White Fire Part 4

And the shorter one of the two said simply:--

"You will have learned by this time, from my dear old friend and second father, what I myself only learned three days ago--that it was your unconscious hand that set my unconscious feet on the ladder. I rejoice to know that it was so. The knowledge of it would be an additional spur, if any spur were needed. Time may come, however, when the remembrance of your kindness and all it has done for me, unconscious though it was, may nerve me for some critical pa.s.sage in the life in front, for we are going among perilous peoples. It is not likely we shall ever meet again, but, having learned how this matter stood, I could not leave home without tendering you my most grateful and hearty thanks.

"That your life may be a wide, and bright, and beautiful, and happy one will be the prayer of

"Yours faithfully, "KENNETH BLAIR."

"He is a good man," said Jean thoughtfully, as she folded the letter and put it carefully into a special corner of her desk, and then immediately took it out again and re-read it. "May G.o.d go with him also!"

She read in the papers next day of his sailing in company with John Gerson, the prophet of the Dark Islands, and was surprised to discover in herself a curious feeling of loss, as though something had gone out of her life. Which, considering all the circ.u.mstances of the case, was distinctly odd, you know.

She had only met him twice in her life; for ten years she had hardly given him a thought; and yet his going left a little blank in a life which was quite unaccustomed to anything of the kind.

But the sudden sight of him in all his quiet strength of attainment, and the knowledge of what it all meant to him, together with this new understanding of how it had all come about, and of the share she herself had unconsciously had in the making of him--well, perhaps after all it was not so odd. For she had felt a sudden glow of partic.i.p.ation in his triumph, a sudden sense of increase such as no procurement of her wealth had ever brought her--and now it was as suddenly gone, and a blank remained.

She caught herself thinking of him oftener than she had ever thought of any man before, and she said to herself in surprise--

"Goodness gracious me! why does that herd-laddie stick in my brain so?"

A quite dispa.s.sionate dissector of the emotions and their origins might have come to the conclusion that it was, after all, only a case of the heart performing its natural function of feeding the brain. For the heart is the life.

She laughed at herself; but the herd-laddie remained in her thoughts, and one day, before she went south, she actually found herself sitting on that very same piece of rock where she had sat ten years before, and in imagination he sat on the adjacent rock, munching his thick oatcake and broken pieces of cheese.

"What a greedy little pig I was!" she said to herself, as she sat leaning forward with her chin in her hand. "But I don't believe he'd have taken a bite from me, however much I'd wanted him to."

She looked at the slab where the windmill had been, and at the pool where the gentleman had washed. He looked as if he had been strenuously washing ever since. What a radiant face he had! It did not come from much washing, she knew; but somehow the two things linked themselves in her mind. It was the white fire inside that lit up the outside: a real man--a man to trust infinitely--a man to----

She sat looking out over the mighty panorama of hills and lochs and mountains opposite--"Gare Loch, Loch Goil, Loch Long, Ben Lomond, Ben Ihme, The Cobbler, Holy Loch." She knew most of them still. How the sight of them all brought him back to her! And, in all probability, he would never see them again. "We are going among perilous peoples."

Well! he had done very wonderfully; he was fulfilling the highest aspirations of his boyish heart.

And she? She was a lady, and very rich, as she had said she would be.

And she remembered the touch of scorn with which the herd-laddie had said, "Yes, that's about all you can be, I suppose."

Close behind her the swift brown waters of the Cut hurried headlong to the town--one long, unceasing blessing. "Men may come and men may go, but we go on for ever," sang the bubbling waters against the rough rock walls of their narrow way.

"Surely I am one of the most useless of G.o.d's creatures," said Jean Arnot, as she wandered slowly back towards the paper-mill and home.

CHAPTER III

THE MAN'S MAN

Unflecked blue sky above, with a blazing white sun in it. A mighty mountain peak, with bald summit, seamed sides mantled with greenery, and round its waist, where it sat in the water, a narrow band of gleaming white sand and tufted cocoa-palms, like an Island woman's girdle. A smooth, dark, ruffled mirror of lagoon; and farther out, with gaps here and there, a barrier reef on which the hungry sea chafed and roared in ceaseless thunder. Two white men and a menacing crowd of brown ones.

"Ready?" asked the elder of the two men.

He was tall and thin, white-haired and grey-bearded, and his eyes shone like stars. His face was bronzed with much sun. There was a glow in it which did not come from the sun, a mighty determination which did not come from mere strength of will, a sweet white soul-fire which had made him a power throughout the islands of the Southern Seas.

"I am ready," said the younger man.

His face was brown also, but not bronzed. There was a lighter patch of tightened skin above each cheek-bone. His jaw was set so grimly that it looked aggressive. His lips were tightly closed. His eyes were unnaturally wide at the moment. He looked slightly raised--fey, in fact, as a man looks when he and death meet face to face in a narrow way.

In front, the crowd of Islanders stood waiting for them at an angle of rock where the white beach curved round into the land. They carried clubs and spears, and swung them restlessly. Behind, on the smooth reflexive swell of the lagoon, a white boat, just pushed off from the sh.o.r.e, rode like a seabird with wings outstretched for swoop or flight.

