(iWHMniannMnininiwnnMnMtamMiiMiiaiouMkMaMiUH Tf ^ .^.^ ""...nrw^ LfBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE a }y\ ^^ Tongues of Conscience. Tongues of Conscience By Robert*^Hichens Author of **Flames," *'The "Green Carnation," et cetera New York I'Tcdcrick A. Stokes Company Publishers Copyright y 1898, 1900, by Frederick A. Stokes Company CONTENTS. PACK Sea Change i ' ' William Foster " 1 09 The Cry of the Child 183 How Love Came to Professor Guildea 267 The Lady and the Beggar 341 " Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change, luto something rich and strange." SliAKiiSl'iiARK. SEA CHANGE. PART I. THE RAINBOW. SEA CHANGE. PART I. THE RAINBOW. In London nightfall is a delirium of bustle, in the country the coming of a dream. The town scatters a dust of city men over its long and lighted streets, powders its crying thoroughfares with gaily dressed creatures who are hidden, like bats, during the hours of day, opens a thousand defiant yellow eyes that have been sealed in sleep, throws off its wrapper and shows its elaborate toilet. The country grows demure and brown, most modest in the shadows. Labourers go home along the damp and silent lanes with heavy weariness. The parish clergyman flits likx- a blackbird through the twink- ling village. Dogs bark from solitar)' farms. A beautiful and soft depression fills all the air like incense or like evening bells. But whether night reveals or hides the activities of men it changes 3 4 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. 4 them most curiously. The difference between man in day, man in night, is acute. The arrival of darkness always meant something to the Rev. Peter Uniacke, whose cure of souls now held him far from the swarming alleys and the docks in which his early work had been done. He seldom failed to give this visitor, so strange and soft-footed, some slight greeting. Sometimes his welcome was a sigh, sometimes a prayer, some- times a clenching of the hands, a smile, a pause in his onward walk. ' Looking backward along his past he could see his tall figure in many different places, aware of the first footfalls of the night, now alone and thinking of night's allegory of man's end, now in company, when the talk insensibly changed its character, flowing into deeper, more mysterious or confidential channels. Peter Uniacke had listened to informal confessions, too, as the night fell, confessions of sin that at first surprised him, that at last could no longer -surprise him. And he had confessed himself, before the altar of the twilight, and had wondered why it is that some- times Nature seems to have the power of absolu- tion, even as God has it. Now, at the age of thirty-two, he heard the foot- steps of night on a windy evening of November, They drew near to the wall of the churchyard in which stood the sturdy and rugged building where now he ministered, on a little isle set lonely in a harsh and dangerous northern sea. He listened to them, leaning his arms along this wall, by which THE RAINBOW. 5 the grey and sleepless waves sang loudly. In the churchyard, growing gradually dim and ethereal, were laid many bodies from which the white vam- pires of the main had sucked out the souls. Here mouldered fisher lads, who had whistled over the nets, and dreamed rough dreams of winning island girls and breeding hardy children. Here reposed old limbs of salty mariners, who had for so long defied the ocean that when they knew themselves taken at the last, they turned their rugged faces down to their enemy with a stony and an ironic wonder. And here, too, among these cast-up bodies of the drowned, lay many women who had loved the prey of the sea, and kissed the cheeks turned acrid by its winds and waters. Some of them had died from heart-sickness, cursing the sea. Some had faded, withering like the pale sand roses beside the sea. Some had lived to old age by empty hearths, in the sound of the sea. Inscriptions faded upon the stones that lay above them. Texts of comfort in which the fine, salt films crept, faint verses of sweet hymns defiled by the perching sea-birds, old rhymes like homely ejaculations of very simple hearts, sank into the gathering darkness on every hand. The graves seemed murmuring to the night : " Look on me, I hold a lover;" " And I — I keep fast a maiden ;" " And within my arms crumbles a little child caught by the sea ;" " And I fold a mother, whose son is in the hideous water foliage of the depths of the sea ;" " And I embrace an old captain whom 6 TONGUES OF CONSCIKNCE. the sea loved even in his hollow age." The last inscription that stood clear to Peter Uniacke's eyes in the dying light ran thus : " Here lies the body of Jack Pringlc, cast up by the sea on December 4th, 1S96. He was boy on the schooner ' Flying Fish.' His age seventeen. ' Lead kindly Light.' " Uniacke watched this history go into the maw of the darkness, and when it was gone he found him- self environed by the cool sea noises which seemed to grow louder in the night, wondering whether the " Kindly Light " was indeed leading on Jack Pringle, no longer boy on the schooner " Flying Fish," but — what? The soul of a fisher lad, who had kissed his girl, and drunk his glass, and told many a brave and unfitting tale, and sworn many a lusty oath, following some torch along the radiant ways of Heaven ! Was that it ? Uniacke had, pos- sibly, preached now and then that so indeed it was. Or, perhaps, was the light-hearted and care- less living lad caught fast, like sunk wreckage, in the under sea of Hell, where pain is like a living fire in the moving dimness? "His age seven- teen." Could that be true and God merciful ? With such thoughts, Uniacke greeted the falling of night. In the broad daylight, full of the songs and of the moving figures of his brawny fisher folk, he had felt less poetically uncertain. He had said like men at sea, " All's well ! " More, he THE RAINBOW. ^ had been able to feel it. But now he leaned on the churchyard wall and it was cold to his arms. And the song of the sea was cold in his ears. And the night lay cold upon his heart. And his mind — in the grim, and apparently unmeaning way of minds set to sad music in a sad atmosphere — crept round and round about the gravestone of this boy ; bereft of boyhood so early, of manhood ere he won to it, and carried so swiftly into mystery beyond the learning of all philosophy. Ignorance, in jersey and dripping sea boots, set face to face with all knowledge, and that called a tragedy ! Yet now to Peter Uniacke it was tragedy, and his own situation, left in the safety of ignorance preaching to the ignorant, tragedy too, because of the night, and the winds and the sea noises, and the bareness of this Isle. Beyond the church a light shone out, and a bearded shadow towered and dwindled upon a white blind. Uniacke, a bachelor, and now al- most of necessity a recluse, entertained for the pres- ent a visitor. Remembering the substance of the shadow he opened the churchyard gate, threaded his way among the gravestones, and was quickly at the vicarage door. As he passed within, a yellow glow of lamplight and of firelight streamed into the narrow passage from a chamber on the left hand, and he heard his piano, surprised to learn that it could be taught todeliverpassionately long winding melodies from Tristan and Isolde. 8 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. Uniacke laid down his hat and stick and entered his sitting-room, still companioned by the shadowy thought-form of the boy of the schooner" Flying Fish," who seemed to tramp at his side noiselessly, in long sea-boots that streamed with the salt water. The man at the piano turned round, showing a handsome and melancholy face, and eyes that looked as if they were tired, having seen too many men and deeds and cities. " I make myself at home, you see," he said, " as I hope you will some day in my studio, when you visit me at Kensington." Uniacke smiled, and laid his hand on a bell which tinkled shrewishly. " It is a great treat for me to hear music and a voice not my own in this room," he answered. " Are you ready for tea ? " *' Thank you, I painted till it was dark. I was able to paint." " I'm glad of that." " When it was too dim to see, and too cold to feel the brush between my fingers, I came back in the twilight to my new roof tree. I am thankful to be out of the inn, yet I've stayed in worse places in Italy and Greece. But they were gilded by the climate." He sat down by the fire and stretched his limbs. Uniacke looked at him rather curiously. To the lonely clergyman it was a novel experience to play host to a man of distinction, to a stranger who THE RAINBOW. 9 had filled the world with his fame years ago. Three days before, in one of his island walks, Uniacke had come upon a handsome bearded man in a lane full of mud, between bleak walls of stone. The man stopped him courteously, asked if he were not the clergyman of the Isle, and, receiving an affirmative reply, began to make some inquiries as to lodging accommodation. " My name is Sir Graham Hamilton," he said presently. Uniacke started with surprise and looked at the stranger curiously. He had read much of the great sea painter, of his lonely wanderings, of his melancholy, of his extraordinary house in Kensing- ton, and, just recently, of his wretched condition of health, which, it was said, had driven him sud- denly from London, the papers knew not whither. " I thought you were ill," he blurted out. " I am not very well," the painter said simply, "and the inn here is exceedingly uncomfortable. But I want to stay. This is the very home of the sea. Here I find not merely the body of the sea but also its soul." " There are no good lodgings, I am afraid," said the clergyman. " Nobody ever wants to lodge here, it seems." " I do. Well, then, I must keep on at the inn." "Come to stay with me, will you?" Uniacke suddenly said. " I have a spare room. It is scarce- ly ever occupied. My friends find this island a far cry, except in the height of summer. I shall be 10 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. glad of your company and glad to make you as comfortable as I can." " You are very kind," said the painter, hesitat- ing. " But I scarcely — " " Come as my guest," said the clergyman, red- dening slightly. " Thank you, I will. And some day you must come to me in London." Now the painter was installed at the Vicarage, and blessed, each hour, his happy escape from the inn, whose walls seemed expanded by the forcible and athletic smell of stale lish. Uniacke's servant girl brought in the tea. The two men had it by the fire. Presently Hamilton said : " Nightfall is very interesting and curious here." " I find it so almost everywhere," Uniackesaid. "Yes. It can never be dull. But here, in winter at least, it is extraordinarily — " he paused for the exactly right word, in a calm way that was peculiar to him and that seemed to emphasise his fine self- possession — "pathetic, and suggestive of calamity." " I have noticed that, indeed," Uniacke an- swered, "and never, I think, more than to-night." Hamilton looked across at him in the firelight. " Where did you see it fall?" he asked. " I was by the wall of the churchyard." " It was you, then, whom I saw from the win- dow. It seemed to be a mourner looking at the graves." " I was looking at them. But nobody I care for THE RAINBOW. II deeply is buried there. The night, however, in such an island as this, makes every grave seem like the grave of a person one has known. It is the sea, I daresay." " So close on every hand. Why, this house of yours might be a ship afloat a hundred miles from land, judging by the sounds of the waves." He sighed heavily. " I hope the air will do you good," Uniacke re- marked, with a sudden relapse into conversational lameness. " Thank you. But sea air is no novelty to me. Half of my life, at least, has been spent in it. I have devoted all the best of my life, my powers, my very soul to the service of the sea. And now, when I am growing old, I sometimes think that I shall hate it before I go." " Hate it ! " " Yes." " Well — but it has brought you fame." " H'm. And wealth and a thousand acquaint- ances. Yes, that's quite true. Sometimes, never- theless, we learn in the end to hate those who have brought us most. Perhaps, because they have educated us in the understanding of disap- pointment. You love the sea?" " Yes." " You wouldn't be here otherwise." " I did not come here exactly because of that," Uniacke said slowly. " No," said the painter. 12 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Rather to forget something." " I doubt if this is a place which could teach one to forget. I find it quite otherwise." The two men looked at each other, the elderly painter on his height of fame, the young clergyman in his depth of obscurity, and each felt that there was a likeness between them. " I came here to forget a woman," Uniackesaid at last, moved by a strange impulse to speak out. "Yes, I see. It is the old idea of sorrowful men, a hermitage. I have often wondered in Lon- don, in Rome, in Athens, whether a hermitage is of any avail. Men went out into the desert in old days. Legend has it that holiness alone guided them there. All their disciples believed that. Reading about them I have often doubted it." He smiled rather coldly and cynically. " You don't know what a hermitage can mean. You have only been here three days. Besides, you come in search of — " " Search ! " Hamilton interrupted, with an un- usual quickness. " Of work and health." " Oh, yes. Do you care, since we are on inti- mate topics, to tell me any more about yourself and — and — " " That woman ? " " Yes." " I loved her. She disappeared out of my life. I don't know at all where she is, with whom, how THE RAINBOW. 13 she lives, anything at all about her. I don't sup- pose I ever shall. She may be dead." "You don't think you would know it if she were r " How could I ? Who would tell me? " " Not something within you ? Not yourself ? " Uniacke was surprised by this remark. It did not fit in precisely with his conception of his guest's mind, so far as he had formed one. " Such an idea never occurred to me," he said. " Do you believe that such an absolute certainty could be put into a man's mind then, without a reason, a scrap of evidence, a hint to eye, or " I don't know. I — I want to know." " That someone's dead ? " " That someone is not dead. How loud the sea is getting ! " " It always sounds much like that at night in winter." " Does the winter not seem very long to you up here quite alone ?" "Oh, yes." "Anrl monotonous?" "Often. But wc have times of keen excite- ment, of violent, even of exhausting activity. I have had to rush from the pulpit up to my shoul- ders in the sea." "A wreck?" "Yes, there have been many. There was the schooner ' Flying Fish.' She broke up when I 14 TONGU?:S OF CONSCIENCE. was holding service one December morning. Only the skipper was saved alive. And he — " " What of him ? " " He went what the people here call ' silly ' from the shock — not directly. It came on him gradu- ally. He would not leave the island. He would never trust the sea again." " So he's here still ? " "Yes." Just then the two plaintive bells of the church began to ring on the wind. " There he is ! " Uniacke said. "Where?" " He's our bell-ringer. It's the only thing he takes any pleasure in, ringing the bells for church and at nightfall. I let him do it, poor fellow. He's got a queer idea into his brain that his drowned mates will hear the bells some night and make the land, guided by the sound. When the darkness falls he always rings for a full hour." " How strange ! How terrible ! " They sat by the fire listening to the pathetic chime of the two bells, whose voices were almost hidden in the loud sea voices that enveloped the little island with their cries. Presently the painter shifted in his armchair. " There is something — I — there is something very eerie to me in the sound of those two bells now I know why they are ringing, and who is ringing them," he said, with a slight irritation. " Don't you find they affect your nerves at all ? " THE RAINBOW. 15 " No. I like to hear them." They tell me that one poor creature is happy. The Skipper — all we Island folk call him so — believes he will bring his mates safe to shore some day. And each time he sets those bells going he thinks the happy hour is perhaps close at hand." " Poor fellow ! And he is summoning the drowned to come up out of their world." They sat silent again for three or four minutes. Then Sir Graham said : " Uniacke, you have finished your tea? " " Yes, Sir Graham." " Has your day's work tired you very much ? " "No." " Then I wish you would do me a favour. I want to see your skipper. Can I get into the church ? " " Yes. He always leaves the door wide open while he rings the bells — so that his mates can come in from the sea to him." " Poor fellow ! Poor fellow ! He got up. " I .shall go across to the church now," he said. " I'll take you there. Wrap yourself up. It's cold to-night." " It is very cold." The painter pulled a great cloak over his shoul- ders and a cap down over his glittering and melan- choly eyes, that had watched for many years all the subtle changes of thccolour and the movement of the sea. Uniacke opened the Vicarage door l6 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. and they stood in the wind. The night was not dark, but one of those wan and light grey nights that seem painted with the very hues of wind and of cloud. It was like a fluid round about them, and surely flowed hither and thither, now swaying quietly, now spreading away, shredded out as water that is split by hard substances. It was full of noise as is a whirlpool, in which melancholy cries resound forever. Above this noise the notes of the two bells alternated like the voices of stars in a stormy sky. " Even living men at sea to-night would not hear those bells," said the painter. " And the drowned — how can they hear ? " " Who knows ? " said the clergyman. " Perhaps they are allowed to hear them and to offer up prayers for their faithful comrade. I think faith- fulness is heaven in a human heart." They moved across the churchyard, and all the graves of the drowned flickered round their feet in the gusty greyness. They passed Jack Pringle's grave, where the " Kindly Light " lay in the stone. When they gained the church Sir Graham saw that the door was set wide open to the night. He stood still. " And so those dead mariners are to pass in here," he said, " under this porch. Uniacke, can- not you imagine the scene if they came ? Those dead men, with their white, sea-washed faces, their dripping bodies, their wild eyes that had looked on the depths of the sea, their hanging hands round which the fishes had nibbled with their oval lips ! THE RAINBOW. I'] The procession of the drowned to their faithful captain. If I stood here long enough alone my imagination would hear them, would hear their ghostly boat grate its keel upon the Island beach, and the tramp of their sodden sea-boots. How many were there?" " I never heard. Only one body was cast up, and that is buried by the churchyard wall. Shall we go in ? " " Yes." They entered through the black doorway. The church was very dim and smelt musty and venerable, rather as the cover of an old and worn Bible smells. And now that they were within it, the bells sounded different, less magical, more full of human music ; their ofifice — the sum- moning of men to pray, the benediction of the marriage tie, the speeding of the departed on the eternal road — became apparent and evoked accus- tomed thoughts. " Where is the belfry? " said Sir Graham in a whisper. " This way. We have to pass the vestry and go up a stone