THE SIGN OF THE HEART

Chapter 3

The sway of Lilith Ormskirk over the saloon and quarter-deck of the Persian

was as complete as any woman's sway ever is. From the grizzled captain—

nominally under whose charge she was making the voyage—down to the newly

emancipated schoolboy going out to seek employment, the male element was,

with scarcely an exception, her collective slave. Among the women, of course,

her rule was less complete; those who were furthest from all possibility of

rivalling her in attractiveness of person or charm of manner being, of course, the

most virulent in their jealousy and the expression thereof. Lilith, however, cared

nothing for this, or, if she did, gave no sign. She was never bitter, even towards

those whom she knew to be among her worst detractors, never spiteful. She was

not faultless, not by any means, but her failings did not lie in the direction of

littleness. But she always seemed bright and happy, and full of life—too much

so, thought more than one of her perfervid adorers, who would fain have

monopolized her.

She was in the mid-twenties—that age when the egotism and rather narrow

enthusiasms and prejudices of the girl shade off into the graciousness and savoirvivre of womanhood. She could look back on more than one foolishness, from

whose results she had providentially escaped, with an uneasy shudder, followed

by a heartfelt thankfulness, and a sense of having not only learnt but profited by

experience, which sense enlarged her mind and her sympathies, and imparted to

her demeanour a self-possession and serenity beyond her years.

We said the male element, with scarce an exception, was her collective slave.

Such an exception was Laurence Stanninghame.

Without being a misogynist, he had no great opinion of women. He owned they

might be delightful—frequently were—up to a certain point, and this was the

point at which you began to take them seriously. But to treat any one of them as

though the sun had ceased to shine because her presence was withdrawn, struck

him as sheer insanity. It might be all right for youngsters like Holmes or

Swaynston, the licensed fool of the smoking room, or Dyson, to whose senile

enthusiasm for the mazy rout we have heard allusion made—the latter on the principle of "no fool like an old fool"; but not for him—not for a man in the

matured vigour of his physical and mental powers. Wherefore, when forced

himself to acknowledge the spell which Lilith had begun to weave around him,

he unhesitatingly set it down to impaired nerves.

As a direct result, he avoided the cause. It was a cowardly course of action, he

told himself. He was afraid of her. If she could throw the magic of her sorcery

over him during a brief ten minutes of conversation, what the very deuce would

happen if he allowed himself to be drawn into anything approaching the easygoing shipboard intimacy—deck-walking by moonlight, chairs drawn up in a

snug corner during the heat of the day, and so forth! Who knew what latent

capacities for being made an ass of might not develop themselves within him. He

felt really alarmed.

Let it not be supposed that any scruple on the ground of conventionality,

obligation, what not, entered into his misgivings. For Laurence Stanninghame

had been clean disillusioned all along the line. He hadn't the shred of an illusion

left. He had started life with a fair stock-in-trade of good intentions and straight

ideas, and, indeed, had acted up to them honestly, and in good faith. But now?

—"I've had a h——l of a time!" he would exclaim to himself, during one of

those meditative gazes out seaward, for which we heard his younger friend

taking him to task. "Yes—just that." And now, only touching middle life, he

believed in nothing and nobody. He had become a cold, keen, strong-headed,

selfish cynic. If ever his mind reverted to the fresher and more generous

impulses or actions of his younger days, it was with a contemptuous self-pity.

His view of the morality of life now was just the amount of success, of

advantage, of gratification to be got out of it. He thoroughly indorsed the

principle of the old roué's advice to his grandson: "Be good, and you may be

happy—but you'll have d——d little fun," taking care to italicise the word

"may." For he had found that the first clause of the saw had brought him neither

happiness nor fun.

With his fellow-passengers on board the Persian he was neither popular nor the

reverse. Among the men, some liked him, others didn't. He was genial enough,

and good company in the smoking room, but wouldn't do anything in the way of

promoting the general amusement—and that voyage was a particularly lively

one in the matter of getting things up. The fair section of the saloon was puzzled,

and could not make up its mind whether to dislike him or not. For the first, he

consistently, though not ostentatiously, avoided it, instead of laying himself out

to make himself agreeable—though indications were not wanting that he could so make himself if he chose. For the second, the fact that he remained an

unknown quantity was in his favour, if only that the unfamiliarity of reserve—

mystery—never fails to appeal strongly to the minds of women—and savages.

It was not so difficult for him to avoid Lilith Ormskirk, if only that until that

morning he had hardly exchanged a hundred words with her at a time.

