"BEWARE SUCH UNHOLY SPELLS!"
The sway of Lilith Ormskirk over the saloon and quarter-deck of the
_Persian_ was as complete as any woman's sway ever is. From the grizzled
captain--nominally under whose charge she was making the voyage--down to
the newly emancipated schoolboy going out to seek employment, the male
element was, with scarcely an exception, her collective slave. Among the
women, of course, her rule was less complete; those who were furthest
from all possibility of rivalling her in attractiveness of person or
charm of manner being, of course, the most virulent in their jealousy
and the expression thereof. Lilith, however, cared nothing for this, or,
if she did, gave no sign. She was never bitter, even towards those whom
she knew to be among her worst detractors, never spiteful. She was not
faultless, not by any means, but her failings did not lie in the
direction of littleness. But she always seemed bright and happy, and
full of life--too much so, thought more than one of her perfervid
adorers, who would fain have monopolized her.
She was in the mid-twenties--that age when the egotism and rather narrow
enthusiasms and prejudices of the girl shade off into the graciousness
and _savoir-vivre_ of womanhood. She could look back on more than one
foolishness, from whose results she had providentially escaped, with an
uneasy shudder, followed by a heartfelt thankfulness, and a sense of
having not only learnt but profited by experience, which sense enlarged
her mind and her sympathies, and imparted to her demeanour a
self-possession and serenity beyond her years.
We said the male element, with scarce an exception, was her collective
slave. Such an exception was Laurence Stanninghame.
Without being a misogynist, he had no great opinion of women. He owned
they might be delightful--frequently were--up to a certain point, and
this was the point at which you began to take them seriously. But to
treat any one of them as though the sun had ceased to shine because her
presence was withdrawn, struck him as sheer insanity. It might be all
right for youngsters like Holmes or Swaynston, the licensed fool of the
smoking room, or Dyson, to whose senile enthusiasm for the mazy rout we
have heard allusion made--the latter on the principle of "no fool like
an old fool"; but not for him--not for a man in the matured vigour of
his physical and mental powers. Wherefore, when forced himself to
acknowledge the spell which Lilith had begun to weave around him, he
unhesitatingly set it down to impaired nerves.
As a direct result, he avoided the cause. It was a cowardly course of
action, he told himself. He was afraid of her. If she could throw the
magic of her sorcery over him during a brief ten minutes of
conversation, what the very deuce would happen if he allowed himself to
be drawn into anything approaching the easy-going shipboard
intimacy--deck-walking by moonlight, chairs drawn up in a snug corner
during the heat of the day, and so forth! Who knew what latent
capacities for being made an ass of might not develop themselves within
him. He felt really alarmed.
Let it not be supposed that any scruple on the ground of
conventionality, obligation, what not, entered into his misgivings. For
Laurence Stanninghame had been clean disillusioned all along the line.
He hadn't the shred of an illusion left. He had started life with a fair
stock-in-trade of good intentions and straight ideas, and, indeed, had
acted up to them honestly, and in good faith. But now?--"I've had a
h----l of a time!" he would exclaim to himself, during one of those
meditative gazes out seaward, for which we heard his younger friend
taking him to task. "Yes--just that." And now, only touching middle
life, he believed in nothing and nobody. He had become a cold, keen,
strong-headed, selfish cynic. If ever his mind reverted to the fresher
and more generous impulses or actions of his younger days, it was with a
contemptuous self-pity. His view of the morality of life now was just
the amount of success, of advantage, of gratification to be got out of
it. He thoroughly indorsed the principle of the old _roue's_ advice to
his grandson: "Be good, and you _may_ be happy--but you'll have d----d
little fun," taking care to italicise the word "may." For he had found
that the first clause of the saw had brought him neither happiness nor
fun.
With his fellow-passengers on board the _Persian_ he was neither
popular nor the reverse. Among the men, some liked him, others didn't.
He was genial enough, and good company in the smoking room, but wouldn't
do anything in the way of promoting the general amusement--and that
voyage was a particularly lively one in the matter of getting things up.
The fair section of the saloon was puzzled, and could not make up its
mind whether to dislike him or not. For the first, he consistently,
though not ostentatiously, avoided it, instead of laying himself out to
make himself agreeable--though indications were not wanting that he
could so make himself if he chose. For the second, the fact that he
remained an unknown quantity was in his favour, if only that the
unfamiliarity of reserve--mystery--never fails to appeal strongly to the
minds of women--and savages.
