Chapter VII: Part 7

But we had never deceived the brigadier. He was not easily deceived in those matters which concerned his son. I knew the old man very well, and for years I had been content to sit by the hour together and talk with him of Charlie. To tell the honest truth, Master Charlie was a very ordinary young man. I take it that a solution of all that was best in five Charles Thurkows would make up one Fitz Marner.

There was something horribly pathetic in the blindness of this usually keen old man on this one point. He would sit there stiffly behind the decanter fingering his wine-glass, and make statements about Charlie which would have made me blush had that accomplishment not belonged to my past. A certain cheery impertinence which characterized Charlie was fondly set down as savoir-faire and dash. A cheap wit was held to be brilliancy and conversational finish. And somehow we had all fallen into the way of humouring the brigadier. I never told him, for instance, that his son was a very second-rate doctor and a nervous operator. I never hinted that many of the cures which had been placed to his credit were the work of Fitz--that the men had no confidence in Charlie, and that they were somewhat justified in their opinion.

“This is a bad business,” repeated the brigadier, looking hard at the despatch that lay on the table before him.

“Yes,” I answered.

He tossed the paper towards me and pointed to a chair.

“Sit down!” he said sharply. “Have you had any report from poor Barber?”

In response I handed him the beginning of an official report. I say the beginning, because it consisted of four lines only. It was in Barber's handwriting, and it broke off suddenly in the middle of a word before it began to tell me anything. In its way it was a tragedy. Death had called for Barber while he was wondering how to spell “nauseous.” I also gave him Colonel Simpson's letter, which he read carefully.

“What is it?” he asked suddenly, as he laid the papers aside.

“Officially--I don't know.”

“And unofficially?”

“I am afraid it is cholera.”

The brigadier raised his glass of claret a few inches from the table, but his hand was too unsteady, and he set the glass down again untouched. I was helplessly sorry for him. There was something abject and humiliating in his averted gaze. Beneath his white moustache his lips were twitching nervously.

For a few moments there was silence, and I dreaded his next words. I was trembling for his manhood.

“I suppose something must be done for them,” he said at length, hoarsely, and it was hard to believe that the voice was the voice of our leader--a man dreaded in warfare, respected in peace.

“Yes,” I answered uncompromisingly.

“Some one must go to them--”

“Yes.”

Again there was that horrid silence, broken only by the tramp of the sentinel outside the glassless windows.

“Who?” asked the brigadier, in little more than a whisper.

I suppose he expected it of me--I suppose he knew that even for him, even in mercy to an old man whose only joy in life trembled at that moment in the balance, I could not perpetrate a cruel injustice.

“It devolves on Charlie,” I answered.

He gave one quick glance beneath his lashes, and again lowered his eyes. I heard a long gasping sound, as if he found difficulty in breathing. He sat upright, and threw back his shoulders with a pitiable effort to be strong.

“Is he up to the work?” he asked quietly.

“I cannot conscientiously say that he is not.”

“D--n it, man,” he burst out suddenly, “is there no way out of it?”

“Yes--one way!”

“What is it?”

“I will go.”

“That is impossible,” he answered with a sublime unconsciousness of his own huge selfishness which almost made me laugh. This man would have asked nothing for himself. For his son he had no shame in asking all. He would have accepted my offer, I could see that, had it been possible.

At this moment the door opened, and Charlie Thurkow came in. His eyes were bright with excitement, and he glanced at us both quickly. He was quite well aware of his father's weakness in regard to himself, and I am afraid he sometimes took advantage of it. He often ignored discipline entirely, as he did in coming into the room at that moment.

I suppose there is in every one a sense of justice which accounts for the subtle annoyance caused by the devotion of parents and others--a devotion which has not the good sense to hide itself. There are few things more annoying than an exhibition of unjust love. I rose at once. The coming interview would be either painful or humiliating, and I preferred not to assist at it.

As I went down the dark passages a man in a staff uniform, wearing spurs, clanked past me. I did not know until later that it was Fitz, for I could not see his face.

I went back to my quarters, and was busy for some time with certain technicalities of my trade which are not worth detailing here. While I and my two dispensers were still measuring out and mixing drugs, Fitz came to us.

“I am going to Capoo,” he said quietly.

In his silent, quick way he was taking in all that we were doing. We were packing medical stores for Capoo. I did not answer him, but waited for further details. We could not speak openly before the two assistants at that moment, and somehow we never spoke about it at all. I glanced up at him. His face was pale beneath the sunburn. There was a drawn look just above his moustache, as if his lips were held tightly.

“I volunteered,” he said, “and the brigadier accepted my offer.”

Whenever the word “duty” is mentioned, I think of Fitz to this day.

I said nothing, but went on with my work. The whole business was too disgusting, too selfish, too unjust, to bear speaking of.

I had long known that Fitz loved Elsie Matheson. In my feeble way, according to my scanty opportunity, I had endeavoured to assist him. But her name had never been mentioned between us except carelessly in passing conversation. I knew no details. I did not even know whether Elsie knew of his love; but it was exceedingly likely that if she did, he had not told her. As to her feelings, I was ignorant. She loved somebody, that much I knew. One can generally tell that. One sees it in a woman's eyes. But it is one thing to know that a woman loves, and quite another to find out whom she loves. I have tried in vain more than once. I once thought that I was the favoured person--not with Elsie, with quite another woman--but I was mistaken. I only know that those women who have that in their eyes which I have learnt to recognize are better women than those who lack it.

