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Updated: June 2, 2025
He stood out on the step. Sea-birds were crying. The sound of the sea withdrew moment by moment, as if it were stealing furtively away. Behind, in the rectory passage, the servant clattered as she brought in the supper. "Sir Graham!" Uniacke called suddenly. "Sir Graham!" "Yes." The voice came from somewhere in the shadow of the church. "Will you not come in? Supper is ready."
"I find it so almost everywhere," Uniacke said. "Yes. It can never be dull. But here, in winter at least, it is extraordinarily " he paused for the exactly right word, in a calm way that was peculiar to him and that seemed to emphasise his fine self-possession "pathetic, and suggestive of calamity." "I have noticed that, indeed," Uniacke answered, "and never, I think, more than to-night."
"Oh, there was always a gap there," said Uniacke hastily, touching the letter that lay in his pocket, and feeling, strangely, as if the contact fortified that staggering pilgrim on the path of lies his conscience. "There was always a gap. It was a whim of the Skipper's a mad whim." "But I understood he was sane when his shipmate was buried? You said so." "Sane?
"Who's that coming?" the painter asked. "The Skipper," Uniacke answered, almost under his breath. In another minute the huge seaman appeared, clad as usual in jersey and peaked cap, his large blue eyes full of an animal expression of vacant plaintiveness and staring lack of thought.
Amongst the losses of this day were Dorsetshire. Nine men killed; Captain Arnold, Lieutenant Hewitt, and thirty-nine men wounded. Gordon Highlanders. Lieutenant Lamont and two men killed; Colonel Mathias, Major Macbean, Captain Uniacke, Lieutenants Dingwall, Meiklejohn, Craufurd, and thirty-five men wounded. Derbyshire. Captain Smith and three men killed, eight wounded.
It's cold to-night." "It is very cold." The painter pulled a great cloak over his shoulders and a cap down over his glittering and melancholy eyes, that had watched for many years all the subtle changes of the colour and the movement of the sea. Uniacke opened the Vicarage door and they stood in the wind.
It blazed yet in two hearts. The shock of its coming, after long hours of storm, had stirred Uniacke and his guest strangely. And the former, leaving in the rectory parlour the sermon he had composed, preached extempore on the text, "In the evening there shall be light." He began radiantly and with fervour.
Uniacke saw that he had been foolishly unguarded. "Oh, no," he said, more quietly, "I only fear that the poor fellow can never recover." "Why not? From what feeling, from what root of intelligence does his interest in my work spring? May it not be that he vaguely feels as if my picture were connected with his sorrow?" Uniacke shook his head.
Must not a man care first for his own soul if he would heal the soul of even one other? Uniacke spoke with a strange and powerful despair on this subject. He ended in a profound sadness and with the words of one scourged by doubts. There was a pause, the shuffle of moving feet. Then the voice of the clerk announced the closing hymn.
"Is it not so?" he asked, in a voice that quivered slightly as if with an agitation he was trying to suppress. Uniacke made no reply. He was seized with a horror he had not known before. He recognised that the island influence mysteriously held his guest. After an interval he said abruptly: "What is your doctor's name, did you say?"
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