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Bye-Ways

by Robert Hichens · English · Gutenberg #33040 · 446,315 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Bye-Ways

Author: Robert Hichens


        
Release date: July 1, 2010 [eBook #33040]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33040

Credits: E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, S. D., and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BYE-WAYS ***


E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, S. D., and the Project Gutenberg Online
Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



BYE-WAYS

by

ROBERT HICHENS

Author of "The Garden of Allah,"
"Bella Donna," etc.







New York
Dodd, Mead and Company
1914

Copyright, 1897,
By Dodd, Mead and Company.




CONTENTS


                                                           PAGE

  THE CHARMER OF SNAKES                                       3

  A TRIBUTE OF SOULS

    Prelude                                                  89

      I. The Stranger by the Burn                            90

     II. The Soul of Dr Wedderburn                          111

    III. The Soul of Kate Walters                           131

     IV. The Soul of Hugh Fraser                            142

      V. The Return of the Grey Traveller                   159
         Written in conjunction with
         Lord Frederick Hamilton.

  AN ECHO IN EGYPT                                          171

  THE FACE OF THE MONK                                      211

  THE MAN WHO INTERVENED                                    237

  AFTER TO-MORROW                                           267

  A SILENT GUARDIAN                                         287

  A BOUDOIR BOY                                             319

  THE TEE-TO-TUM                                            343




BYE-WAYS




THE CHARMER OF SNAKES


I

The petulant whining of the jackals prevented Renfrew from sleeping. At
first he lay still on his camp bed, staring at the orifice of the bell
tent, which was only partially covered by the canvas flap let down by
Mohammed, after he had bidden his master good-night. Behind the tent the
fettered mules stamped on the rough, dry ground, and now and then the
heavy rustling of a wild boar could be heard, as it shuffled through the
scrub towards the water that lay in the hollow beyond the camp. The
wayward songs of the Moorish attendants had died into silence. They
slept, huddled together and shrouded in their djelabes. But their
wailing rapture of those old triumphant days when on the heights above
Granada, beneath the eternal snows, their brethren walked as conquerors,
had been succeeded by the cries of the uneasy beasts that throng the
mountains between Tangier and Tetuan. And Renfrew said to himself that
the jackals kept him from sleeping. He lay still and wondered if Claire
were awake in her tent close by. If so, if her dark eyes were unclouded,
what journeys must her imagination be making! She was so sensitive to
sound of any kind. A cry moved her sometimes with a swift violence that
alarmed those around her. The message of a note of music shut one door
on her soul, opened another, and let her in to strange regions in which
she chose to be lonely.

How amazing it was to think that Claire, with all her serpentine beauty,
all her celebrity, all the legends that clung to her fame, all the wild
caprices of which two worlds had talked for years,--that Claire was
hidden away three feet off, beneath the canvas shield that looked like a
moderate-sized mushroom from the Kasbar on the hill. How amazing to
think she was no longer Claire Duvigne, but Claire Renfrew. Her cheated
audiences sighed in London in which a week ago she was acting. And while
they sighed, she slept in this wild valley of Morocco, or lay awake and
heard the jackals whining among the dwarf palms. And she was his. She
belonged to him. He had the right to hold her--this thin, pale wonder of
night and of fame--in his arms, and to kiss the lips from which came at
will the coo of a dove or the snarl of a tigress. Although Renfrew could
not sleep, he fell into a dream. Indeed, ever since he had married
Claire, a week ago, his life had been a dream. When the goddess suddenly
bends down to the worshipper, and says: "Don't pray to me any more--sit
on my throne by my side!"--the worshipper exchanges one form of devotion
for another, so deep and so different that for a while his ordinary
faculties seem frozen, his life goes in shadowy places. Renfrew was not
a man of deep imagination, but he had enough of the dangerous and dear
quality to make him full of interest in Claire's bonfires of the mind.
He sunned himself in the sparks which flew from her, even as the
phlegmatic man in the pit bathes in the fury of some queen of the stage.
He adored partly because he scarcely understood.

And then, at this moment, he was in the throes of a most unexpected
honeymoon. Claire, after refusing to have anything to do with him for
two years or more, had suddenly married him in such a hurry that, though
London gasped, Renfrew gasped still more. She had sent for him one
night, from her dressing-room, between the third act and the fourth of
an angry drama of passion. He came in and found her sitting in an
arm-chair by a table, on which lay a note containing his last proposal,
and a dagger with which she was about to commit a stage murder that had
carried her glory to the four quarters of the universe. Her face was
covered with powder, and in her long white dress she looked like a
phantom. As she spoke to him, she ran her thin fingers mechanically up
and down the blade of the dagger. When Renfrew was in the room, and the
door shut, she looked up at him and said:--

"Desmond, I'm going to frighten you more than I shall frighten the
audience out there."

And she pointed towards the hidden stage.

"How?" he said, looking at her hand and at the dagger.

"I'm going to marry you."

Renfrew turned paler than she was.

"Ah!" she cried. "You go white?"

"No, no," he murmured. "But--but I can't believe it."

"I will marry you when you like, to-morrow, whenever you can get a
licence."

"Oh, Claire!"

Suddenly she got up.

"Take me away from here," she said. "From this heat and noise. Take me
to some place where it is wild and desolate. I want to be in starlight,
with people who know nothing of me, and my trumpery talent. O God,
Desmond, you don't know how a woman can get to hate being famous! I
should like to act to-night to a circle of savages who had never heard
of me and of my glory."

"Curtain's up!" sang a shrill voice outside.

Claire picked up the dagger.

"Well?" she said. "Shall it be--?"

"Ah, yes--yes!" Renfrew answered in a choked voice.

She smiled and glided out, like a white snake, he thought.

And now--yes, those were really jackals whining, and Claire slept,
surrounded by a circle of Moors under the stars of Morocco.

Renfrew trembled at the astounding surprises of life. Now the devil of
the night--thought--had filled his veins with fever. He got up softly,
drew on his clothes, unfastened the canvas flap, and emerged, like a
shadow, from the mouth of the tent. The night was dewy and cool. All the
heaven was full of eyes. The line of tethered mules looked like a black
hedge in whose shelter the group of tents was pitched. A low fire, held
in a cup of earth, was dying down in the distance, and as Renfrew came
out a lanky dog slunk off among the bushes that clothed the low hills on
every side.

Renfrew stood quite still. He was bare-headed, and the breeze caught at
his thick brown hair, and seemed to tug it like a rough child at play
with a kindly elder. His eyes were turned towards the tiny peaked tent
which shrouded Claire. A small moon half way up the sky sent out a beam
which faintly illuminated this home of a wanderer, and Renfrew thought
the beam was like a silver finger pointing at this wonderful creature
whom glory had so long attended. Such beings must walk in light. Nature
herself protests against their endeavours to shroud themselves even for
a moment in darkness. He drew close to the tent, and listened for
Claire's low breathing. But he could not hear it. Perhaps she was awake
then.

"Claire!" he called, in a low voice.

There was no answer. Renfrew hesitated and glanced round the little
camp. It was just then that he noticed the absence of two figures which
had been standing like statues near his tent when he went to bed. These
were soldiers sent from the nearest village to guard the camp from
marauders during the night. Clad in earth-coloured rags, shrouded in
loose robes that looked like musty dressing-gowns, with fez on head, and
musket in hand, they had seemed devoutly intent on doing their duty
then. But now--where were they? Renfrew strolled among the tents,
expecting to find them squatting near the fire smoking cigarettes, or
playing some Spanish game of cards. But they had vanished. He returned,
and posted himself again by the door of Claire's rude bed-room, saying
to himself that he would be her guard. Those Moorish vagabonds had
deserted her. They cared nothing for the safety of this jewel, whom the
whole civilised world cherished. But in his heart glowed a passion of
protection for her. And then he gazed again at the impenetrable canvas
wall that divided him from her. Only two hours ago he had held her in
his arms and kissed her lips, yet already he felt as if a river of years
flowed between them. He began to torture himself deliberately, as lovers
will, by the imagination of non-existent evils. Suppose Claire
possessed the power of a fairy, and could evaporate at will into the
spaces of the air, leaving no trace behind. She might then have
departed, have faded into the scented silence and darkness of this land
so strange and desolate. Renfrew supposed the departure an actual fact.
What a loneliness would fill his night then; if that little tent stood
empty, if that slim sleeper were removed from the camp round which the
jackals sat on their tiny haunches, whining like peevish spirits. He
trembled beneath the weight of this absurd supposition, revelling in the
intolerable with the folly of worship. Gradually he forced himself on
step by step along the fanciful path till he had assured his imagination
that Claire was really gone, and that he was just such a travelling
Englishman as may come alone across the Straits, take out a camp, and
spend his days in stalking wild boar, or shooting duck, his nights in
the heavy slumber of complete weariness. And, at length, having gained a
ghastly summit of imaginative despair, he suddenly stretched forth his
hand, unhooked the canvas that shrouded Claire's tent door, and peeped
cautiously in, courting the delicious revulsion of feeling which he
would secure when he saw her half defined form in the shadow of the
leaning roof that hid her from the stars.

He bent forward with greedy anxiety. But the pale and tragic face he
looked for, did not greet his eyes. The tent was empty.

Renfrew stood for a moment holding back the canvas flap with one hand.
This denial calmly offered to his expectation bewildered him. He was
confused, and for a moment scarcely thought at all. Then his mind broke
away with the violence of a dog unleashed, and ran a wild course of
surmises. He thought first of rousing the camp and organising an
immediate search. Then he remembered the absence of the two soldiers who
ought to be guarding the tents and the mules. Claire gone, those
soldiers absent! He linked the two facts together, and turned white and
sick. But he did not rouse the camp. Indeed, he thanked God that all the
men were sleeping. He sprang softly back from the tent, turned on his
heel, and stole out of the camp so silently that he scarcely seemed a
living thing. The ground towards the water was boggy and spongy, and the
scent of the thickly growing myrtles was heavy in the air. Renfrew
brushed through them swiftly. He heard the harsh snuffling of a boar,
and the tread of its feet in the mud at the water-side. And these sounds
filled the night with a sense of unknown dangers. Darkness, a wild
country, wild men, wild beasts, and his beautiful Claire out somewhere
alone, near him, perhaps, yet hidden behind the impenetrable veil of
darkness. He saw her fainting, struggling, crying out for him. He saw
her silent and dead, and frenzy seized him. She was not here by the
water. And with a gesture of despair he turned back. Low and rounded
hills faced him on all sides, covered with a dense undergrowth of palms
and close-growing shrubs that looked almost like black velvet in the
night. On one, the highest, was perched the native village from which
the soldiers had come. Dogs were barking in it incessantly. It seemed to
Renfrew that Claire might have been conveyed there by these ruffians;
and he began hastily to ascend in the direction of the dogs' acute
voices. He stumbled among the palms at first; but, mounting higher, he
came into the eye of the moon, and was swallowed up in a shrouded silver
radiance. The camp faded away below him, and he felt the breeze with
greater force. Yet its breath was warm. Could Claire feel it? Did she
see the moon? Now the dogs were evidently close by. The village must be
behind that big clump of trees. Renfrew sprang upward, passed through
them, suddenly drew a great breath and stood still.

Beyond the trees there was a small clearing that almost corresponded to
our English notion of a village green. On the near side of it was the
clump of trees in whose shadow Renfrew now stood. On the far side of it
was the Moorish village, a minute collection of low huts like hovels,
featureless and filthy. The moon streamed over the clearing and lit up
faintly a cluster of seated figures that formed a good-sized circle. The
figures looked broad and almost shapeless, for they were all smothered
in long, voluminous robes, and over all the heads great hoods were drawn
which hid the faces of the wearers. They were absolutely motionless, and
differed little from the more distant clumps of dwarf palms that grew
everywhere among the huts. Only they possessed the curiously sullen
aspect of things alive but entirely motionless. It was not this living
Stonehenge of Morocco, however, which caused Renfrew to catch his breath
and rooted him in the shadow. In the centre of the circle, lit up by the
moon, there stood something that might have been a phantom, it was so
thin, so tall, so white-faced, so strange in its movements. It was a
woman, and long black hair flowed down to its waist,--night standing
back from that moon, vague and spectral, the face. In this human night
and moon, great sombre eyes gleamed with a sort of fatigued beauty. This
spectre stretched out its long arms in weird gesticulations and
sometimes swayed its body as if it moved to music. And from its lips
came a soft and liquid stream of golden words that mingled with the acid
barking of the dogs, some of which crept furtively about on the
outskirts of the serene hooded circle of the listeners. This murmuring
spectre was Claire. She was girt about with silently staring Moors. And
she was in the act of delivering one of her most famous recitations,
which she had last given at a monster morning performance before
Royalties in London, on a sultry day of the season. As this fact broke
upon Renfrew's mind, he seemed for a moment to be back in the hot
dressing-room in which Claire had said: "I will marry you." He seemed to
hear her passionate exclamation: "I should like to act to-night to a
circle of savages!" The hill men of this part of Morocco may not be
savages, but they are fierce and wild and ruthless. And now they hung
upon the lips that had spoken to London, Paris, Vienna, New York--but
never before to such an audience as this. The recitation was a
description of the performance of a snake-charmer, his harangue to his
reptiles and to the crowd watching him, and his departure into the
solitude of the great desert, there to obtain, in communion with its
spirit, the power to work greater miracles, and to charm not alone the
serpents that dwell among the rocks and in the forests, but also men,
women, little children,--the power to thrust a human world into a kennel
of plaited straw, to take it out in sections at pleasure, and to make it
dance, pose, and posture, like a viper tamed into a species of
ballet-dancer. In this recitation the peculiar and almost serpentine
fascination of Claire had full liberty. She represented the
snake-charmer as a being who through long and intimate association with
snakes had become like them, lithe, fantastic, and unexpected, soft and
deadly, by turns sleepy and violent, a coil of glistening velvet and a
length of cast-iron, tipped with a poisoned fang and the music of a
hiss. His fanaticism, his greed for money, the passionate prayer to Sidi
Mahomet that flowed from his lips while his terrible eyes searched an
imaginary crowd in search of the richest man or the most excited woman
in it, his bursts of dancing humour, his deadly stillness, his playful
familiarity with his dangerous captives, his mesmeric anger when they
were sullen and recalcitrant, his relapse into the savage churchwarden
with the collecting box when his "show" was at an end,--every side,
every subtlety of such a creature Claire could give with the certainty
of genius. As you watched her, you beheld the snakes, you beheld their
master. Even at the end you almost saw the vast and trackless desert
open its haggard arms to receive its child, who passed from the crowd to
the silence in which alone he could learn to fascinate the crowd. At the
great morning performance in London, a prince who knew the East had said
to Claire, "Miss Duvigne, you must have lived with snake-charmers. You
must have studied them for months."

"I never saw one in my life," she answered truthfully.

And now she gave her performance to those who, in the dingy market
squares of their white-walled cities, had seen the snakes dance and had
heard the prayer to Sidi Mahomet. And they squatted in the moonbeams,
immobile as goblins carved in dusky oak. Yet they inspired Claire. From
his hiding place Renfrew could note this. She had let her genius loose
upon them, as she had let her cloud of hair loose upon her shoulders.
The frosty touch of smart conventionality bewilders and half paralyses
the utterly unconventional. Often Renfrew had heard Claire curse the
smiling and self-contented Londoners who thronged the stalls of her
theatre. She felt, with the swiftness of genius, the retarding hand they
laid upon her winged talents. She had no inclination to curse these
hooded figures gathered round her in the night, staring upon her with
the fixed concentration of children who behold, rather than hear, a
fairy tale, they paid her the fine compliment of an undivided attention.
It was a curious scene and one that stirred in Renfrew a deep
excitement. He watched it with a double sense, of living keenly and of
dreaming deeply. Claire gave to him the first sense, the moon and the
motionless Moors the second. But presently one of the hooded statues
stirred and swayed, and there mingled with the voice of Claire a twisted
melody, so thin and wandering that it was like a thread binding a bundle
of gold. It pierced the night, and enclosed the words of the reciter,
one sound prisoned by another lighter and less than itself. The dogs had
ceased to bark now, and only the voice that told of the snake-charmer's
journey into the desert, and this whispering Moorish tune, plucked by
dark fingers from the strings of a rough lute, moved in the night, till
Claire ceased. The lute continued for a few bars, like the symphony that
closes a song, and then it too ceased abruptly on a note that brought no
feeling of finale to modern ears. For an instant Claire stood motionless
in the centre of the human circle. Then her arms fell to her sides. She
moved swiftly towards the trees in whose shadow Renfrew was watching.
The Moors made a gap, and as she passed out all the shapeless figures
were suddenly elongated and crowded together upon her footsteps. As
Claire came into the blackness of the trees, Renfrew stretched out his
hand and clasped her arm. She stopped with no tremor, and faced him.

"Claire!"

"What, it is you, Desmond! I thought you were asleep."

"When you were awake? You have given me a fright. I came to your tent; I
found it empty. The soldiers were gone."

"They were guarding me up the hill. I could not sleep. I wandered out.
How hot your hand is!"

Renfrew released her. All the Moors had gathered round them like
enormous shadows.

"My audience has come to the stage door!" Claire said.

Her eyes were gleaming with excitement.

"They are a beautiful audience," she added; "and the orchestra, the
soft music--that was better than London fiddles."

"Come back to the camp, Claire."

"Very well."

He drew her arm through his, and led her out into the moonlight and down
the hill. Two shadows detached themselves from the silent assembly and
followed them, barefooted, over the dewy grass. They were the soldiers.
Claire looked back and saw them.

"I shall give those men a handful of pesetas, to-morrow," she said.

They reached the camp and sat down on two folding chairs in the shadow
of Claire's tent. The soldiers stood near, gazing intently at them.
Claire sat in a curved attitude. She had drawn a dark veil over her
hair, and her enormous and tragic eyes were turned sombrely on Renfrew.
She looked fatigued, as she often did after acting a long and passionate
part. To Renfrew she seemed more wonderful than ever. He could scarcely
believe that he was her husband.

"You have had your circle of savages," he said.

"Yes."

"And you liked them?"

"Do you think they liked me? I wonder if there was a snake-charmer among
them. When I came to Sidi Mahomet I thought perhaps they would kill me.
That thought made me pray better than I can in London."

"You could charm snakes more certainly than any Arab," Renfrew said.

"I daresay. Perhaps I shall try at Tetuan. Good-night, Desmond."

She vanished into the tent. It seemed that she evaporated as Sarah
Bernhardt evaporates in the fourth act of "La Tosca."


II

On the following day they rode across the mountain to Tetuan. They
started in the dawn. Claire's eyes were heavy. She came languidly out
from the tent door to mount her horse, and when she touched Renfrew he
felt that her hand was cold like an icicle. He looked at her anxiously.

"Are you ill?" he asked.

"No, Desmond."

He lifted her into the saddle.

"You haven't slept," he said.

She looked down at him as she slowly gathered up her reins.

"Unfortunately, I have," she replied.

Before Renfrew had time to express surprise at this unexpected
rejoinder, she had struck her horse with the whip, and trotted off over
the grass in the direction of the white Kasbar that gleamed on the hill
under the kiss of the rising sun. He leaped into the saddle, and
followed her. The path into which they came was narrow, winding through
wild fig-trees and olives, and constantly ascending. Claire did not turn
her head, and Renfrew could not ride by her side. He watched her thin
and sinuous figure swaying slightly in obedience to the motion of her
horse, which scrambled over the rough path with the activity of a wild
cat. In front of her their personal attendant, Mohammed, rode on a huge
grey mule, and sang to himself incessantly in a deep and murmuring
voice. Once or twice Renfrew spoke to Claire, but she did not seem to
hear him. He resolved to ask about her sleep when they gained some
plateau on which they could rest for a moment. At present it was
necessary to concentrate his attention on his horse and on the dangers
of the road.

When the sun was high in the heavens, and they were high on the
mountain, above a gorge in which the scrub grew densely, and great
bushes starred with yellow and white flowers hid the rocks and made a
home for birds, Mohammed called a halt. Renfrew lifted Claire to the
ground. The men passed on towards Tetuan with their camp, and Claire
sank down on a gay rug beneath the shade of a huge white umbrella, which
was pitched on a square of level ground and circled with luxuriant
vegetation. Renfrew lay at her feet and lit his pipe, while Mohammed,
the dragoman, and one of the porters squatted at a little distance, and
began to play cards in a cloud of keef. Claire was fanning herself
slowly with an enormous Spanish fan in which all gay colours met. She
still looked very tired. The shuffle of the descending mules died away
down the mountain, and a silence, through which the butterflies flitted,
fell round them.

"Is this journey too much for you, Claire?" Renfrew asked.

"No. I can rehearse for six hours in London, surely I can ride for six
here."

"But you look tired."

