"That's a pity," I said. "But the rumour can still be killed. I
thought of a way yesterday."
"Will it cost much?" he asked.
"Very little."
"What am I to do?"
"Paint the Presidential House," said I. "It wants it badly, and all
Santa Paula will be very sure that you wouldn't spend money in paint
if you meant to run away."
"That's a good idea," said he, and he sat down at once and began to
figure out the expense. "A couple of hundred dollars will do it."
"Not well," said I.
"We don't want it done well," said Juan. "Two men on a plank will, be
enough. A couple of hundred dollars is too much. Half that will be
quite sufficient. By the way"--and he sat with his pen poised--"just
run after--her--and tell her that Vandeleur is landing to-morrow at
Trinidad. I invented some business for him there."
He bent down over the desk. His back was towards the door. As I turned
the handle, someone was opening it from the other side. It was Olivia
Calavera.
"I came back," she said, with the colour mantling in her face. "You
see, I am going away to-morrow--and I hadn't said 'Good-bye.'"
Juan must have heard her voice.
"Please go and give that message," he said sharply. "And shut the
door! I don't want to be disturbed."
Olivia drew back quickly. I was amazed to see that she was hurt.
"His message is for you," I said severely. "Harry Vandeleur lands at
Trinidad to-morrow."
"Thank you," she said slowly; she turned away and walked as slowly
down the passage. "Goodbye," she said, with her back towards me.
"I will see you off to-morrow, Senorita," I said; and she turned back
to me.
"No," she said gently. "Don't do that! We will say 'Good-bye' here."
She gave me her hand--she had been on the point of going without even
doing that. "Thank you very much," she added, and she walked rather
listlessly away. She left me with an uneasy impression that her thanks
were not very sincere. I am bound to admit that Olivia puzzled me that
night. To extract the proposal of marriage from Ballester was within
the rules of the game and good play into the bargain. But to come back
again as she had done, was not quite fair. However, as I watched her
go, I thought that I would keep my bewilderment to myself. I have
never asked Harry Vandeleur, for instance, whether he could explain
it. I went back to the study.
"I think fifty dollars will be ample," said Ballester, still figuring
on his paper. "Has she gone?"
"She is going," said I. He rose from his chair, broke off a rose from
a bowl of flowers which, on this night only, decorated the room. Then
he opened the window and leaned out. Olivia, I reckoned, would be just
at this moment stepping into the carriage. He tossed the rose down and
drew back quickly out of sight.
"Shall it be green paint, your Excellency?" I asked.
His Excellency, I regret to say, swore loudly.
"Never in this world!" said he.
I had left the door open. The music of a languorous and melting waltz
filled the room.
"I do loathe music!" cried Juan Ballester violently. It was the
nearest approach to a sentimental remark that I had ever heard him
make.
NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF
CAPRICORN
NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF
CAPRICORN
The strong civic spirit of the Midlands makes them fertile in
reformers; and Mr. Endicott even in his early youth was plagued by the
divine discontent with things as they are. Neither a happy marriage,
nor a prosperous business, nor an engaging daughter appeased him. But
he was slow in discovering a remedy. The absence of any sense of
humour blunted his wits and he lived in a vague distress, out of which
it needed the death of his wife to quicken him. "Some result must come
out of all these years of pondering and discomfort, if only as a
memorial to her," he reflected, and he burrowed again amongst the
innumerable panaceas. Then at last he found it--on an afternoon walk
in June when the sharp contrast between the grime of the town and the
loveliness of green and leaf which embowered it so closely, smote upon
him almost with pain. The Minimum Wage. Like Childe Roland's Dark
Tower, it had lain within his vision for many a long mile of his
pilgrimage. His eyes had rested on it and had never taken it in; so
simple and clear it was to the view.
Thereafter he was quick to act. Time was running on. He was forty-two.
