, I
+determined to write a novel, it should be of such a man.  He flies wide
+and far; he sees all; he feeds on novelty; he passes from experience to
+experience--liberal pleasures of mind and sense all the way.  Well, he
+tires of Egypt and its flesh-pots.  He has seen as he hurried on--I hope
+I am not growing too picturesque--too much of women, too many men.  He
+has been unwise--most men are.  Perhaps he has been more than unwise;
+he has made a great mistake, a social mistake--or crime--less or more.
+If it is a small one, the remedy is not so difficult.  Money, friends,
+adroitness, absence, long retirement, are enough.  If a great one, and he
+is sensitive--and sated--he flies, he seeks seclusion.  He is afflicted
+with remorse.  He is open to the convincing pleasures of the simple and
+unadorned life; he is satisfied with simple people.  The snuff of the
+burnt candle of enjoyment he calls regret, repentance.  He gives himself
+the delights of introspection, and wishes he were a child again--yes,
+indeed it is so, dear Miss Devlin."
+
+Ruth sat regarding her, her deep eyes glowing.  Mrs. Falchion
+continued: "In short, he finds the bandbox, as you call it, suited to his
+renunciations.  Its simplicities, which he thinks is regeneration, are
+only new sensations.  But--you have often noticed the signification of
+a 'but,'" she added, smiling, tapping her cheek lightly with the ivory
+knife--"but the hour arrives when the bandbox becomes a prison, when the
+simple hours cloy.  Then the ordinary incident is merely gauche, and
+expiation a bore.
+
+"I see by your face that you understand quite what I mean. . . .
+Well, these things occasionally happen.  The great mistake follows the
+man, and, by a greater misery, breaks the misery of the bandbox; or the
+man himself, hating his captivity, becomes reckless, does some mad thing,
+and has a miserable end.  Or again, some one who holds the key to his
+mistake comes in from the world he has left, and considers--considers,
+you understand!--whether to leave him to work out his servitude, or,
+mercifully--if he is not altogether blind--permit him the means of escape
+to his old world, to the life to which he was born--away from the bandbox
+and all therein. . . .  I hope I have not tired you--I am sure I have."
+
+Ruth saw the full meaning of Mrs. Falchion's words.  She realised that
+her happiness, his happiness--everything--was at stake.  All Mrs.
+Falchion's old self was battling with her new self.  She had determined
+to abide by the result of this meeting.  She had spoken in a half gay
+tone, but her words were not everything; the woman herself was there,
+speaking in every feature and glance.  Ruth had listened with an
+occasional change of colour, but also with an outward pride to which she
+seemed suddenly to have grown.  But her heart was sick and miserable.
+How could it be otherwise, reading, as she did, the tale just told her in
+a kind, of allegory, in all its warning, nakedness, and vengeance?  But
+she detected, too, an occasional painful movement of Mrs. Falchion's
+lips, a kind of trouble in the face.  She noticed it at first vaguely
+as she listened to the music in the other room; but at length she
+interpreted it aright, and she did not despair.  She did not then follow
+her first impulse to show that she saw the real meaning of that speech,
+and rise and say, "You are insulting," and bid her good-day.
+
+After all, where was the ground for the charge of insult?  The words had
+been spoken impersonally.  So, after a moment, she said, as she drew a
+glove from a hand slightly trembling: "And you honestly think it is the
+case: that one having lived such a life as you describe so unusually,
+would never be satisfied with a simple life?"
+
+"My dear, never--not such a man as I describe.  I know the world."
+
+"But suppose not quite such an one; suppose one that had not been so--
+intense; so much the social gladiator; who had business of life as well,"
+--here the girl grew pale, for this was a kind of talk unfamiliar and
+painful to her, but to be endured for her cause,--"as well as 'the flesh-
+pots of Egypt;' who had made no wicked mistakes--would he necessarily end
+as you say?"
+
+"I am speaking of the kind of man who had made such mistakes, and he
+would end as I say.  Few men, if any, would leave the world for--the
+bandbox, shall I still say?  without having a Nemesis."
+
+"But the Nemesis need not, as you say yourself, be inevitable.  The
+person who holds the key of his life, the impersonation of his mistake--"
+
+"His CRIMINAL mistake," Mrs. Falchion interrupted, her hand with the
+ivory knife now moveless in that belt of sunlight across her knees.
+
+"His criminal mistake," Ruth repeated, wincing--"might not it become
+changed into mercy, and the man be safe?"
+
+"Safe?  Perhaps.  But he would tire of the pin-hole just the same. . . .
+My dear, you do not know life."
+
+"But, Mrs. Falchion," said the girl, now very bravely, "I know the
+crude elements of justice.  That is one plain thing taught here in the
+mountains.  We have swift reward and punishment--no hateful things called
+Nemesis.  The meanest wretch here in the West, if he has a quarrel,
+avenges himself openly and at once.  Actions are rough and ready,
+perhaps, but that is our simple way.  Hate is manly--and womanly too--
+when it is open and brave.  But when it haunts and shadows, it is not
+understood here."
+
+Mrs. Falchion sat during this speech, the fingers of one hand idly
+drumming the arm of her chair, as idly as when on board the 'Fulvia' she
+listened to me telling that story of Anson and his wife.  Outwardly her
+coolness was remarkable.  But she was really admiring, and amazed at
+Ruth's adroitness and courage.  She appreciated fully the skilful duel
+that had kept things on the surface, and had committed neither of them
+to anything personal.  It was a battle--the tragical battle of a drawing-
+room.
+
+When Ruth had ended, she said slowly: "You speak very earnestly.  You do
+your mountains justice; but each world has its code.  It is good for some
+men to be followed by a slow hatred--it all depends on themselves.  There
+are some who wish to meet their fate and its worst, and others who would
+forget it.  The latter are in the most danger always."
+
+Ruth rose.
+
+She stepped forward slightly, so that her feet also were within the
+sunlight.  The other saw this; it appeared to interest her.  Ruth looked
+--as such a girl can look--with incredible sincerity into Mrs. Falchion's
+eyes, and said: "Oh, if I knew such a man, I would be sorry--sorry for
+him; and if I also knew that his was only a mistake and not a crime, or,
+if the crime itself had been repented of, and atonement made, I would beg
+some one--some one better than I--to pray for him.  And I would go to the
+person who had his life and career at disposal, and would say to her, if
+it were a woman, oh, remember that it is not he alone who would suffer!
+I would beg that woman--if it were a woman--to be merciful, as she one
+day must ask for mercy."
+
+The girl as she stood there, all pale, yet glowing with the white light
+of her pain, was beautiful, noble, compelling.  Mrs. Falchion now rose
+also.  She was altogether in the sunlight now.  From the piano in the
+next room came a quick change of accompaniment, and a voice was heard
+singing, as if to the singer's self, 'Il balen del suo sorris'.  It is
+hard to tell how far such little incidents affected her in what she did
+that afternoon; but they had their influence.  She said: "You are
+altruistic--or are you selfish, or both? . . .  And should the woman
+--if it were a woman--yield, and spare the man, what would you do?"
+
+"I would say that she had been merciful and kind, and that one in this
+world would pray for her when she needed prayers most."
+
+"You mean when she was old,"--Mrs. Falchion shrank a little at the sound
+of her own words.  Now her careless abandon was gone; she seemed to be
+following her emotions.  "When she was old," she continued, "and came to
+die?  It is horrible to grow old, except one has been a saint--and a
+mother. . . .  And even then--have you ever seen them, the women of
+that Egypt of which we spoke--powdered, smirking over their champagne,
+because they feel for an instant a false pulse of their past?--See how
+eloquent your mountains make me!--I think that would make one hard and
+cruel; and one would need the prayers of a churchful of good women, even
+as good--as you."
