"You will have learned by this time, from my dear old friend and second father, what I myself only learned three days ago—that it was your unconscious hand that set my unconscious feet on the ladder. I rejoice to know that it was so. The knowledge of it would be an additional spur, if any spur were needed. Time may come, however, when the remembrance of your kindness and all it has done for me, unconscious though it was, may nerve me for some critical passage in the life in front, for we are going among perilous peoples. It is not likely we shall ever meet again, but, having learned how this matter stood, I could not leave home without tendering you my most grateful and hearty thanks.
"That your life may be a wide, and bright, and beautiful, and happy one will be the prayer of
"Yours faithfully,"KENNETH BLAIR."
"He is a good man," said Jean thoughtfully, as she folded the letter and put it carefully into a special corner of her desk, and then immediately took it out again and re-read it. "May God go with him also!"
She read in the papers next day of his sailing in company with John Gerson, the prophet of the Dark Islands, and was surprised to discover in herself a curious feeling of loss, as though something had gone out of her life. Which, considering all the circumstances of the case, was distinctly odd, you know.
She had only met him twice in her life; for ten years she had hardly given him a thought; and yet his going left a little blank in a life which was quite unaccustomed to anything of the kind.
But the sudden sight of him in all his quiet strength of attainment, and the knowledge of what it all meant to him, together with this new understanding of how it had all come about, and of the share she herself had unconsciously had in the making of him—well, perhaps after all it was not so odd. For she had felt a sudden glow of participation in his triumph, a sudden sense of increase such as no procurement of her wealth had ever brought her—and now it was as suddenly gone, and a blank remained.
She caught herself thinking of him oftener than she had ever thought of any man before, and she said to herself in surprise—
"Goodness gracious me! why does that herd-laddie stick in my brain so?"
A quite dispassionate dissector of the emotions and their origins might have come to the conclusion that it was, after all, only a case of the heart performing its natural function of feeding the brain. For the heart is the life.
She laughed at herself; but the herd-laddie remained in her thoughts, and one day, before she went south, she actually found herself sitting on that very same piece of rock where she had sat ten years before, and in imagination he sat on the adjacent rock, munching his thick oatcake and broken pieces of cheese.
"What a greedy little pig I was!" she said to herself, as she sat leaning forward with her chin in her hand. "But I don't believe he'd have taken a bite from me, however much I'd wanted him to."
She looked at the slab where the windmill had been, and at the pool where the gentleman had washed. He looked as if he had been strenuously washing ever since. What a radiant face he had! It did not come from much washing, she knew; but somehow the two things linked themselves in her mind. It was the white fire inside that lit up the outside: a real man—a man to trust infinitely—a man to——
She sat looking out over the mighty panorama of hills and lochs and mountains opposite—"Gare Loch, Loch Goil, Loch Long, Ben Lomond, Ben Ihme, The Cobbler, Holy Loch." She knew most of them still. How the sight of them all brought him back to her! And, in all probability, he would never see them again. "We are going among perilous peoples."
Well! he had done very wonderfully; he was fulfilling the highest aspirations of his boyish heart.
And she? She was a lady, and very rich, as she had said she would be. And she remembered the touch of scorn with which the herd-laddie had said, "Yes, that's about all you can be, I suppose."
Close behind her the swift brown waters of the Cut hurried headlong to the town—one long, unceasing blessing. "Men may come and men may go, but we go on for ever," sang the bubbling waters against the rough rock walls of their narrow way.
"Surely I am one of the most useless of God's creatures," said Jean Arnot, as she wandered slowly back towards the paper-mill and home.
CHAPTER III
THE MAN'S MAN
Unflecked blue sky above, with a blazing white sun in it. A mighty mountain peak, with bald summit, seamed sides mantled with greenery, and round its waist, where it sat in the water, a narrow band of gleaming white sand and tufted cocoa-palms, like an Island woman's girdle. A smooth, dark, ruffled mirror of lagoon; and farther out, with gaps here and there, a barrier reef on which the hungry sea chafed and roared in ceaseless thunder. Two white men and a menacing crowd of brown ones.
"Ready?" asked the elder of the two men.
He was tall and thin, white-haired and grey-bearded, and his eyes shone like stars. His face was bronzed with much sun. There was a glow in it which did not come from the sun, a mighty determination which did not come from mere strength of will, a sweet white soul-fire which had made him a power throughout the islands of the Southern Seas.
"I am ready," said the younger man.
His face was brown also, but not bronzed. There was a lighter patch of tightened skin above each cheek-bone. His jaw was set so grimly that it looked aggressive. His lips were tightly closed. His eyes were unnaturally wide at the moment. He looked slightly raised—fey, in fact, as a man looks when he and death meet face to face in a narrow way.
In front, the crowd of Islanders stood waiting for them at an angle of rock where the white beach curved round into the land. They carried clubs and spears, and swung them restlessly. Behind, on the smooth reflexive swell of the lagoon, a white boat, just pushed off from the shore, rode like a seabird with wings outstretched for swoop or flight. Farther out a waiting schooner, whose white sails shivered softly to a head breeze.
