I
SUPPOSE that you see Captain Arthur Magellison, late of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, with the eyes of the writer’s remembrance, as a thick-set, fair man of middle height, neat in appearance and alert in bearing. His skin was a curious bleached bronze, and his wide-pupilled pale gray eyes, netted about with close, fine wrinkles, had looked on the awful desolation of the Arctic until something of its loneliness and terror had sunk into them and stamped itself upon the man’s brain, never to be effaced, or so it seemed to me. For his wife, once the marble Miss Dycehurst, who had not married a semi-Celebrity for nothing, took her husband much with her into London Society, and at gossipy dinner-tables and in crowded drawing-rooms; on the Lawn at Ascot and in a box on the Grand Stand at Doncaster, as on a Henley houseboat, and during a polo tournament at Ranelagh, I have seen Magellison, to all appearance perfectly oblivious of the gay and giddy world about him, sitting, or standing with folded arms and bent head, and staring out with fixed and watchful eyes, over Heaven knows what illimitable wastes of snow-covered land or frozen ocean....
I have described Captain Arthur Magellison as a semi-Celebrity. Erstwhile Commander of the Third-class Armored Destroyer Sidonia, he became, after his severance from the Royal Navy, and by reason of the adventures and hardships by him undergone as leader of the Scottish Alaskan Coastal Survey Expedition of 1906-1908, something of a hero. A series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Hall of Science, in the course of which the explorer, by verbal descriptions as well as cinematographic effects, completely disposed of the theory regarding the existence of a range of active volcanoes to the north of Alaska, previously accepted by the illuminati, made a sensation among scientists, and induced, in the case of Sir Jedbury Fargoe, F.R.G.S., M.R.I., a rush of blood to the cerebrum, followed by the breaking out of a Funeral Hatchment over his front door, a procession in slow time, with wreaths, palls, and feathers, and a final exit per trolley into the Furnace at Croking Crematorium.
The Public, never having bothered about the volcanoes, remained unmoved by the intelligence of their non-existence, but the Professors and the Press shed much ink upon the subject. Upon a wave of which sable fluid Captain Arthur Magellison was borne, if not into the inner court, at least into the vestibule of the Temple of Fame. Then the wave, as is the way of waves, receded; leaving Magellison, by virtue of certain researches and discoveries in Natural History, Botany and Physiology, a Member of the Royal Institution, Associate of the Zoological Society, Fellow of the Institute of Ethnology, and the husband of the marble Miss Dycehurst.
Never was a more appropriate sobriquet bestowed. Down in Clayshire, her native county, the statuesque Geraldine, orphan heiress of a wealthy landholder not remotely connected with the Brewing interests of his native isle, dispensed, under the protective auspices of a maternal aunt of good family—Miss Dycehurst’s mother’s deceased papa had wedded a portionless spinster of noble blood—dispensed, I say, a lavish but stony hospitality. In London she went out a great deal, looking like a sculptured Minerva of the Græco-Latin school, minus the helmet but plus a tower of astonishing golden hair, received proposals from Eligibles and Ineligibles, petrified their makers with a single stare, and proceeded upon her marmorean way in maiden meditation, fancy free. Until she attended that series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Hall of Science by the eminent Arctic Explorer, Captain Arthur Magellison.
Society in Clayshire and Society in London expressed ardent curiosity to know how the engagement had been brought about? All that is known for certain is, that after the lecture, when the Explorer held a little reception in a draughty enclosure of green baize screens, Miss Dycehurst, looking rather like a mythical goddess of the Polar Regions, her frosty beauty crowned with its diadem of pale golden hair, and her fine shape revealed in greenish-blue, icily-gleaming draperies, asked a local magnate to present the lecturer, and met him at a public dinner given in his honor upon the following night. Later on in London, where the lecture was, by invitation of the learned heads of the nation, repeated, Miss Dycehurst with a large party occupied the second row of stalls. Later still, Magellison dined with the heiress at 000, Chesterfield Crescent, her town address, and later still the couple were Hanover-Squared into one flesh. It was in May, and the sacred edifice was garlanded with white Rambler roses and adorned with lilies and smilax and palms. A Bishop tied the knot, and the choir rendered the anthem with exquisite effect, as well as “Fight the Good Fight� and “The Voice that Breathed——.� And the Bride, in dead white, with a swansdown train and a Malines veil, and ropes of pearls and brilliants, and a crown of diamond spikes that might have been sparkling icicles, gleaming and scintillating on the summit of her wonderful tower of hair, looked more like the Lady of the Eternal Snows than ever.
No one knew whether the Magellisons’ married life was happy or the other thing. Suffice it, as the popular three-volume novelist used to say when not compelled to pad, that, to all outward seeming, the couple agreed. But I think that when the high tide of Fame receded (as during 1909, when the thrilling adventures of the dauntless explorer, Blank, were electrifying the newspaper-reading world, it certainly did, leaving nothing but a vague halo of heroism and adventure hanging about the name of Magellison, and a sedimentary deposit of honorary letters at the tail of it) the woman who had married Magellison knew disillusion. As for Magellison, he had always been a silent, absorbed and solitary man. And that strange look in those wide-pupilled pale gray eyes of his, the eyes of one who has lived through the half-year-long twilight of Arctic nights, and seen the ringed moon with her mock moons glimmer through the ghostly frost-fog, and the pale pink curving feathers of the Aurora Borealis stream across the ice-blue sky, and the awful crimson of the Polar Day rush up beyond the floe and strike the icy loneliness into new beauty and new terror—never changed. Perhaps, in discovering the true nature of his Geraldine, the Explorer found himself traversing a colder and more rugged desert than he had encountered when he led the Scottish-Northumbrian Polar Expedition in quest of those volcanic ranges proved to be non-existent—in Alaska to the North.
