E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Stephen Blundell, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)

TONGUES OF CONSCIENCE

by

ROBERT HICHENS

_Short Story Index Reprint Series_

Books for Libraries Press
Freeport, New York

First Published 1900
Reprinted 1971

Printed in the United States of America
by
New World Book Manufacturing Co., Inc.
Hallandale, Florida 33009

CONTENTS

                                        PAGE
 SEA CHANGE--
   Part I. THE RAINBOW                     1
   Part II. THE GRAVE                     51

 "WILLIAM FOSTER"                        109

 THE CRY OF THE CHILD--
   Part I. THE DEAD CHILD                183
   Part II. THE LIVING CHILD             223

 HOW LOVE CAME TO PROFESSOR GUILDEA      267

 THE LADY AND THE BEGGAR                 341

SEA CHANGE.

PART I.

THE RAINBOW.

    "Nothing of him that doth fade,
    But doth suffer a sea change,
    Into something rich and strange."

                            SHAKESPEARE.

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 like a
blackbird through the twinkling village. Dogs bark from solitary 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 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, sometimes 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 sometimes Nature seems to have the power of absolution,
even as God has it.

Now, at the age of thirty-two, he heard the footsteps 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 grey
and sleepless waves sang loudly. In the churchyard, growing gradually
dim and ethereal, were laid many bodies from which the white vampires 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 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 Pringle, cast up by the sea on December
    4th, 1896. 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 himself 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, possibly, preached now and then that
so indeed it was. Or, perhaps, was the light-hearted and careless 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 seventeen."
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 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 almost of
necessity a recluse, entertained for the present 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 to deliver
passionately long winding melodies from _Tristan and Isolde_. 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 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 enquiries 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 Kensington, and, just
recently, of his wretched condition of health, which, it was said, had
driven him suddenly 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 scarcely ever occupied. My friends find this island a far
cry, except in the height of summer. I shall be glad of your company
and glad to make you as comfortable as I can."

"You are very kind," said the painter, hesitating. "But I scarcely--"

"Come as my guest," said the clergyman, reddening 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 fish.

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," Uniacke said.

"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 answered, "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 window. It seemed to be a mourner
looking at the graves."

"I was looking at them. But nobody I care for 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 remarked, 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 acquaintances. Yes, that's quite true.
Sometimes, nevertheless, we learn in the end to hate those who have
brought us most. Perhaps, because they have educated us in the
understanding of disappointment. 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.

"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," Uniacke said 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 London, 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 unusual quickness.

"Of work and health."

"Oh, yes. Do you care, since we are on intimate 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 she lives, anything at all about her. I don't
suppose I ever shall. She may be dead."

"You don't think you would know it if she were?"

"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 ear?"

"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."

"And monotonous?"

"Often. But we have times of keen excitement, of violent, even of
exhausting activity. I have had to rush from the pulpit up to my
shoulders in the sea."

"A wreck?"

"Yes, there have been many. There was the schooner 'Flying Fish.' She
broke up when I 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 gradually. 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?"

"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 shoulders and a cap down over
his glittering and melancholy eyes, that had watched for many years all
the subtle changes of the colour and the movement of the sea. Uniacke
opened the Vicarage door and they stood in the wind. The night was not
dark, but one of those wan and light grey nights that seemed 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 faithfulness
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, cannot 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 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 office--the summoning of
men to pray, the benediction of the marriage tie, the speeding of the
departed on the eternal road--became apparent and evoked accustomed
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."

Uniacke moved forward along the uncarpeted 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 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? Are ye comin'? 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," continued 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 sound of the voice approached the two men on the stairs. The thread
of light 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 recovered his footing,
swore a round oath. Sir Graham and Uniacke heard his heavy tread
descending until his breath was warm on their faces.

"Where are ye, lads?" he cried out. "Where are ye? Can't ye throw a word
of welcome to a mate?"

He laid his hands heavily on Uniacke's shoulders in the dark, and felt
him over with an uncertain 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 eagerness 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.