"Remember, my son," said the elder man quietly, "one sign of flinching and it is finished. Now let us go." He bared his white head and said softly, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit," and went up towards the dark men like the courteous Christian gentleman he was. The younger man did the same.
One sign of flinching and it is finished.One sign of flinching and it is finished.
One sign of flinching and it is finished.One sign of flinching and it is finished.
The natives drew back round the rock; the white men followed. The men in the boat watched intently, and then listened and gazed at the angle of the rock. Their orders were to wait.
The two men passed out of sight, the elder, quiet and calm, as if going for a stroll in his mission garden, the younger, strung to martyr pitch, ready to endure to the utmost. The islanders retreated foot by foot; the white men followed steadily. Then, suddenly, clubs whirled and spears bristled, and the brown men turned and rolled on the white like a flood, and parted them.
The elder man stood and eyed them steadfastly. He had been through it many times before. Death and he had been old friends and fellow-travellers for many a year, and the passing of The Gate was to him but the entrance to a larger life. He spoke to them in words he thought they might understand. For a moment the two men were like two white rocks in a foaming mountain stream. Brown arms, clubs, spears whirled about them. Not one man in ten thousand could have stood it unmoved.
The white-haired man was such a one. He stood. The younger man's face broke; the strings had been drawn too tight. He cast one swift glance round.
In an instant the silvery crown beside him ran blood, and disappeared. With bent head inside his folded arms the younger man dashed at the throng, and sent the brown men spinning, as he had sent men of a brawnier breed spinning on the football field at home. He burst through them in spite of blows and cuts. He was close up to the wild eddy under which his old friend lay when a well-flung club caught him deftly in the neck and brought him down in a heap. The brown men danced madly, and let their shouts go up. They took the younger man by the heels, and dragged him to where the body of the elder lay, and flung him down on top of it. Then the sailors from the boat burst on them with a yell, and sent them scattering.
It was days before he recovered consciousness, weeks before he could lie in a chair on the verandah of the distant mission-house—weak from loss of blood, weaker still in other ways.
They tended him lovingly. There were gracious women there who ministered to him like angels. To them he was hero, saint, martyr but once removed. To himself——!
He was almost too weak to think about it yet. He was hacked to pieces, and bruised to pulp. When he tried to move, it seemed to him that not one sound inch of flesh was left him. When he tried to think, all the little blood that was left in him rushed up into his head and set it humming and buzzing, and dyed his face crimson under the partly bleached tan.
His mind was still in a state of confusion; his thoughts were almost as broken as his body. He remembered facing the bristling brown men. He could see their shaggy heads and twisted faces, their white teeth, their gleaming eyes, and the whirl of their brandished weapons. After that all was blurred, and broke off into sudden darkness. He had a dim remembrance of intense strain and a sudden snap. He groped for the ends of the broken threads, but they were hidden in the outer void. He was still very weak.
He accepted gratefully all that was done for him, but for the most part lay in silence. His sufferings were great, but no word of complaint ever passed his lips. If he had permitted himself any such, it would have been that he still lived when his leader died. To all he was a monument of patient resignation.
So great was his depression, and so slow his recovery, that it was decided at last to send him home, as the only hope of full recuperation. He acquiesced, as he had done in everything they suggested, but in this matter with evident reluctance. He thought it unlikely he would ever return. His heart had been in the work, but he had been tried and found wanting. The work, he said to himself, was for abler and more faithful hands.
So the mission schooner carried him to the nearest port of call, and in due course he was lying in a deck chair carefully swathed in plaids, and the great steamer bore him swiftly homewards.
The story of the martyrdom and of his heroic defence of his old friend: how they two had gone up alone to the peaceful assault of an island of the night; how he had fought for his leader till he could fight no longer, and had fallen at last wounded to death across his dead body,—it had all preceded him. The very sailors were proud to have him on board. The officers made much of him in an undemonstrative way. The ladies fluttered round his chair like humming-birds, and loaded him with attentions.
And he suffered it all in silence. He was still very weak. How could he turn his sick soul inside out to these strangers, and what good to do so?
He had not yet decided what course to take when he got home. He had thought and thought, till he was sick of thinking, sick of himself, sick of life. Ah! why had he not died with the brave old man out there on the shore of the creek behind the rocks? Why had his nerve given way at that supreme moment? Why had this bitter cross been laid upon him? Far better to have died—far easier, at all events. But easier and better run opposite ways as a rule, and have little in common.
Should he confess the whole matter, and retire from the field and find some other way of life? Truly he felt no call to any other work. This had been the one desire of his life; he had grown from youth to manhood in the hope of it. He believed he could still be of service when once he got over the effects of his present fall. Should he not rather bury the dead past, with God as only mourner, and start afresh?—to fail once more when the strain came again, he said to himself with exceeding bitterness. He grieved over his lapse as another might grieve over a deliberate crime. But he postponed any final decision as to the future till he should feel stronger in mind and body.
