CHAPTER I. BITS OF LIFE.

Some far-off touch
Of greatness, to know well I am not great.

The local house-agent anticipated no difficulty in letting Malabar Cottage, furnished, at a good weekly rental; and in due course a dreamy clergyman, with a wife who was anything but dreamy, came and saw and hired. The wide-awake wife was so interested in Eve that she forgot to settle several details which came to her mind afterwards. Her curiosity was so aroused that the special cupidity belonging to the wife of the dreamy clergyman was for the moment allayed, and she forgot to drive a hard bargain.

Moreover, Eve’s manner was not exactly encouraging to the would-be bargainer. A stupendous ignorance of the tricks of furnished house-letting, combined with a certain lofty contempt for details, acquired in Spain, where such contempt is thoroughly understood, completely baffled the clergyman’s wife. She concluded that Eve was a very stupid and ignorant girl, a poor housekeeper, and an incompetent woman of the world; and yet she was afraid of her, simply because she did not understand her. Jews, poor men’s wives, and other persons who live by haggling, have a subtle fear of those who will not haggle.

So Malabar Cottage was let; and in due time the sad day arrived when Captain Bontnor had to bid farewell to his “bits of things.” These “bits of things” were in reality bits of his life - and a human life is not so long nor so interesting an affair that we can afford lightly to break off any portion, to throw it away, or even to let it out on hire.

Captain Bontnor wandered rather disconsolately round the rooms after breakfast, and as Eve was with him he gave her a short inventory of these pieces of his life.

“That there harpoon,” he said, pointing to a rusty relic on the wall above the mantelpiece, “was given to me by the finest whaling captain that ever found his way into the North water. When I first went to sea I thought I’d like to be a whaler; but two voyages settled that fancy. I’m told they shoot their harpoons out of a gun nowadays--poor sport that! And there’s no sport like whalin’. Two thousand pounds at one end of a line and your own life at the other--that’s finer sport than these Cockney partridge-shooters know of.

“And that’s my seal-pick--many a seal have I killed with that. That there’s the portrait of the True Love, three-masted schooner, built at Littlehampton by Harvey. Sailed second mate, first mate, and master in her, I did. Then she was sold; and a lubber went and--and threw her on the Kentish Knock in a south-easterly gale. She was a pretty ship! I felt the loss as if she’d been my sweetheart--the pretty little True Love!

“That string of shells was given to me by a shipmate--old Charlie Sams--to bring home for his wife. He picked ’em up on the beach above James Town. Took yellow Jack, he did, and died in my arms--and he only had the shells to send to his young wife and a bit of a baby he was always botherin’ and talkin’ about. I did two cross voyages, and one of them round the Horn, before I got home, and I couldn’t find the woman, she having moved. So when I left the sea, I just hung them up in case she happened to come along by chance and see them with his portrait underneath. That’s Charlie Sams--a bit brown and faded. She won’t come along now, I suppose. It is a matter of fifty-five years since Charlie died.”

As he wandered round the house, so he wandered on in his reminiscences, until Eve led him out of the front door. He took his hat from the peg which he had been intending to unship and refix at a lower level for the last fifteen years, and followed her meekly into the garden. He paused to pick up some yellow jasmine leaves which had withered in the warmth of the May sun and fallen on the doorstep. Then he looked back longingly.

“You see,” said Eve cheerfully, “it is only for a few months. We can always let it in the summer like this, and live luxuriously on our rent in the winter.”

He threw back his shoulders and smiled bravely, trying to banish the thought of his “bits of things.”

“Yes, dearie, it’s only for a few months--only for a few months.”

And they both knew that they could not hope to live in Malabar Cottage again--not, at all events, on the rent paid by the clergyman’s wife.

They had taken lodgings in a small house near the harbour, which, as Eve pointed out, was much more convenient for the shops; and, besides, they could now buy their fish out of the boats. This last theory she propounded with a grave assumption of housekeeping knowledge which did not fail to impress Captain Bontnor.

The whole town knew of the captain’s misfortune, and half the citizens of Somarsh shared in it. Only those who had saved nothing lost nothing, for Merton’s was the only bank on the coast; and more than one old fisherman--bent with rheumatism, crippled by the hardships of a life spent half in the water, half on it--saw his savings - the fruit of long toilsome years--go to pay the London tradesmen a part of what young Merton owed them. It was the old, oft-repeated tale of over-education. A country banker’s son sent to public school and university to be educated out of country banking and into nothing else.

Captain Bontnor was quite penniless. During his long life he had saved nearly four thousand pounds, and this sum he had placed on deposit with the Somarsh bankers, living very comfortably on the interest. The whole of this was absorbed--a mere drop in the financial ocean.

Mrs. Harrington had asked Eve to accept a dress allowance of forty pounds a year, and Eve accepted--for her uncle. Besides this she had a little ready money--the result of the sale of the contents of the Casa d’Erraha. A person who looked like a butler or a major-domo had gone over from Barcelona to Palma to attend this sale; and the local buyers laughed immoderately at him in their sleeves. He was, they opined, a mule--he did not know the value of things, and paid double for all he bought.

But the proceeds of the sale did not amount to much. Eve knew that something must be done. The money would soon be exhausted, and they could not live on the dress allowance. Since the failure of the bank, Captain Bontnor’s mental grasp had seemed less reliable than ever, and Eve had kept these things to herself.

The captain’s one servant--an aged female--who ruined his digestion and neglected her dusting, was prevailed upon to return to her people, and Eve and her uncle settled down to their restricted life in the lodgings which were so conveniently near the fishing harbour.

The captain was too old to break off his habits of life, so he walked his quarter-deck tramp, backwards and forwards beneath the window on the clean pavement of the High Street, which broadened out to the harbour. He went down to meet the boats, where he was ever a welcome onlooker, and he never came back without fish for which no payment had been taken.

He usually met the postman when he was keeping his watch on deck - beneath the little bay-window--and if there was a letter for Eve, he would pause in front of the house, and hand it through the open sash.

He did this one morning after they had been in the lodgings a month, and he had not added two turns to the regulation forty before Eve called to him. He bustled in at the door, hung his old straw hat on a peg, which was likewise too high, and went into the little parlour. As he was smoking, he stood in the doorway, for he had not yet got over his immense respect for the niece who was above him.

“Yes, dearie?” he said. “What to do now?”

Eve was standing near the window, holding a letter in her hand.

“Listen!” she said, and spreading out her elbows she read grandly--

“‘MADAM,--I like your Spanish Notes and Sketches; but I cannot put in number one until I see number two. Send me more, or, better still, if convenient, when you are next in town, do me the honour of calling here.--Yours very truly--’

“Now listen, uncle.”

“Yes, dear!”

“‘Yours very truly,
“‘JOHN CRAIK.’“

“Lor!” ejaculated Captain Bontnor, “the gentleman that writes.”

Eve handed him the letter, which he held, awestruck, with the tip of his thumb and finger.

“He doesn’t write very well--he, he!” he added, with a chuckle. “I’m afraid it’s no good my trying to read it without my glasses.”

He blinked at the crabbed spidery caligraphy, and handed the letter back.

“It is signed John Craik, but Providence held the pen,” said Eve. “If this letter had not come I should have had to leave you, uncle. I should have had to go and be a governess. And I do not want to leave you.”

The old man’s eyes filled suddenly, as old eyes sometimes will. He stuffed his pipe into his pocket and took her two hands in his, patting them tenderly.

He did not speak for some time, but stood blinking back the tears.

“Then God bless John Craik!” he said. “God bless him.”

They sat down to talk this thing over, forgetful of the captain’s pipe, which burnt a hole in the lining of his coat. There was so much to be discussed. Eve had written a certain number of short essays--painfully conscious all the while of their simplicity and faultiness. She did not know that so long as a person has his subject at his finger-ends, simplicity is rather to be commended than otherwise. It is the half-informed who are verbose. She had written simply of the simple life which she knew so well. She had depicted Spanish daily life from the keenly instinctive standpoint of a woman’s observation; and only a week before she had sent a single essay--marked number one - to the editor of the Commentator, John Craik.

She had written for money, and made no disguise of her motive. Here was no literary lady with all the recognised adjuncts except the literature. She did not write in order that she might talk of having written. She did not talk in such flowing periods and with such overbearing wisdom that insincere friends in sheer weariness were called upon to suggest that she should and could write.

In sending her first small attempt to John Craik she had not forwarded therewith a long explanatory letter, which reticence had made him read the manuscript.

Eve read the great man’s letter a second time, while the captain scratched his head and watched her.

“And,” he said meekly, “what do you think of doing?”

Eve looked up with a happy smile.

“What he tells me,” she answered. “Oh, I am so glad, uncle; I cannot tell you how glad I am.”

The captain shuffled awkwardly on his feet.

“I’m more than glad,” he said. “I’m sorter proud.”

He pulled down his coat and walked to the window.

“Yes,” he said, looking out into the street. “That’s it. I’m proud. It’s a great gift--writin’. A great gift.”

Eve laughed.

“Oh!” she answered. “I’m afraid that I have no gift. It is a very, very minute talent. That is all. I always liked books, but I have not the gift for writing them.”

Captain Bontnor never thought Eve was a great authoress. In his simple way this man had a vast deal of discrimination, as simple people often have. It is the oversubtle man who makes the most egregious mistakes, because most of us have not time to be subtle. He never suspected Eve of being a great authoress, and he never attributed to her any desire to attain that doubtful pinnacle of fame. But he saw very plainly the immense advantage to be gathered in this time from her talent. In his simplicity he hoped that something would turn up for him to do, in a world which has no pity nor charity for that which is old, effete, and out of fashion.

“Yes,” he said, after deep thought, “we must do what he tells us. There’s no harm in that.”

Eve laughed.

“I thought,” she said, “that we understood pride in Spain and Mallorca; but I have never met such a proud caballero as you.”

She was standing behind him where he stood, looking grimly out of the window, her two hands resting on his broad shoulders.

“I suppose,” she went on, “that you have once or twice humbled your pride so much as to accept a ship when it was offered you. You said that there are plenty who would give you a command now. John Craik is giving me a ship, that is all.”

The captain nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s it, that’s it. You’ve got your first ship.”

CHAPTER II. A COMPACT.

Prends moy tel que je suy.

The tendency of the age is to peep behind the scenes. The world is growing old, and human nature is nearly worn through; we are beginning to see the bare bones of it. But a strange survival of youthfulness is that remarkable fascination of the unseen--the desire to get behind the scenes and see the powder for ourselves. If a man makes his livelihood by lifting horses and other heavy objects from the earth, we immediately wish to know details of his private life, and an obliging journalist interviews him. If another write a book, we immediately wish to know how he does it, where, when, and why. We also like to see his portrait on the fly-leaf--or he likes to see it there.

Eve Challoner was lamentably behind the spirit of the age in that she did not know how she wrote a series of articles destined to attain renown. But as she never went out to meet the interviewer, he never came to her. She fell into a habit of going out for long walks by herself, and in the course of these peregrinations she naturally acquired the custom of thinking about her writing.

During these long walks Captain Bontnor remained at home alone, or joined a knot of fellow-mariners on the green in front of the reading-room. When Eve came home with her mind full of matter to be set down on paper he discreetly went to keep his watch on deck--backwards and forwards on the pavement in front of the window. At each turn the old sailor paused to cast his eyes over the whole horizon, after the manner of mariners, as if he were steering Somarsh across the North Sea.

Thus uncle and niece glided imperceptibly into that mode of life which is called humdrum, and which some wise people consider the best mode of getting through existence. Sketch number two was written, rewritten, liked, hated, and finally sent to John Craik, with a letter explaining that the writer lived in Suffolk, and could not for the moment make it convenient to go to London. John Craik was a busy man. He made no answer, and in a few days the proof of sketch number one arrived, with a little printed notice of instructions as to correcting and returning. Of all fleeting glamours that of the proof-sheet is assuredly lightest on the wing, and Eve duly hated her own works in print, as we all do hate our first triumphs. Afterwards we get resigned--much as we grow resigned to the face we see in the looking-glass.

At this time Captain Bontnor conceived the idea that it was incumbent upon him to take up seriously, though late in life, the higher walks of literature.

“Now,” he said to Eve one evening, when the first proof had been almost wept over, “now, dearie, what author would you recommend to a man who has a natural likin’ for reading, but owing to the circumstances of his life has had no opportunity of cultivatin’ his taste?”

“Well, uncle, a good deal would depend upon his inclination - whether he liked poetry or fiction, or serious reading.”

“Of course, of course,” acceded Captain Bontnor, pressing the tobacco into his pipe with his thumb; “I am taking that into consideration. There’s all sorts to be had now, ain’t there--poetry and fiction and novels? I am not sure that the style would matter much, so long--so long as the print was nice and clear.”

Eve duly gave her opinion without pressing the question too closely, and while she was out on her long walks Captain Bontnor laboriously cultivated his neglected taste. He sat in the window-seat with much gravity, and more than made up in application for the youthful quickness which he lacked. He resolutely refused to look up from his book when he heard the alternate thud and stump which announced the passage down to the harbour of his particular crony, Mark Standon, whose other leg had been buried at sea. He kept the dictionary beside him, and when the writer used a word of sonorous ring and obscure meaning he gravely looked it out.

The first time that Mr. Standon saw his friend thus engaged he stood on the pavement and expressed his surprise with more force than elegance; whereupon Captain Bontnor went out and explained to him exactly how it stood. So marked was the old sailor’s influence on the social affairs at Somarsh that there was a notable revival of literary taste and discussion at the corner of the Lifeboat House, where the local intellect assembled.

Captain Bontnor was engaged one day in the study of an author called Dickens, to whose works he had not yet found time to devote his full attention, when a strange footstep on the pavement made him look up. It certainly was not Standon’s halting gait, and a lack of iron nail certified to the fact that it was no Somarsh man. The captain looked over his spectacles and saw Cipriani de Lloseta studying the numbers on the doors as he came down the quiet little street.

The sight gave the old sailor rather a shock. He abandoned the study of Mr. Dickens and took off his spectacles. Then he scratched his head--always an ominous sign. His first instinct was to go and open the door; then he remembered that the new-comer was a nobleman who lived in a palace, and that he himself was indirectly a gentleman, inasmuch as he lived in the same house as a lady--his niece. So he sat still and allowed the landlady to open the door.

When Cipriani de Lloseta was ushered into the tiny room he found the captain half-bowing on the hearthrug.

“Captain Bontnor,” he said, with all the charm of manner which was his, “this is a pleasure.”

The captain shook hands, and with the rough hospitality of the cabin drew forward his own armchair, which the Count took at once.

“When last we met,” he said, “I had the privilege of receiving you at my house in Barcelona--a poor dark place in a narrow street. Now here you have a sea-view.”

“But this is not my house,” said Captain Bontnor, feeling unaccountably at ease with this nobleman. “Malabar Cottage is farther up the hill. I’ve got all my bits of things up there.”

“Indeed. It would have given me pleasure to see them. I learnt from a mutual--friend, Mrs. Harrington, of your change of address.”

Captain Bontnor looked at him keenly; and who shall say that the rough old man did not appreciate the refined tact of his visitor?

“I’ve had losses,” he said.

The Count nodded shortly. He was drawing off his gloves.

“I do not know,” he said conversationally, “if it has been your experience, but for myself I have found that reverses of fortune are not without some small consolation. They prove the friendship of one’s friends.”

The captain reflected.

“Yes,” he said, “you’re right, Mr.--I mean Count--and--and brings the good out of women.”

“Women!” the Count repeated gravely. “You refer to Miss Challoner--I see signs of her presence in this room. Is she out?”

“Yes--I am afraid she is.” He glanced nervously at the clock. “She is not likely to be in for an hour and more yet.”

“I am sorry,” said the Count; “but also I am rather glad. I shall thus have an opportunity of asking your opinion upon one or two matters--between men of the world, you know.”

“I am afraid my opinion is not of much value, sir, except it’s about schooners--I always sailed in schooners.”

The Count nodded gravely.

“In my country,” he said, “we usually go in for brigs; they find them easier to handle. But you know Mallorca - you have seen for yourself.”

The captain was not listening; he was looking at the modest lodging-house sideboard.

“I was wondering,” he explained, with a transparent simplicity which was perhaps as good as that which is called good breeding, “whether you would take a glass of sherry wine.”

“I should like nothing better,” said the Count. “It will give me pleasure to take a glass of wine with you.”

Quietly, imperceptibly, De Lloseta set Captain Bontnor at his ease, and at the same time he mastered him. They spoke of indifferent topics--topics which, however, were well within the captain’s knowledge of the world. Then suddenly the Count laid aside the social mask which he wore with such consummate ease.

“I came down to Somarsh,” he said, “because I am deeply distressed at your reverse of fortune. I came to see you, captain, because when I had the pleasure of meeting you at Barcelona I saw you to be a just man, and one to whom one could speak openly. I am a rich man--you understand. Need I say more?”

Captain Bontnor blinked uncertainly.

“No,” he answered, “I’m thinkin’ it isn’t necessary.”

“Not between men of the world,” urged Cipriani de Lloseta. “It is not for your sake. I would not insult you in such a way. It is for Eve. For a woman’s sake a man may easily sacrifice his pride.”

The captain nodded and glanced at the clock. He had not fully realised until that moment how dependent he was upon his niece.

“You know,” continued the Count, following up his advantage, “all the somewhat peculiar circumstances of the case. Do you think there is any chance of Eve’s reconsidering her decision?”

The captain shook his head.

“No,” he answered bluntly, “I don’t. Since she came back from London--” he paused.

“Yes, since she came back from London?” suggested the Count.

“She seems more determined than ever.”

The Count was looking at him keenly.

“Then,” he said, “you also have noticed a change.”

Captain Bontnor shuffled in his seat and likewise in his speech.

“I suppose,” he said, “that she has grown into a woman. Adversity’s done it.”

“Yes,” said the Count, “your observations seem to me to be correct. I had the pleasure of seeing her once or twice when she was staying at Mrs. Harrington’s; but I did not refer to the question raised at my house in Barcelona, because I noticed the change to which you allude. Instead, I attempted to gain the co-operation and assistance of a mutual friend, Henry FitzHenry.”

Cipriani de Lloseta paused and looked at his companion, who in turn gazed stolidly at the fire.

