“Dear Hugh,—Make the man who brings you this letter marry me. If you don't, I will kill myself; for I am ruined.Kate.”
“Dear Hugh,—Make the man who brings you this letter marry me. If you don't, I will kill myself; for I am ruined.Kate.”
I looked up at Hugh Fraser over the letter which my hand still mechanically held near my eyes. I wonder how long the silence through which we stared lasted.
A month later I was married to Kate Walters!
Itmay seem strange that my influence upon the soul of Hugh Fraser should follow upon such a situation as I have just described; but everything connected with my life, since the day when I met the grey boy by the burn, has been utterly strange, utterly abnormal. My treachery, one would have thought, must have led Fraser to hate me. I had wrecked his happiness. I had done him the deepest injury one man can do to another, and atfirst he hated me. When he had wrung from me a promise to marry Kate, he left me, and I did not see him again until after the wedding. But then, it seemed, he could not keep away from her. For he forgave us the wrong we had done him; and, after a while, wrote a friendly letter in which he suggested that we should all forget the past.
“Why should I not see you sometimes?” he concluded. “I only wish you both good, there is no longer any evil in my heart.”
Poor boy! It was to be, I suppose. The Tsar of the empire of my soul set forth his edict, and one winter day carriage wheels ground harshly upon the gravel sweep, and Hugh Fraser was my guest at Carlounie. I welcomed him upon the very spot where those light footsteps paused that black night of Doctor Wedderburn's dreary end. And the faint sound of the burn mingled with our voices in greeting and reply.
The boy was changed. He had aged, grown grave, heavier in movement, fiercer in observation, less ready in speech. But his manner was friendly even to me, and it was plain to see that Kate still had his heart. They met quietly enough, but a flush ran from his cheek to hers as they touched hands. Their voices quivered when they spoke a commonplace of pleasure at the encounter. So the wheels of Fate began slowly to turn on this winter's day.
I must tell you that my fortunes had greatlychanged before Hugh Fraser came to Carlounie. I was grown rich. My investments, my speculations had prospered almost miraculously. The mine I have spoken of was proving a gold mine to me. All worldly things went well with me—all worldly things, yes.
Now, I believe that all mighty circumstances are born tiny, like children, at some given moment. As a rule, they usually seem so insignificant, so puny at the birth, that we take no heed of the fact that they have come into being, and that, in process of time, they will grow to might, perhaps to horrible majesty. Only, when we trace events backwards do we know the exact moment when their first faint wail broke upon our mental hearing. Generally this is so. But I affirm that I felt, at the very time of its first coming, the presence of the shadow, the tiny shadow of the events which I am about to describe. I even said to myself, “This is a birthday.”
Among many improvements on my estate I had built a new Manse, in which, of course, our new minister lived. The old habitation of Doctor Wedderburn stood empty and deserted among its sycamores. One winter's day Hugh Fraser, Kate, and I, in our walk, passed along the lane by the now ragged privet hedge through which I had so often observed the doctor's agonies. It was a black and white day of frost, which crawled along the dark trees and outlined twig and branch. Theair was misty, and distant objects assumed a mysterious importance. Slight sounds, too, suggested infinite activities to the mind. As we neared the Manse, Hugh Fraser said to me:—
“Who lives in that old house?”
“Nobody,” I replied.
Hugh glanced at me very doubtfully.
“Nobody,” I reiterated.
“Really,” he rejoined. “But the garden?”
“Is deserted.”
“Hardly,” he exclaimed, pointing with his hand. “Look!”
“Yes,” said Kate, as if in agreement.
And she grew duskily pale.
I looked over the privet hedge, seeing only the rank and frost-bitten grass, the wild bushes and narrow mossy paths. Then I stared at my two companions in silence. Their eyes appeared to follow the onward movement of some object invisible to me.
“The old man makes himself at home,” Hugh said. “He has gone into the summer-house now.”
“Yes,” Kate said again.
There was fear in her eyes.
I felt suddenly that the air was very chill.
“That house is unoccupied,” I repeated shortly.
We all walked on in silence. But, through our silence, it certainly seemed to me that there came a sound of some one lamenting in the garden.
A day or two later Fraser said to me:—
“Why is that old house shut up?”
“Who would occupy it?” I said. “Of course, if I could get a tenant—”
“I'll take it,” he rejoined quickly. “You can let me some shooting with it, can't you?”
“But,” I began; and then I stopped. I had an instinct to keep the old Manse empty, but I fought it, merely because it struck me as unreasonable. How seldom are our instincts unreasonable! God—how seldom!
“I've been looking out for a shooting-box,” Hugh said. “That house would suit me admirably.”
“All right,” I answered. “I shall be very glad to have you for a tenant.”
So it was arranged. When Kate heard of the arrangement, I observed her to go very pale; but she made no objection. Hugh Fraser rented the house, furnished it, engaged servants, a gardener, enlarged the stables, and took up his abode there. Doctor Wedderburn's old study was now his den. When I looked in at the window through which I had seen the doctor die, I saw Fraser smoking, or playing with his setters. I don't know why, but the sight turned me sick.
My relations with Kate, of which I have said nothing, were rather cold and distant. My passion, such as it was, had died before marriage. Hers seemed to languish afterwards. I believe that shehad really loved me, but that the shame of being with me, after I had wedded her actually against my will, struck this sentiment to the dust. When one feeling that has been very strong dies, its place is generally filled by another. Sometimes I fancied that this was so with Kate, that the bitterness of shattered self-respect gradually transformed her nature, that a cruel frost bound the tendernesses, the warm vagaries of what had been a sweet woman's heart. But, to tell the truth, I did not trouble much about the matter. My affairs were prospering so greatly, my health was so abounding, I had so much beside the mere egotism of brilliant physical strength to occupy me, that I was heedless, reckless—at first. Yet, I had moments of a dull alarm connected with the dweller at the Manse.
If Hugh Fraser changed as he read that fateful letter in London, he changed far more after he came to live at the Manse. And it seemed to me that there were times when—how shall I put it?—when he bore a curious, and, to me, almost intolerable likeness to—some one who was dead. A certain old man's manner came upon him at moments. His body, in sitting or standing, assumed, to my eyes, elderly and damnable attitudes. Once, when I glanced in at the study window before entering the Manse, I perceived him lounging over a table facing me, a pen in his hand and paper before him, and the spectacle threw all mysenses into a violent and most distressing disorder. Instead of going into the house, as I had intended, I struck sharply upon the glass at the window. Fraser looked up quickly.