There was a noted writer on board, a realist of realists. He sought impressions at first hand. He cultivated the sick man's acquaintance, greatly to his discomfort.
"Mr. Blair," he said, sitting down by his side one day, "I would very much like to know just how you felt, and what you thought of, when you were fighting those brown devils. Won't you tell me?"
And the sick man roused himself for a moment, and looked at him with that in his eye which the other comprehended not, and said slowly, "I felt like the devil and I thought of the devil," and not another word would he say. And the writer pondered much on the saying, but never got to the bottom of it or knew how true it was.
His people met him at the landing-place, the reverend father and the white-haired mother, proud to be known even as the foster-parents of such a son, grateful for one more sight of him in the flesh. How could he break their hearts by telling them what a broken reed their trusted one had proved? They rejoiced over him greatly, and said to one another that as his strength came back the cloud that lay on his spirits would be lifted. Their gentle encomiums stung him like darts.
But, by degrees, broken body and broken spirit were healed. Slowly and thoughtfully he made up his mind that the past should be past. He would go out again. He would take his stand in the forefront of the battle in the hope of an honourable death—for he held his life forfeit to the past.
Decision brings a certain peace of mind. He was happier than he had been since he leaped out of the white boat on to the shore of the Dark Island that morning—so long ago that it seemed to belong to a previous life.
The old people said God-speed to his decision. They had possessed him once again after giving him up for good. It was more than they had ever hoped for. They were thankful.
All interested in mission work hailed his decision with enthusiasm. He was common property and too big to be monopolised by any one sect. They had not been able to make one quarter as much of him as they had wished. He had quietly declined to be fêted and lionised. They considered he carried his modesty to too great an extreme. They would have made capital out of him and kindled fresh enthusiasms for the cause by the sight and sound of him. It was with the greatest difficulty that he avoided it all, using the plea of ill-health till his bodily appearance would no longer countenance it.
Once his decision was made known, however, they decided to drag him out of his retirement, and by dint of persistent importunity prevailed on him at last to appear at a public meeting. He consented with reluctance, and only because it was represented to him as a matter of duty.
As the time drew near he began to fear that he was in for more than he had expected. But he had given his word, and he would not draw back.
There were clever men at the head of the movement. Thousands of interested men and women were hungering for a sight of the almost-martyr. They had seen his portrait in the illustrated papers—how joyously the old mother had responded to the many requests for it!—but they wanted to see him with their eyes and hear him with their ears, and the younger folk were to remember all their lives that they had done so. And so, without going into details with him, the leaders of the various societies quietly arranged matters on a generous scale. There were men of imagination among them too, and they prepared a dramatic touch for the meeting which they calculated would make it go with a swing. It went beyond their expectations.
When the young missionary stepped on to the platform he stopped short, and for a moment looked almost as fey as he had done when he leaped out of the white boat that morning on the beach of Dark Island. But there must be no drawing back. He had flinched once—never again!
The chairman of the meeting was a philanthropic Cabinet Minister. As he welcomed the hero of the hour the great audience rose and waved and shouted.
The young man clasped the chairman's welcoming hand as though he were a drowning man, and that hand the one only hope of safety. Then he sank into the chair provided for him, and dropped his face into his hand.
All this was torture to him. Why could they not have let him go out quietly to his work, to his death? No bristling mob of savages that ever could confront him was half so appalling to him as that great well-dressed crowd of enthusiastic men and women and children, gathered to do him honour. Honour! And he before God a dishonoured man—a man who had failed when the pinch came. He groaned in his heart, and wished that he had not come.
But the chairman was speaking, speaking of him, and what he had done—what he was supposed to have done—in warm, appreciative words and flowing periods, and the audience was as still as a flower-garden on a summer afternoon. In the young man's soul there was a great stillness also, a stillness equal almost to that which had fallen on him when he came out of the shadows and lay in the verandah of the mission house.
His eyes wandered unseeingly over those solid banks of faces, all turned on him in eulogy of what he had not done. Those thousands of eyes seemed to pierce his soul.
One face caught his attention and held it, the face of a girl sitting in the third row from the front. Even in his agony he recognised it, as how could he help when it had been so constantly with him in his thoughts. The smooth white brow, like a little slab of polished ivory; the level brows; the large dark eyes looking up at him with something akin to reverence—the beautiful eyes with lustrous points in them; the sweet oval of the lower part of the face; the firm little chin and slightly parted lips, emphasising the old inquiring look which he knew so well: it was a face any man might remember with gratitude for the mere sight of it. It was the face he had at once longed for the sight of and feared to meet, since ever the thought of coming home had been suggested to him. And now here it was, more beautiful than even his dreams of it—inquiring, hopeful, trustful. And he must satisfy the inquiry—and dash the hope, and shatter the trust for ever. Oh, it was hard! It was grievously hard! His life laid down then and there would have been a small price to pay for the confirmation of her belief in him. And he must destroy it and still live on!
