It was not until they had passed the Azores that a voice from the outer world spoke to her. They had reached those islands late one moonlit night. The little square houses, climbing up the hill-side in orderly ranks, looked like silver bricks in a castle of dreams. There was a white fringe of breaking waves threaded between the black sea and the black land. From the boats that hurried between the shore and the steamer, little lamps swung and thin voices cut the darkness. Thundering silence seemed to invade the emptiness left by the ceasing of the propeller. The ceaseless loom that always sang behind the turmoil of the suffragette’s consciousness spun the moon into a quiet melody. The still lap of the sea against the ship’s stern struck the ear like a word never spoken before. You could hear the gods creating new things. You could hear the tread of the stars across the sky.
“I am sorry to disturb you,” said Miss Brown; “it’s Albert. I knew something would come of his going to the fancy-dress dance as Galileo, with such a thin tunic on; but he is so wilful. And now he has a high temperature, and a worse pain in his side than ever. He is crying for you.”
It was a strange sensation for the suffragette, after all these days of loneliness, to be cried for. Tears, like all things that belong to women, appealed to her beyond words.
She found Albert beating on the wall of his cabin. When he cried—it hurt. When he breathed—it hurt. When he moved—it hurt. And yet he had to cry and pant and struggle. There was something in the suffragette’s plain and ordinary face that acted as an antidote to Albert’s hectic personality. She was a poor nurse; her only experience of the sick-room had been from her own sick-bed. But she had a cold hand, an imagination which she only allowed to escape at a crisis, and nerves very difficult to excite. All that night, while the ship climbed the steep seas of the Bay, she and the doctor kept something that was very big from invading the little cabin. The battle was, of course, a losing one. There is something almost funny in the futility of fighting Heaven on an issue like this.
I said there should be no death-bed scenes in this book, so I will only add that after much battling Albert managed at last to get to sleep, and he died before he woke.
The suffragette was there, but she was not needed. She went away and cried because no one would ever cry for her again.
She marconied for Miss Brown’s brother to meet the bereaved aunt at Southampton. And when the boat reached home, she carried her mustard-coloured portmanteau up the gangway, and, by disappearing, closed the incident.
In this wonderful age we do our disappearing by machinery. Fairy godmothers prefer Rolls-Royce cars to broomsticks, the pirate employs a submarine instead of a gallant three-decker, the black sheep of the piece, instead of donning a mask and confining the rest of his career to Maidenhead Thicket, books his passage to a Transatlantic sheepfold on a thirty-knot liner.
The suffragette disappeared by the London train. By travelling third, she hoped to escape the majority of her fellow-passengers, and it was not until the train began to leave the station that she identified a hitherto unnoticed person opposite to her as the priest.
The priest was always overcome by a feeling of virtue when he travelled third.