It will be found not altogether devoid of a strange substratum of truth, though fantastic enough in the superficial utterance, the statement that there are certain climacteric seasons in the history of places when, if events of importance are looming upon the horizon, they are especially liable to fall. Such a season with regard to Rodmoor, or at least with regard to the persons we are most concerned with there, may be said to have arrived with the beginning of Autumn and with the month of October.

The first weeks of this month were at any rate full of exciting and fatal interest to Nance. Something in the change of the weather, for the rains had come in earnest now, affected Sorio in a marked degree. His whole being seemed to undergo some curious disintegrating process as difficult to analyze as the actual force in Nature which was at that very time causing the fall of the leaves. We may be allowed to draw at least this much from Sorio’s own theory of the universal impulse to self-destruction—the possible presence, that is to say, of something positive and active, if not personal and conscious, in the processes of natural decadence. Life, when it corrupts and disintegrates; life when it finally falls away and becomes what we call death, does so sometimes, or seems to do so, with a vehemence and impetuosity which makes it difficult not to feel the pressure of some half-conscious “will to perish” in the thing thus plunging towards dissolution. The brilliant colour which many flowers assume when they approach decease bears out this theory. It is what the poet calls a “lightning before death” and the rich tints of the autumn foliage as well as the phosphorescent glories—only repulsive to our human senses in fatal association—of physical mortality itself, are symbols, if not more than symbols, of the same splendid rushing upon nothingness.

This change in Sorio was not at all to Nance’s disadvantage in the external aspect of the relations between them; indeed, she was carried forward by it to the point of coming to anticipate with trembling excitement what had begun to seem an almost impossible happiness. For Sorio definitely and in an outburst of impatient pleading, implored her to marry him. In the deeper, more spiritual association between them, however, the change which took place in him now was less satisfactory. Nance could not help feeling that there was something blind, childish, selfish, unchivalrous,—something even reckless and sinister—about this proposal and the passionate eagerness with which he pressed it upon her, considering that he made no more attempt than before to secure any employment and seemed to take it for granted that either she or Baltazar Stork or his own son in America, or some vague providential windfall would provide the money for this startling adventure. Side by side with her surprise at his careless disregard for all practical considerations, Nance could not help feeling a profound apprehension which she herself was unwilling to bring to the surface of her mind with regard to his mood and manner during these days. He seemed to throw himself passively and helplessly upon her hands. He clung to her as a sick child might cling to its parent. His old savage outbursts of cynical humour seemed to have vanished and in their place was a constant querulousness and peevishness which rendered their hours together much less peaceful and happy than they ought to have been. All sorts of little things irritated him—irritated him even in her. He clung to her, she could not help fancying, more out of a strange instinct of self-preservation than out of natural love. She couldn’t help wondering sometimes how it would be when they were actually married. He seemed to find it at once difficult to endure her society and impossible to do without it. The bitter saying of the old Latin poet might have been his motto at that time. “Nec sine te nec tecum vivere possum.”

And yet, in spite of all this, these early October days were days of exquisite happiness for Nance. The long probation through which her love had passed had purged and winnowed it. The maternal instinct in her, always the dominant note in her emotions, was satisfied now as it had never been satisfied before, as perhaps unless she had children of her own it would never be satisfied again.

In these days of new hope and new life her youth seemed to revive and put forth exquisite blossoms of gaiety and tenderness. In a physical sense she actually did revive, though this may have been partly due to the cool crisp air that now blew constantly across the fens, and Linda, watching the change with affectionate sympathy, declared she was growing twice as beautiful.

She offered no objection when Sorio insisted upon having their “bans” read out in church, a duty that was most willingly performed without further delay by Hamish Traherne. She did not even protest when he announced that they would be married before October was over, announced it without any indication of how or where they would live, upon whose money or under whose roof!

She felt a natural reluctance to press these practical details upon his notice. The bond that united them was too delicate, too tenuous and precarious, for her to dare to lean heavily upon it, nor did the few hesitating and tentative hints she threw out meet with any response from him. He waved them aside. He threw them from him with a jest or a childish groan of disgust or a vague “Oh, that will work itself out. That will be all right. Don’t worry about that! I’m writing to Baptiste.”

