Tongues of Conscience Part 9

"Do you think that whenever your conscience says, 'You have done wrong'?

Tell me!"

Uniacke, who had got up in his excitement, recoiled at these words which struck him hard.

"I--I!" he almost stammered. "What have I got to do with it?"

"I ask you to judge yourself, to put yourself in my place. That is all.

Do you tell me that all workings of conscience are due to obscure bodily causes?"

"How could I? No, but yours--"

"Are not. They hurt my body. They do not come from my body's hurt. And they increase upon me in this place, yes, they increase upon me."

"I knew it," cried Uniacke.

"Why is that?" said Sir Graham, with a melancholy accent. "I feel, I begin to feel that there must be some powerful reason--yes, in this island."

"There cannot be. Leave it! Leave it!"

"I am held here."

"By what?"

"Something intangible, invisible--"

"Nothing, then."

"All-powerful. I cannot go. If I would go, I cannot. Perhaps--perhaps Jack is coming here."

The painter's eyes were blazing. Uniacke felt himself turn cold.

"Jack coming here!" he said harshly. "Nonsense, Sir Graham. n.o.body ever comes here."

"Dead bodies come on the breast of the sea."

The painter looked towards the window, putting himself into an att.i.tude of horrible expectation.

"Is it not so?" he asked, in a voice that quivered slightly as if with an agitation he was trying to suppress.

Uniacke made no reply. He was seized with a horror he had not known before. He recognised that the island influence mysteriously held his guest. After an interval he said abruptly:

"What is your doctor's name, did you say?"

"Did I ever say whom I had consulted?" said Sir Graham, almost with an invalid's ready suspicion, and peering at the clergyman under his thick eyebrows.

"Surely. But I forget things so easily," said Uniacke calmly.

"Braybrooke is the man--Cavendish Square. An interesting fellow. You may have heard of his book on the use of colour as a sort of physic in certain forms of illness."

"I have. What sort of man is he?"

"Very small, very grey, very indecisive in manner."

"Indecisive?"

"In manner. In reality a man of infinite conviction."

"May I ask if you told him your story?"

"The story of my body--naturally. One goes to a doctor to do that."

"And did that narrative satisfy him?"

"Not at all. Not a bit."

"Well--and so?"

"I did not tell him my mental story. I explained to him that I suffered greatly from melancholy. That was all. I called it unreasoning melancholy. Why not? I knew he could do no more than put my body a little straight. He did his best."

"I see," said Uniacke, slowly.

That night, after Sir Graham had gone to bed, Uniacke came to a resolution. He decided to write to Doctor Braybrooke, betray, for his guest's sake, his guest's confidence, and ask the great man's advice in the matter, revealing to him the strange fact that fate had led the painter of the sea urchin to the very edge of the grave in which he slept so quietly. No longer did Uniacke hesitate, or pause to ask himself why he permitted the sorrow of a stranger thus to control, to upset, his life. And, indeed, is the man who tells us his sorrow a stranger to us? Uniacke's creed taught him to be unselfish, taught him to concern himself in the afflictions of others. Already he had sinned, he had lied for this stricken man. He, a clergyman, had gone out in the night and had defaced a grave. All this lay heavy on his heart. His conscience smote him. And yet, when he saw before him in the night the vision of this tortured man, he knew that he would repeat his sin if necessary.

The next day was Sunday. He sat down and tried to think of the two sermons he had to preach. The sea lay very still on the Sabbath morning, still under a smooth and pathetic grey sky. The atmosphere seemed that of a winter fairyland. All the sea-birds were in hiding. Small waves licked the land like furtive tongues seeking some dainty food with sly desire. Across the short sea-gra.s.s the island children wound from school to church, and the island lads gathered in knots to say nothing. The whistling of a naughty fisherman attending to his nets unsabbatically pierced the still and magically cruel air with a painful sharpness.

People walked in silence without knowing why they did not care to speak.

And even the girls, discreet in ribbons and s.h.i.+ning boots, thought less of kisses than they generally did on Sunday. The older people, sober by temperament, became sombre under the influence of sad, breathless sky, and breathless waters. The coldness that lay in the bosom of nature soon found its way to the responsive bosom of humanity. It chilled Uniacke in the pulpit, Sir Graham in the pew below. The one preached without heart.

