I
Islands of all shapes and sizes troop northward from Stockholm by the
hundred, and the little steamer that threads their intricate mazes in
summer leaves the traveller in a somewhat bewildered state as regards
the points of the compass when it reaches the end of its journey at
Waxholm. But it is only after Waxholm that the true islands begin, so
to speak, to run wild, and start up the coast on their tangled course
of a hundred miles of deserted loveliness, and it was in the very heart
of this delightful confusion that we pitched our tents for a summer
holiday. A veritable wilderness of islands lay about us: from the mere
round button of a rock that bore a single fir, to the mountainous
stretch of a square mile, densely wooded, and bounded by precipitous
cliffs; so close together often that a strip of water ran between no
wider than a country lane, or, again, so far that an expanse stretched
like the open sea for miles.
Although the larger islands boasted farms and fishing stations, the
majority were uninhabited. Carpeted with moss and heather, their
coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy
bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the
water’s edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and
mystery into the very heart of primitive forest.
The particular islands to which we had camping rights by virtue
of paying a nominal sum to a Stockholm merchant lay together in a
picturesque group far beyond the reach of the steamer, one being a mere
reef with a fringe of fairy-like birches, and two others, cliff-bound
monsters rising with wooded heads out of the sea. The fourth, which we
selected because it enclosed a little lagoon suitable for anchorage,
bathing, night-lines, and what-not, shall have what description is
necessary as the story proceeds; but, so far as paying rent was
concerned, we might equally well have pitched our tents on any one of a
hundred others that clustered about us as thickly as a swarm of bees.
It was in the blaze of an evening in July, the air clear as crystal,
the sea a cobalt blue, when we left the steamer on the borders of
civilisation and sailed away with maps, compasses, and provisions for
the little group of dots in the Skärgård that were to be our home for
the next two months. The dinghy and my Canadian canoe trailed behind
us, with tents and dunnage carefully piled aboard, and when the point
of cliff intervened to hide the steamer and the Waxholm hotel we
realised for the first time that the horror of trains and houses was
far behind us, the fever of men and cities, the weariness of streets
and confined spaces. The wilderness opened up on all sides into endless
blue reaches, and the map and compasses were so frequently called
into requisition that we went astray more often than not and progress
was enchantingly slow. It took us, for instance, two whole days to
find our crescent-shaped home, and the camps we made on the way were
so fascinating that we left them with difficulty and regret, for each
island seemed more desirable than the one before it, and over all lay
the spell of haunting peace, remoteness from the turmoil of the world,
and the freedom of open and desolate spaces.
And so many of these spots of world-beauty have I sought out and
dwelt in, that in my mind remains only a composite memory of their
faces, a true map of heaven, as it were, from which this particular
one stands forth with unusual sharpness because of the strange things
that happened there, and also, I think, because anything in which John
Silence played a part has a habit of fixing itself in the mind with a
living and lasting quality of vividness.
For the moment, however, Dr. Silence was not of the party. Some private
case in the interior of Hungary claimed his attention, and it was not
till later--the 15th of August, to be exact--that I had arranged to
meet him in Berlin and then return to London together for our harvest
of winter work. All the members of our party, however, were known to
him more or less well, and on this third day as we sailed through the
narrow opening into the lagoon and saw the circular ridge of trees in a
gold and crimson sunset before us, his last words to me when we parted
in London for some unaccountable reason came back very sharply to my
memory, and recalled the curious impression of prophecy with which I
had first heard them:
“Enjoy your holiday and store up all the force you can,” he had said as
the train slipped out of Victoria; “and we will meet in Berlin on the
15th--unless you should send for me sooner.”
And now suddenly the words returned to me so clearly that it seemed
I almost heard his voice in my ear: “Unless you should send for me
sooner;” and returned, moreover, with a significance I was wholly at a
loss to understand that touched somewhere in the depths of my mind a
vague sense of apprehension that they had all along been intended in
the nature of a prophecy.
In the lagoon, then, the wind failed us this July evening, as was only
natural behind the shelter of the belt of woods, and we took to the
oars, all breathless with the beauty of this first sight of our island
home, yet all talking in somewhat hushed voices of the best place to
land, the depth of water, the safest place to anchor, to put up the
tents in, the most sheltered spot for the camp-fires, and a dozen
things of importance that crop up when a home in the wilderness has
actually to be made.