+
+She could not resist a touch of irony in the last words, and Ruth, who
+had been ready to take her hand impulsively, was stung.  But she replied
+nothing; and the other, after waiting, added, with a sudden and wonderful
+kindness: "I say what is quite true.  Women might dislike you--many of
+them would--though you could not understand why; but you are good, and
+that, I suppose, is the best thing in the world.  Yes, you are good," she
+said musingly, and then she leaned forward and quickly kissed the girl's
+cheek.  "Good-bye," she said, and then she turned her head resolutely
+away.
+
+They stood there both in the sunlight, both very quiet, but their
+hearts were throbbing with new sensations.  Ruth knew that she had
+conquered, and, with her eyes all tearful, she looked steadily,
+yearningly at the woman before her; but she knew it was better she should
+say little now, and, with a motion of the hand in good-bye,--she could do
+no more,--she slowly went to the door.  There she paused and looked back,
+but the other was still turned away.
+
+For a minute Mrs. Falchion stood looking at the door through which the
+girl had passed, then she caught close the curtains of the window, and
+threw herself upon the sofa with a sobbing laugh.
+
+"To her--I played the game of mercy to her!" she cried.  "And she has his
+love, the love which I rejected once, and which I want now--to my shame!
+A hateful and terrible love.  I, who ought to say to him, as I so long
+determined: 'You shall be destroyed.  You killed my sister, poor Alo; if
+not with a knife yourself you killed her heart, and that is just the
+same.'  I never knew until now what a heart is when killed."
+
+She caught her breast as though it hurt her, and, after a moment,
+continued: "Do hearts always ache so when they love?  I was the wife of a
+good man oh! he WAS a good man, who sinned for me.  I see it now!--and I
+let him die--die alone!"  She shuddered.  "Oh, now I see, and I know what
+love such as his can be!  I am punished--punished! for my love is
+impossible, horrible."
+
+There was a long silence, in which she sat looking at the floor, her face
+all grey with pain.  At last the door of the room softly opened, and
+Justine entered.
+
+"May I come in, madame?" she said.
+
+"Yes, come, Justine."  The voice was subdued, and there was in it what
+drew the girl swiftly to the side of Mrs. Falchion.  She spoke no word,
+but gently undid the other's hair, and smoothed and brushed it softly.
+
+At last Mrs. Falchion said: "Justine, on Monday we will leave here."
+
+The girl was surprised, but she replied without comment: "Yes, madame;
+where do we go?"
+
+There was a pause; then: "I do not know.  I want to go where I shall get
+rested.  A village in Italy or--" she paused.
+
+"Or France, madame?"  Justine was eager.
+
+Mrs. Falchion made a gesture of helplessness.  "Yes, France will do. . . .
+The way around the world is long, and I am tired."  Minutes passed, and
+then she slowly said: "Justine, we will go to-morrow night."
+
+"Yes, madame, to-morrow night--and not next Monday."
+
+There was a strange only half-veiled melancholy in Mrs. Falchion's next
+words: "Do you think, Justine, that I could be happy anywhere?"
+
+"I think anywhere but here, madame."
+
+Mrs. Falchion rose to a sitting posture, and looked at the girl fixedly,
+almost fiercely.  A crisis was at hand.  The pity, gentleness, and honest
+solicitude of Justine's face conquered her, and her look changed to one
+of understanding and longing for companionship: sorrow swiftly welded
+their friendship.
+
+Before Mrs. Falchion slept that night, she said again: "We will leave
+here to-morrow, Justine, for ever."
+
+And Justine replied: "Yes, madame, for ever."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+THE SENTENCE
+
+The next morning Roscoe was quiet and calm, but he looked ten years older
+than when I had first seen him.  After breakfast he said to me: "I have
+to go to the valley to pay Phil Boldrick's friend the money, and to see
+Mr. Devlin.  I shall be back, perhaps, by lunchtime.  Will you go with
+me, or stay here?"
+
+"I shall try to get some fishing this morning, I fancy," I said.
+"And possibly I shall idle a good deal, for my time with you here is
+shortening, and I want to have a great store of laziness behind me for
+memory, when I've got my nose to the grindstone."
+
+He turned to the door, and said: "Marmion, I wish you weren't going.  I
+wish that we might be comrades under the same roof till--" He paused and
+smiled strangely.
+
+"Till the finish," I added, "when we should amble grey-headed, sans
+everything, out of the mad old world?  I imagine Miss Belle Treherne
+would scarcely fancy that. . . .  Still, we can be friends just the
+same.  Our wives won't object to an occasional bout of loafing together,
+will they?"
+
+I was determined not to take him too seriously.  He said nothing, and in
+a moment he was gone.
+
+I passed the morning idly enough, yet thinking, too, very much about my
+friend.  I was anxiously hoping that the telegram from Winnipeg would
+come.  About noon it came.  It was not known quite in what part of the
+North-west, Madras (under his new name) was, for the corps of mounted
+police had been changed about recently.  My letter had, however, been
+forwarded into the wilds.
+
+I saw no immediate way but to go to Mrs. Falchion and make a bold bid
+for his peace.  I had promised Madras never to let her know that he was
+alive, but I would break the promise if Madras himself did not come.
+After considerable hesitation I started.  It must be remembered that the
+events of the preceding chapter were only known to me afterwards.
+
+Justine Caron was passing through the hall of the hotel when I arrived.
+After greetings, she said that Mrs. Falchion might see me, but that they
+were very busy; they were leaving in the evening for the coast.  Here
+was a pleasant revelation!  I was so confused with delight at the
+information, that I could think of nothing more sensible to say than
+that the unexpected always happens.  By this time we were within Mrs.
+Falchion's sitting-room.  And to my remark, Justine replied "Yes, it is
+so.  One has to reckon most with the accidents of life.  The expected is
+either pleasant or unpleasant; there is no middle place."
+
+"You are growing philosophic," said I playfully.  "Monsieur," she said
+gravely, "I hope as I live and travel, I grow a little wiser."  Still she
+lingered, her hand upon the door.
+
+"I had thought that you were always wise."
+
+"Oh no, no!  How can you say so?  I have been very foolish sometimes."
+. . . She came back towards me.  "If I am wiser I am also happier,"
+she added.
+
+In that moment we understood each other; that is, I read how unselfish
+this girl could be, and she knew thoroughly the source of my anxiety,
+and was glad that she could remove it.
+
+"I would not speak to any one save you," she said, "but do you not also
+think that it is good we go?"
+
+"I have been thinking so, but I hesitated to say so," was my reply.
+
+"You need not hesitate," she said earnestly.  "We have both understood,
+and I know that you are to be trusted."
+
+"Not always," I said, remembering that one experience of mine with Mrs.
+Falchion on the 'Fulvia'.  Holding the back of a chair, and looking
+earnestly at me, she continued: "Once, on the vessel, you remember, in a
+hint so very little, I made it appear that madame was selfish. . . .
+I am sorry.  Her heart was asleep.  Now, it is awake.  She is unselfish.
+The accident of our going away is hers.  She goes to leave peace behind."
+"I am most glad," said I.  "And you think there will be peace?"
+
+"Surely, since this has come, that will come also."
+
+"And you--Mademoiselle?"  I should not have asked that question had I
+known more of the world.  It was tactless and unkind.
+
+"For me it is no matter at all.  I do not come in anywhere.  As I said,
+I am happy."
