The Sailor knew as soon as he stepped on the platform at Charing Cross that he had no wish to see again that city which had treated him with such unkindness. He left his gear in the station cloak room, and then by the time he had gone a few yards he regretted bitterly that he had ever come back at all. The mere sight of the omnibuses, of the names on the hoardings, of the grotesquely miscellaneous throngs in the Strand, told him that eleven months of ceaseless wandering had done nothing, or at the best very little, to heal the wound he bore.

These streets brought an ache that, steel his will as he might, he could hardly bear. There to the right was the National Gallery. It was on just such a morning as this that she had led him to the Turners. Farther along were Pall Mall and Edward Ambrose.

Five minutes he stood on the curb at the top of Northumberland Avenue, trying to decide whether he should cross Trafalgar Square. Once more the old sense of disintegration was upon him. Once more he was asking himself what he ought to do.

Eleven months had passed, but things were as they were. In that time not a line had been added to the work he was trying to do. Yet he felt that his first duty was to go to see Edward Ambrose. Let him go now. It was no use shirking it. But a curious instinct was holding him back. It was illogical, he knew, but every moment that he stood there seemed to make the task more difficult.

In a state of irresolution he crossed the road as far as an island in the middle. The sense of familiarity was growing at every step. Within a very few yards was Spring Gardens. He could see two doors up the street the brass plate of Messrs. Mortimer mocking him through a weird substitute for the light of day.

In spite of all the months that had passed, the sight of that brass plate was like a knife in his body. He turned from the island to dash across a very dangerous road, and came within an ace of the death that would have been so welcome. A taxi avoided him by an almost miraculous swerve, for which, when he realized it, he did not thank the driver.

All at sea he crossed the Square and entered Pall Mall. In the process of time he came to the home of Brown's Magazine. Edward Ambrose gave him a welcome that nearly brought tears to his eyes.

"My dear boy!" he said. "Not one word in all these months! Anyhow you have come back to us."

It was impossible to doubt the friendship and the affection of this greeting. The Sailor felt a pang of shame. As a fact, he had been too modest to expect such loyalty.

"I'm … I'm sorry."

"You had no right to forget your friends," said Edward Ambrose, a little resentfully. He knew the workings of this childishly open mind, and it hurt him that a sincere emotion should have been underrated.

"Yes," said the Sailor queerly. "It was rotten."

"You are looking splendidly brown and well," said Edward Ambrose as soon as it seemed the part of wisdom to speak. "You don't mean to say that Dick Smith has been sailing the high seas all these long months?"

"Not Dick Smith. Ulysses."

Ambrose gave a little start of pure pleasure.

"Then," he said, "a master mariner has really come into port?"

"No." He stifled a groan. "And never will, I'm thinking. That poor sailor man is still becalmed east by west of Nowhere, and never a sign of land on either bow."

"But you must put it through somehow. Tell me … is there anything I can do to help you?"

The Sailor shook his head miserably.

"I can't accept that as final," said Edward Ambrose. "It's – it's – I hesitate to say what it may be if only you carry it out as you have conceived it. If you don't do that I some how feel the high gods will never forgive you … or me."

If anything could have rekindled Aladdin's lamp in the Sailor's soul it would have been the enthusiasm of this friend. But it was not to be; the trolls had him captive.

"I'm sorry," he said gently, knowing the stab he dealt. "It is no fault of yours. It's you that's made me all I am … and if any man could have helped me here you would have been that man. But I'm just a broken mariner. It's no use mincing it – I'm done."

The stark simplicity of the confession made Edward Ambrose gasp. He could say nothing. In the honest eyes was a look of consternation.

"A mariner has got to have a star to work by. Even old Ulysses had to have that. But there's not one for Henry Harper in all the firmament." He fell into a sudden, odd, and queer kind of rage. "It's a black shame. If only I'd had a fair chance I'd have put this thing through. You might say" – the harsh laugh jarred worse than the baffled anger – "I'm a chap who has been handicapped out of the race. However…" The Sailor became silent.

Ambrose felt himself to be shaken. The impotent fury of this elemental soul was something beyond his experience. He hardened his heart. It must be his task to anchor this derelict adrift in uncharted seas until such time as help could come to him.

"Henry," he said suddenly, "does Mary Pridmore know you have returned?"

"No."

Edward Ambrose mustered his courage.