"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 kindly. "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 island beaches. And
the two men were very silent at first. Sir Graham ate little. He had no
appetite, for he seemed to hear continually in the noises of the
elements the shrill whimpering of a dog. Surely it came from the graves
outside, from those stone breasts of the dead.

"I can't eat 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
from my home, my usual habits of life, at this season of the year."

"Yes?" the clergyman said, with sympathy, without curiosity.

"And yet, I suppose it would seem a little matter 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 ordinary honourable dealings one decent 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! 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 £1,000 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 unimaginative. 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 or
Chancery 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."

"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
imaginative child, who was unfamiliar with the sea, but into whose heart
and brain I could pour its narrated wonders, whose soul I could fill to
the brim with its awe, its majesty, its murmuring sweetness, 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 paddling and catching shrimps."

Uniacke smiled.

"But on the contrary, in London, far from the sea, I could give to the
child only those impressions 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
child's soul cannot be governed 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
picture. 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 were
passed in an atmosphere vibrating with quick impressions. But I went
unrewarded. The children of such people are apt to be peevishly
receptive, 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 hidden sea far inland, watching for the white face of
a little wave in the hard and iron city thoroughfares. Sometimes I
stopped near Victoria Station, put my foot upon a block, and had a boot
half ruined while I watched the bootblack. Sometimes 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 ragamuffins
squalling round their knees the praise of a Creator who had denied them
everything. Ah! forgive me!"

"For some purpose that we shall all know at last," said Uniacke gently.

"Possibly. In all these prospectings I was unlucky. 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 afternoon and spent an hour in the National
Gallery. 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 the fountains, but I took
no notice of them. Sitting down on a bench, I went on planning a
picture--the legendary 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 me stood a 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 intently fixed.

"'Look at that there rainbow!' he said. 'Look at that there rainbow!'

"I glanced up and saw that the clouds had partially 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 habitués of the Square, that
they might share his awe and happiness. Before he had finished teaching
a heavy policeman the lessons 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 upward, and
every eye was completely round over each widely-opened mouth, while
paper-cap repeated 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 kicking the boy--her only child. I
considered her an abandoned and unfeeling female. She dwelt in Drury
Lane and sold something that most of us have never heard of."

"I can see her."

"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 difficulty in
persuading her to let me paint the boy. I don't think she rightly
understood what I meant, except that for some foolish reason I was
prepared to give her money, apparently 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 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 brocade and lighted wax candles, which inspired him with a
solemnity that widened his eyes and narrowed 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 London child's impish nature in
him."

"That impish quality hides in nearly all street-bred children," said
Uniacke. "I have seen larkiness dawn in them for an instant at some
recollection, even when they were dying."

"I daresay. I can believe it. But Jack was solemn 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 me 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 me to the right mind
for my purpose; for the starved gaze that 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 see 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 inland, of wonderful foreign interiors. I fixed all his nature
upon this marvellous element which had never murmured round his life
before. I played to him music in which the sea could be heard. I
described 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 Northumbrian 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 the lagoons. I
explained to 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 monsters;
its wonders of half human lives, too, the mermaids 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 penetrate the weedy valleys, and glide
across the slippery, oozy plains. In fine, Uniacke, 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?" Uniacke 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 the sky. For at length I had his imagination fast in my net
as a salmon that fishermen entice within the stakes. His town mind
seemed to fade under my fostering, and, Uniacke, 'nothing of him that
did fade but did suffer a sea change into something rich and strange.'"

The 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 repeated, 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
memorial 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 desired 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."

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 nature. 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 forever," 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 immediate 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 Drury 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 very different kind from that
splashing and churning in the dingy basins guarded by the lions.
Meanwhile I painted little Jack, all the time keeping alive in his
nature the sea change, which was, in 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 completed--the impish child
began to waken in the wonder-child, and I had to comply with the demands
of this new-born youngster. Our conversation--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
inadvertence of which we spoke formerly. You remember?"

Uniacke nodded.