Farther out a waiting schooner, whose white sails shivered softly to a head breeze.

"Remember, my son," said the elder man quietly, "one sign of flinching and it is finished. Now let us go." He bared his white head and said softly, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit,"

and went up towards the dark men like the courteous Christian gentleman he was. The younger man did the same.

[Ill.u.s.tration: One sign of flinching and it is finished.]

The natives drew back round the rock; the white men followed. The men in the boat watched intently, and then listened and gazed at the angle of the rock. Their orders were to wait.

The two men pa.s.sed out of sight, the elder, quiet and calm, as if going for a stroll in his mission garden, the younger, strung to martyr pitch, ready to endure to the utmost. The islanders retreated foot by foot; the white men followed steadily. Then, suddenly, clubs whirled and spears bristled, and the brown men turned and rolled on the white like a flood, and parted them.

The elder man stood and eyed them steadfastly. He had been through it many times before. Death and he had been old friends and fellow-travellers for many a year, and the pa.s.sing of The Gate was to him but the entrance to a larger life. He spoke to them in words he thought they might understand. For a moment the two men were like two white rocks in a foaming mountain stream. Brown arms, clubs, spears whirled about them. Not one man in ten thousand could have stood it unmoved.

The white-haired man was such a one. He stood. The younger man's face broke; the strings had been drawn too tight. He cast one swift glance round.

In an instant the silvery crown beside him ran blood, and disappeared.

With bent head inside his folded arms the younger man dashed at the throng, and sent the brown men spinning, as he had sent men of a brawnier breed spinning on the football field at home. He burst through them in spite of blows and cuts. He was close up to the wild eddy under which his old friend lay when a well-flung club caught him deftly in the neck and brought him down in a heap. The brown men danced madly, and let their shouts go up. They took the younger man by the heels, and dragged him to where the body of the elder lay, and flung him down on top of it. Then the sailors from the boat burst on them with a yell, and sent them scattering.

It was days before he recovered consciousness, weeks before he could lie in a chair on the verandah of the distant mission-house--weak from loss of blood, weaker still in other ways.

They tended him lovingly. There were gracious women there who ministered to him like angels. To them he was hero, saint, martyr but once removed. To himself----!

He was almost too weak to think about it yet. He was hacked to pieces, and bruised to pulp. When he tried to move, it seemed to him that not one sound inch of flesh was left him. When he tried to think, all the little blood that was left in him rushed up into his head and set it humming and buzzing, and dyed his face crimson under the partly bleached tan.

His mind was still in a state of confusion; his thoughts were almost as broken as his body. He remembered facing the bristling brown men. He could see their s.h.a.ggy heads and twisted faces, their white teeth, their gleaming eyes, and the whirl of their brandished weapons. After that all was blurred, and broke off into sudden darkness. He had a dim remembrance of intense strain and a sudden snap. He groped for the ends of the broken threads, but they were hidden in the outer void. He was still very weak.

He accepted gratefully all that was done for him, but for the most part lay in silence. His sufferings were great, but no word of complaint ever pa.s.sed his lips. If he had permitted himself any such, it would have been that he still lived when his leader died. To all he was a monument of patient resignation.

So great was his depression, and so slow his recovery, that it was decided at last to send him home, as the only hope of full recuperation. He acquiesced, as he had done in everything they suggested, but in this matter with evident reluctance. He thought it unlikely he would ever return. His heart had been in the work, but he had been tried and found wanting. The work, he said to himself, was for abler and more faithful hands.

So the mission schooner carried him to the nearest port of call, and in due course he was lying in a deck chair carefully swathed in plaids, and the great steamer bore him swiftly homewards.

The story of the martyrdom and of his heroic defence of his old friend: how they two had gone up alone to the peaceful a.s.sault of an island of the night; how he had fought for his leader till he could fight no longer, and had fallen at last wounded to death across his dead body,--it had all preceded him. The very sailors were proud to have him on board. The officers made much of him in an undemonstrative way.

The ladies fluttered round his chair like humming-birds, and loaded him with attentions.

And he suffered it all in silence. He was still very weak. How could he turn his sick soul inside out to these strangers, and what good to do so?

He had not yet decided what course to take when he got home. He had thought and thought, till he was sick of thinking, sick of himself, sick of life. Ah! why had he not died with the brave old man out there on the sh.o.r.e of the creek behind the rocks? Why had his nerve given way at that supreme moment? Why had this bitter cross been laid upon him? Far better to have died--far easier, at all events. But easier and better run opposite ways as a rule, and have little in common.

Should he confess the whole matter, and retire from the field and find some other way of life? Truly he felt no call to any other work. This had been the one desire of his life; he had grown from youth to manhood in the hope of it. He believed he could still be of service when once he got over the effects of his present fall. Should he not rather bury the dead past, with G.o.d as only mourner, and start afresh?--to fail once more when the strain came again, he said to himself with exceeding bitterness. He grieved over his lapse as another might grieve over a deliberate crime. But he postponed any final decision as to the future till he should feel stronger in mind and body.