But, as we have said, in spite of all these difficulties and in spite of the deep-hidden dismay which his nervous, querulous mood excited in her, Nance was full of a thrilling and inexpressible happiness during these Autumn days. She loved the roar of the great wind—the north-west wind—in chimneys and house-tops at night. She loved the drifting of the dead leaves along the muddy roads. She loved the long swishing murmur of the rushes growing by the dyke paths as they bent their feathery heads over the wet banks or bowed in melancholy rhythm across the rain-filled ditches.

Autumn was assuredly and without doubt the climacteric season of the Rodmoor fens. They reluctantly yielded to the Spring; they endured the Summer, and the Winter froze them into dead and stoical inertness. But something in the Autumn called out the essential and native qualities of the place’s soul. The fens rose to meet the Autumn in happy and stormy nuptials. The brown, full-brimmed streams mounted up joyously to the highest level of their muddy banks. The faded mallow-plants by the river’s side and the tarnished St. John’s wort in the drenched hedges assumed a pathetic and noble beauty—a beauty full of vague, far-drawn associations for sensitive humanity. The sea-gulls and marsh-birds, the fish, the eels, the water-rats of the replenished streams seemed to share in the general expansion of life with the black and white hornless cattle, the cattle of the fens, who now began to yield their richest milk. Long, chilly, rainy days ended in magnificent and sumptuous sunsets—sunsets in which the whole sky from zenith to nadir became one immense rose of celestial fire. Out of a hundred Rodmoor chimneys rose the smell of burning peat, that smell of all others characteristic of the country whose very soil was formed of the vegetation of forgotten centuries.

In the large dark barns the yellow grain lay piled roof-high, while in every little shed and outhouse in the country, damsons, pears and potatoes lay spread out as if for the enjoyment of some Dionysian gathering of the propitiated earth-gods.

The fishermen, above all, shared in the season’s fortune, going out early and late to their buoy-marked spots on the horizon, where the presence of certain year-old wrecks lying on the sand at the bottom drew the migratory fish and held them for weeks as if by a marine spell.

But if the days had their especial quality, the nights during that October were more significant still. The sky seemed to draw back, back and away, to some purer, clearer, more ethereal level while with a radiance tender and solemn the greater and lesser stars shed down their magical influence. The planets, especially Venus and Jupiter, grew so luminous and large that they seemed to rival the moon; while the Moon, herself, the mystic red moon of the finished harvest, the moon of the equinox, drew the tides after her, higher and fuller and with a deeper note in their ebb and flow than at any other season of the year.

Everywhere swallows were gathering for their long flight, everywhere the wild geese and the herons were rising to incredible heights in the sky and moving northward and westward; and all this while Nance was able, at last really able, to give herself up to her passion for the man she loved.

It was a passion winnowed by waiting and suffering, purged to a pure flame by all she had gone through, but it was a passion none the less—a long exclusive passion—the love of a lifetime. It made her sometimes, this great love of hers, dizzy and faint with fear lest something even now should at the last moment come between them. Sometimes it made her strangely shy of him too, shy and withdrawn as if it were not easy, though so triumphantly sweet, to give herself up body and soul into hands that after all were the hands of a stranger!

Sorio did not understand all this. Sometimes when she thrust him away as if the emotion produced by his caresses were more than she could bear or as if some incalculable pride in her, some inalienable chastity beyond the power of her senses, relucted to yield further, he grew angry and morose and accused her of jealousy or of coldness. This would have been harder to endure from him if there had not existed all the while at the bottom of her heart a strange, maternal pity, a pity not untouched with a sort of humorous irony—the eternal irony of the woman as she submits to the eternal misunderstanding of the man, embracing her without knowing what he does. He seemed to her sometimes in the mere physical stress of his love-making almost like an amorous and vicious boy. She could not resist the consciousness that her knowledge of the mystery of sex—its depth and subtlety not less than its flame and intensity—was something that went much further and was much more complicated and involved with her whole being than anything he experienced. Especially did she smile in her heart at the queer way he had of taking it for granted that he was “seducing” her, of deriving, it seemed, sometimes a satyrish pleasure from that idea, and sometimes a fit of violent remorse. When he was in either of these moods she felt towards him precisely as a mother might feel towards a son whose egoism and ignorance gave him a disproportioned view of the whole world. And yet, in actual age, Sorio was some twenty years her senior.

In her own mind, as the weeks slipped by and their names had already been coupled twice in the Sunday services, Nance was taking thought as to what, in solid reality, she intended to do with this child-man of hers when the great moment came. She must move from their present lodging. That seemed certain. It also seemed certain that Linda would have still to go on living with her. Any other arrangement than that was obviously unthinkable. But where should they live? And could she, with the money at present at her disposal, support three people?

A solution was found to both these problems by Mr. Traherne. There happened to exist in Rodmoor, as in many other old decaying boroughs on the east coast, certain official positions the practical service of which was almost extinct but whose local prestige and financial emoluments, such as they were, lingered on unaffected by the change of conditions. The relentless encroachments of the sea upon the land were mainly responsible for this. In certain almost uninhabited villages there existed official persons whose real raison d’Être lay with the submerged foundations of former human habitations, deep at the bottom of the waters.

It was, indeed, one of the essential peculiarities of life upon those strange sea-banks this sense of living on the edge, as it were, of the wave-drowned graves of one’s fathers. It may have been the half-conscious knowledge of this, bred in their flesh and blood from infancy, that gave to the natives of those places so many unusual and unattractive qualities. Other abodes of men rest securely upon the immemorial roots of the past, roots that lie, layer beneath layer, in rich historic continuity endowing present usages and customs with the consecration of unbroken tradition. But in the villages of that coast all this is different. Tradition remains, handed down from generation to generation, but the physical continuity is broken. The east-coast dwellers resemble certain of the stellar bodies in the celestial spaces, they retain their identity and their names but they are driven, in slow perpetual movement, to change their physical position. In scriptural phrase, they have no “abiding-place” nor can they continue “in one stay.”

The fishing boats of the present generation set their brown sails to cross the water where, some hundreds of years before, an earlier generation walked their cobbled streets. The storm-buoys rock and ring and the boat lanterns burn their wavering signals over the drowned foundations that once supported Town-Hall and church tower, Market place and Village Tavern. It is this slow, century-delayed flight from the invading tide which so often produces in East Anglian coast towns the phenomenal existence of two parish churches, both it may be still in use, but the later and newer one following the heart of the community in its enforced retreat. Thus it is brought about in these singular localities that the very law of the gods, the law which utters to the elements the solemn “thus far and no further” is as a matter of fact, daily and momently, though with infinite slowness, broken and defied.

It is perhaps small wonder that among the counties of England these particular districts should have won for themselves a sinister reputation for impiety and perversity. Nothing so guards and establishes the virtue of a community than its sense of the presence in its midst of the ashes of its generations. Consciously and in a thousand pious usages it “worships its dead.” But East-Anglian coast-dwellers are not permitted this privilege. Their “Lares and Penates” have been invaded and submerged. The fires upon their altars have been drowned and over the graves of their fathers the godless tides ebb and flow without reverence. Fishes swim where once children were led to the font and where lovers were wedded the wild cormorant mocks the sea-horses with its disconsolate cry. It is easy to be believed that the remote descendants of human beings who actually walked and bartered and loved and philosophized on spots of ground now tangled with seaweed and sea-drift, and with fathoms of moaning and whispering water above them, should come in their hour to depart in a measure from the stable and kindly laws of human integrity! With the ground thus literally moving—though in age-long process—under their feet, how should they be as faithful as other tribes of men to what is permanent in human institution?

There was perhaps a certain congruity in the fact that now, after all these ages of tidal malice, it was in the interests of so singular an alien as Sorio—one whose very philosophy was the philosophy of “destruction”—that this lingering on of offices, whose service had been sea-drowned, remained as characteristic of the place. But this is precisely what did occur.

There was in Rodmoor a local official, appointed by the local town council, whose title, “The Warden of the Fishes,” carried the mind back to a time when the borough, much larger then, had been a considerable centre of the fishing industry. This office, tenable for life, carried with it very few actual duties now but it ensured a secure though small emolument and, what was more important, the occupancy, free of rent, of one of the most picturesque houses in the place, an old pre-Elizabethan dwelling of incommodious size but of romantic appearance, standing at the edge of the harbour.

The last incumbent of this quaint and historic office, whose duties were so little onerous that they could be performed by a very old and very feeble man, was a notable character of the village called John Peewit Swinebitter, whose chief glory was not attained until the close of his mortal days, which ended under the table in the Admiral’s Head after a surfeit of the very fish of which he was “warden” washed down by too copious libations of Keith-Radipole ale.

Since Mr. Swinebitter’s decease in June, there had gone on all through July and August, a desperate rivalry between two town factions as to the choosing of his successor and it was Mr. Traherne’s inspired notion to take advantage of this division to secure the post for Nance’s prospective husband.

Sorio, though of foreign blood, was by birth and nationality English and moreover he had picked up, during his stay in Rodmoor, quite as much familiarity with the ways and habits of fish as were necessary for that easy post. If, at any unforeseen crisis, more scientific and intimate knowledge was required than was at his disposal, there was always Dr. Raughty, a past master in all such matters, to whom he could apply. It was Mr. Traherne’s business to wheedle the local rivals into relinquishing their struggle in favour of one who was outside the contention and when this was accomplished the remaining obstacles in the way of the appointment were not hard to surmount. Luckily for the conspirators, Brand Renshaw, though the largest local landowner and a Justice of the Peace, was not on the Rodmoor council.

So skillfully did Mr. Traherne handle the matter and so cautious and reserved was Nance that it was not till after the final reading of their bans in the church on the marshes and the completion of the arrangements for their marriage at the end of the following week, that even Baltazar Stork became aware of what was in the wind.

Sorio himself had been extremely surprised at this unexpected favour shown him by the local tradesmen. He had brooded so long upon his morbid delusion of universal persecution that it seemed incredible to him, in the few interviews which he had with these people, that they should treat him in so courteous and kind a manner. As a matter of fact, so fierce and obstinate were their private dissensions, it was a genuine relief to them to deal with a person from outside; nor must it be forgotten that in the appointment of Nance’s husband to the coveted post they were doing honour to the memory of the bride’s father, Captain Herrick having been by far the most popular of all the visitors to Rodmoor in former times. Most of the older members of the council could well remember the affable sailor. Many of them had frequently gone out fishing with him in the days when there were more fish and rarer fish to be caught than there were at present—those “old days” in fact which, in most remote villages, are associated with stuffed wonders in tavern parlours and with the quips and quirks of half-legendary heroes of Sport and Drink.

It was a reversion to such “old days” to have a gentleman “Warden of the Fishes.” Besides it was a blow at the Renshaws between whom and the town-council there was an old established feud. For it was not hidden from the gossips of Rodmoor that the relations between Nance and the family at Oakguard were more than a little strained, nor did the shrewder ones among them hesitate to whisper dark and ominous hints as to the nature of this estrangement.

Baltazar Stork received the news of his friend’s approaching marriage with something like mute fury. The morning when Sorio announced it to him was one of concentrated gloom. The sea was high and rough. The wind wailed through the now almost leafless sycamores and made the sign which bore the Admiral’s head creak and groan in its iron frame. It had rained steadily all through the night and though the rain had now ceased there was no sun to dry the little pools of water which lay in all the trodden places in the green or the puddles, choked up with dead leaves, which stared desolately from the edges of the road upon the sombre heaven. Sorio, having made his momentous announcement in a negligent, off-hand way, as though it were a matter of small importance, rushed off to meet Nance at the station and go with her to Mundham.

As it was Saturday the girl had no scruple about leaving her work. In any case she would have been free, with the rest of Miss Pontifex’s employees, in the early afternoon. She was anxious to spend as long a time as was possible making her final purchases preparatory to their taking possession of Ferry Lodge. The mere name of this relic of Rodmoor’s faded glory was indicative of how times had changed. What was once an inland crossing—several miles from the shore—had now become the river’s mouth and where farmers formerly watered their cattle the fishing boats spread their sails to meet the sea.

Nance had made a clean sweep of the furniture of their predecessor, something about the reputation of Mr. Peewit Swinebitter prejudicing her, in perhaps an exaggerated manner, against the buying of any of his things. This fastidiousness on her part did not, however, lessen the material difficulties of the situation, Sorio being of singularly little assistance in the rÔle of a house-furnisher.

Meanwhile, with hat pulled low down over his forehead and his cane switching the rain-drenched grass, Baltazar Stork walked up and down in front of his cottage. He walked thus until he was tired and then he came and stood at the edge of the green and looked at his empty house and at the puddles in the road. Into the largest of these puddles he idly poked his stick, stirring the edge of a half-submerged leaf and making it float across the muddy water. Children passed him unheeded, carrying cans and bottles to be filled at the tavern. Little boys came up to him, acquaintances of his, full of gaiety and mischief, but something in his face made them draw back and leave him. Never, in all his relations with his friend, had Baltazar derived more pleasure from being with him than he had done during the recent weeks. That condition of helpless and wistful incompetence which Nance found so trying in Sorio was to Baltazar Stork the cause of the most delicate and exquisite sensations. Never had he loved the man so well—never had he found him so fascinating. And now, just at the moment when he, the initiated adept in the art of friendship, was reaping the reward of his long patience with his friend’s waywardness and really succeeding in making him depend on him exactly in the way he loved best, there came this accursed girl and carried him off!

The hatred which he felt at that moment towards Nance was so extreme that it overpowered and swamped every other emotion. Baltazar Stork was of that peculiarly constituted disposition which is able to hate the more savagely and vindictively because of the very fact that its normal mood is one of urbane and tolerant indifference. The patient courtesy of a lifetime, the propitiatory arts of a long suppression, had their revenge just then for all they had made him endure. In a certain sense it was well for him that he could hate. It was, indeed in a measure, an instinct of self-preservation that led him to indulge such a feeling. For below his hatred, down in the deeper levels of his soul, there yawned a gulf, the desolating emptiness of which was worse than death. He did not visualize this gulf in the same concrete manner as he had done on a previous occasion, but he was conscious of it none the less. It was as a matter of fact a thing that had been for long years hidden obscurely under the hard, gay surface of his days. He covered it over by one distraction or the other. Its remote presence had given an added intensity to his zest for the various little pleasures, Æsthetic or otherwise, which it was his habit to enjoy. It had done more. It had reduced to comparative insignificance the morbid vexations and imaginative reactions from which his friend suffered. He could afford to appear hard and crystal-cold, capable of facing with equanimity every kind of ultimate horror. And he was capable of facing such. Under the shadow of a thing like that—a thing beyond the worst of insane obsessions, for his mind was cruelly clear as he turned his eyes inward—he was able to look contemptuously into the Gorgon face of any kind of terror. When he chose he could always see the thing as it was, see it as the desolation of emptiness, as a deep, frozen space, void of sound or movement or life or hope or end. There was not the least tinge of insanity in the vision.

What he was permitted to see, by reason of some malign clarity of intellect denied to the majority of his fellows, was simply the real truth of life, its frozen chemistry and deadly purposelessness. Most men visualize existence through a blurring cloud of personal passion, either erotic or imaginative. They suffer, but they suffer from illusion. What separated Baltazar from the majority was his power of seeing things in absolute colourlessness—unconfused by any sort of distorting mirage. Thus what he saw with his soul was the ghastly loneliness of his soul. He saw this frozen, empty, hollow space and he saw it as the natural country in which his soul dwelt, its unutterable reality, its appalling truth. That was why no thought of suicide ever came to him. The thing was too deep. He might kill himself, but in so doing he would only destroy the few superficial distractions that afforded him a temporary freedom. For suicide would only fling him—that at least is what, with horrible clarity, he had come to feel about it—into the depths of his soul, into the very abyss, that is to say, which he escaped by living on the surface. It was a kind of death-in-life that he was conscious of, below his crystalline amenities, but one does not fly to death to escape from death.

It will be seen from this how laughable to him were all Sorio’s neurotic reactions from people and things. People and things were precisely what Baltazar clung to, to avoid that “frozen sea” lying there at the back of everything. It will be easily imagined too, how absurd to him—how fantastic and unreal—were the various hints and glimpses which Sorio had permitted him into what his friend called his “philosophy of destruction.” To make a “philosophy” out of a struggle to reach the ultimate horror of that “frozen sea,” how lamentably pathetic it was, and how childish! No sane person would contemplate such a thing and the attempt proved that Sorio was not sane. As for the Italian’s vague and prophetic suggestions with regard to the possibility of something—philosophers always spoke of “something” when they approached nothing!—beyond “what we call life” that seemed to Baltazar’s mind mere poetic balderdash and moon-struck mysticism. But he had always listened patiently to Sorio’s incoherences. The man would not have been himself without his mad philosophy! It was part of that charming weakness in him that appealed to Baltazar so. It was absurd, of course—this whole business of writing philosophic books—but he was ready to pardon it, ready to listen all night and day to his friend’s dithyrambic diatribes, as long as they brought that particular look of exultation which he found so touching into his classic face!

