THE RAINBOW.
In London nightfall is a delirium of bustle, in the country the coming
of a dream. The town scatters a dust of city men over its long and
lighted streets, powders its crying thoroughfares with gaily dressed
creatures who are hidden, like bats, during the hours of day, opens a
thousand defiant yellow eyes that have been sealed in sleep, throws off
its wrapper and shows its elaborate toilet. The country grows demure and
brown, most modest in the shadows. Labourers go home along the damp and
silent lanes with heavy weariness. The parish clergyman flits like a
blackbird through the twinkling village. Dogs bark from solitary farms.
A beautiful and soft depression fills all the air like incense or like
evening bells. But whether night reveals or hides the activities of men
it changes them most curiously. The difference between man in day, man
in night, is acute.
The arrival of darkness always meant something to the Rev. Peter
Uniacke, whose cure of souls now held him far from the swarming alleys
and the docks in which his early work had been done. He seldom failed to
give this visitor, so strange and soft-footed, some slight greeting.
Sometimes his welcome was a sigh, sometimes a prayer, sometimes a
clenching of the hands, a smile, a pause in his onward walk. Looking
backward along his past he could see his tall figure in many different
places, aware of the first footfalls of the night, now alone and
thinking of night's allegory of man's end, now in company, when the talk
insensibly changed its character, flowing into deeper, more mysterious
or confidential channels. Peter Uniacke had listened to informal
confessions, too, as the night fell, confessions of sin that at first
surprised him, that at last could no longer surprise him. And he had
confessed himself, before the altar of the twilight, and had wondered
why it is that sometimes Nature seems to have the power of absolution,
even as God has it.
Now, at the age of thirty-two, he heard the footsteps of night on a
windy evening of November. They drew near to the wall of the churchyard
in which stood the sturdy and rugged building where now he ministered,
on a little isle set lonely in a harsh and dangerous northern sea. He
listened to them, leaning his arms along this wall, by which the grey
and sleepless waves sang loudly. In the churchyard, growing gradually
dim and ethereal, were laid many bodies from which the white vampires of
the main had sucked out the souls. Here mouldered fisher lads, who had
whistled over the nets, and dreamed rough dreams of winning island girls
and breeding hardy children. Here reposed old limbs of salty mariners,
who had for so long defied the ocean that when they knew themselves
taken at the last, they turned their rugged faces down to their enemy
with a stony and an ironic wonder. And here, too, among these cast-up
bodies of the drowned, lay many women who had loved the prey of the sea,
and kissed the cheeks turned acrid by its winds and waters. Some of them
had died from heart-sickness, cursing the sea. Some had faded, withering
like the pale sand roses beside the sea. Some had lived to old age by
empty hearths, in the sound of the sea.
Inscriptions faded upon the stones that lay above them. Texts of comfort
in which the fine, salt films crept, faint verses of sweet hymns defiled
by the perching sea-birds, old rhymes like homely ejaculations of very
simple hearts, sank into the gathering darkness on every hand. The
graves seemed murmuring to the night: "Look on me, I hold a lover;" "And
I--I keep fast a maiden;" "And within my arms crumbles a little child
caught by the sea;" "And I fold a mother, whose son is in the hideous
water foliage of the depths of the sea;" "And I embrace an old captain
whom the sea loved even in his hollow age." The last inscription that
stood clear to Peter Uniacke's eyes in the dying light ran thus:
"Here lies the body of Jack Pringle, cast up by the sea on December
4th, 1896. He was boy on the schooner 'Flying Fish.' His age
seventeen. 'Lead kindly Light.'"
Uniacke watched this history go into the maw of the darkness, and when
it was gone he found himself environed by the cool sea noises which
seemed to grow louder in the night, wondering whether the "Kindly Light"
was indeed leading on Jack Pringle, no longer boy on the schooner
"Flying Fish," but--what? The soul of a fisher lad, who had kissed his
girl, and drunk his glass, and told many a brave and unfitting tale, and
sworn many a lusty oath, following some torch along the radiant ways of
Heaven! Was that it? Uniacke had, possibly, preached now and then that
so indeed it was. Or, perhaps, was the light-hearted and careless living
lad caught fast, like sunk wreckage, in the under sea of Hell, where
pain is like a living fire in the moving dimness? "His age seventeen."
Could that be true and God merciful? With such thoughts, Uniacke greeted
the falling of night. In the broad daylight, full of the songs and of
the moving figures of his brawny fisher folk, he had felt less
poetically uncertain. He had said like men at sea, "All's well!" More,
he had been able to feel it. But now he leaned on the churchyard wall
and it was cold to his arms. And the song of the sea was cold in his
ears. And the night lay cold upon his heart. And his mind--in the grim,
and apparently unmeaning way of minds set to sad music in a sad
atmosphere--crept round and round about the gravestone of this boy;
bereft of boyhood so early, of manhood ere he won to it, and carried so
swiftly into mystery beyond the learning of all philosophy. Ignorance,
in jersey and dripping sea-boots, set face to face with all knowledge,
and that called a tragedy!
Yet now to Peter Uniacke it was tragedy, and his own situation, left in
the safety of ignorance preaching to the ignorant, tragedy too, because
of the night, and the winds and the sea noises, and the bareness of this
Isle.
Beyond the church a light shone out, and a bearded shadow towered and
dwindled upon a white blind. Uniacke, a bachelor, and now almost of
necessity a recluse, entertained for the present a visitor. Remembering
the substance of the shadow he opened the churchyard gate, threaded his
way among the gravestones, and was quickly at the Vicarage door. As he
passed within, a yellow glow of lamplight and of firelight streamed into
the narrow passage from a chamber on the left hand, and he heard his
piano, surprised to learn that it could be taught to deliver
passionately long winding melodies from _Tristan and Isolde_. Uniacke
laid down his hat and stick and entered his sitting-room, still
companioned by the shadowy thought-form of the boy of the schooner
"Flying Fish," who seemed to tramp at his side noiselessly, in long
sea-boots that streamed with the salt water.
The man at the piano turned round, showing a handsome and melancholy
face, and eyes that looked as if they were tired, having seen too many
men and deeds and cities.
"I make myself at home, you see," he said, "as I hope you will some day
in my studio, when you visit me at Kensington."
Uniacke smiled, and laid his hand on a bell which tinkled shrewishly.
"It is a great treat for me to hear music and a voice not my own in this
room," he answered. "Are you ready for tea?"
"Thank you, I painted till it was dark. I was able to paint."
"I'm glad of that."
"When it was too dim to see, and too cold to feel the brush between my
fingers, I came back in the twilight to my new roof tree. I am thankful
to be out of the inn, yet I've stayed in worse places in Italy and
Greece. But they were gilded by the climate."