Fitz was the first to speak.

“Don't put all of that into one case,” he said to one of the dispensers, indicating a row of bottles that stood on the floor. “Divide the different drugs over the cases, so that one or two of them can be lost without doing much harm.”

His voice was quite calm and practical.

“When do you go?” I asked curtly. I was rather afraid of trusting my voice too long, for Fitz was one of the few men who have really entered into my life sufficiently to leave a blank space behind them. I have been a rolling stone, and what little moss I ever gathered soon got knocked off, but it left scars. Fitz left a scar.

“My orders are to start to-night--with one trooper,” he answered.

“What time?”

“In half an hour.”

“I will ride with you a few miles,” I said.

He turned and went to his quarters, which were next to mine. I was still at work when Charlie Thurkow came in. He had changed his dress clothes for an old working suit. I was working in my evening dress--a subtle difference.

“Do you want any help?” he asked. I could hear a grievance in his voice.

“Of course; get on packing that case; plenty of straw between the bottles.”

He obeyed me, working slowly, badly, without concentration, as he always did.

“It's a beastly shame, isn't it?” he muttered presently.

“Yes,” I answered, “it is.”

I suppose he did not detect the sarcasm.

“Makes me look a fool,” he said heatedly. “Why couldn't the governor let me go and take my chance?”

The answer to this question being beyond my ken, I kept a discreet silence. Giving him further instructions, I presently left my junior to complete the task of packing up the necessary medicaments for Capoo.

In less than half an hour Fitz and I mounted our horses. A few of the fellows came out of the messroom, cigar in mouth, to say good-bye to Fitz. One or two of them called out “Good luck” as we left them. Each wish was followed by a little laugh, as if the wisher was ashamed of showing even so minute an emotion. It was, after all, all in the way of our business. Many a time Fitz and I had stood idle while these same men rode out to face death. It was Fitz's turn now--that was all.

The Sikh trooper was waiting for us in the middle of the square--in the moonlight--a grand picturesque figure. A long-faced, silent man, with deep eyes and a grizzled moustache. He wheeled his horse, and dropped ten paces in our rear.

In the course of a varied experience Fitz and I had learnt to ride hard. We rode hard that night beneath the yellow moon, through the sleeping, odorous country. We both knew too well that cholera under canvas is like a fire in a timber-yard. You may pump your drugs upon it, but without avail unless the pumping be scientific. Fitz represented science. Every moment meant a man's life. Our horses soon settled into their stride with a pleasant creaking sound of warm leather and willing lungs.

The moon was above and behind us; we each had a galloping shadow beneath our horse's forefeet. It was a sandy country, and the hoofs only produced a dull thud. There was something exhilarating in the speed--in the shimmering Indian atmosphere. A sense of envy came over me, and I dreaded the moment when I should have to turn and ride soberly home, leaving Fitz to complete his forty-five miles before daylight.

We were riding our chargers. They had naturally fallen into step, and bounded beneath us with a regular, mechanical rhythm. Both alike had their heads down, their shoulders forward, with that intelligent desire to do well which draws a man's heart towards a horse in preference to any other animal. I looked sideways at Fitz, and waited for him to speak. But he was staring straight in front of him, and seemed lost in thought.

“You know,” I said at length, “you have done that old man an ill-turn. Even if you come back he will never forgive himself. He will never look either of us straight in the face again.”

“Can't help that,” replied Fitz. “The thing--” He paused, as if choosing his words. “If,” he went on rather quickly, “the worst comes to the worst, don't let people--ANY ONE--think that I did it because I didn't care, because I set no value on my life. The thing was forced upon me. I was asked to volunteer for it.”

“All right,” I answered, rather absent-mindedly perhaps. I was wondering who “any one” might be, and also who had asked him to throw away his life. The latter might, of course, be the brigadier. Surely it could not have been Elsie. But, as I said before, I always was uncertain about women.

I did not say anything about hoping for the best. Fitz and I had left all that nonsense behind us years before. We did our business amidst battle, murder, and sudden death. Perhaps we were callous, perhaps we had only learnt to value the thing at its true worth, and did not set much fear on death.

And then, I must ask you to believe, we fell to talking “shop.” I knew a little more about cholera than did Fitz, and we got quite interested in our conversation. It is, I have found, only in books that men use the last moment to advantage. Death has been my road-fellow all through life, and no man has yet died in my arms saying quite the right thing. Some of them made a joke, others were merely commonplace, as all men really are whether living or dying.

When the time came for me to turn back, Fitz had said nothing fit for post-mortem reproduction. We had talked unmitigated “shop,” except the few odd observations I have set down.

We shook hands, and I turned back at once. As I galloped I looked back, and in the light of the great tropical moon I saw Fitz sitting forward in his saddle as the horse rose to the slope of a hill, galloping away into the night, into the unknown, on his mission of mercy. At his heels rode the Sikh, enormous, silent, soldierly.

