第37章

All the human thought and feeling which have passed into it through the patient toil of art, remain forever embodied there.A picture is the most living and personal thing that a man can leave behind him.When we look at it we see what he saw, hour after hour, day after day, and we see it through his mood and impression, coloured by his emotion, tinged with his personality.Surely, if the spirits of the dead are not extinguished, but only veiled and hidden, and if it were possible by any means that their presence could flash for a moment through the veil, it would be most natural that they should come back again to hover around the work into which their experience and passion had been woven.Here, if anywhere, they would "Revisit the pale glimpses of the moon." Here, if anywhere, we might catch fleeting sight, as in a glass darkly, of the visions that passed before them while they worked.

This much of my train of reasoning along the edge of the dark, Iremember sharply.But after this, all was confused and misty.The shore of consciousness receded.I floated out again on the ocean of forgotten dreams.When I woke, it was with a quick start, as if my ship had been made fast, silently and suddenly, at the wharf of reality, and the bell rang for me to step ashore.

But the vision of the white blot remained clear and distinct.And the question that it had brought to me, the chain of thoughts that had linked themselves to it, lingered through the morning, and made me feel sure that there was an untold secret in Falconer's life and that the clew to it must be sought in the history of his last picture.

But how to trace the connection? Every one who had known Falconer, however slightly, was out of town.There was no clew to follow.

Even the name "Larmone" gave me no help; for I could not find it on any map of Long Island.It was probably the fanciful title of some old country-place, familiar only to the people who had lived there.

But the very remoteness of the problem, its lack of contact with the practical world, fascinated me.It was like something that had drifted away in the fog, on a sea of unknown and fluctuating currents.The only possible way to find it was to commit yourself to the same wandering tides and drift after it, trusting to a propitious fortune that you might be carried in the same direction;and after a long, blind, unhurrying chase, one day you might feel a faint touch, a jar, a thrill along the side of your boat, and, peering through the fog, lay your hand at last, without surprise, upon the very object of your quest.

III

As it happened, the means for such a quest were at my disposal.Iwas part owner of a boat which had been built for hunting and fishing cruises on the shallow waters of the Great South Bay.It was a deliberate, but not inconvenient, craft, well named the Patience; and my turn for using it had come.Black Zekiel, the captain, crew, and cook, was the very man that I would have chosen for such an expedition.He combined the indolent good-humour of the negro with the taciturnity of the Indian, and knew every shoal and channel of the tortuous waters.He asked nothing better than to set out on a voyage without a port; sailing aimlessly eastward day after day, through the long chain of landlocked bays, with the sea plunging behind the sand-dunes on our right, and the shores of Long Island sleeping on our left; anchoring every evening in some little cove or estuary, where Zekiel could sit on the cabin roof, smoking his corn-cob pipe, and meditating on the vanity and comfort of life, while I pushed off through the mellow dusk to explore every creek and bend of the shore, in my light canoe.

There was nothing to hasten our voyage.The three weeks' vacation was all but gone, when the Patience groped her way through a narrow, crooked channel in a wide salt-meadow, and entered the last of the series of bays.A few houses straggled down a point of land; the village of Quantock lay a little farther back.Beyond that was a belt of woods reaching to the water; and from these the south-country road emerged to cross the upper end of the bay on a low causeway with a narrow bridge of planks at the central point.Here was our Ultima Thule.Not even the Patience could thread the eye of this needle, or float through the shallow marsh-canal farther to the east.

We anchored just in front of the bridge, and as I pushed the canoe beneath it, after supper, I felt the indefinable sensation of having passed that way before.I knew beforehand what the little boat would drift into.The broad saffron light of evening fading over a still lagoon; two converging lines of pine trees running back into the sunset; a grassy point upon the right; and behind that a neglected garden, a tangled bower of honeysuckle, a straight path bordered with box, leading to a deserted house with a high, white-pillared porch--yes, it was Larmone.

In the morning I went up to the village to see if I could find trace of my artist's visit to the place.There was no difficulty in the search, for he had been there often.The people had plenty of recollections of him, but no real memory, for it seemed as if none of them had really known him.