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Half-Past Bedtime

<h2>THE SORROWFUL PICTURE</h2> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div class="figcenter"> <ANTIMG src="images/ill_014.jpg" width-obs="429" height-obs="500" alt="Porto Blanco" title="" /> Porto Blanco</div> <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>XII</h2> <h3>THE SORROWFUL PICTURE</h3> Marian never told anybody, not even Gwendolen, about that strange party of hers under the elm-tree; and the blind painter faithfully promised that he would keep it a secret too. But a fortnight later, when the doctor said that it was quite safe, she introduced him to Gwendolen; and Gwendolen was rather excited, because he was the very man who had painted her favourite picture. This was a picture, only half finished, that her aunt had bought when Gwendolen was quite little and when she used to play games all by herself in the big house in Bellington Square. One of these games was a queer sort of game, in which she would shut herself up in a room, and imagine herself climbing into the pictures on the wall and having adventures with the people inside them. If the picture had a tower in it, she would climb up the tower and peep down over the other side; or if there were ships in it she would go on board and talk to the sailors down below. But her favourite picture she called the "sorrowful picture," because though she loved it, it made her feel sad. It was really little more than a sketch, rapidly painted in a few strokes, and Gwendolen's aunt had only bought it because she had been told that the artist was famous. But it was full of sunlight, of a hot, foreign sunlight, through which an old house had stared at the painter, a yellow-walled house with latticed windows and violet shadows under its broken roof. In a crooked pot near the front door a dead palm stretched its withered fingers; and the front door itself was a cave of darkness, with a jutting eave above it like a frowning eyebrow. But what made it so sorrowful, at any rate to Gwendolen, was a little window up in the right-hand corner—an unlatticed window, as dark as the front door, but with a different sort of darkness. For the darkness of the front door was an angry darkness. When Gwendolen was little, it had made her feel frightened. But the darkness of the window was like a wound. She wanted to kiss it and make it well. After she had played with the other pictures, and climbed the mountains in them, and gone paddling in the streams, she always came to this one and stood on its threshold and wondered why it was so different from the others. She never played with it. It seemed too real. "I believe there's something sad," she said, "that the window wants to tell me." But she loved it too, better than all the other pictures, because nobody else seemed to understand it; and when her aunt had married Captain Jeremy, and they had left Bellington Square, and most of the other pictures had been sold, her aunt had allowed her to take this one with her and hang it in her bedroom in the old farmhouse. So she was rather excited when Marian introduced her to the blind painter; and when he came to tea with them in the middle of April she took him upstairs and told him all about it, because, of course, he could no longer see it. But he couldn't remember it, or even where he had painted it, though there was a date on it which showed that it was six years old, because that was a year, he said, in which he was travelling all over the world and making little sketches almost every day. But he didn't laugh at her as her nurse had done, because pictures, he said, were queer things; and nothing was more likely than that there should be something in this one that only Gwendolen could feel. "You see, a picture," he said, "if you look at it properly, is just like a conversation painted on canvas; and you can see what the artist said to his subject as well as what his subject said to him. Of course, in most pictures, just as in most conversations, all that happened is something like this: 'Good morning,' said the artist, 'fine weather we're having,' and whatever he was painting just nodded its head. That's because he was really thinking about something else—his indigestion or the money that he hoped to make; and nobody ever tells their inmost thoughts to people who talk to them like that. But if he has tried to be a real artist, loving and understanding, and not thinking about himself at all, the hills and the trees, or whatever he was painting, have begun to tell him all about themselves. They've swopped secrets with him just like old friends; and there they are for you to see. Sometimes they have even told him things that he didn't understand himself. But he has painted them so faithfully that other people have; and that's the most wonderful thing that can happen to an artist—better than finding a hundred pounds." He lit a cigarette. "And I shouldn't be surprised," he said, "if that little window wasn't giving me a message. Only it was a message that I never understood; and perhaps