“Your wife! Ah! there was some one else who said that once. It is such an easy thing to say! Yet you look—yes, you seem honest. I remember I liked your face when you were a child. Will you swear it?”
“Why, of course, if you won’t believe my bare word.”
“Yes, but what will you swear by?” He glanced up at the starlit sky. “Not by the stars: there is no firmness or strength about them; they glitter and shine to-night, and all the heavens blaze with them; to-morrow you shall not see one of them. No, there’s no constancy about the stars.”
“By the moon, then,” said Comethup lightly, willing to humour him.
“No, not by the moon; that’s lovers’ nonsense—they all swear by that. But there—you need not swear. I can read men’s faces like a book, and I have read yours. Only be good to her, be true to her—for her sake and your own. For the man who wrongs her”—he shook a trembling, knotted forefinger in the air—“the man who wrongs her deals first with me and afterward with his God. She came to me a mite of a child, sent straight by God to fill an ache in my heart; came to me with smiling eyes, just as another baby—or was it the same?—I always forget—just as another baby once came to me. She belongs to me, and no man shall harm her.”
“You don’t think that I shall harm her, do you?” asked Comethup gently.
“No, you will not; but others may. I can not rest for thoughts of her—dreams of her. I do not know which are the dreams and which the waking. But I have crept at night about her house to see that all was well with her; I have been like a faithful dog, to guard the place where she sleeps. For that is her power: she draws all to her who have seen her once. But she draws the good and the evil alike.”
Muttering to himself he turned abruptly and went rapidly toward the centre of the town, where his own dwelling was. Comethup looked after him for a moment, and then went thoughtfully back to the captain’s house. The captain had gone to bed, but had left a light burning in the little parlour for Comethup. On the table lay a packet addressed to him from London. On breaking the seal he found that the envelope contained two or three letters which had arrived for him in his absence, and had been forwarded by Miss Carlaw’s housekeeper.
Two of the letters were unimportant, but a third was from his cousin Brian. He sat down and began to read it by the light of the lamp. It had been hurriedly scrawled, and he had some difficulty in deciphering it. Briefly and jauntily, with a delightful candour which under other circumstances would have been refreshing and even amusing, Brian informed his “best friend on earth” that he was in desperate straits, and near starvation point; that he had but one thing on which to congratulate himself, and that was that he was but treading in the footsteps of many men more illustrious than he could hope to be, who had travelled the same stony road before; but that the consolation demanded a large amount of philosophy to make it effective when it was remembered that actual food was not always to be obtained; that his landlady, who was a hopeless Philistine, refused to be comforted with promises, or with the possibility of seeing herself immortalized by reason of her businesslike connection with her impecunious lodger; that things were, in a word, at their worst. He implored his cousin to come to his rescue; this would absolutely be the last occasion on which such an appeal would be necessary, as his real prospects, from a sordid point of view, were growing brighter every day.
Comethup read the letter through carefully, smiling a little at some of the quaint phrases and sighing a little over the whole business. It happened that he had decided to go back to London on the morrow, and he was glad to think how much easier now it would be to help his cousin than before he had an income of his own. Whatever might occur, and whatever he might have to keep from his aunt, he would at least be spending that with which he had a right to be doing as he liked. Comforted by that thought, he thrust the letter into his pocket and went to bed.