"The change came suddenly. Shan-Yu first faded behind her advancing figure into air; there stole a chill upon the sunlight; a cool mist rose from the water, hiding the Garden and the hills beyond; our fingers touched, I gazed into her eyes, our lips lay level with the water--and the room was dark and cold about me. The brazier stood extinguished at my side. The dust had burnt out, and no smoke rose. I slowly left my chair and closed the window, for the air was chill."
5
It was difficult at first to return to Hampstead and the details of ordinary life about him. Francis looked round him slowly, freeing himself gradually from the spell his friend"s words had laid even upon his a.n.a.lytical temperament. The transition was helped, however, by the details that everywhere met his eye. The Chinese atmosphere remained.
More, its effect had gained, if anything. The embroideries of yellow gold, the pictures, the lacquered stools and inlaid cabinets, above all, the exquisite figures in green jade upon the shelf beside him, all this, in the shimmering pale olive light the lamps shed everywhere, helped his puzzled mind to bridge the gulf from the Garden of Happiness into the decorated villa upon Hampstead Heath.
There was silence between the two men for several minutes. Far was it from the doctor"s desire to injure his old friend"s delightful fantasy.
For he called it fantasy, although something in him trembled. He remained, therefore, silent. Truth to tell, perhaps, he knew not exactly what to say.
Farque broke the silence himself. He had not moved since the story ended; he sat motionless, his hands tightly clasped, his eyes alight with the memory of his strange imagined joy, his face rapt and almost luminous, as though he still wandered through the groves of the Enchanted Garden and inhaled the perfume of its perfect happiness in the Valley of the Thousand Temples.
"It was two days later," he went on suddenly in his quiet voice, "only two days afterwards, that I met her."
"You met her? You met the woman of your dream?" Francis"s eyes opened very wide.
"In that little harbour town," repeated Farque calmly, "I met her in the flesh. She had just landed in a steamer from up the coast. The details are of no particular interest. She knew me, of course, at once. And, naturally, I knew her."
The doctor"s tongue refused to act as he heard. It dawned upon him suddenly that his friend was married. He remembered the woman"s touch about the house; he recalled, too, for the first time that the letter of invitation to dinner had said "come to _us_." He was full of a bewildered astonishment.
The reaction upon himself was odd, perhaps, yet wholly natural. His heart warmed towards his imaginative friend. He could now tell him his own new strange romance. The woman who haunted him crept back into the room and sat between them. He found his tongue.
"You married her, Edward?" he exclaimed.
"She is my wife," was the reply, in a gentle, happy voice.
"A Ch----" he could not bring himself to say the word. "A foreigner?"
"My wife is a Chinese woman," Farque helped him easily, with a delighted smile.
So great was the other"s absorption in the actual moment, that he had not heard the step in the pa.s.sage that his host had heard. The latter stood up suddenly.
"I hear her now," he said. "I"m glad she"s come back before you left."
He stepped towards the door.
But before he reached it, the door was opened and in came the woman herself. Francis tried to rise, but something had happened to him. His heart missed a beat. Something, it seemed, broke in him. He faced a tall, graceful young English woman with black eyes of sparkling happiness, the woman of his own romance. She still wore the feather boa round her neck. She was no more Chinese than he was.
"My wife," he heard Farque introducing them, as he struggled to his feet, searching feverishly for words of congratulation, normal, everyday words he ought to use, "I"m so pleased, oh, so pleased," Farque was saying--he heard the sound from a distance, his sight was blurred as well--"my two best friends in the world, my English comrade and my Chinese wife." His voice was absolutely sincere with conviction and belief.
"But we have already met," came the woman"s delightful voice, her eyes full upon his face with smiling pleasure, "I saw you at Mrs. Malleson"s tea only this afternoon."
And Francis remembered suddenly that the Mallesons were old acquaintances of Farque"s as well as of himself. "And I even dared to ask who you were," the voice went on, floating from some other s.p.a.ce, it seemed, to his ears, "I had you pointed out to me. I had heard of you from Edward, of course. But you vanished before I could be introduced."
The doctor mumbled something or other polite and, he hoped, adequate.
But the truth had flashed upon him with remorseless suddenness. She had "heard of" him--the famous mental specialist. Her interest in him was cruelly explained, cruelly both for himself and for his friend. Farque"s delusion lay clear before his eyes. An awakening to reality might involve dislocation of the mind. _She_, too, moreover, knew the truth.
She was involved as well. And her interest in himself was--consultation.
"Seven years we"ve been married, just seven years to-day," Farque was saying thoughtfully, as he looked at them. "Curious, rather, isn"t it?"
"Very," said Francis, turning his regard from the black eyes to the grey.
Thus it was that Owen Francis left the house a little later with a mind in a measure satisfied, yet in a measure forgetful too--forgetful of his own deep problem, because another of even greater interest had replaced it.
"Why undeceive him?" ran his thought. "He need never know. It"s harmless anyhow--I can tell her that."
But, side by side with this reflection, ran another that was oddly haunting, considering his type of mind: "Destroyer of Honourable Homes,"
was the form of words it took. And with a sigh he added "Chinese Magic."
III
RUNNING WOLF
The man who enjoys an adventure outside the general experience of the race, and imparts it to others, must not be surprised if he is taken for either a liar or a fool, as Malcolm Hyde, hotel clerk on a holiday, discovered in due course. Nor is "enjoy" the right word to use in describing his emotions; the word he chose was probably "survive."