He sat down by the fire and stretched his limbs. Uniacke looked at him
rather curiously. To the lonely clergyman it was a novel experience to
play host to a man of distinction, to a stranger who had filled the
world with his fame years ago. Three days before, in one of his island
walks, Uniacke had come upon a handsome bearded man in a lane full of
mud, between bleak walls of stone. The man stopped him courteously,
asked if he were not the clergyman of the Isle, and, receiving an
affirmative reply, began to make some enquiries as to lodging
accommodation.
"My name is Sir Graham Hamilton," he said presently.
Uniacke started with surprise and looked at the stranger curiously. He
had read much of the great sea painter, of his lonely wanderings, of his
melancholy, of his extraordinary house in Kensington, and, just
recently, of his wretched condition of health, which, it was said, had
driven him suddenly from London, the papers knew not whither.
"I thought you were ill," he blurted out.
"I am not very well," the painter said simply, "and the inn here is
exceedingly uncomfortable. But I want to stay. This is the very home of
the sea. Here I find not merely the body of the sea but also its soul."
"There are no good lodgings, I am afraid," said the clergyman. "Nobody
ever wants to lodge here, it seems."
"I do. Well, then, I must keep on at the inn."
"Come to stay with me, will you?" Uniacke suddenly said. "I have a spare
room. It is scarcely ever occupied. My friends find this island a far
cry, except in the height of summer. I shall be glad of your company
and glad to make you as comfortable as I can."
"You are very kind," said the painter, hesitating. "But I scarcely--"
"Come as my guest," said the clergyman, reddening slightly.
"Thank you, I will. And some day you must come to me in London."
Now the painter was installed at the Vicarage, and blessed, each hour,
his happy escape from the inn, whose walls seemed expanded by the
forcible and athletic smell of stale fish.
Uniacke's servant girl brought in the tea. The two men had it by the
fire. Presently Hamilton said:
"Nightfall is very interesting and curious here."
"I find it so almost everywhere," Uniacke said.
"Yes. It can never be dull. But here, in winter at least, it is
extraordinarily--" he paused for the exactly right word, in a calm way
that was peculiar to him and that seemed to emphasise his fine
self-possession--"pathetic, and suggestive of calamity."
"I have noticed that, indeed," Uniacke answered, "and never, I think,
more than to-night."
Hamilton looked across at him in the firelight.
"Where did you see it fall?" he asked.
"I was by the wall of the churchyard."
"It was you, then, whom I saw from the window. It seemed to be a mourner
looking at the graves."
"I was looking at them. But nobody I care for deeply is buried there.
The night, however, in such an island as this, makes every grave seem
like the grave of a person one has known. It is the sea, I daresay."
"So close on every hand. Why, this house of yours might be a ship afloat
a hundred miles from land, judging by the sounds of the waves."
He sighed heavily.
"I hope the air will do you good," Uniacke remarked, with a sudden
relapse into conversational lameness.
"Thank you. But sea air is no novelty to me. Half of my life, at least,
has been spent in it. I have devoted all the best of my life, my powers,
my very soul to the service of the sea. And now, when I am growing old,
I sometimes think that I shall hate it before I go."
"Hate it!"
"Yes."
"Well--but it has brought you fame."
"H'm. And wealth and a thousand acquaintances. Yes, that's quite true.
Sometimes, nevertheless, we learn in the end to hate those who have
brought us most. Perhaps, because they have educated us in the
understanding of disappointment. You love the sea?"
"Yes."
"You wouldn't be here otherwise."
"I did not come here exactly because of that," Uniacke said slowly.
"No," said the painter.
"Rather to forget something."
"I doubt if this is a place which could teach one to forget. I find it
quite otherwise."
The two men looked at each other, the elderly painter on his height of
fame, the young clergyman in his depth of obscurity, and each felt that
there was a likeness between them.
"I came here to forget a woman," Uniacke said at last, moved by a
strange impulse to speak out.
"Yes, I see. It is the old idea of sorrowful men, a hermitage. I have
often wondered in London, in Rome, in Athens, whether a hermitage is of
any avail. Men went out into the desert in old days. Legend has it that
holiness alone guided them there. All their disciples believed that.
Reading about them I have often doubted it."
He smiled rather coldly and cynically.
"You don't know what a hermitage can mean. You have only been here three
days. Besides, you come in search of--"
"Search!" Hamilton interrupted, with an unusual quickness.
"Of work and health."
"Oh, yes. Do you care, since we are on intimate topics, to tell me any
more about yourself and--and--"
"That woman?"
"Yes."
"I loved her. She disappeared out of my life. I don't know at all where
she is, with whom, how she lives, anything at all about her. I don't
suppose I ever shall. She may be dead."
"You don't think you would know it if she were?"
"How could I? Who would tell me?"
"Not something within you? Not yourself?"
Uniacke was surprised by this remark. It did not fit in precisely with
his conception of his guest's mind, so far as he had formed one.
"Such an idea never occurred to me," he said. "Do you believe that such
an absolute certainty could be put into a man's mind then, without a
reason, a scrap of evidence, a hint to eye, or ear?"
"I don't know. I--I want to know."
"That someone's dead?"
"That someone is not dead. How loud the sea is getting!"
"It always sounds much like that at night in winter."
"Does the winter not seem very long to you up here quite alone?"
"Oh, yes."
"And monotonous?"
"Often. But we have times of keen excitement, of violent, even of
exhausting activity. I have had to rush from the pulpit up to my
shoulders in the sea."
"A wreck?"
"Yes, there have been many. There was the schooner 'Flying Fish.' She
broke up when I was holding service one December morning. Only the
skipper was saved alive. And he--"
"What of him?"
"He went what the people here call 'silly' from the shock--not directly.
It came on him gradually. He would not leave the island. He would never
trust the sea again."
"So he's here still?"
"Yes."
Just then the two plaintive bells of the church began to ring on the
wind.
"There he is!" Uniacke said.
"Where?"
"He's our bell-ringer. It's the only thing he takes any pleasure in,
ringing the bells for church and at nightfall. I let him do it, poor
fellow. He's got a queer idea into his brain that his drowned mates will
hear the bells some night and make the land, guided by the sound. When
the darkness falls he always rings for a full hour."
"How strange! How terrible!"
They sat by the fire listening to the pathetic chime of the two bells,
whose voices were almost hidden in the loud sea voices that enveloped
the little island with their cries. Presently the painter shifted in his
armchair.
"There is something--I--there is something very eerie to me in the sound
of those two bells now I know why they are ringing, and who is ringing
them," he said, with a slight irritation. "Don't you find they affect
your nerves at all?"
"No. I like to hear them. They tell me that one poor creature is happy.
The Skipper--all we Island folk call him so--believes he will bring his
mates safe to shore some day. And each time he sets those bells going he
thinks the happy hour is perhaps close at hand."
"Poor fellow! And he is summoning the drowned to come up out of their
world."
