"Yes," he said.
"Didn't he speak of little Jack?" said Sir Graham slowly, and with a sudden nervous spasm of the face.
"Yes, Sir Graham."
"That's curious."
"Why?"
"The same name—my wonder-child's name."
"And the name of a thousand children."
"Of course, of course. And—and, Uniacke, the other name, the other name upon that tomb?"
"What other name?"
"Why—why the surname. What is that?"
The painter was standing close to the clergyman and staring straight into his eyes. For a moment Uniacke made no reply. Then he answered slowly:
"There is no other name."
"Why not?"
"Why—the—the Skipper would only have Jack put, that was all. Jack—he was the boy on the schooner 'Flying Fish'—'Lead, kindly light.'"
"Ah!"
The exclamation came in a sigh, that might have been a murmur of relief or of disappointment. Then there was a silence. The painter went over again to the fire. Uniacke stood still where he was and looked on the ground. He had told a deliberate lie. It seemed to grow as he thought of it. And why had he told it? A sudden impulse, a sudden fear, had led him into sin. A strange fancy had whispered to him, "What if that boy buried by the wall yonder should be the wonder-child, the ragamuffin who looked at the rainbow, the sea urchin, the spectre haunting your guest?" How unlikely that was! And yet ships go far, and the human fate is often mysteriously sad. It might be that the wonder-child was born to be wrecked, to be cast up, streaming with sea-water on the strand of this lonely isle. It might be that the eyes which worshipped the rainbow were sightless beneath that stone yonder; that the hands which pointed to it were folded in the eternal sleep.And, if so, was not the lie justified? If so, could Peter Uniacke regret it? He saw this man who had come into his lonely life treading along the verge of a world that made him tremble in horror. Dared he lead him across the verge into the darkness? And yet his lie troubled him, and he saw a stain spreading slowly out upon the whiteness of his ardent soul. The painter turned from the fire. His face was haggard and weary.
"I will go to bed," he said. "I must try to get some sleep even in the storm."
He held out his thin hand. Uniacke took it.
"Good-night," he said.
"Good-night. I am sorry I have troubled you with my foolish history."
"It interested me deeply. By the way—what did you say your wonder-child's name was, his full name?"
"Jack—Jack Pringle. What is it?"
"Nothing. That gust of wind startled me. Good-night."
The painter looked at Uniacke narrowly, then left the room.
The clergyman went over to the fire, leaned his arms on the mantelpiece, and rested his head on them.
Presently he lifted his head, went softly to the door, opened it and listened. He heard the tread of his guest above stairs, moving to and fro about the spare room. He waited. After a while there was silence in the house. Only the wind and thesea roared outside. Then Uniacke went into the kitchen, pulled out a drawer in a dresser that stood by the window, and took from it a chisel and a hammer. He carried them into the passage, furtively put on his coat and hat, and, with all the precaution of a thief, unlocked the front door and stole out into the storm.
Inthe morning the storm was still fierce. Clouds streamed across a sky that bent lower and lower towards the aspiring sea blanched with foam. There was little light, and the Rectory parlour looked grim and wintry when Sir Graham and Uniacke met there at breakfast time. The clergyman was pale and seemed strangely discomforted and at first unable to be natural. He greeted his guest with a forcible, and yet flickering, note of cheerfulness, abrupt and unsympathetic, as he sat down behind the steaming coffee-pot. The painter scarcely responded. He was still attentive to the storm. He ate very little.
"You slept?" asked Uniacke presently.
"Only for a short time towards dawn. I sat at my window most of the night."
"At your window?" Uniacke said uneasily.
"Yes. Somebody—a man—I suppose it must have been the Skipper—came out from the shadow of this house soon after I went to my bedroom, and stole to that grave by the churchyard wall."
"Really," said Uniacke. "Did he stay there?"
"For some time, bending down. It seemed to me as if he were at some work, some task—or perhaps he was only praying in his mad way, poor fellow!"
"Praying—yes, yes, very likely. A little more coffee?"
"No, thank you. The odd thing was that after a while he ceased and returned to this house. One might have thought it was his home."
"You could not see if it was the Skipper?"
"No, the figure was too vague in the faint stormy light. But it must have been he. Who else would be out at such a time in such a night?"
"He never heeds the weather," said Uniacke.
His pale face had suddenly flushed scarlet, and he felt a pricking as of needles in his body. It seemed to him that he was transparent like a thing of glass, and that his guest must be able to see not merely the trouble of his soul, but the fact that was its cause. And the painter did now begin to observe his host's unusual agitation.
"And you—your night?" he asked.
"I did not sleep at all," said Uniacke quickly, telling the truth with a childish sense of relief, "I was excited."
"Excited!" said Sir Graham.
"The unwonted exercise of conversation. You forget that I am generally a lonely man," said the clergyman, once more drawn into the sin of subterfuge,and scorching in it almost like a soul in hell.
He got up from the breakfast-table, feeling strangely unhappy and weighed down with guilt. Yet, as he looked at the painter's worn face and hollow eyes, his heart murmured, perhaps deceitfully, "You are justified."
"I must go out. I must go into the village," he said.
"In this weather?"
"We islanders think nothing of it. We pursue our business though the heavens crack and the sea touches the clouds."
He went out hurriedly and with the air of a man painfully abashed. Once beyond the churchyard, in the plough-land of the island road, he continued his tormented reverie of the night. Never before had he done evil that good might come. He had never supposed that good could come out of evil, but had deemed the supposition a monstrous and a deadly fallacy, to be combated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was chiefly conscious of a mental weakness in himself which had caused him to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniacke was disposed to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint.But he was emotional. He was full of pity. He desired to bandage the wounded world, to hush its cries of pain, to rock it to rest, even though he believed that suffering was its desert. And to the individual, more especially, he was very tender. Like a foolish woman, perhaps, he told himself to-day as he walked on heavily in the wild wind, debating his deed of the night and its consequences.
He had erased the name of Pringle from the stone that covered little Jack, the wonder-child. And he felt like a criminal. Yet he dreaded the sequel of a discovery by the painter, that his fears were well founded, that his sea urchin had indeed been claimed by the hunger of the sea. Uniacke had worked in cities and had seen much of sad men. He had learnt to read them truly for the most part, and to foresee clearly in many instances the end of their journeys. And his ministrations had taught him to comprehend the tragedies that arise from the terrible intimacy which exists between the body and its occupant the soul. He could not tell, as a doctor might have been able to tell, whether the morbid condition into which Sir Graham had come was primarily due to ill-health of the mind acting upon the body or the reverse. But he felt nearly sure that if the painter's fears were proved suddenly to him to be well founded, he might not improbably fall into a condition of permanent melancholia, or even of active despair. Despite his apparent hopelessness, hewas at present sustained by ignorance of the fate of little Jack. He did not actually know him dead. The knowledge would knock a prop from under him. He would fall into some dreadful abyss. The young clergyman's deceit alone held him back. But it might be discovered at any moment. One of the islanders might chance to observe the defacement of the tomb. A gossiping woman might mention to Sir Graham the name that had vanished. Yet these chances were remote. A drowned stranger boy is naught to such folk as these, bred up in familiarity with violent death. Long ago they had ceased to talk of the schooner "Flying Fish," despite the presence of the mad Skipper, despite the sound of church bells in the night. Fresh joys, or tragedies, absorbed them. For even the island world has its record. Time plants his footsteps upon the loneliest land. And the dwellers note his onward tour.
