NOCTURNE
I saw a dream that made me afraid, and the thoughts of my bed and
the visions of my head troubled me.--DANIEL.
Under the canopy of stars Harry Gardiner lay awake thinking of his
sins; among which he did not, then or later, include any responsibility
for the death of Trent. It was a shocking business, of course, and he
was sorry, exceedingly sorry, things had turned out as they had; but it
was no fault of his. You had to put a stopper on that sort of thing,
in the interests of public decency. He even counted it to himself for
righteousness that he had reacted so promptly and so vigorously against
the flesh and the devil. "I didn't know I had it in me at this time
of day to flare up like that!" he reflected ingenuously. Besides--and
this for Gardiner settled the question and finally canonized his
conduct--had not Denis said that in his shoes he would have done the
same? Only Denis wouldn't have turned coward and told lies.
Gardiner was not given to introspection; he did not like himself well
enough to think about himself, or stir up his own motives. In Denis's
company, however, he was forced to think, because the unconscious
Denis pointed the contrast between them at every turn. _Video meliora
proboque, deteriora sequor_. This was the more painful, because
Gardiner's eye was jaundiced; he saw his own vices very large, his
virtues and excuses very small. He knew that the bloom had been rubbed
off his sense of honor, but it did not console him in the least to
reflect that the rough tumblings he had been through might very well
have knocked out of him any sense of honor at all.
He and Denis had been together at school, from which Gardiner had run
or rather walked away to sea about the time when Denis was going up for
Woolwich. Gardiner went, not from any of the usual motives, but because
kind friends had offered him a clerkship in one of the Dartford banks.
He could not refuse to take himself off his father's hands, but he
would not be a clerk. So one fine morning he came to town, hung about
the Surrey Commercial Dock (not for the first time), and being a likely
looking lad got taken on at a pinch on board the s.s. _Immerwald_,
bound for South America. He signed on as O.S.; but at the last moment
the cook of the _Immerwald_, coming on board very drunk, fell down the
companion and had to be left behind in hospital with a broken leg; and
Gardiner, on the strength of some indiscreet boasts, was turned into
the galley in his stead to do his worst. It must be owned that his
worst was rather bad. But he was quick and handy, and by the time they
reached Bahia he was not cursed by the steward after every meal. In
Bahia he deserted. Latin America had always been his goal. His mother
was half Spanish; he had absorbed the lovely language of Castile in his
cradle.
In Bahia they do not talk Spanish, but Gardiner was not slow to pick
up Portuguese; and in his first shore berth, as cook in a sailors'
eating-house, he added to his vocabulary a smattering of Italian,
Dutch, and Swedish. French and German he had learned at home. He was
un-English in his gift for languages; un-English too in other ways,
notably in his readiness to take color from his surroundings. During
the next five years he generally passed for a Spaniard. He wandered
over the length and breadth of America, going north to Los Angeles,
west to Mollendo, south to Santiago de Chile: good cooks are in demand
everywhere. He was a rolling stone, but he gathered moss, which he
dutifully sent home to the Kentish rectory where he had been born.
At twenty-two he was in the Canaries, where Fate, intervening, pushed
him into his true vocation. An Orotavan _fondista_, who had come into
money and was wild to get home to Seville, offered him the goodwill
of his place for a song. Gardiner accepted for the fun of the thing,
and fell in love with his trade. Inns kept by a butler or a cook are
proverbially prosperous, and he had been butler and cook in one. The
Tres Amigos flourished; Gardiner's remittances home became regular and
substantial. It seemed that he had found his niche at last.
He stayed in Orotava three years. Then, without warning, for the first
time since his son left home, the rector missed his weekly letter. Four
months went by, and Mr. Gardiner nearly fretted himself into his grave.
At the end of that time the correspondence was taken up again--from
Sydney. Over his reasons for this quick change to the Antipodes
Gardiner threw an airy veil. "I was plenty sick of the Islands, I
thought I'd get a move on," he wrote. Mr. Gardiner accepted the
excuse in all good faith. Tom, his younger son, a conscientious young
cadet, thought it sounded rather fishy; but Tom was always a little
distrustful of this un-English brother of his.
