Chapter 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.