Wherefore the upshot of his resolve was noticeable neither by its object nor by

the passengers at large. Holmes, indeed, who, having recovered from his

consternation, had been secretly watching his friend, was anticipating the fun of

seeing the latter fall headlong into the pit whose brink he had so boldly skirted,

so openly derided. But he was disappointed. Laurence, if he referred to Lilith

again, did so in the same casual, indifferent way as before, nor did he ever

terminate any of his dreamy and seaward-gazing meditations in order to open

converse with her, even with such inducement as solitary propinquity on more

than one occasion.

"By Jove! the fellow is a cross between an icicle and a stone," quoth Holmes to

himself, in mingled wonder and disgust.

It was night—warm, sensuous, tropical night. There was dancing in the saloon,

and the glare from the skylight and the banging of the piano and chatter of

voices gave forth strange contrast to the awesome stillness of the great liquid

plain, the dewy richness of the air, the stars hanging in golden clusters from a

black vault, the fiery eye of some larger planet rolling and flashing among them

as the revolving beacon of a lighthouse. Here the muffled throb of the propeller,

and the rushing hiss of water as the prow of the great steamer sheared through

the placid surface, furrowing up on either side a long line of phosphorescent

wave. Such a contrast he who stood alone in the darkness, leaning over the

taffrail, could appreciate nicely.

There were quick, light footsteps. Somebody else was walking the deck. Well,

whoever it was, he himself was screened by the stem of one of the ship's boats

swung in and resting on chocks. They would not see him, which was all right,

for he was in a queer mood and not inclined to talk. After a turn or two, the

footsteps paused, then something brushed his elbow in the darkness, as suddenly

starting away, while a half-frightened voice exclaimed: "Oh, I beg your pardon. I couldn't see anything in the dark, just coming up out of

the light of the saloon, too. Why, it's Mr. Stanninghame!"

To one who had been out of doors even a few minutes it was not very dark, for

the stars were shining with vivid brilliancy. It needed not the sense of sight, that

of hearing was enough. Nay, more, a subtile sixth sense, whatever it might be,

had warned Laurence Stanninghame of the identity of the intruder.

"No case of mistaken identity here," he said. "But how is it you are all by

yourself?"

"Oh, I got tired of all the whirl and chatter. I craved for some fresh air, and so I

stole away," said Lilith. "Why, how heavy the dew is here in these tropical seas!"

she added, withdrawing her arm from the taffrail upon which she had begun to

lean.

The man, watching her furtively, said nothing for a moment. That same chord

within him thrilled to her voice, her propinquity. Doubtless his nerves, high

strung with recent worry, were playing the fool with him. He was conscious of a

kind of envenomed resentment, almost aversion; yet his chief misgiving at that

moment, which he recognized with added wrath, was lest she should leave him

as quickly as she had come.

"All by yourself as usual!" she went on, flashing at him a bright smile.

"Thinking, I suppose?"

"I don't know that I was. I believe I was trying to realize the immensity and

silence of the midnight ocean, as far as that tin-pot racket down there would

allow one to realize anything. Then it occurred to me how long it would take for

the intense solitude to drive a man mad if he were cast away alone in it."

"Not long, I should think," answered Lilith, gazing seriously out over the

smooth, oily sea. "The horror of it would soon do that for me."

"And yet why should it have such an effect at all?" he went on. "The grandeur of

the situation ought to counterpoise any such weakness. Given enough to support

life without undue stinting, with a certainty of rescue at the end, and, I think, a

fortnight as castaway in these waveless seas would be an uncommonly

interesting experience."

"What? A fortnight? A whole fortnight in ghastly solitude! Silence only broken

by the splash or snort of Heaven knows what horrible sea monster! Any consideration of peril apart, I am sure that one night of it would turn me into a

raving, gibbering lunatic."

"Perhaps. People are differently built. For my part, discounting the 'sea monster,'

I am certain I should enjoy the experience. For one thing, there would be no

post."

"But no more there is here on board," she said, struggling with the laugh which

the dry irrelevancy had brought to her lips.

"No—but there's—Swaynston."

This time the laugh came rippling outright, and through it came the sound of

footsteps.

"Oh, here you are, Miss Ormskirk. I've been looking for you everywhere. This is

our dance."

Lilith, catching the satirical twinkle in the other's eyes in the starlight, did not

know which way to turn to control an overmastering impulse to laugh

uninterruptedly for about five minutes, the cruel part of it being that the

interrupter was Swaynston himself.

The latter, a pursy individual, was holding out an arm somewhat in the attitude

of a seal's flipper; but Lilith did not take it.

"Do be very good-natured and excuse me," she said. "I don't want to dance any

more to-night; the noise and heat have made my head ache."

"Really, really? I'll find you a chair then, in some quiet corner," fussed

Swaynston. But Lilith seemed not enthusiastic over that allurement, and finally,

with some difficulty, she got rid of him; he grinning "from the teeth outwards,"

but consumed with fury nevertheless.