+
+And turning quickly, yet not so quickly but that I saw her cheeks were
+flushed, she passed out of the room.  In a moment Mrs. Falchion entered.
+There was something new in her carriage, in her person.  She came towards
+me, held out her hand, and said, with the same old half-quizzical tone:
+"Have you, with your unerring instinct, guessed that I was leaving, and
+so come to say good-bye?"
+
+"You credit me too highly.  No, I came to see you because I had an
+inclination.  I did not guess that you were going until Miss Caron told
+me."
+
+"An inclination to see me is not your usual instinct, is it?  Was it some
+special impulse, based on a scientific calculation--at which, I suppose,
+you are an adeptor curiosity?  Or had it a purpose?  Or were you bored,
+and therefore sought the most startling experience you could conceive?"
+She deftly rearranged some flowers in a jar.
+
+"I can plead innocence of all directly; I am guilty of all indirectly: I
+was impelled to come.  I reasoned--if that is scientific--on what I
+should say if I did come, knowing how inclined I was to--"
+
+"To get beyond my depth," she interrupted, and she motioned me to a
+chair.
+
+"Well, let it be so," said I.  "I was curious to know what kept you in
+this sylvan, and I fear, to you, half-barbaric spot.  I was bored with
+myself; and I had some purpose in coming, or I should not have had the
+impulse."
+
+She was leaning back in her chair easily, not languidly.  She seemed
+reposeful, yet alert.
+
+"How wonderfully you talk!" she said, with good-natured mockery.  "You
+are scientifically frank.  You were bored with yourself.--Then there is
+some hope for your future wife. . . .  We have had many talks in our
+acquaintance, Dr. Marmion, but none so interesting as this promises to
+be.  But now tell me what your purpose was in coming.  'Purpose' seems
+portentous, but quite in keeping."
+
+I noticed here the familiar, almost imperceptible click of the small
+white teeth.
+
+Was I so glad she was going that I was playful, elated?  "My purpose,"
+said I, "has no point now; for even if I were to propose to amuse you--I
+believe that was the old formula--by an idle day somewhere, by an
+excursion, an--"
+
+"An autobiography," she broke in soothingly.
+
+"Or an autobiography," I repeated stolidly, "you would not, I fancy, be
+prepared to accept my services.  There would be no chance--now that you
+are going away--for me to play the harlequin--"
+
+"Whose office you could do pleasantly if it suited you--these adaptable
+natures!"
+
+"Quite so.  But it is all futile now, as I say."
+
+"Yes, you mentioned that before.--Well?"
+
+"It is well," I replied, dropping into a more meaning tone.
+
+"You say it patriarchally, but yet flatteringly."  Here she casually
+offered me a flower.  I mechanically placed it in my buttonhole.  She
+seemed delighted at confusing me.  But I kept on firmly.
+
+"I do not think," I rejoined gravely now, "that there need be any
+flattery between us."
+
+"Why?--We are not married."
+
+"That is as radically true as it is epigrammatic," blurted I.
+
+"And truth is more than epigram?"
+
+"One should delight in truth; I do delight in epigram; there seems little
+chance for choice here."
+
+It seemed to me that I had said quite what I wished there, but she only
+looked at me enigmatically.
+
+She arranged a flower in her dress as she almost idly replied, though she
+did not look me full in the face as she had done before: "Well, then, let
+me add to your present delight by saying that you may go play till
+doomsday, Dr. Marmion.  Your work is done."
+
+"I do not understand."
+
+Her eyes were on me now with the directness she could so well use at
+need.
+
+"I did not suppose you would, despite your many lessons at my hands.  You
+have been altruistic, Dr. Marmion; I fear critical people would say that
+you meddled.  I shall only say that you are inquiring--scientific, or
+feminine--what you please!  . . .  You can now yield up your portfolio
+of--foreign affairs--of war--shall I say?  and retire into sedative
+habitations, which, believe me, you become best. . . .  What concerns
+me need concern you no longer.  The enemy retreats.  She offers truce--
+without conditions.  She retires. . . .  Is that enough for even you,
+Professor Marmion?"
+
+"Mrs. Falchion," I said, finding it impossible to understand why she had
+so suddenly determined to go away (for I did not know all the truth until
+afterwards--some of it long afterwards), "it is more than I dared to hope
+for, though less, I know, than you have heart to do if you willed so.  I
+know that you hold some power over my friend."
+
+"Do not think," she said, "that you have had the least influence.  What
+you might think, or may have intended to do, has not moved me in the
+least.  I have had wrongs that you do not know.  I have changed--that is
+all.  I admit I intended to do Galt Roscoe harm.
+
+"I thought he deserved it.  That is over.  After to-night, it is not
+probable that we shall meet again.  I hope that we shall not; as,
+doubtless, is your own mind."
+
+She kept looking at me with that new deep look which I had seen when she
+first entered the room.
+
+I was moved, and I saw that just at the last she had spoken under
+considerable strain.  "Mrs. Falchion," said I, "I have THOUGHT harder
+things of you than I ever SAID to any one.  Pray believe that, and
+believe, also, that I never tried to injure you.  For the rest, I can
+make no complaint.  You do not like me.  I liked you once, and do now,
+when you do not depreciate yourself of purpose. . . .  Pardon me, but
+I say this very humbly too. . . .  I suppose I always shall like you,
+in spite of myself.  You are one of the most gifted and fascinating women
+that I ever met.  I have been anxious for my friend.  I was concerned to
+make peace between you and your husband--"
+
+"The man who WAS my husband," she interrupted musingly.
+
+"Your husband--whom you so cruelly treated.  But I confess I have found
+it impossible to withhold admiration of you."
+
+For a long time she did not reply, but she never took her eyes off my
+face, as she leaned slightly forward.  Then at last she spoke more gently
+than I had ever heard her, and a glow came upon her face.
+
+"I am only human.  You have me at advantage.  What woman could reply
+unkindly to a speech like that?  I admit I thought you held me utterly
+bad and heartless, and it made me bitter. . . .  I had no heart--once.
+I had only a wrong, an injury, which was in my mind; not mine, but
+another's, and yet mine.  Then strange things occurred. . . .  At last
+I relented.  I saw that I had better go.  Yesterday I saw that; and I am
+going--that is all. . . .  I wished to keep the edge of my intercourse
+with you sharp and uncompanionable to the end; but you have forced me at
+my weakest point. . . ."  Here she smiled somewhat painfully. . . .
+"Believe me, that is the way to turn a woman's weapon upon herself.  You
+have learned much since we first met. . . .  Here is my hand in
+friendliness, if you care to take it; and in good-bye, should we not meet
+again more formally before I go."
+
+"I wish now that your husband, Boyd Madras, were here," I said.
+
+She answered nothing, but she did not resent it, only shuddered a little.
+
+Our hands grasped silently.  I was too choked to speak, and I left her.
+At that moment she blinded me to all her faults.  She was a wonderful
+woman.
+
+                    .....................
+
+Galt Roscoe had walked slowly along the forest-road towards the valley,
+his mind in that state of calm which, in some, might be thought numbness
+of sensation, in others fortitude--the prerogative of despair.  He came
+to the point of land jutting out over the valley, where he had stood with
+Mrs. Falchion, Justine, and myself, on the morning of Phil Boldrick's
+death.
+
+He looked for a long time, and then, slowly descending the hillside, made
+his way to Mr. Devlin's office.  He found Phil's pal awaiting him there.