But what was this? The chairman had turned to him in his speech, the flower-garden in front had suddenly become a fluttering snowbank.
"Mr. Blair does not happen to belong to that particular section of the Church to which I belong, and which, as the State Church of the realm, retains, and rightly retains, within its own hands the appointment of its own high officers. There are some of us who, as we grow older, and perhaps wiser, regret more and more that any differences should remain among the followers of Christ. We would fain see them done away with. We would cast down all fences and walls of partition, and meet our Christian brothers and sisters on an absolute equality, on the common platform of love and service to the one Master.
"This meeting to-night, of many sects with one common object, is one step in the right direction—a great step. And here is another. The necessity for a supreme hand and head in the guidance of the mission enterprises of the Outer Islands is apparent to all. For such a position we require a man of tried courage and endurance, a man who can look death in the face without flinching, a man who holds his own life of small account, and who is ready at any moment to lay it down in the service of the cause he loves. Of such stuff martyrs are made. That the man who has given us such signal proofs of his fidelity and courage should be chosen for so onerous and so honourable a post is a matter of great satisfaction to us all. Mr. Blair, as all the world knows, has proved his fitness in a time of grievous danger and perplexity.—a time which I do not hesitate to say would have tried the nerve of any man to breaking-point, under a strain which might have broken any ordinary man, and small blame to him. But here"—and he laid his hand upon young Blair's shoulder—"we have the one man who did not break down, and it is this man whom we would rejoice to recognise as the first bishop of the Outer Islands. I am authorised to request Mr. Blair's acceptance of this arduous and honourable post, without reference to any question of form or creed. And that request is made, not in the name or on behalf of my own Church only, but in the names and on behalf of all the Churches represented by the missions to the Outer Islands. It is a common point of union. Mr. Blair's acceptance of the post will, perhaps, be one step towards that greater union of the Churches to which we look hopefully forward, and I earnestly hope that he will see fit to accept this joint and unanimous request of the Churches." And he sat down with glowing face amidst thunders of applause.
And Kenneth Blair? Oh! why could they not have left him to work out his redemption in quietness and silence? Now it was not possible. Those thousands of eyes burnt into his soul. The words he had listened to pierced him like two-edged swords. Silence was no longer possible. To accept all this, as if it were his rightful due, was to hang a millstone round his neck which would drag him down to perdition.
When the tumult died at last into silence, the young man got up and stood and gripped the railing of the platform.
His face was white and set. "A man of indomitable will," they said.
His eyes burnt with a gloomy fire. "He has seen strange and terrible things," they said.
He swayed slightly once or twice before he found his voice. "He has been very near to death," they said.
And then he began to speak, quietly, as one who might need all his strength before he was done; but there was a timbre in it, born of outdoor speaking, which carried to the remotest corner, and a thrill in it which found its way to every heart. And, of all that great assembly, the only face he saw with any distinctness was the face of the girl in the third row, with its calm brow and its lustrous up-glance. He spoke to it. He watched it. If he could convince that one face of all that was in him, he felt that it would be well with him.
In his emotion he overlooked all formalities. He found his voice at last, and said, "My friends, the words I have just been listening to have been to me as sword-thrusts through the heart."
The silence was intense. Every ear and every eye was upon him. He saw only the calm, sweet face of the girl in the third row.
"I have a very terrible confession to make to you. Had I known what was intended this evening I should not have been here, but no slightest word of it reached me. My sole desire has been to get back to my work out yonder, and to lay down my life in it. I have been told that I am a man of courage and endurance ... of tried nerve ... of unflinching fidelity. There was a time when I too believed this of myself." He spoke very slowly and with a solemn impressiveness which those who heard it never forgot to the last day of their lives. "But between that and this there is a deep gulf ... and at the bottom of that gulf lies the dead body of my dear friend and chief. His death lies at my door."
An almost imperceptible movement ran through the audience, as though a cold breath shook it with a simultaneous chill. The face of the girl in the third row remained steadfastly calm. If anything, it seemed to glow with a deeper intensity of hopeful inquiry. "Say what you will, I believe in you!" it said.
"The whole truth of what happened on that dreadful day has never been told. I will confess that I had dared to hope that it might never need to be told—that it might lie between myself and God—that I might be permitted by Him to work out my redemption on the field of my failure, chastened, and perhaps strengthened, by what has passed. For, at a vital moment, when the flinching of an eyelid meant disaster, I ... flinched.
