Read Ebook: Mrs. Fitz by Snaith J C John Collis

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1757 lines and 91446 words, and 36 pages

Because, when our emotion, when any sudden emotion, is too great for us, we generally have recourse to silence, so now Julian said nothing; he sitting there musing, astonished at what he had just heard. Then, suddenly, knowing, reflecting that he must hear more, hear all, that he must be made acquainted now with everything that had occurred in the far-off past, he said, very gently: "Yes? Well, father--for it is you whom I shall always regard in that light--tell me everything. You said just now we had better make a beginning. Let us do so."

For a moment Mr. Ritherdon hesitated, it seeming as if he still dreaded to make his avowal, to commence to unfold the strange circumstances which had caused him to pass his life under the guise of father to the young man who was, in truth, his nephew. Then, suddenly, nerving himself, as it seemed to Julian, he began:

"A woman's love, perhaps?" Julian said softly. "Was that it?"

"Yes. A woman's love," Mr. Ritherdon exclaimed, and now his voice was louder than before, almost, indeed, harsh. "A woman's love. The love of a woman who loved me in return. That was his fault--that for which, Heaven forgive me!--I punished him, made him suffer. She was my love--she loved me--that was certain, beyond all doubt!--and--she married him."

"Go on," Julian said--and now his voice was low, though clear, "go on."

"Her name was Isobel Leigh, and she was the daughter of an English settler who had fallen on evil days, who had gone out from England with her mother and with her--a baby. But now he had become a man who was ruined if he could not pay certain obligations by a given time. They said, in whispers, quietly, that he had used other people's names to make those obligations valuable. And--and--I was away in New Orleans on business. You can understand what happened!"

"Yes, I can understand. A cruel ruse was practised upon you."

"So cruel that, while I was away in the United States, thinking always about her by day and night, I learnt that she had become his wife. Then I swore that it should be ruse against ruse. That is the word! He had made me suffer, he had broken, cursed my life. Well, henceforth, I would break, curse him! This is how I did it."

Mr. Ritherdon paused a moment--his face white and drawn perhaps from the emotion caused by his recollection, perhaps from the disease that was hurrying him to his end. Then, a moment later, he continued:

"There were those with whom I could communicate in Honduras, those who would keep me well informed of all that was taking place in the locality: people I could rely upon. And from them there came to New Orleans, where I still remained, partly on business and partly because it was more than I could endure to go back and see her his wife, the news that she was about to become a mother. That maddened me, drove me to desperation, forced me to commit the crime that I now conceived, and dwelt upon during every hour of the day."

"I begin to understand," Julian said, as Mr. Ritherdon paused. "I begin to understand." Then, from that time he interrupted the other no more--instead, both the narrative and his own feelings held him breathless. The narrative of how he, a newborn infant, the heir to a considerable property, had been spirited away from Honduras to England.

"I found my way to the neighbourhood of Desolada, stopping at Belize when once I was back in the colony, and then going on foot by night through the forest towards where my brother's house was--since I was forced to avoid the public road--forests that none but those who knew their way could have threaded in the dense blackness of the tropical night. Yet I almost faltered, once I turned back, meaning to return to the United States and abandon my plan. For I had met an Indian, a half-caste, who told me that she, my loved, my lost Isobel was dying, that--that--she could not survive. And then--then--I made a compact with myself. I swore that it she lived I would not tear her child away from her, but that, if--if she died, then he who had made me wifeless should himself be not only wifeless but childless too. He had tricked me; now he should be tricked by me. Only--if she should live--I could not break her heart as well.

"But again I returned upon my road: I reached a copse outside Desolada, outside the house itself. I was near enough to see that the windows were ablaze with lights, sometimes even I saw people passing behind the blinds of those windows--once I saw my brother's figure and that excited me again to madness. If she were dead I swore that then, too, he should become childless. Her child should become mine, not his. I would have that satisfaction at least.

"Still I drew nearer to the house, so near that I could hear people calling to each other. Once I thought--for now I was quite close--that I could hear the wailing of the negro women-servants--I saw a half-breed dash past me on a mustang, riding as for dear life, and I knew, I divined as surely as if I had been told, that he was gone for the doctor, that she was dying--or was dead. Your father's chance was past."

"Heaven help him!" said Julian Ritherdon. "Heaven help him. It was an awful revenge, taken at an awful moment. Well! You succeeded?"

"THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN SUN."

"So, Snowball," Julian said to this descendant of African kings, "this ends your journey, eh? I am in the right road now and we have got to say 'Good-bye.' I suppose you don't happen to be thirsty, do you, Pompey?"

"Hoop! Hoop!" grunted the negro, showing a set of ivories that a London belle would have been proud to possess, "always thirsty. Always hungry. Always want tobaccy. Money, too."