He disposed of his business, and a year later was elected to
Parliament. Once in the House he walked warily. He had no personal
ambition, but he was always afraid lest some indiscretion should set
the House against him and delay his cause. Mr. Endicott had his plan
quite clear in his mind. Samuel Plimsoll was his model. The great Bill
for the establishment of the Minimum Wage should be a private member's
Bill moved from the back benches session after session if need be, and
driven through Parliament into Law at last by the sheer weight of its
public value.
Accordingly for a year he felt his way, learning the rules and orders,
speaking now and then without subservience and without impertinence;
and after the prorogation of the House for the summer, he took his
daughter with him to a farm-house set apart in a dale of Cumberland.
In that solitary place, inspired by the brown fells and the tumbling
streams, and with the one person he loved as his companion, he
proposed finally to smooth and round his Bill.
Accident or destiny, however--whichever you like to call the beginning
of tragic things--put an Australian in the same compartment of the
railway-carriage; and the Australian was led to converse by the sight
of various cameras on the luggage rack.
"My father is very fond of photography," said Elsie Endicott. "It
amuses him, and the pictures which he takes if the day is clear, are
sometimes quite recognisable."
"My dear!" said Mr. Endicott.
Elsie turned to the window and shook hands with two young men who had
come to see her off. One of them, whom Mr. Endicott vaguely remembered
to have seen at meals in his house, climbed on the footboard.
"You will take care of Miss Endicott, sir," he said firmly. "She has
been overdoin' it a bit, dancin', you know, and that sort of thing,
while you were at the House of Commons."
Mr. Endicott chuckled.
"I'll tell you something about my daughter," he replied. "She may look
like china, but she is pretty solid earthenware really. And if there
are any others as anxious about her as you are you might spread the
good news."
The train moved off. "So you are in the House of Commons," said the
Australian, and he began to talk. "Our great trouble--yours and
mine--is----"
"I know it," Mr. Endicott interrupted with a smile of confidence.
"Of course you do," replied the Australian. "It's the overcrowding of
the East under the protective rule of the British."
"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Endicott blankly.
"We could help a good deal," the Australian continued, "if only our
Government had got a ha'porth of common sense. North of the Tropic of
Capricorn, there's land and to spare which coloured labour could
cultivate and white labour can't."
This was strange talk to Mr. Endicott. He was aware, but not conscious
of great dominions and possessions outside the British Islands. He had
indeed avoided the whole subject. He was shy of the phrase which
described them, as a horse is shy of a newspaper blown about the
street. The British Empire! The very words had a post-prandial sound.
Instead of suggesting to him vast territories with myriads of men and
women groping amongst enormous problems, they evoked a picture of a
flamboyant gentleman in evening dress standing at the head of a table,
his face congested with too much dinner, a glass of wine in his one
hand, a fat cigar in the other, and talking vauntingly. This
particular sentence of the Australian stuck inconveniently in his mind
and smouldered there.
For instance. On the afternoon of their arrival Elsie was arranging
his developing dishes and his chemicals on a small rough table in a
corner of their one living-room. She put an old basket-chair by the
table and set around it a screen which she had discovered in one of
the bedrooms upstairs.
"There!" she said. "You can make all your messes here, father, and we
can keep the room looking habitable, and I shan't get all my frocks
stained."
"Very well, Elsie," said her father absently, and he spoke his own
thoughts. "That was a curious fear of the man in the train, Elsie. I
think there's no truth in it. No, the danger's here in this country;
here's what's to be done to avert it," and he slapped his hand down
upon his pile of statistics.
"No doubt, father," said Elsie, and she went on with her work.
The very next evening he returned again to the subject. It was after
dinner and about half-past nine o'clock. The blinds had not been
lowered and Endicott looked out through the open windows on to a great
flank of Scawfell which lay drenched in white moonlight a couple of
fields away.
"North of the Tropic of Capricorn," he said, "I wish we had an atlas,
Elsie."
"I'll write to London and buy one," said the girl. "We haven't got
more than a 'Handy Gazetteer' even at home. It'll be amusing to plan
out some long journeys which we can take together when you have passed
your Bill into law."
Endicott smiled grimly at his daughter.
"I reckon we won't take many journeys together, Elsie. Oh, you needn't
look surprised and hurt! I am not taken in by you a bit, my dear. That
young spark on the footboard who told me I didn't take enough care of
you"--and Elsie gurgled with laughter at the recollection--"threw a
dreadful light upon your character and gave me a clue besides to the
riddle of your vast correspondence. I hope you are telling them all
that my persistent unkindness is not driving you into a decline."
Elsie paused in the act of addressing an envelope--there was a
growing pile of letters in front of her--to reassure her father.
"I tell them all," she replied, "that you neither beat me nor starve
me, and that if you weren't so very messy with your chemicals in the
corner over there, I should have very little reason to change my
home."
"Thank you, my dear," said Mr. Endicott. He was very proud of his
daughter and especially of her health. With her dark rebellious hair,
the delicate colour in her cheeks, and her starry eyes, she had a
quite delusive look of fragility. But she could dance any youth of her
acquaintance to a standstill without ruffling her curls, as he very
well knew. He gazed at her lowered head with a smile.
"However, all this doesn't help me with the Minimum Wage," he
continued, and he turned again to the papers on his desk by the
window, while Elsie at the table in the middle of the big low-roofed
room, continued to write her letters.
They were still engaged in these pursuits when Mrs. Tyson, their
landlady, came into the room to lower the blinds.
"No, please leave them up," said Endicott, in an irritable voice.
"I'll draw them down myself before we go to bed."
Mrs. Tyson accordingly left the blinds alone.
"And you'll be careful of the Crown Derby," she said imperturbably,
nodding towards a china tea-set ranged in an open cabinet near to the
door. "Gentlemen from London have asked me to sell it over and over.
For it's of great value. But I won't, as I promised my mother. She,
poor woman----"
"Yes, yes," interposed Mr. Endicott, "we'll be very careful. You may
remember you told us all about it yesterday."
Mrs. Tyson turned down a little lower the one oil lamp which, with the
candles upon Endicott's desk, lighted the room, and went back to the
inner door.
"Will you be wanting anything more for a little while?" she asked.
"For my girl's away, and I must go down the valley. I am sending some
sheep away to market to-morrow morning."
"No, we want nothing at all," said Elsie, without paying much
attention to what the woman was saying. Mrs. Tyson was obviously
inclined to fuss, and would have to be suppressed. But she went out
now without another word. There were two doors to the room at opposite
ends, the inner one leading to a small hall, the kitchen and the
staircase, the other, and outer door, opening directly close by the
window on to a tiny garden with a flagged pathway. At the end of the
path there was a gate, and a low garden wall. Beyond the gate a narrow
lane and a brook separated the house from the fields and the great
flank of fell.
The night was hot, and Endicott, unable to concentrate his attention
upon his chosen theme, had the despairing sensation that he had lost
grip of it altogether: his eyes wandered from his papers so
continually to the hillside asleep in the bright moonlight. Here a
great boulder threw a long motionless shadow down the slope, like a
house; there a sharp rock-ridge cropping out of the hill, raised
against the sky a line of black pinnacles like a file of soldiers.
"I can't work to-night, Elsie, and that's the truth," cried Endicott
passionately, "though this is just the night when one ought to be most
alive to the millions of men cooped in hot cities and living
wretchedly. I'll go out of doors. Will you come?"
Elsie hesitated. Mr. Endicott was to carry that poignant recollection
to his death. One word of persuasion and she would have come with him.
But he did not speak it, and Elsie bent her head again to her work.
"No, thanks, father," she said. "I'll finish these letters. They must
go off to-morrow morning."
Endicott blew out his candles, lit his pipe, and took up his cap. He
was still smiling over her important air as of someone with great and
urgent business. He went out into the garden. Elsie heard the latch of
the gate click. He walked across the little bridge over the brook and
at once his mood changed. He wandered across the fields and up the
hillside, sorely discontented with himself. He had lost interest in
the Minimum Wage. So much he admitted. The surroundings which were to
inspire him had, on the contrary, merely provoked a disinclination to
do any work whatever. The reaction after the strain of the Session was
making itself felt. The question in his mind was "Why bother?" High up
the hill he sat down upon a boulder to have it out with himself.