“What—what are you writing?” I cried out.
He got up, came to the window, and opened it.
“Eh? What's the row, man?” he said. “Why don't you come in?”
I repeated my question, with an anxiety I strove to mask.
“Writing? Only a letter to town,” he said, looking at me in wonder.
“Not a sermon?” I blurted forth.
“A sermon? Good heavens, no. Why should I write a sermon?”
“Oh,” I replied, forcing an uneasy laugh. “You—you live in a Manse. Doctor Wedderburn used to write his sermons in that room.”
That evening I remember that I said to Kate:
“Don't you think Fraser is getting to look very old at times?”
“I haven't observed it,” she replied coldly.
Another curious thing. Very soon after he took up his abode in the Manse, Fraser, who had been a godly youth, became markedly averse to religion. He informed us, with some excitement, that he had changed his views, and seemed much inclined to carry on an atheistical propaganda among the devout people of the neighbourhood. He declared that much evil had been wrought byfaith in Carlounie, and appeared to deem it as his special duty to preach some sort of a crusade against the accepted Christianity of the parish. I began to combat his views, and once sought the reason of his ardour and self-election to the post of teacher. His answer struck me exceedingly. He said:—
“Why should I be the one to clear away these senseless beliefs in phantasms, you say? Why, because I suppose they were woven by my predecessor in the Manse. Didn't the minister live and die there? Do you know, Ralston, sometimes, as I sit in that study at night, I have a feeling that instead of turning to what is called repentance when he died, the minister turned the other way, recanted in his last hour the faith he had professed all through his life, and expired before he could give words to his new mind and heart. And then I feel as if his influence was left behind him in that room, and fell upon me and imposed on me this mission.”
And as he spoke, he suddenly plucked at his face with an old, habitual action of Doctor Wedderburn's when excited. I scarcely restrained a cry, and with difficulty forced myself to go out slowly from his presence. Nevertheless, I felt strongly impelled to fight against the atheism of this boy, I who had formerly sown the seeds of destruction in the soul of Doctor Wedderburn. But it was as if my own act of the past rose andconquered me in the present. I declare solemnly it was so. Some emanation from the poor dead creature's soul clung round that cursed place of his doom, and, seizing upon the soul of Fraser, spread tyranny from its throne. And whom did it take first as its victim, think you? Kate, my wife.
Let our individual beliefs be what they may, one thing we must all—when we think—acknowledge, that the pulse which beats eternally in the heart of life is reparation.
Kate, as I have said, was originally finely pure and finely dowered with the blessings of faith in a divine Providence, trust in the eventual redemption of the world, hope that sin, sorrow, and sighing would, indeed, flee away, and all mankind find eternal and unutterable peace. In my worst moments I had never tried to destroy this beauty of her soul; and, in her fall, now repaired, she had never abandoned her religion. It was, I know, a haunting memory of the last moments of the doctor that held me back from ever attacking the faith of another. For myself, I did not think much of my future beyond death. Life filled my horizon then.
But now, after a short absence in England, during which I left Kate at Carlounie, I returned to find her infected with Fraser's pestilent notions. She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was better to act up to her real convictions than to set what is called a good example to her dependants.She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually how the matter struck me when I began carefully to consider it. Men often see only what irreligion really is and means when they find it existing in a woman. I was appalled at this deadly fire flaring up in the heart of Kate, and I set myself, at first feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and stamp it out.
But I fought against my own former self. I fought against the influence of the spectre that surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose originally from the very bosom of the burn at my summons. Am I mad to think so? No, no. Oh, the eternal horror that may spring from one wild and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic litany! This was surely the strangest, subtlest reparation that ever beat in the inexorable heart of Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence, still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in pain unknown. But, as the influence of DoctorWedderburn had formerly—before the fever—dominated my influence, so now it dominated my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now. He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me.
Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust—I was as Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey boy's words at the thought of the Cæsar of hell whose tribute was three human souls.
Kate and I were taking tea one evening with Fraser. We sat around the hearth, by which was placed the table with the tea-service and the hot cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss religious subjects and to rail against the professors of faith. Kate listened to him eagerly—a filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes. I was silent, watching. And presently it seemed to me that Fraser's gestures in talking grew like thedead gestures of the doctor. He threw his hands abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of Wedderburn's. He struck his knees sharply, and simultaneously, with both his palms to emphasise his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So vehement was the similarity that I began presently to feel that the doctor himself declaimed in the firelight, and I was seized with a desire to combat effectively his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in, then, upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of religion. He turned upon me, dealt with my pleas, scattered my contentions—growing, I fancied, very old and with the rumbling voice of age,—thrust at me with the lances of sarcasm, sore belaboured me into silence and mute fury. And all the time Kate sat by, and I seemed to see her soul, with fluttering outstretched wings, sinking down to hell, as a hawk drops out of sight into a dark cleft of the mountains. And then, in the last resort, Fraser struck his hand down on mine to clinch his defeat of me. And I, looking upon that poor Kate, cried out:—
“God forgive you, Fraser, for what you're doing—murderer! murderer!”
Scarcely had my cry died away than I knew I had borrowed the very words of Wedderburn to me. A cold, like ice, came upon me. This reversal of the past in the present was too ironic. I heard the doctor chuckling drearily in Hades. I suddenly sprang up like one pursued, and got away into the night, leaving Kate and Fraser togetherby the fire. But the spectre of the Manse surely pursued me. I heard its soft but heavy footsteps coming in my wake. I heard its old laughter in the dark behind me; and I sickened and faltered, and was in fear beyond all human fear of an enemy. The next day I told Fraser he must leave the Manse; I would build him a shooting-lodge on any part of my estate that he preferred.
“No,” he said, “no; I have grown to love the old place; I never feel alone there.”
I looked in his eyes, searching after his meaning.
“I would rather pull down the Manse,” I said.
In reply, he touched with his forefinger the lease I had signed with him, which lay on his writing-table.
“You cannot, my friend,” he said.
I cannot do anything that I would. I am driven on a dark road by the creature with the whip that is surely after every man who once yields to his worst desires.
