The Sailor Part 74

She stood a moment, the tears running down her cheeks.

"You must go to that poor mariner," he said, with odd suddenness, trying now for the first time in all the long years to impose his will upon hers. "He has a very wonderful cargo on board. You and I--we owe it to each other and perhaps to future generations--to see that it comes into port."

Such a tone was startling. She had never heard it before. A new and very potent voice was speaking.

"There is no time to lose." This was Edward Ambrose raised to a higher power. "Every hour is going to count. If it is still possible, go and offer him a refuge from the storm."

She stood irresolute. But already she had begun to waver. A masculine nature in its new and full expression was turning the scale.

"If we go back at once," he said, "there will be time to catch the twelve o'clock train from Woking. You can telegraph to your maid. And Catherine Ellis will understand. Or you can write and explain."

Either the call was stronger than her weakness, or she had underrated the forces within herself. For suddenly she turned round and they began to retrace their steps along the road they had come.

Good walking gave them time for the midday train to Waterloo. Upon arrival at that terminus, shortly before one, they drove to a nursing home in Fitzroy Square.

Permission had already been obtained by Ambrose for Mary Pridmore to see Henry Harper. It was felt that her presence at his bedside could do no harm, although there was very little hope that it could do good.

At any rate, the nurse who received them made no difficulties about admitting her. Ambrose took leave of Mary on the doorstep in the casual rather whimsical way he affected in all his dealings with her, and then drove heroically to his club.

IV

The Sailor lay breathing heavily. He was still just able to keep on keeping on. But in spite of the darkened room and the blindness of his eyes, he knew at once that she had come to him ... the incarnation of the good, the beautiful, and the true ... gray-eyed Athena, with the plumes in her helmet.

His prayer had been heard, his faith had been answered. He knew she had come to him, this emanation of the divine justice and the divine mercy, even before her lips had breathed his name ... that name which through eons of time, as it seemed, he had been striving to fix in the chaos that once had been his brain.

V

It was rather less than a year later that Edward Ambrose, seated in his favorite chair in his rooms in Bury Street, knocked out the ashes of a last pipe before turning in. He had already given a startled glance at the clock on the chimney piece, and had found it was a quarter past three in the morning.

The truth was he had been oblivious of the flight of time for a good many hours. And the cause of this lapse was a bulky bundle of ma.n.u.script which was still on his knees. It had come to him from abroad with a letter the previous day. And having read the last page and having cleared the debris from his pipe, he yet returned the pipe, empty as it was, to his mouth and then read the letter again.

It said:

MY DEAR EDWARD,

In praying you to accept the dedication of what to you and none other I venture to call an epic of that strange and terrible thing, the unsubduable soul of Man, I make one more demand on your patience. I feel that only a very brave man could father such a thing as this poor mariner. It is not that he has not proved to be a stouter fellow than could ever have been hoped. To say otherwise would be black ingrat.i.tude to those who sought him out on the open sea and brought him safely into port. If his book is more than was to have been expected, it is yet less than the future promises now that other new, or shall we say _recovered_ worlds, are continually opening to the gaze of the astonished sailorman as with Athena by his side he roams the sh.o.r.es of his native Ithaca.

Drink deep, O muse, of the Pierian spring, Unlock the doors of memory.

If this prayer is heard, on a day Ulysses may proclaim in native wood-notes wild the goodness of the living G.o.d, and hymn the glories of a universe that man, ill-starred as he may be, is powerless to defile.

Even if such power is not granted to the mariner, he will yet have a happiness he had not thought possible for mortal men to know. And she who had Wisdom for her G.o.dmother, I hope and pray she is also happy in self-fulfillment. If this is a fatal egotism, I am not afraid to expose it to you. The mariner is not so blind that he does not see that it is a more developed, a far higher form of our species who sits with his old pipe in his favorite chair in Bury Street, St. James', frowning over this ridiculous letter. You and she begin where he leaves off. What virtue both must have inherited! And who shall dare to say how terribly a man may be punished for lack of virtue in his ancestors.

We send you our blessing and our affection.

H.H.

Having reread this letter, Edward Ambrose turned again to the concluding pages of the ma.n.u.script still lying upon his knees. The clock on the chimney piece struck four, but no heed was paid to it.

The empty pipe was still between his teeth when finally he exclaimed: "Yes, it's wonderful ... very wonderful. It is even more wonderful than I had hoped."

He then took the pipe from his mouth and found the stem was bitten right through.