“And I received a rebuff,” added the Count. He waited for some little time, but Captain Bontnor had no comment to offer, so De Lloseta went on: “Challoner was one of my best friends. I do not feel disposed to let the matter drop, more especially now that you have been compelled to leave Malabar Cottage. I propose entreating Miss Challoner to reconsider her decision. Will you help me?”

“Yes,” answered Captain Bontnor, “I will.”

“Then tell me if Eve has accepted assistance from Mrs. Harrington?”

“Yes, she has.”

The Count swore softly in Spanish.

“I am sorry for that,” he said aloud. “I am superstitious. I have a theory that Mrs. Harrington’s money is apt to be a curse to those upon whom it is bestowed.”

“Mrs. Harrington’s no friend of mine,” said Captain Bontnor; and De Lloseta, who was looking out of the window, smiled somewhat grimly.

“Perhaps,” he said after a little pause, “perhaps you will allow me to claim the privilege which you deny to her?”

“Yes,” answered Captain Bontnor awkwardly; “yes, if you care to.”

“Thanks. I see Miss Challoner--Eve--coming. I count on your assistance.”

Eve paused on the threshold in astonishment at the sight of the Count de Lloseta and her uncle in grave discourse over a glass of sherry.

“You!” she said. “You here!”

And he wondered why she suddenly lost colour.

“I,” he answered, “I--here to pay my respects.”

Eve gave a little gasp of relief. For a moment she was off her guard--with a dangerous man watching her.

“I thought you had bad news,” she said.

And Cipriani de Lloseta knew that this was a woman whose heart was at sea.

“No,” he answered; “I merely came to quarrel.”

He drew forward a chair, and Eve sat down.

“We shall always quarrel,” he went on, “unless you are kind. Let us begin at once and get it over, because I want to stay to lunch. Will you reconsider your decision with respect to the Val d’Erraha?”

Eve shook her head and looked at her uncle.

“No,” she answered; “I cannot do that. Not now.”

“Some day?” he suggested.

“Not now,” repeated the girl; and, looking up, her face suddenly became grave, as if reflecting the expression in the dark Spanish eyes bent upon her.

“You are cruel!” he said.

“I am young--”

“Is it not the same thing?”

“And I can work,” added Eve.

“Yes,” he said. “But in my old-fashioned way I am prejudiced against a lady working. In the days of women’s rights ladies are apt to forget the charm of white hands.”

Eve made no answer.

“Then it is not peace?”

“No,” she answered, with a smile; “not yet.”

She was standing beside Captain Bontnor, with her hand on his shoulder.

“Uncle and I,” she added, “are not beaten yet.”

Cipriani de Lloseta smiled darkly.

“Will you promise me one thing,” he said; “that when you are beaten you will come to me before you go to any one else?”

“Yes,” answered Eve, “I think we can promise that.”

He conquers who awaits the end.

Fortune fixed her wayward fancy on the first sketch that Eve contributed to the Commentator. Wayward, indeed, for Eve herself knew that it was not good, and in the lettered quiet of the editorial sanctum John Craik smiled querulously to himself. John Craik had a supreme contempt for the public taste, but he knew exactly what it wanted. He was like a chef smiling over his made dishes. He did not care for the flavour himself, but his palate was subtle enough to detect the sweet or bitter that tickled his master’s tongue. He served the public faithfully, with a twisted, cynic smile behind his spectacles--for John Craik had a family to feed. He knew that Eve’s work was only partially good--true woman’s work that might cease to flow at any moment. But he detected the undeniable originality of it, and the public palate likes a novel flavour.

So deeply versed was he in worldly knowledge, so thoroughly had he gauged the critic, the journalist, and the public, that before he unfolded a newspaper he could usually foresee the length, the nature, and the literary merit of the criticism. He knew that the tendency of the age is to acquire as much knowledge as possible in a short time. He looked upon the world as a huge kindergarten, and the Commentator as its school-book. It was good that the world’s knowledge of its own geography should be extended, but the world must not be allowed to detect the authority of the usher’s voice. There are a lot of people who, like women at a remnant sale, go about the paths of literature picking up scraps which do not match, and never can be of the slightest use. It was John Craik’s business to set out his remnant counter to catch these wandering gleaners, and Eve sent him her wares by a lucky chance at the moment when he wanted them.

The editor of the Commentator was sitting in his deep chair before the fire one morning about eleven o’clock, when the clerk, whose business it was to tell glib lies about his chief, brought him a card.

“Lloseta,” said Craik aloud to himself. “Ask him to come up.”

“The man who ought to have written the Spanish sketches,” he commented, when the clerk had left.

The Count came into the room with a certain ease of manner subtly indicative of the fact that it was not the first time that he had visited it. He shook hands and waited until the clerk had closed the door.

There was a copy of the month’s Commentator on the table. De Lloseta took it up and opened it at the first page.

“Who wrote that?” he asked, holding out the magazine.

Craik laughed--a sudden boyish laugh--but he held his sides the while.

“You not only beard the lion in his den, but you ask him to tell you the tricks of his trade,” he said. “Sit down, all the same. You don’t mind my pipe, do you?”

The Spaniard sat down and sought a cigarette-case in his waistcoat pocket with a deliberation that made his companion fidget in his chair.

“You asked me to write those sketches,” said the Count pleasantly. “I delayed and you gave the order to some one else. Assuredly I have a certain right to ask who my supplanter is.”

“None whatever, my dear Lloseta. I did not give the order for those sketches--they came.”

“From whom?”

“Ah!”

“You will not tell me?”

“My dear man, I cannot. The smell of printing ink is not good for a man’s morals. Leave me my unsullied honour.”

The Count had lighted his cigarette. He looked keenly at his companion’s deeply-lined face, and the blue smoke floated between them.

“There are not many people who could have written that article,” he said. “For the few English who know Spain like that are known to the natives. And no Spaniard would have dared to write it.”

John Craik laughed, and while he was laughing his eyes were grave and full of keen observation.

“Then you admit that it is true,” he said.

“Yes,” answered the Count; “it is true--all of it. The writer knows my country as few Englishmen--or women know it.”

John Craik was leaning back in his deep chair an emaciated, pain-stricken form. His calm grey eyes met the quick glance, and did not fall nor waver.

“Then you will not tell me?”

“No. But why are you so anxious to know?”

The Count smoked for a few seconds in silence.

“I will tell you,” he said suddenly, “in confidence.”

Craik nodded, and settled himself again in his chair. He was a very fidgety man.

“It is not the first article that I care about,” explained De Lloseta. “It is that which is behind it. This” - he laid his hand on the page--“is my own country, the north and east of Spain, the wildest part of the Peninsula, the home of the Catalonians, who have always been the leaders in strife and warfare. It is the country from whence my family has its source. All that is written about Catalonia or the Baleares must necessarily refer in part to me and mine. This writer may know too much.”

“I think,” said John Craik, “that I can guarantee that if the writer does know too much, the Commentator shall not be the channel through which the knowledge will reach the public.”

“Thanks; but--can you guarantee it? Can you guarantee that the public interest, being aroused by these articles, may not ask for further details, which details might easily be given elsewhere, in something less--respectable--than the Commentator?”

“My dear sir, one would think you had a crime on your conscience.”

Cipriani de Lloseta smiled--such a smile as John Craik had never seen before.

“I have many,” he answered. “Who has not?”

“Yes; they accumulate as life goes on, do they not?”

“What I fear,” went on De Lloseta, “is the idle gossip which obtains in England under the pleasant title of ‘Society Notes,’ ‘Boudoir Chat,’ and other new-fangled vulgarities. In Spain we have not that.”

“Then Spain is the Promised Land.”

“Your Society journalists may talk of the English nobility, though the aristocracy that fills the ‘Society Notes’ is almost invariably the aristocracy of yesterday. But I want to keep the Spanish families out of it if possible--the names that were there before printing was invented.”

“Printing and education are too cheap nowadays,” said John Craik. “They are both dangerous instruments in the hands of fools, and it is the fool who goes to the cheap market. But you need not be afraid of the Society papers. It is only those who wish to be advertised who find themselves there.”

De Lloseta’s thoughts had gone back to the Commentator. He picked up the magazine and was looking over the pages of the Spanish article.

“It is clever,” he said. “It is very clever.”

Craik nodded, after the manner of one who had formed his own opinion and intended to abide by it. He was a gentle-mannered man in the ordinary intercourse of life, but on the battlefield of letters he was a veritable Coeur-de-Lion. He quailed before no man.

“You know,” said the Count, “there are only two persons who could have written this--and they are women. If it is the one, I fear nothing; if the other, I fear everything.”

“Then,” said John Craik, shuffling in his chair, “fear nothing.”

De Lloseta looked at him sharply.

“I could force you to tell a lie by mentioning the name of the woman who wrote this,” he said.

“Then don’t!” said John Craik. “I lie beautifully!”

“No, I will not. But I will ask you to do something for me instead: let me read the proofs of these as they are printed.”

For exactly two seconds John Craik pondered.

“I shall be happy to do that,” he said. “I will let you know when the proof is ready. You must come here and read it in this room.”

Cipriani de Lloseta rose from his seat.

“Thank you,” he said, holding out his hand. “I will not keep you from your work. You are doing a better action than you are aware of.”

He took the frail fingers in his grasp for a second and turned to go. Before the door closed behind him John Craik was at work again.

So Eve Challoner’s work passed through Cipriani de Lloseta’s hand, and that nobleman came into her life from another point. It would seem that in whichsoever direction she turned, the Mallorcan was waiting for her with his grave persistence, his kindly determination to watch over her, to exercise that manly control over her life which is really the chief factor of feminine happiness on earth--if women only knew it. For all through Nature there are qualities given to the male for the sole advantage of the female, and the beasts of the forest rise up in silent protest against the nonsense that is talked to-day of woman’s place in the world. We may consider the beasts of the field to advantage, for through all the chances and changes of education, of female emancipation, and the subjection of the weaker sort of man, there will continue to run to the end of time the one grand principle that the male is there to protect the female and the female to care for her young.

Cipriani de Lloseta thus late in life seemed to have found an object. Eve Challoner, while bringing back the past with a flood of recollections - for she seemed to carry the air of Mallorca with her--had so far brought him to the present that for the first time since thirty years and more he began to be interested in the life that was around him.

He suspected--nay, he almost knew--that Eve had written the article in the Commentator which had attracted so much attention. John Craik had to a certain extent baffled him. He had called on the editor of the great periodical in the hope of gleaning some detail - some little scrap of information which would confirm his suspicion - but he had come away with nothing of value excepting the promise that the printed matter should pass through his hands before it reached the public.

Even if he was mistaken, and this proved after all to be the work of Mrs. Harrington, the fact of the proof being offered to his scrutiny was in itself an important safeguard. This, however, was only a secondary possibility. He knew that Eve had written this thing, and he wished to have the opportunity of correcting one or two small mistakes which he anticipated, and which he felt that he himself alone could rectify.

In the meantime John Craik was scribbling a letter to Eve in his minute caligraphy.

“DEAR MADAM” (he wrote), “Your first article is, I am glad to say, attracting considerable attention. It is absolutely necessary that I should see you, with a view of laying down plans for further contributions. Please let me know how this can be arranged. Yours truly,
“JOHN CRAIK.”

And at the same time another man, to whom all these things were of paramount importance--to whom all that touched Eve’s life was as if it touched his own--was reading the Commentator. Fitz, on his way home from the Mediterranean, to fill the post of navigating-lieutenant to a new ironclad at that time fitting out at Chatham, bought the Commentator from an enterprising newsagent given to maritime venture in Plymouth harbour. The big steamer only stayed long enough to discharge her mails, and Fitz being a sailor did not go ashore. Instead, he sat on a long chair on deck and read the Commentator. He naturally concluded that at last Cipriani de Lloseta had acceded to John Craik’s wish.

The Ingham-Bakers had come home from Malta and were at this time staying with Mrs. Harrington in London. Agatha had of late taken to reading the newspapers somewhat exhaustively. She read such columns as are usually passed over by the majority of womankind--such as naval intelligence and those uninteresting details of maritime affairs printed in small type, and stated to emanate from Lloyd’s, wherever that vague source may be.

From these neglected corners of the Morning Post Agatha Ingham-Baker had duly learnt that Henry FitzHenry had been appointed navigating-lieutenant to the Terrific, lying at Chatham, which would necessitate his leaving the Kittiwake at Gibraltar and returning to England at once. She also read that the Indian liner Croonah had sailed from Malta for Gibraltar and London, with two hundred and five passengers and twenty-six thousand pounds in specie.

And John Craik had written to Eve to come to London, where she had a permanent invitation to stay with Mrs. Harrington.

From over the wide world these people seemed to be drifting together like leaves upon a pond--borne hither and thither by some unseen current, swirled suddenly by a passing breath--at the mercy of wind and weather and chance, each occupied in his or her small daily life, looking no further ahead than the next day or the next week. And yet they were drifting surely and steadily towards each other, driven by the undercurrent of Fate, against which the strongest will may beat itself in vain.

CHAPTER IV. FOR THE HIGHEST BIDDER.

Let thine eyes look right on.

“How handsome Fitz looks in his uniform!” Mrs. Ingham-Baker said, with that touch of nervous apprehension which usually affected all original remarks addressed by her to Mrs. Harrington.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker had been to Malta and back, but the wonders of the deep had failed to make a wiser woman of her. If one wishes to gain anything by seeing the world, it is best to go and look at it early in life.

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Harrington, with a glance in the direction of Agatha, the only other occupant of the drawing-room--“yes; he is a good-looking young fellow.”

Agatha was reading the Globe, sitting upright and stiff, for she was wearing a new ball-dress.

“I think,” went on Mrs. Ingham-Baker volubly, “that I have never seen a naval uniform before--in a room close at hand, you know. Of course, on board the Croonah the officers wore a sort of uniform, but they had not a sword.”

Agatha turned over her newspaper impatiently. Mrs. Harrington was listening with an air of the keenest interest, which might have been sarcastic.

“Poor Luke had not quite so much gold braid--”

Agatha looked up, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker collapsed.

“I should think,” she added, after some nervous shufflings in her seat, “that a sword is a great nuisance. Should you not think so, Marion dear?”

“I do not know,” replied Mrs. Harrington; “I never wore one.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker laughed eagerly at herself, after the manner of persons who cannot afford to keep up a decent self-respect.

“But I always rather think,” she went on, with an apprehensive glance towards her daughter, “that a sword is out of place in a drawing-room, or--or anywhere where there are carpets, you know.”

“I thought you had never seen one before,” put in Agatha, without looking up from her newspaper. “In a room--close at hand, you know.”

“No--no, of course not; but I knew, dear, that they were worn. Of course, in warfare it is different.”

“In warfare,” said Mrs. Harrington patiently, “they are usually supposed to come in rather handy.”

“Yes--he-he!” acquiesced Mrs. Ingham-Baker, adjusting a bracelet on her arm with something approaching complacency. She thought she began to see daylight through the conversational maze in which--with the best intentions--she had involved herself. “But I was only thinking that for a lady’s drawing-room I think I like Luke’s quiet black clothes just as much.”

“I am glad of that,” said Mrs. Harrington; “because I expect you will see several other men in the same dress this evening.”

Mrs. Harrington had got up a party to go to the great naval ball of the season--a charity ball. Her party consisted of the Ingham-Bakers and the FitzHenrys, and for the first time for eight years the twin brothers met in the house in Grosvenor Gardens. They were at this moment in the dining-room together, where they had been left by their hostess with a kindly injunction to finish the port wine, duly tempered - as was all Mrs. Harrington’s kindness--by instructions not to smoke.

Agatha’s feelings were rather mixed, so, like a wise young woman of the world, she read the evening paper with great assiduity and refused to think.

The evening had been one of comparisons. Fitz and Luke had come together, for they were sharing rooms in Jermyn Street. Fitz, smart, upright, essentially a naval officer and an unquestionable gentleman. Luke, a trifle browner, more weather-beaten, with a faint, subtle suggestion of a rougher life. Fitz, easy, good-natured, calmly sure of himself - utterly without self-consciousness. Luke, conscious of inferior grade, not quite at ease, jealously on the alert for the comparison.

And Agatha had known from the first moment that in the eyes of the world--and Mrs. Harrington looked through those eyes--there was no comparison. Fitz carried all before him. All except Agatha. The girl was puzzled. Luke could not be compared with Fitz, and the whole world did not compare with Luke. She was fully awake to the contradiction, and she could not reconcile her facts. She had been very properly brought up at the Brighton Boarding School, receiving a good, practical, modern, nineteenth-century education--a curriculum of solid facts culled from the latest school books, from which Love had very properly been omitted.

And now, as she pretended to read the Globe Agatha was puzzling vaguely and numbly over the contradictions that come into human existence with the small adjunct called love. She was wondering how it was that she saw Luke’s faults and the thousand ways in which he was inferior to his brother, and yet that with all these to stay him up Fitz did not compare with Luke. After all, there must have been some small defect in the education which she had received, for instead of thinking these futile things she ought to have been attempting to discover--as was her mother at that moment--which of the two brothers seemed more likely to inherit Mrs. Harrington’s money.

Agatha’s thoughts went back to the moment on the deck of the Croonah, when the sea breeze swept over her and Luke, and the strength of it, the simple, open force, seemed to be part and parcel of him--of the strong arms around her in which she was content to lie quiescent. She wondered for a moment whether it had all been true.

For Agatha Ingham-Baker was essentially human and womanly, in that she was, and ever would be, a creature of possibilities. She took up her long gloves and began slowly to draw them on. They were quite new, and she smoothed them with a distinct satisfaction, under which there brooded the sense of a new possibility. In all her calculations of life--and these had been many--she had never thought of the possibility of misery. She buttoned the gloves, she drew them cunningly up over her rounded arms, and she wondered whether she was going to be a miserable woman all her life. She saw herself suddenly with those inward eyes which are sometimes vouchsafed to us momentarily, and she saw Misery--in its best dress.

She looked up as Fitz and Luke came into the room. Luke’s eyes were only for her. Fitz, with the unconcealed absorption which was often his, absolutely ignored her presence. And the little incident roused something contradictory in Agatha--something evil and, alas! feminine. She awoke to the very matter-of-factness of the present moment, and she determined to make a conquest of Fitz.

