Captains of souls

"_Dear Ronnie_: We are back from Italy, arriving this afternoon. Daddy thought you would be there to meet us, and I was so disappointed to find nobody but Mr. Steppe. Oh, yes! I know that he is a most important person, and his importance was supported by his new car; such an impressive treasure, with a collapsible writing-table and cigar-lighter and library--actually a library in a cunning little locker under one of the seats. I just glanced at them.

I am a little afraid of Mr. Steppe, yet he was kindness itself, and that bull voice of his, bellowing orders to porters and chauffeur and railway policemen was comforting in a way. Daddy is a little plaintive on such occasions.

I thought he was looking unusually striking--Steppe I mean. People certainly do look at him, with his black, pointed beard and his bristling, black eyebrows. You like him, don't you? Perhaps I should too, only--he is very magnetic; a commanding person, he frightens me, I repeat. And I have met another man, I don't think you know him, he said he had never met you. Daddy knows him rather well, and so does Mr. Steppe. Such a queer man, Ronnie!

He arrived after Daddy had gone to his club, to collect some correspondence. The maid came and told me there was a strange man in the hall who said Dr. Merville had sent for him; so I went down to see him.

He made the queerest impression on me. You will be amused, but not flattered, when I confess that the moment I saw him, I thought of you! I had a sort of warm impulse toward him. I felt as though I were meeting you, as I wanted you to be. That sounds feeble, and lame, but employing my limited vocabulary to the best of my poor ability, I am striving to reduce my mad impression to words. How mad it was, you'll understand. For, Ronnie, he was a stoutish man of middle age--no more like you than I am like Mr. Steppe! Yet when I saw this shabbily dressed person (the knees of his trousers shone and the laces of his untidy boots were dragging) I just gasped. He sat squarely on one of the hall chairs, a big, rough hand on each knee, and he was staring in an absent-minded way at the wall. He didn't even see me when I stood almost opposite to him. But his head, Ronnie! It was the head of a conqueror; one of those heroes of antiquity. You see their busts in the museums and wonder who they are. A broad, eagle face, strangely dark, and on top a shock of gray-white hair brushed back into a mane. He had the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen in a man, and when they turned in my direction, and he got up from his chair, not awkwardly as I expected, but with the ease of an Augustus, there was within them so much loving-kindness that I felt I could have cried.

And please, Ronnie, do not tell me that I am neurotic and over-tired. I was just mad--nothing worse than that. I'm mad still, for I cannot get him out of my mind. His name is Ambrose Sault, and he is associated with daddy and Mr. Steppe, though I think that he is really attached to that horrid Greek person to whom daddy introduced me--Moropulos. What sort of work he does for Moropulos I have not discovered. There is always a great deal of mystery about Mr. Moropulos and Mr. Steppe's business schemes. Sometimes I am very uncomfortable--which is a very mild way of describing my feelings--about daddy--and things.

Ronnie, you have some kind of business dealings with father, what is it all about? I should so like to discover. It is to do with companies and corporations, isn't it? I know Mr. Steppe is a great financier, but I don't quite know how financiers work. I suppose I ought not to be curious, but it worries me--no, bothers is a better word--sometimes.

Come and see me soon, Ronnie. I promise you I won't--you know. I've never forgiven myself for hurting you so. It was such a horrid story--I blame myself for listening, and hate myself for telling you. But the girl's brother was so earnest, and so terribly upset, and the girl herself was so wickedly circumstantial. You have forgiven me? It was my first experience of blackmailers and I ought to have known you better and liked you better than to believe that you would be such a brute--and she was such a common girl, too--"

She stopped writing and looked round. "Come in."

The maid was straightening her face as she entered. "That gentleman, miss, Mr. Sault, has called."

Beryl tapped her lips with the feathered penholder. "Did you tell him that the doctor was out?"

"Yes, miss. He asked if you were in. I told him I'd go and see." Something about the visitor had amused the girl, for the corners of her lips twitched.

"Why are you laughing, Dean?" Beryl's manner was unusually cold and her grave eyes reproving. For no reason that she could assign, she felt called upon to defend this man, against the ridicule which she perceived in the maid's attitude.

"Oh, miss, he was so strange! He said: 'Perhaps she will see me.' 'Do you mean Miss Merville?' says I. 'Merville!' he says in a queer way, 'of course, Beryl Merville,' and then he said something to himself. It sounded like 'how pitiful'. I don't think he is quite all there, miss."

"Show him up, please," said Beryl quietly. She recognized the futility of argument. Dean and her type found in the contemplation of harmless lunacy a subject for merriment--and Dean was the best maid she had had for years. She sat waiting for the man, uncertain. Why did she want to see him? She was not really curious by nature and the crude manners of the class to which he belonged usually rubbed her raw. The foulness of their speech, the ugliness of their ideals and their lives; the gibberish, almost an unknown language to her, of the cockney man and woman, all these things grated. Perhaps she was a neurotic after all; Ronnie was quite sure of his judgment in most matters affecting her.