Uniacke reckoned the chances for and against the discovery of his furtive act of mercy and its revelation to his guest. The latter outnumbered the former. Yet Uniacke walked nervously as one on the verge of disaster. In the Island cottages that morning he bore himself uneasily in the presence of his simple-minded parishioners. Sitting beside an invalid, whose transparent mind was dimly, but with ardent faith, set on Heaven, he felt hideously unfitted to point the way to that place into which no liar shall ever come. He wastroubled, and prayed at random for the dying—thinking of the dead. At the same time he felt himself the chief of sinners and knew that there was a devil in him capable of repeating his nocturnal act. Never before had he gathered so vital a knowledge of the complexity of man. He saw the threads of him all ravelled up. When he finished his prayers at the bedside, the invalid watched him with the critical amazement of illness.
He went out trembling and conscience-stricken. When he reached the churchyard on his way homewards, he saw Sir Graham moving among the graves. He had apparently just come out from the Rectory and was making his way to the low stone wall, over which shreds of foam were being blown by the wind. Uniacke hastened his steps, and hailed Sir Graham in a loud and harsh voice. He paused, and shading his eyes with his arched hands, gazed towards the road.
Uniacke hurried through the narrow gate and joined his guest, who looked like a man startled out of some heavy reverie.
"Oh, it is you," he said. "Well, I—"
"You were going to watch the sea, I know. It is worth watching to-day. Come with me. I'll take you to the point—to the nigger."
"The nigger?"
"The fishermen call the great black rock at the north end of the Island by that name. The sea must be breaking magnificently."
Uniacke took Sir Graham's arm and led him away, compelling him almost as if he were a child. They left the churchyard behind them, and were soon in solitary country alone with the roar of wind and sea. Branching presently from the road they came into a narrow, scarcely perceptible, track, winding downward over short grass drenched with moisture. The dull sheep scattered slowly from them on either side of the way. Presently the grass ceased at the edge of an immense blunt rock, like a disfigured head, that contemplated fixedly the white turmoil of the sea.
"A place for shipwreck," said Sir Graham. "A place of death."
Uniacke nodded. The painter swept an arm towards the sea.
"What a graveyard! One would say the time had come for it to give up its dead and it was passionately fighting against the immutable decree. Is Jack somewhere out there?"
He turned and fixed his eyes upon Uniacke's face. Uniacke's eyes fell.
"Is he?" repeated Sir Graham.
"How can I tell?" exclaimed Uniacke, almost with a sudden anger. "Let us go back."
Towards evening the storm suddenly abated. A pale yellow light broke along the horizon, almost as the primroses break out along the horizon of winter. The thin black spars of a hurrying vessel pointed to the illumination and vanished, leaving the memory of a torturedgesture from some sea-thing. And as the yellow deepened to gold, the Skipper set the church bells ringing. Sir Graham opened the parlour window wide and listened, leaning out towards the graves. Uniacke was behind him in the room. Vapour streamed up from the buffeted earth, which seemed panting for a repose it had no strength to gain. Ding dong! Ding dong! The wild and far-away light grew to flame and faded to darkness. In the darkness the bells seemed clearer, for light deafens the imagination. Uniacke felt a strange irritability coming upon him. He moved uneasily in his chair, watching the motionless, stretched figure of his guest. Presently he said:
"Sir Graham!"
There was no reply.
"Sir Graham!"
He got up, crossed the little room and touched the shoulder of the dreamer. Sir Graham started sharply and turned a frowning face.
"What is it?"
"The atmosphere is very cold and damp after the storm."
"You wish me to shut the window? I beg your pardon."
He drew in and shut it, then moved to the door.
"You are going out?" said Uniacke uneasily.
"Yes."
"I—I would not speak to the Skipper, if Iwere you. He is happier when he is let quite alone."
"I want to see him. I want him to sit for me."
"To sit!" Uniacke repeated, with an accent almost of horror.
"Yes," said Sir Graham doggedly. "I have a great picture in my mind."
"But—"
"The Skipper's meeting with his drowned comrades, in that belfry tower. He will stand with the ropes dropping from his hands, triumph in his eyes. They will be seen coming up out of the darkness, grey men and dripping from the sea, with dead eyes and hanging lips. And first among them will be my wonder-child, on whom will fall a ray of light from a wild moon, half seen through the narrow slit of the deep-set window."
"No, no!"
"What do you say?"
"Your wonder-child must not be there. Why should he? He is alive."
"You think so?"
Uniacke made no reply.
"I say, do you think so?"
"How can I know? It is impossible. But—yes, I think so."
The clergyman turned away. A sickness of the conscience overtook him like physical pain. Sir Graham was by the door with his hand upon it.
"And yet," he said, "you do not believe in intuitions.Nothing tells you whether that woman you loved is dead or living. You said that."
"Nothing."
"Then what should tell you whether Jack is dead or living?"
He turned and went out. Presently Uniacke saw his dark figure pass, like a shadow, across the square of the window. The night grew more quiet by slow degrees. The hush after the storm increased. And to the young clergyman's unquiet nerves it seemed like a crescendo in music instead of like a diminuendo, as sometimes seems the falling to sleep of a man to a man who cannot sleep. The noise of the storm had been softer than the sound of this increasing silence in which the church bells presently died away. Uniacke was consumed by an apprehension that was almost like the keen tooth of jealousy. For he knew that the Skipper had ceased from his patient task and Sir Graham did not return. He imagined a colloquy. But the Skipper's madness would preserve the secret which he no longer knew, and, therefore, could not reveal. He made the bells call Jack Pringle. He would never point to the defaced grave and say, "Jack Pringle lies beneath this stone." And yet sanity might, perhaps, return, a rush of knowledge of the past and recognition of its tragedy.
Uniacke took his hat and went to the door. He stood out on the step. Sea-birds were crying. The sound of the sea withdrew moment by moment,as if it were stealing furtively away. Behind, in the rectory passage, the servant clattered as she brought in the supper.
"Sir Graham!" Uniacke called suddenly. "Sir Graham!"
"Yes."
The voice came from somewhere in the shadow of the church.
"Will you not come in? Supper is ready."
In a moment the painter came out of the gloom.
"That churchyard draws me," he said, mounting the step.
"You saw the Skipper?"
"Yes, leaving."
"Did he speak to you?"
"Not a word."
The clergyman breathed a sigh of relief.
In the evening Uniacke turned his pipe two or three times in his fingers and said, looking down:
"That picture of yours—"
"Yes. What of it?"
"You will paint it in London, I suppose?"
"How can I do that? The imagination of it came to me here, is sustained and quickened by these surroundings."
"You mean to paint it here?" the clergyman faltered.
