CHAPTER III NOCTURNE
I saw a dream that made me afraid, and the thoughts of my bed and the visions of my head troubled me.—Daniel.
Under the canopy of stars Harry Gardiner lay awake thinking of his sins; among which he did not, then or later, include any responsibility for the death of Trent. It was a shocking business, of course, and he was sorry, exceedingly sorry, things had turned out as they had; but it was no fault of his. You had to put a stopper on that sort of thing, in the interests of public decency. He even counted it to himself for righteousness that he had reacted so promptly and so vigorously against the flesh and the devil. "I didn't know I had it in me at this time of day to flare up like that!" he reflected ingenuously. Besides—and this for Gardiner settled the question and finally canonized his conduct—had not Denis said that in his shoes he would have done the same? Only Denis wouldn't have turned coward and told lies.
Gardiner was not given to introspection; he did not like himself well enough to think about himself, or stir up his own motives. In Denis's company, however, he was forced to think, because the unconscious Denis pointed the contrast between them at every turn. Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. This was the more painful, because Gardiner's eye was jaundiced; he saw his own vices very large, his virtues and excuses very small. He knew that the bloom had been rubbed off his sense of honor, but it did not console him in the least to reflect that the rough tumblings he had been through might very well have knocked out of him any sense of honor at all.
He and Denis had been together at school, from which Gardiner had run or rather walked away to sea about the time when Denis was going up for Woolwich. Gardiner went, not from any of the usual motives, but because kind friends had offered him a clerkship in one of the Dartford banks. He could not refuse to take himself off his father's hands, but he would not be a clerk. So one fine morning he came to town, hung about the Surrey Commercial Dock (not for the first time), and being a likely looking lad got taken on at a pinch on board the s.s. Immerwald, bound for South America. He signed on as O.S.; but at the last moment the cook of the Immerwald, coming on board very drunk, fell down the companion and had to be left behind in hospital with a broken leg; and Gardiner, on the strength of some indiscreet boasts, was turned into the galley in his stead to do his worst. It must be owned that his worst was rather bad. But he was quick and handy, and by the time they reached Bahia he was not cursed by the steward after every meal. In Bahia he deserted. Latin America had always been his goal. His mother was half Spanish; he had absorbed the lovely language of Castile in his cradle.
In Bahia they do not talk Spanish, but Gardiner was not slow to pick up Portuguese; and in his first shore berth, as cook in a sailors' eating-house, he added to his vocabulary a smattering of Italian, Dutch, and Swedish. French and German he had learned at home. He was un-English in his gift for languages; un-English too in other ways, notably in his readiness to take color from his surroundings. During the next five years he generally passed for a Spaniard. He wandered over the length and breadth of America, going north to Los Angeles, west to Mollendo, south to Santiago de Chile: good cooks are in demand everywhere. He was a rolling stone, but he gathered moss, which he dutifully sent home to the Kentish rectory where he had been born.
At twenty-two he was in the Canaries, where Fate, intervening, pushed him into his true vocation. An Orotavan fondista, who had come into money and was wild to get home to Seville, offered him the goodwill of his place for a song. Gardiner accepted for the fun of the thing, and fell in love with his trade. Inns kept by a butler or a cook are proverbially prosperous, and he had been butler and cook in one. The Tres Amigos flourished; Gardiner's remittances home became regular and substantial. It seemed that he had found his niche at last.