The Planter of Malata by Joseph Conrad

CHAPTER I

In the private editorial office of the principal newspaper in a great colonial city two men were talking.  They were both young.  The stouter of the two, fair, and with more of an urban look about him, was the editor and part-owner of the important newspaper.

The other’s name was Renouard.  That he was exercised in his mind about something was evident on his fine bronzed face.  He was a lean, lounging, active man.  The journalist continued the conversation.

“And so you were dining yesterday at old Dunster’s.”

He used the word old not in the endearing sense in which it is sometimes applied to intimates, but as a matter of sober fact.  The Dunster in question was old.  He had been an eminent colonial statesman, but had now retired from active politics after a tour in Europe and a lengthy stay in England, during which he had had a very good press indeed.  The colony was proud of him.

“Yes.  I dined there,” said Renouard.  “Young Dunster asked me just as I was going out of his office.  It seemed to be like a sudden thought.  And yet I can’t help suspecting some purpose behind it.  He was very pressing.  He swore that his uncle would be very pleased to see me.  Said his uncle had mentioned lately that the granting to me of the Malata concession was the last act of his official life.”

“Very touching.  The old boy sentimentalises over the past now and then.”

“I really don’t know why I accepted,” continued the other.  “Sentiment does not move me very easily.  Old Dunster was civil to me of course, but he did not even inquire how I was getting on with my silk plants.  Forgot there was such a thing probably.  I must say there were more people there than I expected to meet.  Quite a big party.”

“I was asked,” remarked the newspaper man.  “Only I couldn’t go.  But when did you arrive from Malata?”

“I arrived yesterday at daylight.  I am anchored out there in the bay—off Garden Point.  I was in Dunster’s office before he had finished reading his letters.  Have you ever seen young Dunster reading his letters?  I had a glimpse of him through the open door.  He holds the paper in both hands, hunches his shoulders up to his ugly ears, and brings his long nose and his thick lips on to it like a sucking apparatus.  A commercial monster.”

“Here we don’t consider him a monster,” said the newspaper man looking at his visitor thoughtfully.

“Probably not.  You are used to see his face and to see other faces.  I don’t know how it is that, when I come to town, the appearance of the people in the street strike me with such force.  They seem so awfully expressive.”

“And not charming.”

“Well—no.  Not as a rule.  The effect is forcible without being clear. . . . I know that you think it’s because of my solitary manner of life away there.”

“Yes.  I do think so.  It is demoralising.  You don’t see any one for months at a stretch.  You’re leading an unhealthy life.”

The other hardly smiled and murmured the admission that true enough it was a good eleven months since he had been in town last.where he had settled after five strenuous years of adventure and exploration.

“It’s a fact,” he said, “that when I am at home in Malata I see no one consciously.  I take the plantation boys for granted.”

“Well, and we here take the people in the streets for granted.  And that’s sanity.”

The visitor said nothing to this for fear of engaging a discussion.  What he had come to seek in the editorial office was not controversy, but information.  Yet somehow he hesitated to approach the subject.  Solitary life makes a man reticent in respect of anything in the nature of gossip, which those to whom chatting about their kind is an everyday exercise regard as the commonest use of speech.

“You very busy?” he asked.

The Editor making red marks on a long slip of printed paper threw the pencil down.

“No.  I am done.  Social paragraphs.  This office is the place where everything is known about everybody—including even a great deal of nobodies.  Queer fellows drift in and out of this room.  Waifs and strays from home, from up-country, from the Pacific.  And, by the way, last time you were here you picked up one of that sort for your assistant—didn’t you?”

“I engaged an assistant only to stop your preaching about the evils of solitude,” said Renouard hastily; and the pressman laughed at the half-resentful tone.  His laugh was not very loud, but his plump person shook all over.  He was aware that his younger friend’s deference to his advice was based only on an imperfect belief in his wisdom—or his sagacity.  But it was he who had first helped Renouard in his plans of exploration: the five-years’ programme of scientific adventure, of work, of danger and endurance, carried out with such distinction and rewarded modestly with the lease of Malata island by the frugal colonial government.  And this reward, too, had been due to the journalist’s advocacy with word and pen—for he was an influential man in the community.  Doubting very much if Renouard really liked him, he was himself without great sympathy for a certain side of that man which he could not quite make out.  He only felt it obscurely to be his real personality—the true—and, perhaps, the absurd.  As, for instance, in that case of the assistant.  Renouard had given way to the arguments of his friend and backer—the argument against the unwholesome effect of solitude, the argument for the safety of companionship even if quarrelsome.  Very well.  In this docility he was sensible and even likeable.  But what did he do next?  Instead of taking counsel as to the choice with his old backer and friend, and a man, besides, knowing everybody employed and unemployed on the pavements of the town, this extraordinary Renouard suddenly and almost surreptitiously picked up a fellow—God knows who—and sailed away with him back to Malata in a hurry; a proceeding obviously rash and at the same time not quite straight.  That was the sort of thing.  The secretly unforgiving journalist laughed a little longer and then ceased to shake all over.

“Oh, yes.  About that assistant of yours. . . .”

“What about him,” said Renouard, after waiting a while, with a shadow of uneasiness on his face.

“Have you nothing to tell me of him?”

“Nothing except. . . .”  Incipient grimness vanished out of Renouard’s aspect and his voice, while he hesitated as if reflecting seriously before he changed his mind.  “No.  Nothing whatever.”

“You haven’t brought him along with you by chance—for a change.”

The Planter of Malata stared, then shook his head, and finally murmured carelessly: “I think he’s very well where he is.  But I wish you could tell me why young Dunster insisted so much on my dining with his uncle last night.  Everybody knows I am not a society man.”

The Editor exclaimed at so much modesty.  Didn’t his friend know that he was their one and only explorer—that he was the man experimenting with the silk plant. . . .

“Still, that doesn’t tell me why I was invited yesterday.  For young Dunster never thought of this civility before. . . .”

“Our Willie,” said the popular journalist, “never does anything without a purpose, that’s a fact.”

“And to his uncle’s house too!”

“He lives there.”

“Yes.  But he might have given me a feed somewhere else.  The extraordinary part is that the old man did not seem to have anything special to say.  He smiled kindly on me once or twice, and that was all.  It was quite a party, sixteen people.”

The Editor then, after expressing his regret that he had not been able to come, wanted to know if the party had been entertaining.

Renouard regretted that his friend had not been there.  Being a man whose business or at least whose profession was to know everything that went on in this part of the globe, he could probably have told him something of some people lately arrived from home, who were amongst the guests.  Young Dunster (Willie), with his large shirt-front and streaks of white skin shining unpleasantly through the thin black hair plastered over the top of his head, bore down on him and introduced him to that party, as if he had been a trained dog or a child phenomenon.  Decidedly, he said, he disliked Willie—one of these large oppressive men. . . .

A silence fell, and it was as if Renouard were not going to say anything more when, suddenly, he came out with the real object of his visit to the editorial room.

“They looked to me like people under a spell.”

The Editor gazed at him appreciatively, thinking that, whether the effect of solitude or not, this was a proof of a sensitive perception of the expression of faces.

“You omitted to tell me their name, but I can make a guess.  You mean Professor Moorsom, his daughter and sister—don’t you?”

Renouard assented.  Yes, a white-haired lady.  But from his silence, with his eyes fixed, yet avoiding his friend, it was easy to guess that it was not in the white-haired lady that he was interested.

“Upon my word,” he said, recovering his usual bearing.  “It looks to me as if I had been asked there only for the daughter to talk to me.”

He did not conceal that he had been greatly struck by her appearance.  Nobody could have helped being impressed.  She was different from everybody else in that house, and it was not only the effect of her London clothes.  He did not take her down to dinner.  Willie did that.  It was afterwards, on the terrace. . . .

The evening was delightfully calm.  He was sitting apart and alone, and wishing himself somewhere else—on board the schooner for choice, with the dinner-harness off.  He hadn’t exchanged forty words altogether during the evening with the other guests.  He saw her suddenly all by herself coming towards him along the dimly lighted terrace, quite from a distance.

She was tall and supple, carrying nobly on her straight body a head of a character which to him appeared peculiar, something—well—pagan, crowned with a great wealth of hair.  He had been about to rise, but her decided approach caused him to remain on the seat.  He had not looked much at her that evening.  He had not that freedom of gaze acquired by the habit of society and the frequent meetings with strangers.  It was not shyness, but the reserve of a man not used to the world and to the practice of covert staring, with careless curiosity.  All he had captured by his first, keen, instantly lowered, glance was the impression that her hair was magnificently red and her eyes very black.  It was a troubling effect, but it had been evanescent; he had forgotten it almost till very unexpectedly he saw her coming down the terrace slow and eager, as if she were restraining herself, and with a rhythmic upward undulation of her whole figure.  The light from an open window fell across her path, and suddenly all that mass of arranged hair appeared incandescent, chiselled and fluid, with the daring suggestion of a helmet of burnished copper and the flowing lines of molten metal.  It kindled in him an astonished admiration.  But he said nothing of it to his friend the Editor.  Neither did he tell him that her approach woke up in his brain the image of love’s infinite grace and the sense of the inexhaustible joy that lives in beauty.  No!  What he imparted to the Editor were no emotions, but mere facts conveyed in a deliberate voice and in uninspired words.

“That young lady came and sat down by me.  She said: ‘Are you French, Mr. Renouard?’”

He had breathed a whiff of perfume of which he said nothing either—of some perfume he did not know.  Her voice was low and distinct.  Her shoulders and her bare arms gleamed with an extraordinary splendour, and when she advanced her head into the light he saw the admirable contour of the face, the straight fine nose with delicate nostrils, the exquisite crimson brushstroke of the lips on this oval without colour.  The expression of the eyes was lost in a shadowy mysterious play of jet and silver, stirring under the red coppery gold of the hair as though she had been a being made of ivory and precious metals changed into living tissue.

“. . . I told her my people were living in Canada, but that I was brought up in England before coming out here.  I can’t imagine what interest she could have in my history.”

“And you complain of her interest?”

The accent of the all-knowing journalist seemed to jar on the Planter of Malata.

“No!” he said, in a deadened voice that was almost sullen.  But after a short silence he went on.  “Very extraordinary.  I told her I came out to wander at large in the world when I was nineteen, almost directly after I left school.  It seems that her late brother was in the same school a couple of years before me.  She wanted me to tell her what I did at first when I came out here; what other men found to do when they came out—where they went, what was likely to happen to them—as if I could guess and foretell from my experience the fates of men who come out here with a hundred different projects, for hundreds of different reasons—for no reason but restlessness—who come, and go, and disappear!  Preposterous.  She seemed to want to hear their histories.  I told her that most of them were not worth telling.”

The distinguished journalist leaning on his elbow, his head resting against the knuckles of his left hand, listened with great attention, but gave no sign of that surprise which Renouard, pausing, seemed to expect.

“You know something,” the latter said brusquely.  The all-knowing man moved his head slightly and said, “Yes.  But go on.”

“It’s just this.  There is no more to it.  I found myself talking to her of my adventures, of my early days.  It couldn’t possibly have interested her.  Really,” he cried, “this is most extraordinary.  Those people have something on their minds.  We sat in the light of the window, and her father prowled about the terrace, with his hands behind his back and his head drooping.  The white-haired lady came to the dining-room window twice—to look at us I am certain.  The other guests began to go away—and still we sat there.  Apparently these people are staying with the Dunsters.  It was old Mrs. Dunster who put an end to the thing.  The father and the aunt circled about as if they were afraid of interfering with the girl.  Then she got up all at once, gave me her hand, and said she hoped she would see me again.”

While he was speaking Renouard saw again the sway of her figure in a movement of grace and strength—felt the pressure of her hand—heard the last accents of the deep murmur that came from her throat so white in the light of the window, and remembered the black rays of her steady eyes passing off his face when she turned away.  He remembered all this visually, and it was not exactly pleasurable.  It was rather startling like the discovery of a new faculty in himself.  There are faculties one would rather do without—such, for instance, as seeing through a stone wall or remembering a person with this uncanny vividness.  And what about those two people belonging to her with their air of expectant solicitude!  Really, those figures from home got in front of one.  In fact, their persistence in getting between him and the solid forms of the everyday material world had driven Renouard to call on his friend at the office.  He hoped that a little common, gossipy information would lay the ghost of that unexpected dinner-party.  Of course the proper person to go to would have been young Dunster, but, he couldn’t stand Willie Dunster—not at any price.

In the pause the Editor had changed his attitude, faced his desk, and smiled a faint knowing smile.

“Striking girl—eh?” he said.

The incongruity of the word was enough to make one jump out of the chair.  Striking!  That girl striking!  Stri . . .!  But Renouard restrained his feelings.  His friend was not a person to give oneself away to.  And, after all, this sort of speech was what he had come there to hear.  As, however, he had made a movement he re-settled himself comfortably and said, with very creditable indifference, that yes—she was, rather.  Especially amongst a lot of over-dressed frumps.  There wasn’t one woman under forty there.

“Is that the way to speak of the cream of our society; the ‘top of the basket,’ as the French say,” the Editor remonstrated with mock indignation.  “You aren’t moderate in your expressions—you know.”

“I express myself very little,” interjected Renouard seriously.

“I will tell you what you are.  You are a fellow that doesn’t count the cost.  Of course you are safe with me, but will you never learn. . . .”

“What struck me most,” interrupted the other, “is that she should pick me out for such a long conversation.”

“That’s perhaps because you were the most remarkable of the men there.”

Renouard shook his head.

“This shot doesn’t seem to me to hit the mark,” he said calmly.  “Try again.”

“Don’t you believe me?  Oh, you modest creature.  Well, let me assure you that under ordinary circumstances it would have been a good shot.  You are sufficiently remarkable.  But you seem a pretty acute customer too.  The circumstances are extraordinary.  By Jove they are!”

He mused.  After a time the Planter of Malata dropped a negligent—

“And you know them.”

“And I know them,” assented the all-knowing Editor, soberly, as though the occasion were too special for a display of professional vanity; a vanity so well known to Renouard that its absence augmented his wonder and almost made him uneasy as if portending bad news of some sort.

“You have met those people?” he asked.

“No.  I was to have met them last night, but I had to send an apology to Willie in the morning.  It was then that he had the bright idea to invite you to fill the place, from a muddled notion that you could be of use.  Willie is stupid sometimes.  For it is clear that you are the last man able to help.”

“How on earth do I come to be mixed up in this—whatever it is?”  Renouard’s voice was slightly altered by nervous irritation.  “I only arrived here yesterday morning.”

CHAPTER II

His friend the Editor turned to him squarely.  “Willie took me into consultation, and since he seems to have let you in I may just as well tell you what is up.  I shall try to be as short as I can.  But in confidence—mind!”

He waited.  Renouard, his uneasiness growing on him unreasonably, assented by a nod, and the other lost no time in beginning.  Professor Moorsom—physicist and philosopher—fine head of white hair, to judge from the photographs—plenty of brains in the head too—all these famous books—surely even Renouard would know. . . .

Renouard muttered moodily that it wasn’t his sort of reading, and his friend hastened to assure him earnestly that neither was it his sort—except as a matter of business and duty, for the literary page of that newspaper which was his property (and the pride of his life).  The only literary newspaper in the Antipodes could not ignore the fashionable philosopher of the age.  Not that anybody read Moorsom at the Antipodes, but everybody had heard of him—women, children, dock labourers, cabmen.  The only person (besides himself) who had read Moorsom, as far as he knew, was old Dunster, who used to call himself a Moorsomian (or was it Moorsomite) years and years ago, long before Moorsom had worked himself up into the great swell he was now, in every way. . . Socially too.  Quite the fashion in the highest world.

Renouard listened with profoundly concealed attention.  “A charlatan,” he muttered languidly.

“Well—no.  I should say not.  I shouldn’t wonder though if most of his writing had been done with his tongue in his cheek.  Of course.  That’s to be expected.  I tell you what: the only really honest writing is to be found in newspapers and nowhere else—and don’t you forget it.”

The Editor paused with a basilisk stare till Renouard had conceded a casual: “I dare say,” and only then went on to explain that old Dunster, during his European tour, had been made rather a lion of in London, where he stayed with the Moorsoms—he meant the father and the girl.  The professor had been a widower for a long time.

“She doesn’t look just a girl,” muttered Renouard.  The other agreed.  Very likely not.  Had been playing the London hostess to tip-top people ever since she put her hair up, probably.

“I don’t expect to see any girlish bloom on her when I do have the privilege,” he continued.  “Those people are staying with the Dunster’s incog., in a manner, you understand—something like royalties.  They don’t deceive anybody, but they want to be left to themselves.  We have even kept them out of the paper—to oblige old Dunster.  But we shall put your arrival in—our local celebrity.”

“Heavens!”

“Yes.  Mr. G. Renouard, the explorer, whose indomitable energy, etc., and who is now working for the prosperity of our country in another way on his Malata plantation . . . And, by the by, how’s the silk plant—flourishing?”

“Yes.”

“Did you bring any fibre?”

“Schooner-full.”

“I see.  To be transhipped to Liverpool for experimental manufacture, eh?  Eminent capitalists at home very much interested, aren’t they?”

“They are.”

A silence fell.  Then the Editor uttered slowly—“You will be a rich man some day.”

Renouard’s face did not betray his opinion of that confident prophecy.  He didn’t say anything till his friend suggested in the same meditative voice—

“You ought to interest Moorsom in the affair too—since Willie has let you in.”

“A philosopher!”

“I suppose he isn’t above making a bit of money.  And he may be clever at it for all you know.  I have a notion that he’s a fairly practical old cove. . . . Anyhow,” and here the tone of the speaker took on a tinge of respect, “he has made philosophy pay.”

Renouard raised his eyes, repressed an impulse to jump up, and got out of the arm-chair slowly.  “It isn’t perhaps a bad idea,” he said.  “I’ll have to call there in any case.”

He wondered whether he had managed to keep his voice steady, its tone unconcerned enough; for his emotion was strong though it had nothing to do with the business aspect of this suggestion.  He moved in the room in vague preparation for departure, when he heard a soft laugh.  He spun about quickly with a frown, but the Editor was not laughing at him.  He was chuckling across the big desk at the wall: a preliminary of some speech for which Renouard, recalled to himself, waited silent and mistrustful.

“No!  You would never guess!  No one would ever guess what these people are after.  Willie’s eyes bulged out when he came to me with the tale.”

“They always do,” remarked Renouard with disgust.  “He’s stupid.”

“He was startled.  And so was I after he told me.  It’s a search party.  They are out looking for a man.  Willie’s soft heart’s enlisted in the cause.”

Renouard repeated: “Looking for a man.”

He sat down suddenly as if on purpose to stare.  “Did Willie come to you to borrow the lantern,” he asked sarcastically, and got up again for no apparent reason.

“What lantern?” snapped the puzzled Editor, and his face darkened with suspicion.  “You, Renouard, are always alluding to things that aren’t clear to me.  If you were in politics, I, as a party journalist, wouldn’t trust you further than I could see you.  Not an inch further.  You are such a sophisticated beggar.  Listen: the man is the man Miss Moorsom was engaged to for a year.  He couldn’t have been a nobody, anyhow.  But he doesn’t seem to have been very wise.  Hard luck for the young lady.”

He spoke with feeling.  It was clear that what he had to tell appealed to his sentiment.  Yet, as an experienced man of the world, he marked his amused wonder.  Young man of good family and connections, going everywhere, yet not merely a man about town, but with a foot in the two big F’s.

Renouard lounging aimlessly in the room turned round: “And what the devil’s that?” he asked faintly.

“Why Fashion and Finance,” explained the Editor.  “That’s how I call it.  There are the three R’s at the bottom of the social edifice and the two F’s on the top.  See?”

“Ha! Ha!  Excellent!  Ha! Ha!” Renouard laughed with stony eyes.

“And you proceed from one set to the other in this democratic age,” the Editor went on with unperturbed complacency.  “That is if you are clever enough.  The only danger is in being too clever.  And I think something of the sort happened here.  That swell I am speaking of got himself into a mess.  Apparently a very ugly mess of a financial character.  You will understand that Willie did not go into details with me.  They were not imparted to him with very great abundance either.  But a bad mess—something of the criminal order.  Of course he was innocent.  But he had to quit all the same.”

“Ha! Ha!” Renouard laughed again abruptly, staring as before.  “So there’s one more big F in the tale.”

“What do you mean?” inquired the Editor quickly, with an air as if his patent were being infringed.

“I mean—Fool.”

“No.  I wouldn’t say that.  I wouldn’t say that.”

“Well—let him be a scoundrel then.  What the devil do I care.”

“But hold on!  You haven’t heard the end of the story.”

Renouard, his hat on his head already, sat down with the disdainful smile of a man who had discounted the moral of the story.  Still he sat down and the Editor swung his revolving chair right round.  He was full of unction.

“Imprudent, I should say.  In many ways money is as dangerous to handle as gunpowder.  You can’t be too careful either as to who you are working with.  Anyhow there was a mighty flashy burst up, a sensation, and—his familiar haunts knew him no more.  But before he vanished he went to see Miss Moorsom.  That very fact argues for his innocence—don’t it?  What was said between them no man knows—unless the professor had the confidence from his daughter.  There couldn’t have been much to say.  There was nothing for it but to let him go—was there?—for the affair had got into the papers.  And perhaps the kindest thing would have been to forget him.  Anyway the easiest.  Forgiveness would have been more difficult, I fancy, for a young lady of spirit and position drawn into an ugly affair like that.  Any ordinary young lady, I mean.  Well, the fellow asked nothing better than to be forgotten, only he didn’t find it easy to do so himself, because he would write home now and then.  Not to any of his friends though.  He had no near relations.  The professor had been his guardian.  No, the poor devil wrote now and then to an old retired butler of his late father, somewhere in the country, forbidding him at the same time to let any one know of his whereabouts.  So that worthy old ass would go up and dodge about the Moorsom’s town house, perhaps waylay Miss Moorsom’s maid, and then would write to ‘Master Arthur’ that the young lady looked well and happy, or some such cheerful intelligence.  I dare say he wanted to be forgotten, but I shouldn’t think he was much cheered by the news.  What would you say?”