Agatha was not quite on her guard, and Mrs. Harrington’s cold grey eyes were alert. It had once been this lady’s intention to use Agatha as a means of subjecting Luke to her own capricious will - Agatha being the alternative means where money had failed. She had almost forgotten this when Luke came into the room with eyes only for Agatha--and the girl was looking at Fitz.

“I suppose, Agatha,” said Mrs. Harrington, “you will not be at a loss for partners to-night? You will know plenty of dancing men?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” replied Agatha indifferently. She turned over her newspaper and retreated, as it were, behind her first line of defence--the sure line of audacious silence.

“The usual throng?”

“The usual throng,” answered Agatha imperturbably.

Luke was biting his nails impatiently. His jealousy was patent to any woman. Fitz was talking to Mrs. Ingham-Baker.

“I should advise you young men to secure your dances now,” continued Mrs. Harrington, with her usual fatal persistence. “Once Agatha gets into the room she will be snapped up.”

Fitz turned round with his good-natured smile--the smile that indicates a polite attention to an indifferent conversation--and Mrs. Ingham-Baker was free to thrust in her awkward oar. She splashed in.

“Oh, I am sure she will not let herself be snapped up to-night; will you, dear?”

“That, no doubt, depends upon the snapper,” put in Mrs. Harrington, looking--perhaps by accident--at Fitz. “Fitz,” she went on, “come here and tell me all about your new ship. I hope you are proud--I am. I am often laughed at for a garrulous old woman when I begin talking of you!”

She glanced aside at Mrs. Ingham-Baker, who was beaming on Fitz, as the simple-hearted beam on the rising sun.

“Yes,” said the stout lady, “we are all so delighted. Agatha was only saying yesterday that your success was wonderful. She was quite excited about it.”

The fond mother looked invitingly towards her daughter with a smile that said as plainly as words--

“There you are! I have cleared the stage for you--step in and score a point.”

But Agatha did not respond.

“I suppose it is a steamer,” continued Mrs. Ingham-Baker eagerly. “A steam man-of-war.”

“Yes,” replied Fitz, with perfect gravity, “a steam man-of-war.”

“The Horrible--or the Terrible, is it not?”

“The Terrific.”

There was an account of the new war-ship in the evening paper which Agatha had laid aside, and Fitz was impolitely glancing at this while he spoke. The journal gave the names of the officers. Fitz was wondering whether Eve Challoner ever saw the Globe.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker became lost in a maternal fit of admiration. She was looking at Agatha with her head on one side. At intervals she glanced towards Fitz--an inviting glance, as if to draw his attention to the fact that one of Nature’s most perfect productions was waiting to gladden his vision.

“Look!” that little glance seemed to say. “Look at Agatha. Is she not lovely?”

But Fitz was still wondering whether Eve was in the habit of reading the Globe. He often wondered thus about her daily habits, trying to picture, in his ignorant masculine way, the hours and minutes of a girl’s daily existence.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker could not stand this waste of his time and Agatha’s dress.

“What do you think of the frock?” she asked Mrs. Harrington, in a whisper which was audible to every one in the room.

“It is very pretty,” replied the hostess, who happened to be in a good humour. Dress possessed a small corner of her cold heart. It was one of very few weaknesses. It was almost a redeeming point in a too man-like character. Her own dresses were always perfect, usually of the richest silk--and grey. Hence she was known as the Grey Lady, and only a few--for Society has neither time nor capacity for thought--wondered whether the colour had penetrated to her soul.

The two now became engaged in a technical conversation, which was only interrupted by the arrival of tea. Luke and Agatha were talking about Malta. She was telling him that their friends in Valetta had invited them to go again next year, and the Croonah was mentioned.

While the hostess was attending to the teapot, Mrs. Ingham-Baker took the opportunity of disturbing Fitz--of stirring him up, so to speak, and making him look at Agatha.

“Do you think you would have recognised your old playmate if you had met her accidentally--to-night, for instance, at the ball?” she asked.

Again the inviting glance toward her daughter, to which Fitz naturally responded. It was too obvious to ignore.

“No; I do not think so,” he replied, going back in his mind to the recollection of a thin-legged little girl with lank hair.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s proud eyes rested complacently on her offspring.

“Do you like her dress?” she asked in a whisper--only audible to him. But Agatha knew the gist of it. The arm and shoulder nearest to them gave a little jerk of self-consciousness.

“Very pretty,” replied Fitz; and Mrs. Ingham-Baker stored the remark away for future use. For all she knew--or all she wanted to know--it might refer to Agatha’s self.

“I am afraid I shall lose her, you know--horribly afraid,” whispered Mrs. Ingham-Baker, knowing the value of competition in all things.

Fitz looked genuinely sympathetic, and glanced at Agatha again, wondering what disease had marked her for its own. Mrs. Ingham-Baker thought fit to explain indirectly, as was her wont.

“She is very much admired,” she said under her breath, with a sigh and a lugubrious shake of the head.

“Oh,” murmured Fitz, with a smile.

“Yes,” answered Mrs. Ingham-Baker. She heaved a sigh, observed a decent pause, and then added, “Does it surprise you?”

“Not in the least. It is most natural.”

“You think so--really?”

“Of course I do,” answered Fitz.

There was another little pause, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker then said, in a tone of friendly confidence--

“I advise you to secure your dances early. She will be engaged three deep in a very short time--a lot of mere boys she does not want to dance with.”

Fitz thanked her fervently, and went to help Mrs. Harrington.

Mrs. Ingham-Baker sat back in her chair, well pleased with herself. Like many of her kind, she began the social campaign with the initial error of underrating her natural foes--young men.

CHAPTER V. THE TEAR ON THE SWORD.

But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.

Agatha was singularly uncertain of herself. If it had not been for her education--at the Brighton school they had taught her that tears are not only idle, but also harmful to the complexion--she would have felt inclined to weep.

There was something wrong about the world this evening, and she did not know what it was. Little things irritated her--such as the creak of Mrs. Harrington’s rich silk dress as that lady breathed. Agatha almost hated Fitz, without knowing why. She wanted Luke to come and speak to her, and yet the necessity of limiting their conversation to mere social platitudes made her hope that he would not do so.

At length she rose to go and make her last preparations for the ball. The old habit was so strong upon her that unconsciously she gave a little swing of the hips to throw her skirt out--to show herself to the greatest advantage in the perfect dress. There was a tiny suggestion of the thoroughbred horse in the paddock--as there always is in the attitude of some young persons, though they would not be grateful were one to tell them of it--a certain bridling, a sleek step, and a lamentably obvious search for the eye of admiration. Fitz opened the door for her, and she gave him a glance as she passed him--a preliminary shot to find the range, as it were--to note which way the wind blew.

In the dimly-lighted hall Agatha suddenly became aware of a hot sensation in the eyelids. The temperature of the tear of vexation is a high one. As she passed towards the staircase, her glance was attracted by a sword, bright of hilt, dark of sheath. Fitz’s sword, lying with his white gloves on the table, where he had laid them on coming into the house. The footman had drawn the blade an inch or so from the sheath--to look at the chasing--to handle the steel that deals in warfare with all the curiosity of one whose business lies among the knives of peace.

Agatha paused and looked at the tokens of Fitz’s calling. She thought of Luke, who had no sword. And the hot unwonted tear fell on the blade.

All the evening Mrs. Harrington had been marked in her attention to Fitz. It was quite obvious that he was--for the moment, at all events--the favoured nephew. And Mrs. Ingham-Baker noted these things.

“My dear,” she whispered to Agatha, when they were waiting in the hall for their hostess, “it is Fitz, of course. I can see that with half an eye.”

Agatha shrugged her shoulders in a rude manner, suggesting almost that her mother was deprived of more reliable means of observation than the moiety mentioned.

“What is Fitz?” she asked, with weary patience.

“Well, I can only tell you that she has called him ‘dear’ twice this evening, and I have never heard her do the same to Luke.”

“A lot Luke cares!” muttered Agatha scornfully, and her mother, whose sense of logic did not run to the perception that Luke’s feelings were beside the question, discreetly collapsed into her voluminous wraps.

She was, however, quite accustomed to be treated thus with contumely, and then later to see her suggestions acted upon--a feminine consolation which men would do well to take unto themselves. As soon as they entered the ball-room, Mrs. Ingham-Baker, with that supernatural perspicacity which is sometimes found in stupid mothers, saw that Agatha was refusing her usual partners. She noted her daughter’s tactics with mingled awe and admiration, both of which tributes were certainly deserved. She saw Agatha look straight through one man at the decorations on the wall behind; she saw her greet an amorous youth of tender years with a semi-maternal air of protection which at once blighted his hopes, cured his passion, and made him abandon the craving for a dance. Agatha was evidently reserving herself and her programme for some special purposes, and she did it with a skill bred of long experience.

Luke was the first to come and ask for a dance--nay, he demanded it.

“Do you remember the last time we danced together?” he asked, as he wrote on her card.

“Yes,” she replied, in a voice which committed her to nothing. She did not look at him, but past him; to where Fitz was talking to Mrs. Harrington.

But he was not content with that. He retained the card and stood in front of her, waiting with suppressed passion in every muscle, waiting for her to meet his eyes.

At last, almost against her will, she did, and for one brief moment she was supremely happy. It was only, however, for a moment. Sent, apparently, by a very practical Providence to save her from herself, a young man blustered good-naturedly through the crowd and planted himself before her with a cheery aplomb which seemed to indicate his supposition that in bringing her his presence he brought the desire of her heart and the brightest moment of the evening.

“Well, Agatha,” he said, in that loud voice which, with all due deference, usually marks the Harrovian, “how many have you got for me? No rot now! I want my share, you know, eh?”

Heedless of Luke’s scowling presence, he held out his hand, encased in a very tight glove, asking with a good-natured jerk of the head for her programme.

“Is your wife here?” asked Agatha, smilingly relinquishing her card.

“Wife be blowed!” he answered heartily. “Why so formal? Of course she’s here, carrying on with all the young ’uns as usual. She’s as fit as paint. But she won’t like to be called stiff names. Why don’t you call her Maggie?”

Agatha smiled and did not explain. She doubtless had a good reason for the unusually formal inquiry, and she glanced at Luke to see that his brow had cleared.

Then suddenly some instinct, coming she knew not whence, and leading to consequences affecting their three lives, made her introduce the two men.

“Mr. Carr,” she said, “Mr. FitzHenry. You may be able to get each other partners. Besides, you have an interest in common.”

The two men bowed.

“Are you a sailor?” inquired Luke, almost pleasantly. With Willie Carr it was difficult to be stiff and formal.

“Not I; but I’m interested in shipping--not the navy, you know--merchant service. I’m something in the City, like the young man on the omnibus, eh?”

“I’m in the merchant service,” answered Luke.

“Ah! What ship?”

“The Croonah.”

“Croonah,” repeated Carr, hastily scribbling his name on Agatha’s programme. “Fine ship; I know her well by name. Know ’em all on paper, you know. I’m an insurance man--what they call a doctor--Lloyd’s and all that; missing ships, overdue steamers, hedging and dodging, and the inner walks of marine insurance--that’s yours truly. Croonah’s a big value, I know.”

He looked up keenly over Agatha’s engagement card. The look was not quite in keeping with his bluff and open manners. Moreover, a man who is, so to speak, not in keeping with himself is one who requires watching.

“Yes, she is a fine ship,” answered Luke, with a momentary thought of the Terrific.

“Tell me,” went on Carr, confidentially plucking Luke’s sleeve, “when she is going to the bottom, and I’ll do a line for you--make your fortune for you. You’d not be the first man who has come to me, with his hair hardly dry, for a cheque.”

Luke laughed and went away in answer to Mrs. Harrington’s beckoning finger.

Fitz was coming towards Agatha and her companion.

“Holloa!” exclaimed Carr, “I’m blowed if here is not a second edition of the same man.”

“His brother,” explained Agatha, who saw Fitz coming, although she was apparently looking the other way.

“Royal Navy,” muttered Carr.

“Yes.”

“Then I’m off. Can’t get on with Royal Navy men, somehow.”

With a jovial nod and something remarkably near a wink, Willie Carr left her, shouldering his way through the crowd with that good-natured boisterousness of manner which is accepted by the world for honesty.

Agatha was looking the other way when Fitz came to her, and he was forced to touch her and repeat his desire to be accorded a dance before she became aware of his proximity.

“Certainly,” she answered rather carelessly, “if you want one. I--”--she paused with infinite skill and looked down at her own dress--“I thought I had displeased you.”

Fitz looked slightly surprised.

“What an absurd thing to think!” he said rather lamely.

She glanced up with pert coquetry.

“Then it was only oblivion or indifference.”

“What was only oblivion or indifference?” he asked, still smiling as he compared cards.

“Your very obvious delay in coming,” she answered. “Considering that we have known each other since we were children, it is only natural that I should want to dance with you.”

“Considering that we have known each other since we were children,” he said, repeating her words and tone, “may I have a third?”

“Yes,” with a frank nod. “And”--she paused, and looking round saw Luke going away in the opposite direction with Mrs. Harrington--“and will you take me to have some coffee now? I am engaged for this dance, but no matter.”

Fitz gave her his arm and turned to hitch his sword higher. He made sure that the blade was well home, shutting in the little red spot of gathering rust--a tear.

When they had at length passed through the eager crowd and found a resting-place in a smaller room, Agatha looked up at Fitz as he handed her her coffee, and did not pretend to hide the admiration with which she regarded him.

“You know,” she said, “you are a great favourite with Mrs. Harrington.”

“She is always very kind to me.”

Fitz was a difficult person to gossip with by reason of his quiet directness of manner. He had a way of abruptly finishing his speech without the usual lowering of the voice. And it is just that small drop of half a tone that invites further confidence. In such small matters as these lies the secret of conversational success, and by such trivial tricks of the tongue we are daily and hourly deceived. The man or the woman who lowers the tone at the end of speech defers to the listener’s opinion, and usually receives it. The manner with which Fitz broke off led his listener to believe that he was not attending to the conversation. Agatha therefore baited her hook more heavily.

“Like many women, she thinks that sailors are superior to the rest of mankind,” she said, with just enough lightness of tone to be converted into a screen if necessary. But she heaved a little sigh before she drank her coffee.

Fitz had not decided whether all this referred to himself or to Luke. He hoped that Agatha had, so to speak, brought her guns to bear upon him, because of himself he was sure, of Luke he was doubtful. As a matter of curiosity he pursued the conversation.

“And you,” he said, “look upon such mistaken persons with the mingled pity and contempt that they deserve?”

“No,” she answered, with audacious calmness, as she rose and passed before him; “for I think the same.”

She cleverly deprived him of the opportunity of answering, and pushed her way through the crowd alone, allowing him to follow.

Before she danced with him again, she danced with Luke, and her humour seemed to have undergone a change.

There are some men who, like salmon, never go back. They push on, and that which they have gained they hold to though it cost them their lives. Luke FitzHenry was one of these, and Agatha found that in the London ball-room she could take back nothing that she had given on board the Croonah. Luke, it is to be presumed, had old-fashioned theories which have fallen into disuse in these practical modern days wherein we flirt for one night only, for a day, for a week, according to convenience. He could not lay aside the voyage to Malta and that which occurred then as a matter of the past; and Agatha, surprised and at a loss, did not seem to know how to make him do so.

She learnt with a new wonder that the rest of this ball--namely, that part of his programme which did not refer to her, the dances he was to dance with partners other than herself--counted as nothing. For him this ball was merely herself. There was not another woman in the room--for him. He told her this and other things. Moreover, the sound of it was quite new to her. For the modern young man does not make serious love to such women as Agatha Ingham-Baker.

CHAPTER VI. THE COUNT STANDS BY.

La discretion d’un homme est d’autant plus grande qu’on lui demande davantage.

“I want you to ask me to dinner!”

The Count de Lloseta bowed as he made this remark, and looked at his companion with a smile.

At times Mrs. Harrington gave way to a momentary panic in respect to Cipriani de Lloseta--when she was not feeling very well, perhaps. Her situation seemed to be somewhat that of a commander holding an impregnable position against a cunning foe. For every position of such a nature is impenetrable only so long as it can meet and defy each new engine of warfare that is brought against it. And one day the fatal engine is invented.

Mrs. Harrington looked into his face with a flicker in her drawn grey eyes. Then she gave a little laugh which was not quite free from uneasiness.

“Why?” she asked sardonically. “Have you fallen in love with some one at last?”

She knew that this taunt would hurt him. Besides, she liked to throw it at the memory of a woman whom she had hated--Cipriani de Lloseta’s dead wife.

“I should like to be of your party to-night,” he said quietly.

She gave another scornful laugh, with that ring of malice in it which thrills in the voice of some elderly women when they speak of young girls.

“Eve is to be of our party to-night,” she said. “Ah--that would be too absurd--a new Adam! You! But, mind you, Agatha will be here too. You will have to be careful how you play your cards, Don Juan! However, we dine at eight, and I shall be glad to see you.”

De Lloseta took up his hat and stick. With Mrs. Harrington, and with no one else perhaps in London, he still observed the stiff Spanish manner. He bowed without offering to shake hands, and left her.

Mrs. Harrington--cold, calculating, essentially worldly--looked at the closed door with deep speculation in her eyes. They were hard eyes, such as are only to be seen in a woman’s face; for an old man has usually picked up a little charity somewhere on the road through life.

Then she looked at a hundred-pound note which he had tossed across the table to her with a silent Catalonian contempt earlier in the proceedings.

“I thought he was rather easy to manage,” she said, examining the note. “I thought he wanted something. He has paid this--for his dinner.”

The Count moreover appeared to consider the entertainment cheap at the price, if his manner was to be relied upon. For he entered the drawing-room at eight o’clock the same evening with an unusually pleasant air of anticipatory enjoyment. He shook hands quite gaily with Mrs. Ingham-Baker, who bridled stoutly, and thought that he was a very distinguished-looking man despite his dark airs. He received Agatha’s careless nod and shake of the hand with a murmured politeness; with Eve he shook hands in silence. Then he turned rather suddenly upon Fitz and held out his hand gravely.

