Here old Nelson, with his eyes cast down, gave me the whole story of the Heemskirk episode in Freya’s words; then went on in his rather jerky utterance, and looking up innocently:
“My dear,’ I said, ‘you have behaved in the main like a sensible girl.’ ‘I have been horrid,’ she cries, ‘and he is breaking his heart over there.’ Well, she was too sensible not to see she wasn’t in a state to travel. But I went. She told me to go, She was being looked after very well. Anæmia. Getting better, they said.”
He paused.
“You did see him?” I murmured.
“Oh, yes; I did see him,” he started again, talking in that reasonable voice as though he were arguing a point. “I did see him. I came upon him. Eyes sunk an inch into his head; nothing but skin on the bones of his face, a skeleton in dirty white clothes. That’s what he looked like, How Freya . . . But she never did—not really. He was sitting there, the only live thing for miles along that coast, on a drift-log washed up on the shore. They had clipped his hair in the hospital, and it had not grown again. He stared, holding his chin in his hand, and with nothing on the sea between him and the sky but that wreck. When I came up to him he just moved his head a bit. “Is that you, old man?’ says he—like that.
“If you had seen him you would have understood at once how impossible it was for Freya to have ever loved that man. Well, well. I don’t say. She might have—something. She was lonely, you know. But really to go away with him! Never! Madness. She
