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Page 9
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 good to her--not your people, nor
my people; but enough were good to her to make her see as much of the
world as she had used to. She never loved Thatcher, and she never
loved any of the men you brought into that trial except one, and he
treated her like a cur. That was myself. Well, what with trying to
please my family, and loving Alice Thatcher all the time and not
seeing her, and hating her too for bringing me into all that
notoriety--for I blamed the woman, of course, as a man always will--I
got to drinking, and then this scrape came and I had to run. I don't
care anything about that row now, or what you believe about it. I'm
here, shut off from my home, and that's a worse punishment than any
damn lawyers can invent. And the man's well again. He saw I was drunk;
but I wasn't so drunk that I didn't know he was trying to do me, and I
pounded him just as they say I did, and I'm sorry now I didn't kill
him."
Holcombe stirred uneasily, and the man at his side lowered his voice
and went on more calmly:
"If I hadn't been a gentleman, Holcombe, or if it had been another
cabman he'd fought with, there wouldn't have been any trouble about
it. But he thought he could get big money out of me, and his friends
told him to press it until he was paid to pull out, and I hadn't the
money, and so I had to break bail and run. Well, you've seen the
place. You've been here long enough to know what it's like, and what
I've had to go through. Nobody wrote me, and nobody came to see me;
not one of my own sisters even, though they've been in the Riviera all
this spring--not a day's journey away. Sometimes a man turned up that
I knew, but it was almost worse than not seeing any one. It only made
me more homesick when he'd gone. And for weeks I used to walk up and
down that beach there alone late in the night, until I got to thinking
that the waves were talking to me, and I got queer in my head. I had
to fight it just as I used to have to fight against whiskey, and to
talk fast so that I wouldn't think. And I tried to kill myself
hunting, and only got a broken collar-bone for my pains. Well, all
this time Alice was living in Paris and New York. I heard that some
English captain was going to marry her, and then I read in the Paris
_Herald_ that she was settled in the American colony there, and
one day it gave a list of the people who'd been to a reception she
gave. She could go where she pleased, and she had money in her own
right, you know; and she was being revenged on me every day. And I was
here knowing it, and loving her worse than I ever loved anything on
earth, and having lost the right to tell her so, and not able to go to
her. Then one day some chap turned up from here and told her about me,
and about how miserable I was, and how well I was being punished. He
thought it would please her, I suppose. I don't know who he was, but I
guess he was in love with her himself. And then the papers had it that
I was down with the fever here, and she read about it. I _was_
ill for a time, and I hoped it was going to carry me off decently, but
I got up in a week or two, and one day I crawled down here where we're
standing now to watch the boat come in. I was pretty weak from my
illness, and I was bluer than I had ever been, and I didn't see
anything but blackness and bitterness for me anywhere. I turned around
when the passengers reached the pier, and I saw a woman coming up
those stairs. Her figure and her shoulders were so like Alice's that
my heart went right up into my throat, and I couldn't breathe for it.
I just stood still staring, and when she reached the top of the steps
she looked up, breathing with the climb, and laughing; and she says,
'Lloyd, I've come to see you.' And I--I was that lonely and weak that
I grabbed her hand, and leaned back against the railing, and cried
there before the whole of them. I don't think she expected it exactly,
because she didn't know what to do, and just patted me on the
shoulder, and said, 'I thought I'd run down to cheer you up a bit; and
I've brought Mrs. Scott with me to chaperon us.' And I said, without
stopping to think: 'You wouldn't have needed any chaperon, Alice, if I
hadn't been a cur and a fool. If I had only asked what I can't ask of
you now'; and, Holcombe, she flushed just like a little girl, and
laughed, and said, 'Oh, will you, Lloyd?' And you see that ugly iron
chapel up there, with the corrugated zinc roof and the wooden cross on
it, next to the mosque? Well, that's where we went first, right from
this wharf before I let her go to a hotel, and old Ridley, the English
rector, he married us, and we had a civil marriage too. That's what
she did for me. She had the whole wide globe to live in, and she gave
it up to come to Tangier, because I had no other place but Tangier,
and she's made my life for me, and I'm happier here than I ever was
before anywhere, and sometimes I think--I hope--that she is, too."
Carroll's lips moved slightly, and his hands trembled on the rail. He
coughed, and his voice was gentler when he spoke again. "And so," he
added, "that's why I felt it last night when you refused to meet her.
You were right, I know, from your way of thinking, but we've grown
careless down here, and we look at things differently."
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