This “look of exultation” in Sorio’s features had indeed been accompanied during the last month by an expression of wistful and bewildered helplessness and it was just the union of these two things that Baltazar found so irresistibly appealing. He was drawn closer to Adrian, in fact, during these Autumn days, than he had ever been drawn to any one. And it was just at this moment, just when he was happiest in their life together, that Nance Herrick must needs obtrude her accursed feminine influence and with this result! So he gave himself up without let or hindrance to his hatred of this girl. His hatred was a cold, calculated, deliberate thing, clear of all volcanic disturbances but, such as it was, it possessed him at that moment to the exclusion of everything else. He imagined to himself now, as with the end of his stick he guided that sycamore leaf across the puddle, how Nance would buy those things in the Mundham shops and what pleasure there would be in her grey eyes, that peculiar pleasure unlike anything else in the world which a woman has when she is indulging, at the same moment, her passion for domestic detail and her passion for her lover!

He saw the serene possessive look in her face, the look of one who at last, after long waiting, arrives within sight of the desired end. He saw the little outbursts of girlish humour—oh, he knew them so well, those outbursts!—and he saw the fits of half-assumed, half-natural shyness that would come over her and the soft, dreamy tenderness in her eyes, as together with Adrian, she bought this thing or the other, full of delicate association, for their new dwelling-place. His imagination went even further. He seemed to hear her voice as she spoke sympathetically, pityingly, of himself. She would be sure to do that! It would come so prettily from her just then and would appeal so much to Adrian! She would whisper to him over their lunch in some little shop—he saw all that too—of how sad she felt to be taking him away from his old friend and leaving that friend alone. And he could see the odd bewildered smile, half-remorseful and half-joyful with which Sorio would note that disinterested sympathy and think to himself what a noble affectionate creature she was and how lucky he was to win her. He saw how careful she would be not to tire him or tease him with her purchases, how she would probably vary the tedium of the day with some pleasant little strolls together round the Abbey grounds or perhaps down by the wharves and the barges.

Yes, she had won her victory. She was gathering up her spoils. She was storing up her possessions! Could any human feeling, he asked himself with a deadly smile upon his lips, be more sickeningly, more achingly, intense than the hatred he felt for this normal, natural, loving woman?

He swept his stick through the muddy water, splashing it vindictively on all sides and then, moving into the middle of the road, looked at his empty cottage. Here, then, he would have to live again alone! Alone with himself, alone with his soul, alone with the truth of life!

No, it was too much. He never would submit to it. Better swallow at once and without more nonsense the little carefully concocted draught which he had long kept under lock and key! After all he would have to come to that, sooner or later. He had long since made up his mind that if things and persons—the “things and persons” he used as his daily drug, failed him or lost their savour he would take the irrevocable step and close the whole farce. Everything was the same. Everything was equal. He would only move one degree nearer the central horror—the great ice field of eternity—the plain without end or beginning, frozen and empty, empty and frozen! He stared at his cottage windows. No, it was unthinkable, beginning life over again without Adrian. A hundred little things plucked at random from the sweet monotony of their days together came drifting through his mind. The peculiar look Adrian had when he first woke in the morning—the savage greediness with which he would devour honey and brown bread—the pleading, broken, childlike tones in his voice when, after some quarrel between them he begged his friend to forgive him—all these things and many others, came pouring in upon him in a great wave of miserable self-pity. No—she should not win. She should not triumph. She should not enjoy the fruits of her victory—the strong feminine animal! He would sooner kill her and then kill himself to avoid the gallows. But killing was a silly futile kind of revenge. Infants in the art of hatred killed their enemies! But at any rate, if he killed her she would never settle down in her nice new house with her dear husband! But then, on the other hand, she would be the winner to the end. She would never feel as he was feeling now; she would never look into his eyes and know that he knew he had beaten her; he would never see her disappointment. No—killing was a stupid, melodramatic, blundering way out of it. Artists ought to have a subtler imagination! Well, something must be done, and done soon. He felt he did not care what suffering he caused Sorio, the more he suffered the better, if only he could see the look in those grey eyes of Nance that confessed she was defeated!