+After a few preliminaries, the money was paid over, and Kilby said:
+
+"I've been to see his camping-ground.  It's right enough.  Viking has
+done it noble. . . .  Now, here's what I'm goin' to do: I'm goin' to
+open bottles for all that'll drink success to Viking.  A place that's
+stood by my pal, I stand by--but not with his money, mind you!  No, that
+goes to you, Padre, for hospital purposes.  My gift an' his. . . .
+So, sit down and write a receipt, or whatever it's called, accordin' to
+Hoyle, and you'll do me proud."
+
+Roscoe did as he requested, and handed the money over to Mr. Devlin for
+safe keeping, remarking, at the same time, that the matter should be
+announced on a bulletin outside the office at once.
+
+As Kilby stood chewing the end of a cigar and listening to the brief
+conversation between Roscoe and Mr. Devlin, perplexity crossed his face.
+He said, as Roscoe turned round: "There's something catchy about your
+voice, Padre.  I don't know what; but it's familiar like.  You never was
+on the Panama level, of course?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Nor in Australia?"
+
+"Yes, in 1876."
+
+"I wasn't there then."
+
+Roscoe grew a shade paler, but he was firm and composed.  He was
+determined to answer truthfully any question that was asked him, wherever
+it might lead.
+
+"Nor in Samoa?"
+
+There was the slightest pause, and then the reply came:
+
+"Yes, in Samoa."
+
+"Not a missionary, by gracious!  Not a mickonaree in Samoa?"
+
+"No."  He said nothing further.  He did not feel bound to incriminate
+himself.
+
+"No?  Well, you wasn't a beachcomber, nor trader, I'll swear.  Was you
+there in the last half of the Seventies?  That's when I was there."
+
+"Yes."  The reply was quiet.
+
+"By Jingo!"  The man's face was puzzled.  He was about to speak again;
+but at that moment two river-drivers--boon companions, who had been
+hanging about the door--urged him to come to the tavern.  This distracted
+him.  He laughed, and said that he was coming, and then again, though
+with less persistency, questioned Roscoe.  .  "You don't remember me, I
+suppose?"
+
+"No, I never saw you, so far as I know, until yesterday."
+
+"No?  Still, I've heard your voice.  It keeps swingin' in my ears; and I
+can't remember. . . .  I can't remember! . . .  But we'll have a
+spin about it again, Padre."  He turned to the impatient men.  "All
+right, bully-boys, I'm comin'."
+
+At the door he turned and looked again at Roscoe with a sharp, half-
+amused scrutiny, then the two parted.  Kilby kept his word.  He was
+liberal to Viking; and Phil's memory was drunk, not in silence, many
+times that day.  So that when, in the afternoon, he made up his mind to
+keep his engagement with Mrs. Falchion, and left the valley for the
+hills, he was not entirely sober.  But he was apparently good-natured.
+As he idled along he talked to himself, and finally broke out into
+singing:
+
+             "'Then swing the long boat down the drink,
+               For the lads as pipe to go;
+               But I sink when the 'Lovely Jane' does sink,
+               To the mermaids down below.'
+
+             "'The long boat bides on its strings,' says we,
+               'An' we bides where the long boat bides;
+               An' we'll bluff this equatorial sea,
+               Or swallow its hurricane tides.'
+
+              "But the 'Lovely Jane' she didn't go down,
+               An' she anchored at the Spicy Isles;
+               An' she sailed again to Wellington Town--
+               A matter of a thousand miles."
+
+It will be remembered that this was part of the song sung by Galt Roscoe
+on the Whi-Whi River, the day we rescued Mrs. Falchion and Justine Caron.
+Kilby sang the whole song over to himself until he reached a point
+overlooking the valley.  Then he stood silent for a time, his glance upon
+the town.  The walk had sobered him a little.  "Phil, old pal," he said
+at last, "you ain't got the taste of raw whiskey with you now.  When a
+man loses a pal he loses a grip on the world equal to all that pal's grip
+was worth. . . .  I'm drunk, and Phil's down there among the worms--
+among the worms! . . .  Ah!" he added in disgust, and, dashing his
+hand across his eyes, struck off into the woods again, making his way to
+the summer hotel, where he had promised to meet Mrs. Falchion.  He
+inquired for her, creating some astonishment by his uncouth appearance
+and unsteady manner.
+
+He learned from Justine that Mrs. Falchion had gone to see Roscoe, and
+that he would probably meet her if he went that way.  This he did.  He
+was just about to issue into a partly open space by a ravine near the
+house, when he heard voices, and his own name mentioned.  He stilled and
+listened.
+
+"Yes, Galt Roscoe," said a voice, "Sam Kilby is the man that loved Alo--
+loved her not as you did.  He would have given her a home, have made her
+happy, perhaps.  You, when Kilby was away, married her--in native
+fashion--which is no marriage--and KILLED her."
+
+"No, no, I did not kill her--that is not so.  As God is my Judge, that is
+not so."
+
+"You did not kill her with the knife? . . .  Well, I will be honest
+now, and say that I believe that, whatever I may have hinted or said
+before.  But you killed her just the same when you left her."
+
+"Mercy Falchion," he said desperately, "I will not try to palliate my
+sin.  But still I must set myself right with you in so far as I can.  The
+very night Alo killed herself I had made up my mind to leave the navy.
+I was going to send in my papers, and come back to Apia, and marry her as
+Englishmen are married.  While I remained in the navy I could not, as you
+know, marry her.  It would be impossible to an English officer.  I
+intended to come back and be regularly married to her."
+
+"You say that now," was the cold reply.
+
+"But it is the truth, the truth indeed.  Nothing that you might say could
+make me despise myself more than I do; but I have told you all, as I
+shall have to tell it one day before a just God.  You have spared me: He
+will not."
+
+"Gait Roscoe," she replied, "I am not merciful, nor am I just.  I
+intended to injure you, though you will remember I saved your life that
+night by giving you a boat for escape across the bay to the 'Porcupine',
+which was then under way.  The band on board, you also remember, was
+playing the music of La Grande Duchesse.  You fired on the natives who
+followed.  Well, Sam Kilby was with them.  Your brother officers did not
+know the cause of the trouble.  It was not known to any one in Apia
+exactly who it was that Kilby and the natives had tracked from Alo's
+hut."
+
+He drew his hand across his forehead dazedly.
+
+"Oh, yes I remember!" he said.  "I wish I had faced the matter there and
+then.  It would have been better."
+
+"I doubt that," she replied.  "The natives who saw you coming from Alo's
+hut did not know you.  You wisely came straight to the Consul's office--
+my father's house.  And I helped you, though Alo, half-caste Alo, was--
+my sister!"
+
+Roscoe started back.  "Alo--your--sister!" he exclaimed in horror.
+
+"Yes, though I did not know it till afterwards, not till just before my
+father died.  Alo's father was my father; and her mother had been
+honestly married to my father by a missionary; though for my sake it had
+never been made known.  You remember, also, that you carried on your
+relations with Alo secretly, and my father never suspected it was you."
+
+"Your sister!"  Roscoe was white and sick.
+
+"Yes.  And now you understand my reason for wishing you ill, and for
+hating you to the end."
+
+"Yes," he said despairingly, "I see."
+
+She was determined to preserve before him the outer coldness of her
+nature to the last.
