Foe-Farrell Part 36

"Her words came in faint, hurrying wafts, much as for days the wind had been ruffling after us. The sunset struck slantwise across her cheek and hung entangled in the brown tress that drooped low by her right temple. I tell you, Roddy, that if the old G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses in our school-books ever turned out to be mortal after all, she was one, and thus looked, and spoke as she died. . . .

"'I understand well enough,' she went on, 'the small things over which women quarrel. . . . Though they all seem very far away just now, I was a woman and could be jealous over _any of them_. But I never understood why _men_ quarrelled, except for me, of course.

. . . Was it over your work, do you tell me?'

"'Surely,' said I, 'a man's work--'

"'Yes. I know that it is so,' she answered me with a small sigh.

'Do you know that, far back, I come down from the Incas? and I dare say they thought less of work than of other things. . . . It is all thanks to your working that we three are alive, now. . . . I understand a little why men so much value their work. . . . But yet I do not understand why they drop their work to quarrel as they do.

I understand it no better than the fighting of dogs.' She paused on that last word, and then, as though it had put new life into her, she sat erect and opened her eyes wider upon the horizon as she put the amazing question, 'Was it over a dog that you two hated?'

"It staggered me: but I caught at the first explanation. 'Oh, I see,' said I. 'Your husband has been telling you?'

"She didn't answer this at once. . . . At length, and as though my voice had taken long in reaching her, far out on the ocean where her gaze rested--'No,' said she, 'Pete has told me nothing. ... I never asked. . . . But if it is true, _ay de mi!_ then that which I behold is not true.'

"'Of what are you speaking?' I asked.

"'I saw an island,' she answered, as one in a dream: 'and again I see it. It has two sharp peaks and one that would seem to be cut short.

Lawns of green climb up to the peaks between forests. There is a ring of surf all about the sh.o.r.e . . . but the boat has found a pa.s.sage through . . . and you and Pete are landing . . . and-- strangest!--there is a dog leaping about on the sh.o.r.e to welcome you.'

"I was silent, not caring to break in upon her happy delirium.

'But I am not there,' she whispered, almost in a moan. 'Why should a dog be there and not I?' Still getting no word from me, she turned her eyes full on mine and repeated the question imperatively, almost indignantly. 'Why should it be a dog?--and not _I_, over whom you never hated?'

"'Santa,' said I, 'if there were such an island as you see--'

"'But there _is_,' she interrupted quick as thought. 'There _is_, and it is near, though I shall not see it, except from the boat.'

"'Say, then, that there is such an island--' said I. It was just possible: for during the last two days we had sighted many sea-birds.

"'And near--quite near,' she insisted. 'It has groves of coco-trees, and streams tumbling down the rocks--on which no boat can row with men cursing in her and fighting with knives.'

"'Then you shall land on that island, O beloved!' said I, 'and we will live on it, and love--'

"'Ah, I know what you mean! You mean as they love in heaven? Yes.'

And she added quite simply. 'I have had great trouble with men.'

"'Not exactly as in heaven,' said I, and took out from a breast-pocket under my jumper a small flask of yellow Chartreuse, which I had s.n.a.t.c.hed up among other small belongings from my state-room locker ten minutes before the _Eurotas_ went down.

I had nursed it with a very jealous purpose. . . . Farrell should not slip through my fingers by dying, while I could yet force a stimulant down his throat, to linger him out. . . . It was a tiny 'sample'

flask, and had been pressed on my acceptance, as a small flourish of trade, by a German wine-dealer in Valparaiso. . . . And here at the crisis, with Farrell dying at my feet, on an instant I renounced my purpose.

"'Drink this,' I commanded Santa, 'and you shall live some hours yet.

And then, if there _be_ an island--'

"She caught at it with a delighted cry, her hands suddenly vitalised.

The guitar slid down from her lap. She drew out the gla.s.s stopper, holding the flask up a moment to the setting sun and letting it blaze through the liquid. Then swiftly, as I made sure she would carry it to her lips, she bent over Farrell and whispered some soft word of the night that pierced his stupor so that he stirred and lolled his head around. . . . Yes, and for a farewell kiss--which I watched without jealousy. . . .

"But as their mouths drew apart, and before his swollen lips could close again, she had slipped the mouth of the flask between them and the cordial was pouring down his throat. . . .

"She had defeated me. . . . I watched her without uttering a word.

Farrell let out a guttural sort of _ah-h!_ and sat up somewhat higher against her knee, opening his chest and breathing in new life as the Chartreuse coursed through his veins. Santa turned the flask upside-down, and handed it to me.

"'I have won!' she said softly. 'Men at the last are--what is the word?--magnanimous, mostly: and that is why a woman can usually win in the end.'

"'You have thrown away,' said I, 'so much of life as I gave you, renouncing much. You have sacrificed yourself.'