staircase." Uniaclce moved forward along the uncarpcted pavement, on which his feet, in their big nailed boots, rang harshly. The painter followed him through a low and narrow door which gave on to a tiny stairway, each step of which was dented and crumbled at the uneven edge. They ascended in the dark, not without frequent stumbling, and l8 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. heard always the bells which seemed sinking down to them from the sky. Presently a turn brought them to a pale ray of light which lay like a thread upon the stone. At the same moment the bells ceased to sound. Both Uniacke and Sir Graham paused simultaneously, the vision of the light and the cessation of the chimes holding them still for an instant almost without their knowledge. There was a silence that was nearly complete, for the tower walls were thick, and kept the sea voices and the blowing winds at bay. And while they waited, involuntarily holding their breath, a hoarse and uneven voice cried out, anxiously and hopefully from above : " Are ye comin*, mates? Areyecomin'? Heave along, boys! D'ye hear me! I'm your skipper. Heave along ! " Uniacke half turned to the painter, whose face was very white. " What are ye waitin' for ? " continued the voice. " I heard ye comin*. I heard ye at the door. Come up, I say, and welcome to ye ! Welcome to ye all, mates. Ye've been a damned long time comin'." " He thinks — he thinks — " whispered Uniacke to his companion. " I know. It's cruel. What shall we—" " Ye've made the land just in time, mates," con- tinued the voice. " For there's a great gale comin' up to-night. The ' Flying Fish ' couldn't live in her under bare poles, I reckon. I'm glad ye've got ashore. Where are ye, I say ? Where are ye ? " THE RAINBOW. IQ The sound of the voice approached the two men on the stairs. The thread of Hght broadened and danced on the stone. High up there appeared the great figure of a man in a seaman's jersey with a peaked cap on his head. In his broad rough hands he held a candle, which he shaded with his fingers while he peered anxiously and expectantly down the dark and narrow funnel of the stairway. " Hulloh ! " he cried. " Hulloh, there ! " The hail rang down in the night. Sir Graham was trembling. " I see ye," cried the Skipper. " It's Jack, eh ? Isn't it little Jack, boys ? Young monkey! Up to his damned larks that I've reckoned up these many nights while I've stood ringin* here ! I'll strike the life out of ye. Jack, I will. Wait till I come down, lads, wait till I come down ! " And he sprang forward, his huge limbs shaking with glad excitement. His feet missed a stair in his hurry of approach, and throwing abroad his hands to the stone walls of the belfry in an effort to save himself, he let fall the candlestick. It dropped on the stones with a dull clatter as the darkness closed in. The Skipper, who had re- covered his footing, swore a round oath. Sir Gra- ham and Uniacke heard his heavy tread descend- ing until his breath was warm on their faces. " Where are ye, lads ? " he cried out. " Where arc ye ? Can't ye throw a word of welcome to a mate ? " He laid his hands heavily on Uniacke's shoul- 20 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. ders in the dark, and felt him over with an uncer- tain touch. •' Is it Jack ? " he said. " Why, what 'a ye got on, lad ? Is it Jack, I say ? " " Skipper," Uniacke said, in a low voice, "it's not Jack." As he spoke he struck a match. The tiny light flared up unevenly right in the Skipper's eyes. They were sea-blue and blazing with eager- ness and with the pitiful glare of madness. Over the clergyman's shoulder the pale painter with his keen eyes swept the bearded face of the Skipper with a rapid and greedy glance. By the time the match dwindled and the blackness closed in again the face was a possession of his memory. He saw it even though it was actually invisible ; the rugged features dignified by madness, the clear, blue eyes full of a saddening fire, and — ere the match faded — of a horror of disappointment, the curling brown beard that flowed down on the blue jersey. But he had no time to dwell on it now, for a dreary noise rose up in that confined space. It was the great seaman whimpering pitifully in the dark. " It isn't Jack," he blubbered, and they could hear his huge limbs shaking. " Ye haven't come back, mates, ye haven't come back. And the great gale comin' up, the great gale comin'." As the words died away, a gust of wind caught the belfry and tore at its rough-hewn and weather- worn stones. " Let us go down," said Sir Graham, turning to feel his way into the church. THE RAINBOW. 21 "Come, Skipper," said Uniacke, "come with us." He laid hold of the seaman's mighty arm and led him down the stairs. He said nothing. On a sudden all the life and hope had died out of him. When they gained the grey churchyard and could see his face again in the pale and stormy light, it looked shrunken, peaked and childish, and the curious elevation of madness was replaced by the uncertainty and weakness of idiocy. He shifted on his feet and would not meet the pitiful glances of the two men. Uniacke touched him on the shoulder. " Come to the Vicarage, Skipper," he said kind- ly. " Come in and warm yourself by the fire and have some food. It's so cold to-night." But the seaman suddenly broke away and stumbled off among the gravestones, whimpering foolishly like a dog that cannot fight grief with thought. " The sea — ah, the hatefulness of the .sea ! " said the painter, " will it ever have to answer for its crimes before God ? " Uniacke and his guest sat at supper that night, and all the windows of the Vicarage rattled in the storm. The great guns of the wind roared in the sky. The great guns of the surf roared on the islancJ beaches. And the two men were very silent at first. I-iir. Graham ate little. He had no appetite, for he seemed to hear continually in the noises of the elements the shrill whimpering 22 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. of a dog. Surely it came from the graves outside, from those stone breasts of the dead. " I can't cat to-night," he said presently. " Do you think that man is lingering about the church still?" They got up from the table and went over to the fire. The painter lit a pipe. " I hope not," Uniacke said, " but it is useless attempting to govern him. He is harmless, but he must be left alone. He cannot endure being watched or followed." " I wish we hadn't gone to the church. I can't get over our cruelty." " It was inadvertent." "Cruelty so often is, Uniacke. But we ought to look forward and foresee consequences. I feel that most especially to-night. Remorse is the wage of inadvertence." As he spoke, he looked gloomily into the fire. The young clergyman felt oddly certain that the great man had more to say, and did not interrupt his pause, but filled it in for himself by priestly considerations on the useless illumination worldly success seems generally to afford to the searchers after happiness. His reverie was broken by the painter's voice saying : " I myself, Uniacke, am curiously persecuted by remorse. It is that, or partly that, which has affected my health so gravely, and led me away Irom my home, my usual habits of life, at this sea- son of the year. " THE RAINBOW. 23 "Yes? "the clergyman said, with sympathy, without curiosity. " And yet, I suppose it would seem a little mat- ter to most people. The odd thing is that it assumes such paramount importance in my life ; for I'm not what is called specially conscientious, except as regards my art, of course, and the ordi- nary honourable dealings onedecent man naturally has with his fellows." " Your conscience, in fact, limits its operations a good deal, I know." " Precisely. But if it will not bore you, I will tell you something of all this." " Thank you. Sir Graham." " How the wind shakes those curtains ! " " Nothing will keep it out of these island houses. You aren't cold ? " " Not in body, not a bit. Well, Uniacke, do you ever go to see pictures ? " " Whenever I can. That's not often now. But when my work lay in cities I had chances which are denied me at present." " Did you ever see a picture of mine called ' A sea urchin ' ? " "Yes, indeed — that boy looking at the waves rolling in ! — who could forget him ? The soul of the sea was in his eyes. He was a human being, and yet he seemed made of all sea things," " He had never set eyes upon the sea." " What ? " cried Uniacke, in sheer astonishment, " the boy who sat for that picture? Impossible! 24 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. When I saw it I felt that you had by some happy chance lit on the one human being who contained the very soul of an element. No merman could so belong of right to the sea as that boy." " Who was a London model, and had never heard the roar of waves or seen the surf break in the wind." " Genius ! " the clergyman exclaimed. " Uniacke," continued the painter, "I got;^i,ooo for that picture. And I call the money now blood- money to myself." " Blood-money ! But why ? " " I had made studies of the sea for that picture. I had indicated the wind by the shapes of the flying foam journeying inland to sink on the fields. I wanted my figure, I could not find him. Yet I was in a sea village among sea folk. The children's legs there were browned with the salt water. They had clear blue eyes, sea eyes ; that curious light hair which one associates with the sea and with spun glass sometimes. But they wouldn't do for my purpose. They were un- imaginative. As a fact, Uniacke, they knew the sea too well. That was it. They were familiar with it, as the little London clerk is familiar with Fleet Street orChancery Lane. The twin brother of a prophet thinks prophecy boring table-talk — not revelation. These children chucked the sea under the chin. That didn't do for me, and for what I wanted." " I understand." THE RAINBOW. 2$ " After a great deal of search and worry I came to this conclusion: that my purpose required of me this — the discovery of an exceptionally imagi- native child, who was unfamiliar with the sea, but into whose heart and brain I could pour its nar- rated wonders, whose soul I could fill to the brim with its awe, its majesty, its murmuring sweet- ness, its wild romance and its inexhaustible cruelty. I must make this child see and know, but through the medium of words alone, of mental vision. If I took it to the sea the imagination would be stricken down — well, by such banalities as pad- dling and catching shrimps." Uniacke smiled. " But on the contrary, in London, far from the sea, I could give to the child only those impres- sions of the sea that would wake in it the sort of sea-soul I desired to print. I should have it in my power. And a cliild's soul cannot be gov- erned by a mere painter, when a conflict arises between him and sand-castles and crabs and prawns and the various magicians of the kind that obsess the child so easily and so entirely." "Yes, children are conquered by trifles." " And that, too, is part of their beauty. Under this strong impression, I packed up my traps and came back to London with the studies for my pic- ture. I placed them on an easel in my studio and began my search for the child. At first I sought this child among my cultivated friends ; married artists, musicians, highly-strung people, whose lives 26 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. were passed in an atmosphere vibrating with quick impressions. But I went unrewarded. The chil- dren of such people arc apt to be peevishly recept- ive, but their moods are often cloudy, and I wished for a pellucid nature. After a time I went lower down, and I began to look about the .streets for my wonder-child." " What a curious quest ! " said Uniacke, leaning forward till the firelight danced on his thin face and was reflected in his thoughtful hazel eyes. "Yes, it was," rejoined the painter, who was gradually sinking into his own narrative, dropping down in the soft realm of old thoughts revived. " It was curious, and to me, highly romantic. I sometimes thought it was like seeking for a hid- den sea far inland, watching for the white face of a little wave in the hard and iron city thorough- fares. Sometimes I stopped near Victoria Station, put my foot upon a block, and had a boot half ruined while I watched the bootblack. Some- times I bought a variety of evening papers from a ragged gnome who might be a wonder-child, and made mistakes over the payment to prolong the interview. I leaned against gaunt houses and saw the dancing waifs yield their poor lives to ugly, hag-ridden music. I endured the wailing hymns of voiceless women on winter days in order that I might observe the wretched ragamufifins squalling round their knees the praise of a Creator who had denied them everything. Ah ! forgive me!" THE RAINBOW. 27 " For some purpose that we shall all know at last," said Uniacke gently. " Possibly. In all these prospectings I was un- lucky. By chance at length I found the wonder- child when I was not seeking him." " How was that ? " " One day the weather, which had been cold, changed and became warm, springlike, and alive with showers. When it was not raining, you felt the rain was watching you from hidden places. You smelt it in the air. The atmosphere was very sweet and depressing, and London was full of faint undercurrents of romance, and of soft and rapidly changing effects of light. I went out in the after- noon and spent an hour in the National Gallcr)\ When I came out my mind was so full of painted canvas that I never looked at the unpainted sky, or at the vaporous Square through which streamed the World, opening and shutting umbrellas. I believe I was thinking over some new work of my own, arranged for the future. Now the rain ceased, I went down the steps and walked across the road into the stone garden of the lions. Round their feet played pigmy children. I heard their cries mingling with the splash of tlie fountains, but I took no notice of them. Sitting down on a bench, I went on planning a picture — the legen- dary masterpiece, no doubt. I was certainly very deep in thought and lost to my surroundings, for when a hand suddenly grasped my knee I was startled. I looked up. In front of mc stood a 28 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. very dirty and atrociously-dressed boy, whose head was decorated with a tall, muddy paper cap, funnel-shaped and bending feebly in the breeze. This boy was clutching my knee tightly with one filthy hand, while with the other he pointed to the sky on which his eyes were in- tently fixed. " ' Look at that there rainbow ! ' he said. * Look at that there rainbow 1 ' " I glanced up and saw that the clouds had par- tially broken and that London lay under a huge and perfect coloured arch. " ' I never did ! ' continued the boy. " He stared at me for an instant with the solemn expression of one who reveals to the ignorant a miracle. Then he took his hand from my knee, hurried to an adjoining seat, woke up a sleeping and partially intoxicated tramp, requested him to observe closely the superb proceedings of Nature, took no heed of his flooding oaths, and passed on in the waving paper cap from seat to seat, rousing from their dreams, and sorrows, and newspapers, the astounded habitues of the Square, that they might share his awe and happiness. Before he had finished teaching a heavy policeman the les- sons of the sky, I knew that I had found my wonder-child." " You followed him ? " " I captured him in the midst of a group of emaciated little girls in the shadow of Lord Nelson. All the childish crowd was looking up- THE RAINBOW. 29 ward, and every eye was completely round over each widely-opened mouth, while paper-cap re- peated his formula. Poor children, looking at the sky ! Ah, Uniacke, what do you think of that for a sermon ? " The young clergyman cleared his throat. The red curtains by the narrow window blew outward towards the fire, and sank in again, alternately forcible and weak. The painter looked towards the window and a sadness deepened in his eyes. " Where is my wonder-child now ? " he said. "You have lost sight of him ? " "Yes — though the blood-money lies at my bank and the paper-cap is in my studio." " Is he not in London ? " "No, no; I learnt his history, the history of a gamin of fifteen or thereabouts. It was much the same as a history of a London pavement, with this exception, that the gamin had a mother to whom he presented me without undue formality. The impression made upon me by that lady at first was unfavourable, since she was slatternly, drank, and was apparently given to cuffing and lacking the boy — her only child. I considered her an abandoned and unfeeling female. She dwelt in Drury Lane and sold somelhing that most of us have never heard of." " I can see her," 30 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " I wish to heaven I could not," the painter said, with a sudden outburst of fire. He was silent a moment and then continued: " I had no difificulty in persuading her to let me paint the boy. I don't think she rightly under- stood what I meant, except that for some foolish reason I was prepared to give her money, ap- parently in return for nothing, that I meant to have little Jack decently dressed — " " Jack — was that his name?" "Yes, and that he was to spend certain hours — snatched from Trafalgar Square — in my house in Kensington." " I see." " The boy turned up in the jersey and cap and boots I had bought him. And then his education began. On first entering my studio he was numb with surprise, a moving and speechless stare — more overcome than by rainbows." " Poor little chap ! " " I let him stray about examining everything. He did so completely oblivious of my presence, and of the fact that all the things in the place were mine. By his demeanour one might have supposed him engaged in an examination of works of God never before brought to his notice. While I smoked and pretended to read, he crept about like a little animal, penetrating into corners where statues stood, smelling — so it seemed — the angles of painted walls, touching the petals of flowers, smoothing rugs the wrong — but soon the THE rL\INBOW. 3 1 right — way. I can hear his new boots creaking still. He was a very muscular little chap, but small. When he was able to speak I questioned him. He had never seen the sea. He had never been out of London for a day or slept away from Drury Lane for a night. The flask was empty ; now to pour the wine into it. I told him to sit down by the open hearth. He obeyed, staring hard at me before he sat, hard at the chair when he was sitting. I interested him much less than old bro- cade and lighted wax candles, which inspired him with a solemnity that widened his eyes and nar- rowed his features. He looked on a new, and never-before-imagined, life. And he was grave to excess, though, later, I found plenty of the Lon- don child's impish nature in him." "That impish quality hides in nearly all street- bred children," said Uniacke. " I have seen larki- ness dawn in them for an instant at some recollec- tion, even when they were dying." " I daresay. I can believe it. But Jack was sol- emn at first, his brow thunderous with thought, as he examined his chair and the rug under his new boots. Then in the firelight I began my task. I wrought to bring about in this Trafalgar Square soul a sea change. For a time I did not attempt to paint. I merely let the boy come to mc day by day, get accustomed to the studio, and listen to my talk — which was often of the sea, I very .soon found that my intention had led mc to the right mind for my purpose ; for the starved gaze that 32 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. had been fixed on the rainbow could turn itself, with equal wonder, similar rapture, on other things. And the mind also could be brought to sec what was not visible to the eye. My studio — you must see it some day — is full of recollections of sea days and nights. Jack explored them. I eliminated from the studio important objects of art which might lead him to think of towns, of villages in- land, of wonderful foreign interiors. I fixed all his nature upon thismarvellouselement which had never murmured round his life before. I played to him music in which the sea could be heard. I de- scribed to him the onward gallop of the white horses, racing over impenetrable depths. I painted for him in words the varying colours of waves in different seas, the black purple of tropical waters, the bottle-green turmoil of a Cornish sea on a choppy day, the brown channel waves near shore, the jewelled smoothness of the Mediterranean in early morning sunshine, its silver in moonrise, melting into white and black. I told him of the crowd of voices that cry in the sea, expressing all the emotions which are uttered on land by the voices of men ; of the childish voices that may be heard on August evenings in fiords, of the solemn sobbing that fills an autumn night on the North- umbrian coast, of the passionate roaring in mid Atlantic, of the peculiar and frigid whisper of waters struggling to break from the tightening embrace of ice in extreme northern latitudes, of the level moan of tlic lagoons. I explained to THE RAINBOW. 