Whereon he threw his leg over the great saddle, reached the ground, and began opening a haversack, from which he took a bottle, a packet, and a horn cup.

"Luncheon time," he said. "Sun's over the foremast! Come on, Julius Caesar, we'll begin."

After which he opened the packet, in which was a considerable quantity of rather thickly cut sandwiches, divided it equally, and then filled the horn cup with the liquid from the bottle, which, after draining, he refilled and handed to his companion.

"I'm sorry it isn't iced, my lily-white friend," he said; "it does seem rather warm from continual contact with the mustang's back, but I daresay you can manage it. Eh?"

"Yes, I know. 'Thirsty, hungry, want tobacco and money.' I tell you, old chap, you're lost in this place. London's the spot for you. You're fitted for a more advanced state of civilization than this."

"This is getting monotonous, Sambo," Julian exclaimed. "Come, let's settle up;" whereon he again replenished the guide's cup, and then drew forth from his pocket two American dollars, which are by now the standard coin of the colony. "One dollar was the sum arranged for," Julian said, "but because you are a merry soul, and also because a dollar extra isn't ruinous, you shall have two. And in years to come, my daisy, you can bless the name of Mr. Ritherdon as that of a man both just and generous. Remember those words, 'just and generous.'"

The negro of many sobriquets--at each of which he had laughed like a child, as in absolute fact the negro is when not a vicious brute--seemed, however, to be struck more forcibly by some other words than those approving ones suggested by Julian as suitable for recollection, and, after shaking his woolly head a good deal, muttered: "Ritherdon, Ritherdon," adding afterwards, "Desolada." Then he continued: "Hard man, Massa Ritherdon. Hard man, Massa Ritherdon. Hard man. Cruel man. Beat Blacky. Beat Whity, too, sometimes. Hard man. Cruel man."

"You relative of Massa Ritherdon!" the other grunted now, though still with the unfailing display of ivories. "You relative. Oh! I know not that. Now," he said, thinking perhaps it was time he departed, and before existing amicable arrangements should be disturbed, "now, I go. Back to Belize. Good afternoon to you, sir. Good-bye. I hope you like Desolada. Fifteen miles further on;" and making a kind of shambling bow, he departed back upon the road they had come. Yet not without turning at every other three or four steps he took, and waving his hand gracefully as well as cordially to his late employer.

"A simple creature is the honest black!" especially when no longer a dweller in his original equatorial savagery.

"Like it," murmured Julian to himself, "Yes, I hope so. Since it is undoubtedly my chief inheritance, I hope I shall!"

"It is strange," he mused to himself now, as from out of that cool, refreshing shade he gazed across groves upon groves of mangroves at his feet, to where, sparkling in the brilliant cobalt-coloured Caribbean Sea, countless little reefs and islets--as well as one large reef--dotted the surface of the ocean, "strange that, at Belize, I could gather no information of my late father. No! not even when I told the man who kept the inn that I was come on a visit to Desolada. Why, I wonder, why was it so? My appearance seemed to freeze them into silence, almost to startle them. Why? Why--this reticence on their part? Can it be that he was so hated all about here that none will mention him? Is that it? Remembering what the negro said of him, of his brutality to black and white, can that be it? Yet my uncle hinted at nothing of the kind."

Still thinking of this, still musing on what lay before him, he adjusted the saddle once more upon the animal's back. Then, as his foot was in the stirrup there came, swift as a flash of lightning, an idea into his mind.

"I must be like him," he almost whispered to himself, "so like him, must bear such a resemblance to him, that they are thunderstruck. And, if any who saw me can recollect that, twenty-six years ago, his newborn child was stolen from him on the night his wife died, it is no wonder that they were thunderstruck. That is, if I do resemble him so much."

But here his meditations ceased, he understanding that his name, which he had inscribed in the visitor's book lying on the marble table of the hotel, would be sufficient to cause all who learnt it to refrain from speaking about the recently dead man--his namesake.

"Yet all the same," he muttered to himself, as now the mule bore him along a more or less good road which traversed copses of oleanders and henna plants, allamandas and Cuban Royal palms--the latter of which formed occasionally a grateful shade from the glare of the sun--"all the same, I wish that darkey had not spoken about my father's cruelty. I should have preferred never to learn that he bore such a character. He must have been very different from my uncle, who, in spite of the one error of his life, was the gentlest soul that ever lived."

