Charles Neville Buck

“ Her voice sang in my brain definitely and with the sweetness of the beloved and familiar. I had, of course, never heard a syllable from her lips, and yet I was sure that could I hear her voice in life I should instantly recognize it, though blindfolded. I thought of it as a richly sweet contralto. It never for a moment occurred to me to fancy it might be anything else.
Once for a week the sky ceased to smile, and grew black. The jungle was lashed and stripped with hurricanes and on several occasions the earth trembled. The sea pounded our porous coast and boiled into a tremendous tide. ”

“ Coulter himself was the last to leap for the swinging boat, and a moment before he did so Hoak appeared. He had miraculously made his way alive out of the engine-room's inferno, and his coming was that of a maniac. His huge body, bare to the waist, sweat-streaked and soot-blackened and fire-blistered, was also dark with blood. His voice was raised in demented laughter and every vestige of reason had deserted eyes that were now agleam only with homicidal mania. ”

“ I lifted up my voice for attention, and from their kneeling postures they regarded me with grave reverence. I took my place, with bowed head, before the portrait and addressed the lady in tones of deep solemnity. It seemed to me that her delicate mouth line quivered with amusement, as though she and I had between us a delicious secret.
"Frances! Frances! Frances!" I declaimed with the deep profundity of a ritual. "I have failed totally and signally at the god job. There is in all this world of sky and sea and of my heart but one deity. ”

“ It was as though the rising rim of water brought a promise of grateful rest. He saw ahead nothing except release from all the wild turmoil and misery which had spoken itself without words that evening when Coulter had silenced the improvisation of his violin.
But if the end was a thing of quiet philosophy to Lawrence, it was not so to others. The lurid flare, which turned the impassioned picture in a moment from a silhouette of blacks and cobalts to a crimson hell, seemed to inflame to greater madness men already mad. ”

“ His movements were all unhurried, even graceful, but every flexing and tensing of his muscles carried a hint of potential swiftness and power. His face was unshaven and dissolute, but it retained a keen and instinctive intelligence. His gray eyes had a light in them that seemed to come from some inner source.
Curt Dawson could hardly have been more than thirty and was in the full prime of his youthful strength, hard as hickory and in the same rough fashion as the pines among which he had grown, commanding in appearance and pungent in personality. ”

“ We traveled at snail's pace over twisting roads where our wagon strained and creaked in tortuous ruts almost hub-deep, and where the scraggly horses lay against their collars and tugged valiantly at the traces. Quail started up before us with their whir of softly drumming wings and disappeared into the thick cover of timber. Squirrels barked and scampered to hiding at our coming. Occasionally a fox whisked out of sight with a contemptuous flirt of its brush. Once only in twenty miles we encountered another traveler. An old man, riding bareback on a mule, drew up in the road and awaited us. ”

“ Could she comprehend a passion fired with no touch of the physical, painted horizon-wide against a canvas of cobalt sky? Perhaps not, but I wished as I had never wished any other thing that I might have been privileged to learn.
Her personality, even in silence, wove an aura of subtle magic about her. She wore at her breast several hot-house orchids. They were pale and exotic, quick wilting and artificial. Already the edges of their petals were curling and darkening. Was she like them? Could she have carried her splendid shoulders with the same grace through jungles and over mountains? ”

“ So vital was the effect as one looked, that it seemed a palpitant personality of breath and soul. The lips might be trembling on the verge of speech and in the quiet smile hovered a delightful hint of whimsical humor. The whole bearing was queenly with that gracious pride which we characterize as royal when we speak of royalty as something inherently noble. For the accolade of a smile from those lips, in the flesh, a man might undertake all manner of folly. The young woman was in evening dress and at her throat hung a rope of pearls. ”

“ Many of life's most sacred and permanent institutions are only fictions, long entertained. My fiction became so real to me that for periods I forgot to question it—then sometimes, at a moment when the illusion was strongest, some impulse of reason would strike in upon and chill me, like a sluicing from a cold bucket. It would come upon me to think of myself as I should have appeared to any unwarned stranger, who had found me talking, even lovemaking, with a sheet of lifeless paper. And from that impersonal view-point I would wonder if my brain had already crumbled to madness and imbecility. ”

“ Weighborne was not the sort of husband who would tamely pass without punishment such an affront to his wife and himself. I hoped that his method of reprisal would be summary. That would bring a sort of relief, yet for her sake he must let me be my own executioner, that it might end there.
The night was all a-sparkle under the moonlight, and the air, spiced with frost, went into the lungs with the tingling stimulation of needles. I tramped endlessly along the road, and all the heat of my paroxysm cooled into a chill of self-contempt. ”

“ Young Mansfield's voice came vaguely to my ear. "They've overlooked the life-raft," he said. "Let's have a try at that. There's not much time now."
The starboard scuppers were letting in sea water and the flames were creeping close, as we turned together, holding to the shadows of the superstructure, and ran forward.
We were tearing our fingers raw over stiffened knots when a rush of feet interrupted us. The next instant I saw my companion lashing out with the butt of his pistol, and surrounded by a quartette of assailants. In the moonlight he loomed gigantic and heroic of proportion. ”

“ However that might be, the gracious smile died slowly on her lips to a seriousness far sweeter, and as she looked into my face her eyes widened, and dropped all concealment until I was gazing into her soul.
When a woman meets the eyes of a man in that fashion he ceases to question, and wishes only to do reverence. It is like rolling back the waters of the sea and revealing the wonders of the deeps. For it is decreed that the eyes of a woman are given her in defense, to hide behind their dance and sparkle the things which lie beneath—and to disarm. ”

