“When I was sure the boat had gone I returned to our camping place, and bound my wounds with strips torn off my shirt. Then I fell asleep. I must have developed fever in my slumber, for I have no clear recollections of the next few days. I vaguely recall roaming like a demented being among those solitudes in search of water, and finding a boiling spring. The water, when cooled, was drinkable. I suppose that saved my life. For food, there was shell-fish and mutton-bird eggs, with no lack of boiling water to cook them.
“I lived there so long that I forgot the flight of time. I became a wild man—a mere shaggy animal, living, eating, and sleeping like a beast.
“I was rescued by a passing steamer at last, rescued without any effort of my own, for I had gone past caring. From the ship they saw me leaping about the naked sides of the volcanic hills like a goat, and they put off a boat. Some lady passengers were badly scared when I was brought aboard—and no wonder. They were very kind to me on that ship. She was homeward bound, and brought me to England. I told the captain my story, but I could see that he didn’t believe me, so I told nobody else. Not that anybody wanted to know—really. One’s misfortunes are never interesting to other people.
“I had a little money left when I landed in England—not much, but sufficient to take me to my wife and support me until I found Robert Turold. I had left my wife living with her parents in a London suburb. Robert Turold and I had both been in love with her before we left England. She loved me, but he had some strange kind of influence over her—the dominance of a strong nature over a weak, I think. Or perhaps it was a more primitive feminine instinct. He was always the strong man—even then—ruthless, determined. It was strange that he should have loved such a gentle timid creature, though that, perhaps, was not so strange as a man like Robert Turold loving any woman. But love her he did.
“She had a great capacity for affection—she was one of those women who have to love, and be loved. Her guileless face, her appealing eyes, seemed to beseech the protection of a masculine shield in a world which has no mercy for the weak. She was born to be guided, to be led. It was my fear of her simple trustful disposition which led me to urge her to marry me secretly before I left England with Turold. Her parents did not favour me, and they wished their daughter to marry well—there was an aunt from whom she had expectations, and the aunt had a prospective husband in view for her. I feared their joint influence. She consented willingly enough; she was easy to persuade—on the eve of our parting. She clung to me weeping—her husband.
“I was to make enough money to return to England to claim her in a year or so—that was the plan. But I had been absent nearly three when I was left on the island. And another twelve months passed before I reached England again. Four years! A long time. Almost any combination of circumstances can be brought about in such a period. People die, marry, or can be forgotten as though they had never existed. It was my lot to be forgotten.
“I hastened to London, to my wife’s old home, and learnt that the family no longer lived there. Where had they gone to? The maid who opened the door could not tell me—she did not know. At my request she went for her mistress. The lady of the house came down to me, a tall slender woman, indifferent, but well-bred enough to be polite. She had taken the house from the Bruntons, she said. It was too large for them after their daughter’s marriage. It was dusk, and she could not see my face, but she heard my startled exclamation—‘Married? To whom?’ To a Mr. Turold—a very suitable match. They had been married for some months, and she was expecting a child.
“How she gathered that last piece of information I do not know. Perhaps she and Mrs. Brunton exchanged letters—women write to one another on the slightest pretexts. That thought made me cautious. Fortunately, I had not given my name. I thanked her, and rose to go. She offered to write down the Bruntons’ address for me (they had gone to live in the country), but I said I could remember it. And I got away from the house in the gathering darkness without her actually seeing my face—not that it would have mattered much, if she had.
“I thought it all over that night. I visualized readily enough what had happened. Robert Turold, returning to England with some concocted story of my death, had swept her off her feet, caught her on the rebound. He had returned a prosperous man, and doubtless his love-making was reinforced by Alice’s worldly parents and the match-making old aunt. The combination was a strong one, and I was supposed to be dead. So she married him, without breathing a word to anybody of her previous secret marriage to me. I realized that at once. She would be too afraid—left to herself. She would tell herself that it wasn’t worth while—that nobody need ever know now. I could imagine her twisting her little hands together in apprehension as she faced the problem—our secret—then gradually becoming calmer as something whispered in her ear that it was her secret now, and need not be told. You see, I knew her nature so well. There are many such natures—gentle souls who shrink from responsibility in a world which, sooner or later, generally sees to it that we are compelled to shoulder the burden of our own acts.