Renouard, his legs stretched out and his chin on his breast, said nothing.  A sensation which was not curiosity, but rather a vague nervous anxiety, distinctly unpleasant, like a mysterious symptom of some malady, prevented him from getting up and going away.

“Mixed feelings,” the Editor opined.  “Many fellows out here receive news from home with mixed feelings.  But what will his feelings be when he hears what I am going to tell you now?  For we know he has not heard yet.  Six months ago a city clerk, just a common drudge of finance, gets himself convicted of a common embezzlement or something of that kind.  Then seeing he’s in for a long sentence he thinks of making his conscience comfortable, and makes a clean breast of an old story of tampered with, or else suppressed, documents, a story which clears altogether the honesty of our ruined gentleman.  That embezzling fellow was in a position to know, having been employed by the firm before the smash.  There was no doubt about the character being cleared—but where the cleared man was nobody could tell.  Another sensation in society.  And then Miss Moorsom says: ‘He will come back to claim me, and I’ll marry him.’  But he didn’t come back.  Between you and me I don’t think he was much wanted—except by Miss Moorsom.  I imagine she’s used to have her own way.  She grew impatient, and declared that if she knew where the man was she would go to him.  But all that could be got out of the old butler was that the last envelope bore the postmark of our beautiful city; and that this was the only address of ‘Master Arthur’ that he ever had.  That and no more.  In fact the fellow was at his last gasp—with a bad heart.  Miss Moorsom wasn’t allowed to see him.  She had gone herself into the country to learn what she could, but she had to stay downstairs while the old chap’s wife went up to the invalid.  She brought down the scrap of intelligence I’ve told you of.  He was already too far gone to be cross-examined on it, and that very night he died.  He didn’t leave behind him much to go by, did he?  Our Willie hinted to me that there had been pretty stormy days in the professor’s house, but—here they are.  I have a notion she isn’t the kind of everyday young lady who may be permitted to gallop about the world all by herself—eh?  Well, I think it rather fine of her, but I quite understand that the professor needed all his philosophy under the circumstances.  She is his only child now—and brilliant—what?  Willie positively spluttered trying to describe her to me; and I could see directly you came in that you had an uncommon experience.”

Renouard, with an irritated gesture, tilted his hat more forward on his eyes, as though he were bored.  The Editor went on with the remark that to be sure neither he (Renouard) nor yet Willie were much used to meet girls of that remarkable superiority.  Willie when learning business with a firm in London, years before, had seen none but boarding-house society, he guessed.  As to himself in the good old days, when he trod the glorious flags of Fleet Street, he neither had access to, nor yet would have cared for the swells.  Nothing interested him then but parliamentary politics and the oratory of the House of Commons.

He paid to this not very distant past the tribute of a tender, reminiscent smile, and returned to his first idea that for a society girl her action was rather fine.  All the same the professor could not be very pleased.  The fellow if he was as pure as a lily now was just about as devoid of the goods of the earth.  And there were misfortunes, however undeserved, which damaged a man’s standing permanently.  On the other hand, it was difficult to oppose cynically a noble impulse—not to speak of the great love at the root of it.  Ah!  Love!  And then the lady was quite capable of going off by herself.  She was of age, she had money of her own, plenty of pluck too.  Moorsom must have concluded that it was more truly paternal, more prudent too, and generally safer all round to let himself be dragged into this chase.  The aunt came along for the same reasons.  It was given out at home as a trip round the world of the usual kind.

Renouard had risen and remained standing with his heart beating, and strangely affected by this tale, robbed as it was of all glamour by the prosaic personality of the narrator.  The Editor added: “I’ve been asked to help in the search—you know.”

Renouard muttered something about an appointment and went out into the street.  His inborn sanity could not defend him from a misty creeping jealousy.  He thought that obviously no man of that sort could be worthy of such a woman’s devoted fidelity.  Renouard, however, had lived long enough to reflect that a man’s activities, his views, and even his ideas may be very inferior to his character; and moved by a delicate consideration for that splendid girl he tried to think out for the man a character of inward excellence and outward gifts—some extraordinary seduction.  But in vain.  Fresh from months of solitude and from days at sea, her splendour presented itself to him absolutely unconquerable in its perfection, unless by her own folly.  It was easier to suspect her of this than to imagine in the man qualities which would be worthy of her.  Easier and less degrading.  Because folly may be generous—could be nothing else but generosity in her; whereas to imagine her subjugated by something common was intolerable.

Because of the force of the physical impression he had received from her personality (and such impressions are the real origins of the deepest movements of our soul) this conception of her was even inconceivable.  But no Prince Charming has ever lived out of a fairy tale.  He doesn’t walk the worlds of Fashion and Finance—and with a stumbling gait at that.  Generosity.  Yes.  It was her generosity.  But this generosity was altogether regal in its splendour, almost absurd in its lavishness—or, perhaps, divine.

In the evening, on board his schooner, sitting on the rail, his arms folded on his breast and his eyes fixed on the deck, he let the darkness catch him unawares in the midst of a meditation on the mechanism of sentiment and the springs of passion.  And all the time he had an abiding consciousness of her bodily presence.  The effect on his senses had been so penetrating that in the middle of the night, rousing up suddenly, wide-eyed in the darkness of his cabin, he did not create a faint mental vision of her person for himself, but, more intimately affected, he scented distinctly the faint perfume she used, and could almost have sworn that he had been awakened by the soft rustle of her dress.  He even sat up listening in the dark for a time, then sighed and lay down again, not agitated but, on the contrary, oppressed by the sensation of something that had happened to him and could not be undone.

CHAPTER III

In the afternoon he lounged into the editorial office, carrying with affected nonchalance that weight of the irremediable he had felt laid on him suddenly in the small hours of the night—that consciousness of something that could no longer be helped.  His patronising friend informed him at once that he had made the acquaintance of the Moorsom party last night.  At the Dunsters, of course.  Dinner.

“Very quiet.  Nobody there.  It was much better for the business.  I say . . .”

Renouard, his hand grasping the back of a chair, stared down at him dumbly.

“Phew!  That’s a stunning girl. . . Why do you want to sit on that chair?  It’s uncomfortable!”

“I wasn’t going to sit on it.”  Renouard walked slowly to the window, glad to find in himself enough self-control to let go the chair instead of raising it on high and bringing it down on the Editor’s head.

“Willie kept on gazing at her with tears in his boiled eyes.  You should have seen him bending sentimentally over her at dinner.”

“Don’t,” said Renouard in such an anguished tone that the Editor turned right round to look at his back.

“You push your dislike of young Dunster too far.  It’s positively morbid,” he disapproved mildly.  “We can’t be all beautiful after thirty. . . . I talked a little, about you mostly, to the professor.  He appeared to be interested in the silk plant—if only as a change from the great subject.  Miss Moorsom didn’t seem to mind when I confessed to her that I had taken you into the confidence of the thing.  Our Willie approved too.  Old Dunster with his white beard seemed to give me his blessing.  All those people have a great opinion of you, simply because I told them that you’ve led every sort of life one can think of before you got struck on exploration.  They want you to make suggestions.  What do you think ‘Master Arthur’ is likely to have taken to?”

“Something easy,” muttered Renouard without unclenching his teeth.

“Hunting man.  Athlete.  Don’t be hard on the chap.  He may be riding boundaries, or droving cattle, or humping his swag about the back-blocks away to the devil—somewhere.  He may be even prospecting at the back of beyond—this very moment.”

“Or lying dead drunk in a roadside pub.  It’s late enough in the day for that.”

The Editor looked up instinctively.  The clock was pointing at a quarter to five.  “Yes, it is,” he admitted.  “But it needn’t be.  And he may have lit out into the Western Pacific all of a sudden—say in a trading schooner.  Though I really don’t see in what capacity.  Still . . . ”

“Or he may be passing at this very moment under this very window.”

“Not he . . . and I wish you would get away from it to where one can see your face.  I hate talking to a man’s back.  You stand there like a hermit on a sea-shore growling to yourself.  I tell you what it is, Geoffrey, you don’t like mankind.”

“I don’t make my living by talking about mankind’s affairs,” Renouard defended himself.  But he came away obediently and sat down in the arm-chair.  “How can you be so certain that your man isn’t down there in the street?” he asked.  “It’s neither more nor less probable than every single one of your other suppositions.”

Placated by Renouard’s docility the Editor gazed at him for a while.  “Aha!  I’ll tell you how.  Learn then that we have begun the campaign.  We have telegraphed his description to the police of every township up and down the land.  And what’s more we’ve ascertained definitely that he hasn’t been in this town for the last three months at least.  How much longer he’s been away we can’t tell.”

“That’s very curious.”

“It’s very simple.  Miss Moorsom wrote to him, to the post office here directly she returned to London after her excursion into the country to see the old butler.  Well—her letter is still lying there.  It has not been called for.  Ergo, this town is not his usual abode.  Personally, I never thought it was.  But he cannot fail to turn up some time or other.  Our main hope lies just in the certitude that he must come to town sooner or later.  Remember he doesn’t know that the butler is dead, and he will want to inquire for a letter.  Well, he’ll find a note from Miss Moorsom.”

Renouard, silent, thought that it was likely enough.  His profound distaste for this conversation was betrayed by an air of weariness darkening his energetic sun-tanned features, and by the augmented dreaminess of his eyes.  The Editor noted it as a further proof of that immoral detachment from mankind, of that callousness of sentiment fostered by the unhealthy conditions of solitude—according to his own favourite theory.  Aloud he observed that as long as a man had not given up correspondence he could not be looked upon as lost.  Fugitive criminals had been tracked in that way by justice, he reminded his friend; then suddenly changed the bearing of the subject somewhat by asking if Renouard had heard from his people lately, and if every member of his large tribe was well and happy.

“Yes, thanks.”

The tone was curt, as if repelling a liberty.  Renouard did not like being asked about his people, for whom he had a profound and remorseful affection.  He had not seen a single human being to whom he was related, for many years, and he was extremely different from them all.

On the very morning of his arrival from his island he had gone to a set of pigeon-holes in Willie Dunster’s outer office and had taken out from a compartment labelled “Malata” a very small accumulation of envelopes, a few addressed to himself, and one addressed to his assistant, all to the care of the firm, W. Dunster and Co.  As opportunity offered, the firm used to send them on to Malata either by a man-of-war schooner going on a cruise, or by some trading craft proceeding that way.  But for the last four months there had been no opportunity.

“You going to stay here some time?” asked the Editor, after a longish silence.

Renouard, perfunctorily, did see no reason why he should make a long stay.

“For health, for your mental health, my boy,” rejoined the newspaper man.  “To get used to human faces so that they don’t hit you in the eye so hard when you walk about the streets.  To get friendly with your kind.  I suppose that assistant of yours can be trusted to look after things?”

“There’s the half-caste too.  The Portuguese.  He knows what’s to be done.”

“Aha!”  The Editor looked sharply at his friend.  “What’s his name?”

“Who’s name?”

“The assistant’s you picked up on the sly behind my back.”

Renouard made a slight movement of impatience.

“I met him unexpectedly one evening.  I thought he would do as well as another.  He had come from up country and didn’t seem happy in a town.  He told me his name was Walter.  I did not ask him for proofs, you know.”

“I don’t think you get on very well with him.”

“Why?  What makes you think so.”

“I don’t know.  Something reluctant in your manner when he’s in question.”

“Really.  My manner!  I don’t think he’s a great subject for conversation, perhaps.  Why not drop him?”

“Of course!  You wouldn’t confess to a mistake.  Not you.  Nevertheless I have my suspicions about it.”

Renouard got up to go, but hesitated, looking down at the seated Editor.

“How funny,” he said at last with the utmost seriousness, and was making for the door, when the voice of his friend stopped him.

“You know what has been said of you?  That you couldn’t get on with anybody you couldn’t kick.  Now, confess—is there any truth in the soft impeachment?”

“No,” said Renouard.  “Did you print that in your paper.”

“No.  I didn’t quite believe it.  But I will tell you what I believe.  I believe that when your heart is set on some object you are a man that doesn’t count the cost to yourself or others.  And this shall get printed some day.”

“Obituary notice?” Renouard dropped negligently.

“Certain—some day.”

“Do you then regard yourself as immortal?”

“No, my boy.  I am not immortal.  But the voice of the press goes on for ever. . . . And it will say that this was the secret of your great success in a task where better men than you—meaning no offence—did fail repeatedly.”

“Success,” muttered Renouard, pulling-to the office door after him with considerable energy.  And the letters of the word PRIVATE like a row of white eyes seemed to stare after his back sinking down the staircase of that temple of publicity.

Renouard had no doubt that all the means of publicity would be put at the service of love and used for the discovery of the loved man.  He did not wish him dead.  He did not wish him any harm.  We are all equipped with a fund of humanity which is not exhausted without many and repeated provocations—and this man had done him no evil.  But before Renouard had left old Dunster’s house, at the conclusion of the call he made there that very afternoon, he had discovered in himself the desire that the search might last long.  He never really flattered himself that it might fail.  It seemed to him that there was no other course in this world for himself, for all mankind, but resignation.  And he could not help thinking that Professor Moorsom had arrived at the same conclusion too.

Professor Moorsom, slight frame of middle height, a thoughtful keen head under the thick wavy hair, veiled dark eyes under straight eyebrows, and with an inward gaze which when disengaged and arriving at one seemed to issue from an obscure dream of books, from the limbo of meditation, showed himself extremely gracious to him.  Renouard guessed in him a man whom an incurable habit of investigation and analysis had made gentle and indulgent; inapt for action, and more sensitive to the thoughts than to the events of existence.  Withal not crushed, sub-ironic without a trace of acidity, and with a simple manner which put people at ease quickly.  They had a long conversation on the terrace commanding an extended view of the town and the harbour.

The splendid immobility of the bay resting under his gaze, with its grey spurs and shining indentations, helped Renouard to regain his self-possession, which he had felt shaken, in coming out on the terrace, into the setting of the most powerful emotion of his life, when he had sat within a foot of Miss Moorsom with fire in his breast, a humming in his ears, and in a complete disorder of his mind.  There was the very garden seat on which he had been enveloped in the radiant spell.  And presently he was sitting on it again with the professor talking of her.  Near by the patriarchal Dunster leaned forward in a wicker arm-chair, benign and a little deaf, his big hand to his ear with the innocent eagerness of his advanced age remembering the fires of life.

It was with a sort of apprehension that Renouard looked forward to seeing Miss Moorsom.  And strangely enough it resembled the state of mind of a man who fears disenchantment more than sortilege.  But he need not have been afraid.  Directly he saw her in a distance at the other end of the terrace he shuddered to the roots of his hair.  With her approach the power of speech left him for a time.  Mrs. Dunster and her aunt were accompanying her.  All these people sat down; it was an intimate circle into which Renouard felt himself cordially admitted; and the talk was of the great search which occupied all their minds.  Discretion was expected by these people, but of reticence as to the object of the journey there could be no question.  Nothing but ways and means and arrangements could be talked about.

By fixing his eyes obstinately on the ground, which gave him an air of reflective sadness, Renouard managed to recover his self-possession.  He used it to keep his voice in a low key and to measure his words on the great subject.  And he took care with a great inward effort to make them reasonable without giving them a discouraging complexion.  For he did not want the quest to be given up, since it would mean her going away with her two attendant grey-heads to the other side of the world.

He was asked to come again, to come often and take part in the counsels of all these people captivated by the sentimental enterprise of a declared love.  On taking Miss Moorsom’s hand he looked up, would have liked to say something, but found himself voiceless, with his lips suddenly sealed.  She returned the pressure of his fingers, and he left her with her eyes vaguely staring beyond him, an air of listening for an expected sound, and the faintest possible smile on her lips.  A smile not for him, evidently, but the reflection of some deep and inscrutable thought.

CHAPTER IV

He went on board his schooner.  She lay white, and as if suspended, in the crepuscular atmosphere of sunset mingling with the ashy gleam of the vast anchorage.  He tried to keep his thoughts as sober, as reasonable, as measured as his words had been, lest they should get away from him and cause some sort of moral disaster.  What he was afraid of in the coming night was sleeplessness and the endless strain of that wearisome task.  It had to be faced however.  He lay on his back, sighing profoundly in the dark, and suddenly beheld his very own self, carrying a small bizarre lamp, reflected in a long mirror inside a room in an empty and unfurnished palace.  In this startling image of himself he recognised somebody he had to follow—the frightened guide of his dream.  He traversed endless galleries, no end of lofty halls, innumerable doors.  He lost himself utterly—he found his way again.  Room succeeded room.  At last the lamp went out, and he stumbled against some object which, when he stooped for it, he found to be very cold and heavy to lift.  The sickly white light of dawn showed him the head of a statue.  Its marble hair was done in the bold lines of a helmet, on its lips the chisel had left a faint smile, and it resembled Miss Moorsom.  While he was staring at it fixedly, the head began to grow light in his fingers, to diminish and crumble to pieces, and at last turned into a handful of dust, which was blown away by a puff of wind so chilly that he woke up with a desperate shiver and leaped headlong out of his bed-place.  The day had really come.  He sat down by the cabin table, and taking his head between his hands, did not stir for a very long time.

Very quiet, he set himself to review this dream.  The lamp, of course, he connected with the search for a man.  But on closer examination he perceived that the reflection of himself in the mirror was not really the true Renouard, but somebody else whose face he could not remember.  In the deserted palace he recognised a sinister adaptation by his brain of the long corridors with many doors, in the great building in which his friend’s newspaper was lodged on the first floor.  The marble head with Miss Moorsom’s face!  Well!  What other face could he have dreamed of?  And her complexion was fairer than Parian marble, than the heads of angels.  The wind at the end was the morning breeze entering through the open porthole and touching his face before the schooner could swing to the chilly gust.

Yes!  And all this rational explanation of the fantastic made it only more mysterious and weird.  There was something daemonic in that dream.  It was one of those experiences which throw a man out of conformity with the established order of his kind and make him a creature of obscure suggestions.

Henceforth, without ever trying to resist, he went every afternoon to the house where she lived.  He went there as passively as if in a dream.  He could never make out how he had attained the footing of intimacy in the Dunster mansion above the bay—whether on the ground of personal merit or as the pioneer of the vegetable silk industry.  It must have been the last, because he remembered distinctly, as distinctly as in a dream, hearing old Dunster once telling him that his next public task would be a careful survey of the Northern Districts to discover tracts suitable for the cultivation of the silk plant.  The old man wagged his beard at him sagely.  It was indeed as absurd as a dream.

Willie of course would be there in the evening.  But he was more of a figure out of a nightmare, hovering about the circle of chairs in his dress-clothes like a gigantic, repulsive, and sentimental bat.  “Do away with the beastly cocoons all over the world,” he buzzed in his blurred, water-logged voice.  He affected a great horror of insects of all kinds.  One evening he appeared with a red flower in his button-hole.  Nothing could have been more disgustingly fantastic.  And he would also say to Renouard: “You may yet change the history of our country.  For economic conditions do shape the history of nations.  Eh?  What?”  And he would turn to Miss Moorsom for approval, lowering protectingly his spatulous nose and looking up with feeling from under his absurd eyebrows, which grew thin, in the manner of canebrakes, out of his spongy skin.  For this large, bilious creature was an economist and a sentimentalist, facile to tears, and a member of the Cobden Club.

In order to see as little of him as possible Renouard began coming earlier so as to get away before his arrival, without curtailing too much the hours of secret contemplation for which he lived.  He had given up trying to deceive himself.  His resignation was without bounds.  He accepted the immense misfortune of being in love with a woman who was in search of another man only to throw herself into his arms.  With such desperate precision he defined in his thoughts the situation, the consciousness of which traversed like a sharp arrow the sudden silences of general conversation.  The only thought before which he quailed was the thought that this could not last; that it must come to an end.  He feared it instinctively as a sick man may fear death.  For it seemed to him that it must be the death of him followed by a lightless, bottomless pit.  But his resignation was not spared the torments of jealousy: the cruel, insensate, poignant, and imbecile jealousy, when it seems that a woman betrays us simply by this that she exists, that she breathes—and when the deep movements of her nerves or her soul become a matter of distracting suspicion, of killing doubt, of mortal anxiety.

In the peculiar condition of their sojourn Miss Moorsom went out very little.  She accepted this seclusion at the Dunsters’ mansion as in a hermitage, and lived there, watched over by a group of old people, with the lofty endurance of a condescending and strong-headed goddess.  It was impossible to say if she suffered from anything in the world, and whether this was the insensibility of a great passion concentrated on itself, or a perfect restraint of manner, or the indifference of superiority so complete as to be sufficient to itself.  But it was visible to Renouard that she took some pleasure in talking to him at times.  Was it because he was the only person near her age?  Was this, then, the secret of his admission to the circle?

He admired her voice as well poised as her movements, as her attitudes.  He himself had always been a man of tranquil tones.  But the power of fascination had torn him out of his very nature so completely that to preserve his habitual calmness from going to pieces had become a terrible effort.

He used to go from her on board the schooner exhausted, broken, shaken up, as though he had been put to the most exquisite torture.  When he saw her approaching he always had a moment of hallucination.  She was a misty and fair creature, fitted for invisible music, for the shadows of love, for the murmurs of waters.  After a time (he could not be always staring at the ground) he would summon up all his resolution and look at her.  There was a sparkle in the clear obscurity of her eyes; and when she turned them on him they seemed to give a new meaning to life.  He would say to himself that another man would have found long before the happy release of madness, his wits burnt to cinders in that radiance.  But no such luck for him.  His wits had come unscathed through the furnaces of hot suns, of blazing deserts, of flaming angers against the weaknesses of men and the obstinate cruelties of hostile nature.