Just after this I received a visit from Mr. Mackenzie, the new minister, a young and fervent, but not very knowledgeable man, whose zeal was red-hot, but incompetent, and who would have died for the faith he could never properly expound, like many young ministers of our church. The little man was in a twisting turmoil of distress, and was moved, so he said, to deal very plainly with me. I bade him deal on. It seemed that his flock was becoming infected with atheism, which spread likethe plague, from the old Manse. The young children lisped it to each other in the lanes; lovers talked it between their kisses; youths chattered perdition at the idle corner by the church wall. Even the old began to look askance at the Bible that had been their only book of age, and to shiver wantonly at the inevitable approach of death. The young minister cried denunciation upon Fraser, like a vague-minded, but angry Jonah before a provincial Nineveh.
“Turn him out, Mr. Ralston, drive him forth,” he ejaculated. “What is his rent to you? What is his money in comparison with the immortal souls of men? Away with him, away with him.”
I mentioned the small matter of the lease. The young minister, with a quivering scarlet face, replied stammering:—
“A lease! But—but—your own wife—she is—is—”
“I do not discuss her,” I said sternly.
“Well; they are deserting the services. You see that yourself. They will not come to hear me preach. They will not listen to me.”
The man was tasting bitterness. He was almost crying. I was terribly sorry for him. Yet, all I could do was to think of the spectre at the Manse and answer:—
“I can do nothing.”
His words were true. Carlounie's soul was being devoured as by a plague. A colony of unbelievers was springing up in the midst of the beautiful woods and the mountains. Soon the evil fame of the place began to spread abroad, and men, in distant parts of Scotland, to speak of mad Carlounie. The matter weighed intolerably upon me, and at last became a fixed idea. I could think of nothing else but this devil's home in the hills, this haunted and harassed centre of doom and darkness which was my possession and in which I lived. I fell into silence. I ceased to stir abroad beyond my own land. It seemed to me that Carlounie should keep strict quarantine, should be isolated, and that each person who went over its borders carried a strange infection and was guilty of murder. I forbade Kate to drive beyond my estates.
“I never wish to,” she said.
And I knew that where Fraser was she was happy. He had her soul fast by this; or, it would be truer to say, the spectre of the Manse had both him and her. And he aged apace and bore on his countenance the stamp of evil. And I brooded and brooded upon the whole matter. But, from whatever point I started, I came back to the Manse and to the spectre dwelling in it with Hugh Fraser. I had given death to Doctor Wedderburn, in return for the life so miraculously given to me, and now his spirit, retained in its ancient abiding-place, spread death about it in its turn. This was, and is, my conviction. The influence of the departedclings to roof, to walls, to floors, leans on the accustomed window-seat, trembles by the bed-head, sits by the hearthstone, stands invisible in the passage way.To kill it one must destroy its home.It was my duty to kill it, therefore it was my duty to destroy the Manse. This thought at length took complete possession of me, and, following it, I strove in every imaginable way to oust Fraser from the house among the sycamores. But he would not go. He loved the place, he said. He stood by his lease and I was powerless.
Oh, God, I have, surely I have, my excuse for what I have done! I meant to be a saviour, not a destroyer! I would have restored Fraser and my poor Kate to their freedom of heart. That was what I meant. Ay, but the grey traveller fought against me. Shut up here by night in my house, on the verge of—that which I cannot, dare not speak of, I declare that I am guiltless. Let him bear the burden, him alone! In these last moments, before my deed is known, I write the truth that men may exonerate me. This is the truth.
Overwhelmed with this idea that Carlounie must be rescued, that Hugh Fraser and Kate must be rescued from this damnation that was preying upon them, I determined, secretly, on the destruction of the Manse, in which the spectre of the doctor stayed to work such evil. But, to do this, I must first make sure that Hugh Fraser was at a distance, and that his small household—he onlykept two servants, hired from the village—were away from the haunted dwelling. I, therefore, suggested to Fraser that he should come and spend a week with me, and give his maids a holiday. After a little demur, and drawn, I see now, by his hidden passion for Kate, he accepted my invitation. He dismissed the maids to their homes for a week, and moved over to us. When the minister knew of it, he, no doubt, fully included me in his prayers for the damnation of those who worked evil among his flock. Will he ever read these pages, I wonder? Kate was now an avowed atheist, and she and Fraser were continually together, glorying in their complete freedom from old prejudices, and their new outlook upon life. They had, I heard them say, broken through the ties that bound poor, terrified Christians; and, when they said this, they smiled, the one upon the other. I did not then know why. Meanwhile, I was preparing for my deed of redemption, as I called it, and meant it to be. I was resolved to go out by night to the empty Manse, and secretly to set it in flames. It stood alone. The country people slept sound at night. I calculated that if I chose midnight for my act none would see the flames, and, ere the peasants woke at dawn, the Manse and the spectre within it would be destroyed for ever. Such was my belief—such the spirit in which I prepared myself for this strange work.
I writethese last words after the dead of night, towards the coming of the dawn. Ere the light is grey in the sky I shall be away to the burn to meet him, the grey traveller. He is there waiting for me. He has come back. I go to meet him, and I shall never return. Carlounie will know my face no more. All is done as he ordained. My words have been as deeds, have marched on inevitably to actual deeds. Long ago he said that sometimes, even as we can never go back from things that we have done, we can never go back from things that we have said. So, indeed, it is.
