Chance

have minded. He told me he was going to look over some business papers till I came.”

The idea of the son of the poet, the rescuer of the most forlorn damsel of modern times, the man of violence, gentleness and generosity, sitting up to his neck in ship’s accounts amused me. “I am sure he would not have minded,” I said, smiling. But the girl’s stare was sombre, her thin white face seemed pathetically careworn.

“I can hardly believe yet,” she murmured anxiously.

“It’s quite real. Never fear,” I said encouragingly, but had to change my tone at once. “You had better go down that way a little,” I directed her abruptly.

I had seen Fyne come striding out of the hotel door. The intelligent girl, without staying to ask questions, walked away from me quietly down one street while I hurried on to meet Fyne coming up the other at his efficient pedestrian gait. My object was to stop him getting as far as the corner. He must have been thinking too hard to be aware of his surroundings. I put myself in his way, and he nearly walked into me.

“Hallo!” I said.

His surprise was extreme. “You here! You don’t mean to say you have been waiting for me?”

I said negligently that I had been detained by unexpected business in the neighbourhood, and thus happened to catch sight of him coming out.

He stared at me with solemn distraction, obviously thinking of something else. I suggested that he had better take the next city-ward tram-car. He was inattentive, and I perceived that he was profoundly perturbed. As Miss de Barral (she had moved out of sight) could not possibly approach the hotel door as long as we remained where we were I proposed that we should wait for the car on the other side of the street. He obeyed rather the slight touch on his arm than my words, and while we were crossing the wide roadway in the midst of the lumbering wheeled traffic, he exclaimed in his deep tone, “I don’t know which of these two is more mad than the other!”

“Really!” I said, pulling him forward from under the noses of two enormous sleepy-headed cart-horses. He skipped wildly out of the way and up on the curbstone with a purely instinctive precision; his mind had nothing to do with his movements. In the middle of his leap, and while in the act of sailing gravely through the air, he continued to relieve his outraged feelings.

“You would never believe! They are mad!”

I took care to place myself in such a position that to face me he had to turn his back on the hotel across the road. I believe he was glad I was there to talk to. But I thought there was some misapprehension in the first statement he shot out at me without loss of time, that Captain Anthony had been glad to see him. It was indeed difficult to believe that, directly he opened the door, his wife’s “sailor-brother” had positively shouted: “Oh, it’s you! The very man I wanted to see.”

“I found him sitting there,” went on Fyne impressively in his effortless, grave chest voice, “drafting his will.”

This was unexpected, but I preserved a non-committal attitude, knowing full well that our actions in themselves are neither mad nor sane. But I did not see what there was to be excited about. And Fyne was distinctly excited. I understood it better when I learned that the captain of the Ferndale wanted little Fyne to be one of the trustees. He was leaving everything to his wife. Naturally, a request which involved him into sanctioning in a way a proceeding which he had been sent by his wife to oppose, must have appeared sufficiently mad to Fyne.

“Me! Me, of all people in the world!” he repeated portentously. But I could see that he was frightened. Such want of tact!

“He knew I came from his sister. You don’t put a man into such an awkward position,” complained Fyne. “It made me speak much more strongly against all this very painful business than I would have had the heart to do otherwise.”

I pointed out to him concisely, and keeping my eyes on the door of the hotel, that he and his wife were the only bond with the land Captain Anthony had. Who else could he have asked?

“I explained to him that he was breaking this bond,” declared Fyne solemnly. “Breaking it once for all. And for what—for what?”

He glared at me. I could perhaps have given him an inkling for what, but I said nothing. He started again:

“My wife assures me that the girl does not love him a bit. She goes by that letter she received from her. There is a passage in it where she practically admits that she was quite unscrupulous in accepting this offer of marriage, but says to my wife that she supposes she, my wife, will not blame her—as it was in self-defence. My wife has her own ideas, but this is an outrageous misapprehension of her views. Outrageous.”

The good little man paused and then added weightily:

“I didn’t tell that to my brother-in-law—I mean, my wife’s views.”

“No,” I said. “What would have been the good?”

“It’s positive infatuation,” agreed, little Fyne, in the tone as though he had made an awful discovery. “I have never seen anything so hopeless and inexplicable in my life. I—I felt quite frightened and sorry,” he added, while I looked at him curiously asking myself whether this excellent civil servant and notable pedestrian had felt the breath of a great and fatal love-spell passing him by in the room of that East-End hotel. He did look for a moment as though he had seen a ghost, an other-world thing. But that look vanished instantaneously, and he nodded at me with mere exasperation at something quite of this world—whatever it was. “It’s a bad business. My brother-in-law knows nothing of women,” he cried with an air of profound, experienced wisdom.

What he imagined he knew of women himself I can’t tell. I did not know anything of the opportunities he might have had. But this is a subject which, if approached with undue solemnity, is apt to elude one’s grasp entirely. No doubt Fyne knew something of a woman who was Captain Anthony’s sister. But that, admittedly, had been a very solemn study. I smiled at him gently, and as if encouraged or provoked, he completed his thought rather explosively.

“And that girl understands nothing... It’s sheer lunacy.”

“I don’t know,” I said, “whether the circumstances of isolation at sea would be any alleviation to the danger. But it’s certain that they shall have the opportunity to learn everything about each other in a lonely tete-a-tete.”