It was not so difficult for him to avoid Lilith Ormskirk, if only that
until that morning he had hardly exchanged a hundred words with her at a
time. Wherefore the upshot of his resolve was noticeable neither by its
object nor by the passengers at large. Holmes, indeed, who, having
recovered from his consternation, had been secretly watching his friend,
was anticipating the fun of seeing the latter fall headlong into the pit
whose brink he had so boldly skirted, so openly derided. But he was
disappointed. Laurence, if he referred to Lilith again, did so in the
same casual, indifferent way as before, nor did he ever terminate any of
his dreamy and seaward-gazing meditations in order to open converse with
her, even with such inducement as solitary propinquity on more than one
occasion.
"By Jove! the fellow is a cross between an icicle and a stone," quoth
Holmes to himself, in mingled wonder and disgust.
It was night--warm, sensuous, tropical night. There was dancing in the
saloon, and the glare from the skylight and the banging of the piano and
chatter of voices gave forth strange contrast to the awesome stillness
of the great liquid plain, the dewy richness of the air, the stars
hanging in golden clusters from a black vault, the fiery eye of some
larger planet rolling and flashing among them as the revolving beacon of
a lighthouse. Here the muffled throb of the propeller, and the rushing
hiss of water as the prow of the great steamer sheared through the
placid surface, furrowing up on either side a long line of
phosphorescent wave. Such a contrast he who stood alone in the darkness,
leaning over the taffrail, could appreciate nicely.
There were quick, light footsteps. Somebody else was walking the deck.
Well, whoever it was, he himself was screened by the stem of one of the
ship's boats swung in and resting on chocks. They would not see him,
which was all right, for he was in a queer mood and not inclined to
talk. After a turn or two, the footsteps paused, then something brushed
his elbow in the darkness, as suddenly starting away, while a
half-frightened voice exclaimed:
"Oh, I beg your pardon. I couldn't see anything in the dark, just coming
up out of the light of the saloon, too. Why, it's Mr. Stanninghame!"
To one who had been out of doors even a few minutes it was not very
dark, for the stars were shining with vivid brilliancy. It needed not
the sense of sight, that of hearing was enough. Nay, more, a subtile
sixth sense, whatever it might be, had warned Laurence Stanninghame of
the identity of the intruder.
"No case of mistaken identity here," he said. "But how is it you are all
by yourself?"
"Oh, I got tired of all the whirl and chatter. I craved for some fresh
air, and so I stole away," said Lilith. "Why, how heavy the dew is here
in these tropical seas!" she added, withdrawing her arm from the
taffrail upon which she had begun to lean.
The man, watching her furtively, said nothing for a moment. That same
chord within him thrilled to her voice, her propinquity. Doubtless his
nerves, high strung with recent worry, were playing the fool with him.
He was conscious of a kind of envenomed resentment, almost aversion; yet
his chief misgiving at that moment, which he recognized with added
wrath, was lest she should leave him as quickly as she had come.
"All by yourself as usual!" she went on, flashing at him a bright smile.
"Thinking, I suppose?"
"I don't know that I was. I believe I was trying to realize the
immensity and silence of the midnight ocean, as far as that tin-pot
racket down there would allow one to realize anything. Then it occurred
to me how long it would take for the intense solitude to drive a man mad
if he were cast away alone in it."
"Not long, I should think," answered Lilith, gazing seriously out over
the smooth, oily sea. "The horror of it would soon do that for me."
"And yet why should it have such an effect at all?" he went on. "The
grandeur of the situation ought to counterpoise any such weakness. Given
enough to support life without undue stinting, with a certainty of
rescue at the end, and, I think, a fortnight as castaway in these
waveless seas would be an uncommonly interesting experience."
"What? A fortnight? A whole fortnight in ghastly solitude! Silence only
broken by the splash or snort of Heaven knows what horrible sea monster!
Any consideration of peril apart, I am sure that one night of it would
turn me into a raving, gibbering lunatic."
"Perhaps. People are differently built. For my part, discounting the
'sea monster,' I am certain I should enjoy the experience. For one
thing, there would be no post."
"But no more there is here on board," she said, struggling with the
laugh which the dry irrelevancy had brought to her lips.
"No--but there's--Swaynston."
This time the laugh came rippling outright, and through it came the
sound of footsteps.
"Oh, here you are, Miss Ormskirk. I've been looking for you everywhere.
This is our dance."
Lilith, catching the satirical twinkle in the other's eyes in the
starlight, did not know which way to turn to control an overmastering
impulse to laugh uninterruptedly for about five minutes, the cruel part
of it being that the interrupter was Swaynston himself.
The latter, a pursy individual, was holding out an arm somewhat in the
attitude of a seal's flipper; but Lilith did not take it.
"Do be very good-natured and excuse me," she said. "I don't want to
dance any more to-night; the noise and heat have made my head ache."
"Really, really? I'll find you a chair then, in some quiet corner,"
fussed Swaynston. But Lilith seemed not enthusiastic over that
allurement, and finally, with some difficulty, she got rid of him; he
grinning "from the teeth outwards," but consumed with fury nevertheless.
