Justine Caron was lost in the scene before us. She had, I fancy, scarcely heard half that had been said. Roscoe said to her presently: “You like it, do you not?”
“Like it?” she said. “I never saw anything so wonderful.”
“And yet it would not be so wonderful without humanity there,” rejoined Mrs. Falchion. “Nature is never complete without man. All that would be splendid without the mills and the machinery and Boldrick’s cable, but it would not be perfect: it needs man—Phil Boldrick and Company in the foreground. Nature is not happy by itself: it is only brooding and sorrowful. You remember the mountain of Talili in Samoa, Mr. Roscoe, and the valley about it: how entrancing yet how melancholy it is. It always seems to be haunted, for the natives never live in the valley. There is a tradition that once one of the white gods came down from heaven, and built an altar, and sacrificed a Samoan girl—though no one ever knew quite why: for there the tradition ends.”
I felt again that there was a hidden meaning in her words; but Roscoe remained perfectly still. It seemed to me that I was little by little getting the threads of his story. That there was a native girl; that the girl had died or been killed; that Roscoe was in some way—innocently I dared hope—connected with it; and that Mrs. Falchion held the key to the mystery, I was certain. That it was in her mind to use the mystery, I was also certain. But for what end I could not tell. What had passed between them in London the previous winter I did not know: but it seemed evident that she had influenced him there as she did on the ‘Fulvia’, had again lost her influence, and was now resenting the loss, out of pique or anger, or because she really cared for him. It might be that she cared.
She added after a moment: “Add man to nature, and it stops sulking: which goes to show that fallen humanity is better than no company at all.”
She had an inherent strain of mockery, of playful satire, and she told me once, when I knew her better, that her own suffering always set her laughing at herself, even when it was greatest. It was this characteristic which made her conversation very striking, it was so sharply contrasted in its parts; a heartless kind of satire set against the most serious and acute statements. One never knew when she would turn her own or her interlocutor’s gravity into mirth.
Now no one replied immediately to her remarks, and she continued: “If I were an artist I should wish to paint that scene, given that the lights were not so bright and that mill machinery not so sharply defined. There is almost too much limelight, as it were; too much earnestness in the thing. Either there should be some side-action of mirth to make it less intense, or of tragedy to render it less photographic; and unless, Dr. Marmion, you would consent to be solemn, which would indeed be droll; or that The Padre there—how amusing they should call him that!—should cease to be serious, which, being so very unusual, would be tragic, I do not know how we are to tell the artist that he has missed a chance of immortalising himself.”
Roscoe said nothing, but smiled at her vivacity, while he deprecated her words by a wave of his hand. I also was silent for a moment; for there had come to my mind, while she was speaking and I was watching the scene, something that Hungerford had said to me once on board the ‘Fulvia’. “Marmion,” said he, “when everything at sea appears so absolutely beautiful and honest that it thrills you, and you’re itching to write poetry, look out. There’s trouble ahead. It’s only the pretty pause in the happy scene of the play before the villain comes in and tumbles things about. When I’ve been on the bridge,” he continued, “of a night that set my heart thumping, I knew, by Jingo! it was the devil playing his silent overture. Don’t you take in the twaddle about God sending thunderbolts; it’s that old war-horse down below.—And then I’ve kept a sharp lookout, for I knew as right as rain that a company of waterspouts would be walking down on us, or a hurricane racing to catch us broadsides. And what’s gospel for sea is good for land, and you’ll find it so, my son.”
I was possessed of the same feeling now as I looked at the scene before us, and I suppose I seemed moody, for immediately Mrs. Falchion said: “Why, now my words have come true; the scene can be made perfect. Pray step down to the valley, Dr. Marmion, and complete the situation, for you are trying to seem serious, and it is irresistibly amusing—and professional, I suppose; one must not forget that you teach the young ‘sawbones’ how to saw.”
I was piqued, annoyed. I said, though I admit it was not cleverly said: “Mrs. Falchion, I am willing to go and complete that situation, if you will go with me; for you would provide the tragedy—plenty of it; there would be the full perihelion of elements; your smile is the incarnation of the serious.”