During my steady run home I thought of those things concerning my craft which required immediate consideration. Would it be necessary to send down to India for help? Cholera at Capoo might mean cholera everywhere in this new unknown country. What about the women and children? The Wandering Jew was abroad; would he wander in our direction, with the legendary curse following on his heels? Was I destined to meet this dread foe a third time? I admit that the very thought caused a lump to rise in my throat. For I love Thomas Atkins. He is manly and honest according to his lights. It does not hurt me very much to see him with a bullet through his lungs or a sabre cut through the collar-bone down to the same part of his anatomy. But it does hurt me exceedingly to see honest Thomas die between the sheets--the death of any common civilian beggar. Thomas is too good for that.

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning when I rode into the palace square. All round I saw the sentinels, their bayonets gleaming in the moonlight. A man was walking backwards and forwards in the middle of the square by himself. When he heard me he came towards me. At first I thought that it was my servant waiting to take the horse, but a moment later I recognized Charlie Thurkow--recognized him by his fair hair, for he was hatless. At the same time my syce roused himself from slumber in the shadow of an arch, and ran forward to my stirrup.

“Come to the hospital!” said Thurkow, the moment I alighted. His voice was dull and unnatural. I once heard a man speak in the same voice while collecting his men for a rush which meant certain death. The man was duly killed, and I think he was trembling with fear when he ran to his death.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I don't know.”

We walked--almost ran--to the hospital, a long low building in the palace compound. Charlie Thurkow led the way to a ward which we had never used--a ward I had set apart for infectious cases. A man was dozing in a long chair in the open window. As we entered he rose hastily and brought a lamp. We bent over a bed--the only one occupied. The occupant was a man I did not know. He looked like a Goorkha, and he was dying. In a few moments I knew all that there was to know. I knew that the Wandering Jew had passed our way.

“Yes,” I said, rising from my knees at the bedside; “we have it.”

Of the days that followed it is not my intention to say much. A woman once told me that I was afraid of nothing. She was mistaken. If she chance to read this and recognize it, I hope she will believe the assertion: I am, and always have been, afraid of cholera--in India. In Europe it is a different matter. The writing of those days would be unpleasant to me; the reading would be still less pleasant to the reader.

Brigadier-General Thurkow rose to the occasion, as we all expected him to do. It is one thing to send a man to a distant danger, and quite another to go with him into a danger which is close at hand. Charlie Thurkow and I were the only two doctors on the spot, and before help could reach us we should probably all be dead or cured. There was no shirking now. Charlie and I were at work night and day, and in the course of thirty-six hours Charlie got interested in it. He reached the fighting point--that crisis in an epidemic of which doctors can tell--that point where there is a certain glowing sense of battle over each bed--where death and the doctor see each other face to face--fight hand to hand for the life.

The doctor loses his interest in the patient as a friend or a patient; all his attention is centred on the life as a life, and a point to be scored against the adversary Death.

We had a very bad time for two days. At the end of that time I had officers bearing Her Majesty's commission serving under me as assistant nurses, and then the women came into it. The first to offer herself was the wife of a non-commissioned officer in the Engineers, who had been through Netley. I accepted her. The second woman was Elsie Matheson. I refused point blank.

“Sooner or later,” she said, looking at me steadily with something in her eyes which I could not make out, “you will have to take me.”

“Does your father know you have come to me?” I retorted.

“Yes; I came with his consent.”

I shook my head and returned to my writing. I was filling in a list of terrific length. She did not go away, but stood in front of me with a certain tranquillity which was unnatural under the circumstances.

“Do you want help?” she asked calmly.

“God knows I do.”

“But not mine--?”

“Not yet, Elsie. I have not got so far as that yet.”

I did not look up, and she stood quite still over me--looking down at me--probably noting that the hair was getting a little thin on the top of my head. This is not a joke. I repeat she was probably noting that. People do note such things at such moments.

“If you do not take me,” she said, in a singularly even voice, “I shall go up to Capoo. Can you not see that that is the only thing that can save me from going to Capoo--or going mad?”

I laid aside my pen, and looked up into her face, which she made no pretence of hiding from me. And I saw that it was as she said.

“You can go to work at once,” I said, “under Mrs. Martin, in ward number four.”

When she had left me I did not go on filling in the list from the notes in my pocket-book. I fell to wasting time instead. So it was Fitz. I was not surprised, but I was very pleased. I was not surprised, because I have usually found that the better sort of woman has as keen a scent for the good men as we have. And I thought of old Fitz--the best man I ever served with--fighting up at Capoo all alone, while I fought down in the valley. There was a certain sense of companionship in the thought, though my knowledge and experience told me that our chances of meeting again were very small indeed.

We had not heard from Capoo. The conclusion was obvious: they had no one to send.

Elsie Matheson soon became a splendid nurse. She was quite fearless--not with dash, but with the steady fearlessness that comes from an ever-present sense of duty, which is the best. She was kind and tender, but she was a little absent. In spirit she was nursing at Capoo; with us she was only in the body.

When Charlie Thurkow heard that she had gone into ward number four, he displayed a sudden, singular anger.