"This is what happened. As we went up towards the savages that day, my dear old friend asked me if I was ready. I was ready. I said so. He said, 'Remember, one sign of flinching and it is finished,' and we went up and round the corner. We were going, as I believed, to certain death, and I was ready—at least, and truly, I believed so. When the savages rushed in upon us, the horror of it broke upon me like a deluge. I glanced round to see if there was no possible way of escape for us. But there was no way. My dear old chief's head was crimson already with blood, and he went down among them. I burst through—and I know no more. They tell me my body was found on top of his. It may be so. How it got there I do not know. What I do know is—that at that supreme moment, when I believed myself to be strong, I found myself weak. When I believed myself ready for a martyr's death, I tried to escape by shameful flight. I was weighed and found wanting, and the remembrance of it has seared my heart like molten iron, night and day, since ever I came to myself. Whether we should have won through if I had remained firm, God only knows. But—I flinched and fled. It seems to me now that I would sooner die a hundred such deaths as I fled from then than stand here before you all and confess my default. I can accept no honours. Honours!" with a despairing lift and fall of the hand. "I can accept no position based on so terrible a misconception. All I ask, and I ask it with the deepest humility, is that I may be allowed to go out there again. My life is forfeit to the past. It shall be spent—if it be God's will, it shall be laid down joyfully—in the service to which I believe He called me, and from which I do not believe He has expelled me."
"My life is forfeit to the past.""My life is forfeit to the past."
"My life is forfeit to the past.""My life is forfeit to the past."
He sat down and covered his face with his hands. There was a momentary silence. The chairman did not quite know what to do. The face of the girl in the third row was ablaze with emotion; the dark eyes were swimming. She glanced restlessly about to see what was going to happen; she looked like springing up herself with flaming words. But another did it. A tall, white-haired man, with a flowing white beard and a face like brown leather, stood up on the platform, and said, in a voice that went straight to all their hearts—
"My friends, we have all heard. Some of us understand, because we have passed through that same dark valley as our young friend. Dare I, in all humility, remind you that a Greater than any shrank from the supreme moment, and prayed, with agonies no man may conceive of, that His bitter cup might pass from Him? I tell you, gentlemen," he cried, in a voice that rang like a trumpet, "that in doing what he has done here this evening our friend has proved himself a man among men. He has said that a hundred savage deaths appear to him less terrible than the confession he has just made. And it is a true saying. Ask your own hearts. I could prove to you that no man can answer absolutely for himself at such a moment; but I will not even argue the point. Our friend has been through the fire. He has been through God's mill. He has been hammered on God's anvil. I tell you that he is true metal. He has proved it here and now. I hold it an honour to grasp his hand and bid him God-speed."
He stretched a sinewy, leather-brown hand to Blair, and the young man gripped it with a new light in his face, and the two stood facing one another.
Still holding the young man's hand, the old one turned to the front again.
"If you agree with me that this is the man we want for the work out there, rise in your seats."
His voice had rung like a bugle-call through the outer darknesses of the earth; his name stood but little lower than God's to tens of thousands who dwelt there, and was held in reverence wherever the English language was spoken. That great audience rose to his call as if a mine had exploded beneath it. His eyes shone with the light the black men knew and loved.
"Let us pray," he said; and the young man fell to his knees beside his chair and dropped his head into his hands again.
CHAPTER IV
A SHAMELESS THING!
The night that followed that meeting at Queen's Hall was the most tempestuous time Jean Arnot ever passed through.
The dramatic events of the meeting had shaken her hidden soul out of its sanctuary. She was thankful to get home intact—so far, at all events, as outward appearances went.
She went at once to her own room. She locked herself in, and paced the floor till she could pace no more.
She could order her steps, but not her thoughts, and her thoughts took wings and climbed lofty heavens of white-piled clouds, and the white-piled clouds were all rosy-tipped, because the thoughts that scaled them came straight from her heart and were tinged with the rosy gold of her heart's desire.
Oh, wonderful! wonderful! The great big soul of him! Was there a nobler man on earth?
How easy to have let it pass! to have kept it between God and himself only! to have worked out his redemption in secret! But he could not, because he was a true man—the truest man ever born, and the bravest. Oh the great, big, noble soul of him!
To and fro she paced, and, no matter where she looked, his white, set face and blazing eyes looked out at her in that agonised strenuity of appeal which had stirred her so in the hall, stirred her to the depths till she had had difficulty in sitting still. It had seemed to her as though he lost sight of all those straining thousands and spoke only to her—as though they were all nothing, and she the whole world. Had he recognised her, she wondered, or had he perceived, in spite of the disguisement of her steady face, the intensity of her sympathy, and had clung to it as to a one and only hope?
And as she paced, and sank down into her chair, which had lost all its ordinary sense of comfort, and started up and paced again, there sprang up in her heart a great golden-glowing purpose—a purpose that trapped her breath and set her gasping when first it peeped out, but which grew like an escaped genie, and filled the world of her thoughts before she knew, and was never to be confined within bounds again.
An unheard-of thing! An incredible thing! A shameless thing!
Nay, not that—and yet—yes! yes! Shameless indeed, for shameless meant without sense of shame, and no sense of shame had she—glory rather.
An unmaidenly thing, then! That without doubt, but not without precedent, and circumstances make laws unto themselves.
But, whatever it was or was not, it grew and grew, stronger and stronger, and ever brighter in its glowing, golden rose.
As she paced to and fro it seemed to her that her path in life had suddenly flashed out before her on the darkness of the night. It was limned in lines and letters of fire, and they cried to her to follow, follow, follow.
