And I have a cook"--she smiled--"and a maid who waits on me. And yet I
go out to walk on the Prado...."
Shane wasn't surprised. It wasn't home, somehow. The room was like a
setting in a play, here light, here shadow.... The paintings, the
instrument of music, the chairs, they were not things owned and loved.
They were properties.... In the golden candle-light, as she moved, she
was like an actress of great restraint. Every step, posture, gesture
seemed to have an occult significance. Even her bedroom, away off
somewhere, he felt, was not a place where one slept easily and dreamed.
It would be like the dressing-room of some woman mummer.... It was all
like a play, of which he was seeing a fragment from the wings.... What
was it all about? Who was she? And why was his heart a-flutter?
She had taken off her hat, and her hair was coiled close about her
exquisite head. White and black, regular, significant, antique--like a
cameo of some Greek woman, long dead. She stood by a little table, one
hand on it, the other like some butterfly against her gown.... It was
like a pose--but unconscious, he knew, utterly unconscious....
"Tell me," she said, "why did you speak to me?"
"I don't know," he said, "I just spoke."
"You weren't"--her words were weighty, picked--"looking for a flirtation
with a pretty woman?"
"Why, no. Of course not," he answered. "I never thought--"
"No. No, you didn't." She decided for herself.
She came toward him suddenly in the candle-light. Stood before him.
"Tell me, who are you? What are you?" There was a tragic appeal in her
face. "Where do you come from? Where are you going?"
"I don't know." His throat was dry, his heart pounding. "A few days ago
I was a contented man, unhappy but contented. And now I don't know."
"And I don't know who I am." Her mouth quivered. "I am two people--three
people."
They looked at each other with a sort of agony, as though they had lost
something dear to each, and to both of them. They were immensely
intimate. He put out his hand....
"Poor ... poor...."
Their hands touched, and there seemed to rush between them, through
them, some powerful current; and how it happened he did not know, but
they were kissing each other.... He thought with a queer shock, was a
woman's mouth so soft, so sweet, so vibrant? He hadn't known. And was he
kissing her? And how had it happened? It was impossible!... Or was he
dreaming?... Or was he--was he dead?...
She released herself from him for an instant, putting her hands on his
shoulders, her eyes looking into his eyes....
"What is your name?"
"Campbell. Shane Campbell."
"Campbell. Shane Campbell. Shane--Shane Campbell. Mine is
Claire-Anne--Claire-Anne Godey."
§ 6
It seemed to him as he went to Les Bains that next evening that the
world had somehow changed into another dimension, so much clearer the
air was, so much brighter the stars.... He had discovered a higher, more
rarefied stratum of life, in the dim, keen atmosphere of which things
took on incomparable beauty and mystery, so that the water on his left
hand, unseen, yet so blue, was not the Gulf of Lyons, but the whole
Mediterranean, which washed Genoa and Naples and Sicily, and the little
islands of the Greeks, and the barbaric shores of Africa, Morocco, and
Algiers; and Gibraltar, where the English were, like an armed sentry in
a turret. The ships in the harbor were not ships of commerce, but
stately entities, each whispering to each in the _shush-shush_ of water
and wind, telling of the voyages they had made, adventurous as
sturgeons. Even from the mud-and-rush huts along the sea-shore came the
note of brave romance. And the softly singing trees! And in the great
amphitheater of the woods no longer the shade of Pontius Pilate gnawed
his bitten nails, but more gallant presences were, gray-eyed Greek
women, with proud composed faces and eloquent hands, and Saracens calmly
awaiting the morrow's battle, and troubadours puzzling keenly for a
rime.... They were not colored thoughts, but sentient presences. Spirit
and thought had united in him into a being like a bird, leaving the
earth, and flying into a realm of ancient forgotten beauty, spirit being
the will, and thought the vibrating wing.... How harmonious everything
was, the stars, the earth, the sea, the people! How clear it had all
become! How one!...
He came to her in her garden where she sat beneath a tree. Around, the
cicadas whirred in the speaking trees. _Zig-zig-zig-zig._ But they were
no longer strident. They seemed but a vibration of the high atmosphere
in which he was....
"Claire-Anne! Claire-Anne...."
"Yes ... yes, lover...."
"Claire-Anne!"
She stood up as he took her lovely, pale hands. There was no shame to
her glance, nothing but a wonderful frankness, her eyes going to his
like brave winged things.
"Claire-Anne, I want to ask you something."
"Yes ... Lover...."
"Claire-Anne, when will you marry me?"