+
+"Let us reckon together," she said.  "I helped to--in fact, I saved your
+life at Apia.  You helped to save my life at the Devil's Slide.  That is
+balanced.  You did me--the honour to say that you loved me once.  Well,
+one of my race loved you.  That is balanced also.  My sister's death came
+through you.  There is no balance to that.  What shall balance Alo's
+death? . . .  I leave you to think that over.  It is worth thinking
+about.  I shall keep your secret, too.  Kilby does not know you.  I doubt
+that he ever saw you, though, as I said, he followed you with the natives
+that night in Apia.  He was to come to see me to-day.  I think I intended
+to tell him all, and shift--the duty--of punishment on his shoulders,
+which I do not doubt he would fulfil.  But he shall not know.  Do not ask
+why.  I have changed my mind, that is all.  But still the account remains
+a long one.  You will have your lifetime to reckon with it, free from any
+interference on my part; for, if I can help it, we shall never meet again
+in this world--never. . . .  And now, good-bye."
+
+Without a gesture of farewell she turned and left him standing there, in
+misery and bitterness, but in a thankfulness too, more for Ruth's sake
+than his own.  He raised his arms with a despairing motion, then let them
+drop heavily to his side. . . .
+
+And then two strong hands caught his throat, a body pressed hard against
+him, and he was borne backward--backward--to the cliff!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+AFTER THE STORM
+
+I was sitting on the verandah, writing a letter to Belle Treherne.  The
+substantial peace of a mountain evening was on me.  The air was clear,
+and full of the scent of the pines and cedars, and the rumble of the
+rapids came musically down the canon.  I lifted my head and saw an eagle
+sailing away to the snow-topped peak of Trinity, and then turned to watch
+the orioles in the trees.  The hour was delightful.  It made me feel how
+grave mere living is, how noble even the meanest of us becomes sometimes
+--in those big moments when we think the world was built for us.  It is
+half egotism, half divinity; but why quarrel with it?
+
+I was young, ambitious; and Love and I were at that moment the only
+figures in the universe really deserving attention!  I looked on down a
+lane of cedars before me, seeing in imagination a long procession of
+pleasant things; of--  As I looked, another procession moved through the
+creatures of my dreams, so that they shrank away timidly, then utterly,
+and this new procession came on and on, until--I suddenly rose, and
+started forward fearfully, to see--unhappy reality!--the body of Galt
+Roscoe carried towards me.
+
+Then a cold wind seemed to blow from the glacier above and killed all the
+summer.  A man whispered to me: "We found him at the bottom of the ravine
+yonder.  He'd fallen over, I suppose."
+
+I felt his heart.  "He is not dead, thank God!" I said.
+
+"No, sir," said the other, "but he's all smashed."  They brought him in
+and laid him on his bed.  I sent one of the party for the doctor at
+Viking, and myself set to work, with what appliances I had, to deal with
+the dreadful injuries.  When the doctor came, together we made him into
+the semblance of a man again.  His face was but slightly injured, though
+his head had received severe hurts.  I think that I alone saw the marks
+on his throat; and I hid them.  I guessed the cause, but held my peace.
+
+I had sent round at once to James Devlin (but asked him not to come till
+morning), and also to Mrs. Falchion; but I begged her not to come at all.
+I might have spared her that; for, as I afterwards knew, she had no
+intention of coming.  She had learned of the accident on her way to
+Viking, and had turned back; but only to wait and know the worst or the
+best.
+
+About midnight I was left alone with Roscoe.  Once, earlier in the
+evening, he had recognised me and smiled faintly, but I had shaken my
+head, and he had said nothing.  Now, however, he was looking at me
+earnestly.  I did not speak.  What he had to tell me was best told in his
+own time.
+
+At last he said faintly:  "Marmion, shall I die soon?"
+
+I knew that frankness was best, and I replied: "I cannot tell, Roscoe.
+There is a chance of your living."
+
+He moved his head sadly.  "A very faint chance?"
+
+"Yes, a faint one, but--"
+
+"Yes?  'But'?"  He looked at me as though he wished it over.
+
+"But it rests with you whether the chance is worth anything.  If you are
+content to die, it is gone."
+
+"I am content to die," he replied.
+
+"And there," said I, "you are wrong and selfish.  You have Ruth to live
+for.  Besides, if you are given the chance, you commit suicide if you do
+not take it."
+
+There was a long pause, and then he said: "You are right; I will live if
+I can, Marmion."
+
+"And now YOU are right."  I nodded soothingly to him, and then asked him
+to talk no more; for I knew that fever would soon come on.
+
+He lay for a moment silent, but at length whispered: "Did you know it was
+not a fall I had?"  He raised his chin and stretched his throat slightly,
+with a kind of trembling.
+
+"I thought it was not a fall," I replied.
+
+"It was Phil's pal--Kilby."
+
+"I thought that."
+
+"How could you--think it?  Did--others--think so?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"No, not others; I alone.  They thought it accident; they could have no
+ground for suspicion.  But I had; and, besides, there were marks on your
+throat."
+
+"Nothing must happen to him, you understand.  He had been drinking, and
+--and he was justified.  I wronged him in Samoa, him and Mrs. Falchion."
+
+I nodded and put my fingers on my lips.
+
+Again there was silence.  I sat and watched him, his eyes closed, his
+body was motionless.  He slept for hours so, and then he waked rather
+sharply, and said half deliriously: "I could have dragged him with me,
+Marmion."
+
+"But you did not.  Yes, I understand.  Go to sleep again, Roscoe."
+
+Later on the fever came, and he moaned and moved his head about his
+pillow.  He could not move his body--it was too much injured.
+
+There was a source of fear in Kilby.  Would he recklessly announce what
+he had done, and the cause of it?  After thinking it over and over, I
+concluded that he would not disclose his crimes.  My conclusions were
+right, as after events showed.
+
+As for Roscoe, I feared that if he lived he must go through life maimed.
+He had a private income; therefore if he determined to work no more in
+the ministry, he would, at least, have the comforts of life.
+
+Ruth Devlin came.  I went to Roscoe and told him that she wished to see
+him.  He smiled sorrowfully and said: "To what end, Marmion?  I am a
+drifting wreck.  It will only shock her."  I think he thought she would
+not love him now if he lived--a crippled man.
+
+"But is this noble?  Is it just to her?" said I.
+
+After a long time he answered: "You are right again, quite right.  I am
+selfish.  When one is shaking between life and death, one thinks most of
+one's self."
+
+"She will help to bring you back from those places, Roscoe."
+
+"If I am delirious ever, do not let her come, will you, Marmion?  Promise
+me that."  I promised.
+
+I went to her.  She was very calm and womanly.  She entered the room,
+went quietly to his bedside, and, sitting down, took his hand.  Her smile
+was pitiful and anxious, but her words were brave.
+
+"My dearest," she said, "I am so sorry.  But you will soon be well, so we
+must be as patient and cheerful as we can."
+
+His eyes answered, but he did not speak.  She leaned over and kissed his
+cheek.  Then he said: "I hope I may get well."
+
+"This was the shadow over you," she ventured.  "This was your
+presentiment of trouble--this accident."
+
+"Yes, this was the shadow."
+
+Some sharp thought seemed to move her, for her eyes grew suddenly hard,
+and she stooped and whispered: "Was SHE there--when--it happened, Galt?"
+
+He shrank from the question, but he said immediately: "No, she was not
+there."
+
+"I am glad," she added, "that it was only an accident."
+
+Her eyes grew clear of their momentary hardness.  There is nothing in
+life like the anger of one woman against another concerning a man.
+
+Justine Caron came to the house, pale and anxious, to inquire.  Mrs.
+Falchion, she said, was not going away until she knew how Mr. Roscoe's
+illness would turn.
+
+"Miss Caron," I said to her, "do you not think it better that she should
+go?"
+
+"Yes, for him; but she grieves now."
+
+"For him?"
+
+"Not alone for him," was the reply.  There was a pause, and then she
+continued: "Madame told me to say to you that she did not wish Mr. Roscoe
+to know that she was still here."