And during this busy sunset hour of unloading before the dark, the
souls of my companions adopted the trick of presenting themselves very
vividly anew before my mind, and introducing themselves afresh.
In reality, I suppose, our party was in no sense singular. In the
conventional life at home they certainly seemed ordinary enough,
but suddenly, as we passed through these gates of the wilderness,
I saw them more sharply than before, with characters stripped of
the atmosphere of men and cities. A complete change of setting
often furnishes a startlingly new view of people hitherto held for
well-known; they present another facet of their personalities. I seemed
to see my own party almost as new people--people I had not known
properly hitherto, people who would drop all disguises and henceforth
reveal themselves as they really were. And each one seemed to say: “Now
you will see me as I am. You will see me here in this primitive life
of the wilderness without clothes. All my masks and veils I have left
behind in the abodes of men. So, look out for surprises!”
The Reverend Timothy Maloney helped me to put up the tents, long
practice making the process easy, and while he drove in pegs and
tightened ropes, his coat off, his flannel collar flying open without
a tie, it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that he was cut out
for the life of a pioneer rather than the church. He was fifty years
of age, muscular, blue-eyed and hearty, and he took his share of the
work, and more, without shirking. The way he handled the axe in cutting
down saplings for the tent-poles was a delight to see, and his eye in
judging the level was unfailing.
Bullied as a young man into a lucrative family living, he had in turn
bullied his mind into some semblance of orthodox beliefs, doing the
honours of the little country church with an energy that made one think
of a coal-heaver tending china; and it was only in the past few years
that he had resigned the living and taken instead to cramming young men
for their examinations. This suited him better. It enabled him, too, to
indulge his passion for spells of “wild life,” and to spend the summer
months of most years under canvas in one part of the world or another
where he could take his young men with him and combine “reading” with
open air.
His wife usually accompanied him, and there was no doubt she enjoyed
the trips, for she possessed, though in less degree, the same joy of
the wilderness that was his own distinguishing characteristic. The only
difference was that while he regarded it as the real life, she regarded
it as an interlude. While he camped out with his heart and mind, she
played at camping out with her clothes and body. None the less, she
made a splendid companion, and to watch her busy cooking dinner over
the fire we had built among the stones was to understand that her heart
was in the business for the moment and that she was happy even with the
detail.
Mrs. Maloney at home, knitting in the sun and believing that the world
was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with
bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was
another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin,
and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very
unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with
slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a
knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with
willing pleasure, for in spite of his general appearance of debility he
was as happy to be in camp as any of them.
But more than any other member of the party, Joan Maloney, the
daughter, was the one who seemed a natural and genuine part of the
landscape, who belonged to it all just in the same way that the trees
and the moss and the grey rocks running out into the water belonged to
it. For she was obviously in her right and natural setting, a creature
of the wilds, a gipsy in her own home.
To any one with a discerning eye this would have been more or less
apparent, but to me, who had known her during all the twenty-two
years of her life and was familiar with the ins and outs of her
primitive, utterly un-modern type, it was strikingly clear. To see
her there made it impossible to imagine her again in civilisation. I
lost all recollection of how she looked in a town. The memory somehow
evaporated. This slim creature before me, flitting to and fro with the
grace of the woodland life, swift, supple, adroit, on her knees blowing
the fire, or stirring the frying-pan through a veil of smoke, suddenly
seemed the only way I had ever really seen her. Here she was at home;
in London she became some one concealed by clothes, an artificial doll
overdressed and moving by clockwork, only a portion of her alive. Here
she was alive all over.
I forget altogether how she was dressed, just as I forget how any
particular tree was dressed, or how the markings ran on any one of the
boulders that lay about the Camp. She looked just as wild and natural
and untamed as everything else that went to make up the scene, and more
than that I cannot say.
Pretty, she was decidedly not. She was thin, skinny, dark-haired, and
possessed of great physical strength in the form of endurance. She had,
too, something of the force and vigorous purpose of a man, tempestuous
sometimes and wild to passionate, frightening her mother, and puzzling
her easy-going father with her storms of waywardness, while at the same
time she stirred his admiration by her violence. A pagan of the pagans
she was besides, and with some haunting suggestion of old-world pagan
beauty about her dark face and eyes. Altogether an odd and difficult
character, but with a generosity and high courage that made her very
lovable.
