The Four Corners of the World

by A. E. W. Mason

V

There is no doubt about it. Women are not reasonable beings. Otherwise Olivia would never have come to the President's party in a white lace coat over a clinging gown of white satin. She looked beautiful, but I was dismayed when I saw her. She had come with the Gimenos, and I took her aside, and I am afraid that I scolded her.

"But you told me," she expostulated, "I was to spare no pains. There must be nothing of the traveller about me"; and there was not. From the heels of her satin slippers to the topmost tress of her hair she was dressed as she alone could dress in Santa Paula.

"But of course I meant you to wear black," I whispered.

"Oh, I didn't think of it," Olivia exclaimed wearily. "Please don't lecture"; and she dropped into a chair with such a lassitude upon her face that I thought she was going to faint.

"It doesn't matter," I said hastily. "No doubt the disguise will cover it. At ten o'clock, slip down into the garden. Until then, dance!"

"Dance!" she exclaimed, looking piteously up into my face.

"Yes," I insisted impatiently, and taking her hand, I raised her from her chair.

She had no lack of partners, for the President himself singled her out and danced in a quadrille with her. Others timorously followed his example. But though she did dance, I was grievously disappointed--for a time. It seemed that her soul was flickering out in her. Just when she most needed her courage and her splendid spirit, she failed of them.

There were only two more hours after a long fortnight of endurance. Yet those two last hours, it seemed, she could not face. I know now that I never acted with greater cruelty than on that night when I kept her dancing. But even while she danced, there came to me some fear that I had misjudged her. I watched her from a corner of the ballroom. There was a great change in her. Her face seemed to me smaller, her eyes bigger, darker even, and luminous with some haunting look. But there was more. I could not define the change--at first. Then the word came to me. There was a spirituality in her aspect which was new to her, an unearthliness. Surely, I thought, the fruit of great suffering; and blundering, with the truth under my very nose, I began to ask myself a foolish question. Had Harry Vandeleur played her false?

A movement of the company awakened me. A premonitory sputter of rockets drew the guests to the cloak-room, from the cloak-room to the garden. I saw Olivia fetch her lace coat and slip it over her shoulders like the rest. It was close upon ten. The Fates were favouring us, or perhaps I was favouring the Fates. For I had arranged that the fireworks should begin just a few minutes before the hour struck. In the darkness of the garden Olivia could slip away, and her absence would not afterwards be noticed.

I waited at the garden door. I heard the clock strike. I saw Juan Ballester's profile in fire against a dark blue sky of velvet and stars. I shook hands with myself in that the moon would not rise till one. And then a whiteness gleamed between the bushes, and Olivia was at my side. Her hand sought mine and clung to it. I opened the postern and looked out into a little street. The lamps of a closed carriage shone twenty yards away, and but for the carriage the street was empty.

"Now!" I whispered.

We ran out. I opened the carriage door. I caught a glimpse of horn spectacles, a lantern-jawed, unshaven face, a shovel hat; and I heard a stifled oath. Mr. Crowninshield, too, had noticed Olivia's white gown. She jumped in, I shut the door, and the carriage rolled away. I went back into the garden, where Juan Ballester's profile was growing ragged.

Of the next hour or two I have only confused memories. I counted stages in Olivia's progress as I passed from room to room among the guests. Now she would have reached the station; now the train had stopped on the Quay at Las Cuevas; now, perhaps, the gangway had been withdrawn and the great ship was warping out into the river. At one o'clock I smoked a cigarette in the garden. From the marquee came the clatter of supper. In the sky the moon was rising. And somewhere outside the three-mile limit a rippling path of silver struck across the Ariadne's dark bows. I was conscious of a swift exultation. I heard the throb of the screw and saw the water flashing from the ship's sides.

Then I remembered that I had left the garden door unlocked. I went to it and by chance looked out into the street. I received a shock. For, twenty yards away, the lights of a closed carriage shone quietly beside the kerb. I wondered whether the last few hours had been really the dream of a second. I even looked back into the garden, to make sure that the profile of Juan Ballester was not still sputtering in fire. Then a detail or two brought me relief. The carriage was clearly a private carriage; the driver on the box wore livery--at all events, I saw a flash of bright buttons on his coat. In my relief I walked from the garden towards the carriage. The driver recognised me most likely--recognised, at all events, that I came from the private door of the President's garden. For he made some kind of salute.

I supposed that he had been told to wait at this spot, away from the park of carriages, and I should have turned back but for a circumstance which struck me as singular. It was a very hot night, and yet not only were the windows of the carriage shut, but the blinds were drawn close besides. I could not see into the carriage, but there was light at the edges of the blinds. A lamp was burning inside. I stood on the pavement, and a chill struck into my blood and made me shiver. I listened. There was no sound of any movement within the carriage. It must be empty. I assured myself and again doubted. The little empty street, the closed carriage with the light upon the edges of the blinds, the absolute quiet, daunted me. I stepped forward and gently opened the door. I saw Olivia. There was no trace of the nun's gown, nor the coif. But that her hair was ruffled she might this moment have left Juan Ballester's drawing-room.

She turned her face to me, shook her head, and smiled.

"It was of no use, my friend," she said gently. "They were on the watch at Las Cuevas. An officer brought me back. He has gone in to ask Juan what he shall do with me."

Olivia had given up the struggle--that was clear.

"It was Crowninshield's fault!" I cried.

"No, it was mine," she answered.

