FullReads

During that walk he did indeed catch and fix the needed sentences. But, as it happened, he was never afterward able to recall one of them. All he remembered was that much rain must have fallen; for the pavements which had been dry in the morning were glistening, and the roadways muddy and with standing puddles. On his way homeward each of these puddles reflected the cold, pure light of the dying day, until Prospect Place might have been a street in the New Jerusalem, paved with jasper, beryl, and chrysoprase. So much he remembered, and also that his feet must have taken him back to the Hoe, where the crowd was thicker and the regatta drawing to an end–a few yachts only left to creep home under a greenish sky, out of which the wind was fast dying. He had paused somewhere to listen to a band: he could give no further account to himself.

For this was what had happened: as he entered his lodgings and closed the front door, the letter-box behind it fell open and he saw a sealed envelope lying inside. He picked it out and read the address.

“Mrs. Wilcox!” he called down the passage. “When did this come?”

Mrs. Wilcox, appearing at the kitchen door and wiping her hands, could not tell. The midday post or else the three o’clock. There were no others. Come to think of it, she had heard a postman’s knock when she was dishing up the dinner, but had supposed it to be next door. It sounded like next door.

Gilbart took the letter upstairs with him. The address was in Casey’s handwriting. “Queer fellow, Casey.” He broke the seal in the little bay window. “Just like him, though, to shake hands yesterday without a spark of feeling, and then send his good-byes to reach me after he was well on his way.” He drew out the inclosure, unfolded it, and saw that the paper bore the printed address of the Sailors’ Home where Casey dossed when ashore, and where writing-paper was supplied gratis. “Couldn’t have come ashore after I left him: he’d paid his bill at the Rest and his bag was aboard. Must have had this in his pocket all the time; might just as well have handed it to me–with instructions not to open it–and saved the stamp. What a secretive old chap it is!”

He held the letter close to his eyes in the waning daylight.

“DEAR JOHN,–By the time this reaches you we shall have started; and by then, or a little later, I shall have gone and the Berenice with me. If you ask where, I don’t know; but it is where we shall never meet.

“You serve your country in your own way. I am going to serve mine. Perhaps I shall also be serving yours; for it is only by striking terribly and without warning that the brave men in this world can get even with the cowards who make its laws.

“One thing I envy you–you’ll be alive to see the rage of the sheep. I am playing this hand alone and without help. So when your silly newspapers begin to cry out about secret societies, you will know. I never belonged to one in my life.

“I think I am sorriest about the way you’ll think of me. But that makes no real difference, because I know it to be foolish. I have the stuff on board and the little machine. I cannot fix the time to an hour up or down; but you may take it for sure that some time between 10 p.m. and midnight the Berenice will be at the bottom of the sea with

“Yours, P. C.”

While John Gilbart read this there was silence in the stuffy little room, and for some minutes after. Then he stepped to the mantelpiece for the match-box and candle. A small ormolu clock ticked there, and while he groped for the matches he put out a hand to stop the noise, which had suddenly grown intolerable. He desisted, remembering that he did not know how the clock worked–that Mrs. Wilcox, who wound it up religiously on Monday mornings, was proud of it, and–anyway, that wasn’t the machine he wanted to stop. He found a match, lit it and held it close to the letter.