"My picture was before me and a child's budding soul, and I thought of
nothing at all but my picture. That's sin, if you like. Little Jack, in
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 sometimes 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
suppose. 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 overwhelming
moment of exultation. Then I turned from my completed picture. 'Jack,'
I cried out, 'little Jack, I've made you famous. D'you know what that
means?'

"I took the little chap by the shoulders and placed him before the
picture. 'See yourself,' I added. The boy stared at the sea urchin, at
those painted eyes full of the sea wonder, at those parted lips, that
mouth whispering to the sea. His nose twisted slightly.

"'That ain't me,' he said. 'That ain't me.'

"I looked down at him, and knew that he spoke the truth; for already the
wonder-child was fading, even had faded. And a little adventurer, a true
boy, stood before me, a boy to pull ropes, lend a hand at an oar,
whistle in the rigging, gaze with keen dancing eyes through a cold dawn
to catch the first sight of a distant land. I looked, understood, didn't
care; although the poetry of wonder had faded into the prose of mere
desire.

"'It isn't you, Jack?' I answered. 'Well, perhaps not. But it is what
you were, what you may be again some day.'

"He shook his head.

"'No, it ain't me. Go on tellin' about them pirits.'

"And, full of gladness, a glory I had never known before, I went on till
it was dark. I said good-by to little Jack on the doorstep. When he had
gone, I stood for a moment listening to the sound of his footsteps dying
away down the road. I did not know that I should never hear them again.
For, although I did not want Jack any more as a model, I was resolved
not to lose sight of him. To him I owed much. I would pay my debt by
making the child's future very different from his past. I had vague
thoughts of educating him carefully for some reasonable life. I believe,
Uniacke, yes, on my soul, I believe that I had bland visions of the
sea-urchin being happy and prosperous on a high stool in an office, at
home with ledgers, a contented little clerk, whose horizon was bounded
by an A B C shop, and whose summer pastime was fly-killing. My big work
finished, a sort of eager idiocy seized me. I was as a man drugged. My
faculties must have been besotted, I was in a dream. Three days
afterwards I woke from it and learnt that there may be grandeur, yes,
grandeur, dramatic in its force, tragic in its height and depth, in a
tipsy old woman of Drury Lane."

"Jack's mother?"

The painter nodded. All the time he had been talking the wind had
steadily increased, and the uproar of the embracing sea had been growing
louder. The windows rattled like musketry, the red curtains shook as if
in fear. Now there came a knock at the door.

"Come in," said the clergyman.

The maid appeared.

"Do you want anything more to-night, sir?"

"No, thank you, Kate. Good-night."

"Good-night, sir."

The door shut.

"Is it late?" said the painter.

"Nearly eleven. That is all."

"Are you tired, Uniacke? perhaps you are accustomed to go to bed early?"

"Not very. Besides to-night the gale would keep me awake; and I want to
hear the end of your story."

"Then--Drury Lane invaded me one evening, smelling of gin, with black
bonnet cocked over one eye, an impossible umbrella, broken boots,
straying hair, a mouth full of objurgation, and oaths, and crying
between times, 'Where's Jack? Where's my boy? What 'a yer done with my
boy,--yer!' I received Drury Lane with astonishment but, I hope, with
courtesy, and explained that my picture was finished, that Jack had left
me to go home, that I meant to take care of his future.

"My remarks were received with oaths, and the repeated demand to know
where Jack was. 'Isn't he at home?' I asked. 'No, nor he ain't been
'ome.' After a while I gathered that Jack had disappeared in darkness
from my house on the night when I put the last touch to my picture, and
had not been seen by his mother since. She now began to soften and to
cry, and I observed that maternity was in her as well as cheap gin. I
endeavoured to comfort her and promised that little Jack should be
found.

"'If he ain't found,' she sobbed, 'I'm done for, I am; 'e's my hall.'

"There was something horribly genuine in the sound of this cry. I began
to see beyond the gin in which this poor woman was soaked; I began to
see her half-drowned soul that yet had life, had breath.

"'We'll find him,' I said.

"'Never, never,' she wailed, rocking her thin body to and fro, 'I know
'e's gone to sea, 'e 'as. Jack's run away fur a sailor.'