And here is what had happened, as I learnt it afterwards. All had gone well until the train reached Las Cuevas. There the police were on the look-out for her. The Padre Antonio, however, excited no suspicion, and very likely Sister Pepita would have passed unnoticed too. But as she stepped down from the carriage on to the step, and from the step to the ground, an officer was startled by the unexpected appearance of a small foot in a white silk stocking and a white satin slipper. Now, the officer had seen nuns before, old and young, but never had he seen one in white satin shoes, to say nothing of the silk stockings. He became more than curious. He pointed her out to his companions. Sister Pepita was deftly separated in the crowd from the Padre Antonio--cut out, to borrow the old nautical phrase--and arrested. She was conducted towards a room in the station, but the steamer's siren hooted its warning to the passengers, and despair seized upon Olivia. She made a rush for the gangway, she was seized, she was carried forcibly into the room and stripped of her nun's disguise and coif. She was kept a prisoner in the room until the Ariadne had left the Quay. Then she was placed in a carriage and driven back, with an officer of the police at her side, to the garden door of the President's house.

Something of this Olivia told me at the time, but she was interrupted by the return of the officer and a couple of Juan Ballester's messengers.

"His Excellency will see you," said the officer to her. He conducted her through the garden and by the private doorway into Ballester's study. I had followed behind the servants and I remained in the room. We waited for a few minutes, and Juan himself came in. He went quickly over to Olivia's side. His voice was all gentleness. But that was his way with her, and I set no hopes on it.

"I am grieved, Señorita, if you have suffered rougher treatment than befits you. But you should not have tried to escape."

Olivia looked at him with a piteous helplessness in her eyes. "What am I to do, then?" she seemed to ask, and, with the question, to lose the last clutch upon her spirit. For her features quivered, she dropped into a chair, laid her arms upon the table, and, burying her face in them, burst into tears.

It was uncomfortable--even for Juan Ballester. There came a look of trouble in his face, a shadow of compunction. For myself, the heaving of her young shoulders hurt my eyes, the sound of her young voice breaking in sobs tortured my ears. But this was not the worst of it, for she suddenly threw herself back in her chair with the tears wet upon her cheeks, and, beating the table piteously with the palms of her hands, she cried:

"I am hungry--oh, so hungry!"

"Good Heavens!" cried Ballester. He started forward, staring into her face.

"But you knew," said Olivia, and he turned away to one of the messengers, and bade him bring some supper into the room.

"And be quick," said I.

"Yes, yes, be quick," said Juan.

At last I had the key to her. She had been starving, in that great, empty house in the Calle Madrid. "A fortnight!" she had cried in dismay. I understood now the reason of her terror. She had known that she would have to starve. And she had held her head high, making no complaint, patiently enduring. It was not her spirit which had failed her. I cursed myself for a fool as once more I enthroned her. Her face had grown smaller, her eyes bigger. There was a look of spirituality which I had not seen before. I had noticed the signs, and I had misread them. Her lassitude this evening, her vain struggle with the police, her apathy under their treatment of her, were all explained. Not her courage, but her body had failed her. She was starving.

A tray was brought in and placed before her. She dried her eyes and with a sigh she drew her chair in to the table and ate, indifferent to the presence of Ballester, of the officer who remained at the door, and of myself. Ballester stood and watched her. "Good Heavens!" he said again softly, and going to her side he filled her glass with champagne.

She nodded her thanks and raised it to her lips almost before he had finished pouring. A little colour came into her cheeks and she turned again to her supper. She was a healthy girl. There never had been anything of the drooping lily about Olivia. She had always taken an interest in her meals, however dainty she might look. The knowledge of that made her starvation doubly cruel--not only to her. Juan sat down opposite to her. There was no doubt now about the remorse in his face. He never took his eyes from her as she ate. Once she looked up and saw him watching her.

"But you knew," she said. "I was alone in the house. How much money did you leave there for me when you took my father away? A few dollars which your men had not discovered."

"But you yourself----" he stammered.

"I was at a ball," said Olivia scornfully. "How much money does a girl take with her to a ball? Where would she put it?"

There was no answer to that question.

"The next day I went to the bank," she continued. "My father's money was impounded. You had seen to that. All the unpaid bills came in in a stream. I couldn't pay them. I could get no credit. You had seen to that. My friends left me alone. Of course I starved; you knew that I should. You meant me to," and, with the air of one who has been wasting time, she turned again to her supper.

"I never thought that you would hold out," stammered Ballester. I had never seen him in an apologetic mood before, and he looked miserable. "I hadn't seen that you were starving."

Olivia looked up at him. It was not so much that her face relented, as that it showed an interest in something beyond her supper.

"Yes," she said, nodding at him. "I think that's true. You hadn't seen with your own eyes that I was starving. So my starving wasn't very real to you."

Ballester changed her plate and filled her glass again.

"Ah!" said Olivia with satisfaction, hitching up her chair still closer. She was really having a good square meal.

"But why didn't you tell me?" I asked.

"I told no one," said Olivia, shaking her head. "I thought that I could manage till to-night. Once or twice I called on the Gimenos at luncheon-time, and I had one or two dollars. No; I would tell no one."

"Yes," said Juan, "I understand that. It's the reason why I wanted you." And at this sign of his comprehension of her, Olivia again looked at him, and again the interest in her eyes was evident.

At last she pushed back her chair. The tray was removed. Ballester offered her a cigarette. She smiled faintly as she took it. Certainly her supper had done her a world of good. She lit her cigarette and leaned her elbows on the table.

"And now," she said, "what do you mean to do with me?"

Ballester went to his bureau, wrote on a sheet of paper and brought the paper to Olivia.

"You can show this at the railway-station to-morrow," he said, and he laid the permit on the table and turned away.

