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 tollsFor 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.
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 Iam thankful to you for visiting me, you need not take the trouble, unlessI 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 CivilWar.
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.
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!"