Her hands never quivered, but he was aware that her mouth did, in the
high diluted starlight.
"Why do you want to marry me? Is it because ...? Do you feel bound?...
or ... just why?"
"I want to be with you, Claire-Anne."
"Then--dearest, does it matter to go before the mayor and arrange about
property? And to go before a priest and make promises--to God!... Sit
down, lover; sit down with me here, in the dusk, under the tree."
She still clasped both his hands. He might have been talking to some
beautiful disembodied spirit, as Pontius Pilate was a poor
panic-stricken spirit, or to something he had conjured out of his head,
but for her firm, warm hands. To-night it was she had strength....
"Dearest, promises are so easy to make. I have made promises, oh, so
many promises!... And life or destiny.... And when you can't keep them,
your heart breaks. You know nothing of me--Shane...."
"I don't want to know; I just want you, Claire-Anne!"
"You must know something. I was just a girl, well brought up, well
educated.... I dreamed of being a great actress. I was an actress, but I
was ... _manquée_ ... didn't succeed, get success.... And then I
married, and my husband died.... And here I am.... And there are other
things you mustn't know.... Not that they are dear to me; oh, no!... but
you must never hear them.... O Shane, if seven years ago.... But Destiny
or life wouldn't let us. And now we can only cheat him, and that only
for a while.... Because Destiny is all-seeing and jealous and cruel....
Only for a while, a sweet while...."
"But, Claire-Anne, I don't understand--"
"Don't understand, don't, my lover. Don't anything.... Only let me give
all I have, can give to you, and let me take what you care to give in
return, only that.... O Shane, we are two people in a dark wood, and it
is lonely and terrifying.... And we have met, and our hands ... _se sont
serrées_ ... gripped and held.... And we aren't lonely any more, or
afraid. And you have a picture in your mind of me, a beautiful, warm
picture.... But if the night passed, and we came to the meadow-lands....
O Shane, don't let's go into the light--not into the open, not into the
light.... Oh, no! no!"
"But, Claire-Anne...."
"Come closer, Shane. The night is empty. There are only we two in the
world.... Come close. Closer. Closer still...."
§ 7
He was sitting in her garden one sunset, under the mulberry-tree, and
she had gone into the house for a minute, moving with the firm, gracious
walk of hers that was like the firm swimming of swans. In the little
hush of sunset, and she gone, there came a sudden knowledge to him....
For a space of time, how long he knew not, he was in an Antrim study....
Without, the sun had gone down, and there was the purple, twilight
water, and the gentle calling of the cricket.... And within was a gray
head that had fallen on a book ... fallen ... fallen as the sun went
down.
"Why, Uncle Robin!" he called.
Then came a great gush of tears to his heart and eyes....
She came from the house, as again he became cognizant of the Midi garden
instead of the Antrim glen, of the Mediterranean instead of the waters
of Moyle. She came down the dusky pathway. At a little distance she saw
his face. She stopped short, her face white....
"Shane! Shane! what is wrong? Are you hurt? Ill?"
"My Uncle Robin is dead, Claire-Anne."
She looked at him for a little instant, not quite understanding. She
came to him swiftly as a swallow. She sat close beside him. Her arm went
through his. Her hands clasped his hands.
"Why didn't you tell me, heart?" she whispered.
"I just knew this instant. I felt, saw.... We were that close ... my
Uncle Robin! _Beannacht De ar a anam!_ God's blessing on his soul!"
She never spoke. She never stirred. She hardly breathed. She was just
there, her hands, firm and strong, on his, did he want her.
"Was it ... a hard death, Shane?"
"No; I seemed to see him, asleep, among his books."
"His books were his friends ... you told me....
"Yes, dear. His life was with them."
"And he wasn't a young man, your Uncle Robin?"
"Eight and sixty years of age."
"Is it so ill, heart, to go quickly, quietly, with your friends about
you, on an autumn afternoon?"
"No, dear, not ill. Very rightly ... I think. But there is something....
Something is gone from the world, like a fine tree from a garden....
And he was awful' dear to me, my Uncle Robin.... It will be a hard thing
to go home, and he not there to come and ask: 'Are you all right,
laddie? You're no sick?' Claire-Anne, I'll be thinking long...."