Women are not reasonable people. For the second time that night Olivia forced me to contemplate that trite reflection. For now that she had got what she had suffered hunger and indignities to get, she merely played with it with the tips of her fingers, looking now upon the table, now at Juan Ballester's back, and now upon the table again.

"And you?" she said gently. "What will become of you?"

I suppose Ballester was the only one in the room who did not notice the softness of her voice. To me it was extraordinary. He had tortured her with hunger, exposed her to the gentle methods of his police, yet the fact that he did these things because he wanted her seemed to make him suddenly valuable to her now that she was free of him.

Ballester turned round and leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets.

"I?" he said. "I shall just stay on alone here until some day someone gets stronger than I am, perhaps, and puts me up against the wall outside----"

"Oh, no!" cried Olivia, interrupting him.

"Well, one never knows," said his Excellency, shrugging his shoulders. He turned to the window and drew aside the curtains. The morning had come. It was broad daylight outside.

"Unless, Olivia," he added, turning again towards her, "you will reconsider your refusal to marry me. Together we could do great things."

It was the most splendid performance of the grand gentleman which Ballester ever gave. And he knew it. You could see him preening himself as he spoke. His gesture was as noble as his words. From head to foot he was the perfect cavalier, and consciousness of the perfection of his chivalry shone out from him like a nimbus. I looked quickly towards Olivia--in some alarm for Harry Vandeleur. She had lowered her head, so that it was impossible to see how she had taken Ballester's honourable amendment. But when she raised her head again a smile of satisfaction was just disappearing from her face; and the smile betrayed her. She had been playing for this revenge from the moment when she had finished her supper.

"I am honoured, Señor Juan," she said sedately, "but I am already promised."

Ballester turned abruptly away. Whether he had seen the smile, whether, if he had seen it, he understood it, I never knew.

"You had better get the Señorita a carriage," he said to the officer at the door. As the man went out, the music from the ballroom floated in. Juan Ballester hesitated, and no shock which Olivia had given to me came near the shock which his next words produced.

"Don Santiago shall have his money. You can draw on it, Señorita, to-morrow, before you go."

"Thank you," she said.

The messenger reappeared. A carriage was waiting. Olivia rose and looked at Juan timidly. He walked ceremoniously to the door and held it open.

"Good night," she said.

He bowed and smiled in a friendly fashion enough, but he did not answer. It seemed that he had spoken his last word to her. She hesitated and went out. At once the President took a quick step towards me.

"Do you know what is said to-night?" he said violently.

I drew back. I could not think what he meant. To tell the truth, I found him rather alarming.

"No," I answered.

"Why, that I have given this party as a farewell; that I am still going to bolt from Maldivia. Do you see? I have spent all this money for nothing."

I drew a breath of relief. His violence was not aimed against me.

"That's a pity," I said. "But the rumour can still be killed. I thought of a way yesterday."

"Will it cost much?" he asked.

"Very little."

"What am I to do?"

"Paint the Presidential House," said I. "It wants it badly, and all Santa Paula will be very sure that you wouldn't spend money in paint if you meant to run away."

"That's a good idea," said he, and he sat down at once and began to figure out the expense. "A couple of hundred dollars will do it."

"Not well," said I.

"We don't want it done well," said Juan. "Two men on a plank will, be enough. A couple of hundred dollars is too much. Half that will be quite sufficient. By the way"--and he sat with his pen poised--"just run after--her--and tell her that Vandeleur is landing to-morrow at Trinidad. I invented some business for him there."

He bent down over the desk. His back was towards the door. As I turned the handle, someone was opening it from the other side. It was Olivia Calavera.

"I came back," she said, with the colour mantling in her face. "You see, I am going away to-morrow--and I hadn't said 'Good-bye.'"

Juan must have heard her voice.

"Please go and give that message," he said sharply. "And shut the door! I don't want to be disturbed."

Olivia drew back quickly. I was amazed to see that she was hurt.

"His message is for you," I said severely. "Harry Vandeleur lands at Trinidad to-morrow."

"Thank you," she said slowly; she turned away and walked as slowly down the passage. "Goodbye," she said, with her back towards me.

"I will see you off to-morrow, Señorita," I said; and she turned back to me.

"No," she said gently. "Don't do that! We will say 'Good-bye' here."

She gave me her hand--she had been on the point of going without even doing that. "Thank you very much," she added, and she walked rather listlessly away. She left me with an uneasy impression that her thanks were not very sincere. I am bound to admit that Olivia puzzled me that night. To extract the proposal of marriage from Ballester was within the rules of the game and good play into the bargain. But to come back again as she had done, was not quite fair. However, as I watched her go, I thought that I would keep my bewilderment to myself. I have never asked Harry Vandeleur, for instance, whether he could explain it. I went back to the study.

"I think fifty dollars will be ample," said Ballester, still figuring on his paper. "Has she gone?"

"She is going," said I. He rose from his chair, broke off a rose from a bowl of flowers which, on this night only, decorated the room. Then he opened the window and leaned out. Olivia, I reckoned, would be just at this moment stepping into the carriage. He tossed the rose down and drew back quickly out of sight.

"Shall it be green paint, your Excellency?" I asked.

His Excellency, I regret to say, swore loudly.

"Never in this world!" said he.

I had left the door open. The music of a languorous and melting waltz filled the room.

"I do loathe music!" cried Juan Ballester violently. It was the nearest approach to a sentimental remark that I had ever heard him make.

NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF
CAPRICORN

[NORTH OF THE TROPIC OF CAPRICORN]

The strong civic spirit of the Midlands makes them fertile in reformers; and Mr. Endicott even in his early youth was plagued by the divine discontent with things as they are. Neither a happy marriage, nor a prosperous business, nor an engaging daughter appeased him. But he was slow in discovering a remedy. The absence of any sense of humour blunted his wits and he lived in a vague distress, out of which it needed the death of his wife to quicken him. "Some result must come out of all these years of pondering and discomfort, if only as a memorial to her," he reflected, and he burrowed again amongst the innumerable panaceas. Then at last he found it--on an afternoon walk in June when the sharp contrast between the grime of the town and the loveliness of green and leaf which embowered it so closely, smote upon him almost with pain. The Minimum Wage. Like Childe Roland's Dark Tower, it had lain within his vision for many a long mile of his pilgrimage. His eyes had rested on it and had never taken it in; so simple and clear it was to the view.

Thereafter he was quick to act. Time was running on. He was forty-two. He disposed of his business, and a year later was elected to Parliament. Once in the House he walked warily. He had no personal ambition, but he was always afraid lest some indiscretion should set the House against him and delay his cause. Mr. Endicott had his plan quite clear in his mind. Samuel Plimsoll was his model. The great Bill for the establishment of the Minimum Wage should be a private member's Bill moved from the back benches session after session if need be, and driven through Parliament into Law at last by the sheer weight of its public value.

Accordingly for a year he felt his way, learning the rules and orders, speaking now and then without subservience and without impertinence; and after the prorogation of the House for the summer, he took his daughter with him to a farm-house set apart in a dale of Cumberland. In that solitary place, inspired by the brown fells and the tumbling streams, and with the one person he loved as his companion, he proposed finally to smooth and round his Bill.

Accident or destiny, however--whichever you like to call the beginning of tragic things--put an Australian in the same compartment of the railway-carriage; and the Australian was led to converse by the sight of various cameras on the luggage rack.

"My father is very fond of photography," said Elsie Endicott. "It amuses him, and the pictures which he takes if the day is clear, are sometimes quite recognisable."

"My dear!" said Mr. Endicott.

Elsie turned to the window and shook hands with two young men who had come to see her off. One of them, whom Mr. Endicott vaguely remembered to have seen at meals in his house, climbed on the footboard.

"You will take care of Miss Endicott, sir," he said firmly. "She has been overdoin' it a bit, dancin', you know, and that sort of thing, while you were at the House of Commons."

Mr. Endicott chuckled.

"I'll tell you something about my daughter," he replied. "She may look like china, but she is pretty solid earthenware really. And if there are any others as anxious about her as you are you might spread the good news."

The train moved off. "So you are in the House of Commons," said the Australian, and he began to talk. "Our great trouble--yours and mine--is----"

"I know it," Mr. Endicott interrupted with a smile of confidence.

"Of course you do," replied the Australian. "It's the overcrowding of the East under the protective rule of the British."

"I beg your pardon," said Mr. Endicott blankly.

"We could help a good deal," the Australian continued, "if only our Government had got a ha'porth of common sense. North of the Tropic of Capricorn, there's land and to spare which coloured labour could cultivate and white labour can't."

This was strange talk to Mr. Endicott. He was aware, but not conscious of great dominions and possessions outside the British Islands. He had indeed avoided the whole subject. He was shy of the phrase which described them, as a horse is shy of a newspaper blown about the street. The British Empire! The very words had a post-prandial sound. Instead of suggesting to him vast territories with myriads of men and women groping amongst enormous problems, they evoked a picture of a flamboyant gentleman in evening dress standing at the head of a table, his face congested with too much dinner, a glass of wine in his one hand, a fat cigar in the other, and talking vauntingly. This particular sentence of the Australian stuck inconveniently in his mind and smouldered there.

For instance. On the afternoon of their arrival Elsie was arranging his developing dishes and his chemicals on a small rough table in a corner of their one living-room. She put an old basket-chair by the table and set around it a screen which she had discovered in one of the bedrooms upstairs.

"There!" she said. "You can make all your messes here, father, and we can keep the room looking habitable, and I shan't get all my frocks stained."

"Very well, Elsie," said her father absently, and he spoke his own thoughts. "That was a curious fear of the man in the train, Elsie. I think there's no truth in it. No, the danger's here in this country; here's what's to be done to avert it," and he slapped his hand down upon his pile of statistics.

"No doubt, father," said Elsie, and she went on with her work.

The very next evening he returned again to the subject. It was after dinner and about half-past nine o'clock. The blinds had not been lowered and Endicott looked out through the open windows on to a great flank of Scawfell which lay drenched in white moonlight a couple of fields away.

"North of the Tropic of Capricorn," he said, "I wish we had an atlas, Elsie."

"I'll write to London and buy one," said the girl. "We haven't got more than a 'Handy Gazetteer' even at home. It'll be amusing to plan out some long journeys which we can take together when you have passed your Bill into law."

Endicott smiled grimly at his daughter.

"I reckon we won't take many journeys together, Elsie. Oh, you needn't look surprised and hurt! I am not taken in by you a bit, my dear. That young spark on the footboard who told me I didn't take enough care of you"--and Elsie gurgled with laughter at the recollection--"threw a dreadful light upon your character and gave me a clue besides to the riddle of your vast correspondence. I hope you are telling them all that my persistent unkindness is not driving you into a decline."

Elsie paused in the act of addressing an envelope--there was a growing pile of letters in front of her--to reassure her father.

"I tell them all," she replied, "that you neither beat me nor starve me, and that if you weren't so very messy with your chemicals in the corner over there, I should have very little reason to change my home."