33 him how this element is so much alive that it is never for a moment absolutely still, even when it seems so to the eyes, as it sleeps within the charmed embrace of a coral reef, extended, like an arm, by some Pacific island far away. I drew for him the thoughts of the sea, its intentions, its desires, its regrets, its griefs, its savage and its quiet joys. I narrated the lives in it, of fishes, of mon- sters ; its wonders of half human lives, too, the mer- maids who lie on the rocks at night to see the twinkling lights on land, the mermen who swim round them, wondering what those lights may mean. I made him walk with me on the land under the sea, where go the divers through the wrecks, and ascend the rocky mountains and pen- etrate the weedy valleys, and glide across the slip- pery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniackc, I drowned little Jack — I drowned him in the sea, I drowned him in the sea." The painter spoke the last words in a voice of profound, even of morbid, melancholy, as if he were indeed confessing a secret crime, driven by some wayward and irresistible impulse. Uniacke looked at him in growing surprise. " And why not ? " Uniackc asked. But the painter did not reply. He continued: " I made him see the rainbows of the sea and he looked no more at the rainbows of tlie sky. For at length I h.id his imagination fast in my net as a salmon that fishermen entice within the stakes. His town mind seemed to fade under my foster- 34 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. ing, and, Uniacke, ' nothing of him that did fade but did suffer a sea change into something rich and strange. Tiie painter got up from his chair and walked over to the blowing wind that crept in at the window fastenings. The red curtains flew out towards him. He pushed them back with his hands. " * Into something rich and strange,' " he re- peated, as if to himself. " And strange." " Ah, but that was said, surely, of one who was actually drowned in the sea," said the clergyman. " It might be suitably placed on many of the mem- orial slabs in the church yonder," he continued, waving his hand towards the casement that looked on the churchyard. " But your sea-urchin — " " Oh, I speak only of the fading of the town nature into the sea nature," rejoined the painter quickly, " only of that. The soil of the childish mind was enriched ; his eyes shone as if touched with a glow from the sun, swaying in the blue sea. The Trafalgar Square gamin disappeared, and at last my sea-urchin stood before me. As the little Raleigh may have looked he looked at me, and I saw in the face then rather the wonder of the sea itself than the crude dancing desire of the little adventurer who would sail it. And it was the wonder of the sea embodied in a child that I de- sired to paint, not the wakening of a human spirit of gay seamanship and love of peril. That's for a Christmas number — but that came at last." THE RAINBOW. 35 He stopped abruptly and faced the clergyman. " Why does the second best succeed so often and so closely the best, I wonder?" he said. " It is very often so in the art life of a man, even of a great man. And it is so sometimes — perhaps you know this better than I — in the soul life of a na- ture. Must we always sink again after we have soared? Must we do that? Is it an immutable law?" " Perhaps for a time. Surely, surely, not for- ever," said Uniacke, His guest's conversation and personality began to stir him more and more powerfully. It seemed so new and vital an experience to be helped to think, to have suggestion poured into him now, after his many lonely island evenings. " Ah, well, who can say ? " said the painter. " I had the best for a time — long enough for my im- mediate purpose ; for now I painted, and I felt that I was enabled by little Jack to do fine work. It seems he told his drinking mother in Druiy Lane, in his lingo, of the wonders of the sea. This I learnt later. And, in his occasional, and now somewhat fleeting visits to Trafalgar Square, he explained to the emaciated little girls, in the shadow of Nelson, the fact that there was to be found, and seen, somewhere, water of a \'ery dif- ferent kind from that splashing and clnirning in the dingy basins guarded by the lions. Mean- while I painted little Jack, all the time keeping alive in his nature the sea change, which was, in 36 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. the end, to bring into my pocket ;^ 1,000 in hard cash." Sir Graham said this with an indescribable cold irony and bitterness. " I can hear that money jingling in the wind, upon my soul, Uniacke," he added, frowning heavily. The young clergyman was touched by a passing thought of the painter's notorious ill-health. " Before the picture was finished — quite com- pleted — the impish child began to waken in the wonder-child, and I had to comply with the demands of this new-born youngster. Our con- versation — little Jack's and mine — drifted from the sea itself to the men and ships that travel it, to the deeds of men that are done upon it ; raidings of Moorish pirates, expeditions to the Spanish Main in old days, to the whaling grounds in new, and so forth. When we got to this sort of thing my work was nearly done and could not be spoiled. So I let myself go, and talked several boys' books in those afternoons. I was satisfied, damnably satisfied — your pardon, Uniacke — with my work, and I was heedless of all else. That is the cursed, selfish instinct of the artist ; that is the inadver- tence of which we spoke formerly. You remem- ber ? " Uniacke nodded. " My picture was before me and a child's bud- ding soul, and I thought of nothing at all but my picture. That's sin, if you like. Little Jack, in THE RAINBOW. 37 his jersey and squeaky boots, with his pale face and great eyes, was my prey on canvas and my ;{^ 1,000. I hugged myself and told him wild stories of bold men on the sea. Uniacke, do you believe in a personal devil?" " I do," replied the young clergyman, simply. " Well, if there is one, depend upon it he some- times requires an introduction before he can make a soul's acquaintance. I effected the introduction between him and my wonder-child when I sat in the twilight and told Jack those tales of the sea. The devil came to the boy in my studio, and I opened the door and bowed him in. And once he knew the boy, he stayed with him, Uniacke, and whispered in his ear — ' Desert your duty. Life calls you. The sea calls you. Go to it. Desert your duty ! ' Even a dirty little London boy can have a duty and be aware of it, I sup- pose. Eh ? " " Yes. I think that. But—" " Wait a moment. I've nearly finished my tale, though I'm living the sequel to it at this moment. One day I completed my picture ; the last touch was given. I stood back, I looked at my canvas. I felt I had done well; my sea urchin was actually what I had imagined. I had succeeded in that curious effort — to accomplish which many of us give our lives — in the effort to project perfectly my thought, to give the exactly right form to my imagination. I exulted. Yes, I had one grand overwhelmin'man spoke with a certain hesitation, a sudden diffidence. He looked at the painter, and an abrupt awkwardness, almost a shamefaced- ness, crept into his manner, even showed itself in his attitude. The painter did not seem to be aware of it. He was still engrossed in his own sorrow, his own morbid reflections. He looked out again in the night. " Poor faithful watch-dog," he murmured. Then he turned away from the window. " The Skipper docs not wait for that boy," he said. "He knows at least that he can never come to him from the sea." "Strangely — no. Indeed, he always looks for the boy first." "First, do you say? Was it so to-night?" Again Uniacke hesitated. He was on the verge of telling a lie, but conscience intervened. "Yes," he said. "Didn't he speak of little Jack?" said Sir Gra- ham slowly, and with a sudden nervous spasm of the face. " Yes, Sir Graham." "That's curious." "Why?" "The same name — my wonder-child's name." "And the name of a thousand children." " Of course, of course. And — and, Uniacke, the other name, the other name upon that tomb?" "What other name?" 48 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Why — why the surname. What is that ? " The painter was standing close to the clergyman and staring straight into his eyes. For a moment Uniacke made no reply. Then he answered slowl}' : " There is no other name." '•Why not?" " Why — the — the Skipper would only have Jack put, that was all. Jack — he was the boy on the schooner ' Flying Fish ' — ' Lead, kindly light.' " "Ah!" The exclamation came in a sigh, that might have been amurmur of relief or of disappointment. Then there was a silence. The painter went over af^ain to the fire. Uniacke stood still where he was and looked on the ground. He had told a de- liberate lie. It seemed to grow as he thought of it. And why had he told it? A sudden impulse, a sudden fear, had led him into sin. A strange fancy had whispered to him, "What if that boy buried by the wall yonder should be the wonder-child, the ragamuffin who looked at the rainbow, the sea urchin, the spectre haunting your guest?" How unlikely that was ! And yet ships go far, and the human fate is often mysteriously sad. It might be that the wonder-child was born to be wrecked, to be cast up, streaming with sea-water on the strand of this lonely isle. It might be that the eyes which worshipped the rainbow were sightless be- neath that stone yonder; that the hands which pointed to it were folded in the eternal sleep. THE RAINBOW. 49 And, if so, was not the lie justified? If so, could Peter Uniacke regret it? He saw this man who had come into his lonely life treading along the verge of a world that made him tremble in horror. Dared he lead him across the verge into the dark- ness? And yet his lie troubled him, and he saw a stain spreading slowly out upon the whiteness of his ardent soul. The painter turned from the fire. His face was haggard and weary. " I will go to bed," he said. " I must try to get some sleep even in the storm." He held out his thin hand. Uniacke took it. " Good-night," he said. " Good-night. I am sorry I have troubled you with my foolish history.^' "It interested me deeply. By the way — what did you say your wonder-child's name was, his full name ? " " Jack— Jack Pringle. What is it ? " " Nothing. That gust of wind startled me. Good-night." The painter looked at Uniacke narrowly, then left the room. The clergyman went over to the fire, leaned his arms on the mantelpiece, and rested his head on them. Presently he lifted his head, went softly to the door, opened it and listened. He heard the tread of his guest above stairs, moving to and fro about the spare room. He waited. After a while there was silence in the house. Only the wind and the 50 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. sea roared outside. Then Uniacke went into the kitchen, pulled out a drawer in a dresser that stood by the window, and took from it a chisel and a hammer. He carried them into the passage, fur- tively put on his coat and hat, and, with all the precaution of a thief, unlocked the front door and stole out into the storm. PART II. THE GRAVE. PART II. THE GRAVE. In the morning the storm was still fierce. Clouds streamed across a sky that bent lower and lower towards the aspiring sea blanched with foam. There was little light, and the Rectory parlor looked grim and wintry when Sir Graham and Uniacke met there at breakfast time. The clergy- man was pale and seemed strangely discomforted and at first unable to be natural. He greeted his guest with a forcible, and yet flickering, note of cheerfulness, abrupt and unsympathetic, as he sat down behind the steaming coffee-pot. The painter scarcely responded. He was still attentive to the storm. He ate very little. "You slept?" asked Uniacke presently. " Only for a short time towards dawn. I sat at my window most of the night." " At your window? " Uniacke said uneasily. "Yes. Somebody — a man — I suppose it must have been the Skipper — came out from the shadow of this house soon after I went to my bedroom, and stole to that grave by the churchyard wall." 53 54 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Really," said Uniacke. " Did he stay there ? " " For some time, bending down. It seemed to me as if he were at some work, some task — or per- haps he was only praying in his mad way, poor fellow ! " " Praying — yes, yes, very likely. A little more coffee ? " " No, thank you. The odd thing was that after a while he ceased and returned to this house. One might have thought it was his home." "You could not see if it was the Skipper?" " No, the figure was too vague in the faint stormy light. But it must have been he. Who else would be out at such a time in such a night ? " " He never heeds the weather," said Uniacke. His pale face had suddenly flushed scarlet, and he felt a pricking as of needles in his body. It seemed to him that he was transparent like a thing of glass, and that his guest must be able to see not merely the trouble of his soul, but the fact that was its cause. And the painter did now begin to observe his host's unusual agitation. "And you — your night?" he asked. " I did not sleep at all," said Uniacke quickly, telling the truth with a childish sense of relief, " I was excited." " Excited ! " said Sir Graham. " The unwonted exercise of conversation. You forget that I am generally a lonely man," said the clergyman, once more drawn into the sin of sub- THE GRAVE. 55 terfuge, and scorching in it almost like a soul in hell. He got up from the breakfast-table, feeling strangely unhappy and weighed down with guilt. Yet, as he looked at the painter's worn face and hollow eyes, his heart murmured, perhaps deceit- fully, " You are justified." " I must go out. I must go into the village," he said. " In this weather? " " We islanders think nothing of it. We pursue our business though the heavens crack and the sea touches the clouds." He went out hurriedly and with the air of a man painfully abashed. Once beyond the churchyard, in the plough-land of the island road, he con- tinued his tormented reverie of the night. Never before had he done evil that good might come. He had never supposed that good could come out of evil, but had deemed the supposition a monstrous and a deadly fallacy, to be com- bated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was chiefly conscious of a mental weak- ness in himself wliich had caused him to act as he had acted. He saw himself as one of those puny creatures whose so-called kind hearts lead them into follies, into crimes. Like many young men of virtuous life and ascetic habit, Uniackc was disposed to worship that which was uncom- promising in human nature, the slight hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint. 56 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. But he was emotional. He was full of pity. He desired to bandage the wounded world, to hush its cries of pain, to rock it to rest, even though he believed that suffering was its desert. And to the individual, more especially, he was very tender. Like a foolish woman, perhaps, he told himself to-day as he walked on heavily in the wild wind, debating his deed of the night and its conse- quences. He had erased the name of Pringle from the stone that covered little Jack, the wonder-child. And he felt like a criminal. Yet he dreaded the sequel of a discovery by the painter, that his fears were well founded, that his sea urchin had indeed been claimed by the hunger of the sea. Uniacke had worked in cities and had seen much of sad men. He had learned to read them truly for the most part, and to foresee clearly in many instances the end of their journeys. And his ministrations had taught him to comprehend the tragedies that arise from the terrible intimacy which exists be- tween the body and its occupant the soul. He could not tell, as a doctor might have been able to tell, whether the morbid condition into which Sir Graham had come was primarily due to ill- health of the mind acting upon the body or the reverse. But he felt nearly sure that if the painter's fears were proved suddenly to him to be well founded, he might not improbably fall into a con- dition of permanent melancholia, or even of active despair. Despite his apparent hopelessness, he THE GRAVE. 57 was at present sustained by ignorance of the fate of little Jack. He did not actually know him dead. The knowledge would knock a prop from under him. He would fall into some dreadful abyss. The young clergyman's deceit alone held him back. But it might be discovered at any moment. One of the islanders might chance to observe the defacement of the tomb. A gossip- ing woman might mention to Sir Graham the name that had vanished. Yet these chances were remote. A drowned stranger boy is naught to such folk as these, bred up in familiarity with vio- lent death. Long ago they had ceased to talk of the schooner " Flying Fish," despite the presence of the mad Skipper, despite the sound of church bells in the night. Fresh joys, or tragedies, absorbed them. For even the island world has its record. Time plants his footsteps upon the loneliest land. And the dwellers note his onward tour. Uniacke reckoned the chances for and against the discovery of his furtive act of mercy and its revelation to his guest. The latter outnumbered the former. Yet Uniacke walked ner\'ously as one on the verge of disaster. In the Island cot- tages that morning he bore himself uneasily in the presence of his simple-minded parishioners. Sit- ting beside an invalid, whose transparent mind was dimly, but with ardent faith, set on Heaven, he f( It hideously unfitted to point the way to that place into which no liar shall ever Lonie. He was 58 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. troubled, and prayed at random for the dying — thinking of the dead. At the same time he felt himself the chief of sinners and knew that there was a devil in him capable of repeating his noc- turnal act. Never before had he gathered so vital a knowledge of the complexity of man. He saw the threads of him all ravelled up. When he finished his prayers at the bedside, the invalid watched him with the critical amazement of ill- ness. He went out trembling and conscience-stricken. When he reached the churchyard on his way homewards, he saw Sir Graham moving among the graves. He had apparently just come out from the Rectory and was making his way to the low stone wall, over which shreds of foam were being blown by the wind. Uniacke hastened his steps, and hailed Sir Graham in a loud and harsh voice. He paused, and shading his eyes with his arched hands, gazed towards the road. Uniacke hurried through the narrow gate and joined his guest, who looked like a man startled out of some heavy reverie. " Oh, it is you," he said. " Well, I—" "You were going to watch the sea, I know. It is worth watching to-day. Come with me. I'll take you to the point — to the nigger." " The nigger ? " " The fishermen call the great black rock at the north end of the Island by that name. The sea must be breaking magnificently." THE GRAVE. 