“ At its bark Hoak staggered to his knees, but was up again and charging forward with the impetus of a wounded rhinoceros. He had one deed to do before he died and would not be denied. The flying shovel narrowly missed the captain's head as he jumped for the boat, but the seaman with his lips parted over the snarl of clenched teeth fought his painful way to the davit, gripping a knife which he had brought in his belt. His eyes glowed with the strange light that madness lends and his muscles were tensed in the brief exaggerated strength of a supreme effort. ”

“ Already the seed for such an influence had been planted in the dependence which young Mansfield and myself came to feel for the unknown girl's diary. Now, in utter isolation, I was doubly in need of something to avert my thoughts from channels which go down to madness and despair. The lifelike quality of the portrait made it easier to talk aloud, and as the spell grew I found myself talking with the softness of the lover.
There is a power in the spoken word. The mere act of giving audible expression is a spur to thought. ”

“ Three thin jets of rifle fire blinked out with acrid sharpness from the laurel through which we had just come. The men who had ambushed us must have lain so close to our passing line that we might almost have touched them from our saddles as we rode down the declivity.
There was instantly a confused, snorting, splashing stampede for the cover of the opposite shore. I, who chanced to be riding third in line, followed my two leaders and made the timber in safety. I slid from my saddle and found refuge in a tangle of drift at the roots of a sycamore which overhung the water. ”

“ Inside Judge Garvin's store we came upon a group of slovenly loungers. Had my mind been free enough of its own troubling thoughts to spare a remnant of interest, I should have found this new and strange scheme of things engrossing. I was in a scrap of America which the onrushing tide of world advancement had left stranded and forgotten. Here a people of unmixed British stock lived primitive lives, fought feudal wars, and shrined every virtue high except regard for human life. ”

“ When sleep came to me it was fitful with a thousand nightmare impossibilities, I saw, in my dreams, the face of the stale sea and sky translated into a broad human visage paralyzed and smiling unendingly in that hideous grin which stamps the tortured teeth of the lockjaw victim. Then the monster of the dream broke out of its fixity and with a shriek of hurricanes aimed a terrific blow at the prow of the Wastrel. ”

“ Now my life depended on attaining a supreme flippancy of attitude on pain of sacrifice to rites for which I had no reverence. When at sundown I reached the place where the portrait smiled whimsically at me from its post of honor, I sat for a while looking into the comprehending eyes and my thoughts took more cheerful color. Before me lay a situation in which I was to pit my legacy of human development against the brute odds of minds lighted only to the mistiness of dawn.
"Frances," I said, "you smile. Of course since you are fixed in print, you can't do otherwise than smile. ”

“ One could understand why men take their lives into their hands and penetrate fever-infested jungles in search of newer types. Their delicacy was unearthly and splendid. They were not, it seemed, flowers growing on dirt-fed stems, but blossoms of the gods. Each one was like the blooming of some human soul freed from the grossness of the flesh. Here was a bloom as ethereally pure and pale as the reincarnation of some flawless virgin spirit; there were flaming petals of such magnificent color as might have sprung from the heart of a conqueror. ”

“ He may seek to keep you out of court."
At length I slipped out and stood for a while leaning against a post of the porch, although the air was sharp with frost, and the stars pierced coldly through the hard steel of a winter sky. My other skies had been softer.
The mountains, under a young moon, stood out black and forbidding; frost mists hung like frozen smoke on the lowlands. From somewhere about the house came the nasal singing of a mountaineer to the plunking of a tuneless banjo. His voice rose and quavered and fell with more care that his words be distinct than that his notes be true. ”

“ I have sometimes felt that all the difference between the courageous and craven lies in the chance of the instant with which the numbers fall on the dice of life. To-day's coward may be to-morrow's hero. For an instant, with an unspeakable babel in my ears and a picture of human battle in my eyes, I knew only the chaotic confusion that comes of panic. Then I caught a glimpse of one detail and all physical fear fell away from me. ”

“ Her voice revealed the hereditary source of Marcus' ability for sincere hating.
I looked at her aged, monkey-like face and the intensity of her beady eyes with wonderment. There was vindictiveness there but no fear, no excitement even, except the excitement of hate—and yet this old woman was the same who could not be induced to travel on a railroad train for fear of an accident.
It was several hours later that the doctor arrived. He was much like the men among whom he lived. ”

“ Of course, there were many topics which we might have discussed to divert our minds from morbidly watching the cloud of impending mutiny spread and grow inky. But the cloud was present and human, and the diary was present and human, and we were present and human. Whether or not we were creatures of atrophied brains and distorted vision is an academic question. The fact remains. For us there was genuine relief in turning from the miasma of brooding doom which overhung the Wastrel to the spiced fragrance of this self-revealed personality. ”

“ If I concede to the cold logic of material reasoning that this dependable companionship and love of a man for a portrait washed up by the sea was merely the aberration of a brain unseated by solitude, I must also believe that a series of totally incredible coincidences subsequently befell me. But if it be that certain things are written in the stars and certain passions are irrevocably decreed, my life is freed of grotesqueness and becomes logical. ”

“ The Upper Corniche Road is perhaps the most charming driveway of the world—and I say this with due reverence to Amalfi. By a road as white as a fresh tablecloth and as smooth as a bowling alley one speeds to the purring of his motor along the way thrown up for the tramping feet of Bonaparte's battalions. From a commanding height the traveler looks down, as from the roof of the world, with close kinship of peaks and clouds, upon a panorama a-riot with breadth and depth and color. ”

“ I needed no car of ivory and bronze with captives marching fettered at its wheel. I needed no slave to whisper in my ear, "Remember, Cæsar, thou art but a man." I was filled with a new graciousness and wished to be generously courteous to all men, yet that desire was born of a sense of vast superiority. I had found the meaning of life; the secret of which the gulls shrieked in mating-time around the rocks of the island—though then my ears were deaf to its significance. ”