“I congratulate you,” he said. “When I last had the pleasure of seeing you, I did not suspect that I was entertaining a great man unawares--you were too humble.”

Fitz involuntarily glanced towards Eve, knowing that the speaker had a second meaning. Eve was watching the Count rather curiously, as if wondering how he would greet Fitz. Every one in the room was looking at the Count de Lloseta; for this quiet-spoken Spaniard was a distinct factor in the life of each one of them.

They fell to talking of commonplace matters, and presently Mrs. Harrington rustled in. The servants were only awaiting her arrival to announce that dinner was ready.

She looked round.

“We are short of men,” she said. “We miss Luke, do we not?”

She looked straight at Agatha, who returned her stare with audacious imperturbability. It was only Luke’s presence that unsteadied her. When he was away, she could hold her own against the world.

“I have never seen Luke,” said Eve to the Count, who had been commanded to offer her his arm. “I am so sorry to have missed him.”

Agatha, who was in front, beneath them on the stairs, turned and looked up at her with a strange smile. She either did not heed the Count, or she undervalued his powers of observation.

“You would undoubtedly have liked him,” said the Spaniard.

At the table there was considerable arranging of the seats, and finally De Lloseta was placed at one side with Mrs. Ingham-Baker, while the two girls sat side by side opposite to them.

Fitz was at the foot of the table.

In the course of conversation the Spaniard leant across and said to Agatha--

“Have you seen this month’s Commentator, Miss Ingham-Baker?”

An unaccountable silence fell upon the assembled guests. Eve Challoner’s face turned quite white. Her eyes were lowered to her plate. No one looked at her except the Count, and his glance was momentary.

“Yes--and of course I have read the Spanish sketch. I suppose every one in London has! It makes me want to go to Spain.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker bridled and glanced at the Spaniard. Agatha might be a countess yet--a foreign one, but still a countess. Fitz was looking at De Lloseta. He naturally concluded that it was he who had written the article. He was still watching his face when the Spaniard turned to him and said--

“And you, Fitz? You know something about the matter too!”

And Eve Challoner betrayed herself completely. No one happened to be looking at her except Cipriani de Lloseta, and he saw that not only had she written the celebrated articles, but that she loved Fitz. Fitz’s opinion was the only one worth hearing. In her anxiety to hear it, she quite forgot to guard her secret.

“Yes,” answered Fitz, wondering what De Lloseta was leading up to. “I have read them both, of course. I hope there are more. The man knows what he is writing about.”

“He does,” said the Count, smiling across the table at Eve.

The girl was moistening her lips, which seemed suddenly to have become dry and feverish. Her hands were trembling. She had evidently been terribly afraid of the opinion so innocently asked by the Spaniard.

De Lloseta changed the subject at once. He had found out all that he wanted to know, and more. He had no intention of forcing a confidence upon Eve.

The burthen of the conversation fell upon his shoulders. Fitz, no great talker at any time, was markedly quiet. He had nothing to offer for the general delectation. His remarks upon all subjects mooted were laconic and valueless. The duties as temporary host occupied him for the moment, and his thoughts were obviously elsewhere. His attitude towards Eve had been friendly, but rather reserved. There was no suggestion of sulkiness, but on the other hand he had failed to take advantage of one or two opportunities which she had given him of referring to the past and to any mutual obligations or common interests they had had therein. It happened that Agatha had heard her give him these openings, and had noticed his lack of enterprise.

Agatha Ingham-Baker had long before conceived a strange suspicion - namely, that Eve and Fitz loved each other. She had absolutely nothing to base her suspicions upon, not so much even as the gossips of Majorca. And nevertheless her suspicions throve, as such do, and grew into conviction.

Agatha had come down early to the drawing-room on purpose to establish her right over Fitz. She found De Lloseta in the hall, and he followed her into the room. Whenever she attempted to demonstrate her right to the attention of the only young man present by one of those little glances or words with which women hurt each other, De Lloseta seemed to step in, intercepting with his dark smile. At dinner, when Fitz was absent-minded, Agatha managed to show the others that she alone could follow him into the land of his reflections and call him back from thence. But on several occasions, when she was about to turn to him with a smile which was especially reserved for certain young men under certain circumstances, Cipriani de Lloseta spoke to her and spoilt the small manoeuvre.

Eve saw it all. She saw more than the acute Spaniard. Firstly, because she was a woman. Secondly, because she loved Fitz. Thirdly, because the inken curse was hers in a small degree, and people who dabble in ink often wade deep into human nature.

And hence one master passion in the breast,
Like Aaron’s serpent, swallows all the rest.

Life is, after all, a matter of habit. In those families where rapid consumption is hereditary, the succeeding generations seem to get into the habit of dying early. They take it, without complaint, as a matter of course. Sailors and other persons who lead a rough and hazardous life seem also to acquire this philosophy of existence. Luke FitzHenry went to sea again on the day appointed for the Croonah to leave London, without so much as a snarl at Fate.

It was a great wrench to him to leave Agatha again so soon, in the first full force of his passion. But he left her almost happily. His love for her was rising up and filling his whole existence. And it is not those lives that are frittered away in a thousand pastimes that are happy. It is the strong life wholly absorbed by one great interest, be it love or be it merely money-making.

Luke had hitherto been rather an aimless man. He was a brilliant sailor, not because he set himself to the task, but merely because seamanship was born in him, together with a dogged steadiness of nerve and a complete fearlessness. It was so easy to be a good sailor that he had not even the satisfaction of having to make an effort. His heart was empty. He had indeed the sea, but his love of it was unconscious. Away from it, he was ill at ease; on its breast, he was not actively happy--he was merely at home. But he had no career. He had no great prize to aim for, and his combative nature required one. He had no career to make, for he was already near the summit of the humble ladder on which Fate had set his feet.

Then came Agatha, and the empty heart was filled with a dangerous suddenness.

The pain which this parting caused him had something of pleasure in it. There are some men and many women who doubt love unless it bring actual pain with it. Luke had always mistrusted fate, and had love brought happiness with it he would probably have doubted its genuineness. He hugged all his doubts, his jealousies, his passionate thoughts to himself. He had nothing to cling to. Agatha had never told him that she loved him. But she was for him so entirely apart from all other women that it seemed necessary that he also should not be as other men for her. Not much for a lover to live upon during four or five months!

Agatha had given him a photograph of herself--a fashionable picture in an affected pose in evening dress--but she had absolutely refused to write. This photograph Luke put into a frame, and as soon as the Croonah was out of dock he hung it up in his little cabin. His servant saw it and recognised the fair passenger of a former voyage, but he knew his place and his master too well to offer any comment.

Unlike the ordinary young man, whose thoughts are lightly turned to love, Luke was no worse a sailor for his self-absorption. All his care, all his keen, fearless judgment were required; for the Croonah ran through a misty channel into a boisterous Atlantic.

He stood motionless at his post, as was his wont, keen and alert for the moment, but living in the past. He saw again Mrs. Harrington’s drawing-room as he had last seen it, with Agatha sitting in a low chair near the fire, while Mrs. Harrington wrote at her desk, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker read the Times.

“I have come,” he remembered saying, “to bid you good-bye.”

He heard again the rustle of Mrs. Ingham-Baker’s newspaper, and again he saw the look in Agatha’s eyes as they met his. He would remember that look to the end of his life; he was living on it now. Agatha, in her rather high-pitched society tones, was the first to speak.

“If I were a sailor,” she said, “I would never say good-bye. It is better to drop in and pay a call; at the end one might casually mention the words.”

“Oh! we grow accustomed to it,” Luke answered.

“Do you?” the girl inquired, with an enigmatical smile, and her answer was in his eyes. She did not want him to grow accustomed to saying farewell to her.

Luke FitzHenry was not inclined to sociability--the stronger sort of man rarely is. On board the Croonah he was usually considered morose and self absorbed. He did his duty, and in this was second to no man on board; but he was content to get the passengers to their destination, looking upon the Croonah as a mere conveyance for a certain number of chattering, gossiping, mischief-making live-stock. He utterly failed in his social duties; he did not cultivate the art of making his ship a sort of floating “hydro”.

The boisterous weather kept the decks fairly select until Gibraltar had been left behind in the luminous haze that hangs over the mouth of the Mediterranean in a westerly breeze. But in the smoother waters of the Southern seas the passengers plucked up courage, and one morning at breakfast Luke perceived a tall, heavy-shouldered man nodding vigorously, and wiping his mouth with a napkin, which he subsequently waved with friendly jocularity.

“Morning--morning!” he cried.

“Good morning,” replied Luke, passing to his seat at the after-end of the saloon. He had recognised the man at once, although he had only exchanged a few words with him in a crowded ball-room. Everything connected with Agatha, however remotely, seemed to engrave itself indelibly on his mind. This was Willie Carr, the man to whom Agatha had introduced him at the naval orphanage ball. Willie Carr was on board the Croonah, evidently quite at home, and bound for India, for he was seated at the Indian table.

It was not necessary for Luke to make inquiries about this passenger, because his brother officers soon began to speak of him. By some means Carr made himself popular among the officers, and gradually began to enjoy privileges denied to his fellow passengers. He frequently visited the engine-room, and was always to be seen after meals in, or in the neighbourhood of, the smoking-room, in conversation with one or other of the Croonah’s officers, who were generally found to be smoking Carr’s cigars.

Despite many obvious and rather noisy overtures of friendship, Luke FitzHenry held aloof until the Aden light was left behind. He succeeded in limiting his intercourse to an exchange of passing remarks on the weather until the Croonah had rounded Pointe de Galle and was heading northwards. Then arose circumstances which brought them together, and possibly served Willie Carr’s deliberate purpose.

Carr was travelling without his wife--he was the sort of man who does travel without his wife. She, poor woman, had made one initial mistake, namely, in marrying him, and such mistakes are sometimes paid for by a life of atonement to the gods. She remained at home to care for an ever-increasing family on a small housekeeping allowance, which was not always paid.

This wife was the only point in his favour which had presented itself to Luke’s mind, for the latter resented a certain tone of easy familiarity, which Agatha seemed to take as a matter of course.

Luke was afraid of being questioned about Agatha, and he therefore kept Carr at a respectful distance. He harboured no personal dislike towards the man, whose bluff and honest manner made him popular among his fellows.

It was the evening of the first day in the Bay of Bengal that a steamer passed the Croonah, running south, and flying a string of signals. The Croonah replied, and the homeward-bound vessel disappeared in the gathering twilight with her code flags still flying.

“What did she say?” asked the passengers.

“Nothing,” replied the officers; “only the weather. It is the change of the monsoon.”

At dinner the captain was remarkably grave; he left the table early, having eaten little. The officers were reticent, as was their wont. Luke FitzHenry, it was remarked and remembered afterwards, alone appeared to be in good spirits.

After dinner a busybody in the shape of a too intelligent young coffee-planter, who possessed an aneroid barometer, brought that instrument to the smoking-room with a scared face. The needle was deflected to a part of the dial which the intelligent young planter had hitherto considered to be merely ornamental and not intended for practical use. His elders and betters told him to put it away and not to tell the ladies. Then they continued smoking; but they knew that they had just seen such a barometer as few men care to look upon.

The word “cyclone” was whispered in one corner of the cabin, and a white-moustached general was understood to mutter--

“Damned young fool!” as he pulled at his cheroot.

The whisperer did not hear the remark, and went on to give further information on atmospheric disturbances. Suddenly the field-officer jumped to his feet.

“Look here, sir!” he cried. “If we are in for a cyclone, I trust that we know how to behave as men--and die as men, if need be! But don’t let us have any whispering in corners, like a lot of schoolgirls. We are in the care of good men, and all we have to do is to obey orders, and--damn it, sir!--to remember we’re Englishmen!”

The general walked out of the smoking-saloon, and the first sight that greeted his eyes was Luke FitzHenry, quick, keen, and supernaturally calm, standing over a group of Malay sailors who were hard at work getting in awnings. The white-haired soldier stood and watched with the grim silence which he had showed to death before now. He was of the Indian army. He had led the black man to victory and death, and he knew to a nerve the sensitive Asiatic organisation. He saw that it was good and not for the first time he noted the sheep-like dependence with which the black men grouped themselves round their white leader, watching his face, taking their cue in expression, in attitude, even in their feelings from him.

“Good man,” muttered the general to himself.

He stood there alone while the ship was stripped of every awning, while the decks were cleared of all that hamper which makes the passenger an encumbrance at sea. There was no shouting, no confusion, no sign of fear. In a marvellously short time the broad decks were lying bare and clear, all loose things were stowed away or made fast, and the Croonah stood ready for her great fight.

All the while an arc of black cloud had been growing on the horizon. There was not a breath of wind. From the engine-rooms the thud of the piston-rods came throbbing up with a singular distinctness. The arc of cloud had risen halfway to the meridian. There were streaks in it--streaks of yellow on black. Far away to the north, at the point of contact with the horizon, a single waterspout rose like a black pillar from sea to cloud. Dwellers in the cool and temperate zones would have thought that the end of the world was about to come. Men, standing quite still, felt the drops of perspiration trickling beneath their ears. The air taken into the lungs seemed powerless to expand them. The desire to take a deeper breath was constant and oppressive.

A quartermaster brought a message to the general that he must go below or else come up to the lower bridge. He could not stay where he was. The captain said that the cyclone might break at any moment. The old soldier nodded, and made his way to the lower bridge. Before he had been there long he was joined by Carr, who carried a mackintosh over his arm. The two men nodded. The general rather liked Carr. He was a Harrovian, and the general’s son was at Harrow.

“Going to see it out on deck?” he inquired.

“Rather. I’m not going to be drowned like a rat in a trap!” replied Carr, jovial still, and brave.

Luke came to the bridge and took up his position by the side of the captain. No one spoke.

From the distant horizon--from the north where the waterspout still was--a long groan floated over the water. There was a green line on the black surface of the ocean, dark green flecked with white; it was spreading over the sea, and coming towards them. Luke turned and said one word to the quartermaster. The man went to the wheelhouse and brought out three long black oilskin coats--two for the captain and Luke, the other for himself.

The groan, like that of an animal in pain, was repeated. It seemed farther off. Then a sound like the escape of steam from an engine came apparently from the sky.

Luke said something to the captain, and pointed with his right hand. They consulted together in a whisper, and the captain made a signal to the two steersmen motionless in the wheelhouse. The well-greased chains ran smoothly, and the great black prow of the Croonah crept slowly round the horizon pointing out to sea, away from the land. Ceylon lay astern of them in the darkness which was almost like night.

The captain and Luke stood side by side on the little bridge, far above the deck. They had exchanged their gold-braided caps for sou’westers. The outline of their black forms was just distinguishable against the sky. They were looking straight ahead into the yellow streaks, out over the flecked sea. And not a breath of wind stirred the leaden atmosphere.

Looking down on the broad decks, it would seem at first that they were deserted, but as the eye became accustomed to the gloom, men standing like shadows could be perceived here and there--at their posts--waiting.

All the skylights had been doubly tarpaulined. Some of them had been strengthened with battens lashed transversely over the canvas. All that mortal brain could devise mortal hand had done. The rest was with God.

The decks were quite dark, for the skylights were covered, even those of the engine-room, and the men at work down there in the stifling heat knew not what the next moment might bring. They had nothing to guide them as to the moment when the hurricane would strike the ship. For the last five minutes they had been holding on to their life-rails with both hands, expecting to be thrown among the machinery at every second.

Still there was no breath of wind. The darkness was less intense. A yellow glow seemed to be behind the cloud.

Then a strange feeling of being drawn upward came to all, and strong men gasped for breath. It was only for a moment. But the sensation was that the air was being sucked up to the sky, leaving a vacuum on the face of the waters.

Suddenly the captain’s voice startled the night, rising trumpet-like above the hiss of the steam.

“Stand by!” he cried.

Luke looked down to the lower bridge.

“You had better hold on to something,” he called, and as he spoke the hurricane struck the Croonah. It can only be described as a pushing smack. She rolled slowly over before it, and it seemed that she would never stop.

CHAPTER VIII. A GREAT FIGHT.

Who knows? The man is proven by the hour.

The sea seemed to rise up and fall on the disabled ship with a wild fury. There was a strange suggestion of passion in every wave as it crashed over the bulwarks. In the roar of the hurricane there was a faint sound of crackling wood. The deck was at an angle of thirty. The port boats on their davits were invisible; they were under water. If the Croonah righted quickly those boats would break up like old baskets.

The two men on the lower bridge stood on the uprights of the rail, leaning against the deck as against a wall. The crackling sound like breaking matchwood seemed to come from above. Carr looked up and saw the captain and Luke at the wheel. The wheelhouse had collapsed like a card house; it had simply been blown away, and one of the helmsmen with it. The other was lying huddled up at the lower end of the narrow bridge.

For a moment the darkness lifted and the survivors saw a weird sight. One of the starboard boats, attached to the davit by only one fall, was held by the wind like a flag straight out over the deck. Already two men were clambering to the upper bridge to take the place of the helmsmen who were dead. Relieved from the wheel, Luke dragged himself up to the ladder leading from the upper to the lower deck. A few moments later they saw him cutting with a hatchet at the ropes holding the boat to the davit. There were four, for it was a heavy boat, held by a double block. He cut two at a stroke: the others ran out instantly. The boat disappeared to leeward like a runaway hat, and fell with a splash into the foaming sea.

The Croonah seemed to feel the relief. She rose a little to windward, but her lee-rail was still under water. Down in the scuppers, in the tangle of ropes and splintered wood, sundry dark forms, looking more like bundles of dirty rags than anything else, rolled and tossed helplessly. These were dead and drowning men. Already the European sailors were at work, some cutting away useless top-hamper, others attempting to drag the terror-stricken Malays to a place of comparative safety. Luke FitzHenry took command of these men, as was his duty, working like one of them, with infinite daring. He could only communicate with his captain by signs, speech being impossible. It was a seaman’s fight. Each man did that which seemed to him expedient for the safety of the ship. The Croonah was fully equipped for fine weather--for cleaning brasses and swabbing decks and bending awnings; but for bad weather--notably for a cyclone - she was perilously undermanned. Half of the native crew were paralysed by fear, many were killed, others drowned from a mere incapacity to hold on.