Being sane he had to be constantly on his guard against falling into adoring silences or breaking out into wild speeches.  He had to keep watch on his eyes, his limbs, on the muscles of his face.  Their conversations were such as they could be between these two people: she a young lady fresh from the thick twilight of four million people and the artificiality of several London seasons; he the man of definite conquering tasks, the familiar of wide horizons, and in his very repose holding aloof from these agglomerations of units in which one loses one’s importance even to oneself.  They had no common conversational small change.  They had to use the great pieces of general ideas, but they exchanged them trivially.  It was no serious commerce.  Perhaps she had not much of that coin.  Nothing significant came from her.  It could not be said that she had received from the contacts of the external world impressions of a personal kind, different from other women.  What was ravishing in her was her quietness and, in her grave attitudes, the unfailing brilliance of her femininity.  He did not know what there was under that ivory forehead so splendidly shaped, so gloriously crowned.  He could not tell what were her thoughts, her feelings.  Her replies were reflective, always preceded by a short silence, while he hung on her lips anxiously.  He felt himself in the presence of a mysterious being in whom spoke an unknown voice, like the voice of oracles, bringing everlasting unrest to the heart.

He was thankful enough to sit in silence with secretly clenched teeth, devoured by jealousy—and nobody could have guessed that his quiet deferential bearing to all these grey-heads was the supreme effort of stoicism, that the man was engaged in keeping a sinister watch on his tortures lest his strength should fail him.  As before, when grappling with other forces of nature, he could find in himself all sorts of courage except the courage to run away.

It was perhaps from the lack of subjects they could have in common that Miss Moorsom made him so often speak of his own life.  He did not shrink from talking about himself, for he was free from that exacerbated, timid vanity which seals so many vain-glorious lips.  He talked to her in his restrained voice, gazing at the tip of her shoe, and thinking that the time was bound to come soon when her very inattention would get weary of him.  And indeed on stealing a glance he would see her dazzling and perfect, her eyes vague, staring in mournful immobility, with a drooping head that made him think of a tragic Venus arising before him, not from the foam of the sea, but from a distant, still more formless, mysterious, and potent immensity of mankind.

CHAPTER V

One afternoon Renouard stepping out on the terrace found nobody there.  It was for him, at the same time, a melancholy disappointment and a poignant relief.

The heat was great, the air was still, all the long windows of the house stood wide open.  At the further end, grouped round a lady’s work-table, several chairs disposed sociably suggested invisible occupants, a company of conversing shades.  Renouard looked towards them with a sort of dread.  A most elusive, faint sound of ghostly talk issuing from one of the rooms added to the illusion and stopped his already hesitating footsteps.  He leaned over the balustrade of stone near a squat vase holding a tropical plant of a bizarre shape.  Professor Moorsom coming up from the garden with a book under his arm and a white parasol held over his bare head, found him there and, closing the parasol, leaned over by his side with a remark on the increasing heat of the season.  Renouard assented and changed his position a little; the other, after a short silence, administered unexpectedly a question which, like the blow of a club on the head, deprived Renouard of the power of speech and even thought, but, more cruel, left him quivering with apprehension, not of death but of everlasting torment.  Yet the words were extremely simple.

“Something will have to be done soon.  We can’t remain in a state of suspended expectation for ever.  Tell me what do you think of our chances?”

Renouard, speechless, produced a faint smile.  The professor confessed in a jocular tone his impatience to complete the circuit of the globe and be done with it.  It was impossible to remain quartered on the dear excellent Dunsters for an indefinite time.  And then there were the lectures he had arranged to deliver in Paris.  A serious matter.

That lectures by Professor Moorsom were a European event and that brilliant audiences would gather to hear them Renouard did not know.  All he was aware of was the shock of this hint of departure.  The menace of separation fell on his head like a thunderbolt.  And he saw the absurdity of his emotion, for hadn’t he lived all these days under the very cloud?  The professor, his elbows spread out, looked down into the garden and went on unburdening his mind.  Yes.  The department of sentiment was directed by his daughter, and she had plenty of volunteered moral support; but he had to look after the practical side of life without assistance.

“I have the less hesitation in speaking to you about my anxiety, because I feel you are friendly to us and at the same time you are detached from all these sublimities—confound them.”

“What do you mean?” murmured Renouard.

“I mean that you are capable of calm judgment.  Here the atmosphere is simply detestable.  Everybody has knuckled under to sentiment.  Perhaps your deliberate opinion could influence . . .”

“You want Miss Moorsom to give it up?”  The professor turned to the young man dismally.

“Heaven only knows what I want.”

Renouard leaning his back against the balustrade folded his arms on his breast, appeared to meditate profoundly.  His face, shaded softly by the broad brim of a planter’s Panama hat, with the straight line of the nose level with the forehead, the eyes lost in the depth of the setting, and the chin well forward, had such a profile as may be seen amongst the bronzes of classical museums, pure under a crested helmet—recalled vaguely a Minerva’s head.

“This is the most troublesome time I ever had in my life,” exclaimed the professor testily.

“Surely the man must be worth it,” muttered Renouard with a pang of jealousy traversing his breast like a self-inflicted stab.

Whether enervated by the heat or giving way to pent up irritation the professor surrendered himself to the mood of sincerity.

“He began by being a pleasantly dull boy.  He developed into a pointlessly clever young man, without, I suspect, ever trying to understand anything.  My daughter knew him from childhood.  I am a busy man, and I confess that their engagement was a complete surprise to me.  I wish their reasons for that step had been more naïve.  But simplicity was out of fashion in their set.  From a worldly point of view he seems to have been a mere baby.  Of course, now, I am assured that he is the victim of his noble confidence in the rectitude of his kind.  But that’s mere idealising of a sad reality.  For my part I will tell you that from the very beginning I had the gravest doubts of his dishonesty.  Unfortunately my clever daughter hadn’t.  And now we behold the reaction.  No.  To be earnestly dishonest one must be really poor.  This was only a manifestation of his extremely refined cleverness.  The complicated simpleton.  He had an awful awakening though.”

In such words did Professor Moorsom give his “young friend” to understand the state of his feelings toward the lost man.  It was evident that the father of Miss Moorsom wished him to remain lost.  Perhaps the unprecedented heat of the season made him long for the cool spaces of the Pacific, the sweep of the ocean’s free wind along the promenade decks, cumbered with long chairs, of a ship steaming towards the Californian coast.  To Renouard the philosopher appeared simply the most treacherous of fathers.  He was amazed.  But he was not at the end of his discoveries.

“He may be dead,” the professor murmured.

“Why?  People don’t die here sooner than in Europe.  If he had gone to hide in Italy, for instance, you wouldn’t think of saying that.”

“Well!  And suppose he has become morally disintegrated.  You know he was not a strong personality,” the professor suggested moodily.  “My daughter’s future is in question here.”

Renouard thought that the love of such a woman was enough to pull any broken man together—to drag a man out of his grave.  And he thought this with inward despair, which kept him silent as much almost as his astonishment.  At last he managed to stammer out a generous—

“Oh!  Don’t let us even suppose. . .”

The professor struck in with a sadder accent than before—

“It’s good to be young.  And then you have been a man of action, and necessarily a believer in success.  But I have been looking too long at life not to distrust its surprises.  Age!  Age!  Here I stand before you a man full of doubts and hesitation—spe lentus, timidus futuri.”

He made a sign to Renouard not to interrupt, and in a lowered voice, as if afraid of being overheard, even there, in the solitude of the terrace—

“And the worst is that I am not even sure how far this sentimental pilgrimage is genuine.  Yes.  I doubt my own child.  It’s true that she’s a woman. . . . ”

Renouard detected with horror a tone of resentment, as if the professor had never forgiven his daughter for not dying instead of his son.  The latter noticed the young man’s stony stare.

“Ah! you don’t understand.  Yes, she’s clever, open-minded, popular, and—well, charming.  But you don’t know what it is to have moved, breathed, existed, and even triumphed in the mere smother and froth of life—the brilliant froth.  There thoughts, sentiments, opinions, feelings, actions too, are nothing but agitation in empty space—to amuse life—a sort of superior debauchery, exciting and fatiguing, meaning nothing, leading nowhere.  She is the creature of that circle.  And I ask myself if she is obeying the uneasiness of an instinct seeking its satisfaction, or is it a revulsion of feeling, or is she merely deceiving her own heart by this dangerous trifling with romantic images.  And everything is possible—except sincerity, such as only stark, struggling humanity can know.  No woman can stand that mode of life in which women rule, and remain a perfectly genuine, simple human being.  Ah!  There’s some people coming out.”

He moved off a pace, then turning his head: “Upon my word!  I would be infinitely obliged to you if you could throw a little cold water. . . ” and at a vaguely dismayed gesture of Renouard, he added: “Don’t be afraid.  You wouldn’t be putting out a sacred fire.”

Renouard could hardly find words for a protest: “I assure you that I never talk with Miss Moorsom—on—on—that.  And if you, her father . . . ”

“I envy you your innocence,” sighed the professor.  “A father is only an everyday person.  Flat.  Stale.  Moreover, my child would naturally mistrust me.  We belong to the same set.  Whereas you carry with you the prestige of the unknown.  You have proved yourself to be a force.”

Thereupon the professor followed by Renouard joined the circle of all the inmates of the house assembled at the other end of the terrace about a tea-table; three white heads and that resplendent vision of woman’s glory, the sight of which had the power to flutter his heart like a reminder of the mortality of his frame.

He avoided the seat by the side of Miss Moorsom.  The others were talking together languidly.  Unnoticed he looked at that woman so marvellous that centuries seemed to lie between them.  He was oppressed and overcome at the thought of what she could give to some man who really would be a force!  What a glorious struggle with this amazon.  What noble burden for the victorious strength.

Dear old Mrs. Dunster was dispensing tea, looking from time to time with interest towards Miss Moorsom.  The aged statesman having eaten a raw tomato and drunk a glass of milk (a habit of his early farming days, long before politics, when, pioneer of wheat-growing, he demonstrated the possibility of raising crops on ground looking barren enough to discourage a magician), smoothed his white beard, and struck lightly Renouard’s knee with his big wrinkled hand.

“You had better come back to-night and dine with us quietly.”

He liked this young man, a pioneer, too, in more than one direction.  Mrs. Dunster added: “Do.  It will be very quiet.  I don’t even know if Willie will be home for dinner.”  Renouard murmured his thanks, and left the terrace to go on board the schooner.  While lingering in the drawing-room doorway he heard the resonant voice of old Dunster uttering oracularly—

“. . . the leading man here some day. . . . Like me.”

Renouard let the thin summer portière of the doorway fall behind him.  The voice of Professor Moorsom said—

“I am told that he has made an enemy of almost every man who had to work with him.”

“That’s nothing.  He did his work. . . . Like me.”

“He never counted the cost they say.  Not even of lives.”

Renouard understood that they were talking of him.  Before he could move away, Mrs. Dunster struck in placidly—

“Don’t let yourself be shocked by the tales you may hear of him, my dear.  Most of it is envy.”

Then he heard Miss Moorsom’s voice replying to the old lady—

“Oh!  I am not easily deceived.  I think I may say I have an instinct for truth.”

He hastened away from that house with his heart full of dread.

CHAPTER VI

On board the schooner, lying on the settee on his back with the knuckles of his hands pressed over his eyes, he made up his mind that he would not return to that house for dinner—that he would never go back there any more.  He made up his mind some twenty times.  The knowledge that he had only to go up on the quarter deck, utter quietly the words: “Man the windlass,” and that the schooner springing into life would run a hundred miles out to sea before sunrise, deceived his struggling will.  Nothing easier!  Yet, in the end, this young man, almost ill-famed for his ruthless daring, the inflexible leader of two tragically successful expeditions, shrank from that act of savage energy, and began, instead, to hunt for excuses.

No!  It was not for him to run away like an incurable who cuts his throat.  He finished dressing and looked at his own impassive face in the saloon mirror scornfully.  While being pulled on shore in the gig, he remembered suddenly the wild beauty of a waterfall seen when hardly more than a boy, years ago, in Menado.  There was a legend of a governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, on official tour, committing suicide on that spot by leaping into the chasm.  It was supposed that a painful disease had made him weary of life.  But was there ever a visitation like his own, at the same time binding one to life and so cruelly mortal!

The dinner was indeed quiet.  Willie, given half an hour’s grace, failed to turn up, and his chair remained vacant by the side of Miss Moorsom.  Renouard had the professor’s sister on his left, dressed in an expensive gown becoming her age.  That maiden lady in her wonderful preservation reminded Renouard somehow of a wax flower under glass.  There were no traces of the dust of life’s battles on her anywhere.  She did not like him very much in the afternoons, in his white drill suit and planter’s hat, which seemed to her an unduly Bohemian costume for calling in a house where there were ladies.  But in the evening, lithe and elegant in his dress clothes and with his pleasant, slightly veiled voice, he always made her conquest afresh.  He might have been anybody distinguished—the son of a duke.  Falling under that charm probably (and also because her brother had given her a hint), she attempted to open her heart to Renouard, who was watching with all the power of his soul her niece across the table.  She spoke to him as frankly as though that miserable mortal envelope, emptied of everything but hopeless passion, were indeed the son of a duke.

Inattentive, he heard her only in snatches, till the final confidential burst: “. . . glad if you would express an opinion.  Look at her, so charming, such a great favourite, so generally admired!  It would be too sad.  We all hoped she would make a brilliant marriage with somebody very rich and of high position, have a house in London and in the country, and entertain us all splendidly.  She’s so eminently fitted for it.  She has such hosts of distinguished friends!  And then—this instead! . . . My heart really aches.”

Her well-bred if anxious whisper was covered by the voice of professor Moorsom discoursing subtly down the short length of the dinner table on the Impermanency of the Measurable to his venerable disciple.  It might have been a chapter in a new and popular book of Moorsomian philosophy.  Patriarchal and delighted, old Dunster leaned forward a little, his eyes shining youthfully, two spots of colour at the roots of his white beard; and Renouard, glancing at the senile excitement, recalled the words heard on those subtle lips, adopted their scorn for his own, saw their truth before this man ready to be amused by the side of the grave.  Yes!  Intellectual debauchery in the froth of existence!  Froth and fraud!

On the same side of the table Miss Moorsom never once looked towards her father, all her grace as if frozen, her red lips compressed, the faintest rosiness under her dazzling complexion, her black eyes burning motionless, and the very coppery gleams of light lying still on the waves and undulation of her hair.  Renouard fancied himself overturning the table, smashing crystal and china, treading fruit and flowers under foot, seizing her in his arms, carrying her off in a tumult of shrieks from all these people, a silent frightened mortal, into some profound retreat as in the age of Cavern men.  Suddenly everybody got up, and he hastened to rise too, finding himself out of breath and quite unsteady on his feet.

On the terrace the philosopher, after lighting a cigar, slipped his hand condescendingly under his “dear young friend’s” arm.  Renouard regarded him now with the profoundest mistrust.  But the great man seemed really to have a liking for his young friend—one of those mysterious sympathies, disregarding the differences of age and position, which in this case might have been explained by the failure of philosophy to meet a very real worry of a practical kind.

After a turn or two and some casual talk the professor said suddenly: “My late son was in your school—do you know?  I can imagine that had he lived and you had ever met you would have understood each other.  He too was inclined to action.”

He sighed, then, shaking off the mournful thought and with a nod at the dusky part of the terrace where the dress of his daughter made a luminous stain: “I really wish you would drop in that quarter a few sensible, discouraging words.”

Renouard disengaged himself from that most perfidious of men under the pretence of astonishment, and stepping back a pace—

“Surely you are making fun of me, Professor Moorsom,” he said with a low laugh, which was really a sound of rage.

“My dear young friend!  It’s no subject for jokes, to me. . . You don’t seem to have any notion of your prestige,” he added, walking away towards the chairs.

“Humbug!” thought Renouard, standing still and looking after him.  “And yet!  And yet!  What if it were true?”

He advanced then towards Miss Moorsom.  Posed on the seat on which they had first spoken to each other, it was her turn to watch him coming on.  But many of the windows were not lighted that evening.  It was dark over there.  She appeared to him luminous in her clear dress, a figure without shape, a face without features, awaiting his approach, till he got quite near to her, sat down, and they had exchanged a few insignificant words.  Gradually she came out like a magic painting of charm, fascination, and desire, glowing mysteriously on the dark background.  Something imperceptible in the lines of her attitude, in the modulations of her voice, seemed to soften that suggestion of calm unconscious pride which enveloped her always like a mantle.  He, sensitive like a bond slave to the moods of the master, was moved by the subtle relenting of her grace to an infinite tenderness.  He fought down the impulse to seize her by the hand, lead her down into the garden away under the big trees, and throw himself at her feet uttering words of love.  His emotion was so strong that he had to cough slightly, and not knowing what to talk to her about he began to tell her of his mother and sisters.  All the family were coming to London to live there, for some little time at least.

“I hope you will go and tell them something of me.  Something seen,” he said pressingly.

By this miserable subterfuge, like a man about to part with his life, he hoped to make her remember him a little longer.

“Certainly,” she said.  “I’ll be glad to call when I get back.  But that ‘when’ may be a long time.”

He heard a light sigh.  A cruel jealous curiosity made him ask—

“Are you growing weary, Miss Moorsom?”

A silence fell on his low spoken question.

“Do you mean heart-weary?” sounded Miss Moorsom’s voice.  “You don’t know me, I see.”

“Ah!  Never despair,” he muttered.

“This, Mr. Renouard, is a work of reparation.  I stand for truth here.  I can’t think of myself.”

He could have taken her by the throat for every word seemed an insult to his passion; but he only said—

“I never doubted the—the—nobility of your purpose.”

“And to hear the word weariness pronounced in this connection surprises me.  And from a man too who, I understand, has never counted the cost.”

“You are pleased to tease me,” he said, directly he had recovered his voice and had mastered his anger.  It was as if Professor Moorsom had dropped poison in his ear which was spreading now and tainting his passion, his very jealousy.  He mistrusted every word that came from those lips on which his life hung.  “How can you know anything of men who do not count the cost?” he asked in his gentlest tones.

“From hearsay—a little.”

“Well, I assure you they are like the others, subject to suffering, victims of spells. . . .”

“One of them, at least, speaks very strangely.”

She dismissed the subject after a short silence.  “Mr. Renouard, I had a disappointment this morning.  This mail brought me a letter from the widow of the old butler—you know.  I expected to learn that she had heard from—from here.  But no.  No letter arrived home since we left.”

Her voice was calm.  His jealousy couldn’t stand much more of this sort of talk; but he was glad that nothing had turned up to help the search; glad blindly, unreasonably—only because it would keep her longer in his sight—since she wouldn’t give up.

“I am too near her,” he thought, moving a little further on the seat.  He was afraid in the revulsion of feeling of flinging himself on her hands, which were lying on her lap, and covering them with kisses.  He was afraid.  Nothing, nothing could shake that spell—not if she were ever so false, stupid, or degraded.  She was fate itself.  The extent of his misfortune plunged him in such a stupor that he failed at first to hear the sound of voices and footsteps inside the drawing-room.  Willie had come home—and the Editor was with him.

They burst out on the terrace babbling noisily, and then pulling themselves together stood still, surprising—and as if themselves surprised.

CHAPTER VII

They had been feasting a poet from the bush, the latest discovery of the Editor.  Such discoveries were the business, the vocation, the pride and delight of the only apostle of letters in the hemisphere, the solitary patron of culture, the Slave of the Lamp—as he subscribed himself at the bottom of the weekly literary page of his paper.  He had had no difficulty in persuading the virtuous Willie (who had festive instincts) to help in the good work, and now they had left the poet lying asleep on the hearthrug of the editorial room and had rushed to the Dunster mansion wildly.  The Editor had another discovery to announce.  Swaying a little where he stood he opened his mouth very wide to shout the one word “Found!”  Behind him Willie flung both his hands above his head and let them fall dramatically.  Renouard saw the four white-headed people at the end of the terrace rise all together from their chairs with an effect of sudden panic.

“I tell you—he—is—found,” the patron of letters shouted emphatically.

“What is this!” exclaimed Renouard in a choked voice.  Miss Moorsom seized his wrist suddenly, and at that contact fire ran through all his veins, a hot stillness descended upon him in which he heard the blood—or the fire—beating in his ears.  He made a movement as if to rise, but was restrained by the convulsive pressure on his wrist.

“No, no.”  Miss Moorsom’s eyes stared black as night, searching the space before her.  Far away the Editor strutted forward, Willie following with his ostentatious manner of carrying his bulky and oppressive carcass which, however, did not remain exactly perpendicular for two seconds together.

“The innocent Arthur . . . Yes.  We’ve got him,” the Editor became very business-like.  “Yes, this letter has done it.”

He plunged into an inside pocket for it, slapped the scrap of paper with his open palm.  “From that old woman.  William had it in his pocket since this morning when Miss Moorsom gave it to him to show me.  Forgot all about it till an hour ago.  Thought it was of no importance.  Well, no!  Not till it was properly read.”

Renouard and Miss Moorsom emerged from the shadows side by side, a well-matched couple, animated yet statuesque in their calmness and in their pallor.  She had let go his wrist.  On catching sight of Renouard the Editor exclaimed:

“What—you here!” in a quite shrill voice.

There came a dead pause.  All the faces had in them something dismayed and cruel.

“He’s the very man we want,” continued the Editor.  “Excuse my excitement.  You are the very man, Renouard.  Didn’t you tell me that your assistant called himself Walter?  Yes?  Thought so.  But here’s that old woman—the butler’s wife—listen to this.  She writes: All I can tell you, Miss, is that my poor husband directed his letters to the name of H. Walter.”

Renouard’s violent but repressed exclamation was lost in a general murmur and shuffle of feet.  The Editor made a step forward, bowed with creditable steadiness.

“Miss Moorsom, allow me to congratulate you from the bottom of my heart on the happy—er—issue. . . ”

“Wait,” muttered Renouard irresolutely.

The Editor jumped on him in the manner of their old friendship.  “Ah, you!  You are a fine fellow too.  With your solitary ways of life you will end by having no more discrimination than a savage.  Fancy living with a gentleman for months and never guessing.  A man, I am certain, accomplished, remarkable, out of the common, since he had been distinguished” (he bowed again) “by Miss Moorsom, whom we all admire.”

She turned her back on him.

“I hope to goodness you haven’t been leading him a dog’s life, Geoffrey,” the Editor addressed his friend in a whispered aside.

Renouard seized a chair violently, sat down, and propping his elbow on his knee leaned his head on his hand.  Behind him the sister of the professor looked up to heaven and wrung her hands stealthily.  Mrs. Dunster’s hands were clasped forcibly under her chin, but she, dear soul, was looking sorrowfully at Willie.  The model nephew!  In this strange state!  So very much flushed!  The careful disposition of the thin hairs across Willie’s bald spot was deplorably disarranged, and the spot itself was red and, as it were, steaming.

“What’s the matter, Geoffrey?”  The Editor seemed disconcerted by the silent attitudes round him, as though he had expected all these people to shout and dance.  “You have him on the island—haven’t you?”

“Oh, yes: I have him there,” said Renouard, without looking up.

“Well, then!”  The Editor looked helplessly around as if begging for response of some sort.  But the only response that came was very unexpected.  Annoyed at being left in the background, and also because very little drink made him nasty, the emotional Willie turned malignant all at once, and in a bibulous tone surprising in a man able to keep his balance so well—

“Aha!  But you haven’t got him here—not yet!” he sneered.  “No!  You haven’t got him yet.”

This outrageous exhibition was to the Editor like the lash to a jaded horse.  He positively jumped.

“What of that?  What do you mean?  We—haven’t—got—him—here.  Of course he isn’t here!  But Geoffrey’s schooner is here.  She can be sent at once to fetch him here.  No!  Stay!  There’s a better plan.  Why shouldn’t you all sail over to Malata, professor?  Save time!  I am sure Miss Moorsom would prefer. . .”

With a gallant flourish of his arm he looked for Miss Moorsom.  She had disappeared.  He was taken aback somewhat.

“Ah!  H’m.  Yes. . . . Why not.  A pleasure cruise, delightful ship, delightful season, delightful errand, del . . . No!  There are no objections.  Geoffrey, I understand, has indulged in a bungalow three sizes too large for him.  He can put you all up.  It will be a pleasure for him.  It will be the greatest privilege.  Any man would be proud of being an agent of this happy reunion.  I am proud of the little part I’ve played.  He will consider it the greatest honour.  Geoff, my boy, you had better be stirring to-morrow bright and early about the preparations for the trip.  It would be criminal to lose a single day.”

He was as flushed as Willie, the excitement keeping up the effect of the festive dinner.  For a time Renouard, silent, as if he had not heard a word of all that babble, did not stir.  But when he got up it was to advance towards the Editor and give him such a hearty slap on the back that the plump little man reeled in his tracks and looked quite frightened for a moment.

“You are a heaven-born discoverer and a first-rate manager. . . He’s right.  It’s the only way.  You can’t resist the claim of sentiment, and you must even risk the voyage to Malata. . . ” Renouard’s voice sank.  “A lonely spot,” he added, and fell into thought under all these eyes converging on him in the sudden silence.  His slow glance passed over all the faces in succession, remaining arrested on Professor Moorsom, stony eyed, a smouldering cigar in his fingers, and with his sister standing by his side.

“I shall be infinitely gratified if you consent to come.  But, of course, you will.  We shall sail to-morrow evening then.  And now let me leave you to your happiness.”

He bowed, very grave, pointed suddenly his finger at Willie who was swaying about with a sleepy frown. . . . “Look at him.  He’s overcome with happiness.  You had better put him to bed . . . ” and disappeared while every head on the terrace was turned to Willie with varied expressions.

Renouard ran through the house.  Avoiding the carriage road he fled down the steep short cut to the shore, where his gig was waiting.  At his loud shout the sleeping Kanakas jumped up.  He leaped in.  “Shove off.  Give way!” and the gig darted through the water.  “Give way!  Give way!”  She flew past the wool-clippers sleeping at their anchors each with the open unwinking eye of the lamp in the rigging; she flew past the flagship of the Pacific squadron, a great mass all dark and silent, heavy with the slumbers of five hundred men, and where the invisible sentries heard his urgent “Give way!  Give way!” in the night.  The Kanakas, panting, rose off the thwarts at every stroke.  Nothing could be fast enough for him!  And he ran up the side of his schooner shaking the ladder noisily with his rush.

On deck he stumbled and stood still.

Wherefore this haste?  To what end, since he knew well before he started that he had a pursuer from whom there was no escape.

As his foot touched the deck his will, his purpose he had been hurrying to save, died out within.  It had been nothing less than getting the schooner under-way, letting her vanish silently in the night from amongst these sleeping ships.  And now he was certain he could not do it.  It was impossible!  And he reflected that whether he lived or died such an act would lay him under a dark suspicion from which he shrank.  No, there was nothing to be done.

He went down into the cabin and, before even unbuttoning his overcoat, took out of the drawer the letter addressed to his assistant; that letter which he had found in the pigeon-hole labelled “Malata” in young Dunster’s outer office, where it had been waiting for three months some occasion for being forwarded.  From the moment of dropping it in the drawer he had utterly forgotten its existence—till now, when the man’s name had come out so clamorously.  He glanced at the common envelope, noted the shaky and laborious handwriting: H. Walter, Esqre.  Undoubtedly the very last letter the old butler had posted before his illness, and in answer clearly to one from “Master Arthur” instructing him to address in the future: “Care of Messrs. W. Dunster and Co.”  Renouard made as if to open the envelope, but paused, and, instead, tore the letter deliberately in two, in four, in eight.  With his hand full of pieces of paper he returned on deck and scattered them overboard on the dark water, in which they vanished instantly.

He did it slowly, without hesitation or remorse.  H. Walter, Esqre, in Malata.  The innocent Arthur—What was his name?  The man sought for by that woman who as she went by seemed to draw all the passion of the earth to her, without effort, not deigning to notice, naturally, as other women breathed the air.  But Renouard was no longer jealous of her very existence.  Whatever its meaning it was not for that man he had picked up casually on obscure impulse, to get rid of the tiresome expostulations of a so-called friend; a man of whom he really knew nothing—and now a dead man.  In Malata.  Oh, yes!  He was there secure enough, untroubled in his grave.  In Malata.  To bury him was the last service Renouard had rendered to his assistant before leaving the island on this trip to town.

Like many men ready enough for arduous enterprises Renouard was inclined to evade the small complications of existence.  This trait of his character was composed of a little indolence, some disdain, and a shrinking from contests with certain forms of vulgarity—like a man who would face a lion and go out of his way to avoid a toad.  His intercourse with the meddlesome journalist was that merely outward intimacy without sympathy some young men get drawn into easily.  It had amused him rather to keep that “friend” in the dark about the fate of his assistant.  Renouard had never needed other company than his own, for there was in him something of the sensitiveness of a dreamer who is easily jarred.  He had said to himself that the all-knowing one would only preach again about the evils of solitude and worry his head off in favour of some forlornly useless protégé of his.  Also the inquisitiveness of the Editor had irritated him and had closed his lips in sheer disgust.

And now he contemplated the noose of consequences drawing tight around him.

It was the memory of that diplomatic reticence which on the terrace had stiffled his first cry which would have told them all that the man sought for was not to be met on earth any more.  He shrank from the absurdity of hearing the all-knowing one, and not very sober at that, turning on him with righteous reproaches—

“You never told me.  You gave me to understand that your assistant was alive, and now you say he’s dead.  Which is it?  Were you lying then or are you lying now?”  No! the thought of such a scene was not to be borne.  He had sat down appalled, thinking: “What shall I do now?”

His courage had oozed out of him.  Speaking the truth meant the Moorsoms going away at once—while it seemed to him that he would give the last shred of his rectitude to secure a day more of her company.  He sat on—silent.  Slowly, from confused sensations, from his talk with the professor, the manner of the girl herself, the intoxicating familiarity of her sudden hand-clasp, there had come to him a half glimmer of hope.  The other man was dead.  Then! . . . Madness, of course—but he could not give it up.  He had listened to that confounded busybody arranging everything—while all these people stood around assenting, under the spell of that dead romance.  He had listened scornful and silent.  The glimmers of hope, of opportunity, passed before his eyes.  He had only to sit still and say nothing.  That and no more.  And what was truth to him in the face of that great passion which had flung him prostrate in spirit at her adored feet!

And now it was done!  Fatality had willed it!  With the eyes of a mortal struck by the maddening thunderbolt of the gods, Renouard looked up to the sky, an immense black pall dusted over with gold, on which great shudders seemed to pass from the breath of life affirming its sway.

CHAPTER VIII

At last, one morning, in a clear spot of a glassy horizon charged with heraldic masses of black vapours, the island grew out from the sea, showing here and there its naked members of basaltic rock through the rents of heavy foliage.  Later, in the great spilling of all the riches of sunset, Malata stood out green and rosy before turning into a violet shadow in the autumnal light of the expiring day.  Then came the night.  In the faint airs the schooner crept on past a sturdy squat headland, and it was pitch dark when her headsails ran down, she turned short on her heel, and her anchor bit into the sandy bottom on the edge of the outer reef; for it was too dangerous then to attempt entering the little bay full of shoals.  After the last solemn flutter of the mainsail the murmuring voices of the Moorsom party lingered, very frail, in the black stillness.

They were sitting aft, on chairs, and nobody made a move.  Early in the day, when it had become evident that the wind was failing, Renouard, basing his advice on the shortcomings of his bachelor establishment, had urged on the ladies the advisability of not going ashore in the middle of the night.  Now he approached them in a constrained manner (it was astonishing the constraint that had reigned between him and his guests all through the passage) and renewed his arguments.  No one ashore would dream of his bringing any visitors with him.  Nobody would even think of coming off.  There was only one old canoe on the plantation.  And landing in the schooner’s boats would be awkward in the dark.  There was the risk of getting aground on some shallow patches.  It would be best to spend the rest of the night on board.

There was really no opposition.  The professor smoking a pipe, and very comfortable in an ulster buttoned over his tropical clothes, was the first to speak from his long chair.

“Most excellent advice.”

Next to him Miss Moorsom assented by a long silence.  Then in a voice as of one coming out of a dream—

“And so this is Malata,” she said.  “I have often wondered . . .”

A shiver passed through Renouard.  She had wondered!  What about?  Malata was himself.  He and Malata were one.  And she had wondered!  She had . . .

The professor’s sister leaned over towards Renouard.  Through all these days at sea the man’s—the found man’s—existence had not been alluded to on board the schooner.  That reticence was part of the general constraint lying upon them all.  She, herself, certainly had not been exactly elated by this finding—poor Arthur, without money, without prospects.  But she felt moved by the sentiment and romance of the situation.

“Isn’t it wonderful,” she whispered out of her white wrap, “to think of poor Arthur sleeping there, so near to our dear lovely Felicia, and not knowing the immense joy in store for him to-morrow.”

There was such artificiality in the wax-flower lady that nothing in this speech touched Renouard.  It was but the simple anxiety of his heart that he was voicing when he muttered gloomily—

“No one in the world knows what to-morrow may hold in store.”

The mature lady had a recoil as though he had said something impolite.  What a harsh thing to say—instead of finding something nice and appropriate.  On board, where she never saw him in evening clothes, Renouard’s resemblance to a duke’s son was not so apparent to her.  Nothing but his—ah—bohemianism remained.  She rose with a sort of ostentation.

“It’s late—and since we are going to sleep on board to-night . . .” she said.  “But it does seem so cruel.”

The professor started up eagerly, knocking the ashes out of his pipe.  “Infinitely more sensible, my dear Emma.”

Renouard waited behind Miss Moorsom’s chair.

She got up slowly, moved one step forward, and paused looking at the shore.  The blackness of the island blotted out the stars with its vague mass like a low thundercloud brooding over the waters and ready to burst into flame and crashes.

“And so—this is Malata,” she repeated dreamily, moving towards the cabin door.  The clear cloak hanging from her shoulders, the ivory face—for the night had put out nothing of her but the gleams of her hair—made her resemble a shining dream-woman uttering words of wistful inquiry.  She disappeared without a sign, leaving Renouard penetrated to the very marrow by the sounds that came from her body like a mysterious resonance of an exquisite instrument.

He stood stock still.  What was this accidental touch which had evoked the strange accent of her voice?  He dared not answer that question.  But he had to answer the question of what was to be done now.  Had the moment of confession come?  The thought was enough to make one’s blood run cold.

It was as if those people had a premonition of something.  In the taciturn days of the passage he had noticed their reserve even amongst themselves.  The professor smoked his pipe moodily in retired spots.  Renouard had caught Miss Moorsom’s eyes resting on himself more than once, with a peculiar and grave expression.  He fancied that she avoided all opportunities of conversation.  The maiden lady seemed to nurse a grievance.  And now what had he to do?

The lights on the deck had gone out one after the other.  The schooner slept.

About an hour after Miss Moorsom had gone below without a sign or a word for him, Renouard got out of his hammock slung in the waist under the midship awning—for he had given up all the accommodation below to his guests.  He got out with a sudden swift movement, flung off his sleeping jacket, rolled his pyjamas up his thighs, and stole forward, unseen by the one Kanaka of the anchor-watch.  His white torso, naked like a stripped athlete’s, glimmered, ghostly, in the deep shadows of the deck.  Unnoticed he got out of the ship over the knight-heads, ran along the back rope, and seizing the dolphin-striker firmly with both hands, lowered himself into the sea without a splash.

He swam away, noiseless like a fish, and then struck boldly for the land, sustained, embraced, by the tepid water.  The gentle, voluptuous heave of its breast swung him up and down slightly; sometimes a wavelet murmured in his ears; from time to time, lowering his feet, he felt for the bottom on a shallow patch to rest and correct his direction.  He landed at the lower end of the bungalow garden, into the dead stillness of the island.  There were no lights.  The plantation seemed to sleep, as profoundly as the schooner.  On the path a small shell cracked under his naked heel.

The faithful half-caste foreman going his rounds cocked his ears at the sharp sound.  He gave one enormous start of fear at the sight of the swift white figure flying at him out of the night.  He crouched in terror, and then sprang up and clicked his tongue in amazed recognition.

“Tse!  Tse!  The master!”

“Be quiet, Luiz, and listen to what I say.”

Yes, it was the master, the strong master who was never known to raise his voice, the man blindly obeyed and never questioned.  He talked low and rapidly in the quiet night, as if every minute were precious.  On learning that three guests were coming to stay Luiz clicked his tongue rapidly.  These clicks were the uniform, stenographic symbols of his emotions, and he could give them an infinite variety of meaning.  He listened to the rest in a deep silence hardly affected by the low, “Yes, master,” whenever Renouard paused.

“You understand?” the latter insisted.  “No preparations are to be made till we land in the morning.  And you are to say that Mr. Walter has gone off in a trading schooner on a round of the islands.”

“Yes, master.”

“No mistakes—mind!”

“No, master.”

Renouard walked back towards the sea.  Luiz, following him, proposed to call out half a dozen boys and man the canoe.

“Imbecile!”

“Tse!  Tse!  Tse!”

“Don’t you understand that you haven’t seen me?”

“Yes, master.  But what a long swim.  Suppose you drown.”

“Then you can say of me and of Mr. Walter what you like.  The dead don’t mind.”

Renouard entered the sea and heard a faint “Tse! Tse! Tse!” of concern from the half-caste, who had already lost sight of the master’s dark head on the overshadowed water.

Renouard set his direction by a big star that, dipping on the horizon, seemed to look curiously into his face.  On this swim back he felt the mournful fatigue of all that length of the traversed road, which brought him no nearer to his desire.  It was as if his love had sapped the invisible supports of his strength.  There came a moment when it seemed to him that he must have swum beyond the confines of life.  He had a sensation of eternity close at hand, demanding no effort—offering its peace.  It was easy to swim like this beyond the confines of life looking at a star.  But the thought: “They will think I dared not face them and committed suicide,” caused a revolt of his mind which carried him on.  He returned on board, as he had left, unheard and unseen.  He lay in his hammock utterly exhausted and with a confused feeling that he had been beyond the confines of life, somewhere near a star, and that it was very quiet there.

CHAPTER IX

Sheltered by the squat headland from the first morning sparkle of the sea the little bay breathed a delicious freshness.  The party from the schooner landed at the bottom of the garden.  They exchanged insignificant words in studiously casual tones.  The professor’s sister put up a long-handled eye-glass as if to scan the novel surroundings, but in reality searching for poor Arthur anxiously.  Having never seen him otherwise than in his town clothes she had no idea what he would look like.  It had been left to the professor to help his ladies out of the boat because Renouard, as if intent on giving directions, had stepped forward at once to meet the half-caste Luiz hurrying down the path.  In the distance, in front of the dazzlingly sunlit bungalow, a row of dark-faced house-boys unequal in stature and varied in complexion preserved the immobility of a guard of honour.

Luiz had taken off his soft felt hat before coming within earshot.  Renouard bent his head to his rapid talk of domestic arrangements he meant to make for the visitors; another bed in the master’s room for the ladies and a cot for the gentleman to be hung in the room opposite where—where Mr. Walter—here he gave a scared look all round—Mr. Walter—had died.

“Very good,” assented Renouard in an even undertone.  “And remember what you have to say of him.”

“Yes, master.  Only”—he wriggled slightly and put one bare foot on the other for a moment in apologetic embarrassment—“only I—I—don’t like to say it.”

Renouard looked at him without anger, without any sort of expression.  “Frightened of the dead?  Eh?  Well—all right.  I will say it myself—I suppose once for all. . . .”  Immediately he raised his voice very much.

“Send the boys down to bring up the luggage.”

“Yes, master.”

Renouard turned to his distinguished guests who, like a personally conducted party of tourists, had stopped and were looking about them.

“I am sorry,” he began with an impassive face.  “My man has just told me that Mr. Walter . . .” he managed to smile, but didn’t correct himself . . . “has gone in a trading schooner on a short tour of the islands, to the westward.”

This communication was received in profound silence.

Renouard forgot himself in the thought: “It’s done!”  But the sight of the string of boys marching up to the house with suit-cases and dressing-bags rescued him from that appalling abstraction.

“All I can do is to beg you to make yourselves at home . . . with what patience you may.”

This was so obviously the only thing to do that everybody moved on at once.  The professor walked alongside Renouard, behind the two ladies.

“Rather unexpected—this absence.”

“Not exactly,” muttered Renouard.  “A trip has to be made every year to engage labour.”

“I see . . . And he . . . How vexingly elusive the poor fellow has become!  I’ll begin to think that some wicked fairy is favouring this love tale with unpleasant attentions.”

Renouard noticed that the party did not seem weighed down by this new disappointment.  On the contrary they moved with a freer step.  The professor’s sister dropped her eye-glass to the end of its chain.  Miss Moorsom took the lead.  The professor, his lips unsealed, lingered in the open: but Renouard did not listen to that man’s talk.  He looked after that man’s daughter—if indeed that creature of irresistible seductions were a daughter of mortals.  The very intensity of his desire, as if his soul were streaming after her through his eyes, defeated his object of keeping hold of her as long as possible with, at least, one of his senses.  Her moving outlines dissolved into a misty coloured shimmer of a woman made of flame and shadows, crossing the threshold of his house.

The days which followed were not exactly such as Renouard had feared—yet they were not better than his fears.  They were accursed in all the moods they brought him.  But the general aspect of things was quiet.  The professor smoked innumerable pipes with the air of a worker on his holiday, always in movement and looking at things with that mysteriously sagacious aspect of men who are admittedly wiser than the rest of the world.  His white head of hair—whiter than anything within the horizon except the broken water on the reefs—was glimpsed in every part of the plantation always on the move under the white parasol.  And once he climbed the headland and appeared suddenly to those below, a white speck elevated in the blue, with a diminutive but statuesque effect.

Felicia Moorsom remained near the house.  Sometimes she could be seen with a despairing expression scribbling rapidly in her lock-up dairy.  But only for a moment.  At the sound of Renouard’s footsteps she would turn towards him her beautiful face, adorable in that calm which was like a wilful, like a cruel ignoring of her tremendous power.  Whenever she sat on the verandah, on a chair more specially reserved for her use, Renouard would stroll up and sit on the steps near her, mostly silent, and often not trusting himself to turn his glance on her.  She, very still with her eyes half-closed, looked down on his head—so that to a beholder (such as Professor Moorsom, for instance) she would appear to be turning over in her mind profound thoughts about that man sitting at her feet, his shoulders bowed a little, his hands listless—as if vanquished.  And, indeed, the moral poison of falsehood has such a decomposing power that Renouard felt his old personality turn to dead dust.  Often, in the evening, when they sat outside conversing languidly in the dark, he felt that he must rest his forehead on her feet and burst into tears.

The professor’s sister suffered from some little strain caused by the unstability of her own feelings toward Renouard.  She could not tell whether she really did dislike him or not.  At times he appeared to her most fascinating; and, though he generally ended by saying something shockingly crude, she could not resist her inclination to talk with him—at least not always.  One day when her niece had left them alone on the verandah she leaned forward in her chair—speckless, resplendent, and, in her way, almost as striking a personality as her niece, who did not resemble her in the least.  “Dear Felicia has inherited her hair and the greatest part of her appearance from her mother,” the maiden lady used to tell people.

She leaned forward then, confidentially.