"Thank you, my dear," said Mr. Endicott. He was very proud of his daughter and especially of her health. With her dark rebellious hair, the delicate colour in her cheeks, and her starry eyes, she had a quite delusive look of fragility. But she could dance any youth of her acquaintance to a standstill without ruffling her curls, as he very well knew. He gazed at her lowered head with a smile.

"However, all this doesn't help me with the Minimum Wage," he continued, and he turned again to the papers on his desk by the window, while Elsie at the table in the middle of the big low-roofed room, continued to write her letters.

They were still engaged in these pursuits when Mrs. Tyson, their landlady, came into the room to lower the blinds.

"No, please leave them up," said Endicott, in an irritable voice. "I'll draw them down myself before we go to bed."

Mrs. Tyson accordingly left the blinds alone.

"And you'll be careful of the Crown Derby," she said imperturbably, nodding towards a china tea-set ranged in an open cabinet near to the door. "Gentlemen from London have asked me to sell it over and over. For it's of great value. But I won't, as I promised my mother. She, poor woman----"

"Yes, yes," interposed Mr. Endicott, "we'll be very careful. You may remember you told us all about it yesterday."

Mrs. Tyson turned down a little lower the one oil lamp which, with the candles upon Endicott's desk, lighted the room, and went back to the inner door.

"Will you be wanting anything more for a little while?" she asked. "For my girl's away, and I must go down the valley. I am sending some sheep away to market to-morrow morning."

"No, we want nothing at all," said Elsie, without paying much attention to what the woman was saying. Mrs. Tyson was obviously inclined to fuss, and would have to be suppressed. But she went out now without another word. There were two doors to the room at opposite ends, the inner one leading to a small hall, the kitchen and the staircase, the other, and outer door, opening directly close by the window on to a tiny garden with a flagged pathway. At the end of the path there was a gate, and a low garden wall. Beyond the gate a narrow lane and a brook separated the house from the fields and the great flank of fell.

The night was hot, and Endicott, unable to concentrate his attention upon his chosen theme, had the despairing sensation that he had lost grip of it altogether: his eyes wandered from his papers so continually to the hillside asleep in the bright moonlight. Here a great boulder threw a long motionless shadow down the slope, like a house; there a sharp rock-ridge cropping out of the hill, raised against the sky a line of black pinnacles like a file of soldiers.

"I can't work to-night, Elsie, and that's the truth," cried Endicott passionately, "though this is just the night when one ought to be most alive to the millions of men cooped in hot cities and living wretchedly. I'll go out of doors. Will you come?"

Elsie hesitated. Mr. Endicott was to carry that poignant recollection to his death. One word of persuasion and she would have come with him. But he did not speak it, and Elsie bent her head again to her work.

"No, thanks, father," she said. "I'll finish these letters. They must go off to-morrow morning."

Endicott blew out his candles, lit his pipe, and took up his cap. He was still smiling over her important air as of someone with great and urgent business. He went out into the garden. Elsie heard the latch of the gate click. He walked across the little bridge over the brook and at once his mood changed. He wandered across the fields and up the hillside, sorely discontented with himself. He had lost interest in the Minimum Wage. So much he admitted. The surroundings which were to inspire him had, on the contrary, merely provoked a disinclination to do any work whatever. The reaction after the strain of the Session was making itself felt. The question in his mind was "Why bother?" High up the hill he sat down upon a boulder to have it out with himself.

The sound of the stream dropping from pool to pool of rock on its way down the valley rose in a continuous thunder to his ears. He looked down at the little farm-house beneath him, and the golden light of the lamp within the windows of the sitting-room.

As he looked the light moved. Then it diminished; then it vanished altogether. Endicott chuckled and lit a second pipe, holding the lighted match in the hollow of his hands and bending his head close over it, because of a whisper of air. Elsie had finished her letters to the youths who besieged her and was off to bed. Only the moonlight blazed upon the windows now and turned them into mirrors of burnished silver.

Endicott smoked a third pipe whilst he wrestled with himself upon the hillside. To-morrow he would get up very early, bathe in the big deep pool, transparent to the lowest of its thirty feet of water, and then spend a long morning with the wage-lists of the chain-making industry. That was settled. Nothing should change his plan. Meanwhile it was very pleasant up here under the cool sky of moonlight and faint stars.

He dragged himself up reluctantly from his seat, and went down towards the farm. There was a little stone bridge to cross over one of the many mountain streams which went to the making of the small river on the other side of the house. Then came the lane and the garden-gate. He closed the door behind him when he had gone in. Although there was no lamp burning, the room was not dark. A twilight, vaporous and silvery, crept into it, darkening towards the inner part and filling the corners with mystery; while the floor by the window was chequered with great panels of light precise and bright as day.

On the hillside Endicott had seen the light go out in the room, and he crossed over to the big table for the lamp. But it was no longer there. Elsie had taken it, no doubt, into the hall with her letters for the morning post and had not brought it back. He moved to his own table where the candles stood; and with a shock he perceived that he was not alone in that unlighted room. A movement amongst the shadows by the inner door caught and held his eyes.

He swung round and faced the spot. He saw against the wall near the screen which hid his photographic paraphernalia, a man standing, straight, upright and very still. The figure was vague and blurred, but Endicott could see that his legs were clothed in white, and that he wore some bulky and outlandish gear upon his head. Endicott quickly struck a match. At the scratch and spurt of flame, the man in the shadow ran forward towards the door with extraordinary swiftness. But his shoulder caught the case in which Mrs. Tyson's Crown Derby china was standing, and brought it with a crash of broken crockery to the floor. Before the intruder could recover, Endicott set his back against the door and held the burning match above his head. He was amazed by what he saw.

