“Thirteen different sawboneses have told me that very same thing,” Lucian confessed; “but it’s one of those things no fellow can remember.”
“I dare say it is difficult,” the stranger assented, his eyes on the printed page.
In face of that august Spectator, Lucian had not the impudence to go on talking, though his own thoughts were far from pleasant company. He amused himself by studying the delicate and rather feminine profile and the long eyelashes of his vis-à-vis, trying from them to read his character and from his clothes his position and prospects; and the longer he looked the more certain he grew that both should be known to him.
“Where have I seen your face before?
It seems so familiar to me!”
whistled Lucian softly to himself, trying to fit together fragments of memory, as in one of those terrible improving Scripture puzzles which had haunted the Sundays of his childhood. Bright sunshine, an architrave of light-coloured wood framing an open door, and some bright figure standing beside him: his brain served up these scraps of information, but he could not complete the picture. His feverish mind had cooled. Lucian was not by nature excitable; it was the electrical influence of Farquhar’s stormy temperament which threw him off his balance, and in his wildest movements he was never mastered by a single motive and passion to the exclusion of every other, as happened to Farquhar. So now, anxiety respecting Dolly lay like a core of ice within his heart while the surface of his fertile brain was occupied in weaving a romantic secret history for the quiet young aristocrat of the Spectator. By the time they had reached Brussels he had made him a bigamist inclining to trigamy, and was only not sure whether he had poisoned his first wife or his mother.
Nine, ten, half-past. Darkness had fallen, spangled with stars, and the southwest wind came sweeping across the sky with a full and steady pressure which reminded Lucian of the strong blue tide of the Trades. Brussels sparkling in lights lay far behind, and Ghent was passed, and they tore through Bruges with three screeches, leaving a trail of opalescent smoke threaded with fire, and noisily rocking and stuffily smelling as a Belgian train alone can. Over the wide flat lands they raced, with a throbbing repeated in triplets as clear as the gait of a galloping horse. No tunnels were here; a grating rush and a roar told when they passed a canal and mirrored their square golden windows one after one in the glass of the water, so dark and so still. Lucian leaned out, received a peppering of grit from the engine, and got his first breath of the sea. There in the west the sky glowed over Ostend. He relegated the aristocratic stranger to a prison dark and drear, with prospects of the gallows, and turned from his own fancies to face the facts of life. Years dropped away like dead leaves; he lived again through the hours when he gambled with Meryon while his wife lay dead above. In those hours he had come to know despair; and now, displacing the veils which resolute courage drew across the face of truth, he saw the same inexorable lineaments confronting him. He had met them now in every path of life. He was a failure: Dolly was not for him. He had known this, while refusing to believe; he did acknowledge it now, and reached the nadir of his troubles before the final sentence fell.
“We shall have a rough crossing,” said the stranger, folding up his paper. “Are you a good sailor?”
“Tolerably vile; are you?”
“Couldn’t be worse,” said the stranger, laughing. “Do you go below?”