You don't know how desperately unhappy.... No mother, never daring
to see my sister (she ran away, too) ... my friendships at school
discouraged ... nothing in life but a great, empty, lonesome house
and my father to bully me and make cruel fun of me because I'm not
pretty.... That's why I ran away with a man I didn't love--because
I wanted freedom and a little happiness."
"Good Lord!" he murmured beneath his breath, awed by the pitiful,
childish simplicity of her confession and the deep damnation that had
waited upon her.
"So it's over!" she cried--"over, and I've learned my lesson, and I'm
disgraced forever, and friendless and--"
"Stop right there!" he checked her roughly. "You're not friendless yet,
and that nullifies all the rest. Be glad you've had your romance and
learned your lesson--"
"Please don't think I'm not grateful for your kindness," she
interrupted. "But the disgrace--that can't be blotted out!"
"Oh, yes, it can," he insisted bluntly. "There's a way I know--"
A glimmering of that way had only that instant let a little light in
upon the darkness of his solicitous distress for her. He rose and began
to walk and think, hands clasped behind him, trying to make what he had
in mind seem right and reasonable.
"You mean beg my father to take me back. I'll die first!"
"There mustn't be any more talk, or even any thought, of anything like
that. I understand too well to ask the impossible of you. But there is
one way out--a perfectly right way--if you're willing and brave enough
to take a chance--a long chance."
Somehow she seemed to gain hope of his tone. She sat up, following him
with eyes that sought incredulously to believe.
"Have I any choice?" she asked. "I'm desperate enough...."
"God knows," he said, "you'll have to be!"
"Try me."
He paused, standing over her.
"Desperate enough to marry a man who's bound to die within six months
and leave you free? I'm that man: the doctors give me six months more of
life. I'm alone in the world, with no one dependent upon me, nothing to
look forward to but a death that will benefit nobody--a useless end to a
useless life.... Will you take my name to free yourself? Heaven my
witness, you're welcome to it."
"Oh," she breathed, aghast, "what are you saying?"
"I'm proposing marriage," he said, with his quaint, one-sided smile.
"Please listen: I came to this place to make a quick end to my
troubles--but I've changed my mind about that, now. What's happened in
this room has made me see that nobody has any right to--hasten things.
But I mean to leave the country--immediately--and let death find me
where it will. I shall leave behind me a name and a little money,
neither of any conceivable use to me. Will you take them, employ them to
make your life what it was meant to be? It's a little thing, but it will
make me feel a lot more fit to go out of this world--to know I've left
at least one decent act to mark my memory. There's only this far-fetched
chance--I _may_ live. It's a million-to-one shot, but you've got to bear
it in mind. But really you can't lose--"
"Oh, stop, stop!" she implored him, half hysterical. "To think of
marrying to benefit by the death of a man like you--!"
"You've no right to look at it that way." He had a wry, secret smile for
his specious sophistry. "You're being asked to confer, not to accept, a
favour. It's just an act of kindness to a hopeless man. I'd go mad if I
didn't know you were safe from a recurrence of the folly of this
afternoon."
"Don't!" she cried--"don't tempt me. You've no right.... You don't know
how frantic I am...."
"I do," he countered frankly. "I'm depending on just that to swing you
to my point of view. You've got to come to it. I mean you shall marry
me."
She stared up at him, spell-bound, insensibly yielding to the domination
of his will. It was inevitable. He was scarcely less desperate than
she--and no less overwrought and unstrung; and he was the stronger; in
the natural course of things his will could not but prevail. She was
little more than a child, accustomed to yield and go where others led or
pointed out the path. What resistance could she offer to the domineering
importunity of a man of full stature, arrogant in his strength
and--hounded by devils? And he in the fatuity of his soul believed that
he was right, that he was fighting for the girl's best interests,
fighting--and not ungenerously--to save her from the ravening
consequences of her indiscretion!
The bald truth is, he was hardly a responsible agent: distracted by the
ravings of an ego mutinous in the shadow of annihilation, as well as by
contemplation of the girl's wretched plight, he saw all things in
distorted perspective. He had his being in a nightmare world of
frightful, insane realities. He could have conceived of nothing too
terrible and preposterous to seem reasonable and right....
