As it happened, the means for such a quest were at my disposal. I
was part owner of a boat which had been built for hunting and fishing
cruises on the shallow waters of the Great South Bay. It was a
deliberate, but not inconvenient, craft, well named the Patience; and my
turn for using it had come. Black Zekiel, the captain, crew, and cook,
was the very man that I would have chosen for such an expedition. He
combined the indolent good-humour of the negro with the taciturnity of
the Indian, and knew every shoal and channel of the tortuous waters. He
asked nothing better than to set out on a voyage without a port; sailing
aimlessly eastward day after day, through the long chain of landlocked
bays, with the sea plunging behind the sand-dunes on our right, and the
shores of Long Island sleeping on our left; anchoring every evening in
some little cove or estuary, where Zekiel could sit on the cabin roof,
smoking his corn-cob pipe, and meditating on the vanity and comfort of
life, while I pushed off through the mellow dusk to explore every creek
and bend of the shore, in my light canoe.
There was nothing to hasten our voyage. The three weeks' vacation was
all but gone, when the Patience groped her way through a narrow, crooked
channel in a wide salt-meadow, and entered the last of the series
of bays. A few houses straggled down a point of land; the village of
Quantock lay a little farther back. Beyond that was a belt of woods
reaching to the water; and from these the south-country road emerged to
cross the upper end of the bay on a low causeway with a narrow bridge
of planks at the central point. Here was our Ultima Thule. Not even
the Patience could thread the eye of this needle, or float through the
shallow marsh-canal farther to the east.
We anchored just in front of the bridge, and as I pushed the canoe
beneath it, after supper, I felt the indefinable sensation of having
passed that way before. I knew beforehand what the little boat would
drift into. The broad saffron light of evening fading over a still
lagoon; two converging lines of pine trees running back into the sunset;
a grassy point upon the right; and behind that a neglected garden, a
tangled bower of honeysuckle, a straight path bordered with box, leading
to a deserted house with a high, white-pillared porch--yes, it was
Larmone.
In the morning I went up to the village to see if I could find trace of
my artist's visit to the place. There was no difficulty in the search,
for he had been there often. The people had plenty of recollections of
him, but no real memory, for it seemed as if none of them had really
known him.
“Queer kinder fellow,” said a wrinkled old bayman with whom I walked
up the sandy road, “I seen him a good deal round here, but 'twan't like
havin' any 'quaintance with him. He allus kep' himself to himself,
pooty much. Used ter stay round 'Squire Ladoo's place most o' the
time--keepin' comp'ny with the gal I guess. Larmone? Yaas, that's what
THEY called it, but we don't go much on fancy names down here. No, the
painter didn' 'zactly live there, but it 'mounted to the same thing.
Las' summer they was all away, house shet up, painter hangin' round all
the time, 's if he looked fur 'em to come back any minnit. Purfessed to
be paintin', but I don' see's he did much. Lived up to Mort Halsey's;
died there too; year ago this fall. Guess Mis' Halsey can tell ye most
of any one 'bout him.”
At the boarding-house (with wide, low verandas, now forsaken by the
summer boarders), which did duty for a village inn, I found Mrs.
Halsey; a notable housewife, with a strong taste for ancestry, and an
uncultivated world of romance still brightening her soft brown eyes. She
knew all the threads in the story that I was following; and the interest
with which she spoke made it evident that she had often woven them
together in the winter evenings on patterns of her own.
Judge Ledoux had come to Quantock from the South during the war, and
built a house there like the one he used to live in. There were three
things he hated: slavery and war and society. But he always loved the
South more than the North, and lived like a foreigner, polite enough,
but very retired. His wife died after a few years, and left him alone
with a little girl. Claire grew up as pretty as a picture, but very shy
and delicate. About two years ago Mr. Falconer had come down from
the city; he stayed at Larmone first, and then he came to the
boarding-house, but he was over at the Ledoux' house almost all the
time. He was a Southerner too, and a relative of the family; a real
gentleman, and very proud though he was poor. It seemed strange that
he should not live with them, but perhaps he felt more free over here.
Every one thought he must be engaged to Claire, but he was not the kind
of a man that you could ask questions about himself. A year ago last
winter he had gone up to the city and taken all his things with him. He
had never stayed away so long before. In the spring the Ledoux had gone
to Europe; Claire seemed to be falling into a decline; her sight seemed
to be failing, and her father said she must see a famous doctor and have
a change of air.
“Mr. Falconer came back in May,” continued the good lady, “as if he
expected to find them. But the house was shut up and nobody knew just
where they were. He seemed to be all taken aback; it was queer if
he didn't know about it, intimate as he had been; but he never said
anything, and made no inquiries; just seemed to be waiting, as if there
was nothing else for him to do. We would have told him in a minute, if
we had anything to tell. But all we could do was to guess there must
have been some kind of a quarrel between him and the Judge, and if there
was, he must know best about it himself.
“All summer long he kept going over to the house and wandering around
in the garden. In the fall he began to paint a picture, but it was very
slow painting; he would go over in the afternoon and come back long
after dark, damp with the dew and fog. He kept growing paler and weaker
and more silent. Some days he did not speak more than a dozen words,
but always kind and pleasant. He was just dwindling away; and when the
picture was almost done a fever took hold of him. The doctor said it was
malaria, but it seemed to me more like a trouble in the throat, a kind
of dumb misery. And one night, in the third quarter of the moon, just
after the tide turned to run out, he raised up in the bed and tried to
speak, but he was gone.
