F. Marion Crawford

“ The Countess could not take her eyes off Claudius. She had never met a man like him; at least she had never met a man who plunged into this kind of talk after half an hour's acquaintance. There was a thrill of feeling in her smooth deep voice when she answered: "If all men thought as you think, the world would be a very different place."
"It would be a better place in more ways than one," he replied.
"And yet you yourself call it a dream," said Margaret, musing.
"It is only you, Countess, who say that dreams are never realised." ”

“ It is the instinct of good women to fight against love—he comes in such a questionable shape. A good woman sees a difference between being in love and loving—well knowing that there is passion without love, but no love without passion. She feels bound in faith to set up a tribunal in her heart, whereby to judge between the two; but very often judge and jury and prisoner at the bar join hands, and swear eternal friendship on the spot. Margaret had feared lest this Northern wooer, with his mighty strength and his bold eyes, should lead her feelings whither her heart would not. ”

“ They were fat brown Havanas, and Claudius enjoyed them.
"Let us go to Baden-Baden," said Barker, sucking at his weed, which protruded from his immense moustache like a gun under the raised port-hole of an old-fashioned man-of-war.
"If I were seeking innocent recreation from my labours, that is not exactly the spot I would choose to disport myself in," replied Claudius. "The scenery is good, but the people are detestable."
"I agree with you; but it is a nice place for all that. You can always gamble to pass the time." ”

“ There is a moment in acquaintance, in friendship, and in love, when two people become suddenly aware that they have a common past. Days, weeks, or months have been spent in conversation, in reading, perhaps in toil and danger, and they have not thought much about it. But one day they wake up to the fact that these little or great things bind them, as forming the portion of their lives that have touched; and as they talk over the incidents they remember they feel unaccountably drawn to each other by the past. Margaret and Claudius knew this on the first evening they spent together on shore. ”

“ But there are times when the cliff at Newport is not an altogether flippant bit of expensive scene-painting, laid out for the sole purpose of "effect." Sometimes in the warm summer nights the venerable moon rises stately and white out of the water; the old moon, that is the hoariest sinner of us all, with her spells and enchantments and her breathing love-beams, that look so gently on such evil works. And the artist-spirits of the night sky take of her silver as much as they will, and coat with it many things of most humble composition, so that they are fair to look upon. ”

“ But all through the evening Claudius never left Margaret's side. He felt that he was bridging over the difference between life at sea and life on land—that he was asserting his right to maintain in a drawing-room the privileges he had gained on the deck of the Streak. And Margaret, moreover, was especially friendly to-night, for she too felt the difference, and recognised that, after all, life on shore is the freer. There are certain conventionalities of a drawing-room that a man is less likely to break through, more certain to remember, than the unwritten rules of cruising etiquette. ”

“ The dark Countess was no soft-hearted Saxon maiden, any more than she was a cold-blooded, cut-throat American girl, calculating her romance by the yard, booking her flirtations by double-entry and marrying at compound interest, with the head of a railway president and the heart of an Esquimaux. She was rather one of those women who are ever ready to sympathise from a naturally generous and noble nature, but who rarely give their friendship and still more seldom their love. They marry, sometimes, where there is neither. They marry—ye gods! ”

“ Barker would know how to deal with the people he met; Claudius could understand a hero if he ever met one, but he bore himself toward ordinary people by fixed rules of his own, not caring or attempting to comprehend the principles on which they acted.
If any one had asked the Doctor if he loved the Countess, he would have answered that he certainly did not. That she was the most beautiful woman in the world, that she represented to him his highest ideal, and that he was certain she came up to that ideal, although he knew her so little, for he felt sure of that. ”

“ There is another time, too, when Newport is no longer commonplace, when that same sea, which never seems to have any life of its own, disgorges its foggy soul over the land. There is an ugly odour as of musty salt-water in men's nostrils, and the mist is heavy and thick to the touch. It creeps up to the edge of the cliff, and greedily clings to the wet grass, and climbs higher and over the lawns, and in at the windows of Dives's dining-room, and of Croesus's library, with its burden of insiduous mould. ”

“ The great tidal wave comes rolling in, once in every lifetime that deserves to be called a lifetime, and sweeps away every one of our landmarks, and changes all our coast-line. But though the waters do not subside, yet the crest of them falls rippling away into smoothness after the first mad rush, else should we all be but shipwrecked mariners in the sea of love. And so, after a time, Margaret drew away from Claudius gently, finding his hands with hers as she moved, and holding them. ”

“ Not the meanest mud-scow or harbour tug but would rather have a little mast and a bit of canvas in the fresh salt breeze than all the hundreds of land-born horse-powers and fire-driven cranks and rods that a haste-loving generation can cram into the belly of the poor craft. How much more, then, must the beautiful clean-built Streak have rejoiced on that night when she felt the throbbing, gnashing pain of the engines stop suddenly in her breast, and was allowed to spread her beautiful wings out to be kissed and caressed all over by her old lover, the north-east wind? ”

“ The conversation languished, and Claudius left the Duke and Barker, and went towards his quarters. It was a warm night for the Atlantic, and though there was no moon, the stars shone out brightly, their reflection moving slowly up and down the slopes of the long ocean swell. Claudius walked aft, and was going to sit down for a few minutes before turning in, when he was suddenly aware of a muffled female figure leaning against the taffrail only a couple of paces from where he was. In spite of the starlight he could not distinguish the person. ”