The intruder was an Asiatic with the conventional hawk-nose of the Jew in the shape of his face; a brown man wearing a coloured turban upon his head, an old tweed jacket on his shoulders, and a pair of dirty white linen trousers on his legs, narrowing until they fitted closely round his ankles. He wore neither shoes nor stockings. And he stood very still watching Endicott with alert, bright eyes. Endicott, without moving from the door, reached out and lit the candles upon the table.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded curiously. He had no personal fear, and he was not much troubled by the man's hiding in the room. Elsie, whom the fellow might have frightened, had long since gone to bed, and there was nothing of value, except the Crown Derby, which he could have stolen. On the other hand Endicott was immensely puzzled by the presence of an Asiastic at all in this inland and lonely valley far from railways and towns, at half-past ten of the night.

"I pass the house," the man answered in English which was astonishingly good. "I think you give me one piece opium to go on with."

"Opium!" cried Mr. Endicott, as if he had been stung. How many times had he voted for the suppression of everything to do with opium. "You'll find none of that abominable drug here!"

He surveyed the Asiatic, outraged in every feeling. He lifted the latch. He was on the point of flinging open the door. He had actually begun to open it, when his mood changed. North of the Tropic of Capricorn. The lilt of the words was in his ears. He remembered the talk of the Australian in the railway-carriage about the overcrowding of the East. The coming of this strange brown man seemed to him of a sudden curiously relevant. He closed the door again.

"You passed the house? Where do you come from? Who are you? How do you come here?"

The Asiatic, who had stood gathered like a runner at the starting-point while the door was being opened, now cringed and smiled.

"Protector of the poor, I tell you my story"; and Mr. Endicott found himself listening in that quiet farm-house of the Cumberland dales to a most enlightening Odyssey.

The man's name was Ahmed Ali, and he was a Pathan of the hills. His home was in the middle country between Peshawur and the borders of Afghanistan, and he belonged to a tribe of seven hundred men, every one of whom had left his home and his wife and his children behind him, and had gone down to Bombay to seek his livelihood in the stokeholds of ships. Ahmed had been taken on a steamer of the Peninsula and Oriental Line bound for Australia, where he hoped to make his fortune. But neither at Sydney nor at Melbourne had he been allowed to land.

"But I am a British citizen," he said, having acquired some English.

"Well, and what of it?" said the Port authorities.

Nevertheless the night before the boat sailed he slipped overboard and swam ashore, to be caught when the smoke of that steamer was no more than a stain on the horizon. He was held in custody and would have been returned by the next steamer to India. But there was already in the harbour a cargo boat of the Clan Line bound for Quebec round the Cape; and the boat was short of its complement in the stokehold.

Ahmed Ali, accordingly, signed on, and sailed in her and acquired more English to help him on in the comfortable life he now proposed to make for himself in Canada.

"But again they would not let me go away into the country," he continued. "I told them I was British citizen, but it did not help me; no, not any more than in Australia. They put me on a ship for England, and I came to Liverpool steerage like a genelman. And at Liverpool I landed boldly. For I was a British citizen."

"Ah!" interjected Mr. Endicott proudly. "Here, in England, you see the value of being a British citizen."

"But, no, my genelman. For here there's no work for British citizen. I land and I walk about and I ask for work. But everyone says, 'Why don't you stay in your own country?' So I come away across the fields, and no man give me one piece opium."

Mr. Endicott nodded his head when the story was ended.

"Well, after all, why don't you stay in your own country?" he asked.

Mr. Endicott had already had his answer from the Australian, but he was now thirsty for details, and his ears in consequence were afflicted with a brief description of British rule from the Pathan's point of view.

"The all-wise one will pardon me. You keep the peace. Therefore we cannot stay in our own country. For we grow crowded and there is no food. In old times, when we were crowded and hungry, we went down into the plains and took the land and the wives of the people of the plains and killed the men. But the raj does not allow it. It holds a sword between us and the plains, a sword with the edge towards us. Neither, on the other hand, does it feed us."

Mr. Endicott was aghast at the perverted views thus calmly announced to him.

"But we can't allow you to come down into India murdering and robbing and taking the wives."

The Asiatic shrugged his shoulders.

"It is the law."

Mr. Endicott was silent. If it were not the law, there were certainly a great many precedents. The men of the hills and the people of the plains--yes, history would say it was the law. Mr. Endicott's eyes were opening upon unknown worlds. The British Power stood in India then cleaving a law of nature?

"Also, you send your doctors and make cures when the plague and the cholera come, so that fewer people die. Also, when the crops fail and there is famine, you distribute food, so that again fewer people die. No, there is no room now for us in our own country because of you, and you will not let us into yours."

"But we can't do anything else," cried Mr. Endicott. "We keep the peace, we feed when there is famine, we send our doctors when there is plague, because that is the law, also--the law of our race."

Ahmed Ali did not move. He had placed the dilemma before Endicott. He neither solved nor accepted it. Nor Was Endicott able to find any answer. There must be one, since his whole race was arraigned just for what it most prided itself upon--oh, no doubt there was an answer. But Mr. Endicott could not find it. His imagination, however, grasped the problem. He saw those seven hundred tribesmen travelling down the passes to the rail head, loading the Bombay train and dispersing upon the steamers. But he had no answer, and because he had no answer he was extremely uncomfortable. He had lived for a year in the world of politicians where, as a rule, there are answers all ready-made for any question, answers neatly framed in aphorisms and propositions and provided for our acceptance by thoughtful organisations. But he could not remember one to suit this occasion. He was at a loss, and he took the easy way to rid himself of discomfort. He dived into his trouser-pocket and fished out a handful of silver.