"Because, as I told you, I slept too much last night."

"What does that mean?"

She stretched herself on the rug with the easy grace of a woman who has
trained her body to carry to the eyes of others, as a message, all the
moods of passion and of peace. Then she leaned her cheek on her hand.

"In the darkness of the tent, Desmond, I slept and did not know it. I
believed that I lay awake. I thought I still could hear the jackals, and
the stamping of the mules. But, really, I slept."

"How do you know that?"

"Because of what I am going to tell you. The wind blew about the canvas
door, and when it bulged outwards I could see on each side of it a tiny
section of the night outside, a bit of a bush, blades of short grass
moving, a ray of the moon, the slinking shadow of one of the dogs from
the village."

"Yes."

"Presently there came, I thought, a stronger gust than usual. It tore
the canvas flap from the pegs, and the whole thing blew up, leaving the
entrance quite open. Then it blew down again. It was only up for a
minute. During that minute I had seen that a very tall man was standing
outside the tent."

"One of the soldiers."

"If I had been awake it might have been."

"You mean that all this was a dream?"

"I mean that I slept last night, and that I wish I hadn't."

She turned her great eyes on Renfrew, holding the red, green, and yellow
fan so that it concealed the lower part of her face. And he looked at
her, staring at him like some tragic stranger above the rampart of an
unknown city, and wondered whether she was acting to him in the sun. On
the forefinger of the hand that held up the fan a huge black pearl
perched in a circle of gold. Renfrew had often noticed it on the stage,
when Claire lifted the silver dagger to kill the man who loved her in
the play.

"The door of your tent was securely closed when I got up and came out
this morning," he said.

"Oh, yes."

She spoke with the utmost indifference. Then she added more sharply:--

"Desmond, has it ever occurred to you that I am serpentine?"

He was startled and made no answer.

"Well--has it?"

"Yes," he said truthfully.

"Why?"

"Every one thinks so. You are so thin. You move so silently. Your body
is so elastic and controlled. You always look as if you could glide into
places where other women could never go, and be at home in attitudes
they could never assume."

"But I'm an actress--my body is trained, you know, to lie, to fall, as I
choose."

"Other actresses don't give one the same impression."

"No," she said thoughtfully. "My peculiar physique has a great deal to
do with it."

"Of course, and there's something more than that, something mental."

Claire's heavy eyes grew more thoughtful. The white lids fluttered lower
over them till they looked like the eyes of one half asleep. She lay in
silence, plunged in a reverie that was deep and dark. In this reverie
she forgot to move her fan, which dropped from her hand and fell softly
upon the rug. Renfrew did not interrupt her. His worship had learned to
wait upon her moods. A huge dragon-fly passed on its journey towards the
far blue range of the Atlas Mountains. It whirred in its haste, and its
burnished body shone in the sunshine between its gleaming wings. Claire
snatched at it with her hand, but missed it.

"I should like to wear it as a jewel," she said.

Then she turned slowly again towards Renfrew, and continued her nocturne
as if it had never been broken off.

"The canvas flap fell down again over the doorway, Desmond, and it
seemed that just then the breeze died away, expiring in that angry gust.
I could not see anything but the interior of the tent, and only that
very dimly. But this man outside. I wanted to see him."

"Did you recognise that he was not one of the soldiers, then?"

"Perfectly. He was not dressed as they are. They were entirely muffled
up with hoods drawn forward above their faces. And in their hands one
could see their guns. This man was bareheaded, and looked half naked.
And in his hands--"

She stopped meditatively.

"Was there anything in his hands?"

"Well--yes, there was."

"What?"

"I wanted to know what it was. But at first I only lay quite still and
wished the wind would come again and blow the flap up so that I could
see out. But it had quite gone down. The canvas did not even quiver."

"Was it near dawn?"

"I haven't an idea. Does the breeze sink then?"

"Very often."

"Ah! Perhaps it was then. Oh, but you'll see in a minute what nonsense
it is to think about that. I lay still, as I said, for some time,
waiting for the breeze. And when it wouldn't come, I made up my mind
that I must arrive at a decision either to turn my face on the pillow
and go to sleep, or else to get up, go to the tent door, and look out."

"To see this man?"

"Exactly."

"Which did you do?"

"Turned my face on the pillow."

"And went off to sleep?"

"No, grew most intensely awake--as I supposed. The pillow was like fire
against my cheek. It burnt me. With the departure of the breeze the
night had become suddenly most intolerably hot. I turned over on my back
and lay like that. Then I felt as if there was sand on the sheets."

"Sand! Impossible! We aren't in the desert."

"No. But it seemed as if I lay in hot sand. I shifted my position, but
it made no difference. I sat up. The tent door was still closed. I
listened. All those dogs had ceased to bark. There wasn't a sound. Even
the jackals had left off whining. Then I slipped out of bed and threw
that rose-coloured Moorish cloak over me. It rustled just like a thing
rustles in grass, Desmond."

She looked at him with a sort of peculiar significance, and as if she
expected him to gather something definite from the remark.

"A thing in grass," he repeated, wondering. "What sort of thing?"

But Claire avoided the question. She had taken up the fan again, and was
opening and shutting it with a quiet and careful sort of precision, as
she went on in a low and even voice:--

"I disliked this rustling, and held the cloak tightly together with my
hands. I felt as if the man outside the tent had been waiting to hear
that very little noise."

"The rustling?"

"Yes. And that when he heard it he smiled to himself. I didn't intend he
should hear it again though, and as I glided towards the tent door, I
held the cloak very tight and away from my body. And I don't think I can
have made any noise. You know how softly I can move when I choose?"

"Yes."

"When I got to the door, I waited. I couldn't hear the man; but I felt
that he was still there, just on the other side of the flap."

Renfrew leaned forward on the rug. He felt deeply interested, perhaps
only because Claire was the narrator. She held him much as she could
hold an audience in a theatre, by her pose, her hands, her pale, almost
weary face, her heavy sombre eyes, even more than by any words she
chanced to be uttering. She could make anything seem vitally important
if she chose, simply by her manner. Renfrew's pipe had gone out; but he
did not know it, and still kept it between his lips.

"I waited for some time by the flap," Claire continued calmly. "I was
going to lift it presently, I knew; but I could not do it at once. The
man and I were standing, I suppose, for full five minutes only divided
by that strip of canvas. I tried not to breathe audibly, and I could not
hear him breathe. At last I resolved to see him, and considered how I
should do so. If I remained standing and looked out, I should have to
push the flap quite away and my eyes would be nearly on a level with
his. He would certainly see me. I didn't wish that. I didn't intend at
all that he should see me. Therefore I resolved to lie down."

"On the ground?"

"Yes, quite flat, and to raise the bottom of the flap gently an inch or
two. This would enable me to see him without being seen, if I did it
without noise. I dropped down quite softly. Do you remember my death in
'Camille'?"

Renfrew nodded.

"Almost like that. But the rose-coloured stuff rustled again. I wished I
hadn't put it on. I raised the flap very slightly and peeped out. Do
you know what I felt like just then, Desmond?"

"What?"

"Just like a snake in ambush. When my cloak rustled, it was the grass
against my body. I lay in cover, and could see my enemy like a creature
in a forest, or a reptile in scrub."

She glanced round at the bushes and the densely growing palms.

"Yes, I lay there like a snake in the grass."

She stretched herself out on the rug as she spoke, with her head towards
Renfrew and her eyes fastened on his.

"I saw first the feet of the man close to my eyes. His feet were almost
black and bare. His legs were bare. My glance travelled up him, and I
saw that his chest and his arms were bare too. He was clothed in a sort
of loose rough garment, the colour of sacking, that fell into a kind of
hood behind; and he looked enormously powerful. That struck me very
much--his power."

"Did you see his face?"

"Quite well. It was the face of a man watching and listening with the
closest attention. He was smiling slightly, too, as if something that
had just happened had satisfied him. I knew he had heard the rustle of
my robe as I slipped to the ground."

"But why should that please him?"

"It told him that I was there, that I was attentive too."

Renfrew's face slightly darkened.

"As I looked, I saw what he was holding in his hands."

"What was it--a dagger--a staff?"

"A serpent."

Renfrew could not repress an exclamation.

"Very large and striped. Its skin was like shot silk in the moonlight.
It writhed softly between his hands, and turned its flat head from side
to side. It seemed to be trying to bend down towards where I lay. Its
tongue shot out like a length of riband out of one of those wooden
winders that you buy in cheap shops. I should think its body was quite
five feet long, and its colour seemed to change as it turned about.
Sometimes it was pink, then it looked dull green and almost black. Once
it wriggled down so near to the ground that I could see two fangs in its
open mouth like hooks, and the roof of its mouth was flesh colour."

"How abominable!" said Renfrew, softly.

"I didn't feel it so at all," Claire said. "I wanted it to come to
me,--back into the grass where such things are safe. But the man
wouldn't let it go. He thrust it into his breast. He wanted to have his
hands free."

"Good God, Claire--what for? Did he--?"

She smiled at his sudden violence, which showed his interest.

"When the snake was safe, he drew out, still smiling and listening, a
little pipe that looked as if it were made of straw, very common and
dirty. He held it up to his black lips, and began to play very softly
and sleepily. Desmond, the tune he played was charmed. It was a tune
composed--for--for--"

She broke off.

"You know the Pied Piper had his tune," she said; "the rats had to
follow it. Well, this tune was for the serpents."

"To charm them you mean?"

"Wisely--dangerously--almost irresistibly, perhaps in time, Desmond,
quite, quite irresistibly. There is a music for all creatures, all
reptiles, birds,--everything that lives; this was for the snakes."

"Well, but, Claire, how did you know that?"

She looked at him with a sort of dull amusement and pity in her
half-shut eyes.

"Shall I tell you?"

"Yes."

"I knew it, because the tune charmed me, Desmond."

"Ah, you are acting! I half suspected it from the first," Renfrew
exclaimed almost roughly.

He sat up as a man who has been lying under a spell stirs when the spell
is broken. Now he knew that his pipe was out, and he felt for his
match-box. But Claire still kept her eyes fixed on him, and laid her
hand on his arm gently.

"No, I am not acting," she said. "The tune charmed me. You see I am a
woman; and there are many women who feel at moments that what attracts
some special creature, thing, of the so-called world without a soul,
attracts them too. Some men can whistle a woman as they would a dog,
can't they?"

"Perhaps."

"Yes, and some men can charm a woman as they could charm a serpent."

"I don't understand you, Claire."

"You don't choose to. The animal is in us all, hidden deftly by Nature,
the artful dodger of the scheme of creation, Desmond; and we know it
when the right tune is played to summon it from its slumber in the nest
of the human body. Only the right tune can waken it."

"The animal! But--"

"Or the reptile, perhaps. What does it matter? This was the right tune
for me. I lay there like a snake in the grass and it thrilled me! And
all the time the black man smiled and listened for the rustling at his
feet. You look black, Desmond! How absurd of you to be angry!"

And she closed her fingers over his hand till the frown died out of his
face.

"The tune seemed to draw me to the man. I understood just how he had
captured the serpent that lay hidden in his bosom. It had once lain in
ambush as I lay now, long ago perhaps, in the desert among the rocks, on
the sand, Desmond."

"Ah, the sand!" he said, remembering suddenly the strange feeling
Claire had described as coming upon her when she was trying to sleep.

"Yes. And he had drawn it from the sand to the oasis among the palms
where he stood playing, till he heard its rustling in the grass about
his feet, as it glided nearer to him, and nearer, and nearer, till at
last it reared up its body, and wound up him and round him, and laid its
flat head between his great hands. Yes, that was how it came."

"You fancy."

"I know. But I would not go. I determined that I would not, and I lay
perfectly still. But all the time I longed to go. I had an almost
irresistible passion for movement towards that tune. It seemed to me a
stream of music into which I yearned to plunge, and drown and die. And
it flowed up there at the man's lips! The longing increased as he piped
the tune, over and over and over again, almost under his breath. I was
sick with it, and it hurt me because I resisted it. And at last I knew
that resisting it would kill me. I must either go, or not go, and die.
There was no alternative. That music simply claimed me. It had the right
to. And if I denied that right I should cease. I did deny it."

She shuddered in the sun, then added, almost harshly:--

"Like a fool."

"And then, Claire, then--?"

"It seemed to me that I died in most horrible pain. I lived once more
when you said, outside my tent, 'Claire, time to get up.' You see, I
slept too much last night."

And again she shuddered. A look of relief shot into Renfrew's face.

"All this came from your mad performance to those Moors," he said. "You
impersonate so vividly that even sleep cannot release your genius, and
bring it out from the world which you have deliberately forced it to
enter."

"But, Desmond, I impersonated the charmer of the snake, not the snake
itself."

"Oh, in a dream the mind always wanders a little from the event that has
caused the dream. It is like a faulty mimic who strives to reproduce
with exactitude and slightly fails. Time to go, Absalem?"

The dragoman had come up.

As they rode down the mountain a strange thing occurred, strange at
least in connection with Claire's narrative of the night. Mohammed, who
was riding just in front of them, pulled up his mule beside a thicket at
the wayside, and, turning his head, signed to them to be silent. Then,
pursing his lips, he whistled a shrill little tune. In a moment an
answer came from the thicket; Claire glanced at Renfrew with a slight
smile. Here was a sort of side light of reality thrown upon her dream
and upon their conversation. Mohammed whistled again. The echo followed.
And then suddenly a bird flew out, almost into his face, and, startled,
swerved and darted away across the gorge into the dense woods beyond.

"A charm of birds," Claire murmured to Renfrew, as they rode on. "The
summoning tune--what can resist it?"

"Claire," he said, almost reproachfully, "you speak like a fatalist."

"And I believe I am one," she answered. "Destiny is not only a phantom
but also a fact. Mine is marked out for me and known--"

"To whom? Not to yourself?"

"Oh, no!"

"To whom then?"

"To the hidden force that directs all things."

"I am your destiny."

"Ah, Desmond--or Morocco. I feel to-day as if I shall never see England
again, or a civilised audience such as I have known."

And then she seemed to fall into a waking dream. Even Renfrew felt
drowsy, the air was so intensely hot and the motion of the horses so
monotonous. And Mohammed's deep voice was never silent. It buzzed like a
bourdon in the glare of the noontide, till, far away on the hill-side,
they saw white Tetuan facing the plain, the river moving stagnantly
towards the sea, the great fields of corn in which strange flowers grew,
and the giant range of shaggy mountains, swimming in a mist of gold that
looked like spangled tissue.


III

The camp was pitched beyond the city in the green plain that lies
between Tetuan and the sea. From the tents Renfrew and Claire saw the
trains of camels and donkeys passing slowly along the high road towards
the steep and stony hill that leads up to the lower city gate, the
white-washed summer palaces of the wealthy Moors, nestling in gardens,
among green fields and groves of acacias, olives and almond trees, the
far-off line of blue water on the one hand and the fairy-like and ivory
town upon the other. Clouds of brown dust flew up in the air, and the
hoarse cry of "Balak! Balak!" made a perpetual and distant music. Far
more strange and barbarous was this city than Tangier. All traces of
Europe had faded away. Thousands of years seemed now to stand like a
wall between the Continents, and the hordes of dark and fanatical
Moslems gazed upon the great actress and her husband as we gaze at wild
animals whose aspects and whose habits are strange to us.

"I know now what it is to feel like an unclean dog," Claire said, as
they sat at dinner under the stars that night, after their halting
progress through the filthy alleys of the white fairyland on the
hill-side. "It is a grand sensation. I suppose children enjoy it, too.
That must be why they like making mud-pies."

"To-morrow is market-day, Absalem tells me," Renfrew said. "We will
spend it in the town, and you can feel unclean to your heart's
content--you!"

He looked at her and laughed low, with the pride of a lover in a
beautiful woman who is his own.

"They ought to fall down and worship you," he said.

"Moors worship a woman! Desmond, you are mad!"

"No, they are--they are. See, Claire, the moon is coming up already. Can
it be shining on Piccadilly too, and on the facade of the theatre?"

"The theatre! I can't believe I shall ever see it again."

"Nonsense!"

"Is it? This wild country seems to have swallowed me up, and I don't
feel as if it will ever disgorge me again. Desmond, perhaps there are
some lands that certain people ought never to visit. For those lands
love them, and, once they have seized their prey, they will never yield
it up again. Poor men must often feel that when they are dying in
foreign places. It is the land which has taken them to itself as an
octopus takes a drifting boat in a lonely sea. Africa!"

She had risen from her seat and moved out into the vague plain. Renfrew
followed her.

"I wonder in which direction the desert lies nearest," she said. "All
the strange people come in from the desert, as the strange things of
life come in from the future, only one so seldom hears the tinkling
bells of those deadly silent caravans in which they travel. If we could
hear and see them coming, what emotions we should have!"

"There are premonitions, some men say," Renfrew answered.

"The faint bells of the caravans ringing,--do you ever hear them?"

"No, Claire--never. And you?"

"I half thought I did once."

"When was that?"

"Last night. Hark! The men have finished supper and are beginning to
sing. That's a song about dancing."

"To-morrow we are going to feast the soldiers, and have an African
fire."

"Splendid! I think I will leap through the flames."

Renfrew put his arm round her.

"No, no. They might singe your beauty. And yet, you are a flame too. You
have burnt your name, yourself, like a brand upon my heart."

The dancing song rang up in the moonlight like the wailing of dead
masqueraders. All Moorish songs are sad and thrilling, fateful and
pregnant with unrest and with forebodings.

With the daylight the Jews came, in their long and morose garments and
black skull-caps, bearing bales of embroideries, slippers, and uncut
jewels. When they saw the wonderful black pearl upon Claire's finger
their huge eyes flamed with an avarice so fierce and open that Renfrew
instinctively moved between them and Claire, as if to guard her from
assault.

But the wonderful pearl was not for them.

The sun blazed furiously when they got upon their horses to ride to the
Soko. Each day the season was growing hotter, and Absalem told them that
there were no English in Tetuan. Nor did they set eyes on a European
woman until that day when Renfrew rode back, crouching along his horse,
to the villas of Tangier.

Tetuan has more than one open mouth, and when it swallows you the
contemplation of a fairyland is immediately exchanged for a desperate
reality of populous filth, stentorian uproar, uneven boulders, beggars,
bazaars like rabbit hutches, men and children pitted with small-pox till
they appear scarcely human, lepers, Jews, pirates from the Riff
Mountains, fanatics from the Ape's Hill, water-carriers, veiled,
waddling women, dogs like sharp shadows, and monkeys that appear and
vanish in sinister doorways with the rapidity and gestures of demons. On
a market-day the city is so full that it seems as if the circling and
irregular white walls must burst and disgorge the clamouring and
gesticulating inhabitants into the tranquil plain below. Claire surveyed
this blanched hell with a still serenity, as she had often surveyed an
applauding audience at the close of her evening's task, ere she thanked
them with the curious gesture, that was almost a salaam, in which
humility and a remote pride mingled. Noise generally gave her calm; and
when passion broke from her she taught the world to be intensely silent.
These alleys became like a dream to her, and the tiny interiors of the
bazaars were little histories of visionary lives, some, but only a few,
mysteriously beautiful. One, in a very dark place where, for some
unknown cause, all voices died away till the hot air was full of a
whispering stillness, brought slow tears to Claire's eyes. In the Street
of the Slippers she passed a cupboard of wood raised high from the
pavement, with low roof, leaning walls, and, in front, a little bar like
that which fences an English baby in its chair before the fire. In this
cupboard squatted two tiny Moorish infants, sole occupants of the
cupboard, with solemn faces, bending to ply their trade of pricking
patterns upon rose-coloured Morocco leather. There was no beauty in the
cupboard, sweetness of light, or ease. And the faces of the little boys
were sad and elderly. But, placed carefully between them, was an ugly
three-legged stool, on which stood two dwarf earthen jars containing two
sprigs of orange flower, and, as Claire looked, one of the babes laid
down his leather, lifted his jar, sniffed, with a sort of gentle
resignation, at his flower, and then resumed his diligent labours,
refreshed perhaps, and strengthened. In the action Claire seemed to
catch sight of a little pallid soul striving to exist feebly among the
slippers.

"Did you see?" she cried to Renfrew, when the baby shoemakers were lost
to sight.

He nodded.

"I wish I were a Moorish woman, Desmond."

"Good Heaven! Why!"

"So that I could kiss the infant who smelt the orange flower in his own
language. Little artist!"

