Chance by Joseph Conrad (free novel 24 .TXT) 📖

Perhaps had he been violent, she might have told him that what she came down to keep was the tryst of death—not of love.  It occurred to me as I looked at her, young, fragile in aspect, and intensely alive in her quietness, that perhaps she did not know herself then what sort of tryst she was coming down to keep.

She smiled faintly, almost awkwardly as if she were totally unused to smiling, at my cheap jocularity.  Then she said with that forced precision, a sort of conscious primness:

“I didn’t want him to know.”

I approved heartily.  Quite right.  Much better.  Let him ever remain under his misapprehension which was so much more flattering for him.

I tried to keep it in the tone of comedy; but she was, I believe, too simple to understand my intention.  She went on, looking down.

“Oh!  You think so?  When I saw you I didn’t know why you were here.  I was glad when you spoke to me because this is exactly what I wanted to ask you for.  I wanted to ask you if you ever meet Captain Anthony—by any chance—anywhere—you are a sailor too, are you not?—that you would never mention—never—that—that you had seen me over there.”

“My dear young lady,” I cried, horror-struck at the supposition.  “Why should I?  What makes you think I should dream of . . . ”

She had raised her head at my vehemence.  She did not understand it.  The world had treated her so dishonourably that she had no notion even of what mere decency of feeling is like.  It was not her fault.  Indeed, I don’t know why she should have put her trust in anybody’s promises.

But I thought it would be better to promise.  So I assured her that she could depend on my absolute silence.

“I am not likely to ever set eyes on Captain Anthony,” I added with conviction—as a further guarantee.

She accepted my assurance in silence, without a sign.  Her gravity had in it something acute, perhaps because of that chin.  While we were still looking at each other she declared:

“There’s no deception in it really.  I want you to believe that if I am here, like this, to-day, it is not from fear.  It is not!”

“I quite understand,” I said.  But her firm yet self-conscious gaze became doubtful.  “I do,” I insisted.  “I understand perfectly that it was not of death that you were afraid.”

She lowered her eyes slowly, and I went on:

“As to life, that’s another thing.  And I don’t know that one ought to blame you very much—though it seemed rather an excessive step.  I wonder now if it isn’t the ugliness rather than the pain of the struggle which . . . ”

She shuddered visibly: “But I do blame myself,” she exclaimed with feeling.  “I am ashamed.”  And, dropping her head, she looked in a moment the very picture of remorse and shame.

“Well, you will be going away from all its horrors,” I said.  “And surely you are not afraid of the sea.  You are a sailor’s granddaughter, I understand.”

She sighed deeply.  She remembered her grandfather only a little.  He was a clean-shaven man with a ruddy complexion and long, perfectly white hair.  He used to take her on his knee, and putting his face near hers, talk to her in loving whispers.  If only he were alive now . . . !

She remained silent for a while.

“Aren’t you anxious to see the ship?” I asked.

She lowered her head still more so that I could not see anything of her face.

“I don’t know,” she murmured.

I had already the suspicion that she did not know her own feelings.  All this work of the merest chance had been so unexpected, so sudden.  And she had nothing to fall back upon, no experience but such as to shake her belief in every human being.  She was dreadfully and pitifully forlorn.  It was almost in order to comfort my own depression that I remarked cheerfully:

“Well, I know of somebody who must be growing extremely anxious to see you.”

“I am before my time,” she confessed simply, rousing herself.  “I had nothing to do.  So I came out.”

I had the sudden vision of a shabby, lonely little room at the other end of the town.  It had grown intolerable to her restlessness.  The mere thought of it oppressed her.  Flora de Barral was looking frankly at her chance confidant,

“And I came this way,” she went on.  “I appointed the time myself yesterday, but Captain Anthony would not 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 tramcar.  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 noncommittal 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 tête-à-tête.”

“But dash it all,” he cried in hollow accents which at the same time had the tone of bitter irony—I had never before heard a sound so quaintly ugly and almost horrible—“You forget Mr. Smith.”

“What Mr. Smith?” I asked innocently.

Fyne made an extraordinary simiesque grimace.  I believe it was quite involuntary, but you know that a grave, much-lined, shaven countenance when distorted in an unusual way is extremely apelike.  It was a surprising sight, and rendered me not only speechless but stopped the progress of my thought completely.  I must have presented a remarkably imbecile appearance.

“My brother-in-law considered it amusing to chaff me about us introducing the girl as Miss Smith,” said Fyne, going surly in a moment.  “He said that perhaps