According to my fixed intention, I determined on a night for the destruction of the Manse. The house was old and would burn like tinder. I should break into it through the window of the study, which was never shuttered. I should set fire to the interior at several points, and escape in the darkness of the night. By dawn the accursed place would be a ruin, and then—then I looked for a new era. Fool! Fool! I looked to see the burden of the vile influence of the spectre lifted from the soul of Fraser, and so from the soul of Kate, which was infected by him. I looked to see my people sane and satisfied as of old, Carlounieno more a plague-spot in the land, that poor and zealous man, the minister, calm and at rest with his little faithful flock once more. All this I looked for confidently. And so, when the black and starless night of my deed came, I was happy and serene. That night Kate pleaded a headache, and went to bed very early, before nine. She begged me not to come to her room to bid her good-night, as she wanted perfect quiet and sleep. All unsuspecting, I agreed to her request. Soon after she had gone, Fraser, who had seemed heavy with unusual fatigue all through the evening, also went off to bed, and I was left alone. But it was not yet time for me to start on my errand of the darkness. The burning Manse would surely attract attention before midnight. People might be out and about in the village. A belated peasant might be on his way home by the lane that skirted the privet hedge. I must wait till all were sleeping. The time seemed very long. Once I fancied I heard a movement in the house—again I dreamed that soft and hurried footsteps upon the gravel outside broke on the silence. But I said to myself that I was nervous, highly strung because of my strange project, that my imagination tricked me. At last the hour came. Without going upstairs I drew on my thickest overcoat, took my hat and a heavy stick, opened the hall door, and passed out into the night. It was still and very cold, and the voice of the burn came loudly to my ears. Treadingquietly, I made my way into the road, and set forth along it in the direction of the Manse. The ground was hard, and scarcely had I gone a few yards before I thought that some one was furtively following me. I stopped rather uneasily, and listened, but heard nothing. I went on, and again seemed aware of distant footsteps treading gently behind me. The sound made me suppose that some one of my household must be after me, moved by curiosity as to the reason of my present pilgrimage; but I was not minded to be watched, so I turned sharply, yet very softly, around and faced the way I had come. I encountered no one, nor did I any longer catch the patter of feet. So, reckoning that my nerves must be playing with me, I pursued my way. But the whole of the distance between my dwelling and the Manse I seemed vaguely to hear a noise of one treading behind me. And, although I said to myself that there was nobody out beside myself, I was filled with the stir of a shifting uneasiness. I entered the lonely and narrow lane that led beside the Manse, and presently arrived in front of the house; when, what was my astonishment to perceive a light gleaming in the study window. My hand was on the gate when it went out, and all the front of the house was black and eyeless. For so brief a moment had I seen the light that I was moved to think that it, too, existed, like the sound of steps, only in my excited brain. Nevertheless, I did not go up atonce to the house, but paced the lane for a full half-hour, always—so it seemed to me—tracked by some one. But, since I kept turning about, and the footfalls were always at my back, I grew certain that they were nothing more nor less than a fantasy on my part. It must have been well after twelve when I summoned courage to enter the garden and to approach the Manse. The steps, I thought, followed me to the gate and then paused, as if a sentinel was posted there to keep watch. Arrived at the stone step which preceded the hall door, I, too, paused in my turn and listened. Did the spectre that inhabited this abode know of my coming, of my purpose? Was it crouching within, like some frantic shadow, fearful of its impending fate? Or was it, perhaps, preparing to attack, to repel me? Strangely, I had now no fear of it, or of anything. I was calm. I felt that my deed was one of rescue, even though, by performing it, I wrought destruction. I moved to the study window, and was about to smash in the glass with my heavy stick when a mad idea came to me to try the hall door. I put my hand upon it and found it not locked. This opening of the door sent a shiver through me, and a ghastly sense of the occupation of this deserted abode. I was filled again with an acute consciousness of the indwelling spectre, whom, in truth, I came to murder. But, I reasoned, this door has been left unbarred by the carelessness of Fraser's servants, that is all.
I stood on the lintel, struck a match and set it to a candle end which I drew from my coat pocket. The flame burned up, showing the narrow passage, the umbrella stand, the doors on either side. I entered the study softly, looking swiftly on all sides of me as I did so. Did I expect a vision of Doctor Wedderburn lounging at the table, his fingers thrust into a Bible? I scarcely know; but I saw nothing except the grimly standing furniture, the lamp on the table, the vacant chairs, the books in their shelves. I listened. There was no rustle of the spectre that I came to kill. Did it watch me? Did it see me there? I set fire to the room, passed quickly to the chamber on the other side of the passage, from thence to the kitchen and the dining-parlour, leaving a track of dwarf flames behind me. The means of destruction I had prepared and carried with me. They availed. When I once more reached the garden, the ground floor of the Manse was in a blaze. But now came the incredible event which I must chronicle before I go down to the burn for the last time.
Having gained the garden, I waited there in the darkness to watch my work progress. I saw the light within the Manse, at first a twinkle, grow to a glare. I heard the faint crackle of the burning rooms increase to a soft and continuous roar. And, as I watched and listened, a mighty sense of relief ran through me. Thus did I burn up my past! thus did I sacrifice grandly andgladly the ill spirit my wild desires had evoked! Thus—thus! All the base of the Manse was red-hot, when, on a sudden, I heard a great shout that seemed to come from the sky. Light sprang in an upper window. There followed a sound like the smash of glass, and I saw two arms shoot out, the top part of a figure and a face framed in the glare. I deemed it the vision of the poor spectre that I destroyed. I looked upon it and fancied I could detect the tortured lineaments of the doctor, his accustomed gestures distorted by fear and fury. But then I seemed to see behind him another figure, struggling, and to hear the failing scream of a woman. But the flames from below leaped to the roof. The floors fell in with an uproar. The figure, or figures, disappeared.
Trembling I turned to go, my mind shuddering at the thought of the apparition I had seen. I got into the lane and hastened towards home. Soon the burning Manse was out of sight, and I was swallowed up in the intense darkness.
Now, as I went along, a terrible and very peculiar sensation came upon me. I heard no footsteps; all was silence. Yet I seemed to be aware that I was closely companioned, that at my very side something—I knew not what—walked, keeping pace with me. And so close did I believe this thing to be, that at moments I even felt it pressing against me like a slim figure in the night. Once, when it thus nestled to me, as if in affection,I could not refrain from crying out aloud. I stretched forth my arms to grasp this surely amorous horror of the darkness, but found nothing, and pursued my road in a sweat of apprehension. And still, the thing was certainly with me, and seemed, I thought, to praise me as I walked, as the good man is praised on his journey. My great horror was that this creature that I could not see, could not hear, could not feel, and yet was so sharply conscious of, waswell disposed towards me. My heart craved its hatred—but it loved me I knew. My soul demanded its curses. I almost heard it bless me as I moved. My knees knocked together, my limbs were turned to wax, as it was borne in upon me that I had surely done this terror that walked in darkness a service of some kind. To be pursued in fury by one of the dreadful beings that dwell in the borderland beyond our sight is sad and dreary; but to be followed thus by one as by a dog, to be fawned upon and caressed—this is appalling. I longed to shriek aloud. I broke into a run, and, like one demented, gained the gate of Carlounie; but always the thing was with me—full of joy and laudation. At the house door I paused, facing round. I was moved to address this thing I could not see.
“Who is it that walks with me?” I cried, and my voice was high and strained.
A voice I knew, young, clear, level, a little formal, answered out of the darkness:—
“It is I.”