She sat with him in silence in the garden, and after a little while got
up and went without a word.... And he sat in the garden thinking to
himself, had he been lax to Uncle Robin in any way? He might have
written oftener. It wasn't fair to have kept the old man worried and he
an apprentice at sea. Yes, he could have written, could have written
oftener. And thought more. And there were books he might have brought
the old man--books from 'Frisco and New York and Naples. The book-stores
were so far from the quays, and he had put it off. And he could have so
easily.... When one is young, one is so thoughtless.... A message from
somewhere ran into his consciousness like a ripple of code-flags: 'It
doesn't matter, dear laddie. Don't be taking on. Don't be blaming
yourself. You were the dear lad ... and I'm happy....'
Ah, yes, but a great tree was gone from the garden. An actuality had
been converted into thought and emotion, and thought and emotion may be
all that endure, and an actuality be unreal ... but an actuality is so
warm ... so reassuring....
He rose and went toward the house, and as he walked he met her....
"Claire-Anne, do you mind if I go back to the ship?... Somehow, I'm a
little lost...."
"There is a carriage waiting for you outside."
For the first time it occurred to him that in this occult experience she
had not uttered one jarring note. She had not asked questions, nor had
she tried to argue with him, as other women would have, telling him he
fancied all this. Nor had she bothered him with vain, unwelcome
sentiment. She had just--stood by, as at sea. And how swiftly she had
divined his need of privacy, of his own ship!
"There are none like you in this world, Claire-Anne," he told her.
"I am what you make me, Shane--what you need of me." Her hand sought his
in the stilly dusk. "Come back only when you are ready dearest ...
dearest ... I am here! Always here!"
§ 8
Though she never said so, yet he knew she wanted to go on board the
ship that was so much of his life, and one day he had her rowed across
to the _Ulster Lady_. He smiled as he saw how firmly she got on board,
though ships were unknown to her. Queer, how she never lost dignity,
grace. And it was so easy for a woman to look silly, undignified,
getting on board ship. She never disappointed him....
She mused over the sweet line of the schooner, the tapering masts, the
snug canvas, the twinkling brass. The wake of a passing paddle-steamer
made the boat pitch gently. It was like breathing.
"She is so much a pretty lady," Claire-Anne said. "So much like you,
Shane, in a way. She might be a young sister--a young, loved sister. And
where is your place on board when she sails?"
He pointed her out the space behind wheel and binnacle.
"Whenever there's any need, I'm there, just there."
"And Shane, great waves like you see in pictures--great enormous waves,
does she stand those?"
"Yes, great waves, like you see in pictures, she stands those. Drives
through them, and over them, and under them."
"And Solomon said"--she was just thinking aloud--"that he couldn't
understand the way of a ship on the sea. And he was immensely wise.
Dearest ... it can't be just wood and canvas, a ship ... power and grace
and beauty.... It's like great people...."
"They're as different as people are, Claire-Anne."
"Are they, Shane? I knew they weren't ... just things."
He took her below in the dusk of his cabin. She filled the space like
some gracious green tree.
"And here is where I live on board ship."
The Aberdeen terrier came forward to greet her, his tail waving gently,
his ears up, his brown eyes grave and warm.
"_Duine uasal! Duine uasal!_" she knelt to him.
"You remember?" He minded he had told her casually of the dog's name.
"Of course I remember! Shane, what does _Duine uasal_ mean?"
"_Gentilhomme_," he translated.
"He has the eyes," she said.
The framed manuscript of his father's verses caught her eyes, and she
looked at him in inquiry.
"What is it?"
"A poem of my father's, in Gaidhlig, Claire-Anne. 'The Bed of Rushes.'"
"How queer the letters are! Slim and graceful, and powerful, too. Would
you read it, Shane?"
"_Leaba luachra_," he read, "a bed of rushes, _bhi fúm aréir_, was
beneath me last night, _agas do chaitheas amach é le banaghadb an lae_,
and I threw it out with the whitening of day. _Thainic mo chéad grádh le
mo thaobh_, my hundred loves came to my side; _guala ee qualainn_,
shoulder to shoulder, _agas béal re béal_, and mouth to mouth."
"Now I know you better, Shane."
"How, dearest?"
"I know how you come by your--your sense of beauty, Shane. It's from
your father. You have it just as he had. But he could say and you can't,
Shane. You have it, but it doesn't come out that way. It comes out in
the sailing of the ship, Shane. You must sail beautifully. Shane, I
should love to see you sail."
With a quick movement she dropped on her knees, and her beautiful dark
head on the pillow of his bed.
"Couldn't you take me with you once, Shane, when you sail? Away on just
one voyage?"
"Of course I could, dearest, and will."
"Would you, my heart? Would you?" She stood up again, and swift tears
came to her eyes.