When he first set eyes on Medicine Lake he was struck by its still, sparkling beauty, lying there in the vast Canadian backwoods; next, by its extreme loneliness; and, lastly--a good deal later, this--by its combination of beauty, loneliness, and singular atmosphere, due to the fact that it was the scene of his adventure.
"It"s fairly stiff with big fish," said Morton of the Montreal Sporting Club. "Spend your holiday there--up Mattawa way, some fifteen miles west of Stony Creek. You"ll have it all to yourself except for an old Indian who"s got a shack there. Camp on the east side--if you"ll take a tip from me." He then talked for half an hour about the wonderful sport; yet he was not otherwise very communicative, and did not suffer questions gladly, Hyde noticed. Nor had he stayed there very long himself. If it was such a paradise as Morton, its discoverer and the most experienced rod in the province, claimed, why had he himself spent only three days there?
"Ran short of grub," was the explanation offered; but to another friend he had mentioned briefly, "flies," and to a third, so Hyde learned later, he gave the excuse that his half-breed "took sick,"
necessitating a quick return to civilization.
Hyde, however, cared little for the explanations; his interest in these came later. "Stiff with fish" was the phrase he liked. He took the Canadian Pacific train to Mattawa, laid in his outfit at Stony Creek, and set off thence for the fifteen-mile canoe-trip without a care in the world.
Travelling light, the portages did not trouble him; the water was swift and easy, the rapids negotiable; everything came his way, as the saying is. Occasionally he saw big fish making for the deeper pools, and was sorely tempted to stop; but he resisted. He pushed on between the immense world of forests that stretched for hundreds of miles, known to deer, bear, moose, and wolf, but strange to any echo of human tread, a deserted and primeval wilderness. The autumn day was calm, the water sang and sparkled, the blue sky hung cloudless over all, ablaze with light. Toward evening he pa.s.sed an old beaver-dam, rounded a little point, and had his first sight of Medicine Lake. He lifted his dripping paddle; the canoe shot with silent glide into calm water. He gave an exclamation of delight, for the loveliness caught his breath away.
Though primarily a sportsman, he was not insensible to beauty. The lake formed a crescent, perhaps four miles long, its width between a mile and half a mile. The slanting gold of sunset flooded it. No wind stirred its crystal surface. Here it had lain since the redskin"s G.o.d first made it; here it would lie until he dried it up again. Towering spruce and hemlock trooped to its very edge, majestic cedars leaned down as if to drink, crimson sumachs shone in fiery patches, and maples gleamed orange and red beyond belief. The air was like wine, with the silence of a dream.
It was here the red men formerly "made medicine," with all the wild ritual and tribal ceremony of an ancient day. But it was of Morton, rather than of Indians, that Hyde thought. If this lonely, hidden paradise was really stiff with big fish, he owed a lot to Morton for the information. Peace invaded him, but the excitement of the hunter lay below.
He looked about him with quick, practised eye for a camping-place before the sun sank below the forests and the half-lights came. The Indian"s shack, lying in full sunshine on the eastern sh.o.r.e, he found at once; but the trees lay too thick about it for comfort, nor did he wish to be so close to its inhabitant. Upon the opposite side, however, an ideal clearing offered. This lay already in shadow, the huge forest darkening it toward evening; but the open s.p.a.ce attracted. He paddled over quickly and examined it. The ground was hard and dry, he found, and a little brook ran tinkling down one side of it into the lake. This outfall, too, would be a good fishing spot. Also it was sheltered. A few low willows marked the mouth.
An experienced camper soon makes up his mind. It was a perfect site, and some charred logs, with traces of former fires, proved that he was not the first to think so. Hyde was delighted. Then, suddenly, disappointment came to tinge his pleasure. His kit was landed, and preparations for putting up the tent were begun, when he recalled a detail that excitement had so far kept in the background of his mind--Morton"s advice. But not Morton"s only, for the storekeeper at Stony Creek had reinforced it. The big fellow with straggling moustache and stooping shoulders, dressed in shirt and trousers, had handed him out a final sentence with the bacon, flour, condensed milk, and sugar. He had repeated Morton"s half-forgotten words:
"Put yer tent on the east sh.o.r.e. I should," he had said at parting.
He remembered Morton, too, apparently. "A shortish fellow, brown as an Indian and fairly smelling of the woods. Travelling with Jake, the half-breed." That a.s.suredly was Morton. "Didn"t stay long, now, did he?" he added in a reflective tone.
"Going Windy Lake way, are yer? Or Ten Mile Water, maybe?" he had first inquired of Hyde.
"Medicine Lake."
"Is that so?" the man said, as though he doubted it for some obscure reason. He pulled at his ragged moustache a moment. "Is that so, now?"
he repeated. And the final words followed him down-stream after a considerable pause--the advice about the best sh.o.r.e on which to put his tent.
All this now suddenly flashed back upon Hyde"s mind with a tinge of disappointment and annoyance, for when two experienced men agreed, their opinion was not to be lightly disregarded. He wished he had asked the storekeeper for more details. He looked about him, he reflected, he hesitated. His ideal camping-ground lay certainly on the forbidden sh.o.r.e. What in the world, he pondered, could be the objection to it?