And now, as she thought it all out, with tightened lips, and crumpled brow, and eyes that shone, it came home to her, like a revelation, that all her life had been working up to this starry point.
She thought long and deeply, and then turned up the light and sat down to her writing-table with a purposeful face. It was done in a moment—a couple of lines. But a single word has changed the destiny of a nation before this. Weighty things, words, at times! Live shells are playthings to them.
She folded and addressed her letter, and then pondered the best way over a difficulty. She wrote two more lines and enclosed them with her original letter in a larger envelope, and addressed it, and then she laid her white forehead on the packet for a moment as it lay on the table. And then, like one whose ships are burned, or whose golden bridge is built, she altered the indicator outside her door, so that her maid would call her at seven, and went to bed. Once, before she got to sleep, she smiled to herself and almost laughed out, as she suddenly remembered that it was Leap Year. Then she cooled her burning cheek on the other pillow and went to sleep, and slept soundly, for she had been living at high pressure these last few hours, and the morrow would need all her strength.
When the maid brought up her cup of tea in the morning, she handed her the letter which had stood on the table by her bedside all night, with these precise directions: "Tell William"—the groom—"to ride into the city and deliver that letter. The answer he will take to whatever address may be given him."
She got up and dressed, and went out for a quick walk in Kensington Gardens. At breakfast Aunt Jannet Harvey commented on her appearance.
"Why, child, what a colour you've got! What took you out so early?"
"I've been bathing in dew and early sunbeams, auntie."
"I couldn't sleep all night for thinking of that young man and his savages. It appears to me that that is a very great man, Jean. If he lives he will do very noble work. It needed a big soul to face that crowd and tell that story as he did it."
"Yes," said Jean. She had never discussed Kenneth Blair with Aunt Jannet Harvey, not to the extent of one single word.
After breakfast she found it difficult to settle down to any of her usual avocations. She could neither read nor play, and she declined to go out. Aunt Jannet Harvey expressed the opinion that such early rising did not suit her, and Jean confirmed her views by going upstairs to her room and wandering about there at a loose end and doing nothing—nothing but think, think, think.
Her maid brought her word that William had returned, having executed his mission in full; and please would Miss Arnot ride in the afternoon?
Miss Arnot would neither ride nor drive that afternoon, nor would she require the brougham in the evening. Mary would please ask Mrs. Harvey if she wished to drive in the afternoon. If not, the men's services would not be required.
CHAPTER V
LEAP YEAR
Kenneth Blair received Miss Arnot's note as he sat at breakfast in the pleasant room of the quiet little hotel overlooking the Embankment, where he was staying in company with Mr. and Mrs. MacTavish. He was to them as one come back from the dead, and they grudged every minute he was out of their sight.
The incidents of the previous night had been rather wearing on them all, and they were later than usual that morning, and, at that, dallying over an enjoyment that would soon be of the memory only.
The rare colour filled his pale face as he read the two lines of Miss Arnot's note, and he read them several times, as though frequent perusal might provoke interpretation.
"DEAR MR. BLAIR,—
"I have an urgent wish to speak with you. Will you do me the favour of calling here at 3 p.m. to-day?
"Yours sincerely,"JEAN ARNOT."
"I wonder what she wants?" he said meditatively, and handed the note to the old people. "I don't think I want to see anybody."
"I think you must comply with her request, my boy," said Mr. MacTavish. "She has more than ordinary claims upon your consideration, you know."
Blair nodded, and winced involuntarily. It went a good deal deeper than the old man knew, and after last night he did not feel quite himself again yet. He had a morbid dread of hero-worship, and though the outward man was healed and shaping well again, the inner man still felt woefully sore and bruised and humbled.
"She was there last night; she sat about three rows from the front," said Mrs. MacTavish. "I wish you could have seen her face while you were speaking, Kenneth. It was like the face of an angel."
Kenneth had seen it, and nothing but it, and the thought of it made it none the easier for him to comply with her request.
He said quietly: "Well, I'll think about it, and see how I happen to be situated for three o'clock. I have to see Mr. Campbell at eleven in Moorgate Street. If he has any appointments for me, I might be unable to go, in which case I'll send Miss Arnot a wire."
But Mr. Campbell knew how short his time was, and so occupied as little of it as possible; and three o'clock found him at Miss Arnot's dainty little house in Knightsbridge, overlooking the Park.
He had hesitated—as an intelligent moth might flutter warily just outside the heat radius of a candle-flame—strongly tempted, desirous, but doubtful.
For she had occupied much, very much, of his thoughts—too much, he had angrily said to himself at times—since ever he learned the part she had had in the making of him. And quite apart from that, she was so very charming in herself. It could hardly be in the power of any man, he thought, to be much in her company and not have longings for still closer acquaintance and companionship—and such things were not for him. His way lay among the shadows of the outer night, and it must of necessity be, outwardly at all events, a somewhat lonely way. Companions he would doubtless have, and the best of all high company. But home, wife, child—these were not for him. In his mind's eye he saw the white beaches, and towering cliffs, and black bosky gorges of the Dark Islands, and the thunder of the surf was in his ear. And in his heart he said bravely, "My home, my wife, my children!"