"I couldn't come," she said.
"But, Claire-Anne--"
"No," she said. She turned her back to him, so that he shouldn't see her
face, and her voice vibrated. "No, Shane dear. No. You go to sea and
sail your ships, and take care of them in the tempest and coax them in
light weather. And go from port to port, watching the strange cities and
the peoples, and seeing into them, with ... _tes yeux d'enfant_ ... your
eyes of a child.... And have your life, free, big, clean.... And just in
a corner ... _le plus petit coin_ ... keep me ... so when you come to
Marseilles, you will come up the garden path in the dusk, and call,
'Claire-Anne!'" There was something like a sob from her. "Just say,
'Claire-Anne'...."
She turned around and caught his hands for a minute, looked at him,
smiled, laughed.... From his desk she picked up the Young Pretender's
dagger.
"What is this for, Shane? Is this yours?"
"Mine now, Claire-Anne; but it was--some one else's once. My Uncle Alan,
Alan Donn, gave it to me."
"Yes?..."
"It belonged once to Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender. He wore
it at his knee in '45. Do you remember, Claire-Anne? He landed in
Scotland and advanced on England, and got as far as Derby at the head of
the Scottish clans and Jacobite gentlemen. 'Black Friday' they called it
in London."
"But he never got to London."
"No, he never got to London. Crash and whir of battle, and when the
smoke cleared, there were the gallant Highland clansmen scattered, and
the sturdy English nobles, and the bonny Irish gentlemen. And a king on
the run!"
"And, Shane, what happened to him after that?"
"I think--my history may not be right, but I think he spent the rest of
his life a pensioner of the king of France, playing petty politics,
drinking, and accepting love from romantic women, and loyalty from the
beaten clans."
"What a pity, Shane! What a pity!"
"That he failed, dearest? I don't know."
"Not that he failed, Shane! No! The most gallant fail, nearly always
fail, for they take the greatest odds. But that he lived too long, Shane
... the high moment gone...."
She looked at the dagger again that had once snuggled to Prince
Tearloch's knee, hefted it, caressed it.
"Shane dearest, why didn't he use his own knife to--set himself free?"
"I don't know."
"I think I know."
She faced him suddenly.
"Shane, why didn't somebody do it for him?"
"I suppose they couldn't see the end, Claire-Anne. They couldn't foresee
the king of France's charity, the tricked women, the wine-stained cards.
There's many the Scots gentlemen who would have--set him free."
"But they didn't, Shane dearest. It seems--Destiny must always win.
Shane, what is that poem in Gaidhlig about the world, the verses you
once said?"
"_Treasgair an saoghal, agus tigeann an garth mar smal.
Alaistir, Cæsar, 's an méad do bhi d'a bpairt
Ta an Theamhair na fear agas feâch an Traoi mar ta_--
Life goes conquering on. The winds forever blow
Alexander, Cæsar, and the crash of their fighting men
Tara is grass, and see how Troy is low--"
He stopped with a little shock, for her face was a mask of tears.
"Dearest, dearest, it's only an old, sad story. It has nothing to do
with us. Claire-Anne--"
"Is any story old, Shane? Is any story ever new? Isn't it always the
same story?"
She looked at the dagger for an instant more, and put it down with a
little sob.
"Poor gentleman!"
§ 9
From his cabin below he could hear the Belfast mate roaring at the
helmsman:
"What kind of steering do you call that? Look at your damned wake. Like
an eel's wriggle. Keep her full, and less of your damned luffin'."
"Keep her full, sir!" the steersman repeated.
"Look at your foretopsail! Bouse it, blast ye! Bouse it! You Skye
cutthroats!"
If the nor'easter held, Shane calculated, he could run through Biscay
full, come into the Mediterranean on a broad reach, and jam her straight
at Marseilles. About him was the tremor as she took the head seas.
Plunge! Tremble! Dash on! Overhead the squeaking of the sheets, the
squeal of blocks, the _thrap-thrap-thrap_ of the lee halyards, the
melancholy whining of the gulls. With luck he would be in Marseilles
within the week. And if the wind swung westward after he left Gibraltar
to port, he would nip off hours, a day even. And every hour counted
until the moment he went up the dusky path and called, "Claire-Anne!"
He had never before driven the _Ulster Lady_ as he was driving her now.
Before, he had been content to get what he could out of her, coaxing
her, nursing her, as a trainer does a horse he is fond of; but now he
was riding her like a jockey intent on winning a race. On deck the crew
wondered what had got into the old man, as they called him, for all his
twenty-eight years.