Quite quietly, quite calmly, he gathered together all the forces of his nature to accomplish this one end. His hatred rose to the level of a passion. He vowed that nothing should make him pause, no scruple, no obstacle, until he saw that beaten look in Nance’s face. Like all dominant obsessions, like all great lusts, his purpose associated itself with a clear concrete image, the image of the girl’s expression when at last, face to face with him, she knew herself broken, helpless and at his mercy.

He walked swiftly down the High Street, crossed the open space by the harbour and made his way to the edge of the waves. Surely that malignant tide would put some triumphant idea into his brain. The sea—the sterile, unharvested sea—had from the beginning of the world, been the enemy of woman! Warden of the Fishes! He laughed as he thought of Sorio’s assuming such a title.

“Not yet, my friend—not quite yet!” he murmured, gazing across the stormy expanse of water. Warden of the Fishes! With a strong, sweet, affectionate wife to look after him? “No, no, Adriano!” he cried hoarsely, “we haven’t come to that yet—we haven’t come to that quite yet!”

By some complicated, psychological process he seemed to be aware, as he stared at the foaming sea-horses, of the head of his mute friend Flambard floating, amid the mist of his own woman-like hair, in the green hollows of the surf. He found himself vaguely wondering what he—the super-subtle Venetian—would have done had he been “fooled to the top of his bent” by a girl like Nance—had he been betrayed in his soul’s deepest passion. And all at once it came over him, not distinctly and vividly but obscurely and remotely as if through a cloudy vapour from a long way off, from far down the vistas of time itself, what Flambard would have done.

He stooped and picked up a long leather-like thong of wet, slippery seaweed and caressed it with his hands. At that moment there passed through him a most curious sensation—the sensation that he had himself—he and not Flambard—stood just in this way but by a different sea, ages, centuries ago—and had arrived at the same conclusion. The sensation vanished quickly enough and with it the image of Flambard, but the idea of what remained for him to do still hovered like a cloud at the back of his mind. He did not drag it forth from its hiding place. He never definitely accepted it. The thing was so dark and hideous, belonging so entirely to an age when “passional crimes” were more common and more remorseless than at the present, that even Baltazar with all the frozen malice of his hate scrupled to visualize it in the daylight. But he did not drive it away. He permitted it to work upon him and dominate him. It was as though some “other Baltazar” from a past as remote as Flambard’s own and perhaps far remoter—had risen up within him in answer to that cry to the inhuman waters. The actual working of his mind was very complicated and involved at that moment. There were moments of wavering—moments of drawing back into the margin of uncertainty. But these moments grew constantly less and less effective. Beyond everything else that definite image of Nance’s grey eyes, full of infinite misery, confessing her defeat, and even pleading with him for mercy, drove these wavering moments away. It was worth it, any horror was worth it, to satiate his revenge by the sight of what her expression would be as he looked into her face then. And, after all, the thing he projected would in any case, come about sooner or later. It was on its way. The destinies called for it. The nature of life demanded it. The elements conspired to bring it about. The man’s own fatality was already with a kind of vehemence, rushing headlong—under the fall of these Autumn rains and the drifting of these Autumn leaves—to meet it and embrace it! All he would have to do himself would be just to give the wheel of fate the least little push, the least vibration of an impulse forward, with his lightest finger!

Perhaps, as far as his friend was concerned, he would really, in this way, be saving him in the larger issue. Were Adrian’s mind, for instance, to break down now at once, rendering it necessary that he should be put, as they say in that appalling phrase, “under restraint,” it might as a matter of fact, save his brain from ultimate and final disaster. It is true that this aspect of what he projected was too fantastic, too ironically distorted, to be dwelt upon clearly or logically but it came and went like a shadowy bird hovering about a floating carcass, round the outskirts of his unspeakable intention. What he reverted to more articulately, as he made his way back across the littered sand-heaps to the entrance of the harbour, was the idea that, after all, he would only be precipitating an inevitable crisis. His friend was already on the verge of an attack of monomania, if not of actual insanity. Sooner or later the thing must come to a definite climax. Why not anticipate events, then, and let the climax occur when it would save him from this intolerable folly—worse than madness—of giving himself up to his feminine pursuer? As he made his way once more through the crowded little street, the fixed and final impression all these thoughts left upon his mind was the impression of Nance Herrick’s face, pale, vanquished and helpless, staring up at him from the ground beneath his feet.