Sir Graham was evidently struck by his host's air of painful discomfiture.
"I beg your pardon," he said hastily. "Of course I do not mean to inflict myself upon yourkind hospitality while I am working. I shall return to the inn."
Uniacke flushed red at being so misunderstood.
"I cannot let you do that. No, no! Honestly, my question was only prompted by—by—a thought—"
"Yes?"
"Do not think me impertinent. But, really, a regard for you has grown up in me since you have allowed me to know you—a great regard indeed."
"Thank you, thank you, Uniacke," said the painter, obviously moved.
"And it has struck me that in your present condition of health, and seeing that your mind is pursued by these—these melancholy sea thoughts and imaginings, it might be safer, better for you to be in a place less desolate, less preyed upon by the sea. That is all. Believe me, that is all."
He spoke the last words with the peculiar insistence and almost declamatory fervour of the liar. But he was now embarked upon deceit and must crowd all sail. And with the utterance of his lie he took an abrupt resolution.
"Let us go away together somewhere," he exclaimed, with a brightening face. "I need a holiday. I will get a brother clergyman to come over from the mainland and take my services. You asked me some day to return your visit. I accept your invitation here and now. Let me come with you to London."
Sir Graham shook his head.
"You put me in the position of an inhospitable man," he said. "In the future you must come to me. I look forward to that. I depend upon it. But I cannot go to London at present. My house, my studio are become loathsome to me. The very street in which I live echoes with childish footsteps. I cannot be there."
"Sir Graham, you must learn to look upon your past act in a different light. If you do not, your power of usefulness in the world will be crushed."
The clergyman spoke with an intense earnestness. His sense of his own increasing unworthiness, the fighting sense of the necessity laid upon him to be unworthy for this sick man's sake, tormented him, set his heart in a sea of trouble. He strove to escape out of it by mental exertion. His eyes shone with unnatural fervour as he went on:
"When you first told me your story, I thought this thing weighed upon you unnecessarily. Now I see more and more clearly that your unnatural misery over a very natural act springs from ill-health. It is your body which you confuse with your conscience. Your remorse is a disease removable by medicine, by a particular kind of air or scene, by waters even it may be, or by hard exercise, or by a voyage."
"A voyage!" cried Sir Graham bitterly.
"Well, well—by such means, I would say, as come to a doctor's mind. You labour under the yoke of the body."
"Do you think that whenever your conscience says, 'You have done wrong'? Tell me!"
Uniacke, who had got up in his excitement, recoiled at these words which struck him hard.
"I—I!" he almost stammered. "What have I got to do with it?"
"I ask you to judge yourself, to put yourself in my place. That is all. Do you tell me that all workings of conscience are due to obscure bodily causes?"
"How could I? No, but yours—"
"Are not. They hurt my body. They do not come from my body's hurt. And they increase upon me in this place, yes, they increase upon me."
"I knew it," cried Uniacke.
"Why is that?" said Sir Graham, with a melancholy accent. "I feel, I begin to feel that there must be some powerful reason—yes, in this island."
"There cannot be. Leave it! Leave it!"
"I am held here."
"By what?"
"Something intangible, invisible—"
"Nothing, then."
"All-powerful. I cannot go. If I would go, I cannot. Perhaps—perhaps Jack is coming here."
The painter's eyes were blazing. Uniacke felt himself turn cold.
"Jack coming here!" he said harshly. "Nonsense, Sir Graham. Nobody ever comes here."
"Dead bodies come on the breast of the sea."
The painter looked towards the window, putting himself into an attitude of horrible expectation.
"Is it not so?" he asked, in a voice that quivered slightly as if with an agitation he was trying to suppress.
Uniacke made no reply. He was seized with a horror he had not known before. He recognised that the island influence mysteriously held his guest. After an interval he said abruptly:
"What is your doctor's name, did you say?"
"Did I ever say whom I had consulted?" said Sir Graham, almost with an invalid's ready suspicion, and peering at the clergyman under his thick eyebrows.
"Surely. But I forget things so easily," said Uniacke calmly.
"Braybrooke is the man—Cavendish Square. An interesting fellow. You may have heard of his book on the use of colour as a sort of physic in certain forms of illness."
"I have. What sort of man is he?"
"Very small, very grey, very indecisive in manner."
"Indecisive?"
"In manner. In reality a man of infinite conviction."
"May I ask if you told him your story?"
"The story of my body—naturally. One goes to a doctor to do that."
"And did that narrative satisfy him?"
"Not at all. Not a bit."
"Well—and so?"
"I did not tell him my mental story. I explained to him that I suffered greatly from melancholy. That was all. I called it unreasoning melancholy. Why not? I knew he could do no more than put my body a little straight. He did his best."
"I see," said Uniacke, slowly.
That night, after Sir Graham had gone to bed, Uniacke came to a resolution. He decided to write to Doctor Braybrooke, betray, for his guest's sake, his guest's confidence, and ask the great man's advice in the matter, revealing to him the strange fact that fate had led the painter of the sea urchin to the very edge of the grave in which he slept so quietly. No longer did Uniacke hesitate, or pause to ask himself why he permitted the sorrow of a stranger thus to control, to upset, his life. And, indeed, is the man who tells us his sorrow a stranger to us? Uniacke's creed taught him to be unselfish, taught him to concern himself in the afflictions of others. Already he had sinned, he had lied for this stricken man. He, a clergyman, had gone out in the night and had defaced a grave. All this lay heavy on his heart. His conscience smote him. And yet, when he saw before him in the night the vision of this tortured man, he knew that he would repeat his sin if necessary.
The next day was Sunday. He sat down and tried to think of the two sermons he had to preach. The sea lay very still on the Sabbath morning, stillunder a smooth and pathetic grey sky. The atmosphere seemed that of a winter fairyland. All the sea-birds were in hiding. Small waves licked the land like furtive tongues seeking some dainty food with sly desire. Across the short sea-grass the island children wound from school to church, and the island lads gathered in knots to say nothing. The whistling of a naughty fisherman attending to his nets unsabbatically pierced the still and magically cruel air with a painful sharpness. People walked in silence without knowing why they did not care to speak. And even the girls, discreet in ribbons and shining boots, thought less of kisses than they generally did on Sunday. The older people, sober by temperament, became sombre under the influence of sad, breathless sky, and breathless waters. The coldness that lay in the bosom of nature soon found its way to the responsive bosom of humanity. It chilled Uniacke in the pulpit, Sir Graham in the pew below. The one preached without heart. The other listened without emotion. All this was in the morning. But at evening nature stirred in her repose and turned, with the abruptness of a born coquette, to pageantry. A light wind got up. The waves were curved and threw up thin showers of ivory spray playfully along the rocks. The sense of fairyland, wrapped in ethereal silences, quivered and broke like disturbed water. And the grey womb of the sky swelled in the west to give up a sunset that became tragic in its crescendo of glory. Burstingforth in flame—a narrow line of fire along the sea—it pushed its way slowly up the sky. Against the tattered clouds a hidden host thrust forth their spears of gold. And a wild-rose colour descended upon the gentle sea and floated to the island, bathing the rocks, the grim and weather-beaten houses, the stones of the churchyard, with a radiance so delicate, and yet so elfish, that enchantment walked there till the night came down, and in the darkness the islanders moved on their way to church. The pageant was over. But it had stirred two imaginations. It blazed yet in two hearts. The shock of its coming, after long hours of storm, had stirred Uniacke and his guest strangely. And the former, leaving in the rectory parlour the sermon he had composed, preached extempore on the text, "In the evening there shall be light."
