The Pagan Madonna - Page 108/141

In the end Dennison spent his fury by travelling round the deck until the

sea and sky became like pearly smoke. Then he dropped into a chair and

fell asleep.

Cunningham had also watched through the night. The silent steersman heard

him frequently rustling papers on the chart table or clumping to the

bridge or lolling on the port sills--a restlessness that had about it

something of the captive tiger.

Retrospection--he could not break the crowding spell of it, twist mentally

as he would; and the counter-thought was dimly suicidal. The sea there; a

few strides would carry him to the end of the bridge, and then--oblivion.

And the girl would not permit him to enact this thought. He laughed. God

had mocked him at his birth, and the devil had played with him ever

since. He had often faced death hotly and hopefully, but to consider

suicide coldly!

A woman who had crossed his path reluctantly, without will of her own; the

sort he had always ignored because they had been born for the peace of

chimney corners! She--the thought of her--could bring the past crowding

upon him and create in his mind a suicidal bent!

Pearls! A great distaste of life fell upon him; the adventure grew flat.

The zest that had been his ten days gone, where was it?

Imagination! He had been cursed with too much of it. In his youth he had

skulked through alleys and back streets--the fear of laughter and ridicule

dogging his mixed heels. Never before to have paused to philosophize over

what had caused his wasted life! Too much imagination! Mental strabismus!

He had let his over-sensitive imagination wreck and ruin him. A woman's

laughter had given him the viewpoint of a careless world; and he had fled,

and he had gone on fleeing all these years from pillar to post. From a

shadow!

He was something of a monster. He saw now where the fault lay. He had

never stayed long enough in any one place for people to get accustomed to

him. His damnable imagination! And there was conceit of a sort. Probably

nobody paid any attention to him after the initial shock and curiosity

had died away. There was Scarron in his wheel chair--merry and cheerful

and brave, jesting with misfortune; and men and women had loved him.

A moral coward, and until this hour he had never sensed the truth! That

was it! He had been a moral coward; he had tried to run away from fate;

and here he was at last, in the blind alley the coward always found at the

end of the run. He had never thought of anything but what he was--never of

what he might have been. For having thrust him unfinished upon a

thoughtless rather than a heartless world he had been trying to punish

fate, and had punished only himself. A wastrel, a roisterer by night, a

spendthrift, and a thief!