The other officers of the ship had their hands more than full. The doctor was below in the saloon surrounded by a babel of shrieking women and white-faced men; the engineers were on watch at their deadly posts in the heart of the ship.

Carr turned and clambered down the iron ladder to the upper deck. He was half a sailor and quite an Englishman. Moreover he came from Harrow, where they teach a certain bull-dog courage.

Luke, working half blinded by spray and salt water, presently found a strong man working at his side. Together they cut away the submerged boats, standing to their waists in water, at infinite peril of their lives; together they made their way forward to help the chief officer and his devoted gang, who were cutting away the foremast and the wreckage of forward boats.

Through the long hours of the night these dauntless men worked unceasingly, and--incongruous practical details--the stewards brought them food at stated intervals, while two men served out spirits all the while. Slowly, inch by inch, they righted the ship, bringing her stubborn prow gradually into the wind; and all the while the engines throbbed, all the while the grimy stokers shovelled coal into the furnaces, all the while the engineers stood and watched their engines.

Dawn broke on a terrific sea and a falling wind. The night was over and the dread Bay had had her thousand lives and more, for a cyclone simply wipes out the native craft like writing on a slate. The Croonah had been right through the corner of the worst cyclone of a generation. Luke crawled back to the bridge where the captain stood, as he had stood all night, motionless. Sheer skill and a great experience had pulled the Croonah through.

When the danger was past those who were on deck saw a man in shirt and trousers only, his grey hair ruffled, his clothes glued to his limbs by perspiration, emerge from the bowels of the ship. He came on deck, passed by those who scarce knew him without his gold braid, and slowly climbed the ladder to the bridge. There, in the early morning light, the two men who had saved three hundred lives--the captain and the chief engineer--silently shook hands.

“I had to keep you down there for the safety of the ship,” said the captain gruffly.

“All right, old man, I knew that.”

The old engineer turned and looked fore and aft over the wrecked decks with a curious smile as if he had come back from another world.

While they stood there the saloon doors were opened and a haggard row of faces peered out. A quarter-master held the passengers back, for the decks were unsafe. Railings and bulwarks were gone, boats smashed, awning stanchions twisted and bent. No landsmen could be trusted to move safely amid such confusion.

And all the while the engines throbbed, and the Croonah held proudly on her course to the north--battered, torn, and sore stricken, yet a victor.

After changing their clothes, Luke and Carr breakfasted together at the after-end of the second officer’s table in the saloon. With a certain humour the captain allowed of no relaxation in the discipline of the ship. The breakfast bell was rung at the usual time, the meal was served with the usual profusion, even the menus were written as carefully as ever; and some good ladies opined that the captain must be a godless man, because forsooth he did not cringe beneath the wing of the passing Angel of Death.

“I am glad I saw that,” said Carr, neat and clean, hearty and smiling as usual.

Luke looked up from a generous plate. He thought that Carr was indulging in bravado, but he relinquished this opinion when he saw the man’s face and his helping of bacon and eggs. Carr seemed to have enjoyed the cyclone, as he had no doubt enjoyed many a game of football in his youth, and many a spin across country later. For this man kept his hunters. He was moved thereto by that form of self-respect which urges some men to live like gentlemen, to, as they express it, “do themselves well,” whether their mere monetary circumstances allow of it or no; and some one usually pays for these philosophers--that is the annoying part of it.

“By gad! I didn’t think it could blow like that, though!” Carr went on, with his mouth full.

“I don’t think it can often,” replied Luke. He could not help liking this man, despite his first prejudice against him. Besides, they had stood shoulder to shoulder, with death around them, and such moments draw differing men together. It is the required touch of Nature, this same death, which frightens us before it comes and seems so gentle when it is here.

“I always wanted to see a cyclone,” went on Carr conversationally, “and now I’m satisfied. I have had enough. I shouldn’t have cared for more. Pass, cyclones!”

“It is not many men who have your laudable thirst for experience,” said Luke. “It is rather a strenuous form of pleasure.”

“Pleasure!” answered Carr, with one of his sharp glances. “Pleasure, be d--d! It’s business, sir, business. I mean to make money out of cyclones.”

“How? Bottle them up and make them turn a windmill?”

“No, sir.”

Carr turned round to make sure that he could not be overheard.

“No, sir. Your idea is not bad in the main, though hardly practicable. No. I know a dodge worth two of that! I told you before that I am in the marine insurance line. Now, the funny part of the marine insurance line is that the majority of the men engaged in it do not know their business. Now I propose to teach these gentlemen their business.”

“Will they thank you for it?” asked Luke.

“They’ll pay me for it, which is better, by a long chalk! Ha, ha! Butter, please.”

“And what have cyclones got to do with it?”

Again one of the sharp glances which sat so strangely on Carr’s open countenance.

“I understand there is a science of cyclones,” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

“Which means that you chaps knew what was coming forty-eight hours ago?”

“Yes,” replied Luke.

“That that steamer flying signals yesterday was talking to you about it?”

“Yes.”

“And that when you got into it you knew exactly whereabout you were in it; where the centre was, and which was the shortest way out of it, to get clear away from the vortex and beyond the axis line, so as not to get into it again?”

“Yes. You’re quite a Fitzroy.”

Carr winked cheerily.

“And all this is a certainty?”

“A dead certainty,” replied Luke. “It is a science.”

Carr laid down his knife and fork.

“Suppose,” he said, “that the next cyclone sends forty ships to kingdom come, and I’ve got a line of five hundred or a thousand insured on every one of them. I’ll study these jolly old cyclones. It will be easy enough to know about when they’ll be coming. When one is about I’ll have a line on every ship at sea between Colombo and Penang--do you see? I’ll get a man on the coast here to watch the weather. When there’s a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal he will wire me home one word, ‘Milksop,’ or ‘Spongecake,’ or something soft and innocent. I’ll do the rest, my boy.”

Luke was only pretending to eat. The desire to make money was strong upon him--as indeed were all his desires--it was almost a passion; for money meant Agatha, and Agatha had grown to be the one absorbing passion of his heart. Agatha had been at the back of the superhuman fight which he had waged all night against death. Agatha was behind Carr’s words. The thought of her was tempting him through the man’s arguments.

“But what will you insure?” he asked.

“Profit,” replied Carr, in a whisper. “It is done every day--policy proof of interest--the fools!”

“What is policy proof of interest?”

“It means that they admit your insurance to be valid, whether you have anything on board the ship or not. It is not legal, but they know it when they sign the policy; and they know that it would ruin them if they refused to pay an ‘honour policy.’ I tell you they don’t know their business and they have no combination. They all distrust each other, and tell lies to each other about their profits and their losses. If I insure profit I have only to say that I shall lose money if the ship does not reach her destination and deliver her cargo safely. The cargo may be mine; I may be buying it or selling it; no one can tell, and the underwriters don’t ask. They pocket their premium, and if they have to pay, and think they have been rooked, they keep it to themselves, because each man is against his neighbour.”

“But do they know nothing about cyclones?” inquired Luke.

“My good sir, they hardly know the difference between Calcutta and Bombay. Half of them think that a cyclone and a monsoon are the same thing, and not one in ten could tell you the difference between a brig and a barquentine.”

Luke gave a little half-convinced laugh. The man was so open and honest that his arguments had nothing underhand or crafty in them.

“It sounds very simple,” he said.

“It is; d--d simple! So are the underwriters; but that is not our business. You see, FitzHenry, in all commerce there are a certain number of fools for the wise men to outwit. In marine insurance there are a large number. All insurance is nothing but a bet, and betting is a matter of intelligence. We bring more intelligence to bear upon it than the other chap, therefore we win.”

He helped himself to marmalade with a jaunty hand. Luke hardly noticed the easy transition from “I” to “we.” He had had no intention of suggesting a partnership in this easy manner of making money, but the partnership seemed to have formed itself.

“But--” Carr paused, holding in the air an emphatic spoon. “But, my boy, we want capital, we want to lay our hands on fifty thousand pounds.”

“I am afraid I could not lay my hand on fifty thousand pence,” said Luke.

Carr glanced at him sharply. There was a little pause while Carr ate marmalade and toast.

“Oh yes, you could,” he said in a low tone. “Between us we could raise fifty thousand as easy as winking.”

As if to demonstrate the facility of the latter, he looked up and closed his left eye confidentially.

“You’re a sailor,” he went on to say, “and a ripping good one at that. You know the perils of the deep, as the parsons say. It wouldn’t be hard for you to tell when the Croonah was running into a tight place like yesterday. All you have to do is to wire home one word to me. My telegraphic address is ‘Simple, London.’ Say you wire home ‘Milksop.’ We could fix on ‘Milksop’; it sounds so innocent! In twenty-four hours I’d have fifty thousand done on the Croonah in London, Glasgow, Liverpool, New York, Paris, and Germany--spread about, you know. In four or five days the Croonah goes to the bottom, and we scoop in, your name never appearing--see?”

There was a little pause.

“See?” repeated Carr, in little more than a whisper. Luke looked up. He met Carr’s eyes and knew that he was dealing with a villain. The strange part of it was that he felt no anger. He could not free his mind from the thought of Agatha. There was one corner of the steamer which was almost sacred to him--the little space behind the deckhouse where he had held Agatha in his arms for one moment of intense happiness--where she told him that she could not be poor.

Carr rose and threw down his table napkin with a certain grand air which was his.

“It would be the making of you,” he said. “It is worth thinking about.”

He threw back his shoulders--a trick common enough with strongly built men who incline to stoutness--nodded, and left him. He passed down the length of the saloon, seeking his cigar-case in the pocket of his coat, exchanging loud and hearty greetings with those among the passengers whom he knew. He was popular on account of the open British frankness which he cultivated, and which is supposed to be the outward sign of an honest heart. He seemed to be thinking of his great scheme no longer, but he left Luke to brood over it--to try and chase the word “Milksop” from his brain, where it seemed to be indelibly engraved.

He left Luke to fight against a great temptation alone and heavily handicapped, for Luke FitzHenry was held as in a vice by his passionate love for Agatha. It is not all men who can love. It is only a few who are capable of a deep passion. This is as rare as genius. A man of genius is usually a failure in all except his own special line. The man who can and does love passionately must be a good man indeed if his love do not make a villain of him.

CHAPTER IX. THE EDITOR’S ROOM.

The greater man, the greater courtesy.

The Count de Lloseta and John Craik were sitting together in the editorial room of the Commentator.

It was a quiet room, with double windows and a permanent odour of tobacco smoke. An empty teacup stood on the table by John Craik’s elbow.

“Name of God!” Cipriani de Lloseta had ejaculated when he saw it. “At eleven o’clock in the morning!”

“Must stir the brain up,” was the reply.

“I would not do it with a teaspoon,” De Lloseta had answered, and then he sat down to correct the proof of Eve’s fourth article on “Spain and Spanish Life.”

They had been sitting thus together for half an hour in friendly silence, only broken by an occasional high-class Spanish anathema hurled at the head of the printer.

“A dog’s trade!” ejaculated De Lloseta at last, leaning back and throwing down his pen, “a dog’s trade, my friend!”

“It is mine,” replied Craik, without looking up. In fiction he was celebrated for a certain smartness of dialogue. His printed conversations were pretty displays of social sword-play. It had become a sort of habit with him to thrust and parry quickly; but the sudden smile on his lined face, the kindly glance from behind the spectacles, always took away the sting and demonstrated that it was mere “copy,” to fill up the dull columns of life and throw in a sparkle here and there.

“Have you finished?” he inquired.

“Yes, thank Heaven! I was not intended for a literary calling. That is number four, and I am not paid--I am not paid; there lies the sting.”

“Number four, yes; two published and two in hand,” replied John Craik. His mind was busy elsewhere; it was with the creatures of his own imagination, living their lives, rejoicing with them, sorrowing with them.

The Count rose and walked gravely to the hearthrug, holding the proof-sheets in his hand.

“Number four,” he reiterated. “Will they go on, my friend?”

John Craik looked up sharply.

“No.”

“How many more will you accept?”

“Two more at the outside, making six in all. The public is like a greedy child, it must be stopped before it makes itself sick. Nausea leaves a lasting distaste for that which preceded it.”

The Count nodded.

“And this worldly wisdom--is it the editor or the man who speaks?”

“The editor. The editor is a man who lives by saying ‘No.’”

“And you will say ‘No’ to any more from this--writer’s pen?”

“To any more about Spain I most certainly shall.”

The Count reflected. What little light the London day afforded fell full upon his long narrow face, upon the pointed Velasquez chin, the receding iron-grey hair brushed straight back.

“And the fact that the writer is supporting herself and a worn-out old uncle by her pen will make no difference?”

John Craik hesitated for a moment.

“Not the least,” he then said. “You seem to know the writer.”

“I do, and I am interested in her.”

“A lady?” John Craik was dotting his i’s with the contemplativeness of artistic finish.

“Essentially so.”

“And poor?”

“Yes, and proud as--”

“A Spaniard,” suggested John Craik.

“If you will. It is a vice which has almost become a virtue in these democratic days.”

John Craik looked up.

“I will do what I can, Lloseta,” he said. “But she is not a great writer, and will never become one.”

“I know that. Some day she will become a great lady, or I know nothing of them.”

Craik was still busy touching up his manuscript.

“I have never seen her,” he said. “But the impression I received from her manuscripts is that she is a girl who has lived a simple life among a simple people. She has seen a great deal of nature, out-of-door nature, which is pure, and cannot be too deeply studied. She has seen very little of human nature, which is not so pure as it might be. That is her chief charm of style, a high-minded purity. She does not describe the gutter and think she is writing of the street. By the way, I am expecting her here” (he paused, and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece) “in exactly two minutes.”

The Count rose quickly and took his hat. As he extended his hand to say “Good-bye” there was a rap at the door. The discreet youth who told John Craik’s falsehoods for him came in and handed his master a slip of paper with a name written thereon.

Craik read the inscription, crumpled up the paper, and threw it into the waste-paper basket.

“In one minute,” he said, and the liar withdrew.

Cipriani de Lloseta, with a quiet deliberation which was sometimes almost dramatic, stooped over the paper basket and recovered the crumpled slip of paper. He did not unfold it, but held it out, crushed up in his closed fist.

“Miss Eve Challoner,” he said.

John Craik nodded.

De Lloseta laughed and threw the paper into the fire.

“I must not be seen. Where do you propose to put me?”

“Go upstairs instead of down,” replied John Craik, as if he had been asked the same question before. “Wait on the next landing until you hear this door close; you may then escape in safety.”

“Thanks--good-bye.”

“Good-bye.”

When Eve entered the room, John Craik was writing. He rose with a bow savouring of a politer age than ours, and held out his hand.

“At last,” he said, “I have prevailed upon you to come and see me. Will you sit down? The chair is shabby, but great men and women have sat in it.”

He spoke pleasantly, with his twisted laugh, and when Eve was seated he sat slowly, carefully down again. He was thinking not so much of what he was saying as of his hearer. He saw that Eve was undeniably beautiful--the man saw that. The novelist saw that she was probably interesting. As he had just stated, great women had sat in the same chair, and it was John Craik’s impulse to save Eve from that same greatness. He had, since a brilliant youth at Oxford, been steeped, as it were, in literature. He had known all the great men and women, and he held strong views of his own. These were probably erroneous--many women will think so--but he held to them. They were based on experience, which is not always the case with views expressed in print and elsewhere. John Craik held that greatness is not good for women. That it is not for their own happiness, he knew. That it is not for the happiness of those around them, he keenly suspected. Some of Eve’s celebrated predecessors in that chair had not quite understood John Craik. All thought that he was not sufficiently impressed--not, that is, so impressed by them as they were themselves when they reflected upon their own renown.

He looked at Eve quickly, rubbing his hands together.

“May I, as an old man, ask some impertinent questions?” he inquired, with a cheerfulness which sat strangely on the wan face.

“Yes.”

“Why do you write?” he said. “Take time; answer me after reflection.”

Eve reflected while the great editor stared into the fire.

“To make money,” she answered at last.

He looked up, and saw that she was answering in simple good faith.

“That is right.”

He did not tell her that he was sick and tired of the jargon of art for art’s sake, literature for literature’s sake. He did not tell that--practical man of the world that he was--he had no faith in literary art; that he believed the power of writing to be a gift and nothing else; that the chief art in literature is that which is unconscious of itself.

“Do you feel within yourself the makings of a great author?”

Eve laughed, a sudden girlish laugh, which made John Craik reduce his estimate of her age by five years.

“No,” she answered.

He sat up and looked at her with a kind admiration.

“You are refreshing,” he said, “very, especially to a man who has seen stout and elderly females sit in that same chair and state their conviction that they were destined to be George Eliots or Charlotte BrontËs, women who had written one improper or irreligious novel, which had obtained a certain success in the foolish circles.”

“Do you think I have,” asked Eve, “the--the makings of an income?”

John Craik reflected.

“A small one,” he said bluntly.

“That is all I want.”

Craik raised his eyebrows.

“And renown,” he said, “do you want that?”

“Not in the least, except for its intrinsic value.”

Craik banged his hand down on the arm of his chair and laughed aloud.

“This is splendid!” he cried. “I have never met such a practical person. Then you would be content to work for a sufficient income without ever being known to the world?”

“Yes, provided that the work was genuine and not given to me out of mere charity.”

The editor of the Commentator looked at her gravely. He had suddenly remembered Cipriani de Lloseta.

“Oh, you are proud!” he said.

Eve laughed with a negative shake of the head.

“Not more than other people,” she answered.

“Not more than other people. Well, we will have it so. And not ambitious.”

“No, I think not.”

“You may thank God for that,” said John Craik, half to himself. “An ambitious woman is not a pleasant person.”

There was a little pause, during which John Craik rubbed his chin reflectively with his bony fingers.

“And now,” he said, “that I know something about you, I will tell you why I asked you to be good enough to come and see me. To begin with, I am an old man; you can see that for yourself. I am a martyr to rheumatism, and I frequently suffer from asthma, otherwise I should have done myself the pleasure of calling on you. I wanted to see you, because lady authors are uncertain creatures. A large majority of them have nothing better to do, and therefore write. Others do not care for the money, but they do most decidedly for the renown. The nudge and whisper of society is nectar to them. Others again are brilliant in flashes and dull in long periods. Few, very few are content to work with their pen as their poorer sisters are forced to work with their needles. In that lies the secret of the more permanent success of men journalists and men authors. The journalism and the authorship are not the men, but merely the business of their lives. Now will you be content to work hard and steadily without any great hope of renown--to work, in fact, anonymously for a small but certain income?”