“It's not fit for her,” he said. “How could you do it?”

And I noticed that, so far as lay in his power, he kept the worst cases away from number four.

It occasionally happens in life that duty is synonymous with inclination; not often, of course, but occasionally. I twisted inclination round into duty, and put Elsie to night work, while Charlie Thurkow kept the day watches. I myself was forced to keep both as best I could.

Whenever I went into number four ward at night before (save the mark) going to bed, I found Elsie Matheson waiting for me. It must be remembered that she was quite cut off from the little world that surrounded us in the palace. She had no means of obtaining news. Her only link with the outer universe was an occasional patient brought in more dead than alive, and too much occupied with his own affairs to trouble about those of other people.

“Any news?” she would whisper to me as we went round the beds together; and I knew that she meant Capoo. Capoo was all the world for her. It is strange how some little unknown spot on the earth will rise up and come into our lives never to leave the memory again.

“Nothing,” I replied with a melancholy regularity.

Once only she broke through her reserve--through the habit of bearing pain in silence which she had acquired by being so much among dying men.

“Have you no opinion?” she asked, with a sharpness in her voice which I forgave as I heard it.

“Upon what subject?”

“Upon... the chances.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“He is a good man--there is no better in India--that is all I can say. Just hold the candle a little closer, will you, please? Thanks--yes--he is quite dead.”

We passed on to the next bed.

“It is both his duty and his inclination to take care of himself,” I said as we went--going back with her in the spirit to Capoo.

“How do you know it is his inclination?” she asked guardedly.

And I knew that I was on the right path. The vague message given to “any one” by Fitz as he rode by my side that night--only a week before, although it seemed to be months--that message was intended for Elsie. It referred to something that had gone before, of which I had no knowledge.

“Because he told me so,” I answered.

And then we went on with our work. Charlie Thurkow was quite right. I knew that all along. It was not fit for her. Elsie was too young, too gentle and delicate for such a place as ward number four. I make no mention of her beauty, for I took no heed of it then. It was there--but it had nothing to do with this matter. Also I have never seen why women who are blessed or cursed by beauty should be more considered in such matters, as they undoubtedly are.

I was up and about all that night. The next morning rose gloomily, as if the day was awakening unrefreshed by a feverish sleep. The heat had been intense all night, and we could look for nothing but an intensification of it when the sun rose with a tropical aggressiveness. I wanted to get my reports filled in before lying down to snatch a little rest, and was still at work when Charlie Thurkow came in to relieve me. He looked ghastly, but we all did that, and I took no notice. He took up the ward-sheets and glanced down the columns.

“Wish I had gone to Capoo,” he muttered. “It couldn't have been worse than this.”

I had finished my writing, and I rose. As I did so Charlie suddenly clapped his hand to his hip.

“I say!” he exclaimed, “I say!”

He looked at me in a stupid way, and then suddenly he tottered towards me, and I caught him.

“Old chap!” he exclaimed thickly, with his face against my shoulder, “I've got it. Take me to number four.”

He had seen by the list that there was a vacant cot in number four.

I carried him there, stumbling as I went, for I was weak from want of sleep.

Elsie had just gone to her room, and Mrs. Martin was getting the vacant bed ready. I was by that bedside all day. All that I knew I did for Charlie Thurkow. I dosed myself with more than one Indian drug to stimulate the brain--to keep myself up to doing and thinking. This was a white man's life, and God forgive me if I set undue store upon it as compared with the black lives we were losing daily. This was a brain that could think for the rest. There was more than one man's life wrapped up in Charlie Thurkow's. One can never tell. My time might come at any moment, and the help we had sent for could not reach us for another fortnight.

Charlie said nothing. He thanked me at intervals for some little service rendered, and nearly all the time his eyes were fixed upon the clock. He was reckoning with his own life. He did not want to die in the day, but in the night. He was deliberately spinning out his life till the night nurse came on duty. I suppose that in his superficial, happy-go-lucky way he loved her.

I pulled him through that day, and we managed to refrain from waking Elsie up. At nightfall she came to her post. When she came into the room I was writing a note to the brigadier. I watched her face as she came towards us. There was only distress upon it--nothing else. Even women--even beautiful women grow callous; thank Heaven! Charlie Thurkow gave a long sigh of relief when she came.

My note was duly sent to the brigadier, and five minutes afterwards I went out on to the verandah to speak to him. I managed to keep him out of the room by a promise that he should be sent for later. I made no pretence about it, and he knew that it was only the question of a few hours when he walked back across the palace square to his quarters. I came back to the verandah, and found Elsie waiting to speak to me.

“Will he die?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Quite sure?”

There was a strange glitter in her eyes which I could not understand.

“Quite,” I answered, forgetting to be professional. She looked at me for a moment as if she were about to say something, and then she apparently decided not to say it.

I went towards a long chair which stood on the verandah.

“I shall lie down here,” I said, “and sleep for an hour.”

“Yes, do,” she answered almost gratefully.

“You will wake me if you want me?”

“Yes.”

“Wake me when... the change comes.”

“Yes.”

In a few moments I was asleep. I do not know what woke me up. It seemed to be very late. All the sounds of barrack life were hushed. The moon was just up. I rose to my feet and turned to the open window. But there I stopped.

Elsie was kneeling by Charlie Thurkow's bed. She was leaning over him, and I could see that she was kissing him. And I knew that she did not love him.

I kicked against the chair purposely. Elsie turned and looked towards me, with her hand still resting on Charlie Thurkow's forehead. She beckoned me to go to them, and I saw at once that he was much weaker. She was stroking his hair gently. She either gave me credit for great discernment, or she did not care what I thought.

I saw that the time had come for me to fulfil my promise to the brigadier, and went out of the open window to send one of the sentinels for him. As I was speaking to the man I heard the clatter of a horse's feet, and a Sikh rode hard into the palace square. I went towards him, and he, recognizing me, handed me a note which he extracted from the folds of his turban. I opened the paper and read it by the light of the moon. My heart gave a leap in my throat. It was from Fitz. News at last from Capoo.

“We have got it under,” he wrote. “I am coming down to help you. Shall be with you almost as soon as the bearer.”

As I walked back towards the hospital the brigadier came running behind me, and caught me up as I stepped in by the window. I had neither time nor inclination just then to tell him that I had news from Capoo. The Sikh no doubt brought official news which would reach their destination in due course. And in the mean time Charlie Thurkow was dying.

We stood round that bed and waited silent, emotionless for the angel. Charlie knew only too well that the end was very near. From time to time he smiled rather wearily at one or the other of us, and once over his face there came that strange look of a higher knowledge which I have often noted, as if he knew something that we did not--something which he had been forbidden to tell us.

While we were standing there the matting of the window was pushed aside, and Fitz came softly into the dimly lighted room. He glanced at me, but attempted no sort of salutation. I saw him exchange a long silent look with Elsie, and then he took his station at the bedside next to Elsie, and opposite to the brigadier, who never looked up.

Charlie Thurkow recognized him, and gave him one of those strangely patronizing smiles. Then he turned his sunken eyes towards Elsie. He looked at her with a gaze that became more and more fixed. We stood there for a few minutes--then I spoke.

“He is dead,” I said.

The brigadier raised his eyes and looked across to Fitz. For a second these two men looked down into each other's souls, and I suppose Fitz had his reward. I suppose the brigadier had paid his debt in full. I had been through too many painful scenes to wish to prolong this. So I turned away, and a general move was the result.

Then I saw that Elsie and Fitz had been standing hand-in-hand all the while.

So wags the world.

THROUGH THE GATE OF TEARS

Give us--ah! give us--but Yesterday!

In the old days, when the Mahanaddy was making her reputation, she had her tragedy. And Dr. Mark Ruthine has not forgotten it, nor forgiven himself yet. Doctors, like the rest of us, are apt to make a hideous mistake or two which resemble the stream anchors of a big steamer warping out into the Hooghly. We leave them behind, but we do not let go of them. They make a distinct difference to the course of our journey down the stream. Sometimes they hold us back; occasionally they swing us into the middle of the current, where there is no shoal. Like the stream anchors, they are always there, behind us, for our good.

Some few of the Mahanaddy passengers have remarked that Mark Ruthine invariably locks his cabin-door whenever he leaves the little den that serves him for surgery and home. This is the outward sign of an inward unforgotten sore.

This, by the way, is not a moral tale. Virtue does not triumph, nor will vice be crushed. It is the mere record of a few mistakes, culminating in Mark Ruthine's blunder--a little note on human nature without vice in it; for there is little vice in human nature if one takes the trouble to sift that which masquerades as such.

It was, therefore, in old days, long ago, on an outward voyage to Madras, that Miss Norah Hood was placed under the care of the captain, hedged safely round by an engagement to an old playmate, and shipped off to the land where the Anglo-Saxon dabbles in tragedy.

Norah is fortunately not a common name. Mark Ruthine's countenance--a still one--changes ever so slightly whenever he hears the name or sees it in print. Another outward sign, and, as such, naturally small.

When the captain was introduced by a tall and refined old clergyman to Miss Norah Hood, he found himself shaking hands with a grave young person of unassertive beauty. Hers was the loveliness of the violet, which is apt to pall in this modern day--to aggravate, and to suggest wanton waste. For feminine loveliness is on the wane--marred, like many other good things, by over-education. Norah Hood was a typical country parson's daughter, who knew the right and did it, ignored the wrong and refused to believe in it.

The captain was busy with his Mahanaddy. He looked over his shoulder, and, seeing Mark Ruthine, called him by a glance.

“This is my doctor,” he said, to the scholarly parson. “He will be happy to see that Miss Hood is comfortably settled among us. I am naturally rather a busy man until we leave the Start Light behind us.”

So Mark Ruthine hovered about, and discreetly looked the other way when the moment of parting came. He suspected, shrewdly enough, that Norah was the eldest of a large family--one less to feed and clothe. An old story. As the great ship glided gently away from the quay--in those days the Mahanaddy loaded at Southampton--he went and stood beside Norah Hood. Not that he had anything to say to her; but his calling of novelist, his experience of doctor, taught him that a silent support is what women sometimes want. They deal so largely in words that a few unexplained deeds sometimes refresh them.