Her sudden blaze of enthusiasm was checked by the infernal Soko into
which they now entered. In this unpaved square, upon which the pitiless
sun beat, the earth seemed to have come alive, to have formed itself
into a thousand vague semblances of human figures, and to be shrieking,
moving, twisting, gesticulating, as if striving to impart a thousand
abominable secrets till now hidden from the world that walks upon its
surface. As snow-men resemble the snow, so did these bargainers, these
buyers, sellers, barterers, pedlars, resemble the baked earth on which
they squatted. Shrouded in earth-coloured garments, they shrieked,
strove, rang their bells, kicked their donkeys, elbowed their rivals,
pommelled their camels, recited the Koran, or testified with frenzy, the
terrific honesty of all their dealings. Here and there tents made of
mud-coloured rags cast a grotesque shadow, in which broad women, hidden
by veils like sacks, and dominated by straw hats a yard wide, sat
huddled together and pecked at by wandering fowls. Jew boys, with long
and expressive faces, their black hair plastered upon their foreheads in
fringes that touched their eyes, strolled through the mob in batches,
some of them reading in little books. Soudanese slave girls carried
bouquets of orange flowers. In a corner some Hawadji were leaping
monotonously to the thunder of a Moorish drum made of baked earth and of
parchment. A sheep, escaped from the slaughterer, tumbled with piteous
bleatings into a group of half breeds, Spanish Moors, who were playing
cards near a stall covered with raw meat and great lumps of some
substance that looked like lard. On a huge heap of rotten oranges and
decaying fish, over which millions of flies swarmed, a number of
children in close white caps were moving in some mysterious game in
which two prowling cats occasionally took an unintentional part. Some
Riff Arabs, fierce as tigers, tall and half-naked, stalked feverishly
towards a water-carrier whose lean form, tottering with age, was almost
eclipsed beneath the monstrous bladder he bore incessantly through the
multitude. The horses of Renfrew and of Claire could scarcely plant
their hoofs on anything that was not moving, crying, panting, or
cursing; and they pulled up, and prepared to descend into this human
ocean of which all the waves roared in their deafened ears. As Claire
leant to Renfrew, who stretched his arms to help her, she said to him:--

"Can you swim? If not, you will certainly be drowned."

"You must not be. Cling to my arm."

They sank together to their necks in the sea. In whatever direction they
looked, they saw a mass of heads, an infinite expanse of shouting
mouths. But suddenly the pressure became extraordinary, the uproar
ear-splitting. And with the voices there mingled a piercing music like a
continuous screech. People began to run, to trample in one direction.
The drum of the leaping Hawadji was drowned by a louder drumming that
came from the centre of the square. Children squeaked with excitement.
The Riffians forgot to drink, and slid forward with the cushioned feet
of animals in a jungle. A tempest arose, and in it a whirlpool formed.
It seemed that Renfrew and Claire must be torn in pieces.

"What on earth is happening?" Renfrew exclaimed to Absalem, with the
English anger our countrymen always display when trodden by a foreign
element.

Absalem smiled with airy dignity, and moved forward, beckoning them to
follow.

"Miracle man, all want see him," he remarked. "Great miracle man."

With consummate adroitness he drew them with him to the edge of the
whirlpool. As they reached it, Renfrew felt that Claire's hand suddenly
tightened upon his arm until his flesh puckered between her fingers as
the flesh of a rabbit puckers in a trap. He glanced at her in
astonishment. Her eyes were fixed on something, or some one, beyond
them, even beyond Absalem, who was forcing people out of their way with
his powerful arms and back. Renfrew followed her eyes, and saw the
centre of the whirlpool.

This mass of humanity had now assumed the form of a rough circus, the
ring of which was kept clear. And in this ring a strange figure had just
appeared with upraised arms, and a manner of wild, even of frantic,
authority. This was a gigantic man, almost black, half-naked, with long
arms, furious eyes, and legs which, though muscular, tapered at the
ankles like the legs of a finely bred race-horse. His head was shaved in
front; but at the back the black hair grew in a long and waving lock,
and his features, magnificently cut, might have been those of a grand
European of some headstrong and high-couraged race. Upon this man
Claire's eyes were fixed, with an expression so strange and knowing that
Renfrew turned on her with a sharp exclamation.

"Claire! Claire!"

She slowly withdrew her eyes.

"Yes, Desmond."

A question stammered on his lips; but as she smiled at him, he felt the
mad absurdity of it, and was silent.

"Well, Desmond, what is it?"

"Nothing," he answered.

Absalem now claimed their attention. He was determined that they should
be in the front of the crowd, and ruthlessly pushed away the Moors who
had obtained the best places, pointing at Claire and Renfrew, and wildly
vociferating their mighty rank and enormous wealth. The staring mob gave
way; and in a moment Claire and the miracle man stood face to face. His
frenzied eyes had no sooner seen her than he too fell upon the
surrounding natives, thrusting them violently to one side, and cursing
them for daring to draw near to the great English gentleman and lady. In
the whole mighty mob these two were the only Europeans, and they
attracted as universal an attention as two Aztecs would in a Bank
Holiday gathering at the Crystal Palace. Renfrew could now see that the
screeching music came from one side of the ring, where a couple of men,
clothed in filthy rags, were sitting on the ground, one playing a long
pipe of straw, the other beating an enormous drum. Immediately behind
them a very old man, evidently a maniac, swayed his body violently
backwards and forwards, and at regular intervals uttered a loud and
chuckling cry that might have been the ejaculation of a tipsy
school-boy, and came strangely from withered lips hanging loose with
weakness and with age. This dancing Methuselah caught Renfrew's
attention; and, for the moment, he forgot to look at the miracle man. A
general outcry from the multitude made him turn his head. He saw then
that the miracle man held in his huge hands a sort of kennel of straw,
the mouth of which was closed with a movable flap. Lifting this aloft,
he sprang wildly round the ring, vociferating some words at the top of
his voice; then, suddenly casting it down, he flung himself upon the
ground, which he beat with his forehead, while he shrieked out a prayer
to his patron saint for protection in the great miracle which he was
about to perform.

"What is he doing?" Renfrew asked of Absalem.

"Don't you know?" Claire said.

Her eyes were gleaming with excitement as they stared at the salaaming
figure that grovelled at their feet.

"No. How should I?"

"He is praying to Sidi Mahomet," she said.

And then she looked at Renfrew. He understood. At that moment, despite
the excessive heat engendered by the blazing sun and the pressure of the
crowd, he turned very cold, as if his body was plunged in glacier water.
He thought of the tall figure that had stood before Claire's tent door
in the moonbeams, the lips that had coaxed from the pipe the tune that
charmed all serpents,--that right tune that they must follow, which drew
them from the desert sands to the grass of the oasis, till they wound up
the body of this gaunt and tremendous savage, and hid themselves in his
hairy bosom. This miracle man, then, was a snake-charmer, and Claire had
divined it at once. How? Renfrew put the question quickly.

"How did I know? He is the man who played outside my tent in the night,
Desmond."

"The very man! Impossible."

"The very man."

"Then you were not asleep, not dreaming?"

"How can one tell? Hush!"

She spoke in the low voice of one whose attention is becoming
concentrated, and who cannot endure the interruption. The charmer had
now finished his petition to his god, and, standing up, thrust into his
mouth a handful of some green herb, which he chewed and swallowed. Then
his whole manner abruptly changed. The frenzy died out of his eyes. A
calm suffused his tall and muscular body till it became strangely
statuesque. His lips slowly smiled, and he raised his hands towards the
glaring sky with a sublime gesture of gratitude.

"What an actor!" Renfrew heard Claire murmur softly.

He, too, had become intensely engrossed by this man in whom he, from
this moment, began to see Claire: the exquisite woman whom the civilised
world worshipped in the mighty savage who came from the remote depths of
Morocco; the white being who played with the minds of the capitals of
Europe, in the black being who played with the reptiles of the desert
and of the jungle. For Claire, guided by the spirit that ever goes
before genius bearing the torch, had instinctively divined what she had
never known. In London it seemed that she had entered into the very soul
of this man who now stood before her. She had caught the wild graces of
his bearing. She had reproduced his smile, so full of secrets and of
power. She had moved as he did. She had been motionless as now he was
motionless. In the sun she stood at this moment and beheld the reality
of which she had been the magnificent reflection. And Renfrew felt his
heart oppressed, as if clouds were closing round him.

Now the snake-charmer looked slowly all round the great circle of
watching faces until his eyes rested on Claire. He had taken the straw
kennel into his hands, and he softly lifted the flap, and turned it flat
upon the top of the kennel, leaving the mouth open. Then he thrust one
hand into this mouth, and withdrew it, holding a writhing snake whose
striped satin skin changed colour in the sunshine, turning from pink to
green, from green to black.

"It is the snake I saw," Claire whispered to Renfrew.

He did not reply. He seemed fascinated by the savage and the serpent.
Holding the snake at arm's length, the charmer walked softly round the
circle, collecting money from the crowd. He stopped in front of Claire.
The snake thrust out its flat head towards her. She did not shrink from
it; and the charmer cried aloud some words that seemed like praise of
her beauty and of her composure. She gave him a piece of gold. Renfrew
gave him nothing.

Then, standing once more in the centre of the circle, he burst into a
frantic incantation, while the musicians redoubled their efforts, and
the old maniac in the corner gave forth his chuckling cry with greater
force, and swayed his trembling body more vehemently to and fro. The
snake, suddenly brought from the darkness of the kennel to the light of
day, was torpid and weary. It drooped between the charmer's hands. He
shook it, called on it, caught up a stick and struck it. Then, forcing
its mouth wide open, he barred its pink throat with the stick, on which
he made it fix its two fangs, which were like two sharp hooks. Holding
the end of the stick, he came again to Claire, to whom his whole
performance was now exclusively devoted; and, approaching the hanging
reptile close to her eyes, he jumped it up and down to the sound of the
drum and pipe.

"You see," Claire said to Renfrew, "the roof of its mouth is
flesh-colour."

He did not answer. Why did all this mean so much to him? Why did the
clouds grow darker? The music and the cries of the old maniac perturbed
him and bewildered his brain. And he wanted to be calm, and to watch
Claire and this savage with a cool and undivided attention. By this
time the snake was growing irritated. It agitated its long body
furiously; and when the charmer unhooked its fangs from the stick, it
turned its head towards him and made a sudden dart at his face. He
opened his mouth wide, thrust the snake into it, and let the creature
fasten on his tongue, from which blood began to flow. Still bleeding,
and with the snake fixed on his tongue, he danced and sprang into the
air. His eyes grew wild. Foam ran from his mouth, and his whole
appearance became demoniacal. Yet his eyes still fastened themselves
upon Claire. In his most frantic moments his attention was never
entirely distracted from the spot where she was standing. He tore the
snake from his tongue and buried its fangs in the flesh of his left
wrist. Cries broke from the crowd. The sight of the blood had excited
them, for these people love blood as the toper loves wine. They urged
the charmer on to fresh exertions with furious screams of encouragement.
The maniac bent his body like a dervish in the last exercises of his
religion, and the ragged musicians forced a more extreme uproar from
their instruments. The charmer caught the snake by the tail, and strove
to pull it backwards off his wrist. But the reptile's fangs were firmly
fastened. It held on with a terrible tenacity, and a struggle ensued
between it and its master. When at length it gave way, it was streaked
with blood, and now at last thoroughly aroused. The charmer scraped his
tongue with a straw; then, casting himself again upon the earth, he
prayed once more with fury to Sidi Mahomet. Claire watched him always,
with that pale and exquisite attention which one genius gives to the
performance of another. Her face was white and still. Her body never
moved. But her eyes blazed with life, and with the fires of a violent
soul completely awake. Having finished his prayer, which ended in a cry
so poignant that it might have burst from the lips of that world on
which the flood came, the charmer remained upon the ground in a sitting
posture, laid the snake in his lap, and drew from the inside of his
ragged robe a Moorish lute made of a bladder, bamboo, and two strings,
and coloured a pale yellowish-green. He plucked the strings gently, and
played the fragment of a wild tune. Then, suddenly catching up the
snake, and thrusting his tongue far out of his mouth, he poised the
snake upon it, rose to his feet and stood at his full height in front of
Claire, fixing his eyes upon her with a glance that seemed to claim from
her both wonder and worship. The snake reared itself up higher and
higher upon the quivering tongue; and the charmer, extending his long
arms, whirled slowly round as if poised upon a movable platform, while a
terrific clamour broke from the Moors, who seemed to be roused by this
feat to the highest pitch of excitement. Still turning and turning, the
charmer drew from his bosom a second snake that was black and larger
than the first, and coiled it round his sinewy neck like a gigantic
necklace, the darting head in front, resting, a sort of monstrous
pendant, upon his uncovered chest. To Renfrew he looked like some
hateful grotesque in a nightmare, inhuman, endowed with attributes of a
devil. The serpents were part of him, growths of his body, visible signs
of some terrible disease in which he gloried and of which he made a
show. The creature was intolerable. His exhibition had suddenly become
to Renfrew unfit for the eyes of any woman; and, without a word, he took
hold of Claire and pulled her almost violently away from the circle on
which the fascinated mob was beginning to encroach. She resisted him.

"Desmond!" she exclaimed, "what are you doing?"

"Claire--come. I insist upon it!"

Already the Moors had thronged the place which they had left vacant. She
turned a white face on him. There was in her eyes the hideous expression
of a sleep-walker suddenly awakened, and she trembled in every limb. She
swung round from Renfrew, and, above the intercepting Moors, high in the
air, she saw the snake, which seemed climbing to heaven. While she
looked, a huge hand closed upon it and took it out of sight. The
charmer, observing the departure of his distinguished patrons, had
abruptly stopped his performance. Claire made no further resistance.
Without a word, she permitted Renfrew to lead her to the horses and
help her into the saddle. They rode down the hill to the camp without
exchanging a word.

When Claire had dismounted, she stood for a moment twisting her whip in
her hands. Then she said:--

"Desmond, I must ask you never to startle me again as you did to-day, by
sudden action. You can't understand how such an interruption hurts a
nature like mine. I would rather you had struck me. That would only have
wounded my body."

She turned and went into her tent, leaving Renfrew in an agony of
penitence and self-reproach. All the rest of the afternoon she was very
cold and silent, rather dreamy than sullen, but obviously disinclined
for conversation, and still more obviously unwilling to endure even the
slightest demonstration of affection on the part of Renfrew. When the
sheep which were to be slaughtered for the soldiers' feast were driven
bleating into the camp, she retired into her tent, and remained there,
resting, until the sun was low in the heavens, and the porters and
mule-drivers went gaily out to search for the materials of the African
fire with which the night was to be celebrated. They returned, singing
the Moorish conquest of Granada, with their strong arms full of canes,
dry and brittle branches of trees, logs that looked like whole trunks,
and huge shrubs, green and sweet-smelling. Hearing their song, Claire
came out of her tent. The sky was red, and, in the southwest, turrets of
vapour rose and streamed out, assuming mysterious and thin shapes in the
gathering dimness. A great flock of birds, flying very high, and forming
a definite and beautiful pattern, passed slowly on the wing towards the
kingdom of the storks, that lies near the sand banks of Ceuta. They
moved in silence, and faded away in the twilight stealthily, like things
full of quiet intention and governed by some furtive, but inexorable,
desire. Renfrew, who was wandering rather miserably near the camp,
watching descending pilgrims from the city melt into the vast bosom of
the plain, saw Claire's white figure in the tent door, half hidden in a
soft rosy mist which stole from the lips of evening as scent steals from
the lips of a flower. He felt afraid to go to her. He possessed her; and
yet it seemed to him now that he scarcely knew her. He was only an
ordinary man. She was a strange woman; not merely because of her
womanhood, as all women are to all men, but strange in that which lay
beyond and beneath her womanhood, in her genius, and in the dull or
ardent moods that stood round it, one, and yet not one, with it. In the
tent door she leaned like a spirit born of the evening, a child of
fading things, dying lights, fainting colours, retreating sounds,--a
spirit waiting for the coming of the stars, and the rising of the moon,
and the mysteries of the night, and the subtle odours that the winds of
Northern Africa bring with them over the mountains and down the lonely
valleys, when the sun descends. And as a spirit may listen to the songs
of men, with the melancholy of a thing apart, she listened to the songs
of the Moors, until at length they seemed to be in her own heart that
evening, as if they were songs of her own country. And these dark men
with wild eyes who sang them, while they flung upon the grass their
burdens from the thickets, and from the hedgeless and wide fields, were
no longer alien to her. She stood in the tent door, and, without any
conscious effort of the imagination, became their fancied mate,--a woman
sprung from the same soil, or come in--like the strange people--from the
deserts of their country. Only she was not as one of their women,
mindless, patient, and concealed; but as their women should be, strong,
hot-blooded, brave, serene, and looked upon by a world without reproach.

Absalem came up to her to tell her some details of the night's
festivity. Before he spoke she said to him:--

"Where does the desert lie?"

He told her.

"Does the miracle man come from there?"

Absalem answered that no one knew. He had been much in Wasan, the sacred
city of Morocco; but none knew his birthplace, his tribe, his name.
Often he disappeared, no man could tell whither. But, doubtless, he
made vast journeys. Some said that he had exhibited his snakes on the
banks of the Nile, that he had gone with the pilgrim trains to Mecca,
that he knew Khartoum as he knew Marakesh, and that he never ceased from
wandering.

"What is his age?" Claire asked.

Absalem answered that he must be old, but that Time had no power over
him.

"He miracle man; he live long as he wish."

Last she asked when he would leave Tetuan.

"Perhaps this night. Perhaps to-morrow night, perhaps never. Perhaps he
go already."

"Already!"

Suddenly Claire moved out from the tent, and joined Renfrew, who was
still watching her, and weaving lover's fancies about her white figure.

"Have you been here long, Desmond?" she asked.

"Very long, dearest. Are you rested?"

"Quite. From here you can see all the people travelling away from the
city towards the sea?"

"Yes."

"Have you been watching them?"

"Yes, indeed; for half the afternoon."

She turned her great eyes on him searchingly, and seemed as if she
checked a question which was almost on her lips.

"They must have been a strange multitude," she said at length. "I wonder
where they are all going?"

"Some to the villages in the plain, some to the coast. I saw the Riffs
who were in the Soko pass by. I suppose they were returning to the
caverns from which they plunder becalmed vessels, Spanish and
Portuguese."

"The Riffs--yes?"

Her intonation suggested that she was waiting for some further
information. Renfrew's curiosity was aroused.

"Why do you look at me like that?" he asked. "What do you want to know?"

"Nothing, Desmond. How dark it is getting! There is Mohammed ringing the
bell. And look, those must be the soldiers. They are just marching in
from the city."

With the coming of night a wind arose, blowing towards the sea from the
mountains; and with it came up a troop of clouds which blotted out stars
and moon, and plunged the plain into a gulf of darkness. Tetuan does not
gleam with lamps at night like a European city, and all the distant
villas of the Moors were closely shuttered. So the wind, warm and
scented and strong, swept over a black land, deserted and vacant. Only
in the camp was there movement, music, and an illumination that strove
up in the night, as if it would climb to the clouds. Scarcely had Claire
and Renfrew finished dinner, when Absalem and Mohammed ceremoniously
appeared to conduct them out to the bare space before the tents on
which the African fire had been carefully built. Absalem carried a lamp
which swung in the wind, and, behind, there appeared from the kitchen
tent some of the porters, bearing burning brands, the flames of which
were at right angles to the wood from which they sprung. The guard of
soldiers, one dozen in all, armed with immense guns and wrapped in
hooded cloaks, were already crouched in a silent mass before the
lifeless and portentous erection which came out of the darkness, as
Absalem swung forward the lamp, like the skeleton of a monster. They
turned their shadowy faces on Claire, and stared with eyes intent and
unself-conscious as those of an animal. The porters flung their brands
on to the mountain of twigs, and instantaneously a huge sheet of livid
gold sprang up against the black background of the night, as if it had
been shaken out on the wind by invisible hands. This sheet expanded,
swayed, fluttered in ragged edges, and cast forth a cloud of sparks
which were carried away into the air and vanished in the sky. The shrubs
caught fire and crackled furiously, and finally the foundation of
gigantic logs began to glow steadily, and to fill the wind with a
scorching heat. The camp was gradually defined, at first vaguely and in
sections,--the peak of a tent, the head of a mule, a startled pariah
dog, a Moor set in the eye of the flames; then clearly, as the buildings
one may see in a furnace, complete and glowing. The faces of the
soldiers were barred with flickering orange, and red lights played in
their huge and staring eyeballs. The horses and mules could be counted.
Before the kitchen tent the sacrifice of sheep was visible, stewing in
enormous pans upon red embers in a trench of earth. And the grave cook,
who was distinguished by a white turban, shone like a pantomime magician
at the mouth of an enchanted cave. Warmth, light, life poured upon the
night, and the voices of men began to mingle with the continuous voice
of this superb fire. The Moors, soldiers, servants, porters, kindled
into furious gaiety with the swiftness of the canes and olive boughs.
They sprang up from the ground, pulled the shrouding hoods from their
faces, tossed away their djelabes, and began, with shouts and
ejaculations, to dance up and down before the golden sheet, spreading
their hands to it with the glee of children. A sudden joy beamed in the
dusky and solemn faces, twinkled in the sombre eyes. One man flung away
his fez, another dashed his turban to the ground. Round, shaven heads,
bare arms, brown legs, half concealed by fluttering linen
knickerbockers, lithe bodies emerged with eager haste into the light.
Shadows became abruptly men, formless humps athletes. Mutes sent out
great voices to startle the sweeping bats. Mourners turned into maniacs.
It was a fantasia that exploded into life like a rocket, shedding a
stream of vivid human fire. Mohammed drew away from the flames, taking
a dozen swift footsteps to the rear. Then, with a shout, he dashed
forward, bounded into the golden sheet, and disappeared as a clown
disappears through a paper hoop. Only the paper closed up behind him. He
leaped through light to darkness, pursued by a thousand eager sparks.
One soldier followed him, then another, and another. The porters,
linking hands, leaped in twos and threes. Even the cook, old, and
serious with a weight of savoury knowledge, tottered to the edge of the
fire, which was now becoming a furnace, and took it as an Irish horse
takes a stone wall, striking the topmost branches with his bare feet
amid a chorus of yells.

Claire watched the darting figures with a silent gravity. She did not
seem to be stirred by the fantasia of the firelight, or to catch any
gaiety or life from the boisterous activity of those about her. The
flames lit up the whiteness of her face, and showed Renfrew that she was
looking gloomy and even despairing.

"Is anything the matter, Claire?" he asked anxiously.

"No. How could there be?"

The wind, which was increasing in violence, blew her thin dress forward,
and she shivered. Absalem noticed it.

"Wear djelabe, lady," he said.

And in a moment he had taken his off, and was carefully wrapping Claire
in it. She seemed glad of it, thanked him, and, with a quick gesture
that hurt Renfrew, pulled the big brown hood up over her head, so that
her face was entirely concealed from view. She now looked exactly like a
Moor, and might have been mistaken for one of the soldiers before the
fire was lit and all impeding garments were thrown aside.

Renfrew, uneasy, and wondering what conduct on his part would best suit
her mysterious mood, after one or two remarks to which she barely
replied, drew away a little, and gave his attention to the antics of the
soldiers. Some of them were already resuming their djelabes, in
preparation for the feast, which they sniffed even through the odour of
burning wood and leaves. The cook, after his emotional and acrobatic
outburst, had returned to his pans, which he was stirring tenderly with
a stick. When Renfrew again looked towards Claire, he found it
impossible to tell which cloak shrouded her from his sight. Four or five
hooded figures stood near the fire. She must be one of them. He
approached the group, but found, to his surprise, that all the members
of it were soldiers. Claire had moved away. Renfrew stood for a few
minutes with the men, till they were summoned to their feast, which,
strangely enough, was to take place away from the fire in the dense
darkness behind the tents. Then he was left alone by the huge mass of
flame, which roared hoarsely in the wind. Where could Claire be? On any
ordinary occasion Renfrew would certainly have sought for her, but
to-night something held him back. He knew very well that she wished to
be alone, that something was closely occupying her mind. Whether she was
still brooding over the event of the afternoon, when he had forcibly led
her away in the very crisis of the snake-charmer's performance, he could
not tell. To an ordinary woman such a matter would have been a trifle;
but Renfrew understood that Claire felt it more deeply. Her mind
appeared to be mysteriously moved and awakened by this savage from the
depths of Morocco. Various circumstances combined to render him more
interesting to her than he could possibly be to any ordinary traveller.
Renfrew recognised that fully and quietly. The genius of Claire had
enabled her to realise in London all the wildly picturesque
idiosyncrasies of a man whom she had never seen or heard of. Suddenly
fate had led her to him, and she had beheld her own performance, the
original of her imitation. As Renfrew stood by the fire, he began to
feel the folly of his proceeding of the afternoon, and to imagine more
clearly than before the condition into which it had thrown Claire. It is
a sin to disturb the contemplations of genius. It is sacrilege. And then
Renfrew had been moved to his act by a preposterous access of jealousy.
He acknowledged this to himself. He had been jealous of Claire's
interest in this man's performance, jealous perhaps even of her dream
among the hills in the midnight camp, where the man stood before her
sleeping eyes, and played with his visionary serpent. How mad can a
lover be? He resolved to go to Claire, and ask her pardon. This resolve
thrilled him. To carry it out, he would have to draw very near to
Claire, to unpack his heart to her. After all, she had given herself to
him. But he had appreciated the wonder of his role as possessor so
keenly, that he had waited upon her moods with an almost trembling awe.
Now, in asking pardon, he would show that in his passion he could be
strong. Women want to see the man in the lover, as well as the devotee.
Renfrew, in acknowledging his jealousy of a black savage, meant to clasp
Claire with the arms of a whirlwind.

Meanwhile she was hidden from him. The wind blew strongly. The sparks
leaped away in clouds toward the sea. From the dense darkness behind him
came a sound of music. The soldiers were feasting. The porters were
striking the lute, and singing songs of the dance and of love and of
victory. It was a night of comradeship and of rejoicing. Yet he stood
alone; and the turmoil of his heart was unheeded. He tried to explore
the blackness of the night which stood round the golden fire with his
eyes. Claire must be in that blackness close to him. Doubtless she saw
him, a red and yellow creature, painted into fictitious brilliance by
the illumination which was shed upon him. She saw him and kept from
him. Renfrew resolved to be patient. When her mood of reserve died she
would come to him, in her dress of a Moor, and he would kiss the white
face beneath the hood, and put his arms round the thin figure that was
lost in the djelabe of brawny Absalem, and tell her the true story of
his heart, never fully told to her yet. He squatted down before the
fire, lit his pipe, shrugged his shoulders against the tempest from the
mountains, and waited, listening to the weird music that swept by him
like a hidden bird on the wind.

And Claire--where was she? When Absalem wrapped her in the huge djelabe
it seemed to Claire that he had divined her secret longing to be in
hiding. She disappeared into the mighty hood of the garment as into a
cave. Its shadow concealed her from the watching eyes of Renfrew. There
was warmth in it and a beautiful darkness. She desired both. She saw
Renfrew turn to watch the leaping soldiers, and stole away out of the
illuminated circle formed by the glow from the fire, into the night
beyond. She did not go far, only into the nearest shadow. And there she
sat down on the short dry grass, and forgot Renfrew, the roaring flames,
the wind that felt incessantly at her robe, the shouting guard, the
radiant and dancing attendants. She forgot them all as completely as if
they had never been in her life; for the strangeness of certain
incidents preoccupied her, to the exclusion of everything else. In the
double existence of a really great actress there are many moments in
which the truths of the imagination seem more important than the truths
of physical phenomena of things seen by the eye, of sounds received and
appreciated by the ear. In these moments, genius usurps the throne of
reason, and the mind beholds fancies as sunlit gods, facts as timid and
scarcely defined shadows. So it was with Claire now. Even the
snake-charmer, as he gave his performance in the Soko, was a shadow in
comparison with that man who summoned her to the tent door in the
solitary encampment. And behind and beyond both these figures of truth
and dreaming stood a third, created for herself by Claire in London,
that figure into whom she had poured her soul as into a mould, when she
charmed imaginary serpents, and prayed to the god in whom, for a moment,
she believed with the passion of the perfect mime. This trio Claire
placed in line, and reviewed: charmer of her imagination, of her dream,
of the Soko.

They were the same, and yet not the same. For the first was dominated,
even was created by her. The second stood above her, like some magician,
and summoned her as one possessing a right. The third--what of him? He
was a wild creature of blood and foam, crafty, a player like herself, a
maker of money, a savage in sacking, and almost nothing to her now. Out
of the desert he came. Into the desert he was, perhaps, even now,
returning, with his snakes sleeping in his bosom, and the money of the
Tetuan Moors jingling in his pouch.

Yes, she saw him, travelling like a shadow in the night, one of those
grotesques which leap on bedroom walls when a lamp flares in the wind
that sighs through an open casement. He was going; but the man of the
dream remained. The dream man had come up out of the world that is
vaguer to us than the desert when we wake, and clearer to us than the
desert when we sleep. Claire saw him still, and, while the wonderful
mountebank of the Soko passed, he stood in the tent door like a statue
of ebony, a rooted reality. And the snake was in his bosom; and the pipe
was at his lips; and the power was in his heart. And as he played,
Claire thought beneath the djelabe of Absalem, there came to him, with
the faltering steps of a thing irresistibly charmed, that third man
whose soul she had seen in London, like approaching like, with the
manner of a slave and the glance of the conquered. And her soul was
still within that charmed figure. She could not rescue it now from the
place where she had put it. And the statue at the tent door played the
irresistible melody until his wild and cringing double stole to his very
feet, and nearer and nearer, till they melted together, and where two
men had been, there was only one. He smiled with a subtle triumph, laid
down his pipe, stretched out his arms and vanished. But within him now
was the soul of Claire, borne wherever he should go, his captive, his
possession for all eternity.

Behind her, in the cloudy darkness, Claire heard a movement, and the
gliding of soft feet on grass. She did not turn her head, supposing that
one of the soldiers was keeping his guard. The movement ceased. But the
little noise had broken the thread on which her fancies were strung.
They were scattered like beads. She found herself feeling quite
ordinary, and listening with an urging attention for a renewal of the
trifling noise behind her. In the distance she could see Renfrew, now
crouching before the fire, which poured colour and a piercing vitality
upon him. She heard also, and for the first time, the sound of the
porters' music, which had been audible in the night all through her
reverie, though she was entirely unaware of the fact. She realised that
the soldiers were devouring the stew of mutton, and that she was in a
gay camp, full of human beings in a state of unusual satisfaction. One
of these human beings must be close to her. She turned her head. But she
was sitting in the darkness beyond the illumination of the fire, and
beyond her the night was like a black wall. Whatever had moved there was
invisible to her. She had not heard the gliding step go away, and she
felt that she was not alone. This feeling began to render her uneasy.
She got up, with the intention of returning to the firelight and to
Renfrew. Indeed she had taken a step or two in his direction, when she
was checked by an unreasonable desire to see who had come so close to
her, who had broken her reverie. Acting upon the sudden impulse, she
turned swiftly and came on into the darkness. Almost instantly she stood
before the dim outline of a man, and paused. Here in the night it was
very lonely, even though the illuminated camp was so near. Claire
hesitated to approach this man who seemed to be on watch and who was
perfectly motionless. She waited a moment, wishing that he would come to
her in order that she might see what he was like, whether he carried a
gun and was a soldier. But it was soon evident that he did not mean to
move. Then Claire went up so close to him that his coarse garment rubbed
against her djelabe and his eyes stared right down into hers. And she
saw that it was the snake-charmer from the Soko, who was looking into
her face with the very smile of the man in her dream. Round his bare
throat one of his snakes was twined, and he held its neck between the
fingers of his left hand. The wind tossed his short and ragged cloak
wildly to and fro, and whirled the long lock of hair at the back of his
shaven head about, and made it dance like a living thing. When Claire
came up to him, he never said a word, or moved at all. It seemed to her
that his face was that of some dark and triumphant being, waiting
immovably for something that was certain to come to him, and to come so
close that he need not even stretch out his hand to take it as his
possession. What was the thing he waited for? She looked at his black
face and at the snake which moved slowly, trying to thrust its way
downward into the warmth of his bosom, out of the reach of the wind and
of the night. And, when the man's fingers unclosed to release it, and it
slid away and softly disappeared beneath his garment, Claire shuddered
under the influence of a sensation that was surely mad. For she felt
that she envied the snake, and that the charmer was waiting there in the
darkness for her. As the snake vanished, Claire recoiled towards the
fire. The charmer did not attempt to follow her, and his huge and
watchful figure quickly faded from Claire's eyes till his blackness had
become one with the blackness of the night.


IV

Renfrew, as he crouched before the fire, felt a light touch on his
shoulder. He looked up, saw Claire's white face peering down on him, and
sprang to his feet.

"I thought you were never coming, that you had deserted me altogether,
and left me lonely in the midst of the fantasia," he cried, seizing her
hands.

"I am cold," she said; "horribly cold. Let me sit beside you, close to
the fire."

She sat down on the ground, almost touching the roaring flames.

"Where have you been?"

"Sitting in the dark. The soldiers are feasting?"

"Yes, and the camp fellows are all singing and playing. Don't you hear
them? We are quite alone. That's all I want, all I care for. Claire,
when you go away like this, and leave me, even for a few minutes,
Morocco is the most desolate place in all the world, and I'm the most
desolate vagabond in it."

He put his arm round her. The terrific glow from the fire played over
her face, danced in the deep folds of her djelabe, shone in her eyes,
showered a cloud of gold and red about her hair. For she had let her
hood fall down on her shoulders. She attained to that fine and almost
demoniacal picturesqueness which glorifies even the most commonplace
smith when you see him in his forge by night. Her cheeks were suffused
with scarlet, as if she had suddenly painted them to go on the stage.
Yet she shivered again as Renfrew spoke.

"You should not have left the fire," he said. "And yet the wind is
warm."

"It can't be. But it's not the wind, it's the darkness that has chilled
me."

"Or is it the loneliness?" he asked, tenderly. "For you have been alone
as well as I, and nothing on earth makes one so cold as solitude."

"I scarcely ever feel alone, Desmond," she said.

And, as she spoke, she cast a glance behind her into the darkness from
which she had just come. Renfrew noticed it.

"You have been alone?" he asked hastily. Then he checked himself with an
ashamed laugh.

"What a fool I am," he exclaimed.

He clasped her more closely.

"A fool, because I'm so desperately in love with you, Claire," he said,
rushing on his confession with the swiftness of alarmed bravery. "Look
here, I want to tell you something. You must put everything I do,
everything I am, down to the account of my love,--shyness, anger,
abruptness, violence,--everything, Claire. My love's responsible. It
does play the devil with an ordinary man when he's given his very soul
to--to a woman like you, to a great woman. It keeps him back when he
ought to go on, and sends him on when he ought to stay quiet, and makes
him jealous of stones and--and savages."

"Savages, Desmond?"

Renfrew's face was scarlet. He put up his hand before it and muttered:--

"This fire's scorching. Yes, Claire, of savages. Didn't you find that
out this afternoon, when we were in Tetuan? But of course you couldn't.
You couldn't know you'd married such an infernal lunatic."

He broke off. She was watching him with a close attention, and her body
had ceased to tremble under his arm.

"Go on, Desmond."

"You want me to tell you the sort of man you've married?"

"I want you to tell me what you mean."

"Then I will. Claire, this afternoon I took you away from that
snake-charming chap because--well, because you watched him as if he
fascinated you."

"Oh!"

"Of course I knew why. His performance was clever, and he was
picturesque in his way, although, to be sure, it was all put on, as far
as that goes."

"Like my stage performances, Desmond."

"Claire," he said hotly. "How can you?"

"That man acts far better than I do--if he acts at all."

"Was that why he interested you so much?"

"In what other way could he interest me?"

Renfrew kicked at one of the blazing logs and sent up a shower of
red-hot flakes.

"Well, there was your dream, Claire."

"Yes, there was that."

"It was curious, coming just before we saw the fellow. And you say the
two men were alike."

"I did not say alike. I said the same."

"How could that be?"

"How can a thousand things be? Yet we cannot deny them when they are,
any more than we can deny that we feel an earthly immortality within us
and yet crumble into dust. In sleep I saw that man. I saw his snake. I
heard him play."

"Yes, Claire, I know. It's damned strange."

Renfrew's forehead was wrinkled in a meditative frown.

"But, after all, what's a dream?" he exclaimed. "A vagary of a sleeping
brain. And in your dream you wouldn't go to that beggar, Claire."

"No. I wouldn't go, and so I died."

"It all means nothing--nothing at all."

She looked at him gravely.

"I wonder whether there are things in life that we are compelled to do,
Desmond," she said. "I sometimes think there must be. How otherwise can
a thousand strange events be accounted for, especially things that women
do?"

"I don't know," he muttered, staring at her anxiously in the firelight.

"Every one acknowledges the irresistible power of physical force over
physical weakness. Some day, perhaps, when the world has grown a little
older, we shall all understand that the power of mental force is
precisely similar, and can as little be resisted. What's that?"

Renfrew felt that she was suddenly alert. Her thin form grew hard and
quivering, like the body of a greyhound about to be let loose on a
hare. He heard nothing except a sound of music from the darkness, and
the gentle rustle of the wind.

"I hear nothing," he said. "What was it--a cry?"

"No, no!"

"What then?"

"Oh, Desmond--hush!"

He was obedient, and strained his ears, wondering what Claire had heard.
The fire was at last beginning to die down, for the flames had devoured
the masses of dry twigs, and had now nothing to feed upon except the
heavy logs. So the darkness drew a little closer round the camp, as if
the night expanded noiselessly. One of the porters, or, perhaps, one of
the soldiers, was playing a queer little air upon a pipe over and over
again. It was plaintive and very soft. But the tone of the instrument
was strangely penetrating, and the wind carried it along over the plain,
as if anxious to bear it to the sea, that the cave men might hear it,
and the sailors bearing up for the Spanish coast. Was Claire listening
to this odd little tune? Renfrew wondered. There seemed no other sound.
She was moving uneasily now, as if an intense restlessness had taken
hold of her. And she turned her head away from him and gazed into the
night.

Presently she put her hand on Renfrew's arm, which was still round her
waist, and tried to remove it. But he would not yield to her desire. He
only held her closer, and again--he could not tell why--the smouldering
jealousy began to flare up in his heart.

"No, Claire," he said, in answer to her movement, "you are mine. You
have given yourself to me. I alone have the right to keep you, to hold
you close--close to my heart."

"Can you keep me always, Desmond?" she said, suddenly turning on him
with a sort of fierce excitement.

She looked into his eyes as if she would search the very depths of his
soul for strength, for power.

"You have the right. Yes; but that is nothing--nothing."

"Nothing, Claire?"

"You must have the strength, Desmond. That is everything."

There was a look almost of despair in her face. She threw herself
against him as if moved by a sudden yearning for protection, and put her
arms round his shoulders.

The hidden Moor was still playing the same monotonous little tune, an
African aria, as wild as a bird that flies over the desert, or a cloud
that is driven across the sky above a dangerous sea. It was imaginative,
and, as all tunes seem to have a shape, this melody was misshapen and
yet delicious, like a twisted tangled creature that has the smile of a
sweet woman, or the eyes of an alluring child. In its plaintiveness
there was the atmosphere of solitary places. And there was a sound of
love in it, too, but of a love so uncivilised as to be almost monstrous.
Some earth man of a dead age might have sung it to his mate in a land
where the sun looked down on things primeval. It might have caught the
heart of maidens very long ago, before they learned to think of passion
as the twin of law, and to regard a kiss as the seal set upon the tape
of matrimony. The queer sorrow of it could hardly have moved any eyes to
tears. Yet few women could have heard it without a sense of desolation.
It ran through the darkness as cold water runs in the black shadow of a
forest, a trickle of sound as thin and persistent as the cry of a wild
creature in the night.

Renfrew thrilled under the touch of Claire's hand.

"You can give me the strength every woman seeks in the man she yields
herself up to," he said.

"How?"

"By loving me."

"Ah, yes. But the strength must not come, however subtly, from the
woman. No--no."

Again she leaned away from him, with her face turned towards the
darkness. Tremors ran through her, and her hands dropped almost feebly
from Renfrew's shoulders, as the hands of an invalid fall away, and
down, after an embrace.

"Oh, no," she reiterated, and her voice was almost a wail. "It must be
there, in the man, part of him, whether he is with the woman in the
night, or alone--far off--in the jungle, or in the--the desert. He must
have the strange strength that comes from solitude. Where can the men of
our country find that now?"

"They find strength in the clash of wills, Claire, and in the battles of
love."

"Most of them never find it at all," she said, with a sort of sullen
resignation. "And most of the women do not want it, or ask for it, or
know what it is. The danger is when some accident or some fate teaches
them what it is. Then--then--"

She stopped, and glanced at Renfrew suspiciously, as if she had so
nearly betrayed a secret that he might, nay, must have guessed it.

"What do you mean? Then they seek it away from--?"

"Where they know they will find it," she said, almost defiantly.

Renfrew's face grew cold and rigid.

"What are you saying to me, Claire?"

"What is true of some women, Desmond."

