The Exiles and Other Stories | Page 9

wondered hotly if they were
laughing at him. He assured himself that it was a matter of indifference
to him if they were. And with this he had a wish that they would not
think of him as holding himself aloof. One of the women began to sing
to a guitar, and to the accompaniment of this a man and a young girl
came out upon the balcony below, and spoke to each other in low,
earnest tones, which seemed to carry with them the feeling of a caress.
Holcombe could not hear what they said, but he could see the curve of
the woman's white shoulders and the light of her companion's cigar as
he leaned upon the rail with his back to the moonlight and looked into
her face. Holcombe felt a sudden touch of loneliness and of being very
far from home. He shivered slightly as though from the cold, and
stepping inside closed the window gently behind him.
Although Holcombe met Carroll several times during the following day,
the latter obviously avoided him, and it was not until late in the
afternoon that Holcombe was given a chance to speak to him again.
Carroll was coming down the only street on a run, jumping from one
rough stone to another, and with his face lighted up with excitement.
He hailed Holcombe from a distance with a wave of the hand. "There's
an American man-of-war in the bay," he cried; "one of the new ones.
We saw her flag from the hotel. Come on!" Holcombe followed as a
matter of course, as Carroll evidently expected that he would, and they
reached the end of the landing-pier together, just as the ship of war ran
up and broke the square red flag of Morocco from her main-mast and
fired her salute.
"They'll be sending a boat in by-and-by," said Carroll, "and we'll have a
talk with the men." His enthusiasm touched his companion also, and
the sight of the floating atom of the great country that was his moved
him strongly, as though it were a personal message from home. It came
to him like the familiar stamp, and a familiar handwriting on a letter in
a far-away land, and made him feel how dear his own country was to
him and how much he needed it. They were leaning side by side upon
the rail watching the ship's screws turning the blue waters white, and
the men running about the deck, and the blue-coated figures on the
bridge. Holcombe turned to point out the vessel's name to Carroll, and
found that his companion's eyes were half closed and filled with tears.
Carroll laughed consciously and coughed. "We kept it up a bit too late

last night," he said, "and I'm feeling nervous this morning, and the sight
of the flag and those boys from home knocked me out." He paused for
a moment, frowning through his tears and with his brow drawn up into
many wrinkles. "It's a terrible thing, Holcombe," he began again,
fiercely, "to be shut off from all of that." He threw out his hand with a
sudden gesture toward the man-of-war. Holcombe looked down at the
water and laid his hand lightly on his companion's shoulder. Carroll
drew away and shook his head. "I don't want any sympathy," he said,
kindly. "I'm not crying the baby act. But you don't know, and I don't
believe anybody else knows, what I've gone through and what I've
suffered. You don't like me, Holcombe, and you don't like my class, but
I want to tell you something about my coming here. I want you to set
them right about it at home. And I don't care whether it interests you or
not," he said, with quick offense; "I want you to listen. It's about my
wife."
Holcombe bowed his head gravely.
"You got Thatcher his divorce," Carroll continued. "And you know that
he would never have got it but for me, and that everybody expected that
I would marry Mrs. Thatcher when the thing was over. And I didn't,
and everybody said I was a blackguard, and I was. It was bad enough
before, but I made it worse by not doing the only thing that could make
it any better. Why I didn't do it I don't know. I had some grand ideas of
reform about that time, I think, and I thought I owed my people
something, and that by not making Mrs. Thatcher my mother's daughter
I would be saving her and my sisters. It was remorse, I guess, and I
didn't see things straight. I know now what I should have done. Well, I
left her and she went her own way, and a great many people felt sorry
for her, and were