He began radiantly and with fervour. But some spirit of contradiction entered his soul as he spoke, impelling him to a more sombre mood that was yet never cold, but rather impassioned full of imaginative despair. He was driven on to discourse of the men who will not see light, of the men who draw thick blinds to shut out light. And then he was led, by the egoism that so subtly guides even the best among men, to speak of those fools who, by fostering darkness, think to compel sunshine, as a man may mix dangerous chemicals in a laboratory, seeking to advance some cause of science and die in the poisonous fumes of his own devilish brew. Can good, impulsiveand radiant, come out of deliberate evil? Must not a man care first for his own soul if he would heal the soul of even one other? Uniacke spoke with a strange and powerful despair on this subject. He ended in a profound sadness and with the words of one scourged by doubts.
There was a pause, the shuffle of moving feet. Then the voice of the clerk announced the closing hymn. It was "Lead, Kindly Light," chosen by the harmonium player and submitted to Uniacke, who, however, had failed to notice that it was included in the list of hymns for the day. The clerk's voice struck on him like a blow. He stared down from the pulpit and met the upward gaze of his guest. Then he laid his cold hands on the wooden ledge of the pulpit and turned away his eyes. For he felt as if Sir Graham must understand the secret that lay in them. The islanders sang the hymn lustily, bending their heads over their books beneath the dull oil lamps that filled the church with a dingy yellow twilight. Alone, at the back of the building, the mad Skipper stood up by the belfry door and stared straight before him as if he watched. And Uniacke's trouble increased, seeming to walk in the familiar music which had been whistled by Jack Pringle as he swarmed to the mast-head, or turned into his bunk at night far out at sea. Sir Graham had spoken of intuitions. Surely, the clergyman thought, to-night he will feel the truth and my lie. To-night he will understand that it is useless to wait, thatthe wonder-child can never come to this island, for he came on the breast of the sea long ago. And if he does know, now, at this moment, while the islanders are singing,
"And with the morn those angel faces smile—"
how will he regard me, who have lied to him and who have preached to him, coward and hypocrite? For still the egoism was in Uniacke's heart. There is no greater egoist than the good man who has sinned against his nature. He sits down eternally to contemplate his own soul. When the hymn was over Uniacke mechanically gave the blessing and knelt down. But he did not pray. His mind stood quite still all the time he was on his knees. He got up wearily, and as he made his way into the little vestry, he fancied that he heard behind him a sound as of some one tramping in sea-boots upon the rough church pavement. He looked round and saw the bland face of the clerk, who wore perpetually a little smile, like that of a successful public entertainer. That evening he wrote to Doctor Braybrooke.
On the morrow Sir Graham began the first sketch for his picture, "The Procession of the Drowned to their faithful Captain."
Three mornings later, when Uniacke came to the breakfast-table, Sir Graham, who was down before him, handed to him a letter, the envelope of which was half torn open.
"It was put among mine," he said in apology,"and as the handwriting was perfectly familiar to me, I began to open it."
"Familiar?" said Uniacke, taking the letter.
"Yes. It bears an exact resemblance to Doctor Braybrooke's writing."
"Oh!" said Uniacke, laying the letter aside rather hastily.
They sat down on either side of the table.
"You don't read your letter," Sir Graham said, after two or three minutes had passed.
"After breakfast. I don't suppose it is anything important," said the clergyman hastily.
Sir Graham said nothing more, but drank his coffee and soon afterwards went off to his work. Then Uniacke opened the letter.
"Cavendish Square,London, Dec.—"Dear Sir:"I read your letter about my former patient, Sir Graham Hamilton, with great interest. When he consulted me I was fully aware that he was concealing from me some mental trouble, which reacted upon his bodily condition and tended to retard his complete recovery of health. However, a doctor cannot force the confidence of a patient even in that patient's own interest, and I was, therefore, compelled to work in the dark, and to work without satisfaction to myself and lasting benefit to Sir Graham. You now let in a strange light upon the case, and I have little doubt whatcourse would be the best to pursue in regard to the future. Sir Graham's nervous system has broken down so completely that, as often happens in nervous cases, his very nature seems to have changed. The energy, the remarkable self-confidence, the hopefulness and power of looking forward, and of working for the future, which have placed him where he is—these have vanished. He is possessed by a fixed idea, and imagines that it is this fixed idea which has preyed upon him and broken him down. But my knowledge of nerve-complaints teaches me that the fixed idea follows on the weakening of the nervous system, and seldom or never precedes it. I find it is an effect and not a cause. But it is a fact that the fixed idea which possesses a man under such circumstances is often connected, and closely, with the actual cause of his illness. Sir Graham Hamilton is suffering from long and habitual overwork in connection with the sea; overwork of the imagination, of the perceptive faculty, and in the mere mechanical labour of putting on canvas what he imagines and what he perceives. In consequence of this overstrain and subsequent breakdown, he has become possessed by a fixed sea-idea, and traces all his wretchedness to this episode of the boy and the picture. You will say I did not succeed in curing him because I did not discover what this fixed idea was. How can that be, if the idea comes from the illness and not the illness from the idea. In reply I must inform youthat a tragic idea, once it is fixed in the mind of a man, can, and often does, become in itself at last a more remote, but effective, cause of the prolonged continuance of the ill-health already started by some other agent. It keeps the wound, which it has not made, open. It is most important, therefore, that it should, if possible, be banished, in the case of Sir Graham as in other cases. Your amiable deception has quite possibly averted a tragedy.Continue in it, I counsel you.The knowledge that his fears are well founded, that the boy—for whose fate he morbidly considers himself entirely responsible—has in very truth been lost at sea, and lies buried in the ground beneath his feet, might, in his present condition of invalidism, be attended by most evil results. Some day it is quite possible that he may be able to learn all the facts with equanimity. But this can only be later when long rest and change have accomplished their beneficent work. It cannot certainly be now. Endeavour, therefore, to dissuade him from any sort of creative labour. Endeavour to persuade him to leave the island. Above all things, do not let him know the truth. It is a sad thing that a strong man of genius should be brought so low that he has to be treated with precautions almost suitable to a child. But to a doctor there are many more children in the world than a statistician might be able to number. I wish I could take a holiday and come to your assistance. Unfortunately, my duties tie me closely to town at the present. And, in anycase, my presence might merely irritate and alarm our friend."Believe me,Faithfully yours,John Braybrooke."
"Cavendish Square,London, Dec.—
"Cavendish Square,
London, Dec.—
"Dear Sir:
"I read your letter about my former patient, Sir Graham Hamilton, with great interest. When he consulted me I was fully aware that he was concealing from me some mental trouble, which reacted upon his bodily condition and tended to retard his complete recovery of health. However, a doctor cannot force the confidence of a patient even in that patient's own interest, and I was, therefore, compelled to work in the dark, and to work without satisfaction to myself and lasting benefit to Sir Graham. You now let in a strange light upon the case, and I have little doubt whatcourse would be the best to pursue in regard to the future. Sir Graham's nervous system has broken down so completely that, as often happens in nervous cases, his very nature seems to have changed. The energy, the remarkable self-confidence, the hopefulness and power of looking forward, and of working for the future, which have placed him where he is—these have vanished. He is possessed by a fixed idea, and imagines that it is this fixed idea which has preyed upon him and broken him down. But my knowledge of nerve-complaints teaches me that the fixed idea follows on the weakening of the nervous system, and seldom or never precedes it. I find it is an effect and not a cause. But it is a fact that the fixed idea which possesses a man under such circumstances is often connected, and closely, with the actual cause of his illness. Sir Graham Hamilton is suffering from long and habitual overwork in connection with the sea; overwork of the imagination, of the perceptive faculty, and in the mere mechanical labour of putting on canvas what he imagines and what he perceives. In consequence of this overstrain and subsequent breakdown, he has become possessed by a fixed sea-idea, and traces all his wretchedness to this episode of the boy and the picture. You will say I did not succeed in curing him because I did not discover what this fixed idea was. How can that be, if the idea comes from the illness and not the illness from the idea. In reply I must inform youthat a tragic idea, once it is fixed in the mind of a man, can, and often does, become in itself at last a more remote, but effective, cause of the prolonged continuance of the ill-health already started by some other agent. It keeps the wound, which it has not made, open. It is most important, therefore, that it should, if possible, be banished, in the case of Sir Graham as in other cases. Your amiable deception has quite possibly averted a tragedy.Continue in it, I counsel you.The knowledge that his fears are well founded, that the boy—for whose fate he morbidly considers himself entirely responsible—has in very truth been lost at sea, and lies buried in the ground beneath his feet, might, in his present condition of invalidism, be attended by most evil results. Some day it is quite possible that he may be able to learn all the facts with equanimity. But this can only be later when long rest and change have accomplished their beneficent work. It cannot certainly be now. Endeavour, therefore, to dissuade him from any sort of creative labour. Endeavour to persuade him to leave the island. Above all things, do not let him know the truth. It is a sad thing that a strong man of genius should be brought so low that he has to be treated with precautions almost suitable to a child. But to a doctor there are many more children in the world than a statistician might be able to number. I wish I could take a holiday and come to your assistance. Unfortunately, my duties tie me closely to town at the present. And, in anycase, my presence might merely irritate and alarm our friend.
"Believe me,Faithfully yours,John Braybrooke."
"Believe me,
Faithfully yours,
John Braybrooke."
Uniacke read this letter, and laid it down with a strange mingled feeling of relief and apprehension. The relief was a salve that touched his wounded conscience gently. If he had sinned, at least this physician's letter told him that by his sin he had accomplished something beneficent. And for the moment self-condemnation ceased to scourge him. The apprehension that quickly beset him rose from the knowledge that Sir Graham was in danger so long as he was in the Island. But how could he be persuaded to leave it? That was the problem.
Uniacke's reverie over the letter was interrupted by the appearance of the painter. As he came into the room, the clergyman rather awkwardly thrust the doctor's letter into his pocket and turned to his guest.
"In already, Sir Graham?" he said, with a strained attempt at ease of manner. "Ah! work tires you. Indeed you should take a long holiday."
He spoke, thinking of the doctor's words.
"I have not started work," the painter said. "I've—I've been looking at that grave by the church wall—the boy's grave."
"Oh!" said Uniacke, with sudden coldness.
"Do you know, Uniacke, it seems—it seems to me that the gravestone has been defaced."
"Defaced! Why, what could make such an idea come to you?" exclaimed the clergyman. "Defaced! But—"
"There is a gap in the inscription after the word 'Jack,'" the painter said slowly, fixing a piercing and morose glance on his companion. "And it seems to me that some blunt instrument has been at work there."
"Oh, there was always a gap there," said Uniacke hastily, touching the letter that lay in his pocket, and feeling, strangely, as if the contact fortified that staggering pilgrim on the path of lies—his conscience. "There was always a gap. It was a whim of the Skipper's—a mad whim."
"But I understood he was sane when his shipmate was buried? You said so."
"Sane? Yes, in comparison with what he is now. But one could not argue with him. He was distraught with grief."
Sir Graham looked at Uniacke with the heavy suspicion of a sick man, but he said nothing more on the subject. He turned as if to go out. Uniacke stopped him.
"You are going to paint?"
"Yes."
Again Uniacke thought of the doctor's advice.
"Sir Graham," he said, speaking with obvious hesitation, "I—I would not work."
"Why?"
"You are not fit to bear any fatigue at present. Creation will inevitably retard your recovery."
"I am not ill in body, and work is the only panacea for a burdened mind. If it cannot bring me happiness, at least—"
"Happiness!" Uniacke interrupted. "And what may not bring that! Why, Sir Graham, even death—should that be regarded as a curse? May not death bring the greatest happiness of all?"
The painter's forehead contracted, but the clergyman continued with gathering eagerness and fervour:
"Often when I pray beside a little dead child, or—or a young lad, and hear the mother weeping, I feel more keenly than at any other time the fact that blessings descend upon the earth. The child is taken in innocence. The lad is bereft of the power to sin. And their souls are surely at peace."
"At peace," said the painter heavily. "Yes, that is something. But the mother—the mother weeps, you say."
"Human love, the most beautiful thing in the world must still be earth-bound, must still be selfish."
"But—"
"Sir Graham, I'll confess to you even this, that on Sunday evening, when, after the service, we sang that hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light,' I thoughtwould it not be a very beautiful thing if the body mouldering beneath that stone in the churchyard yonder were indeed the body of—of your wonder-child."
"Uniacke!"
"Yes, yes. Don't you remember how he looked up from his sordid misery to the rainbow?"
"How can I ever forget it?"
"Does that teach you nothing?"
There was a silence. Then the painter said:
"Death may be beautiful, but only after life has been beautiful. For it is beautiful to live as Jack would have lived."
"Is living—somewhere," interposed Uniacke quickly.
"Perhaps. I can't tell. But I hear the mother weeping. I hear the mother weeping."
That night Uniacke lay long awake. He heard the sea faintly. Was it not weeping too? It seemed to him in that dark hour as if one power alone was common to all people and to all things—the power to mourn.
Next day, despite Uniacke's renewed protests, Sir Graham began to paint steadily. The clergyman dared not object too strongly. He had no right. And brain-sick men are bad to deal with. He could only watch over Sir Graham craftily and be with him as much as possible, always hoping that the painting frenzy would desert him, and that he would find out for himself that his health was too poor to endure any strain of labour.
The moon was now past its second quarter, and the weather continued cold and clear. Sir Graham and Uniacke went out several times by night to the belfry of the church, and the painter observed the light effects through the narrow window. In the daytime he made various studies from memory of these effects. And presently Uniacke began to grow more reconciled to this labour of which—prompted by the doctor's letter—he had at first been so much afraid. For it really seemed that toil could be a tonic to this man as to many other men. Sir Graham spoke less of little Jack. He was devoured by the fever of creation. In the evenings he mused on his picture, puffing at his pipe. He no longer continually displayed his morbid sorrow, or sought to discuss at length the powers of despair. Uniacke was beginning to feel happier about him, even to doubt the doctor's wisdom in denouncing work as a danger, when something happened which filled him with a vague apprehension.
The mad Skipper, whom nothing attracted, wandering vacantly, according to his sad custom, about the graveyard and in the church, one day ascended to the belfry, in which Sir Graham sat at work on a study for the background of his picture. Uniacke was with his friend at the time, and heard the Skipper's heavy and stumbling footsteps ascending the narrow stone stairs.
"Who's that coming?" the painter asked.
"The Skipper," Uniacke answered, almost under his breath.
In another minute the huge seaman appeared, clad as usual in jersey and peaked cap, his large blue eyes full of an animal expression of vacant plaintiveness and staring lack of thought. He showed no astonishment at finding intruders established in his domain, and for a moment Uniacke thought he would quietly turn about and make his way down again. For, after a short pause, he half swung round, still keeping his eyes vaguely fixed on the artist, who continued to paint as if quite alone. But apparently some chord of curiosity had been struck in this poor and benumbed mind. For the big man wavered, then stole rather furtively forward, and fixed his sea-blue eyes on the canvas, upon which appeared the rough wall of the belfry, the narrow window, with a section of wild sky in which a weary moon gleamed faintly, and the dark arch of the stairway up which the drowned mariners would come to their faithful captain. The Skipper stared at all this inexpressively, turned to move away, paused, waited. Sir Graham went on painting; and the Skipper stayed. He made no sound. Uniacke could scarcely hear him breathing. He seemed wrapped in dull and wide-eyed contemplation. Only when at last Sir Graham paused, did he move away slowly down the stairs with his loose-limbed, shuffling gait, which expressed so plainly the illness of his mind.
In the rectory parlour, a few minutes later,Uniacke and Sir Graham discussed this apparently trifling incident. A feeling of unreasonable alarm besieged Uniacke's soul, but he strove to fight against and to expel it.
"How quietly he stood," said the painter. "He seemed strangely interested."
"Yes, strangely. And yet his eyes were quite vague and dull. I noticed that."
"For all that, Uniacke, his mind may be waking from its sleep."
"Waking from its sleep!" said Uniacke, with a sudden sharpness. "No—impossible!"
"One would almost think you desired that it should not," rejoined Sir Graham, with obvious surprise.
Uniacke saw that he had been foolishly unguarded.
"Oh, no," he said, more quietly, "I only fear that the poor fellow can never recover."
"Why not? From what feeling, from what root of intelligence does his interest in my work spring? May it not be that he vaguely feels as if my picture were connected with his sorrow?"
Uniacke shook his head.
"I am not sure that it is impossible," continued Sir Graham. "To-morrow I begin to make studies for the figures. If he comes to me again, I shall sketch him in."
Uniacke's uneasiness increased. Something within him revolted from the association of his guest and the Skipper. The hidden link betweenthem was a tragedy, a tragedy that had wrecked the reason of the one, the peace of the other. They did not know of this link, yet there seemed horror in such a companionship as theirs, and the clergyman was seized with fear.
"You are going to draw your figures from models?" he said, slowly, speaking to cover his anxiety, and speaking idly enough.
The painter's reply struck away his uncertainty, and set him face to face with a most definite dread.
"I shall have models," said Sir Graham, "for all the figures except for little Jack. I can draw him from memory. I can reproduce his face. It never leaves me."
"What!" said Uniacke. "You will paint an exactly truthful portrait of him then?"
"I shall; only idealised by death, dignified, weird, washed by the sad sea."
"The Skipper watched you while you were painting. He saw all you were doing."
"Yes. And I think he'll come again."
"But then—he'll—he'll see—"
The clergyman stopped short.
"See—see what?" Sir Graham asked.
"Himself," Uniacke replied, evasively. "When you paint him with the ropes dropping from his hands. May it not agitate, upset him, to see himself as he stands ringing those bells each night? Ah! there they are!"
It was twilight now, cold, and yellow, and grim; twilight of winter. And the pathetic, cheerlessappeal of the two bells stole out over the darkening sea.
"Perhaps it may agitate him," Sir Graham said. "What then? To strike a sharp blow on the gates of his mind might be to do him a good service. A shock expelled his reason. Might not a shock recall it?"
"I can't tell," Uniacke said. "Such an experiment might be dangerous, it seems to me, very dangerous."
"Dangerous?"
Uniacke turned away rather abruptly. He could not tell the painter what was in his mind, his fear that the mad Skipper might recognise the painted face of the dead boy, for whom he waited, for whom, even at that moment, the bells were ringing. And if the Skipper did recognise this face that he knew so well—what then? What would be the sequel? Uniacke thought of the doctor's letter. He felt as if a net were closing round him, as if there could be no escape from some tragic finale. And he felt too, painfully, as if a tragic finale were all that he—he, clergyman, liar, trickster,—deserved. His conscience, in presence of a shadow, woke again, and found a voice, and told him that evil could not prevail for good, that a lie could not twist the course of things from paths of sorrow to paths of joy. Did not each lie call aloud to danger, saying, "Approach! approach!" Did not each subterfuge stretch out arms beckoning on some nameless end? Heseemed to hear soft footsteps. He was horribly afraid and wished that, in the beginning of his acquaintance with Sir Graham, he had dared consequence and spoken truth. Now he felt like a man feebly fighting that conqueror, the Inevitable, and he went in fear. Yet he struggled still.
"Sir Graham," he said, on the following day, "forgive me, but I feel it my duty to urge you not to let that poor fellow watch you at work. It is not safe. I do not think it is safe. I have a strong feeling that—that the shock of seeing—"
"Himself?"
"Exactly!—might be dangerous."
"To him?"
"Or to you. That is my feeling. Possibly to you. He is not sane, and though he seems harmless enough—"
"I'm fully prepared to take the risk," said Sir Graham abruptly, and with a return of his old suspicious expression. "I'm not afraid of the man."
He got up and went out. The mere thought of danger, in his condition, warmed and excited him. He had resolved before actually starting upon his picture to make someplein airstudies of the islanders. Therefore he now made his way into the village, engaged a fisher-lad to stand to him, returned to the rectory for his easel and set it up just beyond the churchyard wall. He posed the shamefaced and giggling boy and set to work. Uniacke was writing in the small bow-window, orpretending to write. Often he looked out, watching the painter, waiting, with a keen anxiety, to know whether the interest shown in his work by the Skipper was only the passing whim of insanity, or whether it was something more permanent, more threatening perhaps.
The painter worked. The sailor posed, distending his rough cheeks with self-conscious laughter. Uniacke watched. It seemed that the Skipper was not coming. Uniacke felt a sense of relief. He got up from his writing-table at last, intending to go into the village. As he did so, the tall form of the Skipper came into view in the distance. Dark, bulky, as yet far off, it shambled forward slowly, hesitatingly, over the short grass towards the painter. While Uniacke observed it, he thought it looked definitely animal. It approached, making détours, like a dog, furtive and intent, that desires to draw near to some object without seeming to do so. Slowly it came, tacking this way and that, pausing frequently as if uncertain or alarmed. And Uniacke, standing in the shadow of the red curtain, watched its movements, fascinated. He did not know why, but he had a sensation that Fate, loose-limbed, big-boned, furtive, was shambling over the grass towards his guest. Sir Graham went on quietly painting. The Skipper made a last détour, got behind the painter, stole up and peered over his shoulder. Once there, he seemed spellbound. For he stood perfectly still and nevertook his large blue eyes from the canvas. Uniacke went into the little passage, got his hat and hastened out, impelled yet without purpose. As he crossed the churchyard he saw Sir Graham put something into the sailor's hand. The sailor touched his cap awkwardly and rolled off. Uniacke hurried forward.
"You've finished your work?" he said, coming up.
Sir Graham turned and made him a hasty sign to be silent.
"Don't alarm him," he whispered, with a slight gesture towards the Skipper, who stood as if in a vacant reverie, looking at the painted sailor boy.
"But—" Uniacke began.
"Hush!" the painter murmured, almost angrily. "Leave us alone together."
The clergyman moved away with a sinking heart. Indefinable dread seized him. The association between these two men was fraught with unknown peril. He felt that, and so strongly, that he was almost tempted to defy convention and violently interfere to put an end to it. But he restrained himself and returned to the rectory, watching the two motionless figures beyond the churchyard wall from the parlour window as from an ambush, with an intensity of expectation that gave him the bodily sensation of a man clothed in mail.
In the late afternoon Sir Graham showed himan admirable study of the Skipper, standing with upraised arms as if ringing the church bells, his blue eyes fixed as if he scanned a distant horizon, or searched the endless plains of the sea for his lost companions.
"Forgive my abruptness this morning," the painter said. "I was afraid your presence would scare the Skipper."
Uniacke murmured a word in admiration of the painting.
"And to-morrow," he added.
"To-morrow I shall start on the picture," Sir Graham replied.
After supper he drew aside the blind and looked forth.
"The moon is rising," he said. "I shall go out for a little while. I want to observe light effects, and to think over what I am going to do. My mind is full of it, Uniacke; I think it should be a great picture."
His eyes were shining with excitement. He went out. He was away a long time. The clock in the rectory parlour struck eleven, half-past eleven, he did not return. Beginning to feel anxious, Uniacke went to the window and looked out. The night was quiet and clear, bathed in the radiance of the moon, which defined objects sharply. The dark figure of the painter was approaching the house from the church. Uniacke, who did not wish to be thought curious, drew hastily back from the window and dropped the blind. In a moment Sir Grahamentered. He was extremely pale and looked scared. He shut the door very hastily, almost as if he wished to prevent some one from entering after him. Then he came up to the fire without a word.
"You are late," Uniacke said, unpleasantly affected, but trying to speak indifferently.
"Late, am I? Why—what time is it?"
"Nearly midnight."
"Indeed. I forgot the hour. I was engrossed. I—" He looked up hastily and looked down again. "A most strange, most unaccountable, thing has happened."
"What?" said Uniacke. "Surely the Skipper hasn't—"
"No, no. It's nothing to do with him. I haven't seen him. No, no—but the most unaccountable—how long have I been out there?"
"You went out at nine. It's a quarter to twelve now."
"Two hours and three-quarters! I should have said ten minutes. But then—how long was I with it?"
"With it?" repeated Uniacke, turning cold.
"Yes, yes—how long? It seemed no time—and yet an eternity, too."
He got up and went to and fro uneasily about the room.
"Horrible!" he muttered, as if to himself. "Horrible!"
He stopped suddenly in front of Uniacke.
"Do you believe," he said, "that when we think very steadily and intensely of a thing we may, perhaps, project—give life, as it were, for the moment to our thought?"
"Why do you ask me?" said Uniacke. "It has never happened to me to do such a thing."
"Why do I ask? Well, I'll—"
He hesitated, keeping his eyes fixed on Uniacke's face.
"Yes, I'll tell you what took place. I went out thinking of my picture, of its composition, of the light effect, of the faces of the drowned men, especially of the face of little Jack. I seemed to see him coming into that belfry tower—yes, to greet the Skipper, all dripping from the sea. But—but—no, Uniacke, I'll swear that, in my mind, I saw his face as it used to be. That was natural, wasn't it? I imagined it white, with wide, staring eyes, the skin wet and roughened with the salt water. But that was all. So it couldn't have been my thought projected, because I had never imagined.—"
He was evidently engrossed by his own reflections. His eyes had an inward expression. His voice died in a murmur, almost like the murmur of one who babbles in sleep.
"Never had imagined what?" said Uniacke, sharply.
"Oh, forgive me. I cannot understand it. As I paced in the churchyard, thinking of my picture, and watching the moon and the shadows cast bythe church and by the stones of the tombs, I came to that grave by the wall."
"The grave of the boy I told you about?" said Uniacke with an elaborate indifference.
"Yes, the boy."
"Well?"
"I suppose I stood there for a few minutes, or it may have been longer. I can't tell at all. I don't think I was even aware that I was no longer walking. I was entirely wrapped up in my meditations, I believe. I saw my picture before me, the Skipper, the dripping sailors—Jack first. I saw them quite distinctly with my mental vision. And then, by degrees, somehow those figures in the picture all faded into darkness, softly, gradually, till only one was left—Jack. He was still there in the picture. The moonlight through the narrow belfry window fell on him. It seemed to make the salt drops sparkle, almost like jewels, in his hair, on his clothes. I looked at him,—mentally, still. And, while I looked, the moonlight, I thought, grew stronger. The belfry seemed to fade away. The figure of Jack stood out in the light. It grew larger—larger. It reached the size of life. And then, as I stared upon it, the face altered before my eyes. It became older, less childish, more firm and manly—but oh, Uniacke! a thousand times more horrible."
"How? How?"
"Why, it became puffy, bloated, dropsical. The eyes were glazed and bloodshot. On the lipsthere was foam. The fingers of the hands were twisted and distorted. The teeth grinned hideously. The romance of death dropped away. The filthy reality of death stood before me, upon the grave of that boy."
"You imagined it," muttered Uniacke.
He spoke without conviction.
"I did not. I saw it. For now I knew that I was no longer thinking of my picture. I looked around me and saw the small clouds and the night, the moon in the pale sky, the black church, this house, the graves like creatures lying side by side asleep. I saw them all. I heard the dull wash of the sea. And then I looked again at that grave, and on it stood Jack, the dead thing I sent to death, bloated and silent, staring upon me. Silent—and yet I seemed to feel that it said, 'This is what I am. Paint me like this. Look at what the sea has done to me! Look—look at what the sea has done!'—Uniacke! Uniacke!"