The last trace of evening light had faded out of the world before they
were agreed. Darkness wrapped them in its folds; they were but as voices
warring in a black and boundless void.
Whitaker struck a match and applied it to the solitary gas-jet. A thin,
blue, sputtering tongue of flame revealed them to one another. The girl
still crouched in her arm-chair, weary and spent, her powers of
contention all vitiated by the losing struggle. Whitaker was trembling
with nervous fatigue.
"Well?" he demanded.
"Oh, have your own way," she said drearily. "If it must be...."
"It's for the best," he insisted obstinately. "You'll never regret it."
"One of us will--either you or I," she said quietly. "It's too
one-sided. You want to give all and ask nothing in return. It's a fool's
bargain."
He hesitated, stammering with surprise. She had a habit of saying the
unexpected. "A fool's bargain"--the wisdom of the sage from the lips of
a child....
"Then it's settled," he said, business-like, offering his hand. "Fool's
bargain or not--it's a bargain."
She rose unassisted, then trusted her slender fingers to his palm. She
said nothing. The steady gaze of her extraordinary eyes abashed him.
"Come along and let's get it over," he muttered clumsily. "It's late,
and there's a train to New York at half-past ten, you might as well
catch."
She withdrew her hand, but continued to regard him steadfastly with her
enigmatic, strange stare. "So," she said coolly, "that's settled too, I
presume."
"I'm afraid you couldn't catch an earlier one," he evaded. "Have you any
baggage?"
"Only my suit-case. It won't take a minute to pack that."
"No hurry," he mumbled....
They left the hotel together. Whitaker got his change of a hundred
dollars at the desk--"Mrs. Morten's" bill, of course, included with
his--and bribed the bell-boy to take the suit-case to the railway
station and leave it there, together with his own hand-bag. Since he had
unaccountably conceived a determination to continue living for a time,
he meant to seek out more pleasant accommodations for the night.
The rain had ceased, leaving a ragged sky of clouds and stars in
patches. The air was warm and heavy with wetness. Sidewalks glistened
like black watered silk; street lights mirrored themselves in fugitive
puddles in the roadways; limbs of trees overhanging the sidewalks
shivered now and again in a half-hearted breeze, pelting the wayfarers
with miniature showers of lukewarm, scented drops.
Turning away from the centre of the town, they traversed slowly long
streets of residences set well back behind decent lawns. Warm lamplight
mocked them from a hundred homely windows. They passed few people--a
pair of lovers; three bareheaded giggling girls in short, light frocks
strolling with their arms round one another; a scattering of men
hurrying home to belated suppers.
The girl lagged with weariness. Awakening to this fact, Whitaker
slackened his impatient stride and quietly slipped her arm through his.
"Is it much farther?" she asked.
"No--not now," he assured her with a confidence he by no means felt.
He was beginning to realize the tremendous difficulties to be overcome.
It bothered him to scheme a way to bring about the marriage without
attracting an appalling amount of gratuitous publicity, in a community
as staid and sober as this. He who would marry secretly should not
select a half-grown New England city for his enterprise....
However, one rarely finds any really insuperable obstacles in the way of
an especially wrong-headed project.
Whitaker, taking his heart and his fate in his hands, accosted a
venerable gentleman whom they encountered as he was on the point of
turning off the sidewalk to private grounds.
"I beg your pardon," he began.
The man paused and turned upon them a saintly countenance framed in hair
like snow.
"There is something I can do for you?" he inquired with punctilious
courtesy.
"If you will be kind enough to direct me to a minister...."
"I am one."
"I thought so," said Whitaker. "We wish to get married."
The gentleman looked from his face to the girl's, then moved aside from
the gate. "This is my home," he explained. "Will you be good enough to
come in?"
Conducting them to his private study, he subjected them to a kindly
catechism. The girl said little, Whitaker taking upon himself the brunt
of the examination. Absolutely straightforward and intensely sincere, he
came through the ordeal well, without being obliged to disclose what he
preferred to keep secret. The minister, satisfied, at length called in
the town clerk by telephone; who issued the license, pocketed his fee,
and, in company with the minister's wife, acted as witness....