59 Uniacke took Sir Graham's arm and led him away, compelling him almost as if he were a child. They left the churchyard behind them, and were soon in solitary country alone with the roar of wind and sea. Branching presently from the road they came into a narrow, scarcely perceptible, track, winding downward over short grass drenched with moisture. The dull sheep scattered slowly from them on either side of the way. Presently the grass ceased at the edge of an immense blunt rock, like a disfigured head, that contem- plated fixedly the white turmoil of the sea. " A place for shipwreck," said Sir Graham. " A place of death." Uniacke nodded. The painter swept an arm towards the sea. " What a graveyard ! One would say the time had come for it to give up its dead and it was passionately fighting against the immutable de- cree. Is Jack somewhere out there? " He turned and fi.xcd his eyes upon Uniacke's face. Uniacke's eyes fell. " Is he ? " repeated Sir Graham. " How can I tell ? " exclaimed Uniacke, almost with a sudden anger. " Let us go back." Towards evening the storm suddenly abated. A pale yellow ligl^.t broke along the hoii/.on, almost as the j)riinroses break out along the horizon of winter. The thin black spars of a hurrying vessel pointed to the ilhimina- tion and vanished, leaving the memory of ;i tor- 6o TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. tured gesture from some sea-thing. And as the yellow deepened to gold, the Skipper set the church bells ringing. Sir Graham opened the parlour window wide and listened, leaning out towards the graves. Uniacke was behind him in the room. Vapour streamed up from the buffeted earth, which seemed panting for a repose it had no strength to gain. Ding dong ! Ding dong! The wild and far-away light grew to flame and faded to darkness. In the darkness the bells seemed clearer, for light deafens the imag- ination. Uniacke felt a strange irritability coming upon him. He moved uneasily in his chair, watching the motionless, stretched figure of his guest. Presently he said : " Sir Graham ! " There was no reply. " Sir Graham ! " He got up, crossed the little room and touched the shoulder of the dreamer. Sir Graham started sharply and turned a frowning face. " What is it ? " " The atmosphere is very cold and damp after the storm." " You wish me to shut the window ? I beg your pardon." He drew in and shut it, then moved to the door. " You are going out ? " said Uniacke uneasily. " Yes." " I — I would not speak to the Skipper, if I THE GRAVE. 6l were you. He is happier when he is let quite alone." " I want to see him. I want him to sit for me." "To sit ! " Uniacke repeated, with an accent almost of horror. " Yes," said Sir Graham doggedly. ** I have a great picture in my mind." " But—" " The Skipper's meeting with his drowned com- rades, in that belfry tower. He will stand with the ropes dropping from his hands, triumph in his eyes. They will be seen coming up out of the darkness, grey men and dripping from the sea, with dead eyes and hanging lips. And first among them will be my wonder-child, on whom will fall a ray of light from a wild moon, half seen through the narrow slit of the deep-set win- dow." " No, no ! " " What do you say ? " " Your wonder-child must not be there. Why should he ? He is alive." " You think so ? " Uniacke made no reply. " I say, do you think so ? " " How can I know? It is impossible. But — yes, I think so." The clergyman turned away. A sickness of the conscience overtook him like physical pain. Sir Graham was by the door with his hand upon it. " And yet," he said, " you do not believe in in- 62 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. tuitions. Nothing tells you whether that woman you loved is dead or living. You said that." " Nothing." " Then what should tell you whether Jack is dead or living? " He turned and went out. Presently Uniacke saw his dark figure pass, like a shadow, across the square of the window. The night grew more quiet by slow degrees. The hush after the storm increased. And to the young clergyman's unquiet nerves it seemed like a crescendo in music instead of like a diminuendo, as sometimes seems the fall- ing to sleep of a man to a man who cannot sleep. The noise of the storm had been softer than the sound of this increasing silence in which the church bells presently died away. Uniacke was con- sumed by an apprehension that was almost like the keen tooth of jealousy. For he knew that the Skipper had ceased from his patient task and Sir Graham did not return. He imagined a colloquy. But the Skipper's madness would preserve the secret which he no longer knew, and, therefore, could not reveal. He made the bells call Jack Pringle. He would never point to the defaced grave and say, " Jack Pringle lies beneath this stone." And yet sanity might, perhaps, return, a rush of knowledge of the past and recognition of its tragedy. Uniacke took his hat and went to the door. He stood out on the step. Sea-birds were crying. The sound of the sea withdrew moment by mo- THE GRAVE. 63 ment, as if it were stealing furtively away. Be- hind, in the rectory passage, the servant clattered as she brought in the supper. " Sir Graham ! " Uniacke called suddenly. " Sir Graham ! " " Yes." The voice came from somewhere in the shadow of the church. " Will you not come in ? Supper is ready." In a moment the painter came out of the gloom. " That churchyard draws me," he said, mount- ing the step. " You saw the Skipper?" " Yes, leaving." " Did he speak to you ? " " Not a word." The clergyman breathed a sigh of relief. In the evening Uniacke turned his pipe two or three times in his fingers and said, looking down : " That picture of yours — " " Yes. What of it ? " "You will paint it in London, I suppose?" " How can I do that ? The imagination of it came to me here, is sustained and quickened by these surroundings." " Yf)u mean to paint it here?" the clergyman faltered. Sir Graham was evidently struck by his host's air of painful discomfiture. " I beg your pardon," he .said hastily. " Of course I do not mean to inflict myself upon your 64 TONGUES OF C0NSCIP:NCE. kind hospitality while I am working. I shall re- turn to the inn." Uniacke flushed red at being so misunderstood. " I cannot let you do that. No, no ! Honestly, my question was only prompted by — by — a thought — " " Yes ? " " Do not think me impertinent. But, really, a regard for you has grown up in me since you have allowed mc to know you — a great regard indeed." " Thank you, thank you, Uniacke," said the painter, obviously moved. " And it has struck me that in your present condition of health, and seeing that your mind is pursued by these — these melancholy sea thoughts and imaginings, it might be safer, better for you to be in a place less desolate, less preyed upon by the sea. That is all. Believe me, that is all." He spoke the last words with the peculiar insis- tence and almost declamatory fervour of the liar. But he was now embarked upon deceit and must crowd all sail. And with the utterance of his lie he took an abrupt resolution. " Let us go away together somewhere," he ex- claimed, with a brightening face. " I need a holi- day. I will get a brother clergyman to come over from the mainland and take my services. You asked me some day to return your visit. I accept your invitation here and now. Let me come with you to London." Sir Graham shook his head. THE GRAVE. 65 " You put me in the position of an inhospitable man," he said. " In the future you must come to me. I look forward to that, I depend upon it. But I cannot go to London at present. My house, my studio are become loathsome to me. The very street in which I live echoes with childish footsteps. I cannot be there." " Sir Graham, you must learn to look upon your past act in a different light. If you do not, your power of usefulness in the world will be crushed." The clergyman spoke with an intense earnest- ness. His sense of his own increasing unworthi- ness, the fighting sense of the necessity laid upon him to be unworthy for this sick man's sake, tormented him, set his heart in a sea of trouble. He strove to escape out of it by mental exertion. His eyes shone with unnatural fervour as he went on : " When you first told me your story, I thought this thing weighed upon you unnecessarily. Now I see more and more clearly that your unnatural misery over a very natural act springs from ill- health. It is your body which you confuse with your conscience. Your remorse is a disease re- movable by medicine, by a particular kind of air or scene, by waters even it may be, or by hard ex- ercise, or by a voyage." " A voyage ! " cried Sir Graham bitterly. " Well, well — by such means, I would say, as come to a doctor's mind. You labour under the yoke of the body." 66 tongup:s of conscience. " Do you think that whenever your conscience says, ' You have done wrong ' ? Tell me ! " Uniacke, who had got up in his excitement, recoiled at these words which struck him hard. " I — I ! " he almost stammered. " What have I got to do with it ? " I ask you to judge yourself, to put yourself in my place. That is all. Do you tell me that all workings of conscience are due to obscure bodily causes?" " How could I ? No, but yours — " " Are not. They hurt my body. They do not come from my body's hurt. And they increase upon me in this place, yes, they increase upon me." " I knew it," cried Uniacke. " Why is that ? " said Sir Graham, with a melan- choly accent. " I feel, I begin to feel that there must be some powerful reason — yes, in this island." *' There cannot be. Leave it ! Leave it ! " " I am held here." " By what ? " " Something intangible, invisible — " " Nothing, then." "All-powerful. I cannot go. If I would go, I cannot. Perhaps — perhaps Jack is coming here." The painter's eyes were blazing. Uniacke felt himself turn cold. " Jack coming here ! " he said harshly. " Non- sense, Sir Graham. Nobody ever comes here." " Dead bodies come on the breast of the sea." THE GRAVE. 6/ The painter looked towards the window, putting himself into an attitude of horrible expectation. " Is it not so? " he asked, in a voice that quiver- ed slightly as if with an agitation he was trying to suppress, Uniacke made no reply. He was seized with a horror he had not known before. He recognised that the island influence mysteriously held his guest. After an interval he said abruptly : " What is your doctor's name, did you say? " " Did I ever say whom I had consulted ? " said Sir Graham, almost with an invalid's ready suspi- cion, and peering at the clergyman under his thick eyebrows. " Surely. But I forget things so easily," said Uniacke calmly. " Braybrookc is the man — Cavendish Square. An interesting fellow. You may have heard of his book on the use of colour as a sort of physic in certain forms of illness." " I have. What sort of man is he? " " Very small, very grey, very indecisive in man- f * ncr. " Indecisive ?" "In manner. In reality a man of infinite con- viction." " May I ask if you told him your story ?" "The story of my body — naturally. One goes to a doctor to do that." " And did that narrative satisfy him? " Not at all. Not a bit." 68 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. '• Well— and so ? " *' I did not tell him my mental story. I ex- plained to him that I suffered greatly from melan- choly. That was all, I called it unreasoning mel- ancholy. Why not ? I knew he could do no more than put my body a little straight. He did his best." " I see," said Uniacke, slowly. That night, after Sir Graham had gone to bed, Uniacke came to a resolution. He decided to write to Doctor Braybrooke, betray, for his guest's sake, his guest's confidence, and ask the great man's advice in the matter, revealing to him the strange fact that fate had led the painter of the sea urchin to the very edge of the grave in which he slept so quietly. No longer did Uniacke hesitate, or pause to ask himself why he permitted the sorrow of a stranger thus to control, to upset, his life. And, indeed, is the man who tells us his sorrow a stranger to us? Uniacke's creed taught him to be unselfish, taught him to concern himself in the afflictions of others. Already he had sinned, he had lied for this stricken man. He, a clergyman, had gone out in the night and had defaced a grave. All this lay heavy on his heart. His conscience smote him. And yet, when he saw before him in the night the vision of this tortured man, he knew that he would repeat his sin if necessary. The next day was Sunday. He sat down and tried to think of the two sermons he had to preach. The sea lay very still on the Sabbath morning, still THE GRAVE. 69 under a smooth and pathetic grey sky. The at- mosphere seemed that of a Avinter fairyland. All the sea-birds were in hiding. Small waves licked the land like furtive tongues seeking some dainty food with sly desire. Across the short sea-grass the island children wound from school to church, and the island lads gathered in knots to say noth- ing. The whistling of a naughty fisherman at- tending to his nets unsabbatically pierced the slIU and magically cruel air with a painful sharpness. People walked in silence without knowing why they did not care to speak. And even the girls, discreet in ribbons and shining boots, thought less of kisses than they generally did on Sunday. The older people, sober by temperament, became sombre under the influence of sad, breathless sky, and breathless waters. The coldness that lay in the bosom of nature soon found its way to the re- sponsive bosom of humanity. It chilled Uniacke in the pulpit, Sir Graham in the pew below. The one preached without heart. The other listened without emotion. All this was in the morning. But at evening nature .stirred in her repose and turned, with the abruptness of a born coquette, to pageantry. A light wind got up. The waves were curved and threw up thin showers of ivory spray playfully along the rocks. The sense of fairyland, wrapped in ethereal silences, quivered and broke like disturbed water. And llie grey womb of the sky swelled in the west to give uj) a sunset that became tragic in its crescendo of glory. Bursting 70 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. forth in flame — a narrow line of fire along the sea — it pushed its way slowly up the sky. Against the tattered clouds a hidden host thrust forth their spears of gold. And a wild-rose colour de- scended upon the gentle sea and floated to the island, bathing the rocks, the grim and weather- beaten houses, the stones of the churchyard, with a radiance so delicate, and yet so elfish, that enchant- ment walked there till the night came down, and in the darkness the islanders moved on their way to church. The pageant was over. But it had stirred two imaginations. It blazed yet in two hearts. The shock of its coming, after long hours of storm, had stirred Uniacke and his guest strangely. And the former, leaving in the rectory parlour the ser- mon he had composed, preached extempore on the text, " In the evening there shall be light." He began radiantly and with fervour. But some spirit of contradiction entered his soul as he spoke, impelling him to a more sombre mood that was yet never cold, but rather impassioned full of imaginative despair. He was driven on to dis- course of the men who will not see light, of the men who draw thick blinds to shut out light. And then he was led, by the egoism that so subtly guides even the best among men, to speak of those fools who, by fostering darkness, think to compel sunshine, as a man may mix dangerous chemicals in a laboratory, seeking to advance some cause of science and die in the poisonous fumes of his own devilish brew. Can good, impulsive THE GRAVE. 71 and radiant, come out of deliberate evil? Must not a man care first for his own soul if he would heal the soul of even one other? Uniacke spoke with a strange and powerful despair on this subject. He ended in a profound sadness and with the words of one scourged by doubts. There was a pause, the shuffle of moving feet. Then the voice of the clerk announced the closing hymn. It was " Lead, Kindly Light," chosen by the harmonium player and submitted to Uniacke, who, however, had failed to notice that it was included in the list of hymns for the day. The clerk's voice struck on him like a blow. He stared down from the pulpit and met the upward gaze of his guest. Then he laid his cold hands on the wooden ledge of the pulpit and turned away his eyes. For he felt as if Sir Graham must under- stand the secret that lay in them. The islanders sang the hymn lustily, bending their heads over their books beneath the dull oil lamps that filled the church with a dingy yellow twilight. Alone, at the back of the building, the mad Skipper stood up by the belfry door and stared straight before him as if he watched. And Uniacke's trouble increased, seeming to walk in the familiar music which had been whistled by Jack Pringle as he .swarmed to the mast-head, or turned into his bunk at night far out at sea. Sir Graham had spoken of intuitions. Surely, the clergyman thought, to-night he will feel the truth and my He. To-night he will understand that it is useless to wait, that 72 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. the wonder-child can never come to this island, for he came on the breast of the sea long ago. And if he does know, now, at this moment, while the inlanders are singing, " And with the morn those angel faces smile — " how will he regard me, who have lied to him and who have preached to him, coward and hypocrite ? For still the egoism was in Uniacke's heart. There is no greater egoist than the good man who has sinned against his nature. He sits down eter- nally to contemplate his own soul. When the hymn was over Uniacke mechanically gave the blessing and knelt down. But he did not pray. His mind stood quite still all. the time he was on his knees. He got up wearily, and as he made his way into the little vestry, he fancied that he heard behind him a sound as of someone tramp- ing in scaboots upon the rough church pavement. He looked round and saw the bland face of the clerk, who wore perpetually a little smile, like that of a successful public entertainer. That evening he wrote to Doctor Braybrooke. On the morrow Sir Graham began the first sketch for his picture, " The Processioji of tJie Drowned to their faithful Captain.'' Three mornings later, when Uniacke came to the breakfast-table. Sir Graham, who was down before him, handed to him a letter, the envelope of which was half torn open. *' It was put among mine," he said in apology, THE GRAVE. "JT^ " and as the handwriting was perfectly familiar to me, I began to open it." " Familiar ? " said Uniackc, taking the letter. " Yes. It bears an exact resemblance to Doctor Braybrooke's writing." " Oh ! " said Uniacke, laying the letter aside rather hastily. They sat down on either side of the table. "You don't read your letter," Sir Graham said, after two or three minutes had passed. " After breakfast. I don't suppose it is any- thing important," said the clergyman hastily. Sir Graham said nothing more, but drank his coffee and soon afterwards went off to his work. Then Uniacke opened the letter. " Cavendish Square, " London, Dec. — " Dear Sir : " I read your letter about my former patient, Sir Graham Hamilton, with great interest. . When he consulted me I was fully aware that he was con- cealing from me some mental trouble, which reacted upon his bodily condition and tended to retard his complete recovery of health. However, a doctor cannot force the confidence of a patient even in that patient's own interest, and I was, therefore, compelled to work in the dark, and to work without satisfaction to myself and lasting benefit to Sir Graham. You now let in a strange light upon the case, and I have little doubt what 74 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. course would be the best to pursue in regard to the future. Sir Graham's nervous system has broken down so completely that, as oftens hap- pens in nervous cases, his very nature seems to have changed. The energy, the remarkable self- confidence, the hopefulness and power of looking forward, and of working for the future, which have placed him where he is — these have vanished. He is possessed by a fixed idea, and imagines that it is this fixed idea which has preyed upon him and broken him down. But my knowledge of nerve- complaints teaches me that the fixed idea follows on the weakening of the nervous system, and sel- dom or never precedes it. I find it is an effect and not a cause. But it is a fact that the fixed idea which possesses a man under such circum- stances is often connected, and closely, with the actual cause of his illness. Sir Graham Hamilton is suffering from long and habitual overwork in connection with the sea ; overwork of the imagi- nation, of the perceptive faculty, and in the mere mechanical labour of putting on canvas what he imagines and what he perceives. In consequence of this overstrain and subsequent breakdown, he has become possessed by a fixed sea-idea, and traces all his wretchedness to this episode of the boy and the picture. You will say I did not suc- ceed in curing him because I did not discover what this fixed idea was. How can that be, if the idea comes from the illness and not the ill- ness from the idea. In reply I must inform you THE GRAVE. 75 that a tragic idea, once it is fixed in the mind of a man, can, and often does, become in itself at last a more remote, but effective, cause of the prolonged continuance of the ill-health already started by some other agent. It keeps the wound, which it has not made, open. It is most important, there- fore, that it should, if possible, be banished, in the case of Sir Graham as in other cases. Your ami- able deception has quite possibly averted a tragedy. Continue in it, I counsel yoti. The knowledge that his fears are well founded, that the boy — for whose fate he morbidly considers himself entirely respon- sible — has in very truth been lost at sea, and lies buried in the ground beneath his feet, might, in his present condition of invalidism, be attended by most evil results. Some day it is quite pos- sible that he may be able to learn all the facts with equanimity, l^ut this can only be later when long rest and change have accomplished their beneficent work. It cannot certainly be now. Endeavour, therefore, to dissuade him from any sort of crea- tive labor. Endeavour to persuade him to leave the island. Above all things, do not let him know the truth. It is a sad thing that a strong man of genius should be brought so low that he has to be treated witii precautions almost suitable to a child. But to a doctor there are many more children in the world than a statistician might be able to number. I w ish I could take a holiday and come to your assistance. Unfortunately, my duties tie me closely to town at the present. And, in any 76 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. case, my presence might merely irritate and alarm our friend. " Believe me, " Faithfully yours, " John Braybrooke." Uniacke read this letter, and laid it down with a strange mingled feeling of relief and apprehen- sion. The relief was a salve that touched his wounded conscience gently. If he had sinned, at least this physician's letter told him that by his sin he had accomplished something beneficent. And for the moment self-condemnation ceased to scourge him. The apprehension that quickly be- set him rose from the knowledge that Sir Graham was in danger so long as he was in the Island. But how could he be persuaded to leave it ? That was the problem. Uniacke's reverie over the letter was interrupted by the appearance of the painter. As he came into the room, the clergyman rather awkwardly thrust the doctor's letter into his pocket and turned to his guest. *' In already, Sir Graham ? " he said, with a strained attempt at ease of manner. " Ah ! work tires you. Indeed you should take a long holi- day." He spoke, thinking of the doctor's words. " I have not started work," the painter said. " I've — I've been looking at that grave by the church wall — the boy's grave." THE GRAVE. 77 " Oh ! " said Uniacke, with sudden coldness. " Do you know, Uniacke, it seems — it seems to me that the gravestone has been defaced," " Defaced ! Why, what could make such an idea come to you ? " exclaimed the clergyman. " Defaced ! But—" " There is a gap in the inscription after the word * Jack,' " the painter said slowly, fixing a piercing and morose glance on his companion. *' And it seems to me that some blunt instrument has been at work there." " Oh, there was always a gap there," said Uni- acke hastily, touching the letter that lay in his pocket, and feeling, strangely, as if the contact fortified that staggering pilgrim on the path of lies — his conscience. " There was always a gap. It was a whim of the Skipper's — a mad whim." " But I understood he was sane when his ship- mate was buried ? You said so." " Sane ? Yes, in comparison with what he is now. But one could not argue with him. He was distraught with grief." Sir Graham looked at Uniacke with the heavy suspicion of a sick man, but he said nothing more on the subject. He turned as if to go out. Uni- acke stopped him. " Ydu are going to paint ? " " Yes. Again Uniacke thought of the doctor's advice. " Sir Graham," he said, speaking with obvious hesitation, " I — I would not work." 78 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. "Why?" " You are not fit to bear any fatigue at present. Creation will inevitably retard your recovery." " I am not ill in body, and work is the only panacea for a burdened mind. If it cannot bring me happiness, at least — " " Happiness ! " Uniacke interrupted. " And what may not bring that ! Why, Sir Graham, even death — should that be regarded as a curse ? May not death bring the greatest happiness of all ? " The painter's forehead contracted, but the clergyman continued with gathering eagerness and fervour: " Often when I pray beside a little dead child, or — or a young lad, and hear the mother weep- ing, I feel more keenly than at any other time the fact that blessings descend upon the earth. The child is taken in innocence. The lad is bereft of the power to sin. And their souls are surely at peace." "At peace," said the painter heavily. "Yes, that is something. But the mother — the mother weeps, you say." " Human love, the most beautiful thing in the world must still be earth-bound, must still be selfish." " But—" " Sir Graham, I'll confess to you even this, that on Sunday evening, when, after the service, we sang that hymn, ' Lead, Kindly Light,' I thought THE GRAVE. 79 would it not be a very beautiful thing if the body mouldering beneath that stone in the churchyard yonder were indeed the body of — of your won- der-child." " Uniacke ! " " Yes, yes. Don't you remember how he looked up from his sordid misery to the rainbow ? " " How can I ever forget it ? " " Docs that teach you nothing? " There was a silence. Then the painter said : " Death may be beautiful, but only after life has been beautiful. For it is beautiful to live as Jack would have lived." " Is living — somewhere," interposed Uniacke quickly. " Perhaps. I can't tell. But I hear the mother weeping. I hear the mother weeping." That night Uniacke lay long awake. He heard the sea faintly. Was it not weeping too? It seemed to him in that dark hour as if one power alone was common to all people and to all things — the power to mourn. Next day, despite Uniackc's renewed protests, Sir Graham began to paint steadily. The clergy- man dared not object too strongly. He had no right. And brain-sick men are bad to deal with. He could only watch over Sir Graham craftily and be with him as much as possible, always hoping that the painting frenzy would desert him, and that he would find out for himself tliat his health was too poor to endure any strain of labour. 8o TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. The moon was now past its second quarter, and the weather continued cold and clear. Sir Gra- ham and Uniacke went out several times by night to the belfry of the church, and the painter ob- served the light effects through the narrow win- dow. In the daytime he made various studies from memory of these effects. And presently Uniacke began to grow more reconciled to this labour of wliich — prompted by the doctor's letter — he had at first been so much afraid. For it really seemed that toil could be a tonic to this man as to many other men. Sir Graham spoke less of little Jack. He was devoured by the fever of creation. In the evenings he mused on his picture, puffing at his pipe. He no longer con- tinually displayed his morbid sorrow, or sought to discuss at length the powers of despair. Uniacke was beginning to feel happier about him, even to doubt the doctor's wisdom in denouncing work as a danger, when something happened which filled him with a vague apprehension. The mad Skipper, whom nothing attracted, wandering vacantly, according to his sad custom, about the graveyard and in the church, one day ascended to the belfry, in which Sir Graham sat at work on a study for the background of his picture. Uniacke was with his friend at the time, and heard the Skipper's heavy and stumbling footsteps ascending the narrow stone stairs. " Who's that coming? " the painter asked. THE GRAVE. 8 1 " The Skipper," Uniacke answered, almost under his breath. In another minute the huge seaman appeared, clad as usual in jersey and peaked cap, his large blue eyes full of an animal expression of vacant plaintiveness and staring lack of thought. He showed no astonishment at finding intruders estab- lished in his domain, and for a moment Uniacke thought he would quietly turn about and make his way down again. For, after a short pause, he half swung round, still keeping his eyes vaguely fixed on the artist, who continued to paint as if quite alone. But apparently some chord of curiosity had been struck in this poor and benumbed mind. For the big man wavered, then stole rather fur- tively forward, and fixed his sea-blue eyes on the canvas, upon which appeared the rough wall of the belfry, the narrow window, with a section of wild sky in which a weary moon gleamed faintly, and the dark arch of the stairway up which the drowned mariners would come to their faithful captain. The Skipper stared at all this inexpres- sively, turned to move away, paused, waited. Sir Graham went on painting ; and the Skipper stayed. He made no sound. Uniacke could scarcely hear him breathing. He seemed wrapped in dull and wide-eyed contemplation. Only when at last Sir Graham paused, did he move away slowly down the stairs with his loose-limbed, .shuffling gait, which expressed so plainly the illness of his mind. In the rectory parlor, a few minutes later, 82 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. Uniacke and Sir Graham discussed this apparently trifling incident. A feehng of unreasonable alarm besieged Uniacke's soul, but he strove to fight against and to expel it, " How quietly he stood," said the painter. " He seemed strangely interested." " Yes, strangely. And yet his eyes were quite vague and dull. I noticed that." " For all that, Uniacke, his mind may be wak- ing from its sleej^ " Waking from its sleep ! " said Uniacke, with a sudden sharpness. " No — impossible ! " " One would almost think you desired that it should not," rejoined Sir Graham, with obvious surprise. Uniacke saw that he had been foolishly un- guarded. " Oh, no," he said, more quietly, " I only fear that the poor fellow can never recover." '* Why not ? From what feeling, from what root of intelligence does his interest in my work spring ? May it not be that he vaguely feels as if my picture were connected with his sorrow ? " Uniacke shook his head. " I am not sure that it is impossible," continued Sir Graham. " To-morrow I begin to make studies for the figures. If he comes to me again, I shall sketch him in." Uniacke's uneasiness increased. Something within him revolted from the association of his guest and the Skipper. The hidden link between THE GRAVE. 83 them was a tragedy, a tragedy that had wrecked the reason of the one, the peace of the other. They did not know of this Hnk, yet there seemed horror in such a companionship as theirs, and the clergy- man was seized with fear. "You are going to draw your figures from models? "he said, slowly, speaking to cover his anxiety, and speaking idly enough. The painter's reply struck away his uncertainty, and set him face to face with a most definite dread. " I shall have models," said Sir Graham, " for all the figures except for little Jack. I can draw him from memory. I can reproduce his face. It never leaves me." " What ! " said Uniacke. " You will paint an exactly truthful portrait of him then ?" " I shall ; only idealised by death, dignified, weird, washed by the sad sea." " The Skipper watched you while you were paint- ing. Me saw all you were doing." " Yes. And I think he'll come again." " But then— he'll— he'll see—" The clergyman stopped short. "See — sec what?" Sir Graham asked. "Himself," Uniacke replied, evasively. "When you paint him with the ropes dropping from his hands. May it not agitate, upset him, to sec him- self as he stands ringing those bells each night? Ah ! there they are ! " It wastwilight now, cold, and yc.Ilow, and grim ; twilight of winter. And the pathetic, cheerless 84 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. appeal of the two bells stole out over the darken- ing sea. " Perhaps it may agitate him," Sir Graham said. " What then ? To strike a sharp blow on the gates of his mind might be to do him a good ser- vice. A shock expelled his reason. Might not a shock recall it ?" " I can't tell," Uniacke said. " Such an experi- ment might be dangerous, it seems io me, very dangerous." " Dangerous ? " Uniacke turned away rather abruptly. He could not tell the painter what was in his mind, his fear that the mad Skipper might recognise the painted face of the dead boy, for whom he waited, for whom, even at that moment, the bells were ringing. And if the Skipper did recognise this face that he knew so well — what then ? What would be the sequel ? Uniacke thought of the doctor's letter. He felt as if a net were closing round him, as if there could be no escape from some tragic finale. And he felt too, painfully, as if a tragic finale were all that he — he, clergyman, liar, trickster, — deserved. His conscience, in pres- ence of a shadow, woke again, and found a voice, and told him that evil could not prevail for good, that a lie could not twist the course of things from paths of sorrow to paths of joy. Did not each lie call aloud to danger, saying, " Approach ! approach ! " Did not each subterfuge stretch out arms beckoning on some nameless end ? He, THE GRAVE. 8$ seemed to hear soft footsteps. He was horribly afraid and wished that, in the beginning of his acquaintance with Sir Graham, he had dared con- sequence and spoken truth. Now he felt like a man feebly fighting that conqueror, the Inevitable, and he went in fear. Yet he struggled still. " Sir Graham," he said, on the following day, " forgive me, but I feel it my duty to urge you not to let that poor fellow watch you at work. It is not safe. I do not think it is safe. I have a strong feeling that — that the shock of seeing — " "Himself?" " Exactly ! — might be dangerous." "To him?" " Or to you. That is my feeling. Possibly to you. He is not sane, and though he seems harm- less enough — " " I'm fully prepared to take the risk," said Sir Graham abruptly, and with a return of his old suspicious expression. " I'm not afraid of the man." He got up and went out. The mere thought of danger, in his condition, warmed and excited him. He iiad resolved before actually starting upon his picture to make some plciii air studies of the islanders. Tiicrefore he now made his way into the village, engaged a fisher-lad to stand to him, returned to the rectory for his easel and set it up just beyond the churchyard wall. He posed the shamefaced and giggling boy and set to work. Uniackc was writing in the small bow-window, or 86 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. pretending to write. Often he looked out, watch- ing the painter, waiting, with a keen anxiety, to know whether the interest shown in his work by the Skipper was only the passing whim of insanity, or whether it was something more permanent, more threatening perhaps. The painter worked. The sailor posed, distend- ing his rough cheeks with self-conscious laughter. Uniacke watched. It seemed that the Skipper was not coming. Uniacke felt a sense of relief. He got up from his writing-table at last, intending to go into the village. As he did so, the tall form of the Skipper came into view in the distance. Dark, bulky, as yet far off, it shambled forward slowly, hesitatingly, over the short grass towards the painter. While Uniacke observed it, he thought it looked definitely animal. It ap- proached, making detours, like a dog, furtive and intent, that desires to draw near to some object without seeming to do so. Slowly it came, tacking this way and that, pausing fre- quently as if uncertain or alarmed. And Uni- acke, standing in the shadow of the red curtain, watched its movements, fascinated. He did not know why, but he had a sensation that Fate, loose-limbed, big-boned, furtive, was shambling over the grass towards his guest. Sir Graham went on quietly painting. The Skipper made a last detour, got behind the painter, stole up and peered over his shoulder. Once there, he seemed spellbound. For he stood perfectly still and never THE GRAVE. 