So that was why she had stolen away from them all, to slip up and talk in a quiet

corner with that fellow Stanninghame, who was probably some absconding

swindler, with a couple of detectives and a warrant waiting for him in Table

Bay? Thus Swaynston.

Nor would it have tended to allay his irritation could he have heard the object of

it after his departure.

"So you think he is worse than the post?" she said, with a laugh in her eyes. "Yet he is one of the most devoted of my—poodles."

The demure malice of her tone no more disconcerted the other than that former

endeavour to show him she had overheard his remarks by quoting his own

words.

"Oh, yes," was the unconcerned reply. "He sits up on his hind legs a little better

than any of them."

For a few moments she said nothing, seeming to have become infected with her

companion's dreamy meditativeness. Then:

"And you are not tired of the voyage yet? You were saying the other day that its

monotony was enjoyable."

"I say so still. Look!" he broke off, pointing to the sea.

A commotion was going on beneath its surface. Their grisly shapes vivid in the

disturbed phosphorescence, drawing a wake of flame behind them, rushed two

great sharks. Hither and thither they darted, every detail of their ugly forms

discernible on the framing of the phosphorescent blaze, even the set glare of the

cruel eye; and, no less nimble in swift doubling flashes, several smaller fish were

trying to evade the laws of nature—the absorption of the weakest, to wit. There

was something indescribably horrible in the fiery rush of the sea-demons

beneath the oily blackness of the tropical waters.

"How awful! how truly awful!" murmured Lilith, with a strong shudder of

repulsion, yet gazing as one fascinated at the weird sight.

"Yet it is the perfection of an object lesson, one that comes in just in time to

point the moral to my answer," he said. "If those fish, now in process of being

eaten, were caught and kept in an aquarium tank, it might be more monotonous

for them than furnishing fun and food to the first comer in the way of bigger

fish. Possibly they might yearn for the excitement of being harried, though I

doubt it. That sort of philosophy is reserved for us humans. If we knock our

heads against a brick wall we howl; if we haven't got a brick wall to knock them

against we howl louder."

"And the moral is?"

"Dona nobis pacem." "I see," she said at last, for it took her a little while to thoroughly grasp the

application, partly distracted as her thinking powers were in trying to find a

deeper meaning than the one intended. "Yet peace is a thing that no one can

enjoy in this world. How should they when the law of life is struggle—struggle

and strife?"

"Precisely. That, however, is due to the faultiness of human nature. The

philosophy of the matter is the same. Its soundness remains untouched."

"Yet you are not consistent. You were implying just now that, failing a brick wall

to knock our heads against, we started in search of one. Now does not that apply

to those who go out into the world—to the other end of the world—instead of

remaining peacefully at home?" she added, a sly sort of "I-have-you-there"

inflection in her tone.

"Pardon me. My consistency is all right. Begging a question will not shatter it."

"Begging a question?"

"Of course. For present purposes the said begging is comprised in the word

'peacefully.' See?"

"Ah!"

Again she was silent. The other, watching the flash of the starlight on the

meditative upturned eyes, the clearly marked brows, the firm setting of the lips,

was more conscious than ever of the latent witchery in the sweet, serene face. He

would not flee from its spells now, he decided. He would meet them boldly, and

throw them off, coil for coil, however subtilely, however dexterously they were

wound about him. Meanwhile, two things had not escaped him: She had yielded

the point gracefully, and convinced, instead of launching out into a voluble

farrago of irrelevant rubbish, as ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have

done in order to have "the last word." That argued sense, judgment, tact. Further,

she had avoided that vulgar commonplace, instinctive to the crude and

unthinking mind, of whatever s*x, of importing a personal application into an

abstract discussion. This, too, argued tact and mental refinement, both qualities

of rarer distribution among her s*x than is commonly supposed—qualities,

however, which Laurence Stanninghame was peculiarly able to appreciate.

Then she talked about other things, and he let her talk, just throwing in a word

here and there to stimulate the expansion of her ideas. And they were good ideas, too, he decided, listening keenly, and balancing her every point, whether he

agreed with it or not. He was interested, more vividly interested than he would

fain admit! This girl with the enthralling face and noble beauty of form, had a

mind as well. All the slavish adoration she received had not robbed her of that. It

was an experience to him, as they lounged there on the taffrail together in the

gold-spangled velvet hush of the tropical night. How delightfully companionable

she could be, he thought; so responsive, so discriminating and unargumentative.

Argumentativeness in women was a detestable vice, in his opinion, for it meant

everything but what the word itself etymologically did. Craftily he drew her out,

cunningly he touched up every fallacy or crudeness in her ideas, in such wise

that she unconsciously adopted his amendments, under the impression that they

were all her own.

"But—I have been boring you all this time," she broke off at last. "Confess now,

you who are nothing if not candid. I have been boring your life out?"

"Then, on your own showing, I am nothing, for I am not candid," he answered.

"On the contrary, it is an unadvisable virtue, and one calculated to corner you

without loophole. And you certainly have not been boring me."

He thought, sardonically, what any one of those whom he had caustically defined

as her "poodles" would give for an hour or so of similar boredom, if it involved

Lilith all to himself. Some of this must have been reflected in his eyes, for Lilith

broke in quickly:

"No, you are not candid. I accept the amendment. I can see the sarcasm in your

face."

"But not on that account," he rejoined tranquilly, and at the same time dropping

his hand on to hers as it rested on the taffrail. The act—an instinctive one—was

a dumb protest against the movement she had made to withdraw. And as such

Lilith read it; more potent in its impulsiveness than any words could have been.

"Listen!" he went on. "I suppose there is a sort of imp of scepticism sitting ever

upon one shoulder, and that is what you saw. Something in my thoughts

suggested a droll contrast, that was all. So far from boring me, you have afforded

me an intensely agreeable surprise."

"Now you are sneering again. I will not talk any more."

He recognized in her tone a quick sensitiveness—not temper. Accordingly his

own took on an unconscious softness, a phenomenally unwonted softness. "Don't be foolish, child. You know I was doing nothing of the sort. Go on with

what you were saying at once."

"What was I saying? Oh, I remember. That idea that board-ship life shows

people in their real character. Do you believe in it?"

"Only in the case of those who have no real character to show. Wherein is a

paradox. Those who have got any—well, don't show it, either on board ship or

on shore."

"I believe you are right. Now, my own character, do you think it shows out more

readable on board than it would on shore."

"Do you think you have me so transparently as that? What was I saying just now

on that head?"

"I see. Really, though, I had no ulterior motive. I asked the question in perfect

good faith. Tell me—if anyone can, you can. Tell me. Shall I make a success—a

good thing of life? I often wonder."

She threw up her head with a quick movement, and the wide, serious eyes, fixed

full upon his, seemed to flash in the starlight. He met the glance with one as

earnest and unswerving as her own.

"You rate my powers of vaticination too high," he said slowly, "and—you are

groping after an ideal."

"Perhaps. Tell me, though, what you think, character-reader as you are. Shall I

make a success of life?"

"I should think the chances were pretty evenly balanced either way, inclining, if

anything, to the reverse."

"Thanks. I shall remember that."

"But you are not obliged to believe it."

"No. I shall remember it. And now I must go below; it is nearly time for putting

out the saloon lights. Good-night. I have enjoyed our talk so much."

She had extended her hand, and as he took it, the sympathetic—was it magnetic?

—pressure was mutual, almost lingering.

"Good-night," he said. "The enjoyment has not been all on one side." Left alone, he returned to his solitary musings—tried to, rather, for there was no

"return" about the matter, because now they took an entirely new line. His late

companion would intrude upon them—nay, monopolized them. She had

appealed powerfully to his senses, to his mind, how long would it be before she

did so to his heart? He had avoided her—he alone—up till then, and yet now,

after this first conversation, he was convinced that of all gathered there he alone

knew the real Lilith Ormskirk as distinct from the superficial one known to the

residue. And to his mind recurred her former warning, laughingly uttered:

"Beware such unholy spells!" With a strange intoxicating recollection did that

warning recur, together with the consciousness that more than ever was it needed

now. But as against this was the protecting strength of a triple chain armour. Life

was only rendered interesting by such interesting character studies as this. Oh,

yes; that was the solution—that, and nothing more.

This was by no means the last talk they had—they two alone together. But it

seemed to Laurence Stanninghame that a warning note had been sounded, and

one of no uncertain nature. His tone became more acrid, his sarcasm more biting,

more envenomed. One day Lilith said:

"Why do you dislike me so?"

He started at the question, thrown momentarily off his guard.

"I don't dislike you," he answered shortly.

"Then why have you such a very poor opinion of me? You never lose an

opportunity of letting me see that you have. What have I done? What have I said

that you should think so poorly of me?"

There was no spice of temper, of resentment, in the tone. It was soft, and rather

pleading. The serious eyes were sweet and wistful. As his own met their steady

gaze, it seemed that a current of magnetic thought flashed from mind to mind.

"I hold no such opinion," he said, after a few moments of silence. "Perhaps I

dread those 'unholy spells,' thou sorceress. Ah! there goes the second dinner-bell.

Run away now, and make yourself more beautiful than ever—if possible."

A bright laugh flashed in the hazel eyes, and the white teeth showed in a smile.

"I'll try—since you wish it," she said over her shoulder, as she turned away.