“Yes,” answered Eve, without hesitation.

Craik nodded his head gravely and thoughtfully. He was too deeply experienced to fall into the error of thinking that Eve was different from other women. He did not for a moment imagine that he had secured in her a permanent subscriber to the Commentator--possibly he did not want her as such. He was merely doing a good deed--no new thing to him, although his right hand hardly knew what his left was doing. He liked Eve, he admired her, and was interested in her. Cipriani de Lloseta he was deeply interested in, and he knew, with the keen instinct of the novelist, that he was being drawn into one of those romances of real life which exists in the matter-of-fact nineteenth century atmosphere that we breathe.

So Eve Challoner left John Craik’s office an independent woman for the time being, and the charity was so deeply hidden that her ever-combative pride had failed to detect it.

The shadow, cloaked from head to foot,
Who keeps the keys of all the creeds.

As she walked back to Grosvenor Gardens, Eve reflected with some satisfaction that the Ingham-Bakers had left Mrs. Harrington’s hospitable roof. From this shelter they had gone forth into a world which is reputed cold, and has nevertheless some shelter still for such as are prepared to cringe to the overbearing, to flatter the vain, to worship riches.

Eve wanted time to think over her new position, to reflect with satisfaction over her new independence, for the Caballero Challoner, if he had bequeathed little else, had left to her a very active pride. She knew so little of the world that she never paused to wonder why John Craik should have made her a proposal which could hardly be beneficial to himself. She was innocent enough to think that the good things of this world are given just where and when they are wanted.

Captain Bontnor was the chief object of her thoughts, and she was already dreaming of restoring him to Malabar Cottage and his bits of things. So engrossed was she in these reflections, that she noticed nothing unusual in the face of the butler who opened the door which had shut upon Luke FitzHenry some years before.

“I’m glad you’re back, miss,” he said gravely.

Something in his tone--cold and correct--caught Eve’s attention.

“Why?” she asked, and a consoling knowledge that the Terrific was safe in Chatham Dockyard leapt into her mind.

“Mrs. Harrington’s been took rather bad, miss.”

The man’s manner said more than his words. Eve hurried upstairs to Mrs. Harrington’s bedroom. She tapped at the door and went in without waiting. There was a strong smell of ammonia in the air. The blinds were half lowered, and in the dim light Eve did not see very clearly. Presently, from the depths of a huge four-poster bed, she descried a pair of keen eyes--the face of Mrs. Harrington. The face, the eyes, the mind were alive, the body was stricken; it was almost dead already. Mrs. Harrington looked down at the shapeless limbs beneath the coverlet with something like fear in her eyes, something of the expression of a dog that has been run over. This woman meant to die hard.

Eve knew little of life, but she was no stranger to death. She recognised our last enemy in the grey face beneath the canopy of the four-poster.

“Where have you been so long, child?” said Mrs. Harrington querulously, “leaving me to these fools of servants. I have been unwell, but I’m better now. They’ve sent for the doctor. I shall be better presently. I have no pain, only--only a sort of numbness.”

She looked down at her left hand, which lay outside the coverlet, and fear was in her eyes. She had defied men too long to be afraid of God, but she did not want to die; she had too keen an enjoyment for the good things of this world.

Eve came to the bedside.

Mrs. Harrington’s face was drawn together in anger. She was annoyed that Death should have come for her, and, true to herself, she insulted him by deliberately ignoring his presence. There was something defiant in her cold eyes still, something unbeaten, although she knew that there was no one on her side. The general feeling was against her. So far as the world was concerned, Death could have her.

Eve turned away from the bed and faced the doctor, who was coming into the room with Mrs. Harrington’s maid. No one displayed the slightest emotion. A selfish life and a happy death are rarely vouchsafed to the same person. The doctor did not ask Eve to stay, so she went downstairs and wrote to Fitz, sending the note round to his rooms in Jermyn Street by a servant. It was the second time in her life that she had sent for Fitz.

When the doctor came downstairs, Eve went out into the hall. He pointed with his finger to the room from which she came, and followed her back there. He was a middle-aged man, educated to the finger-tips - all science and no heart.

“Are you a relation of Mrs. Harrington’s?” he inquired.

“We are distantly connected,” answered Eve.

The doctor was not giving much attention to her answer. He had a habit of tapping his teeth with his thumbnail, which made Eve dislike him at sight.

“Has she any one else?” he asked. “Any one who--cares?”

He was quite without the intention of being rude but he was absorbed in his profession, and had a large practice. He wanted to go.

“She has a nephew. I have sent for him.”

The doctor nodded. He glanced at Eve, then he said quietly -

“She will live about an hour. She wants me to come again and bring another man. I will do it, although it is useless. There are some things money cannot buy.”

With a quick mechanical smile he was gone.

Eve went upstairs again to the room where Mrs. Harrington was fighting her last fight. As she passed up the stairs, she noticed two letters on the hall table awaiting postage; one was addressed to Mrs. Ingham-Baker, the other to Luke, at Malta.

Mrs. Harrington had ordered the blinds to be pulled up, and the daylight showed her face to be little changed. It had always been grey; the shadows on it now were grey; the eyes were active and bright. It was only the body that was dying; Mrs. Harrington’s mind was bright and keen as ever.

“That doctor is a fool,” she said. “I have told him to come back and bring Sir James Harlow with him. And will you please send and tell Fitz that I should like to see him? You must arrange to stay on a few days until I am better. Captain Bontnor will have to do without you. My servants are not to be trusted alone. I shall want you to keep them in order; they require a tight reign.”

“I have sent for Fitz,” said Eve.

“Why?” snapped Mrs. Harrington. “To come and make love to you? Leave that to Agatha. She has been teaching them both to do that for the last three years. Her idea is to marry the one who gets my money. I’ve known that all along.”

Eve’s dark eyes hardened suddenly. She could not believe what the doctor had told her five minutes earlier. Five minutes - one-twelfth part of Mrs. Harrington’s life ebbed away.

“Pray do not talk like that,” said the girl quietly.

Mrs. Harrington’s cold grey eyes fell before Eve’s glance of mingled wonder and contempt; her right hand was feebly plucking at the counterpane.

Far below, in the basement, a bell rang, and soon after there was a step on the stairs.

“Who is that?” inquired Mrs. Harrington.

“Fitz.”

The dying woman was looking at the door with an unwonted longing in her eyes.

“You seem to know his step,” she said, with a jealous laugh.

Eve said nothing. The door opened, and Fitz came in.

Mrs. Harrington was the first to speak.

“I am not well this morning, dear,” she said. “I sent for you because I have a few things I want you to do for me.”

“Pleasure,” murmured Fitz, glancing at Eve. He either did not know how ill Mrs Harrington was, or he did not care. It is probable that these two persons now at the dying woman’s bed were the only two people who would be in any degree sorry at her death.

Eve, with a woman’s instinct, busied herself with the pillow - with the little adjuncts of a sick-room which had already found their way to the bedside. She looked at Mrs. Harrington’s face, saw the hard eyes fixed on Fitz, and something in the glance made her leave the room.

“Just leave me alone,” the dying woman said peevishly as Eve went away; “I don’t want a lot of people bothering about.”

But Fitz stayed, and when Eve had closed the door the sudden look of cunning that came over the faded face did not appear to surprise him.

“Quick!” whispered Mrs. Harrington, “quick! I do not believe I am dying, as that doctor said I was, but it is better to make sure. Open the left-hand drawer in the dressing-table; you will find my keys.”

Fitz obeyed her, bringing the bunch of keys, rusty and black from being concealed in a thousand different hiding-places.

“Now,” she said, “open that desk; it was--your father’s. Bring it here. Be quick! Some one may come.”

Her shrivelled fingers fumbled hastily among some old papers. Finally she found an envelope, brown with age, on which was written, in her own spidery handwriting, “Recipe for apple jelly.”

She thrust the envelope into Fitz’s hands, and he smilingly read the superscription.

“That’s nothing,” she explained sharply; “that’s only for the servants. One cannot be too careful. Inside there is some money. I saved it up. It will help to furnish your new cabin.”

“Thank you,” said Fitz, looking critically at the envelope. “But--”

“You must take it,” she interrupted; “it is the only money I ever saved.” She broke off with a malicious laugh. “All these fools thought I was rich,” she went on. “They have been scheming and plotting to get my money. There is no money. That is all there is. You and Luke were the only two who never thought about it. You are both like your father. Here, shut the desk up again. Put it back on the table. Now hide the keys--left-hand corner, under the box of hairpins.”

Fitz obeyed her and came back towards the bed. His large mind felt a sudden contempt for this petty and mean woman. He did not understand her, and the contempt he felt for her in some way hurt him. He was afraid of what she was going to say next.

“But,” she said, “if I get better you must give me the money back.”

Fitz gave a little laugh. Something prompted him to open the envelope and look at the contents. There were five notes of ten pounds each. The rich Mrs. Harrington of Grosvenor Gardens had saved fifty pounds, and she lay on her death-bed watching Fitz count this vast hoard with a quiet deliberation. In its way it was a tragedy--the grimmest of all--for its dominant note was the contemptibility of human nature.

“I do not want the money. I should not keep it under any circumstances.”

“What would you do with it?” she asked sharply.

“Give it to a charity.”

“No, no, you must not do that; they are all swindles!”

In her eagerness she tried to sit up, and fell back with a puzzled look on her face, as if some one had struck her.

“Here,” she gasped, “give it to me! give it to me!”

She clutched the envelope in her unsteady hands, and suddenly her jaw dropped.

Fitz ran to the door. On the stairs were the two doctors, followed closely by Eve. In a moment the doctors were at the bedside.

“Yes,” said one of them--the younger of the two--and he glanced at his watch. “I gave her an hour.”

The elder man took the dead woman’s hand in his. He released the envelope from her grasp and read the superscription, “Recipe for apple jelly.” With a grave smile he handed the envelope to Eve as Fitz took her out of the room.

They went downstairs together, and both were thinking of D’Erraha. They went into the library, which was silent and gloomy. Fitz had not spoken yet, but she seemed to understand his silence, just as she had understood it once before. She had told him then. She did not do so now.

Eve was not thinking of the dead woman upstairs. This death came to her only as a faint reflection of the one great grief which had cut her life in two--as great griefs do. She was perhaps wondering how it was that Fitz seemed always to come to her at those moments when she could not do without him. She was more probably not thinking at all, but resting as it were in the sense of complete safety and protection which this man’s presence gave her.

There was a little silence, broken only by the sound of street traffic faintly heard through the plate-glass windows. Fitz was looking at her, his blue eyes grave and searching. This was not a man to miss his opportunity, this youngest commander on the list.

“Eve,” he said, “I used to think at D’Erraha that you cared for me.”

“I have always cared for you,” she answered, with a queer little smile, half bold, half shy.

So Love came in at the windows as Death crept up the stairs.

Before long they heard the doctors go away, but they heeded not. They only forgot each other when Cipriani de Lloseta came into the room. The Spaniard’s quick eyes read something in Eve’s face. He looked sharply at Fitz, but he said nothing of what he saw.

“So our dear lady has been taken from us,” he said quietly, with an upward jerk of the head.

Fitz nodded. Cipriani de Lloseta walked to the window and quietly drew down the blind.

“So falls the curtain,” he said, “on the little drama of my humble life.”

He turned and looked from one to the other with that sudden warmth of love which either of them seemed able to draw from him.

“Some day,” he said, “I will tell you--you two - the story, but not now.”

He stepped forward and raised Eve’s fingers to his lips. A quaint, half-Spanish grace marked the picture of Southern chivalry.

“My child,” said Lloseta, “may Heaven always bless you!” And he left them.

CHAPTER XI. “MILKSOP”.

What have we made each other?

The cathedral bells were calling good Papists to their morning devotion as the Croonah moved into Valetta harbour. No sooner did her black prow appear between the pier heads than a score of boats left the steps, their rowers gesticulating, quarrelling, laughing among themselves with Maltese vivacity.

One boat, flying the Croonah’s houseflag, made its way more leisurely through the still, clear water. This boat was bringing mails to the Croonah, and in the letter-bag Mrs. Harrington’s last missive to Luke had found its place. This letter had been posted by the well-trained footman while Eve and Fitz stood at Mrs. Harrington’s bedside. Before it was stamped at the district office the hand that wrote it was still. And it contained mischief. Even after her death Mrs. Harrington brought trouble to the man whose life she had spoilt by her caprice. The letter ran--

“DEAR LUKE,--Just a line to tell you that you may bring your portmanteau straight up to Grosvenor Gardens when your ship arrives in London. I read of your fortunate escape from the cyclone, and congratulate you. I dare say I shall be having a few friends to stay when you are with me, so you need not fear dulness. Yours affectionately,
“MARIAN HARRINGTON.

“P.S.--I always suspect you of having, consciously or unconsciously, possessed yourself of the affections of a young lady who shall be nameless. A word to the wise: make good use of your opportunities, for there are other aspirants in the field--a certain brilliant young naval officer not unknown to you. Moreover his chance appears to be a good one. You must waste no more time.”

It happened that Luke FitzHenry was in a dangerous mood when he read this letter. He had been up half the night. The captain had been cross-grained and unreasonable. Even the mildest of us has his moments of clear-sightedness when he sees the world and the hollowness thereof. Luke saw this and more when he had read Mrs. Harrington’s evil communication. He seemed to have reached the end of things, when his present life became no longer tolerable. It must be remembered that this man was passionate and very resolute. Moreover he had been handicapped from the beginning of his life by a tendency to go wrong. He was not a good subject for ill-fortune.

It was his duty to go ashore with papers to be delivered at the agent’s office. He delivered his papers and then he went to the cable office. He telegraphed the single word “Milksop” to Willie Carr in London. When he got back to the Croonah, worn out, dirty, and morose, the passengers were not yet astir. He had an unsatisfactory breakfast, and went to his cabin for a few hours’ necessary sleep. He had given way to a great temptation, not as the weak give way, on the spur of the moment, with hesitation, but as a strong man--strong, even in his weaknesses.

He did it after mature deliberation--did it thoroughly and carefully, without the least intention of regretting it afterwards. He was desperate and driven. He could not think of life without Agatha, and he did not see why he should be called upon to do so. Ill fortune had dogged him from his childhood. He had borne it all, morosely but without a murmur. He was going to turn at last. The Croonah must go. She was well insured, he knew that. That the cargo was fully covered against loss he could safely suppose. As to the passengers and the crew, none of them should suffer; he thought he was a clever enough sailor for that.

So he laid him down in his little cabin to sleep, while the sun rose over the blue Mediterranean, while some passengers went ashore and others came on board, while the single word “Milksop” was spelt over a continent; and he was still sleeping when the anchor was jerked up from its muddy bed, and the watchers on pier and harbour looked their last on the grand old Croonah.

A breeze was blowing out in the open, one of those bright westerly breezes that bring a breath of the Atlantic into the Mediterranean, and often make the short passage from Malta to Gibraltar the worst part of the voyage from India to the Channel.

None of the passengers took any interest in the morose second officer, and few of them remarked his absence from table during the two days’ passage. The Croonah arrived at Gibraltar after dark, took her mails and passengers on board, and proceeded down the Straits about eight o’clock in the evening. It was late autumn, and the breeze from the cool Atlantic still hurried in over the parched lands of Africa and Southern Europe.

Tarifa light was sighted and left twinkling behind. Trafalgar stared out of the darkness ahead, and in its turn was left behind. A few of the passengers had recovered their Mediterranean ill-usage sufficiently to dine in the Straits, but the Atlantic swell soon sent them below. The decks were deserted, for many of these people were returning to England after long years in India, and the first chill northern breeze they met made them shiver while it delighted them.

Luke FitzHenry was on the bridge from eight o’clock till midnight, motionless at his post--a mere navigating machine, respected and feared by all who worked with him, understood of none.

When midnight came he exchanged a few words with the first officer, and together they superintended the shaking out of the foresails before the watch went below. The wind was on the quarter, strong and steady. Almost immediately the good steamer felt the canvas, leaning gently over to leeward, adding another mile to her great speed. The sea was black, and the air seemed to be full of the sounds of waves breaking and hissing. Ahead the mast-head and the side-lights shone down on the face of the waters and lighted up an occasional white-capped wave. In the air, brisk and masterful, there was a sense of purpose and tension which sailors understand, while mere printed words cannot convey it to landsmen. It was a very dark night.

“St. Vincent,” said Luke tersely, as he turned to leave the bridge. The first officer, a man grown old at his post, followed the direction of his junior’s gaze, but some seconds elapsed before he distinguished the light twinkling feebly low down on the horizon.

Luke went to his cabin and lay down on his berth all dressed. He was due on the bridge again at four o’clock. The Croonah sailed by time-table, subjecting the winds and seas, as the great steamships do nowadays. Luke FitzHenry had calculated this to a minute before he telegraphed the single word “Milksop” to Willie Carr in London.

He was on the bridge a few minutes before eight bells rang, and found the captain. He knew his chief’s customs. He knew that this wise old sailor was in the habit of accumulating as much sleep in his brain as possible before passing Ushant light, because he lived on the bridge when the Croonah had once turned eastward up the Channel. Whenever the captain took a night’s rest, he broke it at four o’clock, at the change of the watch. He stood muffled in a big coat over his pyjamas, and exchanged a few words with his subordinates. After the first officer had gone below, Luke went to his post at the starboard end of the bridge, while the captain walked slowly backwards and forwards. They remained thus for half an hour. The ship was all quiet. The breeze had fallen a little. There was as yet no sign of daybreak towards the east. A steamer passed, showing a red light and a white mast-head light.

Presently the captain paused in his walk near to Luke.

“Call me,” he said, “when you raise the Burling light.”

Luke answered with a monosyllable, and the elder sailor went towards the ladder.

No one had heard the order given. Luke followed him to the ladder, and watched him go down into the darkness. They had sailed together six years in fair weather and foul; they had fought and conquered a cyclone in the Bay together from that bridge; but Agatha Ingham-Baker was stronger than these things. Woman is the strongest thing in a man’s life.

There was still no sign of daylight, no faintest gleam in the eastern sky, when the Burling light was sighted right ahead. The look-out on the forecastle did not “sing out” the lights on board the Croonah, but sent a companion aft to the bridge with the report. This was done for the comfort of the passengers.

Luke altered the course half a point. From the wheel-house the men could not see the light, which was hidden by the fore-mast. Luke went aft and looked at the patent log. His calculations were all correct. He glanced at his watch--he had to go to the wheel-house to do this, and the binnacle-lights showed his face to be still and pale. He moved and had the air of a man upon whose shoulders an immense responsibility was weighing. He was going to wreck the Croonah, but he had two hundred and ninety lives to save. He carefully studied the eastern sky. He did not want daylight yet.

The Burling light is not a very big one--not so big, some mariners think, as it should be. It is visible twenty-five miles away; but Luke’s knowledge told him that in thick and misty weather, such as hovers over this coast in a westerly wind, the glare of the revolving lamp could not be distinguished at a greater distance than ten or twelve miles.

The Croonah raced on, a ship full of sleeping human beings. There came a faint blue tinge into the eastern sky, a gleam over the eastern sea.

The Burling light--an eye looking round into the darkness, seeming to open and shut sleepily--grew brighter and brighter. It was right ahead! it rose as they approached it until it stood right above the bowsprit.

Then Luke FitzHenry changed the course. The Croonah turned her blunt prow half a point out into the Atlantic, and she raced on; she passed by Burling Island, leaving the slowly winking eye on her starboard quarter. Ahead lay the complete darkness of the north-west horizon.

Luke stood at his post, his eyes hidden by his binoculars. He was studying the horizon in front of him--in front of the Croonah. There was a little lump on the horizon, like the top of a mountain sticking out of the sea; this he knew to be the rock called the Great Farilhao. Again he altered the course, still seeking the Atlantic, another quarter point to the west. He was going to pass the Great Farilhao as he had passed the Burling, within a stone’s throw. This he actually did, the rugged outline of the barren rock standing out sharply against the eastern sky. There was now nothing ahead; the horizon lay before him, clear, unbroken.

Luke moved a few paces. He went and stood by the engine-room telegraph. The engines throbbed merrily, but the steamer was still asleep. There was no sound but the thud of the piston-rods and the whispering swirl of the water lashed by the huge screw.

The Croonah raced on, her sails set, her engines working at full speed. Suddenly Luke FitzHenry grasped the handle of the engine-room signal. He wrenched it to one side--“Stand by.” Instantly the gong answered, “Stand by.” “Half speed ahead.”

And half speed ahead it was. Luke FitzHenry was clever even in his crime; he had three hundred lives to save. He stood motionless as a statue, gazing at the smooth unbroken water in front of him; he grasped the rail and set his teeth; he stood well back with his feet firmly planted. And there was a grinding crash. The Croonah seemed to climb up into the air, then she stopped dead, and below--inside her--there was a long, rumbling crash, as if all that was inside her had been cast forward in confusion. She had run on to the sunken rocks that lie north-west of the Farilhoes.

A great silence followed and immediately the pattering of bare feet. A confused murmuring of voices rose from the saloon gangway--a buzzing sound, like that of a hive disturbed. A single voice rose in a shriek of mortal terror, and immediately there followed a chorus of confused shouts.

Luke already had his lips at the speaking-tube. He was telling the engineer on watch to steam ahead; he knew the danger of the Croonah slipping back into deep water and sinking.

In a marvellously short time the decks were thronged with people, some standing white-faced and calm in the dim light of early morning; others, mad with terror, rushing from side to side.

The strange part of it was that Luke remained alone on the bridge. The captain and the other officers were busy with the passengers. The second officer remained motionless at his post; he commanded the steersman by a wave of the arm to stay at the wheel, although he knew that the Croonah would never answer her helm again; her travelling days were done.

In the dim light now increasing momentarily, Luke FitzHenry looked down upon the wildly confused decks and saw discipline slowly assert itself. He saw the captain commanding by sheer force of individual power; he saw the quartermasters form in line across the deck and drive the passengers farther aft, leaving room to get out the boats.

In a few moments--in a marvellously short space of time--the work of saving life began. A boat was lowered, the crew slipped into their places, and a certain number of lady passengers were hastily handed down the gangway. The first boat eased away. The oars were thrown out. It was off, and some of the passengers cheered. One can never tell what men, especially Englishmen, may do when they actually see death face to face. The boat was headed to the south-east, towards the Carreiro do Mosteiro, on Burling Island, the only possible landing-place.

Luke felt a touch on his arm and turned sharply. It was a quartermaster, breathless but cool.

“Captain wants you, sir. I’ll take the bridge.”

Luke turned to obey orders.

“Keep her steaming full speed ahead,” he said, jerking his head towards the engine-room telegraph.

“Ay, sir,” the man replied.

“Until the water gets to the furnaces,” he added to himself, “and then we’re dead men.”

Luke ran lightly down the iron ladder to the lower bridge, which was deserted. From thence he made his way aft to the quarter-deck. As he passed the saloon staircase he ran against two women; one was dragging the other, or attempting to do so, towards the group of passengers huddled together amidships.

“You go,” the younger woman was saying, “if you want to. I will wait.”

Luke stopped. The elder woman was apparently wild with terror. She had not even stopped to put on a dressing-gown. Her thin grey hair fluttered in the breeze. She was stout and an object of ridicule even with death clutching at her.

“Go on, mother,” said the younger woman, with contempt in her voice.

“Agatha!” cried Luke. “You here?”

“Yes; we came on board at Malta.”

CHAPTER XII. THE END OF THE “CROONAH”.

Our life is given us as a blank;
Ourselves must make it blest or curst.

A man came running along and clutched at Luke’s arm.

“Captain wants you, sir, immediate!” he cried.

“All right,” answered Luke. “Here, take this lady and put her into a boat.”

Mrs. Ingham-Baker was clinging to him.

“Luke,” she said firmly, “you must provide us with a lifeboat--a safe one. I will not stand this neglect.”

“Here!” cried Luke to the man. “Take her away.”

“You come along o’ me, marm,” said the man, with a twinkle in his eye. “I’ll pervide ye with a lifeboat, bless yer heart!”

And in the dim light of the saloon stairhead lamp, Luke and Agatha were left facing each other.

“Why did you not let me know you were coming?” he asked sharply. He looked round with haggard eyes; they were quite alone.

“I had no time. We just caught the boat by an hour.”

She was singularly quiet. Both of them seemed to forget that every moment lost increased the danger of their position.

“Why did you come?” he asked.

She looked at him, and there was that in her eyes that makes men mad.

“Because I could not stay away from you.”

His breath came sharply with a catch.

For a few moments they forgot such things as life and death. They did more, they defied death; for surely such love as this is stronger than the mere end of life. Again it was the possibility of something good and something strong that lurked hidden behind the worldliness of Agatha Ingham-Baker, and Luke FitzHenry, of all men, alone had the power of bringing that possibility to the surface.

All around them the wind moaned and shrieked through the rigging; the waves, beating against the sheer side of the doomed Croonah, filled the air with a sound of great foreboding--the deep voice of an elemental power that knows no mercy. Within twenty feet of them men and women were struggling like dumb and driven animals for bare life--struggling, shouting, quarrelling over a paltry precedence of a minute or so in going to the boats; within a hundred yards of them, out over the dark waters, Agatha’s mother, thrown from an overturned boat, was struggling her last struggle, with her silly old face turned indignantly up to heaven. But they saw none of these things.

All the good men were wanted for the boats, and the captain, with two officers only and a few stewards, defended the gangway against the rush of the panic-stricken native crew.

“FitzHenry! FitzHenry!” the old captain shouted. “For God’s sake, come here!” For Luke alone was dreaded by the lascars.

But Luke and Agatha heeded nothing. These people, these lives, were nothing to them, for a passionate love is the acme of selfishness.

They heard the sounds, however; they heard the captain calling for the man who had never failed him.

“I wrecked her for you,” said Luke, in Agatha’s hungry ears. “I did it all for you.”

And at last the woman’s vanity was satisfied; it was thrown a sop that would suffice for its eternal greed. Luke had done this thing for her. She was quick enough to guess how and why, for she knew Willie Carr. She knew that good ships are thrown away for money’s sake. The Croonah had been thrown away for her sake--the Croonah, the patient, obedient servant to Luke’s slightest word, almost an animal in its mechanical intelligence, filling that place in the sailor’s heart that some men reserve for their horses and others for their wives. Women have been jealous of a ship before now. Eve was jealous of the Terrific; Agatha had always been jealous of the Croonah. And now the ship had been thrown away for her, and with his ship Luke had cast away his unrivalled reputation as a seaman, his honour as a gentleman, his conscience. He was a criminal, a thief, a murderer for Agatha’s sake. She, true to her school, to her generation, to her training, was proud of it; for she was one of those unhappy women who will not have their lovers love honour more.

There was a sudden roar far down in the bowels of the vessel, and immediately volumes of steam issued from every skylight. The inrushing sea had broken down the bulk-heads, the water had reached the engine-rooms. In an instant Luke was alive to the danger--the good sailor that was within the man all awake. His trained ears and the tread of his feet on the deck told him that the screw was still.

“Come,” he cried to Agatha, “you must get away in the next boat.”

But Agatha resisted his arm. That which had hitherto been mere pertness in her manner and carriage had suddenly grown into a strong determination. The woman was cool and fearless.

“Not without you,” she answered. “I will not leave the ship until you do.”

“I must stay till the last,” he said.

She looked at him with a little smile, for women love courage, though it sometimes frightens them. She never dreamt of danger to either of them. Her trust in Luke was all-sufficient, without reserve, without hesitation.

“Then I will stay too.”

For a moment his iron nerve--a nerve which had deliberately planned all this destruction--wavered.

“Why did you not let me know you were coming?” he asked desperately.

“I had no time,” she answered, with a singular shortness, for she could not tell him that a letter from Mrs. Harrington to her mother--the companion to that received by Luke at Valetta--had brought about this sudden decision. She could not tell him that, egged on by a transparent hint from Mrs. Harrington that Luke was to be her heir, she and her mother had taken the first boat to Malta; that she had deliberately planned to marry him for the money that was to be his. Such a confession was impossible at that time; with his arms still round her, the mere thought of it nauseated her. For a moment, she saw herself as others had seen her--a punishment which for some women is quite sufficient.

At this moment a man came running along the deck--the same quartermaster who had taken charge of Mrs. Ingham-Baker. He was a man of no nerves whatever, and of considerable humour.

“Any more ladies?” he was shouting as he ran. “Any more for the shore?”

He laughed at his own conceit as he ran--the same fearless laugh with which he sent Mrs. Ingham-Baker down the gangway to her death. He paused, saw Luke and Agatha standing together beneath the lamp.

“Captain’s callin’ you like hell!” he cried. “Engine-room’s full. The old ship’s got it this time, sir.”

“All right, I know,” answered Luke curtly; and the man ran on, shouting as he went.

At this moment the Croonah gave a shiver, and Luke looked round hastily. He ran to the rail and looked over with a quick sailor’s glance fore and aft. He turned towards Agatha again, but before he could reach her the steamer gave a lurch over to starboard. The deck seemed to rise between them. For a moment Agatha stood above him, then she half ran, half fell, down the short steep incline into his arms. Luke was ready for her, with one foot against the rail--for the deck was at an angle of thirty and more; no one could stand on it. He caught her deftly, and the breeze whirling round the deck-house blew her long hair across his face.

She never changed colour. There was the nucleus of a good and strong woman somewhere in Agatha Ingham-Baker. She clung to her lover’s arms and watched his face with a faith that nothing could shake. Thus they stood during three eternal seconds while the Croonah seemed to hesitate, poised on the brink. Then the great steamer slowly slid backwards, turning a little as she did so.

There was a sickening sound of gurgling water. The Croonah was afloat, but only for a few seconds. There was no time to lower another boat, and all on board knew it. There were not many remaining, for the passengers had all left the ship--the stokers, the engineers. Amidships the captain stood, surrounded by his officers and a few European sailors--faithful to the end. They had only one boat left, and that was forward, half under water--out of the question. So they stood and waited for the ship to sink beneath them.

In the distance, on the rough sea, now grey in the light of a sullen dawn, two boats were approaching, having landed their human freight on Burling Island.

“Now, my lads,” cried the captain, “if any of you are feeling like going overboard, over you go.”

One man slowly took off his coat. He stooped down and unlaced his boots, while the others watched him. It seemed to take him hours. The bows of the great steamer were almost buried in the broken seas; her stern was raised high in the air, showing the screw and the rudder.

The man who preferred to swim for it looked round with a strange smile into the quiet, rough faces of his undismayed companions. It seemed to be merely a choice of deaths.

“Well, mates,” he said, “so long!”

He dived overboard and swam slowly away.

Luke watched him speculatively. He knew that had he been alone he could have saved himself quite easily. With Agatha his chances were less certain. Agatha it was who had spoilt his careful calculation. Without conceit--for he was a stubbornly self-depreciating man--he knew that his absence from his captain’s side had just made the difference--the little difference between life and death--to twenty or thirty people. Had he been beside the captain and the other officers the native crew would have worked quietly and intrepidly; there would have been time for all hands to leave the Croonah before she slipped back into deep water.

The great steamer rolled slowly from side to side, like a helpless dumb animal in death agony, but she never righted herself, her decks were never level. At length she gave a roll to leeward and failed to recover herself. From some air-shaft there came a ceaseless whistle, deep and sonorous, like the emission of air from the bunghole of a beer-barrel. The engines were quite still, even the steam had ceased to rise.

Luke stood holding Agatha with one arm. He was watching the two boats making their way through the choppy sea towards them, and Agatha was watching his face.

The Croonah was now lying right over on her beam ends. Luke was standing on the wire network of the rail. Suddenly he threw himself backwards, and as they fell through space Agatha heard the captain’s voice quite distinctly, as from the silence of another world.

“She’s going!” he cried.

They struck the water together, Luke undermost, as he had intended. Agatha shut her eyes and clung to him. They seemed to go down and down. Then suddenly she heard Luke’s voice.

“Take a breath,” he gasped short and sharp. His voice was singularly stern.

With his disengaged hand he put her hair from her face. She opened her eyes and saw him smiling at her; she saw a huge piece of wreckage poised on the edge of a wave over his head; she saw it fall; she felt the shock of it.

Luke’s arm lost its hold; he rolled over feebly in the water, the blood running down his face, a sudden sense of sleep in his brain. He awoke again to find himself swimming mechanically, and opened his eyes. Close to him something white was floating half under water. Spread out over the surface of the wave Agatha’s long hair rose and fell like seaweed, almost within his grasp. It was like a horrible nightmare. He tried to reach it, but his arms were powerless; he could not make an inch of progress; he could only keep himself afloat. Agatha’s face was under water. On the rise of a wave he saw her little bare foot; it was quite still. He knew that she was dead, and the blessed sleepiness took him again, dragging him down.

. . . . .

So the last of the Croonah was her good name written large on a yellow telegram form, nailed to the panel of the room technically known as the Chamber of Horrors at Lloyd’s.

Around this telegram a group of grave-faced men stood in silence, or with muttered words of surprise.

“The Croonah!” they said, “the Croonah!” as if a pillar of their faith had fallen. For once no one had a theory: no carpet mariner could explain this thing.

Against the jamb of the window, behind them all, Willie Carr stood leaning.

“Done anything on her?” some one asked him.

“Yes, bad luck,” he answered. “Had friends on her, too.”

It was a long and expansive telegram, giving the list of the lost, twenty-nine in all, and among the names were mentioned Mrs. Ingham-Baker and her daughter.

“Ship in charge of second officer,” said the telegram. And lower down, at the foot of the fatal list: “Second officer picked up unconscious. Doing well.”

Suddenly Willie Carr moved, and, turning his back somewhat hastily, looked out of the window.

Fitz had just come into the dreary, fateful little room, conducted thither by the Admiralty agent. He read the telegram carefully from beginning to end.

“Luke on the Burlings!” he muttered, as he turned to go. “Luke! I can’t understand it. He must have been mad!”

And after all Fitz only spoke the truth; but it was a madness to which we are all subject.

There is no statute so sublime
As Love’s in all the world; and e’en to kiss
The pedestal is still a better bliss
Than all ambitions.

Three years later Eve was sitting on the terrace of the Casa d’Erraha. It was late autumn, and we who live in Northern latitudes do not quite realise what the autumn of Southern Europe is. Artists and others interested in the beauties of nature love a dry summer for the autumn that is sure to follow it. In Spain and in the islands of the Mediterranean every summer is dry, and every autumn is beautiful.

The Casa d’Erraha has not changed in any way--nothing changes in the Balearics. The same soft Southern odours creep up from the valley to battle with the strong resinous scent of the pines that crown the mountains.

Eve had been a year in D’Erraha--the whole of her married life. The Count de Lloseta placed the house at their disposal for the honeymoon. Fitz and she came to stay a month; they had remained twelve. It is often so in Majorca. A number of Spaniards came six hundred years ago--nine families; the nine names are there to-day.

Fitz had taken D’Erraha on the Minorcan rotas lease, so the old valley, the old house, was his.

Eve was not alone on the terrace, for a certain small gentleman, called Henry Cyprian FitzHenry, a prospective sailor, lay in a pink and perfect slumber on her lap. Henry Cyprian fully appreciated the valley of repose.

Eve was reading a letter--a lamentable scrawl, by the way--obviously the work of a hand little used to the pen.

“My dearie,” the letter ran; and it bore the address - Malabar Cottage, Somarsh, Suffolk.