"At these words I turned cold, for I felt as if they were true. I saw in
a flash the result of my experiment. I had shown the boy the way that
led to the great sea. Perhaps that night, even as he left my door, he
had seen in fancy the white waves playing before him in the distance,
the ships go sailing by. He had heard siren voices calling his youth and
he had heeded them. His old mother kept on cursing me at intervals.
Instinct, rather than actual knowledge, led her to attribute this
disappearance to my initiative. I did not attempt to reason her out of
the belief, for alas! I began to hold it myself, Uniacke."

"You thought Jack had run away to sea, prompted by all that you had told
him of the sea?"

"Yes. And I think it still."

"Think--then you don't--"

"I don't know it, you'd say? Do I not? Uniacke, a little while ago, when
you told me of that--that woman for whom you cared much, you remember my
saying to you, was there not something within you that would tell you
if she were dead?"

"Yes, I remember."

"That something which makes a man know a thing without what is generally
called knowledge of it. Well, that something within me makes me know
that little Jack did run away to sea. I searched for him, I strove, as
far as one can do such a thing, to sift all the innumerable grains of
London through my fingers to find that one little grain I wanted. I
spared no pains in my search. Conceive, even, that I escorted Drury Lane
in the black bonnet to the Docks, to ships lying in the Thames, to a
thousand places! It was all in vain; the wonder-child was swallowed up.
I had indeed drowned little Jack in the sea. I have never set eyes on
him since he left me on the evening of the day when I completed my
picture. Shall I ever set eyes on him again? Shall I, Uniacke? Shall I?"

Sir Graham put this strange question with a sort of morose fierceness,
getting up from his chair as he spoke. The young clergyman could think
of no reply.

"Why not?" he said at last. "He may be well, happy, active in a life
that he loves, that he glories in."

"No, Uniacke, no, for he's far away from his duty. That hideous old
woman, in her degradation, in her cruelty, in her drunkenness, loved
that boy, loves him still, with an intensity, a passion, a hunger, a
feverish anxiety that are noble, that are great. Her hatred of me proves
it. I honour her for her hatred. I respect her for it! She shows the
beauty of her soul in her curses. She almost teaches me that there is
indeed immortality--at least for women--by her sleepless horror of me.
Her hatred, I say, is glorious, because her love shines through it. I
feed her. She doesn't know it. She'd starve rather than eat my bread.
She would kill me, I believe, if she didn't fancy in her vague mind,
obscured by drink, that the man who had sent her boy from her might
bring him back to her. For weeks she came every day--walking all the way
from Drury Lane, mind you--to ask if the boy had returned. Then she
endured the nightmare of my company, as I told you, while we searched in
likely places for the vanished sea urchin. Jack did nothing for the
support of his mother. It was she who kept him. She beat him. She cursed
him. She fed him. She loved him; like an animal, perhaps, like a mother,
certainly. That says all, Uniacke. It was I who sent that boy away. I
must give him back to that old woman. Till I do so I can never find
peace. This thing preys upon my life, eats into my heart. It's the
little worm gnawing, always gnawing at me. The doctors tell me I am
morbid because I am in bad health, that my bad health makes the malady
in my mind. On the contrary, it is my mind that makes the malady in my
body. Ah! you are wondering! You are wondering, too, whether it's not
the other way! I see you are!"

"I cannot deny it," Uniacke said gently.

"You are wrong. You are wrong, I assure you. And surely you, a
clergyman, ought to be the very man to understand me, to know how what
seems a slight thing, a small selfishness, well, the inadvertence we
spoke of lately, may punish the soul, may have a long and evil train of
consequences. I was careless of that child, careful only of my ambition.
I ground the child in the mortar of my ambition; is it not natural that
I should suffer now? Does not your religion tell you that it is right?
Answer me that?"