“Oh!  Mr. Renouard!  Haven’t you something comforting to say?”

He looked up, as surprised as if a voice from heaven had spoken with this perfect society intonation, and by the puzzled profundity of his blue eyes fluttered the wax-flower of refined womanhood.  She continued.  “For—I can speak to you openly on this tiresome subject—only think what a terrible strain this hope deferred must be for Felicia’s heart—for her nerves.”

“Why speak to me about it,” he muttered feeling half choked suddenly.

“Why!  As a friend—a well-wisher—the kindest of hosts.  I am afraid we are really eating you out of house and home.”  She laughed a little.  “Ah!  When, when will this suspense be relieved!  That poor lost Arthur!  I confess that I am almost afraid of the great moment.  It will be like seeing a ghost.”

“Have you ever seen a ghost?” asked Renouard, in a dull voice.

She shifted her hands a little.  Her pose was perfect in its ease and middle-aged grace.

“Not actually.  Only in a photograph.  But we have many friends who had the experience of apparitions.”

“Ah!  They see ghosts in London,” mumbled Renouard, not looking at her.

“Frequently—in a certain very interesting set.  But all sorts of people do.  We have a friend, a very famous author—his ghost is a girl.  One of my brother’s intimates is a very great man of science.  He is friendly with a ghost . . . Of a girl too,” she added in a voice as if struck for the first time by the coincidence.  “It is the photograph of that apparition which I have seen.  Very sweet.  Most interesting.  A little cloudy naturally. . . . Mr. Renouard!  I hope you are not a sceptic.  It’s so consoling to think. . .”

“Those plantation boys of mine see ghosts too,” said Renouard grimly.

The sister of the philosopher sat up stiffly.  What crudeness!  It was always so with this strange young man.

“Mr. Renouard!  How can you compare the superstitious fancies of your horrible savages with the manifestations . . . ”

Words failed her.  She broke off with a very faint primly angry smile.  She was perhaps the more offended with him because of that flutter at the beginning of the conversation.  And in a moment with perfect tact and dignity she got up from her chair and left him alone.

Renouard didn’t even look up.  It was not the displeasure of the lady which deprived him of his sleep that night.  He was beginning to forget what simple, honest sleep was like.  His hammock from the ship had been hung for him on a side verandah, and he spent his nights in it on his back, his hands folded on his chest, in a sort of half conscious, oppressed stupor.  In the morning he watched with unseeing eyes the headland come out a shapeless inkblot against the thin light of the false dawn, pass through all the stages of daybreak to the deep purple of its outlined mass nimbed gloriously with the gold of the rising sun.  He listened to the vague sounds of waking within the house: and suddenly he became aware of Luiz standing by the hammock—obviously troubled.

“What’s the matter?”

“Tse!  Tse!  Tse!”

“Well, what now?  Trouble with the boys?”

“No, master.  The gentleman when I take him his bath water he speak to me.  He ask me—he ask—when, when, I think Mr. Walter, he come back.”

The half-caste’s teeth chattered slightly.  Renouard got out of the hammock.

“And he is here all the time—eh?”

Luiz nodded a scared affirmative, but at once protested, “I no see him.  I never.  Not I!  The ignorant wild boys say they see . . . Something!  Ough!”

He clapped his teeth on another short rattle, and stood there, shrunk, blighted, like a man in a freezing blast.

“And what did you say to the gentleman?”

“I say I don’t know—and I clear out.  I—I don’t like to speak of him.”

“All right.  We shall try to lay that poor ghost,” said Renouard gloomily, going off to a small hut near by to dress.  He was saying to himself: “This fellow will end by giving me away.  The last thing that I . . . No!  That mustn’t be.”  And feeling his hand being forced he discovered the whole extent of his cowardice.

CHAPTER X

That morning wandering about his plantation, more like a frightened soul than its creator and master, he dodged the white parasol bobbing up here and there like a buoy adrift on a sea of dark-green plants.  The crop promised to be magnificent, and the fashionable philosopher of the age took other than a merely scientific interest in the experiment.  His investments were judicious, but he had always some little money lying by, for experiments.

After lunch, being left alone with Renouard, he talked a little of cultivation and such matters.  Then suddenly:

“By the way, is it true what my sister tells me, that your plantation boys have been disturbed by a ghost?”

Renouard, who since the ladies had left the table was not keeping such a strict watch on himself, came out of his abstraction with a start and a stiff smile.

“My foreman had some trouble with them during my absence.  They funk working in a certain field on the slope of the hill.”

“A ghost here!” exclaimed the amused professor.  “Then our whole conception of the psychology of ghosts must be revised.  This island has been uninhabited probably since the dawn of ages.  How did a ghost come here.  By air or water?  And why did it leave its native haunts.  Was it from misanthropy?  Was he expelled from some community of spirits?”

Renouard essayed to respond in the same tone.  The words died on his lips.  Was it a man or a woman ghost, the professor inquired.

“I don’t know.”  Renouard made an effort to appear at ease.  He had, he said, a couple of Tahitian amongst his boys—a ghost-ridden race.  They had started the scare.  They had probably brought their ghost with them.

“Let us investigate the matter, Renouard,” proposed the professor half in earnest.  “We may make some interesting discoveries as to the state of primitive minds, at any rate.”

This was too much.  Renouard jumped up and leaving the room went out and walked about in front of the house.  He would allow no one to force his hand.  Presently the professor joined him outside.  He carried his parasol, but had neither his book nor his pipe with him.  Amiably serious he laid his hand on his “dear young friend’s” arm.

“We are all of us a little strung up,” he said.  “For my part I have been like sister Anne in the story.  But I cannot see anything coming.  Anything that would be the least good for anybody—I mean.”

Renouard had recovered sufficiently to murmur coldly his regret of this waste of time.  For that was what, he supposed, the professor had in his mind.

“Time,” mused Professor Moorsom.  “I don’t know that time can be wasted.  But I will tell you, my dear friend, what this is: it is an awful waste of life.  I mean for all of us.  Even for my sister, who has got a headache and is gone to lie down.”

He shook gently Renouard’s arm.  “Yes, for all of us!  One may meditate on life endlessly, one may even have a poor opinion of it—but the fact remains that we have only one life to live.  And it is short.  Think of that, my young friend.”

He released Renouard’s arm and stepped out of the shade opening his parasol.  It was clear that there was something more in his mind than mere anxiety about the date of his lectures for fashionable audiences.  What did the man mean by his confounded platitudes?  To Renouard, scared by Luiz in the morning (for he felt that nothing could be more fatal than to have his deception unveiled otherwise than by personal confession), this talk sounded like encouragement or a warning from that man who seemed to him to be very brazen and very subtle.  It was like being bullied by the dead and cajoled by the living into a throw of dice for a supreme stake.

Renouard went away to some distance from the house and threw himself down in the shade of a tree.  He lay there perfectly still with his forehead resting on his folded arms, light-headed and thinking.  It seemed to him that he must be on fire, then that he had fallen into a cool whirlpool, a smooth funnel of water swirling about with nauseating rapidity.  And then (it must have been a reminiscence of his boyhood) he was walking on the dangerous thin ice of a river, unable to turn back. . . . Suddenly it parted from shore to shore with a loud crack like the report of a gun.

With one leap he found himself on his feet.  All was peace, stillness, sunshine.  He walked away from there slowly.  Had he been a gambler he would have perhaps been supported in a measure by the mere excitement.  But he was not a gambler.  He had always disdained that artificial manner of challenging the fates.  The bungalow came into view, bright and pretty, and all about everything was peace, stillness, sunshine. . . .

While he was plodding towards it he had a disagreeable sense of the dead man’s company at his elbow.  The ghost!  He seemed to be everywhere but in his grave.  Could one ever shake him off? he wondered.  At that moment Miss Moorsom came out on the verandah; and at once, as if by a mystery of radiating waves, she roused a great tumult in his heart, shook earth and sky together—but he plodded on.  Then like a grave song-note in the storm her voice came to him ominously.

“Ah!  Mr. Renouard. . . ”  He came up and smiled, but she was very serious.  “I can’t keep still any longer.  Is there time to walk up this headland and back before dark?”

The shadows were lying lengthened on the ground; all was stillness and peace.  “No,” said Renouard, feeling suddenly as steady as a rock.  “But I can show you a view from the central hill which your father has not seen.  A view of reefs and of broken water without end, and of great wheeling clouds of sea-birds.”

She came down the verandah steps at once and they moved off.  “You go first,” he proposed, “and I’ll direct you.  To the left.”

She was wearing a short nankin skirt, a muslin blouse; he could see through the thin stuff the skin of her shoulders, of her arms.  The noble delicacy of her neck caused him a sort of transport.  “The path begins where these three palms are.  The only palms on the island.”

“I see.”

She never turned her head.  After a while she observed: “This path looks as if it had been made recently.”

“Quite recently,” he assented very low.

They went on climbing steadily without exchanging another word; and when they stood on the top she gazed a long time before her.  The low evening mist veiled the further limit of the reefs.  Above the enormous and melancholy confusion, as of a fleet of wrecked islands, the restless myriads of sea-birds rolled and unrolled dark ribbons on the sky, gathered in clouds, soared and stooped like a play of shadows, for they were too far for them to hear their cries.

Renouard broke the silence in low tones.

“They’ll be settling for the night presently.”  She made no sound.  Round them all was peace and declining sunshine.  Near by, the topmost pinnacle of Malata, resembling the top of a buried tower, rose a rock, weather-worn, grey, weary of watching the monotonous centuries of the Pacific.  Renouard leaned his shoulders against it.  Felicia Moorsom faced him suddenly, her splendid black eyes full on his face as though she had made up her mind at last to destroy his wits once and for all.  Dazzled, he lowered his eyelids slowly.

“Mr. Renouard!  There is something strange in all this.  Tell me where he is?”

He answered deliberately.

“On the other side of this rock.  I buried him there myself.”

She pressed her hands to her breast, struggled for her breath for a moment, then: “Ohhh! . . . You buried him! . . . What sort of man are you? . . . You dared not tell! . . . He is another of your victims? . . . You dared not confess that evening. . . . You must have killed him.  What could he have done to you? . . . You fastened on him some atrocious quarrel and . . .”

Her vengeful aspect, her poignant cries left him as unmoved as the weary rock against which he leaned.  He only raised his eyelids to look at her and lowered them slowly.  Nothing more.  It silenced her.  And as if ashamed she made a gesture with her hand, putting away from her that thought.  He spoke, quietly ironic at first.

“Ha! the legendary Renouard of sensitive idiots—the ruthless adventurer—the ogre with a future.  That was a parrot cry, Miss Moorsom.  I don’t think that the greatest fool of them all ever dared hint such a stupid thing of me that I killed men for nothing.  No, I had noticed this man in a hotel.  He had come from up country I was told, and was doing nothing.  I saw him sitting there lonely in a corner like a sick crow, and I went over one evening to talk to him.  Just on impulse.  He wasn’t impressive.  He was pitiful.  My worst enemy could have told you he wasn’t good enough to be one of Renouard’s victims.  It didn’t take me long to judge that he was drugging himself.  Not drinking.  Drugs.”

“Ah!  It’s now that you are trying to murder him,” she cried.

“Really.  Always the Renouard of shopkeepers’ legend.  Listen!  I would never have been jealous of him.  And yet I am jealous of the air you breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees you—moving free—not mine.  But never mind.  I rather liked him.  For a certain reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant here.  He said he believed this would save him.  It did not save him from death.  It came to him as it were from nothing—just a fall.  A mere slip and tumble of ten feet into a ravine.  But it seems he had been hurt before up-country—by a horse.  He ailed and ailed.  No, he was not a steel-tipped man.  And his poor soul seemed to have been damaged too.  It gave way very soon.”

“This is tragic!” Felicia Moorsom whispered with feeling.  Renouard’s lips twitched, but his level voice continued mercilessly.

“That’s the story.  He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to tell me something.  I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in me.  I told him that he was mistaken.  That there was a good deal of a plebeian in me, that he couldn’t know.  He seemed disappointed.  He muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a curse on some woman, then turned to the wall and—just grew cold.”

“On a woman,” cried Miss Moorsom indignantly.  “What woman?”

“I wonder!” said Renouard, raising his eyes and noting the crimson of her ear-lobes against the live whiteness of her complexion, the sombre, as if secret, night-splendour of her eyes under the writhing flames of her hair.  “Some woman who wouldn’t believe in that poor innocence of his. . . Yes.  You probably.  And now you will not believe in me—not even in me who must in truth be what I am—even to death.  No!  You won’t.  And yet, Felicia, a woman like you and a man like me do not often come together on this earth.”

The flame of her glorious head scorched his face.  He flung his hat far away, and his suddenly lowered eyelids brought out startlingly his resemblance to antique bronze, the profile of Pallas, still, austere, bowed a little in the shadow of the rock.  “Oh!  If you could only understand the truth that is in me!” he added.

She waited, as if too astounded to speak, till he looked up again, and then with unnatural force as if defending herself from some unspoken aspersion, “It’s I who stand for truth here!  Believe in you!  In you, who by a heartless falsehood—and nothing else, nothing else, do you hear?—have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable farce!”  She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the pose of simple grief—mourning for herself.

“It only wanted this.  Why!  Oh!  Why is it that ugliness, ridicule, and baseness must fall across my path.”

On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if the earth had fallen away from under their feet.

“Are you grieving for your dignity?  He was a mediocre soul and could have given you but an unworthy existence.”

She did not even smile at those words, but, superb, as if lifting a corner of the veil, she turned on him slowly.

“And do you imagine I would have devoted myself to him for such a purpose!  Don’t you know that reparation was due to him from me?  A sacred debt—a fine duty.  To redeem him would not have been in my power—I know it.  But he was blameless, and it was for me to come forward.  Don’t you see that in the eyes of the world nothing could have rehabilitated him so completely as his marriage with me?  No word of evil could be whispered of him after I had given him my hand.  As to giving myself up to anything less than the shaping of a man’s destiny—if I thought I could do it I would abhor myself. . . .”  She spoke with authority in her deep fascinating, unemotional voice.  Renouard meditated, gloomy, as if over some sinister riddle of a beautiful sphinx met on the wild road of his life.

“Yes.  Your father was right.  You are one of these aristocrats . . .”

She drew herself up haughtily.

“What do you say?  My father! . . . I an aristocrat.”

“Oh!  I don’t mean that you are like the men and women of the time of armours, castles, and great deeds.  Oh, no!  They stood on the naked soil, had traditions to be faithful to, had their feet on this earth of passions and death which is not a hothouse.  They would have been too plebeian for you since they had to lead, to suffer with, to understand the commonest humanity.  No, you are merely of the topmost layer, disdainful and superior, the mere pure froth and bubble on the inscrutable depths which some day will toss you out of existence.  But you are you!  You are you!  You are the eternal love itself—only, O Divinity, it isn’t your body, it is your soul that is made of foam.”

She listened as if in a dream.  He had succeeded so well in his effort to drive back the flood of his passion that his life itself seemed to run with it out of his body.  At that moment he felt as one dead speaking.  But the headlong wave returning with tenfold force flung him on her suddenly, with open arms and blazing eyes.  She found herself like a feather in his grasp, helpless, unable to struggle, with her feet off the ground.  But this contact with her, maddening like too much felicity, destroyed its own end.  Fire ran through his veins, turned his passion to ashes, burnt him out and left him empty, without force—almost without desire.  He let her go before she could cry out.  And she was so used to the forms of repression enveloping, softening the crude impulses of old humanity that she no longer believed in their existence as if it were an exploded legend.  She did not recognise what had happened to her.  She came safe out of his arms, without a struggle, not even having felt afraid.

“What’s the meaning of this?” she said, outraged but calm in a scornful way.

He got down on his knees in silence, bent low to her very feet, while she looked down at him, a little surprised, without animosity, as if merely curious to see what he would do.  Then, while he remained bowed to the ground pressing the hem of her skirt to his lips, she made a slight movement.  He got up.

“No,” he said.  “Were you ever so much mine what could I do with you without your consent?  No.  You don’t conquer a wraith, cold mist, stuff of dreams, illusion.  It must come to you and cling to your breast.  And then!  Oh!  And then!”

All ecstasy, all expression went out of his face.

“Mr. Renouard,” she said, “though you can have no claim on my consideration after having decoyed me here for the vile purpose, apparently, of gloating over me as your possible prey, I will tell you that I am not perhaps the extraordinary being you think I am.  You may believe me.  Here I stand for truth itself.”

“What’s that to me what you are?” he answered.  “At a sign from you I would climb up to the seventh heaven to bring you down to earth for my own—and if I saw you steeped to the lips in vice, in crime, in mud, I would go after you, take you to my arms—wear you for an incomparable jewel on my breast.  And that’s love—true love—the gift and the curse of the gods.  There is no other.”

The truth vibrating in his voice made her recoil slightly, for she was not fit to hear it—not even a little—not even one single time in her life.  It was revolting to her; and in her trouble, perhaps prompted by the suggestion of his name or to soften the harshness of expression, for she was obscurely moved, she spoke to him in French.

“Assez!  J’ai horreur de tout cela,” she said.

He was white to his very lips, but he was trembling no more.  The dice had been cast, and not even violence could alter the throw.  She passed by him unbendingly, and he followed her down the path.  After a time she heard him saying:

“And your dream is to influence a human destiny?”

“Yes!” she answered curtly, unabashed, with a woman’s complete assurance.

“Then you may rest content.  You have done it.”

She shrugged her shoulders slightly.  But just before reaching the end of the path she relented, stopped, and went back to him.

“I don’t suppose you are very anxious for people to know how near you came to absolute turpitude.  You may rest easy on that point.  I shall speak to my father, of course, and we will agree to say that he has died—nothing more.”

“Yes,” said Renouard in a lifeless voice.  “He is dead.  His very ghost shall be done with presently.”

She went on, but he remained standing stock still in the dusk.  She had already reached the three palms when she heard behind her a loud peal of laughter, cynical and joyless, such as is heard in smoking-rooms at the end of a scandalous story.  It made her feel positively faint for a moment.

CHAPTER XI

Slowly a complete darkness enveloped Geoffrey Renouard.  His resolution had failed him.  Instead of following Felicia into the house, he had stopped under the three palms, and leaning against a smooth trunk had abandoned himself to a sense of an immense deception and the feeling of extreme fatigue.  This walk up the hill and down again was like the supreme effort of an explorer trying to penetrate the interior of an unknown country, the secret of which is too well defended by its cruel and barren nature.  Decoyed by a mirage, he had gone too far—so far that there was no going back.  His strength was at an end.  For the first time in his life he had to give up, and with a sort of despairing self-possession he tried to understand the cause of the defeat.  He did not ascribe it to that absurd dead man.

The hesitating shadow of Luiz approached him unnoticed till it spoke timidly.  Renouard started.

“Eh?  What?  Dinner waiting?  You must say I beg to be excused.  I can’t come.  But I shall see them to-morrow morning, at the landing place.  Take your orders from the professor as to the sailing of the schooner.  Go now.”

Luiz, dumbfounded, retreated into the darkness.  Renouard did not move, but hours afterwards, like the bitter fruit of his immobility, the words: “I had nothing to offer to her vanity,” came from his lips in the silence of the island.  And it was then only that he stirred, only to wear the night out in restless tramping up and down the various paths of the plantation.  Luiz, whose sleep was made light by the consciousness of some impending change, heard footsteps passing by his hut, the firm tread of the master; and turning on his mats emitted a faint Tse! Tse! Tse! of deep concern.

Lights had been burning in the bungalow almost all through the night; and with the first sign of day began the bustle of departure.  House boys walked processionally carrying suit-cases and dressing-bags down to the schooner’s boat, which came to the landing place at the bottom of the garden.  Just as the rising sun threw its golden nimbus around the purple shape of the headland, the Planter of Malata was perceived pacing bare-headed the curve of the little bay.  He exchanged a few words with the sailing-master of the schooner, then remained by the boat, standing very upright, his eyes on the ground, waiting.

He had not long to wait.  Into the cool, overshadowed garden the professor descended first, and came jauntily down the path in a lively cracking of small shells.  With his closed parasol hooked on his forearm, and a book in his hand, he resembled a banal tourist more than was permissible to a man of his unique distinction.  He waved the disengaged arm from a distance, but at close quarters, arrested before Renouard’s immobility, he made no offer to shake hands.  He seemed to appraise the aspect of the man with a sharp glance, and made up his mind.

“We are going back by Suez,” he began almost boisterously.  “I have been looking up the sailing lists.  If the zephirs of your Pacific are only moderately propitious I think we are sure to catch the mail boat due in Marseilles on the 18th of March.  This will suit me excellently. . . .”  He lowered his tone.  “My dear young friend, I’m deeply grateful to you.”

Renouard’s set lips moved.

“Why are you grateful to me?”

“Ah!  Why?  In the first place you might have made us miss the next boat, mightn’t you? . . . I don’t thank you for your hospitality.  You can’t be angry with me for saying that I am truly thankful to escape from it.  But I am grateful to you for what you have done, and—for being what you are.”

It was difficult to define the flavour of that speech, but Renouard received it with an austerely equivocal smile.  The professor stepping into the boat opened his parasol and sat down in the stern-sheets waiting for the ladies.  No sound of human voice broke the fresh silence of the morning while they walked the broad path, Miss Moorsom a little in advance of her aunt.

When she came abreast of him Renouard raised his head.

“Good-bye, Mr. Renouard,” she said in a low voice, meaning to pass on; but there was such a look of entreaty in the blue gleam of his sunken eyes that after an imperceptible hesitation she laid her hand, which was ungloved, in his extended palm.

“Will you condescend to remember me?” he asked, while an emotion with which she was angry made her pale cheeks flush and her black eyes sparkle.

“This is a strange request for you to make,” she said, exaggerating the coldness of her tone.