They sat silent again for three or four minutes. Then Sir Graham said:
"Uniacke, you have finished your tea?"
"Yes, Sir Graham."
"Has your day's work tired you very much?"
"No."
"Then I wish you would do me a favour. I want to see your skipper. Can I
get into the church?"
"Yes. He always leaves the door wide open while he rings the bells--so
that his mates can come in from the sea to him."
"Poor fellow! Poor fellow!"
He got up.
"I shall go across to the church now," he said.
"I'll take you there. Wrap yourself up. It's cold to-night."
"It is very cold."
The painter pulled a great cloak over his shoulders and a cap down over
his glittering and melancholy eyes, that had watched for many years all
the subtle changes of the colour and the movement of the sea. Uniacke
opened the Vicarage door and they stood in the wind. The night was not
dark, but one of those wan and light grey nights that seemed painted
with the very hues of wind and of cloud. It was like a fluid round about
them, and surely flowed hither and thither, now swaying quietly, now
spreading away, shredded out as water that is split by hard substances.
It was full of noise as is a whirlpool, in which melancholy cries
resound forever. Above this noise the notes of the two bells alternated
like the voices of stars in a stormy sky.
"Even living men at sea to-night would not hear those bells," said the
painter. "And the drowned--how can they hear?"
"Who knows?" said the clergyman. "Perhaps they are allowed to hear them
and to offer up prayers for their faithful comrade. I think faithfulness
is heaven in a human heart."
They moved across the churchyard, and all the graves of the drowned
flickered round their feet in the gusty greyness. They passed Jack
Pringle's grave, where the "Kindly Light" lay in the stone. When they
gained the church Sir Graham saw that the door was set wide open to the
night. He stood still.
"And so those dead mariners are to pass in here," he said, "under this
porch. Uniacke, cannot you imagine the scene if they came? Those dead
men, with their white, sea-washed faces, their dripping bodies, their
wild eyes that had looked on the depths of the sea, their hanging hands
round which the fishes had nibbled with their oval lips! The procession
of the drowned to their faithful captain. If I stood here long enough
alone my imagination would hear them, would hear their ghostly boat
grate its keel upon the Island beach, and the tramp of their sodden
sea-boots. How many were there?"
"I never heard. Only one body was cast up, and that is buried by the
churchyard wall. Shall we go in?"
"Yes."
They entered through the black doorway. The church was very dim and
smelt musty and venerable, rather as the cover of an old and worn Bible
smells. And now that they were within it, the bells sounded different,
less magical, more full of human music; their office--the summoning of
men to pray, the benediction of the marriage tie, the speeding of the
departed on the eternal road--became apparent and evoked accustomed
thoughts.
"Where is the belfry?" said Sir Graham in a whisper.
"This way. We have to pass the vestry and go up a stone staircase."
Uniacke moved forward along the uncarpeted pavement, on which his feet,
in their big nailed boots, rang harshly. The painter followed him
through a low and narrow door which gave on to a tiny stairway, each
step of which was dented and crumbled at the uneven edge. They ascended
in the dark, not without frequent stumbling, and heard always the bells
which seemed sinking down to them from the sky. Presently a turn brought
them to a pale ray of light which lay like a thread upon the stone. At
the same moment the bells ceased to sound. Both Uniacke and Sir Graham
paused simultaneously, the vision of the light and the cessation of the
chimes holding them still for an instant almost without their knowledge.
There was a silence that was nearly complete, for the tower walls were
thick, and kept the sea voices and the blowing winds at bay. And while
they waited, involuntarily holding their breath, a hoarse and uneven
voice cried out, anxiously and hopefully from above:
"Are ye comin', mates? Are ye comin'? Heave along, boys! D'ye hear me!
I'm your skipper. Heave along!"
Uniacke half turned to the painter, whose face was very white.
"What are ye waitin' for?" continued the voice. "I heard ye comin'. I
heard ye at the door. Come up, I say, and welcome to ye! Welcome to ye
all, mates. Ye've been a damned long time comin'."
"He thinks--he thinks--" whispered Uniacke to his companion.
"I know. It's cruel. What shall we--"
"Ye've made the land just in time, mates," continued the voice. "For
there's a great gale comin' up to-night. The 'Flying Fish' couldn't live
in her under bare poles, I reckon. I'm glad ye've got ashore. Where are
ye, I say? Where are ye?"
The sound of the voice approached the two men on the stairs. The thread
of light broadened and danced on the stone. High up there appeared the
great figure of a man in a seaman's jersey with a peaked cap on his
head. In his broad rough hands he held a candle, which he shaded with
his fingers while he peered anxiously and expectantly down the dark and
narrow funnel of the stairway.
"Hulloh!" he cried. "Hulloh, there!"
The hail rang down in the night. Sir Graham was trembling.
"I see ye," cried the Skipper. "It's Jack, eh? Isn't it little Jack,
boys? Young monkey! Up to his damned larks that I've reckoned up these
many nights while I've stood ringin' here! I'll strike the life out of
ye, Jack, I will. Wait till I come down, lads, wait till I come down!"
And he sprang forward, his huge limbs shaking with glad excitement. His
feet missed a stair in his hurry of approach, and throwing abroad his
hands to the stone walls of the belfry in an effort to save himself, he
let fall the candlestick. It dropped on the stones with a dull clatter
as the darkness closed in. The Skipper, who had recovered his footing,
swore a round oath. Sir Graham and Uniacke heard his heavy tread
descending until his breath was warm on their faces.
"Where are ye, lads?" he cried out. "Where are ye? Can't ye throw a word
of welcome to a mate?"
He laid his hands heavily on Uniacke's shoulders in the dark, and felt
him over with an uncertain touch.
"Is it Jack?" he said. "Why, what 'a ye got on, lad? Is it Jack, I say?"
"Skipper," Uniacke said, in a low voice, "it's not Jack." As he spoke he
struck a match. The tiny light flared up unevenly right in the Skipper's
eyes. They were sea-blue and blazing with eagerness and with the pitiful
glare of madness. Over the clergyman's shoulder the pale painter with
his keen eyes swept the bearded face of the Skipper with a rapid and
greedy glance. By the time the match dwindled and the blackness closed
in again the face was a possession of his memory. He saw it even though
it was actually invisible; the rugged features dignified by madness, the
clear, blue eyes full of a saddening fire, and--ere the match faded--of
a horror of disappointment, the curling brown beard that flowed down on
the blue jersey. But he had no time to dwell on it now, for a dreary
noise rose up in that confined space. It was the great seaman whimpering
pitifully in the dark.
"It isn't Jack," he blubbered, and they could hear his huge limbs
shaking. "Ye haven't come back, mates, ye haven't come back. And the
great gale comin' up, the great gale comin'."
As the words died away, a gust of wind caught the belfry and tore at its
rough-hewn and weather-worn stones.