"'That was _my_ share of the price, my friend. Now continue to be great, as for these many days you have been good. There is a bad pain about my heart. With that other small bottle of yours, and with that needle I have seen you use . . . You will? Ah, how much better it is to be friends than enemies, when the world--even this little shrinking world--is so wide yet--so wide--'

"So I took her wrist and, she scarcely wincing, injected the last drop of my morphia: yes, Roddy, and kissed the spot like any poor fool, she not resisting! . . . Her last words were that I should lay the guitar back again on her lap. . . . Oh, d.a.m.n it, man! it was everything your d.a.m.ned sneerer would choose to call it. . . . But I tell you I held my ear close to her breast for hours; and in my light-headedness I heard the muted music lulling her: and in and out of her breathing, when she was long past speech--and above the stertorous snoring of my enemy laid at her feet--I heard distant waves breaking in a low chime to some words of a verse I had once quoted to her on a night when her song had made the crews sorrowful for a while before lifting their hearts again to make them merry--music to ripple, ripple:"

'--Ripple in my hearing Like waves upon a lonely beach, where no craft anch.o.r.eth; That I may steep my soul therein, and craving naught, nor fearing, Drift on through slumber to a dream, and through a dream to death.'

"My ear was close to her breast, listening, as the last breath went out with a flutter . . . and Santa was dead, having conquered me-- conquered me far beyond my guessing; but up to the moment having subdued me so effectively that my sole kiss of her had been taken, kneeling, upon the wrist, as one kisses faith to a sovereign, and had never been returned. Through the night I held her wrist until it was cold."

"Towards dawn, and just at that moment when a watcher's spirits are at their lowest, Farrell stirred, stretched out his legs, drew them up again, and asked how things were? . . . For his part (he added, sitting up weakly), he felt a different man.

"'It behoves you to be,' said I with some sternness. 'Take the tiller and--yes, you may hold on to it with some firmness. Your wife is dead.'

"'Santa!' he gasped. 'Oh, my G.o.d!' and cast himself upon her body, seemly bestowed as I could serve it.

"'Get off of it,' I shouted, 'before I brain you!' I held the very gaff with which Grimalson had torn my arm. He had plucked the tiller from the rudder-head, and with these two weapons in our right hands we faced one another, each with his left feeling for the revolver he carried.

"Then Farrell, who stood facing the bows, shot out his right as if jabbing at me with the stick, a foot short of my shoulder.

The action was, as a stroke, so idiotic that, although it might so easily have meant death to me, I turned half-about to where the stick pointed, as the helmless boat yawed.

"And there, above the low-lying wisps of morning fog, stood three peaks: two sharp and the third blunted: and, below the fog, ran a thin white ribbon of breaking water!

"We had run down upon it so close in those hours of darkness that the beat of the surf had, as I now recognised, confused itself into Santa's last breathings: so close that, as the sun took swift mastery of the mist and dissolved it, disclosing, below the peaks, the variegated greenery of lawn and forest pouring down to the seamed cliffs and pouring over them to the very beaches in tapestries of vines and creepers, we were almost in the ring of the surf: and it came as a shock to me that the lazy swell on which we had so long lifted and dropped, heeding it least among many threats, could beat on this islet so terrifically.

"The sight so vanquished Farrell that he yielded the stick over to me, obedient as a child. I thrust it back in its socket, hauled sheet and fetched her up close to the wind outside the surges. . . .

Without a word said, he turned to pointing out this and that inlet between the reefs where there seemed a chance to slip through.

"For two miles at least we fended off in this way, until we came to the base of the hill which, from seaward, had appeared so curiously truncated. As we opened its steep-to sides, they rounded gradually into a high curve at the skyline, and, at the base, into a foresh.o.r.e of tumbled rock through which ran a cleft with still water protected by sheer rocks--a narrow slit, but worth risking with the wind to drive us straight through. So I upped helm on the heave of a comber, and drove her for it, the walls of rock so close on either hand that twice the end of our short boom brushed them before Farrell, who held the sheet, could avoid touching. . . . And then, rushed by a heave of the swell through this gorge, we were shot into a round lake of the bluest water I ever set eyes on; a lakelet, rather; calm as a pond except by the entrance, where the waves, broken and spent, spread themselves in long ripples that melted and were gone.

"You know Lulworth Cove? Well, imagine Lulworth, with a narrower entrance, its water blue as a sapphire shot with amethystine violet, its cliffs taller, steeper, hung with matted creeper and, high aloft, holding the heaven in a three-part circle almost as regular as you could draw with a pair of compa.s.ses. We were floating in the cup of a dead volcano, broken on the seaward side; and broken many hundreds of years ago--for on our starboard hand, by the edge of the rent, swept down a slope of turf, cropped by the gales, green as an English park; with a thread of a stream dropping to a small wilderness of ferns, and, through this, to plash upon a miniature beach of pink sand, on the edge of which the sea scarcely lapped. Sea-birds of many kinds circled and squawked overhead. Yet it was not our boat that had frightened them.

"They had risen in alarm at the sound of barking, high up the slope.

A dog came leaping down it, tore through the fern, and, as our boat drew to sh.o.r.e, raced to and fro by the water's edge, barking wildly in an ecstasy of welcome. A yellow dog, Roddy--a largish yellow dog--and, as I live by food, the living image of my murdered Billy!"

NIGHT THE NINETEENTH.

THE CASTAWAYS.

(Foe's Narrative Continued.)

"A miracle? Well, I had always supposed poor Billy to be a mongrel of such infinite variety of descent that the world might never hope to behold his like. But, after all, the strains even of dogs are limited in number; and what Nature has produced she can reproduce.