“Is it?  Impudent perhaps.  Yet I am not so guilty as you think; and bear in mind that to me you can never make reparation.”

“Reparation?  To you!  It is you who can offer me no reparation for the offence against my feelings—and my person; for what reparation can be adequate for your odious and ridiculous plot so scornful in its implication, so humiliating to my pride.  No!  I don’t want to remember you.”

Unexpectedly, with a tightening grip, he pulled her nearer to him, and looking into her eyes with fearless despair—

“You’ll have to.  I shall haunt you,” he said firmly.

Her hand was wrenched out of his grasp before he had time to release it.  Felicia Moorsom stepped into the boat, sat down by the side of her father, and breathed tenderly on her crushed fingers.

The professor gave her a sidelong look—nothing more.  But the professor’s sister, yet on shore, had put up her long-handle double eye-glass to look at the scene.  She dropped it with a faint rattle.

“I’ve never in my life heard anything so crude said to a lady,” she murmured, passing before Renouard with a perfectly erect head.  When, a moment afterwards, softening suddenly, she turned to throw a good-bye to that young man, she saw only his back in the distance moving towards the bungalow.  She watched him go in—amazed—before she too left the soil of Malata.

Nobody disturbed Renouard in that room where he had shut himself in to breathe the evanescent perfume of her who for him was no more, till late in the afternoon when the half-caste was heard on the other side of the door.

He wanted the master to know that the trader Janet was just entering the cove.

Renouard’s strong voice on his side of the door gave him most unexpected instructions.  He was to pay off the boys with the cash in the office and arrange with the captain of the Janet to take every worker away from Malata, returning them to their respective homes.  An order on the Dunster firm would be given to him in payment.

And again the silence of the bungalow remained unbroken till, next morning, the half-caste came to report that everything was done.  The plantation boys were embarking now.

Through a crack in the door a hand thrust at him a piece of paper, and the door slammed to so sharply that Luiz stepped back.  Then approaching cringingly the keyhole, in a propitiatory tone he asked:

“Do I go too, master?”

“Yes.  You too.  Everybody.”

“Master stop here alone?”

Silence.  And the half-caste’s eyes grew wide with wonder.  But he also, like those “ignorant savages,” the plantation boys, was only too glad to leave an island haunted by the ghost of a white man.  He backed away noiselessly from the mysterious silence in the closed room, and only in the very doorway of the bungalow allowed himself to give vent to his feelings by a deprecatory and pained—

“Tse!  Tse!  Tse!”

CHAPTER XII

The Moorsoms did manage to catch the homeward mail boat all right, but had only twenty-four hours in town.  Thus the sentimental Willie could not see very much of them.  This did not prevent him afterwards from relating at great length, with manly tears in his eyes, how poor Miss Moorsom—the fashionable and clever beauty—found her betrothed in Malata only to see him die in her arms.  Most people were deeply touched by the sad story.  It was the talk of a good many days.

But the all-knowing Editor, Renouard’s only friend and crony, wanted to know more than the rest of the world.  From professional incontinence, perhaps, he thirsted for a full cup of harrowing detail.  And when he noticed Renouard’s schooner lying in port day after day he sought the sailing master to learn the reason.  The man told him that such were his instructions.  He had been ordered to lie there a month before returning to Malata.  And the month was nearly up.  “I will ask you to give me a passage,” said the Editor.

He landed in the morning at the bottom of the garden and found peace, stillness, sunshine reigning everywhere, the doors and windows of the bungalow standing wide open, no sight of a human being anywhere, the plants growing rank and tall on the deserted fields.  For hours the Editor and the schooner’s crew, excited by the mystery, roamed over the island shouting Renouard’s name; and at last set themselves in grim silence to explore systematically the uncleared bush and the deeper ravines in search of his corpse.  What had happened?  Had he been murdered by the boys?  Or had he simply, capricious and secretive, abandoned his plantation taking the people with him.  It was impossible to tell what had happened.  At last, towards the decline of the day, the Editor and the sailing master discovered a track of sandals crossing a strip of sandy beach on the north shore of the bay.  Following this track fearfully, they passed round the spur of the headland, and there on a large stone found the sandals, Renouard’s white jacket, and the Malay sarong of chequered pattern which the planter of Malata was well known to wear when going to bathe.  These things made a little heap, and the sailor remarked, after gazing at it in silence—

“Birds have been hovering over this for many a day.”

“He’s gone bathing and got drowned,” cried the Editor in dismay.

“I doubt it, sir.  If he had been drowned anywhere within a mile from the shore the body would have been washed out on the reefs.  And our boats have found nothing so far.”

Nothing was ever found—and Renouard’s disappearance remained in the main inexplicable.  For to whom could it have occurred that a man would set out calmly to swim beyond the confines of life—with a steady stroke—his eyes fixed on a star!

Next evening, from the receding schooner, the Editor looked back for the last time at the deserted island.  A black cloud hung listlessly over the high rock on the middle hill; and under the mysterious silence of that shadow Malata lay mournful, with an air of anguish in the wild sunset, as if remembering the heart that was broken there.

 Dec. 1913.

THE PARTNER

“And that be hanged for a silly yarn.  The boatmen here in Westport have been telling this lie to the summer visitors for years.  The sort that gets taken out for a row at a shilling a head—and asks foolish questions—must be told something to pass the time away.  D’ye know anything more silly than being pulled in a boat along a beach? . . . It’s like drinking weak lemonade when you aren’t thirsty.  I don’t know why they do it!  They don’t even get sick.”

A forgotten glass of beer stood at his elbow; the locality was a small respectable smoking-room of a small respectable hotel, and a taste for forming chance acquaintances accounts for my sitting up late with him.  His great, flat, furrowed cheeks were shaven; a thick, square wisp of white hairs hung from his chin; its waggling gave additional point to his deep utterance; and his general contempt for mankind with its activities and moralities was expressed in the rakish set of his big soft hat of black felt with a large rim, which he kept always on his head.

His appearance was that of an old adventurer, retired after many unholy experiences in the darkest parts of the earth; but I had every reason to believe that he had never been outside England.  From a casual remark somebody dropped I gathered that in his early days he must have been somehow connected with shipping—with ships in docks.  Of individuality he had plenty.  And it was this which attracted my attention at first.  But he was not easy to classify, and before the end of the week I gave him up with the vague definition, “an imposing old ruffian.”

One rainy afternoon, oppressed by infinite boredom, I went into the smoking-room.  He was sitting there in absolute immobility, which was really fakir-like and impressive.  I began to wonder what could be the associations of that sort of man, his “milieu,” his private connections, his views, his morality, his friends, and even his wife—when to my surprise he opened a conversation in a deep, muttering voice.

I must say that since he had learned from somebody that I was a writer of stories he had been acknowledging my existence by means of some vague growls in the morning.

He was essentially a taciturn man.  There was an effect of rudeness in his fragmentary sentences.  It was some time before I discovered that what he would be at was the process by which stories—stories for periodicals—were produced.

What could one say to a fellow like that?  But I was bored to death; the weather continued impossible; and I resolved to be amiable.

“And so you make these tales up on your own.  How do they ever come into your head?” he rumbled.

I explained that one generally got a hint for a tale.

“What sort of hint?”

“Well, for instance,” I said, “I got myself rowed out to the rocks the other day.  My boatman told me of the wreck on these rocks nearly twenty years ago.  That could be used as a hint for a mainly descriptive bit of story with some such title as ‘In the Channel,’ for instance.”

It was then that he flew out at the boatmen and the summer visitors who listen to their tales.  Without moving a muscle of his face he emitted a powerful “Rot,” from somewhere out of the depths of his chest, and went on in his hoarse, fragmentary mumble.  “Stare at the silly rocks—nod their silly heads [the visitors, I presume].  What do they think a man is—blown-out paper bag or what?—go off pop like that when he’s hit—Damn silly yarn—Hint indeed! . . . A lie?”

You must imagine this statuesque ruffian enhaloed in the black rim of his hat, letting all this out as an old dog growls sometimes, with his head up and staring-away eyes.

“Indeed!” I exclaimed.  “Well, but even if untrue it is a hint, enabling me to see these rocks, this gale they speak of, the heavy seas, etc., etc., in relation to mankind.  The struggle against natural forces and the effect of the issue on at least one, say, exalted—”

He interrupted me by an aggressive—

“Would truth be any good to you?”

“I shouldn’t like to say,” I answered, cautiously.  “It’s said that truth is stranger than fiction.”

“Who says that?” he mouthed.

“Oh!  Nobody in particular.”

I turned to the window; for the contemptuous beggar was oppressive to look at, with his immovable arm on the table.  I suppose my unceremonious manner provoked him to a comparatively long speech.

“Did you ever see such a silly lot of rocks?  Like plums in a slice of cold pudding.”

I was looking at them—an acre or more of black dots scattered on the steel-grey shades of the level sea, under the uniform gossamer grey mist with a formless brighter patch in one place—the veiled whiteness of the cliff coming through, like a diffused, mysterious radiance.  It was a delicate and wonderful picture, something expressive, suggestive, and desolate, a symphony in grey and black—a Whistler.  But the next thing said by the voice behind me made me turn round.  It growled out contempt for all associated notions of roaring seas with concise energy, then went on—

“I—no such foolishness—looking at the rocks out there—more likely call to mind an office—I used to look in sometimes at one time—office in London—one of them small streets behind Cannon Street Station. . . ”

He was very deliberate; not jerky, only fragmentary; at times profane.

“That’s a rather remote connection,” I observed, approaching him.

“Connection?  To Hades with your connections.  It was an accident.”

“Still,” I said, “an accident has its backward and forward connections, which, if they could be set forth—”

Without moving he seemed to lend an attentive ear.

“Aye!  Set forth.  That’s perhaps what you could do.  Couldn’t you now?  There’s no sea life in this connection.  But you can put it in out of your head—if you like.”

“Yes.  I could, if necessary,” I said.  “Sometimes it pays to put in a lot out of one’s head, and sometimes it doesn’t.  I mean that the story isn’t worth it.  Everything’s in that.”

It amused me to talk to him like this.  He reflected audibly that he guessed story-writers were out after money like the rest of the world which had to live by its wits: and that it was extraordinary how far people who were out after money would go. . . Some of them.

Then he made a sally against sea life.  Silly sort of life, he called it.  No opportunities, no experience, no variety, nothing.  Some fine men came out of it—he admitted—but no more chance in the world if put to it than fly.  Kids.  So Captain Harry Dunbar.  Good sailor.  Great name as a skipper.  Big man; short side-whiskers going grey, fine face, loud voice.  A good fellow, but no more up to people’s tricks than a baby.

“That’s the captain of the Sagamore you’re talking about,” I said, confidently.

After a low, scornful “Of course” he seemed now to hold on the wall with his fixed stare the vision of that city office, “at the back of Cannon Street Station,” while he growled and mouthed a fragmentary description, jerking his chin up now and then, as if angry.

It was, according to his account, a modest place of business, not shady in any sense, but out of the way, in a small street now rebuilt from end to end.  “Seven doors from the Cheshire Cat public house under the railway bridge.  I used to take my lunch there when my business called me to the city.  Cloete would come in to have his chop and make the girl laugh.  No need to talk much, either, for that.  Nothing but the way he would twinkle his spectacles on you and give a twitch of his thick mouth was enough to start you off before he began one of his little tales.  Funny fellow, Cloete.  C-l-o-e-t-e—Cloete.”

“What was he—a Dutchman?” I asked, not seeing in the least what all this had to do with the Westport boatmen and the Westport summer visitors and this extraordinary old fellow’s irritable view of them as liars and fools.  “Devil knows,” he grunted, his eyes on the wall as if not to miss a single movement of a cinematograph picture.  “Spoke nothing but English, anyway.  First I saw him—comes off a ship in dock from the States—passenger.  Asks me for a small hotel near by.  Wanted to be quiet and have a look round for a few days.  I took him to a place—friend of mine. . . Next time—in the City—Hallo!  You’re very obliging—have a drink.  Talks plenty about himself.  Been years in the States.  All sorts of business all over the place.  With some patent medicine people, too.  Travels.  Writes advertisements and all that.  Tells me funny stories.  Tall, loose-limbed fellow.  Black hair up on end, like a brush; long face, long legs, long arms, twinkle in his specs, jocular way of speaking—in a low voice. . . See that?”

I nodded, but he was not looking at me.

“Never laughed so much in my life.  The beggar—would make you laugh telling you how he skinned his own father.  He was up to that, too.  A man who’s been in the patent-medicine trade will be up to anything from pitch-and-toss to wilful murder.  And that’s a bit of hard truth for you.  Don’t mind what they do—think they can carry off anything and talk themselves out of anything—all the world’s a fool to them.  Business man, too, Cloete.  Came over with a few hundred pounds.  Looking for something to do—in a quiet way.  Nothing like the old country, after all, says he. . . And so we part—I with more drinks in me than I was used to.  After a time, perhaps six months or so, I run up against him again in Mr. George Dunbar’s office.  Yes, that office.  It wasn’t often that I . . . However, there was a bit of his cargo in a ship in dock that I wanted to ask Mr. George about.  In comes Cloete out of the room at the back with some papers in his hand.  Partner.  You understand?”

“Aha!” I said.  “The few hundred pounds.”

“And that tongue of his,” he growled.  “Don’t forget that tongue.  Some of his tales must have opened George Dunbar’s eyes a bit as to what business means.”

“A plausible fellow,” I suggested.

“H’m!  You must have it in your own way—of course.  Well.  Partner.  George Dunbar puts his top-hat on and tells me to wait a moment. . . George always looked as though he were making a few thousands a year—a city swell. . . Come along, old man!  And he and Captain Harry go out together—some business with a solicitor round the corner.  Captain Harry, when he was in England, used to turn up in his brother’s office regularly about twelve.  Sat in a corner like a good boy, reading the paper and smoking his pipe.  So they go out. . . Model brothers, says Cloete—two love-birds—I am looking after the tinned-fruit side of this cozy little show. . . Gives me that sort of talk.  Then by-and-by: What sort of old thing is that Sagamore? Finest ship out—eh?  I dare say all ships are fine to you.  You live by them.  I tell you what; I would just as soon put my money into an old stocking.  Sooner!”

He drew a breath, and I noticed his hand, lying loosely on the table, close slowly into a fist.  In that immovable man it was startling, ominous, like the famed nod of the Commander.

“So, already at that time—note—already,” he growled.

“But hold on,” I interrupted.  “The Sagamore belonged to Mundy and Rogers, I’ve been told.”

He snorted contemptuously.  “Damn boatmen—know no better.  Flew the firm’s house-flag.  That’s another thing.  Favour.  It was like this: When old man Dunbar died, Captain Harry was already in command with the firm.  George chucked the bank he was clerking in—to go on his own with what there was to share after the old chap.  George was a smart man.  Started warehousing; then two or three things at a time: wood-pulp, preserved-fruit trade, and so on.  And Captain Harry let him have his share to work with. . . I am provided for in my ship, he says. . . But by-and-by Mundy and Rogers begin to sell out to foreigners all their ships—go into steam right away.  Captain Harry gets very upset—lose command, part with the ship he was fond of—very wretched.  Just then, so it happened, the brothers came in for some money—an old woman died or something.  Quite a tidy bit.  Then young George says: There’s enough between us two to buy theSagamore with. . . But you’ll need more money for your business, cries Captain Harry—and the other laughs at him: My business is going on all right.  Why, I can go out and make a handful of sovereigns while you are trying to get your pipe to draw, old man. . . Mundy and Rogers very friendly about it: Certainly, Captain.  And we will manage her for you, if you like, as if she were still our own. . . Why, with a connection like that it was good investment to buy that ship.  Good!  Aye, at the time.”

The turning of his head slightly toward me at this point was like a sign of strong feeling in any other man.

“You’ll mind that this was long before Cloete came into it at all,” he muttered, warningly.

“Yes.  I will mind,” I said.  “We generally say: some years passed.  That’s soon done.”

He eyed me for a while silently in an unseeing way, as if engrossed in the thought of the years so easily dealt with; his own years, too, they were, the years before and the years (not so many) after Cloete came upon the scene.  When he began to speak again, I discerned his intention to point out to me, in his obscure and graphic manner, the influence on George Dunbar of long association with Cloete’s easy moral standards, unscrupulously persuasive gif

The turning of his head slightly toward me at this point was like a sign of strong feeling in any other man.

“You’ll mind that this was long before Cloete came into it at all,” he muttered, warningly.

“Yes.  I will mind,” I said.  “We generally say: some years passed.  That’s soon done.”

He eyed me for a while silently in an unseeing way, as if engrossed in the thought of the years so easily dealt with; his own years, too, they were, the years before and the years (not so many) after Cloete came upon the scene.  When he began to speak again, I discerned his intention to point out to me, in his obscure and graphic manner, the influence on George Dunbar of long association with Cloete’s easy moral standards, unscrupulously persuasive gift of humour (funny fellow), and adventurously reckless disposition.  He desired me anxiously to elaborate this view, and I assured him it was quite within my powers.  He wished me also to understand that George’s business had its ups and downs (the other brother was meantime sailing to and fro serenely); that he got into low water at times, which worried him rather, because he had married a young wife with expensive tastes.  He was having a pretty anxious time of it generally; and just then Cloete ran up in the city somewhere against a man working a patent medicine (the fellow’s old trade) with some success, but which, with capital, capital to the tune of thousands to be spent with both hands on advertising, could be turned into a great thing—infinitely better-paying than a gold-mine.  Cloete became excited at the possibilities of that sort of business, in which he was an expert.  I understood that George’s partner was all on fire from the contact with this unique opportunity.

“So he goes in every day into George’s room about eleven, and sings that tune till George gnashes his teeth with rage.  Do shut up.  What’s the good?  No money.  Hardly any to go on with, let alone pouring thousands into advertising.  Never dare propose to his brother Harry to sell the ship.  Couldn’t think of it.  Worry him to death.  It would be like the end of the world coming.  And certainly not for a business of that kind! . . . Do you think it would be a swindle? asks Cloete, twitching his mouth. . . George owns up: No—would be no better than a squeamish ass if he thought that, after all these years in business.

“Cloete looks at him hard—Never thought of selling the ship.  Expected the blamed old thing wouldn’t fetch half her insured value by this time.  Then George flies out at him.  What’s the meaning, then, of these silly jeers at ship-owning for the last three weeks?  Had enough of them, anyhow.

“Angry at having his mouth made to water, see.  Cloete don’t get excited. . . I am no squeamish ass, either, says he, very slowly.  ’Tisn’t selling your oldSagamore wants.  The blamed thing wants tomahawking (seems the name Sagamore means an Indian chief or something.  The figure-head was a half-naked savage with a feather over one ear and a hatchet in his belt).  Tomahawking, says he.

“What do you mean? asks George. . . Wrecking—it could be managed with perfect safety, goes on Cloete—your brother would then put in his share of insurance money.  Needn’t tell him exactly what for.  He thinks you’re the smartest business man that ever lived.  Make his fortune, too. . . George grips the desk with both hands in his rage. . . You think my brother’s a man to cast away his ship on purpose.  I wouldn’t even dare think of such a thing in the same room with him—the finest fellow that ever lived. . . Don’t make such noise; they’ll hear you outside, says Cloete; and he tells him that his brother is the salted pattern of all virtues, but all that’s necessary is to induce him to stay ashore for a voyage—for a holiday—take a rest—why not? . . . In fact, I have in view somebody up to that sort of game—Cloete whispers.

“George nearly chokes. . . So you think I am of that sort—you think me capable—What do you take me for? . . . He almost loses his head, while Cloete keeps cool, only gets white about the gills. . . I take you for a man who will be most cursedly hard up before long. . . He goes to the door and sends away the clerks—there were only two—to take their lunch hour.  Comes back . . . What are you indignant about?  Do I want you to rob the widow and orphan?  Why, man!  Lloyd’s a corporation, it hasn’t got a body to starve.  There’s forty or more of them perhaps who underwrote the lines on that silly ship of yours.  Not one human being would go hungry or cold for it.  They take every risk into consideration.  Everything I tell you. . . That sort of talk.  H’m!  George too upset to speak—only gurgles and waves his arms; so sudden, you see.  The other, warming his back at the fire, goes on.  Wood-pulp business next door to a failure.  Tinned-fruit trade nearly played out. . . You’re frightened, he says; but the law is only meant to frighten fools away. . . And he shows how safe casting away that ship would be.  Premiums paid for so many, many years.  No shadow of suspicion could arise.  And, dash it all! a ship must meet her end some day. . .

“I am not frightened.  I am indignant,” says George Dunbar.

“Cloete boiling with rage inside.  Chance of a lifetime—his chance!  And he says kindly: Your wife’ll be much more indignant when you ask her to get out of that pretty house of yours and pile in into a two-pair back—with kids perhaps, too. . .

“George had no children.  Married a couple of years; looked forward to a kid or two very much.  Feels more upset than ever.  Talks about an honest man for father, and so on.  Cloete grins: You be quick before they come, and they’ll have a rich man for father, and no one the worse for it.  That’s the beauty of the thing.

“George nearly cries.  I believe he did cry at odd times.  This went on for weeks.  He couldn’t quarrel with Cloete.  Couldn’t pay off his few hundreds; and besides, he was used to have him about.  Weak fellow, George.  Cloete generous, too. . . Don’t think of my little pile, says he.  Of course it’s gone when we have to shut up.  But I don’t care, he says. . . And then there was George’s new wife.  When Cloete dines there, the beggar puts on a dress suit; little woman liked it; . . . Mr. Cloete, my husband’s partner; such a clever man, man of the world, so amusing! . . . When he dines there and they are alone: Oh, Mr. Cloete, I wish George would do something to improve our prospects.  Our position is really so mediocre. . . And Cloete smiles, but isn’t surprised, because he had put all these notions himself into her empty head. . . What your husband wants is enterprise, a little audacity.  You can encourage him best, Mrs. Dunbar. . . She was a silly, extravagant little fool.  Had made George take a house in Norwood.  Live up to a lot of people better off than themselves.  I saw her once; silk dress, pretty boots, all feathers and scent, pink face.  More like the Promenade at the Alhambra than a decent home, it looked to me.  But some women do get a devil of a hold on a man.”

