Read Ebook: An Ocean Tragedy by Russell William Clark

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Ebook has 2952 lines and 186151 words, and 60 pages

'I?'

'Oh,' he cried, 'it would be ridiculous in me to expect you to say at once that you will come; but before I leave this room I shall have your promise.' And as he said this he stretched his arms across the table and took my hand in both his and fondled it, meanwhile eyeing me in the most passionate, wistful manner that can be imagined.

'Ay, reason,' he responded, relinquishing my hand and folding his arms, and leaning back in his chair.

'I have been a sailor in my time, as you know,' said I, 'and have some acquaintance with the sea, even though my experience goes no further than a brief spell of East African and West Indian stations; and, therefore, forgive me for inquiring your expectations. What do you suppose? The "Shark" will have had three days' start of you.'

'Five days,' he interrupted.

'Five days, then. Do you expect to overhaul her at sea, or is it your intention to crowd on to the Cape, await her arrival there, or, if you find that she has already sailed, to follow her to the next port, providing you can learn it?'

'You have named the programme,' he answered. 'I shall chase her. If I miss her I shall wait for her at Table Bay.'

'She may get there before you,' I said, 'and be under way for another destination whilst you are still miles to the nor'ard.'

'No,' he cried hotly, 'we shall be there first; but we shall not need to go so far. Her course must be our course, and we shall overhaul her; don't doubt that.'

He listened with a face clouded and frowning with impatience; but I was resolved to weaken if I could what seemed to me an insane resolution.

'Count upon missing her at sea, for I tell you the chances of your picking her up are all against you. Well, now, you arrive at Table Bay and find that the "Shark" sailed a day or two before for some port of which nobody knows anything. What will you do then? How will you steer your "Bride"? For all you can tell, this man Hope-Kennedy may make for the Pacific Islands by way of Cape Horn, or he may head north-east for the Mozambique and the Indian waters, or south-east for the Australias. It is but to let fly an arrow in the dark to embark on such a quest.'

'Yes, a chance, as you say.'

'A chance,' he continued, 'that need not keep me waiting long for it to happen. D'ye think I could rest with the knowledge that that scoundrel and the woman he has rendered faithless to me are close yonder?' he exclaimed, pointing as though there had come a vision of the Atlantic before his mind's eye, and he saw the yacht afloat upon it. 'Who's to tell me that before the month is out our friend the Colonel will not be drifting somewhere fathoms deep with a shot through his heart?'

'If you catch him you will shoot him?'

'Oh yes.'

'And Lady Monson?'

He looked down upon his hands without answering.

'I am a single man,' said I, 'and am, therefore, no doubt disqualified from passing an opinion. But I vow to heaven, Wilfrid, if my wife chose to leave me for another man, I would not lift a finger either to regain her or to avenge myself. A divorce would fully appease me. Who would not feel gay to be rid of a woman whose every heart-throb is a dishonour? What more unendurable than an association rendered an incomparable insult, and the basest lie under heaven, by one's wife's secret abhorrence and her desire for another?'

'But you say you start the day after to-morrow?'

'Yes.'

'From Southampton?'

'Yes.'

'Well?'

'Ay,' said I, 'that's just it. We should be like Adam and Eve, with all the world before us where to choose.'

'Charlie, will you come? I counted upon you from the moment of forming my resolution. You have been a sailor. You are the one man of them all that I should turn to in such a time as this. Say you will come. Laura Jennings, my wife's--my--my sister-in-law I mean--will accompany us. Did I tell you this? Yes; I recollect. She is a stout-hearted little woman, as brave as she is beautiful, and so shocked, so shocked!' He clasped his hands upon his brow, lifting his eyes. 'She would pass through a furnace to rescue her sister from this infamy. Come!'

'You give me no time.'

'Will your yacht be ready for sea by the day after to-morrow?'

'She is ready now.'

