were great, but no word of complaint ever passed his lips. If he had permitted himself any such, it would have been that he still lived when his leader died. To all he was a monument of patient resignation.
So great was his depression, and so slow his recovery, that it was decided at last to send him home, as the only hope of full recuperation. He acquiesced, as he had done in everything they suggested, but in this matter with evident reluctance. He thought it unlikely he would ever return. His heart had been in the work, but he had been tried and found wanting. The work, he said to himself, was for abler and more faithful hands.
So the mission schooner carried him to the nearest port of call, and in due course he was lying in a deck chair carefully swathed in plaids, and the great steamer bore him swiftly homewards.
The story of the martyrdom and of his heroic defence of his old friend: how they two had gone up alone to the peaceful assault of an island of the night; how he had fought for his leader till he could fight no longer, and had fallen at last wounded to death across his dead body—it had all preceded him. The very sailors were proud to have him on board. The officers made much of him in an undemonstrative way. The ladies fluttered round his chair like humming-birds, and loaded him with attentions.
And he suffered it all in silence. He was still very weak. How could he turn his sick soul inside out to these strangers, and what good to do so?
He had not yet decided what course to take when he got home. He had thought and thought, till he was sick of thinking, sick of himself, sick of life. Ah! why had he not died with the brave old man out there on the shore of the creek behind the rocks? Why had his nerve given way at that supreme moment? Why had this bitter cross been laid upon him? Far better to have died—far easier, at all events. But easier and better run opposite ways as a rule, and have little in common.
Should he confess the whole matter, and retire from the field and find some other way of life? Truly he felt no call to any other work. This had been the one desire of his life; he had grown from youth to manhood in the hope of it. He believed he could still be of service when once he got over the effects of his present fall. Should he not rather bury the dead past, with God as only mourner, and start afresh?—to fail once more when the strain came again, he said to himself with exceeding bitterness. He grieved over his lapse as another might grieve over a deliberate crime. But he postponed any final decision as to the future till he should feel stronger in mind and body.
There was a noted writer on board, a realist of realists. He sought impressions at first hand. He cultivated the sick man's acquaintance, greatly to his discomfort.
"Mr. Blair," he said, sitting down by his side one day, "I would very much like to know just how you felt, and what you thought of, when you were fighting those brown devils. Won't you tell me?"
And the sick man roused himself for a moment, and looked at him with that in his eye which the other comprehended not, and said slowly, "I felt like the devil and I thought of the devil," and not another word would he say. And the writer pondered much on the saying, but never got to the bottom of it or knew how true it was.
His people met him at the landing-place, the reverend father and the white-haired mother, proud to be known even as the foster-parents of such a son, grateful for one more sight of him in the flesh. How could he break their hearts by telling them what a broken reed their trusted one had proved? They rejoiced over him greatly, and said to one another that as his strength came back the cloud that lay on his spirits would be lifted. Their gentle encomiums stung him like darts.
But, by degrees, broken body and broken spirit were healed. Slowly and thoughtfully he made up his mind that the past should be past. He would go out again. He would take his stand in the forefront of the battle in the hope of an honourable death—for he held his life forfeit to the past.
Decision brings a certain peace of mind. He was happier than he had been since he leaped out of the white boat on to the shore of the Dark Island that morning—so long ago that it seemed to belong to a previous life.
The old people said God-speed to his decision. They had possessed him once again after giving him up for good. It was more than they had ever hoped for. They were thankful.
All interested in mission work hailed his decision with enthusiasm. He was common property and too big to be monopolised by any one sect. They had not been able to make one quarter as much of him as they had wished. He had quietly declined to be fêted and lionised. They considered he carried his modesty to too great an extreme. They would have made capital out of him and kindled fresh enthusiasms for the cause by the sight and sound of him. It was with the greatest difficulty that he avoided it all, using the plea of ill-health till his bodily appearance would no longer countenance it.
Once his decision was made known, however, they decided to drag him out of his retirement, and by dint of persistent importunity prevailed on him at last to appear at a public meeting. He consented with reluctance, and only because it was represented to him as a matter of duty.
As the time drew near he began to fear that he was in for more than he had expected. But he had given his word, and he would not draw back.
There were clever men at the head of the movement. Thousands of interested men and women were hungering for a sight of the almost-martyr. They had seen his portrait in the illustrated papers—how joyously the old mother had responded to the many requests for it!—but they wanted to see him with their eyes and hear him with their ears, and the younger folk were to remember all their lives that they had done so. And so, without going into details with him, the leaders of the various societies quietly arranged matters on a generous scale. There were men of imagination among them too, and they prepared a dramatic touch for the meeting which they calculated would make it go with a swing. It went beyond their expectations.
When the young missionary stepped on to the platform he stopped short, and for a moment looked almost as fey as he had done when he leaped out of the white boat that morning on the beach of Dark Island. But there must be no drawing back. He had flinched once—never again!
The chairman of the meeting was a philanthropic Cabinet Minister. As he welcomed the hero of the hour the great audience rose and waved and shouted.
The young man clasped the chairman's welcoming hand as though he were a drowning man, and that hand the one only hope of safety. Then he sank into the chair provided for him, and dropped his face into his hand.
All this was torture to him. Why could they not have let him go out quietly to his work, to his death? No bristling mob of savages that ever could confront him was half so appalling to him as that great well-dressed crowd of enthusiastic men and women and children, gathered to do him honour. Honour! And he before God a dishonoured man—a man who had failed when the pinch came. He groaned in his heart, and wished that he had not come.
But the chairman was speaking, speaking of him, and what he had done—what he was supposed to have done—in warm, appreciative words and flowing periods, and the audience was as still as a flower-garden on a summer afternoon. In the young man's soul there was a great stillness also, a stillness equal almost to that which had fallen on him when he came out of the shadows and lay in the verandah of the mission house.
His eyes wandered unseeingly over those solid banks of faces, all turned on him in eulogy of what he had not done. Those thousands of eyes seemed to pierce his soul.
One face caught his attention and held it, the face of a girl sitting in the third row from the front. Even in his agony he recognised it, as how could he help when it had been so constantly with him in his thoughts. The smooth white brow, like a little slab of polished ivory; the level brows; the large dark eyes looking up at him