"If you don't bring the mariner into port it will be a heavy blow for her."

"What has it to do with her?" was the almost savage reply.

"She believes in you."

"Why should she?" There was almost a note of menace.

"She is your friend. We are both your friends."

The quiet tone somehow prevailed.

"Of course," he said queerly, "you are both my friends. And I'm not worthy of either."

"Suppose we leave her to be the judge of that."

The Sailor shook his head.

"She can't judge anything until … until I've told her … about Cora."

"She has not been told?" Ambrose spoke casually, impassively. Somehow he had allowed himself to guess that the Sailor had told her, and that she had sent him away. Why he should have come to that rather fantastic conclusion he didn't know, except that she had not had a line from Henry Harper in eleven months. But he saw at once that he was wrong.

He felt that he must use great care. The ice was even thinner than he had suspected. Moreover an acute perception told him that nothing would be easier than for ill informed well-meaningness to commit a tragic blunder.

"You don't mean to say you thought I had?" The Sailor put his question oddly, disconnectedly.

"The fact is," said Edward Ambrose jesuitically, "I have never been impertinent enough to think the matter out. I know nothing beyond the fact that Mary Pridmore is very much your friend."

"There's no use in saying that when I can never be hers."

"Ah, there I don't agree," said Edward Ambrose calmly.

"Why not look the facts in the face?"

"Yes, why not?"

"Friendship between us is impossible. That's why I went away. We … we played it up too high. Friendship between a man and a woman is no use … at least not to her and me … although…"

"I'm not talking merely of friendship," said Edward Ambrose, very deliberately. "I'm talking of something else."

So charged with meaning were the words that the Sailor recoiled as if he had received a blow.

"What … what are you saying!" he cried with a sudden blind rage in his face.

BOOK V
FULFILLMENT

I

"Why do you taunt me?" cried the Sailor after a pause hard to endure.

"I offer neither reason nor excuse for the words I have used," said Edward Ambrose calmly. "I can only say that she is more than your friend. You must remember that you have been away eleven months. In the meantime water still continues to flow under London Bridge."

"I don't follow you."

"Yes, of course – one assumes too much. One forgets that you have been away so long and that apparently you have not yet seen Mortimer."

"Mortimer!"

"Perhaps I ought to have told you … yes … I can see I ought to have. Mortimer has news."

"News!"

"Now I am going to put you out. Go at once and see him."

Henry Harper presently realized that he was again on the pavement of Pall Mall, but he was too bewildered to know how he had come there. He was in a kind of dream. But all he did had a specific purpose. For instance, he was going to see Mr. Mortimer. Yet he could not understand what lay behind his friend's desire that he should see the solicitor at once. The true explanation never occurred to him.

Mr. Mortimer had to tell him that his wife had died two months ago in the course of one of her bouts of drinking. At first the Sailor could not grasp the significance of the statement. It hardly seemed to make any impact upon him. He thanked Mr. Mortimer for all his services in a trying matter, and went out into the street, apparently giving very little thought to what had happened.

Here, however, he grew suddenly aware that the aspect of things had completely changed. Something had occurred which lay beyond his ken, but he knew already that the whole universe was different.

A new man in brain and heart, he collected his things from Charing Cross and drove to Brinkworth Street. His room was ready to receive him in spite of the fact that he had been away eleven months. He had written to Mr. Paley from time to time inclosing money and telling him that he hoped to be home presently. And home he was at last.

It was not at once that he could set his thoughts in order. But one fact was clear. He was free. He was free to enjoy the light of heaven, to breathe the breath of life.

In the height of the tumult now upon him he took a resolve. The barrier was down. He would put all to the touch. Somehow he had an implicit faith. A gulf was fixed, he knew, between Mary and himself. She belonged to a world far removed from the one in which he had been born, in which he had passed so much of his life. But he had that final pledge, "If ever you want help!" Well, there was only one way in which she could help him, and that she knew as well as he.

Soon after five he set out. If he went leisurely he would reach Queen Street about six, a propitious hour. She was generally at home at that time. It was hard to believe that he was the same man who had stood that morning on the curb at Charing Cross. He had absolutely nothing now in common with that broken mariner.

In those few brief hours he had suffered one sea change the more. The genie had relit the lamp. Again he was a forward-looking man. Nay, he was more. He was a prince of the blood approaching the portals of an imperial kingdom. Otto, a prince of that other kingdom, issued from the threshold of No. 50, while Venables, the butler, with polite surprise, was in the very act of receiving the Sailor.

"Hulloa, Harper," said the Prince. "Turned up again. We had all given you up for lost."

It might have been possible for a delicate ear to detect something other than welcome in the voice of his highness. But whether such was the case or not was a matter of no concern to the returned mariner.

Mary was at home and alone. At first he was a little unnerved by the sight of her, and she perhaps by the sight of him. The look of sadness in her face distressed him.

"Not one line," she said. But there was nothing of Edward Ambrose's half reproach in her voice.

"No."

"I was beginning to think I should never see or hear of you again." Her simplicity was the exact counterpart of his own.

"I don't think I ever meant you to."

She waited patiently for him to add to his strange words and was slow to realize that he couldn't.

"That would have been cruel," she said at last.

"It would have been cruel either way. However, it is all done with now."

"I'm afraid I don't understand," she said, finding that speech had failed him again.

"I don't know whether I can tell you."

Ought he to tell her? A harrowing doubt arose. She knew that there had been some grave reason for his going away. But what the hidden cause had been, hers was not a nature that would ask. She only knew that if speech and bearing meant anything, he was deeply in love with her, and yet for some unfathomable reason he had shirked the issue.

And now he had returned after these long months, which to her as well as to himself had been a time of more than bitterness, there was still this shadow between them. Yet it surely belonged to the past. There was no barrier between them now, except the memory of a secret which somehow he could not believe was vital.

In her immense desire to serve him she was ready to give all that he might ask. But there was still a reservation in his mind. In the sudden revelation, as it seemed to him, of the divine clemency, he was overwhelmed by a desire to confess all.

There may have been no need to do so, yet that was not a question to ask. She was his, he knew it; she would not be less, she would be doubly his, if she learned the circumstances of his life. Besides, so high was the revulsion of feeling now upon him that it seemed the course of honor. And was it not her right to know all concerning him before he demanded so great a sacrifice?

In this mood he never for a moment doubted that it would be a further bond. Let him tell his secret now that his lips had been unsealed.

"Mary," he said, "do you remember your words eleven months ago?"

"I remember them perfectly."

"Well, there was only one way in which you could help me then, and that was why I went away. And I never intended to return unless I could claim that which you offered me."

"Was it necessary?"

"Mere friendship is no use to you and me. But I couldn't ask you to marry me then, although I knew … at least I thought I knew … you'll tell me if I am wrong…"

She couldn't help smiling a little at this rather childlike confusion.

"… that you would marry me if I asked you. But I didn't, because I couldn't. Do you understand that? Do you still look at things in the way you did?"

The soul of a poor mariner might be tempest tossed on all the oceans of the world, but the soul of Mary Pridmore was the fixed star of his faith. The mere thought seemed to brace his courage for the task that honor laid upon him.

He took her hand. It was the only manifestation he would allow himself until he had told her.

"I could not ask you to marry me then," he said, "because I had a wife."

"You had a wife." She repeated the words numbly, incredulously.

"I had a wife," he said, doggedly. "She died two months ago."

"And … and you never told me!"

"No."

There was an edge to her tone that had struck like a knife.

"Henry!"

"I tried," he said feebly. "God knows I tried."

"You don't mean you deceived me?" Her voice was hardening.

"No." A queer kind of faintness was coming over him. "I don't mean that. You never asked me and … and I never told you."

"But you knew I took it for granted that you were not married."

The order and precision of her speech began to frighten him. He could give no answer.

"You knew that." Her voice was hurting him terribly.

"I don't say I didn't," he said. He had a sick feeling that he was already in the jaws of a trap. God in heaven, what madness had lured him to tell her when he had no need to do so!

"Then you deceived me." The voice was pitiless.

He looked at her with scared eyes.

"Don't say that," he said.

He saw there was a cold light blazing in her and he began to grow miserably afraid.

"I tried very hard not to deceive you," he said. "God knows I tried. And it was because I couldn't go on with it that I went away and … and never meant to see you again."

"I don't quite think that is an excuse."

Somehow the words seemed to goad him on to unknown perils. But he was in a quicksand, the ground was moving under his feet.

"You don't know what my life has been," he said desperately. "You don't know what a wife I married, you don't know anything about me, else you wouldn't be so hard."

She realized while he was speaking, realized with a kind of nausea, which came suddenly upon her, that all he said was true. There was a peculiar note creeping into his voice that assailed her fastidious ears like a sudden descent to a subterranean region which she knew to exist, but of which she had never had first-hand knowledge. The subtle change of tone was telling her as nothing else could have done that it was perfectly true that she knew neither what his life had been nor anything about him.

"Mary." In spite of an intense feeling for him it was beginning to make her wince to hear her name on his lips. "If you don't mind I think I'll tell you one or two things about my life and … and how I came … to get married."

"I think perhaps I would rather not know." It was not she who said that. Long generations of Pridmores and Colthursts had suddenly taken charge and had answered for her.

It was a tone he had never heard her use, not even at the dinner party at which she had discussed the question of divorce. It was almost as if she had hit him a blow and yet without intending to deal one. By this time he had grown so dazed and frightened that he had begun to lose his head.

"The woman I married was not respectable, and that was why I didn't tell you."

She drew away from him a little. It was quite an involuntary action, but he felt it like a knife in the flesh. In sick desperation he floundered on, suddenly losing touch with all the small amenities of speech and manner he had so painfully imposed upon himself. Moreover, he realized the fact with pangs that were almost murderous. There were notes from the Blackhampton gutter beginning to strike through his voice.

"You don't know what my life has been," he said. "You don't know where I started from."

Again she made that involuntary movement, almost as if she felt that the mere tone was defiling her.

"You must let me tell you … let me tell you all, if you don't mind. It'll help you understand."

"I would rather you didn't." Again the Pridmores and the Colthursts were speaking.

He looked at her with a wildness that made her shiver. An intense pity for this man had suddenly begun to do battle with the Colthursts and the Pridmores. There was something in those eyes, as there always had been, that was almost beyond her power to meet.

"I never had a chance," he said, holding her in thrall with the voice she no longer recognized as his. "I've been handicapped out of the race. I'm going to tell you, Mary. It's not that I want your pity … I ask more than that. It's more than pity will bring a sailorman like me into port."

A kind of defiance of himself and of her had entered his tone. His words seemed to open a vein in her heart. She had a great compassion for this man, but with all her strength of soul, with all her independence, she knew and felt that voice had already told her that the facts of his life were going to prove more than she could bear.

In a dogged way, with many of the tricks of speech and manner of former phases of his life, which he had sloughed as a snake its skin, and had now reassumed in the stress of overmastering agony, he told her all. He spared her nothing, not even his comparatively recent knowledge that his father had been driven to commit a murder, which in Henry Harper's view accounted for the price the son had had to pay. Nothing was spared her of Auntie, of the police, of the night on the railway, of Mr. Thompson and the Old Man, of the Margaret Carey and the Island of San Pedro, of Ginger and Blackhampton, of the first meeting with Klondyke, of the first meeting with Edward Ambrose, and, finally, an account of his fall into the clutches of Cora Dobbs and how he made the horrible discovery concerning her on the night of their own first memorable meeting at the dinner party in Bury Street.

Some insane demon seemed to urge him on. In spite of the look of horror in her eyes, he told her everything. Somehow he felt it was the only reparation he could make to her for being as he was.

"Klondyke gave me my first start," he said finally. "He knows nearly as much as you – except about that woman – but he's stood to me all through. I don't ask your pity. I admit I deceived you, Mary, an' I done wrong, but it warn't because I didn't want to do right. I got to pay for it, I can see that. I dare say it's right, but I'll only say … and this is final … Enry Arper, whatever 'is father done, don't deserve not a half, not a quarter of what's been done to him."

She had to hold on by the table. Something was stifling her. There were things in this elemental soul which the Pridmores and the Colthursts might once have known, but for long generations had forgotten.

She dare not look at him. An abyss had opened. She simply couldn't face it.

Somehow he knew that. It needed no words to tell him. Everything was lost. The mariner could never hope to come into port. Again that horrible sense of rage came on him, which a few hours ago had overthrown him in his interview with Edward Ambrose. It maddened him to think that he had been allowed to get so far along the road and that a subtle trick had defeated him when the goal was actually in sight.

Yet even at the last there was just one thing, and only one, that stood to him: if it was still possible he must be a man, a gentleman. He knew this woman was suffering cruelly, and he owed it to her and to his friends not to profane the God she worshiped. There was no God in heaven after all, it seemed, for Henry Harper, but for her, who had not the stain of a father's crime upon her, it was a different matter.

