Miranda of the Balcony Part 37

"Go," said the doctor, "both of you."

"I can stay," said Warriner. "This is Mrs. Warriner; I am her husband, Ralph Warriner." The doctor looked up sharply. Warriner simply nodded his head. "Yes, yes," he said; "and this is Charnock. _Ce bon_ Charnock. You see, he loves my wife."

Warriner spoke slowly and in an inexpressive voice, as though he too was hardly aware of what he said. The conviction that Miranda was dead had come with equal force to both of these two men, and the knowledge that she was not brought an equal stupefaction. Warriner remained in the room; Charnock went outside and down the stairs.

He came to his senses in the streets of Gibraltar, and looking backwards, seemed to himself to have lost them weeks ago somewhere between Mequinez and Alkasar, in a profitless rivalry for a woman who could not belong to him. In the present revulsion of his feelings he was conscious that he had lost all his enmity towards Warriner. He walked down to the landing-stage at the Mole. The Levanter had spent its force during the night; the sea had gone down; a steamer was dropping its anchor in the bay. Charnock was in two minds whether or no to cross the harbour to Algeciras, where Warriner and himself had left their traps the day before, gather together his belongings, and sail for England in that steamer. He had done all that he had been enjoined to do; he had brought Warriner back; he had even, as he had promised, paid the one last visit to Miranda. But,--but, he might be wanted, he pleaded to himself, and so undecided he wandered about the streets, and in the afternoon came back to the hotel.

The waiter was watching for his return. Mrs. Warriner wished to speak with him. There was no sign of Warriner. Charnock mounted the stairs.

There was no sign of Warriner within the sitting-room. Miranda was alone, and from the frank unembarra.s.sed way with which she held out her hand, Charnock understood that she knew nothing of what had pa.s.sed in the morning.

CHAPTER XXIII

RELATES A SECOND MEETING BETWEEN CHARNOCK AND MIRANDA

"I Was afraid you had gone without my thanks," she said; "and thanks are the only coin I have to pay you with."

"Surely there needs no payment."

"I should have thanked you this morning; but your return overcame me, I had hoped and prayed so much for it."

The scream of the P. and O.'s steam-whistle sounded through the room.

They both turned instinctively to the window, they saw the last late boat-load reach the s.h.i.+p's side, and in a moment or so they heard the rattle of the anchor-chain.

"And Ralph?" asked Charnock.

Miranda pointed to the steamer. Already the white fan of water streamed away from its stern.

"He has sailed?"

"Yes. He could not stay here. His--" she paused for a second and then spoke the word boldly, "his crime was hushed up, but it is of course known here to a few, and all know that there is something. He told his name to the doctor. It was not safe for him to stay over this morning."

"He has gone to England?"

"Yes, but he will leave England immediately. He promised to write to me, so that I may know where he is."

More of Warriner's interview with his wife, neither Charnock nor anyone ever knew. Whether he asked her to come with him and she refused, or whether, once he saw her and had speech with her, his fict.i.tious pa.s.sion died as quickly as it had grown--these are matters which Miranda kept locked within her secret memories. At this time indeed such questions did not at all occur to Charnock. As he watched the great steamer heading out of the bay, and understood that he must be taking the same path, he was filled with a great pity for the lonely woman at his side. The thought of her home up there in the Spanish hills and of her solitary, discontented companion came to him with a new and poignant sadness. Ronda was no longer a fitting shrine for her as his first fancies had styled it, but simply a strange place in a strange country.

"Why don't you go home to your own place, to your own people?" he suggested rather than asked.

Miranda was silent for a while. "I have thought of it," she said at length; "I think too that I shall. At first, there was the disgrace, there was the pity--I could not have endured it; besides, there was Rupert. But--but--I think I shall."

"I should," said Charnock, decidedly. "I should be glad, too, to know that you had made up your mind to that. I should be very glad to think that you were back at your own home."

"Why?" she asked, a little surprised at his earnestness.

"Of course, I wasn't born to it," he replied disconnectedly; "but now and then I have stayed at manor-houses in the country; and such visits have always left an impression on me. I would have liked myself to have been born of the soil on which I lived, to have lived where my fathers and grandfathers lived and walked and laughed and suffered, in the same rooms, under the same trees, enjoying the a.s.sociations which they made. Do you know, I don't think that that is a privilege lightly to be foregone." And for a while again they both were silent.

Then Miranda turned suddenly and frankly towards him: "I should like so much to show you my home." She had said much the same on that first evening of their meeting in Lady Donnisthorpe's balcony, as they both surely remembered.

"I should like much to see it," returned Charnock, gently; "but I am a busy man." Miranda coloured at the conventional excuse, as Charnock saw. "But it was kind of you to say that. I was glad to hear it," he added.

It was not to the addition she replied, but to his first excuse. "As it is, you have lost two years. I have made you lose them."

"Please!" he exclaimed. "You won't let that trouble you. Promise me! I am a young man; it would be a strange thing if I could not give two years to you. Believe me, Mrs. Warriner, when my time comes, and I turn my face to the wall, whatever may happen between now and then, I shall count those two years as the years for which I have most reason to be thankful."

Miranda turned abruptly away from him and looked out of the window with intense curiosity at nothing whatever. Then she said in a low voice: "I hope that's true; I hope you mean it; I believe you do. I have been much troubled by an old theory of yours, that a woman was a brake on the wheel going up hill, and a whip in the driver's hand going down."

"I will give you a new theory to replace the old," he answered. "There are always things to do, you know. Suppose that a man has cared for a woman, has set her always within his vision, has always worked for her, for a long while, and has at last come surely, against his will, to know that she was ... despicable, why then, perhaps he might have reason to be disheartened. But otherwise--well, he has things to do and memories to quicken him in the doing of them."

"Thank you," she said simply. "I think what you say is true. I once met a man who found a woman to be despicable, and the world went very ill with him."

It was of Major Wilbraham she was thinking, who had more than once written to Miranda during these two years, and whose last letter she imagined to be lying then in a drawer of her writing-table at Ronda.

CHAPTER XXIV

A MIST IN THE CHANNEL ENDS, AS IT BEGAN, THE BOOK

But that letter was in Ralph Warriner's pocket, as he walked the deck of the P. and O. It was dated from a hotel at Dartmouth, whence, said the Major, he was starting on a little cruise westwards in the company of a young gentleman from Oxford who owned a competence and a yacht.

The Major would be back at Dartmouth in some six weeks' time and hoped, for Mrs. Warriner's sake, that he would find a registered letter awaiting him. The Major was still upon his cruise, as Ralph Warriner was a.s.sured from the recent date of the letter.

Warriner disembarked at Plymouth and took train to Dartmouth, where he learned the name of the yacht by merely asking at the hotel. He tried to hire a steam launch, for sooner or later in one of the harbours he would be sure to come up with Wilbraham, if he only kept a sharp eye; but steam launches are difficult to hire at this season of the year, and in the end he had to content himself with chartering a ten-ton cutter. He engaged one hand, by whose testimony the history of Ralph's pursuit came to be known, and sailed out of Dartmouth to the west. He sailed out in the morning, and coming to Salcombe ran over the bar on the tail of the flood, but did not find his quarry there, and so beat out again on the first of the ebb and reached past Bolt Head and Bolt Tail, across Bigbury Bay with its low red rocks, to Plymouth.

Wilbraham had anch.o.r.ed in the Catt.w.a.ter only two days before; the yacht was a yawl, named the _Monitor_; and was making for the Scillies. Warriner laughed when he picked up word about the destination of the yacht, and thought it would be very appropriate if he could overhaul the _Monitor_ somewhere off Rosevear. As to what course he intended to pursue when he caught Wilbraham, he had no settled plan; but on the other hand he had a new revolver in his berth.

He put out from Plymouth under a light breeze, which failed him altogether when he was abreast of Rame Head. Through the rest of the day he drifted with the tide betwixt Rame Head and Plymouth. The night came upon him jewelled with stars, and a light mist upon the surface of the water; all that night he swung up and down some four miles out to sea within view of Plymouth lights, but towards morning, a fitful wind sprang up, drove the cutter as far as Polperro, and left it becalmed on a sea of gla.s.s, in front of the little white village in the wooded cliff-hollow, while the sun rose. Warriner opened the narrow line of blue water which marks the mouth of the Fowey river at eleven o'clock of the morning, and anch.o.r.ed in Fowey harbour about twelve. It was a Sunday, and though the _Monitor_ was not at Fowey, Warriner determined to stay at his anchorage till the morrow.

The Brixham fisherman who served him upon this cruise relates that Warriner displayed no impatience or anxiety at any time. Of the febrile instability which had set his thoughts flying this way and that during the days of his companions.h.i.+p with Charnock, there was no longer any trace in his demeanour. Perhaps it was that he was so certain of attaining his desires; perhaps the long lesson of endurance which he had been painfully taught in Morocco now bore its fruit; perhaps too he had acquired something of the pa.s.sive fatalism of the Moorish race. During this Sunday afternoon, his last Sunday as it proved, he quietly sculled the dinghy of his cutter, when the tide was low, through the mud flats of the Fowey river to Lostwithiel; and coming down again when the river was full, lay for a long time upon his oars opposite a certain church that lifts above a clump of trees on the river-bank. There he remained listening to the roll of the organ and the sweet voices of the singers as they floated out through the painted windows into the quiet of the summer evening; when the service was over he bent to his sculls again and rowed back between the steep and narrowing coppices, but it was dark before he turned the last shoulder of hill and saw the long lines of riding-lights trembling upon the water.

Warriner raised his anchor early on the Monday morning, and having the wind on his quarter, made Falmouth betimes. At Falmouth he learned that the _Monitor_ had put out past St. Anthony's light only the day before and had sailed westwards to Penzance.

Warriner followed without delay, and when he was just past the Manacle rocks, the wind dropped. With the help of the tide and an occasional flaw of wind, he worked his cutter round the Lizard Point and laid her head for Penzance across the bay; and it was then that the fog took him. It crept out of the sea at about four of the afternoon, a thin grey mist, and it thickened into a dense umber fog.

The fog hung upon the Channel for thirty hours. The cutter swung into the bay with the tide. The Brixham fisherman could hear all along, to his right hand, the m.u.f.fled roar as the groundswell broke upon the Lizard rocks, and the sucking withdrawal which told that those rocks were very near. The Lizard fog-horn, which sounded a minute ago abreast of them, sounded now quite faintly astern. The boat swung with the tide and would not steer; yet Warriner betrayed no alarm and no impatience at the check. He sat on the deck with a lantern by his side and drew, said the fisherman, a little flute or pipe from his pocket, on which he played tunes that were no tunes, and from which he drew a weird shrill music of an infinite melancholy and of infinite suggestions. Once the Brixham man crouched suddenly by the gunwale and peered intently over the boat's side. At a little distance off, something black loomed through the fog about the height of the mast's yard,--something black which rapidly approached.

"It's not a squall," said Warriner, quietly interrupting his music.

"It's a rock. I know this coast well. We had better get the dinghy out and row her head off."

When that was done, he squatted again upon the deck by the side of the lantern, and played shrilly upon his pipe while the light threw a grotesque reflection of his figure upon the fog.

After a while they heard the Lizard-horn abreast of them again.