+
+I assured her that I understood, and then she added mournfully: "I cannot
+help you now, monsieur, as I did on board the 'Fulvia'.  But he will be
+better cared for in Miss Devlin's hands, the poor lady! . . .  Do you
+think that he will live?"
+
+"I hope so.  I am not sure."
+
+Her eyes went to tears; and then I tried to speak more encouragingly.
+
+All day people came to inquire, chief among them Mr. Devlin, whose big
+heart split itself in humanity and compassion.  "The price of the big
+mill for the guarantee of his life!" he said over and over again.  "We
+can't afford to let him go."
+
+Although I should have been on my way back to Toronto, I determined to
+stay until Roscoe was entirely out of danger.  It was singular, but in
+this illness, though the fever was high, he never was delirious.  It
+would almost seem as if, having paid his penalty, the brain was at rest.
+
+While Roscoe hovered between life and death, Mr. Devlin, who persisted
+that he would not die, was planning for a new hospital and a new church,
+of which Roscoe should be president and padre respectively.  But the
+suspense to us all, for many days, was very great; until, one morning
+when the birds were waking the cedars, and the snow on Mount Trinity was
+flashing coolness down the hot valley, he waked and said to me: "Marmion,
+old friend; it is morning at last."
+
+"Yes, it is morning," said I.  "And you are going to live now?  You are
+going to be reasonable and give the earth another chance?"
+
+"Yes, I believe I shall live now."
+
+To cheer him, I told him what Mr. Devlin intended and had planned; how
+river-drivers and salmon-fishers came every day from the valley to
+inquire after him.  I did not tell him that there had been one or two
+disturbances between the river-drivers and the salmon-fishers.  I tried
+to let him see that there need be no fresh change in his life.  At length
+he interrupted me.
+
+"Marmion," he said, "I understand what you mean.  It would be cowardly of
+me to leave here now if I were a whole man.  I am true in intention, God
+knows, but I must carry a crippled arm for the rest of my life, must I
+not? . . . . and a crippled Padre is not the kind of man for this
+place.  They want men straight on their feet."
+
+"Do you think," I answered, "that they will not be able to stand the
+test?  You gave them--shall I say it?--a crippled mind before; you give
+them a crippled body now.  Well, where do you think the odds lie?  I
+should fancy with you as you are."
+
+There was a long silence in which neither of us moved.  At last he turned
+his face towards the window, and, not looking at me, said lingeringly:
+"This is a pleasant place."
+
+I knew that he would remain.
+
+I had not seen Mrs. Falchion during Roscoe's illness; but every day
+Justine came and inquired, or a messenger was sent.  And when, this
+fortunate day, Justine herself came, and I told her that the crisis was
+past, she seemed infinitely relieved and happy.  Then she said:
+
+"Madame has been ill these three days also; but now I think she will be
+better; and we shall go soon."
+
+"Ask her," said I, "not to go yet for a few days.  Press it as a favour
+to me."  Then, on second thought, I sat down and wrote Mrs. Falchion a
+note, hinting that there were grave reasons why she should stay a little
+longer: things connected with her own happiness.  Truth is, I had
+received a note that morning which had excited me.  It referred to Mrs.
+Falchion.  For I was an arch-plotter--or had been.
+
+I received a note in reply which said that she would do as I wished.
+Meanwhile I was anxiously awaiting the arrival of some one.
+
+That night a letter came to Roscoe.  After reading it shrinkingly he
+handed it to me.  It said briefly:
+
+     I'm not sorry I did it, but I'm glad I hevn't killed you.  I was
+     drunk and mad.  If I hadn't hurt you, I'd never hev forgive myself.
+     I reckon now, there's no need to do any forgivin' either side.
+     We're square--though maybe you didn't kill her after all.  Mrs.
+     Falchion says you didn't.  But you hurt her.  Well, I've hurt you.
+     And you will never hear no more of Phil's pal from Danger Mountain.
+
+Immediately after sunset of this night, a storm swept suddenly down the
+mountains, and prevented Ruth and her father from going to Viking.  I
+left them talking to Roscoe, he wearing such a look on his face as I like
+to remember now, free from distress of mind--so much more painful than
+distress of body.  As I was leaving the room, I looked back and saw Ruth
+sitting on a stool beside Roscoe's chair, holding the unmaimed hand in
+hers; the father's face shining with pleasure and pride.  Before I went
+out, I turned again to look at them, and, as I did so, my eye fell on the
+window against which the wind and rain were beating.  And through the wet
+there appeared a face, shocking in its paleness and misery--the face of
+Mrs. Falchion.  Only for an instant, and then it was gone.
+
+I opened the door and went out upon the verandah.  As I did so, there was
+a flash of lightning, and in that flash a figure hurried by me.  One
+moment, and there was another flash; and I saw the figure in the beating
+rain, making toward the precipice.
+
+Then I heard a cry, not loud, but full of entreaty and sorrow.  I moved
+quickly toward it.  In another white gleam I saw Justine with her arms
+about the figure, holding it back from the abyss.  She said with
+incredible pleading:
+
+"No, no, madame, not that!  It is wicked--wicked."
+
+I came and stood beside them.
+
+The figure sank upon the ground and buried a pitiful face in the wet
+grass.
+
+Justine leaned over her.
+
+She sobbed as one whose harvest of the past is all tears.  Nothing human
+could comfort her yet.
+
+I think she did not know that I was there.  Justine lifted her face to
+me, appealing.
+
+I turned and stole silently away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+IN PORT
+
+That night I could not rest.  It was impossible to rid myself of the
+picture of Mrs. Falchion as I had seen her by the precipice in the storm.
+What I had dared to hope for had come.  She had been awakened; and with
+the awakening had risen a new understanding of her own life and the lives
+of others.  The storm of wind and rain that had swept down the ravine was
+not wilder than her passions when I left her with Justine in the dark
+night.
+
+All had gone well where the worst might have been.  Roscoe's happiness
+was saved to him.  He felt that the accident to him was the penalty he
+paid for the error of his past; but in the crash of penalties Mrs.
+Falchion, too, was suffering; and, so far as she knew, must carry with
+her the remorse of having seen, without mercy, her husband sink to a
+suicide's grave.  I knew that she was paying a great price now for a
+mistaken past.  I wished that I might make her remorse and sorrow less.
+There was a way, but I was not sure that all would be as I wished.  Since
+a certain dreadful day on the 'Fulvia', Hungerford and I had held a secret
+in our hands.  When it seemed that Mrs. Falchion would bring a great
+trouble and shame into Roscoe's life, I determined to use the secret.  It
+must be used now only for Mrs. Falchion's good.  As I said in the last
+chapter, I had received word that somebody was coming whose presence must
+take a large place in the drama of these events: and I hoped the best.
+
+Until morning I lay and planned the best way to bring things to a
+successful issue.  The morning came--beautiful after a mad night.  Soon
+after I got up I received a note, brought by a boy from Viking, which
+gave me a thrill of excitement.  The note requested me to go to Sunburst.
+But first I sent a note to Mrs. Falchion, begging her in the name of our
+new friendship not to leave the mountains that day.  I also asked that
+she would meet me in Sunburst that evening at eight o'clock, at a place
+indicated by me.  I asked for a reply by the messenger I sent, and urged
+her to ask no questions, but to trust me as one who only wished to do her
+a great service, as I hoped her compliance would make possible.  I waited
+for the reply, and it bore but the one word--"Yes."
