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Updated: June 7, 2025
I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued the flatness of the sea to the naked line of the horizon. This is the setting now inseparably connected with my knowledge of Falk's misfortune. My diplomacy had brought me there, and now I had only to wait the time for taking up the role of an ambassador.
It seems absurd to compare a tugboat skipper to a centaur: but he reminded me somehow of an engraving in a little book I had as a boy, which represented centaurs at a stream, and there was one, especially in the foreground, prancing bow and arrows in hand, with regular severe features and an immense curled wavy beard, flowing down his breast. Falk's face reminded me of that centaur.
As he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject of the tale. If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk's attempt to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.
Falk's name had not been mentioned in the house during these last weeks, and, although she realised that a new relationship was springing up between herself and her father, she was still shy of him and conscious of a deep gulf between them.
Falk's love-story pursued at first its usual realistic course. She was there near the waterfall waiting for him; they had very little to say to one another. She was depressed to-night, and he fancied that she had been crying. She was not so attractive to him in such a mood. He liked her best when she was intolerant, scornful, aloof.
This is platitudinous, but platitudes are not platitudes when we first make our personal experience of them. There seemed nothing platitudinous to Brandon in his present experiences. The day on which he had received Falk's letter had seemed to fling him neck and crop into a new world a world dim and obscure and peopled with new and terrifying devils.
His mind went back to that day, not so very long ago, when, with triumphant happiness, he had seemed to share in the Bishop's spirit, to be dust of his dust, and bone of his bone. That had been the very day, he remembered, of Falk's return from Oxford. And now his wife! Never in all the years of his married life had she spoken to him as she had done that morning.
Three days after Falk's escape he was having breakfast alone with Joan. "Mother has a headache," Joan said. "She's not coming down." He nodded, scarcely looking up from his paper. In a little while she said: "What are you doing to-day, daddy? I'm very sorry to bother you, but I'm housekeeping to-day, and I have to arrange about meals " "I'm lunching at Carpledon," he said, putting his paper down.
For some time after Falk's return from Oxford nothing happened. Joan did not know what exactly she had expected to happen, but she had an uneasy sense that more was going on behind the scenes than she knew. The Archdeacon did not speak to Falk unless he were compelled, but Falk did not seem to mind this in the least. His handsome defiant face flashed scorn at the whole family.
Falk's fear of her perception brought about a new situation between them. He was not now oblivious of her presence as he had been. He tried to discover whether she knew anything. She found him often watching her, half in fear and half in defiance. The thought that he might be engaged now upon some plan of his own in which she might share excited her and gave her something new to live for.
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