"Others can see you in life; others can hear the music of your voice, my beloved; others can look into the light of those eyes, can melt to the radiance of your smile, while I—only the image is mine, the tiny oblong of hard inanimate cardboard," he murmurs, in a tone that is half weariful, half passionate. "And now for the words!"
A slip of folded paper occupies the side of the little tin box. This he extracts and unfolds with a touch that is almost reverent, and, as his eyes wander over the writing, his every faculty of soul and mind and being is concentrated in rapt love upon each word. For not every day will he suffer his eyes to rest upon them, lest too great familiarity with them should dull them with a mechanical nature when seen so often. They are kept for rare occasions, and now, his waking thoughts sweet with the influence of the recent dream, he reckons just such an occasion.
The history of the box, the portraits, the letter, was a strange one. After that last parting, as Laurence was wending his way in the darkness, he became aware that his breast pocket contained something which was not there before. He drew it forth. It was small, flat, hard, oblong. By the light of successive vestas he proceeded to investigate, and there, in the flickering glow, Lilith's sweet eyes gazed out at him from the cardboard, daintily framed within the work of her fingers, even as here in the burning glare of the equatorial sun; and there, too, within the box, lay a folded slip of paper covered with her handwriting—her last words to him, drawing out, perpetuating the echo of her last spoken ones. With a thrill of love and pain, he had stood there in the darkness until his last vesta had burned out, and then the letter was not half read, but from that moment the box and its contents had rested upon his heart day and night—through scenes of blood and of woe, through every conceivable phase of hardship and starvation and peril—had rested there as a charm, or amulet, which should shield him from harm. And as such, indeed, its donor had intended it.
And now his eyes, wandering over the paper, as though devouring every word, are nearing the end:
"Does this come as a surprise, my darling—a very sweet surprise? [it ran.] I mean it to be that. 'Is it for good or for ill, this love of ours?' you have said. Surely for good. Keep, then, this image of me, my beloved. Never part with it, day or night, and may it ever, by the very strength of my love for you, be as a talisman—a 'charm'—to stand between you and all peril, as you say the mental image of me has already done; how, I cannot see, but it is enough for me that you say so. And the consciousness that I should have been the means of averting evil from you is sweet, unutterably so. May it continue, and strengthen me as it will mysteriously shield you, while we are far apart. My Laurence! my ideal!—yes, you are that; the very moment my eyes first met the firm full gaze of yours I recognized it. I knew what you were, and my heart went out to you."
The blood surged hotly, in a dark flush, beneath Laurence Stanninghame's bronzed face, as he pictured the full force and passion of those parting utterances murmured into his ear instead of confided only to cold, inanimate paper; then the demon of cynicism ingrained within him came uppermost with hateful and haunting suggestions:
"She is safe? Yes. But those words were penned more than two years ago. More than two years ago! That is a long time for one in the full glow of her glorious youth. More than two years ago! And in the joy and delight of living, what charm has the memory—the daily fading memory—of the absent for such as she? Think of it, oh, fool, not yet free from the shackles of the last illusion! Think of circumstances, of surroundings, of temperament, above all, of such a temperament as hers! Is your mature knowledge of life to go for nothing that you are so easily fooled? Ha, Ha!"
Thus laughed the demon voice in mocking gibe. But he—no, he would not listen; he would stifle it. Those words were the outcome of one love—the love of a lifetime, and nothing less.
Suddenly, with multifold splash, and a great winnowing of wings, a flight of cranes and egrets arose from the bank some little distance farther down. Dark forms were moving among the reeds. All the instincts of a constant familiarity with peril alert within him, Laurence had in a moment replaced the case and its contents. His Express was grasped in readiness as he peered forth eagerly from his place of concealment. He was the crafty, ruthless slaver once more.
Then the expression, stealthy, resolute, which his discovery had evoked, faded, giving way to one of half-interested curiosity, as he saw that the potential enemies—more or less redoubtable assailants—were merely a few small boys, wandering along the reed-fringed bank, jabbering light-heartedly as they strolled.