+
+Greatly pleased, I started down the valley.  It was still early when I
+reached Sunburst.  I went directly to the little tavern from whence the
+note had come, and remained an hour or more.  The result of that hour's
+conversation with the writer of the note was memorable, as was the hour
+itself.  I began to hope fondly for the success of my scheme.
+
+From the tavern I went to the village, with an elation hardly disturbed
+by the fact that many of the salmon-fishers were sullen, because of
+foolish depredations committed the evening before by idle river-men and
+mill-hands of Viking.  Had I not been so occupied with Mrs. Falchion and
+an event wherein she must figure, I should have taken more seriously the
+mutterings of the half-breeds, the moroseness of the Indians, and the
+nervous threatenings of the white fishers: the more so because I knew
+that Mr. Devlin had started early that morning for the Pacific Coast, and
+would not be back for some days.
+
+No two classes of people could be more unlike than the salmon-fishers of
+Sunburst and the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.  The life of the
+river-men was exciting, hardy, and perilous; tending to boisterousness,
+recklessness, daring, and wild humour: that of the salmon-fishers was
+cheerful, picturesque, infrequently dangerous, mostly simple and quiet.
+The river-driver chose to spend his idle hours in crude, rough
+sprightliness; the salmon-fisher loved to lie upon the shore and listen
+to the village story-teller,--almost official when successful,--who
+played upon the credulity and imagination of his listeners.  The river-
+driver loved excitement for its own sake, and behind his boisterousness
+there was little evil.  When the salmon-fisher was roused, his anger
+became desperately serious.  It was not his practice to be boisterous for
+the sake of boisterousness.
+
+All this worked for a crisis.
+
+From Sunburst I went over to Viking, and for a time watched a handful of
+river-drivers upon a little island in the centre of the river, working to
+loosen some logs and timber and foist them into the water, to be driven
+down to the mill.  I stood interested, because I had nothing to do of any
+moment for a couple of hours.  I asked an Indian on the bank to take his
+canoe and paddle me over to the island.  He did so.  I do not know why I
+did not go alone; but the Indian was near me, his canoe was at his hand,
+and I did the thing almost mechanically.  I landed on the island and
+watched with great interest the men as they pried, twisted and tumbled
+the pile to get at the key-log which, found and loosened, would send the
+heap into the water.
+
+I was sorry I brought the Indian with me, for though the river-drivers
+stopped their wild sing-song cry for a moment to call a "How!" at me,
+they presently began to toss jeering words at the Indian.  They had
+recognised him--I had not--as a salmon-fisher and one of the Siwash tribe
+from Sunburst.  He remained perfectly silent, but I could see sullenness
+growing on his face.  He appeared to take no notice of his scornful
+entertainers, but, instead of edging away, came nearer and nearer to the
+tangle of logs--came, indeed, very close to me, as I stood watching four
+or five men, with the foreman close by, working at a huge timber.  At a
+certain moment the foreman was in a kind of hollow.  Just behind him,
+near to the Indian, was a great log, which, if loosened by a slight
+impulse, must fall into the hollow where the foreman stood.  The foreman
+had his face to us; the backs of the other men were on us.  Suddenly the
+foreman gave a frightened cry, and I saw at the same instant the Indian's
+foot thrust out upon the big log.  Before the foreman had time to get out
+of the hollow, it slid down, caught him just above the ankle and broke
+the leg.
+
+I wheeled, to see the Indian in his canoe making for the shore.  He was
+followed by the curses of the foreman and the gang.  The foreman was very
+quiet, but I could see that there was danger in his eye, and the
+exclamations of the men satisfied me that they were planning an inter-
+municipal difficulty.
+
+I improvised bandages, set the leg directly, and in a little while we got
+to the shore on a hastily constructed raft.  After seeing the foreman
+safely cared for, and giving Mr. Devlin's manager the facts of the
+occurrence, more than sated with my morning's experience, I climbed the
+mountain side, and took refuge from the heat in the coolness of Roscoe's
+rooms.
+
+In the afternoon I received a note from Mrs. Falchion, saying that on the
+following day she would start for the coast; that her luggage would be
+taken to Sunburst at once; and that, her engagement with me fulfilled,
+she would spend a night there, not returning again to the hills.  I was
+preparing for my own departure, and was kept very busy until evening.
+Then I went quickly down into the valley,--for I was late,--and trudged
+eagerly on to Sunburst.  As I neared the village I saw that there were
+fewer lights--torches and fires--than usual on the river.  I noticed also
+that there were very few fishers on the banks or in the river.  But still
+the village seemed noisy, and, although it was dusk, I could make out
+much stir in the one street along which the cottages and huts ambled for
+nearly a mile.
+
+All at once it came to me strongly that the friction between the two
+villages had consummated in the foreman's injury, and was here coming to
+a painful crisis.  My suspicions had good grounds.  As I hurried on I saw
+that the lights usually set on the banks of the river were scattered
+through the town.  Bonfires were being lighted, and torches were flaring
+in front of the Indian huts.  Coming closer, I saw excited groups of
+Indians, half-breeds, and white men moving here and there; and then, all
+at once, there came a cry--a kind of roar--from farther up the village,
+and the men gathered themselves together, seizing guns, sticks, irons,
+and other weapons, and ran up the street.  I understood.  I was
+moderately swift of foot those days.  I came quickly after them, and
+passed them.  As I did so I inquired of one or two fishers what was the
+trouble.
+
+They told me, as I had guessed, that they expected an attack on the
+village by the mill-hands and river-drivers of Viking.
+
+The situation was critical.  I could foresee a catastrophe which would
+for ever unsettle the two towns, and give the valley an unenviable
+reputation.  I was certain that, if Roscoe or Mr. Devlin were present,
+a prohibitive influence could be brought to bear; that some one of strong
+will could stand, as it were, in the gap between them, and prevent a
+pitched battle, and, possibly, bloodshed.  I was sure that at Viking the
+river-drivers had laid their plans so secretly that the news of them
+would scarcely reach the ears of the manager of the mill, and that,
+therefore, his influence, as Mr. Devlin's, would not be available.
+
+Remained only myself--as I first thought.  I was unknown to a great
+number of the men of both villages, and familiar with but very few--
+chiefly those with whom I had a gossiping acquaintance.  Yet, somehow,
+I felt that if I could but get a half-dozen men to take a firm stand with
+me, I might hold the rioters in check.
+
+As I ran by the side of the excitable fishers, I urged upon one or two of
+them the wisdom and duty of preventing a conflict.  Their reply was--and
+it was very convincing--that they were not forcing a struggle, but were
+being attacked, and in the case would fight.  My hasty persuasion
+produced but little result.  But I kept thinking hard.  Suddenly it came
+to me that I could place my hand upon a man whose instincts in the matter
+would be the same as mine; who had authority; knew the world; had been in
+dangerous positions in his lifetime; and owed me something.  I was sure
+that I could depend upon him: the more so that once frail of body he had
+developed into a strong, well-controlled man.
+
+Even as I thought of him, I was within a few rods of the house where he
+was.  I looked, and saw him standing in the doorway.  I ran and called to
+him.  He instantly joined me, and we ran on together: the fishermen
+shouting loudly as they watched the river-drivers come armed down the
+hill-slope into the village.
+
+I hastily explained the situation to my friend, and told him what we must
+do.  A word or two assured me of all I wished to know.  We reached the
+scene of the disorder.  The fishermen were bunched together, the river on
+the one side, the houses and hills on the other.  The river-drivers had
+halted not many yards away, cool, determined and quiet, save for a little
+muttering.  In their red shirts, top boots, many of them with long black
+hair and brass earrings, they looked a most formidable crowd.  They had
+evidently taken the matter seriously, and were come with the intention of
+carrying their point, whatever it might be.  Just as we reached the space
+between the two parties, the massive leader of the river-drivers stepped
+forward, and in a rough but collected voice said that they had come
+determined to fight, if fighting were necessary, but that they knew what
+the end of the conflict would be, and they did not wish to obliterate
+Sunburst entirely if Sunburst accepted the conditions of peace.