The sound of the stream dropping from pool to pool of rock on its way
down the valley rose in a continuous thunder to his ears. He looked
down at the little farm-house beneath him, and the golden light of the
lamp within the windows of the sitting-room.
As he looked the light moved. Then it diminished; then it vanished
altogether. Endicott chuckled and lit a second pipe, holding the
lighted match in the hollow of his hands and bending his head close
over it, because of a whisper of air. Elsie had finished her letters
to the youths who besieged her and was off to bed. Only the moonlight
blazed upon the windows now and turned them into mirrors of burnished
silver.
Endicott smoked a third pipe whilst he wrestled with himself upon the
hillside. To-morrow he would get up very early, bathe in the big deep
pool, transparent to the lowest of its thirty feet of water, and then
spend a long morning with the wage-lists of the chain-making industry.
That was settled. Nothing should change his plan. Meanwhile it was
very pleasant up here under the cool sky of moonlight and faint stars.
He dragged himself up reluctantly from his seat, and went down towards
the farm. There was a little stone bridge to cross over one of the
many mountain streams which went to the making of the small river on
the other side of the house. Then came the lane and the garden-gate.
He closed the door behind him when he had gone in. Although there was
no lamp burning, the room was not dark. A twilight, vaporous and
silvery, crept into it, darkening towards the inner part and filling
the corners with mystery; while the floor by the window was chequered
with great panels of light precise and bright as day.
On the hillside Endicott had seen the light go out in the room, and he
crossed over to the big table for the lamp. But it was no longer
there. Elsie had taken it, no doubt, into the hall with her letters
for the morning post and had not brought it back. He moved to his own
table where the candles stood; and with a shock he perceived that he
was not alone in that unlighted room. A movement amongst the shadows
by the inner door caught and held his eyes.
He swung round and faced the spot. He saw against the wall near the
screen which hid his photographic paraphernalia, a man standing,
straight, upright and very still. The figure was vague and blurred,
but Endicott could see that his legs were clothed in white, and that
he wore some bulky and outlandish gear upon his head. Endicott quickly
struck a match. At the scratch and spurt of flame, the man in the
shadow ran forward towards the door with extraordinary swiftness. But
his shoulder caught the case in which Mrs. Tyson's Crown Derby china
was standing, and brought it with a crash of broken crockery to the
floor. Before the intruder could recover, Endicott set his back
against the door and held the burning match above his head. He was
amazed by what he saw.
The intruder was an Asiatic with the conventional hawk-nose of the Jew
in the shape of his face; a brown man wearing a coloured turban upon
his head, an old tweed jacket on his shoulders, and a pair of dirty
white linen trousers on his legs, narrowing until they fitted closely
round his ankles. He wore neither shoes nor stockings. And he stood
very still watching Endicott with alert, bright eyes. Endicott,
without moving from the door, reached out and lit the candles upon the
table.
"What are you doing here?" he demanded curiously. He had no personal
fear, and he was not much troubled by the man's hiding in the room.
Elsie, whom the fellow might have frightened, had long since gone to
bed, and there was nothing of value, except the Crown Derby, which he
could have stolen. On the other hand Endicott was immensely puzzled by
the presence of an Asiastic at all in this inland and lonely valley
far from railways and towns, at half-past ten of the night.
"I pass the house," the man answered in English which was
astonishingly good. "I think you give me one piece opium to go on
with."
"Opium!" cried Mr. Endicott, as if he had been stung. How many times
had he voted for the suppression of everything to do with opium.
"You'll find none of that abominable drug here!"
He surveyed the Asiatic, outraged in every feeling. He lifted the
latch. He was on the point of flinging open the door. He had actually
begun to open it, when his mood changed. North of the Tropic of
Capricorn. The lilt of the words was in his ears. He remembered the
talk of the Australian in the railway-carriage about the overcrowding
of the East. The coming of this strange brown man seemed to him of a
sudden curiously relevant. He closed the door again.