“ Home through the long streets, lighted with the pale electric flame that gives so deathly a tinge to everything that comes within the circling of its discolour; home to her rooms with the pleasant little fire smouldering on the hearth, and flowers—Barker's flowers—scenting the room; home to the cares of Clémentine, to lean back with half-closed eyes, thinking, while the deft French fingers uncoil and smooth and coil again the jet-black tresses; home to the luxury of sleep unbroken by ill ease of body, though visited by the dreams of a far-away lover—dreams not always hopeful, but ever sweet ”

“ Not that she doubted, but that she thought—well—perhaps she thought she ought to doubt. Some cunning reader of face and character, laughing and making love by turns, had once told her she had more heart than head. Every woman knows she ought to seem flattered at being considered a "person of heart," and yet every woman cordially hates to be told so. And, at last, Margaret began to wonder whether it were true. Should she have admitted she loved a man who left her a moment afterwards in order to make a voyage of two months for the mere furthering of his worldly interest? ”

“ I suppose there is another?"
"Yes, Countess, there is another reason, but I cannot tell you now what it is."
"I have no right to ask, of course," said Margaret,—"unless I can help you," she added, in her soft, deep voice.
"You have more right than you think, far more right," answered Claudius. "And I thank you for the kind thought of help. It is very good of you." He turned towards her, and leaned upon his hand as he sat. Still the fog rolled up, and the lifeless sea seemed overshed with an unctuous calm. ”

“ He will teach you a lesson you will not forget. The day is sinking. The warm earth is drinking out its cup of sunlight to the purple dregs thereof. There is great colour in the air, and the clouds are as a trodden wine-press in the west. The old sun, the golden bowl of life, is touching earth's lips, and soon there will be none of the wine of light left in him. She will drink it all. Yet your lover tarries, Margaret, and comes not.
Margaret and Lady Victoria agreed they would dine together. Indeed, Margaret had a little headache, for she was weary. ”

“ Claudius was not thinking of producing an effect, for the fascination of the dark woman was upon him, and the low, strange voice bewitched him, so he said what came uppermost.
"Yes," said he, "there are persons whose lives may indeed be matters of fact to themselves—who shall say?—but who are always dreams in the lives of others."
"Charming," laughed the Countess, "do you always talk like that, Professor Claudius?"
"I have always thought," Mr. Barker remarked in his high-set voice, "that I would like to be the dream of somebody's life. ”

“ She was a loyal woman, and had loved her husband as much as most good wives, though with an honest determination to love him better; for she was young when they married, and she thought her love stronger than it really was. She had mourned him sincerely, but the wound had healed, and being a brave woman, with no morbid sensitiveness of herself, she had contemplated the possibility of marrying again, without, however, connecting the idea with any individual. She had liked Claudius from the first, and there had been something semi-romantic about their meeting in the Schloss at Heidelberg. ”

“ Is true friendship as uncalculating as true love? Does it make no reservations, and does it admit of no check from the reason?"
"I think, as I said, that friendship is a substitute for love, second best in its nature and second best, too, in its unselfishness."
"Many people say love is selfishness itself."
"I know," answered the Doctor, and paused as if thinking.
"Do you not want to smoke?" asked Margaret, with a tinge of irony, "it may help you to solve the difficulty." ”

“ But do you think it requires no imagination to conceive a new application of knowledge, to invent new methods where old ones are inadequate, to lay out a route through the unknown land beyond the regions of the known?"
"Ordinary people, like me, associate mathematics with measurement and figures and angles."
"Yes," said Claudius, "but it is the same as though you confused religion with its practical results. If the religion is true at all, it would be just as true if man did not exist, and if it consequently had no application to life." ”

“ There are moments in a man's existence when the act of conveying half a dozen sovereigns to the pocket of that stern monitor of good faith, the brass-buttoned custom-house officer with the tender conscience, is of more importance to salvation than women's love or the Thirty-nine Articles. All this they did. Nor were they spared by the great tormentor of the West, who bristleth with the fretful quill, whose ears surround us in the night-time, and whose voice is as the voice of the charmer, the reporter of the just and the unjust, but principally of the latter. ”

“ There are no folk like our own folk, after all; and there is truly a great gulf between Scandinavians and every other kind of people. But it seemed to Claudius that he loved the Germans and their ways—and indeed he did; but does not everyday experience show that the people we admire, and even love, the most are not necessarily those with whom we are most in sympathy or with whom it is best for us to live? He would have been better among his own Northern people; but that did not strike him, and he determined he would go to the Engadine to-morrow or next day. ”

“ Onward slides the thick cloud, and soon the deep-mouthed monotone of the fog-horns in the distance tells it is in the bay. There is nothing commonplace about the Newport cliff in a fog; it is wild enough and dreary enough then, for the scene of a bad deed. You might meet the souls of the lost in such a fog, hiding before the wrath to come.
Late on Tuesday afternoon Claudius and Margaret had taken their way towards the cliff, a solitary couple at that hour on a week-day. Even at a distance there was something about their appearance that distinguished them from ordinary couples. ”