Four o’clock at Gedinne station, thirteen miles from Vresse. Rain was streaming down in torrents, yet of the two passengers waiting for the train only one was under the shelter; and when the other in momentary absence of mind came under the glass, the first vacated his seat and took refuge in the storm. There he stayed, keeping an immovable face while the wind lashed him and the grey lances of rain assailed him, staring steadily at the silver-and-golden line along the horizon under the storm-cloud, and the amber glow which was slowly transfusing the sombre brown swells of vapour. Mademoiselle Hélène-Marie-Denise Bonin-Watelot, the signal-man’s eldest hope, with whom Farquhar had conscientiously made friends on his journeys to Brussels, came up and told him the number of the forks she had washed and the nature of the garters which she wore; but she got nopralinesto-day from the big pocket in the overcoat.
When the train came in, the rivals got into different carriages as far apart as might be. Glad enough were they to be moving at all, though they stopped at every station. No lover journeying to his bride, nor widow hurrying to the sick-bed of her only son, ever found the giant steam more laggard. Five o’clock brought them to Houyet, where they changed trains and had their second encounter; for the platform was crowded, and Farquhar, springing into an empty seat at the moment before their start, found himself face to face with Lucian, and fled out again with an exclamation which the Belgian ladies, sitting stout and placid in an atmosphere of indescribable tobacco, luckily did not understand. Lucian, spite of his anxiety, nearly choked with laughter to see his friend hurrying into the company of three babies and a nurse, in preference to travelling up with him. Farquhar had a delightful journey; he stood all the way to Dinant and enjoyed a chorus of wails at every tunnel.
Six o’clock: Dinant sailed into sight and brought their third change. And now they had to wait for a full half-hour. The rain was done; the sunlight streamed over the earth like a tissue of gold, and across the blue sky floated low huge masses of dove-greycloud, clear-edged with pearl, and higher, motionless as though painted on the motionless dome, long plumes of immaculate white widened out to the wind. The indefatigable artist tried to describe the scene with a stump of lead-pencil on the back of Dolly’s letter while he waited.
Travelling up through the lovely rocky valley of the Meuse, bright-hung with rain-drops, Farquhar sat watch in hand counting the minutes; for their train was late, and there was a doubt whether it could catch the main-line connection at Namur, and if they failed in that they could not cross that night and must wait a whole day more ere hearing Dolly’s decree. Seven found them passing Yvoir, the sky bare of clouds, and the wide Meuse rosing herself in the sunset’s glow, which stained the very granite cliffs and dyed the green of young leaves madder-brown. Half-past seven: they were coming into Namur station, ten minutes late, and the Brussels express was due. Standing up, Farquhar held himself in readiness. Before the wheels were still he had sprung out, leaping with the train to balance his initial velocity, and was running along the platform towards the main line, for he knew his way. Lucian did not know his way, but he did not stay to ask it; he ran after Farquhar. There was a crowd, and twostout Belgians, excitedly discussing the wonderful rescue at Vresse, got right in his way: as he reached the platform the train began to move, and Lucian, who was too much exhausted to do more than just clutch at the foot-board, would certainly have been left had not somebody opened the door of a first-class carriage and hauled him in by the collar and tail of his coat. Lucian collapsed, utterly spent, his face as white as paper; the stranger ministered to his needs with half a glass of brandy, and assisted him to a seat. There Lucian lay with his eyes shut for several minutes before he found energy even to feel curiosity concerning his saviour. To a person of Lucian’s inquisitive temper, three minutes is an æon of time.
When his heart had moderated its suffocating pulsations and his eyes had ceased to swim, he made use of them, and discovered that his companion was a slight, fair-haired, good-looking young Englishman dressed in grey—who was watching him with a good deal of friendliness out of a pair of dark-grey eyes. Lucian smiled back and gave him a military salute, being still beyond speech.
“You were almost left behind,” said the stranger. Lucian nodded. “I hope I didn’t tear your coat.”
Lucian put up his hand and found a long rent, but he smiled on. “No, it’s all right, thanks. I’m no end obliged to you. I was dead set on catching this train; there’d have been Holy Moses to settle if I’d missed it.”
“I’m glad.”
“You crossing to-night?”
“Yes, I’m going back,” said the stranger, taking a paper out of his bag. Lucian made a bet with himself as to what that paper would be, and transferred a sixpence from the right-hand pocket of his coat to the left when theSpectatorcame into view. TheEngineer Journalfollowed. “Oho!” said Lucian to himself; “a soldier of the king, my friend, are you? That’s why you look so smart.” He went on aloud: “I’ve a kind of idea you saved my life, you know.”
“By pulling you in? Surely not.”
“No-o; not that way. By the kindly, felicitous, and opportunitatious administration of O. D. V.”
“You ought not to run if you have trouble with your heart,” said the stranger, unfolding theSpectatorpreparatory to beginning to read.
