When the Duke of Dorset came into the hotel dining room at ten o'clock
for breakfast, he met a hall boy, calling his name and "letter please,"
after the manner of the English hostelry. He sat down at a table, thrust
a knife under the flap of the letter and ripped it open. He took out the
folded paper within and bent it back across his fingers. The paper
was an outline map of the Pacific Coast of the United States. Merely a
tracing like those maps used commonly on liners to indicate the day's
run. It was marked with a cross in ink, at a point off the coast of
Oregon, and signed across the bottom "Caroline Childers."
The Duke arose and went over to the window. The white yacht, lying last
night at anchor, was going now out of the bay of Oban, the smoke pouring
from her stacks. The gulls attended her, the sun danced on her painted
flanks, and the green water, boiling under lace, ran hissing in two
furrows, spreading like a V from her screw. The Duke remained standing
in the window, his shoulders thrown loosely forward, his hand clenched
and resting on the sill, the open map in his fingers. The yacht saluted
the warship, dipping her colors, and turned westward slowly into the
channel. Her proportions descended gradually into miniature. The
smoke crawled lazily in thinner whisps along the sky landward from her
funnels. The sea was a pot of molten glass, green as verdigris far down
under the light, and polished on the surface like a crystal. Over this
water, easily, without a sound, without the swinging of a davit, the
yacht moved out slowly to the sea like something crawling on a mirror.
The Duke of Dorset was not prepared for this sudden departure of the
yacht. Certain vague detached impressions had, during the night, got
themselves slowly into form. Certain incidents, apparently unrelated,
had moved one around the other into a sort of sequence. He was beginning
to see, he thought, to what end certain events were on the way.
For fully twenty minutes the Duke stood in the window watching the
departing yacht, his jaw thrust forward, the muscles of his face
hardening, his clinched fingers bearing heavily on the sill. Then, he
turned back slowly, deliberately, into the dining room, folded the map,
put it into his pocket, went out to the clerk's cage, paid his bill
with a five-pound note, ordered his luggage sent at once to the railway
station, and went down the steps of the hotel into the street.
The visitors overland to Oban were in exodus; lorries passed him piled
high with black leather trunks, boxes, bags, and traveling rugs; old
women passed, sallow, haggard from the nights' chaperoning; girls, worn
out and sleepy; men looking a stone thinner from seven hours of dancing;
Highlanders in kilts, pipers, sailors, crowded around the doors of
public houses, blinking in the sun. From behind these doors came oaths,
bits of ribald songs, the unsteady voices of the drunken.
Here and there a yacht lifting its anchor steamed slowly out of the bay
following that first one, now visible only as a picture etched on
the horizon. Stupid sea birds, their shoulders drawn up, their beaks
drooping, stood about the beach, or eyed leisurely the line of salvage
thrust up by the tide. At the dock the day boat for Fort William and
the north was taking on its cargo, and on mid deck, as a sort of lure,
a little thin man with a wizened receding face was picking out swinging
modern waltzes on a zither. His fingers moving nimbly as a monkey's, and
his face following in sympathy his fingers with little nods and jerks,
inconceivably grotesque.
The Duke went into the train shed, got a seat in a compartment and
returned to Doune. He was not, on this day, annoyed by the asperities of
travel, although the whole train south was packed, like a Brighton coach
with trippers. He sat crowded on either side by a loose-jointed baronet
and his equally masculine wife, who snapped at each other across him
like trapped timber wolves. An old lady of some country house, raw
with her long vigil, lectured her niece on the personal supervision of
luggage.
And by the door a betartaned female slept audibly, unconscious that she
rode south badged by two clans between which, after many hundred years,
lies still the bitterness of death; her cap Glencoe MacDonald, her skirt
a dress plaid of the Glen Lion Campbells; not since the massacre had one
person worn the two of them.
It was a hard, uncomfortable journey after a night on one's feet, but
the annoyance of it did not reach inward to the Duke of Dorset. He sat
oblivious to this environment. He was holding here a review of the last
two days and nights; as he visualized their incidents he seemed to come,
now and then, upon events indicating a certain order, as though directed
by some authority invisible behind the machinery of the world. The
coming of this girl to Oban seemed something cleaner to a purpose than
a mere whim of chance. And yet, looked at from another point of view, it
was a mere coincidence. This review was like work expended on a cipher,
or rather characters that might or might not be cipher. Characters set
thus by accident and meaning nothing, or by design, with a story to be
read.
The Duke of Dorset came on this evening to his house, with the problem
still turning in his mind. The mystery lying about the Marchesa
Soderrelli when she appeared at Old Newton was now clear enough. To
give herself a certain importance at Biarritz, she had boasted an
acquaintance with him. She had promised to produce him at Oban. She had
sought thus to attach herself to these wealthy Americans. It was a bit
of feminine strategy, but could he condemn it? An atmosphere of pity lay
about the Marchesa Soderrelli. The Marquis of Soderrelli, earning his
damnation, had been paid off at God's window--he was dead now--and she
was free. And she had come forth, like that Florentine, from hell,
her beauty fading, her youth required of her. She was no lay figure of
drama, plotting behind a domino. She was only a tired woman, whose youth
a profligate had squandered, making what she could, with courage, of the
fragments. Was it any wonder, then, that she kept fast hold of this new
hand, that she sought, with every little artifice, to bind this girl to
her?
In his heart he could find no criticism for her. He found rather a
certain admiration for this woman, who swam with such courage after her
galleon was sunk; who presented herself, not as wetting the ashes of her
life with tears, but as blowing on the embers of her courage.
When the Duke of Dorset reached his house every physical thing there
seemed to present an unfamiliar aspect. The form of nothing had
changed, but the essence of everything had changed. He seemed to arrive,
awakened, in a place which he had hitherto inhabited in a sort of
somnambulism. There lay about the house an atmosphere of loneliness--of
desolation. There was no physical reason for this change; it was as
though the peace of his house had been removed by some angered prophet's
curse. He seemed, somehow, to have come within the circle of an
invisible magic, wherein old, hidden, mysterious influences labored at
some great work. He had stepped out of the world into this circle at
Oban. What was there about this dark-haired, slender girl that effected
this sorcery? On the instant, as at a signal, he felt the pull of some
influence as old and resistless as that drawing the earth in its orbit.
He stood that night at the window looking out at the white fairy village
beyond the Ardoch, and suddenly he realized that all of his life he had
been comparing other women with this girl. He had not understood this.
He had not understood that he was comparing them with anyone, but he
was. When he had gauged the charming qualities of a woman, he had gauged
them against a standard. And now, he saw what that standard was.
But before he had seen, wherefrom had he the knowledge of this standard?
Wherefrom, indeed! For a moment the idea seemed like some new and
overpowering conception, then he remembered, that from this thing--this
very thing--the ancients had drawn the conclusion that the soul of
man had existed before he was born. And he recalled fragments of the
argument.
"A man sees something and thinks to himself, 'This thing that I see aims
at being like some other thing, but it comes short, and cannot be like
that other thing; it is inferior'; must not the man who thinks that have
known, at some previous time, that other thing, which he says that it
resembles and to which it is inferior?"
And the memory of that old legend, which had come so strikingly into his
mind, in the moment, with the girl before the sea, returned to him.
Was there truth shadowing in this fable? And there attended it the
recollection of that insolent, aggressive face which he had seen on the
yacht, and the girl's words as they returned along the deserted street.
But with it came the feeling that this man was in himself nothing, he
was only the creature, the receptive creature of that strange, powerful
old man's design. And he seemed to know an ancient enemy in this old
man, and to move again in some dim, forgotten struggle.
He determined to set out at once for Canada. A big, open, primeval land,
with its bright rivers, its mountains, its deserts, would cleanse him of
these fancies.