“Yes, some do,” I assented.  “Even when the man is the husband.”

“My missis,” he addressed me unexpectedly, in a solemn, surprisingly hollow tone, “could wind me round her little finger.  I didn’t find it out till she was gone.  Aye.  But she was a woman of sense, while that piece of goods ought to have been walking the streets, and that’s all I can say. . . You must make her up out of your head.  You will know the sort.”

“Leave all that to me,” I said.

“H’m!” he grunted, doubtfully, then going back to his scornful tone: “A month or so afterwards the Sagamore arrives home.  All very jolly at first. . . Hallo, George boy!  Hallo, Harry, old man! . . . But by and by Captain Harry thinks his clever brother is not looking very well.  And George begins to look worse.  He can’t get rid of Cloete’s notion.  It has stuck in his head. . . There’s nothing wrong—quite well. . . Captain Harry still anxious.  Business going all right, eh?  Quite right.  Lots of business.  Good business. . . Of course Captain Harry believes that easily.  Starts chaffing his brother in his jolly way about rolling in money.  George’s shirt sticks to his back with perspiration, and he feels quite angry with the captain. . . The fool, he says to himself.  Rolling in money, indeed!  And then he thinks suddenly: Why not? . . . Because Cloete’s notion has got hold of his mind.

“But next day he weakens and says to Cloete . . . Perhaps it would be best to sell.  Couldn’t you talk to my brother? and Cloete explains to him over again for the twentieth time why selling wouldn’t do, anyhow.  No!  The Sagamore must be tomahawked—as he would call it; to spare George’s feelings, maybe.  But every time he says the word, George shudders. . . I’ve got a man at hand competent for the job who will do the trick for five hundred, and only too pleased at the chance, says Cloete. . . George shuts his eyes tight at that sort of talk—but at the same time he thinks: Humbug!  There can be no such man.  And yet if there was such a man it would be safe enough—perhaps.

“And Cloete always funny about it.  He couldn’t talk about anything without it seeming there was a great joke in it somewhere. . . Now, says he, I know you are a moral citizen, George.  Morality is mostly funk, and I think you’re the funkiest man I ever came across in my travels.  Why, you are afraid to speak to your brother.  Afraid to open your mouth to him with a fortune for us all in sight. . . George flares up at this: no, he ain’t afraid; he will speak; bangs fist on the desk.  And Cloete pats him on the back. . . We’ll be made men presently, he says.

“But the first time George attempts to speak to Captain Harry his heart slides down into his boots.  Captain Harry only laughs at the notion of staying ashore.  He wants no holiday, not he.  But Jane thinks of remaining in England this trip.  Go about a bit and see some of her people.  Jane was the Captain’s wife; round-faced, pleasant lady.  George gives up that time; but Cloete won’t let him rest.  So he tries again; and the Captain frowns.  He frowns because he’s puzzled.  He can’t make it out.  He has no notion of living away from his Sagamore. . .

“Ah!” I cried.  “Now I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” he growled, his black, contemptuous stare turning on me crushingly.

“I beg your pardon,” I murmured.

“H’m!  Very well, then.  Captain Harry looks very stern, and George crumples all up inside. . . He sees through me, he thinks. . . Of course it could not be; but George, by that time, was scared at his own shadow.  He is shirking it with Cloete, too.  Gives his partner to understand that his brother has half a mind to try a spell on shore, and so on.  Cloete waits, gnawing his fingers; so anxious.  Cloete really had found a man for the job.  Believe it or not, he had found him inside the very boarding-house he lodged in—somewhere about Tottenham Court Road.  He had noticed down-stairs a fellow—a boarder and not a boarder—hanging about the dark—part of the passage mostly; sort of ‘man of the house,’ a slinking chap.  Black eyes.  White face.  The woman of the house—a widow lady, she called herself—very full of Mr. Stafford; Mr. Stafford this and Mr. Stafford that. . . Anyhow, Cloete one evening takes him out to have a drink.  Cloete mostly passed away his evenings in saloon bars.  No drunkard, though, Cloete; for company; liked to talk to all sorts there; just habit; American fashion.

“So Cloete takes that chap out more than once.  Not very good company, though.  Little to say for himself.  Sits quiet and drinks what’s given to him, eyes always half closed, speaks sort of demure. . . I’ve had misfortunes, he says.  The truth was they had kicked him out of a big steam-ship company for disgraceful conduct; nothing to affect his certificate, you understand; and he had gone down quite easily.  Liked it, I expect.  Anything’s better than work.  Lived on the widow lady who kept that boarding-house.”

“That’s almost incredible,” I ventured to interrupt.  “A man with a master’s certificate, do you mean?”

“I do; I’ve known them ’bus cads,” he growled, contemptuously.  “Yes.  Swing on the tail-board by the strap and yell, ‘tuppence all the way.’  Through drink.  But this Stafford was of another kind.  Hell’s full of such Staffords; Cloete would make fun of him, and then there would be a nasty gleam in the fellow’s half-shut eye.  But Cloete was generally kind to him.  Cloete was a fellow that would be kind to a mangy dog.  Anyhow, he used to stand drinks to that object, and now and then gave him half a crown—because the widow lady kept Mr. Stafford short of pocket-money.  They had rows almost every day down in the basement. . .

“It was the fellow being a sailor that put into Cloete’s mind the first notion of doing away with the Sagamore.  He studies him a bit, thinks there’s enough devil in him yet to be tempted, and one evening he says to him . . . I suppose you wouldn’t mind going to sea again, for a spell? . . . The other never raises his eyes; says it’s scarcely worth one’s while for the miserable salary one gets. . . Well, but what do you say to captain’s wages for a time, and a couple of hundred extra if you are compelled to come home without the ship.  Accidents will happen, says Cloete. . . Oh! sure to, says that Stafford; and goes on taking sips of his drink as if he had no interest in the matter.

“Cloete presses him a bit; but the other observes, impudent and languid like: You see, there’s no future in a thing like that—is there? . . Oh! no, says Cloete.  Certainly not.  I don’t mean this to have any future—as far as you are concerned.  It’s a ‘once for all’ transaction.  Well, what do you estimate your future at? he asks. . . The fellow more listless than ever—nearly asleep.—I believe the skunk was really too lazy to care.  Small cheating at cards, wheedling or bullying his living out of some woman or other, was more his style.  Cloete swears at him in whispers something awful.  All this in the saloon bar of the Horse Shoe, Tottenham Court Road.  Finally they agree, over the second sixpennyworth of Scotch hot, on five hundred pounds as the price of tomahawking the Sagamore.  And Cloete waits to see what George can do.

“A week or two goes by.  The other fellow loafs about the house as if there had been nothing, and Cloete begins to doubt whether he really means ever to tackle that job.  But one day he stops Cloete at the door, with his downcast eyes: What about that employment you wished to give me? he asks. . . You see, he had played some more than usual dirty trick on the woman and expected awful ructions presently; and to be fired out for sure.  Cloete very pleased.  George had been prevaricating to him such a lot that he really thought the thing was as well as settled.  And he says: Yes.  It’s time I introduced you to my friend.  Just get your hat and we will go now. . .

“The two come into the office, and George at his desk sits up in a sudden panic—staring.  Sees a tallish fellow, sort of nasty-handsome face, heavy eyes, half shut; short drab overcoat, shabby bowler hat, very careful—like in his movements.  And he thinks to himself, Is that how such a man looks!  No, the thing’s impossible. . . Cloete does the introduction, and the fellow turns round to look behind him at the chair before he sits down. . . A thoroughly competent man, Cloete goes on . . . The man says nothing, sits perfectly quiet.  And George can’t speak, throat too dry.  Then he makes an effort: H’m!  H’m!  Oh yes—unfortunately—sorry to disappoint—my brother—made other arrangements—going himself.

“The fellow gets up, never raising his eyes off the ground, like a modest girl, and goes out softly, right out of the office without a sound.  Cloete sticks his chin in his hand and bites all his fingers at once.  George’s heart slows down and he speaks to Cloete. . . This can’t be done.  How can it be?  Directly the ship is lost Harry would see through it.  You know he is a man to go to the underwriters himself with his suspicions.  And he would break his heart over me.  How can I play that on him?  There’s only two of us in the world belonging to each other. . .

“Cloete lets out a horrid cuss-word, jumps up, bolts away into his room, and George hears him there banging things around.  After a while he goes to the door and says in a trembling voice: You ask me for an impossibility. . . Cloete inside ready to fly out like a tiger and rend him; but he opens the door a little way and says softly: Talking of hearts, yours is no bigger than a mouse’s, let me tell you. . . But George doesn’t care—load off the heart, anyhow.  And just then Captain Harry comes in. . . Hallo, George boy.  I am little late.  What about a chop at the Cheshire, now? . . . Right you are, old man. . . And off they go to lunch together.  Cloete has nothing to eat that day.

“George feels a new man for a time; but all of a sudden that fellow Stafford begins to hang about the street, in sight of the house door.  The first time George sees him he thinks he made a mistake.  But no; next time he has to go out, there is the very fellow skulking on the other side of the road.  It makes George nervous; but he must go out on business, and when the fellow cuts across the road-way he dodges him.  He dodges him once, twice, three times; but at last he gets nabbed in his very doorway. . . What do you want? he says, trying to look fierce.

“It seems that ructions had come in the basement of that boarding-house, and the widow lady had turned on him (being jealous mad), to the extent of talking of the police.  That Mr. Stafford couldn’t stand; so he cleared out like a scared stag, and there he was, chucked into the streets, so to speak.  Cloete looked so savage as he went to and fro that he hadn’t the spunk to tackle him; but George seemed a softer kind to his eye.  He would have been glad of half a quid, anything. . . I’ve had misfortunes, he says softly, in his demure way, which frightens George more than a row would have done. . . Consider the severity of my disappointment, he says. . .

“George, instead of telling him to go to the devil, loses his head. . . I don’t know you.  What do you want? he cries, and bolts up-stairs to Cloete. . . . Look what’s come of it, he gasps; now we are at the mercy of that horrid fellow. . . Cloete tries to show him that the fellow can do nothing; but George thinks that some sort of scandal may be forced on, anyhow.  Says that he can’t live with that horror haunting him.  Cloete would laugh if he weren’t too weary of it all.  Then a thought strikes him and he changes his tune. . . Well, perhaps!  I will go down-stairs and send him away to begin with. . . He comes back. . . He’s gone.  But perhaps you are right.  The fellow’s hard up, and that’s what makes people desperate.  The best thing would be to get him out of the country for a time.  Look here, the poor devil is really in want of employment.  I won’t ask you much this time: only to hold your tongue; and I shall try to get your brother to take him as chief officer.  At this George lays his arms and his head on his desk, so that Cloete feels sorry for him.  But altogether Cloete feels more cheerful because he has shaken the ghost a bit into that Stafford.  That very afternoon he buys him a suit of blue clothes, and tells him that he will have to turn to and work for his living now.  Go to sea as mate of the Sagamore.  The skunk wasn’t very willing, but what with having nothing to eat and no place to sleep in, and the woman having frightened him with the talk of some prosecution or other, he had no choice, properly speaking.  Cloete takes care of him for a couple of days. . . Our arrangement still stands, says he.  Here’s the ship bound for Port Elizabeth; not a safe anchorage at all.  Should she by chance part from her anchors in a north-east gale and get lost on the beach, as many of them do, why, it’s five hundred in your pocket—and a quick return home.  You are up to the job, ain’t you?

“Our Mr. Stafford takes it all in with downcast eyes. . . I am a competent seaman, he says, with his sly, modest air.  A ship’s chief mate has no doubt many opportunities to manipulate the chains and anchors to some purpose. . . At this Cloete thumps him on the back: You’ll do, my noble sailor.  Go in and win. . .

“Next thing George knows, his brother tells him that he had occasion to oblige his partner.  And glad of it, too.  Likes the partner no end.  Took a friend of his as mate.  Man had his troubles, been ashore a year nursing a dying wife, it seems.  Down on his luck. . . George protests earnestly that he knows nothing of the person.  Saw him once.  Not very attractive to look at. . . And Captain Harry says in his hearty way, That’s so, but must give the poor devil a chance. . .

“So Mr. Stafford joins in dock.  And it seems that he did manage to monkey with one of the cables—keeping his mind on Port Elizabeth.  The riggers had all the cable ranged on deck to clean lockers.  The new mate watches them go ashore—dinner hour—and sends the ship-keeper out of the ship to fetch him a bottle of beer.  Then he goes to work whittling away the forelock of the forty-five-fathom shackle-pin, gives it a tap or two with a hammer just to make it loose, and of course that cable wasn’t safe any more.  Riggers come back—you know what riggers are: come day, go day, and God send Sunday.  Down goes the chain into the locker without their foreman looking at the shackles at all.  What does he care?  He ain’t going in the ship.  And two days later the ship goes to sea. . . ”

At this point I was incautious enough to breathe out another “I see,” which gave offence again, and brought on me a rude “No, you don’t”—as before.  But in the pause he remembered the glass of beer at his elbow.  He drank half of it, wiped his mustaches, and remarked grimly—

“Don’t you think that there will be any sea life in this, because there ain’t.  If you’re going to put in any out of your own head, now’s your chance.  I suppose you know what ten days of bad weather in the Channel are like?  I don’t.  Anyway, ten whole days go by.  One Monday Cloete comes to the office a little late—hears a woman’s voice in George’s room and looks in.  Newspapers on the desk, on the floor; Captain Harry’s wife sitting with red eyes and a bag on the chair near her. . . Look at this, says George, in great excitement, showing him a paper.  Cloete’s heart gives a jump.  Ha!  Wreck in Westport Bay.  The Sagamore gone ashore early hours of Sunday, and so the newspaper men had time to put in some of their work.  Columns of it.  Lifeboat out twice.  Captain and crew remain by the ship.  Tugs summoned to assist.  If the weather improves, this well-known fine ship may yet be saved. . . You know the way these chaps put it. . . Mrs. Harry there on her way to catch a train from Cannon Street.  Got an hour to wait.

“Cloete takes George aside and whispers: Ship saved yet!  Oh, damn!  That must never be; you hear?  But George looks at him dazed, and Mrs. Harry keeps on sobbing quietly: . . . I ought to have been with him.  But I am going to him. . . We are all going together, cries Cloete, all of a sudden.  He rushes out, sends the woman a cup of hot bovril from the shop across the road, buys a rug for her, thinks of everything; and in the train tucks her in and keeps on talking, thirteen to the dozen, all the way, to keep her spirits up, as it were; but really because he can’t hold his peace for very joy.  Here’s the thing done all at once, and nothing to pay.  Done.  Actually done.  His head swims now and again when he thinks of it.  What enormous luck!  It almost frightens him.  He would like to yell and sing.  Meantime George Dunbar sits in his corner, looking so deadly miserable that at last poor Mrs. Harry tries to comfort him, and so cheers herself up at the same time by talking about how her Harry is a prudent man; not likely to risk his crew’s life or his own unnecessarily—and so on.

“First thing they hear at Westport station is that the life-boat has been out to the ship again, and has brought off the second officer, who had hurt himself, and a few sailors.  Captain and the rest of the crew, about fifteen in all, are still on board.  Tugs expected to arrive every moment.

“They take Mrs. Harry to the inn, nearly opposite the rocks; she bolts straight up-stairs to look out of the window, and she lets out a great cry when she sees the wreck.  She won’t rest till she gets on board to her Harry.  Cloete soothes her all he can. . . All right; you try to eat a mouthful, and we will go to make inquiries.

“He draws George out of the room: Look here, she can’t go on board, but I shall.  I’ll see to it that he doesn’t stop in the ship too long.  Let’s go and find the coxswain of the life-boat. . . George follows him, shivering from time to time.  The waves are washing over the old pier; not much wind, a wild, gloomy sky over the bay.  In the whole world only one tug away off, heading to the seas, tossed in and out of sight every minute as regular as clockwork.

“They meet the coxswain and he tells them: Yes!  He’s going out again.  No, they ain’t in danger on board—not yet.  But the ship’s chance is very poor.  Still, if the wind doesn’t pipe up again and the sea goes down something might be tried.  After some talk he agrees to take Cloete on board; supposed to be with an urgent message from the owners to the captain.

“Whenever Cloete looks at the sky he feels comforted; it looks so threatening.  George Dunbar follows him about with a white face and saying nothing.  Cloete takes him to have a drink or two, and by and by he begins to pick up. . . That’s better, says Cloete; dash me if it wasn’t like walking about with a dead man before.  You ought to be throwing up your cap, man.  I feel as if I wanted to stand in the street and cheer.  Your brother is safe, the ship is lost, and we are made men.

“Are you certain she’s lost? asks George.  It would be an awful blow after all the agonies I have gone through in my mind, since you first spoke to me, if she were to be got off—and—and—all this temptation to begin over again. . . For we had nothing to do with this; had we?

“Of course not, says Cloete.  Wasn’t your brother himself in charge?  It’s providential. . . Oh! cries George, shocked. . . Well, say it’s the devil, says Cloete, cheerfully.  I don’t mind!  You had nothing to do with it any more than a baby unborn, you great softy, you. . . Cloete has got so that he almost loved George Dunbar.  Well.  Yes.  That was so.  I don’t mean he respected him.  He was just fond of his partner.

“They go back, you may say fairly skipping, to the hotel, and find the wife of the captain at the open window, with her eyes on the ship as if she wanted to fly across the bay over there. . . Now then, Mrs. Dunbar, cries Cloete, you can’t go, but I am going.  Any messages?  Don’t be shy.  I’ll deliver every word faithfully.  And if you would like to give me a kiss for him, I’ll deliver that too, dash me if I don’t.

“He makes Mrs. Harry laugh with his patter. . . Oh, dear Mr. Cloete, you are a calm, reasonable man.  Make him behave sensibly.  He’s a bit obstinate, you know, and he’s so fond of the ship, too.  Tell him I am here—looking on. . . Trust me, Mrs. Dunbar.  Only shut that window, that’s a good girl.  You will be sure to catch cold if you don’t, and the Captain won’t be pleased coming off the wreck to find you coughing and sneezing so that you can’t tell him how happy you are.  And now if you can get me a bit of tape to fasten my glasses on good to my ears, I will be going. . .

“How he gets on board I don’t know.  All wet and shaken and excited and out of breath, he does get on board.  Ship lying over, smothered in sprays, but not moving very much; just enough to jag one’s nerve a bit.  He finds them all crowded on the deck-house forward, in their shiny oilskins, with faces like sick men.  Captain Harry can’t believe his eyes.  What!  Mr. Cloete!  What are you doing here, in God’s name? . . . Your wife’s ashore there, looking on, gasps out Cloete; and after they had talked a bit, Captain Harry thinks it’s uncommonly plucky and kind of his brother’s partner to come off to him like this.  Man glad to have somebody to talk to. . . It’s a bad business, Mr. Cloete, he says.  And Cloete rejoices to hear that.  Captain Harry thinks he had done his best, but the cable had parted when he tried to anchor her.  It was a great trial to lose the ship.  Well, he would have to face it.  He fetches a deep sigh now and then.  Cloete almost sorry he had come on board, because to be on that wreck keeps his chest in a tight band all the time.  They crouch out of the wind under the port boat, a little apart from the men.  The life-boat had gone away after putting Cloete on board, but was coming back next high water to take off the crew if no attempt at getting the ship afloat could be made.  Dusk was falling; winter’s day; black sky; wind rising.  Captain Harry felt melancholy.  God’s will be done.  If she must be left on the rocks—why, she must.  A man should take what God sends him standing up. . . Suddenly his voice breaks, and he squeezes Cloete’s arm: It seems as if I couldn’t leave her, he whispers.  Cloete looks round at the men like a lot of huddled sheep and thinks to himself: They won’t stay. . . Suddenly the ship lifts a little and sets down with a thump.  Tide rising.  Everybody beginning to look out for the life-boat.  Some of the men made her out far away and also two more tugs.  But the gale has come on again, and everybody knows that no tug will ever dare come near the ship.

“That’s the end, Captain Harry says, very low. . . . Cloete thinks he never felt so cold in all his life. . . And I feel as if I didn’t care to live on just now, mutters Captain Harry . . . Your wife’s ashore, looking on, says Cloete . . . Yes.  Yes.  It must be awful for her to look at the poor old ship lying here done for.  Why, that’s our home.

“Cloete thinks that as long as the Sagamore’s done for he doesn’t care, and only wishes himself somewhere else.  The slightest movement of the ship cuts his breath like a blow.  And he feels excited by the danger, too.  The captain takes him aside. . . The life-boat can’t come near us for more than an hour.  Look here, Cloete, since you are here, and such a plucky one—do something for me. . . He tells him then that down in his cabin aft in a certain drawer there is a bundle of important papers and some sixty sovereigns in a small canvas bag.  Asks Cloete to go and get these things out.  He hasn’t been below since the ship struck, and it seems to him that if he were to take his eyes off her she would fall to pieces.  And then the men—a scared lot by this time—if he were to leave them by themselves they would attempt to launch one of the ship’s boats in a panic at some heavier thump—and then some of them bound to get drowned. . . There are two or three boxes of matches about my shelves in my cabin if you want a light, says Captain Harry.  Only wipe your wet hands before you begin to feel for them. . .

“Cloete doesn’t like the job, but doesn’t like to show funk, either—and he goes.  Lots of water on the main-deck, and he splashes along; it was getting dark, too.  All at once, by the mainmast, somebody catches him by the arm.  Stafford.  He wasn’t thinking of Stafford at all.  Captain Harry had said something as to the mate not being quite satisfactory, but it wasn’t much.  Cloete doesn’t recognise him in his oilskins at first.  He sees a white face with big eyes peering at him. . . Are you pleased, Mr. Cloete . . . ?

