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JULIUS KENNETH disappeared
from the city. If his sudden departure
was noticed, it excited no
comment. No one suspected the
important rôle he had played in
the tragedy; and the public
ceased to be interested, as new
events crowded it off the stage.
If anybody recalled the circumstance, it was only
to wonder, and be lost in the impenetrable darkness
which wrapt the story of Mary Ware.

I think that twelve months, or more, had
passed when I first got tidings of Julius Kenneth—
he had sailed out of New Bedford, or Marblehead,
or somewhere, in a whaling ship.

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For two years I lost all trace of him. Then he
abruptly turned up at Panama, on the way to
California.

Then I heard of him in a small town on the
coast of South America.

Then in India.

Then in Switzerland.

Afterwards in Egypt, and Syria.

Always wandering.

Travellers, when they came home, spoke of a
tall gaunt man that went stalking about the ends
of the earth.

And I pictured him to myself — roaming moodily
from place to place, incessant, tireless, urged on;
and ever before him flew a frightened little Shape
that was ready to drop dead, whenever it paused
to look back, and saw this perpetual man at
its heels.

And the man, too, I fancied, sometimes looked
back — and then he pressed on more rapidly.
Always wandering.

Whether Julius Kenneth ever caught up with

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this Shape, or even if he were ever searching for
any one in these weary journeys, I never knew:
but I know that the chief trouble of my life, at
that time, was the thought of this man coming
and going, so ceaselessly.

Always wandering. No resting spot. No
tranquil fireside. But on through snow-storms.

Whipped by the sleet.

Burnt by the sun.

Blinded by the bronzed dust of the desert.

I used to lie in bed, and think of him, —
prowling about the Pyramids, in the gray dawn;
or standing alone in the Arctic midnight; or
gazing up at the crags of Ben Nevis; or among
the Caffre huts; or sitting by the camp-fires of
the Bedouins — as fine an Arab as any of them.
Then he drifted down reedy rivers in more boats,
and tossed on the ocean in more ships than were
ever built in the world.

I was unable, even for an hour, to rid myself of
the magnetic influence he exerted over me. I
always knew where he was, or thought I knew.

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If I took up a volume of Travels, this man
went with me from beginning to end — always
the hero of every perilous adventure, always
doing everything but stopping.

If, by any chance, I looked in at Matelli's shopwindow,
where there used to be an Alpine landscape,
composed of confectionary, Julius Kenneth,
in chocolate, was always sure to be scaling sugar
precipices, setting my hair on end with terror.

He became an irrepressible torment to me, an
incubus day and night. I am not clear as to how
many years this lasted.

But one summer morning, I woke up refreshed
from a dream in which he did not intrude. A
weight seemed lifted off my mind; a cloud gone;
and I knew that Julius Kenneth, somewhere and
somehow, had ended his wanderings — or, rather,
that he had started on a very long pilgrimage!

p448-127

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