Whitaker found himself on his feet beside Mary Ladislas. They were being
married. He was shaken by a profound amazement. The incredible was
happening--with his assistance. He heard his voice uttering responses;
it seemed something as foreign to him as the voice of the girl at his
side. He wondered stupidly at her calm--and later, at his own. It was
all preposterously matter-of-fact and, at the same time, stupidly
romantic. He divined obscurely that this thing was happening in
obedience to forces nameless and unknown to them, strange and terrific
forces that worked mysteriously beyond their mortal ken. He seemed to
hear the droning of the loom of the Fates....
And they were man and wife. The door had closed, the gate-latch clicked
behind them. They were walking quietly side by side through the scented
night, they whom God had joined together.
Man and wife! Bride and groom, already started on the strangest,
shortest of wedding journeys--from the parsonage to the railroad
station!
Neither found anything to say. They walked on, heels in unison pounding
the wet flagstones. The night was sweet with the scent of wet grass and
shrubbery. The sidewalks were boldly patterned with a stencilling of
black leaves and a milky dappling of electric light. At every corner
high-swung arcs shot vivid slants of silver-blue radiance through the
black and green of trees.
These things all printed themselves indelibly upon the tablets of his
memory....
They arrived at the station. Whitaker bought his wife a ticket to New
York and secured for her solitary use a drawing-room in the sleeper.
When that was accomplished, they had still a good part of an hour to
wait. They found a bench on the station platform, and sat down. Whitaker
possessed himself of his wife's hand-bag long enough to furnish it with
a sum of money and an old envelope bearing the name and address of his
law partner. He explained that he would write to Drummond, who would see
to her welfare as far as she would permit--issue her an adequate monthly
allowance and advise her when she should have become her own mistress
once more: in a word, a widow.
She thanked him briefly, quietly, with a constraint he understood too
well to resent.
People began to gather upon the platform, to loiter about and pass up
and down. Further conversation would have been difficult, even if they
had found much to say to one another. Curiously or not, they didn't.
They sat on in thoughtful silence.
Both, perhaps, were sensible of some relief when at length the train
thundered in from the East, breathing smoke and flame. Whitaker helped
his wife aboard and interviewed the porter in her behalf. Then they had
a moment or two alone in the drawing-room, in which to consummate what
was meant to be their first and last parting.
"You'll get in about two," said Whitaker. "Better just slip across the
street to the Belmont for to-night. To-morrow--or the day
after--whenever you feel rested--you can find yourself more quiet
quarters."
"Yes," she said....
He comprehended something of the struggle she was having with herself,
and respected it. If he had consulted his own inclinations, he would
have turned and marched off without another word. But for her sake he
lingered. Let her have the satisfaction (he bade himself) of knowing
that she had done her duty at their leave-taking.
She caught him suddenly by the shoulders with both her hands. Her eyes
sought his with a wistful courage he could not but admire.
"You know I'm grateful...."
"Don't think of it that way--though I'm glad you are."
"You're a good man," she said brokenly.
He knew himself too well to be able to reply.
"You mustn't worry about me, now. You've made things easy for me. I can
take care of myself, and ... I shan't forget whose name I bear."
He muttered something to the effect that he was sure of that.
She released his shoulders and stood back, searching his face with
tormented eyes. Abruptly she offered him her hand.
"Good-by," she said, her lips quivering--"Good-by, good friend!"
He caught the hand, wrung it clumsily and painfully and ... realized
that the train was in motion. He had barely time to get away....
He found himself on the station platform, stupidly watching the rear
lights dwindle down the tracks and wondering whether or not
hallucinations were a phase of his malady. A sick man often dreams
strange dreams....
A voice behind him, cool with a trace of irony, observed:
"I'd give a good deal to know just what particular brand of damn'
foolishness you've been indulging in, this time."
He whirled around to face Peter Stark--Peter quietly amused and very
much the master of the situation.
