THE FLIGHT TO EDEN

A FLORIDA ROMANCE

HARRISON RHODES

CHAPTER I

Lady kitty

LADY KITTY had been dead seven days, buried

two. To Basil Forrester the days had been weeks.

The postman had seemed to stagger to the house

under the weight of letters of condolence. The

door-bell seemed perpetually clanging through the

quiet house at the call of messengers and telegraph

boys. The streets , when he ventured upon them,

seemed thronged with friends bent upon condolence.

Broken as he was, he found it almost beyond his

strength to endure sympathy from those who knew

nothing of the cause of his wife's death, nor of the

manner of it , nor of his share in it . Now, when he

longed for silence, solitude, and the sight of strangers,

was the moment to have slipped away from

London ; yet somehow he could not go. It could

serve no good end , minimise no one's shame and

sorrow , he knew, to be there when the scandal came,

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if come it must . But just this uncertainty of its

coming held him in the silent house, covering his

ears when the bell rang noisily, or drove him forth

to walk through avenues of staring eyes upon the

streets. Amid the turmoil and roar of London he

strained after accusing whispers. His imagination

played tricks with him ; when, after ranging through

the Park and Piccadilly, he turned into White's, he

was always wondering whether men that afternoon.

would cut him, and he should learn that Kitty's

mother had broken silence at last , choosing to suffer

herself, rather than let him go scot- free.

It had been inevitable, of course, from the beginning

that many should believe that Lady Kitty

had killed herself. That same afternoon when, for

the first time in weeks , a pale and watery February

sun tempted people to the Park she had been seen

driving for an hour. That midnight she was dead.

It would not have been strange perhaps that a

breath should put her out ; she was a white flower of

a creature, with the palest golden hair, the faintest

rose upon her cheeks , and the blue of hazy April

skies beneath her eyelids. It would not have surprised

the world to learn that any trifle of an illness

had stilled her heart. So it was credible enough

that an accidental overdose of a sleeping draught

Lady Kitty 5

should have caused her death ; yet this official statement

gave food to wondering whispers. Too often

had some such guarded bulletin bolstered up the

pride of families and hid the shame of some poor

tragedy. London hushed its tones to gossip.

Less than this explanation it would have been impossible

to give . Even the servants in the Mount

Street house knew the suddenness of their mistress'

death . A little before midnight she had come home

alone, nervous , they thought, but with unusual fire

in her pale-blue eyes. She had worn amber satin

that night, with her great chain of topazes ; Brinton ,

her maid, remembered afterwards how she had

thought her lovelier than ever before . Lady Kitty

had sent the maid away, thanking her, and saying

that she was a good girl. But first , when Brinton

was putting away the jewels in their case, her mistress

had stood by her side, and picking out a tiny

brooch of gold with a pearl set in it had given it to

the girl, who now for seven nights in her room under

the attic roof had sobbed herself to sleep with it

clutched in her hands.

From midnight until towards the half-hour the

house had dozed ; Thomas, the second man, blinking

sleepily as he waited for Lord Basil. The footman

had just had time to put out the lights when

6 London

he heard his lordship's sharp cry of alarm , and the

frantic ringing of a bell from her ladyship's bedroom

. Several of the servants, trooping down the

passage before Masters, the butler, drove them back

like frightened sheep, caught a glimpse of her bed,

of her white figure with that pale gold hair streaming

across the pillows , and of her husband kneeling

by her side and chafing her hand . Alice Alman, a

housemaid, swore later in the servants' hall that she

had been able to see that from the hand the wedding

ring was gone. For hours through the night the

terrified creatures chattered, and their ignorant

imaginations invented enough wild stories to set all

London chattering as well. Yet though their disordered

fancy ranged through suicide to the thought

of murder even, none could bring forth any reason

which gained general credence why Lady Kitty

should destroy herself.

On a larger scale, and with some slight gain in

refinement , London reproduced the conversation of

the servants' hall, and in the end found itself confronted

with the same difficulty. If she had killed

herself, it was hard to know why. There was in

her family no strain of madness , and in herself

seemingly no trace of morbidness or melancholia.

Instead she had seemed to sit in the sunlight and

Lady Kitty 7

be happy. And her marriage had been successful ,

notably so, said every one , though the bride's family

It was a love match ,

Since she met him and

had originally opposed it .

every one had known that.

walked with him in the Long Garden at Galtymore

on that never-to-be- forgotten day, there had been

no one in her world but Basil Forrester. Her

whole vitality, every interest in her life had been absorbed

by him, nothing had been left for others .

She had few friends, and marriage had seemed

to accentuate her excessive reserve, which had in

it so strong a mixture of aloofness and pride.

When she had gone out, it had been because Basil

wished her to , and she had often preferred to stay

at home, pleading ill health as her excuse, and then

watching till the small hours of the morning for his

return . Not a week before she died she had said

to a cousin of hers, one of her few intimates, "I am

completely happy . Oh, I know you're thinking that

I'm ill, and that I mightn't last long. Yes, that's

true, but while I do , each day is paradise , so long

as I have Basil ."

The cousin now found in the repetition of this

speech of the unhappy dead girl's an easy way

to a kind of momentary celebrity as the last and

strongest witness against the theory of suicide .

8 London

Her story turned the knife again in Lord Basil's

heart. But even without it he could for himself

have built up the whole structure of London's gossip .

It was as if his senses were on edge with the pain

of it all . He seemed to catch from every quarter

scraps of talk, seemed to hear ten thousand idle

creatures soiling by their touch the memory of poor

Kitty and her love. He caught their cackling as

they retold the story of those first days at Galtymore,

and he almost thought he heard repeated with

mocking laughs all that had been said along the

fragrant paths of the rose -garden , or in the shaded

alleys of the Small Wood , all the vows and protestations

of eternal love , eternal constancy which made

up that dream of young love , all the vows which

Kitty had kept, and she alone. His ears almost

cracked with the accusing murmurs which seemed

to swell into a great roar around him, reminding

him how his dead wife had loved him, reminding

him of the one thing life could never drive from out

his memory

At the same time , as if to prove that the whisperings

which kept him sleepless through the long

nights were not merely the fictions of his conscience,

but some real record on his supersensitised hearing,

there was in them recognition of his love for her.

Lady Kitty 9

He could hear them say lightly of him that he was

perhaps not an ideal husband ; such things may be

said lightly in this battered town of London. But

he knew that they added with a laugh that his wife

had never seemed to know, nor to care to know anything

of his changing infidelities. And they admitted,

they must admit, that he had loved her.

Yes, he had loved her, loved her in the beginning,

loved her till the end, if any one could but understand

the emotions of his wretched soul . The

horror of seven days had not clouded his vision of

events . They had loved each other, so much the

world could see. It was just this that for London

deepened the mystery of the suicide, if suicide it

could be believed to be. It was just this that for him

darkened the horror of his responsibility for it , made

him feel that he must call it murder.

There were times when the storm of his emotions,

of his bitter self- reproach, wore itself out. Then

he lost himself in tangled logic, and put himself

endless questions that he could not answer.

ceased to ask why with him love could not mean

constancy and loyalty. He began to ask himself

whether since he could not give continually to his

wife that singleness of devotion which she gave him ,

it would not have been better that he should have

ΙΟ London

given her nothing .

crime ? Had it not prepared the way for the blow

that had sickened her of life ? What better in the

end was a fool's paradise, he wondered , than hell

itself ?

Was not his love for her his

It was not that he saw at once any new sanctity

in matrimony, or any essential wrong in his infidelity

. The standards of his world, the manners

of his class and generation were too intimately his

own. Even as a boy at home he had somehow

guessed that it was a world where men loved and

rode gaily away to come as gaily back to love

again ; where women watched and wept and yet

were glad of love. As a child he remembered overhearing

whispered gossip among the servants of a

strange lady with yellow hair who had come to live

in the cottage in Watermill Lane, and finding his

mother crying over the cradle of his sister, then a

tiny child. Later he came to know of other ladies ,

other cottages , though he never again found his

mother in tears . He had had moments of hot boyish

resentment, for her sake, yet he saw that she

bore what she had to bear as if it were a necessary

part of life itself, and that with it all Lord Kingstowne

had seemed loving and Lady Kingstowne

happy, as happiness goes . Was it wonderful that

Lady Kitty

their son should think it small matter if he, too,

when he grew to be a man, rode gaily to and fro

in search of love ?

The last wayside inn of this thoughtless wayfarer

had been a tiny cottage near the Regent's Park

where a silly girl from the theatres had hung up

sillier pink window curtains , behind which she often

watched for his coming. Another year, behind a

different colour, perhaps , she would wait for someone

else ; so Basil judged her. He merely lit a

campfire by the roadside . At his own hearth the

blaze was bright and from every voyage he returned

to sit beside it, Kitty's hand in his. Kitty was

happy ; why, then, should he not wander forth like a

child on holidays, snatching at every bright and

lovely thing along his path ? Beauty was set in the

world for those who had eyes to see it, hands to

grasp it, he would have reasoned , had he reasoned

at all. But he left little time for reasoning while

he was grasping eagerly at pleasure , as though he

feared it might escape him before youth was spent.

Women when they loved him most called him a boy,

pushing back the tangle of his dark curls and looking

at his Irish eyes. A boy he was, with all a boy's

thoughtlessness

, all a boy's unconscious

cruelty .

The girl behind the pink curtains was only a sleek

12 London

pretty kitten that he kissed and petted ; he would

have said good-bye to her in a moment rather than

cause his wife a moment's sorrow . But it never

seemed to cross his mind that Mount Street should

come to know of Regent's Park, nor did it occur to

him what it would mean to the woman whose happiness

he was pledged to maintain should she by

chance, through the gates of her fool's paradise ,

catch a glimpse of the world outside . Women had

loved him, yet what did he know of women's love ?

Kitty had been his wife ; what did he know of her

until the last revealing night ?

A thousand times he had gone over every instant

of those five minutes which had in one great lightning

flash shown him the whole face of life anew,

displayed to him under its hard light every detail of

his weakness, his shame, his perfidy . He sat again

in the little dining -room with its silly pink curtains

and poor silly Rose Atherton across the supper table

from him. Again he lifted his glass and smiling

held her hand in his, a foolish boy risking everything

for nothing that he valued at a farthing's

worth .

She prattled on, telling some rambling, rather

squalid tale of another foolish girl who thought she

cared for Basil , who had quarrelled first with him

Lady Kitty 13

This,

and then with the lucky occupant of the pink-lined

nest , who threatened vengeance now, and talked

wildly of letting Lady Kitty Forrester know how

her husband spent his time away from her. Basil

scarcely listened ; bad grammar, the taste of the

lower middle classes , and a gossiping mind had no

charms for him. He murmured some soothing

words, and leaning over kissed her hand again.

From its daintiness his eyes wandered to the rosy

curve of her cheek, to the tiny waves in which her

gold-brown hair rose from off her brow, to every

detail of the lovely material thing she was.

he realised, as he seemed to feel his heart pumping

his young blood to his finger-tips and to every cell

of his hot brain, this was what held him now, this

was what led him, a modern and a weaker Tannhäuser,

into every gateway of the Venusberg

through which beauty beckoned to him with shining

eyes and white breasts . One romance, in which was

all the glamour of the spirit, he lived with Kitty.

Another he sought along life's highroads, stopping

where the lights burned behind pink curtains and

invited him . But for such hospitality he gave little

of himself, and in return he asked only beauty's

presence and kindness, not her inner soul. He had

often wished that women might learn to love and

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ride away, giving him a gay farewell in exchange

for his. He was glad that a cheap heart like this

Rose creature's would not break when parting came.

The pink lining and the nest itself would be payment

of the reckoning. When it was time to say goodbye,

she would not be hurt, he mused . That was

part of the self- respect he carried into what some

might call his weaknesses , even his vices. He did

not make women suffer, neither Kitty nor those

nameless others. He made them happy, yes, that

was his excuse, his justification for yielding to the

temptation.

"You're happy, aren't you , Rose ?" he asked ,

breaking in upon her prattle with this continuation

of his own thoughts .

He was startled , almost displeased by the vehemence

of her reply.

"Oh, I'm happy," she said , almost angrily, "but

how long shall I be ? Basil , you don't like Lydia,

do you ?"

"Lydia , Lydia ?" he queried , almost forgetting

the quarrel between this young person and Miss

Atherton which had formed the topic of the last

half- hour's monologue. "No, I don't especially

like Lydia. Why should I ? You're prettier than

she."

Lady Kitty 15

"Yes, but there are others prettier than me."

"Not many," said Basil caressingly.

For a moment she was soothed .

"Well, perhaps not many," she said, half consciously

arranging her lace flounces . Then she

burst out with almost angry insistence, "You love

me, Basil , don't you ?"

He reached out a hand , and she, upsetting a glass

or two as she did it, jumped up and came around

the table to his side. He caught her round the waist

and pulled her down until his lips touched hers. He

felt her waving hair against his own brown curls

and her warm arms around him. Surely he might

say he loved her.

"You won't leave me ?"

He promised afresh , feeling afresh the intoxication

of her beauty.

"And if Lydia goes to her ladyship, and she

swore she would , the cat, -you won't let her take

you from me ?"

Lord Basil released the girl and turned to pour

himself out a glass of wine . The passion had gone

out of his voice when he spoke .

"Don't be a fool , Rose . Lydia isn't likely to

go to my wife with any tales. She's not likely

to be believed, if she does."

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"But if she does , what will you do ?"

"It isn't a question we need to discuss, my dear.

Sit down and take some food , and a glass of wine.

You've had nothing at all ."

"You mean you'd give me up if your wife should

find out." She walked across the room and then

faced him against the background of silly pink.

Basil gazed at her with astonished eyes. Had the

vulgar squabble with Lydia roused the tiger in the

peaceful, purring cat ? Was this the Rose who

would laugh when good -bye came ?

"You'd give me up to please her ladyship,

wouldn't you ?" she screamed at him again.

For a moment he hesitated , a pained look in his

eyes, then:

"Yes, I would," he said gravely.

It did not stop the torrent of her newly aroused

vehemence .

"Oh, yes, that's you ! I've been finding you out

lately. Much you care about me ! Just because

I'm pretty- why, you just now said if Lydia were

prettier you would go to her.

And I loved you,

God knows I did."

"Yes, yes," murmured her companion .

"Not that you care much whether I do or not,"

she went on to his amazement . "Oh, I don't know

Lady Kitty 17

how I've got to know what you're really like. But

I know what you like me for . Ain't her ladyship

pretty ? Ain't she affectionate ?”

Lord Basil got up from the table.

"We must manage to confine the discussion to

ourselves ."

"Oh, must we ?" sneered Miss Atherton . "Out

of respect for her ? I jolly well respect her as much

as ever you do. I'm not jealous of her . A fair lot

you must love her, spending your time with us girls.

I don't suppose she sent you off to spend a holiday

with Rosie."

"You may rest assured, " he said, his face a little

pale and his mouth set, "that she knows nothing

even of your existence. "

"And happy she'll be if that cat Lydia tells her of

it."

"Lydia is not such a fool ."

Lord

"You're very fond of Lydia , it seems to me.

Perhaps you'd leave me to please Lydia as well ”

"Well, if you are to go on like this "

Basil took up his coat from a chair in the corner and

laid his hand upon his hat. His move brought the

inevitable reaction in this creature of crude impulse .

She sprang at him with tears streaming down her

cheeks, and tore the coat away. Her arms were

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about his neck and she dragged him down into a

chair while she knelt in her crumpled flounces at

his feet, protesting her love and demanding forgive-

He kissed the tear-stained face and swore he ness .

loved her. Why were men sent into the world to

bring unhappiness to women ? Rose asked between

her sobs . Why ? asked Basil to himself. He sat

half frightened by this spectacle of affection almost

unsought and ill repaid , holding poor Rosie in his

arms ; and he thought of Kitty . Silently he gave

thanks that his wife was happy in her ignorance and

in his love. The sobbing girl grew quiet gradually

against his heart, and a calm seemed to fall upon the

little room as the night wore on toward midnight.

Basil's thoughts grew kindlier, and his hand rested

upon the gold-brown head as on a child's .

this Rose he had plucked from the hedgerows as he

passed along he must be gentle . With the other,

the white flower in that closed garden of his heart

to which he came at every journey's end, he must

take no risks. He must never hear the sound of

Kitty's sobbing as he had heard this girl to -night.

In the stillness he seemed to get a view as from some

hill crest back over the highway of his youth . His

mood grew almost solemn. Why, he could scarcely

have said ; other foolish girls had sobbed out their

With

Lady Kitty 19

foolish rages on his breast.

There had been other

moments when the thought of Kitty should have

constrained him. To-night in a curious way small

happenings seemed to have great meanings . He

bade a kind of farewell to the tumults of other days,

smiling ironically to himself the while. An odd

place, he thought , in which to be growing good.

Outside London little by little fell asleep . The

half-hour clanged from the tower of a neighbouring

church, and a solitary cab came clattering along the

silent street. Basil listened to the hoof-beats , wondering

whether it went to some doubtful nest behind

drawn curtains , or to the domestic fireside of some

shopkeeper of Camden Town.

As its pace slackened Rose spoke.

"Perhaps it's Cis and Charlie stopping for a bite,"

she said, jumping up and tentatively refurbishing

the supper remnants. "Of course they always

know that I have enough, hot or cold, for six at least.

But it's pretty late. However, Cis will go anywhere

for food, and she never as much as gives you the

smell of anything to eat at her place, let alone drink."

Here was the old Rose again—all signs of the

recently displayed realities of feeling effaced , the

vulgar girl from the burlesque theatre, the squalid

intrigue in an ugly room . Then the bell tinkled,

20 London

and she rushed to answer it , leaving the door wide

open as she went. The light streamed from the

dining-room across the untidy passage, and when

she opened the outer door, upon the figure of his

wife, upon her pale face, pale golden hair, and the

pale glitter of her great topaz chain .

Nothing of this last time he saw her ever faded

from Basil's memory, yet it lived there with the

vividness of some ineffaceable dream, not with the

semblance of reality. So little, oh , so little was said

in those last moments when there was so much to

say. For one instant as the glare of light fell on

her and she saw her husband, Lady Kitty caught at

her heart and seemed to sway against the dark background

of the night outside. Then she came in the

door, without a word until "Basil , Basil" she said

as she passed into the dining-room.

"Who the devil is this ?" asked Rose, and Basil

remembered that she stubbed her toe and stumbled

on the sill , but no one answered her.

There were some bright gas jets in the centre of

the room , and Lady Kitty half unconsciously put up

her hand for a moment to shade her eyes from

the glare , then silently she looked around the

room .

"Is it true, Basil, is it true ?" she asked .

Lady Kitty

"Let me take you home, my dear, you shall know

everything."

"Gawd ! her ladyship !" ejaculated Rose.

"Is it true, Basil , is it true ?"

"Why, yes, it's true, " broke in the girl in pink,

her accent relapsing into its original cockney as if to

point the contrast with the other's voice. "'E's ' ere

a good ' alf ' is time. Leastways ' e was . But

'e'll leave me for some one else as ' e left

' E'll break both our ' earts. "

you

for me.

She threw herself on the sofa, a heap of crumpled

pink, and her sobs punctuated the few speeches

that were to be good-bye between the other

two.

"Is it true, Basil ?" Lady Kitty asked again .

"Yes," he answered, "the obvious thing, my

presence here , yes. The other, no . Oh, Kitty,

come away . let me take you

home."

Darling,

"No, Basil , no . " She gave one glance at the

flounces on the sofa, half in pity , half in scorn.

"Try to keep her heart from breaking , if you can ,

mine is gone already. ”

Her face was calm enough, though Basil saw

that her slender hands were clenched tight and that

into her eyes the betraying tears that cannot be con22

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trolled were rising . Suddenly he felt afraid, terrified

at some unknown consequence of the night.

Before he had been sorry, ashamed , abased , yet confident,

fresh as he was from his meditations on

virtue, that he could patch up the future, kiss away

the past. Now confidence oozed out of him, he

shivered as a gust of the rising wind reached him .

through the half-opened window. He turned to

Kitty as if for strength, calling her name as it were

a cry for help. In answer to him her own selfcontrol

seemed to give way. She came swiftly to

him across the room, the tears streaming down her

cheeks, and half- checked sobs struggling in her

throat. She threw both arms around his neck with

nervous violence and pressed her hot lips against

his . Tears of mingled happiness and repentance

came into his eyes . He held her safe within his

arms ; he was forgiven , he thought. So , for a minute

they stood, and he felt her heart beat against his .

Then before he knew it she had slipped away from

him. Before he saw clearly through his tears her

hand was on the door. Then with sudden frantic

energy and determination he started to plead with

her, even to command that at home she should listen

to some explanation. But Rosie now clung to him,

and the sound of her hysterical sobbing drowned his

Lady Kitty 23

words . In Kitty's pale-blue eyes he seemed to see

unconquerable determination and hostility.

"No , Basil, I will not have you come home with

me now."

Before he knew it she was gone, and she had said

the last words he was ever to hear her say— words

murmured as she went out into the night.

"Good - bye, Basil . Oh, Basil , Basil , goodbye

The words rang in his ears. The clatter of her

cab died away in the distance, mingling in the faint,

far roar of the great city.

"Good- bye, Basil. Oh, Basil , good-bye."

He turned gravely, though with nervous haste, to

Rose Atherton. Again he kissed her on the cheek

and again he held her hand in his "Good-bye , little

Rosie," he said, "good-bye."

And Rosie felt afraid and shivered in the west

wind that blew across the room. Yes, thought

Basil, in a numb and aloof sort of way, as he looked

at her face, now pinched and pale under the glaring

lights, yes, she had loved him too. She would reap

her harvest of unhappiness as well . He saw himself,

taking his pleasure in the love of women while

their hearts were bleeding, a poor coward cursed

because he loved them, more cursed because they

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loved him in return.

fledgling sobbed and pleaded and raged in anger .

Yet he went away, only a few minutes by the clock

after the cab that bore his wife had clattered down

the street. And they laughed at Rosie Atherton for

years, at supper parties , and told her favourites that

she had never cared for any one as for Lord Basil

Forrester. Let us hope the suppers were always as

gay for Rosie as for the others . In this tale we

In the pink nest this unhappy

soon say good-bye to her.

There was no cab at the usual corner by the Park,

and Basil half- ran , half- walked , down a long dismal

street till he found at last a rickety one with a decrepit

horse, and drove away. At first he ordered

the man to go to Mount Street, then suddenly feeling

that he must think, that he must make some plan ,

he changed the direction and went into Piccadilly to

his club. But its lighted , cheerful windows frightened

him away. How could he think ? he asked

himself; what plan could he make ? He was now

in a kind of unnatural calm, feeling like a spectator

of his own acts, or like one in a dream. The world

looked strange as he came between the twinkling

lights along the broad, deserted space of Grosvenor

Square and through the quiet streets of Mayfair at

last to Mount Street.

Lady Kitty 25

There he found her, dead among her pillows, her

pale-gold hair streaming across them. On the little

table at her head was a letter-to her mother-and

from the poor, thin hand he covered with his kisses

and his tears she had taken her wedding ring.

side.

CHAPTER II

Fudgment

FOR seven days the secret had stalked by Basil's

On the seventh at the Mount Street house

he found a note awaiting him from his mother.

Lady Kingstowne begged him to come to Berkeley

Square at once.

"The Duchess has written me [she wrote] . Oh,

Basil, how could you leave me so unprepared for this

fresh blow? She spares me nothing ; she has even

sent me a copy of the letter that Kitty left for her. It

wrings my heart . Oh, my dear, my dear, that poor

Kitty ! You must come here at once. Your father

is angry and frightened, and your brother as well.

Alkinloch has heard that there are some stories in

the clubs ; he fears it will be too late for the Duchess's

silence to avail anything, even could we secure it upon

her conditions . We must talk everything over, pray

God it may be with some calmness. Come here at

once ."

The evening was of one of those moist, warm

days that sometimes come in February. They were

lighting the lamps as Basil went across to Berkeley

Judgment 27

Square and each seemed to gather round it a shining

yellow globe of mist. The air smelt close , yet

for Basil there was something almost of exhilaration

in it, a sense of escape into the open . His secret no

longer went with him . Already he could see it

among the loungers in club windows, by the tables

in ladies ' drawing-rooms , and in the servants' hall .

As darkness came he felt it scurrying to and fro,

arousing London. It no longer walked whispering

in his ear. He had a welcome feeling of solitude

at last , a kind of bitter satisfaction in facing the

very worst.

What was in the letter of farewell from Kitty to

her mother, he could only guess. The Duchess had

never shown it to him, though it was sure, he felt ,

to contain some word, some message of good - bye

for him. He had sent it to Galt House that morning,

with a hurried scrawl of his own giving the

dreadful news. But never, except when others were

by, had she willingly spoken one single word

to him. In public she addressed him occasionally,

with a faultless air of sympathy and repressed sorrow,

though her words were impersonal and vague.

In private he might have been not there . At the

funeral she leant upon his arm, and sat by his side.

She gave no hint of what was happening within.

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But her pale-blue eyes, with a flash of steel in them

that had not been in Kitty's , looked through him as

if he had been thin air. She seemed like some grim

figure of fate, meditating upon the means of justice .

Reproach , hatred , vituperation , Basil had expected ,

could have borne. But this speechless preparation

for revenge- he never took it for forgivenessbroke

his courage , shattered his nerves. It had

seemed to put him into a silent world, where he

could hear only the pattering of his secret by his

side, and the whisperings of London, so faint that

it was painful to strain one's ears to catch them.

He had waited for some catastrophe as one waits in

the hot, close, lifeless air before a violent thunderstorm

He had waited, but some others had fled before

the threatening clouds . We must give the reader

one more glimpse of poor Rose Atherton , a bedraggled

and pale object upon the deck of a channel

steamer scurrying out of the boisterous grey waves

into the harbour of Boulogne. By her side was,

oddly enough , some might think, another frightened

creature, vaguely terrified lest in some way she be

implicated in Lady Kitty's tragedy-Lydia , making

friends again with Rosie in their terror and their

common sorrow. They had stoutly announced a

Judgment

pleasure trip to Paris and perhaps to Monte Carlo.

Rosie was in luck and had some money, -Lord

Basil's solicitors could have explained this, and how

Rosie's luck was to be a quarterly event , helping her

to remember, yet it was hoped without regret too

poignant, the past in the pink nest . Of the culprits

in the case Basil alone had waited for sentence to be

given.

At the house in Berkeley Square his mother's sitting-

room , as he came into it , gave him a strange

sense of peace. Here, with faded red curtains

drawn against the world outside , she had made herself

a kind of refuge among shabby flowered chintzes

and pink roses, a refuge where often by ignoring

sorrow she had kept it outside this door, at least.

Her son realised, as she came across the room to

meet him, that this time with his entrance the lurking

beast slipped in . Here was another woman

added to the dreary list of those to whom he , who

wished well by all of them, must bring suffering.

Yet this woman, like the others , kissed him tenderly.

No, not quite as the others did . Yet all of them

could forgive, all of them, he thought, with a great

pang, except Kitty, who had loved him most of all .

"I told them to bring you to me first ," said Lady

Kingstowne , quietly enough . "I have the letters

London

here. I thought perhaps you would rather read

them alone or with me, than with your father and

brother."

"Give me Kitty's, " was all the answer he could

make. His mother went to a desk and brought

him some sheets of paper. They were covered , he

saw, even from a distance, not with Kitty's rather

waving lines , but with her mother's old- fashioned ,

small , black handwriting. Instead of being alone

again with Kitty for one last farewell , he was in the

Duchess's accusing presence. He took the letter ;

half the eagerness he had felt for one word from his

dead wife was now gone. In the upper corner was

an inscription blacker than the rest and twice underlined-

"Letter to me from my daughter Kitty, murdered

by her husband , Lord Basil Forrester ,

February 5th, 1871. "

For an instant Lord Basil put down the paper,

with a kind of gasp at this blow in the face . His

mother looked and understood .

"Oh, she spares you nothing !" she said .

He took up the letter again, and Lady Kingstowne

in a chair, the back of which hid her, and her

Judgment 31

tears , from Basil , held her hands tight clasped , and

prayed God, if He could, to help her son to bear the

pain.

"Dear Mother" -the letter ranwell

as to you.

Perhaps it is to

Basil has gone

"This is to say good - bye to Basil as

I cannot trust myself to write to him.

say good - bye . I shall know to-night.

to Brighton. But a woman has been here this afternoon

who swears that she can drive me to- night to a

house near Regent's Park where I shall find him with

another woman, a common creature whom he loves.

When I have finished writing this, I shall go to learn

the truth. Oh, I've been all over the question ; I know

what would be brave , be dignified , be loyal to Basil ,

and I'm going to be all the other things. I must

know, though I feel that I know already. If he has

lied to me in the past , he will lie to me again ; I must

see with my own eyes . Then I will come home, and

to-morrow they will find that I have taken an overdose

of my sleeping-draught. Basil will understand , I

think ; this is to make you understand. You will

say that I am weak and cowardly , that no woman

of spirit, that no woman of our class , would solve the

problem as I am solving it. I know all that , but I am

weak, a coward, and of no spirit . A wretched body ,

racked with pain , as mine so often is , can't hold anything

but a wretched spirit. I only lived because

Basil was mine, because I thought he loved me. If

it prove that he does not, why should I live ? I shall

not care to.

32 London

"I am weaker even than you think. For I shall not

be doing what I do to punish Basil , not even to resent

his infidelity. I am too poor a thing even to resent

that. I must die just because I have no courage to

live . Other women, I know, learn to content themselves

with part of a man's heart . And, indeed, why

should I expect to hold his ? Other women must love

him, must tempt him away from me. That other

woman will suffer too , if she loves him.

she will take what is flung at her, and be happy . Oh,

mother, why was the world invented , that we women

should break our hearts in it ? Why cannot I be

happy and content to live on the crusts of his love ?

Or perhaps

But he will not under-

"I cannot , I cannot, and I will not . I've this much.

courage. Perhaps he will be happier-no , I don't

mean that. I don't believe it . Basil will be sorry,

and sorry that he has hurt me .

stand that I must have all or nothing . All is what

I gave him . Oh, is it quite fair that I should not have

everything in return ? That's the way of the world ,

I suppose . Well , then, it's a poor world, and I am

sick at heart. I'll say good-bye to it.

"Good-bye to you , mother dearest and best. You

must have felt sometimes, during these years when I

was so happy, that I had drifted away from you . Perhaps

it was true ; there was so little life in me that

Basil took it all . Forgive me for that. I am still your

loving Kitty, though I am doing nothing that you will

think good or honest or brave. Try to forgive me,

try when I'm gone.

"There is one chance that this need never have been

written, that I shall tear it up before I go to sleep toJudgment

night. God grant I may. Oh, mother dear, wherever

you are to -night , pray for your child . I am so lonely

and so afraid .

"Later.

"K. F."

"I have come home . Good-bye , mother ; good-bye ,

world . Oh, Basil , my love, my husband , good-bye. "

"Good- bye , Basil ; oh, Basil , good-bye, " this had

been all she had found to say to him that night .

This was all she had found to write. No hatred,

scarcely blame put upon him. His eyes were dry

and hot when he spoke :

"It's worse than . I thought. She forgives me.

She knows my utter weakness . What's her phrase ?

Oh, why was the world invented that we men should

break women's hearts in it ? I wish to God that I

could have died instead of her. She did nothing but

good in the world . I did nothing but mischief. "

"You made her very happy , you succeeded in deceiving

her for a time," said Lady Kingstowne ;

"that doesn't happen to every woman. It is something,

in this world ."

"Don't, don't, mother," he protested , "don't forgive

! Oh, if women would be as hard as we can

be ! If they would only not sacrifice themselves

to our selfishness and to our passions ! The worst

34 London

of it all is" -his voice fell-"that I should probably

behave as badly another time. I'm frightened now ,

but I don't dare to trust myself. I don't dare to

stay in London, I don't dare to stay anywhere. I

ought to find a Robinson Crusoe's island, if such

things exist now "

"Read the Duchess's letter," his mother's voice

interrupted him. "You will find it apropos. And

she does not forgive. No. She has been my

friend for twenty-five years, yet she does not spare

me now."

"Remember she has lost a daughter ."

"Oh, Basil , if I felt sure that I were not going

to lose a son !"

"I'm better lost," he said, almost lightly, and went

across and kissed her on the cheek. The thought

of escape, of losing himself somewhere at any cost

was almost a cheerful one. It seemed to tone his

grief, to make it other than a weak and whining one,

to teach it a way to face the world . He took the

Duchess's letter from its envelope eagerly,-

"For seven days [ it began ] I have tried to be a Christian

woman, if, indeed , it be Christian to forgive and

to bury in forgetfulness a great crime, which I begin

to doubt. For seven days I have kept silent, but I can

bear it no longer. I had to drive through Grosvenor

Judgment 35

Square to-day. I saw Basil Forrester. Men speak to

him ; I suppose they are sorry for him because he has

lost my Kitty. Don't I know ? Didn't I sit by hi.m

at the funeral ? Couldn't I hear what was said ?

There's a God of justice somewhere, I know, whether

there's any other or not. It was not meant that your

son should go scot-free. You have been trying to

comfort him, perhaps . You can stop now.

"He has not told you , probably, that Kitty left a

letter for me. Here it is , at least a copy of it . I

won't say that I wouldn't trust you with the original ,

Helen, though it is like the relic of some martyred

saint to me. Still , you are a mother-believe me, I

remembered that for seven days , and that you were

my lifelong friend-and this is all the proof I have

of what drove my child to her death. Read it , and

understand my actions , if you can and will .

"I will not endure it that Basil Forrester shall stay

in England where she is buried , or that he shall be

where I might see him again. His death would be the

payment due me for my daughter's,-an eye for an

eye, Helen,-call me wicked or mad , if you like . But

he is too soft a coward for that."

The man who was reading paused a moment, and

his face hardened as if the writer had stung him to

some sudden resolution . The woman across the

room, watching him from her corner, grew pale .

Before he knew it she had come to him and, kneeling

by his side, seemed instinctively to fix upon the

London

passage which had stopped his reading. She

clutched his arm .

"Basil, Basil ," she said in a broken kind of whisper

, "not that , not that ."

"It's her due, " he answered with half a smile.

"It's my due that you shouldn't. Will you better

things by breaking my heart as well ?"

"As well," mused Basil ; then he went over and

kissed her hair, softened with grey. "I promise,

dear, " he said , "if I can make you any happier by

living. "

"He must , at least, die to our world [the letter went

on] . If he stays here some other poor girl will marry

him, and break her heart for him. Women will al-

Iways love him, and it will be their curse ; I wish I

might make it his . Let him go away ; there is surely

some place for outcasts . Let him be somewhere, if

that is possible , where he will not be spoiled and pampered

because he is Lord Basil Forrester, somewhere

where they kill a snake before it starts to bite. Let

him go into the woods , and out under the sun , if he

wants to live. I swear I will hunt him out of every

capital in Europe , I will dog his footsteps into every

provincial town, and people who befriend him shall

know he is a murderer. The law cannot touch him,

but he shall see I can.

"If he goes at once, I will keep the secret. You

have my word for that. I have not told it to any one

Judgment 37

yet. I am a lonely old woman, as you know, and never

so lonely nor so alone as during the seven days just

gone by. If any rumours of the truth have been heard

they are not traceable to me. His own guilty conscience

probably makes the whole world point its finger

at him. What reports the vile companion of his

crime may have circulated along the gutters of Regent

Street , I cannot say . I know that I have almost bitten

my lips till the blood came, but I have kept them closed .

It rests with him, with you , with the family , whether

I open them or not.

"There can be no doubt , I think, of how London

will take the news. I can scarcely believe that your

son is deceived, or flatters himself that the town would

hear my revelation lightly . I do not pretend to be

other than a woman of the world. As to the creature

in Regent's Park, I am aware that most husbands

are probably acquainted with that quarter of

the town. Mine was , or worse ; and I've heard that

yours but these were different ; London takes such.

things lightly enough, but then we took them lightly,

too , you and I. Lightly compared to the way my

poor, unhappy girl did. I give Basil his chance , because

even at the end Kitty would not have had him

suffer . If he will slink away to some hole, if he will

never cross my sight again , if he will go where no

word of him may ever reach me, I will spare him, because

that is what she would have wished . If not ,

she has put into my hand , never knowing that she did,

the whip to lay across his back. Oh, we are a moral

race, when there's a man so defenceless as Basil Forrester

will be. No one will dare defend him. He will

London

be branded as the murderer he is . I say it now after

the first rage of my anger and my sorrow is gone , I

say it in cold blood ; he is a murderer. He robbed

me of part of my happiness when he won her love , now

he has taken it all . I am a broken old woman with not

much left to live for . Let him glory, if he likes , in

adding one more name to the list of women whose

lives are ruined because of him. Yes, I too ; I lay this

tribute at his feet . But I am not too broken yet to

make him pay.

"I ask no pardon , want no allowance made for my

action now. The one chance I give him is in part my

tribute to you , my dear Helen , and to a friendship

that has stood long usage , that I for one would wish

to see continued . But you must forgive it in me that

I hate your son.

"Yours,

"CONSTANCE AVERCREWE. "

This was tonic , thought Basil, putting down the

letter, and throwing back his head for an instant as

if he felt the east wind and the sting of salt spray

on his face . Terrified at love and all its consequences,

he welcomed hate. To his accusing conscience,

grown lonely at its work, now came a

comrade with a stout arm to lay the lash across his

back. With gratitude he felt it cut . It was no

reparation, no atonement, yet somehow he felt himself

more a man.

Bankrupt though he was , he was

Judgment 39

making some small payment on account with every

throb of pain the bitter sentences caused him. And

vaguely he caught a vision of himself toiling in the

heat of some far-distant sun-bleached sands to make

remittances of suffering and of remorse to clear his

debt.

He was happier than he had been any moment

since that one night of nights. Never had he liked

the Duchess so well as now.

"Shall we go down to a council of the family?"

he asked , almost smiling, with that smile the mere

suggestion of which brought boyishness into his

face.

Lady Kingstowne rose wearily. The lash of

shame, the sting of suffering were no tonic influence

for her. Men might work out their atonement,

and forget themselves in the sweat of their toil .