The other listened without emotion. All this was in the morning. But at evening nature stirred in her repose and turned, with the abruptness of a born coquette, to pageantry. A light wind got up. The waves were curved and threw up thin showers of ivory spray playfully along the rocks. The sense of fairyland, wrapped in ethereal silences, quivered and broke like disturbed water. And the grey womb of the sky swelled in the west to give up a sunset that became tragic in its crescendo of glory. Bursting forth in flame--a narrow line of fire along the sea--it pushed its way slowly up the sky. Against the tattered clouds a hidden host thrust forth their spears of gold. And a wild-rose colour descended upon the gentle sea and floated to the island, bathing the rocks, the grim and weather-beaten houses, the stones of the churchyard, with a radiance so delicate, and yet so elfish, that enchantment walked there till the night came down, and in the darkness the islanders moved on their way to church. The pageant was over. But it had stirred two imaginations. It blazed yet in two hearts. The shock of its coming, after long hours of storm, had stirred Uniacke and his guest strangely.

And the former, leaving in the rectory parlour the sermon he had composed, preached extempore on the text, "In the evening there shall be light."

He began radiantly and with fervour. But some spirit of contradiction entered his soul as he spoke, impelling him to a more sombre mood that was yet never cold, but rather impa.s.sioned full of imaginative despair.

He was driven on to discourse of the men who will not see light, of the men who draw thick blinds to shut out light. And then he was led, by the egoism that so subtly guides even the best among men, to speak of those fools who, by fostering darkness, think to compel suns.h.i.+ne, as a man may mix dangerous chemicals in a laboratory, seeking to advance some cause of science and die in the poisonous fumes of his own devilish brew. Can good, impulsive and radiant, come out of deliberate evil? Must not a man care first for his own soul if he would heal the soul of even one other? Uniacke spoke with a strange and powerful despair on this subject. He ended in a profound sadness and with the words of one scourged by doubts.

There was a pause, the shuffle of moving feet. Then the voice of the clerk announced the closing hymn. It was "Lead, Kindly Light," chosen by the harmonium player and submitted to Uniacke, who, however, had failed to notice that it was included in the list of hymns for the day. The clerk's voice struck on him like a blow. He stared down from the pulpit and met the upward gaze of his guest. Then he laid his cold hands on the wooden ledge of the pulpit and turned away his eyes. For he felt as if Sir Graham must understand the secret that lay in them. The islanders sang the hymn l.u.s.tily, bending their heads over their books beneath the dull oil lamps that filled the church with a dingy yellow twilight.

Alone, at the back of the building, the mad Skipper stood up by the belfry door and stared straight before him as if he watched. And Uniacke's trouble increased, seeming to walk in the familiar music which had been whistled by Jack Pringle as he swarmed to the mast-head, or turned into his bunk at night far out at sea. Sir Graham had spoken of intuitions. Surely, the clergyman thought, to-night he will feel the truth and my lie. To-night he will understand that it is useless to wait, that the wonder-child can never come to this island, for he came on the breast of the sea long ago. And if he does know, now, at this moment, while the islanders are singing,

"And with the morn those angel faces smile--"

how will he regard me, who have lied to him and who have preached to him, coward and hypocrite? For still the egoism was in Uniacke's heart.

There is no greater egoist than the good man who has sinned against his nature. He sits down eternally to contemplate his own soul. When the hymn was over Uniacke mechanically gave the blessing and knelt down. But he did not pray. His mind stood quite still all the time he was on his knees. He got up wearily, and as he made his way into the little vestry, he fancied that he heard behind him a sound as of some one tramping in sea-boots upon the rough church pavement. He looked round and saw the bland face of the clerk, who wore perpetually a little smile, like that of a successful public entertainer. That evening he wrote to Doctor Braybrooke.

On the morrow Sir Graham began the first sketch for his picture, "_The Procession of the Drowned to their faithful Captain_."

Three mornings later, when Uniacke came to the breakfast-table, Sir Graham, who was down before him, handed to him a letter, the envelope of which was half torn open.

"It was put among mine," he said in apology, "and as the handwriting was perfectly familiar to me, I began to open it."

"Familiar?" said Uniacke, taking the letter.