"Before, he was a sailor," the isles crew complained. "Is he now a
merchant at last? _A Righ is truagh!_ O King, the pity!"
But it was not interest in cargoes that compelled him; it was the
thought of a face like the wing of a bird, ready to soar. The dark,
gracious face, with the eyes where emotion swirled like a mill-race, the
parted ruddy lips-_La Mielleuse_--mouth of honey. And the word he must
not say aloud, like some occult word of magic until a certain moment
should come:
"Claire-Anne!" Just "Claire-Anne!"
Before he had left Marseilles he had not been able to think of her, to
weigh what happened, to understand. Things were too close. But at sea,
and in the dusk of the Antrim glen, and in Belfast and Liverpool, he had
had time to view the incident in perspective; to stand aside, as one
stands back from a picture, and appreciate the color, the line, the
truth; to see that that rich purple, that splash of orange, that
rippling, rich silver-gray are not spots like flowers, but a definite
design....
In Antrim he had remembered Dancing Town, the vision of Fiddlers' Green.
Fourteen years before!
And now that he remembered, it seemed to him foolish not to have known
he was sailing somewhere. He was always sailing.... And unexpectedly,
after he had given up all hope, under his lee bow had risen suddenly
Fiddlers' Green.... Once before he thought he had made port there, but
that only made this island the true one.... For there were always two
things, and the second was right.... False dawn and dawn; the False Cape
and Cape Horn; the Southern Crosses, the false and true....
And he would tell her this, when he met her again, of how he had been
thinking, and discovered her to be the true life....
The wife he had married and buried seven years before he thought of now;
she was the second woman he had known, his mother the first. And from
the cold precipice of his mother he had fled into the flinty fields of
Moyra Dolan.... He felt a little sorry for the boy he was seven years
before--so young, so gallant, so wrong.... He had thought that all there
was in life was a home to return to, a wife, children.... He had wanted
an acre of land in the sun, where all the world was his. When one was
young, one knew so little.... Wisdom came with the lapping of the waves,
and years of quiet thinking under the gigantic stars.... A plot of land
he had wanted then, and now he had the stars, they belonging more to him
than to the astrologers who conned them, the fields, more than to the
tillers who cultivated them, the sea than to the fishermen who
trawled.... He was one with everything, understanding everything, its
immense harmony.... From hard earth and wet sea he had arisen on swift,
dark pinions until he had been one with the spirit that infused all
earth and sea and sky holding the multitudinous atoms in One with
immense will and scheme.... And it was she who had given them to
him--Claire-Anne ... the wings of the morning.... The flutter of her
white hands ... the eyes that looked and drooped, looked, drooped ...
the little catch in her breath....
His life opened before him now, like a fair seaway. About his appointed
tasks he would go in his appointed life ... sailing ships with needed
cargoes ... a despatch messenger for the peoples of the world over the
vast solitudes of sea ... doing his work well and willingly ... and
asking no reward but that the bird of dusk, the mouth of honey, be his
to love and be loved by ... to melt with and be one in occult alchemy of
soul and mind and body ... to get strength and knowledge, and the
understanding which is more than strength and knowledge....
He was twenty-eight, she was twenty-five. There were twenty years before
them still, twenty years of love and understanding, and then a strange
happy twilight, like the dusk of Antrim, that gives way hardly to the
short night.... Some day she would marry him and come to his house ...
some day when something that was wrong in her heart was righted and
forgotten, something he had no wish to intrude upon, so closely did she
conceal it.... There was a locked, haunted room in her heart ... poor
heart!... but one day the presence would be exercised, and the room
swept and garnished.... Some day she would marry him, and he would bring
her home to Ulster.... And who better than she could understand the
springy heather and the blue smoke-reek, the crickets of the evening
and the curlew's call? And in the house where his mother was cold and
arrogant, would be a warm and gracious lady ... Claire-Anne!...
God! he was thinking long to be in Marseilles again, to go up the dusky
path, to call, "Claire-Anne!"
The big Belfast mate larruped down the short companionway.
"How's she doing, Mr. McKinstry?"
"She's doing fine, sir. If I may say so, there's not a better boat sails
the water, not the _Sovereign of the Seas_ itself. Nor a better crew to
handle things, not on board the king's yacht."
"Nor a better mate, Mr. McKinstry."
"Ah, well, sir; we do wir best."
He tumbled on deck again, and Shane could hear him roar from amidships: