“C. Q.”; or, In the Wireless House
the morning sun, the screaming gulls would find and settle on it.
As Cloud stood there, Micky saw it all, and he turned faint with horror. What a deed must rest on the stalwart Englishman’s soul if he could seriously contemplate doing such a thing! What foul iniquity could this man have perpetrated, when, as the woman he called “Lily” had said, he ought to be tucked up in his little bed at Parsley Croft, full of brandy-and-soda? Yet, whatever it was, Micky’s inherited instincts made his muscles stiffen in an automatic resolve that no living temple of God should cast itself thus down—that no creature once of the sunlight, however abased and sullied with crime or vice, should plunge into the oblivion of death to rot in a nameless ocean grave or be gnawed by the slimy denizens of the sea, so long as he could save it. Murderer, betrayer, traitor,—it mattered not; the man himself was no sane judge of his present relation to life. As he stood there he was but a mindless effigy of a man swayed by the winds of destiny.
Thus the two stood. Cloud unconscious of the other’s presence, while a filament of mackerel cirrus drifted between the moon’s76