In town life she always seemed to me to feel cramped, bored, a devil
in a cage, in her eyes a hunted expression as though any moment she
dreaded to be caught. But up in these spacious solitudes all this
disappeared. Away from the limitations that plagued and stung her, she
would show at her best, and as I watched her moving about the Camp
I repeatedly found myself thinking of a wild creature that had just
obtained its freedom and was trying its muscles.
Peter Sangree, of course, at once went down before her. But she was so
obviously beyond his reach, and besides so well able to take care of
herself, that I think her parents gave the matter but little thought,
and he himself worshipped at a respectful distance, keeping admirable
control of his passion in all respects save one; for at his age the
eyes are difficult to master, and the yearning, almost the devouring,
expression often visible in them was probably there unknown even to
himself. He, better than any one else, understood that he had fallen in
love with something most hard of attainment, something that drew him
to the very edge of life, and almost beyond it. It, no doubt, was a
secret and terrible joy to him, this passionate worship from afar; only
I think he suffered more than any one guessed, and that his want of
vitality was due in large measure to the constant stream of unsatisfied
yearning that poured for ever from his soul and body. Moreover, it
seemed to me, who now saw them for the first time together, that there
was an unnamable something--an elusive quality of some kind--that
marked them as belonging to the same world, and that although the girl
ignored him she was secretly, and perhaps unknown to herself, drawn by
some attribute very deep in her own nature to some quality equally deep
in his.
This, then, was the party when we first settled down into our two
months’ camp on the island in the Baltic Sea. Other figures flitted
from time to time across the scene, and sometimes one reading man,
sometimes another, came to join us and spend his four hours a day in
the clergyman’s tent, but they came for short periods only, and they
went without leaving much trace in my memory, and certainly they played
no important part in what subsequently happened.
The weather favoured us that night, so that by sunset the tents were
up, the boats unloaded, a store of wood collected and chopped into
lengths, and the candle-lanterns hung round ready for lighting on the
trees. Sangree, too, had picked deep mattresses of balsam boughs for
the women’s beds, and had cleared little paths of brushwood from their
tents to the central fireplace. All was prepared for bad weather. It
was a cosy supper and a well-cooked one that we sat down to and ate
under the stars, and, according to the clergyman, the only meal fit to
eat we had seen since we left London a week before.
The deep stillness, after that roar of steamers, trains, and tourists,
held something that thrilled, for as we lay round the fire there was
no sound but the faint sighing of the pines and the soft lapping of
the waves along the shore and against the sides of the boat in the
lagoon. The ghostly outline of her white sails was just visible
through the trees, idly rocking to and fro in her calm anchorage,
her sheets flapping gently against the mast. Beyond lay the dim blue
shapes of other islands floating in the night, and from all the great
spaces about us came the murmur of the sea and the soft breathing of
great woods. The odours of the wilderness--smells of wind and earth,
of trees and water, clean, vigorous, and mighty--were the true odours
of a virgin world unspoilt by men, more penetrating and more subtly
intoxicating than any other perfume in the whole world. Oh!--and
dangerously strong, too, no doubt, for some natures!
“Ahhh!” breathed out the clergyman after supper, with an indescribable
gesture of satisfaction and relief. “Here there is freedom, and room
for body and mind to turn in. Here one can work and rest and play. Here
one can be alive and absorb something of the earth-forces that never
get within touching-distance in the cities. By George, I shall make a
permanent camp here and come when it is time to die!”
The good man was merely giving vent to his delight at being under
canvas. He said the same thing every year, and he said it often. But it
more or less expressed the superficial feelings of us all. And when, a
little later, he turned to compliment his wife on the fried potatoes,
and discovered that she was snoring, with her back against a tree,
he grunted with content at the sight and put a ground-sheet over her
feet, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to fall
asleep after dinner, and then moved back to his own corner, smoking his
pipe with great satisfaction.