He was silent. Pain and fear invaded his heart; and, by degrees, the
little tune played by the Moor seemed to approach him, very quietly, and
to become one with this slow agony. Music, among its many and terrible
powers, numbers one that is scarcely possessed as forcibly by any other
art. It can glide into a man and direct his emotions as irresistibly as
science can direct the flow of a stream. It can penetrate as a thing
seen cannot penetrate. For that which is invisible is that which is
invincible. And this tune of the Moor, while it added to Renfrew's
distress, touched his distress with confusion and bewilderment. At first
he did not realise that the music had anything to do with his state of
mind, or with the growing turmoil of his heart and brain; but he felt
that something was becoming intolerable to him, and pushing him on in a
dangerous path. He thought it was the statement of Claire; and, for the
first time in his life, he was stirred by an anger against her that was
horrible to him. He released her from his arm.

"How dare you say that to me?" he asked. "Do you understand what your
words imply, that--Good God!--that women are like animals, creatures
without souls, running to the feet of the master who has the whip with
the longest, the most stinging lash? Why, such a creed as yours would
keep men savages, and kill all gentleness out of the world. Curse that
chap! That hideous music of his--"

He had suddenly become aware that the Moor's melody added something to
his torment. At his last exclamation, the sullen look in Claire's pale
face gave way to an expression of fear and of startling solicitude.

"Desmond, you are putting a wrong interpretation on what I said," she
began hastily.

But he was excited, and could not endure any interruption.

"And you imply a degrading immorality as a prevailing characteristic of
women too," he went on, "that they should leave their homes, deny their
obligations, because they find elsewhere--away, out in some dark place
with a blackguard--a powerful will to curb them and keep them down,
like--why, like these wretched women all round us here in this
country,--the women we saw in Tetuan only to-day, veiled, hidden, loaded
with burdens, worse off than animals, because their masters doubt them,
and would not dream of trusting them. Claire, there's something
barbarous about you."

He spoke the words with the intonation of one who thinks he is uttering
an insult. But she smiled.

"It's the something barbarous about me that has placed me where I am,"
she said, with a cold pride. "It is that which civilisation worships in
me, that which has set me above the other women of my time. It is even
that which has made you love me, Desmond, whether you know it or not."

He looked at her like a man half dazed.

"I frighten the dove-cotes. I can make men tremble by my outbursts of
passion, and women faint because I am sad; and even the stony-hearted
sob when I die. And I can make you love me, Desmond. Yes, perhaps I am
more barbarous than other women. But do you think I am sorry for it?
No."

"Some day you may be, Claire."

He spoke more gently. The wonder and worship he had for this woman
stirred in him again. While she had been speaking, she had instinctively
risen to her feet, and she stood in the dull red glow of the waning
fire, looking down at him as if he were a creature in a lower world than
the one in which she could walk at will.

"I shall never choose to be sorry," she said, "whatever my fate may be.
To be sorry is to be feeble, and to be feeble is to be unfit to live,
and unfit to die. Never, never think of me as being sorry for anything I
have done, or may do. Never deceive yourself about me."

A great log, eaten through by a flame at its heart, broke gently asunder
on the summit of the heaped wood. One half of it, red-hot, and alive
with multitudes of flickering fires, gold, primrose, steel-blue, and
deep purple, dropped and fell at Claire's feet. She glanced down at it,
and at Renfrew.

"My deeds may burn me up," she said, "as those coloured fires burn up
that wood, until it is no longer wood but fire itself. They shall never
drench me with wretched, contemptible tears."

He got up; and, when he was on his feet, he seemed to hear the incessant
music more clearly, blending with the words of Claire. The notes were
like hot sparks falling on him. He winced under them, and looked round
almost wildly. Then, without speaking, he hurried away in the darkness
to the place where the soldiers were feasting, and the men of the camp
were holding their fantasia. Claire divined why he went. She started a
step forward as if to try and stop him; but his movement had been so
abrupt that she was too late. She had to let him go. Her hands fell at
her sides, and she waited by the dying fire in the attitude of one who
listens intently. The soft melody of that hidden and persistent musician
wailed in her ears, on and on. It came again and again, never ceasing,
never altering in time. And its influence upon Claire was terrible as
the influence of the dream music in the valley beneath the Kasbar. She
longed to go to it. She seemed to belong to it,--to be its possession,
and to have erred when she separated herself from it. In the darkness it
was awaiting her, and it sent out its crying voice in the night as a
message, as a summons soft, clear, and quietly determined. She clenched
her hands as she stood by the fire. She strove to root her feet in the
ground. If there had been anything to cling to just then, she would have
stretched forth her arms and clung to it, resisting what she loved from
fear of the future. But there was nothing. And she thought of the
children and of the Pied Piper. But they were legendary beings of a
fable long ago. And she thought of Renfrew and of his love. But that
seemed nothing. That could not keep her. He was a pale phantom, and her
career was a handful of dust, and her name was as the name graven upon a
tomb, and her life was but as a gift to be offered to an unknown
destiny,--while that melody called to her. Had any one seen her then in
the glow of the firelight, she would have seemed to him terrible. For
suddenly she let the djelabe of Absalem slip from her shoulders to the
ground. And, in the fiercely flickering light, that makes all things and
people assume unearthly aspects, her thin figure in its white robe
looked like the white body of a serpent, erect and trembling, under the
influence of the charmer. But the melody grew softer and softer, more
faint, more dreamy in the darkness. Presently it ceased. As it did so,
Claire drew a deep breath, lifted her head like one released from a
thraldom, and turned her face towards the camp.

Almost directly she saw Renfrew returning towards her. He looked
puzzled.

"It wasn't any of the men playing," he said to her.

"No?"

Claire bent, caught up the djelabe and drew it over her.

"I went to them, and found them listening to some story Absalem was
telling. They were all gathered close round him, huddled up together in
the dark. And the piping came from quite another direction--not from the
soldiers either. It must have been some vagabond out of Tetuan. I was
just going to make a search for him, when the noise stopped. He must
have heard me coming."

He still looked disturbed and angry, and this break in their
conversation was final. It seemed impossible to take up the thread of it
again. They stood together watching the fire fade away till it was a
faint glow almost level with the ground. Then at last Renfrew spoke, in
a voice that was almost timid.

"Claire," he said.

"Yes," she answered out of the dull twilight that would soon be
darkness.

"If I have said anything to-night to hurt you, don't think of it, don't
remember it. I don't know--I don't seem to have been like myself
to-night. I believe that cursed music irritated me, so ugly, and so
monotonous; it got right on my nerves, I think."

"Did it?"

"Without my knowing it."

He felt for one of her hands and clasped it.

"Yes, dear. We both said more than we meant. Didn't we?"

Claire did not assent; but she let her hand lie in his. That satisfied
him then, although afterwards he remembered her silence. Soon the fire
was dead; and they said good-night in the wind, which seemed colder
because there was no more light.

       *       *       *       *       *

Renfrew went to his tent, undressed, and got into bed. The wind roared
against the canvas. But the pegs had been driven stoutly into the ground
by the porters, and held the cords fast. He felt very tired and
depressed, and thought he would not fall asleep quickly. But he soon
began to be drowsy, and to have a sense of dropping into the very arms
of the tempest, lulled by its noise. He slept for a time. Presently,
however, and while it was still quite dark, he woke up. He heard the
wind as before, but was troubled by an idea that some other sound was
mingling with it, some murmur so indistinct that he could not decide
what it was, although he was aware of it. He sat up and strained his
ears, and wished the wind would lull, if only for a moment, or that this
other sound--which had surely been the cause of his waking--would
increase, and stand out distinctly in the night. And, at last, by dint
of listening with all his force, Renfrew seemed to himself to compel the
sound to greater clearness. Then he knew that somewhere, far off perhaps
in the wind, the player on the pipe reiterated his soft and stealthy
music. It was swept on the tempest like a drowning thing caught in a
whirlpool. It was so faint as to be almost inaudible. But in all its
weakness it retained most completely its character, and made the same
impression upon Renfrew as when it was near and distinct. It irritated
and it repelled him. And, with an angry exclamation, he flung himself
down and buried his head in the pillow, stopping his ears with his
hands.

       *       *       *       *       *

With daylight the camp was in a turmoil. Claire was gone. Her bed had
not been slept in. She had not undressed. She had not even taken off
Absalem's djelabe. At least it could not be found. Renfrew, frantic,
almost mad with anxiety, explored the plain, rode at a gallop to the
gate of the city, called upon the Governor of Tetuan to help him in his
search, and summoned the Consul to his aid in his despair. Every effort
was made to find the missing woman; but no success crowned the quest,
either at that time, or afterwards, when weeks became months, and months
grew into years. A great actress was lost to the world. His world was
lost to Renfrew. He rode back at last one day to the villas of Tangier,
bent down upon his horse, broken, alone. In his despair he cursed
himself. He accused himself of cruelty to Claire that night beside the
African fire, when he had been roused to a momentary anger against her.
He even told himself that he had driven her away from him. But other
men, who had known Claire and the strangeness of her caprices, said to
each other that she had got tired of Renfrew and given him the slip,
wandering away disguised in the djelabe of a Moor, and that some fine
day she would turn up again, and re-appear upon the stage that had seen
her glory.

Later on, when Renfrew at last, after long searching, came hopelessly
back to England, so changed that his friends scarcely recognised him, he
was sometimes seized with strange and terrible thoughts as he sat
brooding over the wreck of his love. He seemed to see, as in a pale
vision of flame and darkness, a little dusky Moorish boy bending to
smell at a withered sprig of orange flower, and to remember that
once--how long ago it seemed--Claire had wished to kiss that boy as a
Moorish woman might have kissed him. And then he saw a veiled figure,
that he seemed to know even in its deceitful robe, bend down to the boy.
And the vision faded. At another time he would hear the little tune that
had persecuted him in the night. And then he recalled the music of
Claire's dream, and the melody that charmed the snakes; and he
shuddered. For the miracle man had never been seen in Tetuan since the
day when Claire had watched him in the Soko. Nor could Renfrew ever find
out whither he had wandered.

       *       *       *       *       *

Very long afterwards, however,--although this fact was never known to
Renfrew,--two Russian travellers in the Great Sahara desert witnessed
one evening, as they sat in their tent door, the performance of a savage
charmer of snakes who carried upon his body three serpents,--one
striped, one black, one white. And the younger of them noticed, and
remarked to the other, that the charmer wore half-way up the little
finger of his left hand a thin gold circle in which there was set a
magnificent black pearl.




A TRIBUTE OF SOULS


PRELUDE

The matter of Carlounie, the village of Perthshire in Scotland, is
become notorious in the world. The name of its late owner, his
remarkable transformation, his fortunate career, his married life, the
brooding darkness that fell latterly upon his mind, the flaming deed
that he consummated, its appalling outcome, and the finding of him by Mr
Mackenzie, the minister of the parish of Carlounie, sunk in a pool of
the burn that runs through a "den" close to his house--all these things
are fresh in the minds of many men. It has been supposed that he had
discovered a common intrigue between his wife, Kate, formerly an
hospital nurse, and his tenant, Hugh Fraser of Piccadilly, London. It
has been universally thought that this discovery led to the last action
of his life. The following pages, found among his papers, seem to put a
very different complexion on the affair, although they suggest a
mediaeval legend rather than a history of modern days. It may be added
that careful enquiries have been made among the inhabitants of
Carlounie, and that no man, woman, or child has been discovered who ever
saw, or heard of, the grey traveller mentioned in Alistair Ralston's
narrative.


I

THE STRANGER BY THE BURN

Can a fever change a man's whole nature, giving him powers that he never
had before? Can he go into it impotent, starved, naked, emerge from it
potent, satisfied, clothed with possibilities that are wonders, that are
miracles to him? It must be so; it is so. And yet--I must go back to
that sad autumn day when I walked beside the burn. Can I write down my
moods, my feelings of that day and of the following days? And if I can,
does that power of pinning the butterfly of my soul down upon the
board--does that power, too, bud, blossom from a soil mysteriously
fertilised by illness? Formerly, I could as easily have flown in the air
to the summit of cloud-capped Schiehallion as have set on paper even the
smallest fragment of my mind. Now--well, let me see, let me still
further know my new, my marvellous self.

Yes, that first day! It was Autumn, but only early Autumn. The leaves
were changing colour upon the birch trees, upon the rowans. At dawn,
mists stood round to shield the toilet of the rising sun. At evening,
they thronged together like a pale troop of shadowy mutes to assist at
his departure to the under world. It was a misty season, through which
the bracken upon the hillsides of my Carlounie glowed furtively in
tints of brown and of orange; and my mind, my whole being, seemed to
move in mists. I was just twenty-two, an orphan, master of my estate of
Carlounie, a Scotch laird, and my own governor. And some idiots envied
me then, as many begin to envy me now. I even remember one ghastly old
man who clapped me on the shoulder, and, with the addition of an
unnecessary oath, swore that I was "a lucky youngster." I, with my thin,
chetif body, my burning, weakly, starved, and yet ambitious soul--lucky!
I remember that I broke into a harsh laugh, and longed to kill the
babbling beast.

And it was the next day, in the afternoon, that I took that book--my
Bible--and went forth alone to the long den in which the burn hides and
cries its presence. Yes, I took Goethe's "Faust," and my own complaining
spirit, and went out into the mist with my misty, clouded mind. My
cousin Gavin wanted me to go out shooting. He laughed and rallied me
upon my ill-luck on the previous day, when I had gone out and been the
joke of my own keepers because I had missed every bird; and I turned and
railed at him, and told him to leave me to myself. And, as I went, I
heard him muttering, "That wretched little fellow! To think that he
should be owner of Carlounie!" Now, he sings another tune.

With "Faust" in my hand, and hatred in my heart, I went out into the
delicately chilly air, down the winding ways of the garden, through the
creaking iron gateway. I emerged on to the wilder land, irregular,
grass-covered ground, strewn with grey granite boulders, among which
coarse, wiry ferns grew sturdily. The blackfaced sheep whisked their
broad tails at me as I passed, then stooped their ever-greedy mouths to
their damp and eternal meal again. I heard the thin and distant cry of a
hawk, poised somewhere up in the mist. The hills, clothed in the
death-like glory of the bracken, loomed around me, like some phantom,
tricked-out procession passing through desolate places. And then I heard
the voice of the burn--that voice which is even now for ever in my ears.
To me that day it was the voice of one alive; and it is the voice of one
alive to me now. I descended the sloping hill with my lounging,
weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called me master had so
often looked contemptuously askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I
descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the tree-fringed den, and
the burn was noisy in my ears. I could see it now, leaping here and
there out of its hiding-place--ivory foam among the dripping larches,
and the birches with their silver stems; ivory foam among the deep brown
and flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a voice
calling--calling me to come down into its hiding-place, presided over by
the mists--to come down into its hiding-place, away from men: away from
the living creatures whom I hated because I envied them, because they
were stronger than I, because they could do what I could not do, say
what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn, my tenants, the smallest
farm boy, the grooms, the little leaping peasants--I hated, I hated them
all. And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and I went down into
the hiding-place of the burn.

It ran through strange and secret places where the soft mists hung in
wet wreaths. I seemed to be in another world when I was in its lair. On
the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees like shadows, some of
them with tortured and tormented shapes. As I turned and looked straight
up the hill of the burn's descending course, the mountain from which it
came closed in the prospect inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in--me
and the burn which talked to me. We two were out of the world which I
hated and longed to have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world, full
of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now that I was right down at the
water-side, the ivory face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to
me, the ivory heart that beat against my heart--so sick and so
weary--were varied and were changed. As thoughts streak a mind, the
clear amber of the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous foam
that marked the incessant leaps taken by the water towards the valley.
The silence of those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for
contemplation in a great career of action; and their silence spoke to
me, mingling mysteriously with the voice of the foam. The course of the
burn is broken up, and attended by rocks that have been modelled by the
action of the running water into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in
mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch, and all covered with
drops of moisture; some are gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp
edges and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a cunning and almost
coquettish grace, dashes brutally against others, as if impelled by an
internal violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses quite gently,
and would be glad to linger by, if Nature would allow the dalliance. And
this army of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite
variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut of expression; for the
differing shape of each boulder, against which it rushes in its long
career, gives it a different note. It flickers across the small and
round stone with the purling cry of a child. From the stone curved
inwards, and with a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody. The
pointed and narrow colony of rocks which break it into an intricate
network of small water threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards
the dark pool under the birches, where the trout play like sinister
shadows and the insects dance in the sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it
gains a great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from which it
takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and defiant, and shrieks with a
banshee of triumph--in which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of
wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices among the rocks, under the
ferns and the birch trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and
shadows, between the steep walls of the green banks that hem it in! Many
voices which can sing, when they choose, one song, again and again
and--monotonously--again!

So--now on this sad Autumn day--I was with the burn in its hiding-place,
cool, damp, fretful. Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden, the wilder
land beyond, the moors on which yesterday my incompetence as a shot had
roused the contempt of my cousin and of my hirelings--all were lost to
view. I was away from all men in this narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a
world. I sat down on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my
heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear brown water glided
swiftly. I sat and listened to its murmur. And, just then, it did not
occur to me that water can utter words like men. The murmur was
suggestive but definitely inarticulate. I had come down here to be away
and to think. The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur of the burn;
and, as ever, in those days, it lamented and cursed and bitterly
complained.

Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence that clung to both
mind and body? (So ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten by
Providence? Why had I been given a soul that could not express itself in
the frame of a coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost a
deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded exactly to my body, then
all might have been well enough. I should have been more complete,
although less, in some way, than I now was. For such a soul would have
accepted cowardice, weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it,
as a right fate. Such a soul would never have known the meaning of the
word rebellion, would never have been able to understand its own cancer
of disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous and creeping
malady. It would never have aspired like a flame, and longed in vain to
burn clearly and grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would such a
soul have guttered on like some cheap and ill-smelling candle, shedding
shadows rather than any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless
of the possibilities that teem like waking children in the wondrous womb
of life, oblivious of the contempt of the souls around it, heedless of
ambition, of the trumpet call of success, of the lust to be something,
to do something, of the magic, of the stinging magic of achievement.
With such a soul in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body--I thought,
sitting thus by the burn--I might have been content, an utterly low, and
perhaps an utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.

But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was the most bitterly
miserable of men. God--or the Devil--had made me ill-shaped, physically
despicable, with the malign sort of countenance that so often
accompanies and illustrates a bad poor body. My limbs, without being
actually twisted, were shrunken and incompetent--they would not obey my
desires as do the limbs of other men. My legs would not grip a horse.
When I rode I was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness, no
agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When I tried to box, to
fence, I was one whirling, jigging incapacity. I had feeble sight, and
objects presented themselves to my vision so strangely that I could not
shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the young Laird of Carlounie! When I
walked my limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no grace, no
lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence of bodily power. And this
was bitter, yet as nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my body was
in a way complete. It was a wretch. But when you came to the mind you
had the real tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there dwells a
commanding spirit, as a great God might dwell--of mysterious choice--in
a ruinous and decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit rules,
disposes, presides, develops, has its own full and superb existence,
triumphing not merely over, but actually through the contemptible body
in which it resides, so that men even are led to worship the very
ugliness and poverty of this body, to adore it for its power to retain
such a mighty spirit within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it been,
I might have been happy by the burn that Autumn day. Had it been, I
might never--But I am anticipating, and I must not anticipate. I must
sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch of my limbs, and
recall the horror of my musing.

In a manner, then, my soul matched my body. It was feeble and
incompetent too. My brain was dull and clouded. My intellect was
sluggish and inert. But--and this was the terror for me!--within the
rank nest of my soul--my spirit--lay coiled two vipers that never ceased
from biting me with their poisoned fangs--Self-consciousness and
Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to be other than I was. I watched
my own incompetence as one who watches from a tower. I divined how
others regarded me--precisely. The blatant and comfortable egoism of a
dwarf mind in a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I was that
terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and incompetent thing that
adored, with a curious wildness of passion, completeness, competence.
Nor had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided
perfection. My desires were Gargantuan. When I was with my cousin Gavin,
a fine all-round sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot, to
throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on a horse. I felt that I
would give up years of life to beat him once in any of his pursuits.
When I was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense, were utterly
different. He represented in my neighbourhood Intellect--with a capital
I. A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of Carlounie, he was
astonishingly adroit as a controversialist, astonishingly eloquent as a
divine. His voice was full of music. His eyes were full of light and of
the most superb self-confidence. He rested upon his intellect as a man
may rest upon a rock. The power of his personality was calm and immense.
I felt it vehemently. I shook and trembled under it. I hated and loathed
the man for it, because I wanted and could never possess it. So, too, I
hated my cousin Gavin for his possessions, his long and sure-sighted
eyes, great and strong arms, broad chest, lithe legs, bright agility. My
body could do nothing. My soul could do nothing--except one great thing.
It could fully observe and comprehend its own impotence. It could fully
and desperately envy and pine to be what it could never be. Could never
be, do I say? Wait! Remember that is only what I thought then as I sat
upon the rock, and, with haggard young eyes, watched the clear brown
water slipping furtively past between my knees.