As he stood not three paces from her, clenched and incoherent, fighting not to strike her with the sudden awful blasphemies that were surging to his lips, he knew nothing of what was passing in her mind. Had he known she would have had his pity. All that her progenitors had stood for in the past had suddenly recoiled upon her. All those entries in Burke it had been her pleasure to deride, all the politicians and the landed proprietors, all the Lady Sophias and the Lady Carolines, all that flunkyfied reverence for concrete things of those generations of the Pridmores and the Colthursts, which had so long affronted her high good sense, were now having their word to say in the matter.

She had pledged her help to this man if ever he asked it, but now she found that help was not hers to give. Said the tart voice of her famous Aunt Caroline, it is not to be expected, my dear, of a sane Christian gentlewoman. Think of your father, my dear! By some strange irony, Mary Pridmore suddenly thought of him, that admired and bewhiskered servant of a generation which allowed his friend Bismarck to steal Schleswig and to murder France, but paid itself the tribute of building the Albert Memorial; the distinguished servant of a generation that had denied reading, writing, and arithmetic to its Henry Harpers and had turned them barefoot into its Blackhampton gutters.

Many things were coming home to the heart of Mary Pridmore in the awful silence of that room. She was no more to blame for the long line of her fathers whose governing abilities were commemorated in the England of the sixties than was their victim, Henry Harper, in whose bruised body and tormented soul had been commemorated his mother's murder. She was numb and dazed now she had heard his story, but she had nothing to give him.

The truth had come to him already. "Now, Enery, you must be a man and bear it," said the voice of Auntie, wheezing in the upper air. Well … if his flesh and blood would only let him he must be a gentleman as long as he had the honor to converse with a real Hyde Park lady who believed in God … that was all he knew at the moment. If there was a spark of manhood in him he must hold on to that.

"Miss Pridmore." … He was able to pull himself together in a way that astonished even himself… "I see it's all over with me and you. I'll never be able to get through without your help. I'm fair done in. But I don't blame you. An' I just want you to say you don't blame me, an' then I'll quit."

She couldn't speak. Aunt Caroline in a hoop and elastic-sided boots was simply imploring her to behave with dignity.

"Say you don't blame me, Miss Pridmore, an' then I'll quit. It's not reelly my fault about my father." He laughed a little, but she didn't hear him. "I'm sorry, though, about the Mariner. If we could have brought him into port, you and me, Miss Pridmore, there'd been nothing like him outside the Russians. However … say I'm not to blame … and then I'll quit."

She was unable to hear what he was saying.

"Won't you, Miss Pridmore? I can't bear you should think I've played it low down. If I could ha' told you afore I'd ha' done it … you can lay to that."

It was not a voice that she knew, and she could not answer it.

"Well, I'm sorry."

Suddenly he took her hand, and its coldness startled him.

"I'll say good-by," he said with a sort of laugh.

Aunt Charlotte primly informed her niece that Mr. Harper was taking leave.

"Oh," she said. "Good-by."

Without venturing again to touch the hand she offered, he stumbled headlong out of the room and down the stairs. He took his hat from a table in the hall and let himself out of the front door before the butler could get there. He closed the door after him with a sharp bang – it was a door with a patent catch and could only be closed in that way – and as he did this and the sound re-echoed along Queen Street, the lamp in the right-hand corner of his brain suddenly went out.

By the time he came to the end of the street it had grown very dark. And as he turned a corner and found himself in a street whose name he didn't know he was unable to see anything. And then all at once he realized that Aladdin's lamp was broken in a thousand pieces, and he gave a little wild shriek of dismay. The savage hunted eyes of Mr. Thompson were gazing at him from under the helmet of a passing constable.

The trolls had got him.

Nothing could help him now. It had grown so dark that he couldn't see anything, although it was hardly seven at present of an evening in June. He almost shrieked again as he heard the sniggering voice of Auntie ascend above the gathering noises of the town: "Now, Enery, you must be a man and bear it."

He didn't know where he was now amid the maze of the little-frequented streets of Mayfair. He had lost his way and he couldn't see. He was blind already with an ever growing darkness. He was losing all sense of time and place. But the voice of Auntie was ever in his ears, exhorting him, with that shrill and peculiar snigger of which she never seemed to grow weary, to be a man and bear it, as he stumbled on and on into the night.