Their women must weep, they the guiltless must

bear half the burdens of men's sins . The smile

faded from Basil's face , he saw himself again driving

the spiked wheels of his car along a roadway

paved with soft hearts. He offered his mother his

arm , as to an old woman, gravely, and with a solicitude

which her usual strength and self- reliance

would have rendered needless .

"Will you go to them first ? I'll come later when

40 London

you've heard your father. I'm too weary to go

through it all a second time."

He went out quietly, but sorrow and shame that

she had kept so long outside the door did not go out

with him, though he lingered an instant in the odd

fancy that it might follow him like a dog, leaving

his mother, in this haven of her faded chintzes ,

again to forget that to a man she had borne men

children and so must suffer.

He went down the staircase, stopping for a moment

on the landing to look at an odd ill- painted

little picture of the " Earl Alkinloch and Lord Basil

Forrester, sons of the Marquess and Marchioness

of Kingstowne . Ætat. 5 and 3 respectively. "

Once, he remembered, the small spaniel in the picture

had been allowed to come to London and had

raced with him down this same staircase. They

both used to slip on the landing he remembered, and

he remembered, too , that he and " Chevalier" had

been banished to the country after two days of

noisiness . How he had cried ! A silly memory,

he told himself. Yet it came across him suddenly,

as he looked down the last well -worn stretch of steps

that perhaps he was seeing them for the last time ,

and that the family council might be banishing him

again. This time, however, he would be willing to

Judgment 41

go. Under such circumstances one may await

family decisions with a willing and obedient spirit .

He was the least excited of the four persons in the

drawing-room when he entered.

Lord Kingstowne was pacing down the room.

As his son entered he nervously put down a cigar,

then took it up again.

"If your mother is not coming , I might as well

smoke."

"How are you, père ?" Basil asked and gave a

greeting to his brother, sitting sullenly in an armchair.

Alkinloch had evidently thought the occasion

demanded a relaxation of the regulations of his

mother's drawing -room. A glass of whiskey stood

at his elbow , and he replied to his brother's salutation

by emptying this . The third occupant of the

room, whose presence Lord Basil had not expected ,

was more daintily occupied ; a glass of sherry and

the thinnest wafer of a biscuit had been placed for

his refreshment on a small gilt table, and Monsignor

Forrester, in black soutane and purple sash, smiled

benignantly upon his glass of wine, and upon his

cousin as he entered .

"Ah, Cousin Henry. I didn't know you were

here."

"Thought it was a case for the advice of the

42 London

Church, " growled Lord Kingstowne, who was apparently

by his flushed face endeavouring to retain

some show of calmness . "And although your

cousin's a Papist , he's in the family, and it isn't a

question to be discussed much outside ."

"Fancy old Mr. Etherton up from the country to

hear about Basil and his friends." Lord Alkinloch

in his armchair smiled rather disagreeably and

took up his glass, discovering regretfully that it was

empty.

In this room the air of tragedy was gone . The

squalor of his misdeeds, the vulgarity of the impending

scandal was all Basil could see now. Why,

indeed , should they consult this distinguished old

gentleman with his grey hair and his well - cut,

amiable face ? In cases like the present, any magistrate

would give as good advice from the bench to

the butcher and the baker, spicing it with cheap jests

for the reporters of the morning newspapers. Then

Monsignor Forrester spoke, and Basil gratefully

recognised that he at once brought the affair back

into recognised regions, where one sinned but also

made reparation like a gentleman.

"Basil will , I'm sure , understand my wish to

help him in this trouble." Then he added, " My

name is Forrester, too ."

Judgment 43

“And a damned dirty service Basil's done the

name," came from his brother.

For a moment Lord Kingstowne had the air of

finding his elder son's method of expression complete

and satisfactory . Then he seemed to remember

the dignity of his position, and spoke slowly,

choosing his words .

"I hope you realise how disgraceful , how damned

disgraceful your conduct was , and how great a

scandal , a public shame you are likely to inflict on

your unhappy family. "

It was ironic , thought Basil to himself, that these

two who really realised so little the disgrace should

urge him to confess .

"It will clear the ground, I think," he said , "if

I confess at once the full wickedness of my actions .

No one could feel the disgracefulness of infidelity

to a wife as I do . I realise now, I dare say, the

propriety of a clean and decent and pure life as much

as any one of us ."

There was a pause, almost awkward. Lord

Kingstowne, with his back turned to his younger

son, struck several matches before he managed

to relight his cigar. His heir found

words.

"Confound it, Basil , I'm not married yet, if you

London

refer to me.

when I am. "

And I mean to give everything up

"I shall certainly insist on it ." Lord Kingstowne's

dignity was now thoroughly re- established .

"But how do I expect I'm to be married now ?"

Lord Alkinloch's heavy fist came down on the table .

"The thing has troubled the Mertfields as it is ."

(To a daughter of this house the gentleman was to

be married in June. ) " Don't you expect when this

comes out they will chuck me altogether ? Violet's

fond enough of me, but this is sure to frighten her

off love matches in our family, even if it breaks

her heart, poor little kid."

Basil said nothing. Would this Violet, a stupid ,

pop-eyed girl, always in limp white muslins , would

she, too ? The indictment roll against him

grew longer.

Lord Kingstowne turned almost impatiently to

his cousin.

"I suppose there's no doubt in your judgment ,

Henry, as to how people will behave to Basil if the

truth becomes known ?"

Monsignor Forrester was tapping lightly on the

table at his side with his well -shaped fingers. The

suggestion of a smile, faintly ironic, passed over his

face.

Judgment 45

"That is a question of the world, Frederick,

rather than of the spirit . My advice would presumably

be__"

"Oh, hang it, Henry, you were of the world before

you-

What I mean is," he went on , hesitating

slightly, "of course I don't defend or uphold

my son ; still we all know that that sort of thing,

men deceiving their wives, happens pretty generally,

and nobody takes a high line about it."

"No, nobody does. " The faintly ironic smile still

played about Monsignor Forrester's lips , yet somehow

as he went on , his words coming with even more

exquisitely perfect enunciation , one felt that within a

hidden fire burned ; one caught a suggestion of what,

to every one's astonishment , had made a priest of him.

"Betrayal of the marriage vow we treat lightly

enough, if it is our happy sex which betrays it . We

forgive, and we teach our women to . We forget

the wife's side , and we teach our wives to. Everybody

would have welcomed Basil with a jest, if it

had been just the usual scandal . Poor Kitty

wouldn't play the game ; she broke the rules ; though

she paid high for it, she put her side of the question

so that it must be faced. No, I don't think London

would dare to palter with it now ; I don't think it

would dare to forgive Basil . We're all born and

London

bred in a Christian country, though we often forget."

"Yes, it's a rum thing, ain't it ?" meditated Lord

Kingstowne.

"I don't think she wanted revenge-Helen showed

me the letters," went on the priest-"but she took it

in the only way that was possible. "

“And a damned, silly , selfish revenge I call it ,"

broke in Alkinloch .

Basil turned white.

"Here, cut that," he said . "Good God, " he went

on, breaking for a moment completely from his

self-control ,-"do you think I'll sit here and hear

anything from you against her ? Father, the object

of this meeting is to discuss my future, not my past.

I've been a cur ; what d'ye want me to be now ?"

Lord Kingstowne got up from his chair, threw

away one cigar, and lighted a fresh one , nervous as

a child upon whom some unwelcome responsibility is

thrust. There was an uneasy pause.

"I suppose, Basil , there's no chance of denying

the whole thing , of facing the Duchess out ? This

woman, this girl, what will she do ? And" -he

hesitated , his curiosity obvious , though ashamed—

"who is she ?"

"Rose Atherton. ”

Judgment 47

"Rose ?"

"Of the Regent's Theatre."

"Know her, father ?" asked Alkinloch, with his

disagreeable laugh.

"Basil means to deny nothing, I can see that ."

The priest again brought the discussion back from

vulgarity.

"Then, what are we to do , Henry ? There will

be an atrocious scandal. "

Alkinloch had a suggestion .

"Basil had jolly well better take the old Duchess's

suggestion, she'll keep quiet then. And, I may

as well say it in the family council , -I'm the heir,

I'm going to be married soon , unless this row stops

it, and—well, you've seen Violet Mertfield-I don't

think there's any doubt but that we can take care of

the Kingstowne title . "

Lord Kingstowne, in his peregrinations through

the room, happened to be standing by his younger son.

He put his hand awkwardly on his shoulder. For

the first time that afternoon Basil felt that , after all ,

here was a father with something of a father's affection

for his child , even though that affection was expressed,

as now, in what his oversensitive imagination

conceived to be terms of an ideal of life now

grown repellent.

London

"But you'll hate to give up London, won't you ,

Basil , my boy, and all the fun you've had here ?"

At the moment the son lost sight of the father's

affection in horrified contemplation of the latter's

probable conception of " fun " in London, a conception

only seven days ago the son's as well . His

revulsion from life as he had known and loved it was

still his master, it made him almost shrink from his

father's touch.

"I am quite ready to go away from London," he

said in a dull, emotionless voice.

"It isn't that we wouldn't stand by you ," went

on Lord Kingstowne , "if you like to stay and face

it out. "

Here was the affection again. Basil, jumping

up, gripped his father's hand an instant.

"Thanks," he said , "but I would rather go .

Thanks all the same." Then he went quickly across

the room and seated himself by Monsignor Forrester's

side . A wave of emotion swept over him .

again . His elder brother watched him curiously

and then turned to speak to his father, with that constrained

air of the Anglo- Saxon in the presence of

displays of feeling.

"Cousin Henry," began the young man in a voice

full of suppressed energy, " can one go anywhere

Judgment 49

and get away from the world, get away from temptation

? You see I'm too weak to resist anything ;

still I think I've done about enough harm already

in the world. Shall I be safe anywhere ?"

The young face was worn and pale with seven days

and nights of strain , but it recaptured all its youth

as Basil leant eagerly forward , and with an impatient

gesture put back the dark hair from his forehead.

Henry Forrester involuntarily thought of

some passionate, tormented boy in an old Italian

story, and of the refuge from the storm to which

he, had he been a Cardinal in mediæval Rome,

might have counselled some distracted child of those

turbulent days to fly. At ordinary moments, though

his vocation-his own life , perhaps might suggest

such advice, his calmer common sense, his worldliness

would make it seem ridiculous. Now, he, too ,

for a moment forgot the modern setting, forgot

Lord Kingstowne, and Alkinloch sitting sullen in his

chair.

"Safe, Basil ?" he repeated. "I think one is only

safe in this world with one's eyes fixed on the next.

There is one refuge that has been open to every one

for many centuries, but fewer and fewer seem to like

to go to it now. "

"You meanbegan

the young man.

50 London

"Oh, the Church has always stoood ready for

those who are sick of this world. "

"A priest ?" asked Basil.

"Well, perhaps not just at first . "

"But I've no beliefs, you know, at all. "

Monsignor Forrester took no notice of this interruption.

"I've to go down to Hampshire to-morrow ," he

said, "to a small Carmelite monastery . It's just

below the crest of the downs, with a walled garden,

with decent flowers and fruits, running down the

hill, and a jolly view from its upper windows as far

as Hindhead and to Haslemere."

"But I should always know that London lay beyond.

"You forget London in time, Basil . Why, I remember

the first time I went into retreat " He

paused a moment as if lost in contemplation of some

memory.

"Yes , Cousin Henry."

"Oh, nothing ! Except that I was just about

your age and, well perhaps not quite unlike you .

You forget London , Basil , you forget it."

"I should forget it ; then I should remember

again," came from the younger man with sudden

emphasis. Then he laughed , at himself, it seemed ,

Judgment 51

and thus inoffensively. "No, that wouldn't do

for me. If I only had ever been the least pious .

But-well you know the family well enough . I

don't mean to laugh at anything you propose, but it

just won't do . I must get away altogether. I

don't want a part of the old life fenced off to live

in, I want something new, new. We needn't debate

it ; I'll go , I'll go to -morrow early. Every one

would rather have me away and I'd rather go."

There was a slight sound by the door at his last

words. Basil turned and saw his mother there, her

hand for one instant pressed against her side . Another

picture flashed across his memory, another

swaying figure, this time against the dark background

of the night outside , another hand pressed

against another woman's heart, beating hard with

pain, of which he was the cause . He started forward,

but Lady Kingstowne recovered herself, as

the other woman had done , and came into the room .

Her face was pale and she had been crying, one

could see. But her manner had no trace of feeling

in it.

"It's settled then, is it ?" she asked the company .

"Basil's cutting," answered . Lord Alkinloch .

"We all think it's necessary to avoid a scandal .

And he's behaving very well , I'll say that. "

London

His mother turned to the priest .

“Is it right , Henry ?" she demanded. "Ought he

to go ? And what's to happen to him ?"

Her husband fidgeted with his cigar and then

said with a bluff air that was half embarrassment :

"Basil can go out somewhere and try it for a

time. Things will blow over. We'll get him back

after a while ; eh, Basil ?"

"Perhaps, père," the young man answered.

"Perhaps after a while he will feel he can come

back, " said his cousin the priest , the look again in

his face that made one understand why he should be

a priest.

For perhaps a half-minute there was silence in

the room . Once more, and he felt it was for the

last time, his eyes rested on all its old familiar chairs ,

on its dull red curtains, on the Sèvres china in the

gilt cabinet which his mother had collected just after

she was married, on every loved rag and stick in it .

His father must be feeling it was time to dress and

dine , he thought. Alkinloch must be thirsty.

Cousin Henry had to go to Hampshire , to the hillcrest

to-morrow. And his mother-they must all

take up life and go on with it . The old room would

be still the same when he was gone. He looked at

it to say good-bye . He impressed its image on his

Judgment 53

memory again with his father, his mother, his

brother all in black, and Monsignor Forrester in the

purple of the Church .

"I'll go to- morrow, " he said.

"You will dine here to-night ?" his mother asked .

"No, not if I must get away so soon. "

"Where will you go to -morrow ?"

"I had no plans. '

"Perhaps then mine will help, " she said . "You

remember that land I'm supposed to have in

America, in Florida. It was always a kind of joke

in the family. Your grandfather took it , I believe,

for a bad debt. "

"At cards ?" enquired Lord Alkinloch .

"Possibly. I never troubled to ask . I've no

idea what it's like , though I know the rates and

taxes are not heavy. How would you like to go to

Tomocala for me, Basil, and prospect ? I will give

you the land, and if it is at all pleasant you can stay ;

you say you want to stay a little while."

There was another silence. Then Lord Kingstowne

began with suspicious heartiness of tone, his

first instinct being to hide the fact that it might stir

emotions to wish their son God- speed .

"Then you're off for this Florida- "

wished him luck , he even managed to wonder about

London

the climate , and to mention oranges . He and

Alkinloch both got away without a scene, finding

a handshake and good -bye sufficient.

Monsignor Forrester rose and Basil , obeying a

sudden impulse , knelt an instant at his feet, to hear

a murmured Latin blessing , and to feel , rather than

see, the hands that signed the cross above him.

Then the priest was gone.

"Mother," he cried , " you understand, they're not

sending me away, the Duchess , nor father and

Alkinloch, nor the world . I have to go.

bye."

"Good-bye," she repeated , as if afraid .

Good-

"Yes ." He was at her feet now and held her

hands . "I'll come back, if I ever feel I can."

He put his arms around her as he knelt there and

they both said some incoherent, murmured words .

Her tears were wet upon his face as he rushed away.

This was good-bye.

Lady Kingstowne sat gazing fixedly at the disordered

tea-things when they came to take them

away. She rose, and trouble, that for so many

years by a fierce effort of her will she had kept lurking

outside the door, now went padding familiarly

by her side . Often hearts that husbands cannot

harm only wait for sons to bruise and break them.

CHAPTER III

Good-bye, London !

BASIL walked slowly home to Mount Street.

Later there was to come to him a more poignant

sense of parting with the city of his youth , but now

a temporary peace settled upon him . The darkness

enclosed him pleasantly , and the occasional yellow

street lamps pointed out the way in friendly

fashion. The secret no longer went by his side.

He felt the calm that comes with finality in any

form , and the gentle pervasive glow which even in

the deepest sorrow for a little while at least follows

on sacrifices and resolutions for reform. Basil's

mood was solemn, and as he walked through the

familiar streets they gave him a new and strange

impression, the hushed feeling of some church.

In the small room which served as library he

wrote letters for an hour, as if it were quite the usual

thing. They were business letters . In his ordinary

careless mood Basil might conceivably have

gone away and left everything at loose ends . But

this new solemnity of life made it seem natural to

London

write to solicitors , to attempt to put everything in

order before he went. At half-past seven his man ,

discreetly entering, reminded him that dinner was

ordered at home, and that it was time to dress .

Was his Lordship dining alone ? he asked . And

Basil, with an odd smile, said , "Please lay the table

for two , but if no one comes I will sit down at

eight."

To the surprise of the butler, though perhaps

not to that of his master, no one came. Lord Basil

sat silent through a long dinner-it was in the days

of long dinners, and his Lordship's chef could

think of no other way of consoling his unhappy employer

than to make the menu longer and more

elaborately illustrative of his art than usual . But dinners

-above all , the dinners that one eats alone- are

food for memory as well. The room was in gloom ,

only the light from two candles fell on the white

cloth and upon the shining silver at Basil's place ,

and at the one laid opposite , by a vacant chair.

Somehow to-night , when he was about to hide himself

in the wilderness , to begin the long vacant years

which were to be his poor atonement, there came a

moment when he could think of her without anguish

that was intolerable . Again she sat opposite him,

happy, smiling, as he was too ; then the memory of

Good-bye, London !

happiness brought back the flood of shame and sorrow,

higher and more turbid than before , engulfing

him in its bitter waters. And his imagination ,

which had given him in this raising the wraith of

Kitty one fleeting instant almost of happiness , now

brought before him other figures to torture him.

Into the room trooped London , London in all its

infinite , what once he had thought its fascinating

variety. In the shadows around his table Basil

caught sight of crowding faces . There came, as if

to some quiet family dinner, his father and mother,

Monsignor Forrester in his purple, and the old

Duchess, with her worn, rugged features. There

came as well friends gathered along the whole course

of his life, suggesting familiarly to him Eton , Oxford,

London at last . Here were those whom he

had loved, to whose love and friendship he had

played false. In the gloom their pale faces stared

at him in sorrow and shame. Yes, it was better to

lose them, he thought , better to sit through the

years in loneliness than to face their accusing eyes,

their eyes which spoke of faith in him betrayed .

There were others, mocking faces, that seemed to

delight in pushing their way into his lonely room, in

spoiling these last moments in the place where the

memories of Kitty clung thickest. These were

London

casual acquaintances who had done their part in the

show of fashion and the season's pomp . They had

meant nothing to him, nor he to them. As they

once indifferently had enjoyed his hospitality, so now

their phantoms seemed to stare at him in idle curiosity,

showing no sorrow, feeling no sympathy,

ready to go on, chattering merrily, to some gayer

board. They laughed at him, though sometimes

where the shadows were least deep and the look of

laces and of the sparkle of jewels seemed to fix his

gaze, there seemed to be women whose eyes demanded

of him his ever ready tribute of admiration,

or more than that. How easy a capture, how

cheap a captive he must have been thought, he told

himself : a silly fool ready at a glance to fly to their

sides ! Around him circled this hideous phantasmagoria

of his former life , the awful panorama of

what he had once thought pleasure . It whirled

about the vacant chair where for one instant he had

seemed to see Kitty with forgiveness in her face.

It seemed to shut out the sight of her from him,

to push him farther than ever from that thought of

her which was all he could cling to now. Violently

he roused himself, and by sheer will-power brought

himself back to the lonely room and his solitary

dinner.

Good-bye, London !

To the servant at his side he gave a message

of congratulation for the chef, and then told

him briefly of his departure on the morrow and

the closing of the house . Masters hesitated a

moment.

"We shall all be sorry to go, my lord," he answered

finally, " but there's none of us as can't

understand how your lordship must wish a change."

"Thank you, Masters , " said Basil.

Masters did not over -colour the picture , thought

his master. A change ! A change in everything

that he had known , a change in everything that he

had been !

When the butler had gone he rose and lingered a

moment at his place , then gravely he poured out

some wine . He was bending over the table, and

one hand was stretched out on it toward the vacant

place across from him . Slowly he lifted the glass

to his lips . He was smiling, tenderly, affectionately,

though there were tears in his eyes .

"Good-bye," he said in a half-whisper, "goodbye."

Then he drained the glass, and tossed it from

him towards the fireplace, where it crashed and lay

in a hundred pieces on the hearth, sparkling white

and red in the light of the flames . They had drunk

his health and Kitty's at the wedding breakfast , and

60 London

had broken the glasses then , wishing endless happiness

In the little library, after dinner, he sat , staring

at the fire . He tried a cigarette and hated it : he

lit a cigar and tossed it impatiently away. Books

were hopeless , and he was driven to the rack of his

thoughts. There was but one thing he could think

of, indeed but one thing he could have wished to

think of. Yet the torment of such meditation , now

that he had borne it for seven lonely nights, seemed

to grow into a physical torture. He paced the

room , trying to quiet himself. The future was

chosen, he told himself.

nerves.

What he must show now

was courage to face it. He must conquer his

Yes, he would go out , he suddenly resolved

. The air, the exercise , the blackness of the

night should pull him together. This last vigil in

a house still pervaded by her presence would break

him utterly. He must forget for an instant, just

that so he might keep the strength to remember

always . He did not go out, as he had sometimes

done, to see London crowding through its narrow

streets and to let his pulses quicken , as they had so

often, at the roar and cry of the great town seeking

its pleasures when the lamps were lit. To -night he

went, like a sick wild thing, seeking some herb in its

Good - bye , London ! 61

familiar pastures that would bring momentary relief

from pain .

The night was still warm for the season , and

muggy. There was moisture enough in the air

faintly to blur all outlines. The open space of

Grosvenor Square seemed to stretch indefinitely before

him like a great plain . He skirted the south side,

and before a house near the middle saw some waiting

carriages and a group of gossiping footmen.

He remembered, as he quickened his pace , that he

was to have been dining there that very night—

with Kitty. As he went by a streak of light shot

across the pavement as the door was opened, and he

saw against the bright background the figure of a

woman he had known , dined with, consequently

probably made meaningless love to. He put down

his head and hurried by.

Across Park Lane and into the Park chance , or

caprice, led him and he turned north under the trees

dripping with the afternoon's rain , toward the lights

that blinked at him by the Marble Arch. The exceptional

warmth had started again the preaching of

the many gospels which the place knows, and Basil

stopped near a group in the centre of which a short,

red-whiskered man denounced the sins of London

and called the shopkeepers ' assistants grouped

London

around him to repentance . He looked at the weak

face of the preacher and the stupid ones around him.

What, pray, did they know of sin or of repentance ?

What should they renounce if they gave up London

? He turned away, and saw the lamps of the

Edgeware Road shining gaily, and its pavements

bringing their stream of evening promenaders toward

the Park. Yes , after all , he told himself, they

had their pleasures and their sins, perhaps their repentances

and their renunciations. The changing

show of the dingy street was as exciting for them as

the pageant of the London season ; the public house

at the corner, gaudier and more merry than his clubs .

And yes, the draper's assistant tucked under his arm

a young person from some cheap milliner's shop,

and the bright-coated guardsman convoyed some

lovely housemaid, there was the love of women.

There was a moment when Basil felt that he might

mount a park bench and harangue the crowd. Love

which could make life could break it too ; this they

should know. If one could not be its master- and

who could ?-one would be its slave . They could

resist, they might object, they could hold loyally to

one cherished and beloved object , they might protest.

Basil could warn them against the folly of

such hopes . He could counsel flight in the face of

Good -bye, London !

danger, renunciation before it was too late. He

could tell them that he himself, now as red- handed

as any murderer, once for a little while dreamed the

same dream , once, like them, thought that the

woman by his side was for him-a red-faced , dingy

couple lurching out of a public house jostled against

him , and the man caught the woman round the waist

to save her from falling. She giggled in Basil's

face at this caress of love , and he turned away

sickened at the comparison he had been about to

make.

it.

A passing hansom invited him and he stepped into

"Drive anywhere for an hour," he told the startled

driver.

They wandered for the hour or more.

In great

curves and zigzags they went through the town of

Basil's youth, down Park Lane, across the open

space by Hyde Park Corner, down Constitution Hill

between its arching trees , sweeping by the gloomy

mass of Buckingham Palace , and along the south

side of St. James ' Park to hear the hour boomed out

by Big Ben high above their heads in a misty sky.

Then they came along Whitehall into the stateliness

of Trafalgar Square and made a detour into the

more gaily lighted Strand.

London

Why had he thought that he might escape his

memories ? London was no longer merely London ;

it was London where Kitty had lived ; London

where he had made her die . Every inch of the way

was a reminder- Mayfair of the stately, ordered

life of fashion , led with Kitty ; Westminster of his

own brief career in Parliament , undertaken because

Kitty had been so sure that he would make a career

in politics. If in the Strand the memories were of

the follies of his youth, the youth only just now

passing in this passionate remorse, they were for that

only the more painful . The crowds poured out

from the theatres, and he stared at them with a pale ,

haggard face . The lights blinded him , he hated

the street and its surging crowd . There , around

the corner of that quiet street , leading into the Adelphi

, he had often waited in the dark corner of a cab

for Rosie. He gave an almost inarticulate cry of

protest, and hurriedly stopped the cab. Into the

cabman's hand he thrust some money, and then halfstumbled

, half-ran , up a quiet street leading north ,

flying in vain from memories.

But memory dogged his steps ; at Covent Garden ,

where some early porters were carrying boxes of

fragrant white hyacinths such as stood in a small

sitting -room in Mount Street, that had become a

Good-bye, London ! 65

sanctuary to him now ; before the dark façade of the

Opera-she had cared for music. Long Acre was

silent, but ahead was the brightness of Leicester

Square, enlivened by the new Alhambra Palace.

Here , where currents formed to carry the flood of

home-going London toward the great eddying pool

where Regent Street joined Piccadilly , Basil felt for

one fleeting moment a faint flicker, the old excitement

which a town by night , its light, its clamour,

its suggestion of mystery and adventure , had never

failed to give him. But it died at once, and he

walked through almost with unseeing eyes . If he

had ever thought that in his repentance he was

paying a heavy price, he would have laughed scornfully

now to see how the price turned to nothingness

before him . Ah, gladly he said, " Good-bye light ,

good - bye clamour." As for mystery, the future only

could hold that.

He went west along Piccadilly, his eyes again on

the pavement . He felt the swish of skirts against

him and caught some whispered words. Involuntarily

he looked up , involuntarily he noted a pretty,

worn face below some tawdry , tossing feathers ,

glanced at a slender, graceful form , then below his

breath he murmured an oath , -not at this poor,

wayfaring merchant of her wares , but at himself.

66 London

Under a street lamp the skirts, slackening their pace,

again swished against him. This time he did not

look up.

“Non , ma chère," he said, gently enough, and

catching a hand in a dirty white glove thrust some

gold pieces into it , then rushed on, straight to Mount

Street now. London seemed to laugh at him behind

his back. Were her streets not full of pretty

faces , she seemed to say , that would make him forget

his resolutions , his new-found strength ? No, a

thousand times no, he muttered to himself as he

hurried on. He would retreat till he found some

place where love was not.

And he vowed to himself again that somewhere

(in Tomocala in that remote , strange land, he

hoped ) he would find new courage , would make over

the world to what it was in Eden before Eve came.

Monsignor Forrester, talking of the monastery on

the Hampshire hillcrest , had in mind no greater exaltation

of spirit, no fiercer fire of asceticism than his

cousin Basil felt , planning to plant orange trees on

his lands in Florida . He found himself at his own

door without realising it , having come through the

familiar streets in a strange, confused, forgetful

uplifting of his deepest feelings, an unaccustomed

thrill of almost happy pain .

Good-bye, London ! 67

The house was silent . In his bedroom he found

a small trunk and some bags packed for. his departure

with the few simple country clothes he had

asked for, and a few others not so simple without

which no well-trained servant could allow a master

to go. With a smile the prospective traveller

dragged out a black tailed coat and some satin waistcoats

and tossed them in a careless heap upon the

floor. Not such equipment , not such memories did

he mean to carry with him. Yet somewhere he

meant to hide away a keepsake of the youth to which

he now said good-bye.

He lit a candle, and gently opening the door,

entered the bedroom that was Kitty's . They had

given him her keys , and he opened a drawer in the

great mahogany chest and took out her jewel case .

The little key that fitted this he knew well, and often

in those first days she had sent away Brinton when

she was ready to put on her jewels , and called in

Basil to help her choose them, when the two , like

children, would play at adorning her in any strange,

fantastic way they could invent . Half the gems

that he fingered they had bought themselves , and to

them had given in consequence associations that

now racked Basil. Two tiny trays he lifted , and

finally from the lowest corner of the casket drew

68 London

forth in one long, glittering, yellow stream the great

chain of topazes which they had found in Paris

that May afternoon , which Kitty had worn on that

last night . He closed and locked the jewel case ;

but these hard stones he held clutched in his hands

till the sharp edges of their setting almost cut into

his palms . An odd, unwieldy keepsake it was for a

man to take long journeys with , yet it was this and

nothing else that he chose to take. It was this, and

nothing else, though he could not know, that could

so glitter again with its yellow lights beneath the

golden splendour of a tropic moon and at so strange

a crisis in his life. Now he carried it back and

stuffed it in a dressing-bag, wrapped in a fine linen

handkerchief with initials in the corner she had put

there. Again he closed the door, and again in a

hushed whisper he said good-bye.

With deliberate precaution he consulted again an

evening paper as to the steamer he hoped to catch

to-morrow. Then he turned to the writing table in

the corner and wrote one note before he threw himself

upon the bed . It was written in the solemn

hush of the early hours of the morning. When they

took it to the Duchess her son-in -law, after a few

hours of restless sleep, was already speeding on his

way to Liverpool . It was his last good -bye . It

Good -bye, London ! 69

was as well the solemn pledge with which he set out

on his pilgrimage.

"When this comes to you [ it read ] I shall have gone

away from London . I will not come back unless you

call me, perhaps not then. I go willingly, I go hoping

I may find a way to make reparation for what I have

done. Will you keep the secret for my mother's sake ,

and for Kitty's-not for mine ?

"Reparation ! I find it impossible to imagine any

way in which I can ever make it fully. I can only

take my oath, upon what honour there is left in me,

that I will not let any woman suffer for my sake . If

I keep this pledge I shall have done the poor best that

I can. Good-bye . Thank you for showing me the

path away from London."

BOOK II

TOMOCALA

CHAPTER I

Exile

It is easy to go to Tomocala now. Luxurious

trains crowd their way into what was once the sleepy

old Spanish city of St. Augustine. Long , yellow

lines of hot cars creep down through the sandy pine

barrens of the East Coast almost to the very tip of

Florida , discharging crowds of tourists all along

their route. The magic of the original Spanish

name still keeps something of its power. And the

first sight of blue skies with glossy , dark- green

leaves and orange fruit against them always gives

one who has never spent a winter away from the inclement

north , some sense of romance and unreality.

But excursion tickets and illustrated "railway literature"

have , for the most part, taken away all the

feeling of strangeness , and the fabled Land of

Flowers, where the great Spanish captain thought

to find the Fountain of Perpetual Youth is reduced

to the commonplace level of any tourist region.

True it is that the jealous land guards even now at

the outermost part of its peninsula in the vast track-

Tomocala

less region of the Everglades almost the one remaining

mystery of America , the one labyrinth at whose

edges the white man stops baffled, through whose

wilderness of cypress and saw grass threaded

through and through by narrow waterways and

dotted with lakes in which strange shifting currents

run, only the few remnants of the original race can

go with surety. From this refuge even now

only an occasional Seminole Indian comes forth ,

though in the little settlements along its edge

one can hear curious half-legendary stories, of

the village near the west coast to which flee negro

convicts escaped from their labour on the Florida

roads, of the cabins here and there where men

whose names are now forgotten in the world still

live. But even the tourist when he spends a winter

near the Everglades herds with his fellow tourists

and rarely hears these tales . For him Florida is a

discovered and well -known land.

Thirty-odd years ago this was not so . The State

has had a curious history. After the Spanish and

the English left it , and it became a part of the Union,

it was for long years an almost undiscovered country.

The early time of its settlement and cultivation

was forgotten. It was thought to be barren , a long

spit of sand covered with pines and palmetto scrub

Exile

stretching down to the tropics . Until the orange

culture began and the climate commenced to bring

people south it lay year after year sleeping in the

sun , its inhabitants ( mostly white ) , scattered , ignorant

, and shiftless . There were few negroes , though

these gradually drifted into it. It was never in any

real sense a part of the South . Except in the hill country

of the northwest around Talahassee , which is indeed

geographically part of Georgia and Alabama ,

it had no wealth, no gentry , no real Floridian families.

It was a refuge for the idle and incompetent

of the other Southern States and for occasional

fugitives from the Spanish Indies . Lying between

the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico its coasts caught

driftwood, human and otherwise, from every quarter

of the globe . But there are no annals of that time,

when this enormous State , the greatest in area east

of the Mississippi, still waited for the touch of

modern civilisation . Fragments of stories of those

days may be gathered here and there . One of

them , the beginning of which in a distant great city

we have already seen , is now to be put together as

best one may.

The traveller in the hot yellow cars may perhaps

wonder how they went down the East Coast before

the railway came. If such an inquisitive person,

Tomocala

some time when he is staying in any of the seacoast

towns between St. Augustine and New

Smyrna, will leave the hotels and boarding- houses

on the Lagoon and wander back along one of the

straggling, sandy wagon tracks that lead into the

flatwoods, he will come upon a road almost overgrown

and disused, but still traceable after more

than a century's existence going its green way north

and south at a distance of two to three miles inland.

If along its bushy stretches he should have the rare

chance to meet a "cracker" driving a melancholy

horse and an antiquated vehicle to town from his

lonely cabin in the back country, he will be told by

this native that he is on the " King's Road."

Reminiscences of our English origin one expects to

find in the old historic colonies, though indeed there

in Revolutionary days most names were altered

to obliterate traces of early loyalty to the British

Crown. But in the loneliness of the Florida woods,

in a land originally Spanish, and settled quite within

most people's memory from the bustling modern

North and West it is curious to go along a highroad

still called for one of the Georges. The English

occupation, lasting from 1763 to 1783 , though generally

forgotten still has its mark upon the region .

It was then that the Minorcans were brought from

Exile

their Mediterranean island by Dr. Turnbull to cultivate

rice, sugar, and indigo in his lands around New

Smyrna-it was then that they revolted , freed themselves

from their almost slavery, and scattered

along the coast, where their descendants may be

recognised now by their Spanish names, their dark

skins, and their adherence to the Roman faith . It

was then that the Governor drove the King's Road

southward from St. Augustine , which was then the

capital , as it had been since 1565. Those first days

were the only ones when it saw much show of traffic

or gaiety. Yet as far down as the early seventies

it was still the post-road, and along it a so-called

stage went southwards. In this one could go as

far as New Smyrna-on his way to Tomocala .

It was March of '71 that a young Englishman

who gave his name as Basil Forrester took the trip ,

sitting by the driver. The latter was curious , as

are his class, and asked the stranger why he had

come to Florida . They generally put the question

to strangers in those days, but rarely expected an

answer, nor took the one they got to be a true one.

Many a secret before Basil's had sat on the front

seat and hurried southwards. Mr. Forrester,

though genial enough, and eager to talk of the country

through which they passed , gave no more specific

78 Tomocala

information than that he had some land at Tomocala

and hoped to do something with it .

"What crops do they raise here ?" he asked.

The driver cracked his whip out over the scrub

palmetto that lined the road and smiled.

"Reckon it looks to you like you couldn't raise

nothing on this here land."

It had looked so to Basil . The tropics, for the

Northerner, are a kind of fairyland of the imagination

. What Basil had expected he could not perhaps

have definitely explained . But he had had a

confused idea of tangled primæval forests where the

rich ground steamed with heat, where strange overcoloured

flowers grew with heavy scents , where

bright-plumaged birds flitted in the lofty trees uttering

harsh, shrill cries . In clearings where the black

so was riotously fruitful he had pictured pleasant

white houses standing among oranges and lemon

trees, the proprietor resting luxuriously on cool ,

shady verandas while hundreds of black servants

toiled in the sun. Instead there was this endless ,

barren flat country and the solemnity of the pines .

Occasionally near a little pool of water, they passed

cypresses, bare at this time of year, standing in a

little thicker undergrowth . Sometimes they went

through "hammocks, " where the ground sank to a

Exile

shallow rill of dark-brown surface-water and slender

palmettoes rose from the black earth through a tangle

of creepers and rank tropic growths. Sometimes

the monotonous level lifted to the slightest ridge

and they passed through groves of small hickory

and maple. But for hour after hour there would

be nothing but the flat expanse of sand and blue

scrub dotted over with slender pine trees in whose

tops high above their heads sounded that indescribable

continuous murmuring of the wind . The woods

were not thick ; open rather with a certain park- like

look. But at a distance they seemed to gather themselves

together into the appearance of a thicker

screen hemming in the view. To the edge of this

one continually advanced , only to find it melting

away into the usual scattering trees, while still farther

beyond a thick wood again shut out the horizon

and baffled any onward progress. For hours at a

time they passed over this same monotony, always

going toward a retreating goal . It was too soon

for any of the flowers that later sprinkle the patches

of turf by the roadside . The sun shone and the

wind was fresh and sweet. But the sands seemed

quickening to no life . Moaning pine and crackling

scrub sang a lonely and desolate song in the wind

and under the bright sky.

80 Tomocala

"Yes," continued the driver, "looks like this here

land won't bear nothing, but there's nothing much

won't grow on it. Yes, sir , you go over to them

God- forsaken sandhills by the ocean and scratch

'em and you can have garden truck, and plenty. "

"Then why," asked his passenger, waving his

hand over the pine - lands , " doesn't anybody do anything

"Shiftless ! I asked the same questions you do

when I first came down- I'm from Massachusetts

myself. But , Lord, it's climate. Them crackers.

won't do no work, except perhaps turpentine pine

and kill ' em . And then they're too lazy to clear ' em

away . "

He cracked his whip at the horses, and seemed to

meditate.

"It's the climate, I judge. If I wasn't Massachusetts

I expect I wouldn't be doin' even this

drivin'. It seems like you change down here , somehow,

when the west wind's a -blowin ' good and hot ."

"Well, I hope so," said the passenger, in a way

that caused the driver to stare at him for moment .

The monotonous landscape scarcely changed to

mark the progress of the hours , yet Basil felt

acutely that each step of the lazy horses carried him

farther towards his refuge in the unknown , towards

Exile 81

the hermitage he was to make for himself here in

the greenwood . Each pine tree , with the wind singing

in its waving top as he passed along, seemed to

range itself with its thousand brothers to thicken

the screen that hid him from the world , seemed to

close forever the path behind him that led back to

London.

Two nights they slept in the pine woods , once at a

"cracker" cabin surrounded by a struggling patchy

vegetable garden, and a barnyard where a thin

white horse and three scrawny cows were standing :

the second night at a camp of turpentiners . Into

one of the little temporary houses where there was a

chimney built of mud and straw, a dozen men or

more crowded after supper and around a blazing

fire of fat pine, passing the evening with rough jest

and song. The passenger from the stage wandered

out after a time into the cool night air. A hundred

yards or more away light flared from another door ,

and there could be heard a low, half-chanted song.

Basil stepped softly down the grassy cart-track that

led through the camp till he could look in the open

doorway. There were a few negroes working for

the turpentiners , and they too were gathered before

a hearth after the day's work. Most Americans

have lost almost wholly any sense of the strangeness

82 Tomocala

of the black man . But Basil Forrester, just from

England, looking on the dark faces shining in the

red firelight, and hearing the curious cadences of the

song, got a fresh feeling that he was entering some

new, half-barbarous land .

Somehow a negro from farther north had drifted

here.

"Jaybird sat on a hickory tree , " he sang ( some

Virginians may recognise it ) —

"Wink at me. Shoot at he,

Jingle-bum. Cider come .

Massa give poor nigger some .

Sweet potato an' a dram

Carry nigger to Alabam '.

Sweet potato an' a guinea

Carry him back to ole Virginny."

The odd meaningless words, the mournful

melody, the swaying woolly head of the singer,

and the grinning faces of his comrades were part of

a life all new now to the listener, but destined he

felt to become familiar. For an instant , while the

song of the lately - freed slave mingled with that of

the wind in the pines , homesickness caught at Basil's

heart. "Sweet potato and a guinea" would not

carry him back. The lights of London would never

twinkle for him at nightfall ; he would see the blaze

of pine logs and hear the moaning in the tree-tops .

Exile 83

Never again would he go through leafy, dripping

English lanes winding their way up and down the

hills about his home ; he would go in this crackling

palmetto scrub along the great monotonous lonely

stretches of flatlands . This he must make home.

These sallow, sad-faced men, bleeding the woods to

death for their turpentine, these black creatures

scarcely emerged from their jungle savagery, were

to be his comrades . His courage faltered . For a

moment he wondered if there was no other way,

no compromise with his conscience and his remorse

that would let him turn back. Then in an instant

revulsion to braver feeling he saw that here in this

desolation , in this alien life , was the very answer to

his prayer. Here there would at least be none of the

old temptation. Venus, if she set her snares among

these pine lands, must be a dusky and a savage

goddess . He would find new courage to withstand

new wiles . Again , this time alone under the light

of the stars, he swore that he would pay the price,

vowed that he would make reparation for his

sins.

The singer within the lighted hut increased the

speed of his chant till it became a kind of militant

and triumphant song . An awkward , loose- jointed

boy in picturesque tatters came into the open space

Tomocala

before the blazing hearth and began to do a shuffling

dance. It brought the man outside back from his

dreaming. He went off to hunt for a place to lay

his blanket . That night he slept more peacefully

than he had for weeks .

The next day brought them to the oddly-named

little village of New Smyrna, which competes with

St. Augustine and Santa Fé in the distant Southwest

for the honour of being the first permanent settlement

by Europeans in what is now the United

States. Here Basil found a coastwise schooner,

which would be going on southwards in a couple of

days and could give him passage to Tomocala . This

was luck, he was told , as he might easily have waited

a fortnight , in stormy weather even a month . The

two days he spent pleasantly enough . He lodged at

a dirty little hotel by the waterside and ate with

zest abominably greasy food, for the east wind,

blowing in from the sea , gave him an appetite for

anything. He went back into the woods to see the

ruins of the mission where Spanish priests so long

ago had taught religion and planted sugar-cane.

Its arched cloister had already almost yielded to

time and encroaching vegetation while the local inhabitants

, imitating the mediæval Romans , used it

as a convenient quarry for building - stone. Making

Exile 85

friends on the front with the owner of a catboat,

he sailed down to Turtle Mound, that curious heap

of shells constructed by some prehistoric native race

along the river's edge . He idly dug into it and

gathered a few curious fragments of rude pottery

which later were to decorate a shelf in a cabin undreamt

of now. The east wind still swept in from

the sea, the river broke into gay little waves , the

sky was blue, and to his own astonishment it was

almost bearable to be alive . His curiosity wakened

as to Tomocala. A month ago it had been but a

name, merely a refuge which would do as well as

any other to hide him from the world. Now he

found himself repeating to himself the musical Indian

word, finding in it already vague suggestions

that were pleasant. His life had not been all London-

happily no Englishman's , of his class , is . The

open air, even though it was not the breezes that

blow over Scotch moors or Surrey hillsides , had in it

an appeal to which his blood responded . He looked

over the guns and fishing- tackle he had brought and

was impatient for the Rosie S. to carry him out to

sea and down the coast towards his new home. His

conscience vaguely troubled him , as he meditatively

polished a smooth barrel , that he could so soon feel

any interest whatever, or that the sound of Tomo86

Tomocala

cala should come to mean to him anything not quite

penitential . But he told himself that it could not be

wrong to answer the call of sea and sands and woodlands

. They could only lead him farther and farther

away from the danger that lurked in human

relationships, if indeed-and he put the question to

himself with a kind of scornful satisfaction- there

could be any question of human relationship worth

the name for him in Tomocala .

The Rosie S. having discharged, one might have

thought, sufficient canned goods permanently to

weary the inhabitants of New Smyrna of such a diet,

put out through the Mosquito Inlet and turned

southward. The single passenger, sitting near the

bow, watched the low, straight coast of sand dunes

as eagerly as some early adventurer from Spain to

whom any passage in from the sea might mean the

way to where the sand of the rivers shone with gold ,

or where crystal-clear among the tropic forest the

fabled Fountain of Perpetual Youth rose in its

magic basin. All through its history there has

been sought in the Florida peninsula fulfilment of

some extravagant wish that the world denied. Since

the earliest days broken men have buried lost hopes

within its border. To many another before Basil

Forrester, Carnaveral Inlet , opening at last between

Exile 87

the sand dunes , had seemed the gateway to a new

life.

As eagerly as a boy he watched the schooner

thread her way up the tortuous channel that showed

smooth water through the surf, past the mournful

fragments of two wrecked ships gone to grief finding

their way into the river. They went over the

bar-at high tide, though as they beat up a lagoon ,

in these regions called a river, toward the town,

Basil saw behind great flats left by the ebbing waters

on which innumerable pelicans and cranes were

settling. Ahead the channel wound up towards a

dozen or two white houses along the river- front .

The Rosie S. , cleverly manoeuvred , came to anchor

by a rather rickety wharf, and Mr. Basil Forrester ,

for so he was called now, stepped ashore. This

was Tomocala . This was home.

There was even then a tiny hotel , the Tomocala

House, outwardly a fairly pleasant- looking building

with a small veranda in front and a fine group

of three slim palmettoes growing at the side. Basil

signed his name in a yellow, fly-blown register and

was given a room. Supper would be at half- past

five , he was told, so he pulled a shirt out of a bag

and poured some water into a wash-bowl of ungenerous

proportions . But instead of proceeding

88 Tomocala

further with a toilet he lit a pipe and, seating

himself by the window in a rocking-chair, -still

for him a rather frightening novelty, -looked

forth .

Before him stretching north and south lay the

broad stream of the Carnaveral River, about threequarters

of a mile wide here, from mainland to

peninsula. A little to the left he could see the

wooded shore break into the piled -up dunes that

flanked the Inlet. But otherwise the continuous

green line extended on either hand as far as the eye

could reach . With the east wind came borne in the

regular booming of the surf upon the ocean beach,

over a mile away. Thus for hundreds of miles along

the East Coast, a narrow strip of sand keeps back

the ocean and confines the long tidal lagoons or

rivers which skirt the mainland and which now,

since the cutting of a few canals , offer a whole system

of inland waters and sheltered navigation . Behind

Basil the sun was setting, but as he faced the east

it flushed in answer to the west. The green line of

the Peninsula brightened into a golden yellow. The

little hollows of the ripples on the river seemed to fill

with purpled brown , while towards the south the

whole stream seemed to melt away in a grey and

pink mist against which some tall, slim palmetExile

toes on a small point of land silhouetted themselves.

In the hotel and below him along the front there

was some stir of life , but the panorama that outrolled

itself seemed only water and sea and air, the

fair loneliness of nature. Then suddenly the glow

from the west seemed to light up the opposite shore

more brightly than before, and Basil caught a

glimpse of the roof-line of a house half-hidden among

green trees toward the south. And as he did so

suddenly upon the rippling river there came into his

field of vision a rowboat, which had put off from

the wharf and was heading obliquely across the

river toward the house he had just discovered . It was

laden with a number of tubs and buckets , carrying ,

if one might trust the east wind and one's nose , the

refuse of the town . Its occupant, who bent vigorously

to the oars , was a man with a great shaggy

grey beard, which , with a battered hat pulled down

over his eyes, almost concealed his face . This was

the first glimpse Basil had of Jim Harriman, carrying

his unsavoury freight away across the Carnaveral

crimsoning in the sunset . He often wondered

afterwards that the keen grey eyes did not catch and

hold his attention then , that they gave him no hint

of the part that Harriman and the drama of his life

90 Tomocala

were to play in that of the stranger just arrived.

Basil plunged his face in the bowl, changed his shirt,

and went down to supper.

After this was over he strolled out. The surf

still boomed in the east, and a crescent moon added

a dim light to that of the stars . Across the road

by the waterside the hotel and the three shops of the

town threw bright yellow streaks, and beyond an

occasional lamp shone from a house window.

"Sandford's Emporium" did what it could to justify

its grandiloquent name ; it was the largest of the

commercial establishments, and it contained , so a

sign indicated , the post office . Basil argued that an

"emporium " might also contain tobacco for a pipe.

It would save him the trouble of going up to his

room , also it would give him a nearer view of Tomocala,

five or six of the male inhabitants of which were

seated under the most glaring lamp, in comfortable

and negligent attitudes . He started towards the

door, wondering lazily just how one introduced

one's self in new communities , not knowing that

new communities always introduce themselves.

"Mr. Forrester, ain't it ?" asked a rather squeaky

voice at his elbow, just as he was going in.

"Thanks," its owner went on , "I jest stepped into

the hotel to ask. Seen Captain Morton of the

Exile 91

Rosie S. there, and he tells me he thinks it likely

you'll settle here ."

"Yes , I mean to settle, " said Basil.

"Glad to know you, sir." Here a hand was extended

. "My name's Herron, county assessor.

I'm an old inhabitant here, sir ; no one knows this

country better'n I do ."

Mr. Herron seemed disinclined to enter Sandford's

. Instead he delayed outside, and as he proceeded

his voice grew more confidential .

"If you're thinking of settling, " he said, " and

buying any land, there ain't nobody can tell you

better'n I what you want to buy. In fact," and his

voice sank mysteriously, "I've got a few hundred

acres more than I can handle myself of the best

orange-bearing land in this county that I'd be willing

to dispose of. It ain't that I'm in any sweat to get

rid of it , but I happen to be going out there tomorrow,

and I thought if you'd like to have a look

at it "

"I should like to well enough, Mr. Herron," said

Basil, "but I've some land already."

"You have ?" squeaked the assessor incredulously.

"Where did you get it?"

"In England, before I came here . "

"You ain't bought that there tract belonging to

92 Tomocala

some woman called Kingstowne, have you ?" Mr.

Herron's manner grew distinctly excited.

"Yes, that's it. "

"You have, have you ? Here , boys , " he called out

to the group within , advancing to them followed by

the wondering Basil . " Here's a gentleman has

bought that English tract on the peninsula where

I claim Jim Harriman's got his house put . I've

told him for years that when that tract's surveyed

he'll have to quit. He'd ought to be the other side

of that cove. I've told him so times enough."

"And what effect did your telling him seem to

have on Harriman , Herron ?" asked a bystander

quizzically.

"Said he liked the cove better. And told me I

could go to ”

"This Harriman's a character," ventured Basil

with a smile.

Sandford summed it up.

"He certainly is, " he said. " Lord ! he certainly

is."

CHAPTER II

Legends

IT was never difficult to induce Tomocala,

grouped in Sandford's, to talk ; it was least , of all

supposable cases, difficult to make it talk of Harriman,

who was at once its detestation and its pride ,

whose "queerness " made Tomocala listen with complacency

to any tales of eccentricity which other

towns along the East Coast might bring forward in

rivalry. Every stranger heard something of Harriman.

In honour of Basil, whose connection with

him seemed so close and so likely to prove dramatic ,

the representative citizens in the Emporium talked

till ten, first disclosing to the newcomer the fact that

Sandford , discreetly retiring behind a pile of packing

boxes at the back of the place , could dispense to him

-and to any friends of his-something, which

proved to be rye whiskey. A round or two of this

cemented friendship, possibly loosened tongues. At

any rate it will be easier to summarise the story of

James Harriman as Tomocala knew it and imagined

it , than to repeat the rambling and contradictory

94 Tomocala

gossip through which Basil learned it . It is hopeless

to attempt to disentangle truth from invention .

The man must remain what he always was for Basil ,

who came to know him best of any one at Tomocala,

what he himself perhaps consciously wished to be,

something mysterious and strange, playing tricks

with the imagination . To the end Basil could never

decide whether the old man's curious existence was

a real necessity to his warped and embittered nature ,

or was, in part,-half subconsciously perhaps , -the

result of some inborn desire to deck out his life in

the finery of romance, however soiled and tattered.

Tomocala drew no such fine distinctions, probably

could not have understood them, for Harriman had

come to it from out a world to which few or none of

its inhabitants had ever belonged .

None of Basil's companions that night at Sandford's

store had been in Tomocala when Harriman

first came, twenty-two years before . They had

gathered the story from earlier settlers , and it had

already something of the quality of a legend. Just

where he had come from no one could say with certainty

; why he came , still less . It was said by some

that the window sashes, the doors and the carved

Italian chimney-pieces of white marble that had been

put into the house, had come from an older mansion.

Legends 95

in Washington Square , New York, demolished just

as Harriman migrated to the south . Basil had

driven through the peaceful, serene, aristocratic

sunny square, with its row of spacious oldfashioned

red-brick houses the day he landed , and

it had reminded him to his astonishment of the best

of his own London. He remembered the grey roofline

emerging from the green by the lonely Carnaveral

, and caught at the very beginning something

of the flavour of the Harriman legend . But even

here uncertainty began. Herron the assessor had

been to New York once and had inquired in vain for

any record of a Harriman who had been a householder

in the Square . Yet there seemed something

in the story, for one old man remembered that he

had heard that Harriman tore down the house when

his only child and heir , a boy a year old , died there .

Or was it because in it the child had been born with

some vile deformity ? He thought he had heard

both tales .

There were other stories of why the man had

come down to the wilderness , stories to which Mr.

Herron's investigations in New York and his theory

of false names gave colour. It was said that Harriman

fled to preserve from the law gains ill-gotten

in his earlier life . Just what these were again no

Tomocala

one could quite say, with certainty, but the accepted

theory built itself around a strange object seen by

the few people who had ever succeeded in penetrating

the house. They brought back the story of a

Chinese pagoda standing four or five feet high from

the carved-wood pedestal on which it rested. It was

said to be constructed of blocks of a milky-greenish

stone and "hung all up and down" with little gilt

bells that tinkled as the wind swept through the big,

bare room . Harriman had once told some visitor

that it had been " presented to him by the Government

at Peking for distinguished services. " But

here Tomocala thought it detected irony, and

laughed at the few who took this statement at its

face value and believed that the old man had been

in the service of the Emperor. Instead it talked

darkly of piracy in the China Seas, which had been

the source of the fortune, which had built the mansion

in New York and later had erected at enormous

expense what was at that time a veritable palace in

the wilderness.

Sandford, as befitted the manager of such a commercial

enterprise as the Emporium, had a sane and

unimaginative sense of humour.

"Appears to me, Herron," he said to the assessor,

who was painting the picture in lively colours , " apLegends

pears to me like we see so blamed little money down

in this country we can't believe any one as has any

come by it honest ."

"Well, I reckon, Sandford ," said the squeaky

gentleman, turning on him with animation , "if you

was a millionaire in New York City you wouldn't

spend your money building a big house down here

and living in it , unless New York was too hot for

you. Why, when he come down, " he went on, turning

to Basil , the chief auditor, " he brought all his

building material down in a schooner from Charleston,

they say, and more'n a dozen men to build it.

They was six months or more at it, and finishing

it inside fit to kill . Then there comes another

schooner filled with carpets, Brussels and velvet ,

and gilt mirrors and carved French furniture , a

piano and wines. I've heard tell he brought a hundred

cases of champagne. They do say that for a

year there was high jinks over in that there

house. "

"That was when his first wife was alive , wasn't

it ?" asked some one. "The one he says was a lady.

He says this one he has now is a ' cracker,' " the

speaker went on in explanation to Basil, "and she

certainly is . He must have got her right out of the

backwoods."

Tomocala

The listener's imagination caught at the figure

of the first wife "who was a lady " and who had only

a year or two of this strange, luxurious existence

in the wilderness . When everything was completed,

the beautiful furniture set in place , and the

champagne put to cool in a great vault built of

coquina or shell- stone, parties of people from farther

north used to come down and spend gay weeks in the

new house. Then the blaze from its windows used to

shine across the lagoon at night , and occasional curious

townsfolk, floating near in rowboats, heard music

and laughter, and saw dancing within the lighted

rooms or strolling down the garden path toward the

river, women in gowns of silks and laces and men in

the smart finery of the day. It was a fantastic unreal

episode in the history of Tomocala , as indeed it must

have been to the fashionable, gaiety-loving people

themselves of those pleasant ante-bellum days , this

transplantation of the world into the wilderness .

What sort had the woman been for whose sake

Harriman had brought about this ? What had the

man carrying away the refuse of Tomocala to a

dilapidated house to do with this earlier gallant

figure ? What was the meaning of this abandonment

of the world ? Vaguely Basil grasped at

some resemblance to his own flight from London.

Legends 99

Vaguely he felt that he , and he alone of all those

present, might understand the man. A half- formed

impulse of friendliness seemed to stir within him.

And an eagerness , that was perhaps not all curiosity,

came over him to know Jim Harriman and to learn

his history.

"But he doesn't live like that now," he put in .

"He lives worse than a nigger now, he lives like

some brute," came the answer. "And as for his

wife and them two gals of his , I reckon by this time

they've clean forgot they was ever born white

folks."

"But why did he change so ?" pursued the enquirer.

"Did he lose his money ?"

After all , he reflected , this might be the simple,

dull explanation. When one became penniless one

blew out the candle, dismissed the band , and sped the

guests upon their way. The world turned the tables

on one, before one had any chance to abandon it .

"No one here knows whether he lost it," answered

Sandford. "He may be as rich as he was in the

beginning. You wouldn't think so , though," he

added scornfully, "to judge by what trading he

does here."

"Guess he don't spend much on soap , " hazarded

one of the Tomocalans, testifying to his own love of

276651

100 Tomocala

cleanliness by spitting toward a receptacle on the

opposite side of the floor with considerable accuracy

for so long a range.

"About a dollar a year."

"I bet he's got money all right, " came from Mr.

Herron. "He's always got money to buy anything

he wants and to pay his taxes, but he don't raise

nothing and he don't sell nothing."

"They say he's always been queer since the first

wife died ," said a bystander. "Just adores her

memory. Some folks say he's got her backbone

inside that there pagoda . Seems a queer kind of remembrance

, don't it ?"

"Some folks says, so old man Storer tells, that

she never did die, at least not here, but he had to

pretend she did, so as to get this second woman.

She got sick of this, and when one of them fine

parties was finished she skipped with a handsomer

man." Mr. Herron winked suggestively . “And

left him with them two gals as babies ."

"I seen her grave once, ” said a young man who

hadn't spoken before.

"When was you to Harriman's ? I didn't know

he allowed young chaps like you nosin' around them

gals of his."

"I reckon he didn't know I was there. Anyhow,

Legends

ΙΟΙ

I seen her grave under a China tree with a little

fence around it."

"Well, you can't tell anyhow ," said Sandford , as

if he were summing up the arguments , "not when

folks is queer like Harriman . Maybe she died , and

maybe she skipped . I should think this present

woman of his would want to do one or the other."

Past history was closed, and Tomocala now

passed to the surer ground of the present. Though

indeed since Harriman generally warned off trespassers

with a gun in hand and allowed Mrs. Harriman

to come to Tomocala only twice year on a

shopping tour, as to even immediate details there

was some controversy . But the main facts of a

strange and repellent family life stood out. After

the first wife died , or went away,-the one "who

was a lady ,"-Harriman had gone into the backwoods

, some said within a month and brought back

her successor, already somewhat worn, faded , and

yellowed by the sun. This woman brought up the

two daughters-at least it was supposed generally

that the two girls were the first wife's. They never

even came to town , but passing by on the river people

saw them sometimes, splitting wood, or carrying

up the filthy buckets from their father's boat to the

fierce brown hogs that occupied the door-yard . It

102 Tomocala

was the impression in Tomocala that Harriman did

no work at home, but rested like some savage potentate

among his slaves . The girls had never been

to school , it was said he refused to allow them to

learn either to read or write.

"He brings ' em up jest like animals, " said the

young man who had seen the grave under the china

tree, rather fiercely. "I think the town should have

the law on him. "

"If it can be done, my son ," said a new voice,

mellow, with a touch of brogue in it , " I'll join you . "

Basil turned. By the glass case in which the Emporium

displayed its tobacco stood a little man with

a round face, which, in spite of repeated baking

through the Florida summers, had kept something

of the freshness that the sea mists of his Irish boyhood

had given it . He was in clerical costume ,

somewhat shabby, but still recognisable, with the

odd addition of a very battered yachtsman's cap

with a visor. In his hand he carried a rod and on

the floor by his side he had flung a string of fish.

"Good luck, Father Sullivan ?" said some one , going

over to examine the catch .

"Faith , better luck than Thursday generally gives

me, though I am late home. But there will be no

excuse for any one of my few people not keeping toLegends

103

morrow. Here , Hernandez," he said , detaching a

fish and throwing it over to a dark- faced man—a

Minorcan, Basil learned afterwards- "give this to

the wife. 'Tis virtue made easy. And you , Dick,"

he went on, turning to the young man who had

caused the priest's first interruption of the conversation,

"I'm glad to hear you talk the way you were.

And if you, or Mr. Baxter of your church, can find

any legal way to take those two poor girls away

from that father of theirs and teach them something

of the ways of God and man, I'm with you through

thick and thin."

"They certainly ought to be took away," said the

young man called Dick, almost sullenly, flushing

under his sunburnt skin .

"Be they good-looking gals , Dick ?" asked Mr.

Herron with a wink, but got no reply.

"Why don't you talk to Harriman yourself, Father

?" asked Sandford .

"Have I not ?" was the little man's brisk reply.

""Tis not only a fisher of fish I want to be. When

I first came here some one told me his first wife had

been a Catholic. So I went there once, and I

landed, in spite of the lack of welcome, and I gave

him the whole of my mind, in spite of the devil himself,

which I believe the man to be."

104

Tomocala

"And then ?" some one said as he paused.

"And then I came away, that was all . Oh, but

the foul oaths he used and the ignorant heart he

showed ! He swore he'd shoot me down if he ever

found that I'd tried to talk religion to his girls.'

Father Sullivan looked around upon the company

and after a moment went on-"But sometimes I go

fishin ' at night, and in the darkness of the river I

might easily meet any boats that were driftin ' about

with any lost souls aboard . I met you once or

twice, Dick."

"Oh, hell !" said Dick, flushing again . " I was

fetching some firewood from down the river. "

"I remember you said so ," assented the priest.

He took his tobacco and his string of fish , and with

a nod to the company went out . There was a general

movement to go. Mr. Herron found himself

by Basil outside the store.

"You get that there tract of yours surveyed , " he

counselled again, "and you'll find that Jim Harriman's

house is on your land . I told him so the last

time he came to pay his taxes."

"And what did he say ?" asked Basil.

"He said I could be damned and he'd wait till the

owner called on him ."

"Well, I feel inclined to go to call to- morrow. "

Legends 105

"I wish you could run him out of the town."

"Oh, I don't know, " ventured the other with a

laugh . "I think I'd like to have him stay just because

he is so queer."

"Well, he certainly is queer," assented Herron ,

and then he added , as if in vague warning , "if you

don't get your belly full of his queerness pretty

soon ."

But Basil was not to be warned . His dreams

that night were of the vagaries of the household on

the peninsula . Thus, when you fly from life , she

meets you as you turn some strange and distant

corner, and you catch up eagerly and begin to follow

the threads she offers .

CHAPTER III

The House of the pagoda

THE next morning the young man who was called

Dick agreed to take the stranger in a catboat

across to the peninsula to view his lands . He also

arranged to sell Basil a second boat of his , now

hauled out for repairs in the little shipyard beyond

the Tomocala House . The shipyard was Dick's,

and there was work in it to do , but the proprietor

made no objection to leaving it, though , as Basil was

to come to realise later, he was , for Tomocala, a

model of industry and was alleged to work "as

though he was drove every minute. " Standards of

industry vary, however, and perhaps even in the

North few could have resisted the invitation of the

Gypsy's flapping sail and of the little bright blue

waves of the Carnaveral , dancing in the sunlight

at the bidding of an east wind which blew gaily

as if refreshed by the night, during which it had

sunk to rest.

"I could land you to Harriman's too , " said Dick,

106

The House of the Pagoda 107

hesitating a little, "if you still reckon you'll make

that call on Jim. "

"Right you are," assented Basil cheerfully.

Dick paused , he was hauling on a sheet ,—and

for a moment sullen anger flared up in his eyes.

"He treats them girls like hell , " he said , and then

relapsing into silence , resumed his work with the sail .

His companion said nothing, but smiled a little

to himself. He could guess at something beyond

humanitarianism in Dick's protest and he felt himself

seared and old, gently contemplative of the folly

of youth, able , if he would, to warn this Floridian

young man of all the suffering that lay in store for

him in love. But even such reflections were morbid

and forbidden, he told himself. He found it easy

to put them by, as the sail filled and the boat swung

off across the water. This was men's work they

had in hand, to beat across the river, to explore his

estate and consider what it was worth for orange

planting, finally to visit a grizzled old reprobate

with a shady history. What did it matter that Jim

Harriman had two daughters and that Dick White

was in love with one of them?

The Kingstowne tract lay south of the little curve

in the shore where the Harriman house stood, and

on the last tack, made slowly because they were in

108 Tomocala

was.

The

the lee of the land and had lost part of their wind,

Basil and Dick White could see it plainly .

house still stands at Tomocala , though it is inhabited

by a Northern family, and fresh white paint and repairs

have left little to remind one of what it once

Then its shingled roof and clapboarded sides

had turned the wonderful glistening silvery grey

which comes to any wooden structure which does not

shield itself with paint but abandons itself to long

and friendly intimacy with the salt sea wind. The

house was simple in design , a square structure, at

the front and back of which the roof sloped down to

cover a two -storied veranda , suggestive of the

tropics and the blazing suns of summer. A doorway

in the centre seemed to indicate a broad,

straight hall leading to a similar opening on the

other side , and one could imagine the cooling sweep

of the wind along it.

"Yes, it certainly are cool ," assented Dick to

Basil's suggestion . "The hogs won't stay nowhere

else when the weather heats up, folks say."

"And they let them ?"

"Old Jim lets ' em. But I surmise it ain't ' cause

he thinks so darned much of hogs , but because he

thinks so darned little of humans, especially women.

This here's your land," he went on, changing the

The House of the Pagoda 109

subject abruptly, and waving a hand towards the

green bank covered with tangled vegetation along

which they were passing out of sight of Harriman's

cove.

They could not bring the boat actually to land ,

but they brought it close enough to a tiny sandy

beach to wade ashore. Here there was a little clearing-

some earlier owners had evidently contemplated

building-and though it was overgrown with

small pines as high as a man's head , it was still penetrable.

Behind it they found the vestige of a trail ,

running perhaps fifty yards back into the scrub and

then ending in a discouraged way. Standing there

under the dwarf pines they heard the lonely booming

of the surf, and behind through the green caught a

glimpse of the river's blue. Overhead a small bird

twittered upon a swaying branch and a tiny browngreen

lizard ran away from beneath their feet.

Basil filled his pipe and gave Dick White a cigar.

The sun was warm on his back, and he stood for a

moment in silence, watching the smoke drift lazily

up through the branches of the pines. Here in

America, he thought , with memories of a boy's reading

of Fenimore Cooper, here one might call it

smoking the pipe of peace. Nature seemed to make

him welcome. The woods were friendly and

ΙΙΟ Tomocala

through their fringed branches he saw a smiling

sky. The brown -green lizard emerged from behind

a tree-trunk and contemplated with reassured curiosity

the new master of the domain. Here , thought

Basil, in this warm heart of the sandy peninsula

perhaps was home.

"This'll be the likeliest place for a house," said

Dick, as if in answer to his companion's unspoken

thought, "though I don't know," he went on, "as

I'd settle here. There's a sight o' clearing to be

done, and when you get it done this here land on

the peninsula don't compare with the hammocks on

the mainland . "

"What would hammock land cost ?"

"Oh, about a dollar an acre . "

"And this ? What's my three hundred acres

worth ? ”

Dick considered, his eye lighting with a humourous

twinkle .

"Well," he said at length, "you wouldn't be doing

badly if you give it away, but you might perhaps get

twenty-five cents an acre , with luck."

Basil laughed, thinking of how these unknown

estates had seemed so full of mysterious possibilities

in England . He knelt down, digging his fingers

through the carpet of pine needles into the white sea

The House of the Pagoda

III

sand beneath , and smiled as he let it run through his

fingers.

"It won't ever make me rich," he said , "still I

think I'll build and wait for a rise in prices. Let's

go and see how my neighbours make a living ," and

he sprang up and pushed his way back to the riverside.

Basil was almost unconscious that he was already

setting his feet upon a new, strange path ; already he

was caught again by the varying lure of life . It

was left for Dick White , looking doubtfully at his

passenger as the catboat came up at the little dock

in Harriman's cove, to wonder why Basil was so

eager to see his neighbours.

A lean dog, limping on one hind leg, rushed

across the bare, hot, sandy yard to the dock, barking

an alarm as they approached, but only sniffing uneasily

at Basil when he disembarked and started towards

the house. A few chickens were digging at

a heap of refuse, on the side where two of the famous

brown hogs allowed them space to scratch. A

woman in a dark-blue gown looked furtively out of

the doorway at him and disappeared as quickly and

silently as she had come. Basil went slowly up the

slope of fifty yards or more that led to the house ,

II 2 Tomocala

turning once to see Dick and his catboat start on the

short sail from which they were to return to pick

him up, and feeling, for all its deserted air, that the

grey house watched him sharply from somewhere

behind each window. Near at hand, he could read

upon its face something of its curious story. There

were remains of glass set in old - fashioned designs

on either side of and above the door, out of which

now suddenly ran a tiny brown pig , hurrying as if

unexpectedly driven out by some unseen person

within. In the dormer windows of the roof, too,

there were broken sashes, now free from glass , designed

in the elegant manner which remained in

America from late colonial times . The well- chosen

proportions, the gracefully sloping roof over its

pleasantly southern veranda, these few battered

relics of former elegance gave the house an air of

distinction which could not be found in any new ,

white-painted residence in Tomocala. This at least

had been a gentleman's house . This was what a

gentleman's house could come to be. This held

within it an example-a prophecy perhaps, thought

Basil, with the slightest touch of something almost

like fear, of what a gentleman himself could come to

be. He was nearly at the steps leading up to the

veranda before the old house took any steps in its

The House of the Pagoda 113

defence. Then suddenly in the door stood old Harriman

slouching across its width, his sharp, restless

eyes looking angrily from a tangle of grizzled hair

and beard .

"Get out, will you ?" he called out, and added an

insulting epithet.

"Don't see very well how I can, " replied the

visitor genially. "White won't be back with the boat

for half an hour."

"White !" exclaimed the old man, and he broke

into a laugh. "He's got too much respect for his

hide to land here himself. If I catch him again—

you might as well know yourself ; I don't allow any

young fellows nosing around here. There's one old

woman here's ugly enough to be safe. But the

two girls, do you understand , have business of their

own here, feeding the hogs and making their dear

father comfortable. I'll have no nonsense with

them . If you men in Tomocala need female society

you can be contented with what you get in the

damned settlement itself, and if that ain't enough

you might bring a shipload down from the streets

of New York. There were plenty of them there

in my day."

This singular stream of abuse, coloured with some

filth and blasphemy beyond what it has seemed neces114

Tomocala

sary to record, was nevertheless delivered in a voice

pleasant in tone and modulation ; in the accents , in

short , of a gentleman . The situation kept all of its

strangeness , and the young man who listened to this

tirade felt acutely into how new and curious a world

he had come .

"As a matter of fact, " he said , " I was not planning

to call upon the ladies of your family, but on

you. "

He advanced a step, smiling, and the man in the

door instinctively, so it seemed, stepped aside as if

to make a passageway, then caught himself.

"Who the devil are you ?" he asked .

"My name's Forrester," answered Basil , still

smiling. "Shall I go in ?"

The breeze

A moment Harriman gazed at him.

swept through the hall and from somewhere within

came the tinkle of little bells, rung irregularly as if

by the passing wind . Also there was about the

place the same odd air of some one watching from

behind cover.

"Go in if you want to , " at last the older man said,

and led the way to the right into the big room that

had once been the drawing- room of the first wife ,

who was a lady. Basil looked around slowly, feeling

that he could afford to take the time, and that

The House of the Pagoda 115

the ordinary courtesies of intercourse it might be

wiser to dispense with . The bells still tinkled, and

in the centre of one side of the room the green

jade pagoda, legendary in Tomocala, was the first

thing that caught the eye . It stood some three feet

high upon a carved teakwood base, tapering gracefully

through its seven stories to a pointed gilt roof.

Each of its balconies was guarded by a delicately

designed balustrade above which hung the small

gold bells jingling in the breeze. A shaft of sunlight

from a south window buried itself in the milky

green translucence of the jade and seemed to make

it glow as if with some inner life and fire. On the

edge of the gilt roof sat a small brown warbler,

which whisked itself out of an open window as

they entered . But the domesticated occupants of

the room were less frightened. Two yellow hens

continued to walk with rather aimless curiosity

about the room. And a half-grown brown pig succeeded

at the moment of their entrance in overturning

a pan of potato parings and other less savoury

refuse, which he gobbled up in greater comfort from

the floor. At one side of the fireplace, of white

marble with a graceful female figure in relief carved

on either side, the sort of thing one finds in old New

York houses, stood a tumbled and frowsy bed , made

116 Tomocala

up on a cot , on the other a huge pile of firewood and

kindling. By this latter on the floor lay a coat, two

pairs of trousers , and a greasy black felt hat,

whether discarded or not Basil felt he could not

say. Near by was what seemed the most luxurious

seat, the remnants of a gilt French sofa of the Empire

period . On one arm there was still a patch,

faded and befouled , of pink brocade , but sailcloth

covered the rest of the upholstery, and three of the

four legs had been replaced by pieces of rough pine

scantling nailed on against the elegantly finished

gilt framework . There was another gilt chair in

the room , with the seat completely gone , and two

deal chairs of the cheapest kitchen kind. On one

of the last Harriman seated himself and commenced

filling a pipe. Basil took out his handkerchief and

flicked off what dirt was detached and removable

from one end of the gold sofa .

"Filthy hole you keep it , " he remarked , wondering

whether this might not be the tone to suit his

eccentric host.

"Dirt's healthy," was the answer, and Basil

thought the old man looked at him with awakening

curiosity, as if his were not the usual manner of

visitors. "There's no reason , " he went on, "why

we should be cleaner than the animals ."

The House of the Pagoda 117

"There's no reason , I suppose , " retorted Basil

in the politest tones, "why we should be dirtierthough

that's none of my business , after all ," he

added .

"What the devil is your business ?" came angrily

from Harriman.

"I own the Kingstowne tract over here, and I'm

thinking of settling on it. "

This brought the old man promptly to his feet ,

swearing. He told his guest to leave the house at

once, and then forgetting this invitation stood over

him covering him with abuse and giving him defiance.

The vehemence of his attack on Herron as

a liar, a meddler, and a being generally doomed to

perdition was sufficient to convince Basil that a surveyor

would probably prove him to be the owner of

the land on which this strange, wrecked , proud

house stood.

but soon, perhaps that his anger might have fuller

scope , seemed willing to assume , if only for the sake

of more violent argument.

This Harriman started by denying ,

"Suppose the land is yours by some confounded

mistake of a surveyor twenty years back . Do you

think I'll get out of my house ?" he asked , striding

up and down the room before Basil . "Try to eject

me. Try it !" he screamed , stopping to shake a fist

118

Tomocala

in his visitor's face . "I'll shoot down the first man

who tries . Perhaps you think not, just fresh from

your blasted civilisation in England. Let me tell

you, young fellow, that this is a slightly different

country. I'll eat you and throw your bones into

the palmetto scrub behind the house whenever I

choose, and the law be damned."

His voice grew coarser as he railed , and his rage

seemed to pull up his drooping shoulders and make

him a younger, more picturesque figure of bravado .

As he paused for breath, Basil heard again the tinkle

of the pagoda bells, and saw the sunlight bury itself

in milky green jade. The furious old man glaring

at him through his tangled hair and beard seemed

now at last to fit into the vague tales told in Sandford's

of a tempestuous youth in the East and gains

ill-gotten in the China seas , tales which last night,

though they had fired the imagination , had not convinced

the reason . For Basil Forrester in that moment

the world that he had known, the real world,

seemed suddenly to recede another step from him,

to retreat as he gazed back on it in memory into a

region of trailing mists, seemed to take on itself a

strange, shimmering look of unreality. He who

had so wanted to forget seemed to have wandered

already farther than he had dreamed. It was one

The House of the Pagoda 119

thing to have found the remote loneliness of the

pine lands, the warm, friendly hollows in the white

sands of the peninsula- his hermitage in the greenwood

; it was another to have come into this country

of romance where somehow there was a new sun and

moon and a strange light over everything. He

seemed to feel some magic in the land, to recognise

already that along the long reaches of its deserted

rivers he had come into the comradeship of passions

that like his own had blazed high and could

even now puff up hotly from their smouldering

embers. Meanwhile, as he meditated, old Harriman

poured forth blasphemies till they seemed to

buzz in a cloud about his head like bees in a swarm.

For the fifteenth time he consigned his visitor's soul

to hell and invited him to attempt eviction .

Basil looked up lazily and smiled , a smile with

the least touch of insolence in it.

"I don't know why you take it for granted that I

want the land, even if it is mine ," he said, "so

where's the use of swearing at me ? They tell me,'

he went on, as Harriman stared at him , " that it's

worth at most five -and-twenty cents the acre, which

is comparatively unimportant , I should say. "

"I won't pay you a penny," said the old man

threateningly.

I 20 Tomocala

"Don't !" answered Basil. "You're quite welcome

to the land as far as I'm concerned. "

There was a pause before the old man

spoke.

"You will disappoint Herron considerably."

This was said with the suggestion of a smile .

"I don't know that I mind that. If I'm to live

over here I would rather be friendly with my neighbours

than with the mainland people."

"I don't want any friendliness, " began Harriman

gruffly, "but," and he hesitated, " you're acting

like a gentleman. Have a drink. I haven't taken

a drink with a gentleman for above ten years. Hi ,

Marion," he called out in a louder voice, seating

himself meanwhile and spitting with genial copiousness

on the floor.

A door behind Basil opened and he turned . But

the observer that he meant to be became at once the

observed as well. The girl who stood there in a

faded and torn blue calico looked him over with a

frank insolence in her gaze only equalled by the

boldness with which she seemed to invite him in

return to look upon her beauty. She was actually

in slatternly rags, but they draped swelling and

graceful lines , and on her head, held proudly, her

dark-brown hair was sleekly and carefully piled,

The House of the Pagoda 121

with irreproachable neatness . She was like a

Neapolitan woman in the slums , her pride seeming

to be only in the dressing of her head.

"Are you Marion ?" cried out old Harriman in a

harsh voice. "I called for Marion."

She

He reached down to the floor over the arm of his

chair and seized a boot that lay near. This he flung

petulantly across the room at his daughter.

moved a little aside to avoid it , and as she did so the

colour deepened in her cheeks and the light in her

dark eyes grew angrier . She turned slowly to

her father, and spoke, with the lazy drawling accent

of the backwoods native, into which she put a note

of insolence.

"How come I won't do as well as Marion ?"

"Speak English , will you ?" snapped the old man .

"It's bad enough to have the old woman talking

'cracker' around here."

"Very well," she answered , with a totally different

intonation . "I'll send Marion . "

With her hand upon the door she turned again.

Her glance swept past her father with scorn and

fixed itself on Basil. She smiled slowly and deliberately,

with lazy provocation in her eyes beneath

their half-closed lids . Then she was gone, and the

visitor involuntarily drew a long breath as at the

122 Tomocala

passing of a vision . For weeks he had lived without

even the thought of woman . Though he had

no longer any outer signs of the storm through

which he had passed, within he still felt himself a

fugitive hurrying to the safety of the wilderness ,

seeking a refuge which should at least be the poor

Paradise that Eden was before Eve came. Now in

the greenwood the Devil had set this ragged temptress

, this slatternly dryad of the pines and palmettoes

. Basil brushed a hand across his eyes as if

to shut out the very memory of her.

"That's one of ' em," snarled Harriman. "Constance

by name . Lord God, who can teach women

their place ?"

Basil blurted out an answer from the fulness of

his freshly awakened memories.

"Mustn't we learn ours first ?"

The old man turned on him .

"Women were made to serve our pleasure when

we're young , our comfort when we're old, and they

need a good lash over their backs . The man who

loves them and who tries to make them happy is a

fool , and will be sold out for his pains . There's one ,

thank God, " he went on , pointing to the farther

door, "there's one that's kept where she belongs ;

ain't that so, Marion ?"

The House of the Pagoda 123

"Yes, father," came in response in a soft, frightened

voice, much gentler in quality than had been

Constance's even when she was "speaking English"

instead of "cracker." Basil turned to see what this

second wood nymph might be like.

This time no bold eyes met his, no wild , compelling

beauty from which there would be refuge

only in flight. This was a shy, furtive creature ,

looking at him in unresponsive wonder, eager to slip

back to some hiding- place under a tangle of brown

branches and green leaves . A mere slip of a girl

she was , a slender, swaying figure just to be guessed

at beneath the clumsy blue gown she , like the other,

wore. Her cheeks , which he guessed to be usually

pale, now flushed a faint pink ; her head drooped in

embarrassment , and her hands were clasped together,

half in fright. Beauty there was in the oval of the

face, in the light blue of the eyes , and in the pale gold

of the hair which waved timidly back from the low

forehead and fell in a heavy shining plait behind ,

but it was beauty so shy, so gentle , so elusive that

Basil, as he looked upon it , felt calmed and reassured.

Pity he gave her there at once , and liking,

poor victim that she seemed of the fantastic

whims of this mad old man . But no panic fear

seized on him, no impulse of flight, nothing of the

124

Tomocala

half-hatred, half- fascination which her sister's

rankly growing beauty had made him feel .

She found a cracked tumbler and a white stoneware

teacup with the handle gone, and brought out

from under a heap of odds and ends which almost

completely filled the space beneath the bed, a bottle

of what proved to be port.

"I had some decent wines once," murmured old

Harriman (and this indeed was mellow with age ) ,

"but corn whiskey's good enough for me now. And

you're the first man I've seen in years that wine

wouldn't be wasted on."

"Your health , sir, " said Basil, raising the cracked

tumbler. "Long life and happiness. "

"Happiness !" growled the old man, and with a

quick, impatient movement he tossed the teacup with

the handle gone into the fireplace , where it clattered

against the bricks, but did not break. Marion, with

eyes still frightened, rescued it from the ashes

and began polishing it on the skirt of her

gown.

"That's what I've got here , " continued her father.

"Enough grub, enough sleep, and women to wait

on me. There's your boat , Mr. Forrester," rising

and looking at Dick's approaching sail through the

front window.

The House of the Pagoda 125

Basil felt that he was dismissed .

"I'm starting to build soon down on that clearing,"

he said.

"I'll stop and see you some day," said the old

man-then suddenly : "Shall you be keeping

pigs ?"

"I scarcely know," this with a laugh.

"Because if you don't I could stop and fetch your

swill away for mine ."

"Certainly, certainly," assented Basil, and on this

he went.

Marion said no good -bye , nor did Constance appear

again. But he encountered by the front door

a small woman with a bent figure and a pinched,

yellow face with high cheek-bones, who murmured

a good-morning and seemed to examine him with

eyes which seemed in a strange way at once appealing

and distrustful . What did she think of life and

happiness ? wondered Basil . What did she ask of

existence for these girls, strange, lovely flowers of

a new kind sprung from barren Floridian soil ? Did

her eyes beg him to help, or only to leave her alone

bending under the yoke she had worn so long ?

Even the bright sunlight and fresh breeze before

which the catboat skimmed back towards Tomocala

could not wholly drive these strange vapours from

126 Tomocala

his mind, could not quite waken him from what

seemed a dream into which he had irrevocably

fallen, in which he himself was now to live, in which

he seemed bound by some fatality to the grey house

of the Harrimans.

CHAPTER IV

Spring Again

SPRING came, then summer. Basil superintended

the building of a little house, and the cutting of a

trail that should lead backwards from it across the

peninsula to the sea. In his little clearing a kitchen

garden began to flourish. He planted orange trees,

and learned something of the mysteries of " budding"

and "grafting." He and a boy named Jim

did all the work. Gradually his days filled with

little occupations and duties. He rarely went to

Tomocala . Yet the months dragged on faster than

he could have thought. Outwardly he was busy,

almost content. But within he still felt numbed and

chill. There were nights when again he felt the

bitterness of his memories almost intolerable , and

asked himself despairingly whether an eternity could

ever bring peace, or make reparation . Then kneeling

in his lonely cabin he would pray passionately

to God—perhaps rather to the pale ghost of Kitty—

to show him the great task, the great duty which

could wipe out his sin. Yet in the mornings his

127

128 Tomocala

garden, his orchard, or his boat made some simple,

homely demand, and he did his little duties as

though they were great ones. Winter came again,

and then, for the second time, spring.

It is a common misconception with Northerners

that the South is a land of perpetual summer. The

belief is fostered in the railway folders advertising

the yellow cars . Tourists come, admire the wellweathered

green of pine and palmetto and the serviceable

dark glossiness of old magnolia leaves , then

when the thickets begin to quicken with life and

the awakening season throws a thin veil of delicately

coloured flowers over the burnt-grass patches of the

flatwoods , turn backward to the chill north country,

there to await the spring . No one, however, can

know the Florida sands nor feel the haunting charm

of their strange loveliness until he has watched the

rout of winter and the triumph of coming summer.

The air softens , even the gales from the north lose

their bluster and their nip of cold. Gradually they

veer to the south, and little by little begins the gentle

pulsing rhythm of the summer winds . By day the

breeze pours over the land from the southeast like

some great mild river, bringing in the smell of salt

and the tonic freshness of mid -ocean until the sun has

set . By night while the whip-poor- wills call from

Spring Again 129

their hiding in the shadowy trees and fireflies begin

to dance among the bushes the west wind springs up

in the darkness and carries back to the sea the

fragrance of pine needles and the burnt smell of long

stretches of the back country that have been baking

in the sun all day.

There come days when the sky becomes suddenly

alive with twittering, whirling birds , as some great

migrating army rests for a little while on its great

journey to the north. They pass on their way and

others come, for the same brief encampment. One

can feel the spring sweep majestically up from the

tropics towards the pole .

The green landscape turns a greener green . The

pine puts out pale tassels , and the cypress covers

each twig and branch with the stiff fringe of its

young needles. Deciduous trees, modest and unnoticed

through the winter by the side of the evergreens

, now break out into their lighter, gayer foliage.

The sea grows lazy and sleeps at times for

days like some placid lake , the smallest curling wave

where it meets the sand taking the place of the

boisterous surf of winter. On days of fresher wind

seaweed and innumerable shells begin to come in

with the tides. Blue and grey crabs spawn in the

shallow pools left where there is any undulation in

130

Tomocala

the tight - packed beach . The very sands themselves

at low tide are alive with tiny clams gaily striped

with greys , greens, pinks, and mauves . Under the

blown and tattered bushes on the crest of the dunes

next the sea the sands grow starry with small , white

flowers . In the sunny shelter where the dunes dip

behind their outermost defences, bay trees drop their

fragrant, glossy leaves and put out new tender foliage.

Here, too , bristling Spanish Bayonets shoot

forth great creamy spikes of velvety blossoms , and

cumbrous spiny cacti which have stood in a dull

lethargy through the winter suddenly grow gorgeous

with large, soft -petalled , yellow flowers , like golden

roses that might bloom in some Northern hedgerow.

The most barren spots , the most awkward plants , are

transformed by the hurrying hands of spring. The

saddest hearts quicken to some poor blossoming.

Basil himself only half realised what changes the

passing year had brought to him . What he felt

most strongly, as he settled in his little house by the

river and grew familiar with each fresh leaf that

was put forth by its surrounding trees, was the fading

of London and his life that was. As it seemed

that the sweet monotony of the present days could

have no end, so at last it came to seem that they

could have known no beginning . Two worlds , he

Spring Again 131

knew, divided from each other by that sharp catastrophe

which was the one great fixed point in his

life . One was a dream world , one was real, but

which was which he could not tell . They grew to

stand unconnected in his mind- unconnected, that

is, except by his great loss , his great guilt, and this

reparation which could never be adequate through

all the years . He forgot all London except that

one pale ghost of Kitty, saw in the future only one

duty, never again to cause a woman pain . And as

the friendly wilderness took him to its heart, and

made a hermitage for his asceticism , the task of selfrestraint

seemed easy. So far Basil understood his

flight and its results.

But there were vague , indefinite workings within

him that he could not have formulated . Love

comes with springtime, but so too do a hundred

other impulses with which humanity, stirring with

the universal sense of growth and mating, grows

kindlier to fellow humanity, longs for friendliness

and comradeship, and feels its heart pulsate with the

joys and sorrows of the whole race.

Basil, growing

closer, somehow, to the green things with which

he lived, could not keep himself from putting forth

tendrils. In the past these had curled themselves

about the varied images of woman, his kindliness

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Tomocala

had spent itself in love. There were nights now

when the moon flooded the world with gold-of old

he would inevitably have sat by beauty's side and

begged her treasures while the west wind murmured

in the pines and the broad river shone in glory.

Now love was dead within him, so he thought .

May one perhaps guess at its metamorphosis ? May

one suspect that its force transmuted was what now

caused the confused and half-understood impulses

of sympathy with the world, a sympathy, be it said,

he had never felt so strongly when he lived closest

to its misery and suffering ?

This must suffice for explanation of why this

young hermit, too desperately heartsick even to

think of women, so he would have told himself, still

this second spring could let his imagination wander

to the old grey house by the waterside, could grow

hot and indignant over the wrongs of three of them,

living beneath its shelter. His very uncertainty

as to facts, the vagueness of what he actually knew

of life under its roof, preserved for him the mystery,

and thus inevitably deepened the fascination of the

problem. It had been a long time since he put foot

into the room where the jade pagoda stood , but he

sat sometimes for hours trying to picture what

might be happening there . Brooding thus was apt

Spring Again 133

to make him restless, and he would often jump into

his boat and sail up and down the Carnaveral watching

the light at Harriman's till it went out. On

nights of moon his lonely sail would be the only

thing moving on the river, but at other times he

was met by another silent craft slipping through the

blackness, and was occasionally hailed by Dick

White. With this young man Basil had formed a

kind of friendship, founded perhaps , for each of

them, on their common wish to talk about the house

on the peninsula . Basil came to know that sometimes

when the nights were darkest Dick dared to

run the Gypsy up to the old man's rickety dock,

and that if her father was safely asleep Constance

Harriman would come out with him for an

hour.

"But I can't understand her," complained Dickit

was a night when Con had disappointed him and

he had come, as he sometimes did, to Basil's house

for a talk. "I don't know what she wants , I reckon

perhaps she don't know herself. She likes me to

love her, and- well-she let me kiss her the other

night . And she kissed me too. It ain't right if

she don't like me. It's too hard, by God it is ! But

when I ask her to come away and get out of it all

and marry me, she just laughs."

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Tomocala

Dick sat a moment plunged in meditative gloom,

then he went on.

"It ain't as if she was happy to home ; she hates

her father."

"And her stepmother ?" put in Basil . "She is

the stepmother, isn't she ?"

"I reckon so . But she's like a mother to ' em, as

good to the gals as she can be But-well, I

guess Con thinks the old woman's poor - spirited . "

"Con's not poor-spirited though, is she ?"

"Not her." Dick was emphatic . "She means to

go away and leave ' em altogether, I guess . But she

said once that when she got away she was a- going

farther than Tomocala. Don't know what she

thinks of. Perhaps St. Augustine. I told her once

I could easy settle there. But she only laughed

again."

Perhaps it was only as far as sleepy, Spanish St.

Augustine that her fancy wandered , thought Basil ;

but he doubted. Somehow, he could imagine, those

bold eyes of hers had caught sight of the world beyond

the river and across the sea, and seen there

lovers who offered her a life more splendid than

Tomocala and Dick White could ever dream of.

The once he had seen her, holding her proud , sleek

head so high and gazing at him so unabashedly, had

Spring Again 135

made him feel her an untamed spirit , needing and

asking no sympathy. As he had then put her out of

his mind as a creature too violently beautiful for

him to see, so now, in the reassurance of Dick

White's knowledge, with something of a feeling of

glad relief, he set her outside the circle of those who

seemed by their helplessness to demand a share in

this new kindliness of his.

But if he thought less of Constance and her

flaunting loveliness , he brooded more over the old

woman with the dumb, questioning look in her

eyes, and over Marion , with that helpless and wistful

grace and shyness, and the drooping head with

its heavy crown of pale-gold hair. These two came

to be in a sense companions of his loneliness, of the

long, meditative hours which he had never known

till now. But for a time after his first visit to Harriman's

he saw no more of the three women of the

family, than a glimpse of them caught as his boat

sailed by.

The old man , on the contrary, he saw, for Harriman

paid him occasional visits . These must have

been prompted by some desire for companionship,

for the scant refuse of Basil's modest kitchen could

scarcely have been worth the carrying away. Basil

himself felt no growth of friendliness. Indeed it

136 Tomocala

seemed to him that he and Harriman had fled to the

wilderness for reasons so diametrically opposed as

almost to breed dislike. He had come as some

wounded thing might plunge into the thickets , bewildered

and suffering because he had done so much

hurt to women . Harriman had retreated to a lair

where he might growl at the world and might take

revenge upon three captives for the hurt he fancied

women had done to him. Basil did not believe in

the grave under the China tree. He thought that

the old man's pride had dug it , and that though undoubtedly

he had buried there much that was

precious in his life , he had sunk it to hide the disgraceful

memory of that first wife who was a lady

and who must have run away with her lover, perhaps

after an evening when the house had been gay

with music and dancing, and idle , pleasure-loving

guests from the North had in those remote days

made carnival by the lonely river. The very dissimilarity

of their attitudes , however, made Harriman

for the younger man a figure that fascinated

though it no longer claimed sympathy.

"I think," Basil was saying one morning as the

house neared completion , "that, after all , I must try

to find a servant . I'm so confoundedly ignorant of

every household duty."

Spring Again 137

Harriman in his unsavoury rowboat looked upthe

conversation was taking place by Basil's new

dock.

"You can find a wife easier, " he said , "if you'll

hire a rig and drive out some afternoon into the

backwoods ."

Basil stared at him a moment , and then, unwilling

to make a confidant of the old man by giving any

of the various answers that sprang to his lips, said

with a smile :

"No , thanks ; I don't believe that it is the sort of

life I should care to ask any woman to share.”

"Who wants any woman to share his life ?" broke

in Harriman scornfully. "Give one a share in your

life and she'll ruin her share and yours, too , before

she's done . Take a share in hers, that's the way to

do it."

"But is that quite fair ?"

"Hell ! Is life fair ? I don't care ; I want it to be

livable ."

"It doesn't appear to take much to make it livable

for you ," suggested Basil . This elicited only a

grunt in answer, so he went on . "I hope I, too ,

shall be able to content myself with just what is

barely necessary."

"You won't , young man . I don't know why you

138 Tomocala

came out here , but it wasn't to earn your living I

can guess. Perhaps you thought you would run

away from trouble . If you did you'll find you'll

get deeper into it somehow here . If you ain't a

fool you'll go back and get what pleasure you can

out of the world. And when you're forty you can

come back and get your revenge against it by living

on the bare necessities and organising the society

you live in on a new basis . And you can keep

hogs," he added with a somewhat sardonic smile.

"We live like hogs at our place . So there's no

jealousy, and nobody gets any ideas about having

any right to happiness . We know that all we want

is food and a place to wallow in ."

"Is that all your wife and daughters want ?" asked

Basil suddenly, with a challenge in his voice .

Harriman met his look squarely and deliberated a

moment.

"Sure," he answered gravely, but for an instant

there was a mocking flash beneath his shaggy brows.

Then came silence for a moment.

"Have a cigar ?" asked Basil , offering one .

The old man took it in a dirty claw, looked it

over, smelled it, and passed it back .

"No, thank you," he said. "But I can give you

something really fit to smoke," as he hauled out a

Spring Again 139

ragged red leather case from his pocket. "I

have them sent from Havana especially for

me. "

Don't I

Basil took one , looked it over , smelled it .

"Wallowing ?" he enquired at last .

"Yes, my hogs get the best swill going.

row across the river every day to fetch ' em delicacies

? Don't they live high by the sweat of my

brow ? Humph !"

With this grunting explanation he pushed the

boat off and rowed slowly home, leaving Basil to

puzzle over the oddness of the character which was

being revealed in this fragmentary way, and to

brood again over the household in which it ruled .

The old man's occasional visits, highly-coloured

patches in the dreamy, green world , kept his curiosity

alive, and carried on to summer the impulse

of sympathy which he felt first as spring crept over

the land, and there were no other impressions in

Tomocala vivid enough to threaten its supremacy.

Now and then he went to the village, but even its

poor attempts at civilisation , its meagre gossip in

Sandford's store , seemed to haul him with too sharp

a pull from the secluded life he was leading and was

learning to love. It is the first months when one

begins to live alone that cost ; afterwards, for a time

140 Tomocala

at least, the love of solitude becomes a growing passion.

Dick White and Harriman Basil saw on

the peninsula ; Father Sullivan he occasionally

visited in the tiny house at the north end of the village

. The black boy who came to act as cook and

gardener combined was, oddly for that race , a silent

creature himself, though he may have made up for

the quality by the social gaiety of the evenings he

was constantly rowing across to Tomocala for. All

through the long, hot summers when comfort was

only to be secured by indolence in the shade Basil

lived alone . But, though he himself did not realise

it, the second summer he was alone with the thought

of Marion Harriman.

The first time that he talked with her was on

the beach , towards evening. He had come across the

little trail cut from his house to the sea across the

undulations of the dunes, first through the kind of

dwarf pine wood that nestled in the valleys in the

sand on the landward side, just below the low crest

that sheltered it from the full force of the winter's

northeast wind and then across the moor-like green

stretch that led to the thickets of palmetto scrub

which cover the dunes at the beach's edge. To the

north the broad stretch of sands left by the ebb tide

seemed to sink gradually into the tossing whiteSpring

Again 141

crested breakers that marked the inlet ; to the south

the smooth path of tight- packed sands , a hundred

yards across, led the eye in a long curve to a horizon

where land and water melted together in the sunlit

distance . Here Basil had found solitude shared

only by lonely hawks floating above the surf, by

herons fishing in the shallows , or pelicans playing

follow-the-leader in long, curving flights close to

the varying undulations of the waves.

The unbroken

waters stretched before him to the hot coast

of Africa , the desolate beach went north and south

through hundreds of miles before it came upon the

settlements of men. Here especially he was used

to feeling the sense of remoteness from all that life

had meant to him. Here he hugged closest the

thought that he had safely accomplished his flight

into the wilderness . But here, too , that night , as

the sun sank behind the peninsula and as the shallow

pools shone with purplish metallic lights, he saw her

slender figure on the great loneliness of the yellow

sands, and felt a pang almost of welcome as he

moved towards her.

He thought of their meeting afterwards-indeed

he was never to forget it—as if he had been trying

to come close to some woodland creature , too wild to

trust man, yet also too wild to know him as an

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Tomocala

enemy. The soft southeast wind, dying gently as

the sun set, was still strong enough to blow the tattered

blue gown and disturb the tendrils of pale

gold that fringed her brow. Her eyes grew wide

in wonder or in fear, and she held in both hands the

battered and rusty pail which she had been filling

with parti-coloured coquina clams from the heaps

that the tide had left upon the sands. She stood

before Basil like the image of youth itself ; not the

flaunting, triumphant youth that Constance was ,

but that wistful, wondering thing, gazing at the

uncertain future, whose very loveliness brings unreasoning

tears to the eyes, and to the heart undefined

apprehension and hope mingled . For an instant

he feared she was going to retreat from him,

through the trail which, as his did , connected the

Harriman house with the sea. But she stood her

ground, and though her figure, he imagined, grew a

little tense and nervous, a flickering smile answered

his as he came across the sands .

"You remember me , don't you ? I came to

your house one day more than a year ago, " he

said.

"Yes," she answered , and then, seeming to gain

courage "pa's like that, " she added , "but he

treated you better than he does most people . We

Spring Again 143

wondered, that is ma and Con and I, if you'd

know . "

"Oh, that's all right, " laughed Basil . "We're

good friends now ."

"Are you ? Pa hasn't got any friends.

us has any friends .

None of

Ma used to, when she was a

girl in the back settlements .

you see. "

But she wasn't a lady,

She spoke slowly, each word coming out as if the

search for it , though in a very limited vocabulary ,

had been almost painful. But the effect was startling

in its unconscious frankness . Would the wild

deer or the birds , wondered Basil, use so little

concealment could they but speak ? He had meant

to question the girl , to "draw her out, " but somehow

before the serene simplicity of these few first sentences

he drew back, abashed .

He dropped to his knees and scooped up a handful

of the striped clams .

"Mayn't I help ?"

"There's enough for supper. We make broth of

them ."

"Is it good ?"

"No," she answered with a smile that was calm .

and mild . "But pa likes it ."

There was no note of irritation , of complaint in

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Tomocala

her voice, which in spite of the languid, soft drawl

which betrayed the "cracker" stepmother, had

nevertheless an odd suggestion of breeding.

stared at the pale-blue eyes as if to drag some secret

from them. Was there no revolt in the girl , no

sense of the injustice of her life ? Was it conceivable

that when one grew up in ignorance of all

the world calls desirable one could realise no deprivation

? He had smouldered with dull anger for

her sake through long, lonely weeks .

no answering gleam in those wide eyes ?

been looking up at the girl from the sands .

rose , and asked of her almost harshly:

"Are you happy ?"

Was there

Basil had

Now he

"Happy ?" she repeated, and for a moment it

seemed as if a veil were swept across the blue pools

he was gazing at so eagerly. Her voice sank lower.

"That's what ma wants us to be. That's what Dick

White says Con will be if she'll go away with him.

I don't know as I know what it is. I reckon I'm

happy. Are you ?"

"No," he answered, his voice roughened with the

sudden fierce sweep of memory upon his emotions.

She looked at him enquiringly , and then with a kind

of helpless movement of her hands, " I'm sorry.

People like to be happy ; isn't that it ? Perhaps I'm

Spring Again 145

not. But I'm happy in the woods and here on the

beach . "

"Don't you ever want to get away from it ?"

"I don't know, " she answered, her face troubled

as if with an effort to think clearly. "Perhaps Con

is going some day, but that's a secret ; you mustn't

tell . If I did too , it would leave ma alone. No , I

reckon I don't want to go."

She paused, and then with the smile that was so

unconscious of itself, she said :

"But I'd like sometimes to talk to some one."

"You'll talk to me sometimes," came eagerly from

the man. "You'll be coming to the beach and I

often come here to watch the sea. I'll look out for

you . "

"No, no," she said nervously, taking the clam

bucket up, and glancing as if in sudden fright towards

the trail's end , " pa won't like it . He doesn't

want us to talk to any one."

"I know , I know," protested Basil, " but you must

let me be your friend. "

"No, I can't. Dick White wants to be Con's

friend, and make her go away. It would leave ma

alone, and I don't know what pa'd do . He'd kill us

both . "

"But I won't be like Dick White . I won't want

146

Tomocala

you to go away. I only thought we could talk, and

that perhaps we might both be happier. "

The uncertain look swept across her face again.

"Perhaps. Yes, I'll come sometimes," she said, and

she turned towards the trail . " It's right, isn't it ,

that we should both be happier ?"

"I think we may as well face the fact ," he wrote

towards the end of a long letter to his mother that

night, "that I shall never come back . I believed

this in the beginning , but I have waited to make sure .

This doesn't mean that I shall never see you again,

dear ; somehow we'll manage that, you and I. But

it means that there are no reasons, there never were,

why I should come back to England . I have no

duties there, and little chance , if one is to judge by

the past, of leading a life that I should not be

ashamed of. Once the break was made I came into

something so new that I seemed to get free of the

past and start fresh . Here I can be happy, in a

calm and a harmless way. The responsibilities ,

such as they are, I can shoulder here. And here

moments have come to me, of late, when I believed

that sometime , somehow I should be happier than I

am now, should perhaps have brought some happiness,

instead of sorrow, into the world . Oh, I don't

Spring Again 147

forget, mother, you know that ! I can't forget ! But

perhaps it would be right that I should be a little

happier. Even Kitty would have wished it , though

it is only lately that I have dared let myself think of

that."

CHAPTER V

The Secret Rose

SUMMER, in its blaze of heat , slipped away, and

often, as the sun sank behind Tomocala, turning

its scattered white houses on the waterfront rosy in

the fading light , through two green trails carpeted

with fragrant pine needles , a man and a girl went

to the sea and met on the broad stretches of its yellow

sands . It was a strange relationship , but in the

dream -like world in which Basil seemed to himself

to live it was natural enough. London, and Basil

himself in the London days, would have permitted

themselves a smile at the thought of such philanthropy.

Now, though he could not have told to

what future he planned to lead the girl , he felt it an

obvious duty to hold out a hand in help . At first

all there was to do was to learn the habits of the

wild-grown thing, to understand the mind of a little

child. He never thought that perhaps he might

make the plant in the hot sands break into blossoming

, this girl open and flower . into womanhood.

Once he might have seen such possibilities as these,

148

The Secret Rose 149

and laughed , or been afraid . Now he was unconscious

of them, unconscious as well of anything happening

to himself. Yet vaguely he felt that he was

growing happier. More than ever he lost the sense

of time ; it seemed to him that he had always lived

by this Floridian river. London was as far away

as the moon ; Kitty had been gone-always .

could not, he did not forget. But need we smile at

him because time and the incessant ministrations of

the wilderness had made his wound throb with a

less angry pain ?

It would be impossible to give the full record of

those meetings by the sea , the long talks in which

Basil, wooing the girl from the shy reticence into

which she had relapsed after the candour of that

first encounter, gradually learned the story of that

stunted childhood , and strange, barren , monotonous

girlhood . In the beginning she could talk easily

only of the things about which her knowledge was

full , of the life of the sands and the dunes of the

peninsula, of matters in short in which she was the

master and he the pupil . Together they watched

hawks dive and patient herons fish the shallows, saw

shoals of porpoises rolling in clumsy happiness in

the surf, and detected by his sharp fin an occasional

shark spreading terror along the shore. She taught

150

Tomocala

him to recognise the darkening of the water where

solid banks of mullet were migrating northwards ,

and to know when the sea-crabs would come tumbling

in with the tide to lay their eggs. On the

smooth expanse of sands she showed him the lacelike

tracery that the pale land-crabs in their wanderings

left and in a little hollow in the seaward crest of

the dunes the heaps of their shells and scattered

claws which marked where a coon had come to the

shore for a prodigal feast. Down from the scrub

to the sea she tracked for him once the almost imperceptible

path of a rattlesnake which had gone

down to swim in the salt water. Venturing a little

way towards home with him along the trail , she

pointed out the traces of deer and bear, and the little

paths on which rabbits and the other smaller inhabitants

of the woods wound their way through the

underbrush, beating their roadways hard with their

small, furry feet. Sometimes they would catch a landtortoise

or "gopher" sunning its bossy back in some

bare spot among the palmettoes . She told him how

when June came again he was to wait for the

gopher's cousin , the great loggerhead turtle of the

deep sea, which on moonlight nights crawls painfully

up the Florida beaches to deposit its eggs.

This was the world she knew, and into it she made

The Secret Rose

151

him welcome, like some woodland divinity granting

to a mortal the privilege of her domain . She did it

with laughter and childish delight, with gaiety such

as only the morning of the world could have known ,

he thought.

Of anything beyond the boundaries within which

she had lived she was almost completely ignorant,

and—what was more astonishing-she was not even

curious. Basil could see how the faded , beaten

little mother clung desperately to poor fragments of

knowledge saved from her ignorant, unlettered girlhood

in the backwoods, and how Constance , snatching

eagerly at these, and later risking her father's

anger to learn from Dick White, or from any one

she could seize upon, built up in fancy some image of

the world outside, and began to feel an imperious

necessity to venture into it , an inner clamouring for

its happiness and its suffering. Marion , on the

other hand, lived as if the old grey house and the

peninsula were a kind of island of reality in a dream

world. Even Tomocala, where she went twice a

year "shopping" with her mother and Constance ,

might all other days have been a kind of mirage

floating upon the Carnaveral. If there was a world

outside, was it not inevitably, perhaps , a world

where a grizzled father bullied and beat his woman152

Tomocala

kind, where red hogs disputed with you the comforts

you had, where there were escape and affection

only in the green heart of the woods ? The facts of

life were to the girl a kind of phantasmagoria,

which she could not understand, but accepted with a

helpless contentment which was not happiness . Her

curiosity, her dumb demands were concerned with

the spirit and the emotions, not with material things.

The one thing that had been vivid in her life , so it

seemed to Basil , was her stepmother's affection .

"Ma likes Con and me," she had once said wonderingly,

her eyes shining softly as she spoke . “ Is

it that way everywhere ?"

"Yes ," he had answered softly , his thoughts flying

back to England.

"I talked with a priest once," she went on. "He

told me about God. God likes Con and me and

everybody, and He wants me to like Him, so Father

Sullivan said. Ma had heard of God, too . When

she was a girl she got religion , back in the woods,

and when we were little she tried to tell us . But

pa caught her at it and beat her. So she stopped.

But after I'd met Father Sullivan I asked her. And

she hadn't forgotten . "

"You've never been to church ?"

"Ma went when she was a girl . Pa don't let us.

The Secret Rose

153

But Con says she's going some time ; she says everybody

goes, and she wants to see them. I went by

Father Sullivan's church last year and the door was

open. I could see something bright, and flowers,

and candles burning. I think sometimes that God

would like our pagoda , if I could put flowers and

candles around it . But pa wouldn't let me. I

wonder why pa isn't more like God . You're more

like Him than pa, aren't you ?" she went on after a

pause . "You like me and you want me to like you,

don't you ?"

"Yes ," answered Basil softly.

"Oh, I do , I do, " she murmured.

For an instant he looked at her sharply, but he

met the innocent candour of her eyes and turned

away from their perfect unconsciousness , reassured

that it was still a child who spoke.

"There's the blue heron again, " he said , pointing

down the beach.

"Yes," answered Marion , as though she had not

heard . "I think I'm happier now. That's what

ma wants me to be."

Thus far had summer carried these two children .

We who look at them now may perhaps smile almost

in unbelief at their unconsciousness ; at Basil

especially, the thoughtless loiterer who had plucked

154

Tomocala

and thrown away so many flowers in love's garden .

We, however, are not lying on the sand dunes when

the southeast wind pours over the land. We do

not solve the problems of life while the tropic moon

floods the world with gold , and the South with her

eternal magic stirs the senses while she makes the

understanding drowsy. And none is so blind as he

who will not see. No one is so little safe as he

who thinks his heart is dead. Basil , telling himself

that pity sent him so many an afternoon to the

waterside in the hope that Marion would come,

thinking himself an anchorite leaving his hermitage

to instruct some peasant of the country- side , is indeed

a thing to be laughed at , but pitied as well—a

poor, tormented boy imagining that passionate renunciation

of his world that was could in itself buy

safety, could be reparation , that Tomocala by the

Carnaveral was far enough to fly. So while July

and August burned themselves out he came to believe

that he was finding some happiness and a quiet

soul. He and Marion Harriman still saw the sunset

from the lonely beach .

The first of these meetings had been a milestone

in his progress. As September approached there

came another, which even less was he ever to forget.

The day had been unusually close and lowering .

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155

The great trade-wind from the sea had seemed to

hesitate and then fail. In the early afternoon there

was thunder in the west and a furious downpour

with lightning about three. It ceased towards sunset,

the air grew fresher, and patches of blue sky

broke through . As Basil went through the trail

the little pines and the scrub palmettoes that were

scattered here and there over the expanse of brown

needles were dripping still, and as he came up a little

hill and emerged from the dwarf woods upon the

moor-like tract that lay next the sea all the bushes

were glistening in the level rays that the sun suddenly

shot from the west, touching everything with

an almost unreal gold . And arching over the sea

in a prodigious circle from the unknown north to

the unknown south of the green peninsula was a

great shining rainbow. There is almost no one who

can forget the legendary significance of the particoloured

vision ; Basil going towards it felt somehow

that it held a pledge of happiness , that he went

through its tremendous gateway into some promised

land.

By the end of the other trail he found Marion ,

her slender figure poised almost as it were on tiptoe

as she lifted her gold - crowned head towards the

shimmering east. The blue-green palmettoes that

156 Tomocala

crowned the dunes caught the light in the raindrops

still hanging on their sharp - pointed , fan - shaped

leaves. Through the opening of the trail the sunset

light poured in a full flood on the girl , making

the pale hair a kind of misty glory under which her

face , partly in the shadow, seemed, so Basil

imagined, to have taken on a faint , delicate look of

ecstastic forgetfulness . At first she did not seem to

notice his approach , but at last she turned towards

him with a slow, solemn smile of welcome . Against

the dull, faded blue of her poor blue calico rags he

saw a patch of colour, and as he drew nearer he

found that she held in both hands a green branch on

which nodded three heavy, great yellow rosebuds ,

so tight-packed with petals that they seemed to be

opening in their impatience at their own rich stores .

Basil looked at them in astonishment. In the woodland

kingdom of the sand dunes of which he had

been made a citizen, no such blossoms grew. And

in the barren, ill-kempt surroundings of the grey

house, overrun with pigs and picked bare by

chickens, there was no such thing as a flower garden.

Once he had asked her, he remembered , as she stood

in delight before the yellow splendour of a cactus,

why she had no flowers at home.

"Pa," she had answered. "He won't let us."

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157

And she had seemed troubled and constrained by the

question. Once or twice Basil had broken off a bit

of some flowering shrub in a Tomocala door-yard as

he passed by and brought it to the peninsula to her.

It had hardened his heart against the old man to see

the joy that a fringe of pink along a green branch

could bring to the girl. It had made him angry that

she must leave the flowers by the sea to fade, because

she did not dare to take them home.

Events are only relative in importance-these

rosebuds in the Florida wilderness seemed to him an

inexplicable apparition . Then suddenly he asked

angrily, startling himself, as he did so :

"Who gave you those ?"

Marion laughed like a mischievous child , shaking

her head as she sat down on a crest of white

sand .

"No one. I knew you would be surprised

. "

His suspicion passed , but not his own astonishment

at it . He laughed a little too , and then went

on in a caressing voice, such as one might use to

persuade a child .

"Tell me, Marion , won't you ? That's a dear."

"I'll show you," and she scrambled up . Then at

the beginning of the trail she stopped , and the shy,

wild woodland look that he knew so well came over

158 Tomocala

her. She glanced nervously ahead and then back

at him .

"You'll never tell ?"

"No."

She started over the trail, Basil close behind

her. After a moment she began to talk hurriedly,

the words tumbling one over the other as they did

sometimes when her shyness gave way and she

poured herself out in a flood of startling frankness .

"I couldn't help it. I do what father wants always.

I've done it all my life . I try to understand

why he wants us not to have things . But I

couldn't ever see what hurt a flower would do him,

or us. Ma says when I was a little girl and first

Iwent to Tomocala I cried for the rosebushes.

pa had only let me plant just one I'd have liked it

so."

"Did you ever try ?"

"Yes, ma sneaked in a little bush for me once .

But pa pulled it up and he gave me a real hiding."

"Then you gave it up ?"

She stopped ; the path was rising to the crest of a

tiny hill. Basil caught glimpses of the colour of

the sunset sky. She stood above him and, smiling,

waved mysteriously her green branch with its three

nodding yellow blossoms , sending out waves of their

The Secret Rose

159

heavy perfumes to mingle with the scent of pines

and the sharp smell of moist earth.

"Oh, no," she said triumphantly, "I tried again .”

Then her face hardened for an instant as she went

on :

"He wants to keep flowers away from me, and

God and happiness , I guess . He'd keep you away,

if he knew."

"He shan't do that," broke impulsively from

Basil.

"Never?"

"Never !"

"I'll always be happy then, " she said quite simply.

They went a little farther along the trail till it

dipped to the bottom of one of the little valleys

where under cover from the sea wind the scrub pines

of the peninsula flourished in a sun -warmed shelter.

Here Marion stopped again.

"No one knows, " she said, "not even ma and Con.

It's my secret."

Again she glanced both ways along the trail , then

murmured :

"Come."

By the side of the path, under the shade of the

pines, grew a bank of palmetto scrub. Into this the

girl seemed to plunge, parting the rattling, stiff

160 Tomocala

leaves and forcing a way through . Basil wonderingly

followed her. Ten feet beyond they emerged

into clearer ground , and went along a little animal

track that wound through the pines and underbrush

. Sometimes they passed great patches of

white moss , like drifted ghostly snow. Then the

way led over the crest of one of the undulations of

the sands. Here the pines were scarcer. They

came out under the sky where the evening star hung

like a soft-burning lamp in the pale pink . Across

the moor-like stretches from the sea came the boom

of the surf. A whip -poor-will called from its hidingplace

in some neighbouring tree. Here and there

fireflies sparkled against the green. Even Tomocala

and the two houses on the peninsula grew remote.

As the light faded , the wilderness with a

thousand caressing touches, a thousand soft voices ,

seemed to creep nearer, to enfold them close to its

everlasting heart . Basil's senses stirred at the magic

of its beauty, at the loveliness of the slender woodsprite

who stood before him against the background

of a clump of glossy bay trees, whose eyes shone

tenderly at him as she led him to this mysterious and

enchanted goal within the greenwood. He felt a

thrill as though somewhere here, at the end of this

journey, there was a talisman which could make

The Secret Rose 161

life over. Did he not already feel its spell ? Did

he not experience

more vividly than ever before the

sense of escape into some primæval world of poetry ?

Was there, he wondered, anything in the world except

himself, this girl , and love ? At the moment the

past was dead; more than that , it had never existed.

Thoughts

and emotions, understood

and formulated

passed into feelings felt. Basil, going along this

path, breaking through the thicket of bay trees with

Marion, might have been any boy since the beginning

of time , wondering

at the grasp in which love

caught him.

Marion went silently on. The path dipped to the

hollow of another valley, and ahead through the

trees there seemed to be a greater flashing of light,

as though with the dropping of the wind the fireflies

had drifted down into a great sparkling pool .

The girl paused, and laid a hand upon her companion's

arm , as if to bring him to the journey's

end herself. Nothing was said. They turned a

corner beyond a palmetto bank and came upon the

secret rose.

It stood in a tiny round clearing among the sober

pines, a kind of radiant princess cloistered in some

hidden bower. Sheltered from wind, warmed by

sun, tended, so one may imagine, by all the love of

162 Tomocala

one human heart, it had grown high. It was

starred with heavy blossoms , clad in a yellow fragrant

glory. And its beauty had in addition a

strangeness beyond even the strangeness of its

wild setting. For the lights that had pierced

the leafy screens around came from six candles

which stood upon a rude table before the rosebush

and lit it up, making it shine like the altar to

some strange woodland divinity. Occasional fireflies

wandered out from the shadow of the pines

and danced confusedly near these rival flames , and

a bewildered moth, with dark velvety wings spotted

with pale green, lay fluttering at the candles ' feet ,

burnt already at this new god's shrine. Basil

stopped, speechless , now that he had arrived at this

heart of the world of dreams . Finally he stole a

glance at the girl by his side ; she too had been in

a kind of ecstasy ; it was the spirit , if not the attitude,

of prayer. She turned as if in answer to his

eyes.

"That time I saw into Father Sullivan's church

there were candles. Sometimes , if I've saved up for

a long time and gone to bed in the dark, I get enough

to burn them here. Do you think God likes

it ?"

"Yes," Basil answered softly .

The Secret Rose

163

"Do you like it ?" She paused anxiously for a

reply.

"Yes, I like it too. Did you do it for me ?"

"I've been saving them almost ever since I first

knew you. It takes so long. Pa swears awfully

about the candles I use. He caught me taking the

last one to -day. Look, " she pulled the blue sleeve

of her gown and showed the blue-black marks where

some rough hand had gripped her. "Pa's so

strong."

"Oh !" said Basil in pity, and then flushed hot

with anger.

He bent gently down and brushed the

poor flesh with his lips-for pity. Then suddenly

he caught her firmly in both his arms, in anger and

in love, fused to one fire.

"Marion , my poor Marion, " he cried , as he

covered her face with kisses . Her eyes were closed ,

and her slender figure abandoned itself to him. He

could feel her heart pound against his breast.

"I must take you away. I must make you

happy. I love you , I love you , dear ; do you understand

She opened her eyes and he saw tears in them,

she put an arm on his shoulder.

"Ma told us about love. Men used to love girls

in the backwoods where she came from. But I

164 Tomocala

never thought there would be any one to love me.

I prayed " she stopped .

"Yes, dearest . "

"Oh, not at first, " she said. "But three weeks

ago. I only had three candles then, but I lit them

one evening here by my rosebush , and I asked God

to let you love me. Father Sullivan said He could

do anything. Did He make you love me?"

"Something made me, dearest . "

Again he kissed her, again he murmured the

half- articulate protestations of lovers in her ears .

Powers denied and disowned swept in and took

up their old dominion over him. He could not remember

that he had ever thought it possible to fly

from love. The phrases which he used he had used

before so often ! But he forgot that now. The

old miracle repeated itself afresh. Again new desires

within him strove for utterance, again a new

glamour covered the earth with beauty, as he told

Marion Harriman that he loved her.

"And you love me, Marion ?"

"Of course." The pale-blue eyes opened wider in

surprise.

"Say it."

For the first time shyness and a kind of delicious

confusion seized her, her eyes fell .

The Secret Rose

165

"I love you . "

"Say- Basil, I love you . ' "

"Basil, I love you ."

Silly, dear, fond speeches ! Why should they be

written down except that they may be comprehended

by the memories there are within each one of us ?

The light faded and the moon began to mingle silver

with the flush of sunset ; the roses poured out their

perfume, and the candles' flames streamed up into

a breathless air, while the girl told how year by

year she had watched and tended the tiny plant the

priest had once brought her, bringing black earth

from the house-yard, and, when the drought came,

secretly carrying water along the hidden trail . On

this the fourth year it seemed to be of inexhaustible

resources , and month by month had bloomed with

gold. This was its summer of all summers ,

Marion's, too, and Basil's , so their foolish logic told

them. Here in the circle of the little pine trees all

life was flowering ; here, as if it had been in that

garden of Paradise, long ago and for the first time.

of all time, so it seemed to both these children, love

and beauty met in one inextinguishable flame of

happiness. Again Basil pledged himself to everlasting

faithfulness , again with his kisses a woman

seemed to drink in his whole soul.

166 Tomocala

Finally the girl remembered home, the grim

father, and the frightened little mother in the grey

house . Together, through the underbrush in the

gathering dusk, starred by fireflies , and flooded in

the open places by faint, pale moonlight , the pair

went back to the trail , Basil's arm protectingly about

her shoulders. Here they parted , Marion , all her

woodland shyness suddenly come back to her , darting

away into the dark shadow of the pines after one

hurried kiss upon his cheek ; Basil , still drunk with

emotion, going slowly towards the sea whose booming

drifted back over the sandhills .

He came out of the pine wood , and started across

the undulations of the dunes. The open sky and

the cooler air brought him down from his highest

pitch of ecstasy. Yet while now he saw clearly, so

he told himself, he still burned with a fine , steady

flame and faced his happiness and the future with

reasoned convictions. He had come, he felt , to a

deeper truth than the renunciations of his ascetic

fervour, had found a way to pay his debt by adding

happiness to the world's store to replace something

of what he had taken away. The thought of it

grew solemn, and the consciousness of new impassioned

wisdom deepened as he found that in this

moment he could think of Kitty , could call upon her

The Secret Rose 167

memory for justification . To her pale ghost he

went to ask the right to comfort , to cherish, and to

love this other shy , dear creature. Kitty had understood

so much , she could understand this now . She

had forgiven so much , she could-no , here there was

nothing to forgive. The old duty of renunciation

had been too easy a one . The new vow to bring

happiness to Marion , to guard her safely from the

terror of sorrow, this was more worthy of a man,

more worthy of the debt he owed to the angel that

was Kitty . A second time , as once before in the

streets of London , he consecrated himself, and

pledged the honour he had once so stained. He

felt uplifted, sustained , and happy in a solemn way.

But Nature, sometimes so quick to answer our

moods, this time seemed to protest. As Basil came

down upon the sands he could see great clouds to

the north gathering and marching southwards along

the coast as he had seen them in some winter storm .

The summer air around him was still warm and

fragrant , yet it seemed to wait, as the wind died ,

for some sharp change, the coming of autumn perhaps.

Basil sank down on the sands , something already

gone of his serenity, something vaguely foreboding

already clutching at his spirit. He shrugged

his shoulders in a scornful , irritated way, telling him168

Tomocala

self that he had grown too sensitive to Nature's

whims. Yet still he sat there in the cold light of the

young moon, awaiting the storm, feeling vaguely

that he must stand and meet its onset, must shelter

from it his dear thoughts of Marion.

The clouds drew nearer and finally the wind

reached him in one sharp, cold breath . It roused

him from his mooning meditations and sent him

southwards along the beach towards home. But

the world was somehow all turned grey. The wind

whipped the wiregrass and palmetto scrub upon the

dunes into frantic, fantastic activity, lit up by the

occasional flickering of the little moon as she sped

through the clouds . A rising tide of lead-coloured

waves edged with white foam encroached upon the

land . The beach itself grew blurred and misty as

the furious wind caught up the loose, dry sand and

sent it south like a great streaming eddying river of

grey mist, in whose shallows ghostly, grey-white

land-crabs scuttled away from Basil's approach.

Through this pale stream he came to his trail and

across it through the dwarf pine wood bending before

the high sea wind to his cabin. As he emerged

into his clearing he saw to his astonishment that

there was a light within. Jim, his negro cook, had

gone, he knew, that afternoon to Tomocala for the

The Secret Rose 169

night. Nervous, angry at himself for being so,

cursing his agitation , and blaming it upon this sudden

storm , he rushed to the door and tore it open.

Within sat his brother, Lord Alkinloch , drinking

whiskey. He rose and lurched unsteadily toward

Basil by way of welcoming him.

CHAPTER VI

The Sbadow of London

THE two brothers shook shook hands . Alkinloch

laughed.

"Fancy meetin' me !" he said jocosely.

"How did you get here ?" asked Basil .

"Sailed over from Tomocala ."

"I meant from England. "

"Boat again," answered Alkinloch gaily. "Did

you think I swam ?"

"Sit down," Basil suggested, a little wearily.

"And have a drink ?".

"Not necessarily."

"I'm forbidden to take it now. But you were so

late coming back to this happy little home that I

hunted out your whiskey." He pushed the glass

on the table away from him with sudden, awkward

impulsiveness. "No , I won't have any more."

For a moment they sat silent, Basil looking at

his brother intently. When he spoke there was for

the first time in their interview a note of friendliness,

almost affection in his voice.

170

The Shadow of London

171

"Are you ill, Freddy ? You look seedy."

Indeed Lord Alkinloch's changed appearance

would have been the cause of immediate astonishment

to Basil, had not the feeling been swamped at

first by the great surprise at his mere presence. For

his high colouring was brushed over with grey, and

his well- filled cheeks were already dragged a little

into lines . His whole figure , though it still indicated

enormous strength , drooped loosely, and his

eye seemed dimmed beyond the dimness for which

the bottle by his side might claim credit.

"Oh, I'm done for, Basil , old man."

He smiled vaguely at his younger brother, but

there was a seriousness beneath the speech which

brought Basil to his feet.

"Rot !" he said, as he crossed the room and stood

for a moment with his hand on Alkinloch's shoulder,

looking down at him searchingly. "What do you

mean ?"

"I'll tell you about it later, What time do you

feed here ?"

“Oh, any time I put the food out. Jim-I have

a servant, you know-has gone to Tomocala, but I

can easily find all there is , there isn't much, you

know, Freddy."

"I'm hungry as the devil," was the guest's com172

Tomocala

ment. "I thought you were never coming back.

What was it, crocodile - hunting, or some fair

negress ? Did she give you your button -hole ?"

"Nonsense !" commented Basil, after an almost

imperceptible start.

"What is it , ' the white flower of a blameless

life ' ?" roared Alkinloch, laughing loudly. "Oh,

I'll be damned if it is. It's yellow anyhow, ain't

it ?"

He stretched out a hand as if to take the golden

rosebud from his brother's coat. Basil turned

quickly away and went across the room. He poured

some water into a glass and took the flower out .

"Oh, Bassy, Bassy ! I know you of old. "

"Don't be a fool , Fred. "

Lord Alkinloch smashed a heavy fist down upon

the table and ripped out an oath .

"I shall be anything I like, d'ye understand ?"

he said. "If I've only got about a year longer to

live, anything I like , d'ye understand ? I hope she's

pretty, my boy, and that there are more where she

came from ."

He poured himself out another drink of whiskey,

while Basil stared at him.

"You're really ill , Fred , badly ?"

"Oh, yes, that's all right ; I'm really ill. Get us

The Shadow of London

173

something to eat and I'll tell you about it and why

I'm here and why you've got to go back ."

"Oh , I'll not go back, " said Basil.

"Oh , yes, you will, " replied Alkinloch , his

cheerfulness all returned , "I've come to fetch

you. "

To this the younger brother vouchsafed no reply.

He occupied himself with the preparations for the

meal . Removing the whiskey from the table, in

face of Alkinloch's protests , he laid a cloth, the

checkered red and white which was the mode of the

country, and put on some thick white stoneware

plates and a few serviceable-looking knives and

forks . From the kitchen he produced a cold boiled

sea bass and a slab of canned corned -beef.

"There's a fire in the kitchen , Fred ; I could make

you some coffee. That's what we drink with supper

here in Rome-a large cup of it-will you do as

we do, now you're here ?"

"Oh, yes," was the unenthusiastic answer. "I

thought of course you'd be living simply." Alkinloch

went on with more alertness of expression on

his face than it had hitherto displayed, "but you've

always done yourself so uncommon well. "

"Oh, you'll find me changed ." Basil spoke almost

lightly, then he repeated the words, and they

174

Tomocala

sounded somehow more serious . "Yes, I really

think you'll find me a little changed ."

"Changed !" Alkinloch stared at his brother.

"You may think you change . Don't get such foolish

ideas into your head. You jolly well don't .

You're the old-the old Adam still, my boy. I

know you of old. "

He spoke, so it seemed to Basil , with the accent

of conviction and sincerity-or was it of prophecy ?

Alkinloch in London in his usual ruddy health

might have expounded his philosophy to Basil in

vain. But here in this lonely hut by the Carnaveral,

here with a worn, grey face his brother had never

seen, with this new, strange talk of death, he produced

an unaccustomed impression-was, in fact,

such a messenger from the old , forgotten world as

might well have arrived with this cold, northern

storm which had broken the warm spell of the long,

enchanted summer. Something of almost superstitious

dread had seized upon him when, after parting

from Marion , he had sat on the edge of the

dunes and watched the wind sweep southward over

the placid sea. Something of panic fear now caught

him in its grip as, while the rain beat against the

house with gusty, intermittent deluges, he laid

the table for this apparition from England across the

The Shadow of London

175

water, from the land of old violent , painful memories

which he had almost lulled to sleep . Could Alkinloch

carry him back to all that he had counted lost

for ever ? No, a thousand times no, he told himself;

calling up the vision of Marion in her magic

sanctuary of the secret rose , to give him strength and

courage . Yet he knew in his heart that he did not

quite conquer doubt and fear. There could be no

reason, so he told himself, which could force him

back to England . Yet in spite of himself he felt

his powers of resistance oozing away from him. He

realised now that the dream world in which he had

lived had never become quite real . To keep his paradise

he must find some way to close the gates that

were now swinging ajar. He must learn definitely

what danger threatened , why Lord Alkinloch had

with no warning descended upon the Floridian solitudes.

In spite of Basil's impatience, however, by a kind

of tacit agreement the brothers talked only of commonplaces

while they ate their simple meal . The

older brother commented upon the Atlantic voyage,

the younger discoursed of the orange industry—

which he himself, idler that he was, had not even

attempted. The food and the coffee-as the Romans

take it, in large cups-lessened only slightly

176 Tomocala

the buoyancy of Lord Alkinloch's spirits, but at the

same time they increased what one may call the

responsibility of his conversation . In short, he became

sober. When the canned corned- beef was

finished and Basil had given him a cigar, he pushed

back his chair and put his feet on the table with the

red checkered cloth .

I've

"You do that in America , only higher, don't

you ?" he asked cheerily. "No ? Then I won't,"

as he took them down. "I suppose we must settle

down and have a jaw-I feel better now.

come out on a serious mission from the familymy

being the family diplomat is a rum thing, ain't

it ? I've come to take you home. "

"Why must I go home ?"

The sight of his brother's face , the sound of a

hollow cough which broke in from time to time

upon his cheerful vulgarities, had indeed made Basil

see only too clearly why the presence of the second

son might soon be required at home, but he had

tried to avoid facing the facts. Now he felt , as he

put his question almost impatiently, that he must

have them all.

"Because you'll be having to take up my duties

and my pleasures, soon, and in due time the governor's

The Shadow of London

177

"Oh, we'll have you well , Fred, I swear we will, "

cried out Basil with such real eagerness that Alkinloch

looked surprised .

"It won't be so very bad for you," he said slowly

in reply. "My duties aren't much and my pleasures

are quite worth while. The same could be said of

the governor's. Look here, Basil , old man, there

ain't any need of nonsense between us. Of course

you're sorry I've got this beastly trouble here❞—

he thumped his chest. "So am I, damned sorry.

But it ain't your fault, and why shouldn't you be

glad that you'll get the title one day, and the places ?

The shooting at King's-Thornton would be as decent

a bit as there is anywhere in the southern counties,

if the governor would have it half looked after .

That fool of a head-keeper of his "

"How did this start ?" Basil interrupted .

"The lungs , you mean ?" Lord Alkinloch asked .

The account of his illness must be summarised ; it

will be less picturesque, but much shorter than if it

were told in his own words . About a year after

Basil had left England his brother had a violent

attack of pneumonia, from which he recovered

(that was the word employed ) in March. He was ,

however, left in a weak condition. He would not

condescend, moreover, to take any care of himself.

178 Tomocala

These two things must have left him peculiarly open

to the attack of some latent germ of consumption,

hereditary perhaps , going back to generations two

or three past . The medical aspects of his case,

though interesting perhaps from that point of view,

have , however, little bearing on the present story.

It is sufficient to know that the traces of the disease

were to be discovered in April and that awful

progress had been made by August.

"And that's my story," said the victim, " as they

say in the music-halls, ' from the cradle to the

grave.' "

"And Violet Mertfield ?" asked Basil .

"Oh, she was fond enough of me to have married

me, poor little beggar. But naturally her family

made a row . And of course one wouldn't

want to breed a rotten lot of weak- lunged kids .

I'm out of the race , so the family want to enter

you . "

"For Violet Mertfield ?"

"Oh, no . But you see that everything is on your

back now. Choose for yourself."

"You think I can," mused Basil .

"Oh, hang it all ; yes, of course I understand,—

Kitty, and all that. But, oh, well ! a man can bear

it to marry again, I dare say. And you can easily

The Shadow of London

179

enough find a pretty girl. You're more of a catch

now, Basil."

To this no answer was made. Basil seemed

plunged in thought-or gloom ; and his brother

might easily have wondered whether he had ever

heard what had been said. They sat perhaps a full

minute in silence , then Basil, who had till now

drunk nothing , poured himself out some whiskey.

Finally he spoke, hesitatingly.

"It's all so unexpected . And so difficult to think

out. "

"I should say it was damned simple, " commented

Alkinloch . "I've a long letter for you from the

mater. Perhaps that will make it clearer."

He reached into his pocket and brought out an

envelope. Basil took it and for an instant held it

helplessly, almost fearfully, before he opened it . The

path back from the world of dreams is often a painful

one. Alkinloch's rude recall to the realities

Basil could more easily endure than the unknown.

one now in his hands. The first, by its very harshness,

roused in him some opposing strength to argue

and to fight against it . The second , he knew already,

while the letter was still unread, would play

on his liveliest emotions, would with tears and

tenderness and loving words exact as reparation

180

Tomocala

for the past some new cruelty in the future, call for

some fresh sacrifice , when he had thought , poor fool ,

The letter stung

that he had already sacrificed all .

his hands. For one moment he would have liked

to tear it to bits , to leave it unread , to plunge back

at any cost into the green thickets of his new life.

Then, with a sudden reaction , the love for his mother

that had never left him from childhood up seemed to

sweep over him in a great, warm wave. Pity, sorrow,

painful uncertainty were still in his heart. But

for her sake , willingness to face his problem was

there too . He broke the seal of his letter and read .

"MY DEAREST BASIL : It is so hard merely to be

able to write you , for we have always talked things

over, haven't we , you and I ? Alkinloch can tell you

what has happened ; indeed only to see him is enough

to let you know. Of course, everything has been done.

and will be done, and the doctors give some hopedon't

they always ?-but very little. It has been a bad

year for your father and me. First it seemed that

we had lost you-oh, I knew, and you knew that I

knew, that when you left me that night you meant

never to come back . Now it seems that we may lose

your brother, too . The marriage is not to take place.

Everything seems changing and crumbling down.

about us. I feel old . And you'll find your father

changed. In their way Alkinloch and he were

The Shadow of London 181

great pais. He liked Violet, too, and I think he had

begun to think of grandchildren . You see, the Kingstowne

name and the family mean very much to him—

more, I think, than they do to your generation . And

he has great affection for us all -though he may have

shown it sometimes in odd ways . He is growing old,

like me, and we both need all the kindness and liking

we can give each other, and can get from our children .

You must come back to us, Basil ; you must come back

to me.

"It is possible. I have been to the Duchess , though

I had not seen her since-since that letter of February a

year ago. It would only be painful to you to hear much

about our interview. I abased myself, and that is

hardest to do before an old friend with whom one has

lived on terms of equality for many years. I begged

of her-well, I went down on my knees , almost . I

could do it, my dear, because I want you back, and

because-forgive me for saying it-because I can understand

why she feels as she does . She yielded , because

even through all this breach-she is a loving

and a loyal woman, and because she is , as well, a

woman who can see reason. I told her of the danger

that threatened my eldest son ; she saw that it was too

much to ask the sacrifice of my youngest . Then , too,

she is of an older generation than yours ; she feels

what I now want you to feel , the meaning of your

name and the duty one has to preserve a family.

makes a sacrifice to her principle more painful than

any you can possibly be making in coming back to

face your memories , and to take up , as you must now,

the duties of your life again. Indeed , in the end she

She

182 Tomocala

came so completely around to my point of view that I

can almost say that now she lays it upon you as a command,

as a reparation which she has a right to exact,

that you are to come to England. She is very broken

and very odd, my dear, and her temper, with age

and with sorrow, seems to have grown quite unbridled

. I cannot deny that her complete volte-face

has startled me ; that I feel, somehow, that she is no

longer altogether to be reckoned with . I cannot complain

now when she helps to bring me back the boy I

had lost , yet-oh , this is all more than I had meant to

tell you. I had meant, even though the truth might

help me more, to say that in calmness she had consented

to your return . But the truth is that she became

as violently insistent upon it , once I suggested

it to her, as she was upon your banishment . I fearforgive

me, Basil , if I seem to use anything I find that

will serve me as an argument-that she is capable of

employing the same means of compulsion which were

within her power before . I am afraid she has come

to take a kind of unworthy pleasure in the idea that

she can drive you hither and thither at her caprice .

Yet it's an ill wind- Oh, Basil, if you'll only come

back to me !

"'Yes, we must have him home, ' she said, ' quite

apart from what you tell me of Alkinloch . He will do

less mischief if we watch him, '-and then , no, I won't

repeat to you what she said. I had to speak out in

your defence. I know you went away to fly from your

weaknesses , to avoid your temptations ; I know you

have been strong. When you come back to me there

will be no woman left behind in Florida who will be

The Shadow of London

183

sorry that you went there. I know you learnt your

lesson ; that I know.

"I feel ashamed of even telling you of the Duchess's

threats-I must call them that. I want you to come

back just because you see it is right, just because it

will be a kindness to your father and to me. Yet

what I have told you is only the truth. If you should

linger too long in Florida there is danger. There

might be the scandal which we once feared . I , at

least, am even less able to bear the thought of it than

I was then. So is your father . So is the family name

and our honour , if we are to think of that. The responsibility

for everything is on your shoulders now ;

I know you will be brave and take it up .

"I have just read over what I have written . It

would seem to most people , so it occurs to me now,

that I am making a tragedy where none exists . I

knew how deeply wounded you were by the circumstances

of poor Kitty's death , I remembered with what

solemn resolve you had gone to Florida, not because

you were forced there, but because you wished to go .

I have taken it for granted that you are still in just that

state of mind. Yet indeed , Basil , I hope that you are

not. Life in such rough countries cannot be pleasant

for you . And it is only right that time should

make your sorrow less , even your regrets . You can

cancel much of what you have done in the past if you

will find yourself a wife here who, with the grandchildren

I might then hope for, will be a friend and

companion for your father and me as we grow old.

And it is not wrong to say what Alkinloch himself understands,

and wishes us all to be honest about, that his

184

Tomocala

death, should it come, will bring you much that you

cannot help being glad to have.

"There is nothing more to write . You are very

dear to me, Basil ; you are still to me always my baby.

I shall be happy when you come home.

"MOTHER. "

Basil sat staring blankly at the lamp and slowly

tearing the letter in tiny bits. This, then, was the

world, he thought with a kind of despair,—a place

where no course of action could ever again be wholly

right, could ever fail to bring unhappiness to some

one in its trail. He was in a trap , and for the moment

he lacked the strength even to try for freedom.

What was freedom but a mockery ? What was

the world but hell ? He had had a glimpse of Eden,

but now the gates were closed .

Any-

"Good God, Basil, " cried Lord Alkinloch, "don't

look as if the noose were around your neck.

body would think you were me. I mightn't be

blamed if I pulled a long face. But aren't I cheerful

? And if I can be cheerful about your becoming

Marquess of Kingstowne , I should think you might

manage it."

"There isn't anything, Freddy," answered Basil,

almost angrily, "that would so ruin my plans and

wreck my life as your death ."

The Shadow of London

185

"Well then, old son , there is just a chance. And

between you and me that's partly why I came out

on this diplomatic mission. One of the medical

Johnnies did give me some hope. He was a queer

duck and he didn't prescribe drugs . But he said

if I'd come here and live every minute in the open,

even sleep à la belle étoile, I might get well . I'd

try it if I didn't think it would be so damned dull .

At any rate, drink my health."

Basil sprang to his feet , light again in his eyes.

He raised his glass and drank.

"We'll have you well, Freddy, we'll have you

well," he cried.

Lord Alkinloch looked at him curiously again .

"Thank you , Basil, " he said, " thank you , very

much. You're behaving uncommon decently, my

boy. Perhaps I will get well ."

Basil scarcely heard. His mind had already gone

crashing through the rain- soaked underbrush of the

peninsula to the grey house , to Marion , and to

the secret rose. He might at least prowl through

the wind- swept night outside the walls of paradise ,

though he perhaps should never again see the lights

within.

Lord Alkinloch slept through the night on his

186

Tomocala

brother's bed, snoring stertorously . Basil, with a

blanket and a pillow on the floor, lay hour after

hour, open-eyed and staring into the darkness . His

head throbbed and his throat was hot and dry. His

problems remained unsolved, though with that

ceaseless activity of brain which renders nights of

insomnia still more dreadful , he turned them over a

thousand times, seeking frantically for some immediate

assurance that happiness might be his without

waiting upon the doubtful chance of his brother's

recovery. But balanced arguments of duty to the

Forresters in England and to Marion in Tomocala

seemed to fall upon him as relentlessly as did the

downpour outside upon the pines . Somehow the

two grew confused in his mind, and at last he came

to feel that only if the rain would stop could he think

clearly.

Between one and two of the morning the storm

moderated . Basil , making the hundredth uneasy

journey to the cabin's door, found that the sky had

partly cleared , and that the moon , scudding through

flying rags and tatters of cloud, gave a fitful light.

He caught up a cap- he had not undressed- and

closing the door behind him, started forth . Instinctively

he took the trail towards the sea , dashing

along it and cooling his hot head against the

The Shadow of London 187

heavy, soaked branches of the pines, which brushed

his brow with wet needles as he ran upon them in

the half-darkness . The tide was full , and the beach

along which he had earlier come was now a tumbling

confusion of foaming waters , gleaming white

when the moon broke for a moment into a patch of

open sky. He was forced to pick his way along the

undulations of the sand hillocks . He had turned

north , towards that other trail , scarcely knowing

what he did, yet proceeding as if some immediate

necessity urged him on . It was not till he found

himself going inland again that he realised that he

was blindly making his way to the bower where he

had sealed his love to Marion ; that by that yellow

rosebush, now drenched and bedraggled by the

storm , he hoped to find some talisman , some magic

that would give him back the old dream world of

summer, would hide for ever in forgetfulness this

new call to duty and sacrifice. In this kind of

madness born of his anxieties and of the great loneliness

of the night he plunged along Harriman's

trail, somewhat as a wounded wild thing might fly

to nurse its wounds in some well-worn hollow of the

wilderness .

But the little hidden path through which he had

gone with Marion he could not find again. He had

188

Tomocala

been sure that he knew the dip in which was the

screen of palmetto scrub that covered its beginning.

Perhaps indeed he found it , but in the darkness could

not make out the secret trail . Disappointment and

anger blinded him, it may be . Almost crying with

rage, almost dropping with exhaustion , he fought his

way for an hour or more through the underbrush ,

tearing his hands and cutting his face upon thickgrowing

trees and sharp palmetto leaves that would

not let him through. Once or twice quail or rabbits

frightened him by starting up from under his very

feet. Once at least a snake glided ominously across

his path. Before he gave up in despair he had lost

his reckoning altogether. The crash of the surf

that might have guided him seemed to sound in his

ears from every side. Finally on a little sandy

summit where the trees were sparse , he made out his

direction by the fading stars in a sky faintly lit by

the coming dawn. He turned back towards the

trail, whipped and beaten now.

He reached the trail and walked slowly back to

the sea. The tide had ebbed and a line of minor

wreckage marked its highest point ; seaweed, fish

turning up silvery bellies to the light, crabs cast

on their backs with dead legs sprawled helplessly

askew . Everything looked mournful and hopeless

The Shadow of London

189

in this pale , white light. Nature gave no encouragement,

no help to the man whom she had been

teaching for months to lean on her for sympathy and

aid. Marion, in happy unconsciousness , slept with

a smile upon her face in the attic under the grey

roof. Basil was alone with trouble.

There was no possible compromise . Marion by

the Carnaveral was perfection, a dream princess in

a dream world. In England , as the future Marchioness

of Kingstowne, she would be a hopelessly

ignorant and untutored savage, the offspring of a

disreputable and disordered father and a wayward,

disgraced mother. Here in a cottage among the

pines and palmettoes her beauty, her gentleness ,

and his love would make her in his new life a comrade

of whom he might be proud. There in

Berkeley Square or at King's-Thornton in the country

she would be uncouth , a source of endless mortifications

among which love would probably die.

Basil winced as this thought passed through his

mind, yet in the pale dawn he forced himself to go

on with his argument . In Tomocala the image of

Marion was his whole world. In England it faded

away to nothingness ; it could not exist . More than

ever before he felt a passionate protest against the

conventions , the duties, and the cowardices of civili190

Tomocala

sation ; as he had never done, he clutched despairingly

at this simple, primitive existence which he

had half seen, already half begun to live . Yet the

old world had sent its messenger, and he felt its

tentacles close about him and prepare to drag him

back.

But his own atti-

There was nothing now that he could not see

clearly, for exaltation had died with weariness and

lack of sleep. It did not fail to come into his mind

that marriage and a title were not the only things

that were offered to ignorant country girls whose

loveliness caught one's eye. He could imagine

Alkinloch's advice in the matter.

tude was for him a measure of the progress he had

made. Chilled and weary as he was both in body

and in soul, he could yet feel some satisfaction and

some pride in the fact that a wife in Mount Street

and this poor, dear child in a nest by the Regent's

Park seemed no longer possible to him. If he and

Marion were to part it should be for ever. If they

were not they would go to the end of the world and

of time, hand in hand, together always . Love had

come to mean something better than it had been

when he was a vagabond of the emotions, something

which consorted better with the memory of Kitty.

There was another change which his intelligence ,

The Shadow of London 191

lucid in a weary body, could mark that morning.

But it was a change , not so much from those earlier

days as from the asceticism of the dark period

through which he had gone. Time had taught him

reason, or perhaps it was that the constant pressure

of his inclinations had at last made him see reason

where before he had seen crime and folly. No one

need settle the question. It is enough to know that

Basil himself felt that wisdom had come to him.

When the heart spoke, when the flesh cried out,

Nature gave a call, so he told himself, that was not

to be denied. He was not meant to live alone.

Marion must be his . His face grew grim as he

went back towards his cottage in the crimsoning

dawn.

"He must get well . He must live," he kept muttering

to himself.

The sunlight roused Lord Alkinloch, who woke to

find his brother rattling breakfast dishes and frying

bacon. The sight seemed to cheer him, though he

ventured to assert that it was a "rum" one. He

made a rapid toilet, and was soon devouring the

results of Basil's culinary efforts with avidity . The

night's rest, perhaps already the fresh sea air,

seemed to have made his face less haggard than it

192

Tomocala

had looked by last night's candles.

Basil was inclined

for a time to think that he had been exaggerating

his danger. But it was not for long . The

faded colour would not be denied, nor the curious

, restless activity which seemed to have replaced

the old phlegmatic strength . Basil watched him ,

and the seriousness of the situation came back in

redoubled force. With it, too , came the redoubled

determination that the prescription of the " medical

Johnny" who advised fresh air and life in the

auberge de la belle étoile should have fair trial .

Alkinloch should grow well again.

After breakfast , they explored the small clearing ,

and Basil drew the picture of life by the Carnaveral

as he thought it might seem most pleasing to his

brother. He made no mention of the problem that

confronted the younger brother, nor of the fate

that hung over the elder. He talked of the comforts

of roughing it. He told of the bear and deer

which were to be shot in the woods of the peninsula ,

of the wild turkey and quail to be found in the flatlands

back of Tomocala, and of bass to be taken in

the surf on the ocean beach. The air was clean,

with the hint of autumn in it, and the blue waves of

the river danced invitingly . With such weather

and the catboat tugging at the wharf as the tide

The Shadow of London

193

streamed up from the inlet , it was easy to plan cruises

along the deserted reaches of the coast lagoons , almost

with favouring winds a crossing to Cuba , or

failing that, an exploration of the mysterious Everglades

. Basil grew eloquent. At about ten o'clock

his brother called for a drink.

Basil fetched it , but went on with his talk.

"That's about what it is , Freddie, and it's not a bad

life. I hope we can manage to have a decent enough

winter of it."

Alkinloch gulped down some whiskey.

"Havana sounds all right ," he said . "And if the

shootin' and fishin's as good as you say, I can do

with a week of it very well . I'd like to pot a bear

before I leave no grizzlies here, I suppose. But

winter ? You don't catch Freddie ! I've been

thinking it over. "

"You'll be well at the end of it . ”

"Will I ? It's too much of a gamble. Do you

think that , if I've only six months left , I'm going to

waste ' em over any beastly cure ?"

Basil protested warmly. But Alkinloch , the sullen

look which his brother knew so well coming over

his face, took no notice of it .

"No, I mean to have a little run of it . Why the

devil shouldn't I ? Fishing and shooting for a while

194

Tomocala

Some

if you like . Then London , Paris , Monte Carlo.

Not this hole , with all respect to you , Basil .

good champagne , some pretty women. What's the

German motto- Wein, Weib ? -well, some sport

anyhow before I go . Since Violet Mertfield was

made to chuck me " He meditated over his

empty glass and drew a rather gusty sigh.

"I don't think I quite realised that you'd take it

so much to heart as this." Basil looked at him with

curiosity.

"Violet was a damned well set- up girl, " blustered

the other, "and devilish fond of me. If you want

me to stay out here and take the cure of the belle

étoile, find me another one like her."

"Oh, that !" Basil got up from his chair, and

stood leaning against a post of the little veranda

where they had been sitting.

out here for that, you know ."

“Oh , I didn't come

But it ain't a question

Basil still

"Yes , I know, dear boy.

of what you came out for, it's what you found. "

Nothing was said in reply to this.

stood gazing out upon the river , while Alkinloch

beat a kind of tattoo on the arm of his chair with

his empty glass. Then around the point to the

north, where a group of palmettoes stood out against

the Carnaveral's blue, there came a boat. It carried

The Shadow of London 195

some tubs and buckets, and old Harriman, bending

to the oars, was pulling it towards Basil's

wharf.

"A neighbour?" asked Alkinloch .

"Yes , a leading citizen ."

"Well," with a laugh , the elder brother went on,

"I'll apply to him for information you don't seem

willing to give. Perhaps he'll give me a better idea

of Tomocala for my cure !"

They went down to the wharf to meet the boat.

That had come to be the custom when the old man

came.

"He's a rum chap, " said Basil . There was not

time for much explanation .

"You're all a rum lot down here, " commented

his brother, and appeared to be satisfied not to know

more.

The boat came alongside the wharf.

"Morning," said the old man, then seeing the

newcomer, added , "Who's this ?"

"My brother," said Basil .

"Oh !" The interest appeared to fade out of his

voice . "Got any swill to-day ?" he asked indifferently.

"Some, not much."

"I should have thought there'd have been more ,

196 Tomocala

with two of you . " He turned to Alkinloch , and it

was characteristic of him that he now spoke with a

sudden change to apparent heartiness and cordiality.

"How are you, Mr. Forrester ? Glad to see you

here. Just got here ?"

"Yes , yesterday," replied Alkinloch , responding

in kind to Harriman's cheerfulness . The old man

took note of this.

"England get too hot for you ?" he asked , breaking

into a kind of guffaw.

"No, damn you, " answered Alkinloch promptly.

The old man's eyes lit with appreciation.

"You can go back then . Well , well ! The sooner

the better, I expect. "

"Right you are, old man , " was the reply. And

then all three laughed. The sun was cheerfully

bright, and after all it was natural that in Florida

they should behave like a rum lot . Basil called on

Freddy to lend a hand with a bucket which contained

his contribution to the dinner of Harriman's

The recipient did not thank them ; it was not

his way.

hogs .

"A person might think you were starving yourself

to judge by this, " he said . This was , for him,

gratitude indeed . Without further comments he

put hands again upon the oars , when a fit of coughThe

Shadow of London

197

ing which seized Lord Alkinloch seemed to arrest

him. It was Basil, however, who spoke.

"You ought to know the Florida climate, Harriman.

I've been telling my brother it will cure

that, if he will stay and give it the chance. Am I

right ?"

An odd, faraway look was for one instant in the

old man's eyes as he answered slowly :

"Florida climate will cure most things, if you give

it the chance . What does he want to be cured of?

Better not . He's young yet ." Then he seemed to

rouse himself, and , quite as any one else might , gave

instances, all of them encouraging, of what tropical

warmth and air had done for various invalids who

had found their way into this little -known region

during the twenty-odd years that he had known it .

"There, you see, Fred !" exclaimed Basil.

"I see what I saw before, that it would be a

devilish tiresome process , getting well , if one did get

well. You're a leading citizen , Mr. Harriman , so

Basil tells me. Isn't your house somewhat more

gay and festive than my brother's?

Won't you

take me home now for a call ? I'll help row the

boat."

Alkinloch spoke with the cheerful familiarity of

tone which the situation- and the whiskey he had

198 Tomocala

already taken- seemed to suggest to him. He

started as Harriman's face clouded with unrestrained

anger.

"When you set foot on my place, I'll set the dog

on you ."

"And I'll shoot him," replied Alkinloch , adding

an oath . But his directness did not, as it had

earlier, mollify Harriman, who, as usual when

roused, began to abound in strange blasphemies ,

not to be set down here .

"You've set him to sneaking around my house, I

suppose, " he began , turning on Basil . "Weren't

you warned off yourself ? Aren't there any of the

over in Tomocala ? Don't you know that

you're not to come near my daughters ?"

"You flatter us," said Alkinloch . "Now Basil

here but I'm quite safe."

"None of your modesty ."

"Why shouldn't I know your daughters ? Are

they good-looking, Basil ?" Alkinloch's tone was

insolent.

Before Basil could answer the old man took the

words from his mouth.

"They are ; the one called Constance is a beauty.

Isn't that reason enough why I won't have you

skulking about them ?"

The Shadow of London 199

"Oh, I don't know. " Alkinloch's laugh was not

altogether pleasant.

"Do you want to marry either of them ?" said

Harriman sharply.

For an instant Basil felt that he must speak, that

he was willing to make the irretrievable decision

rather than allow the discussion to proceed . But

while he hesitated, his brother's laugh broke the

train of his thoughts.

"Oh," said he, "I hadn't gone so far as to be

thinkin' of marryin ' them."

"The more fool you'd be if you did," was the

father's amazing comment upon this. "Ignorant—

though they're the better for that ; dirty-though

that's no harm ; idle , silly creatures . No, of course,

you don't want to marry them. Though you're

young and fools yourselves. Yet why shouldn't

you? And then let them trick you , pull the wool

over your eyes , and be common property of all your

friends."

"Stop," interrupted Basil sharply. "Control

yourself . You know your girls are good girls.

And that they've a good mother."

"Oh, they're good. So is their mother. I look

out for that. And I mean to keep up doing it .

You don't care to make an offer to marry one of

200 Tomocala

them, you say, Mr. Forrester"-this to Alkinloch.

"Well, then, you shan't even see them . I don't

think it will be wise for them to marry before their

old father dies. They're needed around the house—

the pigs need their care . But meanwhile any fellow

who comes around proposing anything else will get

into trouble."

"You arouse my curiosity to know the ladies of

your family," said Lord Alkinloch , smiling.

Harriman put his oars in the locks and slowly

pushed the ill-smelling boat away from the wharf.

Then he looked up.

"By God, sir," he said , " I'd shoot the man who

makes any trouble at my house. Shoot him on

sight, do you understand ?"

The boat slowly made its way around the point .

The brothers watched it silently .

"Rum lot ," said Alkinloch finally. "Think I'll

have another drink. "

"Thought it wasn't allowed, " suggested Basil .

"No. But the climate's going to do me so much

good, according to you all, that I ought to be able

to do myself a little harm occasionally ."

"You'll have to stay to give the climate a

chance."

"I suppose so ."

The Shadow of London 201

The drink was procured, and the drinker seemed

to meditate.

"Rum lot, " he murmured again. Then later—

"Confounded impertinent old fool . " Finally he put

a question.

"Are these girls of his really beauties ?"

For a moment Basil hesitated , as if he ventured

something by his answer-then :

"Yes," came from him slowly.

"Well, perhaps I might give the climate a chance,"

said Alkinloch with a smile and the suggestion of a

wink.

Basil looked at him doubtfully, filled with hope,

yet oppressed with forebodings which he dared not

put definitely to himself.

CHAPTER VII

Treacherous Calm

His

MR. FRED FORRESTER, who had commonly been

known in England as the Earl of Alkinloch, made

himself most easily at home in Tomocala.

geniality and friendliness were much greater than

his brother's had been. His crossings of the Carnaveral

to the little town were as frequent as those of

Jim , the black servant, and Basil suspected that they

led him into a society in essentials little more elevated

. The younger brother had begun by attempting

to establish with the elder a companionship of

some sort. This was partly with the idea that in

this way Alkinloch might be induced to stay on,

partly with an idea, vaguely defined and only half

admitted, that the stay might thus be made altogether

of good consequences . But what years in

England had failed to do , weeks in Tomocala could

not accomplish. The ties of blood and of common

interests had sometimes brought them momentarily

together. But they had never been comrades.

They were not so now. Mr. Fred Forrester ac-

202

Treacherous Calm

203

cepted his brother's cabin on the peninsula as a pied

à terre. He ate half his meals there, and for perhaps

that part of the time he slept on a cot bed in the

little room through which swept unimpeded the

health-giving breath of the Atlantic. The other

half of his life he soon ceased to explain.

Basil knew that in the meetings of the town at

Sandford's Emporium his brother had come to be a

familiar figure. He heard vaguely of gatherings

less representative and also less respectable at outlying

and lonely cottages . Freddy went off upon

fishing and shooting expeditions of a week or more

with his new friends, and came back burned by the

sun and seemingly invigorated and toned by the climate.

But he also took, so rumour had it , excursions

of shorter duration and more doubtful character

to certain remote settlements in the pine woods

where even so far back as those days nameless and

oddly composed families gained a living denied them

on the barren sands in purveying illicit whiskey and

the opportunity for squalid debaucheries. Quiet

inhabitants of Tomocala were sometimes aroused

from their sleep by the half-drunk yells of returning

revellers . And once, at two o'clock of a

moonlit morning, the sharp crack of a pistol was

heard, and Jim Blagdon , one of Freddy's friends,

204

Tomocala

was found dead by the river front. It was whispered

afterwards that on that night the " boys" -so

they called them at Sandford's-after an unusual

bout with corn whiskey had enjoyed by force the

hospitality of a lonely house up the creek where, as it

chanced that night, the husband and father of the

three women left alone there was away, searching

for some strayed cattle . He had returned , after the

boys had gone , at one. And at two, desperately

spurring a worn-out old black mule to the limit of

its poor speed, he had come on Jimmy Blagdon

where the road skirted the Carnaveral and shot him

from behind a clump of magnolia trees. For all

that Tomocala knew or guessed, it might as well

have been Fred Forrester, or any of the others , who

paid the penalty of that night's revelry. There were

other stories , too , though this was perhaps the

darkest, as it was the most dramatic.

Basil listened to such tales as little as possible .

He was not his brother's keeper, he told himself.

His business was only to note the colour on Alkinloch's

cheek, to watch his shoulders straighten, and

to listen for the lessening hacking in his cough . Fred

was to live ; it would be asking too much to choose

how he should live . Yet often in the late golden

afternoon when in the little space which the secret

Treacherous Calm

205

rosebush, as autumn came, had strewn thick with its

yellow petals and green leaves Basil sat with one

protecting arm around Marion's shoulder he gave

thanks that Alkinloch had never seen this wild sweet

flower, that her new paradise at least was undisturbed

by his blustering cries.

It seemed now always to be his fate to be retreating

from the alarums and excursions of whatever

was his world to the peace and sanctity of some remoter

retreat . As he had fled from London to Tomocala,

so now he fled from Tomocala , from the

sinister vision of how his brother was passing the

little time he thought was left him , to the enchanted

sanctuary in the wilderness where his love was.

By Marion's side there was no need to face the

future. In her divine simplicity and ignorance she

was content merely to know that he loved her ; she

asked no questions. Deep in his heart he knew that

this too perhaps must end, but he forced himself to

forget. He too , like Alkinloch, chose how he should

pass the little time that was left . There were moments

when he called himself a coward, when he

accused himself of needless cruelty, when he felt

that, as in the old days , he was sitting at a banquet

for which in the end a woman must pay in sorrow

and in tears . But the first force of the resolutions

206 Tomocala

he had so passionately made at Kitty's death was

now half worn out, had indeed been slipping from

him through the long languorous tropical summer,

in that warm, soft air in which the moral rigidity of

the Northerner droops and dies . In the nights

sometimes , when Alkinloch's hollow cough kept him

awake, he still had spasms of self-abasement , and

clear visions of the treachery he would doubtless

perpetrate if Alkinloch died and England with a

new welcome called him back. He saw himself loving

and riding away, as he had before . Some new

shock, terrible, like that first, might give him

strength again, he thought. But no shock came.

Some further flight-oh, could flight be ever far

enough !-might carry him beyond his own miserable

weakness and the temptations of the world.

But no flight was possible when for nine days out of

ten one could forget the need of it. The days

passed, and Basil , sedulously teaching himself not to

count their flight , gave himself up again to the spell

of nature and of the woodsprite who had taught him

to know the wilderness .

At first he had feared that Freddy's presence

might prevent his meetings with Marion . But in

fact his absences made it possible for Basil not only

to see her as before, but to forget his brother and

Treacherous Calm

207

all that his presence in Florida meant. It was late

in October that Basil was startled by Marion's saying

"Con knows your brother, Basil ; why don't I ?”

"How does she come to know him?" he asked ,

almost sharply.

"I don't think I know. Con don't tell me many

of her secrets . She don't tell mother. She says

Marion

we're too simple ; stupid, I suppose she means .

guess she thinks I haven't any secrets ."

smiled with an innocent air of superiority.

"I think I can guess how it happened," meditated

Basil. He was remembering a meeting with Father

Sullivan some weeks before. He had been used to

seeing the priest sailing the lagoon or fishing in his

strange, shabby nondescript costume. But he had

not been included in the father's parochial visits , and

he had consequently been surprised one morning,

when loafing on the dock, to see the well-known catboat

sail up to it.

"Is Mr. Fred Forrester here ?"

"No," Basil had answered.

"Well, I don't want him," said the little ruddyfaced

Galway man, bringing his craft alongside.

"I want to talk to you about him. Have you any

influence over him ?"

208 Tomocala

"Not any, I should say."

"Well, he has over Dick White, and for the bad.

Dick's a damned Protestant-why, of course he's

damned ! that's theology, not blasphemy as you seem

to think-but he's a good lad, a decent, clean boy."

"Yes, Dick's all of that."

"But how long he will be I don't know, I don't

know."

Father Sullivan had shaken his head in doubt. It

was certain, he said , that Fred Forrester had sought

Dick's acquaintance . They had sailed and fished

together ; lately they had drunk together. And

often had gone off at night, to what devil's cabin in

the backwoods Father Sullivan could not say. "Of

course it's not my business , but ' tis a pity."

This conversation came back to Basil now. "It

would be through Dick White, I think, that he came

to know Con. She still sees Dick White, doesn't

she ?"

"I think she must be planning to run away with

him the way he has always wanted her to . She's

got the stuff for a pink dress hidden away in the

garret, and when pa's away she sews on it. Dick

must have bought it for her, and he must be rich,

for oh, it's so lovely. It's silk ! Con told me that

it was to wear to church, that Dick was going to

Treacherous Calm

209

take her to the Primitive Baptist meeting in November.

But Con doesn't always tell me everything.

I thought perhaps she was going to St. Augustine

with him. She hates everything at home, and I

know she's been thinking of running away for a

long time. Con hasn't ever been happy, not even so

happy as I was before you came. I wish Con could

be. Of course she can't ever be so happy as I am,

But I guess Dick loves her. You told me once you

thought so too. "

"Yes."

"The way you do me. Did you know, " the girl

went on, " that I talked to ma the other day about

love ? Ma was in love herself when she was just

my age. But the man didn't love her. Ma was

sorry. And then pa came and she married him. ”

"Without caring for him ?"

"Oh , yes !"

"Then why ”

"Her pa and ma didn't want her at home much

longer. You see she was nineteen , and girls have

to marry, so ma says. Oh, I couldn't tell her she

was wrong without letting her know our secret !

But we haven't got to marry, Basil, have we ? And

be like pa and ma ? We love each other, dear. Say

we haven't got to."

210 Tomocala

For a moment he laughed . But she had grown

used to his laughing at her speeches, even those

which seemed to her the profoundest.

suddenly became grave.

"No," he said, "we needn't be married .

Then he

As you

say, we love each other, dear. But perhaps it would

be better that we should . "

"Of course," answered Marion in a low voice , "if

you want us to. " Then she looked up. "But, oh,

Basil, you won't be like pa is to ma ; you couldn't

be."

"No," said he gently. "Marriage doesn't mean

just that. It would mean for us that we would say

that we would never be apart, that we would always

be together. "

"Oh, but we're always going to be together. "

She caught him by the arm like a frightened child .

"Basil, you won't ever leave me. I couldn't live if

things were like what they were before you came. ”

She put her head down on the sleeve of his coat and

ever so quietly, with no sobs , she began to cry.

"You see," he said , with a laugh and a pat on her

head, but with an underlying note more serious , "we

ought to be married , just to make quite sure. "

"Yes, if that will keep you always with me ! Tonight,

Basil ; let's be married to-night. "

Treacherous Calm 21I

He held her for a moment tight - clasped in his

arms, and his lips were against her soft, warm cheek.

But as he spoke he knew there were other things he

must remember.

"We must wait a little , " he said. "But when my

brother, who's ill now, get's well , you and I will be

married . "

"But we will still be in love. "

"Always," answered Basil, "whatever happens . "

A few days later, coming through the path, now

worn wider, that led to the enclosure of the rose,

Basil saw again , as on that first evening, the flash of

lights through the green bushes that sheltered it .

The fireflies which had danced all through the long

summer had vanished, and he knew that Marion

must have lit the lights of her woodland altar. He

saw her on the ground before the little table on

which, as before , stood six candles, and he experienced,

as so often with Marion, a sense that , even

with her guidance , he had not quite entered into the

wild world in which she lived. He felt as some

early Christian might, who had loved some wood

nymph lingering from an earlier day, and had been

present when she celebrated half- forgotten pagan

212 Tomocala

rites. Though he knew that Marion groping in her

ignorance had raised her shrine to the God of Christians,

he still thought of some autumn festival of the

divinities of the woods and sands . She must have

heard the crackling of the trail under his footsteps ,

yet she did not turn from her half-kneeling , halfcrouching

position on the soft carpet of pine needles

in front of the altar. The six candles retouched her

hair with an even brighter gold , and seemed to reveal

to him with a fresh impression of beauty the

wild grace of her attitude . With a quick wave of

emotion it came to him that the shrine was reared

to Eros , the immemorial God of young men and

maidens . He bent over and brushed her cheek

lightly with his lips ; half reverently, as if in a sacred

presence . He saw her eyes hazy and far-away in

expression.

"Aren't they beautiful ?" she asked. "When I lit

them before it made you love me. Now, perhaps ,

it will make your brother well ."

Basil almost unconsciously bent one knee and

sank by her side , memories of the church-going of

his childhood and of its simple faith coming back to

him : thoughts of his mother, of his Cousin Henry,

as he had talked with him that last night . For an

instant the pine trees seemed to arch over him in a

Treacherous Calm 213

great cathedral aisle , and he too asked God to make

Alkinloch well.

"We will light them every night," exclaimed

Marion, clapping her hands softly together in a

sudden mood of gaiety, " and when these are gone

you can bring some, Basil. You don't have such

trouble to get them as I do.

your brother well. I think God likes me, Basil ,

you and me."

And God will make

So as autumn went on towards winter, and the

rose shed its yellowed leaves over the carpet of pine

needles before undertaking its winter growth and

flowering, each time they met the candles were lit

upon the tiny altar. And the miracle happened .

Nowadays it would perhaps be explained by the

marvellous healing power of fresh air and the recreative

effect of life in the open . Some of Freddy's

pals advanced a medical theory-no stranger

than a thousand others which gain credence-that

the corn whiskey he consumed so freely "pickled"

him to an extent which not only prevented the further

progress of his disease , but ultimately killed it

altogether. Gradually his eye brightened and his

shoulders grew straighter. The grey of his haggard

countenance vanished and the colour bred of

English airs came back, while the tired lines were

214 Tomocala

effaced . Basil watching him carefully, and noting

day by day that he seemed better , suddenly woke to

the fact that he was well . The hacking cough was

gone. Alkinloch was what he had always been.

It was all like the waking from some unpleasant

dream , though the former invalid remained, an incongruous

figure not wholly without menace in the

Arcadian landscape.

Full realisation of this seemed to come one

November day, a day with a kind of memory of

summer in it , when Alkinloch had chanced to loaf

about the cabin, smoking a pipe contentedly and

warming himself in the sun . After lunch Basil

found him gazing on the few leather bags he had

brought from England , and poking them meditatively

with his foot.

"Well , Freddy ?" he asked.

"Yes, I think I'll go. This is all deuced comfortable

and idle, but I think I'd like some hunting."

He overturned a kit-bag with his foot and

went on.

"You know the New York chap, big crack as a

doctor, who was at the Tomocala House ”

"No, I didn't know."

"You don't know anything that happens in the

You miss what fun there is . " Alkinloch's town.

Treacherous Calm

215

eye lit up for a moment as if with memories.

"You're too damned moral now, or at least you pretend

to be."

"Don't let that trouble you , Freddy ."

"It don't, my boy.

nicely before you.

But of course I have to speak

Lord, if I told you half the

larks, or one game in especial- Well , I spare you,

Bassy, and I'll take myself off and leave you . Tomorrow

I think I'll go . The doctor said—it's really

amazing, it really is—that I'm actually perfectly fit

again. He was surprised himself, and jawed a lot

about the extraordinary effects of great change of

climate and so on while he was thumping me over.

So I've done you . Oh, you were decent about it ;

I'll be the first to say it. But personally I'm jolly

glad I'm to live and get what perquisites there are

when the Governor cracks up-and I call it sportsmanlike

of you to urge me to stay the way you did,

and give Florida a chance. "

"You haven't disliked it so much, have

you ?"

"I haven't, my son. I have done myself most uncommon

well. I have had it both ways, you see.

I've thought it was my last three months and taken

it as such . And now it isn't. I could tell your old

friend Harriman, " he chuckled , "that life here is

216

Tomocala

quite worth the living. By Jove, I could tell him

some things ."

At another time Basil might have invited his

brother's confidences. To -day he was too elated by

his escape into the open, by complete freedom again

from doubts and problems. It would have been his

duty, he could now admit it , to have gone back to

London. There would have been something for

him , it was not now longer to be denied , in standing

as the head of his house, in bearing the title, and in

enjoying the rich full life England offers to her

petted few. But he had once paid heavily for the

world's pleasures with human suffering, and might

indeed, so he feared , have gone on through the years

paying the same price . Now he no longer needed

to distrust his strength. Life had grown again

simple , possible. He could hope to be a man and

bear his head with pride. The tragedy that

had threatened for months was never to take

place.

As the sun sank westwards he went to a box

hidden away under his bed and slipped a small parcel

into the pocket of his coat . Then he sauntered

away over the familiar trail to the sea, along the

sand, and back again to his old meeting-place with

Marion. The wind had fallen , and a solemn hush

Treacherous Calm 217

seemed over all the green peninsula , as if in

sympathy with his mood, and the great decisive step

that he was now to take. To the girl waiting there

he brought this time the gift of his whole life , with

no doubts , no hesitations, and no hidden dangers .

CHAPTER VIII

Treasures

MARION was shy, gentle , with possibilities of long

silences, but she was also at times gay with the

gaiety of all young wild things, laughing with little

reason, skipping with happiness like a dryad, approaching

Basil with fleeting caresses such as a

frolicking kitten might bestow. In such a mood

she was that late afternoon . In the enclosure of the

rosebush it was truly St. Martin's summer, warm

and perfumed with scent of pines . The slanting

sun's rays fell full on the girl, as Basil , lounging on

the fragrant carpet of needles , watched her. They

touched the gold of her hair, and the glittering yellow

glory of the great chain of topazes which hung

round her neck, and was held out at the length of

her arms in three long festoons of sparkling light.

It swung gently to and fro, catching the light on its

many facets. In her face were wonder and ecstasy.

It was more than a woman's first sight of jewels , it

was some sylvan creature's first glimpse of the sun ,

or first startled vision of the radiant moon. Basil

218

Treasures 219

remembered the times he had heard the Jewel Song

in "Faust," and listened while that ecstatic fountain

of melody poured from Margaret's throat in bell- like

tones . But the heroine of the poem and the music

seemed by contrast squalid , worldly, and sophisticated

. Nothing that he had ever imagined could

equal the simplicity of this girl's joy, who for the

first time in her life gazed upon this unimagined

miracle of precious stones . In Basil's eyes, too,

these yellow gems were transfigured . In renewed

wonder at their beauty, he could for a moment

almost forget the associations that clung round

them .

For the great chain of topazes, taken that day

from its hiding-place for the first time since Basil

came to Florida , had been to him less a jewel than a

symbol almost religious, a great chain of his

memories, ranging from the happy morning in Paris

when he bought it to that last awful night when

he had seen it weighing down the loved figure of

Kitty. He had brought it to Marion as a wedding

gift, so he told her, and it seemed to him a

pledge of all his future, sanctified by all his holiest

memories of the past. But now, as had happened

before with him when he was with Marion , he felt

the world elude him, fade away into the dimmest

220 Tomocala

vision , leaving him alone with this one woman in the

wilderness. He could still cling to the thought of

Kitty somewhere in the vague unknown, smiling

upon and consenting to this happiness . But except

for her image, he seemed to have been carried by

magic back along the ages, till he was in that first

Paradise with which history began.

Something touched him on the forehead and

roused him from this reverie. Marion had unwound

the chain, which had been passed twice round

her neck, and now swaying toward him, till she

seemed just poised for flight , swung in a long curve

the shining yellow gems, smiling meanwhile. He

put out one hand and caught the chain , and then

pulling gently on it, drew her a laughing but willing

captive to his arms.

"I'll walk home with you to-night," he said , a

little later.

She started . With this speech her world , such as

it was, came back to frighten her.

"Yes, we will tell our secret, " he went on . "My

brother goes away to -morrow, and then on the day

after we will be married, and you will come to live

always with me."

"Pa won't let me ."

Treasures 221

"He must let you . We will tell him to- night.

And your mother will be glad , I believe."

"Yes," said Marion shyly, "she will be glad . I

think mother guessed that something was happening

to make me happy."

This time they went bravely along the secret

trail, Marion taking a childish delight in making the

stiff palmettoes crackle loudly as they crushed

through the thickets , which at so many points hid

the path from ordinary observation . With no

hesitations, no preliminary reconnoitrings, such as

were usual, they passed the screen that sheltered

the entrance from the main trail . And there no

farewell was said. Frightened, yet exulting in

her boldness and feigning , with elaborate selfconsciousness

which broke down into laughter, an

indifference to the strangeness of the act, Marion

turned towards the west with Basil's arm around

her.

The old grey house looked sleepy still , as on that

other day when he had gone to it . Fowls and pigs

were busy in the clearing where it stood ; nothing

else alive stirred . Yet as before, in spite of peace

and somnolence it seemed to watch from behind its

windows, and to have in its deserted silence an air

mysterious and threatening. Involuntarily the two

222 Tomocala

approaching it stopped as they emerged from the

trail.

"Pa's still over to Tomocala for the swill , I guess ,

and Con- Oh ! I didn't tell you about Con , " said

Marion, lowering her voice with an air of secrecy .

"This made me forget it," fingering her chain and

laughing silently. "Con's gone to church up Tomocala

Creek, the Foot- washing Baptists, they call it ,

with Dick White . I don't know how she dared .

Pa'll beat her so when she comes back . He missed

her this afternoon , and he banged ma with a stick ,

but ma wouldn't tell."

"Did he touch you ?" interrupted her companion

angrily.

"I-Oh, I ran away, and then he had to go over

to town ."

The thin dog that Basil had seen before

skulked out from the door and down to greet

them, otherwise the grey house gave no sign of

life .

"He's always lame, " was Basil's comment.

"Pa gets angry. ”

They both stooped with a common impulse and

caressed the wretched beast's head. Then Marion

spoke almost as if in fear, at asking so great a

favour.

Treasures 223

"Could I take him with me, Basil ? so that he can

be happy too. "

"Certainly, dearest."

They had started again towards the house when

the girl stopped, as if struck by a sudden thought.

"Ought I to take mother ? He beats her worse'n

he does Sammy. Could I take her too ?"

"Would she want to come ?" asked Basil in return

Marion hesitated.

"I don't know. She don't mind beatings much.

now, I guess . And, I don't know-sometimes I

think she likes pa , spite of everything . I wouldn't

much mind if you beat me if you wanted to, Basil ,"

she went on, as if meditating on the mystery of

woman's devotion to man , of the quality of which

she now caught a glimpse .

As they talked they went up the steps to the back

veranda . Basil remembered how in some occult

way the old house, when he first saw it , seemed to

promise that it would bring changes in his life .

These changes had indeed come, he thought, yet in

the house nothing was changed . A speckled hen

foraged along the hall, and a brown sow, established

under the staircase, suckled two tiny pigs . In the

big room there was the same confusion of filth and

224

Tomocala

tattered elegance, and as the breeze swept through

the windows from the Carnaveral , the golden bells

of the green jade pagoda still tinkled, stirring the

imagination with suggestions of the East where

nothing can seem strange .

"I've tried to keep it cleaner lately," said Marion ,

glancing round as if she had learned to see the place

with new eyes, "but pa wouldn't let me. Now we

can have clean new furniture from Tomocala, can't

we, in your house ? And you won't let the

pigs come in, will you ? I'll do what I want,

won't I ? "

She did not wait for an answer.

"No one's here," she announced , and then, as if

carried away by this new- found freedom, she ran to

the pagoda, jingling its bells with her finger as she

circled round it , and laughing like a happy child .

They went through the empty room and out upon

the veranda . The sun was setting, and the western

sky and the river were both aglow. Upon the rippling

expanse of the Carnaveral one dark spot

travelled slowly towards them, the familiar rowboat,

laden with the refuse of the settlement and

with old Harriman. Half-way down the sandy

stretch to the wharf was the bent figure of a

woman, alternately raising a heavy axe, and bringTreasures

225

ing it down with a kind of convulsive, tired energy.

Mrs. Harriman was splitting firewood.

Marion caught sight of her, and with a little cry

rushed down to her, the lame dog following at her

heels . Basil saw her throw both arms about Mrs.

Harriman's neck, and knew that while he came

slowly across the loose sand towards them, she was

telling the old woman their secret . For an instant

he saw Marion stand back and hold up to her astonished

mother one long festoon of the topaz chain ,

which caught blood- red lights from the crimson sky,

then take her again in her arms and murmur half

inarticulately to her of this new happiness . As he

came near them Mrs. Harriman disengaged herself

from her daughter, and turned to him, in painful

embarrassment, he could see, yet with a grotesquely

heroic attempt to seem dignified, even brave .

cast one quick, frightened glance upon the river

where the black rowboat was coming closer in to

shore, then nervously rubbing her hand on her faded

thin blue gown, finally raised her head with a pathetic

little jerk, which had , in her whom Basil had

seen before silent, bent, and cowering, an odd air ,

almost of bravado . She gave him her hand.

She

"I'm right pleased to meet you, " she said. "I'm

right glad that you " She paused, and her

226 Tomocala

struggle to go on was almost painful . Then she

suddenly broke out , speaking more rapidly, as

though deeper feelings had swept away her embarrassment

. "I know I ain't brought up them gals

like I ought ; I surely does know it . But their pa

is-well , he's mighty curious. They ain't had no

fair show, and I reckon I'm to blame. " The tears.

began to stream down her yellow, furrowed cheeks,

but she went on . "Marion's a good girl, though ;

and she's a lady , ' cause her ma wa'n't no pore

white trash like we-all was. She'll make you a

good wife. You do want to marry her right,

don't you ?"

"I do , Mrs. Harriman . "

"She's a good girl . Make her happy. She ain't

never had no chance to be happy. "

"You ain't neither, ma," interrupted Marion.

"You are to come and live with us, so pa won't beat

you , and the hogs won't worry you , and you won't

have to split wood. You can split wood, can't you,

Basil ? Anyhow, I can . You're to live with us

always ."

"No, I reckon I won't come."

The older woman

suddenly relapsed into the kind of unemotional

stupidity so common among the ignorant women of

the backwoods. The dull veil , which for a moment

Treasures 227

had been pulled aside , seemed again drawn over her

face . Yet there was, in spite of this, a kind of a

look of craft, a sort of elusive suggestion that years

of weariness and fear had taught her to conceal all

feeling . "No, I reckon I'd better not," she said ,

almost stolidly. Somehow her tears had not quite

stopped flowing yet, and she caught up a fold of her

skirt to dry them. "You'll be better off without

me. "

"No, ma, no, " protested Marion .

"Besides , who'd cook for your pa ? He ain't no

hand at cooking, " she said with an air of explaining

to Basil . Again she looked furtively at the river,

and it seemed to him that in one briefest second the

varied emotions of the long years passed as if in review

through her eyes. Then "I guess I'll stick to

pa , and to Con. I ought ter. Con and her pa

don't always get on very well ," she added , again as

if for the third party's sake.

"Con won't stay long, I don't believe , " said

Marion in a hushed voice. "Then, ma, you could

come. "

"No, Marion. Perhaps he won't be quite so

curious. You gals worry him, you know. Anyhow,

I can stand it ."

"But you won't be happy."

228 Tomocala

"P'raps I won't never be," assented Mrs. Harriman.

"But when you gals is fixed , somehow I

guess I can stand it ." She paused a moment, and

Basil found himself suspecting in astonishment how

it had happened that she had endured this long marriage,

that looked like slavery. A curious look

seemed to him to come over her face. "He's the

father of my little gal I've told you about that died ,"

she said. "I dunno but I'd as soon stay. There's

a sight of things about being married you don't understood

yet, Marion . You can make her happy,

you know, " she added to Basil , " if you'll only try

just the littlest mite. "

"God knows I'll try," he answered fervently, with

solemnity in his voice. They stood silent for a little

while, watching the rowboat come along the last

part of its ruddy sunset path and touch the wharf.

The old man stopped a minute before he made the

painter fast, shook his fist at them, and, so they

guessed, began to mutter blasphemies. Marion had

been drooping on her mother's shoulder ; now she

raised her head and smiled at Basil.

"It's funny," she said ; " I'm not afraid of him

now. "

Mrs. Harriman, however, spoke in sudden agitation.

Treasures 229

"How are you going to tell him ? Oh, don't

make him mad, don't!"

The old man was half- way up the path.

"I thought there was some wood to split , " he said ,

seeming to take no notice either of Basil or of

Marion . His wife without a word turned to the

pile of logs and took up the axe. But she did not

start to use it . A little way off she stood through

all that followed, her eager eyes strained first upon

one and then another of the three.

stooped and picked up a block of wood.

Old Harriman

With it he

The dog

managed to catch Sammy on the ribs.

limped away hurriedly, yelping sharply with pain.

"If that dog was worth his salt , he'd have driven

you off before now, instead of leaving it to me.

Why in hell are you here ?" The enquiry was at

last directly to Basil-" Haven't you been warned

off, you skulking hound ?" He went on, comparing

the intruder to various kinds of vermin , of which it

was difficult to rid oneself. Basil glanced once at

Marion, wondering what effect this filthy torrent of

oaths could have on her. She smiled back at him

bravely, a little frightened perhaps at her father's

vehemence , but in no way astonished at his foulness,

unconscious of it in fact , as some flower might be of

the vileness of the soil from which it had sprung.

230

Tomocala

"What do you want ?" asked the old man at last,

stopping his curses , as he usually did, from mere

lack of breath .

"I can tell you now you've stopped swearing.

Though really I want nothing from you .

You've

to listen to what's been decided . I'm going to take

your daughter Marion away to -morrow and marry

her."

There was a moment's silence after Basil spoke.

Mother and daughter exchanged a quick look of terrified

anxiety. Then , as they waited , the old man

began to laugh softly.

"Marry her ?" he chuckled .

Marion, and to her he spoke sharply.

you get that ?"

He took a step towards her.

He looked at

"Where did

She retreated ,

catching up the great lengths of the topaz chain and

holding it as if to protect it against her breast.

"He gave it to me ," she faltered .

"Then why wait till to-morrow?" The old man

turned to the younger again, who too shrank from

him for one fleeting instant, almost frightened by

this queer merriment. "Why not take her away

to-night ? Why marry her ? Why should he

marry you, my dear ?"-again he spoke to Marion-

"you'll go with him for the pretty jewel. Oh, it

Treasures

231

won't be the first time it's happened here ." He

stopped. Basil saw an odd glitter of rage in his

deep- set eyes . The old man pointed suddenly towards

the feathery green China tree that stood by

the side of the old house . "He gave her two strings

of pearls, they said . I saw them, and I never

guessed. Oh, but I forgot" -he laughed again—

"you didn't know her. But they are all

alike. "

"I dare say you think so . And I won't stop to tell

you what an ignoble and unworthy father I think

you've been to the two children you chose to bring

into the world . "

"Don't, " retorted Harriman . "I brought them

into it for myself, not for you."

"Exactly. But you didn't reckon with me . And

one of them at least I'm going to rescue. I'm going

to take her away to - morrow . "

"Not to-night ?" insinuated the old man in a tone

that made Basil white.

"Don't insult her," he broke in . "I tell you I'm

going to make her my wife."

"About time, I guess," muttered Harriman under

his breath . "How long has this been going on?"

he asked Marion , speaking louder.

"I don't know."

232 Tomocala

"I'll teach you to sneak off to your lover while

I break my back fetching swill back from Tomocala

for you and the other hogs. I'll teach you "

But this time Marion stood her ground . Her

head was raised , as old Harriman perhaps had never

seen it before.

"He won't let you beat me now. He ain't going

to let you beat ma . You don't dare touch Con,

and if you hurt Sammy we're going to take him to

live with us , too ."

"You impudent slut- " began Harriman, starting

towards her.

"Don't be a fool, " interposed Basil, standing between.

Harriman drew back an arm, still powerful .

Basil caught him by the wrist and held him.

"You're an old man , Harriman . I have to remember

that. And you're not insane, are you ?

Try to remember that as well ."

"No, damn you," was the snarling reply, as Harriman's

arm was released and he stepped back.

"I'm not. You mean that I ought to be glad that

you are to honour my family with an alliance. My

God, my God, you are a fool !"

He seated himself on the step leading to the

veranda, and broke again into his strange, mocking

Treasures 233

laughter, slapping his leg the while. It ran

through Basil's mind that he was dealing with a

madman , when Harriman suddenly became calm,

and began to speak quietly, with the accent and the

unmistakable air which marked him, even in his

squalid decay, as a gentleman.

"I don't dislike you , Forrester," he said , "though

one's manners do grow odd in the wilderness , I

must admit . In fact, my example is probably worth

following in very few ways indeed . I can see that ;

I'm not insane, as you were good enough to observe

. I have my reasons for not caring for the

world as I find it ."

"So have I ," said Basil quietly .

"I choose to live like this"-he glanced around

in scorn-"with a dull, ignorant cracker woman,

some hogs, and the litters of both breeds . Is that

any reason why you should do likewise , my lord ?"

His voice had grown gentle, almost caressing, but

there was mockery in the last words, in the false

obsequiousness of this new mode of address.

I know the honour done the family when Lord Basil

proposes for my daughter's hand , but I also know

what a fool his lordship is ."

"Oh,

"Why do you call him lord ?" It was the girl

who spoke, her eyes on Basil , and a look of exalta234

Tomocala

tion, almost religious , in her face. "Is he Lord ?"

"It's just my name, " answered Basil hastily. "It

doesn't mean anything especial. "

"I call him lord, my dear, " her father went on,

"because his drunken blackguard of a brother can't

hold his tongue . He's had to tell them over at

Tomocala that this is Lord Basil, that he is Lord

Alkinloch, and that one or the other of them will

be the Marquess of Kingstowne some day."

"I don't understand, I don't know what you

mean," murmured Marion helplessly, her eyes filling

with tears.

"Of course you don't, you fool . By gad, " the

old man chuckled , " to think that you, you, if he marries

you, will be the Lady Basil Forrester. "

"No, no, " protested Marion eagerly. "He knows

I wasn't brought up to be a lady. He don't blame

ma for that, and he don't blame me, because I'm just

like ma."

"Yes"-it was old Harriman who spoke "she's

just like ma. You don't think so now, because she's

young and fresh, and her hair is yellow. That's

how they always catch us .

shrivel and grow old soon.

She'll change , she'll

But their souls are always

the same ; it's their lying souls that trick us ;

that's what tricks us." At the end , he seemed to

Treasures

235

be talking half to himself. Marion roused him,

Marion with her strange , new bravery.

"You don't understand, pa . He loves me and I

love him—and it makes him happy."

Harriman looked at her with curiosity, but he

made no answer. Then he turned to Basil.

"I think it must have been your grandfather I met

once, at dinner at the British Consul's in Tientsin , a

tall, thin man, with white hair and moustaches ."

The faint tinkling of the pagoda bells struck on

Basil's ear. The mysterious atmosphere of the grey

house closed round them. It was always thus ;

when one had for the moment come to think of

Harriman as a common East Coast ruffian, one was

suddenly taken back to civilisation , and beyond that

to the Orient.

"He was in the East a good deal , I believe . I ,

of course, can't remember.”

"That would be he , I think. Yes, I'm sure

Kingstowne was the name. An ass about Eastern

politics, so far as my recollections go, but a fine

aristocratic type . "

"Yes, he was that."

"Is he alive still ?”

"No."

"That's a pity. I can imagine how delighted he

236 Tomocala

would have been to welcome a cracker from the East

Coast as a granddaughter. It ought to be made

clear to you , dear Marion , " he went on, turning to

his daughter with a new politeness which was in

itself insulting, "if it is possible to make anything

clear to you. Your young man's family, back in

England where he came from, all live in large

houses, and wear beautiful clothes . They never

work. They know how to read and write . They

would think of you about as they think of a nigger.

They wouldn't speak to you, they wouldn't even let

you feed their hogs. They wouldn't think you were

even good enough for that. Very likely, if they

knew that he had married such a girl as you, they

wouldn't speak to him. They'd be ashamed of him.

It wouldn't be long before he'd be ashamed of you. ”

Basil stretched out a reassuring hand to her.

"It's none of it true," he said.

"It's true, and you know it . You ought to be

grateful to me for putting the case so well. You're

not insane either, are you ? Picture this girl in

England . She can't even be a lady in Tomocala,

she knows that herself. Think of her humiliating

position there . Come, you must see the difficulties .

Or are you a complete fool ?"

"I have no intention of returning to England.

Treasures

237

Even if there were difficulties , I have no need to face

them ."

"Oh, they will have you back there some day,

even if they don't want the Lady Basil . "

"I think ," said Basil with a smile , "that you

exaggerate the importance of younger sons, -and

their wives ."

"How would they like her as the Marchioness of

Kingstowne ? And yes , now I think of it , wasn't

your brother coughing his lungs up a little while

ago ?"

"He's quite well now . If hisill health were any

obstacle to my marriage , it is removed now. Be as

reasonable as you like. Granted that I couldn't

very well have married Marion if he hadn't got well.

What does that matter now ?"

Marion had followed the conversation as best

she could, a pained look of failure to understand in

her eyes half the time. half the time. But here her face cleared ,

as she came to Basil's help .

"You don't understand , pa . That's how he

asked me to marry him, if his brother got well," she

smiled triumphantly.

"Humph ," grunted her father, "not such a fool as

he seems , after all . Do you know what that means,

Marion ?"

238 Tomocala

The girl was again confused and frightened after

her bravery.

"I dunno," she faltered .

"Well, it means that if his brother were to die,

your young man would become a great man ; that he

couldn't have such a wife as you-then ; that he'd

be ashamed of you then ; that you would spoil all his

chances in the world ? That's why he wouldn't

marry you unless his brother got well. But he

thinks you good enough for him if he stays in this

hole."

"Is it true, Basil ?" she asked , looking a little

pale, yet smiling at him. "You can say what you

like . I reckon I ain't good enough for you anywhere,

nohow."

"Yes, yes, dear, you are," he protested .

"I know more than you think, pa, " she went on

with a pathetic touch of pride. "I know I couldn't

go to St. Augustine or-England-isn't it ? But

he's well now, isn't he ?" she asked almost vehemently

of Basil. "You said he was.

And you

said it'd make you happy for me to marry you. I

didn't ask for you to marry me. I don't want to do

you any harm. I didn't know you might have to go

away. Oh, you won't have to go away now, will

you ?"

Treasures

239

"No, Marion. My brother's well . He starts

back to- morrow to England.

And he leaves me

here-in Paradise, " he added gently.

"What's Paradise ? " she asked .

"Where you and I can be together, and where the

world can't find us out."

She threw herself on him, and for the first time

her tears began to flow. Basil's arm was about her,

and with one hand he patted the golden head, as if

it had been a troubled child's. On the top step

leading to the veranda , sat old Harriman , whittling

at a chip of wood and chuckling softly. The sun

had set and the brief, grey twilight of the tropics

rested for a moment on the river. It was the old

man who broke the silence.

"Hurry up, old woman, with your splitting," he

shouted to the bent figure by the woodpile . " ' Cause

I want some grub, and damned quick, too . As for

you two, you're going to marry her to-morrow, you

say ? Well, if this is the best you can do , instead

of taking what life offers while you're young, I don't

know that I can express my opinion of you better

than to let you have your way. Marry her ! Good

Lord, I did have more respect for you than that .

Get out, will you , you poor specimen . ”

Marion dried her eyes.

240 Tomocala

"I'll have to cook supper, " she said. "Goodnight,

Basil."

"I'll come for you to-morrow, " he said. This

time he took her hand , and held it firmly in farewell .

"To-morrow."

Then to Harriman, " Remember, if you lay hand

on either of them I shall know it , and you'll pay for

it, old man though you are."

"All right, sonny. I won't touch either of them, "

Then as Basil turned to go , with a chuckle the old

man added , "I'm waiting for Con ."

"Don't touch her," said Basil.

Harriman made no answer. He rose and went

slowly into the house . But as the younger man

started homeward in the half- darkness along the

trail, he heard the old man's voice growing shriller

as he grew more blasphemous, cursing Constance.

The sound was disquieting somehow ; the voice one

which must be kept out of Paradise , if it were indeed

to be Paradise. Basil was happy, yet his happiness

had still some thread of vague, uncertain

fear. He wished that to- morrow had come and

gone , that his flight from the world had already been

completed , for in old Harriman's voice the world

still seemed to menace and deride him.

CHAPTER IX

Victims

THE Coming home that night seemed to Basil the

second great milestone in his progress . One had

been when revelation had come to him by the secret

rose, and he had returned to his cabin to find Alkinloch

there that was Freddy's first night in Tomocala

; this his last . Was there something, the

younger brother wondered, that tangled the fates.

of the two together ? Was the dim foreboding

which he felt a sign that his happiness still lay in

his brother's hand. For months it had been there,

he could admit that now. Alkinloch's death would

have been a call from the world that he must have

obeyed. He would have brushed aside the mists

and dreams that made his happiness and gone back

to realities , to London as he knew it. Yet the reluctance

which he felt to make any such return was

evidence to him, even leaving out of consideration ,

if that were possible, his love for Marion , of how

far he had made himself a part of this vision of a

simpler life . In life , as chance had placed him in

241

242

Tomocala

it, he had proved himself a failure, unequal to its

responsibilities , weak before its temptations. In this

primæval woodland existence , this Eden which for

him , in a cabin by the Carnaveral with Marion,

might almost be free from the taint of the knowledge

of good and evil, he felt that he could be a

man. The sacrifice of it had been almost demanded.

To-morrow was to be witness that it had not been

asked . As he meditated the foreboding disappeared,

like clouds gradually scattered by a steady sun .

What mischief was there, he asked himself, that

Alkinloch still could do ? It was womanish fear

to doubt his actual safety when he had come safely

through the danger of so many months . As for

drink and debaucheries, they had only seemed to

make him ruddier with the health which was Basil's

title to freedom . Disease was conquered . Alkinloch

would be married in a month ; in a year or so

heirs would have finished the work of cutting Basil

Forrester out of the old , distrusted world.

The cottage was empty when he came home, but

there were glowing wood embers on the hearth and

the fresh smell of tobacco smoke in the room. On

the table were the remains of the simple evening

meal which Lord Alkinloch had laid for himself, and

by the door was a small portmanteau which he had

Victims

243

evidently been packing. Basil stepped out upon

the veranda . The night was just light enough to

show shadows against the grey of the river and on

the wharf he saw his brother's figure, evidently

bending over to untie the rowboat.

"Hello, Freddy !" he called . "You've packed

up, I see. "

"Yes, there's a boat going up to St. Augustine

to-morrow. When do you think of going to bed ?"

"Hadn't planned. "

"Well, sit up for me if you like and we'll have a

good-bye jaw."

"You off to town now ?"

"I'm off on a very particular errand, my son , not

for good little hermits like you to know about."

"All right, Freddy. Make your farewell calls .

I'll smoke a pipe or two and wait. "

The boat went off into the blackness of the river

and the splash of the oars finally died away. Basil

turned back to the house, lit a lamp, and remembered

that he had had no supper. He ate some cold

corned-beef with bread-there had been no butter

in Tomocala for a month. Then he lit his pipe and,

as the evening seemed a trifle chill , threw some

fresh logs on the fire . When these blazed up he put

out the lamp and, pulling his one comfortable chair

244

Tomocala

up before the hearth, sat down, puffing a meditative

cloud of blue tobacco smoke into the air, and thinking,

as he had so often in those early, lonely days,

of the House of Harriman and its fortunes.

The old man remained a mystery , -neither his

history nor his character wholly to be understood .

His future, however, and that of the bent, yellow

cracker woman who bore his insults and his cruelty

and yet seemed to love him, seemed certain to be

what they had been for years, except that loneliness

might increase for Mrs. Harriman when she was

left alone with her strange lord and master.

those early evenings it had been about the shadowy

figure of Marion that his wandering thoughts had

gathered . Marion's future was now secure . There

was left Constance , and somehow to-night it was

with new interest , with a new pity and kindness ,

almost brotherly, that he thought of that proud,

beautiful, wild creature as he had seen her that one

time in the long room where the pagoda stood. He

remembered how then the hint of tumultuous, unruly

passions there was about her had made him

avoid even the thought of her as part of that world

he had turned his back upon. Would these same

qualities, he wondered , ever lead her out into that

world to which she seemed so naturally to belong,

Victims 245

whose rich pleasures she must instinctively divine

and ask as her own right ? He hoped that something

might catch and keep her here in this wilderness

, where alone , as he knew so well , there was safety.

The strangeness of her inheritance and the very

insolence of her beauty would mark her in that outer

world , he could not help feeling, for some tragic

and ill - starred fate . It would be better if she could

be induced to cheat her doom in some cottage here

with a man to whom she might bear children , making

bonds which should fix her here . It was natural to

think of Dick White and his patient wooing . He

had always wished its success . Now more than

ever he did so, the thought gaining warmth and

kindness from his own happiness , and finding hope

in the decisive step which Constance had taken that

very day in going with Dick to the church meeting

up Tomocala Creek.

The wind, rising a little as the night deepened ,

stirred the trees outside, and, as the tide rose, made

the waves of the Carnaveral lap against the dock.

Basil threw another log on his crackling fire , filled

his pipe afresh, and fell to thinking of a Sunday the

spring before when curiosity had led him to ride

back into the woods to see the May church meeting

of the Primitive Baptists. As he went over it again

246 Tomocala

while he waited for Alkinloch , it deepened his sense

of the mystery and romance of the land to which he

had emigrated, and it prepared his mind to some extent

for the visitor who was to come later that night

to break his solitude.

Even now, when the tourists invade Florida in

their thousands in the yellow cars, there are such

festivals in the deserted stretches of the flatwoods ,

strange , pathetic religious rites seen by none but

the native Floridians themselves . In the towns

negroes work themselves into hysterical religious

emotions before crowds of giggling whites who

crowd the churches as if they were theatres. But a

few times a year in some remote recess of the forest

the primitive church performs its ceremonial. The

scoffer, if he is there, is a "cracker " himself, and has

ridden his mule or his rawboned horse from some

isolated farm. The church meeting draws its congregation

from a radius of some twenty or thirty

miles, but even now rarely from the towns .

Basil remembered how he had gone back over

mile after mile of wandering tracks , at times barely

to be traced over the pine needles . Often he lost

his way, and it had been impossible to ask it , for

even the rare farmhouses had been left that day in

the charge of pigs and chickens. He had stopped

Victims

247

once or twice, to water his horse at a sulphur well

flowing in a sunken tub where strange, grey- blue

growths like seaweed flourished , or to cool himself

in the thick shade of the China tree which usually

grows by such artesian fountains . The ramshackle

cabins and the sandy yards looked stricken with

poverty. The lean hens seemed to scratch out all

that even tried to grow in the hot, dry kitchen

gardens. It was a marvel how life could be sustained.

The only conceivable source of it seemed to

be the wild brown hogs which Basil occasionally

heard crashing through the underbrush , where water

was, or foraging over the more open pine lands.

They wander freely, but they are all branded , and to

this day in Florida it is more dangerous to shoot a

pig than a negro.

The church- house "up the creek" was a rough

structure, lit only from the opening that served as

doorway and from the spaces between the logs that

made its walls . It stood in the pine woods about

half a mile from the stream, where the trees had

been thinned out a little .

sight, nor within a mile.

There was no house in

Yet this desolate spot

seemed a convenient centre for the scattered inhabitants

of the region . Here they came riding

horses and mules, or driving them in grotesquely

248

Tomocala

antiquated vehicles . They came to a religious ceremonial,

but they came also, as Constance and Dick

White, to a social gathering, bringing dinner with

them, wearing their best clothes, exchanging the

gossip of the season , making its matches. Basil

remembered how blankets had been spread on the

hard-packed earth near the preacher's platform and

how here played or slept the smallest children while

the mothers , during the praying or preaching, occasionally

went outside for a chat . Girls in their

cheap finery sat together on the back benches, and

giggled with the younger men. Constance must

have found it more intoxicating than any girl's first

ball had ever been, thought Basil, smiling.

Yet it had had its profoundly impressive religious

side , as well . He remembered the older men and

women, sallow , high- cheekboned , sad, furtivelooking

creatures , placed on either side of the table ,

as befitted the brethren and sisters of the church.

He remembered the preaching, falling almost at

once into a monotonous chant which took on at

times in the strangest way the cadences of the Mass,

and rose sometimes to a kind of hysterical frenzy of

half-intelligible words which quieted the congregation,

even to the giggling girls , as if by some

hypnotic spell. There had been two preachers on

Victims 249

the occasion of Basil's visit to the church-house, and

these, helped out by a young lay aspirant, had

preached for hours. This time, so he remembered

hearing from Dick White , a powerful exhorter from

over Kissimmee way, Willie Elwell, was to be there.

He was noted for his ability to make " folks get

religion" and repent of their sins, so Dick had said .

Basil almost wished he had gone . It would have

been curious to see the effect of this man upon such

primitive ignorance as Constance's.

To himself, however, the celebration of the Communion

and the curious ceremony of the footwashing

had been more impressive than the preaching.

The wine had been taken from its bottle, first opened

with a corkscrew by one of the preachers sitting at

a rude table covered with a white cloth , and poured

into thick, white stoneware coffee-cups . The bread

was upon a plate of the same material, -homely

dishes such as served them in their own poor farmhouses

. They ate and drank with no ceremonial, yet

with the solemnity that mere quiet always brings.

The mystical element of the Mass seemed absent ;

this was a simple supper that they ate, in commemoration

of that one so long ago in Palestine.

"Has every one been served ?" he remembered

that the preacher had asked , and that one woman

250

Tomocala

who had been outside with a crying baby had been

given her sup of bread and wine . Such one could

imagine early celebrations might have been , in the

days when Christianity was a faith of peasants and

the poor of towns. It was all the stranger now to

find this hint of the primitive church in a log cabin

set among the whispering Florida pines.

Then had come the foot-washing. Tin basins

filled with water from the creek were produced .

One preacher took off his shoes and his thick, homeknit

socks . The other, girding himself with a

towel , knelt by his comrade and after a lowmurmured

salutation and prayer washed the other's

feet in the tin of water and dried them with the

white cloth he wore bound around him. This office

was then performed for him in return . And on

either side of the little altar, bending laboriously

down, sisters did this humble service for sisters and

brothers for brothers. Then there was prayer

again, followed by what was quaintly called " goodfellowship

meeting." The communicants all stood

and every one solemnly shook the others in turn by

the hand, wishing each God- speed until the next

church meeting. TThheerree hhaadd bbeeeenn one feeble,

shrivelled old woman in a black silk sunbonnet

standing by a fat, middle- aged daughter, down

Victims

251

whose cheeks tears were streaming freely. The

mother was the oldest Christian of them all , but it

was not to be hoped that she would live to come to

the church meeting in the autumn. It had not been

only the daughter, nor only the women, whose

eyes had been wet as their hands grasped the poor,

thin, old claws in "good fellowship. "

This was religion as it brought its message to the

backwoods country, too forlorn to be noticed by any

but this obscure, shy sect. This was the church as

Constance's mother had known it in those halfforgotten

days when she " had heard of God, " as

Marion had told him . To-day Constance had, for

the first time, seen the world and heard of God, such

world and such God as existed in the wilderness .

The quiet of the night, and the memories he had

just gone over made him frame a wish that was almost

a prayer that the world and what powers there

be above it might treat this wild Constance tenderly

and give her happiness.

The peace of the night and the seeming happy

and simple solution of the problem of his own

troubled life made it easier to believe that his prayer

for another might be answered . The vague forebodings

which earlier in the evening had assailed him

fled away. The fire on his hearth warmed him.

252

Tomocala

And he felt that all around him, for every one,

difficulties were being swept away, chapters

concluded happily. To-morrow his backward

flight would bring him to Arcadia in the Golden

Age.

The earlier flurry of west wind had died down.

The night, too, had gone through a restless hour to

peace. Then upon its stillness there came the faint

sound of oars . Basil in his chair by the fire raised

his head to listen . Alkinloch was coming home, he

supposed. Yet afterwards he could remember that

at the time he had thought the strokes too agitated

and violent for his lazy brother. It is possible that

for one moment he may have wondered whether

anything could have happened to Fred, and this

boat hurrying across the blackness of the Carnaveral

be bringing him the news.

missed at once and easily.

But the fear was dis-

Basil rose and went to

the doorway, his figure showing black against the

flickering firelit interior. Nothing seemed to tell

him, so he was to think afterwards when he went

over the memories of that night, that instead of

chapters concluding happily around him , the most

violent that he had known was even then opening

out before him, and that, by the tragic ordering of

events, he himself was again to be put on trial for

Victims

253

his happiness and his honour, -for the peace of his

soul .

He watched and gradually upon the dim , grey

river the moving black spot that was the boat disengaged

itself, coming straight to the dock. It

came under the darker shadow of the bank, and as

he knew that it must now be alongside the landingplace

he started slowly across the veranda as if to

stroll down the path. A voice, not Alkinloch's , rang

suddenly out :

"Stop ; which one of you is it ?"

There was an instant during which Basil did not

recognise it. Then-

"Dick, is that you ?" he responded with great

friendliness in his tone.

"Yes," came back. "Where's your brother ?"

"I don't know. Over at Tomocala, I

thought . "

Dick White was coming up the pathway. "I

reckon I'll see for myself, " he said roughly, and

brushed by Basil , who saw him go into the cabin

and look around its single room with an angry, halfbewildered

air. The owner followed him through

the door.

"What's up, Dick ? "

"I'm a- lookin' for your brother. "

254

Tomocala

"Well, sit down and wait for him . He'll be back

any minute."

"You ain't got no call to be by when I find him.

If he ain't here , I reckon I know where he is . Got

anything to drink ?" He asked the question

abruptly.

"Yes ," said Basil, fetching a glass from a shelf at

the side of the room and shoving a bottle across the

table towards his visitor . "You didn't use to be

much of a drinker , Dick."

Then sud-

"Mebbe not ," was the sullen answer.

denly he flared up into anger, till his hand trembled

as he poured the whiskey out. "Who got me

started at it ?" he demanded. "You know. Damn

him ! I know why it was now. So as he could

go across the river to her while I was swilling it

down over to Tomocala . Well, I'll learn him as

how he learnt me too much."

He gulped down half of what he had poured out,

then angrily smashed the glass down on the table .

"No, I won't drink his whiskey, though he never

treated us to any as good as this in town . ”

"It's my whiskey," amended Basil quietly.

Dick grunted inarticulately, then slowly taking

up the glass he drained it . He smiled at Basil.

(It was evident that he had already had something,

Victims 255

if not of this admirable quality, across the river. )

Then he gazed at him with sudden suspicion , quickly

passing into a feeling more violent.

"Was it you told him about her ? If I thought

SO " He did not finish his threat, but instead

slumped down into a chair by the table, and looked

half-abstractedly at the bottle and beyond it at the

fire . "Oh, Lord , Lord, " he went on in a lower voice

that quivered with feeling , "when I think how I

used to come here and talk about her like I never

talked to nobody else ."

"You mean Constance Harriman ?"

"Who else could I mean ? Oh, you're a lord,

too, so he says. Are you all skunks like that ?

Did you send him after her ? Perhaps you've been

coming it around the other one, Marion . Perhaps-

"Stop, Dick," cried Basil sharply. He came

across the room and sat down across the table from

his visitor.

"Tell me, Dick, and pull yourself together-what

has my brother done ? I must know. "

"He's ruined her." Dick spoke solemnly, as if

for the moment his pity was greater than his

anger.

"How do you know this ? Did he tell you ?"

256 Tomocala

Dick laughed ironically as well as half- drunkenly .

"No ? Well, then, did she ?"

Dick rose from his chair. When he spoke it was

in a torrent of words so over-laden with anger, pity,

shame, and half-blended astonishment at the scene

of which he spoke that Basil sat dumb and fascinated

"Did she tell me ?" repeated Dick. "She told me.

She told everybody at the church meeting up the

creek. Willie Elwell was a -preachin '. And he

prayed and he exhorted and then he prayed again

until it was enough to drive anybody plumb out of

their mind. And then the women commenced singing

one of those high , creepy kind of hymns that

goes through you, and Willie Elwell kept on right

through it calling on sinners to come to Christ and

confess their sins, till he worked himself up right

powerful. And then old man Streeter's old woman

and her daughter got the power and was on their

knees by Willie Elwell and was a - screaming and

praying and confessing to beat the band . I thought

it was sort of comic like , and I looked at Con and

then I see she was a - trembling and wild -looking.

" Curious, ain't it ?' I said to her, but she didn't

seem to hear me. She just kept looking at Willie

Elwell and kind of swaying with the hymn- singing.

Victims

257

And then she stood up and I could see her eyes and

they looked like she didn't know where she was .

But you could see how she was feeling something

mighty powerful . Willie Elwell, he went on about

the temptations and the weaknesses of the flesh and

cursed ' em all and said how many poor sinners there

was everywhere , men who was bad and women as

was led astray through loving them. Then she broke

out and told ' em , broke out before all them women

that had been a - looking at her before as if she was

mighty queer. She said she was an unworthy sinner,

that she wasn't pure. And she went out to

where them Streeter women was and kneeled down

in the new pink silk dress . And she said he giv' her

that and then she up and tore two great long gashes

in it with her hands . And that made her cry more

than anything somehow, and she broke down, and

they all sang hymns and prayed like hell. "

"And she told them it was my brother ?" Basil

put the question as Dick White paused for an instant

and glowered at the fire .

"Willie Elwell asked her , ' cause he said he would

make him marry her . He won't marry her. "

"I'm afraid not, " assented Basil.

"I could have told ' em that. There wasn't no

good of their screeching and praying ."

258 Tomocala

"What did you do ? Did you say anything ?"

"No, I just sat quiet, thinking and planning something.

"And afterwards ? "

"Well, it was all over after a while and it seemed

like Con waked up from a kind of dream.

" I dunno why I did it ,' she says to me kind of

stupid- like. And she didn't say she was sorry no

more. And somehow she didn't seem ashamed like

she was when she was repenting in church.

" He said he'd take me away,' says she . ' I

guess he'll marry me if I ask him to. Then they

can't say I'm so wicked .'

" I heard he was going up to Augustine on the

Rosie B. to -morrow ,' says I, and then she began to

cry."

"Were you taking her home ?" asked Basil.

"Yes. The preacher said he was going to take her

home to her father and see that things was fixed up

right. But she wouldn't let him ; seemed almost

like she had forgotten what had happened at the

church meeting . Elwell got mad and he started off

to Tomocala without her. I expect he'd go over to

old man Harriman's alone. He ain't afraid . She

come along with me. " He stopped a moment and

then : "I tried to comfort her," he went on mediVictims

259

tatively. "I kissed her, and she let me. Somehow

she didn't seem to notice. I don't expect I'll ever

kiss her again. Why don't he come home ?"

Dick roused himself from the kind of reverie into

which he had been sinking . He started for the

door.

"I'll find him," he said. "I know where he'll

be."

"Dick, what are you going to do ?" Basil put the

question as a sudden alarm and instinctive comprehension

of the other's mood swept over him.

The answer came slowly, in Dick's drawl which

was usually so good- natured.

"I'm going to fix him. I'm going to learn him

what he can't come and do down here ."

"Where are you going ? To Harriman's ? I'll

come along with you. "

"No," said Dick. "You ain't a-comin' with me ;

see ? You're his brother and you've been a kind

of friend of mine. I don't think it's just exactly

appropriate that you should come along now. No,

it ain't no use trying to stop my going, nor trying

to go along with me. ”

Dick was by this time out of the cabin and down

the steps to the path. He faced Basil against the

black background of the night , one hand half in the

260 Tomocala

pocket where Basil guessed there was a pistol. He

had suddenly become in himself a symbol of all the

lawlessness of this lonely land , of all the roughand-

ready chivalry of the West.

"When a man does like that to a woman he's got

to pay for it here. I don't want to do it , but if you

try any tricks with me now I'll shoot you , too . I

swear to God I will."

"You're drunk," said Basil .

"Well, perhaps I be, " came slowly in reply. " But

it was him got me to taking too much.

to pay for that now, too . "

He'll have

He went slowly down the path into the darkness .

Basil started to follow him, and was stopped by a

sharp warning from the black shadows which made

the danger seem real to him for the first time . He

heard Dick clamber into his boat, and saw the dark

spot creep along under the bank . The sound of

rowing was now slow, measured , almost stealthy.

It died away, and then Basil awoke from the kind of

lethargy which had seemed to hold him.

Now he accused himself of cowardice. But while

Dick had told his story Basil's sympathy had been

with him and with Constance and her broken pride ,

rather than with Alkinloch. The bitter memory of

his own fault and its punishment, the vivid presence

Victims 261

of his own repentance seemed to give him the right

to judge . He condemned his brother. For the

moment the ties of blood meant nothing . He had

experienced almost rejoicing at Dick's anger and

his threats of vengeance . Now his eyes were

opened, and the figure of murder was before them .

To prevent this seemed now his only duty . In

a swift revulsion of feeling he branded himself a

useless , inactive, faltering creature . Down to the

wharf he ran , untied his rowboat and jumped in .

The oars were gone ; out on the dim expanse of

water he thought he could see two white streaks

which might be they, floating towards the inlet with

the tide upon which Dick must have thrown them,

cunningly making himself safe from pursuit as he

stole upon the old grey house and its inhabitants.

The wind was dead and the sailboat consequently

useless . The white streaks drifted out of sight and

reach. But this perverse opposition to immediate

action stirred Basil , roused him as the cut of a whip

lash might. The way by the water was cut off, but

there still remained the land . Two green trails and

a stretch of white sands divided him from Harriman's,

a path along which he had gone on many an

errand, but on none more urgent than this on which

he now sped , plunging through the black shadow of

262 Tomocala

the dwarf pine wood and racing across the starlit

billowing of the dunes . What sinister tragedies the

grey house might see to-night he did not dare to

guess. His mind was intent on Dick creeping upon

the house from the waterside , Dick aflame with

rage, made rash by drink, Dick coming to this house

where already, so Basil thought, fierce and dark passions

might be alight. But he had no plans of action

for his arrival. Indeed , when he stopped to

think he knew that Dick, if he went straight to

Harriman's, must inevitably arrive before he himself

could . He only felt as he panted along the trail

back from the sea that he alone could even have the

forlorn hope of giving warning of the breaking of

some dreadful storm . At last he saw the yellow

glow of the window in the room where the jade

pagoda stood , and as he stumbled up the steps

caught sight of the Earl of Alkinloch within , and

saw Marion by her mother's side. With a catch in

his breath he realised that he had perhaps come in

time, or that Dick had not come at all .

CHAPTER X

The Price

LATER Basil was to learn just how the company

in the Harrimans ' big room was assembled. Willie

Elwell had come first, alone , to break the news , as

he imagined, to a grieved and angry parent, and to

aid him to meet the crisis as a Christian should .

Old man Harriman was indeed angry, but his manner

of confronting the situation was a mixture of

contempt for the girl and half-admiration , halthatred

of her seducer , which infuriated the preacher ,

a profoundly devout and fanatical man in no way

afraid of Harriman. There had been high and violent

words between them. But Elwell remained ,

his thin , yellow, clean- shaven face hardened into

an expression of grim determination to force events

into channels that he, and not Harriman , should indicate

. He was seated on one of the rickety chairs ,

near the old man's. Near by stood Marion and her

mother, the girl's arm around the older woman's

shoulders. Farther down the room, beyond the

fireplace, and by the green pagoda , were Constance

263

264

Tomocala

and Alkinloch , as if they had just come in by the

door on the river- side. Constance was in the pink

silk dress, awkwardly made, yet lovely in the freshness

of its colour in this dingy room. Freddy,

standing a little behind the girl, was red- faced and

defiant- at bay.

"Where's Dick White ?" Basil asked urgently , as

he came in , panting from his last spurt through the

loose sand of the trail. "Is Dick White here , I

say ?"

Every one turned to him, startled at his violent

and sudden entrance, but it was the old man who

was first to reply.

"Why should there be another of you whelps

here ?" he snarled. "Is he after the old woman ?"

"Has he been here , Marion ?" Basil asked , paying

no attention to her father.

"No , " she answered .

"He mustn't come."

She slipped away from her mother, and went towards

the door into the long passage.

"I'll watch , " she said as she went by Basil, "and

let you know if he comes. "

"No , I'll go ," objected Basil .

"No, please , no . Stay and see if you can help

Con. Poor Con !"

The Price

265

These few sentences were exchanged in lowered

tones . No one seemed to notice Marion's departure ;

every one by this time seemed to have forgotten

Basil's presence. It was true , he reflected, that

Marion could see Dick land. Indeed, there had been

time for him to land already, and now, reasoning

more calmly, he thought it probable that he might,

after all , have crossed the river to Tomocala. Basil

could stay, he felt . He did not realise, perhaps , how

the drama happening in the long room riveted his

interest, made him half forget danger.

"Then you decline to do justice to this unhappy

creature, this woman who is already your wife

in the sight of God ?" It was Elwell who put

the question , making the well- worn phrase ring

solemnly, spoken in his deep tones .

"I have to do justice to a great many people

besides her. What are you meddling

for ?"

"She is one of His sheep ."

"She's the daughter of that black old ram there ."

Alkinloch glared at Harriman. "This affair is between

him and me. I know what he thinks of

What does he expect ? They say his wife

had to run away from him because she couldn't

stand his damned brutality."

women .

266 Tomocala

"You lie ! By God , you lie !" Old Harriman

jumped up from his chair. His eyes fairly blazed at

Alkinloch . "She never knew what unkindness was.

She ran away because she was a-

"Don't say it, man. " The preacher's voice rang

out so unexpectedly that it pulled up the speaker

short.

"Glad to find you know the word I mean, Mr.

Elwell," he said finally with a sneer, sitting down

again.

"I ain't never blamed her." Constance spoke.

Her head was thrown back proudly, and the light

glistened on her sleek, dark hair. Basil suddenly

remembered his first sight of her, before trouble had

come. She met her father's gaze now with a courage

as untamed as then.

"He'll take me away with him," she said, with a

backward movement of her head towards Alkinloch

. "And I'm a-going."

"No," cried Elwell.

"Certainly you're not , my dear. " Old Harriman's

voice was silky.

"I certainly am. " The girl's speech was gradually

taking on more strongly the backwoods intonations

of her stepmother. "What for you think I

want to stay here ?"

The Price 267

"Anything is better than a life of shame."

She turned on Elwell.

"Shame ! What's that ? Ain't this shame ?

Ain't we just niggers, pigs here ? He knows ; pa

there . He knows anything would be better'n staying

here. He knows how I hate him. ”

She paused a moment, looking at the old man

contemptuously. Then her anger broke out , and

she began :

"I ain't never told you, pa , just what I think of

you, but I'm a-going to now."

As she went on they were all silenced, though

varied emotions of resentment , astonishment, and

horror must have moved them all to protest . For

Constance, in her ignorance , borrowed from her

father's own speech the terms of abuse for him.

Blasphemous and foul oaths fell from her lips , and

vile expressions rained down on his head.

It was

the tired, frightened mother who first found the

courage to speak.

"Con, Con," she quavered, " you mustn't talk like

that. ”

"How else should I talk , ma ? I ain't ever heard

any other sort of talk . "

"You never heard me-

"You've always been scared to speak out. If you

268 Tomocala

did, you'd speak about pa just as I do . He's

The sentence finished in another strange , abominable

phrase. Alkinloch touched her lightly on the

arm .

"Don't, old girl . Your mother's right. "

The girl suddenly seemed to grow conscious, shy.

When Willie Elwell spoke this time she looked at

him with an almost frightened expression.

"Haye you forgotten, you wretched and abandoned

woman, that not six hours ago you knelt at

God's feet and begged for mercy and forgiveness

for your sins ? Have you forgotten that Christ

forgave you and that you were washed clean by His

Blood ? How has your soul turned black again

within you? How can you turn away from the

light of His love to sin and abomination and hell

fire ? What did you mean ; answer me? What

did you mean when you asked our prayers?"

"I dunno," she answered , with a stupid, halfcomprehending

air. "You made me feel queer. I

did what you told me," she went on. "I asked him

to marry me. But he can't ' cause he's a lord . "

"Again I ask you , sir , as you value your honour

and the salvation of your soul , will you make this

girl your wife ?"

The Price 269

"No," Alkinloch answered . "I tell you I can't .

She understands."

"Then, Constance Harriman , you must give him

up. You must let him go, that is , if the boys over

to Tomocala ever let him go without doing you

justice, which I doubt. "

"He's going to show me the world ," said Constance.

"Besides," she added in a lower voice, "I

can't let him go, nohow." She turned to Alkinloch

and, swaying towards him, lifted her head and

just brushed his cheek with her lips . There was a

softer light in her eyes. "I can't let him go without

me, nohow ."

"You aren't going away." It was the old man

who spoke. "But he's not going without you,

neither. He was warned . He can't say he wasn't

warned. You may think I'm an old man, but I'll

teach you that my teeth aren't drawn yet . "

"Basil! Basil !" It was Marion's voice, with a

note of alarm in it. She stood at the door nearest

the river- side of the house . "There's some one

been out here underneath the window . I just saw

him . Perhaps it is Dick ."

Basil started down the room, but in spite of himself

turned at the sound of a scream from Constance

and a scuffle at its farther end . Old man Harriman

270

Tomocala

had a pistol in his hand , but the preacher, and an

instant afterwards the girl, were upon him and had

caught his arm. They struggled a moment and

then Elwell, wrenching the weapon from him,

stepped to the open window and threw it violently

out. They heard it crackle as it fell upon a clump

of stiff scrub palmettoes .

"It is written ' Thou shalt not kill ,' " the preacher's

voice boomed out.

"Dick, Dick," called out Basil at the door.

"Thou shalt not kill, " repeated Elwell within .

Then there came the sharp crack of a pistol shot .

Looking back, Basil saw his brother sway and fall .

Then down the path toward the river he saw a dark

figure flying. Pulling his pistol out of his own

pocket he aimed at it , shot , and then ran quickly

down the path . He heard the clatter with which the

fugitive threw himself into the boat. There came

a shot in return, and Basil stumbled and fell with a

quick, sharp pain in his leg. He got to his feet ,

however, and plunged down upon the dock. He

heard the splash of oars , but the rowboat , lost in the

shadow of the bank, he could not make out . He

shot once at random . Then Dick's voice came out

of the black distance :

"I got a line on you there on that dock, " it said.

The Price

271

"I don't mean you no harm. But don't you try to

get into one of them boats to follow me."

Basil hesitated, then with a feeling that no foolhardiness

now could ever atone for his delay in the

long room while Dick must have been hiding near, he

started to step down into Alkinloch's boat , which lay

alongside .

"Look out !" yelled Dick . Then Basil found

himself caught from behind.

"He can shoot you, dear, he can shoot you. Come

back . If you was to be hurt, I should die. Come

back ; oh, do !"

It was Marion, clinging to him desperately. The

splash of oars grew fainter in the distance , but he

could tell that Dick was now rowing with frantic

haste.

"You can find him to-morrow," the girl pleaded.

"Come

you ?"

back to your brother now, won't

"Is he alive still ?"

"Yes, and groaning. Pa says he's done for ; and

Willie Elwell's praying on his knees by his side .

He'll want to see you if he's going to die."

Basil gave one look at the darkness of the river

and then turned . Up the path he limped , conscious

now of a sharp pain in his leg . As he went across

272

Tomocala

the long room towards his brother lying on the

floor, he left a trail of tiny drops of blood along it .

Marion saw this, and gave a cry as he knelt by

Alkinloch's side.

Constance had stripped his coat and shirt open

and had stanched the little outward bleeding there

was from his wound with a great mass of the thin,

rose silk of her skirt . She was on the floor by his

side, a hand on either of his shoulders, her pale ,

tragic face bent searchingly over his. By the fireplace,

in the battered relic of a gilt Empire chair, sat

the old man, puffing into the room a great cloud of

blue-grey smoke from one of the cigars he imported

from Havana.

Basil called his brother by name. Alkinloch

slowly opened his eyes, and seemed to make a feeble

effort to brush off Constance's hands upon his

shoulders . The girl took them away silently, after

one single gasping sob.

"Rum lot, Bassy," murmured the dying man .

"Damn them ." Then he seemed to grow pale with

pain or faintness . Constance's head went down

into the hollow underneath his shoulder. The whole

crumpled mass of pink at his side was stirred convulsively

by her crying . Finally Alkinloch spoke

again.

The Price

273

"You've got my job now, old man, and you'll be

going back to England , won't you ?”

Basil made no answer, though his head sank lower

as he bent over his brother , almost as if he were answering

affirmatively.

"Good luck," Alkinloch went on , and then again,

almost inarticulately, " Good- luck-for you. Don't

begrudge you- Damn ' em. Damn-

He seemed to faint away. A minute later there

was one quick shudder of the prostrate figure . Old

Harriman flicked a long ash off his cigar.

"He's gone, I guess, " he said.

Basil put his hand on Alkinloch's breast.

"He's gone," he repeated .

"God in His mercy save his soul. We ask this for

Christ's sake . Amen."

After Elwell spoke there was no sound for a

minute except that of Constance sobbing. The

preacher silently put the dead man's arms straight,

and Mrs. Harriman with shaky hands closed his

eyelids . At last Marion touched Basil timidly on

the shoulder. Her face was wet with tears.

"Your leg's bleeding still , " she said . "Won't

you let me tie a cloth round it ?" Basil seated himself

in one of the deal chairs , and pulled up one

trouser leg to the knee. He was bleeding still , but

274

Tomocala

only from a flesh wound . Marion found some rags

just outside the door and, kneeling , put a bandage

on. Then she went over to Constance , who lay still ,

her face hidden , on the filthy floor. She bent over

her and whispered her name. The older girl rose

slowly to her feet. She was no longer crying, and

she wiped away the tears from her face with her

pink sleeve .

"My goodness , Con," said her mother, " you've

ruined your skirt. ”

The girl looked down.

patches on the rose -pink.

and then said very gently :

"It don't matter, ma.

it's only his blood on it.

There were great scarlet

She smiled ever so faintly

He give me the dress , and

Besides I'm a-going up to

change. I should have worn the blue anyhow to go

away ."

"Be you going away, Con ? I should have

thought you could stay here- now. "

"She will stay, mother, " interposed the old man.

Constance turned her pale face toward him.

"No , I ain't a- going to stay, pa . Don't begin

cursing and carrying on . It ain't nothing to me no

more. You ain't nothing to me, pa, and you can't

scare me no more. I'm growed up."

"Speak English, will you !" rapped out her father.

The Price

275

"I'd rather speak like ma than like you, pa. I'm

going away, I tell you, to - night. He was going to

make me see the world.

going to see it by myself."

Now he's killed and I'm

"Where are you going, woman ?" Willie Elwell

put to her sternly.

"First I'm going to find Dick White , and— ”

"You aren't going away with him now ? After

this ?" broke from Basil in amazed revolt.

"No, I ain't going away with him. I just want

to find him." A look went across her face , a faraway

something in her eyes which made Basil understand

. He seemed to see her again , as she had

appeared in his reveries earlier that night, marked

out for tragic and ill-starred deeds and fate. He

went quickly to her side , and catching her arm

looked her straight in the eyes .

"I understand, Con . But don't. That's what I

must do ."

For an instant she drew away from him, and held

her head more proudly, as if claiming vengeance as

her own. Then suddenly the stupid, sullen , cunning

look he had seen before in the inhabitants of the

backwoods swept over and changed her whole face.

She answered as if she had not understood

him.

276 Tomocala

"I've just a -got to find him and then I'm going

up North."

She started towards the door. Before it stood

her mother. The events of the night had done

something to rouse her, too , from the lethargy of

years. It was as if in Alkinloch's death there had

been emancipation for all in the old grey house . Old

Harriman sat in his cloud of smoke, smiling his

faint, mocking smile, but he was no longer ruler .

He could still scoff, he could still make them suffer ,

but he could not command. Even bent, shrivelled

Mrs. Harriman found a little courage , where she

never had had any before.

"If you go, Con, it'll be powerful lonely here for

me alone with your pa ." For an instant she glanced

at the old man. "It'll be mighty hard ."

"You won't be alone, ma .

Marion."

"Marion's a-going to be married . "

You'll have

Constance turned in astonishment to her sister,

who was still kneeling by Basil's side , just finishing

binding up his leg.

"Him ?" she asked.

"Yes," answered the younger girl, her head

pressed for a moment against her lover's arm .

Constance went across the room to the two .

The Price 277

"I'm glad, Marion, " she said , and the girls kissed

each other.

Perhaps each wept a few tears.

Then Con spoke to Basil.

"You got the pick of us ," she said . "And I

guess you'll be good to her. Marion don't know

much about men,-and things." She paused a moment,

looking at them. "Ain't it wonderful," she

went on, "you're going to marry her."

"Yes ," said Basil, involuntarily pulling himself

straighter.

"And you're a lord , too ." Constance meditated .

The air somehow grew close , and Basil felt himself

tugging at his thoughts , trying to hold them

back from headlong flight. In the silence he heard

old Harriman chuckle , and it seemed as if at that

sound they were released and dragged him after

them. He looked at the old man, and clenched his

fists at his side in helpless rage.

"Yes, he's a lord , too , now, Con. He's going to go

back to England and be the Marquess of Kingstowne

some day, thanks to Dick White. He can't marry

Marion now any more than his late lordship could

marry you . So perhaps your ma and I will have

our dear girl with us after all. ”

And he re-

Basil heard Marion cry his name.

membered that he had said " No , no , " hurriedly and

278

Tomocala

fiercely. He was vaguely conscious that old Harriman

went on talking. But for the time he sat

among them alone with his own thoughts, face to

face, at last , with his temptation .

He could realise now that he had never, even for

one second, believed that his brother would not live.

Even while he had delayed to take the final step that

would link him forever with this new life and plunge

him into eternal forgetfulness of the old , there had

been no real doubt in his mind of the end . He had

never believed that the world would have anything

to set before him which could really tempt. But

now on the floor before him lay Freddy, growing

cold. And in the distance he seemed to see the flare

of beacon lights along the coast of England with

which the past signalled to him to return .

lay wealth, pleasure-more than that, duty. There

lay everything which a year ago he would have

thought made life worth living. Here on this barren,

low-lying coast there was only forgetfulness ,

and love . But even if he could count the world

well lost , could he ( and here his memories poisoned

the very fountain of his hopes ) , could he , who had

proved so weak and unstable in the past, dare believe

himself capable of unchanging love ? His emotions

had tricked him before when he had sworn, God

There

The Price

279

knew with what deep sincerity, to make Kitty happy

always. Ought he not to ask himself whether they

deluded him now? Would it not be the greater

kindness, even to Marion herself, to wrench himself

away now rather than stay and try to do for her

what he had failed to do for Kitty.

Then flushing at his own thoughts , and despising

himself for what suddenly seemed cowardly attempts

to twist logic to his own uses, and to hide

his own weakness under the cover of a pretended

unselfishness and thoughtfulness , he faced his temptation

squarely. Yes, it would be good to go home

as he might now go. A sudden homesickness

rushed over him. He saw the lights of London ,

and he breathed again the perfume of English gardens

and the smell of heather. The whole land

called him. For a moment at least he was ready to

go back. For a moment he was ready, as he had

been so often before , to buy his own happiness at

the cost of a woman's. Again the world was too

powerful for him. Again, if he could have seen

clearly, it was proved that for him the only safety

lay in flight beyond its reach , in refuge in the first

Eden. For he stood not only face to face at last

with real temptation , but looking squarely at treachery

and dishonour.

280 Tomocala

A breath of wind stirred the pagoda bells and

called him back to consciousness .

"Is it true, Basil, is it true ?" Marion was

asking him. The words were re-echoed from his

memories.

He found courage to answer, "No." His

thoughts had gone beyond control, but he could

still force his words to speak for a better man than

he felt himself to be.

Marion stood before him bending forward, her

face pale and tear- stained , her hands clasped tight

together. Her eyes searched his. His struggled

not to answer. Yet what they saw wrung his

heart. Her gold - crowned beauty, her love and her

surrender complete and pathetic , burned themselves

into his memory, making the vision of the future

for ever bitter -sweet. It shamed him into a fresh

struggle.

"I always knew I wasn't good enough for you ,

nohow," she said , " but you said you were happy .

And I ain't forgot you only said we'd be married

when your brother got well ."

"We will be married now ." He had a curious

sensation that some one else spoke the words for

him , yet, he thanked God , they were what he wished

them to be.

The Price 281

"You don't need to be afraid to tell me, dear ; I

can understand. I'm growed up , too , like Con said.

I guess we're all growed up after to-night ." She

cast one long glance about the room as if she saw it ,

and the world, with new eyes. "If it's right, I

want to marry you and go to England with you, —

because I love you."

"We won't go to England. " The words came almost

involuntarily from Basil.

Old Harriman chuckled .

"But you want to go , don't you ? Tell me," she

demanded with an odd note of command in her

voice. "I must know."

"There are many reasons, " he answered , speaking

gravely, "why I should like to go. But there

are at least as many why I want to stay here . You

are one of them, you are the best reason. "

"So I'd be keeping you here ?"

"He can't take you to England, dear, " interposed

Constance gently, "except if he doesn't marry you .

I know that ; Fred told me. If you was his wife his

folks would hate him . ' Cause it ain't right for a

lord to marry a cracker."

"Your father ain't no cracker, Con. " Mrs. Harriman

spoke almost angrily.

"Will you take me to England without marrying

282 Tomocala

me, Basil ?" Marion asked anxiously. "I don't

care ."

Willie Elwell sprang to his feet and fixed his

stern eyes on the young man.

Basil smiled a wry smile.

"No, dearest," he answered gently. "I won't do

that."

"Then I'm keepin ' you here ."

"Don't you want to keep me ?" His weakness

broke into a cry to her for strength . "Oh, try to

keep me, dear."

"Yes, try, my dear. " It was Harriman's scoffing

voice. "You're a poor critter. But you , " he spoke

to Basil, "you're a poorer critter still. Be honest

with her. If you're going to break her heart, have

the courage to do it. What are their hearts for?

Don't they break ours ? He wants to go , but perhaps

you can keep him , Marion ."

"Do you want to go ?" she asked again.

"I want to stay."

"If Dick had hit me, too , when he shot him,

would you have wanted to go ?"

"Yes," answered Basil.

nothing to keep me then."

"There would have been

She threw her arms around his neck and , kissing

him , sobbed on his breast.

The Price

283

"All I want is for you to be happy," she murmured

through her tears. Then detaching herself

from his embrace , she slowly unwound the great

chain of topazes from around her neck.

"May I give it to Con ?" she asked . " She ain't

never had anything pretty to wear, except this pink

silk, and that's spoiled now. "

Constance took the chain , and stood dumbly

gazing on it, as if fascinated by its yellow

lights .

"You must go to England, Basil . "

He made no answer. Temptation , so it seemed ,

would not be routed . Again England called him.

Again his mother's voice reached him, preaching

duty. And again there stood before him a pale ,

golden-haired woman, ready to sacrifice her own

happiness because she loved him. His brain and

heart whirled in a turmoil of conflicting arguments

and emotions. His face grew drawn and old as

Marion watched and tried to read it.

"You must go to England, " she repeated .

"How could I go and leave you here ?" he broke

out, putting this inner question to her, again in his

weakness asking help from her strength .

She was silent an instant. A look of pain swept

over her face ; as she stood, swaying slightly, she put

284

Tomocala

her hand to her heart for one moment in a gesture

which suddenly stirred bitter memories in Basil.

Then she smiled faintly, like a frightened child, and

it seemed to her lover, as he looked at her , that never

had she seemed more the incarnation of innocence ,

of the simplicity of the primeval wilderness . Even

as he felt that he was giving it up , he caught a vision

lovelier than ever before of the new dream world

which he had found by the Carnaveral , and he felt

his heart contract with a pang of sorrow. Marion

was still smiling faintly , tenderly, at him out of her

pale- blue eyes.

"You'd let me go ?" he asked.

unhappy ?"

"And not be too

"You don't need to think of me, " she said. "I

can fix that."

Then her eyes swam with tears and the smile

faded . She caught her mother's hand , and for a

moment buried her head and muffled her sobs on the

old woman's shoulder .

"Oh, ma, ma," she cried ; " it wa'n't no use trying

to be happy. "

Then, with her arm held up to cover her tearstained

face, she went swiftly to the door. There

she stopped, gave Basil one fleeting look, and went

on. Outside in the night they heard her hurry

The Price 285

down the steps. Basil thought he heard her murmuring

good-bye.

In the long room there was silence . The five

who were left stared at each other questioningly.

It was old Harriman who spoke . He suddenly

pulled himself up from his chair and started across

the room .

"After her, you cur !" he cried . "Good God,

don't you see what she means to do ?"

Mrs. Harriman began screaming shrilly, and in

a rush together Basil and she were out of the house

and down the path toward the dark water of the

river.

The old man, following them, caught Willie Elwell

by the arm.

"Preacher," he said , " it's years since I thought

much of women. But, by God, sir, they beat men."

CHAPTER XI

Good-bye, Tomocala !

By the river tiny waves were lapping against the

dock and the boats , but there was no one there.

"Marion, Marion !" Basil called out.

Mrs. Harriman gripped his arm convulsively.

"Look, look !" she said .

Even before he saw he began tearing his coat

off. Then somehow the night seemed to lighten,

or their eyes grew accustomed to its blackness . On

the dark tide that swept down the river they saw

faintly a drifting something that sank again as they

looked, below the surface of the little dancing waves.

"Thank God !" cried Basil, and he was as he

spoke in the water, chilled by the approaching

winter, swimming frantically out toward the spot

where she had disappeared . His leg , where the

wound was, was cut with a pain like a knife , and

he was terrified lest he should have a cramp . The

water seemed to stretch illimitably before him, a

black waste where he searched vainly. Suddenly

he heard Mrs. Harriman's voice again. "There,

286

Good-bye, Tomocala ! 287

there !" she screamed .

rise like a ghost Marion's pale face and floating,

yellow hair. The girl's arms struggled wildly,

and the splashing helped to guide him . He caught

hold of thick masses of her hair. The tide was

against him now, and the distance from the

dock had increased . His wounded leg was almost

useless . Just how he swam as far as the boat's

stern, from which Willie Elwell stretched out helping

hands to him, he never knew. But it was accomplished.

Marion lay limp and almost unconscious

on the wharf. He found himself wrapped in

the preacher's coat, and saw Marion carried up to the

grey house in Elwell's arms, followed by her mother

and Constance . He noticed how the wind had

drifted the clouds apart till in tiny patches the stars

shone . He heard old Harriman speak to him in an

altered and a kindly voice.

And a little way off he saw

"You all right ?" he asked .

"Yes ," answered Basil , without turning to look

at him. "I'm all right now; -all right."

And indeed for him in the few minutes just gone

by the world had changed . Within had happened

the miracle , wrought by the catastrophe of the

night. All doubts and all hesitations had vanished .

He walked in the serene, clear atmosphere left by

288

Tomocala

a storm that has passed, and before him he saw

stretching, clear and inevitable, the path by which he

was to go. A half-hour ago there had been for him

flaring beacons on the cliffs of England , the sky he

had seen crimsoned by the reflection of the lights of

London. Now the cloudy heavens arched over only

his own Floridian land and river. The wilderness

welcomed him home at last.

The world had tried its last fascinations, had set

its last lure for him, and had failed . It had put

its temptations before him, calling them alternately

pleasure and duty, and his weakness had almost

yielded .

Marion had saved him , choosing in her abandonment

of self- sacrificing love the one way in which he

could have been saved . He thought with awestruck

horror of how closely his miserable history

had come to repeating itself. Once before his weakness

and his disloyalty had exacted the sacrifice of a

woman's life ; when Marion's white face and floating

hair rose upon the cold surface of the Carnaveral he

had seemed to see Kitty lying dead among her pillows,

the pale gold of her hair streaming across

them. The intolerable shame of that first sacrifice

became doubly intolerable now. As he had struggled

against the ebbing tide of the river he had

Good- bye , Tomocala ! 289

sworn that if he could not save Marion he would at

least die with her, and be swept in her arms out

through the Inlet with its white- capped breakers

over the sandbar to the oblivion of the Atlantic beyond.

And if they should come safe to land he

knew the future. There could be no reasons, no

arguments whatever, to dissuade him. His life was

to be always with Marion and to make her happy ;

that was the only reparation for the past, it was the

only conceivable duty he could find in life . And it

was indeed the only conceivable hope . Flight must

be made still further from the world , Tomocala itself

was the world in little . Tomocala must be left behind,

as London had been. It must be abandoned

for some remoter solitude, some perfect isolation

in the mysterious and untracked depths of the tropic

wilderness. Earlier ages had sought in it the

legendary Fountain of Eternal Youth . Something

of the influence of their old adventures still seemed

to linger like a hint of magic in the land. Basil

now could believe that he would find for himself

some hidden Eden where blue skies and love were

perpetual, and where history had never begun and

the world was not. This was the solution of his

problem. In his new home the stars should be as

near and as companionable as the earth . History

290 Tomocala

should begin again, and begin aright. He would in

time cease to believe that anything had ever been

real but his own Paradise . Marion and he, like

gods, would re-create the world that they might live

in it. As once to London, he now said good- bye to

everything. He felt a passionate and solemn happiness

, disturbed only by a new feeling of sorrow

for the humanity that could not discover, as he was

discovering, this mystic gate of exit from a world

gone wrong.

In the long room of the old grey house they laid

the body of Lord Alkinloch on the cot. Mrs. Harriman

found somewhere a clean white cloth and

spread it on the face . Near the foot sat the old

man, puffing a cloud of smoke like incense into the

brightness around two candles some one had placed

by the dead man's side . The grey-bearded, old

face was expressionless, almost inscrutable. Yet

somehow the happenings of the night seemed to

have touched him too . He seemed , as Basil had

never seen him before , withdrawn into himself,

meditating in abstraction and in the presence of his

own strange memories. On a deal chair was the

preacher, praying in a low, monotonous voice, as if

he spoke only for himself and for Alkinloch lying

near.

There had been almost nothing said since the

Good-bye , Tomocala ! 291

little procession came up from the river. Upstairs

they heard the women's voices , then the mother came

silently into the room, and Harriman , rousing himself,

said :

"Marion will be cold , ma. Give her a glass of

my port."

"Why, pa , will you let me ?" the woman answered,

looking half- frightened . " I guess it'll get

her het up a little . "

"How is Marion, Mrs. Harriman ? Is she coming

down ?" Basil asked.

"She's all right . Yes, she'll come down when

she's changed into something. I don't reckon as

we'll many of us go to bed to - night. We'll want

to watch by the corpse."

She disappeared, and there was silence again.

Finally at the door he saw Marion .

"Are you all right, girl ?" her father asked.

"Yes, pa," she answered , then she crossed to

Basil .

"You'd ought to have let me go, dear," she

said.

"I'll never let you go," he replied fervently.

"Never.. It's all been a mistake, dearest, an awful

dream . Forget it . I never meant to go to England

. I shall never want to go."

292

Tomocala

"I only wanted for you to be happy. And I

thought-

"The only way to make me happy"-he interrupted

her " is to keep me here for ever. "

"You're sure ?" she asked again, and again she

threw herself upon his breast and cried, but this

time with happiness.

"Mr. Elwell," Basil turned to him, "will you

marry us?"

"What, now ?"

"Now, if that's possible . "

There was some delay before the ceremony could

take place. The bride was dressed in the same tattered

blue she always wore. But Constance hung

round her neck and gave back to her with a bridal

kiss the glittering, yellow chain of gems. And the

girl's mother, disappearing for a moment, came back

excited and flustered, as mothers are apt to be at

other weddings , with a little strip of the cheapest,

coarsest cotton lace.

"I got it to Tomocala once , pa , " she said , as with

trembling hands she pinned it around Marion's

neck. "It cost a quarter, I ain't never dared tell

you till now. Don't it make her look pretty, pa ?"

"Nobody could look lovelier, Mrs. Harriman. "

Basil spoke, and the old woman glowed with pride.

Good- bye, Tomocala ! 293

"She could ha' had my pink dress ," said Constance

, "only it's spoiled ." She suddenly went -

across to the cot where her dead lover lay, and knelt

in her soiled, blood - stained , pink finery by his side .

Later she rose, but all through the service she stood

there, and Basil could not help entertaining the

fantastic notion that, as the words were said which

were to join him and Marion as man and wife, Constance

felt that in some silent, mystical ceremony

of the same sort she and Alkinloch who had gone,

had a part.

It was towards midnight that they stood before

Elwell. The night was silent, but in the little hush

before he began to speak , a bird somewhere outside

chirped a few plaintive , sweet notes , as it woke for

a confused moment from its sleep . It seemed to

Basil to bring greeting from the wilderness , to

promise him and his new bride welcome into its

secret heart. He was at peace with the sands and

the river and the sea, with his world that was to

be. The marriage service , patched together from

Elwell's memory, had nothing of the rich beauty

which Basil remembered. It was simpler, as perhaps

befitted their primitive surroundings. But

the strangeness of the scene and hour and the presence

of the grim witness from the bridegroom's

294

Tomocala

family, lying stark on the narrow cot, gave solemnity

to the words , and the power in Elwell that moved

the church meetings , that had urged Constance to

confess , and ultimately had brought on the whole

tragedy of the night , now made the sacrament which

came last in the hurried march of events a strongly

emotional act.

Questions were duly put and answered, and at

last the minister asked for the ring. There was no

ring, no one had thought of it , no one had remembered

. Elwell paused , awkwardly. Basil instinctively

turned to Marion's stepmother.

"Mrs. Harriman ," he began, "have you

He stopped, for he could see that even through

her wrinkled , yellowish skin she was flushing deep.

"No ," she said, " I ain't got one. "

"Well, I guess we'll have to go on without it ,"

said Elwell . "It's jest as legal . "

"I'd ' a ' liked Marion to have one ," murmured

Mrs. Harriman.

The minister had started again when suddenly

he was interrupted by the old man, who seemed

labouring under the stress of some strong and unusual

emotion.

"Wait a minute ," he said, and he went across the

floor to the jade pagoda. Putting his hand inside

Good-bye , Tomocala !

295

and then up it , he drew out a box of Chinese lacquer.

Every one watched in silence while he fumbled at

his watch-chain for a key and opened it.

"What's the good of bringing ' em up so that

they shan't be like all the others of their damned

female race ?" he asked the company. "They're all

alike . But Marion's not such a bad lot , after all .

Here, young man, here's a ring," and he lifted a

band of gold from the box. "Here's a ring that

was left here once by some one who went away.

Give it to Marion and listen to me, both of you. If

you don't make each other happy may you be cursed

for ever. If you don't treat her well , I'd kill you

And if she was to go away from you

and leave the ring behind as it was left once before,

I'd serve her the same."

if I could .

Basil was looking at the girl. She swayed

slightly towards him . He bent over and kissed her

on the forehead . It might have been an appointed

part of the sacred ceremony.

"We can promise," he said in a low voice.

"It was her mother's ring. I loved her, too, before

I found out what she was and hated her.

You're a pair of fools, but if you're determined to

run the risk, here, take this thing. Get on with

your job, Elwell."

296 Tomocala

Harriman seemed to repent of his momentary

lapse into kind speech . He was gruffer than ever

when he spoke to Elwell, and he ostentatiously

struck matches and relit his cigar during the last

prayer. Yet the last prayer came, the final words

were said, and Basil and Marion stood together,

man and wife .

Then the dead again claimed their attention .

Basil sat by his brother all night , his wife by his

side asleep, with her tired head on his shoulder.

Old Harriman, in another chair, snored loudly, his

grizzled head thrown back ; Lord Alkinloch's body

lay upon the old man's usual bed. Somewhere upstairs

Mrs. Harriman found a bed for the preacher,

and she herself must have gone to her own. Basil

remembered afterwards that towards dawn, when his

eyes were heavy with sleep, Con came into the room ,

dressed again in the blue she always wore. She went

silently to the bedside, kissed the dead man's forehead

lightly, and then disappeared again , to Basil's

drowsy perceptions like a figure in a dream.

morning came they found she had slipped away.

Never again did Tomocala see her. That same day

too Dick White was missing. It was thought in

the town that they had gone away together. Only

those who had been in the grey house when Lord

When

Good-bye, Tomocala !

297

Alkinloch died remembered what she had said then,

and wondered whether the forest or the river hid

the evidence of some tragedy.

Of what happened to her in after years some little

can be told. Men who knew New Orleans , though

perhaps not its better side , in the late seventies ,

will remember a woman called Constance, a dark

and splendid beauty with angry eyes . She was

taken from a resort of the most doubtful character,

so the story goes, by a rich young Brazilian , who

married her. Rio knew her later, gorgeous in a

kind of barbaric splendour. Then fate brought her

tragedy, the tragedy that had seemed to dog her

footsteps always. She had a lover, and she tried

to fly with him , as long years ago her mother was

said to have fled from the house by the Carnaveral.

The plot was discovered and the husband shot her

with her lover-the story makes one wonder and

fear what may have been the truth about the grave

upon which the China tree dropped its purple flowers

in Tomocala.

This all , however, is history by the way. To the

watchers at Harriman's the grey daylight came at

last . Mrs. Harriman brought coffee , and Basil and

Willie Elwell prepared to take the dead man to the

village for immediate burial. They offered , too , to

298 Tomocala

search for Constance, but the old man with violent

words forbade them, saying the girl should never

enter his house again . Basil turned to the mother.

"Perhaps it's just as well," she meditated . “ I

shall be powerful lonely. But Con wanted to go

anyhow, perhaps she's happier away.”

"What are you going to do about Dick White ?"

Elwell asked his companion as they rowed slowly

across the river.

"Make a deposition of my evidence this morning,"

replied Basil, "and let the authorities, if there

are any, do what they like. Isn't there something

about vengeance being the

justice between Dick and poor Fred into my

hands ."

Lord's ? I can't take

In the afternoon he crossed the river again to

the old grey house , alone this time. On the dock

Marion waited for him, and as the setting sun again

crimsoned the Carnaveral he took her to his cabin.

The farewells had been brief. Basil gave the old

man a deed of the Kingstowne tract, and the old

woman a bolt of black silk from the Emporium.

Marion clung to her mother, but her eyes, though

wet, were happy as she stepped down into the

boat.

"Be you going to live in your house ?" asked Mrs.

Good-bye, Tomocala ! 299

Harriman timidly, " 'cause then I could see Marion

sometimes."

"No, Mrs. Harriman , " answered Basil, "only tonight.

To-morrow morning we're going south in

the sailboat."

"Far ?"

"As far as ever we can."

"Are you going to live in Miami ?"

"No," said Basil , and he laughed . " In Paradise ,

I think."

Then they floated out upon the streaming river.

The setting sun which had shone upon their first

love-making now smiled upon the beginning of their

journey into the unknown. The clouds and sea

took on magic tints , and in their eyes was the vision

of happiness. London, Tomocala , the world sank

below the horizon . Nothing existed except their

two selves and love.

BOOK III

THE EVERGLADES

CHAPTER I

Eden

SIX islands there were, rising with their weight

of palmettoes and orange trees from the middle of a

clear lake , the shores of which were great belts of

sawgrass , the outlet from which was a long, winding

waterway which led to labyrinths of twisting

channels through the reeds , to other lonely lakes

bearing on their placid bosoms other heavily luxuriant

islands , fertile oases in the watery desert of the

Everglades . Thirty miles away the San Josefa

River went in rapids down over the great limestone

rim that encloses the brimming waters of the central

basin. At the mouth of the river lay the few scattered

houses around the deserted Fort Scott.

in that southernmost region even now civilisation

seems a mere outpost on the edge of the unconquered

Everglades . In those days the thirty miles.

might well have been a hundred .

But

Secret ways there were into the mysterious heart

of Florida , this was sure . Old Joe Manetti , who

lived in a cabin alone at the head of the San Josefa,

303

304 The Everglades

could thread his way safely, it was said , through the

network of narrow passages beyond his house, guiding

himself by the stars and gaining strange information

from the inexplicable set of currents this

way and that in the curious , clean, sweet waters

which are alive as are those of no mere swamp or

marsh. But Manetti was half Minorcan, half

Seminole Indian, and guarded his knowledge safely.

He was gatekeeper of the Everglades , it was said ; a

guard for the inhabitants within. That inhabitants

there were the legends of the coast had always maintained.

And it was not uncommon in the settlements

by the sea for men to assert that, fishing or

shooting beyond the rapids of the San Josefa, they

had heard voices beyond impenetrable barriers of

sawgrass, seen canoes disappear furtively around distant

corners , or even come upon the huts which these

unknown people called home. But these accounts

varied, and Joe Manetti chuckled derisively when

questioned as to their authenticity. Through long

years the wilderness hid safely those who had sought

its refuge. As once the dwarf wood on the peninsula

at Tomocala had concealed a golden rosebush ,

so through the years the Everglades shut out from

the world the six islands where roses bloomed more

prodigally than ever they had among the pines.

Eden

305

Six tiny isles there were, lying close together and

connected with rude wooden bridges which rose

with something of the curve of those in the Chinese

landscape on a willow-pattern plate . Here in the

sheltered heart of Florida there is little change in

the seasons, all the year round flowers bloomed ,

gardens flourished , and fruits grew purple and gold

as they ripened . On the island round which the

others seemed to hang like a jewelled circlet stood

a low house built roughly of palmetto logs, embowered

in fragrant orange trees and hibiscus blazing

with scarlet blossoms. The long veranda was

half enclosed by the growth of climbing crimson

roses, tawny trumpet-vine, and white star-jessamine .

By the water's edge , where the dock was , there was

a kind of rude terrace, one tangled mass of yellow

roses. Near by along the shore grew hundreds of

irises , a great patch of white , pale-yellow, and deep

purple, with blue forget-me-nots in between.

Scarcely an inch of the home island did not flame

with colour and greet one with heavy fragrance,

while around the sister islands seemed to offer to

load your table with simple fruits of the earth , as

the sparkling lake to supply fish , and the low shores

beyond to give you wild birds and their eggs . Here

in this generous Paradise within the wilderness life

306 The Everglades

seemed given with full hands . Here within the enclosure

of the Everglades , as once in Tomocala the

secret rose had bloomed, so now hidden from the

world in primæval solitude flourished happiness and

love for Basil and Marion, as in the first Eden.

Summers came and winters, the birds migrated

north to return again. Nothing seemed to mark

the years but the coming of three curly, goldenhaired

children. Perhaps the passing of time may

have seemed to bring forgetfulness with it . And

certainly Basil , in this world created from the very

substance of his dreams, could play his part, was

competent, was a man at last. Here he wrought

no mischief, here indeed he made these human creatures

happy, here he was beholden to no man for the

living he made by the work of his own hands . And

it was something that in England great useless

revenues could go to the unhappy and unfortunate

who could not live their lives as he was doing, who

could not fly for ever from a wretched world. As

the years went by he could come to feel that some

reparation, some atonement had been made, and that

he need no longer bow his head in utter shame. Yet

reparation and atonement were not quite complete .

England over the waters still called for another

sacrifice, still signalled to him that his work in her

Eden

307

world must be done by a substitute since he himself

had proved unworthy.

When all else faded he could still see this message

flashing from distant white cliffs .

By the dock one morning lay a rowboat. In it

had been placed a small leather trunk and a dressingbag,

the luggage the boy's father had brought from

that distant, strange England before the boy was

born. For years they had excited the children's

admiration. Now it was perhaps just the possession

of these marvellous treasures which made it

seem real at last to Helen and Constance that Ed ,

having attained the great age of ten, was to go

away. Of course they had known always that this

time would come. They had been told that across

the lake , at the end of many winding channels

through the reeds , beyond great belts of sawgrass ,

oh ! so far away, lay something called the world.

In this world, perhaps across greater lakes , wider

channels , there was the place called England.

was father's land, as this was mother's.

stayed in mother's land because he loved mother so.

But they, though they too loved mother, were some

day to go to father's land. Ed was to go first , because

he was older, also because he was a boy and

That

Father

308

The Everglades

there was so much that he must do in England. In

England, so it seemed, was father's mother, all

alone. She was old ; that meant that her hair was

not gold like mother's , nor her face pink and beautiful.

It meant that she was lonely and that she

needed Ed, to take care of her, since father could

not go, but must stay here to look after mother and

the little girls. In England Eddie had to do all that

father could not do, had not done. Sometimes

Helen and Constance thought this must be a great

deal, even for a boy so old as ten.

This was the day of his going . Father was to

take him in the boat. They were to camp one night.

The next day they would come to Joe Manetti's

house on the San Josefa River. ( Manetti they knew,

he came once a year with a boat piled high with

boxes of clothing and nails and seeds and garden

tools which he got for father at a place called Fort

Scott, where as many as two hundred people lived. )

Manetti was to carry Ed to Fort Scott, and there

some one from England was to meet him and row

him, they supposed , to father's land , in another boat,

while father came home again.

Ed's journey was to take a fortnight , and since

it was so long, it was hoped that his companion

would not object to screech-owls. For it had been

Eden

309

secretly planned by the three children that two of

these birds , in a wooden box, should be conveyed as

a gift to father's mother. The secrecy was necessary

because-well, if father had a fault it was a

distaste for these birds as pets. In the dusk the

night before they had stealthily dragged the box

to the terrace by the water's edge, and hidden it in

the tangle of roses, to be produced at the very moment

of departure .

The night had gone quickly, though Eddie

thought he had not slept at all . He had a confused

memory of some one coming into his room in

the blackness and crying by his bedside. He

thought he had put out a little hand , and called ,

"Mother," and that the crying sound had ceased as

some one took his hand and covered it with soft,

warm kisses. But this was only vaguely remembered.

He seemed to have lain in the darkness and

wondered, till his head almost cracked , about England.

The name he had always known, but lately it

had seemed to grow solemnly beautiful . Merely to

think of it made him almost a man, filled him with.

great hopes that almost frightened him. Merely to

talk of it with father seemed to draw them closer

together than they had ever been. For it was not

only that in England and the world he could see and

310 The Everglades

learn and enjoy as was never possible on their

six islands ; in England he could do something for

father which no one else in the world could do ,

something which would make father happier because

of it every hour of every day and every night,

while he was fishing, or shooting, or pruning the

orange trees, or weeding the garden , or feeding the

pets that Eddie had to leave behind. If in England

he was loving and kind always to father's

mother, if he was always good and honest and loyal

and generous , people-there were many of them in

England, more than in Fort Scott-people would

tell each other whose boy he was, and father away

here in Florida would know and would be proud and

happy. When father had talked to him like this he

had trembled with a strange , new excitement, but he

had lifted his head and taken father's hand in his

and promised. It was so wonderful that he could

do anything so great for father.

They had talked again together the last night.

The little girls had gone to bed, and mother was

busy in the kitchen wing. Basil and the boy walked

out for a minute to the veranda, to look at the stars,

to listen to the lapping waters of their little lake,

and to smell the perfumed air around them. Basil

picked a great rosebud from a bush near by and,

Eden

311

when they came indoors again , shut it up in a small

box, and gave it to his son.

"There's another thing you must do for me in

England, son, " he said. "I've asked you to do a

lot of things , haven't I , old man ?" he added with a

smile. "You must know , Eddie, that when I came

away from England some one I loved very much

had died - died , you know, as the little dog did, that

Joe Manetti brought you from Fort Scott. It was

some one I loved as I love mother now. When you

are older they will tell you about her , and show you

her picture. I want you to go with your grandmother

to the place where she lies . There will be

plenty of flowers there , I think, but I want you to

put this rosebud from our garden here there, even

if it is dried and old , and I think somehow she will

understand that you are there and that you've come

to tell her about us and our islands here , and that

we are happy . And she'll understand , too, that

you're going to be a good boy and an honest man ,

and if you are that always, she will be proud and

happy, just as your mother and I are here. You see

you can make everybody happy at last, if you will ,

old son . "

Then for one instant father, sitting by the table,

put his head down upon the box where the rosebud

312

The Everglades

was and- no , it couldn't of course have been that

father cried . In a moment , at any rate, he was

smiling as he kissed the boy good-night. In his

room Eddie , though he dozed occasionally, kept a

kind of vigil, filled with solemn thoughts, a tiny

knight-errant about to go forth on a great quest .

When the east began to crimson he was up and out ,

saying good-bye to every nook and corner of his

little world, dividing its sovereignty between the

admiring Helen and Constance trotting at his heels.

The sun rose , there was breakfast. And mother

smiled , so perhaps he had only dreamed that she

had cried at night. They embarked in the boat-

[alas , poor screech -owls , destined never to leave the

Fortunate Isles ! ]-and rowed away . Mother in a

white dress with an arm around each of his sisters

stood on the dock, the morning sun making her wonderful

hair shine, oh ! so brightly. The mists of the

morning had cleared away and the green, fertile

islands in their lonely lake were brilliant in the clear

air. Some sudden sense of their beauty must have

come to the small traveller, for turning to his father,

he said :

"Will England be better than this , father ?"

"For you, old son , " Basil had answered . "Not

for me. When you're older, and come back to visit

Eden

313

us perhaps I can tell you more.

Look at home now,

how beautiful it is ! Look at your mother and your

sisters. You'll never see any one lovelier and better

in the whole world . Still the world is good .

You and I will divide it up between us like kings.

You shall have England and all the other countries.

You take good care of England , dear , for I love

that too. I'll keep this ; this is Eden, this is Paradise

. And I've a right to it at last . ”

MERCANTILE LIBRARY,

NEW YORK .

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