“MY DEARIE,--Please thank your good husband for his letter to me announcing the birth of your son. I hope the little man is doing well. Make a sailor of him. Being one myself I have had opportunity of noticing seafaring men under different circumstances, and I have never had an occasion to be ashamed of a shipmate, only excepting when he was drunk, which is human, so to speak. Thanking the captain kindly for his inquiries, I have to advise that all is going well at Malabar Cottage. The cottage keeps taut and staunch; and now that my old shipmate Creary has joined me, we keep to the weather side of the butcher’s bill without any difficulty. We pull along on a even keel wonderfully well, Creary being a good-natured man, and as pleasant a shipmate as one could wish. He has brought his bits of things with him, and alongside of mine they make a homely look. I miss your voice about the house, and sometimes I feel a bit lonely, but being a rough seafaring man I know that Malabar Cottage was hardly fit for a lady like yourself. The Count de Lloseta has twice been down to see me, sitting affable down to our bit of lunch with us and making Creary laugh till he choked. I don’t rightly understand how it was that the Count and your good husband the captain (R.N.) fixed up my money affairs, getting so much of it back from Merton’s while others haven’t had a halfpenny. I asked the Count to explain, which he did at some length. But I didn’t rightly understand it, never having had a good head for figures, though I could always work out my sums near enough to fix her position on the chart at mid-day. I take it that Mr. Lloseta has got a gift for financials, leastwise he pays me my money most regular, and last time there was two pounds more. I am sure I ought to feel thankful that I have such good friends, and people, too, so much above me. I understand that the Count de Lloseta is going out to Majorca this autumn. He is a good man.--Your affectionate uncle,

“WILLIAM JOHN BONTNOR (Master).”

Eve read this effusion with a queer little smile which had no mirth in it. She folded the letter carefully and laid it aside for her husband to see when he returned. Then she fell into a reverie, looking down over the great silent valley that lay between her and the sea. She had been out into the world and had come back to D’Erraha again. In the world she had had a somewhat singular experience. She had never loved a woman, she had never known a woman’s love. One man after another had come into her life, passing across the field of her mental vision when it was most susceptible to impression, each influencing her life in his own way, each loving her in his own way, each claiming her love. Here was a woman, the mother of a boy, whose every thought had been formed by men, whose knowledge had been acquired from men, whose world was a world of men. She would not have known what to do with a daughter, so Fate had sent her a son. From the Caballero Challoner to Fitz, from Fitz to Captain Bontnor, from Captain Bontnor to John Craik, and from Craik back to Fitz, this, with Cipriani de Lloseta ever coming and going, in and out, had been Eve FitzHenry’s life.

These men had only taught her to be a woman, as men ever do; but from them she had acquired the broader way of taking life, the larger way of thinking, which promised well for Henry Cyprian lying asleep on her lap.

She was thinking of these men, for all they had taught her, of all she had learnt from them without their knowing it, when one of them came to her. Fitz had dismounted in the patio and came walking somewhat stiffly through to the terrace. He had been out all day on a distant part of the D’Erraha property, for he combined the farmer and the sailor. He had applied for a year’s leave after having served his country for fifteen. The year had run into fifteen months, and there was talk of the time when he should go to sea no longer.

Fitz had changed little. The cloud, however, that had formerly hung as it were in his eyes had vanished. Eve had driven it away, slowly and surely. Perhaps Henry Cyprian had something to do in the matter also by pushing his uncle Luke out of the place he had hitherto occupied in Fitz’s heart. Luke had voluntarily relinquished the place to a certain degree. He had left England three years before to seek his fortune in other seas, and Fortune had come to him as she often does when she is sought half-heartedly. Luke commanded one of the finest war-ships afloat, but she sailed under the Chilean flag.

“Letters,” said Fitz.

Eve smiled and handed him Captain Bontnor’s epistle. She watched his face as he read--she had a trick of watching her husband’s face. This was a hopelessly taciturn man, but Eve seemed to understand him.

There was another letter unopened and addressed to Fitz. He took it up and opened it leisurely, after the manner of one who has all he wants and looks for nothing by post.

Eve saw his face brighten with surprise. He read the letter through, and then he handed it to her.

“Lloseta,” he said, “is coming. He is in Barcelona.”

Eve read the letter. She leant back in her deep chair with a pensiveness, a faint suggestion of weariness bespeaking the end of a convalescence, which was perhaps climatic.

“I have never understood the Count,” she said. “There are so many people one does not understand.”

She broke off with a little laugh, half impatient.

“Yes,” said her husband quietly. “Whom are you thinking of?”

“Agatha.”

Fitz was gazing at the fine quartz gravel beneath his feet.

“Agatha cared for Luke,” he said.

A faint flicker of anxiety passed across Eve’s eyes--the mention of Luke’s name always brought it. She had never seen this twin brother--this shadow as it were of Fitz’s life--and it had been slowly borne in upon her--perhaps Henry Cyprian had taught her--that there is a tie between twins which no man can gauge nor tell whither it may lead.

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I know.”

“How do you know? Did she tell you?”

Eve smiled.

“No; but I knew long ago. I do not think she was good, Fitz, but that was good in her--quite good. People say that it sometimes saves men. It often saves women. I think it is better for a girl to have no mother at all than to have a foolish mother, much better, I am sure of it.”

“Women like Mrs. Ingham-Baker,” said Fitz gruffly, “do more harm in the world than women who are merely bad. She made Agatha what she was, and Agatha made Luke throw away the Croonah.”

“But the Court decided that it was an unusual current,” said Eve, who had followed every word of the official inquiry.

Fitz shrugged his shoulders.

“He threw the ship away,” he said. “Sailors like Luke do not get wrecked on the Burlings.”

Eve did not pursue the subject, for this was the shadow on her happiness. It has been ruled that we are not to be quite happy here, and those are happiest who have a shadow that comes from outside--from elsewhere than from themselves or their own love.

Eve, womanlike, had thought of these things, analysing them as women do, and she recognised the shadow frankly. She was too intelligent, too far-sighted to expect perfect bliss, but she knew that she had as near an approach to it as is offered for human delectation, neutralised as it was by that vague regret which is only the reflection of the active sorrows of others.

Fitz had handed the Count’s letter to his wife. She read it slowly and allowed it to drop. As it fluttered to her lap she caught sight of some writing on the back.

“Did you see the postscript?” she asked.

“No.”

She turned the letter and read aloud.

“I saw Craik just before I left. He was, I think, in better health. His mind is much too brilliant, his brain too active, his humour too keen to be that of a sick man. When I told him your good news he quite forgot to be rheumatic. ‘Glad to hear it, glad to hear it,’ he said. ‘She was much too good to be a mere writing woman.’ By the way, I imagine Eve never learnt that all the Spanish articles, except the first, passed through my hands as well as Craik’s before publication. I knew who wrote them, and am still one of their profoundest admirers, but, like John Craik, I am well content that the gifted author should turn her attention to other things, notably to my godson, to whom salutations. Did either of you ever meet young Lord Seahampton, an excellent fellow, with the appearance of a cleanly groom and the heart of a true knight? He was killed while riding a steeplechase last week. I regret him deeply. He was one of my few friends.”

Eve laid the letter down with a little sigh, a species of sigh which she reserved for Cipriani de Lloseta.

“He is a nineteenth-century Quixote,” she said. “No one ever knows what good he may be doing.”

Then they fell to talking of this man, of what he had done and what he had left undone. They guessed at what he had suffered, and of the suffering which he had spared others they knew a little; but of his own feelings they were ignorant, his motives they only knew in part. His life had been lived out to a certain extent before them, but they knew nothing of it; it was a mere superficies without perspective, and Eve, woman-like, wanted to put a background to it.

“But why,” she persisted, from the height of her own happiness, which had apparently been so easy to reach, “why does he lead such a lonely, gloomy life? Why has he so few friends? Why does he not come and live at Lloseta instead of in the gloomy palace in the Calle de la Paz?”

“His life is all whys,” answered Fitz; “it is one big note of interrogation. He said that some day he would tell us; no doubt he will.”

“Yes; perhaps so.”

Eve reflected, and again she indulged in a short sigh.

“And after he has told us there will be nothing to be done, that is the worst of it; there will be nothing to be done, Fitz.”

“There never has been anything to be done,” replied Fitz slowly, as was his wont. “That has been the keynote of his life as long as I have known him. If there had been anything to do, you may be sure that De Lloseta would have done it.”

Eve was bending over the small beginnings of a man lying supine on her knees. She drew Henry Cyprian’s wraps closer around him preparatory to taking him indoors.

“Then his is surely the saddest life imaginable,” she said.

CHAPTER XIV. THE COUNT’S STORY.

And yet I know
That tears lie deep in all I do.

The pine forests on the mountain-tops were beginning to gather the darkness as the Count de Lloseta rode up the last slope to the Casa d’Erraha. The sun had just set behind the rocky land that hides Miramar from D’Erraha. A stillness seemed to be creeping down from the mountain to the valley. The wind had gone down with the sun.

The Count rode alone beneath the gloom of the maritime pines which grow to their finest European stature on the northern slope of D’Erraha. He had been in the saddle all day; but Cipriani de Lloseta was a Spaniard, and a Spaniard is a different man when he has thrown his leg across a horse. The suave indolence of manner seems to vanish, the courtly indifference, the sloth and contemplativeness which stand as a bar between our northern nature and the peninsular habit. De Lloseta was a fine horseman--even in Spain, the nation of finest horsemen in the world; also he was on Majorcan soil again. He had landed at Palma that morning from the Barcelona steamer, and he had found Fitz awaiting him with a servant and a led horse on the quay.

There was a strangely excited gleam in De Lloseta’s dark eyes which Fitz did not fail to notice. The Count looked around over the dark wild faces of his countrymen and met no glance of recognition, for he had been absent forty years. Then he raised his eyes to the old city towering on the hillside above them, the city that has not changed these six hundred years, and he smiled a wan smile.

“I have brought a horse for you,” said Fitz, “either to ride back to D’Erraha with me now or to take you to Lloseta, should you care to go direct there. Eve has packed up some lunch for you in the saddle-bag if you think of going to Lloseta first.”

The Count nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “that is like Eve; she would think of such things.”

He went up to the horse, patted it, measured the length of the stirrup-leather, and then turned to Fitz.

“I will go to Lloseta,” he said. “It is only natural after forty years. I will be with you by seven o’clock to-night at D’Erraha.”

Fitz did not offer to accompany him, and Cipriani de Lloseta rode that strange ride alone; unknown, an outcast in his own land, he rode through the most fertile valley in the world, of which every tree was dear to him; and no man knew his thoughts. The labourers in the fields, men and women, brown, sunburnt, half Moorish, wholly simple and natural, paused in their toil and looked wonderingly at the lonely horseman; the patient mules walking their ceaseless round at the Moorish wells blinked lazily at him; the eagles of Lloseta swept slowly round in a great circle far above the old castle, as they had swept in his childhood, and he looked up at them with his strange patient smile. He pushed the great olive-wood gate open and passed into the terraced garden, all overgrown, neglected, mournful. It was a strange home-coming, with no one near to see.

He spent the whole day at Lloseta engaged in the very practical work of employing men to labour at the garden and in the house. It was, he said, his intention to come back to his “possession,” as these Majorcan country houses are called, to inhabit it the larger part of the year, and to pass the remaining winter months at his palace in Palma.

In the afternoon he mounted his horse, and in the evening, as has been said, he reached D’Erraha.

A servant must have been watching his approach, for the large door was thrown open and he rode into the patio. Fitz was here to welcome him; and behind him Eve, with Henry Cyprian in her arms. No one spoke. It was rather singular. The Count dismounted. He took off his hat and held it in the Spanish mode in his hand while he shook hands with Fitz and Eve. He looked round the patio. He noted the old marble well, yellow with stupendous age, the orange trees clustering over it, the palms and the banana trees, then he smiled at Eve.

“After many years,” he said.

There was a little pause.

“I should have wished to see your father,” he said, “amidst these surroundings.”

Eve gave a little nod. From long association with men she had learnt a manlike reticence. She moved a little towards the open archway leading through to the terrace.

“We have some tea,” she said, “waiting for you. Will you come to the terrace?”

He followed her, while the servant led the tired horse away.

They sat at the northern end of the terrace, where the garden-chairs always stood, and before, beneath, all around them rose and fell the finest of all the fine Majorcan scenery--scenery which only Sardinia can rival in Europe.

Eve poured out his tea, which he drank, and set the cup aside.

They all knew that the time had come for the Count de Lloseta to tell his story--to redeem the promise made to Eve and Fitz long ago, before they were married.

Cipriani de Lloseta leant back in his deep garden-chair nursing one booted leg over the other. He was dusty and travel-stained, but the natural hardiness of his frame seemed to be more apparent than ever in his native land, on his native mountains.

“My poor little tale,” he said; “you will have it?”

“Yes,” said Eve; and Fitz nodded.

Cipriani de Lloseta did not look at them, but down into the gathering blue of the valley beneath them. His quiet, patient eyes never turned elsewhere during his narrative, as if he were telling the story to the valley and the hills.

“When I was quite a young man everything was too prosperous with me. I was rich, I had health and liberty and many friends; life was altogether too simple and easy for me. Before I was twenty-one I met my dear Rosa and fell in love with her. Here again it was too easy, too convenient. Fate is cruellest when she is too kind. The parents wished it. The two families were equally old, equally rich; and lastly Rosa--Rosa was kind enough to be--kind to me.”

He paused, pensively rubbing his clean-shaven chin with his forefinger, his long profile was turned towards Eve, standing out like brown marble against the gloom of the valley. Eve wondered about this woman, this Rosa, who had been forty years in her grave. She wondered what manner of woman this must have been to have kept the love of a man through all these years by a mere memory, but she did not wonder that Rosa had been kind.

“She saw things in me that do not exist,” Cipriani de Lloseta went on quietly. “It is so with women when--and men may thank God that it is so.”

He gave a little laugh, unpleasant to the ear--the laugh of a man who has been right down to the bottom of life and comes up again with a sneer.

Eve and Fitz made no sign. This story was like wine that has lain forgotten in the dark for many years, it needed careful handling. Henry Cyprian turned on his silken cushion, and opening his great dark eyes watched the speaker with that infantine steadfastness of gaze which may perchance see more than we suspect.

“We were married”--he paused and gave a jerk of the head towards Palma, behind him to the left--“in the cathedral, and were quite happy. At that time the Harringtons were living, or rather staying, in this house with your good father. Neither of you ever saw the Honourable George Harrington; your loss is infinitesimal. For some reason they began to come to Lloseta a good deal--some reason of Mrs. Harrington’s. She was always a singular woman, with a reason for all that she did, which I, in my old-fashioned way, do not think good in a woman. She disliked my wife. I could see that through her affectionate ways. I do not know why. Men cannot understand these things. Rosa was very beautiful.”

Eve, who was watching his face, gave a little nod--a mental nod, as it were, for her own edification. It is possible that she, being a woman, understood.

“Finally they came to stay a few days--you know the Spanish hospitality. She forced it on us against our will. I was particularly averse to it because of--Rosa. I wanted to be quietly at Lloseta. We intended to live almost entirely in Majorca. We wanted our children to be Majorcans, and especially a son. The Harringtons stayed longer than we invited them for. They were well-bred adventurers. I have met many such in English country houses--people who shoot, and fish, and hunt at the expense of others. It suited them to stay at Lloseta, and they did so. They were people who got the best of everything by asking for it--by looking upon it in a well-bred way as their right. I did not mind that, but I wanted them to go, on account of Rosa. Also I disliked the woman’s manner towards myself; it altered when Rosa was not there, you understand. We have a word for it in Spain, but I will not say it because the woman is dead.”

There was a rasping sound as he drew his first and second fingers across his closely shaven chin. It is a singular thing that cynics usually reserve their keenest shafts for women.

“At last I informed Rosa that they must be told to go, and Rosa was very angry. It was her pride--the pride of a new-fledged hostess, of a young matron. She was Spanish, and hot tempered. My inhospitality was terrible to her, and she spoke sharply. I was quicker to feel and to act then than I am now. I answered her. I would not give way, thinking, as I was, of the son we hoped for. It was nothing, but we raised our voices. In the heat of the argument I lifted my hand. Rosa thought that I was going to strike her--a strange mistake. She stepped back and fell. You know our marble floors. She struck her temple against the floor, and she lay quite still. I heard a sound, and turning, saw Mrs. Harrington in the doorway. She had been listening; she had seen everything. Rosa never recovered consciousness; she died. It was terribly easy for her to die. It was equally hard for me to continue living. Mrs. Harrington helped me in my great sorrow to a certain extent, but she would not help me by going away. Then, as soon as Rosa was buried, she told me that unless I gave her money she would tell all Spain that I had murdered my wife. At first I did not understand. I did not know that God had created women such as this. But she made her meaning quite clear. Indeed to do this thoroughly, she hinted to the neighbours that she knew more than she had disclosed. All Majorca would turn its back upon me--all except Challoner. I paid the woman. I have paid her ever since, and I do not regret it. What else could I do? After many generations of honour and uprightness I could not let the name of Lloseta fall into the hands of a low woman such as Mrs. Harrington. I had to pay heavily, but it was still cheap. I saved the name. No breath of dishonour has reached the name of De Lloseta de Mallorca. I got her out of Majorca, and my old friend Challoner set himself the task of silencing the gossips. But I found that I had to leave Lloseta--for the name’s sake I quitted my home.”

He spread out his hands with a patient gesture of resignation.

“Such has been my life,” he went on. “It has been spent in preserving the name unspotted, in paying Mrs. Harrington, and in praying the good God to make her life unhappy and short. In His greater wisdom He prolonged her life, but it was never a happy one, for God is just. I am the last of the Llosetas. The name will die, but it has lived for six hundred years, and it dies as it lived--unspotted--one of the great names of the world.”

He broke off with a little laugh.

“Spanish pride,” he said. “I must beg your indulgence. My life you know. It has not been a happy one. I have never forgotten Rosa; I have never even tried. I have had several objects however in life; it has not been uninteresting. One of the chief of these objects has been to repay to a minute extent the true friendship of my dear Challoner. He was a friend in need. He taught me to look upon the English as the finest race of men on this planet. I may be wrong, but I shall adhere to my opinion. In my small way I attempted to repay in part to Challoner’s daughter all that I owed to him; but I only ran against a pride as strong, as sensitive as my own. My child, you did quite right!”

He turned to Eve, smiling his patient smile.

“And now,” he went on, “I shall have my way after all.”

He laid his hand on Henry Cyprian, who was conscientiously putting the Valley of Repose to its best use.

“After all, this little caballero was born at D’Erraha. D’Erraha is his; is it not so?”

And Eve, giving up her pride to him--casting it down before his loftier pride--came round to his chair, and bending over, kissed him silently.