But his thoughts were never far from her, and now that, in spite of himself, he was to meet her face to face, they gathered head and had their way in spite of him.
He had often wondered why she had not married. She was still young, of course; but, after all, twenty-five was not so very young for an unmarried lady of such unusual possessions of mind, body, and estate.
She possessed, he could well believe, an independent spirit. Had she not, even at thirteen, told him that one of her aspirations was to do as she liked?
He had recognised her instantly, and with a start, the previous night. That was before the drama became exciting. And he had wondered then if she had changed her name since last he saw her, or whether "Jean Arnot was still good enough for her."
And what could she possibly want to say to him?
Possibly—quite likely—in the excitement of the evening's proceedings she had felt an impulse to do something more for the mission cause than she had done hitherto.
That was it, no doubt. Well, they could do with Miss Arnot's assistance. Funds were never too ample for the work that cried aloud to be done.
He was evidently expected. The maid led him along the hall, through green baize doors, down a passage, into the library, a beautiful and cosy room such as he had imagined wealthy people might possibly possess, if, in addition to all their other possessions, they possessed a love of books. It overlooked the garden and the Park, and was as bright and secluded a little holy of holies as the most devoted worshipper of the sacred flame might desire. The Island Mission houses were—not exactly geographically perhaps, but in every other attribute and particular—the absolute antipodes and antithesis of this charming little sanctum. The walls were lined with bookcases full of richly bound books, the table was strewn with books and magazines, among which, and queening it over them all, stood a great night-blue bowl of white lilac, filling the room with the perfume of the spring. There was a cheerful little fire of mixed peat and logs on a flat hearth, with brass dogs and chains. A sudden whiff of the peat, as he passed the hearth, carried him in an instant back into his boyhood.
He glanced at the bountiful shelves, with the hungry look of the student whose pocket had never at any time been able to keep pace with his appetite. For knowledge of books is good, and possession of books is good, but knowledge and possession combined are still much better.
He was standing looking out into the garden whence the lilac had come, when Miss Arnot came quietly in.
He turned and bowed. He had made up his mind to hold himself tightly, but her welcoming hand drew forth his own, and carried his first line of defence in a walk-over.
"It was good of you to come," she said impulsively, "and I thank you. I know your time is very short, and you must have much to do."
"Yes, there is much to do," he said very quietly. "But I am grateful to you for, at all events, affording me another opportunity of thanking you in person——" But she stopped him with a peremptory little hand.
How beautiful she was, with her wistful face and commanding little ways! There was even more than usual of strenuous inquiry in those shining eyes of hers.
"You are going back on the first of May?"
Her speech was more rapid than usual. He saw that she was excited. Probably the remembrance of last night's meeting still held her, he thought.
"Yes, on the first of May. And then——I hardly think it likely I shall ever return to England."
"But why?" she jerked, in her old, quick, want-to-know way.
"Well—you see—I really feel as if I had no right to be here at all. By rights I ought to be lying under a cairn on the beach of Dark Island."
"Oh, but that is simply morbid, and the result of your long illness. You will not feel that way long."
"I hope not. The work is crying to be done. Perhaps, after all, I shall be able to help it more above ground than below."
"Of course you will. Don't you find it dreadfully lonely out there, with none but black people about you?"
"They are very fine people, some of them. And the loneliness only nails one the tighter to the work. Besides there are——"
"Has it never struck you that you might possibly help it quite as much by remaining here as by going out again?"
Oh, Jean! Jean!
"Never," he said, with a slight flush. "My work lies there, and I hope to give my life to it, and to give it up for it if need be, as my dear old friend gave his."
"But there are others who could do the work just as well, are there not?"
"Many, I hope. I hope many will."
"And, if I understand aright, Missionary Societies are always short of funds, and the work is hindered, or at all events progresses more slowly, in consequence."
"I have my own views as to that," he said quietly.
"Won't you tell me what they are? I am greatly interested."
"They are not shared by many of my friends, and I do not obtrude them. I believe that the work is God's work, and when He sees fit to provide larger ways and means, larger ways and means will be forthcoming. If we had all the money we wanted, we might lose our heads, and go ahead too fast—scamp the work perhaps, and prove but jerry-builders in the end. One cannot forget that it has taken Christianity eighteen hundred years to arrive at its present position, and that for long periods it lay almost dormant; whereas, if the Founder had deemed it best to accomplish the work at one stroke, He could have done it."
"Yes," she said thoughtfully. "I don't think I ever looked at it in that light before. And you are quite determined to go back?"
"Quite determined—only too grateful for the chance."
"And nothing would keep you here?"
"Nothing that I can imagine—except absolute incapacity for the work."