87 took his large blue eyes from the canvas. Uniacke went into the little passage, got his hat and hast- ened out, impelled yet without purpose. As he crossed the churchyard he saw Sir Graham put something into the sailor's hand. The sailor touched his cap awkwardly and rolled off. Uniacke hurried forward. " You've finished your w^ork ? " he said, coming up. Sir Graham turned and made him a hasty sign to be silent. " Don't alarm him," he whispered, with a slight gesture towards the Skipper, who stood as if in a vacant reverie, looking at the painted sailor boy. " But — " Uniacke began. " Hush ! " the painter murmured, almost angrily. " Leave us alone together." The clergyman moved away with a sinking heart. Indefinable dread seized him. The asso- ciation between these two men was fraught with unknown peril. lie felt that, and so strongly, that he was almost tempted to defy convention and violently interfere to put an end to it. I^ut he restrained himself and returned to the rectory, watching the two motionless figures beyond the churchyard wall from the parlour window as from an ambush, with an intensity of expectation that gave him the bodily sensation of a man clothed in mail. In the late afternoon Sir Graham showed him 88 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. an admirable study of the Skipper, standing with upraised arms as if ringing the church bells, his blue eyes fixed as if he scanned a distant horizon, or searched the endless plains of the sea for his lost companions. " Forgive my abruptness this morning," the painter said. "I was afraid your presence would scare the Skipper." Uniacke murmured a word in admiration of the painting. "And to-morrow," he added. "To-morrow I shall start on the picture," Sir Graham replied. After supper he drew aside the blind and looked forth. " The moon is rising," he said. " I shall go out for a little while. I want to observe light effects, and to think over what I am going to do. My mind is full of it, Uniacke ; I think it should be a great picture." His eyes were shining with excitement. He went out. He was away a long time. The clock in the rectory parlour struckeleven, half-past eleven, he did not return. Beginning to feel anxious, Uniacke went to the window and looked out. The night was quiet and clear, bathed in the radiance of the moon, which defined objects sharply. The dark figure of the painter was approaching the house from the church. Uniacke, who did not wish to be thought curious, drew hastily back from the win- dow and dropped the blind. In a moment Sir Gra- THE GRAVE. 89 ham entered. He was extremely pale and looked scared. He shut the door very hastily, almost as if he wished to prevent someone from entering after him. Then he came up to the fire without a word. "You are late," Uniacke said, unpleasantly af- fected, but trying to speak indifferently. " Late, am I ? Why — what time is it?" " Nearly midnight." " Indeed. I forgot the hour. I was engrossed. I — " He looked up hastily and looked down again. "A most strange, most unaccountable, thing has happened." "What?" said Uniacke. "Surely the Skipper hasn't — " "No, no. It's nothing to do with him. I haven't seen him. No, no — but the most unac- countable — how long have I been out there?" " You went out at nine. It's a quarter to twelve now." " Two hours and three-quarters ! I should have said ten minutes. But then — how long was I with it?" "With it?" repeated Uniacke, turning cold. "Yes, ye:; — how long? It seemed no time — and yet an eternity, too." He got up and went to and fro uneasily about the room. " Horrible ! " he muttered, as if to himself. " Hor- rible!" He stopped suddenly in front of Uniacke. 90 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Do you believe," he said, " that when we think very steadily and intensely of a thing we may, per- haps, project — give life, as it were, for the moment to our thought?" "Why do you ask me?" said Uniacke. "It has never happened to mc to do such a thing." "Why do I ask? Well, I'll—" He hesitated, keeping his eyes fixed on Uniacke's face, "Yes, I'll tell you what took place. I went out thinking of my picture, of its composition, of the light effect, of the faces of the drowned men, especially of the face of little Jack. I seemed to see him coming into that belfry tower — yes, to greet the Skipper, all dripping from the sea. But — but — no, Uniacke, I'll swear that, in my mind, I saw his face as it used to be. That was natural, wasn't it ? I imagined it white, with wide, staring eyes, the skin wet and roughened with the salt water. But that v/as all. So it couldn't have been my thought projected, because I had never im- agined — " He was evidently engrossed by his own reflec- tions. His eyes had an inward expression. His voice died in a murmur, almost like the murmur of one who babbles in sleep. "Never had imagined what?" said Uniacke, sharply. " Oh, forgive me. I cannot understand it. As I paced in the churchyard, thinking of my picture, and watching the moon and the shadows cast by THE GRAVE. 91 the church and by the stones of the tombs, I came to that grave by the wall." " The grave of the boy I told you about ? " said Uniacke with an elaborate indifference. " Yes, the boy." " Well ? " " I suppose I stood there for a few minutes, or it may have been longer. I can't tell at all. I don't think I was even aware that I was no longer walking. I was entirely wrapped up in my medi- tations, I believe. I saw my picture before me, the Skipper, the dripping sailors — Jack first. I saw them quite distinctly with my mental vision. And then, by degrees, somehow those figures in the pic- ture all faded into darkness, softly, gradually, till only one was left — Jack. He was still there in the picture. The moonlight through the narrow belfry window fell on him. It seemed to make the salt drops sparkle, almost like jewels, in his hair, on his clothes. I looked at him, — mentally, still. And, while I looked, the moonlight, I thought, grew stronger. The belfry seemed to fade away. The figure of Jack stood out in the light. It grew larger — larger. It reached the size of life. And then, as I stared upon it, the face altered before my eyes. It became older, less childish, more firm and manly — but oh, Uniacke! a thousand times more horrible." "How? How?" "Why, it became puffy, bloated, drojisical. The eyes were glazed and bloodshot. On the lips 92 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. there was foam. The fingers of the hands were twisted and distorted. The teeth grinned hid- eously. The romance of death dropped away. The filthy reality of death stood before me, upon the grave of that boy." " You imagined it," muttered Uniacke. He spoke without conviction. " I did not. I saw it. For now I knew that I was no longer thinking of my picture. I looked around me and saw the small clouds and the night, the moon in the pale sky, the black church, this house, the graves like creatures lying side by side asleep. I saw them all. I heard the dull wash of the sea. And then I looked again at that grave, and on it stood Jack, the dead thing I sent to death, bloated and silent, staring upon me. Silent — and yet I seemed to feel that it said, ' This is what I am. Paint mc like this. Look at what the sea has done to me ! Look — look at what the sea has done ! ' — Uniacke ! Uniacke ! " He sank down into a chair and stared before him with terrible eyes. A shudder ran over the clergyman, but he said, in a voice that he tried to make calm and consolatory, " Of course it was your fancy, Sir Graham. You had conjured up the figures in your picture. There was nothing unnatural in your seeing one — the one you had known in life — more distinctly than the others." " I had not known it like that. I had never imagined anything so distorted, so horrible, tragic THE GRAVE. 93 and yet almost grotesque, a thing for the foolish to — to laugh at, ugh ! Besides, it stood there. It was actually there on that grave, as if it had risen out of that grave, Uniacke." " Your fancy." Uniacke spoke with no conviction, and his lips were pale. " I say it is not. The thing — Jack, come to that ! — was there. Had you been with me, you must have seen it as I did." Uniacke shook his head. " Believe me, Sir Graham," he exclaimed, " you ought to go from here. The everlasting sound of the sea — the presence of the Skipper — your idea for this terrible picture — " " Terrible ! Yes, I see it must be terrible. My conception — how wrong it was ! I meant to make death romantic, almost beautiful. And it is like that. To-morrow — to-morrow — ah, Jack ! I can paint you now ! " lie sprang up and hurried from the room. Uniacke heard him pacing up and down above stairs till far into the night. The clergyman was deeply and sincerely reh'g- ious, but he was in nowise a superstitious man. Association with Sir Graham, however, and the circumstances attendant upon that association, had gradually unnerved him. He was now a prey to fear, almost to horror. Was it possible, he thought, as he sat listening to that eternal footfall overhead, that Providence permitted a spirit to 94 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. rise from the very grave to proclaim his lie, and to show the truth in a most hideous form ? He could almost believe so. It seemed that the dead boy resented the defacement of his tomb, resented the deliberate untruth which concealed from the painter his dreary destiny, and came up out of the other world to proclaim the clergyman's deception. It seemed as if God himself fought with a miracu- lous means the battle of truth and tore aside the veil in which Uniacke had sought to shroud the actuality of death. Uniacke could not bring him- self to speak to the painter, to acknowledge the trickery resorted to for a sick man's sake. But this vision of the night paralysed his power to make any further effort in deception. He felt be- numbed and impotent. A Power invisible to him fought against him. He could only lay down his weapons, — despicable, unworthy, as they were, — and let things take their course, while he looked on as one in a sad dream, apprehensive of the ending of that dream. Sir Graham began his picture on the morrow. His first excitement in the conception of it, which had been almost joyous, was now become feverish and terrible. He was seized by the dreary pas- sion of the gifted man who means to use his^gifts to add new and vital horrors to the horrors of life. He no longer felt the pathos, the almost exquisite romance, of his subject. He felt only its tragic, its disgusting terror. While he painted feverishly the mad Skipper hovered about him, with eyes still THE GRAVE. 95 vacant but a manner of increasing unrest. It seemed as if something whispered to him that this work of a stranger had some connection with his life, some deep, though as yet undiscovered, mean- ing for him. The first figure in the picture was the Skipper himself. When it was painted the likeness was striking. But the poor mad seaman stared upon it with an ignorant vagueness. It was evident that he looked without seeing, that he obser\'cd without comprehending. " Surely he will not know Jack," Uniacke thought, " since he does not know his own face." And he felt a faint sense of relief. But this passed away, for the unrest of the Skipper seemed continually to grow more marked and seething. Uniacke noticed it with gathering anxiety. Sir Graham did not observe it. Rethought of noth- ing but his work. " I shall paint Jack last of all," he said grimly, to Uniacke. " I mean to make a crescendo of horror, and in Jack's figure the loathsomeness of death shall reach a climax. Yes, I will paint him last of all. Perhaps he will come again and pose for mc upon that grave." And he laughed as he sat before his easel. " What painter ever before had such a model ? " he said to Uniacke. And that night after supper, he got up from the table saying : " I must go and sec if Jack will give mc a sitting to-night." 96 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. Uniacke rose also. " Let me come with you," he said. Sir Graham stopped with his hand on the door. There was a smile on his lips, but his eyes were full of foreboding. " Do you want to see Jack, then ? " he asked, with a dreadful feigning of jocularity. " But you arc not a painter. You require no model, living or dead." He burst again into a laugh. " Let me come with you," the clergyman repeated doggedly. Sir Graham made no objection, and they went out together. The moon was now growing towards the full, but it was yet low in the sky, and the night was but faintly lit, as a room is lit by a heavily shaded lamp. Sir Graham's manner lost its almost pite- ous bluster as he stood on the doorstep and felt the cold wind that blew from the wintry sea. lie set his lips, and his face twitched with nervous agitation as he stole a furtive glance at the clergy- man, whose soft hat was pulled down low over his eyes as if to conceal their expression. The two men Avalkcd forward slowly into the churchyard. Uniacke's heart was beating with violence and his mind was full of acute anticipa- tion. Yet he would scarcely acknowledge even to himself the possibility of such an appearance as that affirmed by Sir Graham. They drew near to the grave of little Jack, round which the chill winds of night blew gently and the dull voices THE GRAVE. 97 of the waves sang hushed and murmurous noc- turnes. Uniacke was taken b)' an almost insur- mountable inclination to pause, even to turn back. Their progress to this grave seemed attended by some hidden and ghastly danger. He laid his hand upon the painter's arm, as if to withhold him from further advance. " What is it ? " Sir Graham asked, speaking almost in a whisper. " Nothing," said Uniacke, dropping his hand. Sir Graliam's eyes were full of sombre ques- tioning as they met his. Moving slowly on, the two men stood at length by Jack's grave. The moon rose languidly, and shed a curious and ethereal twilight upon the stone at its head. The blurred place from which Uniacke had struck the name was plainly visible. Instinctively the clergyman's eyes sought the spot and stared upon it. " Does it not bear all the appearance of having been defaced ? " said Sir Graham in his ear. Uniacke shook his head. "The Skipper would have it so," he murmured, full of a heavy sense of useless contest against the determination of something hidden that all should be known to his companion, perhaps even that very night. They waited, as mourners wait beside a tomb. As the moon rose, the churchyard grew more dis- tinct. The surrounding graves came into view, the crude bulk of the rectory, the outline of the 98 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE church tower, and the long wall of the churchyard. On the white faces of the two men the light fell pitilessly, revealing the strained and anxious ex- pression of Uniacke, the staring watchfulness of the painter. The minutes ran by. Uniacke shiv- ered slightly in the wind. By degrees he began to lose the expectation of seeing any apparition. Presently he even sneered silently at himself for his folly in having ever entertained it. Neverthe- less he was strongly affected by the nearness of the wonder-child's grave, from which seemed to emanate an influence definite and searching, and — so he felt — increasingly hostile, either to himself or to the artist. It came up like a thing that threatened. It crept near like a thing that would destroy. Uniacke wondered whether Sir Graham was conscious of it. But the painter said nothing, and the clergyman dared not ask him. At length, however, his fanciful sense of this dead power, speaking as it were from the ground under his feet, became so intolerable to him that he was resolved to go ; and he was about to tell Sir Gra- ham of his intention when the painter suddenly caught his arm in a tight grip. " There it is," he whispered. He was staring before him over the grave. Uni- acke followed his eyes. He saw the short grass stirring faintly in the night wind. He thought it looked like hair bristling, and his hair moved on his head. He saw the churchyard in a maze of moon- rays. And with the moonlight had come many THE GRAVE. 99 shadows. But not one of them was deceptive. Not one took the form of any spectre. Neverthe- less Uniacke recoiled from this Uttle grave at his feet, for it seemed to him as if the power that had been sleeping there stirred, forsook its recum- bent position, rose up warily, intent on coming forth to confront him. " You see it ? " whispered Sir Graham, still keep- ing hold of his arm. " No, no, I see nothing; there is nothing. It's your fancy, your imagination that plays tricks on you. " No, it's Jack. Oh, Uniacke, sec — see how he poses ! He knows that I shall paint him to- morrow. How horrible he is ! Do the drowned always look like that ? " " Come away, Sir Graham. This is a hideous hallucination. Come away." " How he is altered. All his features arecoars, cned, bloated. My wonder-child! lie is tragic now, and he is disgusting. How loathsomely he twists his fingers ! Must I paint him like that — with that grinning, ghastly mouth — little Jack? Ah ! ah ! He poses — he poses always. I Ic would have me paint him now, — here in the moonlight — here — here — standing on this grave ! " " Sir Graham, come with me ! " exclaimed Uniacke. And this time he forcibly drew his companion with him from the grave. The painter seemed in- clined to resist for a moment. I Ic turned his head TOO TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. and looked long and eagerly behind him. Then suddenly he acquiesced. " It has gone," he said. " You have driven it away." Uniacke hurried forward to the Rectory. That night he implored the painter for the last time to leave the island. " Can't you feel," he said, almost passionately, " the danger you are running here, the terrible danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind the drowning of men. The sight of that poor maniac depresses you perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you. Sir Graham, that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It begins even to trick your eyes in this abominable way." " You swear you saw nothing ? " " I do. There was nothing. You have thought of that boy until you actually see him before you." "Ashe is?" " As he is not, as he will never be." The painter got up from his chair, came over to Uniacke, and looked piercingly into his eyes. " Then you declare — onyour honour asa priest," he said slowly, " that you do not know that my wonder-child is the boy who is buried beneath that stone? " " I buried that boy, and I declare on my honour THE GRAVE. 10 1 as a priest that I do not know it," Uniacke answered, desperately but unflinchingly. It was his last throw for this man's salvation. " I believe you," the painter said. He returned to the fireplace, and leaned his face on his arm against the mantelpiece. " I believe you," he repeated presently. " I have been mistaken." " Mistaken — how ? " " Sometimes I have thought that you have lied to me." Uniackc's heart grew heavier at the words. In the morning Sir Graham said to him, with a curious calmness : " I think perhaps you arc right, Uniacke. I have been considering your words, your advice." " And you will take it ? " Uniacke said, with a sudden enormous sense of gratefulness. " I think I shall." " Think — Sir Graham ! " " I'll decide to-night. I must have the day to consider, liut — yes, you arc right. That — that horrible appearance. I suppose it must be evoked by the trickery of my own brain." " Undoubtedly." " There can be no other reason for it ? " " None — none." " Then — then, yes, I had better go from here, liat you will come with me ? " " To Londf)n ? " " Anywhere — it does not matter." 102 tongup:s of conscience. He looked round him wistfully. "HI am to leave the island," he said sorrow- fully, " it docs not matter where I go." " To London then," Uniacke said, almost joy- ously. " I will make my arrangements." " To-morrow ? " " To-morrow. Yes. Excuse me for the present. I must run over to the mainland to settle about the Sunday services. I shall be back in a few hours." He went out, feeling as if a weight had been lifted from brain and heart. So good could come out of evil. Had he not done right to lie? He began to believe that he had. As he crossed to the mainland he wrapped himself in warm and comfortable sophistries. The wickedness of sub- terfuge vanished now that subterfuge was found to be successful in attaining a desired end. For that which is successful seldom appears wholly evil. To-day Uniacke glowed in the fires of his sinfulness. He transacted his business on the mainland and set out on his return home, driving through the shallow sea in a high cart. The day, which had opened in sunshine, was now become grey, very still and depressing. An intense and brooding silence reigned, broken by the splashing of the horse's hoofs in the scarcely ruffled water, and by the occasional peevish cackle of a gull hovering, on purposeless wings, between the waters and the mists. The low island lay in the dull distance ahead, wan and deprecatory of aspect, like a thing THE GRAVE. 