“I was not long in making up my mind. I determined to do nothing. I take no special credit to myself for that decision. The marriage with Robert Turold was an accomplished fact, and my belated reappearance upon the scene would have plunged her in unhappiness. She was about to become a mother, too. That weighed with me. I loved her far too well to injure her or her child. It meant letting Robert Turold go free if I remained dead, but there are other things in life besides money and revenge. Fortunately the position from the practical point of view was simplified by the death of my only relative, my uncle, during my absence from England, who had bequeathed his small property to me—not much, but sufficient for my own simple needs.
“I took my uncle’s name, the better to conceal my identity, and resumed the medical studies which had been interrupted by my departure from England four years before. When I received my degree I searched for a remote spot where I was not likely to encounter any one who had known me in my past life, and chose this lonely part of the Cornish coast. And here I have remained for thirty years.
“They have not been unhappy years. It was not my disposition to waste my life by hugging the illusions of the past. My days were occupied walking long distances to see my patients scattered at distant intervals on this desolate coast, and my nights I spent in antiquarian and archaeological studies, which were always a favourite pursuit of mine. It was a hobby which earned me some local repute in the course of the years, and was ultimately the means of bringing me face to face with Robert Turold again. That was the last thing in the world I desired to happen. In the early years I used to think of him wedded to my wife, and wonder whether he had succeeded in his great ambition. After a while the memory faded, as most memories do with the passing of the years.
“Then the meeting came—six months ago. I heard Flint House was let, though not to whom. The news did not interest me. But next evening, when I returned from my rounds, my servant met me at the door with the information that the new tenant of Flint House was in the consulting-room waiting to see me.
“I went in. The tall elderly figure sitting there rose at my entrance and said: ‘Not a patient, doctor—quite another matter.’ I started slightly at the familiar ring to that harsh authoritative voice, but I did not know who he was until he handed me his card. He had already commenced talking about that accursed title as he did so, and he did not notice my agitation. He had come to Cornwall in pursuit of the last pieces of evidence for his family tree, and some local busybody had told him that I was versed in Cornish antiquities and heraldry. That piece of information had brought him to me. He begged for my assistance—my valuable assistance—in elucidating the last scraps of his genealogy from the graves of the past.
“I could have cut him short by laughing aloud—though not in mirth. I had regained my self-command, for I saw that he had not the slightest suspicion to whom he was talking. That in itself was not surprising. I had not recognized him. And how much greater was the change in my own case! Time alters us all in a much less period than thirty years, and there was more than the passage of time. Those months of horrible solitude on that island had changed me into an old man in appearance, with grey hair, and bleared and weak eyes from the sulphur fumes. And Time had made the disguise impenetrable in the thirty added years. I was an old man. My hair and beard were white, and I wore thick glasses. I felt I need be under no apprehension of Robert Turold recognizing me—then, or at any time, unless I was careless.
“His request for my help had a strange fascination for me. There was an uncanny thrill in sitting there within an arm’s length of him, meeting his unsuspicious glance, and listening to him with the knowledge that I could have put his plans and ambitions to flight with a single word, and had him begging for mercy. I was in the position of Providence, and withheld my hand, as Providence generally does. My desire to punish Robert Turold had long since died. At sixty, revenge is a small thing. What is human retribution to the ferocity of Time’s revenge on us all? Retribution and Justice—these are human catchwords, signifying nothing. What is Justice? Who is to judge when the scales are even? It was easier to comply with his request than arouse suspicion by refusal, but that wasn’t what weighed with me. I wanted to see more of him, to win his confidence, if possible. I was curious to know what kind of life he had given the woman for whose sake I had let him go free for thirty years.