Gwendolen does." But Gwendolen shook her head. "Not very well," she said. "I only know that it makes me feel sad." And then Gwendolen's aunt came to tell them that tea was ready, and in a couple of minutes they had forgotten all about the picture; and a quarter of an hour later they forgot it still more, for in came Captain Jeremy and Lancelot, the bosun's mate. They were both in high spirits, because they had had an order to put to sea again for Porto Blanco, to fetch a cargo of fruit from the Gulf of Oranges, on the shores of which Porto Blanco was the principal town. "A matter of three months," said Captain Jeremy, "out and home." He gave Marian a kiss and pulled Gwendolen's pigtail. "You'd better come with us. What do you say, Lancelot? Or do you think they'd bring us bad luck?" But Lancelot only grinned and made a husky noise—not because he was naturally shy, but because he was always afraid of having tea in the drawing-room, in case he should spill something on the carpet. He would much have preferred, in fact, to have tea in the kitchen with Mrs Robertson, the housekeeper, because he was very fond of Mrs Robertson, and wanted to marry her, and had told her so several times. But Mrs Robertson couldn't make up her mind. Her first husband had been rather a nuisance; and though he had been dead for nine and a half years, she was still a little doubtful about taking a second one. But Marian and Gwendolen couldn't help jumping up and down, and the blind painter said that they ought to go, and Captain Jeremy promised to go round to Peter Street and see what Marian's mother had to say about it. "But you'll have to talk to her," said Marian, "through the window, because she's still nursing Cuthbert." "Then that's all the more reason," said Captain Jeremy, "why she'll be glad to let you go." Then he asked the blind painter if he would like to come as well, but he shook his head and said that he would be unable to, though he had several times visited the Gulf of Oranges, and would much have liked to go there once more. But after a little persuasion Marian's mother said that Marian could go if Gwendolen went; and a week later they were climbing on board the schooner as she lay at anchor in Lullington Bay. That was the first time that Marian had been aboard her, and everything seemed strange to her, smelling so fresh and salt. But of course Gwendolen knew all about the ship, and soon she was busy taking Marian round. She showed her the big hold, dark and empty, in which they would bring back the cases of fruit, and the cook's galley, and the sailors' bunks, and Captain Jeremy's neat little cabin. And then, just after tea, the anchor was pulled up, and the sails were shaken out, and the wind began to fill them; and presently there were little waves slapping against the bow, and the land was fading into the dusk behind them. Both of them were sea-sick during the night, and felt rather queer most of the next day. But the day after that they were as hungry as they could be, and were soon on deck talking to the sailors. Most of these were the same sailors that had been to Monkey Island, and so Gwendolen knew them already; and she introduced Marian to them, who very soon felt as if they had been friends of hers all her life. But Lancelot was her favourite, just as he was Gwendolen's, and when he was off duty and smoking his pipe, they would sit on either side of him and listen to his stories as the deck beneath them rose and fell. As for Porto Blanco and the Gulf of Oranges, he had been there more times, he said, than he could remember; and once he had been stranded there for such a long time that he had learned to talk the language as well as any of the inhabitants. "But it's a queer place," he said, "and they're queer people, sort of half-way between black and white, and the sun's in the bones of them, and half the time they're fighting, and the other half they're snoozing in the shadders." But for the most part, he said, they were kindly people and very indulgent to each other's faults; and the women all went barefooted and smoked cigarettes, and the men sang love-songs together when they weren't quarrelling. "And up in the hills," said Lancelot, "back of the town, you can see such flowers as you never saw anywhere, and great big oranges hanging off of the trees, and corn-cobs taller than your head. And back of the orange-trees there's great big forests, full of little Injuns with long beards, and nasty yeller snakes, and birds of paradise, and parrots and monkeys and inji-rubber trees," and sometimes he would go on talking till they forgot all about supper-time, and the stars would open above their heads, and far away, perhaps, like a little chain of beads, they would see the port-lights of some great liner. The wind held so fair that by the end of a month they were nearly four thousand miles from home, and a week later when they came on deck they found the sea dotted with little islands. So lovely were they in their wet colours that they might have been enamelled there during the night, and Marian