+
+There seemed no leader to the fishermen.
+
+My friend said to me quickly: "You speak first."  Instantly I stepped
+forward and demanded to know what the terms of peace were.  As soon as I
+did so, there were harsh mutterings among the river-drivers.  I explained
+at once, waving back some of the fisher-men who were clamouring about me,
+that I had nothing whatever to do with the quarrel; that I happened to be
+where I was by accident, as I had happened by accident to see the
+difficulty of the morning.  But I said that it was the duty of every man
+who was a good citizen and respected the laws of his country, to see, in
+so far as it was possible, that there should be no breach of those laws.
+I spoke in a clear strong voice, and I think I produced some effect upon
+both parties to the quarrel.  The reply of the leader was almost
+immediate.  He said that all they demanded was the Indian who had so
+treacherously injured the foreman of their gangs.  I saw the position at
+once, and was dumfounded.  For a moment I did not speak.
+
+I was not prepared for the scene that immediately followed.  Some one
+broke through the crowd at my back, rushed past me, and stood between the
+two forces.  It was the Indian who had injured the foreman.  He was naked
+to the waist, and painted and feathered after the manner of his tribe
+going to battle.  There was a wild light in his eye, but he had no
+weapon.  He folded his arms across his breast, and said:
+
+"Well, you want me.  Here I am.  I will fight with any man all alone,
+without a gun or arrow or anything.  I will fight with my arms--to kill."
+
+I saw revolvers raised at him instantly, but at that the man, my friend,
+who stood beside me, sprang in front of the Indian.
+
+"Stop--stop!" he cried.  "In the name of the law!  I am a sergeant of
+the mounted police of Canada.  My jurisdiction extends from Winnipeg to
+Vancouver.  You cannot have this man except over my body: and for my body
+every one of you will pay with your lives; for every blow struck this
+night, there will be a hundred blows struck upon the river-drivers and
+mill-hands of this valley.  Take care!  Behind me is the law of the land
+--her police and her soldiery."
+
+He paused.  There was almost complete silence.  He continued:
+
+"This man is my prisoner; I arrest him."--He put his hand upon the
+Indian's shoulder.--"For the crime he committed this morning he shall
+pay: but to the law, not to you.  Put up your revolvers, men.  Go back to
+Viking.  Don't risk your lives; don't break the law and make yourselves
+criminals and outlaws.  Is it worth it?  Be men.  You have been the
+aggressors.  There isn't one of you but feels that justice which is the
+boast of every man of the West.  You wanted to avenge the crime of this
+morning.  But the vengeance is the law's.--Stand back--Stand back!" he
+said, and drew his revolver, as the leader of the river-drivers stepped
+forward.  "I will kill the first man that tries to lay his hand upon my
+prisoner.  Don't be mad.  I am not one man, I am a whole country."
+
+I shall never forget the thrill that passed through me as I saw a man
+who, but a handful of months before, was neck deep in his grave, now
+blossomed out into a strong, defiant soldier.
+
+There was a pause.  At last the leader of the river-drivers spoke.
+"See," he said, "Sergeant, I guess you're right.  You're a man, so help
+me!  Say, boys," he continued, turning to his followers, "let him have
+the Injin.  I guess he's earned him."
+
+So saying he wheeled, the men with him, and they tramped up the slope
+again on their way back to Viking.  The man who had achieved this turned
+upon the fishers.
+
+"Back to your homes!" he said.  "Be thankful that blood was not shed
+here to-night, and let this be a lesson to you.  Now, go."
+
+The crowd turned, slowly shambled down the riverside, and left us three
+standing there.
+
+But not alone.  Out of the shadow of one of the houses came two women.
+They stepped forward into the light of the bonfire burning near us.  One
+of the women was very pale.
+
+It was Mrs. Falchion.
+
+I touched the arm of the man standing beside me.  He wheeled and saw her
+also.  A cry broke from his lips, but he stood still.  A whole life-time
+of sorrow, trouble, and love looked out of his eyes.  Mrs. Falchion came
+nearer.  Clasping her hands upon her breast, she peered up into his face,
+and gasped:
+
+"Oh--oh--I thought that you were drowned--and dead!  I saw you buried in
+the sea.  No--no--it cannot be you!  I have heard and seen all within
+these past few minutes.  YOU are so strong and brave, so great a man!...
+Oh, tell me, tell me, are you in truth my husband?"
+
+He spoke.
+
+"I was your husband, Mercy Falchion.  I was drowned, but this man"--he
+turned and touched my shoulder--"this man brought me back to life.  I
+wanted to be dead to the world.  I begged him to keep my secret.  A
+sailor's corpse was buried in my shroud, and I lived.  At Aden I stole
+from the boat in the night.  I came to America--to Canada--to begin a new
+life under a new name, never to see you again. . . .  Do not, do not
+speak to me--unless I am not to lose you again; unless I am to know that
+now you forgive me--that you forgive me--and wish me to live--my wife!"
+
+She put both her hands out, a strange, sorrowful look in her eyes, and
+said: "I have sinned--I have sinned."
+
+He took her hands in his.
+
+"I know," he said, "that you do not love me yet; but you may some day."
+
+"No," she said, "I do not love you; but . . . . I am glad you live.  Let
+us--go home."
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+A heart-break for that kind is their salvation
+A man may be forgiven for a sin, but the effect remains
+A man you could bank on, and draw your interest reg'lar
+Aboriginal dispersion
+All he has to do is to be vague, and look prodigious (Scientist)
+And even envy praised her
+Audience that patronisingly listens outside a room or window
+But to pay the vulgar penalty of prison--ah!
+Death is a magnificent ally; it untangles knots
+Death is not the worst of evils
+Engrossed more, it seemed, in the malady than in the man
+Every true woman is a mother, though she have no child
+Fear a woman are when she hates, and when she loves
+For a man having work to do, woman, lovely woman, is rocks
+He didn't always side with the majority
+He had neither self-consciousness nor fear
+Her own suffering always set her laughing at herself
+It is difficult to be idle--and important too
+It is hard to be polite to cowards
+Jews everywhere treated worse than the Chinaman
+Learned what fools we mortals be
+Love can outlive slander
+Men do not steal up here: that is the unpardonable crime
+One always buys back the past at a tremendous price
+One doesn't choose to worry
+Saying uncomfortable things in a deferential way
+She had provoked love, but had never given it
+Slow-footed hours wandered by, leaving apathy in their train
+"Still the end of your existence," I rejoined--"to be amused?"
+That anxious civility which beauty can inspire
+The happy scene of the play before the villain comes in
+The ravings of a sick man are not always counted ravings
+The sea is a great breeder of friendship
+The tender care of a woman--than many pharmacopoeias
+The threshold of an acknowledged love
+There are things we repent of which cannot be repaired
+There is no refuge from memory and remorse in this world
+Think that a woman gives the heart for pleasant weather only?
+Thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart
+Time a woman most yearns for a man is when she has refused him
+Vanity; and from this much feminine hatred springs
+Very severe on those who do not pretend to be good
+What is gone is gone  Graves are idolatry
+Who get a morbid enjoyment out of misery
+Would look back and not remember that she had a childhood
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. FALCHION, BY PARKER, ENTIRE ***
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