CHAPTER I
LES TROIS FOLIES
I was born on the Isle of Wight. My father was a seafaring man. He owned his own vessel—a brigantine as sailed from the Thames to British South Africa and sometimes around the Hope to Madagascar.
Where he met my mother I never knew. He was Scotch and she was an Irish beauty, I can tell you. Looking back on it now, I believe she was of rich and proud people and that they had cast her off for her folly in marrying a man that was rough of cheek and speech, for all his ready good heart. She was as delicate and high-strung and timid, as he was brown, big, and fearless as to anything, be it man or typhoon. And yet it was she who could stick to one purpose as if the character of a bulldog was behind the slender, girlish face of her, while he was always making for this and that end, charging at life with head down, like a bull.
I can see the two of them now, walking together arm in arm, when he’d come back out of the sea; I can see them strolling off down along the old hedges of the garden, or sitting beneath the thatched roof of our cottage which had stood the wind sweeping off the Channel for more time than any one at Bolanbywick could remember. She looked like a child beside him, for his shoulders would measure three of the width of hers. It was from him I have my frame that once called to the eyes of men to see the figure that it held, though I say it myself. But from her I got many a trait that fitted me badly, because craftiness and stubbornness and a weakness for sentiment and the like of that, had best be in a body small enough to tame them.
The two of them loved each other completely, each in their way, but it was well that they had no other children. It was well, perhaps, that when I was seventeen I had grown strong and quick as a hound. My mother went with him then for her first voyage since her honeymoon, and it was the last ever seen of her or him, or the only property we owned, which was the vessel and a cargo of cotton ducks and sheetings for speculation, bound to the Gold Coast. Sometimes the sea opens its mouth like that, and the jaws close again.
There was no more education for me! My father’s sister was a boarding-house keeper in London. I was staying with her then, and when the lawyer found there was no insurance, life, ship, or cargo, she was for setting me to work the next morning. Poor woman, she had slaved her life against dust in halls and cockroaches and couples who wanted rooms without references and the heart had gone from her, and when she died she left the best of two thousand pound to a clairvoyant and card-reader, who had robbed her week after week for ten years and more.
I took a place as companion to an old lady, going to Odymi in Hungary. It was there one of the doctors, who had seen my two bare forearms, spoke of my strength and told me that I could make good money as a rubber in the baths, and I was glad of the change from the old woman. I was proud and short of tongue and patience with her, and we were always snarling at each other. But time wears those edges off people, I can tell you!
It was there, at the baths, I fell in with the woman who called herself Madame Welstoke. She was an evil woman, and of the worst of such, because she was one who never seemed bad at first, and then, little by little, as she showed herself, you could get used to her deviltry and for each step you could find an apology or excuse, until at last the thing she had done yesterday seemed all right to-day and you were ready for some new invention of hers to-morrow.
Mainly she treated diseases by the laying on of hands, and the best that could be said of her as to that was she preyed on the rich and would take no patients she thought were short of at least fifty pounds to spend for her mumbo-jumbo and gimcracks. She would talk in a very smooth voice to those she got in her web—about the flow of vital energy and the power of positive and negative currents over the valves of the heart and circulation of the blood. She would roll up her eyes and complain of how the treatments, which consisted of laying her fingers on a person’s temples and wrists, exhausted her, and at first I thought she really meant it, and when her good, old motherly face was turned away, many was the time I laughed. And finally, when I began to see that most of her patients improved and some were cured, I stopped laughing, for there was the evidence before my eyes and no denying it.