103 desirincf to be left alone in the morose embrace of solitude. Uniacke, gazing towards it out of the midst of the sea, longed ardently for the morrow when Sir Graham would be caught away from this pale land of terror. He no longer blamed himself for what he had done. Conscience was asleep. He exulted, and had a strange feeling that God smiled on him with approval of his sin. As he reached the island, the grey pall slightly lifted and light broke through the mist. He came up out of the sea, and, whipping the wet and weary horse, drove along the narrow lanes towards the Rectory. But when he came within hail of the churchyard all his abnormal exultation was suddenly quenched, and the oppressive sense of threatening danger which had for so long a time persecuted him, returned with painful force. He saw ahead of him Sir Graham seated before his easel painting. Behind the artist, bending down, his eyes fixed intently on the canvas, his huge hands gripping one another across his chest, stood the mad Skipper. As the wheels of the cart ground tlie rough road by the churchyard wall, Sir Graham looked up and smiled. " I'm doing a last day's work," he called. Uniacke stopped the cart and jumped out. The Skipper never moved. His eyes never left the canvas. He seemed utterly absorbed. " You arc not working on the picture ? " said Uniacke hastily. " No." 104 TOXGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Thank God." " Why d'you say that ? " " I — the subject was so horrible." " This is only a study. I shall leave the pic- ture as I am leaving the Island. Perhaps some day — " He paused. Then he said : " I call this ' Sea Change.' Go indoors. In about half an hour I will come and fetch you to see it. Where will you be ? " " In my little room at the back of the house. I have some letters to write." " I'll come there. Don't disturb me, till then, I think the picture will be strange — and I hope beautiful." And again he smiled. Reassured, Uniacke made his way into the Rectory. He sat down at his writing-table, took up his pen and wrote a few words of a letter. But his mind wandered. The pen dropped on the table and he fell into thought. It was strangely still weather, and there was a strange stillness in his heart and conscience, a calm that was sweet to him. He felt the relief of coming to an end after a journey that had not been without dangers. For, during his intercourse with Sir Graham, he had often walked upon the edge of tragedy. Now he no longer looked down from that precipice. He leaned his arm on the table, among the litter of papers connected with parish affairs, and rested his head in his hand. Almost unconsciously, at that moment he began to rejoice at his own boldness in deviating from THE GRAVE. I05 the strict path of uncompromising rectitude. For he thought of it as boldness, and of his former unyielding adherence to the principles he believed to be right, as timidity. After all, he said to him- self, it is easy to be too rigid, too strict. In all human dealings we must consider not only our- selves, but also the individuals with whom we have to do. Have we the right to injure them by our determination to take care of the welfare of our own souls? It seemed to him just then as if virtue was often merely selfishness and implied a lack of sympathy with others. He might have refused to lie and destroyed his friend. Would not that have been selfishness? Would not that have been sheer cowardice? lie told himself that it would. Calm flowed upon him. He was lost in the day-dream of the complacent man whose load of care has fallen away into the abyss from which he has fortunately escaped. The silence of the Island was intense to-day. His conscience slept with the winds. And the sea slept too with all its sorrow. He sat there like a carvcn figure with his face in his hand. And, by degrees, he ceased to feel, to think actively. Conscious, not asleep, with oi)cn eyes he remained in a placid attitude, lulled in the arms of a quiet happiness. He was distracted at length by some sound at a distance. It broke through his day-dream. At first he could not tell what it was, but presently he became aware that a hoarse voice was cjacu- I06 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. lating some word outside, probably in the church- yard. He took his hand from his face, sat up straight by the writing-table and began to listen, at first with some slight irritation. For he had been happy in his day-dream. The voice outside repeated the word. Uniacke thought of the street- cries of London to which he was going, and that this cry was hke one of them. He heard it again. Now it was nearer. Short and sharp, it sounded both angry and — something else — what ? Dolo- rous, he fancied, keen with a horror of wonder and of despair. He remembered where he was, and that he had never before heard such a cry on the Island. But he still sat by the table. He was listening intently, trying to hear what was the word the voice kept perpetually calling. " Jack ! Jack ! " Uniacke sprang up, pushing back his chair vio- lently. It caught in a rug that lay on the bare wooden floor and fell with a crash to the ground. "Jack! Jack!" The word came to his cars now in a sort of strident howl that w-as hardly human. He began to tremble. But still he did not recognise the voice. " Jack ! " It was cried under the window of the parlour, fiercely, frantically. Uniacke knew the voice for the mad Skipper's. He delayed no longer, but hastened to the front room and stared out across the churchyard. THE GRAVE. I07 The Skipper, with his huge hands uplifted, his fingers working as if they strove to strangle some- thing invisible in the air, was stumbling among the graves. His face was red and convulsed with excitement. " Jack ! " he shouted hoarsely, " Jack ! " And he went on desperately towards the sea, pursuing — nothing. Uniacke looked away from him towards the place where Sir Graham had been painting. The easel stood there with the canvas resting upon the wooden pins. On the ground before it was hud- dled a dark thing. Uniacke went out from his house. Although he did not know it he walked very slowly as if he dragged a weight. His feet trod upon the graves. As he walked he could hear the hoarse shout of the skipper dying away in the distance towards the sea. " Jack ! " The voice faded as he gained the churchyard wall. The dark thing huddled at the foot of the easel was the painter's dead body. On his discoloured throat there were the marks of fingers. Mechanic- ally Uniacke turned his eyes from those purple and red marks to the picture the dead man had been painting. He saw the figure of a boy in a seaman's jersey and long sea-boots dripping with water. The face of the boy was pale and swollen. The mouth hung down hideously. The hair was I08 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. matted with moisture. Only the eyes were beau- tiful, for they looked upward with a rapt and childlike expression. " He sees the rainbow ! " murmured the clergy- man. And he fell forward against the churchyard wall with his face buried in his arms. The voice of the grey sea was very loud in his ears. Darkness seemed to close in on him. He had done evil to do good, and the evil he had done had been in vain. His heart beat hard, and seemed to be in his throat choking him. And in the darkness he saw a vision of a dirty child, dressed in rags and a tall paper cap, and pointing upwards. And he heard a voice, that sounded far off and unearthly, say : " Look at that there rainbow ! Look at that there rainbow ! " He wondered, as a man wonders in a dream, whether the dead artist heard the voice too, but more clearly — and elsewhere. "WIILLIAM FOSTER." " WILLIAM FOSTER." One sad cold day in London, city of sad cold days, a man in a Club had nothing on earth to do. He had glanced through the morning papers and found them full of adjectives and empty of news. He had smoked several cigarettes. He had ex- changed a word or two of gossip with two or three acquaintances. And he had stared moodily out of a bow window, and had been rewarded by a vision of wet paving stones, wet beggars and wet sparrows. He felt depressed and inclined to wonder why he existed. Turning from the window to the long room at his back he saw an elderly Colonel yawning, with a sherry and bit- ters in one hand and a toothpick in the other. He decided not to remain in the Club. So he took his hat and went out into the street. It was raining in the street and he had no umbrella. He hailed a hansom and got in. " Where to, sir ? " asked the cabby through the trap door. " What?" said the man. " Where to, sir ? " " Oh ! go to— to " III 112 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. He tried to think of some place where he might contrive to pass an hour or two agreeably. " Sir ? " said the cabby. " Go to Madame Tussaud's," said the man. It was the only place he could think of at the moment. He had lived in London for years but he had never been there. He had never had the smallest desire to go there. Wax and glass eyes did not attract him. Dresses that hung from corpses, which had never been alive, did not appeal to him. Nor did he care for buns. He had never been to Tussaud's. He was only going there now because literally, at the moment, he knew not where to go. He leaned back in the cab and looked at the wet pedestrians, and at the puddles. When the cab stopped he got out and entered a large building. He paid money at a turnstile and drifted aimlessly into a waxen world. Some fat men in strange costumes, with bulging eyes like black velvet, and varying expressions of heavy lethargy, played Hungarian music on vio- lins. It was evident that they did not thrill them- selves. Their aspect was at the same time fierce and dull, they looked like volcanoes that had been drenched with water. The man passed on, the music grew softer and the waxen world pressed more closely round. Kings, cricketers, actresses, and statesmen beset him in vistas. He trod a maze of death that had not lived. There were very few school treats about, for the fashionable "WILLIAM FOSTER." II3 school treat season had not yet fully set in. So the man had the wax almost entirely to himself. He spread his wings to it like a bird to the air. By degrees, as he wandered — pursued by the dis- tant music from the drenched volcanoes — a feel- ing of suffocation overtook him. All these men and women about him stared and smiled, but all were breathless. They wore their gaudy clothes with an air, no doubt. The Kings struck regal attitudes. The cricketers had a set manner of bringing off dreamy, difficult catches. The actresses were properly made up to charm, and the statesmen must surely have brought plenty of empires to ruin, if insipidity has power to cause such wreckage. But they were all deci- sively breathless. They seemed caught by some ghastly physical spell. And this spell was laid also upon the man who wandered among them. The breath of life withdrew from him to a long, long distance — he fancied. He felt as one who, taken by a trance, is bereft of power though not of knowledge. The staring silence was as the silence of a tomb, whose walls were full of eyes, intent and fatigued. He started when a person in uniform, hitherto apparently waxen, said in a cockney voice, "Sec the Chamber of Horrors, sir ? " But he recovered in time to acquiesce. He descended towards a subterranean vault: as if to a lower circle of this inferno full of breath- less (lemons. I Icrc there were no rustic strangers, *3 il4 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. no clergymen with their choirs, no elderly ladies in command of " Bands of Hope." The silence was great, and the murderers stood together in companies, looking this way and that as if in search of victims. Some sat on chairs or stools. Some crouched in the dock. Some prepared for a mock expiation in their best clothes. One was at work in his house, digging in quicklime a hole the length of a human body. His waxen visage gleamed pale in the dim light, and he appeared to pause in his digging and to listen for sounds above his head. For he was in the cellar of his house. The man stood still and looked at him. He had a mean face. All the features were squeezed and venom'^s, and expressive of criminal desires and of extreme cruelty. And so it was with most of his comrades. They varied in height, in age, in social status and in colouring. But upon all their faces was the same frigid expression, a sort of thin hatefulness touched with sarcasm. The man wandered on among them and saw it everywhere, on the lips of a youth in rags, in the eyes of an old woman in a bonnet, lurking in the wrinkles of a labourer, at rest upon the narrow brow of a doctor, alive in the puffed-out wax of an attorney's bloated features. Yes, it was easy to recognise the Devil's hall-mark on them all, he thought. And he wondered a little how it came about that they had been able, in so many cases, to gain the confidence of their un- «« TTTTT T I . ■. r T^^r^rr^T^-.^ " WILLIAM FOSTER. II5 happy victims. Here, for instance, were the man and woman who had lured servant girls into the depths of a forest and there murdered them for the sake of their boxes. Even the silliest girl, one would have supposed, must have fled in terror from the ape-like cunning of those wicked faces. Here was the housekeeper who had made away with her aged mistress. Surely any one with the smallest power of observation would have refused to sit in the evening, to sleep at night, in company with so horrible a countenance. Here was the man who killed his paramour with a knife. How came he to have a paramour? The desire to kill lurked in his bony cheeks, his small, intent eyes, his narrow slit of a mouth, but no desire to love. God seemed to have set his warning to humanity upon each of these creatures of the Devil. Yet they had deceived mankind to mankind's undoing. They had won confidence, respect, even love. The man was confused by this knowledge, as he moved among them in the dimness and the silence, brushing the sleeve of one, the skirt of another, looking into the curiously expressive eyes of all. But presently his wondering recog- nition of the world's fatuous and frantic gulli- bility ceased. I'or at the end of an alley of murderers he stood before a woman. She was young, pretty and distinguished in appearance. Her features were small and delicate. Her brow was noble. Her painted mouth was tender and Il6 TONGUES OF COXSCIE\XE. saintly; and, though her eyes wcve sightless, truth and nobility surely gazed out of them. For a moment the man was seized by a conviction that a mistake had been made by the proprietors of the establishment, and that some being, famous for charitable deeds, or intellect, or heroic accomplishment had been put in penance among these tragic effigies. He glanced at her number, consulted his catalogue, and found that this woman was named Catherine Sirrett, and that she had been convicted of the murder of her husband by poison some few years before. Then he looked at her again and, before this criminal, he felt that she might, nay, must, have deceived any man, the most acute and enlightened ob- server. No one could have looked into that face and seen blackness in the heart of that woman. Everyone must have trusted her. Many must have loved her. Her appearance inspired more than confidence — reverence ; there was something angelic in its purity. There was something re- ligious in its quiet gravity. His heart grew heavy as he looked at her, heavy with a horror far more great than any that had overcome him as he examined the bestial company around. And when he came away, and long afterwards, Catherine Sirrett's face remained in his memory as the most horrible face in all that silent, watch- ful crowd of beings who had wrought violence upon the earth. For it was dressed in deceit. The other faces were naked. So he thought. "WILLIAM FOSTER." II7 He did not know Catherine Sirrett's story, though he remembered that a woman of her name had been hanged in England some years before, when he was in India, and that she had gained many sympathisers by her bearing and roused some newspaper discussion by her fate. This is her story, the inner story which the world never knew. • ••••• Catherine Sirrett's mother was an intensely, even a morbidly, religious woman. Her father was»an atheist and an aesthete. Yet her parents were fond of each other at first and made com- mon cause in spoiling their only child. Some- times the mother would whisper in the little girl's ear that she must pray for poor father who was blind to the true light and deaf to the beau- tiful voice. Sometimes the father would tell her that if she would worship she must worship genius, the poet, the painter, the musician ; that if she would pray she must pray to Nature, the sea, the sunset and the sj)ringtime. But as a rule these two loving antagonists thought it was enough f(jr their baby, their treasure, to develop quietly, steadily, in an atmosphere of adoration, in which arose no mist of theories, no war of words. Till slic was ten years old Catherine was untroubled. At that age a parental contest began to rage — at first furtively, — about her. With the years her mother's morbidity waxed, her father's restraint waned. The one became more intensely Il8 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. and frantically devout, the other n)ore frankly pagan. And now, as the child grew, and her mind and heart stood up to meet life and girl- hood, each of her parents began to feel towards her the desire of sole possession. She had been brought up a Christian. The father had per- mitted that. So long as she was an ignorant in- fant he had felt no anxiety to attach her to his theories. But when he saw the intelligence grow- ing in her eyes, the dawn of her soul deepening, there stirred within him a strong desire that she should face existence as he faced it, free from trammels of superstition. The mother, with the quick intuition of woman, soon understood his unexpressed feeling and thrilled with religious fear. Although — or indeed because — she loved her husband so much she was tortured by his lack of faith. And now she was alarmed at the thought of the effect his influence might have upon Catherine. She was roused to an intense activity of the soul. She said nothing to her husband of her fear and horror. He said nothing to her of his secret determination that his only child should grow up in his own faithless faith. But a silent and determined battle began to rage between them for the possession of Catherine's soul. And, at last, this battle turned the former love of the parents mto a sort of uneasy hatred. The child did not fully comprehend what was going on around her, but she dimly felt it. And it influenced her whole nature. "WILLIAM FOSTER." IIQ Her mother, who was given over to religious forms, who was rituahstic and sentimental as well as really devout and fervent, at first gained the ascendancy over Catherine. Holy but narrow- minded, she compressed the girl's naturally ex- pansive temperament, and taught her something of the hideous and brooding melancholy of the bigot and the fanatic. Then the father, quick- sighted, and roused to an almost angry activity by his appreciation of Catherine's danger, threw himself into the combat, and endeavoured to im- bue the girl with his own comprehension of life's meaning, exaggerating all his theories in the en- deavour to make them seem sufficiently vital and impressive. Catherine lived in the centre of this battle, which became continually more fierce, un- til she was eighteen. Then she fell in love with Mark Sirrett, married him, and left her parents alone with their mutual hostility, now compli- cated by a sort of paralysis of surprise and sense of mutual failure. They had forgotten that their child's future might hold a lover, a husband. Now they found themselves in the rather absurd position of enemies who have quarrelled over a shadow which suddenly vanishes away. They had lost their love for each other, they had lost Catherine. But her soul, though it was given to Mark Sirrett, had not lost their impress. Both the Puritanism of her mother and the paganism of her father were destined to play their parts in the guidance of her strange and terrible destiny. 