So that was why she had stolen away from them all, to slip up and talk
in a quiet corner with that fellow Stanninghame, who was probably some
absconding swindler, with a couple of detectives and a warrant waiting
for him in Table Bay? Thus Swaynston.
Nor would it have tended to allay his irritation could he have heard the
object of it after his departure.
"So you think he is worse than the post?" she said, with a laugh in her
eyes. "Yet he is one of the most devoted of my--poodles."
The demure malice of her tone no more disconcerted the other than that
former endeavour to show him she had overheard his remarks by quoting
his own words.
"Oh, yes," was the unconcerned reply. "He sits up on his hind legs a
little better than any of them."
For a few moments she said nothing, seeming to have become infected
with her companion's dreamy meditativeness. Then:
"And you are not tired of the voyage yet? You were saying the other day
that its monotony was enjoyable."
"I say so still. Look!" he broke off, pointing to the sea.
A commotion was going on beneath its surface. Their grisly shapes vivid
in the disturbed phosphorescence, drawing a wake of flame behind them,
rushed two great sharks. Hither and thither they darted, every detail of
their ugly forms discernible on the framing of the phosphorescent blaze,
even the set glare of the cruel eye; and, no less nimble in swift
doubling flashes, several smaller fish were trying to evade the laws of
nature--the absorption of the weakest, to wit. There was something
indescribably horrible in the fiery rush of the sea-demons beneath the
oily blackness of the tropical waters.
"How awful! how truly awful!" murmured Lilith, with a strong shudder of
repulsion, yet gazing as one fascinated at the weird sight.
"Yet it is the perfection of an object lesson, one that comes in just in
time to point the moral to my answer," he said. "If those fish, now in
process of being eaten, were caught and kept in an aquarium tank, it
might be more monotonous for them than furnishing fun and food to the
first comer in the way of bigger fish. Possibly they might yearn for the
excitement of being harried, though I doubt it. That sort of philosophy
is reserved for us humans. If we knock our heads against a brick wall we
howl; if we haven't got a brick wall to knock them against we howl
louder."
"And the moral is?"
"_Dona nobis pacem._"
"I see," she said at last, for it took her a little while to thoroughly
grasp the application, partly distracted as her thinking powers were in
trying to find a deeper meaning than the one intended. "Yet peace is a
thing that no one can enjoy in this world. How should they when the law
of life is struggle--struggle and strife?"
"Precisely. That, however, is due to the faultiness of human nature. The
philosophy of the matter is the same. Its soundness remains untouched."
"Yet you are not consistent. You were implying just now that, failing a
brick wall to knock our heads against, we started in search of one. Now
does not that apply to those who go out into the world--to the other end
of the world--instead of remaining peacefully at home?" she added, a sly
sort of "I-have-you-there" inflection in her tone.
"Pardon me. My consistency is all right. Begging a question will not
shatter it."
"Begging a question?"
"Of course. For present purposes the said begging is comprised in the
word 'peacefully.' See?"
"Ah!"
Again she was silent. The other, watching the flash of the starlight on
the meditative upturned eyes, the clearly marked brows, the firm setting
of the lips, was more conscious than ever of the latent witchery in the
sweet, serene face. He would not flee from its spells now, he decided.
He would meet them boldly, and throw them off, coil for coil, however
subtilely, however dexterously they were wound about him. Meanwhile, two
things had not escaped him: She had yielded the point gracefully, and
convinced, instead of launching out into a voluble farrago of irrelevant
rubbish, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have done in order
to have "the last word." That argued sense, judgment, tact. Further, she
had avoided that vulgar commonplace, instinctive to the crude and
unthinking mind, of whatever sex, of importing a personal application
into an abstract discussion. This, too, argued tact and mental
refinement, both qualities of rarer distribution among her sex than is
commonly supposed--qualities, however, which Laurence Stanninghame was
peculiarly able to appreciate.
Then she talked about other things, and he let her talk, just throwing
in a word here and there to stimulate the expansion of her ideas. And
they were good ideas, too, he decided, listening keenly, and balancing
her every point, whether he agreed with it or not. He was interested,
more vividly interested than he would fain admit! This girl with the
enthralling face and noble beauty of form, had a mind as well. All the
slavish adoration she received had not robbed her of that. It was an
experience to him, as they lounged there on the taffrail together in the
gold-spangled velvet hush of the tropical night. How delightfully
companionable she could be, he thought; so responsive, so discriminating
and unargumentative. Argumentativeness in women was a detestable vice,
in his opinion, for it meant everything but what the word itself
etymologically did. Craftily he drew her out, cunningly he touched up
every fallacy or crudeness in her ideas, in such wise that she
unconsciously adopted his amendments, under the impression that they
were all her own.
