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“It was when he was a subaltern that he made up his mind to the plunge. For years he had placed all his hopes and confidents in a book of verses he had wrote, and added to, and improved during that time. A little encouragement, a little word of praise, was all he looked for, and then he was ready to buckle to again, profitin’ by advice, and do better. He put all the love and beauty of his heart into that book, and at last, after doubt, and anguish, and much diffidents, he published it and give it to the world. Sir, it fell what they call still-born from the press. It was like a green leaf flutterin’ down in a dead wood. To a proud and hopeful man, bubblin’ with music, the pain of neglect, when he come to realize it, was terrible. But nothing was said, and there was nothing to say. In silence he had to endure and suffer.

“But one day, during maneuvers, there came to the camp a grey-faced man, a newspaper correspondent, and young Shrike knocked up a friendship with him. Now how it come about I cannot tell, but so it did that this skip-kennel wormed the lad’s sorrow out of him, and his confidents, swore he’d been damnabilly used, and that when he got back he’d crack up the book himself in his own paper. He was a fool for his pains, and a serpent in his cruelty. The notice come out as promised, and, my God! the author was laughed and mocked at from beginning to end. Even confidentses he had given to the creature was twisted to his ridicule, and his very appearance joked over. And the mess got wind of it, and made a rare story for the dog days.

“He bore it like a soldier, and that he became heart and liver from the moment. But he put something to the account of the grey-faced man and locked it up in his breast.

“He come across him again years afterwards in India, and told him very politely that he hadn’t forgotten him, and didn’t intend to. But he was anigh losin’ sight of him there for ever and a day, for the creature took cholera, or what looked like it, and rubbed shoulders with death and the devil before he pulled through. And he come across him again over here, and that was the last of him, as you shall see presently.

“Once, after I knew the Major (he were Captain then), I was a-brushin’ his coat, and he stood a long while before the glass. Then he twisted upon me, with a smile on his mouth, and says he,–

“‘The dog was right, Johnson: this isn’t the face of a poet. I was a presumtious ass, and born to cast up figgers with a pen behind my ear.’

“‘Captain,’ I says, ‘if you was skinned, you’d look like any other man without his. The quality of a soul isn’t expressed by a coat.’

“‘Well,’ he answers, ‘my soul’s pretty clean-swept, I think, save for one Bluebeard chamber in it that’s been kep’ locked ever so many years. It’s nice and dirty by this time, I expect,’ he says. Then the grin comes on his mouth again. ‘I’ll open it some day,’ he says, ‘and look. There’s something in it about comparing me to a dancing dervish, with the wind in my petticuts. Perhaps I’ll get the chance to set somebody else dancing by-and-by.’

“He did, and took it, and the Bluebeard chamber come to be opened in this very jail.

“It was when the system was lying fallow, so to speak, and the prison was deserted. Nobody was there but him and me and the echoes from the empty courts. The contract for restoration hadn’t been signed, and for months, and more than a year, we lay idle, nothing bein’ done.

“Near the beginnin’ of this period, one day comes, for the third time of the Major’s seein’ him, the grey-faced man. ‘Let bygones be bygones,’ he says. ‘I was a good friend to you, though you didn’t know it; and now, I expect, you’re in the way to thank me.’