Uniacke hesitated. A conviction had been growing up in him all the
evening that his guest was suffering severely under some nervous
affliction; one of those obscure diseases which change the whole colour
of life to the sufferer, which distort all actions however simple and
ordinary, which render diminutive trials monstrous, and small evils
immense and ineffably tragic. It seemed to Uniacke to be his duty to
combat Sir Graham's increasing melancholy, which actually bordered upon
despair. At the same time, the young clergyman could not hide from his
mind--a mind flooded with conscience--that the painter was slightly to
blame for the action which had been followed by so strange a result.

"I see you hesitate, Uniacke," said Sir Graham. "Ah, you agree with
me!"

"No; I think you may have been careless. But you magnify a slight error
into a grievous sin; and I do indeed believe that it must be your
present bad state of health which acts as the magnifying glass. That is
my honest opinion."

"No, no," said the painter, almost with anger, "my illness is all from
the mind. If I could find that boy, if I could give him back to his
mother, I should recover my peace, I should recover my health--I should
no longer be haunted, driven as I am now. But, Uniacke, do you know what
it is that I fear most of all, what it is that dogs me, night and day;
though I strive to put it from me, to tell myself that it is a chimera?"

"What?"

"The belief that little Jack is dead; that he has been drowned at sea,
perhaps lately, perhaps long ago."

"Why should you think that? You do not even know for certain that he ran
away to sea."

"I am sure of it. If he is dead! If he is dead!"

The painter, as if in an access of grief, turned abruptly from the fire,
walked over to the window, pulled one of the blowing curtains aside and
approached his face to the glass.

"In spite of the storm it is still so light that I can see those
graves," he said in a low voice.

"Don't look at them, Sir Graham. Let us talk of other things."

"And--and--yes, Uniacke, that poor, mad Skipper is still out there,
lingering among them. He is by the churchyard wall, where you were
standing this evening in the twilight: one would say he was watching."

The clergyman had also risen from his seat. He moved a step or two
across the little room, then stood still, looking at Sir Graham, who was
half concealed by the fluttering curtains.

"He is just where I stood?" Uniacke asked.

"Yes."

"Then he is watching."

"By a grave?"

"Yes. Only one of his crew ever gained the land. He gained it--a corpse.
He is buried by that wall. I was reading the inscription upon his
tombstone, and wondering--"

"Wondering? Yes?"

"Where he is, how he is now, far away from the voice of the sea which
took his life, the wind which roared his requiem."

"Poor man! You were here when he was washed up on the beach?"

"Yes. I buried him. The Skipper--sane then, though in terrible
grief--was able to identify him, to follow the drowned body as chief
mourner, to choose the inscription for the stone."

"What was it?" asked Sir Graham, without curiosity, idly, almost
absently.

"'Lead, kindly light.' He would have that put. I think he had heard the
boy sing it, or whistle the tune of it, at sea one day."

"The boy? It was a boy then?"

"Yes."

The clergyman spoke with a certain hesitation, a sudden diffidence. He
looked at the painter, and an abrupt awkwardness, almost a
shamefacedness, 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 does 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 Graham 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?"

"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
slowly:

"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 a murmur of relief
or of disappointment. Then there was a silence. The painter went over
again to the fire. Uniacke stood still where he was and looked on the
ground. He had told a deliberate 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 beneath that stone yonder; that the hands which pointed to it
were folded in the eternal sleep. 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
darkness? 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 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, furtively 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 parlour looked grim and wintry
when Sir Graham and Uniacke met there at breakfast time. The clergyman
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."

"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 perhaps 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
subterfuge, 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 deceitfully, "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
continued 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 combated, to be struck down to the dust. Even now he was
chiefly conscious of a mental weakness in himself which 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, Uniacke was disposed
to worship that which was uncompromising in human nature, the slight
hardness which sometimes lurks, like a kernel, in the saint. 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 consequences.

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 learnt
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 between 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 condition of permanent
melancholia, or even of active despair. Despite his apparent
hopelessness, he 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 gossiping 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 violent 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 nervously as one on the verge
of disaster. In the Island cottages that morning he bore himself
uneasily in the presence of his simple-minded parishioners. Sitting
beside an invalid, whose transparent mind was dimly, but with ardent
faith, set on Heaven, he felt hideously unfitted to point the way to
that place into which no liar shall ever come. He was 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 nocturnal 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 illness.