“We tried to find out his relations, but there didn't seem to be any,
except the Ledoux, and they were out of reach. So we sent the picture
up to our cousin in Brooklyn, and it sold for about enough to pay Mr.
Falconer's summer's board and the cost of his funeral. There was nothing
else that he left of any value, except a few books; perhaps you would
like to look at them, if you were his friend?
“I never saw any one that I seemed to know so little and like so well.
It was a disappointment in love, of course, and they all said that he
died of a broken heart; but I think it was because his heart was too
full, and wouldn't break.
“And oh!--I forgot to tell you; a week after he was gone there was a
notice in the paper that Claire Ledoux had died suddenly, on the last
of August, at some place in Switzerland. Her father is still away
travelling. And so the whole story is broken off and will never be
finished. Will you look at the books?”
Nothing is more pathetic, to my mind, than to take up the books of one
who is dead. Here is his name, with perhaps a note of the place where
the volume was bought or read, and the marks on the pages that he liked
best. Here are the passages that gave him pleasure, and the thoughts
that entered into his life and formed it; they became part of him, but
where has he carried them now?
Falconer's little library was an unstudied choice, and gave a hint
of his character. There was a New Testament in French, with his name
written in a slender, woman's hand; three or four volumes of stories,
Cable's “Old Creole Days,” Allen's “Kentucky Cardinal,” Page's “In
Old Virginia,” and the like; “Henry Esmond” and Amiel's “Journal” and
Lamartine's “Raphael”; and a few volumes of poetry, among them one of
Sidney Lanier's, and one of Tennyson's earlier poems.
There was also a little morocco-bound book of manuscript notes. This I
begged permission to carry away with me, hoping to find in it something
which would throw light upon my picture, perhaps even some message to
be carried, some hint or suggestion of something which the writer would
fain have had done for him, and which I promised myself faithfully
to perform, as a test of an imagined friendship--imagined not in the
future, but in the impossible past.
I read the book in this spirit, searching its pages carefully, through
the long afternoon, in the solitary cabin of my boat. There was nothing
at first but an ordinary diary; a record of the work and self-denials of
a poor student of art. Then came the date of his first visit to Larmone,
and an expression of the pleasure of being with his own people again
after a lonely life, and some chronicle of his occupations there,
studies for pictures, and idle days that were summed up in a phrase: “On
the bay,” or “In the woods.”
After this the regular succession of dates was broken, and there
followed a few scraps of verse, irregular and unfinished, bound together
by the thread of a name--“Claire among her Roses,” “A Ride through
the Pines with Claire,” “An Old Song of Claire's” “The Blue Flower in
Claire's Eyes.” It was not poetry, but such an unconscious tribute to
the power and beauty of poetry as unfolds itself almost inevitably from
youthful love, as naturally as the blossoms unfold from the apple trees
in May. If you pick them they are worthless. They charm only in their
own time and place.
A date told of his change from Larmone to the village, and this was
written below it: “Too heavy a sense of obligation destroys freedom, and
only a free man can dare to love.”
Then came a number of fragments indicating trouble of mind
and hesitation; the sensitiveness of the artist, the delicate,
self-tormenting scruples of the lonely idealist, the morbid pride of the
young poor man, contending with an impetuous passion and forcing it to
surrender, or at least to compromise.
“What right has a man to demand everything and offer nothing in return
except an ambition and a hope? Love must come as a giver, not as a
beggar.”
“A knight should not ask to wear his lady's colours until he has won his
spurs.”
“King Cophetua and the beggar-maid--very fine! but the other
way--humiliating!”
“A woman may take everything from a man, wealth and fame and
position. But there is only one thing that a man may accept from a
woman--something that she alone can give--happiness.”
“Self-respect is less than love, but it is the trellis that holds love
up from the ground; break it down, and all the flowers are in the dust,
the fruit is spoiled.”
“And yet”--so the man's thought shone through everywhere--“I think she
must know that I love her, and why I cannot speak.”
One entry was written in a clearer, stronger hand: “An end of
hesitation. The longest way is the shortest. I am going to the city to
work for the Academy prize, to think of nothing else until I win it, and
then come back with it to Claire, to tell her that I have a future,
and that it is hers. If I spoke of it now it would be like claiming the
reward before I had done the work. I have told her only that I am
going to prove myself an artist, AND TO LIVE FOR WHAT I LOVE BEST. She
understood, I am sure, for she would not lift her eyes to me, but her
hand trembled as she gave me the blue flower from her belt.”
The date of his return to Larmone was marked, but the page was blank, as
the day had been.
Some pages of dull self-reproach and questioning and bewildered regret
followed.
“Is it possible that she has gone away, without a word, without a sign,
after what has passed between us? It is not fair. Surely I had some
claim.”
“But what claim, after all? I asked for nothing. And was it not pride
that kept me silent, taking it for granted that if I asked, she would
give?”
“It was a mistake; she did not understand, nor care.”
“It was my fault; I might at least have told her that I loved her,
though she could not have answered me.”
“It is too late now. To-night, while I was finishing the picture, I saw
her in the garden. Her spirit, all in white, with a blue flower in her
belt. I knew she was dead across the sea. I tried to call to her, but my
voice made no sound. She seemed not to see me. She moved like one in a
dream, straight on, and vanished. Is there no one who can tell her? Must
she never know that I loved her?”
The last thing in the book was a printed scrap of paper that lay between
the leaves: