Chapter 15

They lapsed into a little silence. And then they both looked up, and saw Norah Hood walking slowly backwards and forwards with Manly Fenn of the Guides.

After all, it was only natural that these two young persons should drift together. They were both so “quiet and stupid.” Neither had much to say to the world, and they both alike heard what the world had to say with that somewhat judicial calm which knocks down feeble wit.

There was no sparkle about either of them, and the world is given to preferring bad champagne to good burgundy because of the sparkle. The world therefore left Manly Fenn alone; and Manly Fenn, well pleased, went about his own business. It has been decreed that men who go about their own business very carefully find that it is a larger affair than they at first took it to be. Manly Fenn had never been aware until quite lately that these things which he took to be his own affairs were in reality the business of an Empire. The Empire found it out before Manly Fenn--found it out, indeed, when its faithful servant was hiring himself out as assistant-herdsman to a large farmer on the Beloochistan frontier.

And Major Fenn had to buy a new uniform, had to interview many high-placed persons, and had, finally, to present himself before his Gracious Sovereign, who hooked a little cross into the padding of his tunic--all of which matters were extremely disagreeable to Manly Fenn.

Finally, the devil--as the captain bluffly affirmed--brought it to pass that he, Manly Fenn, should take passage in the Mahanaddy on the voyage of which we have to do.

It was very sudden, and many thorough things are so. It happened somewhere in the Red Sea, and Mrs. Stellasis was probably the first to sniff danger in the breeze. That was why she asked Mark Ruthine if he knew anything about the old playmate to whom Norah Hood was engaged. That was why Mark Ruthine looked for the back of the question; for he was almost as expert as a woman among the humanities.

Somewhere between Ismailia and the Gate of Tears, Love came on board the Mahanaddy--a sorry pilot--and took charge of Manly Fenn and the girl who was going out to marry her old playmate.

It was a serious matter from the first--like a fever that takes a man of middle age who has never been ill before.

There was a consultation of the authorities--Mrs Stellasis, namely, and the captain, and Mark Ruthine.

The captain disgraced himself early in the proceedings.

“Perhaps it is only a flirtation,” he said.

Whereupon Mrs. Stellasis laughed scornfully, and the mariner collapsed. Moreover, the consultation resulted in nothing, although Stellasis himself joined it, looking grave and thoughtful behind his great grey moustache.

“Known Manly Fenn for ten years,” he said; “but I am afraid of him still. I cannot speak to him. Can you not say something to the girl?”

But Mrs. Stellasis shook her head with determination. That was the worst of it--they were not the sort of persons to whom one can say such things. The captain was technically responsible, but he had proved himself utterly incompetent. “No,” said Mrs. Stellasis finally. There was nothing to be done but hope for the best. Of course, Mrs. Stellasis was without conscience--quite without justice. It is to be feared that nearly all women are. She was all for Manly Fenn and dead against the old playmate, whom she intuitively described as “that stupid.”

In the mean time all the ship knew it. In some ways the two culprits were singularly innocent. It is possible that they did not know that the world is never content unless it is elbow-deep in its neighbour's pie--that their affairs were the talk of the Mahanaddy. It is also possible that they knew and did not care.

The good steamer pounded out of the Gate of Tears and struck a bee-line across the Arabian Sea. The passengers settled down to await the sequel which would be delivered to them at Madras.

Norah Hood and Fenn were together from morning till night. They seemed to ignore the sequel, which made it all the more exciting for the lookers-on. Norah still saw a good deal of Mrs. Stellasis. She still took a great interest in the “specimen,” whose small ailments received her careful attention. With Mark Ruthine she was almost familiar, in her quiet way. She came to his little surgery to get such minute potions as the “specimen” might require. She even got to know the bottles, and mixed the drugs herself while he laughingly watched her. She had dispensed for a village population at home, and knew a little medicine.

Ruthine encouraged her to come, gave her the freedom of his medicine chests, and all the while he watched her. She interested him. There were so many things which he could not reconcile.

In some ways she was quite a different woman. This love which had come to her suddenly--rather late in her life--had made a strange being of her. She was still gentle, and rather prim and quite self-possessed. She looked Ruthine in the face, and knew that he knew all about her; but she was not in the least discomposed. She was astonishingly daring. She defied him and the whole world--gently.

The little Dutch lighthouse at Galle was duly sighted, and the Mahanaddy was in the Bay of Bengal. The last dinner was duly consumed, and the usual speech made by the usual self-assertive old civilian. And, for the last time, the Mahanaddy passengers said good night to each other, seeking their cabins with a pleasant sense of anticipation. The next day would bring the sequel.

A stewardess awoke Mark Ruthine up before it was light. He followed the woman to number seventy-seven cabin. There he found Norah Hood, dressed, lying quietly on her berth--dead.

A bottle--one of his bottles from the medicine-chest--stood on the table beside her.

A PARIAH

“I have heard that there is corn in Egypt.”

Slyne's Chare is in South Shields, and Mason's Chop House stands at the lower corner of Slyne's Chare--Mason's Chop House, where generations of honest Tyneside sailors have consumed pounds of honest mutton and beef, and onions therewith. For your true salt loves an onion ashore, which makes him a pleasanter companion at sea. Mason's Chop House is a low-roofed, red-tiled, tarred cottage with a balcony--a “balcohny” overhanging the river. It is quite evident that the “balcohny” was originally built, and has subsequently been kept in repair, by ships' carpenters. It is so glaringly ship-shape, so redolent of tar, so ridiculously strong.

The keen fresh breeze--and there is nothing keener, fresher, stronger, and wholesomer in the world than that which comes roaring up between the two piers of the Tyne--this breeze blows right through Mason's, and blows the fume of cooking out into Slyne's Chare.

It is evening--tea-time--and the day's work is almost done; for Mason's does little in suppers. A bullet-headed boy is rubbing pewter pots at the door. Mrs. Mason, comfortably somnolent at the entrance of the little kitchen, watches her daughter--comely, grave-faced Annie Mason--“our Annie,” as she is called, who is already folding the table-cloths. A few belated customers linger in the partitioned loose-boxes which lend a certain small privacy to the tables, and often save a fight. They are talking in gruff, North-country voices, which are never harsh.

A man comes in, after a moment's awkward pause at the open door, and seeks a secluded seat where the gas overhead hardly affords illumination. He is a broad-built man--a Tynesider; not so very big for South Shields; a matter of six feet one, perhaps. He carries a blue spotted handkerchief against his left cheek, and the boy with the pewter pots stares eagerly at the other. A boy of poor tact this; for the customer's right cheek is horribly disfigured. It is all bruised and battered in from the curve of a square jaw to the cheek-bone, which is broken. But the eye is intact; a shrewd, keen eye, accustomed to the penetration of a Northern mist--accustomed to a close scrutiny of men's faces. It is painfully obvious that this sailor--for gait and clothes and manner set aside all other crafts--is horribly conscious of his deformity.

“Got the toothache?” inquires the tactless youth.

The new-comer replies in the negative and orders a cup of tea and a herring. It is Annie who brings the simple meal and sets it down without looking at the man.

“Thanks,” he growls in his brown beard, and the woman pauses suddenly. She listens, as if hearing some distant sound. Then she slowly turns--for she has gone a step or two from the table--and makes a pretence of setting the salt and pepper closer to him.

Three ships had come up with the afternoon tide--a coaster, a Norwegian barque in ballast, and a full-rigged ship with nitrate from the West Coast of South America.

“Just ashore?” inquired Annie--economical with her words, as they mostly are round the Northern river.

“Ay!”

“From the West Coast?”

“Ay,” grumbles the man. He holds the handkerchief to his cheek, and turns the herring tentatively with a fork.

“You'll find it's a good enough fish,” says the woman, bluntly. Her two hands are pressed to her comely bosom in a singular way.

“Ay!” says the man again, as if he had no other word.

The clock strikes six, and the boy, more mindful of his own tea than his neighbour's ailments, slips on his jacket and goes home. The last customers dawdle out with a grunt intended for a salutation. Mrs. Mason is softly heard to snore. And all the while Annie Mason--all the colour vanished from her wholesome face--stands with her hands clutching her dress, gazing down at the man, who still examines the herring with a self-conscious awkwardness.

“Geordie!” she says. They are all called Geordie in South Shields.

“Ay, lass!” he answers, shamefacedly.

Annie Mason sits down suddenly--opposite to him. He does not look up but remains, his face half hidden by the spotted blue handkerchief, a picture of self-conscious guilt and shame.

“What did ye did it for, Geordie?” she asks, breathlessly. “Eleven years, come March--oh, it was cruel!”

“What did I do it for?” he repeats. “What did I do it for? Why, lass, can't ye see my face?”

He drops the handkerchief, and holds up his poor scarred countenance. He does not look at her, but away past her with the pathetic shame of a maimed dog. The cheek thus suddenly exposed to view is whole and brown and healthy. Beneath the mahogany-coloured skin there is a glow singularly suggestive of a blush.

“Ay, I see your face,” she answers, with a note of tenderness for the poor scarred cheek. “I hope you haven't been at the drink.”

He shakes his head with a little sad smile that twists up his one-sided mouth.

“Is it because you wanted to get shot of me?” asks the woman, with a sort of breathlessness. She has large grey-blue eyes with a look of constant waiting in them--a habit of looking up at the open door at the sound of every footstep.

“D--n it, Annie. Could I come back to you with a face like this; and you the prettiest lass on the Tyneside?”

She is fumbling with her apron string. There is a half-coquettish bend of her head--with the grey hairs already at the temple--awakened perhaps by some far-off echo in his passionate voice. She looks up slowly, and does not answer his question.

“Tell us,” she says slowly. “Tell us where ye've been.”

“Been?--oh, I don't know, lass! I don't rightly remember. Not that it matters. Up the West Coast, trading backwards and forwards. I've got my master's certificate now. Serving first mate on board the Mallard to Falmouth for orders, and they ordered us to the Tyne. I brought her round--I knew the way. I thought you'd be married, lass. But maybe ye are?”

“Maybe I'm daft,” puts in Annie coolly.

“I greatly feared,” the man goes on with the slow self-consciousness of one unaccustomed to talk of himself. “I greatly feared I'd meet up with a bairn of yours playing in the doorway. Losh! I could not have stood THAT! But that's why I stayed away, Annie, lass! So that you might marry a man with a face on him. I thought you would not know me if I held up my handkerchief over my other cheek!”

There is a strange gleam in the woman's eyes--a gleam that one or two of the old masters have succeeded in catching and imparting to the face of their Madonnas, but only one or two.

“How did you come by your hurt?” she asks in her low voice.

“Board the old Walleroo going out. You mind the old ship? We had a fire in the hold, and the skipper he would go down alone to locate it before we cut a hole in the deck and shipped the hose in. The old man did not come up again. Ye mind him. Old Rutherford of Jarrow. And I went down and looked for him. It was a hell of smoke and fire, and something in the cargo stinking like--like hell fire as it burnt. I got a hold of the old man, and was fetching him out on my hands and knees, when something busts up and sends us all through the deck. I had three months in Valparaiso hospital; but I saved old Jack Rutherford of Jarrow. And when I got up and looked at my face I saw that it was not in the nature of things that I could ever ask a lass to have me. So I just stayed away and made believe that--that I had changed my mind.”

The man pauses. He is not glib of speech, though quick enough at sea. As he takes up the little teapot and shakes it roundwise, after the manner of the galley, his great brown hand shakes too.

“I would not have come back here,” he goes on after a silence; “but the Mallard was ordered to the Tyne. And a chap must do his duty by his shipmates and his owners. And I thought it would be safe--after eleven years. When I saw the old place and smelt the smell of the old woman's frying-pan, I could not get past the door. But I hung around, looking to make sure there were no bairns playing on the floor. I have only come in, lass, to pass the time of day and to tell you ye're a free woman.”

He is not looking at her. He seems to find that difficult. So he does not see the queer little smile--rather sadder, in itself, than tears.

“And you stayed away eleven years--because o' THAT?” says the woman, slowly.

“Ay, you know, lass, I'm no great hand at the preaching and Bibles and the like; but it seems pretty clear that them who's working things did not think it fit that we should marry. And so it was sent. I got to think it so in time--least, I think it's that sometimes. And no woman would like to say, 'That's my man--him with only half a face.' So I just stayed away.”

“All for that?” asks the woman, her face, which is still, pretty and round and rosy, working convulsively.

“Ay, lass.”

“Then, honey,” she cries softly, “you dinna understand us women!”

THE PRODIGAL'S RETURN

“Yes, mother, he will come. Of course he will come!” And the girl turned her drawn and anxious young face towards the cottage door, just as if her blind mother could see the action.

It is probable that the old woman divined the longing glance from the change in the girl's tone, for she, too, half turned towards the door. It was a habit these two women had acquired. They constantly looked towards the door for the arrival of one who never came through the long summer days, through the quiet winter evenings; moreover, they rarely spoke of other things, this arrival was the topic of their lives. And now the old woman's life was drawing to a close, as some lives do, without its object. She herself felt it, and her daughter knew it.

There was in both of them a subtle sense of clinging. It was hard to die without touching the reward of a wondrous patience. It was cruel to deprive the girl of this burden, for in most burdens there is a safeguard, in all a duty, and in some the greatest happiness allotted to human existence.

It was no new thing, this waiting for the scapegrace son; the girl had grown up to it, for she would not know her brother should she meet him in the street. Since sight had left the old mother's eyes, she had fed her heart upon this hope.

He had left them eighteen years before in a fit of passionate resentment against his father, whose only fault had been too great an indulgence for the son of his old age. Nothing had been too good for dear Stephen--hardly anything had been good enough. Educated at a charity school himself, the simple old clergyman held the mistaken view that no man can be educated above his station.

There are some people who hold this view still, but they cannot do so much longer. Strikes, labour troubles, and the difficulties of domestic service, so called gentleman farmers, gentleman shopkeepers and lady milliners--above all, a few colonies peopled by University failures, will teach us in time that to educate our sons above their station is to handicap them cruelly in the race of life.

Stephen Leach was one of the early victims to this craze. His father, having risen by the force of his own will and the capabilities of his own mind from the People to the Church, held, as such men do, that he had only to give his son a good education to ensure his career in life. So everything--even to the old parson's sense of right and wrong--was sacrificed to the education of Stephen Leach at public school and University. Here he met and selected for his friends youths whose futures were ensured, and who were only passing through the formula of an education so that no one could say they were unfit for the snug Government appointment, living, or inheritance of a more substantial sort, that might be waiting for them. Stephen acquired their ways of life without possessing their advantages, and the consequence was something very nearly approaching to ruin for the little country rectory. Not having been a University man himself, the rector did not know that at Oxford or Cambridge, as in the army, one may live according to one's taste. Stephen Leach had expensive tastes, and he unscrupulously traded on his father's ignorance. He was good-looking, and had a certain brilliancy of manner which “goes down” well at the 'Varsity. Everything was against him, and at last the end came. At last the rector's eyes were opened, and when a narrow-minded man's eyes are once opened he usually becomes stony at heart.

Stephen Leach left England, and before he landed in America his father had departed on a longer journey. The ne'er-do-well had the good grace to send back the little sums of money saved by his mother in her widowhood, and gradually his letters ceased. It was known that he was in Chili, and there was war going on there, and yet the good old lady's faith never wavered.

“He will come, Joyce,” she would say; “he will surely come.”

And somehow it came to be an understood thing that he was to come in the afternoon when they were all ready for him--when Joyce had clad her pretty young form in a dark dress, and when the old lady was up and seated in her chair by the fire in winter, by the door in summer. They had never imagined his arrival at another time. It would not be quite the same should he make a mistake and come in the morning, before Joyce had got the house put right.

Yet, he never came. A greater infirmity came instead, and at last Joyce suggested that her mother should not get up in bad weather. They both knew what this meant, but the episode passed as others do, and Mrs. Leach was bedridden. Still she said--

“He will come, Joyce! He will surely come.”

And the girl would go to the window and draw aside the curtain, looking down the quiet country road towards the village.

“Yes, mother, he will come!” was her usual answer; and one day she gave a little exclamation of surprise and almost of fear.

“Mother,” she exclaimed, “there is some one coming along the road.”

The old lady was already sitting up in bed, staring with her sightless orbs towards the window.

Thus they waited. The man stopped opposite the cottage, and the two women heard the latch of the gate. Then Joyce, turning, saw that her mother had fainted. But it was only momentary. By the time she reached the bed her mother had recovered consciousness.

“Go,” said the old lady, breathlessly; “go and let him in yourself.”

Downstairs, on the doorstep, the girl found a tall man of thirty or thereabouts with a browner face than English suns could account for. He looked down into her eager eyes with a strange questioning wonder.

“Am I too late?” he asked in a voice which almost seemed to indicate a hope that it might be so.

“No, Stephen,” she answered. “But mother cannot live much longer. You are just in time.”

The young man made a hesitating little movement with his right hand and shuffled uneasily on the clean stone step. He was like an actor called suddenly upon the stage having no knowledge of his part. The return of this prodigal was not a dramatic success. No one seemed desirous of learning whether he had lived upon husks or otherwise and with whom he had eaten. The quiet dignity of the girl, who had remained behind to do all the work and bear all the burden seemed in some subtle manner to deprive him of any romance that might have attached itself to him. She ignored his half-proffered hand, and turning into the little passage, led the way upstairs.

Stephen Leach followed silently. He was rather large for the house, and especially for the stairs; moreover, he had a certain burliness of walk, such as is acquired by men living constantly in the open. There was a vaguely-pained look in his blue eyes, as if they had suddenly been opened to his own shortcomings. His attitude towards Joyce was distinctly apologetic.

When he followed the girl across the threshold of their mother's bedroom the old lady was sitting up in bed, holding out trembling arms towards the door.

Here Stephen Leach seemed to know better what to do. He held his mother in his arms while she sobbed and murmured out her joy. He had no words, but his arms meant more than his lips could ever have told.

It would seem that the best part of happiness is the sharing of it with some one else.

“Joyce,” was the first distinct word the old lady spoke, “Joyce, he has come at last. He has come! Come here, dear. Kiss your brother. This is my firstborn--my little Steve.”

The young man had sunk upon his knees at the bedside, probably because it was the most convenient position. He did not second his mother's proposal with much enthusiasm. Altogether he did not seem to have discovered much sympathy with the sister whom he had left in her cradle.

Joyce came forward and leaned over the bed to kiss her brother while the old lady's hands joined theirs. Just as her fresh young lips came within reach he turned his face aside, so that the kiss fell on barren ground on his tanned cheek.

“Joyce,” continued the old lady, feverishly, “I am not afraid to die now, for Stephen is here. Your brother will take care of you, dear, when I am gone.”

It was strange that Stephen had not spoken yet; and it was perhaps just as well, because there are occasions in life when men do wisely to keep silent.

“He is strong,” the proud mother went on. “I can feel it. His hands are large and steady and quiet, and his arms are big and very hard.”

The young man knelt upright and submitted gravely to this maternal inventory.

“Yes,” she said, “I knew he would grow to be a big man. His little fingers were so strong--he hurt me sometimes. What a great moustache! I knew you had been a soldier. And the skin of your face is brown and a little rough. What is this? what is this, Stephen dear? Is this a wound?”

“Yes,” answered the Prodigal, speaking for the first time. “That is a sword cut. I got that in the last war. I am a colonel in the Chilian army, or was, before I resigned.”

The old lady's sightless eyes were fixed on his face, as if listening for the echo of another voice in his deep quiet tones.