and Gwendolen almost gasped with joy as the ship slid past them in the early morning. For a long time now the weather had been so hot that awnings had been stretched over the deck; and Marian and Gwendolen wore as little as they could—the thinnest of white jerseys and the shortest of skirts. For nearly three weeks they had worn no shoes or stockings, and their feet and legs were the colour of copper; and for two or three hours in the middle of the day Captain Jeremy had made them go to sleep. But to-day they were much too excited to stay in their hammocks; and presently, as they hung over the schooner's bow, they could see the horizon beginning to creep closer, and the hill-tops and forests of the mainland. The wind had dropped now, and the sea was like glass, and sometimes the ship scarcely seemed to move, but early in the afternoon they began to see the roofs of the town and the tower of the cathedral and the white-walled quay. Slowly they drew nearer until they could see the people on the shore or lounging in the other ships at anchor in the harbour; and just before sunset they had come to their moorings and were lying securely against the quay. Down in the cabin, Captain Jeremy was talking business with two of the fruit-merchants—dark-skinned men in white linen suits, smoking pale-coloured long cigars. But Marian and Gwendolen stayed up on deck, watching the night coming down like a shutter, and the lamps beginning to shine in the crooked streets and behind the windows of the houses. Now that it was cooler the people were taking the air, and gaily-dressed women sauntered up and down; and in front of a cafe, where there were a lot of little tables, some men were singing and playing guitars. It was all so strange, it was like being in a theatre, and the air was full of spice-scents and the scent of oranges; and it was hard to believe that they were even in the same world with school and Peter Street and Fairbarrow Down. But next morning it all seemed more real again, and Captain Jeremy took them round the town; and they had lunch with one of the fruit-merchants in a low-walled house built round a courtyard. After lunch they slept in long armchairs, and when they woke up queer sorts of drinks were brought to them; and then it was time to go back to the ship again and watch the cases of fruit being packed in the hold. After a day or two, when they had learned their way about, Captain Jeremy let them go ashore alone; and by the end of the week they had explored every corner of the town, and even gone for walks along the country roads. Some of these were broad roads leading to other towns, but most of them became mule-tracks after a mile or two; and they seldom went very far up these because of the heat, which was greater then even the inhabitants had ever known. Day after day, through the still air, the great sun emptied itself into the town; and the streets cracked, and the barometer fell, and Captain Jeremy looked anxiously at the weather; and it was upon the hottest day of all—the day before they were leaving—that Gwendolen suddenly gripped Marian's arm. It was early in the morning, before the sun was at its steepest, and they had wandered past the cathedral into the outskirts of the town, where a little track between two high garden walls had tempted them to explore it. It had led them into a sort of garden, untidy and deserted, and on the other side of this there stood a house—a yellow-walled house with latticed windows and violet shadows under its broken roof. Beside the front door stood a crooked pot, and the front door itself was a cave of darkness, and up in the right-hand corner, under the roof, was a little window standing open. Gwendolen found herself shaking all over. "Why, it's the very house," she said, "of the sorrowful picture." And so it was, and as they stood looking up at it, it seemed more sorrowful to Gwendolen than ever. For there was the little window almost beseeching her in actual words to go and comfort it; and she even had a feeling that for all these years it had been crying in vain to her across half the world. But there was the front door too, dark with anger, and before they could move a man came out of it. He was a big man with a fat face, and he stood blinking for a moment in the sunshine; and then they saw him frown as he caught sight of them; and he shouted words at them that they didn't understand. But it was evident that he wanted them to go away, and they saw him touch a knife that he wore in his belt; and so they ran back again up the little track, and there in the street they met Lancelot. He was grinning as usual, and he looked so big and strong that they could almost have hugged him on the spot; but his face grew serious when they told him what had happened, and he stroked his chin and became thoughtful. "Well, it's a good thing," he said, "that you come away. In this here town you have to be careful. But I'll have a turn round and see if I can find anything out about this here house and the feller as lives in it." Then he mopped his face and looked at the