"Let us go down," said Sir Graham, turning to feel his way into the
church.
"Come, Skipper," said Uniacke, "come with us."
He laid hold of the seaman's mighty arm and led him down the stairs. He
said nothing. On a sudden all the life and hope had died out of him.
When they gained the grey churchyard and could see his face again in the
pale and stormy light, it looked shrunken, peaked and childish, and the
curious elevation of madness was replaced by the uncertainty and
weakness of idiocy. He shifted on his feet and would not meet the
pitiful glances of the two men. Uniacke touched him on the shoulder.
"Come to the Vicarage, Skipper," he said kindly. "Come in and warm
yourself by the fire and have some food. It's so cold to-night."
But the seaman suddenly broke away and stumbled off among the
gravestones, whimpering foolishly like a dog that cannot fight grief
with thought.
"The sea--ah, the hatefulness of the sea!" said the painter, "will it
ever have to answer for its crimes before God?"
Uniacke and his guest sat at supper that night, and all the windows of
the Vicarage rattled in the storm. The great guns of the wind roared in
the sky. The great guns of the surf roared on the island beaches. And
the two men were very silent at first. Sir Graham ate little. He had no
appetite, for he seemed to hear continually in the noises of the
elements the shrill whimpering of a dog. Surely it came from the graves
outside, from those stone breasts of the dead.
"I can't eat to-night," he said presently. "Do you think that man is
lingering about the church still?"
They got up from the table and went over to the fire. The painter lit a
pipe.
"I hope not," Uniacke said, "but it is useless attempting to govern him.
He is harmless, but he must be left alone. He cannot endure being
watched or followed."
"I wish we hadn't gone to the church. I can't get over our cruelty."
"It was inadvertent."
"Cruelty so often is, Uniacke. But we ought to look forward and foresee
consequences. I feel that most especially to-night. Remorse is the wage
of inadvertence."
As he spoke, he looked gloomily into the fire. The young clergyman felt
oddly certain that the great man had more to say, and did not interrupt
his pause, but filled it in for himself by priestly considerations on
the useless illumination worldly success seems generally to afford to
the searchers after happiness. His reverie was broken by the painter's
voice saying:
"I myself, Uniacke, am curiously persecuted by remorse. It is that, or
partly that, which has affected my health so gravely, and led me away
from my home, my usual habits of life, at this season of the year."
"Yes?" the clergyman said, with sympathy, without curiosity.
"And yet, I suppose it would seem a little matter to most people. The
odd thing is that it assumes such paramount importance in my life; for
I'm not what is called specially conscientious, except as regards my
art, of course, and the ordinary honourable dealings one decent man
naturally has with his fellows."
"Your conscience, in fact, limits its operations a good deal, I know."
"Precisely. But if it will not bore you, I will tell you something of
all this."
"Thank you, Sir Graham."
"How the wind shakes those curtains!"
"Nothing will keep it out of these island houses. You aren't cold?"
"Not in body, not a bit. Well, Uniacke, do you ever go to see pictures?"
"Whenever I can. That's not often now. But when my work lay in cities I
had chances which are denied me at present."
"Did you ever see a picture of mine called 'A sea urchin'?"
"Yes, indeed--that boy looking at the waves rolling in!--who could
forget him? The soul of the sea was in his eyes. He was a human being,
and yet he seemed made of all sea things."
"He had never set eyes upon the sea."
"What?" cried Uniacke, in sheer astonishment, "the boy who sat for that
picture? Impossible! When I saw it I felt that you had by some happy
chance lit on the one human being who contained the very soul of an
element. No merman could so belong of right to the sea as that boy."
"Who was a London model, and had never heard the roar of waves or seen
the surf break in the wind."
"Genius!" the clergyman exclaimed.
"Uniacke," continued the painter, "I got L1,000 for that picture. And I
call the money now blood-money to myself."
"Blood-money! But why?"
"I had made studies of the sea for that picture. I had indicated the
wind by the shapes of the flying foam journeying inland to sink on the
fields. I wanted my figure, I could not find him. Yet I was in a sea
village among sea folk. The children's legs there were browned with the
salt water. They had clear blue eyes, sea eyes; that curious light hair
which one associates with the sea and with spun glass sometimes. But
they wouldn't do for my purpose. They were unimaginative. As a fact,
Uniacke, they knew the sea too well. That was it. They were familiar
with it, as the little London clerk is familiar with Fleet Street or
Chancery Lane. The twin brother of a prophet thinks prophecy boring
table-talk--not revelation. These children chucked the sea under the
chin. That didn't do for me, and for what I wanted."
"I understand."
"After a great deal of search and worry I came to this conclusion: that
my purpose required of me this--the discovery of an exceptionally
imaginative child, who was unfamiliar with the sea, but into whose heart
and brain I could pour its narrated wonders, whose soul I could fill to
the brim with its awe, its majesty, its murmuring sweetness, its wild
romance and its inexhaustible cruelty. I must make this child see and
know, but through the medium of words alone, of mental vision. If I took
it to the sea the imagination would be stricken down--well, by such
banalities as paddling and catching shrimps."
Uniacke smiled.
"But on the contrary, in London, far from the sea, I could give to the
child only those impressions of the sea that would wake in it the sort
of sea-soul I desired to print. I should have it in my power. And a
child's soul cannot be governed by a mere painter, when a conflict
arises between him and sand-castles and crabs and prawns and the various
magicians of the kind that obsess the child so easily and so entirely."
"Yes, children are conquered by trifles."
"And that, too, is part of their beauty. Under this strong impression, I
packed up my traps and came back to London with the studies for my
picture. I placed them on an easel in my studio and began my search for
the child. At first I sought this child among my cultivated friends;
married artists, musicians, highly-strung people, whose lives were
passed in an atmosphere vibrating with quick impressions. But I went
unrewarded. The children of such people are apt to be peevishly
receptive, but their moods are often cloudy, and I wished for a pellucid
nature. After a time I went lower down, and I began to look about the
streets for my wonder-child."
"What a curious quest!" said Uniacke, leaning forward till the firelight
danced on his thin face and was reflected in his thoughtful hazel eyes.
"Yes, it was," rejoined the painter, who was gradually sinking into his
own narrative, dropping down in the soft realm of old thoughts revived.
"It was curious, and to me, highly romantic. I sometimes thought it was
like seeking for a hidden sea far inland, watching for the white face of
a little wave in the hard and iron city thoroughfares. Sometimes I
stopped near Victoria Station, put my foot upon a block, and had a boot
half ruined while I watched the bootblack. Sometimes I bought a variety
of evening papers from a ragged gnome who might be a wonder-child, and
made mistakes over the payment to prolong the interview. I leaned
against gaunt houses and saw the dancing waifs yield their poor lives to
ugly, hag-ridden music. I endured the wailing hymns of voiceless women
on winter days in order that I might observe the wretched ragamuffins
squalling round their knees the praise of a Creator who had denied them
everything. Ah! forgive me!"