And I, smoking mine too, lay and fought against the most delicious
sleep imaginable, while my eyes wandered from the fire to the stars
peeping through the branches, and then back again to the group about
me. The Rev. Timothy soon let his pipe go out, and succumbed as his
wife had done, for he had worked hard and eaten well. Sangree, also
smoking, leaned against a tree with his gaze fixed on the girl, a
depth of yearning in his face that he could not hide, and that really
distressed me for him. And Joan herself, with wide staring eyes, alert,
full of the new forces of the place, evidently keyed up by the magic of
finding herself among all the things her soul recognised as “home,” sat
rigid by the fire, her thoughts roaming through the spaces, the blood
stirring about her heart. She was as unconscious of the Canadian’s gaze
as she was that her parents both slept. She looked to me more like a
tree, or something that had grown out of the island, than a living
girl of the century; and when I spoke across to her in a whisper and
suggested a tour of investigation, she started and looked up at me as
though she heard a voice in her dreams.
Sangree leaped up and joined us, and without waking the others we three
went over the ridge of the island and made our way down to the shore
behind. The water lay like a lake before us still coloured by the
sunset. The air was keen and scented, wafting the smell of the wooded
islands that hung about us in the darkening air. Very small waves
tumbled softly on the sand. The sea was sown with stars, and everywhere
breathed and pulsed the beauty of the northern summer night. I confess
I speedily lost consciousness of the human presences beside me, and I
have little doubt Joan did too. Only Sangree felt otherwise, I suppose
for presently we heard him sighing; and I can well imagine that he
absorbed the whole wonder and passion of the scene into his aching
heart, to swell the pain there that was more searching even than the
pain at the sight of such matchless and incomprehensible beauty.
The splash of a fish jumping broke the spell.
“I wish we had the canoe now,” remarked Joan; “we could paddle out to
the other islands.”
“Of course,” I said; “wait here and I’ll go across for it,” and was
turning to feel my way back through the darkness when she stopped me in
a voice that meant what it said.
“No; Mr. Sangree will get it. We will wait here and cooee to guide him.”
The Canadian was off in a moment, for she had only to hint of her
wishes and he obeyed.
“Keep out from shore in case of rocks,” I cried out as he went, “and
turn to the right out of the lagoon. That’s the shortest way round by
the map.”
My voice travelled across the still waters and woke echoes in the
distant islands that came back to us like people calling out of space.
It was only thirty or forty yards over the ridge and down the other
side to the lagoon where the boats lay, but it was a good mile to coast
round the shore in the dark to where we stood and waited. We heard him
stumbling away among the boulders, and then the sounds suddenly ceased
as he topped the ridge and went down past the fire on the other side.
“I didn’t want to be left alone with him” the girl said presently in a
low voice. “I’m always afraid he’s going to say or do something----”
She hesitated a moment, looking quickly over her shoulder towards the
ridge where he had just disappeared--“something that might lead to
unpleasantness.”
She stopped abruptly.
“_You_ frightened, Joan!” I exclaimed, with genuine surprise. “This is
a new light on your wicked character. I thought the human being who
could frighten you did not exist.” Then I suddenly realised she was
talking seriously--looking to me for help of some kind--and at once I
dropped the teasing attitude.
“He’s very far gone, I think, Joan,” I added gravely. “You must be kind
to him, whatever else you may feel. He’s exceedingly fond of you.”
“I know, but I can’t help it,” she whispered, lest her voice should
carry in the stillness; “there’s something about him that--that makes
me feel creepy and half afraid.”
“But, poor man, it’s not his fault if he is delicate and sometimes
looks like death,” I laughed gently, by way of defending what I felt to
be a very innocent member of my sex.
“Oh, but it’s not that I mean,” she answered quickly; “it’s something
I feel about him, something in his soul, something he hardly knows
himself, but that may come out if we are much together. It draws me, I
feel, tremendously. It stirs what is wild in me--deep down--oh, very
deep down,--yet at the same time makes me feel afraid.”
“I suppose his thoughts are always playing about you,” I said, “but
he’s nice-minded and----”
“Yes, yes,” she interrupted impatiently, “I can trust myself absolutely
with him. He’s gentle and singularly pure-minded. But there’s something
else that----” She stopped again sharply to listen. Then she came up
close beside me in the darkness, whispering--
“You know, Mr. Hubbard, sometimes my intuitions warn me a little too
strongly to be ignored. Oh yes, you needn’t tell me again that it’s
difficult to distinguish between fancy and intuition. I know all that.
But I also know that there’s something deep down in that man’s soul
that calls to something deep down in mine. And at present it frightens
me. Because I cannot make out what it is; and I know, I _know_, he’ll
do something some day that--that will shake my life to the very
bottom.” She laughed a little at the strangeness of her own description.