I believe he really loved the woman he had married. I know that, while he acted as the unpaid steward of her estates, he spent nothing beyond his half-pay, eked out by articles which he wrote now and then for the kind of Scientific Review that rewards the contributor with ten shillings per page of one thousand words, plus the honor of having contributed. In his own houses—his wife’s, I should say—he was a pathetic nonentity. At 000 Chesterfield Crescent, and at Edengates in Clayshire, the recent Miss Dycehurst’s country seat, he hugged his own rooms, about which, arranged in cases and hung upon the walls, were disposed native weapons, stuffed birds, geological specimens, dried algæ, water-color sketches, and such trophies of the Survey Expedition as had not been presented by Magellison to needy museums. When his name appeared in newspaper-paragraphs as the writer of one of the articles referred to, or as the donor of such a gift, his wife would pluck him from his beloved solitude, and compel him to tread the social round with her. But as the slow years crept on, the man himself, long before the ebbing tide of Fame left a desolate stretch of seaweedy mud where its waters had heaved and whispered, was so rarely seen, in his wife’s company or out of it, that her all-but-newest friends believed Mrs. Arthur Magellison to be the wife of an incurable invalid, and the most recent were convinced that she was a widow. Proposals of marriage were sometimes made to the lady, who by the way was handsomer and stonier than ever, by Eligibles or Ineligibles laboring under this conviction.
“I am extremely sensible of the honor you have done me,� said Mrs. Magellison upon one of these occasions, “but as a fact, my husband is alive. Which relieves me of the necessity—don’t you think?—of coming to a decision!�
The man who had proposed, a barely middle-aged, extremely good-looking, well-made, well-bred Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, sufficiently endowed with ancient, if embarrassed, acres, and a sixteenth-century Baronetcy, to have tempted the marble Geraldine, had her frosty hand been disengaged, to its bestowal on him, was, though impecunious enough to be strongly attracted by the lady’s wealth, yet honestly enamored of her sculpturesque person. Consequently as the final syllable of the foregoing utterance fell from the lady’s lips, he assumed, for a fleeting instant or so, the rosy complexion of early adolescence, and stared upon the conquering Geraldine with blank and circular eyes. Then he said:
“By—Jove! that does let me out, doesn’t it? My dear lady, I entreat you to consider me as prostrate in humiliation at your feet. With�—he felt over the surface of an admirably thought-out waistcoat for his eyeglass, which was still in his eye—“with sackcloth and ashes, and all the appropriate trimmings. Let me retrieve my character in your eyes by saying, that if it—ahem!—gives you any gratification to have a live husband at this juncture—I will endeavor to share the sentiment. But you really have run him as a Dark Horse, now haven’t you?�
He lifted his eyebrows in interrogation, and the eyeglass leaped into the folds of his well-chosen cravat, the kind of subdued yet hopeful thing in shades a man of taste and brains would put on to propose in.
“My dear Sir Robert,� Mrs. Magellison said, in well-chosen language and with an icy little smile, “I am not an adept in the use of sporting phraseology. Captain Magellison is of studious habits, retiring nature, and—shall I say?—an indolent disposition. It would not very well become me if I insisted on his society when he is not disposed to bestow it upon me, and therefore I generally go out alone. When, unless I give a formal dinner, upon which an occasion my husband must necessarily take his place at the other end of the board—when I entertain intimates——�
“You put your people at a round table,� said Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere. “And a round table is the very deuce—and—all for obliterating a husband!� He found his eyeglass and screwed it firmly in.
“I do not altogether blame the table,� said Mrs. Magellison coldly. “Because, upon nine occasions out of ten my husband prefers a cutlet in his rooms. Pray do not suppose that I find fault with the preference. He is not by nature sociable, as I have said, and prefers to follow, at Edengates and in Scotland and in Paris, as well as here in town, his own peculiar bent. And what that is you are probably aware?� She turned her head with a superb movement, and her helmet of pale hair gleamed in the wintry sunshine that streamed through the lace blinds of the Chesterfield Crescent drawing-room.
“I had a general idea,� said the man she addressed, who, hampered in early life by the fact of being born a Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, had not succeeded in being anything else, “that the late—I beg your pardon!—the present Captain Magellison was—I should say is—a Scientific Buffer—of sorts!�
Mrs. Magellison smiled coldly and rose.
“The term you employ is slang, of course,� she said, “but it is quite appropriate and really descriptive. My husband was once a famous man, he is now a Scientific Buffer—and as you say—of sorts. Would you like to see him?�
She moved to the drawing-room door and turned her head with another fine movement, and Hawting-Holliday’s eclectic taste was charmed with the sculpturesque pose. He followed her and they crossed a landing, and Mrs. Magellison knocked at the door of one of a suite of rooms that had been thrown out over what had been a back-yard. And as nobody said “Come in,� she entered, followed by the visitor.