Chapter XXII

Upon the same Sunday afternoon, in a small port on the eastern Spanish seaboard, Giles Legard leant over the rail of a long, forlorn-looking, wooden jetty. Against the black piles which upheld it the sea heaved inwards in smooth ripples. Every now and then wisps of dark seaweed floated by, and up the sides of the piles the green slime gleamed in the hot sunshine. Keeping a precarious foothold on the slippery cross-beams with his bare, brown feet, a red-capped fisher boy plucked mussels, dropping them into a basket slung on his arm. The sea, hushed and bright, stretched past the jetty to the town, which rose in compact white tiers under the lee of a sandy waste of hills; on the hard line of the eastern horizon the dim haze of an island was visible.

A brig, with sails set, was sidling out of the harbour against a head wind. A row of fishermen and loafers, barelegged or booted, with swarthy faces, and blue clothing, came running down the jetty, stretching a tow-rope hove to them from the brig, and shouting in a babel of uncouth words. Legard, with his hands in his pockets, and his cap drawn over his eyes, turned his back against the rail, and watched them idly.

They strained on the rope, laughing and talking in a strange medley of words and dialects. Then, as if by consent, they ceased hauling, and paused in relaxed attitudes, shouting irrelevantly at the brig a jumble of foreign words. A bearded man, in a peaked cap, standing on the poop, put his hand to his mouth, and the hail came with a steady ring over the water, “Pūlley! Hāūley!”

The words had an inflection, as of a man speaking to children, a kind of compassionate superiority. The chain of men strained forward again upon the rope, and, with a clatter of feet and voices, went surging up the pier.

“Pulley! Hauley!” Words comprehended of every nation under the sun, words by the aid of which men make shift to go through the business of life. They struck a chord in Legard’s heart that had not sounded for many years. They roused in him a longing for action, and a feeling of pride, such as one has when one reads of some gallant feat done by a countryman. He watched the Union Jack stream out in the wind as the brig cleared the end of the jetty with a queer feeling, that made him shuffle his feet on the tarred boards, and swear softly to himself. Then he took out a cigar, and bit the end very hard, looking into the distance over the sea.

The men, broken up now into groups, lolled on the jetty sides, or lounged back up the pier talking and spitting. They looked at him as they passed, with dark eyes, curious or indifferent, and exchanged remarks in low voices. He was a strange bird to them; an English traveller did not often find his way to their town.

Gradually, under the brassy sun, the jetty resumed its look of desolation.

Giles took his cap off, and wiped his forehead. His face, which was tanned a deep sallow brown, had somewhat hardened and set; the features looked as if always held in a vice of constraint. There was no trace of the old languor in his eyes, they looked up clear and straight from under his brows, but they had a rather wistful expression, as if always seeking for something. His dark hair had grown very grey at the sides of his head and on his temples. In his thin flannel suit his tall figure looked lean to emaciation, but his muscles, from constant hard exercise, were like whipcord. He had that day returned to the town, whence he had started a month before on a restless wander through a wild part of Spain.

He replaced his cap, and began to pace uneasily up and down the jetty, stopping every now and then to take a long look under his hand towards the town. He muttered to himself at intervals. He had begun rather to have the habit of talking to himself--a habit which tells of much loneliness....

The test of a man’s temperament is the way in which he manages himself under trouble. Legard had managed himself in solitude. A hundred times in those ten months he had been impelled to seek distraction in society, dissipation, excitement--to try and forget, for it was his nature to fly from pain; but something in him had always revolted at the last moment, and he had shrunk back. He had, deeply rooted, the feeling that if he even _tried_ to rid himself of his suffering and his desolation, he would lose loyalty, the one thing which remained to him. If he gave that up, he felt that he must go under--irretrievably under. It was not choice so much as instinct that compelled him to hold on to his bitter, regretful longing; and with his grip fast on _that_ plank, he felt his head still above water. Of the memory of his wife’s death he tried not to be mindful. At times a sudden spasm of self-loathing and of superstitious horror caught him, as it were, by the throat, but there was a certain gravity in his mind which helped him--the ballast of his own egotism, his matter-of-fact conviction of the futility of regret, and his feeling for what was of use in the future. That same feeling of loyalty, to which he clung so tenaciously, blunted, even at times negatived, the bite of remorse. It became a sort of painful pleasure to him to reason the thing out with a grim analysis. The evil did not seem to him to lie in the wrong he had done to the woman he loved, nor in the guilty inaction by which he had sought to repair that wrong, it lay further back, in the fibre of his own nature and the infirmity of his will--he felt that he had suffered for it, was always suffering. If repentance be suffering--he repented; if it be knowledge of self--he repented, for he was getting to know his own limitations as he had never known them before; but if it be that feeling which says, “Give me the past again, that I may act otherwise!” he did not repent, for he was not sure that he would act differently. The thing was over and done with, he had behaved like a coward and a scoundrel, but regret was of no use--he looked to the future, to the time, if it ever came, when he should see Jocelyn again; and in long reveries over smoky camp fires, on the decks of ships under starry skies, beneath the burning sun of the desert, and the unfallen snow-clouds of mountains, his face became gradually and indelibly stamped with that drawn expression of constraint. He had wandered about unceasingly, in the Austrian highlands, in Turkey, Algeria, Spain, anywhere, indeed, where he could get hard physical exertion, and be unlikely to meet people. He would have gone to the East, or to South Africa, but he would not put himself out of reach of his letters. Time would surely have done more for him, if he would have cut himself completely adrift, but he would not. Every month he received a letter from Jocelyn; it was never anything but a bare record of doings, smelling of violets, scanty and formal, and very precious to him. It began without any prefix, ended simply “Jocelyn”--it would be hard to say the amount of comfort he derived from that solitary and dumb confession of a link between them....