"Here!" he said. "This'll help you on a bit. Now go!"

He stood aside from the door and the Asiatic darted to it with an extraordinary eagerness. But once he had unlatched it, once it stood open to the hillside and the sky, and he free in the embrasure, he lost all his cringing aspect. He turned round upon Mr. Endicott.

"I go now," he cried in a high arrogant voice. "But I shall come back very soon, and all our peoples will come with me, all our hungry peoples from the East. Remember that, you genelman!" And then he ran noiselessly out of the house and down the pathway to the gate.

He ran with extraordinary swiftness; so that Endicott followed him to the gate and watched him go. He flew down the road, his shadow flitting in the moonlight like a bird. Once he looked over his shoulder, and seeing Endicott at the gate he leapt into the air. A few yards farther he doubled on his steps, climbed down into the little stream beside the lane and took to the hills. And in another moment he was not. The broad and kindly fell took him to its bosom. He was too tiny an atom to stand out against that great towering slope of grass and stones. Indeed, he vanished so instantly that it seemed he must have dived into a cave. The next moment Endicott almost doubted whether he had ever been at all, whether he was not some apparition born of his own troubled brain and the Australian's talk. But, as he turned back into the house, he saw upon the flags of the garden path the marks of the man's wet, bare feet. Not only had Ahmed Ali been to the farm-house, but he had crossed the stream to get there.

Mr. Endicott went back to his table in the window and seated himself in front of his lighted candles, more from habit than with any thought of work. He felt suddenly rather tired. He had not been conscious of any fear while Ahmed Ali was in the room, or indeed of any strain. But strain, and perhaps fear, there had been. Certainly a vague fear began to get hold of him now. He had a picture before his eyes of the Asiatic leaping into the air upon the road, and then doubling for the hills. Why had he fled so fast?

"North of the Tropic of Capricorn!"

He repeated the words to himself aloud. Was the Australian right after all? And would they come from the East--those hungry people? Mr. Endicott seemed to feel the earth tremble beneath the feet of the myriads of Asia. He bent his ear and seemed to hear the distant confusion of their approach. He looked down at his papers and flicked them contemptuously. Of what use would be his fine Bill for the establishment of a Minimum Wage? Why, everything would go down--civilisation, the treasures of art, twenty centuries of man's painful growth--just as that Derby China teapot with its wonderful colour of dark blue and red and gold. The broken fragments of the teapot became a symbol to Endicott.

"And the women would go down too," he thought with a shiver. "They would take the wives."

He had come to this point in his speculations when the inner door opened, and the light broadened in the room. He heard Mrs. Tyson shuffle in, but he did not turn towards her. He sat looking out upon the fell.

"I found the lamp burning on the hall table by the letters, sir," she said, "and I thought you might want it."

"Thank you," said Endicott vaguely, and he was roused by a little gasping cry which she uttered.

"Oh, yes! I am very sorry, Mrs. Tyson. Your teapot has been knocked down. I went out. There was a man in the room when I came back. He knocked it down. Of course I'll make its value good, though I doubt if I can replace it."

Mrs. Tyson made no answer. She placed the lamp on the table. Endicott was still seated at his table in the window with his back to the room. But he had thrown back his head, and he saw the circle of reflected light upon the ceiling shake and quiver as Mrs. Tyson put the lamp down. The glass chimney, too, rattled as though her hands were shaking.

"I am very sorry indeed," he continued.

Mrs. Tyson dropped upon her knees and began to pick up the broken pieces from the floor.

"It doesn't matter at all, sir," she said, and Endicott was surprised by the utter tonelessness of her voice. He knew that she set great store upon this set of china; she had boasted of it. Yet now that it was spoilt she spoke of it with complete indifference. He turned round in his chair and watched her picking up the fragments--watched her idly until she sobbed.

"Good heavens," he cried, "I knew that you valued it, Mrs. Tyson, but--" and then he stopped. For she turned to him and he knew that there was more than the china teapot at the bottom of her trouble. Her face, white and shaking and wet with tears, was terrible to see. There was a horror upon it as though she had beheld things not allowed, and a hopeless pain in her eyes as though she was sure that the appalling vision would never pass. But all she did was to repeat her phrase.

"It doesn't matter at all, sir."

Endicott started up and laid his hand upon her shoulder.

"What has happened, Mrs. Tyson?"

"Oh, I can't tell you, sir." She knelt upon the floor and covered her face with her hands and wept as Endicott had never dreamed that a human being could weep. Fear seized upon him and held him till he shivered with the chill of it. The woman had come in by the inner door. In the hall, then, was to be found the cause of her horror. He lifted the lamp and hurried towards it, but to reach the door he had to pass the screen which Elsie had arranged on the day of their coming. And at the screen he stopped. The terror which may come to a man once in his life clutched his heart so that he choked. For behind the screen he saw the gleam of a girl's white frock.

"Elsie," he cried, "you have been all this while here--asleep." For he would not believe the thing he knew.

She was lying rather than sitting in the low basket chair in front of the little table on which the chemicals were ranged, with her back towards him, and her face buried in the padding of the chair. Endicott stretched his arm over her and set down the lamp upon the table. Then he spoke to her again chidingly and shaking her arm.

"Elsie, wake up! Don't be ridiculous!"

He slipped an arm under her waist, and lifting her, turned her towards him. The girl's head rolled upon her shoulders, and there was a look of such deadly horror upon her face that no pen could begin to describe it. Endicott caught her to his breast.