"You passed the house? Where do you come from? Who are you? How do you
come here?"
The Asiatic, who had stood gathered like a runner at the
starting-point while the door was being opened, now cringed and
smiled.
"Protector of the poor, I tell you my story"; and Mr. Endicott found
himself listening in that quiet farm-house of the Cumberland dales to
a most enlightening Odyssey.
The man's name was Ahmed Ali, and he was a Pathan of the hills. His
home was in the middle country between Peshawur and the borders of
Afghanistan, and he belonged to a tribe of seven hundred men, every
one of whom had left his home and his wife and his children behind
him, and had gone down to Bombay to seek his livelihood in the
stokeholds of ships. Ahmed had been taken on a steamer of the
Peninsula and Oriental Line bound for Australia, where he hoped to
make his fortune. But neither at Sydney nor at Melbourne had he been
allowed to land.
"But I am a British citizen," he said, having acquired some English.
"Well, and what of it?" said the Port authorities.
Nevertheless the night before the boat sailed he slipped overboard and
swam ashore, to be caught when the smoke of that steamer was no more
than a stain on the horizon. He was held in custody and would have
been returned by the next steamer to India. But there was already in
the harbour a cargo boat of the Clan Line bound for Quebec round the
Cape; and the boat was short of its complement in the stokehold.
Ahmed Ali, accordingly, signed on, and sailed in her and acquired more
English to help him on in the comfortable life he now proposed to make
for himself in Canada.
"But again they would not let me go away into the country," he
continued. "I told them I was British citizen, but it did not help me;
no, not any more than in Australia. They put me on a ship for England,
and I came to Liverpool steerage like a genelman. And at Liverpool I
landed boldly. For I was a British citizen."
"Ah!" interjected Mr. Endicott proudly. "Here, in England, you see the
value of being a British citizen."
"But, no, my genelman. For here there's no work for British citizen. I
land and I walk about and I ask for work. But everyone says, 'Why
don't you stay in your own country?' So I come away across the fields,
and no man give me one piece opium."
Mr. Endicott nodded his head when the story was ended.
"Well, after all, why don't you stay in your own country?" he asked.
Mr. Endicott had already had his answer from the Australian, but he
was now thirsty for details, and his ears in consequence were
afflicted with a brief description of British rule from the Pathan's
point of view.
"The all-wise one will pardon me. You keep the peace. Therefore we
cannot stay in our own country. For we grow crowded and there is no
food. In old times, when we were crowded and hungry, we went down into
the plains and took the land and the wives of the people of the plains
and killed the men. But the raj does not allow it. It holds a sword
between us and the plains, a sword with the edge towards us. Neither,
on the other hand, does it feed us."
Mr. Endicott was aghast at the perverted views thus calmly announced
to him.
"But we can't allow you to come down into India murdering and robbing
and taking the wives."
The Asiatic shrugged his shoulders.
"It is the law."
Mr. Endicott was silent. If it were not the law, there were certainly
a great many precedents. The men of the hills and the people of the
plains--yes, history would say it _was_ the law. Mr. Endicott's eyes
were opening upon unknown worlds. The British Power stood in India
then cleaving a law of nature?
"Also, you send your doctors and make cures when the plague and the
cholera come, so that fewer people die. Also, when the crops fail and
there is famine, you distribute food, so that again fewer people die.
No, there is no room now for us in our own country because of you, and
you will not let us into yours."
"But we can't do anything else," cried Mr. Endicott. "We keep the
peace, we feed when there is famine, we send our doctors when there is
plague, because that is the law, also--the law of our race."
