She obeyed. He rose. “Come,” said he, and led the way to the stairhead by the saloon where was fixed the collecting box in aid of the Fund for Shipwrecked Mariners. He slipped the coin down the slot.
“Now,” said he, “honour is satisfied.”
But listening to her artless and complicated tale, he wondered, while a shiver ran over his frame, whether he would ever be able again to slip a five-franc piece into his waistcoat pocket. He felt yet older than before, incapable of piercing to the root of youth’s perplexities. He counselled with oracular vagueness, conscious of not having earned his fee. He paced the deck again.
“Were it not for Abu Mohammed,” he said, “I should call it a disastrous journey.”
Meanwhile Martin, lonelier even than he, sat in the bows of a great Eastward bound steamer, his eyes opened to the staring facts of life. No longer must he masquerade as the man of fashion—never again until he had bought the right. The remains of his small capital he must keep intact for the day of need. No more the luxury of first-class travel. This voyage in the steerage was but a means of transit to the new lands where he would win his way to fortune. He needed no advice. He had spiritually and morally outgrown his tutelage. No longer, so he told himself, would he nourish his soul on dreams. It could feed if it liked on memories. The madness had passed. He drew the breath of an honest man. If he had taken Lucilla at her word and married her, what would have been his existence? Trailing about the idle world in the wake of a rich wife, dependent on her bounty even for a pair of shoe-laces; eating out his heart for the love she could not give; at last, perhaps, quarrelling desperately, or else with sapped will-power sunk in sloth, accepting from her an allowance on condition that they should live apart. He had heard of such marriages since he had mingled with the wealthy. Even had she met him with a love as passionate as his own, would the happiness have lasted? In his grim mood he thought not. He reasoned himself into the conviction that his loss had been his gain. Far better that he should be among these few poor folk who sat down to table in their shirt-sleeves, than that he should be eating the flesh-pots of dishonour in the land of Egypt. He himself dined in his shirt-sleeves, as he had done many a time before in the kitchen of the Hôtel des Grottes.
Yet he hungered for her. It seemed impossible that he should never see her again, never again watch the sweep of the adorable brown eyelashes, the subtle play of laughter around her mobile lips; never again greet with delicious heart-pang the sight of her slim figure willowy like those in the Primavera. In vain he schooled himself to regard her as one dead. The witchery of her obsessed him night and day. He learned what it was to suffer.
He had taken his deck passage to Hong-Kong—why he could scarcely tell. It sounded very far away—as far away from her as practicable. As the sultry days went on, he realised that he had not reckoned on the tremendous distance of Hong-Kong. It was past Bombay, Colombo, Penang and Singapore. At such ports as he could, he landed, but the glamour of the East had gone. He was a man who had expended his power of wonder and delight. He looked on them coldly as places he might possibly exploit, should Hong-Kong prove barren. Also the period of great heat had begun, and he found danger in strolling about the deadly streets. On ship-board he slept on deck. As they neared Hong-Kong his heart sank. For the first time he wished that Fortinbras were with him. Perhaps he had repaid affection with scant courtesy. He occupied himself with a long letter to his friend, setting out his case. He then imagined the reply. “My son,” said the mellow, persuasive voice, “have you not been carrying on from thrill to thrill the Great Adventure begun last August, when you threw off the chains of Margett’s? Have you not filled your brain and your soul with new and breathless sensations? Have you not tasted joys hitherto unimagined? Have you not been admitted to the heart of a great and loyal nation? Have you not flaunted it in the dazzling splendour of the great world? Have you not steeped your being in the gorgeous colour of the East? Have not your pulses throbbed with an immortal passion for a woman of surpassing beauty? Have you not known, what is only accorded to the select of the sons of men, a supreme moment of delirious joy when Time stood still and Space was not? Have you not lived intensely all this wonderful year? Are you the same blank-minded, starving-souled, mild negation of a man who sat as a butt for Corinna’s pleasantries at the Petit Cornichon? Have you not progressed immeasurably? Have you not gained spiritual stature, wisdom both human and godlike? And are you not now, having passed through the fiery furnace not only unscathed but tempered, setting out on the still greater adventure—the conquest of the Ends of the Earth? Less than a year ago what were you but a slave? What are you now? A free man.”
So through the ears of fancy ran the sonorous rhetoric of Fortinbras. Martin tore up his letter and scattered the fragments on the sea. A day or two afterwards, with a stout heart, he landed at Victoria, the capital of Hong-Kong.