My disease seemed to culminate that day, I remember. I was a sick
invalid alone in the mist. Something--it might have been vitriol--was
eating into me, eating, eating its way to my very heart, to the core of
me. Oh, to be stunted and desire to be straight and tall, to be dwarf
and wish to be giant, to be stupid and long to be a genius, to be ugly
and yearn to be in face as one of the shining gods, to have no power
over men, and to pine to fascinate, hold, dominate a world of men--this
indeed is to be in hell! I was in hell that Autumn day. I clenched my
thin, weak hands together. I clenched my teeth from which the pale lips
were drawn back in a grin; and I realised all the spectral crowd of my
shortcomings. They stood before me like demons of the Brocken--yes, yes,
of the Brocken!--and I cursed God with the sound of the burn ringing and
chattering in my ears. And I devoted Gavin, Doctor Wedderburn, every man
highly placed, every lowest peasant, who could do even one of all the
things I could not do, to damnation. The paroxysm that took hold of me
was like a fit, a convulsion. I came out of it white and feeble. And,
suddenly, the voice of the burn seemed to come from a long way off. I
put out my hand, and took up from the rock on which I had laid it,
"Faust." And, scarcely knowing what I did, I began mechanically to
read--to the dim rapture of the burn--

"_Scene III.--The Study. Faust (entering, with the poodle)._" I began to
read, do I say, mechanically? Yes, it is true, but soon, very soon, the
spell of Goethe was laid upon me. I was in the lofty-arched, narrow
Gothic chamber, with that living symbol of the weariness, broken
ambition, learned despair of all the ages. I was engrossed. I heard the
poodle snarling by the stove. I heard the spirits whispering in the
corridor. Vapour rose--or was it indeed the mist from the mountains
among the birch trees?--and out of the vapour came Mephistopheles in the
garb of a travelling scholar. And then--and then the great bargain was
struck. I heard--yes, I did, I actually, and most distinctly, heard a
voice--Faust's--say, "_Let us the sensual deeps explore.... Plunge we in
Time's tumultuous dance, In the rush and roll of circumstance._" A
pause; then the Student's grave and astonished tones came to me: _Eritis
sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum._ The cloak was spread, and on the
burning air Faust was wafted to his new life--nay, not to his new life
merely, but to life itself. He vanished with his guide in a coloured,
flower-like mist. I dropped my hand holding the book down upon the cold
rock by which the cold water splashed. It felt burning hot to my touch.
My head fell upon my breast, and I had my dreams--dreams of the life of
Faust and of its glories, gained by this bargain that he made. And
then--yes, then it was!--the voice of the burn, as from leagues away in
the bosom of this very mist, began to sing like a fairy voice, or a
voice in dreams, and in visions of the night, "_If it was so then, it
might be so now._" At first I scarcely heeded it, for I was enwrapt.
But the song grew louder, more insistent. It was travelling to me from a
far country. I heard it coming: "_If it was so then, it might be so
now_"--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" How near it was at
last, how loud in my ears! And yet always there was something vague,
visionary about it, something of the mist, I think. At length I heard it
with the attention that is of earth. I came to myself, out of the narrow
Gothic chamber in which the genius of Goethe had prisoned me, and I
stared into the mist, which was gathering thicker as the night began to
fall. It seemed flower-like, and full of strange and mysterious colour.
I trembled. I got up. Still I heard the voice of the burn singing that
monotonous legend, on, and on, and on. Slowly I turned. I climbed the
bank of the den. The sheep scattered lethargically at my approach. I
passed through the creaking iron gate into the garden. Carlounie was
before me. There was something altered, something triumphant about its
aspect. The voice of the burn faded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even as I
gained the door of my house, and, before entering it, paused in an
attentive attitude, I heard the water chanting faintly from the
den--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" ... As I came into the
hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn stood together talking earnestly,
I remember that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.

       *       *       *       *       *

From that moment not a day passed without my visiting the burn. It
summoned me. Always it sang those words persistently. The sound of the
water can be very faintly heard from the windows of Carlounie. Each day,
at dawn, I pushed open the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear
if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise, or in the darkness
through which the soft and small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the
sill and listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among the mountains.
Sometimes the silence was intense and awful. But in storm or in
stillness the burn sang on, ever and ever the same words. At moments I
fancied that the voice was as the voice of a man demented, repeating
with mirthless frenzy through all his years one hollow sentence. At
moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman, a siren, a Lorelei among my
rocks in my valley. Then again I said, "It is a spirit voice, a voice
from the inner chamber of my own heart." And--why I know not--at that
last fantasy I shuddered. Even in the midnight from my window ledge I
leaned while the world slept and I heard the mystic message of the burn.
My visits to its bed were not unobserved. One morning my cousin Gavin
said to me roughly, "Why the devil are you always stealing off to that
ditch"--so he called the den that was the home of my voice--"when you
ought to be practising to conquer your infernal deficiencies? Why, the
children of your own keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man,
and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling." I stared at him and
answered, "You don't understand everything." Once Dr Wedderburn, who had
been my tutor, said to me more kindly, "Alistair, action is better for
you than thought. Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try to
work, for work is the best man-maker after all."

And to him I said, "Yes, I know!" and flew with a strong wing in the
face of his advice. For the voice of the burn was more to me than the
voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind of the burn meant more to
me than the mind of any man. And so the Autumn died slowly, with a
lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in mist. I often felt ill,
even then. My body was dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever
was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it crawling in my veins? Was it
nestling about my heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...

Certainly during this period life seemed alien to me, and I moved as one
apart in a remote world, full of the music of the burn, and full, too,
of vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know it. Still, I cannot be
sure what is the truth. In the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the
burn before my illness seized me. The cold of early Winter was in the
air and a great stillness. It was afternoon when I left the house
walking slowly with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white and
drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching. I did not carry my volume
of Goethe in my hand; but, in its place, held an old book on
transcendental magic. The voice of the burn--yes, that alone--had led me
to study this book. So now I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the
foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the den to this strange
writing on the black art? Who knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put
the book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold as I descended the
steep ground that lay about the water, which that day seemed to roar in
my ears the sentence I had heard so many days and nights. And this time,
as I hearkened, my heart and my brain echoed the last words--"_It might
be so now._" Gaining the edge of the burn, then in heavy spate, I
watched for a while the passage of the foam from rock to rock. I peered
into the pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and with
whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all my meagre body seemed pulsing
with those everlasting words: "Why not now?" I murmured to myself, with
a sort of silent sneer, too, at my own absurdity. I remember I glanced
furtively around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness, dripping
bare trees through whose branches the mist curled silently, cold rocks,
the cold flood of the swollen burn--such was the blank prospect that met
my eyes.

There was no man near me. There was no one to look at me. I was remote,
hidden in a secret place, and the early twilight was already beginning
to fall. No one could see me. I opened my old and ragged book, or,
rather, let it fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for the
hundredth time, and read that he who would evoke the Devil must choose a
solitary and condemned spot. The burn was solitary. The burn was
condemned surely by the despair and by the endless incapacities of the
wretched being who owned it. I had taken off my shoes and placed them
upon a rock. My feet were bare. My head was covered. I now furtively
proceeded to gather together a small heap of sticks and leaves, and to
these I set fire, after several attempts. As the flames at last crept
up, the mist gathered more closely round me and my fire, as if striving
to warm itself at the blaze. The voice of the burn mingled with the
uneasy crackle of the twigs, and a murmur of its words seemed to emanate
also from the flames, two elements uniting to imitate the utterance of
man to my brain, already surely tormented with fever. And now, with my
eyes upon my book, I proceeded to trace with the sharp point of a stick
in some sandy soil between two rocks a rough Goetic Circle of Black
evocations and pacts. From time to time I paused in my work and glanced
uneasily about me, but I saw only the mists and the waters.

At length my task was finished, and the time had arrived for the
supreme effort of my insane and childish folly. Standing at Amasarac in
the Circle, I said aloud the formula of Evocation of the Grand Grimoire,
ending with the words "Jehosua, Evam, Zariat, natmik, Come, come, come."

My voice died away in the twilight, and I stood among the grey rocks
waiting, mad creature that I surely was! But only the rippling voice of
the burn answered my adjuration. Then I repeated the words in a louder
tone, adding menaces and imprecations to my formula. And all the time
the fire I had kindled sprang up into the mist; and the twilight of the
heavy Autumn fell slowly round me. Again I paused, and again my madness
received no satisfaction, no response. But it seemed to me that I heard
the browsing sheep on the summit of the right bank of the gully scatter
as if at the approach of some one. Yet there was no stir of footsteps.
It must have been my fancy, or the animals were merely changing their
feeding ground in a troop, as they sometimes will, for no assignable
cause. And now I made one last effort, urged by the voice of the burn,
which sang so loudly the words which had mingled with my dream of Faust.
I cried aloud the supreme appellation, making an effort that brought out
the sweat on my forehead, and set the pulses leaping in my thin and
shivering body. "_Chavajoth! chavajoth! chavajoth! I command thee by the
Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras._"

       *       *       *       *       *

A little way up the course of the burn the dead wood cracked and
shuffled under the pressure of descending feet. Again I heard a
scattering of the sheep upon the hillside. My hair stirred on my head
under my cap, and the noise of the falling water was intolerably loud to
me. I wanted to hear plainly, to hear what was coming down to me in the
mist. The brush-wood sang nearer. In the heavy and damp air there was
the small, sharp report of a branch snapped from a tree. I heard it drop
among the ferns close to me. And then in the mist and in the twilight I
saw a slim figure standing motionless. It was vague, but less vague than
a shadow. It seemed to be a man, or a youth, clad in a grey suit that
could scarcely be differentiated from the mist. The flames of my fire,
bent by a light breeze that had sprung up, stretched themselves towards
it, as if to salute it. And now I could not hear any movement of the
sheep; evidently they had gone to a distance. At first, seized with a
strange feeling of extreme, almost unutterable fear, I neither moved nor
spoke. Then, making a strong effort to regain control of my ordinary
faculties, I cried out in the twilight--

"What is that? What is it?"

"Only a stranger who has missed his way on the mountain, and wants to go
on to Wester Denoon."

The voice that came to me from the figure beyond the fire sounded, I
remember, quite young, like the voice of a boy. It was clear and level,
and perhaps a little formal. So that was all. A tourist--that was all!

"Can you direct me on the way?" the voice said.

I gave the required direction slowly, for I was still confused, nervous,
exhausted with my insane practices in the den. But the youth--as I
supposed he was--did not move away at once.

"What are you doing by this fire?" he said. "I heard your voice calling
by the torrent among the trees when I was a very long way off."

Strangely, I did not resent the question. Still more strangely, I was
impelled to give him the true answer to it.

"Raising the Devil!" he said. "And did he come to you?"

"No; of course not. You must think me mad."

"And why do you call him?"

Suddenly a desire to confide in this stranger, whose face I could not
see now, whose shadowy form I should, in all probability, never see
again, came upon me. My usual nervousness deserted me. I let loose my
heart in a turbulent crowd of words. I explained my impotence of body
and of mind to this grey traveller in the twilight. I dwelt upon my
misery. I repeated the cry of the burn and related my insane dream of
imitating Faust, of making my poor pact with Lucifer, with the Sphinx of
mediaeval terrors. When I ceased, the boy's voice answered:--

"They say that in these modern days Satan has grown exigent. It is not
enough to dedicate to him your own soul; but you must also pay a tribute
of souls to the Caesar of hell."

"A tribute of souls?"

"Yes. You must bring, they say, the mystic number, three souls to
Satan."

Suddenly I laughed.

"I could never do that," I said. "I have no power to seduce man or
woman. I cannot win souls to heaven or to hell."

"But if you received new powers, such as you desire, would you use them
to win souls, three souls, to Lucifer?"

"Yes," I said with passionate earnestness. "I swear to you that I
would."

Suddenly the boy's voice laughed.

"_Quomodo cecidisti_, Lucifer!" he said. "When thou canst not contrive
to capture souls for thyself! But," he added, as if addressing himself
once more to me, after this strange ejaculation, "your words have,
perhaps, sealed the bond. Who knows? Words that come from the very heart
are often deeds. For, as we can never go back from things that we have
done, it may be that, sometimes, we can never go back from things that
we have said."

On the words he moved, and passed so swiftly by me into the twilight
down the glen that I never saw his face. I turned instinctively to look
after him; and, this was strange, it seemed that the wind at that very
moment must have turned with me, blowing from, instead of towards, the
mountain. This certainly was so; for the tongues of flame from my fire
bent backward on a sudden and leaned after the grey traveller, whose
steps died swiftly away among the rocks, and on the shuffling dead wood
and leaves of the birches and the oaks.

And then there came a singing in my ears, a beating of many drums in my
brain. I drooped and sank down by the fire in the mist. My fever came
upon me like a giant, and presently Gavin and Doctor Wedderburn,
searching in the night, found me in a delirium, and bore me back to
Carlounie.


II

THE SOUL OF DR WEDDERBURN

To emerge from a great illness is sometimes dreadful, sometimes divine.
To one man the return from the gates of death is a progress of despair.
He feels that he cannot face the wild contrasts of the surprising world
again, that his courage has been broken upon the wheel, that energy is
desolation, and sleep true beauty. To another this return is a
marvellous and superb experience. It is like the vivid re-awakening of
youth in one who is old, a rapture of the past committing an act of
brigandage upon the weariness of the present, a glorious substitution of
Eden for the outer courts where is weeping and gnashing of teeth. It
will be supposed that I found myself in the first category, a
terror-stricken and rebellious mortal when the fever gave me up to the
world again. For the world had always been cruel to me, because I was
afraid of it, and was a puny thing in it. Yet this was not so. My
convalescence was like a beautiful dream of rest underneath which riot
stirred. A simile will explain best exactly what I mean. Let me liken
the calm of my convalescence to the calm of earth on the edge of Spring.
What a riot of form, of scent, of colour, of movement, is preparing
beneath that enigmatic, and apparently profound, repose. In the simile
you have my exact state. And I alone felt that, within this womb of
inaction, the child, action, lay hid, developing silently, but
inexorably, day by day. This knowledge was my strange secret. It came
upon me one night when I lay awake in the faint twilight, shed by a
carefully shaded lamp over my bed. Rain drummed gently against the
windows. There was no other sound. By the fire, in a great armchair, the
trained nurse, Kate Walters, was sitting with a book--"Jane Eyre" it
was--upon her knees. I had been sleeping and now awoke thirsty. I put
out my hand to get at a tumbler of lemonade that stood on a table by my
pillow. And suddenly a thought, a curious thought, was with me. My hand
had grasped the tumbler and lifted it from the table; but, instead of
bringing my hand to my mouth I kept my arm rigidly extended, the tumbler
poised on my palm as upon the palm of a juggler.

"How long my arm is!" that was my thought, "and how strong!" Formerly it
had been short, weak, awkward. Now, surely, after my illness, my arms
would naturally be nerveless, useless things. The odd fact was that now,
for the first time in my life, I felt joy in a physical act. An absurd
and puny act, you will say, I daresay. What of that? With it came a
sudden stirring of triumph. I lay there on my back and kept my arm
extended for full five minutes by the watch that ticked by my bed-head.
And with each second that passed joy blossomed more fully within my
heart. I drank the lemonade as one who drinks a glad toast. Yet I was
puzzled. "Is this--can this be a remnant of delirium?" I asked myself.
And beneath the clothes drawn up to my chin I fingered my arm above the
elbow. It was the limb of a big, strong man. Surprise, supreme
astonishment forced an exclamation from my lips. Kate got up softly and
came towards me; but I feigned to be asleep, and she returned to the
fire. Yet, peering under my lowered eyelids, I noticed an expression of
amazement upon her young and pretty face. I knew afterwards that it was
the sound of my voice--my new voice--that drew it there. After that
night my convalescence was more than a joy to me, it was a rapture,
touched by, and mingled with something that was almost awe. Is not the
earth awe-struck when she considers that Spring and Summer nestle
silently in her bosom? With each day the secret which I kept grew more
mysterious, more profound. Soon I knew it could be a secret no longer.
The fever--it must be that!--had wrought magic within my body, driving
out weakness, impotence, lassitude, developing my physical powers to an
extent that was nothing less than astounding. Lying there in my bed, I
felt the dwarf expand into the giant. Think of it! Did ever living man
know such an experience before? A bodily spring came about within me.
And I was already twenty-two years old before the fever took me. My
limbs grew large and strong; the muscles of my chest and back were
tensely strung and knit as firmly as the muscles of an athlete. I lay
still, it is true, and felt much of the peculiar vagueness that follows
fever; but I was conscious of a supine, latent energy never known
before. I was conscious that when I rose, and went out into the world
again, it would be as a man, capable of holding his own against other
strong, straight men. That was a wonder. But it was succeeded by a
greater marvel yet.

One afternoon, while I was still in bed, Doctor Wedderburn came to see
me and to sit with me. He had been away on a holiday, and,
consequently, had not visited me before, except once when I had been
delirious. The doctor was a short, spare man, with a sharply cut
brick-red face, lively and daring dark eyes, and straight hair already
on the road to grey. His self-possession bordered on self-satisfaction;
and, despite his good heart and the real and anxious sanctity of his
life, he could seldom entirely banish from his manner the contempt he
felt for those less intellectual, less swift-minded than himself. Often
had I experienced the stinging lash of his sarcasm. Often had I withered
beneath one of his keen glances that dismissed me from an argument as a
profound sage might kick an urchin from the study into the street. Often
had I hated him with a sick hatred and ground my teeth because my mind
was so clouded and so helpless, while his was so lucent and so adroit.
So now, when I heard his tap on the door, his deep voice asking to come
in, a rage of self-contempt seized me, as in the days before my illness.
The doctor entered with an elaborate softness, and walked, flat-footed,
to my bed, pursing his large lips gently as men do when filled with
cautious thoughts. I could see he desired to moderate his habitual voice
and manner; but, arrived close to me, he suddenly cried aloud, with a
singularly full-throated amazement.

"Boy--boy, what's come to you?" he called. Then, abruptly putting his
finger to his lips, he sank down in a chair, his bright eyes fixed upon
me.

"It's a miracle," he said slowly.

"What is?" I asked with an invalid's pettishness.

"The voice, too--the voice!"

I grew angry easily, as men do when they are sick.

"Why do you say that? Of course I've been bad--of course I'm changed."

"Changed! Look at yourself--and praise God, Alistair."

He had caught up a hand-mirror that lay on the dressing-table and now
put it into my hand. For the first time since the fever I saw my face.
It was as it had been and yet it was utterly different, for now it was
beautiful. The pinched features seemed to have been smoothed out. The
mouth had become firm and masterful. The haggard eyes were alight as if
torches burned behind them. My expression, too, was powerful, collected,
alert. I scarcely recognised myself. But I pretended to see no change.

"Well--what is it?" I asked, dropping the glass.

The doctor was confused by my calm.

"Your look of health startled me," he answered, sitting down by the bed
and examining me keenly.

All at once I was seized by a strange desire to get up an argument with
this man, by whom I had so often been crushed in conversation. I leaned
on my elbow in the bed, and fixing my eyes on him, I said:--

"And why should I praise God?"

The doctor seemed in amazement at my tone.

"Because you are a Christian and have been brought back from death," he
replied, but with none of his usual half-sarcastic self-confidence.

"You think God did that?"

"Alistair, do you dare to blaspheme the Almighty?"

I felt at that moment like a cat playing with a mouse. My lips, I know,
curved in a smile of mockery, and yet I will swear--yes, even to my own
heart--that all I said that day I said in pure mischief, with no evil
intent. It seemed that I, Alistair Ralston, the dolt, the ignoramus,
longed to try mental conclusions with this brilliant and opinionated
divine. He bade me praise God. In reply I praised--the Devil, and I
forced him to hear me. Absolutely I broke into a flood of words, and he
sat silent. I compared the good and evil in the scheme of the world,
balancing them in the scales, the one against the other. I took up the
stock weapon of atheism, the deadly nature, the deadly outcome of free
will. I used it with skill. The names of Strauss, Comte, Schopenhauer,
Renan, a dozen others, sprang from my lips. The dreary doctrine of the
illimitable triumph of sin, of the appalling mistake of the permission
granted it to step into the scheme of creation, in order that its
presence might create a _raison d'etre_ for the power of personal action
one way or the other in mankind--such matters as these I treated with a
vehement eloquence and command of words that laid a spell upon the
doctor. Going very far, I dared to exclaim that since God had allowed
his own scheme to get out of gear, the only hope of man lay in the
direction of the opposing force, in frank and ardent Satanism.