He stood there until the tall, slim form in the rusty black coat was no longer discernible. Then he made a little movement and spoke.

“Have you been to your cabin?” he asked. “Do you know where it is?”

“I have not seen it,” she answered composedly. “The number of my berth is seventy-seven.”

There was a singular lack of fluster. It was impossible to divine that she had never trod the deck of a big steamer before--that her walk in life had been limited to the confines of a tiny, remote parish in the eastern counties. Ruthine glanced at her. He saw that she was quite self-possessed, with something more complete than the self-possession of good breeding. It was quite obvious that this woman--for Norah Hood was leaving girlhood behind--had led a narrow, busy life. She had obviously lost the habit of attaching much importance to her own feelings, her own immediate fate or passing desires, because more pressing matters had so long absorbed her. There was a faint suggestion of that self-neglect, almost amounting to self-contempt, which characterizes the manner of overburdened motherhood. This would account for her apparent ignorance of the fact that she was beautiful.

As he led the way down below Ruthine glanced at her again. He had an easy excuse for so doing on the brass-bound stairs, where landsmen feet may slip. He was, above all things, a novelist, although he wrote under another and greater name, and those around him knew him not. He looked more at human minds than human bodies, and he was never weary of telling his friends that he was a poor doctor. He concluded--indeed, her father had almost told him--that she was going out to be married. But he needed not to be told that she was going to marry a man whom she did not love. He found that out for himself in a flash of his quiet grey eyes. An expert less skilful than himself could see that Norah Hood did not know what love was. Some women are thus--some few, God help them! go through life in the same ignorance.

He took her down to her cabin--a small one, which she was fortunate enough to have to herself. He told her the hours of the meals, the habits of the ship, and the customs of the ocean. He had a grave way with him, this doctor, and could put on a fatherly manner when the moment needed it. Norah listened with a gravity equal to his own. She listened, moreover, with an intelligence which he noted.

“If you will come,” he said, “on deck again, I will introduce you to a very kind friend of mine--Mrs. Stellasis. You have heard of John Stellasis?”

“No,” answered Norah, rather indifferently.

“You will some day--all the world will. Stellasis is one of our great men in India. Mrs. Stellasis is a great lady.”

This was a prophecy.

They went on deck, and Mark Ruthine effected the introduction. He stayed beside them for a few moments, and did not leave them until they were deeply engrossed in a conversation respecting babies in general, and in particular a small specimen which Mrs. Stellasis had lately received.

An Indian-going steamer is rather like a big box of toys. She goes bumping down Channel, rolling through the Bay, and, by the time that Gibraltar is left behind, she has shaken her passengers into their places.

Norah Hood shook down very quietly into the neighbourhood of Mrs. Stellasis, who liked her and began to understand her. Mrs. Stellasis--a good woman and a mother--pitied Norah Hood with an increasing pity; for as the quiet Mediterranean days wore to a close she had established without doubt the fact that the engagement to the old playmate was a sordid contract entered into in all innocence by a girl worthy of a better fate. But Mrs. Stellasis hoped for the best. She thought of the “specimen” slumbering in a berth six sizes too large for it, and reflected that Norah Hood might snatch considerable happiness out of the contract after all.

“Do you know anything of the old playmate?” Mrs. Stellasis asked Dr. Ruthine suddenly one afternoon in the Red Sea.

Mark Ruthine looked into the pleasant face and saw a back to the question--many backs, extending away into a perspective of feminine speculation.

“No,” he answered slowly.

They lapsed into a little silence. And then they both looked up, and saw Norah Hood walking slowly backwards and forwards with Manly Fenn of the Guides.

After all, it was only natural that these two young persons should drift together. They were both so “quiet and stupid.” Neither had much to say to the world, and they both alike heard what the world had to say with that somewhat judicial calm which knocks down feeble wit.

There was no sparkle about either of them, and the world is given to preferring bad champagne to good burgundy because of the sparkle. The world therefore left Manly Fenn alone; and Manly Fenn, well pleased, went about his own business. It has been decreed that men who go about their own business very carefully find that it is a larger affair than they at first took it to be. Manly Fenn had never been aware until quite lately that these things which he took to be his own affairs were in reality the business of an Empire. The Empire found it out before Manly Fenn--found it out, indeed, when its faithful servant was hiring himself out as assistant-herdsman to a large farmer on the Beloochistan frontier.

And Major Fenn had to buy a new uniform, had to interview many high-placed persons, and had, finally, to present himself before his Gracious Sovereign, who hooked a little cross into the padding of his tunic--all of which matters were extremely disagreeable to Manly Fenn.

Finally, the devil--as the captain bluffly affirmed--brought it to pass that he, Manly Fenn, should take passage in the Mahanaddy on the voyage of which we have to do.

It was very sudden, and many thorough things are so. It happened somewhere in the Red Sea, and Mrs. Stellasis was probably the first to sniff danger in the breeze. That was why she asked Mark Ruthine if he knew anything about the old playmate to whom Norah Hood was engaged. That was why Mark Ruthine looked for the back of the question; for he was almost as expert as a woman among the humanities.

Somewhere between Ismailia and the Gate of Tears, Love came on board the Mahanaddy--a sorry pilot--and took charge of Manly Fenn and the girl who was going out to marry her old playmate.

It was a serious matter from the first--like a fever that takes a man of middle age who has never been ill before.

There was a consultation of the authorities--Mrs Stellasis, namely, and the captain, and Mark Ruthine.

The captain disgraced himself early in the proceedings.

“Perhaps it is only a flirtation,” he said.

Whereupon Mrs. Stellasis laughed scornfully, and the mariner collapsed. Moreover, the consultation resulted in nothing, although Stellasis himself joined it, looking grave and thoughtful behind his great grey moustache.

“Known Manly Fenn for ten years,” he said; “but I am afraid of him still. I cannot speak to him. Can you not say something to the girl?”

But Mrs. Stellasis shook her head with determination. That was the worst of it--they were not the sort of persons to whom one can say such things. The captain was technically responsible, but he had proved himself utterly incompetent. “No,” said Mrs. Stellasis finally. There was nothing to be done but hope for the best. Of course, Mrs. Stellasis was without conscience--quite without justice. It is to be feared that nearly all women are. She was all for Manly Fenn and dead against the old playmate, whom she intuitively described as “that stupid.”

In the mean time all the ship knew it. In some ways the two culprits were singularly innocent. It is possible that they did not know that the world is never content unless it is elbow-deep in its neighbour's pie--that their affairs were the talk of the Mahanaddy. It is also possible that they knew and did not care.

The good steamer pounded out of the Gate of Tears and struck a bee-line across the Arabian Sea. The passengers settled down to await the sequel which would be delivered to them at Madras.

Norah Hood and Fenn were together from morning till night. They seemed to ignore the sequel, which made it all the more exciting for the lookers-on. Norah still saw a good deal of Mrs. Stellasis. She still took a great interest in the “specimen,” whose small ailments received her careful attention. With Mark Ruthine she was almost familiar, in her quiet way. She came to his little surgery to get such minute potions as the “specimen” might require. She even got to know the bottles, and mixed the drugs herself while he laughingly watched her. She had dispensed for a village population at home, and knew a little medicine.

Ruthine encouraged her to come, gave her the freedom of his medicine chests, and all the while he watched her. She interested him. There were so many things which he could not reconcile.

In some ways she was quite a different woman. This love which had come to her suddenly--rather late in her life--had made a strange being of her. She was still gentle, and rather prim and quite self-possessed. She looked Ruthine in the face, and knew that he knew all about her; but she was not in the least discomposed. She was astonishingly daring. She defied him and the whole world--gently.

The little Dutch lighthouse at Galle was duly sighted, and the Mahanaddy was in the Bay of Bengal. The last dinner was duly consumed, and the usual speech made by the usual self-assertive old civilian. And, for the last time, the Mahanaddy passengers said good night to each other, seeking their cabins with a pleasant sense of anticipation. The next day would bring the sequel.

A stewardess awoke Mark Ruthine up before it was light. He followed the woman to number seventy-seven cabin. There he found Norah Hood, dressed, lying quietly on her berth--dead.

A bottle--one of his bottles from the medicine-chest--stood on the table beside her.

A PARIAH

“I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.”

Slyne's Chare is in South Shields, and Mason's Chop House stands at the lower corner of Slyne's Chare--Mason's Chop House, where generations of honest Tyneside sailors have consumed pounds of honest mutton and beef, and onions therewith. For your true salt loves an onion ashore, which makes him a pleasanter companion at sea. Mason's Chop House is a low-roofed, red-tiled, tarred cottage with a balcony--a “balcohny” overhanging the river. It is quite evident that the “balcohny” was originally built, and has subsequently been kept in repair, by ships' carpenters. It is so glaringly ship-shape, so redolent of tar, so ridiculously strong.

The keen fresh breeze--and there is nothing keener, fresher, stronger, and wholesomer in the world than that which comes roaring up between the two piers of the Tyne--this breeze blows right through Mason's, and blows the fume of cooking out into Slyne's Chare.

It is evening--tea-time--and the day's work is almost done; for Mason's does little in suppers. A bullet-headed boy is rubbing pewter pots at the door. Mrs. Mason, comfortably somnolent at the entrance of the little kitchen, watches her daughter--comely, grave-faced Annie Mason--“our Annie,” as she is called, who is already folding the table-cloths. A few belated customers linger in the partitioned loose-boxes which lend a certain small privacy to the tables, and often save a fight. They are talking in gruff, North-country voices, which are never harsh.

A man comes in, after a moment's awkward pause at the open door, and seeks a secluded seat where the gas overhead hardly affords illumination. He is a broad-built man--a Tynesider; not so very big for South Shields; a matter of six feet one, perhaps. He carries a blue spotted handkerchief against his left cheek, and the boy with the pewter pots stares eagerly at the other. A boy of poor tact this; for the customer's right cheek is horribly disfigured. It is all bruised and battered in from the curve of a square jaw to the cheek-bone, which is broken. But the eye is intact; a shrewd, keen eye, accustomed to the penetration of a Northern mist--accustomed to a close scrutiny of men's faces. It is painfully obvious that this sailor--for gait and clothes and manner set aside all other crafts--is horribly conscious of his deformity.

“Got the toothache?” inquires the tactless youth.

The new-comer replies in the negative and orders a cup of tea and a herring. It is Annie who brings the simple meal and sets it down without looking at the man.

“Thanks,” he growls in his brown beard, and the woman pauses suddenly. She listens, as if hearing some distant sound. Then she slowly turns--for she has gone a step or two from the table--and makes a pretence of setting the salt and pepper closer to him.

Three ships had come up with the afternoon tide--a coaster, a Norwegian barque in ballast, and a full-rigged ship with nitrate from the West Coast of South America.

“Just ashore?” inquired Annie--economical with her words, as they mostly are round the Northern river.

“Ay!”

“From the West Coast?”

“Ay,” grumbles the man. He holds the handkerchief to his cheek, and turns the herring tentatively with a fork.

“You'll find it's a good enough fish,” says the woman, bluntly. Her two hands are pressed to her comely bosom in a singular way.

“Ay!” says the man again, as if he had no other word.

The clock strikes six, and the boy, more mindful of his own tea than his neighbour's ailments, slips on his jacket and goes home. The last customers dawdle out with a grunt intended for a salutation. Mrs. Mason is softly heard to snore. And all the while Annie Mason--all the colour vanished from her wholesome face--stands with her hands clutching her dress, gazing down at the man, who still examines the herring with a self-conscious awkwardness.

“Geordie!” she says. They are all called Geordie in South Shields.

“Ay, lass!” he answers, shamefacedly.

Annie Mason sits down suddenly--opposite to him. He does not look up but remains, his face half hidden by the spotted blue handkerchief, a picture of self-conscious guilt and shame.

“What did ye did it for, Geordie?” she asks, breathlessly. “Eleven years, come March--oh, it was cruel!”

“What did I do it for?” he repeats. “What did I do it for? Why, lass, can't ye see my face?”

He drops the handkerchief, and holds up his poor scarred countenance. He does not look at her, but away past her with the pathetic shame of a maimed dog. The cheek thus suddenly exposed to view is whole and brown and healthy. Beneath the mahogany-coloured skin there is a glow singularly suggestive of a blush.

“Ay, I see your face,” she answers, with a note of tenderness for the poor scarred cheek. “I hope you haven't been at the drink.”

He shakes his head with a little sad smile that twists up his one-sided mouth.

“Is it because you wanted to get shot of me?” asks the woman, with a sort of breathlessness. She has large grey-blue eyes with a look of constant waiting in them--a habit of looking up at the open door at the sound of every footstep.

“D--n it, Annie. Could I come back to you with a face like this; and you the prettiest lass on the Tyneside?”

She is fumbling with her apron string. There is a half-coquettish bend of her head--with the grey hairs already at the temple--awakened perhaps by some far-off echo in his passionate voice. She looks up slowly, and does not answer his question.

“Tell us,” she says slowly. “Tell us where ye've been.”

“Been?--oh, I don't know, lass! I don't rightly remember. Not that it matters. Up the West Coast, trading backwards and forwards. I've got my master's certificate now. Serving first mate on board the Mallard to Falmouth for orders, and they ordered us to the Tyne. I brought her round--I knew the way. I thought you'd be married, lass. But maybe ye are?”

“Maybe I'm daft,” puts in Annie coolly.

“I greatly feared,” the man goes on with the slow self-consciousness of one unaccustomed to talk of himself. “I greatly feared I'd meet up with a bairn of yours playing in the doorway. Losh! I could not have stood THAT! But that's why I stayed away, Annie, lass! So that you might marry a man with a face on him. I thought you would not know me if I held up my handkerchief over my other cheek!”

There is a strange gleam in the woman's eyes--a gleam that one or two of the old masters have succeeded in catching and imparting to the face of their Madonnas, but only one or two.

“How did you come by your hurt?” she asks in her low voice.

“Board the old Walleroo going out. You mind the old ship? We had a fire in the hold, and the skipper he would go down alone to locate it before we cut a hole in the deck and shipped the hose in. The old man did not come up again. Ye mind him. Old Rutherford of Jarrow. And I went down and looked for him. It was a hell of smoke and fire, and something in the cargo stinking like--like hell fire as it burnt. I got a hold of the old man, and was fetching him out on my hands and knees, when something busts up and sends us all through the deck. I had three months in Valparaiso hospital; but I saved old Jack Rutherford of Jarrow. And when I got up and looked at my face I saw that it was not in the nature of things that I could ever ask a lass to have me. So I just stayed away and made believe that--that I had changed my mind.”

The man pauses. He is not glib of speech, though quick enough at sea. As he takes up the little teapot and shakes it roundwise, after the manner of the galley, his great brown hand shakes too.

“I would not have come back here,” he goes on after a silence; “but the Mallard was ordered to the Tyne. And a chap must do his duty by his shipmates and his owners. And I thought it would be safe--after eleven years. When I saw the old place and smelt the smell of the old woman's frying-pan, I could not get past the door. But I hung around, looking to make sure there were no bairns playing on the floor. I have only come in, lass, to pass the time of day and to tell you ye're a free woman.”