Antony Gray,—Gardener - LM

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death had summoned him hurriedly from college. A quixotic, and, it is to be feared, culpable generosity on Richard Gray’s part had left his son penniless.

      Antony had accepted the fact stoically, and even cheerfully. He had looked straight at the generosity, denying the culpability, thereby preserving what he valued infinitely more than lands or gold—his father’s memory, thus proving himself in very truth his son. He had no ties to bind him; he was an only child, and his mother was long since dead. He set out on his own route, a route which had led him far, and finally had landed him, some five years previously, on the African veldt, where he had become the owner of the small farm he now occupied.

      After all, there had been compensations in the life. All unconsciously he had taken for his watch-word the cry: “I will succeed in spite of …” rather than the usual old lament: “I could succeed if. …” Naturally there had been difficulties. He had considered them grave-eyed and silent; he had tackled them smiling and singing. Inwardly he was the same Antony who had conquered the gorse-stick on the moorland; outwardly—well, he didn’t make the fight so obvious. That was all the difference.

      And now, sitting on the stoep with the silence of the African night around him, he tried to shape his plans, to bring them forth from the glamour of the marvellous which had enshrouded them, to marshal them up into coherent everyday form. But the glamour refused to be dispelled. Everything, the smallest and most prosaic detail, stood before him bathed in its light. It was all so gorgeously unexpected, so—so stupendously mysterious.

      And through all the glamour, the unexpectedness, and the mystery, there was sounding an ever-repeated chord of music, composed of the notes of youth, happiness, memory, desire, and expectation. And, thus combined, they struck the one word—England.

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       Table of Contents

      The Fort Salisbury was cutting her way through the translucent green water. Cape Town, with Table Mountain and the Lion’s Head beyond it, was vanishing into the increasing distance.

      Antony had taken his passage on the Fort Salisbury for three reasons: number one, she was the first boat sailing from Cape Town after he had dispatched his momentous cablegram; number two, he had a certain diffidence regarding the expenditure of other people’s money, and his passage on the Fort Salisbury would certainly be lower than on a mail boat; number three, a curious and altogether unaccountable impulse had impelled him to the choice. This reason had, perhaps unconsciously, weighed with him considerably more than the other two. He often found instinct throwing itself into the balance for or against the motives of mere reason. When it was against mere reason, matters occasionally complicated themselves in his mind. It had been a comfort to find, in this case, reason on the same side of the scale as instinct.

      Antony, leaning on the rail of the upper deck, was content, blissfully content. The sole speck that marred his entire enjoyment was the fact that the rules of the boat had separated him, pro tem, from an exceedingly perplexed and distressed puppy. It was the perplexity and distress of the said puppy that caused the speck, rather than the separation. Antony, with the vaster wisdom vouchsafed to humans, knew the present separation to be of comparatively short duration, and to be endured in the avoidance of a possibly infinitely longer one. Not so Josephus. He suffered in silence, since his deity had commanded the silence, but the perplexed grief in his puppy heart found an echo in Antony’s.

      It was a faint echo, however. Time and a daily visit would bring consolation to Josephus; and, for himself, the present adventure—it was an adventure—was all-absorbing and delicious. He revelled in it like a schoolboy on a holiday. He watched the sparkling water, the tiny rippling waves; he felt the freshness of the sea breeze, and the throb of the engine like a great living heart in the body of the boat. The fact that there were other people on her decks concerned him not at all. Those who have travelled a good deal become, generally speaking, one of two types—the type that is quite enormously interested in everyone, and the type that is entirely indifferent to any one. Antony was of this last type. He had acquired a faculty for shutting his mental, and to a great degree, his physical eyes to his human fellows, except in so far as sheer necessity compelled. Naturally this did not make for popularity; but, then, Antony did not care much for popularity. The winning of it would have been too great an effort for his nature; the retaining of it, even more strenuous. Of course the whole thing is entirely a question of temperament.

      A few of the other passengers looked somewhat curiously at the tall lean man gazing out to sea; but, as he was so obviously oblivious of their very existence, so entirely absorbed in his contemplation of the ocean, they left him undisturbed.

      It was not till the dressing bugle sounded that he roused himself, and descended to his cabin. It was a matter for his fervent thanksgiving that he had found himself the sole occupant of the tiny two-berthed apartment.

      He arrayed himself with scrupulous care. Only the most stringent exigencies of time and place—though they for a while had been frequent—had ever caused him to forego the ceremonial of donning dress clothes for dinner, though no eyes but his own should behold him. Latterly there had been Riffle and then Josephus to behold, and the former to marvel. Josephus took it, puppy-like, as a matter of course.

      There were not a vast number of passengers on the boat. Of the four tables in the dining saloon, Antony found only two fully laid, and a third partially so. His own place was some three seats from the captain’s left. The chair on the captain’s right was, as yet, unoccupied. For the rest, with but one or two exceptions at the other tables, the passengers had already put in an appearance. The almost entire absence of wind, the smoothness of the ocean, had given courage even to those the most susceptible to the sea’s malady. It would have required a really vivid imagination to have perceived any motion in the boat other than the throbbing of her engines.

      Antony slipped into his seat, and a steward placed a plate of clear soup before him. In the act of taking his first spoonful, he paused, his eyes arrested by the sight of a woman advancing towards the chair on the captain’s right.

      At the first glance, Antony saw that she was a tall woman, dressed in black unrelieved save for ruffles of soft creamy lace at her throat and wrists. Presently he took in further details, the dark chestnut of her hair, the warm ivory of her skin, the curious steady gravity of her eyes—grey or violet, he was not sure which—the straight line of her eyebrows, the delicate chiselling of her nose, and the red-rose of her mouth. And yet, in spite of seeing the details, they were submerged in the personality which had first arrested him. Something within him told him as clearly as spoken words, that here, in her presence, lay the explanation of the instinct which had prompted him to take his passage on this boat.

      An odd little thrill of unaccountable excitement ran through him. He felt like a man who had been shown a page in his own life-book, and who found the words written thereon extraordinarily and amazingly interesting. He found himself longing, half-inarticulately, to turn the leaf; and, yet, he knew that Time’s hand alone could do this. He could only read as far as the end of the open page before him. And that page but recorded the fact of her presence.

      Once, during the repast, her eyes met his, steady, grave, and yet with a little note of half interrogation in them. Again Antony felt that odd little thrill run through him, this time intensified, while his heart beat and pounded under his immaculate white shirt-front.

      Perhaps it is a mercy that shirt-fronts, to say nothing of other things, do hide the vagaries of our hearts. It would be a sorry thing for us if the world at large could perceive them—the joy, the anguish, the remorse, and the bitter little disappointments. Yes, above all, the bitter little disappointments, the cause possibly so trivial, so childish almost, yet the hurt, the wound, so very real, the pain so horribly poignant. It is the little stab which smarts

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