“Thirteen different sawboneses have told me that very same thing,” Lucian confessed; “but it’s one of those things no fellow can remember.”
“I dare say it is difficult,” the stranger assented, his eyes on the printed page.
In face of that augustSpectator, Lucian had not the impudence to go on talking, though his own thoughts were far from pleasant company. He amused himself by studying the delicate and rather feminine profile and the long eyelashes of his vis-à-vis, trying from them to read his character and from his clothes his position and prospects; and the longer he looked the more certain he grew that both should be known to him.
“Where have I seen your face before?It seems so familiar to me!”
“Where have I seen your face before?It seems so familiar to me!”
“Where have I seen your face before?It seems so familiar to me!”
“Where have I seen your face before?
It seems so familiar to me!”
whistled Lucian softly to himself, trying to fit together fragments of memory, as in one of those terrible improving Scripture puzzles which had haunted the Sundays of his childhood. Bright sunshine, an architrave of light-coloured wood framing an open door, and some bright figure standing beside him: his brain served up these scraps of information, but he could not complete the picture. His feverish mind had cooled. Lucian was not by nature excitable; it was the electrical influence of Farquhar’s stormy temperament which threw him off his balance, and in his wildest movements he was never mastered by a single motiveand passion to the exclusion of every other, as happened to Farquhar. So now, anxiety respecting Dolly lay like a core of ice within his heart while the surface of his fertile brain was occupied in weaving a romantic secret history for the quiet young aristocrat of theSpectator. By the time they had reached Brussels he had made him a bigamist inclining to trigamy, and was only not sure whether he had poisoned his first wife or his mother.
Nine, ten, half-past. Darkness had fallen, spangled with stars, and the southwest wind came sweeping across the sky with a full and steady pressure which reminded Lucian of the strong blue tide of the Trades. Brussels sparkling in lights lay far behind, and Ghent was passed, and they tore through Bruges with three screeches, leaving a trail of opalescent smoke threaded with fire, and noisily rocking and stuffily smelling as a Belgian train alone can. Over the wide flat lands they raced, with a throbbing repeated in triplets as clear as the gait of a galloping horse. No tunnels were here; a grating rush and a roar told when they passed a canal and mirrored their square golden windows one after one in the glass of the water, so dark and so still. Lucian leaned out, received a peppering of grit from the engine, and got his first breath of the sea. There in thewest the sky glowed over Ostend. He relegated the aristocratic stranger to a prison dark and drear, with prospects of the gallows, and turned from his own fancies to face the facts of life. Years dropped away like dead leaves; he lived again through the hours when he gambled with Meryon while his wife lay dead above. In those hours he had come to know despair; and now, displacing the veils which resolute courage drew across the face of truth, he saw the same inexorable lineaments confronting him. He had met them now in every path of life. He was a failure: Dolly was not for him. He had known this, while refusing to believe; he did acknowledge it now, and reached the nadir of his troubles before the final sentence fell.
“We shall have a rough crossing,” said the stranger, folding up his paper. “Are you a good sailor?”
“Tolerably vile; are you?”
“Couldn’t be worse,” said the stranger, laughing. “Do you go below?”
“No; I lie where I fall and abide in my misery until my journey’s end.Sic transitis my motto; and sick it always is, too.”
“You’ll get wet through if you stay on deck to-night. Why don’t you try a private cabin? They’re comfortable.”
“To tell the plain but honest truth,” said Lucian, cheerfully leaning back and stretching a pair of muddy boots on the opposite seat, “because I’m clean cleaned out. I’ve nothing but my fare up from Dover.”
“I see.”
The stranger stood up to lift down his bag and put on his overcoat, in all of which actions he was as neat and quiet and dainty as a cat. After a short pause he turned to Lucian again and said, with some hesitation, “I shall have a deck cabin myself; will you share it?”
“I shall be awfully ill,” said Lucian, very much amazed.
“So shall I.”
“Well, under those circumstances you may be grateful and comforting; I’m disgusting. Sure you want me?”
“If I did not I should not have asked you,” said the stranger concisely.
“It’s really remarkably good of you.”
“Then that’s settled; thanks very much.”
Thus it came to pass that Lucian and Lal crossed the Channel in one cabin, and very ill were they both, especially Lal, who suffered like a martyr, without one groan. He could hardly have done a thing more unselfish than this, but, unluckily, his conscience was too lofty-minded to applaud him for a sacrificemerely of personal dignity. Virtue failed to reward itself here. Moreover, he was partly of opinion that he had made a fool of himself in making friends with a stranger. The hollow sound of Lucian’s cough and the mournful display of dripping passengers at Dover were consolatory, inasmuch as they permitted him to father his impulsive behaviour on common humanity.