'Your people will have worked expeditiously,' said I, fencing a little, for he was leaning towards me and devouring me with his eyes, and I found it impossible to say yes or no right off.

'Will you come?'

'How many form your party?'

'There is myself, there is Laura, then you, then a maid for my sister-in-law, and my man, and yours if you choose to bring him.'

'In short, there will be three of us,' said I; 'no doctor?'

'We cannot be too few. What would be the good of a doctor? Will you come?'

'Do you sleep in town to-night?'

'Yes,' he replied, naming a hotel near Charing Cross.

'Well, then, Wilfrid,' said I, 'you must give me to-night to think the thing over. What are your plans for to-morrow?'

'I leave for Southampton at ten. Laura arrives there at six in the evening.'

'Then,' said I, 'you shall have my answer by nine o'clock to-morrow morning. Will that do?'

A quarter of an hour later I was alone.

THE 'BRIDE.'

Time was when I had been much thrown with my cousin. I had served in the Royal Navy for a few years, as I have said, but abandoned it on my inheriting a very comfortable little fortune from my father, who survived my mother a few months only. I say I quitted the sea then, partly because I was now become an independent man, partly because I was comparatively without influence and so found the vocation unpromising, and partly because my frizzling equatorial spells of service had fairly sickened me of the life.

It was then that Wilfrid, who was a bachelor, and my senior by some ten years or thereabouts, invited me down to Cumberland, where I hunted and shot with him and passed some merry weeks. He took a great liking to me, and I was often with him, and we were much together in London. There came a time, however, when he took it into his head to travel. He thought he would go abroad and see the world; not Paris, Brussels, and Rome, but America and the Indies and Australia--a considerable undertaking in those ambling days of the tea waggon and the cotton kettle-bottom, when the passage from the Thames to Bombay occupied four months, and when a man who had made a voyage round the world believed he had a right to give himself airs.

Well, my cousin sailed; I went down to Gravesend with him and bade him good-bye there. His first start was for New York, and then he talked of proceeding to the West Indies and afterwards to the Cape, thence to India or Australia, and so on. He was away so long that the very memory of him grew dim in me, till one day I heard some men in a club that I belonged to speaking about the beautiful Lady Monson. I pricked up my ears at this, for Monson is my name and the word caught me instantly, and, gathering from the talk that one of the group, a young baronet with whom I was well acquainted, could satisfy my curiosity about the lady, I waited till he was alone and then questioned him.

He told me that Lady Monson was my cousin's wife; Sir Wilfrid had met her at Melbourne and married her there. She was the daughter of a squatter, a man of small beginnings, who had done amazingly well. She was exceedingly beautiful, my young friend assured me. He had met her twice at county balls, and had never seen her like for dignity, grace, and loveliness of form and face. He told me that she was very fond of the sea, so some friends or acquaintances of hers had informed him, and that, to gratify her taste in this way, Sir Wilfrid sold his cutter--a vessel of twenty tons, aboard which I had made one or two excursions with him--and replaced her by a handsome schooner which he had rechristened the 'Bride.' I understood from the young baronet that my cousin and his wife were then away cruising in the Mediterranean.

I had not before heard of Wilfrid's marriage, and, though for the moment I was a little surprised, and perhaps vexed, that he had never communicated so interesting a piece of news as this to me, who, as a blood relation and an intimate friend, had a claim upon his candour and kindness, yet on reflection I judged that his memory had been weakened by separation as mine had; and then I considered that he was so much engrossed by his wife as to be able to think of little besides, whilst, though he had then been married many months, he had apparently spent with Lady Monson a good deal of his time out of England.

About six weeks before the opening of this story I met him in Bond Street. I was passing him, for time and travel had wonderfully changed him, and in his long hair and smooth face I must certainly have failed, in the hurry of the pavement, to have recognised the cropped and bewhiskered young fellow whom I had taken leave of at Gravesend, but for his starting and his peculiar way of peering at me. My rooms were conveniently near; I carried him to them, and a couple of hours passed whilst he told me of his adventures. I noticed that he said much less about his wife than I should have expected to hear from him. He referred to her, indeed; praised her beauty, her accomplishments, with an almost passionate admiration in his way of speaking, yet I remarked a sort of uneasiness in his face too, a kind of shadowing as though the having to speak of his wife raised thoughts which eclipsed or dimmed the brightness of the holiday memories he was full of. Still I was so little sure that when I came to think it over I was convinced it was mere fancy on my part, or at the worst I took it that, though he was worth ten thousand a year, she might be making him uneasy by extravagance, or there might have been a tiff between them before leaving his home to come to London, the memory of which would worry a man of his temperament, a creature of nerves, and tainted besides, as you know. He told me he was in London for a couple of days on a matter of business, and that he had asked Lady Monson to accompany him, but she had said it vexed her to leave her baby for even a day, and that it was out of the question to subject the bairn to the jolting, risks, and fatigue of a long journey. He looked curiously as he said this, but the expression fled too nimbly from his face to be determinable.

I had now to decide how to act, and I was never more puzzled or irresolute in the whole course of my life. Had he proposed an ocean cruise as a mere yachting trip, I should have accepted the offer right out of hand.

The sea, as a vocation, I did not love; but very different from the discipline of a man-of-war's quarter-deck, and the fever-breeding tedium of stagnant and broiling stations, was the business of navigating the blue brine in a large richly-equipped yacht, of chasing the sun as one chose, of storing one's mind with memories of the glittering pageantry of noble and shining rivers, and green and sparkling scenes of country radiant and aromatic with the vegetation of tropic heights and distant sea-board cities, past the gleam of the coral strand with a scent of sandalwood in the offshore breeze, and boats of strange form and rig, gay as aquatic parrots, sliding along the turquoise surface to the strains of a chant as Asiatic as the smell of the hubble-bubble. No man ever loved travel more than I; only, unfortunately, in my time, when I had the right sort of health and spirit for adventure, journeys by land and by sea were tedious and fatiguing. Very few steamers were afloat: one might have sought in vain for a propeller to thrash one to the world's end with the velocity of a gale of wind. I had often a mind, after Wilfrid had started on his voyage to various parts of the world, to follow his example; but I would shake my head when I came to think of the passenger ship, the chance of being locked up for months with a score or two of people, half of whom might prove disagreeable, not to mention indifferent food and a vile ship's cook, with weeks of equatorial deadness, and everything to be gone through again as one went from place to place by sea, and myself companionless the while.

Moreover, how could one be sure that the Colonel and Lady Monson would not change their minds and make for American or Mediterranean ports? Their determination to put the whole world between them and England was not very intelligible, seeing that our globe is a big one, and that scoundrels need not travel far to be lost to the eye. If Lady Monson discovered that she had left behind her the remarkable letter which Wilfrid had given to me to read, then it would be strange if she and the Colonel did not change their programme, unless, indeed, they supposed that Wilfrid would never dream of following them upon the high seas.

But these were idle speculations; they made no part of my business. Should I accompany my cousin on as mad an undertaking as ever passion and distraction could hurry him into? I was heartily grieved for the poor fellow, and I sincerely desired to be of use to him. It might be that after we had been chasing for a few weeks his heart would sicken to the sight hour after hour of the bare sea-line, and then perhaps, if I were with him, I might come to have influence enough over his moods to divert him from his resolution, and so steer us home again; for I would think to myself, grant that we fall in with the 'Shark,' what can Wilfred do? Would he arm his men and board her? Yachtsmen are a peaceful body of sea-farers, and before it could come to a boarding match and a hand-to-hand fight, he would have to satisfy his crew that they had signed articles to sell their lives as well as work his ship. To be sure, if the yachts fell within hail and Sir Wilfrid challenged the Colonel, the latter would not, it may be supposed, decline the duel.

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