When at length I ceased from speaking, I expected Dr Wedderburn to rise
up in his wrath and to annihilate me, but he sat still in his chair with
a queer, and, as I thought, puzzled expression upon his face. At last he
said, as if to himself:

"The miracle of Balaam; verily, the miracle of Balaam."

The ass had indeed spoken as never ass spoke before. I waited a moment,
then I said:--

"Well, why don't you rebuke me, or why don't you try to controvert me?"

Again he looked upon me, very uneasily I thought, and with something
that was almost fear in his keen eyes.

"Ah!" he said, "I have praised the Lord many a morning and evening for
his gift of words to me. It seems others bestow that gift too.
Alistair"--and here his voice became deeply solemn--"where have you been
visiting when you lay there, mad to all seeming? In what dark place have
you been to gather destruction for men? With whom have you been
talking?"

Suddenly, I know not why, I thought of the grey stranger, and, with a
laugh, I cried:--

"The grey traveller taught me all I have said to you."

"The grey traveller! Who may he be?"

But I lay back upon the pillows and refused to answer, and very soon the
doctor went, still bending uneasy, nervous eyes upon me.

In those eyes I read the change that had stolen over my intellect, as in
the hand-mirror I had read the change that had stolen over my face. This
strange fever had caused both soul and body to blossom. I trembled with
an exquisite joy. Had Fate relented to me at last? Was it possible that
I was to know the joys of the heroes? I longed for, yet feared my full
recovery. In it alone should I discover how sincere was my
transformation. Doctor Wedderburn did not come to me again. The days
passed, my convalescence strengthened, watched over by the pretty nurse,
Kate Walters, a fresh, pure, pious, innocent, beautiful soul, tender,
temperate, and pitiful for all sorrow and evil. At length I was well. At
length I knew, to some extent, my new, my marvellous self. For I had,
indeed, been folded up in my fever like a vesture, and, like a vesture,
changed. I had grown taller, expanded, put forth mighty muscles as a
tree puts forth leaves. My cheeks and my eyes glowed with the radiance
of strong health. I went out with my cousin Gavin, whose estate marched
with mine, and I shot so well that he was filled with admiration, and
forthwith conceived a sort of foolish worship for me--having a
sportsman's soul but no real mind. For the first time in my life I felt
absolutely at home on a horse, an unwonted skill came to my hands, and I
actually schooled Gavin's horses over some fences he had had set up in a
grass park at the Mains of Cossens. The keepers who had once secretly
jeered at me were now at my very feet. Their children looked upon me as
a young god. I rejoiced in my strength as a giant. But I asked myself
then, as I ask myself now--what does it mean? The days of miracles are
over. Yet, is this not a miracle? And in a miracle is there not a gleam
of terror, as there is a gleam of stormy yellow in the fated opal? But
here I leave my condition of body alone, and pass on to the episode of
Doctor Wedderburn, partially related in the newspapers of the day and
marvelled at, I believe, by all who ever knew, or even set eyes upon
him.

The doctor, as I have said, did not come again to see me, but I felt an
over-mastering desire to set forth and visit him. This was surprising,
as hitherto I had rather avoided and hated him. Now something drew me to
the Manse. At first I resisted my inclination, but a chance word led me
to yield to it impulsively. Since my illness I had not once attended
church. Moved by a violent distaste for the religious service, that was
novel in me, I had frankly avowed my intention of keeping away. But, as
I did not go to the kirk, I missed seeing Dr Wedderburn; and I wanted to
see him. One day, leaning by chance against a stone dyke in the Glen of
Ogilvy, smoking a pipe and enjoying the soft air of Spring as it blew
over the rolling moorland, I heard two ploughmen exchange a fragment of
gossip that made excitement start up quick within me.

One said:--

"The doctor's failin'. Man, he was fairly haverin' last Sabbath, on and
on, wi'out logic or argeyment or sense."

The other answered:--

"Ay; he's greatly changed. He's no the man he was. It fairly beats me; I
canna mak' it out. Ye've heard that--" And here he lowered his voice and
I could not catch his words.

I turned away from the wall, and walking swiftly, set out for the Manse
with a busy mind. The afternoon was already late, and when I gained a
view of the Manse, a cold grey house standing a little apart in a grove
of weary-looking sycamores, one or two lights smiled on me from the
small windows that stared upon the narrow and muddy road. The minister's
study was on the right of the hall door; and, as I pulled the bell, I
observed the shadow of his head to dance upon the drawn white blind, a
thought fantastically, or with a palsied motion, I fancied. The
yellow-headed maidservant admitted me with a shrunken grin, that
suggested wild humour stifled by achieved respect, and I was soon in the
minister's study. Then I saw that Doctor Wedderburn was moving up and
down the room, and that his head was going this way and that, as he
communed in a loud voice with himself. My entrance checked him as soon
as he observed me, which was not instantly, as, at first, his back was
set towards me and the mood-swept maid. When he turned about, his
discomposure was evident. His gaze was troubled, and his manner, as he
shook hands with me, had in it something of the tremulous, and was
backward in geniality. We sat down on either side of the fire, the tea
service and the hot cakes, loved of the doctor, between us. At first we
talked warily of such things as my recovery, the weather, the condition
of affairs in the parish and so forth. I noticed that though the
doctor's eyes often rested with an almost glaring expression of scrutiny
or of surprise upon me, he made no remark on the change of my
appearance. Nor did I on the change of his, which was startling, and
suggested I know not what of sorrow and of the attempt to kill it with
evil weapons. The healthy brick-red of his complexion was now become
scarlet and full of heat; his mouth worked loosely while he talked; the
flesh of his cheeks was puffed and wrinkled; his eyes had the clouded
and yet fierce aspect of the drunkard. But, absurdly enough, what most
struck me in him was his abstinence from an accustomed act. He drank
his tea, but he ate no hot cakes. This was a departure from an
established, if trifling custom of many years' standing, and worked on
my imaginative conception of what the doctor now was more than would, at
the first blush, appear likely, or even possible. Instead of, as of old,
feeling myself on the worm level in his presence, I was filled with a
sense of pity, as I looked upon him and wondered what subtle process of
mental or physical development or retrogression had wrought this dreary
change. Presently, while I wondered, he put his cup down with an awkward
and errant hand that set it swaying and clattering in the tray, and said
abruptly:--

"And what have you come for, Alistair, eh? what have you come for? To go
on with what you've begun? Well, well, lad, I'm ready for you; I'm ready
now."

His voice was full of timorous irritation, his manner of pitiable
distress.

"I've thought it out, I've thought it all out," he continued; "and I can
combat you, I can combat you, Alistair, wherever you've got your
fever-mind from and your fever-tongue."

I knew what he meant, and suddenly I knew, too, why I had wanted so
eagerly to come to the Manse. My instinct of pity and of sympathy died
softly away. My new instinct of cruel rapture in the ruthless exercise
of my--shall I call them fever-powers then?--woke, dawned to sunrise.
And Doctor Wedderburn and I fell forthwith into an animated theological
discussion. He was desperately nervous, desperately ill at ease. His
argumentative struggles were those of a drowning man positively
convinced--note this,--that he would drown, that no human or divine aid
could save him. There was, too, a strong hint of personal anger in his
manner, which was strictly undignified. He fought a losing battle with
bludgeons, and had an obvious contempt for the bludgeons while in the
act of using them in defence or in attack. And at last, with a sort of
sharp cry, he threw up his hands, and exclaimed in a voice I hardly knew
as his:--

"God forgive you, Alistair, for what you're doing! God forgive
you--murderer, murderer!"

This dolorous exclamation ran through me like cold water and chilled all
the warmth of my intellectual excitement.

"Murderer!" I repeated inexpressively.

Doctor Wedderburn sat in his chair trembling, and looking upon me with
despairing and menacing eyes, the eyes of a man who curses but cannot
fight his enemy.

"Of a soul, of a soul," he said. "The poisoned dagger?--doubt, the
poisoned dagger--you've plunged it into me, boy."

Then raising his voice harshly, he exclaimed:

"Curse you, curse you!"

I was thunderstruck. I declare it here, for it is true. I had
defamed--and deliberately--the doctor's dearest idols. I had driven my
lance into his convictions. I had blasphemed what he worshipped, and had
denied all he affirmed. But that I had made so terrific an impression
upon his mind, his soul--this astounded me. Yet what else could his
passionate denunciation mean? Had I, a boy, unused to controversy,
unskilled in dialectics, overthrown with my hasty words the faith of
this strong and fervent man? The thought thrilled one side of my dual
nature with triumph, pierced the other with grim horror. My emotions
were divided and complex. As I sat silent, my face dogged yet ashamed,
the doctor got up from his chair trembling like one with the palsy.

"Away from me--away," he cried in a hoarse voice, and pointing at the
door. "I'll have no more talk with the Devil, no more--no more!"

I had not a word. I got up and went, bending a steady, fascinated look
upon this old mentor of mine, who now proclaimed himself my victim.
Arrived in the garden I found a thin moon riding above the sycamores,
and soft airs of Spring playing round the doctor's habitation.
Strangely, I had no mind to begone from it immediately. I crossed the
garden bit and paced up and down the country lane that skirted it,
keeping an eye upon the lighted window of the study. So I went back and
forth for full an hour, I suppose. Then I heard a sound in the Spring
night. The doctor's hall door banged, and, peering through the privet
hedge that protected his meagre domain, I perceived him come out into
the air bareheaded. He took his way to the small path that ran by the
hedge parallel to the lane, coming close to the place by which I
crouched, spying upon his privacy. And there he paced, bemoaning aloud
the ill fate that had come upon him. I heard all the awful complaining
of this soul in distress, besieged by doubts, deserted by the faith and
hope of a lifetime. It was villainous to be his audience. Yet, I could
not go. Sometimes the poor man prayed with a desolate voice, calling
upon God for a sign, imploring against temptation. Sometimes--and this
was terrible--he blasphemed, he imprecated. And then again he prayed--to
the Devil, as do the Satanists. I heard him weeping in his garden in the
night, alone under the sycamores. It was a new agony of the garden and
it wrung my heart. Yet I watched it till the spectral moon waned, and
the trees were black as sins against the faded sky.

About this time, as I have said, his parishioners began to mark the
outward change of Dr Wedderburn that signified the inward change in him.
The talking ploughmen had their fellows. All who sat under the doctor
were conscious of a difference, at first vague, in his eloquent
discourses, of a diminuendo in the full fervour of his delivery and
manner. Gossip flowed about him, and presently there were whisperings
of change in his bodily habits. He had been seen by night wandering
about his garden in very unholy condition, he who had so often rebuked
excess. Children, passing his gate in the dark of evening, had endured
with terror his tipsy shoutings. A maidservant left him, and spread
doleful reports of his conduct through the village. By degrees, rumours
of our minister's shortcomings stole, like snakes, into the local
papers, carefully shrouded by the wrappings that protect scandal-mongers
against libel actions. The congregation beneath the doctor's pulpit
dwindled. Women looked at him askance. Men were surly to him, or--and
that was less kind--jocular. I, alone, followed with fascination the
paling to dusk of a bright and useful career. I, alone, partially
understood the hell this poor creature carried within him. For I often
heard his dreary night-thoughts, and assisted, unperceived of him, at
the vigils that he kept. The lamp within his study burned till dawn
while he wrestled, but in vain, with the disease of his soul, the malady
of his tortured heart.

One night in Summer time, towards midnight, I bent my steps furtively to
the Manse. It was very dark and the weather was dumb and agitating. No
leaf danced, no grass quivered. Breathless, dead, seemed the woods and
fields, the ocean of moorland, the assemblage of the mountains. I heard
no step upon the lonely road but my own, and life seemed to have left
the world until I came upon the Manse. Then I saw the light in the
doctor's window, and, drawing near, observed that the blind was up and
the lattice thrust open among the climbing dog-roses. Craftily I stole
up the narrow garden path, and, keeping to the side of the window,
looked into the room.

Doctor Wedderburn lounged within at the table facing me. A pen was in
his shaking hand. A shuffle of manuscript paper was before him, and a
Bible, in which he thrust his fingers as if to keep texts already looked
out. Beyond the Bible was a bottle, three-quarters full of whiskey, and
a glass. His muttering lips and dull yet shining eyes betokened his
condition. I saw before me a drunkard writing a sermon. The vision was
sufficiently bizarre. A tragedy of infinite pathos mingled with a comedy
of hideous yet undeniable humour in the live picture. I neither wept nor
did I laugh. I only watched, shrouded by the inarticulate night. The
doctor took a pull at the bottle, then swept the leaves of the Bible....

"Let me die the death of the righteous," he murmured thickly. "That's
it--that's--that's--" He wrote on the paper before him with a wandering
pen, then pushed the sheet from him. It fell on the floor by the window.

"And let my last end be like his--Ah--ah!"

He drank again, and again wrote with fury. How old and how wicked he
looked, yet how sad! He crouched down over the table and the pen broke
in his hand. A dull exclamation burst from him. Taking up the bottle, he
poured by accident some of the whiskey over the open Bible.

"A baptism! A baptism!" he ejaculated, bursting into laughter.
"Now--now--let's see--let's see."

Again he violently turned the sodden leaves and shook his head. He could
not read the words, and that angered him. He drank again and again till
the bottle was empty, then staggered out of the room. I heard his
frantic footsteps echoing in the uncarpeted passage. Quickly I leaned in
at the window and caught up the sheet of paper that had fallen to the
floor. I held it up to the light. Only one sentence writhed up and down
over it, repeated a dozen times; "There is no God!" While I read I heard
the doctor returning, and I shrank back into the night. He came
stumbling in, another whiskey bottle full in his hand. Falling down in
the chair he applied his lips to it and drank--on and on. He was killing
himself there and then. I knew it. I wanted to leap into the room, to
stop him, yet I only watched him. Why?--I want to know why--

At last he fell forward across the Bible with a choking noise. His limbs
struggled. His arms shot out wildly, the table broke under him--there
was a crash of glass. The lamp was extinguished. Darkness crowded the
little room--and silence.

       *       *       *       *       *

The papers recorded the shocking death of a minister. They did not
record this.

As I stole home that night, alone in my knowledge of the doctor's
appalling end, I heard going before me light and tripping footsteps,
those, apparently, of some youth, not above three yards or so from me.
What wanderer thus preceded me, I asked myself, with a certain tingling
of the nerves, shaken, perhaps, by what I had just seen? I paused. The
steps also paused. The person was stopping too. I resumed my way. Again
I heard the tripping footfalls. Their sound greatly disquieted me, yet I
hurried, intending to catch up the wayfarer. Still the steps hastened
along the highway, and always just before me. I ran, yet did not come up
with any person. I called "Stop! Stop!" There was no reply. Again I
waited. This man--or boy--(the steps seemed young) waited also. I
started forward once more. So did he. Then a fury of fear ran over me,
urging me at all hazards to see in whose train I travelled. We were now
close to Carlounie. We entered the policies. Yes, this person turned
from the public road through my gates into the drive, and the footfalls
reached the very house. I stopped. I dared not approach quite close to
the door. With trembling fingers I fumbled in my pocket, drew out my
match-box, and, in the airless night, struck a match. The tiny flame
burned steadily. I stretched my hand out, approaching it, as I supposed,
to the face of the stranger.

But I saw nothing. Only, on a sudden, I heard some one hasten from me
across the sweep of gravel in the direction of the burn. And then, after
an interval, I heard the rush of startled sheep through the night.

Just so had they scattered on the day I spoke with the grey traveller by
the waterside.


III

THE SOUL OF KATE WALTERS

It is more than two years since I wrote down any incident of my life.
Two years ago I seemed to myself a stranger. To-day an intimacy has
sprung up between myself and that observant, detached something within
me--that little extra spirit which looks on at me, and yet is, somehow,
me. I am at home with my own power. I am accustomed to my strength of
personality. From my fever I rose like some giant. Long ago my world
recognised the obedience it owed me. Long ago, by many signs, in many
ways, it taught me the paramount quality of the emanation from my soul
that is called my influence. Yet sometimes, even now, I seem to stare at
myself aghast, to turn cold when I am alone with myself. I am seized
with terrible fancies. I think of the voice of the burn. I think of that
childish Autumn ceremony upon its bank among the mists and the flying
leaves. I think of the grey youth who spoke with me in the twilight, and
my soul is full of questions. I muse upon the Wandering Jew, upon Faust,
upon Van Der Decken, upon the monstrous figures that are legends, yet
sometimes realities to men. And then--and this is ghastly--I say to
myself, can it be that I, too, shall become a legend? Can it be that my
name will be whispered by the pale lips of good men long after I am
dead? For, is there not a whirl of white faces attending my progress as
the whirl of dead leaves attends the Autumn? Do I not hear a faint
symphony of despairing cries like a dreadful music about my life? Is not
my power upon men malign? Boys with their hopes shattered, men with
their faiths broken, women with their love turned to gall--do they not
crowd about my chariot wheels? Or is it my vain fancy that they do? Here
and there from the sea of these beings one rises like a drowned creature
whom the ocean will not hide, stark, stiff, corpse-like. Doctor
Wedderburn was the first. Kate Walters is the second--Kate Walters.

       *       *       *       *       *

When my convalescence was well advanced she left Carlounie and went back
to Edinburgh. Some months afterwards I heard casually that she was
working in an hospital there. But a year and a half went by before I saw
this girl again. Her fresh, pure, ministering face had nearly faded
from my memory. Yet, she had attended intimately upon my marvellous
transformation from my death of weakness to the life of strength. She
had lifted me in her girl's arms when I was nothing. Yes, I had been in
her arms then. How strange, how close are the commonest relations
between the invalid and his nurse! When I chanced to meet Kate again I
had no thought of this. I had forgotten. I came to Edinburgh on some
business connected with a mine discovered on my estate, which seemed
likely to make a great fortune for me, and is already on the way to
accomplishing this first duty of a mine. My business done, I stayed on
at my hotel in Princes Street amusing myself, for I had a multitude of
friends in Edinburgh. One of these friends was a medical student
attached to the hospital there, and he chanced to invite me to go with
him through the wards one day. In one of the wards I encountered Kate
Walters, fresh, clear, calm as in the old Carlounie days of my illness.
She did not know me till I recalled myself to her recollection; then she
looked into my face with the frankest astonishment. My superb physique
amazed her, although she had attended upon its beginnings. I asked after
her life in the interval since our last meeting; and she told me, with a
delightful blush, that her period of nursing was nearly concluded, as
she was engaged to be married to one Hugh Fraser, a handsome, rich,
and--strange thing this!--most steadfast youth, who lived in England in
the south, and who loved her tenderly. I congratulated her, and was on
the point of moving away down the ward with my friend when my eyes were
caught again by Kate's blushing cheeks and eyes alight with the fiery
shames and joys of love. How beautiful is the human face when the
torches of the heart are kindled thus. How beautiful! I paused, and,
before I went, invited Kate to tea one afternoon at my hotel. She
accepted the invitation. Why not? In our meeting the old chain of
sympathy between patient and nurse seemed forged anew. We felt that we
were indeed friends. As we left the ward, my student chum chaffed me--I
let his words go by heedlessly. I was not in love with Kate, but I was
half in love with her love for Hugh Fraser. It had such pretty features.
She came to tea and told me all about him; and when she talked of him
she was so fascinating that I was loath to let her go. It was a sweet
evening, and, as Kate had not to be back at the hospital early, I
suggested that we should go for a stroll on Carlton Hill, and talk a
little more about Hugh Fraser. The bribe tempted her. I saw that. And
she agreed after a moment's hesitation.

There is certainly an influence that lives only out of doors and can
never enter a house, or exercise itself within four walls. There is a
wandering spirit in the air of evening, a soul that walks with
gathering shadows, speaks in the distant hum of a city, and gazes
through its twinkling lights. _There is a grey traveller who journeys in
the twilight._ (What am I saying? To-day, as I write, I am full of
fancies.) I felt that, so soon as Kate and I were away from the hotel,
out under the sky and amid the mysteries of Edinburgh, we were changed.
In a flash our intimacy advanced, the sympathy already existing between
us deepened. Leaving the streets, we mounted the flight of steps that
leads to the hill, and joined the few couples who were walking, almost
like gods on some Olympus, above the world. They were all obviously
lovers. I pointed this fact out to Kate, saying, "Hugh Fraser should be
here, not I."

She smiled, but scarcely, I thought, with much regret. For the moment it
seemed that a confidant satisfied her; and this pleased me. I drew her
arm within mine.

"We must not alarm the lovers," I said. "We must appear to be as they
are, or we shall carry a fiery sword into their Eden."

"You seem to understand us very well," she answered with a smile. And
she left her arm in mine.

The mention of "us" chilled me. It seemed to set me outside a magic
circle within which she, Hugh Fraser, these people sauntering near us,
like amorous ghosts in the dimness, moved. I pressed her arm ever so
gently.

"Tell me how lovers feel at such a time as this," I whispered, looking
into her eyes.

       *       *       *       *       *

From Carlton Hill at night one sees a heaving ocean of yellow lights,
gleaming like phosphorescence on ebon waves. Towards Arthur's Seat,
towards the Castle, they rise; by Holyrood, by the old town, they fall.
That night I could fancy that this sea of light spoke to me, murmured in
my ear, urging me to prosecute my will, ruthlessly stirring a strange
and, perhaps, evanescent romance in my heart. I know that when I parted
from Kate that night I bent and kissed her. I know that she looked up at
me startled, even terrified, yet found no voice to rebuke me. I know
that I did not leave Edinburgh, as I had originally intended, upon the
morrow. And I know this best of all--that I had no ill-intent in
staying. I was caught in a net of impulse despite my own desire. I was
held fast. There are--I believe it unalterably now--influences in life
that are the very Tsars of the empires of men's souls. They must be
obeyed. Possibly--is it so I wonder?--they only mount upon their thrones
when they are urgently invoked by men who, as it were, say, "Come and
rule over us!" But once that invocation has been made, once it has been
responded to, there is never again free will for him who has rashly
called upon the power he does not understand, and bowed before the
tyrant whose face he has not seen. I tremble now, as I write; I tremble
as does the bond slave. Yet I neither speak with, nor hear, nor have
sight of, my master. Unless, indeed--but I will not give way to any
madness of the brain. No, no; I do not hear, I do not see, although I am
conscious of, my Tsar, whose unemancipated serf I am.

I need not tell all the story of my soul's impression that was stamped
upon the soul of Kate Walters. Perhaps it is old. Certainly it is sad. I
stamped deceit upon the nature which had not known it, knowledge of evil
where only purity had been, satiety upon temperance. And, worst of all,
I expelled from this girl's heart love for a good man who loved her, and
planted, in its stead, passion for a--must I say a bad, or may I not
cry, a driven man? And all this time Hugh Fraser knew nothing of his
sorrow, growing up swiftly to meet him like a giant. Even now, while I
write these words, he knows nothing of it. As I had carelessly taken
possession of the mind, the very nature of Dr Wedderburn, so now I took
possession of the very nature of Kate Walters. My immense strength, my
abounding physical glory drew her--who had known me a puny
invalid--irresistibly. I won the doctor by my mind; this girl, in the
main, I think, by my body. And when at length I tired of her slightly,
the woman, the gentle woman, sprang up a tigress. I had said one night
that, since I was obliged to go to London, we must part for a while. I
had added that it was well Hugh Fraser lived in complete ignorance of
his betrayal.

"Why?" Kate suddenly cried out.

"Because--because it is best so. He and you--some day."

I paused. She understood my meaning. Instantly the tigress had sprung
upon me. The scene that followed was eloquent. I learned what lives and
moves in the very depths of a nature, stirred by the inexhaustible greed
of passion, twisted by passion's fulfilment, the ardent touched by the
inert. But upon that hurricane has followed an immense and very strange
calm. Kate is almost cold to me, though very sweet. She has acquiesced
in my departure for town. She has come to one mind with me on the
subject of Hugh Fraser. More, she has even written a letter to him
asking him to come to her, pressing forward their marriage, and I am to
be the bearer of it to him. This is only a woman's whim. She insists
that I must see once the man who is to be her husband.

So, after all, the tragedy of Dr Wedderburn is not to be repeated. I--I
shall not hear, stealing along the steep and windy streets of Edinburgh,
any--any strange footsteps.

       *       *       *       *       *

What is the awful fate that pursues me? A year ago I left Edinburgh
carrying with me the letter which I understood to contain the request
of Kate Walters to her lover, Hugh Fraser, to hasten on their marriage.
As the train roared southwards, I congratulated myself on my clever
management of a woman. I had, it is true, stepped in between Kate and
the calm happiness she had been anticipating when I first met her in the
hospital ward. But now I had withdrawn. And, I told myself, in time. All
would be well. This girl would marry the boy who loved her. She would
deceive him. He would never know that the girl he married was not the
girl he originally loved. He would never perceive that a human being had
intervened between her and purity, truth, honour. In this letter--I
touched it with my fingers, congratulating myself--Hugh Fraser would
read the summons to the future he desired, the future with Kate Walters.
His soul would rush to meet hers, and surely, after a little while, hers
would cease to hold back. She would really once more be as she had been.
I forgot that no human soul can ever retreat from knowledge to
ignorance.

Hugh Fraser's rooms in London were in Piccadilly. Directly I arrived in
town I wrote him a note, saying that I was from Edinburgh with a message
from Kate Walters for him. I explained that she had nursed me through a
severe illness, and hoped I might have the pleasure of making his
acquaintance. In reply, I received a most friendly note, begging me to
call at an hour on the evening of the following day.

That evening I drove in a hansom from the Grand Hotel to Piccadilly,
taking Kate's note with me. I was conscious of a certain excitement, and
also of a certain moral exultation. Ridiculously enough, I felt as if I
were about to perform a sort of fine, almost paternal act, blessing
these children with genuine, as opposed to stage, emotion. Yes; I glowed
with a consciousness of personal merit. How incredible human beings are!
Arrived at Hugh Fraser's rooms, I was at once shown in. How vividly I
remember that first interview of ours, the exact condition of the room,
Hugh's attitude of lively anticipation, the precise way in which he held
his cigarette, the grim, short bark of the fox-terrier that sprang up
from a sofa when I came in. Hugh was almost twenty-four years old,
rather tall, slim, with intense, large, dark eyes--full of shining
cheerfulness just then--very short, curling black hair, and fine,
straight features. His expression was boyish; so were his movements. As
soon as he saw me, he sprang forward and gave me an enthusiastic
welcome--for the sake of Kate, I knew. He led me to the fire and made me
sit down. I at once handed him my credentials, Kate's letter. His face
flushed with pleasure, and his fingers twitched with the desire to tear
it open, but he refrained politely, and began to talk--about her, I
confess. I understood in three minutes how deeply he was in love with
her. I told him all about her that might please him, and hinted at the
contents of the letter.

"What!" he exclaimed joyously. "She wants to hasten on our marriage at
last. And she's kept me off--but you know what girls are! She couldn't
leave the hospital immediately. She swore it. There were a thousand
reasons for delay. But now--by Jove!"

His eyes were suddenly radiant, and he clutched hold of my hand like a
schoolboy.

"You are a good chap to bring me such a letter," he cried.

"Read it," I said, again filled with moral self-satisfaction, vain,
paltry egoist that I was.

"No, no--presently."

But I insisted; and at length he complied, enchanted to yield to my
importunity. He opened the letter, and, as he broke the seal, his face
was like morning. Never shall I forget the change that grew in it as he
read. When he had finished his face was like starless night. He looked
old, haggard, black, shrunken. I watched him with a sensation that
something had gone wrong with my sight. Surely radiance was fully before
me and my tricked vision saw it as despair. Raising his blank, bleak
eyes from the letter, Hugh stared towards me and opened his lips. But no
sound came from them. He frowned, as if in fury at his own dumbness.
Then at last, with a sharp shake of his head sideways, he said in a low
and dry voice:

"You know what is in this letter, you say?"

"I--I thought so," I answered, growing cold and filled with anxiety.

"Well, read it, will you?"

I took the paper from his hand and read:--

   "DEAR HUGH,--Make the man who brings you this letter marry me.
   If you don't, I will kill myself; for I am ruined. KATE."

I looked up at Hugh Fraser over the letter which my hand still
mechanically held near my eyes. I wonder how long the silence through
which we stared lasted.

       *       *       *       *       *

A month later I was married to Kate Walters!


IV

THE SOUL OF HUGH FRASER

It may seem strange that my influence upon the soul of Hugh Fraser
should follow upon such a situation as I have just described; but
everything connected with my life, since the day when I met the grey boy
by the burn, has been utterly strange, utterly abnormal. My treachery,
one would have thought, must have led Fraser to hate me. I had wrecked
his happiness. I had done him the deepest injury one man can do to
another, and at first he hated me. When he had wrung from me a promise
to marry Kate, he left me, and I did not see him again until after the
wedding. But then, it seemed, he could not keep away from her. For he
forgave us the wrong we had done him; and, after a while, wrote a
friendly letter in which he suggested that we should all forget the
past.

"Why should I not see you sometimes?" he concluded. "I only wish you
both good, there is no longer any evil in my heart."

Poor boy! It was to be, I suppose. The Tsar of the empire of my soul set
forth his edict, and one winter day carriage wheels ground harshly upon
the gravel sweep, and Hugh Fraser was my guest at Carlounie. I welcomed
him upon the very spot where those light footsteps paused that black
night of Doctor Wedderburn's dreary end. And the faint sound of the burn
mingled with our voices in greeting and reply.

The boy was changed. He had aged, grown grave, heavier in movement,
fiercer in observation, less ready in speech. But his manner was
friendly even to me, and it was plain to see that Kate still had his
heart. They met quietly enough, but a flush ran from his cheek to hers
as they touched hands. Their voices quivered when they spoke a
commonplace of pleasure at the encounter. So the wheels of Fate began
slowly to turn on this winter's day.

I must tell you that my fortunes had greatly changed before Hugh Fraser
came to Carlounie. I was grown rich. My investments, my speculations had
prospered almost miraculously. The mine I have spoken of was proving a
gold mine to me. All worldly things went well with me--all worldly
things, yes.

Now, I believe that all mighty circumstances are born tiny, like
children, at some given moment. As a rule, they usually seem so
insignificant, so puny at the birth, that we take no heed of the fact
that they have come into being, and that, in process of time, they will
grow to might, perhaps to horrible majesty. Only, when we trace events
backwards do we know the exact moment when their first faint wail broke
upon our mental hearing. Generally this is so. But I affirm that I felt,
at the very time of its first coming, the presence of the shadow, the
tiny shadow of the events which I am about to describe. I even said to
myself, "This is a birthday."

Among many improvements on my estate I had built a new Manse, in which,
of course, our new minister lived. The old habitation of Doctor
Wedderburn stood empty and deserted among its sycamores. One winter's
day Hugh Fraser, Kate, and I, in our walk, passed along the lane by the
now ragged privet hedge through which I had so often observed the
doctor's agonies. It was a black and white day of frost, which crawled
along the dark trees and outlined twig and branch. The air was misty,
and distant objects assumed a mysterious importance. Slight sounds, too,
suggested infinite activities to the mind. As we neared the Manse, Hugh
Fraser said to me:--

"Who lives in that old house?"

"Nobody," I replied.

Hugh glanced at me very doubtfully.

"Nobody," I reiterated.

"Really," he rejoined. "But the garden?"

"Is deserted."

"Hardly," he exclaimed, pointing with his hand. "Look!"

"Yes," said Kate, as if in agreement.

And she grew duskily pale.

I looked over the privet hedge, seeing only the rank and frost-bitten
grass, the wild bushes and narrow mossy paths. Then I stared at my two
companions in silence. Their eyes appeared to follow the onward movement
of some object invisible to me.

"The old man makes himself at home," Hugh said. "He has gone into the
summer-house now."

"Yes," Kate said again.

There was fear in her eyes.

I felt suddenly that the air was very chill.

"That house is unoccupied," I repeated shortly.

We all walked on in silence. But, through our silence, it certainly
seemed to me that there came a sound of some one lamenting in the
garden.

A day or two later Fraser said to me:--

"Why is that old house shut up?"

"Who would occupy it?" I said. "Of course, if I could get a tenant--"

"I'll take it," he rejoined quickly. "You can let me some shooting with
it, can't you?"

"But," I began; and then I stopped. I had an instinct to keep the old
Manse empty, but I fought it, merely because it struck me as
unreasonable. How seldom are our instincts unreasonable! God--how
seldom!

"I've been looking out for a shooting-box," Hugh said. "That house would
suit me admirably."

"All right," I answered. "I shall be very glad to have you for a
tenant."

So it was arranged. When Kate heard of the arrangement, I observed her
to go very pale; but she made no objection. Hugh Fraser rented the
house, furnished it, engaged servants, a gardener, enlarged the stables,
and took up his abode there. Doctor Wedderburn's old study was now his
den. When I looked in at the window through which I had seen the doctor
die, I saw Fraser smoking, or playing with his setters. I don't know
why, but the sight turned me sick.

My relations with Kate, of which I have said nothing, were rather cold
and distant. My passion, such as it was, had died before marriage. Hers
seemed to languish afterwards. I believe that she had really loved me,
but that the shame of being with me, after I had wedded her actually
against my will, struck this sentiment to the dust. When one feeling
that has been very strong dies, its place is generally filled by
another. Sometimes I fancied that this was so with Kate, that the
bitterness of shattered self-respect gradually transformed her nature,
that a cruel frost bound the tendernesses, the warm vagaries of what had
been a sweet woman's heart. But, to tell the truth, I did not trouble
much about the matter. My affairs were prospering so greatly, my health
was so abounding, I had so much beside the mere egotism of brilliant
physical strength to occupy me, that I was heedless, reckless--at first.
Yet, I had moments of a dull alarm connected with the dweller at the
Manse.

If Hugh Fraser changed as he read that fateful letter in London, he
changed far more after he came to live at the Manse. And it seemed to me
that there were times when--how shall I put it?--when he bore a curious,
and, to me, almost intolerable likeness to--some one who was dead. A
certain old man's manner came upon him at moments. His body, in sitting
or standing, assumed, to my eyes, elderly and damnable attitudes. Once,
when I glanced in at the study window before entering the Manse, I
perceived him lounging over a table facing me, a pen in his hand and
paper before him, and the spectacle threw all my senses into a violent
and most distressing disorder. Instead of going into the house, as I had
intended, I struck sharply upon the glass at the window. Fraser looked
up quickly.

"What--what are you writing?" I cried out.

He got up, came to the window, and opened it.

"Eh? What's the row, man?" he said. "Why don't you come in?"

I repeated my question, with an anxiety I strove to mask.

"Writing? Only a letter to town," he said, looking at me in wonder.

"Not a sermon?" I blurted forth.

"A sermon? Good heavens, no. Why should I write a sermon?"

"Oh," I replied, forcing an uneasy laugh. "You--you live in a Manse.
Doctor Wedderburn used to write his sermons in that room."

That evening I remember that I said to Kate:

"Don't you think Fraser is getting to look very old at times?"

"I haven't observed it," she replied coldly.

Another curious thing. Very soon after he took up his abode in the
Manse, Fraser, who had been a godly youth, became markedly averse to
religion. He informed us, with some excitement, that he had changed his
views, and seemed much inclined to carry on an atheistical propaganda
among the devout people of the neighbourhood. He declared that much evil
had been wrought by faith in Carlounie, and appeared to deem it as his
special duty to preach some sort of a crusade against the accepted
Christianity of the parish. I began to combat his views, and once sought
the reason of his ardour and self-election to the post of teacher. His
answer struck me exceedingly. He said:--

"Why should I be the one to clear away these senseless beliefs in
phantasms, you say? Why, because I suppose they were woven by my
predecessor in the Manse. Didn't the minister live and die there? Do you
know, Ralston, sometimes, as I sit in that study at night, I have a
feeling that instead of turning to what is called repentance when he
died, the minister turned the other way, recanted in his last hour the
faith he had professed all through his life, and expired before he could
give words to his new mind and heart. And then I feel as if his
influence was left behind him in that room, and fell upon me and imposed
on me this mission."

And as he spoke, he suddenly plucked at his face with an old, habitual
action of Doctor Wedderburn's when excited. I scarcely restrained a cry,
and with difficulty forced myself to go out slowly from his presence.
Nevertheless, I felt strongly impelled to fight against the atheism of
this boy, I who had formerly sown the seeds of destruction in the soul
of Doctor Wedderburn. But it was as if my own act of the past rose and
conquered me in the present. I declare solemnly it was so. Some
emanation from the poor dead creature's soul clung round that cursed
place of his doom, and, seizing upon the soul of Fraser, spread tyranny
from its throne. And whom did it take first as its victim, think you?
Kate, my wife.

Let our individual beliefs be what they may, one thing we must all--when
we think--acknowledge, that the pulse which beats eternally in the heart
of life is reparation.

Kate, as I have said, was originally finely pure and finely dowered with
the blessings of faith in a divine Providence, trust in the eventual
redemption of the world, hope that sin, sorrow, and sighing would,
indeed, flee away, and all mankind find eternal and unutterable peace.
In my worst moments I had never tried to destroy this beauty of her
soul; and, in her fall, now repaired, she had never abandoned her
religion. It was, I know, a haunting memory of the last moments of the
doctor that held me back from ever attacking the faith of another. For
myself, I did not think much of my future beyond death. Life filled my
horizon then.

But now, after a short absence in England, during which I left Kate at
Carlounie, I returned to find her infected with Fraser's pestilent
notions. She declined to go to the kirk, declaring that it was better to
act up to her real convictions than to set what is called a good example
to her dependants. She and Fraser gloried openly in their new-found
damnation. I say damnation, for this was actually how the matter struck
me when I began carefully to consider it. Men often see only what
irreligion really is and means when they find it existing in a woman. I
was appalled at this deadly fire flaring up in the heart of Kate, and I
set myself, at first feebly, at length determinedly, to quench it and
stamp it out.

But I fought against my own former self. I fought against the influence
of the spectre that surely haunted the Manse, and that spectre rose
originally from the very bosom of the burn at my summons. Am I mad to
think so? No, no. Oh, the eternal horror that may spring from one wild
and lawless action, from the recital of one diabolic litany! This was
surely the strangest, subtlest reparation that ever beat in the
inexorable heart of Life. Hugh Fraser was enveloped by the influence,
still retained mysteriously in his abode, of the soul that was gone to
its account. Through him it seized upon Kate, and thus the mystic number
was made up, three souls were bound and linked together. (I hear as I
write the voice of the grey traveller by the burn in the twilight.) And
in the first soul I had planted the seed of death, and so in the second
and in the third. Now, thrusting as it were backward through Kate and
Hugh Fraser, I fought with a dead man, long ago, perhaps, wrapped in
pain unknown. But, as the influence of Doctor Wedderburn had
formerly--before the fever--dominated my influence, so now it dominated
my influence from the tomb. Indeed, this man whom I had destroyed had a
drear revenge upon me. There had been an interregnum when the doctor
wavered from Christianity to atheism. But that had ceased to be. He died
undoubting, a blatant unbeliever. Hence, surely, his deadly power now.
He returned, as it were, to slay me. The spectre at the Manse defied me.

Slowly I grew to feel, to know, all this. It did not come upon me in a
moment; for sometimes my worldly affairs still occupied me. My glory of
health and of strength still delighted me. I was as Faust--I was as
Faust in his monstrous and damnable youth. But there came a time when
the spectre at the Manse touched me with the hand of Hugh Fraser. And
then I rose up to battle with it, trembling at the thought of the grey
boy's words at the thought of the Caesar of hell whose tribute was three
human souls.

Kate and I were taking tea one evening with Fraser. We sat around the
hearth, by which was placed the table with the tea-service and the hot
cakes. Fraser began, as was his habit now, to discuss religious subjects
and to rail against the professors of faith. Kate listened to him
eagerly--a filthy fire, so I thought, gleaming in her great eyes. I was
silent, watching. And presently it seemed to me that Fraser's gestures
in talking grew like the dead gestures of the doctor. He threw his
hands abroad with the fingers divided in a manner of Wedderburn's. He
struck his knees sharply, and simultaneously, with both his palms to
emphasise his remarks, a frequent habit of the dead man's. So vehement
was the similarity that I began presently to feel that the doctor
himself declaimed in the firelight, and I was seized with a desire to
combat effectively his wicked, but forcible arguments. I broke in, then,
upon Fraser's tirade and cried the cause of religion. He turned upon me,
dealt with my pleas, scattered my contentions--growing, I fancied, very
old and with the rumbling voice of age,--thrust at me with the lances of
sarcasm, sore belaboured me into silence and mute fury. And all the time
Kate sat by, and I seemed to see her soul, with fluttering outstretched
wings, sinking down to hell, as a hawk drops out of sight into a dark
cleft of the mountains. And then, in the last resort, Fraser struck his
hand down on mine to clinch his defeat of me. And I, looking upon that
poor Kate, cried out:--

"God forgive you, Fraser, for what you're doing--murderer! murderer!"

Scarcely had my cry died away than I knew I had borrowed the very words
of Wedderburn to me. A cold, like ice, came upon me. This reversal of
the past in the present was too ironic. I heard the doctor chuckling
drearily in Hades. I suddenly sprang up like one pursued, and got away
into the night, leaving Kate and Fraser together by the fire. But the
spectre of the Manse surely pursued me. I heard its soft but heavy
footsteps c

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