“At last, knowing that she liked the hunt, I asked her if she was going to the meet on the following Saturday, saying that I intended to follow, having been offered a horse. With a steely ring to her voice, and a further brightening of the eyes, she said: ‘You are a stout little sportsman, Marmy. Yes, I am going on Major Karney’s big horse, Carbine.’
“Valiant looked up, half sneering, half doubtful, I thought, and rejoined: ‘Carbine is a valuable horse, and the fences are stiff in the Garston country.’
“She smiled gravely, then, with her eyes fixed on her husband, said: ‘Carbine is a perfect gentleman. He will do what I ask him. I have ridden him.’
“ ‘The devil you have!’ he replied.
“ ‘I am sure,’ said I, as I hoped, bravely, and not a little enthusiastically, ‘that Carbine would take any fence you asked him.’
“ ‘Or not, as the case might be. Thank you, Marmy, for the compliment,’ she said.
“ ‘A Triton among minnows,’ remarked Valiant, not entirely under his breath; ‘horses obey, and students admire, and there is no end to her greatness.’
“ ‘There is an end to everything, Edward,’ she remarked a shade sadly and quietly.
“He turned to me and said: ‘Science is a great study, Marmion, but it is sardonic too; for you shall find that when you reduce even a Triton to its original elements—’
“ ‘Oh, please let me finish,’ she interrupted softly. ‘I know the lecture so well. It reads this way: “The place of generation must break to give place to the generated; but the influence spreads out beyond the fragments, and is greater thus than in the mass—neither matter nor mind can be destroyed. The earth was molten before it became cold rock and quiet world.” There, you see, Marmy, that I am a fellow-student of yours.’
“Valiant’s eyes were ugly to watch; for she had quoted from a lecture of his, delivered to us that week. After an instant he said, with slow maliciousness: ‘Oh, ye gods, render me worthy of this Portia, and teach her to do as Brutus’s Portia did, ad eternum!’
“She shuddered a little, then said very graciously, and as if he had meant nothing but kindness: ‘Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks.’ I will leave you now to your cigarettes; and because I must go out soon, and shall not, I fear, see you again this afternoon, good-bye, Marmy, till Saturday—till Saturday.’ And she left us.
“I was white and trembling with anger. He smiled coolly, and was careful to choose me one of his best cigars, saying as he handed it: ‘Conversation is a science, Marmion. Study it; there is solid satisfaction in it; it is the only art that brings instant pleasure. Like the stage, it gets its immediate applause.’
“Well, Mrs. Valiant did ride Carbine on that Saturday. Such a scene it was! I see it now—the mottled plump of hounds upon the scent, the bright sun showing up the scarlet coats of the whips gloriously, the long stride of the hunters, ears back and quarters down! She rode Carbine, and the fences WERE stiff—so stiff that I couldn’t have taken half of them. Afterward I was not sorry that I couldn’t; for she rode for a fall that day on Carbine, her own horse, she had bought him of Major Karney a few days before—and I heard her last words as she lay beside him, smiling through the dreadful whiteness of her lips. ‘Goodbye, Marmy,’ she whispered. ‘Carbine and I go together. It is better so, in the full cry and a big field. Tell the men at Luke’s that I hope they will pass at the coming exams. … I am going up—for my final—Marmy.—I wonder—if I’ll—pass.’ And then the words froze on her lips.
“It was persecution that did it—diabolical persecution and selfishness. That was the worst day the college ever knew. At the funeral, when the provost read, ‘For that it hath pleased Thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world,’ Big Wallington, the wildest chap among the grads, led off with a gulp in his throat, and we all followed. And that gold-spectacled sneak stood there, with a lying white handkerchief at his eyes.
“I laid myself out to make the college too hot for him. In a week I had every man in the place with me, and things came to such a pass that all of us must be sent down, or Valiant resign. He resigned. He found another professorship; but the thing followed him, and he was obliged to leave the country.”
When I finished the story, Mrs. Falchion was silent for a time, then, with a slight air of surprise, and in a quite critical way, she said: “I should think you would act very well, if you used less emotion. Mrs. Valiant had a kind of courage, but she was foolish to die. She should have stayed and fought him—fought him every way, until she was his master. She could have done it; she was clever, I should think. Still, if she had to die, it was better to go with a good horse that way. I think I should prefer to go swiftly, suddenly, but without the horror of blood and bruises, and that sort of thing. … I should like to meet Professor Valiant. He was hard, but he was able too. … But haven’t we had enough of horror? I asked you to amuse me, and you have merely interested me instead. Oh!—”
This exclamation, I thought, was caused by the voice of the quartermaster humming:
“I’m a-sailing, I’m a-sailing on the sea,
To a harbour where the wind is still”—
Almost immediately she said: “I think I will go below.” Then, after a slight pause: “This is a liberal acquaintance for one day, Dr. Marmion; and, you know, we were not introduced.”
“No, Mrs. Falchion, we were not introduced; but I am in some regards your host, and I fear we should all be very silent if we waited for regular introductions here. The acquaintance gives me pleasure, but it is not nearly so liberal as I hope it may become.”
She did not answer, but smiled at me over her shoulder as she passed down the staircase, and the next instant I could have bitten my tongue for playing the cavalier as I had done; for showing, as I think I did, that she had an influence over me—an influence peculiar to herself, and difficult to account for when not in her presence.
I sat down, lit a cigar, and went over in my mind all that had been said between us; all that had occurred in my cabin after dinner; every minute since we left Colombo was laid bare to its minutest detail. Lascars slipped by me in the half-darkness, the voices of two lovers near alternated with their expressive silences, and from the music saloon there came the pretty strains of a minuet, played very deftly. Under the influence of this music my thoughts became less exact; they drifted. My eyes shifted to the lights of the ‘Porcupine’ in the distance, and from them again to the figures passing and repassing me on the deck. The “All’s well” of the look-out seemed to come from an endless distance; the swish of water against the dividing hull of the ‘Fulvia’ sounded like a call to silence from another world; the phosphorescence swimming through the jarred waters added to the sensation of unreality and dreams. These dreams grew, till they were broken by a hand placed on my shoulder, and I saw that one of the passengers, Clovelly, an English novelist, had dropped out from the promenade to talk with me. He saw my mood, however, and said quietly: “Give me a light for my cigar, will you? Then, astride this stool, I’ll help you to make inventory of the rest of them. A pretty study; for, at our best, ‘What fools we mortals be!’ ”
“ ‘Motley is your only wear,’ ” was my reply; and for a full half-hour, which, even for a man, is considerable, we spoke no word, but only nodded when some one of the promenaders noticed us. There was a bookmaker fresh from the Melbourne races; an American, Colonel Ryder, whose eloquence had carried him round the world; a stalwart squatter from Queensland; a pretty widow, who had left her husband under the sods of Tasmania; a brace of girls going to join their lovers and be married in England; a few officers fleeing from India with their livers and their lives; a family of four lanky lasses travelling “home” to school; a row of affable ladies, who alternated between envy and gaiety and delight in, and criticism of, their husbands; a couple of missionaries, preparing to give us lectures on the infamous gods of the heathen—gods which, poor harmless little