The Survivor | Page 8

upon
the flying landscape, were set in a fixed, unseeing stare--surely the
fields were peopled with evil memories, and faces in the trees were
mocking him. So he remained for several moments as though in the
grip of a nightmare, and the lady watched him. There was a little
tragedy, then, behind.
"There was a man once," he said, "who drew a line through his life, and
said to himself that everything behind it concerned some other
person--not him. So with me. Such memories as I have, I shall strangle.
To-day I commence a new life."
She sighed.
"One's past" she said, "is not always so easily to be disposed of. There
are ghosts which will haunt us, and sometimes the ghosts are living
figures."
"Let them come to me," he murmured, "and my fingers shall be upon
their throats. I want no such legacies."
She shook her head slowly.
"Ghosts" she said, with a faint smile, "are sometimes very difficult
people to deal with."
CHAPTER IV
EXIT MR. DOUGLAS GUEST
Through the heart of England the express tore on--through town and

country, underneath the earth and across high bridges. All the while the
man and the woman talked. To him she was a revelation. Every
moment of his life had been spent in a humdrum seclusion--every
moment of hers seemed to have been lived out to its limit in those
worlds of which he had barely even dreamed. She was older than he
had thought her--thirty, perhaps, or thirty-one--and her speech and
gestures every now and then had a foreign flavour. She talked to him of
countries which he had scarcely dared hope to visit, and of men and
women whose names were as household words. She spoke of them
with an ease and familiarity which betokened close
acquaintance--talking to him with a mixture of kindness and reserve as
if he were some strange creature who had had the good fortune to
interest her for the moment, but from whom at any time she might draw
aloof. Every word she spoke he hung upon. He had come out into the
world to seek for adventures--not, indeed, in the spirit of the modern
Don Quixote, tingling only for new sensations to stimulate; but with the
more robust and breezy spirit of his ancestors, seeking for a fuller life
and a healthy excitement, even at the cost of hard blows and many
privations. Surely this was an auspicious start--an adventure this indeed!
During a momentary silence she looked across at him with genuine
curiosity, her eyes half closed, her brows knitted. What enthusiasm!
She was not a vain woman, and she knew that her personality had little,
if anything, to do with the flush upon his cheeks and the bright light in
his eyes. She herself, a much travelled, a learned, a brilliant, even a
famous woman, had become only lately conscious of a certain jaded
weariness in her outlook upon life. Even the best had begun to pall, the
sameness of it had commenced its fatal work. More than once lately a
touch of that heart languor, which is the fruit of surfeit, had startled her
by its numbing and depressing effect. Here at last was a new type--a
man with clean pages before him--young, emotional, without a doubt
intellectual. But for his awful clothes he was well enough to look upon,
he had no affectations, his instincts were apparently correct. His
manners were hoydenish, but there was nothing of the clown about him.
She asked him a direct question concerning himself.
"Tell me," she said, "what you really are. A worker, a student--or have
you a trade?"

He flushed up to his brows.
"I was brought up" he said, in a low tone, "for the ministry. It was no
choice of mine. I had an uncle and guardian who ruled our household
as he ruled everybody and everything with which he came in contact."
She was puzzled. To her the word sounded political.
"The ministry?"
"Yes. You remember when you first saw me? It was my first
appearance. I was to have been chosen pastor of that church."
"Oh!"
She looked at him now with something like amazement. This, then,
accounted for the sombreness of his clothes and his little strip of white
tie. She had only the vaguest ideas as to the conduct of those various
sects to be met with in English villages, but she had certainly believed
that the post of preacher was filled indifferently by any member of the
congregation, and she had looked upon his presence in the pulpit on
that last Sunday as an accident. To associate him with such an
occupation permanently seemed to her little short of the ridiculous. She
laughed softly, showing, for the first time, her brilliantly white teeth,
and his