"You needn't think," said he, "that you have any chance on earth of
escaping my fond attentions, Hugh. I'll go to the ends of the earth
after you, if you won't let me go with you. I've fixed it up with Nelly
to wait until I bring you home, a well man, before we get married; and
if you refuse to be my best man--well, there won't be any party. You can
make up your mind to that."
V
WILFUL MISSING
It was one o'clock in the morning before Whitaker allowed himself to be
persuaded; fatigue reenforced every stubborn argument of Peter Stark's
to overcome his resistance. It was a repetition of the episode of Mary
Ladislas recast and rewritten: the stronger will overcame the
admonitions of a saner judgment. Whitaker gave in. "Oh, have your own
way," he said at length, unconsciously iterating the words that had won
him a bride. "If it must be...."
Peter put him to bed, watched over him through the night, and the next
morning carried him on to New Bedford, where they superintended the
outfitting of Peter's yacht, the _Adventuress_. Beyond drawing heavily
on his bank and sending Drummond a brief note, Whitaker failed to renew
communication with his home. He sank into a state of semi-apathetic
content; he thought little of anything beyond the business of the
moment; the preparations for what he was pleased to term his funeral
cruise absorbed him to the exclusion of vain repinings or anxiety for
the welfare of his adventitious wife. Apparently his sudden
disappearance had not caused the least ripple on the surface of life in
New York; the newspapers, at all events, slighted the circumstance
unanimously: to his complete satisfaction.
Within the week the _Adventuress_ sailed.
She was five months out of port before Whitaker began to be conscious
that he was truly accursed. There came a gradual thickening of the
shadows that threatened to eclipse his existence. And then, one day as
they dined with the lonely trader of an isolated station in the
D'Entrecasteaux Islands, he fell from his chair as if poleaxed. He
regained consciousness only to shiver with the chill of the wind that's
fanned by the wings of death. It was impossible to move him. The agonies
of the damned were his when, with exquisite gentleness, they lifted him
to a bed....
Stark sailed in the _Adventuress_ before sundown of the same day,
purposing to fetch a surgeon from Port Moresby. Whitaker said a last
farewell to his friend, knowing in his soul that they would never meet
again. Then he composed himself to die quietly. But the following
morning brought a hapchance trading schooner to the island, and with it,
in the estate of supercargo, a crapulous Scotch gentleman who had been a
famous specialist of London before drink laid him by the heels. He
performed an heroic operation upon Whitaker within an hour, announced by
nightfall that the patient would recover, and the next day sailed with
his ship to end his days in some abandoned Australian boozing-ken--as
Whitaker learned in Sydney several months later.
In the same place, and at the same time, he received his first authentic
news of the fate of the _Adventuress_. The yacht had struck on an
uncharted reef, in heavy weather, and had foundered almost immediately.
Of her entire company, a solitary sailor managed to cling to a life-raft
until picked up, a week after the wreck, by a tramp steamship on whose
decks he gasped out his news and his life in the same breaths.
Whitaker hunted up an account of the disaster in the files of a local
newspaper. He read that the owner, Peter Stark, Esq., and his guest, H.
M. Whitaker, Esq., both of New York, had gone down with the vessel.
There was also a cable despatch from New York detailing Peter Stark's
social and financial prominence--evidence that the news had been cabled
Home. To all who knew him Whitaker was as dead as Peter Stark.
Sardonic irony of circumstance, that had robbed the sound man of life
and bestowed life upon the moribund! Contemplation wrought like a toxic
drug upon Whitaker's temper, until he was raving drunk with the black
draught of mutiny against the dictates of an Omnipotence capable of such
hideous mockeries of justice. The iron bit deep into his soul and left
corrosion there....
"There is a world outside the one you know
To which for curiousness 'Ell can't compare;
It is the place where wilful missings go,
As we can testify, for we are there."