I turned to look at her more closely, but the darkness was too great to
show her face. There was an intensity, almost of suppressed passion, in
her voice that took me completely by surprise.
“Nonsense, Joan,” I said, a little severely; “you know him well. He’s
been with your father for months now.”
“But that was in London; and up here it’s different--I mean, I feel
that it may be different. Life in a place like this blows away the
restraints of the artificial life at home. I know, oh, I know what I’m
saying. I feel all untied in a place like this; the rigidity of one’s
nature begins to melt and flow. Surely _you_ must understand what I
mean!”
“Of course I understand,” I replied, yet not wishing to encourage her
in her present line of thought, “and it’s a grand experience--for a
short time. But you’re overtired to-night, Joan, like the rest of us.
A few days in this air will set you above all fears of the kind you
mention.”
Then, after a moment’s silence, I added, feeling I should estrange her
confidence altogether if I blundered any more and treated her like a
child--
“I think, perhaps, the true explanation is that you pity him for loving
you, and at the same time you feel the repulsion of the healthy,
vigorous animal for what is weak and timid. If he came up boldly and
took you by the throat and shouted that he would force you to love
him--well, then you would feel no fear at all. You would know exactly
how to deal with him. Isn’t it, perhaps, something of that kind?”
The girl made no reply, and when I took her hand I felt that it
trembled a little and was cold.
“It’s not his love that I’m afraid of,” she said hurriedly, for at this
moment we heard the dip of a paddle in the water, “it’s something in
his very soul that terrifies me in a way I have never been terrified
before,--yet fascinates me. In town I was hardly conscious of his
presence. But the moment we got away from civilisation, it began to
come. He seems so--so _real_ up here. I dread being alone with him. It
makes me feel that something must burst and tear its way out--that he
would do something--or I should do something--I don’t know exactly what
I mean, probably,--but that I should let myself go and scream----”
“Joan!”
“Don’t be alarmed,” she laughed shortly; “I shan’t do anything silly,
but I wanted to tell you my feelings in case I needed your help. When
I have intuitions as strong as this they are never wrong, only I don’t
know yet what it means exactly.”
“You must hold out for the month, at any rate,” I said in as
matter-of-fact a voice as I could manage, for her manner had somehow
changed my surprise to a subtle sense of alarm. “Sangree only stays the
month, you know. And, anyhow, you are such an odd creature yourself
that you should feel generously towards other odd creatures,” I ended
lamely, with a forced laugh.
She gave my hand a sudden pressure. “I’m glad I’ve told you at any
rate,” she said quickly under her breath, for the canoe was now gliding
up silently like a ghost to our feet, “and I’m glad you’re here too,”
she added as we moved down towards the water to meet it.
I made Sangree change into the bows and got into the steering seat
myself, putting the girl between us so that I could watch them both by
keeping their outlines against the sea and stars. For the intuitions
of certain folk--women and children usually, I confess--I have always
felt a great respect that has more often than not been justified by
experience; and now the curious emotion stirred in me by the girl’s
words remained somewhat vividly in my consciousness. I explained it in
some measure by the fact that the girl, tired out by the fatigue of
many days’ travel, had suffered a vigorous reaction of some kind from
the strong, desolate scenery, and further, perhaps, that she had been
treated to my own experience of seeing the members of the party in a
new light--the Canadian, being partly a stranger, more vividly than the
rest of us. But, at the same time, I felt it was quite possible that
she had sensed some subtle link between his personality and her own,
some quality that she had hitherto ignored and that the routine of town
life had kept buried out of sight. The only thing that seemed difficult
to explain was the fear she had spoken of, and this I hoped the
wholesome effects of camp-life and exercise would sweep away naturally
in the course of time.
We made the tour of the island without speaking. It was all too
beautiful for speech. The trees crowded down to the shore to hear us
pass. We saw their fine dark heads, bowed low with splendid dignity
to watch us, forgetting for a moment that the stars were caught in
the needled network of their hair. Against the sky in the west, where
still lingered the sunset gold, we saw the wild toss of the horizon,
shaggy with forest and cliff, gripping the heart like the motive in
a symphony, and sending the sense of beauty all a-shiver through the
mind--all these surrounding islands standing above the water like low
clouds, and like them seeming to post along silently into the engulfing
night. We heard the musical drip-drip of the paddle, and the little
wash of our waves on the shore, and then suddenly we found ourselves at
the opening of the lagoon again, having made the complete circuit of
our home.