All the way out from England to New Orleans, and thence to Belize by a different steamer, his thoughts had been with that dear uncle--who survived the disclosure he had made but eight days--he being found dead in his bed on the morning of the ninth day--and those thoughts were with him now. Gentle memories, too, and kindly, with in them never a strain of reproach for what had been done by him in his hour of madness and desire for revenge; and with no other current of ideas running through his reflections but one of pity and regret for the unhappiness his real father must have experienced at finding himself bereft at once of both wife and child. Regret and sorrow, too, for the years which that father must have spent in mourning for him, perhaps in praying that, as month followed month, his son might in some way be restored to him. And now he--that son--was in the colony; here, in the very locality where the bereaved man must have passed so many sad and melancholy years! Here, but too late!

Ere he died, George Ritherdon had bidden his nephew make his way to British Honduras and proclaim himself as what he was; also he had provided him with that very written statement which he had spoken of as being in preparation for Julian's own information in case he should die suddenly, ere the latter returned home.

"With that in your possession," he had said, two days before his death actually occurred, "what's there that can stand in the way of your being acknowledged as his son? He cannot have forgotten my handwriting; and even if he has, the proofs of what I say are contained in the intimate knowledge that I testify in this paper of all our surroundings and habits out there. That paper is a certificate of who you are."

"Suppose he is dead when I get there, or that he should have married again. What then?"

"He may be dead, but he has not married again. Remember what I told you last night. I know my brother has remained a widower."

"I wonder the paper did not also say that his son was stolen from him many years ago, or that there was no heir to his property, or something to that effect."

"It is strange perhaps that such a state of things is not mentioned. Yet, the Picayune's correspondent may have forgotten it, or not known it, or not have thought it worth mention--or have had other news which required to be published. Half a hundred things might have occurred to prevent mention of that one."

Julian vowed inwardly that in no circumstances should the latter happen, while, at the same time, he thought it by no means unlikely that the necessary leave would be granted. He had already fifty days' leave standing to his credit, and he knew that not only his captain, but all his superiors in the service, thought well of him. The "urgent private affairs," when properly explained to their lordships, would make that matter easy.

"When I go to British Honduras, then," said Julian, putting now the question which he had been about to ask in a slightly different form, but asking it nevertheless, "what am I to do supposing he is dead? I may have many obstacles to encounter--to overcome."

"Don't talk of that!"

"I must talk of it. At best it cannot be far off. Let us face the inevitable. Be ready to go as soon as possible. If I am alive when you set out, I will give you the necessary documents; if I die before you start, they are here," and as he spoke he touched lightly the desk at which he always wrote.

AN ENCOUNTER.

And now Julian Ritherdon was here, in British Honduras, within ten or fifteen miles of the estate known as Desolada--a name which had been given to the place by some original Spanish settlers years before his father and uncle had ever gone out to the colony. He was here, and that father and uncle were dead; here, and on the way to what was undoubtedly his own property; a property to which no one could dispute his right, since George Ritherdon, his uncle, had been the only other heir his father had ever had.

Yet, even as the animal which bore him continued to pace along amid all the rich tropical vegetation around them; even, too, as the yellow-headed parrots and the curassows chattered above his head and the monkeys leapt from branch to branch, he mused as to whether he was doing a wise thing in progressing towards Desolada--the place where he was born, as he reflected with a strange feeling of incredulity in his mind.

"For suppose," he thought to himself, "that when I get to it I find it shut up or in the occupation of some other settler--what am I to do then? How explain my appearance on the scene? I cannot very well ride up to the house on this animal and summon the garrison to surrender, like some knight-errant of old, and I can't stand parleying on the steps explaining who I am. I believe I have gone the wrong way to work after all! I ought to have gone and seen the Governor or the Chief Justice, or taken some advice, after stating who I was. Or Mr. Spranger! Confound it, why did I not present that letter of introduction to him before starting off here?"

The latter gentleman was a well-known planter and merchant living on the south side of Belize, to whom Julian had been furnished with a letter of introduction by a retired post-captain whom he had run against in London prior to his departure, and with whom he had dined at a Service Club. And this officer had given him so flattering an account of Mr. Spranger's hospitality, as well as the prominent position which that personage held in the little capital, that he now regretted considerably that he had not availed himself of the chance which had come in his way. More especially he regretted it, too, when there happened to come into his recollection the fact that the gallant sailor had stated with much enthusiasm--after dinner--that Beatrix Spranger, the planter's daughter, was without doubt the prettiest as well as the nicest girl in the whole colony.

However, he comforted himself with the reflection that the journey which he was now taking might easily serve as one of inspection simply, and that, as there was no particular hurry, he could return to Belize and then, before making any absolute claim upon his father's estate, take the advice of the most important people in the town.

"All of which," he said to himself, "I ought to have thought of before and decided upon. However, it doesn't matter! A week hence will do just as well as now, and, meanwhile, I shall have had a look at the place which must undoubtedly belong to me."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet