Page:Doughty--Mirrikh or A woman from Mars.djvu/17

 “Now then, old fellow, here’s something to make you forget your troubles. I have the promise of a passage in a steamer bound up to lake Thalaysap and the Siamrap  river. I am going to take a month’s vacation and visit the world-famed ruins of Angkor—will you go along?

“Go!”

Why I would have gone to the South Pole with Maurice De Veber willingly, and yet he was only a chance aquaintance, after all.

We had met two years before on a steamer plying between Swatow and Hong Kong, to which latter port I was bound upon certain official business, I had been attracted  by his manly figure, dark, handsome face, and regular  features, from the moment I first laid eyes on him at the  supper table, just after we left Swatow; and when I found  he was an American and a New Yorker, of course an acquaintance sprang up at once.

Maurice was a splendid fellow; positively my ideal of young American manhood. What, therefore, did it matter that I had seen forty years and he not more than twenty-five?

You see there was a great void in my heart waiting to be filled by some one. It was the place my wife might have filled, should have filled, but at that time the very sight of  womankind was disgusting to me. I execrated the sex; in my lonely hours of self-communion I had brought my mind  into that condition where I looked upon every married man  as one to be pitied; where I longed for my vanished youth and its opportunities, where I reversed the order of nature,  and despising the affection of woman, sighed for that of the  brother or the faithful friend. Positively my mental state, just then, must have bordered upon insanity, for I never had  but one brother and he was a drunkard and a most precious  rascal, and as for my early friends there was not one I could  name who had not used me in a shameful way.

Long before we reached Hong Kong I stood ready to give Maurice De Veber my head if he had asked it, and I  know that I made myself noticeable by the way I followed  him about.

Still he seemed to like it without making the least pretence of returning the absurd affection which I could scarcely help  displaying for him.

Possibly some one had said to him, “that old fellow