"For some purpose that we shall all know at last," said Uniacke gently.
"Possibly. In all these prospectings I was unlucky. By chance at length
I found the wonder-child when I was not seeking him."
"How was that?"
"One day the weather, which had been cold, changed and became warm,
springlike, and alive with showers. When it was not raining, you felt
the rain was watching you from hidden places. You smelt it in the air.
The atmosphere was very sweet and depressing, and London was full of
faint undercurrents of romance, and of soft and rapidly changing effects
of light. I went out in the afternoon and spent an hour in the National
Gallery. When I came out my mind was so full of painted canvas that I
never looked at the unpainted sky, or at the vaporous Square through
which streamed the World, opening and shutting umbrellas. I believe I
was thinking over some new work of my own, arranged for the future. Now
the rain ceased, I went down the steps and walked across the road into
the stone garden of the lions. Round their feet played pigmy children. I
heard their cries mingling with the splash of the fountains, but I took
no notice of them. Sitting down on a bench, I went on planning a
picture--the legendary masterpiece, no doubt. I was certainly very deep
in thought and lost to my surroundings, for when a hand suddenly grasped
my knee I was startled. I looked up. In front of me stood a very dirty
and atrociously-dressed boy, whose head was decorated with a tall, muddy
paper cap, funnel-shaped and bending feebly in the breeze. This boy was
clutching my knee tightly with one filthy hand, while with the other he
pointed to the sky on which his eyes were intently fixed.
"'Look at that there rainbow!' he said. 'Look at that there rainbow!'
"I glanced up and saw that the clouds had partially broken and that
London lay under a huge and perfect coloured arch.
"'I never did!' continued the boy.
"He stared at me for an instant with the solemn expression of one who
reveals to the ignorant a miracle. Then he took his hand from my knee,
hurried to an adjoining seat, woke up a sleeping and partially
intoxicated tramp, requested him to observe closely the superb
proceedings of Nature, took no heed of his flooding oaths, and passed on
in the waving paper cap from seat to seat, rousing from their dreams,
and sorrows, and newspapers, the astounded habitues of the Square, that
they might share his awe and happiness. Before he had finished teaching
a heavy policeman the lessons of the sky, I knew that I had found my
wonder-child."
"You followed him?"
"I captured him in the midst of a group of emaciated little girls in the
shadow of Lord Nelson. All the childish crowd was looking upward, and
every eye was completely round over each widely-opened mouth, while
paper-cap repeated his formula. Poor children, looking at the sky! Ah,
Uniacke, what do you think of that for a sermon?"
The young clergyman cleared his throat. The red curtains by the narrow
window blew outward towards the fire, and sank in again, alternately
forcible and weak. The painter looked towards the window and a sadness
deepened in his eyes.
"Where is my wonder-child now?" he said.
"You have lost sight of him?"
"Yes--though the blood-money lies at my bank and the paper-cap is in my
studio."
"Is he not in London?"
"No, no; I learnt his history, the history of a gamin of fifteen or
thereabouts. It was much the same as a history of a London pavement,
with this exception, that the gamin had a mother to whom he presented me
without undue formality. The impression made upon me by that lady at
first was unfavourable, since she was slatternly, drank, and was
apparently given to cuffing and kicking the boy--her only child. I
considered her an abandoned and unfeeling female. She dwelt in Drury
Lane and sold something that most of us have never heard of."
"I can see her."
"I wish to heaven I could not," the painter said, with a sudden outburst
of fire.
He was silent a moment and then continued: "I had no difficulty in
persuading her to let me paint the boy. I don't think she rightly
understood what I meant, except that for some foolish reason I was
prepared to give her money, apparently in return for nothing, that I
meant to have little Jack decently dressed--"
"Jack--was that his name?"
"Yes, and that he was to spend certain hours--snatched from Trafalgar
Square--in my house in Kensington."
"I see."
"The boy turned up in the jersey and cap and boots I had bought him. And
then his education began. On first entering my studio he was numb with
surprise, a moving and speechless stare--more overcome than by
rainbows."
"Poor little chap!"
"I let him stray about examining everything. He did so completely
oblivious of my presence, and of the fact that all the things in the
place were mine. By his demeanour one might have supposed him engaged in
an examination of works of God never before brought to his notice. While
I smoked and pretended to read, he crept about like a little animal,
penetrating into corners where statues stood, smelling--so it
seemed--the angles of painted walls, touching the petals of flowers,
smoothing rugs the wrong--but soon the right--way. I can hear his new
boots creaking still. He was a very muscular little chap, but small.
When he was able to speak I questioned him. He had never seen the sea.
He had never been out of London for a day or slept away from Drury Lane
for a night. The flask was empty; now to pour the wine into it. I told
him to sit down by the open hearth. He obeyed, staring hard at me before
he sat, hard at the chair when he was sitting. I interested him much
less than old brocade and lighted wax candles, which inspired him with a
solemnity that widened his eyes and narrowed his features. He looked on
a new, and never-before-imagined, life. And he was grave to excess,
though, later, I found plenty of the London child's impish nature in
him."
"That impish quality hides in nearly all street-bred children," said
Uniacke. "I have seen larkiness dawn in them for an instant at some
recollection, even when they were dying."
"I daresay. I can believe it. But Jack was solemn at first, his brow
thunderous with thought, as he examined his chair and the rug under his
new boots. Then in the firelight I began my task. I wrought to bring
about in this Trafalgar Square soul a sea change. For a time I did not
attempt to paint. I merely let the boy come to me day by day, get
accustomed to the studio, and listen to my talk--which was often of the
sea. I very soon found that my intention had led me to the right mind
for my purpose; for the starved gaze that had been fixed on the rainbow
could turn itself, with equal wonder, similar rapture, on other things.
And the mind also could be brought to see what was not visible to the
eye. My studio--you must see it some day--is full of recollections of
sea days and nights. Jack explored them. I eliminated from the studio
important objects of art which might lead him to think of towns, of
villages inland, of wonderful foreign interiors. I fixed all his nature
upon this marvellous element which had never murmured round his life
before. I played to him music in which the sea could be heard. I
described to him the onward gallop of the white horses, racing over
impenetrable depths. I painted for him in words the varying colours of
waves in different seas, the black purple of tropical waters, the
bottle-green turmoil of a Cornish sea on a choppy day, the brown channel
waves near shore, the jewelled smoothness of the Mediterranean in early
morning sunshine, its silver in moonrise, melting into white and black.
I told him of the crowd of voices that cry in the sea, expressing all
the emotions which are uttered on land by the voices of men; of the
childish voices that may be heard on August evenings in fiords, of the
solemn sobbing that fills an autumn night on the Northumbrian coast, of
the passionate roaring in mid Atlantic, of the peculiar and frigid
whisper of waters struggling to break from the tightening embrace of ice
in extreme northern latitudes, of the level moan of the lagoons. I
explained to him how this element is so much alive that it is never for
a moment absolutely still, even when it seems so to the eyes, as it
sleeps within the charmed embrace of a coral reef, extended, like an
arm, by some Pacific island far away. I drew for him the thoughts of the
sea, its intentions, its desires, its regrets, its griefs, its savage
and its quiet joys. I narrated the lives in it, of fishes, of monsters;
its wonders of half human lives, too, the mermaids who lie on the rocks
at night to see the twinkling lights on land, the mermen who swim round
them, wondering what those lights may mean. I made him walk with me on
the land under the sea, where go the divers through the wrecks, and
ascend the rocky mountains and penetrate the weedy valleys, and glide
across the slippery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniacke, I drowned little
Jack--I drowned him in the sea, I drowned him in the sea."
The painter spoke the last words in a voice of profound, even of morbid,
melancholy, as if he were indeed confessing a secret crime, driven by
some wayward and irresistible impulse. Uniacke looked at him in growing
surprise.
"And why not?" Uniacke asked.
But the painter did not reply. He continued:
"I made him see the rainbows of the sea and he looked no more at the
rainbows of the sky. For at length I had his imagination fast in my net
as a salmon that fishermen entice within the stakes. His town mind
seemed to fade under my fostering, and, Uniacke, 'nothing of him that
did fade but did suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.'"
The painter got up from his chair and walked over to the blowing wind
that crept in at the window fastenings. The red curtains flew out
towards him. He pushed them back with his hands.
"Into something rich and strange," he repeated, as if to himself. "And
strange."
"Ah, but that was said, surely, of one who was actually drowned in the
sea," said the clergyman. "It might be suitably placed on many of the
memorial slabs in the church yonder," he continued, waving his hand
towards the casement that looked on the churchyard. "But your
sea-urchin--"
"Oh, I speak only of the fading of the town nature into the sea nature,"
rejoined the painter quickly, "only of that. The soil of the childish
mind was enriched; his eyes shone as if touched with a glow from the
sun, swaying in the blue sea. The Trafalgar Square gamin disappeared,
and at last my sea-urchin stood before me. As the little Raleigh may
have looked he looked at me, and I saw in the face then rather the
wonder of the sea itself than the crude dancing desire of the little
adventurer who would sail it. And it was the wonder of the sea embodied
in a child that I desired to paint, not the wakening of a human spirit
of gay seamanship and love of peril. That's for a Christmas number--but
that came at last."
He stopped abruptly and faced the clergyman.
"Why does the second best succeed so often and so closely the best, I
wonder," he said. "It is very often so in the art life of a man, even of
a great man. And it is so sometimes--perhaps you know this better than
I--in the soul life of a nature. Must we always sink again after we have
soared? Must we do that? Is it an immutable law?"
"Perhaps for a time. Surely, surely, not forever," said Uniacke.
His guest's conversation and personality began to stir him more and more
powerfully. It seemed so new and vital an experience to be helped to
think, to have suggestion poured into him now, after his many lonely
island evenings.
"Ah, well, who can say?" said the painter. "I had the best for a
time--long enough for my immediate purpose; for now I painted, and I
felt that I was enabled by little Jack to do fine work. It seems he told
his drinking mother in Drury Lane, in his lingo, of the wonders of the
sea. This I learnt later. And, in his occasional, and now somewhat
fleeting visits to Trafalgar Square, he explained to the emaciated
little girls, in the shadow of Nelson, the fact that there was to be
found, and seen, somewhere, water of a very different kind from that
splashing and churning in the dingy basins guarded by the lions.
Meanwhile I painted little Jack, all the time keeping alive in his
nature the sea change, which was, in the end, to bring into my pocket
L1,000 in hard cash."
Sir Graham said this with an indescribable cold irony and bitterness.
"I can hear that money jingling in the wind, upon my soul, Uniacke," he
added, frowning heavily.
The young clergyman was touched by a passing thought of the painter's
notorious ill-health.
"Before the picture was finished--quite completed--the impish child
began to waken in the wonder-child, and I had to comply with the demands
of this new-born youngster. Our conversation--little Jack's and
mine--drifted from the sea itself to the men and ships that travel it,
to the deeds of men that are done upon it; raidings of Moorish pirates,
expeditions to the Spanish Main in old days, to the whaling grounds in
new, and so forth. When we got to this sort of thing my work was nearly
done and could not be spoiled. So I let myself go, and talked several
boys' books in those afternoons. I was satisfied, damnably
satisfied--your pardon, Uniacke--with my work, and I was heedless of all
else. That is the cursed, selfish instinct of the artist; that is the
inadvertence of which we spoke formerly. You remember?"
Uniacke nodded.
"My picture was before me and a child's budding soul, and I thought of
nothing at all but my picture. That's sin, if you like. Little Jack, in
his jersey and squeaky boots, with his pale face and great eyes, was my
prey on canvas and my L1,000. I hugged myself and told him wild stories
of bold men on the sea. Uniacke, do you believe in a personal devil?"
"I do," replied the young clergyman, simply.
"Well, if there is one, depend upon it he sometimes requires an
introduction before he can make a soul's acquaintance. I effected the
introduction between him and my wonder-child when I sat in the twilight
and told Jack those tales of the sea. The devil came to the boy in my
studio, and I opened the door and bowed him in. And once he knew the
boy, he stayed with him, Uniacke, and whispered in his ear--'Desert your
duty. Life calls you. The sea calls you. Go to it. Desert your duty!'
Even a dirty little London boy can have a duty and be aware of it, I
suppose. Eh?"
"Yes. I think that. But--"
"Wait a moment. I've nearly finished my tale, though I'm living the
sequel to it at this moment. One day I completed my picture; the last
touch was given. I stood back, I looked at my canvas. I felt I had done
well; my sea urchin was actually what I had imagined. I had succeeded in
that curious effort--to accomplish which many of us give our lives--in
the effort to project perfectly my thought, to give the exactly right
form to my imagination. I exulted. Yes, I had one grand overwhelming
moment of exultation. Then I turned from my completed picture. 'Jack,'
I cried out, 'little Jack, I've made you famous. D'you know what that
means?'
"I took the little chap by the shoulders and placed him before the
picture. 'See yourself,' I added. The boy stared at the sea urchin, at
those painted eyes full of the sea wonder, at those parted lips, that
mouth whispering to the sea. His nose twisted slightly.
"'That ain't me,' he said. 'That ain't me.'
"I looked down at him, and knew that he spoke the truth; for already the
wonder-child was fading, even had faded. And a little adventurer, a true
boy, stood before me, a boy to pull ropes, lend a hand at an oar,
whistle in the rigging, gaze with keen dancing eyes through a cold dawn
to catch the first sight of a distant land. I looked, understood, didn't
care; although the poetry of wonder had faded into the prose of mere
desire.
"'It isn't you, Jack?' I answered. 'Well, perhaps not. But it is what
you were, what you may be again some day.'
"He shook his head.
"'No, it ain't me. Go on tellin' about them pirits.'
"And, full of gladness, a glory I had never known before, I went on till
it was dark. I said good-by to little Jack on the doorstep. When he had
gone, I stood for a moment listening to the sound of his footsteps dying
away down the road. I did not know that I should never hear them again.
For, although I did not want Jack any more as a model, I was resolved
not to lose sight of him. To him I owed much. I would pay my debt by
making the child's future very different from his past. I had vague
thoughts of educating him carefully for some reasonable life. I believe,
Uniacke, yes, on my soul, I believe that I had bland visions of the
sea-urchin being happy and prosperous on a high stool in an office, at
home with ledgers, a contented little clerk, whose horizon was bounded
by an A B C shop, and whose summer pastime was fly-killing. My big work
finished, a sort of eager idiocy seized me. I was as a man drugged. My
faculties must have been besotted, I was in a dream. Three days
afterwards I woke from it and learnt that there may be grandeur, yes,
grandeur, dramatic in its force, tragic in its height and depth, in a
tipsy old woman of Drury Lane."
"Jack's mother?"
The painter nodded. All the time he had been talking the wind had
steadily increased, and the uproar of the embracing sea had been growing
louder. The windows rattled like musketry, the red curtains shook as if
in fear. Now there came a knock at the door.
"Come in," said the clergyman.
The maid appeared.
"Do you want anything more to-night, sir?"
"No, thank you, Kate. Good-night."
"Good-night, sir."
The door shut.
"Is it late?" said the painter.
"Nearly eleven. That is all."
"Are you tired, Uniacke? perhaps you are accustomed to go to bed early?"
"Not very. Besides to-night the gale would keep me awake; and I want to
hear the end of your story."
"Then--Drury Lane invaded me one evening, smelling of gin, with black
bonnet cocked over one eye, an impossible umbrella, broken boots,
straying hair, a mouth full of objurgation, and oaths, and crying
between times, 'Where's Jack? Where's my boy? What 'a yer done with my
boy,--yer!' I received Drury Lane with astonishment but, I hope, with
courtesy, and explained that my picture was finished, that Jack had left
me to go home, that I meant to take care of his future.
"My remarks were received with oaths, and the repeated demand to know
where Jack was. 'Isn't he at home?' I asked. 'No, nor he ain't been
'ome.' After a while I gathered that Jack had disappeared in darkness
from my house on the night when I put the last touch to my picture, and
had not been seen by his mother since. She now began to soften and to
cry, and I observed that maternity was in her as well as cheap gin. I
endeavoured to comfort her and promised that little Jack should be
found.
"'If he ain't found,' she sobbed, 'I'm done for, I am; 'e's my hall.'
"There was something horribly genuine in the sound of this cry. I began
to see beyond the gin in which this poor woman was soaked; I began to
see her half-drowned soul that yet had life, had breath.
"'We'll find him,' I said.
"'Never, never,' she wailed, rocking her thin body to and fro, 'I know
'e's gone to sea, 'e 'as. Jack's run away fur a sailor.'
"At these words I turned cold, for I felt as if they were true. I saw in
a flash the result of my experiment. I had shown the boy the way that
led to the great sea. Perhaps that night, even as he left my door, he
had seen in fancy the white waves playing before him in the distance,
the ships go sailing by. He had heard siren voices calling his youth and
he had heeded them. His old mother kept on cursing me at intervals.
Instinct, rather than actual knowledge, led her to attribute this
disappearance to my initiative. I did not attempt to reason her out of
the belief, for alas! I began to hold it myself, Uniacke."
"You thought Jack had run away to sea, prompted by all that you had told
him of the sea?"
"Yes. And I think it still."
"Think--then you don't--"
"I don't know it, you'd say? Do I not? Uniacke, a little while ago, when
you told me of that--that woman for whom you cared much, you remember my
saying to you, was there not something within you that would tell you
if she were dead?"
"Yes, I remember."
"That something which makes a man know a thing without what is generally
called knowledge of it. Well, that something within me makes me know
that little Jack did run away to sea. I searched for him, I strove, as
far as one can do such a thing, to sift all the innumerable grains of
London through my fingers to find that one little grain I wanted. I
spared no pains in my search. Conceive, even, that I escorted Drury Lane
in the black bonnet to the Docks, to ships lying in the Thames, to a
thousand places! It was all in vain; the wonder-child was swallowed up.
I had indeed drowned little Jack in the sea. I have never set eyes on
him since he left me on the evening of the day when I completed my
picture. Shall I ever set eyes on him again? Shall I, Uniacke? Shall I?"
Sir Graham put this strange question with a sort of morose fierceness,
getting up from his chair as he spoke. The young clergyman could think
of no reply.
"Why not?" he said at last. "He may be well, happy, active in a life
that he loves, that he glories in."
"No, Uniacke, no, for he's far away from his duty. That hideous old
woman, in her degradation, in her cruelty, in her drunkenness, loved
that boy, loves him still, with an intensity, a passion, a hunger, a
feverish anxiety that are noble, that are great. Her hatred of me proves
it. I honour her for her hatred. I respect her for it! She shows the
beauty of her soul in her curses. She almost teaches me that there is
indeed immortality--at least for women--by her sleepless horror of me.
Her hatred, I say, is glorious, because her love shines through it. I
feed her. She doesn't know it. She'd starve rather than eat my bread.
She would kill me, I believe, if she didn't fancy in her vague mind,
obscured by drink, that the man who had sent her boy from her might
bring him back to her. For weeks she came every day--walking all the way
from Drury Lane, mind you--to ask if the boy had returned. Then she
endured the nightmare of my company, as I told you, while we searched in
likely places for the vanished sea urchin. Jack did nothing for the
support of his mother. It was she who kept him. She beat him. She cursed
him. She fed him. She loved him; like an animal, perhaps, like a mother,
certainly. That says all, Uniacke. It was I who sent that boy away. I
must give him back to that old woman. Till I do so I can never find
peace. This thing preys upon my life, eats into my heart. It's the
little worm gnawing, always gnawing at me. The doctors tell me I am
morbid because I am in bad health, that my bad health makes the malady
in my mind. On the contrary, it is my mind that makes the malady in my
body. Ah! you are wondering! You are wondering, too, whether it's not
the other way! I see you are!"
"I cannot deny it," Uniacke said gently.
"You are wrong. You are wrong, I assure you. And surely you, a
clergyman, ought to be the very man to understand me, to know how what
seems a slight thing, a small selfishness, well, the inadvertence we
spoke of lately, may punish the soul, may have a long and evil train of
consequences. I was careless of that child, careful only of my ambition.
I ground the child in the mortar of my ambition; is it not natural that
I should suffer now? Does not your religion tell you that it is right?
Answer me that?"
Uniacke hesitated. A conviction had been growing up in him all the
evening that his guest was suffering severely under some nervous
affliction; one of those obscure diseases which change the whole colour
of life to the sufferer, which distort all actions however simple and
ordinary, which render diminutive trials monstrous, and small evils
immense and ineffably tragic. It seemed to Uniacke to be his duty to
combat Sir Graham's increasing melancholy, which actually bordered upon
despair. At the same time, the young clergyman could not hide from his
mind--a mind flooded with conscience--that the painter was slightly to
blame for the action which had been followed by so strange a result.
"I see you hesitate, Uniacke," said Sir Graham. "Ah, you agree with
me!"
"No; I think you may have been careless. But you magnify a slight error
into a grievous sin; and I do indeed believe that it must be your
present bad state of health which acts as the magnifying glass. That is
my honest opinion."
"No, no," said the painter, almost with anger, "my illness is all from
the mind. If I could find that boy, if I could give him back to his
mother, I should recover my peace, I should recover my health--I should
no longer be haunted, driven as I am now. But, Uniacke, do you know what
it is that I fear most of all, what it is that dogs me, night and day;
though I strive to put it from me, to tell myself that it is a chimera?"
"What?"
"The belief that little Jack is dead; that he has been drowned at sea,
perhaps lately, perhaps long ago."
"Why should you think that? You do not even know for certain that he ran
away to sea."
"I am sure of it. If he is dead! If he is dead!"
The painter, as if in an access of grief, turned abruptly from the fire,
walked over to the window, pulled one of the blowing curtains aside and
approached his face to the glass.
"In spite of the storm it is still so light that I can see those
graves," he said in a low voice.
"Don't look at them, Sir Graham. Let us talk of other things."
"And--and--yes, Uniacke, that poor, mad Skipper is still out there,
lingering among them. He is by the churchyard wall, where you were
standing this evening in the twilight: one would say he was watching."
The clergyman had also risen from his seat. He moved a step or two
across the little room, then stood still, looking at Sir Graham, who was
half concealed by the fluttering curtains.
"He is just where I stood?" Uniacke asked.
"Yes."
"Then he is watching."
"By a grave?"
"Yes. Only one of his crew ever gained the land. He gained it--a corpse.
He is buried by that wall. I was reading the inscription upon his
tombstone, and wondering--"
"Wondering? Yes?"
"Where he is, how he is now, far away from the voice of the sea which
took his life, the wind which roared his requiem."
"Poor man! You were here when he was washed up on the beach?"
"Yes. I buried him. The Skipper--sane then, though in terrible
grief--was able to identify him, to follow the drowned body as chief
mourner, to choose the inscription for the stone."
"What was it?" asked Sir Graham, without curiosity, idly, almost
absently.
"'Lead, kindly light.' He would have that put. I think he had heard the
boy sing it, or whistle the tune of it, at sea one day."
"The boy? It was a boy then?"
"Yes."
The clergyman spoke with a certain hesitation, a sudden diffidence. He
looked at the painter, and an abrupt awkwardness, almost a
shamefacedness, crept into his manner, even showed itself in his
attitude. The painter did not seem to be aware of it. He was still
engrossed in his own sorrow, his own morbid reflections. He looked out
again in the night.
"Poor faithful watch-dog," he murmured.
Then he turned away from the window.
"The Skipper does not wait for that boy," he said. "He knows at least
that he can never come to him from the sea."
"Strangely--no. Indeed, he always looks for the boy first."
"First, do you say? Was it so to-night?"
Again Uniacke hesitated. He was on the verge of telling a lie, but
conscience intervened.
"Yes," he said.
"Didn't he speak of little Jack?" said Sir Graham slowly, and with a
sudden nervous spasm of the face.
"Yes, Sir Graham."
"That's curious."
"Why?"
"The same name--my wonder-child's name."
"And the name of a thousand children."
"Of course, of course. And--and, Uniacke, the other name, the other name
upon that tomb?"
"What other name?"
"Why--why the surname. What is that?"
The painter was standing close to the clergyman and staring straight
into his eyes. For a moment Uniacke made no reply. Then he answered
slowly:
"There is no other name."
"Why not?"
"Why--the--the Skipper would only have Jack put, that was all. Jack--he
was the boy on the schooner 'Flying Fish'--'Lead, kindly light.'"
"Ah!"
The exclamation came in a sigh, that might have been a murmur of relief
or of disappointment. Then there was a silence. The painter went over
again to the fire. Uniacke stood still where he was and looked on the
ground. He had told a deliberate lie. It seemed to grow as he thought of
it. And why had he told it? A sudden impulse, a sudden fear, had led him
into sin. A strange fancy had whispered to him, "What if that boy buried
by the wall yonder should be the wonder-child, the ragamuffin who looked
at the rainbow, the sea urchin, the spectre haunting your guest?" How
unlikely that was! And yet ships go far, and the human fate is often
mysteriously sad. It might be that the wonder-child was born to be
wrecked, to be cast up, streaming with sea-water on the strand of this
lonely isle. It might be that the eyes which worshipped the rainbow were
sightless beneath that stone yonder; that the hands which pointed to it
were folded in the eternal sleep. And, if so, was not the lie
justified? If so, could Peter Uniacke regret it? He saw this man who had
come into his lonely life treading along the verge of a world that made
him tremble in horror. Dared he lead him across the verge into the
darkness? And yet his lie troubled him, and he saw a stain spreading
slowly out upon the whiteness of his ardent soul. The painter turned
from the fire. His face was haggard and weary.
"I will go to bed," he said. "I must try to get some sleep even in the
storm."
He held out his thin hand. Uniacke took it.
"Good-night," he said.
"Good-night. I am sorry I have troubled you with my foolish history."
"It interested me deeply. By the way--what did you say your
wonder-child's name was, his full name?"
"Jack--Jack Pringle. What is it?"
"Nothing. That gust of wind startled me. Good-night."
The painter looked at Uniacke narrowly, then left the room.
The clergyman went over to the fire, leaned his arms on the mantelpiece,
and rested his head on them.
Presently he lifted his head, went softly to the door, opened it and
listened. He heard the tread of his guest above stairs, moving to and
fro about the spare room. He waited. After a while there was silence in
the house. Only the wind and the sea roared outside. Then Uniacke went
into the kitchen, pulled out a drawer in a dresser that stood by the
window, and took from it a chisel and a hammer. He carried them into the
passage, furtively put on his coat and hat, and, with all the precaution
of a thief, unlocked the front door and stole out into the storm.