The Reverend Timothy had awakened from sleep and was singing to
himself; and the sound of his voice as we glided down the fifty yards
of enclosed water was pleasant to hear and undeniably wholesome. We saw
the glow of the fire up among the trees on the ridge, and his shadow
moving about as he threw on more wood.
“There you are!” he called aloud. “Good again! Been setting the
night-lines, eh? Capital! And your mother’s still fast asleep, Joan.”
His cheery laugh floated across the water; he had not been in the least
disturbed by our absence, for old campers are not easily alarmed.
“Now, remember,” he went on, after we had told our little tale of
travel by the fire, and Mrs. Maloney had asked for the fourth time
exactly where her tent was and whether the door faced east or south,
“every one takes their turn at cooking breakfast, and one of the men is
always out at sunrise to catch it first. Hubbard, I’ll toss you which
you do in the morning and which I do!” He lost the toss. “Then I’ll
catch it,” I said, laughing at his discomfiture, for I knew he loathed
stirring porridge. “And mind you don’t burn it as you did every blessed
time last year on the Volga,” I added by way of reminder.
Mrs. Maloney’s fifth interruption about the door of her tent, and her
further pointed observation that it was past nine o’clock, set us
lighting lanterns and putting the fire out for safety.
But before we separated for the night the clergyman had a time-honoured
little ritual of his own to go through that no one had the heart to
deny him. He always did this. It was a relic of his pulpit habits.
He glanced briefly from one to the other of us, his face grave and
earnest, his hands lifted to the stars and his eyes all closed and
puckered up beneath a momentary frown. Then he offered up a short,
almost inaudible prayer, thanking Heaven for our safe arrival, begging
for good weather, no illness or accidents, plenty of fish, and strong
sailing winds.
And then, unexpectedly--no one knew why exactly--he ended up with an
abrupt request that nothing from the kingdom of darkness should be
allowed to afflict our peace, and no evil thing come near to disturb us
in the night-time.
And while he uttered these last surprising words, so strangely unlike
his usual ending, it chanced that I looked up and let my eyes wander
round the group assembled about the dying fire. And it certainly seemed
to me that Sangree’s face underwent a sudden and visible alteration.
He was staring at Joan, and as he stared the change ran over it like a
shadow and was gone. I started in spite of myself, for something oddly
concentrated, potent, collected, had come into the expression usually
so scattered and feeble. But it was all swift as a passing meteor, and
when I looked a second time his face was normal and he was looking
among the trees.
And Joan, luckily, had not observed him, her head being bowed and her
eyes tightly closed while her father prayed.
“The girl has a vivid imagination indeed,” I thought, half laughing,
as I lit the lanterns, “if her thoughts can put a glamour upon mine in
this way;” and yet somehow, when we said good-night, I took occasion to
give her a few vigorous words of encouragement, and went to her tent
to make sure I could find it quickly in the night in case anything
happened. In her quick way the girl understood and thanked me, and
the last thing I heard as I moved off to the men’s quarters was Mrs.
Maloney crying that there were beetles in her tent, and Joan’s laughter
as she went to help her turn them out.
Half an hour later the island was silent as the grave, but for the
mournful voices of the wind as it sighed up from the sea. Like white
sentries stood the three tents of the men on one side of the ridge,
and on the other side, half hidden by some birches, whose leaves just
shivered as the breeze caught them, the women’s tents, patches of
ghostly grey, gathered more closely together for mutual shelter and
protection. Something like fifty yards of broken ground, grey rock,
moss and lichen, lay between, and over all lay the curtain of the night
and the great whispering winds from the forests of Scandinavia.
And the very last thing, just before floating away on that mighty
wave that carries one so softly off into the deeps of forgetfulness,
I again heard the voice of John Silence as the train moved out of
Victoria Station; and by some subtle connection that met me on the very
threshold of consciousness there rose in my mind simultaneously the
memory of the girl’s half-given confidence, and of her distress. As by
some wizardry of approaching dreams they seemed in that instant to be
related; but before I could analyse the why and the wherefore, both
sank away out of sight again, and I was off beyond recall.
“Unless you should send for me sooner.”