"Truly, to think hardly of no woman should be always in a man's heart.
But I have known only one woman of my race in twenty-five years!"
"And as time went on?"
"As time went on, and no word came, I ceased to look for it. But I followed that chart spiked with the captain's pencil, as he had done it in season and out of season, and by and by I ceased to look for any word. I even became reconciled to my life. The ambitious and aching cares of the world dropped from me, and I stood above all—alone in my suffering, yet not yielding. Loneliness is a terrible thing. Under it a man—"
"Goes mad or becomes a saint—a saint!" Pierre's voice became reverent.
Fawdor shook his head, smiling gently. "Ah no, no. But I began to understand the world, and I loved the north, the beautiful hard north."
"But there is more?"
"Yes, the end of it all. Three days before you came I got a packet of letters, not by the usual yearly mail. One announced that the governor was dead. Another—"
"Another?" urged Pierre.
—"was from Her. She said that her brother, on the day she wrote, had by chance come across my name in the Company's records, and found that I had been here a quarter of a century. It was the letter of a good woman. She said she thought the governor had forgotten that he had sent me here —as now I hope he had, for that would be one thing less for him to think of, when he set out on the journey where the only weight man carries is the packload of his sins. She also said that she had written to me twice after we parted at Lachine, but had never heard a word, and three years afterwards she had gone to India. The letters were lost, I suppose, on the way to me, somehow—who can tell? Then came another thing, so strange, that it seemed like the laughter of the angels at us. These were her words: 'And, dear Mr. Fawdor, you were both wrong in that quotation, as you no doubt discovered long ago.' Then she gave me the sentence as it is in Cymbeline. She was right, quite right. We were both wrong. Never till her letter came had I looked to see. How vain, how uncertain, and fallible, is man!"
Pierre dropped his cigarette, and stared at Fawdor. "The knowledge of books is foolery," he said slowly. "Man is the only book of life. Go on."