A voyage of discovery

by Hamilton Aïdé

Quintin Ferrars was gone, and Miss Ballinger acknowledged to herself that she missed his visits greatly. His conversation, it is true, aroused her combativeness as no one else's did; but then, no one interested, and at the same time puzzled her, as did this strange man. It cannot be said that she thought much of him when alone, for her mind was still engrossed with the image of a very different person, between whom and herself a gulf, wider than the Atlantic, had been fixed. But in the human procession that passed daily before her eyes, no figure was as vivid as that of Ferrars, none that she could have missed as she did his. Under no circumstances could she have loved this man—his nature was not heroic. And the only men who had exercised, or could by any possibility ever exercise, an influence on her life, had, whether rightly or wrongly, seemed to her as heroes. For Quintin Ferrars she felt very sorry, but no respect. His existence appeared to be a wasted one. She admired his intellectual capacity; his very strangeness had a certain attraction for her; the knowledge that there was some real cause for his unhappiness, though she was ignorant of that cause, all made him an interesting person in her eyes. But there her feeling for him stopped. The more she studied his character, the more she felt that there was something which evaded her. He had shirked a duty; he had not fallen in a fair stand-up fight with life—he almost acknowledged as much—and it is not of such stuff that heroes are made.

But Grace Ballinger was a woman, and not above a woman's weaknesses. She liked appreciation—admiration—call it what you will; and, though possessed of no craving to have a man always at her feet, the constant occupation—it might almost be called the devotion—of a clever and original one was certainly agreeable to her. She did not even now realize all that this meant to Ferrars. He sought her as he did no one else; but his reticence as to his own feelings on every personal subject blinded her to the fact that she was growing to be of paramount importance in his scheme for the future. They had now been nearly a month in New York, and had met almost daily, yet it never occurred to her to regard his assiduity in a very serious light. Her view of it was that he found an intellectual pleasure in her society, nothing more. He was too self-absorbed in brooding over past troubles to feel any longer a passionate interest in any one. Mordaunt, standing further off, discovered what she did not. We cannot see the object accurately that is held too close to our eyes.

And so it came to pass that when he bade her good-by, with a certain rigidity and difficulty of utterance, she expressed her sorrow at his departure with more than her usual frankness.

"I am so sorry you are going. I hope you will try and be at Brackly when we are there."

"Yes. You may depend on that. Mrs. Courtly will write to me; she has promised."

"I fancy we shall not be there beyond the middle of February, and I think, from what my brother said yesterday, he means to go to Boston straight from here."

Mordaunt had dropped something more than this, to wit—that Miss Planter was a friend of Mrs. Courtly's, and was going to stay at Brackly in February. But Grace did not give this reason for the faith that was in her as regarded her brother's movements.

"I hope you are going to do your duty as a good American citizen," she said, smiling, as she shook his hand.

"I am going to fulfil the law, at all events," he returned, grimly. And then he departed.

What an odd man he was, to be sure! How difficult it was to understand him! Perhaps the explanation of it was that the lens of his mental photographic apparatus was ill-adjusted: not only were the shadows too black, the objects themselves were distorted; and the nearer they stood in relation to him, the more they were out of focus.