He strolled on aimlessly a prey to gentle melancholy. He walked and

walked. There were but few people about in this breathing space of a

poor neighbourhood. Under certain conditions of life there is precious

little time left for mere breathing. But still a few here and there were

indulging in that luxury; yet few as they were Captain Anthony, though

the least exclusive of men, resented their presence. Solitude had been

his best friend. He wanted some place where he could sit down and be

alone. And in his need his thoughts turned to the sea which had given

him so much of that congenial solitude. There, if always with his ship

(but that was an integral part of him) he could always be as solitary as

he chose. Yes. Get out to sea!

The night of the town with its strings of lights, rigid, and crossed like

a net of flames, thrown over the sombre immensity of walls, closed round

him, with its artificial brilliance overhung by an emphatic blackness,

its unnatural animation of a restless, overdriven humanity. His thoughts

which somehow were inclined to pity every passing figure, every single

person glimpsed under a street lamp, fixed themselves at last upon a

figure which certainly could not have been seen under the lamps on that

particular night. A figure unknown to him. A figure shut up within high

unscaleable walls of stone or bricks till next morning . . . The figure

of Flora de Barral's father. De Barral the financier--the convict.

There is something in that word with its suggestions of guilt and

retribution which arrests the thought. We feel ourselves in the presence

of the power of organized society--a thing mysterious in itself and still

more mysterious in its effect. Whether guilty or innocent, it was as if

old de Barral had been down to the Nether Regions. Impossible to imagine

what he would bring out from there to the light of this world of

uncondemned men. What would he think? What would he have to say? And

what was one to say to him?

Anthony, a little awed, as one is by a range of feelings stretching

beyond one's grasp, comforted himself by the thought that probably the

old fellow would have little to say. He wouldn't want to talk about it.

No man would. It must have been a real hell to him.

And then Anthony, at the end of the day in which he had gone through a

marriage ceremony with Flora de Barral, ceased to think of Flora's father

except, as in some sort, the captive of his triumph. He turned to the

mental contemplation of the white, delicate and appealing face with great

blue eyes which he had seen weep and wonder and look profoundly at him,

sometimes with incredulity, sometimes with doubt and pain, but always

irresistible in the power to find their way right into his breast, to

stir there a deep response which was something more than love--he said to

himself,--as men understand it. More? Or was it only something other?

Yes. It was something other. More or less. Something as incredible as

the fulfilment of an amazing and startling dream in which he could take

the world in his arms--all the suffering world--not to possess its

pathetic fairness but to console and cherish its sorrow.




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