"Oh, my God," he cried hoarsely. "My poor girl! My poor girl!"

Mrs. Tyson had come up behind him.

"It was he," she whispered, "the man who was here. He killed her!" And as Endicott turned his head towards the woman, some little thing slipped from the chair on to the floor with a tiny rattle. Endicott laid her down and picked up a small, yellow, round tablet.

"No, he didn't," he said with a queer eagerness in his voice. The tablet came from a small bottle on the table at the end of his row of chemicals. It was labelled, "Intensifier" and "Poison," and the cork was out of the bottle. The bottle had been full that afternoon. There was more than one tablet missing now.

"No, she killed herself. Those tablets are cyanide of potassium. He never touched her. Look!"

Upon the boards of the floor the wet and muddy feet of the Asiatic had written the history of his movements beyond the possibility of mistake. Here he had stood in front of her--not a step nearer. Mrs. Tyson heard him whisper in her daughter's ear. "Oh, my dear, I thank God!" He sank upon his knees beside her. Mrs. Tyson went out, and, closing the door gently, left him with his dead.

She sat and waited in the kitchen, and after a while she heard him moving. He opened the door into the hall and came out and went slowly and heavily up the stairs into Elsie's room. In a little while he came down again and pushed open the kitchen door. He had aged by twenty years, but his face and his voice were calm.

"You found the lamp in the hall?" he said, in a low voice. "Beside the letters? Come! We must understand this. My mind will go unless I am quite sure."

She followed him into the living-room and saw that his dead daughter was no longer there. She stood aside whilst, with a patience which wrung her heart, Endicott worked out by the footprints of the intruder and this and that sure sign the events of those tragic minutes, until there was no doubt left.

"Elsie wrote eight letters," he said. "Seven are in the hall. Here is the eighth, addressed and stamped upon the table where she wrote."

The letters had to be sent down the valley to the inn early in the morning. So when she had finished, she had carried them into the hall--all of them, she thought--and she had taken the lamp to light her steps. Whilst she was in the hall, and whilst all this side of the house was in darkness Ahmed Ali had slipped into the room from the lane by the brook. There were the marks of his feet coming from the door.

"But was that possible?" Endicott argued. "I was on the hillside, the moon shining from behind my shoulders on to the house. There were no shadows. It was all as clear as day. I must have seen the man come along the little footpath to the door, for I was watching the house. I saw the light in this room disappear. Wait a moment! Yes. Just after the light went out I struck a match and lit my pipe."

He had held the match close to his face in the hollow of his hands, and had carefully lit the pipe; and after the match had burned out, the glare had remained for a few seconds in his eyes. It was during those seconds that the Asiatic had crossed the lane and darted in by the door.

The next step then became clear. Elsie, counting her letters in the hall, had discovered that she had left one behind, she knew where she had left it. She knew that the moonlight was pouring into the room; and, leaving the lamp in the hall, she had returned to fetch it. In the moonlit room she had come face to face with the Asiatic.

He had been close to the screen when she met him, and there he had stood. No doubt he had begun by asking her for opium. No doubt, too--perhaps through some unanswered cry of hers, perhaps because she never cried out at all, perhaps on account of a tense attitude of terror not to be mistaken even in that vaporous silvery light--somehow, at all events, he had become aware that she was alone in the house; and his words and his demands had changed. She had backed away from him against the wall, moving the screen and the chair, and upsetting a book upon the table there. That was evident from the disorder in this corner. Upon the table stood Endicott's chemicals for developing his photographs. Endicott saw the picture with a ghastly distinctness--her hand dropping for support upon the table and touching the bottles which she had arranged herself.

"Yes, she knew that that one nearest, the first she touched was the poison, and meant--what? Safety! It's awful, but it's the truth. Very probably she screamed, poor girl. But there was no one to hear her."

The noise of the river leaping from rock pool to rock pool had drowned any sound of it which might else have reached to Endicott's ears. The scream had failed. In front of her was a wild and desperate Pathan from the stokehold of a liner. Under her hand was the cyanide of potassium. Endicott could see her furtively moving the cork from the mouth of the bottle with the fingers of one hand, whilst she stood watching in horror the man smiling at her in silence.

"Don't you feel that that is just how everything happened? Aren't you sure of it?" he asked, turning to Mrs. Tyson with a dreadful appeal in his eyes. But she could answer it honestly.

"Yes, sir, that is how it all happened," and for a moment Mr. Endicott was comforted. But immediately afterwards he sat down on a chair like a tired man and his fingers played upon the table.

"It would all be over in a few seconds," he said lamentably to Mrs. Tyson. "But, oh, those seconds! They would have been terrible--terrible with pain." His voice trailed away into silence. He sat still staring at the table. Then he raised his head towards Mrs. Tyson, and his face was disfigured by a smile of torment. "Hard luck on a young girl, eh, Mrs. Tyson?" and the very banality of the sentence made it poignant. "Everything just beginning for her--the sheer fun of life. Her beauty, and young men, and friends and dancing, the whole day a burst of music--and then suddenly--quite alone--that's so horrible--quite alone, in a minute she had to----" His voice choked and the tears began to run down his face.

"But the man?" Mrs. Tyson ventured.

"Oh, the man!" cried Endicott. "I will think of him to-morrow."

He went up the stairs walking as heavily as when he had carried his daughter in his arms; and he went again into Elsie's room. Mrs. Tyson blew out the candles upon his writing-table and arranged automatically some disordered sheets of foolscap. They were notes on the great principle of the Minimum Wage.