The truth being that Gardiner had been burning his fingers in his first
love affair. It was strange, in the life he had led, that he should
have kept his innocence so long. He owed that to his mother, who had
done what few mothers dare--taken her courage in both hands and told
him plainly what to expect. Then she set the seal on her counsels by
dying during his first voyage. She had been very fair, as well as
very wise; her son never forgot her, and found it easier to follow
her advice because her beauty and wits had trained his senses to be
fastidious. But he had a passionate temperament under his superficial
hardness, and, never having fribbled away his feelings in light
connections, he came to Pilar Anguita with all the fire of unspoiled
youth. In her pale tropical lily loveliness she seemed to him the
incarnation of his dreams, flower of the Virgin for whom she was named.
She should have been what he thought her; she belonged to the guarded
class, the class that does not allow its daughters to set foot in
the streets unattended. Her father was a rich man, as riches go in
Tenerife, her mother had been a countess. Nevertheless, this sheltered
lily was pleased to run concurrent intrigues with Gardiner and with an
idle young sprig of nobility from Madrid. Gardiner, it should be said,
had no thought of intrigue; his intentions were strictly honorable, and
he would have been content to "pluck the turkey-hen" outside her window
in humble adoration till he was in a position to ask for her hand.
When he found himself launched into another course he was horrified,
conscience-stricken, eager only to make amends. But Pilar had no
intention of getting married. She preferred to enjoy herself in her own
way in her own home, with the connivance of her _ama_, a latter-day
Celestina. She ran her brace of lovers till she made the inevitable
blunder, and Gardiner arrived on an evening dedicated to his rival.
The scene that followed brought the house about their ears, and Pilar's
career found an abrupt close. She was whisked off to a convent, whence
she eloped, a month later, with one of her father's grooms, who, as it
then came out, had antedated both his rivals by a year or so.
Gardiner did not hear the end of the story till long after. He had
found it expedient to leave the Islands immediately after his duel with
Don Luis. You may call a bullet in the chest pneumonia, and so long as
you do not die nobody can question your assertion. But the very dogs in
the streets of Orotava knew all about the duel, which was conducted on
the American plan of turning both combatants loose on opposite sides of
a wood, to shoot at sight. Gardiner was out to kill; only luck, and a
silver match-box, diverted his bullet from his rival's heart.
He went to Sydney to get away from himself. It took him two years.
Then he came home. England, which he had seen twice only since he was
sixteen, amused him at first; but he soon grew tired of it--it was
too cramped, he wanted more space, fewer people. Still, he could not
go far; his father was getting an old man, and clung to him. A winter
walking tour discovered his ideal on the Semois. He settled his
affairs at the Easedale with his usual luck and expedition, and was
free to start his new life--if only--
Since the affair with Pilar, Gardiner had given women a wide berth. The
burnt child dreads the fire, and besides he was mightily distrustful of
his own temperament. He did not make the mistake of despising all women
for the fault of one; but raptures and revenges, duels and despair
did not fit into the scheme of life mapped out by his practical mind.
Friendships did. He had many friends. He liked middle-aged men, unlucky
men, lame dogs of any kind; and his friends were without exception
better men than he. A choice which showed that, given the chance, he
would grow upwards and not down. And of all his friends Denis stood
first, partly for old time's sake, but mainly for no other reason than
that of all men in the world there was none he respected more.
"Dear old ass!" he said to himself, between amusement, affection, and
envy, contrasting his own easy code with Denis's Puritan stiffness.
"One of God's dandies, that's what he is, but I wouldn't have him
different, no, I wouldn't, though he's putting me in the divvle of a
hole with his whimsies. Of course he's right, I ought to have owned up
at once, it would have been far better in every way. But that unlucky
speech of his gave me a loophole, and I jumped at it--I'd have jumped
at anything then. I didn't exactly shine on that occasion, and he sees
I didn't.... I wonder, would it be better even now to eat my own words
and make a clean breast of it? Upon my soul, I've half a mind to! Ten
to one I shall be caught out over this inquest; in fact, I don't see
how I'm going to escape, unless Mrs. Trent is too ill to show up--and I
don't desire that, be shot if I do! poor little woman."
A blank supervened. He took his pipe out of his mouth and listened.
He was sleeping on the roof, a habit he had learned in Orotava, and
earlier in the night there had been significant sounds below. All was
quiet now, however. "No, I definitely do not want her to be ill," he
resumed his meditation. "I haven't sunk to that yet, no matter what
it costs me. And what will it cost me? Not hanging; Denis was talking
through his hat there, no jury could possibly bring it in murder. But
prison? I'm not sure I wouldn't rather hang."
He stared up at the stars. Walls and a roof instead of the limitless
freedom of the night. Day has its bounds, either a bright blue dome
or a ceiling of cloud, but night is open to the infinite. You may
lose yourself climbing to the pale moon, you may send out your soul
for ever through space beyond the ranges of the stars. There were two
men in Gardiner. By day he was the prosperous practical innkeeper; by
night--even he himself did not know how much he owed to those solitary
nights of his, though he did know that he would have hated to have
Denis spread his mattress on the roof beside him. In cities Gardiner
was an alien; but trees, mountains, rivers were all alive for him,
large calm gracious beings to whom he belonged, with whom he was at
ease. Loneliness and freedom were the breath of his life; and was he
to exchange them for an eight-foot cell with a spy-hole in the door?
"Decidedly I'd rather hang," he said to himself in a crawling sweat. He
faced a new idea. "I believe I funk prison."
Fear. It was an unfamiliar feeling. He had never been afraid of
men, not even as a boy on the _Immerwald_ when the mate had been
drinking; he had kept out of the way at such times, but he had grinned
indifferent. Nor was he afraid of death; he had seen it too often.
But this? "I've never had much opinion of men who funk things, but I
believe I'd run like a hare if it was a question of prison--well, to
all intents and purposes I did. Pleasant. I didn't know I was a coward
before. Hullo! is that that poor little woman again? If she loses her
kid, I _shall_ feel like a murderer."
An idea, conceived in his mind hours before, had been growing in
secret, and now came suddenly to birth as a resolution. "If she loses
her kid through me, I'll hold my tongue about Trent's last bit of
beastliness," he said, and registered the vow. "I do owe her something,
and I'll pay this way. It'll mean a lot to her: I believe nothing,
not his death nor even the kid's, would hit her so hard as that last
thing he said. Probably it didn't in the least represent his normal
attitude, but a woman would never see that. She'd feel as I felt when
I heard Pilar-- No, that I'll spare her! Yet it'll mean a lot to me
too--great heavens, but it will! Say I'm committed for trial after this
inquest. If I tell the whole truth, I shall probably be acquitted. If
I don't I may get--six months? a year? Oh, Lord! The point is that
mine's such a beastly lame story without that speech; I'm throwing
away my one excuse.... Yet if I speak I shall make a clean sweep of
all she has left, after practically robbing her of her husband and
child--no, I can't and won't, _sea lo que fuere_, in common decency
I must hold my tongue. Well, anyhow, this disposes of any idea of my
owning up voluntarily, as Denis wants--by the way, I must give him a
hint to shut his mouth too. He'll do it to spare a woman, even if it
involves sacrificing me. Chivalrous is Denis; I suspect he'll come a
bad cropper one of these days, and it'll hurt him worse than it did
me, because he's finer stuff. There's the dawn--I wonder how it looks
over the Semois at Frahan? What a jolly place the world is! and I've
an impression that in a manslaughter case they won't allow bail. Well,
I've done enough soul-searching for the present, and I think I will now
go to by-by. _Amanecerá Dios, y medraremos._"
Five minutes later he was asleep under the paling stars, while the dawn
came up in silver over Helvellyn, this astute young man who was ready
to throw away everything for a romantic scruple, and call it common
decency. Gardiner was not quite so astute, nor so level-headed, nor so
cowardly as he thought himself.