Of those, dripping passengers Farquhar was the wettest and least pitiable. For the past four hours he had been leaning over the bows, watching the speed of the steamer, and formulating arguments that should be urgent enough to procure him a special at Dover. Those arguments only failed because the thing was impossible. Cursing high and cursing low, Farquhar went to look at a time-table, and found that the quickest way to reach Monkswell was by going straight past it in the express up to London, and coming down again by the slow. He went off to take his ticket, confident that though he and his rival might arrive at Monkswell together he would yet be the first to see Dolly at Fanes. How that could be was his secret.
But they did not arrive at Monkswell together. Lucian’s unrecognised friend had a mind to follow Farquhar’s plan, and he wentup by the express; Lucian bade him good-bye and remained at Dover. When crossing in the spring he had made the acquaintance of a porter; between the station and the pier they had become intimate friends. Lucian sought out this man now, and by dint of much persuasive eloquence seduced him into an alliance. There was no slow train up for some hours; but a goods train started immediately after the express. The porter and Lucian both talked to the driver of that engine from the time the boat came in till the goods train went off, and after its departure Lucian was no more to be seen at Dover Priory. It was strictly against the rules, no doubt, but rules are not unbreakable. The consequence was that Lucian was turned out at Faversham Junction at three in the morning, and there waited until a slow train up from the Kent coast-line carried him on to Monkswell.
First of the three, Lucian reached the station at ten minutes to seven, and set off to walk to Fanes, at two miles’ distance. He was utterly tired; the exhaustion of the previous day’s adventures, capped by a long journey, bad sea-sickness, a sleepless night, and exciting anxiety, weighed down each step he made. He had had nothing to eat, feeling disinclined at Dover and lacking the chance at Monkswell.The familiar morning-scented country lanes spun round him as he went.
Nine minutes after the up, the down train from town came in, bringing Noel Farquhar and Lal Laurenson. Seeing each other for the first time on the platform, they saluted distantly. Lal passed straight out of the station from the down platform, whence a field path led past the station-master’s pigsties and clothes-line to the road. Farquhar crossed over to the main buildings of the station, on the up platform, and there in the yard found his dog-cart waiting with an extremely sleepy groom. This was his trump card; he had telegraphed to Simpson from Gedinne before ever they started; by this he hoped to forestall Lucian at Fanes. And now all three had entered on the final stage of their journey.
Farquhar’s dog-cart flew down the hill and under the railway arch, noiselessly running on its rubber tyres: past the surgery and through the village and on into the country lanes, long tunnels of green sprinkled with sunlight. The irreproachable Simpson still sat behind. They turned a sharp corner, and the horse shied across the road: Farquhar checked him mercilessly, glanced back to see the cause of offence, and pulled him up short. Lucian sat clasping his knees by the way-side.
He looked up; consciousness of defeat blent with laughing and charitable defiance was writ on his face; impotent anger and deadly impatience on Farquhar’s. He tossed the reins to his groom with a curt, “Hold that,” sprang down, and went to Lucian.
“Come, will you? Confound you!”
Lucian’s face changed. “Going to give me a lift, sonny?”
“D’you suppose I can leave you here?”
“Right, then; I’m dead beat.”
For the second time Farquhar picked him up and deposited him in the dog-cart; and they drove on together.
Half a mile beyond this the gates of Fanes confronted the road. As the horse slackened to ascend the hill, the groom jumped down to throw them open, but when he turned he saw that they were open already, and that his master’s carriage was vanishing down the slope. He ran after it for a little way; then with great philosophy relapsed among the bushes and got out his pipe.
Farquhar drove noiselessly down the smooth yellow drive between snow-wreathed acacias, past the stream and past the lawn and past the rookery, till at the turn of the path where it widened to the sweep and thehouse came in sight, he again pulled up with a jerk.
In the fresh morning sunshine before the open door stood Dolly, in her blue frock, calling the pigeons to be fed. They sailed down to her, blue, and fawn, and white as snow, settling around and upon her, and she scattered handfuls of grain which glittered like gold. Her milk-white skin, her chestnut hair, her cornflower dress were bright and pure in colour as the sunlight itself. One pigeon floated down with outspread quiet wings and alit on her bare head, and she laughed as she shook it off: a careless laugh, a free gesture, which brought the blood to Lucian’s face. Then Farquhar’s hand fell on his arm, and he saw what he had not seen before, what Dolly, with her back turned, still did not see: the figure of a young man in a grey suit in the act of leaning a bicycle against the wall, a bicycle which unkindly refused to stand. He settled it at last, came noiselessly behind, and slipped his arm round the curve of her waist.
Dolly turned to him; the watchers saw her colour blossom and the breaking of light over her beautiful, vivid young face, as her basket slid down the curve of her drooping arm and spilled her golden store.
“You!” she said. “Back already! I’vewished ten times an hour I’d never sent you, Lal.”
Lucian shut his eyes. Farquhar, without a word, dragged the chestnut round and lashed him till he went flying back up the drive, scattering pebbles at every step.