Ambrose Sault, standing in the doorway, hat in hand, saw her bite her lower lip reflectively. She looked around with a start of surprise and, seeing him, got up. He was a colored man! She had not realized this before, and she was unaccountably hurt; just colored and yet his eyes were gray!

"I hope I haven't disturbed you, mademoiselle," he said. His voice was very soft and very sweet. Mademoiselle? A Creole--a Madagascan--an octoroon? From one of the French foreign territories, perhaps. He spoke English without an accent, but the "mademoiselle" had come so naturally to his lips.

"You are French, Mr. Sault--your name of course?" She smiled at him questioningly and wondered why she troubled to ask questions at all.

"No, mademoiselle," he shook his great head and the mask of a face did not relax. "I am from Barbadoes, but I have lived in Port de France, that is, in Martinique, for many years. I was also in Noumea, in New Caledonia, that is also French."

There was an awkward silence here. Yet he was not embarrassed and displayed no incertitude of his position. Her dilemma came from the fact that she judged men by her experience and acquaintance with them, and the empirical method fails before the unusual--Ambrose Sault was that.

"My father will be home very soon, Mr. Sault. Won't you please sit down?" As he chose a chair with some deliberation it occurred to her that she would find a difficulty in explaining to the fastidious Dr. Merville, why she had invited this man to await him in the drawing-room. Strangely enough, she herself felt the capacity of entertaining and being entertained by the visitor and she had no such spasm of dismay as had come to her, when other, and more presentable, visitors, had settled themselves for a lengthy call. This fact puzzled her. Ambrose Sault was--an artisan perhaps, a messenger, more likely. The shabbiness of his raiment and the carelessness of his attire suggested some menial position. One waistcoat button had been fastened into the wrong buttonhole, the result was a little grotesque.

"Have you been working very long, with my father?" she asked.

"No--not a very long time," he said. "Moropulos and Steppe know him better than I."

He checked himself. She knew that he would not talk any more about his associates and the enigma which their companionship presented would remain unsolved, so far as he could give a solution. "Moropulos"--"Steppe"? He spoke as an equal. Even Ronnie was deferential to Mr. Steppe and was in awe of him. Her father made no attempt to hide his nervousness in the presence of that formidable person. Yet this man could dispense with the title. It was not bravado on his part, the conscious impertinence of an underling, desirous of asserting his equality. Obviously, he thought of Mr. Steppe as "Steppe". What would he call her father? No occasion arose, but she was certain he would have been "Merville" and no more.

Sault's eyes were settled on her, absorbing her; yet his gaze lacked offence, being without hostility, or notable admiration. She had a ridiculous sensibility of praise. So he might have looked upon Naples from the sea, or upon the fields of narcissi above Les Avants, or the breath-taking loveliness of the hills of Monticattini in the blue afterlight of sunset. She could not meet his eyes--yet was without discomfort. The praise of his conspection was not human.

She laughed, artificially, she thought, and reached out for a book that lay on the table.

"We have just returned from Italy," she said. "Do you know Italy at all, Mr. Sault?"

"I do not know Italy," he said, and took the book she held to him.

"This is rather a wonderful account of Lombardy and its history," she said. "Perhaps you would like to read it?"

He turned the leaves idly and smiled at her. She had never seen a man smile so sweetly.

"I cannot read," he said simply.

She did not understand his meaning for a while thinking that his eyesight was failing.

"Perhaps you would care to take it home."

He shook his head and the book came back to her.

"I cannot read," he said, without shame, "or write--at least I cannot write words. Figures, yes, figures are easy; somebody told me--he was a professor of English I think, at one of the universities--that it was astonishing that I could work out mathematical problems and employ all the signs and symbols of trigonometry and algebra without being able to write. I wish I could read. When I pass a bookshop I feel like an armless man who is starving within hands' reach of salvation. I know a great deal and I pay a man to read to me--Livy and Prescott and Green, and, of course, Bacon--I know them all. Writing does not worry me--I have no friends."

If he had spoken apologetically, if he had displayed the least aggression, she might have classified, and held him in a place. But he spoke of his shortcomings as he might have spoken of his gray hair, as a phenomenon beyond his ordering.

She was thunderstruck; possibly he was so used to shocking people from this cause that he did not appear to observe the effect he had produced.

He was so completely content with this, the first contact with his dream woman, that he was almost incapable of receiving any other impression. Her hair was fairer than he had thought, the nose thinner, the molding of her delicate face more spirituel. The lips redder and fuller, the rounded chin less firm. And the eyes--he wished she would turn her head so that he could be sure of their color. They were big, set wide apart, there was depth in them and a something upon which he yearned. The figure of her he knew by heart. Straight and tall and most gracious. A patrician; he thought of her as that. And oriental. He had pictured her as a great lady at Constantine's court; he set her upon the marble terrace of a decent villa on the hills above the Chrysopolis; a woman of an illustrious order.