sky and told them to go back again to the ship; and a couple of hours later he came aboard and beckoned them to talk to him while he smoked his pipe. Everything was ready now for the ship to sail next morning, and most of the other sailors were asleep, and Captain Jeremy had gone to lunch again with the fruit-merchant in the town. "Well, this here feller," said Lancelot, "seems a queer sort of cove, with a bad name, and he lives all alone; and his wife ran away from him six years ago, taking their only little girl along with her. But there's some folks believe that he went after her and killed her—anyway, she was found dead in the forest—but what happened to Pepita, who was three years old at the time, nobody knows, for she's never been seen." Then he smoked his pipe for a minute. "But I tell you what," he said. "He's pretty sure to be asleep just now. And if you like I'll go and have a look at the house, and see what there is to it, and come and tell you." "But I must come too," said Gwendolen. "I really must." "And so must I," said Marian. "We must both come," and after a while they persuaded him to take them, and they set off again through the town. It was now so hot that it seemed as if the very earth must begin to melt and crumble away; and when they came to the house there were no signs of life—there was only that little window, dark and aching. For a moment they stood listening at the front door, and then they cautiously stepped inside; and there, in a lower room, asleep on the floor, they saw the big man with the fat face. Then they stole upstairs until they came to the little room under the roof to which the window belonged; and then, as they pushed the door open, the tears sprang to their eyes, and Lancelot swore a great oath. For there they saw, tied to a staple in the wall, a little girl of about nine years old, ragged and scarred, with timid dark eyes and cheeks like a flower that has never seen the sun. Tied across her mouth was a dirty cloth, and when she first saw them she shrank away; but as Gwendolen went up to her with outstretched arms, her eyes widened in sheer astonishment. Then Lancelot stooped and cut the rope that bound her, and pulled away the cloth that was gagging her mouth; and then he jumped round just as the little girl's father came stumbling fiercely into the room. Gwendolen heard him shouting something and using the word Pepita; and as she clasped the little girl in her arms she knew why it was that all these years the sorrowful picture seemed to have been calling to her. It was because the little girl's pain and longing for freedom had somehow stolen into the painter's brush. Then she saw Lancelot's fist shoot out like a bullet, and Pepita's father tumble to the floor; and then Lancelot shouted to them to hurry away, and picking up Pepita, he ran down the stairs. In less than a minute they were in the little track between the high garden walls; and in a few seconds more they were out in the street, and then a most strange and awful thing happened. For Marian stopped short and pointed with her finger. "Why, what's the matter," she cried, "with the cathedral tower?" They all stared at it, and saw it rock to and fro; and then Lancelot swung round toward the open country. "Run for your lives," he said, and then, as they followed him, they felt the ground beneath them rise and fall. Then they heard a crash, and people shouting, and then all was still again, and they stopped running. Lancelot wiped his forehead. "Well, now you know," he said, "what an earthquake's like. Lucky it wasn't a worse one." And there was the cathedral tower still standing on its foundations, but when they looked for Pepita's house it had fallen down like a pack of cards, a fitting grave for Pepita's father. For they heard in the evening that he had been killed; and Pepita afterward told them how he had killed her mother, and how he had kept her for all those years tied to the wall in that dark upper room. As for Captain Jeremy, he was so rejoiced at seeing Marian and Gwendolen safe that he told Lancelot he would have forgiven him if he had brought fifty Pepitas on board. Lancelot was very pleased about that, because, in his heart of hearts, he knew that he ought never to have let them come with him. But, as he told Gwendolen, all was well that ended well, and he hoped that she would allow him to take care of Pepita. Gwendolen wasn't quite sure at first, but when they arrived home her aunt and Mrs Robertson thought it a good idea. For Mrs Robertson had made up her mind to marry Lancelot, and Pepita was just the little girl, she said, that she had always wanted. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> We're going the way that Drake went, We shall see what Drake's men saw, A coppery curly cobra-snake, And a scarlet-cloaked macaw. For we're going the way that Drake went, We're taking the jungle trail, And we'll bring you a dark-eyed damsel home, And a cock with a golden tail. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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