Ahmed Ali did not move. He had placed the dilemma before Endicott. He
neither solved nor accepted it. Nor Was Endicott able to find any
answer. There must be one, since his whole race was arraigned just for
what it most prided itself upon--oh, no doubt there was an answer. But
Mr. Endicott could not find it. His imagination, however, grasped the
problem. He saw those seven hundred tribesmen travelling down the
passes to the rail head, loading the Bombay train and dispersing upon
the steamers. But he had no answer, and because he had no answer he
was extremely uncomfortable. He had lived for a year in the world of
politicians where, as a rule, there are answers all ready-made for any
question, answers neatly framed in aphorisms and propositions and
provided for our acceptance by thoughtful organisations. But he
could not remember one to suit this occasion. He was at a loss, and he
took the easy way to rid himself of discomfort. He dived into his
trouser-pocket and fished out a handful of silver.
"Here!" he said. "This'll help you on a bit. Now go!"
He stood aside from the door and the Asiatic darted to it with an
extraordinary eagerness. But once he had unlatched it, once it stood
open to the hillside and the sky, and he free in the embrasure, he
lost all his cringing aspect. He turned round upon Mr. Endicott.
"I go now," he cried in a high arrogant voice. "But I shall come back
very soon, and all our peoples will come with me, all our hungry
peoples from the East. Remember that, you genelman!" And then he ran
noiselessly out of the house and down the pathway to the gate.
He ran with extraordinary swiftness; so that Endicott followed him to
the gate and watched him go. He flew down the road, his shadow
flitting in the moonlight like a bird. Once he looked over his
shoulder, and seeing Endicott at the gate he leapt into the air. A few
yards farther he doubled on his steps, climbed down into the little
stream beside the lane and took to the hills. And in another moment he
was not. The broad and kindly fell took him to its bosom. He was too
tiny an atom to stand out against that great towering slope of grass
and stones. Indeed, he vanished so instantly that it seemed he must
have dived into a cave. The next moment Endicott almost doubted
whether he had ever been at all, whether he was not some apparition
born of his own troubled brain and the Australian's talk. But, as he
turned back into the house, he saw upon the flags of the garden path
the marks of the man's wet, bare feet. Not only had Ahmed Ali been to
the farm-house, but he had crossed the stream to get there.
Mr. Endicott went back to his table in the window and seated himself
in front of his lighted candles, more from habit than with any thought
of work. He felt suddenly rather tired. He had not been conscious of
any fear while Ahmed Ali was in the room, or indeed of any strain. But
strain, and perhaps fear, there had been. Certainly a vague fear began
to get hold of him now. He had a picture before his eyes of the
Asiatic leaping into the air upon the road, and then doubling for the
hills. Why had he fled so fast?
"North of the Tropic of Capricorn!"
He repeated the words to himself aloud. Was the Australian right after
all? And would they come from the East--those hungry people? Mr.
Endicott seemed to feel the earth tremble beneath the feet of the
myriads of Asia. He bent his ear and seemed to hear the distant
confusion of their approach. He looked down at his papers and
flicked them contemptuously. Of what use would be his fine Bill
for the establishment of a Minimum Wage? Why, everything would go
down--civilisation, the treasures of art, twenty centuries of man's
painful growth--just as that Derby China teapot with its wonderful
colour of dark blue and red and gold. The broken fragments of the
teapot became a symbol to Endicott.
"And the women would go down too," he thought with a shiver. "They
would take the wives."
He had come to this point in his speculations when the inner door
opened, and the light broadened in the room. He heard Mrs. Tyson
shuffle in, but he did not turn towards her. He sat looking out upon
the fell.
"I found the lamp burning on the hall table by the letters, sir," she
said, "and I thought you might want it."
"Thank you," said Endicott vaguely, and he was roused by a little
gasping cry which she uttered.
"Oh, yes! I am very sorry, Mrs. Tyson. Your teapot has been knocked
down. I went out. There was a man in the room when I came back. He
knocked it down. Of course I'll make its value good, though I doubt if
I can replace it."
Mrs. Tyson made no answer. She placed the lamp on the table. Endicott
was still seated at his table in the window with his back to the room.
But he had thrown back his head, and he saw the circle of reflected
light upon the ceiling shake and quiver as Mrs. Tyson put the lamp
down. The glass chimney, too, rattled as though her hands were
shaking.
"I am very sorry indeed," he continued.
Mrs. Tyson dropped upon her knees and began to pick up the broken
pieces from the floor.
"It doesn't matter at all, sir," she said, and Endicott was surprised
by the utter tonelessness of her voice. He knew that she set great
store upon this set of china; she had boasted of it. Yet now that it
was spoilt she spoke of it with complete indifference. He turned round
in his chair and watched her picking up the fragments--watched her
idly until she sobbed.
"Good heavens," he cried, "I knew that you valued it, Mrs. Tyson,
but--" and then he stopped. For she turned to him and he knew that
there was more than the china teapot at the bottom of her trouble. Her
face, white and shaking and wet with tears, was terrible to see. There
was a horror upon it as though she had beheld things not allowed, and
a hopeless pain in her eyes as though she was sure that the appalling
vision would never pass. But all she did was to repeat her phrase.
"It doesn't matter at all, sir."
Endicott started up and laid his hand upon her shoulder.
"What has happened, Mrs. Tyson?"
"Oh, I can't tell you, sir." She knelt upon the floor and covered her
face with her hands and wept as Endicott had never dreamed that a
human being could weep. Fear seized upon him and held him till he
shivered with the chill of it. The woman had come in by the inner
door. In the hall, then, was to be found the cause of her horror. He
lifted the lamp and hurried towards it, but to reach the door he had
to pass the screen which Elsie had arranged on the day of their
coming. And at the screen he stopped. The terror which may come to a
man once in his life clutched his heart so that he choked. For behind
the screen he saw the gleam of a girl's white frock.
"Elsie," he cried, "you have been all this while here--asleep." For he
would not believe the thing he knew.
She was lying rather than sitting in the low basket chair in front of
the little table on which the chemicals were ranged, with her back
towards him, and her face buried in the padding of the chair. Endicott
stretched his arm over her and set down the lamp upon the table. Then
he spoke to her again chidingly and shaking her arm.
"Elsie, wake up! Don't be ridiculous!"
He slipped an arm under her waist, and lifting her, turned her towards
him. The girl's head rolled upon her shoulders, and there was a look
of such deadly horror upon her face that no pen could begin to
describe it. Endicott caught her to his breast.
"Oh, my God," he cried hoarsely. "My poor girl! My poor girl!"
Mrs. Tyson had come up behind him.
"It was he," she whispered, "the man who was here. He killed her!" And
as Endicott turned his head towards the woman, some little thing
slipped from the chair on to the floor with a tiny rattle. Endicott
laid her down and picked up a small, yellow, round tablet.
"No, he didn't," he said with a queer eagerness in his voice. The
tablet came from a small bottle on the table at the end of his row of
chemicals. It was labelled, "Intensifier" and "Poison," and the cork
was out of the bottle. The bottle had been full that afternoon. There
was more than one tablet missing now.
"No, she killed herself. Those tablets are cyanide of potassium. He
never touched her. Look!"
Upon the boards of the floor the wet and muddy feet of the Asiatic had
written the history of his movements beyond the possibility of
mistake. Here he had stood in front of her--not a step nearer. Mrs.
Tyson heard him whisper in her daughter's ear. "Oh, my dear, I thank
God!" He sank upon his knees beside her. Mrs. Tyson went out, and,
closing the door gently, left him with his dead.
She sat and waited in the kitchen, and after a while she heard him
moving. He opened the door into the hall and came out and went slowly
and heavily up the stairs into Elsie's room. In a little while he came
down again and pushed open the kitchen door. He had aged by twenty
years, but his face and his voice were calm.
"You found the lamp in the hall?" he said, in a low voice. "Beside the
letters? Come! We must understand this. My mind will go unless I am
quite sure."
She followed him into the living-room and saw that his dead daughter
was no longer there. She stood aside whilst, with a patience which
wrung her heart, Endicott worked out by the footprints of the intruder
and this and that sure sign the events of those tragic minutes, until
there was no doubt left.