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."

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 contemplated 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 decree. Is
Jack somewhere out there?"

He turned and fixed 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 light broke
along the horizon, almost as the primroses break out along the horizon
of winter. The thin black spars of a hurrying vessel pointed to the
illumination and vanished, leaving the memory of a tortured 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 imagination. 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 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 comrades, 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 window."

"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 intuitions. 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 falling 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 consumed 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 moment,
as if it were stealing furtively away. Behind, 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, mounting 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."

"You 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 kind hospitality while I am working. I shall
return 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 me 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 insistence 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 exclaimed, with a brightening
face. "I need a holiday. 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.

"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 earnestness. His sense of his own
increasing unworthiness, 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
removable by medicine, by a particular kind of air or scene, by waters
even it may be, or by hard exercise, 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."

"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 melancholy 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. "Nonsense, Sir Graham. Nobody ever
comes here."

"Dead bodies come on the breast of the sea."

The painter looked towards the window, putting himself into an attitude
of horrible expectation.

"Is it not so?" he asked, in a voice that quivered 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 suspicion, and peering at the clergyman under his thick
eyebrows.

"Surely. But I forget things so easily," said Uniacke calmly.

"Braybrooke 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 manner."

"Indecisive?"

"In manner. In reality a man of infinite conviction."

"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."

"Well--and so?"

"I did not tell him my mental story. I explained to him that I suffered
greatly from melancholy. That was all. I called it unreasoning
melancholy. 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 under a smooth and pathetic grey sky. The atmosphere seemed that
of a winter 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 nothing. The
whistling of a naughty fisherman attending to his nets unsabbatically
pierced the still 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 responsive 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 the grey womb of the sky swelled in
the west to give up a sunset that became tragic in its crescendo of
glory. Bursting 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 descended
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 enchantment 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 sermon 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 discourse 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 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 understand 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 lie. To-night he will understand that it is useless to
wait, that 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 islanders 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 eternally 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 some one tramping in
sea-boots 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
Procession of the 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, "and as the handwriting
was perfectly familiar to me, I began to open it."

"Familiar?" said Uniacke, 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 anything 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 concealing 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 course would be the best to
    pursue in regard to the future. Sir Graham's nervous system has
    broken down so completely that, as often happens 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 seldom 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
    circumstances 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
    imagination, 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 succeed 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 illness from the idea. In reply I must inform
    you 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, therefore, that it should,
    if possible, be banished, in the case of Sir Graham as in other
    cases. Your amiable deception has quite possibly averted a tragedy.
    _Continue in it, I counsel you._ The knowledge that his fears are
    well founded, that the boy--for whose fate he morbidly considers
    himself entirely responsible--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 possible that he may be able to learn all the
    facts with equanimity. But 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
    creative labour. 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 with 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 wish I could take a holiday and come to
    your assistance. Unfortunately, my duties tie me closely to town at
    the present. And, in any 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 apprehension. 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 beset 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 holiday."

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."

"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 Uniacke 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 shipmate 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. Uniacke
stopped him.

"You 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."

"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 weeping, 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 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 wonder-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?"

"Does 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 Uniacke's renewed protests, Sir Graham began to paint
steadily. The clergyman 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 that his health was too poor to endure any strain of labour.

The moon was now past its second quarter, and the weather continued cold
and clear. Sir Graham and Uniacke went out several times by night to the
belfry of the church, and the painter observed the light effects through
the narrow window. In the daytime he made various studies from memory of
these effects. And presently Uniacke began to grow more reconciled to
this labour of which--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 continually 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 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 established 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 furtively
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 inexpressively, 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 parlour, a few minutes later, Uniacke and Sir Graham
discussed this apparently trifling incident. A feeling 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 waking from its sleep."

"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 unguarded.

"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 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 link, yet there seemed
horror in such a companionship as theirs, and the clergyman 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 painting. He 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--see 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 see
himself as he stands ringing those bells each night? Ah! there they
are!"

It was twilight now, cold, and yellow, and grim; twilight of winter. And
the pathetic, cheerless appeal of the two bells stole out over the
darkening 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 service. A
shock expelled his reason. Might not a shock recall it?"

"I can't tell," Uniacke said. "Such an experiment might be dangerous, it
seems to 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 presence 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 seemed to hear soft footsteps. He was horribly
afraid and wished that, in the beginning of his acquaintance with Sir
Graham, he had dared consequence 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 harmless 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 had resolved before actually starting upon
his picture to make some _plein air_ studies of the islanders. Therefore
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. Uniacke was writing in the small bow-window, or pretending to
write. Often he looked out, watching 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, distending 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 approached, making détours, 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 frequently as if uncertain or alarmed. And Uniacke, 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 détour, got behind the
painter, stole up and peered over his shoulder. Once there, he seemed
spellbound. For he stood perfectly still and never took his large blue
eyes from the canvas. Uniacke went into the little passage, got his hat
and hastened 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 work?" 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 association between these two men was fraught with unknown
peril. He felt that, and so strongly, that he was almost tempted to defy
convention and violently interfere to put an end to it. But 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 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 struck eleven, 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 window and dropped the
blind. In a moment Sir Graham entered. He was extremely pale and looked
scared. He shut the door very hastily, almost as if he wished to prevent
some one from entering after him. Then he came up to the fire without a
word.

"You are late," Uniacke said, unpleasantly affected, 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 unaccountable--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, yes--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. "Horrible!"

He stopped suddenly in front of Uniacke.

"Do you believe," he said, "that when we think very steadily and
intensely of a thing we may, perhaps, project--give life, as it were,
for the moment to our thought?"

"Why do you ask me?" said Uniacke. "It has never happened to me 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 was all. So it couldn't have been my thought projected, because I
had never imagined.--"

He was evidently engrossed by his own reflections. 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 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 meditations, 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 picture 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, dropsical. The eyes were glazed and
bloodshot. On the lips there was foam. The fingers of the hands were
twisted and distorted. The teeth grinned hideously. 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 me 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 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!"

He 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 religious, 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 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
miraculous 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 himself 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
benumbed 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 passion 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
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, meaning 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 observed 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. He thought of nothing 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 me 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 see if Jack will give me a sitting to-night."

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 are 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 piteous bluster as he
stood on the doorstep and felt the cold wind that blew from the wintry
sea. He set his lips, and his face twitched with nervous agitation as he
stole a furtive glance at the clergyman, whose soft hat was pulled down
low over his eyes as if to conceal their expression.

The two men walked forward slowly into the churchyard. Uniacke's heart
was beating with violence and his mind was full of acute anticipation.
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 of the waves sang hushed and murmurous nocturnes.
Uniacke was taken by an almost insurmountable 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 Graham's eyes were full of sombre questioning 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 distinct. The surrounding graves came into view,
the crude bulk of the rectory, the outline of the 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 expression of
Uniacke, the staring watchfulness of the painter. The minutes ran by.
Uniacke shivered 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. Nevertheless 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 Graham 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. Uniacke 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
shadows. But not one of them was deceptive. Not one took the form of any
spectre. Nevertheless Uniacke recoiled from this little grave at his
feet, for it seemed to him as if the power that had been sleeping there
stirred, forsook its recumbent position, rose up warily, intent on
coming forth to confront him.

"You see it?" whispered Sir Graham, still keeping 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, see--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 are coarsened, bloated. My
wonder-child! He 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. He 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 inclined to resist for a moment. He turned his head
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 sigh 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."

"As he 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--on your honour as a 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 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."

Uniacke's heart grew heavier at the words.

In the morning Sir Graham said to him, with a curious calmness:

"I think perhaps you are 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. But--yes, you
are 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. But you will come with me?"

"To London?"

"Anywhere--it does not matter."

He looked round him wistfully.

"If I am to leave the island," he said sorrowfully, "it does not matter
where I go."

"To London then," Uniacke said, almost joyously. "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
subterfuge vanished now that subterfuge was found to be successful in