120 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. Mark Sirrctt, \vhcn he married Catherine, was twenty-five, dark', handsome, warm-hearted and rich. It seemed that he had an exceptionally sweet and attractive nature. He had been an affectionate son, a kind brother in his home, a generous comrade at school and college. Every- body had a good word for him ; his family, his tutors, his friends, his servants. Like most young and ardent men he had had some follies. At least they were never mean or ungenerous. He entered upon married life with an unusually good record. Those who knew him casually, even many who knew him well, considered that he was easily read, that he was transparently frank, that, though highly intelligent, he was not particularly subtle, and that no still waters ran deep in Mark Sirrett. All these people were utterly wrong. Mark had a very curious side to his nature, which remained almost unsuspected until after his mar- riage with Catherine, but which eventually was to make a name very well known to the world. He was, although apparently so open, in reality full of reserve. He was full of ambition. And he had an exceptionally peculiar, and exception- ally riotous, imagination. And this imagination he was quite determined to express in an art — the art of literature. But his reserve kept him inactive until he had left Oxford, when he went to live in London, where eventually he met Cath- erine. His reserve, and his artistic hesitation to work "WILLIAM FOSTER." 121 until he felt able to do good work, held Mark's imagination in check as a dam holds water in check. He sometimes wrote, but nobody knew that he wrote except one friend, Frederic Ber- rand. And Berrand could be a silent man. Even to Catherine, when he fell in love with her and wooed her, Mark did not reveal his desire for fame, or his intention to win it. The girl loved her lover for what he was, but not for all he was. Of the still water that ran deep she as yet knew nothing. Siie thought her husband, who was rich, who appeared gay, who had lived so far, as it seemed, idly enough, would continue to live with her, as he had apparently lived with- out her, brightly, honestly, a little thoughtlessly, a little vainly. She had no sort of suspicion that she had married that very curious phenomenon — a born artist. Had her mother suspected it s-he would have been shocked. Had her father dreamed it he would have been delighted. And Catherine herself ? well, she was still a child at this time. She and Mark went to Spain for their honey- moon, and lived in a tiny white villa at Granada. It stood on the edge of the hill whose crown is the exquisite and dream-like Alhambra. Itslong and narrow garden ran along the hillside, a slope of roses and of orange flowers, of thick, hot grass and of tangled green shrubs. The garden wall was white and uneven, and almost hidden by wild, pink flowers. Beneath was spread the plain 122 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. in which lies the City, bounded by the mountains over which, each evening, the sun sets. And every day the d-rowsy air humm-ed in answer to the huge and drowsy voice of the wonderful Ca- thedral bell, which struck the hours and filled this lovely world with almost terrible vibrations of romance. In the thick woods that steal to the feet of the ethereal Palace the murmur of the streams was ever heard, and the white snows of the Sierra Nevada stared over the yellow and russet plain, and were touched with a blue blush as the night came on. Catherine, although she loved her parents and had never fully realised the enmity grown up be- tween them, felt a strange happiness, that was more than the happiness of new-born passion, in her emancipation. She was by nature exquisitely sensitive, and she had often been vaguely troubled by the contest between her parents. Their fight- ing instfncts had sometimes set her face to face with a sort of shadowed valley, in whose black- ness she faintly heard the far-off clash of weapons. Now she was caught away from this subtle tumult, and as she looked into her husband's vivacious dark eyes she felt that a little weight which had lain loner on her heart was lifted from it. She had thought herself happy before, now she knew herself utterly happy. Life seemed to have no dark background. Even love itself was not spoiled by a too great wonder of seriousness. They loved in sunshine and were gay — like grass- "WILLIAM FOSTER. 12$ hoppers in the grass that the sun has filled with a still rapture of warmth. Not till two days be- fore their departure for England was this chirp- ing, grasshopper mood disturbed or dispelled. At one end of the long and narrow garden there was a little crude pavilion, open to the air on three sides. The domed roof was supported on painted wooden pillars up which red and white roses audaciously climbed. Rugs covered the floor. A wooden railing ran along the front facing the steep hillside. The furniture was simple and homely, a few low basket chairs and an oval table. In this pavilion the newly mar- ried pair took tea nearly every afternoon after their expeditions in the neighbourhood, or their strolls through the sunny Moorish Courts. After tea they sat on and watched the sunset, and fancied they could see the birds that flew away above the City towards the distant mount- ains drop down to their nests in Seville ere the darkness came. This last evening but one was intensely hot ; the town at their feet seemed drowning in a dust of gold. Cries, softened and made utterly musical, rose up to them from this golden world, beyond which the sky reddened as the sun sank lower. Sometimes they heard the jingling bells of mules and horses in the hidden streets; they saw the pigeons circling above the house-tops, and doll-like figures moving whim- sically in gardens that seemed as small as pocket- handkerchiefs. Thin laughter of playing children 124 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. stole to them. And then the huge and veiled voice of the Cathedral bell tolled the hour, like Time become articulate. A voice may have an immense influence over a sensitive nature. This bell of the Cathedral of Granada has one of the most marvellous voices in the world, deep with a depth of old and van- ished ages, heavy with the burden of all the long-dead years, and this evening it seemed sud- denly to strike away a veil from Catherine's husband. She was leaning her arms on the painted railing and searching the toy city with her happy eyes. Mark, standing behind her, was solicitously winding a shawl round her to protect her from the chill that falls from the Sierra Ne- vada with the dropping downward of the sun. As the bell tolled, Catherine felt that Mark's hands slipped from her shoulders. She glanced roundand upat him. He was standing rigid. His eyes were widely opened. His lips were parted. All the gaiety that usually danced in his face had disappeared. He looked like an entranced man. " Mark ! " Catherine exclaimed. " Mark ! why, how strange you look! " " Do I ? " he said, staring out over the wide plain below. The voice of the bell died reluctantly on the air, but some huge and vague echo of its heavy romance seemed to sway, like a wave, across the little houses to the sunset and faint towards Soiville. •t ,TTTT T TAUT T-^OT.T-n " WILLIAM FOSTER. 1 25 " Yes, you look sad and stern. I have never seen your face like this — till now." He made no answer. " Are you sad because we are going so soon ? " she asked. " But then why should we go ? We are perfectly happy here. There is nothing to call us away." " Kitty, docs not that bell give you the lie?" he answered. " The bell of the Cathedral ? " she asked, wondering. " Yes. Just now when I listened to it, I seemed to hear it whispering of the mysterious things of life, of the hidden currents in the great river, of the sorrows, of the terrors, of the crimes." " Mark ! " said Catherine in amazement. " Nothing to call us away from our idle hap- piness here ! " he continued. ** Do you say — nothing ? " " Why — no. For we are free ; we have no ties. You have no profession, Mark. You have no art even to call you back to England. Dear father — how he worships the arts ! " " And you, Kitty — you ?" Mark spoke with a curious pressure of excite- ment. " He has taught mc to love them too." " How mucii, Kitty? As he loves them, more than anything else on earth ? " 126 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. She had never heard him speak at all like this. She answered : " Ah no. For my mother " She paused. " My mother has made me understand that there is something greater than any art, more important, more beautiful." " What can that be ? " " Oh, Mark —religion ! " He leaned over the railing at her side, and the ■white and red roses that embraced the pillar shook against his thick dark hair in the infant breeze of evening. " But there are many religions," he said. " A man's art may be his religion." A troubled look came into her eyes and made them like her mother's. " Oh no, Mark." " Yes, Kitty," he said, with growing earnest- ness, putting aside his reserve for the first time with her. " Indeed it may." " You mean when he uses it to do good ?" He shook his head. The roses shivered. ** The true artist never thinks of that. To have a definite moral purpose is destructive." The City at their feet was sinking into shadow now, and the air grew cold, filled with the snowy breath of the Sierra. " When we go back to England I will teach you the right way to follow an art, to worship it ; the way that will be mine." "WILLIAM FOSTER." 127 " Yours, Mark?" But I don't understand." " No," he said. " You don't understand all of me yet, Kitty. Do you want to ? " " Yes," she said. There was a sound of fear in her voice. Mark sat down beside her and put his arm round her. " Kitty," he began. " I'm only on the thresh- old of my life, of my real life, my life with you and with my work." " You are going to work ? " she exclaimed. " Yes. That bell just now seemed to strike the hour of commencement — to tell me it was time for me to begin. I should like, some day — far in the future, Kitty, — to hear it strike that other hour, the hour when I must finish, when the little bit of work that I can do in the world is done. I shan't be afraid of that hour any more than I'm afraid of this one. Perhaps, when you and I are old we shall come here again, and listen to that bell once more, the same, when wc are changed." He pointed towards the Cathedral which was still touched by the sun. Catherine leaned against his shoulder. She said nothing, and did not move. " Everything in life has its appointed recorder," he continued. " They are a big band, the band of the recorders who strive accurately to write down life as it is. Well, Kitty, I am going to be one of that band." " You arc going to be a writer, Mark?" 128 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Yes." " Then, you will record the beauty, the joy, the purity, the goodness of life ? " His usually bright face had become sombre and thoughtful. It looked strangely dark and satur- nine in the twilight. " I shall record what I see most clearly." " And what is that ? " " Not the things on the surface, but the things beneath the surface, of life." And then he told Catherine more fully of his ambition and gave her a glimpse of the hidden side of his duplex nature. She gazed up at him in the gathering twilight and it seemed to her that she was looking at a stranger. The climbing roses still shook against Mark in the wind. While he talked his voice grew almost fierce, and his dark eyes shone like the eyes of a fanatic. When he ceased to speak, Catherine's lips were pursed together, like her mother's when she listened to the pagan rhapso- dies of Mr. Ardagh. Two days later the Sirretts left Granada for England. On their return they paid a short visit to Catherine's parents, who were living in Eaton Square. Mr. and Mrs. Ardagh received them with a sort of dulled and narcotic affection. In truth, for different reasons, the Puritan and the "WILLIAM FOSTER." 129 pagan cherished a certain resentment against the man who had stepped in and robbed them of their cause of warfare. Nevertheless they desired his company in their house. For each Avas anxious to study him and to discover what influence he was hkely to have upon Catherine. During her daughter's absence Mrs. Ardagh had found the emptiness of her childless life insupportable, and she had, therefore, engaged a young girl, called Jenny Levita, to come to her every day as companion. Jenny was intelligent and very poor, bookish and earnest, even ardent in nature. Mrs. Ardagh gained a certain amount of interest and pleasure from forming the pliant mind of her protd'gee, who was with her always from eleven till six in the evening, who read aloud to her, accompanied her on her charitable missions, and took — so far as a stranger might, — the place of Catherine in her life. Catherine met Jenny upon the doorstep of her parents' house on the evening of her arrival, and hastened to ask her mother who the slim girl, with the tall figure, narrow shoulders, fluffy brown hair, and large oriental eyes was. " My paid daughter," said Mrs. Ardagh, almost bitterly, " But she can't fill the place of my lost Catherine." Nevertheless, Catherine discovered that her mother was truly attached to Jenny. " I took her partly because she is easily led," she said, " easily influenced and so very jiretty 130 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. and poor. I want to save her for God, and when I met her there was one who wished to lead her to the devil. She won't see him now. She won't hear his name." Then she dropped the subject. Catherine was alternately questioned by her father and by her mother as to the influence of Mark. But something within her prevented her from telling them of the conversation in the Pavilion, when the cries of the toy city died down into the night. Mrs. Ardagh, now sinking in the confusion of a rather dreary middle age, compli- cated by a natural melancholy, and by incessant confession to a ritualistic clergyman seductive in receptivity, was relieved to think that Mark was harmless. Art for Art's sake — the motto of her husband — had apparently little meaning for Mark. As Mrs. Ardagh thought it the devil's motto she was glad of this and said so to Catherine. Mr. Ar- dagh, on the other hand, was vexed to find Mark apparently so frivolous ; and he also expressed his feelings to Catherine, who became slightly confused. " I should like to see your husband doing something," he said. "You have much of me in you. Kit, despite your poor dear mother's extrav- agant attempts to limit your reading to Frances Ridley Havergal. Why didn't you marry an artist, eh ? A painter or an author, somebody •who can give us more beauty than we have al- •'WILLIAM FOSTER." I3I ready, or more truth ? You're too good for P'rances Ridley Havergal. Leave her to your mother and that girl, Jenny, who is like wax in your mother's hands and the hands of the Rev. Father Grimshaw. Piff ! " Catherine said nothing, but she sought an op- portunity of seeing something of Jenny. She found it, just before the day on which she and Mark were to leave London for their country house. Jenny had come as usual one morning, to read aloud to Mrs. Ardagh. They were just then deep in the " Memoirs " of a certain pious divine, whose chief claim upon the attention and gratitude of posterity seemed to be that, during a very long career, he had " confessed " more Anglican notabilities than any of his rivals, and had used up, in his church, an amount of incense that would have put a Roman Catholic priest to shame. On the morning in question the reading was interrupted. Mrs. Ardagh was called away to consult with a lay-worker in the slums upon some scheme for reclaiming the submerged masses, and Catherine, running in to her mother's boudoir after a walk with Mark, found the tall, narrow-shouldered girl with the oriental eyes sitting alone with the apostolic memoirs lying open upon her knees. Catherine was not sorry. She took off her fur coat and sat down. " What are you and my mother reading, Miss Levita ? " she asked. Jenny told her. 132 TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE. " Is it interesting? " " I suppose it ought to be," Jenny answered, thoughtlessly. Then a flush ran over her thin cheeks, on which there were a great many little freckles. " I mean that it is very interesting," she added. " Your mother will tell you so, Mrs. Sirrett." " Perhaps. But I was asking your opinion." It struck Catherine that Jenny had her opinion and was scarcely as compliant as Mr. Ardagh evi- dently supposed her to be. At Catherine's last re- mark Jenny glanced up. The two girls looked into each other's eyes, and, in Jenny's, Catherine thought she saw a flickering defiance. " I was asking your opinion," she repeated. " Well, Mrs. Sirrett," Jenny said, more hardily, •*' I don't know why it is. I admire and love goodness, yes, as your mother — who's a saint, I think — does. But I'll tell you frankly that I think it's often very dull to read about. Don't you think so? " She blushed again, and let the heavy white lids droop over her eyes, which had glittered almost like the eyes of a fever patient while she was speaking. " Only when dull people write about it, surely," said Catherine. " I don't know," Jenny said, twisting her black stuff dress with nervous fingers. " I often think that in the books of the cleverest authors there are " WILLIAM FOSTER." 133 dull moments, and that those dull moments are nearly always when the good, the really excellent, characters are being written about." " And in real life. Miss Levita ? " asked Cath- erine. " Do you find the good people duller, less interesting, than the bad ones in real life ? " :' I haven't known many very bad ones, Mrs. Sirrett." " Well — but those you have known ! " Jenny hesitated. She was obviously cmbar- rassed. She even shifted, like an awkward child, in her chair. But there was something of obsti- nate honesty in her that would have its way. "If you must know, — I mean, if you care to know, please," she said at length, " the most interesting person I ever met was — yes, I sup- pose he was a wicked man." Her curious, sharp-featured, yet attractive, face was hot all over as she finished. Catherine divined at once that she was speaking of the person who, according to Mrs. Ardagh, had wished " to lead her to the devil." At this moment, while the two girls were silent, Mrs. Ardagh returned to the room. As Catherine left it she heard the soft and high V(jice of Jenny taking u[) once more the parable of the highly-honoured divine. Catherine was not allf)