At this moment, as he strode across and across the jetty gnawing his moustache, the cigar, still unlit, between his fingers, he was waiting for Jacopo’s return from the post-office. It was nine weeks since he had received a letter, and even _he_ had not realised how much they meant to him, till they had ceased to come. He had put off the day of his return to the coast, in sheer dread of not getting one, and now he had not had the courage to go and see for himself. He felt sick with suspense. He threw away his cigar unsmoked. Two seagulls swooped on it, shrieking discordantly. A faint, muffled sound of voices came down to him from a group of men and women at the far end of the jetty, and the salt wind fanned his cheek gently. He gazed towards the shore, where the world seemed to stand still in hot, hard lines.

A figure presently detached itself at the end of the jetty, and came towards him. He recognised Jacopo by his light clothes and wide-brimmed hat, and by the dog with him.

He forced himself to stand still and wait, his hands crossed behind his back, his limbs and every feature of his face quivering with the strain of repression. He was thinking: supposing there were no letter!--what then? There _must_ be one!

Jacopo was walking fast. In the same breath he seemed to Giles to be years arriving, and to come with the swiftness of a wind. When he was within fifty yards the boy’s hand went to his pocket, and the dog, breaking from him, ran to his master and thrust his pointed nose up against his legs.

In spite of himself he turned away, grasped the jetty rail hard, and stood, looking, with eyes that saw nothing, at the horizon.

Jacopo came up to him, cool and silent.

“Well?” said Giles without turning.

“There are letters, Signore--three.”

Still leaning over the rail, Legard put out his hand, his fingers closed on the letters, and he said--

“Thank you, Jacopo, you have been rather long.” He spoke with the idea of gaining time.

“_Si, Signore_, the man at the post was very stupid.”

“You are sure these are all?”

“_Si, Signore_, sure.”

“Thank you, wait at the end of the pier till I call you.”

Jacopo moved away; Giles, clutching the letters, looked blankly after his retreating figure. Shikari rubbed a wet nose suddenly against his hand, and then stretched his body at full length, placing his forepaws on the rail, and working his nostrils from side to side with a snuffle at the unconscious sea. Giles bit his lips, raised his hand quickly, and without glancing at the outsides tore open the letters one by one. He dropped them unread into his pocket, lifted his cap, and ran his hand through his hair.

Nothing! He took a rapid turn across the jetty and back again, followed solemnly by the dog. Nothing! He muttered to himself one or two commonplaces. “Very awkward thing! Odd! Very odd!” Words absolutely inexpressive of his feelings, but somehow comforting.

He took Shikari’s forepaws, and drew them on to his chest, put them down again, and took another turn across the jetty. He stood, and looked out on the other side, and said, “My God!” in a low voice. He drew another cigar out of his case, bit it, and put it back again.

Nothing. Nine weeks! She had ceased to write! What did it mean? Was she ill?

He called suddenly “Jacopo!”

The boy came quickly, his slight figure in its nankeen suit, at once alert and watchful.

“Go, and find out when there is a train to join the main line for England. Get a carriage and horses; have the things ready--we shall start for it at the earliest minute, do you understand?”

“_Si, Signore!_” The boy whistled to Shikari, and vanished down the pier at a long stealthy trot.

Giles crammed his cap down over his eyes, as if he were riding at a fence, and shut his teeth together with a snap. He _must_ act! He _must_ know. Phew! That was a relief. He twisted the slight ends of his dark moustache fiercely upwards, and took a glance all round him.

Westwards the brig’s sails were glistening under the sun like the snow of a mountain peak.

Thrusting his hands into the pockets of his coat he walked rapidly down the pier.