“Cloete is moved to laugh at the whine, and shakes him off.  But the fellow scrambles on after him on the poop and follows him down into the cabin of that wrecked ship.  And there they are, the two of them; can hardly see each other. . . You don’t mean to make me believe you have had anything to do with this, says Cloete. . .

“They both shiver, nearly out of their wits with the excitement of being on board that ship.  She thumps and lurches, and they stagger together, feeling sick.  Cloete again bursts out laughing at that wretched creature Stafford pretending to have been up to something so desperate. . . Is that how you think you can treat me now? yells the other man all of a sudden. . .

“A sea strikes the stern, the ship trembles and groans all round them, there’s the noise of the seas about and overhead, confusing Cloete, and he hears the other screaming as if crazy. . . Ah, you don’t believe me!  Go and look at the port chain.  Parted?  Eh?  Go and see if it’s parted.  Go and find the broken link.  You can’t.  There’s no broken link.  That means a thousand pounds for me.  No less.  A thousand the day after we get ashore—prompt.  I won’t wait till she breaks up, Mr. Cloete.  To the underwriters I go if I’ve to walk to London on my bare feet.  Port cable!  Look at her port cable, I will say to them.  I doctored it—for the owners—tempted by a low rascal called Cloete.

“Cloete does not understand what it means exactly.  All he sees is that the fellow means to make mischief.  He sees trouble ahead. . . Do you think you can scare me? he asks,—you poor miserable skunk. . . And Stafford faces him out—both holding on to the cabin table: No, damn you, you are only a dirty vagabond; but I can scare the other, the chap in the black coat. . .

“Meaning George Dunbar.  Cloete’s brain reels at the thought.  He doesn’t imagine the fellow can do any real harm, but he knows what George is; give the show away; upset the whole business he had set his heart on.  He says nothing; he hears the other, what with the funk and strain and excitement, panting like a dog—and then a snarl. . . A thousand down, twenty-four hours after we get ashore; day after to-morrow.  That’s my last word, Mr. Cloete. . . A thousand pounds, day after to-morrow, says Cloete.  Oh yes.  And to-day take this, you dirty cur. . . He hits straight from the shoulder in sheer rage, nothing else.  Stafford goes away spinning along the bulk-head.  Seeing this, Cloete steps out and lands him another one somewhere about the jaw.  The fellow staggers backward right into the captain’s cabin through the open door.  Cloete, following him up, hears him fall down heavily and roll to leeward, then slams the door to and turns the key. . . There! says he to himself, that will stop you from making trouble.”

“By Jove!” I murmured.

The old fellow departed from his impressive immobility to turn his rakishly hatted head and look at me with his old, black, lack-lustre eyes.

“He did leave him there,” he uttered, weightily, returning to the contemplation of the wall.  “Cloete didn’t mean to allow anybody, let alone a thing like Stafford, to stand in the way of his great notion of making George and himself, and Captain Harry, too, for that matter, rich men.  And he didn’t think much of consequences.  These patent-medicine chaps don’t care what they say or what they do.  They think the world’s bound to swallow any story they like to tell. . . He stands listening for a bit.  And it gives him quite a turn to hear a thump at the door and a sort of muffled raving screech inside the captain’s room.  He thinks he hears his own name, too, through the awful crash as the old Sagamore rises and falls to a sea.  That noise and that awful shock make him clear out of the cabin.  He collects his senses on the poop.  But his heart sinks a little at the black wildness of the night.  Chances that he will get drowned himself before long.  Puts his head down the companion.  Through the wind and breaking seas he can hear the noise of Stafford’s beating against the door and cursing.  He listens and says to himself: No.  Can’t trust him now. . .

“When he gets back to the top of the deck-house he says to Captain Harry, who asks him if he got the things, that he is very sorry.  There was something wrong with the door.  Couldn’t open it.  And to tell you the truth, says he, I didn’t like to stop any longer in that cabin.  There are noises there as if the ship were going to pieces. . . Captain Harry thinks: Nervous; can’t be anything wrong with the door.  But he says: Thanks—never mind, never mind. . . All hands looking out now for the life-boat.  Everybody thinking of himself rather.  Cloete asks himself, will they miss him?  But the fact is that Mr. Stafford had made such poor show at sea that after the ship struck nobody ever paid any attention to him.  Nobody cared what he did or where he was.  Pitch dark, too—no counting of heads.  The light of the tug with the lifeboat in tow is seen making for the ship, and Captain Harry asks: Are we all there? . . . Somebody answers: All here, sir. . . Stand by to leave the ship, then, says Captain Harry; and two of you help the gentleman over first. . . Aye, aye, sir. . . Cloete was moved to ask Captain Harry to let him stay till last, but the life-boat drops on a grapnel abreast the fore-rigging, two chaps lay hold of him, watch their chance, and drop him into her, all safe.

“He’s nearly exhausted; not used to that sort of thing, you see.  He sits in the stern-sheets with his eyes shut.  Don’t want to look at the white water boiling all around.  The men drop into the boat one after another.  Then he hears Captain Harry’s voice shouting in the wind to the coxswain, to hold on a moment, and some other words he can’t catch, and the coxswain yelling back: Don’t be long, sir. . . What is it?  Cloete asks feeling faint. . . Something about the ship’s papers, says the coxswain, very anxious.  It’s no time to be fooling about alongside, you understand.  They haul the boat off a little and wait.  The water flies over her in sheets.  Cloete’s senses almost leave him.  He thinks of nothing.  He’s numb all over, till there’s a shout: Here he is! . . . They see a figure in the fore-rigging waiting—they slack away on the grapnel-line and get him in the boat quite easy.  There is a little shouting—it’s all mixed up with the noise of the sea.  Cloete fancies that Stafford’s voice is talking away quite close to his ear.  There’s a lull in the wind, and Stafford’s voice seems to be speaking very fast to the coxswain; he tells him that of course he was near his skipper, was all the time near him, till the old man said at the last moment that he must go and get the ship’s papers from aft; would insist on going himself; told him, Stafford, to get into the life-boat. . . He had meant to wait for his skipper, only there came this smooth of the seas, and he thought he would take his chance at once.

“Cloete opens his eyes.  Yes.  There’s Stafford sitting close by him in that crowded life-boat.  The coxswain stoops over Cloete and cries: Did you hear what the mate said, sir? . . . Cloete’s face feels as if it were set in plaster, lips and all.  Yes, I did, he forces himself to answer.  The coxswain waits a moment, then says: I don’t like it. . . And he turns to the mate, telling him it was a pity he did not try to run along the deck and hurry up the captain when the lull came.  Stafford answers at once that he did think of it, only he was afraid of missing him on the deck in the dark.  For, says he, the captain might have got over at once, thinking I was already in the life-boat, and you would have hauled off perhaps, leaving me behind. . . True enough, says the coxswain.  A minute or so passes.  This won’t do, mutters the coxswain.  Suddenly Stafford speaks up in a sort of hollow voice: I was by when he told Mr. Cloete here that he didn’t know how he would ever have the courage to leave the old ship; didn’t he, now? . . . And Cloete feels his arm being gripped quietly in the dark. . . Didn’t he now?  We were standing together just before you went over, Mr. Cloete? . . .

“Just then the coxswain cries out: I’m going on board to see. . . Cloete tears his arm away: I am going with you. . .

“When they get aboard, the coxswain tells Cloete to go aft along one side of the ship and he would go along the other so as not to miss the captain. . . And feel about with your hands, too, says he; he might have fallen and be lying insensible somewhere on the deck. . . When Cloete gets at last to the cabin companion on the poop the coxswain is already there, peering down and sniffing.  I detect a smell of smoke down there, says he.  And he yells: Are you there, sir? . . . This is not a case for shouting, says Cloete, feeling his heart go stony, as it were. . . Down they go.  Pitch dark; the inclination so sharp that the coxswain, groping his way into the captain’s room, slips and goes tumbling down.  Cloete hears him cry out as though he had hurt himself, and asks what’s the matter.  And the coxswain answers quietly that he had fallen on the captain, lying there insensible.  Cloete without a word begins to grope all over the shelves for a box of matches, finds one, and strikes a light.  He sees the coxswain in his cork jacket kneeling over Captain Harry. . . Blood, says the coxswain, looking up, and the match goes out. . .

“Wait a bit, says Cloete; I’ll make paper spills. . . He had felt the back of books on the shelves.  And so he stands lighting one spill from another while the coxswain turns poor Captain Harry over.  Dead, he says.  Shot through the heart.  Here’s the revolver. . . He hands it up to Cloete, who looks at it before putting it in his pocket, and sees a plate on the butt with H. Dunbar on it. . . His own, he mutters. . . Whose else revolver did you expect to find? snaps the coxswain.  And look, he took off his long oilskin in the cabin before he went in.  But what’s this lot of burnt paper?  What could he want to burn the ship’s papers for? . . .

Cloete sees all, the little drawers drawn out, and asks the coxswain to look well into them. . . There’s nothing, says the man.  Cleaned out.  Seems to have pulled out all he could lay his hands on and set fire to the lot.  Mad—that’s what it is—went mad.  And now he’s dead.  You’ll have to break it to his wife. . .

“I feel as if I were going mad myself, says Cloete, suddenly, and the coxswain begs him for God’s sake to pull himself together, and drags him away from the cabin.  They had to leave the body, and as it was they were just in time before a furious squall came on.  Cloete is dragged into the life-boat and the coxswain tumbles in.  Haul away on the grapnel, he shouts; the captain has shot himself. . .

“Cloete was like a dead man—didn’t care for anything.  He let that Stafford pinch his arm twice without making a sign.  Most of Westport was on the old pier to see the men out of the life-boat, and at first there was a sort of confused cheery uproar when she came alongside; but after the coxswain has shouted something the voices die out, and everybody is very quiet.  As soon as Cloete has set foot on something firm he becomes himself again.  The coxswain shakes hands with him: Poor woman, poor woman, I’d rather you had the job than I. . .

“Where’s the mate?” asks Cloete.  He’s the last man who spoke to the master. . . Somebody ran along—the crew were being taken to the Mission Hall, where there was a fire and shake-downs ready for them—somebody ran along the pier and caught up with Stafford. . . Here!  The owner’s agent wants you. . . Cloete tucks the fellow’s arm under his own and walks away with him to the left, where the fishing-harbour is. . . I suppose I haven’t misunderstood you.  You wish me to look after you a bit, says he.  The other hangs on him rather limp, but gives a nasty little laugh: You had better, he mumbles; but mind, no tricks; no tricks, Mr. Cloete; we are on land now.

“There’s a police office within fifty yards from here, says Cloete.  He turns into a little public house, pushes Stafford along the passage.  The landlord runs out of the bar. . . This is the mate of the ship on the rocks, Cloete explains; I wish you would take care of him a bit to-night. . . What’s the matter with him? asks the man.  Stafford leans against the wall in the passage, looking ghastly.  And Cloete says it’s nothing—done up, of course. . . I will be responsible for the expense; I am the owner’s agent.  I’ll be round in an hour or two to see him.

And Cloete gets back to the hotel.  The news had travelled there already, and the first thing he sees is George outside the door as white as a sheet waiting for him.  Cloete just gives him a nod and they go in.  Mrs. Harry stands at the head of the stairs, and, when she sees only these two coming up, flings her arms above her head and runs into her room.  Nobody had dared tell her, but not seeing her husband was enough.  Cloete hears an awful shriek. . . Go to her, he says to George.

“While he’s alone in the private parlour Cloete drinks a glass of brandy and thinks it all out.  Then George comes in. . . The landlady’s with her, he says.  And he begins to walk up and down the room, flinging his arms about and talking, disconnected like, his face set hard as Cloete has never seen it before. . . What must be, must be.  Dead—only brother.  Well, dead—his troubles over.  But we are living, he says to Cloete; and I suppose, says he, glaring at him with hot, dry eyes, that you won’t forget to wire in the morning to your friend that we are coming in for certain. . .

“Meaning the patent-medicine fellow. . . Death is death and business is business, George goes on; and look—my hands are clean, he says, showing them to Cloete.  Cloete thinks: He’s going crazy.  He catches hold of him by the shoulders and begins to shake him: Damn you—if you had had the sense to know what to say to your brother, if you had had the spunk to speak to him at all, you moral creature you, he would be alive now, he shouts.

“At this George stares, then bursts out weeping with a great bellow.  He throws himself on the couch, buries his face in a cushion, and howls like a kid. . . That’s better, thinks Cloete, and he leaves him, telling the landlord that he must go out, as he has some little business to attend to that night.  The landlord’s wife, weeping herself, catches him on the stairs: Oh, sir, that poor lady will go out of her mind. . .

“Cloete shakes her off, thinking to himself: Oh no!  She won’t.  She will get over it.  Nobody will go mad about this affair unless I do.  It isn’t sorrow that makes people go mad, but worry.

“There Cloete was wrong.  What affected Mrs. Harry was that her husband should take his own life, with her, as it were, looking on.  She brooded over it so that in less than a year they had to put her into a Home.  She was very, very quiet; just gentle melancholy.  She lived for quite a long time.

“Well, Cloete splashes along in the wind and rain.  Nobody in the streets—all the excitement over.  The publican runs out to meet him in the passage and says to him: Not this way.  He isn’t in his room.  We couldn’t get him to go to bed nohow.  He’s in the little parlour there.  We’ve lighted him a fire. . . You have been giving him drinks too, says Cloete; I never said I would be responsible for drinks.  How many? . . . Two, says the other.  It’s all right.  I don’t mind doing that much for a shipwrecked sailor. . . Cloete smiles his funny smile: Eh?  Come.  He paid for them. . . The publican just blinks. . . Gave you gold, didn’t he?  Speak up! . . . What of that! cries the man.  What are you after, anyway?  He had the right change for his sovereign.

“Just so, says Cloete.  He walks into the parlour, and there he sees our Stafford; hair all up on end, landlord’s shirt and pants on, bare feet in slippers, sitting by the fire.  When he sees Cloete he casts his eyes down.

“You didn’t mean us ever to meet again, Mr. Cloete, Stafford says, demurely. . . That fellow, when he had the drink he wanted—he wasn’t a drunkard—would put on this sort of sly, modest air. . . But since the captain committed suicide, he says, I have been sitting here thinking it out.  All sorts of things happen.  Conspiracy to lose the ship—attempted murder—and this suicide.  For if it was not suicide, Mr. Cloete, then I know of a victim of the most cruel, cold-blooded attempt at murder; somebody who has suffered a thousand deaths.  And that makes the thousand pounds of which we spoke once a quite insignificant sum.  Look how very convenient this suicide is. . .

“He looks up at Cloete then, who smiles at him and comes quite close to the table.

“You killed Harry Dunbar, he whispers. . . The fellow glares at him and shows his teeth: Of course I did!  I had been in that cabin for an hour and a half like a rat in a trap. . . Shut up and left to drown in that wreck.  Let flesh and blood judge.  Of course I shot him!  I thought it was you, you murdering scoundrel, come back to settle me.  He opens the door flying and tumbles right down upon me; I had a revolver in my hand, and I shot him.  I was crazy.  Men have gone crazy for less.

“Cloete looks at him without flinching.  Aha!  That’s your story, is it? . . . And he shakes the table a little in his passion as he speaks. . . Now listen to mine.  What’s this conspiracy?  Who’s going to prove it?  You were there to rob.  You were rifling his cabin; he came upon you unawares with your hands in the drawer; and you shot him with his own revolver.  You killed to steal—to steal!  His brother and the clerks in the office know that he took sixty pounds with him to sea.  Sixty pounds in gold in a canvas bag.  He told me where they were.  The coxswain of the life-boat can swear to it that the drawers were all empty.  And you are such a fool that before you’re half an hour ashore you change a sovereign to pay for a drink.  Listen to me.  If you don’t turn up day after to-morrow at George Dunbar’s solicitors, to make the proper deposition as to the loss of the ship, I shall set the police on your track.  Day after to-morrow. . .

“And then what do you think?  That Stafford begins to tear his hair.  Just so.  Tugs at it with both hands without saying anything.  Cloete gives a push to the table which nearly sends the fellow off his chair, tumbling inside the fender; so that he has got to catch hold of it to save himself. . .

“You know the sort of man I am, Cloete says, fiercely.  I’ve got to a point that I don’t care what happens to me.  I would shoot you now for tuppence.

“At this the cur dodges under the table.  Then Cloete goes out, and as he turns in the street—you know, little fishermen’s cottages, all dark; raining in torrents, too—the other opens the window of the parlour and speaks in a sort of crying voice—

“You low Yankee fiend—I’ll pay you off some day.

“Cloete passes by with a damn bitter laugh, because he thinks that the fellow in a way has paid him off already, if he only knew it.”

My impressive ruffian drank what remained of his beer, while his black, sunken eyes looked at me over the rim.

“I don’t quite understand this,” I said.  “In what way?”

He unbent a little and explained without too much scorn that Captain Harry being dead, his half of the insurance money went to his wife, and her trustees of course bought consols with it.  Enough to keep her comfortable.  George Dunbar’s half, as Cloete feared from the first, did not prove sufficient to launch the medicine well; other moneyed men stepped in, and these two had to go out of that business, pretty nearly shorn of everything.

“I am curious,” I said, “to learn what the motive force of this tragic affair was—I mean the patent medicine.  Do you know?”

He named it, and I whistled respectfully.  Nothing less than Parker’s Lively Lumbago Pills.  Enormous property!  You know it; all the world knows it.  Every second man, at least, on this globe of ours has tried it.

“Why!” I cried, “they missed an immense fortune.”

“Yes,” he mumbled, “by the price of a revolver-shot.”

He told me also that eventually Cloete returned to the States, passenger in a cargo-boat from Albert Dock.  The night before he sailed he met him wandering about the quays, and took him home for a drink.  “Funny chap, Cloete.  We sat all night drinking grogs, till it was time for him to go on board.”

It was then that Cloete, unembittered but weary, told him this story, with that utterly unconscious frankness of a patent-medicine man stranger to all moral standards.  Cloete concluded by remarking that he, had “had enough of the old country.”  George Dunbar had turned on him, too, in the end.  Cloete was clearly somewhat disillusioned.

As to Stafford, he died, professed loafer, in some East End hospital or other, and on his last day clamoured “for a parson,” because his conscience worried him for killing an innocent man.  “Wanted somebody to tell him it was all right,” growled my old ruffian, contemptuously.  “He told the parson that I knew this Cloete who had tried to murder him, and so the parson (he worked among the dock labourers) once spoke to me about it.  That skunk of a fellow finding himself trapped yelled for mercy. . . Promised to be good and so on. . . Then he went crazy . . . screamed and threw himself about, beat his head against the bulkheads . . . you can guess all that—eh? . . . till he was exhausted.  Gave up.  Threw himself down, shut his eyes, and wanted to pray.  So he says.  Tried to think of some prayer for a quick death—he was that terrified.  Thought that if he had a knife or something he would cut his throat, and be done with it.  Then he thinks: No!  Would try to cut away the wood about the lock. . . He had no knife in his pocket. . . he was weeping and calling on God to send him a tool of some kind when suddenly he thinks: Axe!  In most ships there is a spare emergency axe kept in the master’s room in some locker or other. . . Up he jumps. . . Pitch dark.  Pulls at the drawers to find matches and, groping for them, the first thing he comes upon—Captain Harry’s revolver.  Loaded too.  He goes perfectly quiet all over.  Can shoot the lock to pieces.  See?  Saved!  God’s providence!  There are boxes of matches too.  Thinks he: I may just as well see what I am about.

“Strikes a light and sees the little canvas bag tucked away at the back of the drawer.  Knew at once what that was.  Rams it into his pocket quick.  Aha! says he to himself: this requires more light.  So he pitches a lot of paper on the floor, set fire to it, and starts in a hurry rummaging for more valuables.  Did you ever?  He told that East-End parson that the devil tempted him.  First God’s mercy—then devil’s work.  Turn and turn about. . .

“Any squirming skunk can talk like that.  He was so busy with the drawers that the first thing he heard was a shout, Great Heavens.  He looks up and there was the door open (Cloete had left the key in the lock) and Captain Harry holding on, well above him, very fierce in the light of the burning papers.  His eyes were starting out of his head.  Thieving, he thunders at him.  A sailor!  An officer!  No!  A wretch like you deserves no better than to be left here to drown.

“This Stafford—on his death-bed—told the parson that when he heard these words he went crazy again.  He snatched his hand with the revolver in it out of the drawer, and fired without aiming.  Captain Harry fell right in with a crash like a stone on top of the burning papers, putting the blaze out.  All dark.  Not a sound.  He listened for a bit then dropped the revolver and scrambled out on deck like mad.”

The old fellow struck the table with his ponderous fist.

“What makes me sick is to hear these silly boat-men telling people the captain committed suicide.  Pah!  Captain Harry was a man that could face his Maker any time up there, and here below, too.  He wasn’t the sort to slink out of life.  Not he!  He was a good man down to the ground.  He gave me my first job as stevedore only three days after I got married.”

As the vindication of Captain Harry from the charge of suicide seemed to be his only object, I did not thank him very effusively for his material.  And then it was not worth many thanks in any case.

For it is too startling even to think of such things happening in our respectable Channel in full view, so to speak, of the luxurious continental traffic to Switzerland and Monte Carlo.  This story to be acceptable should have been transposed to somewhere in the South Seas.  But it would have been too much trouble to cook it for the consumption of magazine readers.  So here it is raw, so to speak—just as it was told to me—but unfortunately robbed of the striking effect of the narrator; the most imposing old ruffian that ever followed the unromantic trade of master stevedore in the port of London.

Oct. 1910.