“He took a liking to me. My knowledge of ancient Cornish lore proved useful in the final stages of his search—his thirty years’ search for a family tree. It was not long before I discovered that he had found no happiness in life. At times his face wore a hunted look—the look of a man who walked his days in fear. His imperfect vision peered out on a darkened world with apprehension, though not of me. In my strange position with him I felt like a ghost permitted to watch, unseen and unsuspected, the travail of a gloomy solitary mind. It was apparent enough, but only to me. My quickened eyes pierced the outward husk and saw within. I thought I had outlived my desire for revenge, but it grew again at the sight of a punishment which was so much more subtle than anything I could have planned. Death would have put his restless soul to sleep, granted him eternal respite. The sufferings of the spirit were a living torment. His was a strange case. His lifelong pursuit of a single idea, his restricted consciousness of one image, had made him morbid, lonely, introspective. And so the past had revisited him, darkening and disquieting his mind. He feared shadows, he was haunted by footsteps.
“Footsteps! I learnt that when he consulted me for sleeplessness. He told me he used to lie awake at night, imagining he heard footsteps pattering on the rocks outside. I knew well enough whose footsteps he was haunted by. I imagined him lying there in that lonely house, sweating with horror, listening … listening. He asked me once, did I believe in ghosts? I told him no, but I said I’d known a case of man returning to life long after he was supposed to be dead. I related the story—one which had come under my observation as a medical man. He listened with gnawing lip and pale face, and from my window afterwards I saw him striding home across the moors, glancing backwards in the dusk.
“It was his own fault that he ever heard those footsteps in the way he feared. He did not play the game, according to our poor conception of what the game is. If he had done so he would have been quite safe from me. But there are some things too shocking to be contemplated, even in the worst of our kind. A man does not give away a woman—that is one of the rules. Robert Turold put a woman to shame in her coffin.
“I had kept out of her way, never going to Flint House because I feared her feminine eyes might be too sharp for me. But she fell ill, and Robert Turold asked me to attend her. Refusal was impossible, as there was no other doctor nearer than Penzance.
“She did not recognize me—at first, but the shock I received when I saw her left me almost stunned. I had carried her memory through the years—the image of a pretty slim girl, with brown hair and eyes, and kind of soft vivacity which was her greatest charm. In her place I found, lying there, a withered grey woman with dim eyes and broken spirit. God knows what she had gone through at his hands, but it had destroyed her.
“It was her death-bed. She was worn out in body and spirit, and had no strength to rally. She was weeks dying, but her life was steadily ebbing all that time. It was a kind of slow fever. She was delirious when I first saw her, and delirious or unconscious, with few lucid intervals, until she died. And the jargon of her wandering mind was in reality the outpouring of a tortured soul. It was the title and the family name—always that, and nothing else. She wasn’t well-born enough or sufficiently educated to bear the title as his wife—it seemed that that fact had been impressed on her again and again in the long lean years of the search for the family tree. Let her go away … go away somewhere quietly with Sisily, and she would never bother him any more. That was the unceasing burden of her cry, a cry to which I was compelled to listen with a torn heart.
“The reserve, the frame of mind, which I wore like armour in Robert Turold’s company I dropped altogether at her bedside. Her lucid intervals were few, but I was not afraid of her recognizing the old Cornish doctor with his muffler, his glasses, his shaggy white hair and beard. The daily sight of her shrunken ageing features reminded me that I had nothing to fear—that Time had effectually disguised us from each other’s recognition. We were old, we two. Life had receded from us—what had we to do with its fever, its regrets, its passions and futile joys? The clock had ticked the time away, the fire was dying out, the hearth desolate and cold. I was resigned before, I was resigned then. I did what I could for her, which was little enough. Human progress, such as it is, has been acquired through the spirit. The body defies us—we have no control over it. So she died—mercifully unconscious most of the time—and died, as I had hoped, without the least suspicion of the truth.
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