"But--I have been boring you all this time," she broke off at last.
"Confess now, you who are nothing if not candid. I have been boring your
life out?"
"Then, on your own showing, I am nothing, for I am not candid," he
answered. "On the contrary, it is an unadvisable virtue, and one
calculated to corner you without loophole. And you certainly have not
been boring me."
He thought, sardonically, what any one of those whom he had caustically
defined as her "poodles" would give for an hour or so of similar
boredom, if it involved Lilith all to himself. Some of this must have
been reflected in his eyes, for Lilith broke in quickly:
"No, you are not candid. I accept the amendment. I can see the sarcasm
in your face."
"But not on that account," he rejoined tranquilly, and at the same time
dropping his hand on to hers as it rested on the taffrail. The act--an
instinctive one--was a dumb protest against the movement she had made to
withdraw. And as such Lilith read it; more potent in its impulsiveness
than any words could have been. "Listen!" he went on. "I suppose there
is a sort of imp of scepticism sitting ever upon one shoulder, and that
is what you saw. Something in my thoughts suggested a droll contrast,
that was all. So far from boring me, you have afforded me an intensely
agreeable surprise."
"Now you are sneering again. I will not talk any more."
He recognized in her tone a quick sensitiveness--not temper. Accordingly
his own took on an unconscious softness, a phenomenally unwonted
softness.
"Don't be foolish, child. You know I was doing nothing of the sort. Go
on with what you were saying at once."
"What was I saying? Oh, I remember. That idea that board-ship life shows
people in their real character. Do you believe in it?"
"Only in the case of those who have no real character to show. Wherein
is a paradox. Those who have got any--well, don't show it, either on
board ship or on shore."
"I believe you are right. Now, my own character, do you think it shows
out more readable on board than it would on shore."
"Do you think you have me so transparently as that? What was I saying
just now on that head?"
"I see. Really, though, I had no ulterior motive. I asked the question
in perfect good faith. Tell me--if anyone can, you can. Tell me. Shall I
make a success--a good thing of life? I often wonder."
She threw up her head with a quick movement, and the wide, serious eyes,
fixed full upon his, seemed to flash in the starlight. He met the glance
with one as earnest and unswerving as her own.
"You rate my powers of vaticination too high," he said slowly, "and--you
are groping after an ideal."
"Perhaps. Tell me, though, what you think, character-reader as you are.
Shall I make a success of life?"
"I should think the chances were pretty evenly balanced either way,
inclining, if anything, to the reverse."
"Thanks. I shall remember that."
"But you are not obliged to believe it."
"No. I shall remember it. And now I must go below; it is nearly time for
putting out the saloon lights. Good-night. I have enjoyed our talk so
much."
She had extended her hand, and as he took it, the sympathetic--was it
magnetic?--pressure was mutual, almost lingering.
"Good-night," he said. "The enjoyment has not been all on one side."
Left alone, he returned to his solitary musings--tried to, rather, for
there was no "return" about the matter, because now they took an
entirely new line. His late companion would intrude upon them--nay,
monopolized them. She had appealed powerfully to his senses, to his
mind, how long would it be before she did so to his heart? He had
avoided her--he alone--up till then, and yet now, after this first
conversation, he was convinced that of all gathered there he alone knew
the real Lilith Ormskirk as distinct from the superficial one known to
the residue. And to his mind recurred her former warning, laughingly
uttered: "Beware such unholy spells!" With a strange intoxicating
recollection did that warning recur, together with the consciousness
that more than ever was it needed now. But as against this was the
protecting strength of a triple chain armour. Life was only rendered
interesting by such interesting character studies as this. Oh, yes; that
was the solution--that, and nothing more.
This was by no means the last talk they had--they two alone together.
But it seemed to Laurence Stanninghame that a warning note had been
sounded, and one of no uncertain nature. His tone became more acrid, his
sarcasm more biting, more envenomed. One day Lilith said:
"Why do you dislike me so?"
He started at the question, thrown momentarily off his guard.
"I don't dislike you," he answered shortly.
"Then why have you such a very poor opinion of me? You never lose an
opportunity of letting me see that you have. What have I done? What have
I said that you should think so poorly of me?"
There was no spice of temper, of resentment, in the tone. It was soft,
and rather pleading. The serious eyes were sweet and wistful. As his own
met their steady gaze, it seemed that a current of magnetic thought
flashed from mind to mind.
"I hold no such opinion," he said, after a few moments of silence.
"Perhaps I dread those 'unholy spells,' thou sorceress. Ah! there goes
the second dinner-bell. Run away now, and make yourself more beautiful
than ever--if possible."
A bright laugh flashed in the hazel eyes, and the white teeth showed in
a smile.
"I'll try--since _you_ wish it," she said over her shoulder, as she
turned away.