It was the voice of the grey traveller whom I had seen long ago by the burnside. I leaned back against the door and my shoulders shook against it.
“What do you want of me?”
“I come to thank you.”
“What, then, have I done?”
“You have brought the tribute money.”
I did not understand, and I answered:—
“No. One soul I may have destroyed, but two I have saved to-night. For I have slain the spectre that preyed upon them and I have set them free from bondage.”
The voice answered:—
“Go into the house and see.”
Then again I was filled with apprehension. I turned to go in at my door, and, as I did so, I heard footsteps treading in the direction of the burn, and a fading voice which cried, like an echo:—
“And then come to me.”
And, as the voice died, I heard the rush of sheep in the night.
Filled with nameless fear and a cold apprehension, I entered the house, and, led by some cruel instinct, made my way to Kate's room. The lamp she always had at night burned dimly on the dressing-table and cast a grave radiance upon an empty bed.
What could this mean?
I stole to the room of Fraser, bearing the lamp with me. His chamber was also untenanted; but, on the quilt of the bed, lay a piece of paper written over. I took it up and read—with the sound of the burn in my ears:—
“You stole her from me. I take back my own. To-night we stay at the old Manse. To-morrow we shall be far away.Hugh Fraser.”
“You stole her from me. I take back my own. To-night we stay at the old Manse. To-morrow we shall be far away.Hugh Fraser.”
The paper dropped from my hand upon the quilt. A woman's scream rang in my ears above the roar of flames. I understood.
The tribute money has been paid. I go down to the burn. The grey traveller is waiting there for me.
Robert Hichens.Frederic Hamilton.
Thatlustrous land of weary music and wild dancing, of reverend tombs and pert Arabs, that Egypt of plagues and tourists, to whose sandy bosom Society flocks, affects her visitors in many different ways. Bellairs went to her under the fixed impression that he was a cynic, and found that he was a romanticist. Very acute in mind, he had long flattered himself on being unimpressionable; and he was much inclined to think that to be insensitive was to be strong with the best kind of strength. He loved to lay stress on all that was devil-may-care in his character, and to put aside all that was prone to cling, or weep, or wonder, or pray, and he fancied that if he cultivated one side of his mind assiduously he could eliminate the other sides. In England, in London, the process had seemed to be successful. But Egypt gave to him illusions with both hands, and, against his will, he had to accept them. Protests were unavailing, and soon he ceased to protest, and told himself the horrid fact that he was a sentimentalist, perhaps even a poet. Good heavens! a Bellairs—a poet! His soldier ancestors seemed forming a square and fixing bayonets to resist the charging notion. And yet—and yet—
Instead of playing pool after dinner at night, Bellairs found himself wandering, like Haroun Al Raschid, through the narrow ways of Cairo, mixing with the natives, studying their loves, and drinking their coffee. There were moments, retrograde moments, when he even wished to wear their dress, to drape his long-limbed British form in a flowing blue robe, and wrap his dark head in a bulging white turban. He resisted this devil of an idea; but the fact that it had ever come to him troubled him. And, partly to regain his manhood, his hard scepticism, his contempt of outside, delicate influences, he went up the Nile—and succumbed utterly to fantasy and to old romance. “I am no longer Jack Bellairs,” he told himself one day, as the steamer on which he travelled neared Luxor on its way down the river from the First Cataract—“I am somebody else; some one who is touched by a sunset, and responsive to a gleam of rose on the Libyan Mountains, some one who dreams at night when the pipes wail under the palm-trees, some one who feels that the great river has life, and that the desert owns a wistful soul, and has a sweet armour with silence. Good-bye, Jack Bellairs! Go home to England—I stay here.”
And that evening he left the steamer, and took a room for a month at the Luxor Hotel. And that evening he cast the skin of his former self, and emerged, with fluttering wings, from the chrysalis of his identity. He was a bachelor, agedtwenty-eight, and he was travelling alone; so there was no critical eye to mark the change in him, no chattering tongue to express surprise at his pleasant abandonment to the follies which make up the lives of sensitive artists and refined sensualists who can differentiate between the promenade of the “Empire,” and the garden of love. As he stepped out into the Arab-haunted village that night, after dinner, Bellairs breathed a sigh of relief. For a month he would let himself go. Where to? He bent his steps towards the river, the Nile that is the pulsing blood in the veins of Egypt. Moored in the shadow of its brown banks lay a string of bright-eyed dahabeeyahs. From more than one of them came music. Bellairs, his cigarette his only companion, strolled slowly along listening idly in a pleasant dream. A woman's voice sang, asking “Ninon” what was her scheme of life. A man beat out his soul at the feet of “Medje.” And, upon the deck of the last dahabeeyah, a woman played a fantastic mazurka. Bellairs was fond of music, and her performance was so clever, so full of nuances, understanding, wild passion, that he stood still to remark it more closely.
“She has known many things, good and evil,” he thought, as his mind noted the intellect that spoke in the changes of time, the regret and the gaiety that the touch demonstrated so surely and easily, as the mood of the composition changed. The music ceased.
“Betty,” a woman's voice said, in English, but with a slight French accent, “I want to see the stars. This awning hides them. Come for a little walk.”
“Yes; I want to see the stars too, and the awning does hide them,” a girl's voice answered. “Do let us take a little walk.”
Bellairs smiled, as he said to himself, “The first voice is the voice of the musician, and the second voice seems to be its echo.” He was still standing on the bank when the two women stepped upon the gangway to the shore and climbed to the narrow path.
As they passed him by they glanced at him rather curiously. One was a woman of about thirty, dark, with a pale, strong-featured face. The other was a fair, aristocratic-looking girl, not more than seventeen.
“She is the echo,” Bellairs thought. “Rather a sweet one.” Then, at a distance, he followed them, and presently found them sitting together in the garden of the Hotel. He sat down not far off. A man, whom he knew slightly, spoke to them, and afterwards crossed to him.
“That lady plays very cleverly,” Bellairs said.
“Mademoiselle Leroux, you mean—yes. You know her?”
“Not at all. I only heard her from the river bank.”
“She is travelling with Lord Braydon. She is a great friend of Lady Betty Lambe, his daughter.”
“That pretty girl?”
“Yes. Shall I introduce you?”
“I should be delighted.”
A moment later Bellairs was sitting with the two ladies and talking of Egypt. It seemed to him that they were the first nurses to dandle his new baby-nature, this nature which Egypt had given to him, and which only to-night he had definitely accepted. Perhaps this fact quickly cemented their acquaintance. At any rate, a distinct friendship began to walk in their conversation, and Bellairs found himself listening to Mdlle. Leroux, and looking at Lady Betty, with a great deal of interest and of admiration. Presently the former said:—
“I knew you would be introduced to us to-night.”
Bellairs was surprised.
“When?” he asked.
“When we passed you just now on the bank of the Nile.”
“I knew we should too,” said Lady Betty.
“You must be very intuitive,” said Bellairs.
“Women generally are,” remarked Mdlle. Leroux.
“Yes. Do your intuitions tell you whether our acquaintance will be long and agreeable?”
“Perhaps—but I never prophesy.”
“Why?”
“Because I am always right.”
“Is that a valid reason for abstention?”
“I think so. For in this world those who look forward generally see darkness.”
“I cannot achieve a proper pessimism in Upper Egypt,” Bellairs replied.
A week later, Bellairs felt quite certain that there had never been a period in his life when he had not known and talked with Mdlle. Leroux and Lady Betty Lambe. Lord and Lady Braydon asked him to lunch on the dahabeeyah almost every day, and he often strolled down to tea without invitation. Then, in the afternoon, there were donkey expeditions to Karnak, or across the river to the tombs of the kings, to the desert villa of Monsieur Naville, to ancient Thebes, to the two Colossi. Lord Braydon was consumptive and was spending the winter and spring in Egypt. Lady Braydon seldom left his side, and so it happened that Bellairs and his two acquaintances of the garden were often alone together. Bellairs became deeply interested in them, and for a rather peculiar reason. He was fascinated by the extraordinary sympathy that existed between the two women—if Lady Betty could be called a woman yet. Mdlle. Leroux had obtained so strong an influence over the girl that she seemed to have grafted not only her mind, but her heart, her apparatus of emotions and of affections, on to Lady Betty's. What the former silently thought, thelatter silently thought too, and when the silence died in expression, they frequently spoke almost the same sentence simultaneously. Sometimes Mdlle. Leroux would express some feeling with vehemence to Bellairs when Lady Betty was out of hearing, and an hour or two afterwards, with only a slightly fainter vehemence, Lady Betty would express the same feeling. Indeed, these two women seemed to have only one heart, one soul, between them, the heart and soul that had originally been the sole property of the elder one.
“You are very generous,” said Bellairs one day to Mdlle. Leroux.
“Why?” she asked in surprise.
“You give away things that most of us have only the power to keep.”
“What do you mean?”
“Some day, perhaps, I will tell you.”
Clarice Leroux was tremendously impulsive, and she had taken an immediate and strong liking to Bellairs. In this Lady Betty, as usual, coincided. But when Clarice's liking passed through self-revelations, confidences, towards a stronger feeling, it was rather strange to find Lady Betty still treading in her footsteps, still ever succeeding her in her attitudes of mind and of heart. Yet the inevitable double flirtation, apparently expected and desired by the two women, was strangely gilded by novelty; and, at first, Bellairs played as happily with these two dual natures as a child playswith two doll representatives of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. For, at first, he possessed the child's power of detachment, and felt that he could at any moment discard dolls for soldiers, or a Noah's Ark, and still keep happiness in his lap. But most things have an inherent tendency to become complicated if they are let alone and allowed to develop free from definite guidance, and presently Bellairs became conscious of advancing complications. His intellectual appreciation of a new situation began to degenerate into a more emotional condition, which disturbed and irritated him. It seemed that he was peering through the bars of the gate that guards the garden of passion. Which of the two women did he see in the garden?
He told himself that, having regard to the circumstances of the case, he ought to see both of them. Unfortunately, a vision of that kind never has been, and never will be, seen by a man. The temple in which the idol sits always makes a difference in the nature of our worship of the idol. Bellairs was forced to recognise this fact. And the temple in which sat the idol of Lady Betty's nature attracted him more than the temple in which sat the idol of Mdlle. Leroux's nature. He came to this conclusion one afternoon at Karnak. They three were hidden away in a stone nook of this great stone forest, enshrined from the gaze of tourists by mighty rugged pillars, walled in by huge blocks of antique masonry that threw cold shadowswhence the lizards stole to seek the sun. The blue sky was broken to their gaze by a narrow section of what had been, doubtless, once a wide-spread roof. A silence of endless ages hung around them in this haven fashioned by dead men and living Time.
Mdlle. Leroux had been boiling a kettle; and they sipped tea, and, at first, did not talk. But tea unlooses the bonds of speech. After their second cups they felt communicative.
“One week gone out of my four,” Bellairs said, “and each will seem shorter-lived than its forerunner.”
“You go in three weeks from now?” said Mdlle. Leroux, with an uneven intonation that betokened a sudden awakening to the finality of things.
“Yes; at the end of January.”
“And we are here until nearly the end of March.”
“Yes,” said Lady Betty; “it will seem a very long time. February will be eternal.”
“It is the shortest month in the year,” Bellairs remarked.
Mdlle. Leroux looked at him sarcastically.
“You English are so prosaic,” she exclaimed. “Any Frenchman would have understood.”
“What?”
“That we were paying you a compliment.”
“Perhaps I did understand it, and preferred not to show my comprehension; there is such a thing as modesty!”
“There is—such a thing as false modesty!”
“Exactly,” remarked Lady Betty.
“I will accept your compliment gladly,” said Bellairs, looking at Lady Betty.
“Mine?” asked Clarice Leroux.
“Yes,” Bellairs replied.
The consciousness that he cared very much more for such a pretty meaning in Lady Betty than in Clarice Leroux led him then, for the first time, to that Garden Gate. He looked at Lady Betty again with a new feeling. She returned his gaze quietly. Then he turned his eyes to those of Clarice. Hers were fixed upon him with a curious violence. He had a momentary sensation, literally for the first time, that these two women after all, had not one soul, one heart, between them. They did not feel quite simultaneously. Lady Betty was always a step behind Clarice. Yes, that was the difference between them. However quickly the echo follows the voice that summons it, yet it must always follow. Would Lady Betty never cease to follow? Bellairs found himself wondering eagerly, for that afternoon a strange certainty came to him. He knew, in a flash, that Clarice, if she did not already love him, was on the verge of loving him. He knew now that he loved Lady Betty. But she didn't love him yet, was not even quite close to loving him. Had she been in Egypt alone, divorced from Clarice, Bellairs believed that he would not have attracted her.He attracted her through Clarice, because he attracted Clarice. Could he make her love him in the same way? It would be a curious, subtle experiment to try to win one woman's heart by winning another's: Bellairs silently decided to make it. All the rest of that afternoon he talked to Clarice, showing to her the new self that Egypt had given him, the poetry which had ousted the prose inherited from a long line of ancestors, the sentiment of which he was no longer ashamed now he felt it to be a weapon with which he might win two hearts, the heart that contained another heart, as one conjurer's box contains a hundred others.
“I knew it when I first saw you,” Clarice said. “Directly I looked at you that evening on the bank I knew it.”
“How strange,” Bellairs answered.
“And you—did you know it when you heard me playing?”
“That mazurka! Remember I am a man.”
They were sitting in the garden. It was night. Very few people were out, for a great Austrian pianist was playing in the public drawing-room, and the little world of Luxor sat at his feet relentlessly. They two could hear, mingling with a Polonaise of Chopin, the throbbing of tom-toms in the dusty village, the faint and suggestive cry of the pipes, which fill the soul at the same time with desire, and regret for past desire killed bygratification. Bellairs had been making love to Clarice, and she had told him that she loved him. And he had kissed her and his kiss had been returned.
“Will this kiss, too, have its echo?” he thought; and his eyes travelled towards the lighted windows of the drawing-room behind which Lady Betty sat. He turned again to Clarice.
“Do you believe in echoes?” he asked.
“Echoes!”
“That each thing we do in life, each word, each cry, each act, calls into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?”
“From the same person?”
“Or from some other person.”
“What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repetition of our feeling, our doing, to-night.”
“Yet, there may be. Who knows?”
“I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a hateful thing?”
“I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me.”
And again he glanced towards the lighted windows.
“The world is very full of echoes,” he went on; “our troubles are repeated.”
“But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!”
“There have always been lovers, and they all act in much the same way!”
“Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some new mode of expression for ourselves—you and I?”
“Because we are human beings, and one network of tangled limitations.”
“You make me cry with anger,” she said.
And when he looked, he saw that there were tears shining in her eyes.
At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction swept over him. What had he done? A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do. He had made an experiment, as a scientist may make an experiment. He had vivisected a soul, but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When it knew, would it die? But then he told himself he had to do it. For he loved passionately, and was certain that he could only gain the heart he had not yet completely won by gaining this heart that he had completely won. He had made an experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail. All that Clarice said, all that she thought, all that she desired, Betty said, thought, desired. After the necessary interval the echo must follow the voice. And he smiled to himself.
“Why do you smile like that?” Clarice asked.
“Because—because I thought I heard an echo,” he replied. And then they kissed again. He, with his eyes shut, forced his imagination to tell him that the lips he pressed were the lips of Betty. She thought only of the lips of love, that burn up all the recollections of the lonely years, all the phantoms which dwell in the deserts through which women pass to joy—or to despair.
The Austrian pianist was exhausted. Even his long hair could no longer sustain his failing energies. He expired magnificently, the seventh rhapsody of Liszt serving as his bier. Lady Betty came out into the garden.
“How unmusical you two are,” she said; “his playing was exquisite.”
“We heard finer music here,” Clarice answered, as she got up to go back to the dahabeeyah—“did we not?”
She turned to Bellairs. He was looking at Lady Betty and did not hear. Clarice's cheek flushed angrily.
“Come, Betty,” she exclaimed. “Good-night, Mr Bellairs.”
“Good-night, Mr Bellairs,” echoed Lady Betty.
The two women moved away, and vanished down the narrow and dusty avenue that leads to the bank of the Nile. Bellairs stood looking after them. He was wondering why he loved Bettyand did not love Clarice. It seemed feeble to love an echo. Yet, the intonation of an echo is sometimes exquisite in its trilling vagueness, its far-off, thrilling beauty. And Bellairs fancied that if he once wakened Betty to passion he would free her, in a moment, from her curious bondage, would give to her the soul that Clarice must surely have crushed down and expelled, replacing it with a replica of her own soul. And then he asked himself, being analytically inclined that night, what he adored in Betty. Was it merely her fresh young beauty? It could not be her nature; for that, at present, was merely Clarice's, and he did not love the nature of Clarice. Yet he felt it was something more than her beauty. When he had made her love him he would know; for, when he had made her love him, he would force her to be herself.
He watched the bats circling among the shadowy palms. How gentle the air was. How sweet the stars looked. Bellairs thought of England that was so far away. It seemed impossible that he could ever be in London again, ever again assume a Piccadilly nature, and laugh at the folly of having a romance. Yes, it seemed impossible. Nevertheless, in a fortnight he must go. But he would take Betty's promise with him. He was resolved on that. And then he left the silent garden to the bats, and was soon between the mosquito curtains, dreaming.
Three days afterwards Clarice was prostrated with a nervous headache. She could not bear to have any one in her cabin, and Lady Betty sat on the deck of theQueen Hatasooquite inconsolable. Bellairs, arriving to pay his usual afternoon call, found her there. Lord Braydon was out, sailing in a flat-bottomed boat far up the river with Lady Braydon, so Lady Betty was quite desolate. She told Bellairs so mournfully.
“And Clarice won't let me come near her,” she exclaimed. “A step on the floor, the creak of the cabin door as I come in, tortures her. She is all nerves. I hope I shan't have her headache presently.”
“Is it likely?”
“I often do. She seems to pass it on to me. I never had a headache until I knew her. But, indeed, I never seemed to live, I never seemed to know anything, be anything, until she came into my life.”
“I wish I had known you before you knew her,” Bellairs said.
“Why?”
“I don't know—perhaps to see if you were really so very different from what you are now.”
“I was—utterly.”
“What were you like?”
“I can't remember—but I was utterly different.”
As she ceased speaking, Bellairs glanced over the rail to the river bank. Two blue-robed donkeyboys stood there trying to attract his attention, and pointing significantly to their gaily-bedizened donkeys.
“Shall we go for a ride?” he said to Lady Betty. “Just along the river bank? Then we shall see Lord Braydon as he sails back. Mdlle. Leroux won't miss you. Shall we go?”
Betty hesitated. But she could do the invalid no good by staying. So she assented. Bellairs helped her to the bank and placed her in the smart red saddle. He motioned the boys to keep well in the rear, and they started at a quick, tripping walk. As they went, a white face appeared at a cabin window, staring after them, the face of Clarice, who had with difficulty lifted her throbbing head from the pillow. She watched the donkeys diminishing till they were black shadows moving along against the sky, then she began to cry weakly, but only because she was too ill to be with them. Her gift of prophecy failed her at this critical juncture of her life, and she had no sense of a coming disaster, as she lay back on her berth, and gave herself up once more to pain.
That evening Lord Braydon asked Bellairs to dine on the dahabeeyah, and he accepted the invitation. Clarice was still in durance, having entirely failed to pass her headache on to Lady Betty. After dinner Lord Braydon went into the saloon to write a letter to England, and Lady Betty and Bellairs had the deck to themselves. He was resolved to put his fate to the touch; for, duringthe donkey ride, he had discovered the change in Betty which he had so eagerly desired, the change from warm friendship to a different feeling. The girl had not acknowledged it. Bellairs had not asked her to do so; but he meant to. Only the thought of his treachery to the woman lying in the cabin below held him back, just for a moment, and prompted him to talk lightly of indifferent things. But that treachery had been a necessary manœuvre in his campaign of happiness. He strove to dismiss it from his mind as he leant forward in his chair, and led Lady Betty to the subject that lay so near to his heart.
“You love me?” she said presently.
“Yes—deeply. You are angry?”
“How can I be? No, no—and yet—”
“Yes?”
“And yet, when you told me, I felt sad.”
Bellairs looked keenly vexed, and she hastened to add:—
“Not because I am—indifferent. No, no. I can't explain why the feeling came. It was gone in a moment. And now—”
“Now you are happy?”
He caught her hand and she left it in his.
“Yes, very happy.”
Bellairs bent over her and kissed her—as he lifted himself up a white hand appeared on the rail of the companion that led from the lower to the upper deck of theHatasoo. Clarice wearily draggedherself up. She was wrapped in a shawl and looked very ill. Betty ran to help her.
“I thought I must get a little air,” she said feebly. “How d'you do, Mr Bellairs?”
She sank down in a chair.
Bellairs felt like a man between two fires.
Two days later Lord Braydon gave his consent to his daughter's engagement with Bellairs, and Lady Betty ran to tell Clarice. She had not previously said a word to her friend of what had passed between her and Bellairs. He had begged her to keep silence until he had spoken to Lord Braydon, and she had promised and had kept her promise. But now she rushed into the saloon where Clarice was playing Chopin, and, throwing her arms round her friend, told her the great news. The body of Clarice became rigid in her arms.
“And the king has consented,” Betty cried.
The king was her father.
“Clarice, Clarice, isn't it wonderful?”
“Wonderful! I thought so when you told me. But already I begin to doubt if it is.”
“To doubt, Clarice?”
“To doubt whether anything a man does is wonderful.”
That was all Clarice said. Then she kissed Betty, and went on playing Chopin feverishly, while Betty told, to the accompaniment of the music, all that was in her heart.
“And,” she said at last, “I love him, Clarice; I love him intensely. I shall always love him.”
Clarice played a final chord and got up.
Bellairs lunched on the dahabeeyah that day and Clarice met him as usual. Her manner gave no sign of any mental disturbance. Perhaps it was curiously calm. He wondered a little, but was too happy to wonder much. Joy made him cruel, for nothing is so cruel as joy. Only he was glad that Clarice had so much pride, for he thought now that in her pride lay his safety. He no longer feared that she would condescend to a scene, and he even thought that perhaps she did not feel so deeply as he had supposed.
“After all,” he said to himself exultantly, “there's no harm done. I need not have been so conscience-stricken. What is a pretty speech and a kiss to a woman who has lived, travelled over the world, read widely, thought many things? Now, if I had treated Betty in such a way I should be a blackguard. She could not have understood. She could only have suffered. I will never hurt her—Betty!”
His nature was so full of her that it could no longer hold any thought of Clarice. And for a little while, as Bellairs dived into Betty's heart, he was astonished at the passion he found there, and congratulated himself on having released her from bondage. Now, at least, he was teaching her to be herself. He was killing the echo and creatinga voice, a beautiful, clear, radiant voice that would sing to him, to him alone.
“Betty has a great deal in her,” he said to Clarice once.
“Yes—a great deal. Who put it there, do you think?”
“Who? Why, nobody. Surely you would not say that all you yourself have of—of strength, originality, courage, was put into you by some other man or woman.”
“No. I would not say that. But then—I am not Betty.”
Bellairs felt irritated.
“Please don't run Betty down,” he exclaimed hastily.
“I! I run down Betty! I don't think you understand what I feel about Betty. She is the one perfect being I know. I worship her.”
“I am sure you do,” he said, mollified. “And you have done much for her, perhaps too much.”
“I cannot tell that—yet,” Clarice answered. “Some day I may know whether I have done very much, or very little.”
“Some day—when?”
“Perhaps very soon.”
Bellairs wondered what she meant, and wondered, too, why he had a sudden sense of uneasiness.
It was a day or two after this conversation that a light cloud seemed to float across his lover's happiness with Betty. He could not tell the exactmoment when it came, nor from what quarter it journeyed. But he felt the obscuring of the sun and the lessening of the lovely warmth of intimacy. He was chilled and alarmed, and at night, when he was alone with Betty in the stern of theHatasoobidding her good-bye, he could not refrain from saying:—
“Betty, is anything the matter?”
“The matter, Jack?”
“Yes. Are you quite happy to-day? Quite as happy as you were yesterday?”
“I suppose so—I believe so.”
But she did not speak with a perfect conviction, and Bellairs was more gravely troubled.
“I am certain something is wrong,” he persisted. “I have done something that has offended you, or said something stupid. What is it? Do tell me.”
“I can't. There is nothing to tell. Really, there is not.”
“You would tell me if there was?”
“Of course.”
“And you love me as much as ever?”
“Oh, yes.”
He looked into her eyes, asking them mutely to tell him the truth. And he thought their expression was strangely cold. The light had surely faded out of them. He kissed her silently and went forward. Clarice was standing there looking at the rising moon.
“Good-night,” he said, holding out his hand.
“How grave you look,” she answered, not seeing the hand.
“The moonlight makes people look unnatural.”
“It does not reach the deck yet.”