He sank down into a chair and stared before him with terrible eyes. A shudder ran over the clergyman, but he said, in a voice that he tried to make calm and consolatory,
"Of course it was your fancy, Sir Graham. You had conjured up the figures in your picture. There was nothing unnatural in your seeing one—the one you had known in life—more distinctly than the others."
"I had not known it like that. I had never imagined anything so distorted, so horrible, tragicand yet almost grotesque, a thing for the foolish to—to laugh at, ugh! Besides, it stood there. It was actually there on that grave, as if it had risen out of that grave, Uniacke."
"Your fancy."
Uniacke spoke with no conviction, and his lips were pale.
"I say it is not. The thing—Jack, come to that!—was there. Had you been with me, you must have seen it as I did."
Uniacke shook his head.
"Believe me, Sir Graham," he exclaimed, "you ought to go from here. The everlasting sound of the sea—the presence of the Skipper—your idea for this terrible picture—"
"Terrible! Yes, I see it must be terrible. My conception—how wrong it was! I meant to make death romantic, almost beautiful. And it is like that. To-morrow—to-morrow—ah, Jack! I can paint you now!"
He sprang up and hurried from the room. Uniacke heard him pacing up and down above stairs till far into the night.
The clergyman was deeply and sincerely religious, but he was in nowise a superstitious man. Association with Sir Graham, however, and the circumstances attendant upon that association, had gradually unnerved him. He was now a prey to fear, almost to horror. Was it possible, he thought, as he sat listening to that eternal footfall overhead, that Providence permitted a spirit torise from the very grave to proclaim his lie, and to show the truth in a most hideous form? He could almost believe so. It seemed that the dead boy resented the defacement of his tomb, resented the deliberate untruth which concealed from the painter his dreary destiny, and came up out of the other world to proclaim the clergyman's deception. It seemed as if God himself fought with a miraculous means the battle of truth and tore aside the veil in which Uniacke had sought to shroud the actuality of death. Uniacke could not bring himself to speak to the painter, to acknowledge the trickery resorted to for a sick man's sake. But this vision of the night paralysed his power to make any further effort in deception. He felt benumbed and impotent. A Power invisible to him fought against him. He could only lay down his weapons,—despicable, unworthy, as they were,—and let things take their course, while he looked on as one in a sad dream, apprehensive of the ending of that dream.
Sir Graham began his picture on the morrow. His first excitement in the conception of it, which had been almost joyous, was now become feverish and terrible. He was seized by the dreary passion of the gifted man who means to use his gifts to add new and vital horrors to the horrors of life. He no longer felt the pathos, the almost exquisite romance, of his subject. He felt only its tragic, its disgusting terror. While he painted feverishly the mad Skipper hovered about him, with eyes stillvacant but a manner of increasing unrest. It seemed as if something whispered to him that this work of a stranger had some connection with his life, some deep, though as yet undiscovered, meaning for him. The first figure in the picture was the Skipper himself. When it was painted the likeness was striking. But the poor mad seaman stared upon it with an ignorant vagueness. It was evident that he looked without seeing, that he observed without comprehending.
"Surely he will not know Jack," Uniacke thought, "since he does not know his own face."
And he felt a faint sense of relief. But this passed away, for the unrest of the Skipper seemed continually to grow more marked and seething. Uniacke noticed it with gathering anxiety. Sir Graham did not observe it. He thought of nothing but his work.
"I shall paint Jack last of all," he said grimly, to Uniacke. "I mean to make a crescendo of horror, and in Jack's figure the loathsomeness of death shall reach a climax. Yes, I will paint him last of all. Perhaps he will come again and pose for me upon that grave." And he laughed as he sat before his easel.
"What painter ever before had such a model?" he said to Uniacke.
And that night after supper, he got up from the table saying:
"I must go and see if Jack will give me a sitting to-night."
Uniacke rose also.
"Let me come with you," he said.
Sir Graham stopped with his hand on the door. There was a smile on his lips, but his eyes were full of foreboding.
"Do you want to see Jack, then?" he asked, with a dreadful feigning of jocularity. "But you are not a painter. You require no model, living or dead." He burst again into a laugh.
"Let me come with you," the clergyman repeated doggedly.
Sir Graham made no objection, and they went out together.
The moon was now growing towards the full, but it was yet low in the sky, and the night was but faintly lit, as a room is lit by a heavily shaded lamp. Sir Graham's manner lost its almost piteous bluster as he stood on the doorstep and felt the cold wind that blew from the wintry sea. He set his lips, and his face twitched with nervous agitation as he stole a furtive glance at the clergyman, whose soft hat was pulled down low over his eyes as if to conceal their expression.
The two men walked forward slowly into the churchyard. Uniacke's heart was beating with violence and his mind was full of acute anticipation. Yet he would scarcely acknowledge even to himself the possibility of such an appearance as that affirmed by Sir Graham. They drew near to the grave of little Jack, round which the chill winds of night blew gently and the dull voicesof the waves sang hushed and murmurous nocturnes. Uniacke was taken by an almost insurmountable inclination to pause, even to turn back. Their progress to this grave seemed attended by some hidden and ghastly danger. He laid his hand upon the painter's arm, as if to withhold him from further advance.
"What is it?" Sir Graham asked, speaking almost in a whisper.
"Nothing," said Uniacke, dropping his hand.
Sir Graham's eyes were full of sombre questioning as they met his. Moving slowly on, the two men stood at length by Jack's grave. The moon rose languidly, and shed a curious and ethereal twilight upon the stone at its head. The blurred place from which Uniacke had struck the name was plainly visible. Instinctively the clergyman's eyes sought the spot and stared upon it.
"Does it not bear all the appearance of having been defaced?" said Sir Graham in his ear.
Uniacke shook his head.
"The Skipper would have it so," he murmured, full of a heavy sense of useless contest against the determination of something hidden that all should be known to his companion, perhaps even that very night.
They waited, as mourners wait beside a tomb. As the moon rose, the churchyard grew more distinct. The surrounding graves came into view, the crude bulk of the rectory, the outline of thechurch tower, and the long wall of the churchyard. On the white faces of the two men the light fell pitilessly, revealing the strained and anxious expression of Uniacke, the staring watchfulness of the painter. The minutes ran by. Uniacke shivered slightly in the wind. By degrees he began to lose the expectation of seeing any apparition. Presently he even sneered silently at himself for his folly in having ever entertained it. Nevertheless he was strongly affected by the nearness of the wonder-child's grave, from which seemed to emanate an influence definite and searching, and—so he felt—increasingly hostile, either to himself or to the artist. It came up like a thing that threatened. It crept near like a thing that would destroy. Uniacke wondered whether Sir Graham was conscious of it. But the painter said nothing, and the clergyman dared not ask him. At length, however, his fanciful sense of this dead power, speaking as it were from the ground under his feet, became so intolerable to him that he was resolved to go; and he was about to tell Sir Graham of his intention when the painter suddenly caught his arm in a tight grip.