"Elsie wrote eight letters," he said. "Seven are in the hall. Here is
the eighth, addressed and stamped upon the table where she wrote."
The letters had to be sent down the valley to the inn early in the
morning. So when she had finished, she had carried them into the
hall--all of them, she thought--and she had taken the lamp to light
her steps. Whilst she was in the hall, and whilst all this side of the
house was in darkness Ahmed Ali had slipped into the room from the
lane by the brook. There were the marks of his feet coming from the
door.
"But was that possible?" Endicott argued. "I was on the hillside, the
moon shining from behind my shoulders on to the house. There were no
shadows. It was all as clear as day. I must have seen the man come
along the little footpath to the door, for I was watching the house. I
saw the light in this room disappear. Wait a moment! Yes. Just after
the light went out I struck a match and lit my pipe."
He had held the match close to his face in the hollow of his hands,
and had carefully lit the pipe; and after the match had burned out,
the glare had remained for a few seconds in his eyes. It was during
those seconds that the Asiatic had crossed the lane and darted in by
the door.
The next step then became clear. Elsie, counting her letters in the
hall, had discovered that she had left one behind, she knew where she
had left it. She knew that the moonlight was pouring into the room;
and, leaving the lamp in the hall, she had returned to fetch it. In
the moonlit room she had come face to face with the Asiatic.
He had been close to the screen when she met him, and there he had
stood. No doubt he had begun by asking her for opium. No doubt,
too--perhaps through some unanswered cry of hers, perhaps because
she never cried out at all, perhaps on account of a tense attitude
of terror not to be mistaken even in that vaporous silvery
light--somehow, at all events, he had become aware that she was alone
in the house; and his words and his demands had changed. She had
backed away from him against the wall, moving the screen and the
chair, and upsetting a book upon the table there. That was evident
from the disorder in this corner. Upon the table stood Endicott's
chemicals for developing his photographs. Endicott saw the picture
with a ghastly distinctness--her hand dropping for support upon the
table and touching the bottles which she had arranged herself.
"Yes, she knew that that one nearest, the first she touched was the
poison, and meant--what? Safety! It's awful, but it's the truth. Very
probably she screamed, poor girl. But there was no one to hear her."
The noise of the river leaping from rock pool to rock pool had drowned
any sound of it which might else have reached to Endicott's ears. The
scream had failed. In front of her was a wild and desperate Pathan
from the stokehold of a liner. Under her hand was the cyanide of
potassium. Endicott could see her furtively moving the cork from the
mouth of the bottle with the fingers of one hand, whilst she stood
watching in horror the man smiling at her in silence.
"Don't you feel that that is just how everything happened? Aren't you
sure of it?" he asked, turning to Mrs. Tyson with a dreadful appeal in
his eyes. But she could answer it honestly.
"Yes, sir, that is how it all happened," and for a moment Mr. Endicott
was comforted. But immediately afterwards he sat down on a chair like
a tired man and his fingers played upon the table.
"It would all be over in a few seconds," he said lamentably
to Mrs. Tyson. "But, oh, those seconds! They would have been
terrible--terrible with pain." His voice trailed away into silence. He
sat still staring at the table. Then he raised his head towards Mrs.
Tyson, and his face was disfigured by a smile of torment. "Hard luck
on a young girl, eh, Mrs. Tyson?" and the very banality of the
sentence made it poignant. "Everything just beginning for her--the
sheer fun of life. Her beauty, and young men, and friends and dancing,
the whole day a burst of music--and then suddenly--quite alone--that's
so horrible--quite alone, in a minute she had to----" His voice choked
and the tears began to run down his face.
"But the man?" Mrs. Tyson ventured.
"Oh, the man!" cried Endicott. "I will think of him to-morrow."
He went up the stairs walking as heavily as when he had carried his
daughter in his arms; and he went again into Elsie's room. Mrs. Tyson
blew out the candles upon his writing-table and arranged automatically
some disordered sheets of foolscap. They were notes on the great
principle of the Minimum Wage.