It beckons you to go away with it,
As if it some impartment did desire
To you alone.
... Weigh what loss
If with too credent ear you list his songs
Or lose your heart...
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it.--_Hamlet._
|IT could hardly be expected that there should be in the mind of Daireen
Gerald a total absence of interest in the man who by her aid had been
rescued from the deep. To be sure, her friend Mrs. Crawford had given
her to understand that people of taste might pronounce the episode
melodramatic, and as this word sounded very terrible to Daireen, as,
indeed, it did to Mrs. Crawford herself, whose apprehension of its
meaning was about as vague as the girl's, she never betrayed the anxiety
she felt for the recovery of this man, who was, she thought, equally
accountable for the dubious taste displayed in the circumstances of
his rescue. She began to feel, as Mr. Glaston in his delicacy carefully
refrained from alluding to this night of terror, and as Mrs. Crawford
assumed a solemn expression of countenance upon the least reference
to the girl's participation in the recovery of the man with the
melodramatic name, that there was a certain bond of sympathy between
herself and this Oswin Markham; and now and again when she found the
doctor alone, she ventured to make some inquiries regarding him. In the
course of a few days she learned a good deal.
“He is behaving handsomely--most handsomely, my dear,” said the doctor,
one afternoon about a week after the occurrence. “He eats everything
that is given to him and drinks in a like proportion.”
The girl felt that this was truly noble on the part of the man, but it
was scarcely the exact type of information she would have liked.
“And he--is he able to speak yet?” she asked.
“Speak? yes, to be sure. He asked me how he came to be picked up, and
I told him,” continued the doctor, with a smile of gallantry of which
Daireen did not believe him capable, “that he was seen by the most
charming young lady in the world,--yes, yes, I told him that, though
I ran a chance of retarding his recovery by doing so.” This was, of
course, quite delightful to hear, but Daireen wanted to know even more
about the stranger than the doctor's speech had conveyed to her.
“The poor fellow was a long time in the water, I suppose?” she said
artfully, trying to find out all that the doctor had learned.
“He was four days upon that piece of wreck,” said the doctor.
The girl gave a start that seemed very like a shudder, as she repeated
the words, “Four days.”
“Yes; he was on his way home from Australia, where he had been
living for some years, and the vessel he was in was commanded by some
incompetent and drunken idiot who allowed it to be struck by a tornado
of no extraordinary violence, and to founder in mid-ocean. As our friend
was a passenger, he says, the crew did not think it necessary to invite
him to have a seat in one of the boats, a fact that accounts for his
being alive to-day, for both boats were swamped and every soul sent to
the bottom in his view. He tells me he managed to lash a broken topmast
to the stump of the mainmast that had gone by the board, and to cut the
rigging so that he was left drifting when the hull went down. That's all
the story, my dear, only we know what a hard time of it he must have had
during the four days.”
“A hard time--a hard time,” Daireen repeated musingly, and without a
further word she turned away.
Mr. Glaston, who had been pleased to take a merciful view of her recent
action of so pronounced a type, found that his gracious attempts to
reform her plastic taste did not, during this evening, meet with that
appreciation of which they were undoubtedly deserving. Had he been aware
that all the time his eloquent speech was flowing on the subject of
the consciousness of hues--a theme attractive on account of its
delicacy--the girl had before her eyes only a vision of heavy blue skies
overhanging dark green seas terrible in loneliness--the monotony of
endless waves broken only by the appearance in the centre of the waste
of a broken mast and a ghastly face and clinging lean hands upon it,
he would probably have withdrawn the concession he had made to Mrs.
Crawford regarding the taste of her protégée.
And indeed, Daireen was not during any of these days thinking about much
besides this Oswin Markham, though she never mentioned his name even
to the doctor. At nights when she would look out over the flashing
phosphorescent waters, she would evermore seem to see that white face
looking up at her; but now she neither started nor shuddered as she was
used to do for a few nights after she had seen the real face there. It
seemed to her now as a face that she knew--the face of a friend looking
into her face from the dim uncertain surface of the sea of a dream.
One morning a few days after her most interesting chat with Doctor
Campion, she got up even earlier than usual--before, in fact, the
healthy pedestrian gentleman had completed his first mile, and went on
deck. She had, however, just stepped out of the companion when she heard
voices and a laugh or two coming from the stern. She glanced in the
direction of the sounds and remained motionless at the cabin door.
A group consisting of the major, the doctor, and the captain of the
steamer were standing in the neighbourhood of the wheel; but upon a
deck-chair, amongst a heap of cushions, a stranger was lying back--a
man with a thin brown face and large, somewhat sunken eyes, and a short
brown beard and moustache; he was holding a cigar in the fingers of
his left hand that drooped over the arm of the chair--a long, white
hand--and he was looking up to the face of the major, who was telling
one of his usual stories with his accustomed power. None of the other
passengers were on deck, with the exception of the pedestrian, who came
into view every few minutes as he reached the after part of the ship.
She stood there at the door of the companion without any motion, looking
at that haggard face of the stranger. She saw a faint smile light up his
deep eyes and pass over his features as the major brought out the full
piquancy of his little anecdote, which was certainly not _virginibus
puerisque_. Then she turned and went down again to her cabin without
seeing how a young sailor was standing gazing at her from the passage
of the ship's bridge. She sat down in her cabin and waited until the
ringing of the second bell for breakfast.
“You are getting dreadfully lazy, my dear,” said Mrs. Crawford, as she
took her seat by the girl's side. “Why were you not up as usual to get
an appetite for breakfast?” Then without waiting for an answer, she
whispered, “Do you see the stranger at the other side of the table? That
is our friend Mr. Oswin Markham; his name does not sound so queer when
you come to know him. The doctor was right, Daireen: he is a gentleman.”
“Then you have----”
“Yes, I have made his acquaintance this morning already. I hope Mr.
Glaston may not think that it was my fault.”
“Mr. Glaston?” said Daireen. .
“Yes; you know he is so sensitive in matters like this; he might
fancy that it would be better to leave this stranger by himself; but
considering that he will be parting from the ship in a week, I don't
think I was wrong to let my husband present me. At any rate he is a
gentleman--that is one satisfaction.”
Daireen felt that there was every reason to be glad that she was not
placed in the unhappy position of having taken steps for the rescue of a
person not accustomed to mix in good society. But she did not even once
glance down towards the man whose standing had been by a competent judge
pronounced satisfactory. She herself talked so little, however, that she
could hear him speak in answer to the questions some good-natured people
at the bottom of the table put to him, regarding the name of his ship
and the circumstances of the catastrophe that had come upon it. She also
heard the young lady who had the peculiar fancy for blue and pink beg of
him to do her the favour of writing his name in her birthday book.
During the hours that elapsed before tiffin Daireen sat with a novel in
her hand, and she knew that the stranger was on the ship's bridge with
Major Crawford. The major found his company exceedingly agreeable, for
the old officer had unfortunately been prodigal of his stories through
the first week of the voyage, and lately he had been reminded that he
was repeating himself when he had begun a really choice anecdote. This
Mr. Markham, however, had never been in India, so that the major found
in him an appreciative audience, and for the satisfactory narration of
a chronicle of Hindustan an appreciative audience is an important
consideration. The major, however, appeared alone at tiffin, for Mr.
Markham, he said, preferred lying in the sun on the bridge to eating
salad in the cabin. The young lady with the birthday book seemed a
little disappointed, for she had just taken the bold step of adding to
her personal decorations a large artificial moss-rose with glass beads
sewed all about it in marvellous similitude to early dew, and it would
not bear being trifled with in the matter of detaching from her dress.
Whether or not Mrs. Crawford had conferred with Mr. Glaston on the
subject of the isolation of Mr. Markham, Daireen, on coming to sit down
to the dinner-table, found Mrs. Crawford and Mr. Markham standing in
the saloon just at the entrance to her cabin. She could feel herself
flushing as she looked up to the man's haggard face while Mrs. Crawford
pronounced their names, and she knew that the hand she put in his thin
fingers was trembling. Neither spoke a single word: they only looked at
each other. Then the doctor came forward with some remark that Daireen
did not seem to hear, and soon the table was surrounded with the
passengers.
“He says he feels nearly as strong as he ever did,” whispered Mrs.
Crawford to the girl as they sat down together. “He will be able to
leave us at St. Helena next week without doubt.”
On the same evening Daireen was sitting in her usual place far astern.
The sun had set some time, and the latitude being only a few degrees
south of the equator, the darkness had already almost come down upon
the waters. It was dimmer than twilight, but not the solid darkness of
a tropical night. The groups of passengers had all dispersed or gone
forward, and the only sounds were the whisperings of the water in the
wake of the steamer, and the splashing of the flying fish.
Suddenly from the cabin there came the music of the piano, and a low
voice singing to its accompaniment--so faint it came that Daireen knew
no one on deck except herself could hear the voice, for she was sitting
just beside the open fanlight of the saloon; but she heard every word
that was sung:
I.
When the vesper gold has waned:
When the passion-hues of eve
Breathe themselves away and leave
Blue the heaven their crimson stained,
But one hour the world doth grieve,
For the shadowy skies receive
Stars so gracious-sweet that they
Make night more beloved than day.
II
From my life the light has waned:
Every golden gleam that shone
Through the dimness now las gone.
Of all joys has one remained?
Stays one gladness I have known?
Day is past; I stand, alone,
Here beneath these darkened skies,
Asking--“Doth a star arise?”
|IT ended so faintly that Daireen Gerald could not tell when the last
note had come. She felt that she was in a dream and the sounds she had
heard were but a part of her dream--sounds? were these sounds, or
merely the effect of breathing the lovely shadowy light that swathed the
waters? The sounds seemed to her the twilight expressed in music.
Then in the silence she heard a voice speaking her name. She turned and
saw Oswin Markham standing beside her.
“Miss Gerald,” he said, “I owe my life to you. I thank you for it.”
He could hardly have expressed himself more simply if he had been
thanking her for passing him a fig at dinner, and yet his words thrilled
her.
“No, no; do not say that,” she said, in a startled voice. “I did
nothing--nothing that any one else might not have done. Oh, do not talk
of it, please.”
“I will not,” he said slowly, after a pause. “I will never talk of
it again. I was a fool to speak of it to you. I know now that you
understand--that there is no need for me to open my lips to you.”
“I do indeed,” she said, turning her eyes upon his face. “I do
understand.” She put out her hand, and he took it in his own--not
fervently, not with the least expression of emotion, his fingers closed
over it. A long time passed before she saw his face in front of her own,
and felt his eyes looking into her eyes as his words came in a whisper,
“Child--child, there is a bond between us--a bond whose token is
silence.”
She kept her eyes fixed upon his as he spoke, and long after his words
had come. She knew he had spoken the truth: there was a bond between
them. She understood it.
She saw the gaunt face with its large eyes close to her own; her
own eyes filled with tears, and then came the first token of their
bond--silence. She felt his grasp unloosed, she heard him moving away,
and she knew that she was alone in the silence.