"You would not stop even if"—and she bent forward, with hands tightly clasped to prevent them jumping visibly before him, and eyes that shone like stars. God! how beautiful she was!—"if I begged you to do so?"
He jumped up hastily.
"If you——? If you begged me to—what?"
And her bright eyes, fixed intently on his lean face, caught the sudden fierce clench of the teeth inside, which threw the cheek-bones into bolder prominence. She noted it—she could almost hear the grinding of his teeth; and the game was in her hands. She had the advantage of understanding what the game was, while he was completely in the dark.
He stood gazing down at her for a moment, and then said more quietly—
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand. Perhaps my illness has dulled my brain somewhat."
"No, it hasn't, Mr. Blair. I was asking you in cold blood if you would not stay in England and marry me, and use my money from here for the furtherance of the cause out there."
He stared at her still with all his great heart in his eyes—all of it that was not jumping in his throat like a baby rabbit.
He gazed down at her for another moment, then bent suddenly before her and took her hand and kissed it, and said huskily and in jerks—between the rabbit-kicks—
"You will think no ill of me—if I go—at once. I dare not stop——"
But she had gripped his hand and held it tight, and stood holding him, and her face shone and her eyes.
"Then—will you take me with you, Kenneth?"
"Take you with me?" Her rings cut into her next fingers under the fierceness of his sudden grip, and she could have sung aloud, for the grip came right from his heart and told his tale to her. "Do you mean it—Jean?"
"Surely."
And yet he had a doubt. You must bear with him. You see, he had been half inside the gates of death, and—well, the proceedingwasdistinctly out of the common run of things.
"Is it myself—or the work?" he asked almost fiercely. For the thought had flashed across him—and not unnaturally—that this was but one more result of the excitement of the meeting last night. She had been shaken out of her usual discretion and decorum, had probably lain awake all night, and——
But her eyes were steady as stars, and as bright, as she said—
"Both! But yourself first. I liked you the first time we met. I loved you the second. I have never ceased to think about you. Your going away left a blank in my life. After last night I love and trust you more than ever, if that be possible. Last night my way was made clear to me."
"Now, glory be to God!" he cried, and kissed the wistful lips that looked as if they had been waiting long for just that seal to the compact. And then he sat down suddenly and covered his face with his hands, as though what was in him was not even for her eyes.
She sank down on to a footstool beside his chair, and noticed how white his hand was compared with the great, strong brown hand which had held hers that day in the Greenock church.
He was himself again in a moment—or suppose we say he came back from where he had been—and his face was full of the old radiant glow as he raised it to look at her.
"Itisreal, isn't it?" he asked in a light-hearted, boyish way.
"I'm real," she said, smiling back at him. "You seem not quite yourself."
"Did you ever try to imagine what it would feel like to have every single desire of your heart suddenly granted to you all in a lump?"
"I don't think I ever did. It sounds as if it might be too much for one."
"It is—almost. And you wonder if it is real and true, or only a vain imagining. Jean, is it true that you care for me?"
"No—love you, Ken,—dearly—every inch of you."
"And that you are going to marry me?"
"If you ask me properly."
"Jean, will you marry me and come out with me and share my work?"
"I will!"
He gazed at her steadfastly, and said softly—
"Thank God! it is true!"
He enjoyed that full sunshine of felicity for close on five minutes, and then said more soberly—
"Do you quite understand, dear, all that you are giving up? Life out there——"
"It is enough for me at present to realise what I have gained. Can you not understand, dear, that to a woman the time comes when the heart's love of one man is more to her than all the rest of the whole wide world? Life touched its highest with me when you made my fingers bleed a few minutes ago."
"I made your——" and he snatched her hands and saw the tiny wounds. "Oh, forgive me! I did not know——" and he kissed them tenderly.
"Sweet wounds!" she said. "They told me more than all you have forgotten to tell me—all that I was aching to know."
"And you really care for me like that, Jean? For me! Is it possible? I wonder why?"
"Perhaps God had something to do with it. It is so very good that it must be from Him."
"Yes," he said emphatically.
"And now—when are you going to tell me that you care a little for me, and are not just taking me because I threw myself at your head and you could not help yourself?"
"Oh, Jean! Jean! you knew—though how I cannot tell. You have been shrined in my heart since that second time we met, but I knew it was hopeless——"
"Clever boy! And you hardly knew me then."
"I knew your eyes the moment I looked into them, and they have never left me since."
"Such common brown eyes! But you didn't know what lay behind them?"
"The most beautiful eyes in the world."
And by degrees they settled into quiet talk of the future.
He still feared she did not fully understand all she was giving up, and conscientiously endeavoured to make it clear to her.
She listened to please him, and because it was sweet to hear him, for all his thought in the matter was for her and her well-being.
So she let him go on; and when he had exhausted all his arguments, she said quietly—
"It is all nothing and less than nothing, dearest, compared with the rest. Where you go I go. Your work shall be my work, and your people my people, and nothing but death shall part us."
And with a heart that seemed like to burst for very fulness of joy in her, he said, "Amen!"