Kipling's lines buzzed through his head more than once in the course of
the next few years; for he was "there." They were years of such
vagabondage as only the South Seas countenance: neither unhappy nor very
strenuous, not yet scarred by the tooth of poverty. Whitaker had between
four and five thousand dollars in traveller's checks which he converted
into cash while in Sydney. Memory of the wreck of the _Adventuress_ was
already fading from the Australian mind; no one dreamed of challenging
the signature of a man seven months dead. And as certainly and as
quietly as the memory, Whitaker faded away; Hugh Morten took his place,
and Sydney knew him no more, nor did any other parts wherein he had
answered to his rightful name.
The money stayed by him handsomely. Thanks to a strong constitution in a
tough body (now that its malignant demon was exorcised) he found it easy
to pick up a living by one means or another. Indeed, he played many
parts in as many fields before joining hands with a young Englishman he
had grown to like and entering upon what seemed a forlorn bid for
fortune. Thereafter he prospered amazingly.
In those days his anomalous position in the world troubled him very
little. He was a Wilful Missing and a willing. The new life intrigued
him amazingly; he lived in open air, in virgin country, wresting a
fortune by main strength from the reluctant grasp of Nature. He was one
of the first two men to find and mine gold in paying quantities in the
Owen Stanley country.... Now that Peter Stark was dead, the ties of
interest and affection binding him to America were both few and slender.
His wife was too abstract a concept, a shadow too vague in his memory,
to obtrude often upon his reveries. Indeed, as time went on, he found it
anything but easy to recall much about the physical appearance of the
woman he had married; he remembered chiefly her eyes; she moved mistily
across the stage of a single scene in his history, an awkward,
self-conscious, unhappy, childish phantasm.
Even the consideration that, fortified by the report of his death, she
might have married again, failed to disturb either his slumbers or his
digestion. If that had happened, he had no objection; the tie that bound
them was the emptiest of forms--in his understanding as meaningless and
as powerless to make them one as the printed license form they had been
forced to procure of the State of Connecticut. There had been neither
love nor true union--merely pity on one side, apathy of despair on the
other. Two souls had met in the valley of the great shadow, had paused a
moment to touch hands, had passed onward, forever out of one another's
ken; and that was all. His "death" should have put her in command of a
fair competence. If she had since sought and found happiness with
another man, was there any logical reason, or even excuse, for Whitaker
to abandon his new and pleasant ways of life in order to return and
shatter hers?
He was self-persuaded of his generosity toward the girl.
Casuistry of the Wilful Missing!...
It's to be feared he had always a hard-headed way of considering matters
in the light of equity as distinguished from the light of ethical or
legal morality. This is not to be taken as an attempt to defend the man,
but rather as a statement of fact: even as the context is to be read as
an account of some things that happened rather than as a morality....
When at length he did make up his mind to go Home, it wasn't because he
felt that duty called him; plain, everyday, human curiosity had
something to do with his determination--a desire to see how New York was
managing to get along without him--together with a dawning apprehension
that there was an uncomfortable amount of truth in the antiquated
bromidiom about the surprising littleness of the world.
He was in Melbourne at that time, with Lynch, his partner. Having
prospered and laid by a lump of money, they had planned to finance their
holdings in the traditional fashion--that is, to let in other people's
money to do the work, while they rested and possessed their souls and
drew dividends on a controlling interest. Capital in Melbourne had
proved eager and approachable; the arrangement they desired was quickly
consummated; the day the papers were signed, Whitaker passed old friends
in the street. They were George Presbury and his wife--Anne Forsythe
that was--self-evident tourists, looking the town over between steamers.
Presbury, with no thought in his bumptious head of meeting Hugh Whitaker
before the Day of Judgment, looked at and through him without a hint of
recognition; but his wife was another person altogether. Whitaker could
not be blind to the surprise and perplexity that shone in her eyes, even
though he pretended to be blind to her uncertain nod; long after his
back alone was visible to her he could feel her inquiring stare boring
into it.
The incident made him think; and he remembered that he was now a man of
independent fortune and of newly idle hands as well. After prolonged
consideration he suddenly decided, told Lynch to look out for his
interests and expect him back when he should see him, and booked for
London by a Royal Mail boat--all in half a day. From London Mr. Hugh
Morten crossed immediately to New York on the _Olympic_, landing in the
month of April--nearly six years to a day from the time he had left his
native land.