THE STRANGER FROM THE SEA
I held his hand tight. It was so pleasant to know I could love him
now with a clear conscience, even if I had to give myself up to the
police to-morrow. And indeed, being a woman, I didn't really much
care whether they took me or not, if only I could love Jack, and
know Jack loved me.
"You must tell me everything--this minute--Jack," I said, clinging
to him like a child. "I can't bear this suspense. Begin telling me
at once. You'll do me more harm than good if you keep me waiting any
longer."
Jack took instinctively a medical view of the situation.
"So I think, my child," he said, looking lovingly at me. "Your
nerves are on the rack, and will be the better for unstringing. Oh,
Una, it's such a comfort that you know at last who I am! It's such a
comfort that I'm able to talk to you to-day just as we two used to
talk four years ago in Devonshire!"
"Did I love you then, Jack?" I whispered, nestling still closer to
him, in spite of my horror. Or rather, my very horror made me feel
more acutely than ever the need for protection. I was no longer
alone in the world. I had a man to support me.
"You told me so, darling," he answered, smoothing my hair with his
hand. "Have you forgotten all about it? Doesn't even that come back?
Can't you remember it now, when I've told you who I am and how it
all happened?"
I shook my head.
"All cloudy still," I replied, vaguely. "Some dim sense of
familiarity, perhaps,--as when people say they have a feeling of
having lived all this over somewhere else before,--but nothing more
certain, nothing more definite."
"Then I must begin at the beginning," Jack answered, bracing himself
for his hard task, "and reconstruct your whole life for you, as far
as I know it, from your very childhood. I'm particularly anxious you
should not merely be TOLD what took place, but should remember the
past. There are gaps in my own knowledge I want you to eke out.
There are places I want you to help me myself over. And besides,
it'll be more satisfactory to yourself to remember than to be told
it."
I leaned back, almost exhausted. Incredible as it may seem to you,
in spite of that awful photograph, I couldn't really believe even so
I had killed my father. And yet I knew very well now that Jack, at
least, hadn't done it. That was almost enough. But not quite. My
head swam round in terror. I waited and longed for Jack to explain
the whole thing to me.
"You remember," he said, watching me close, "that when you lived as
a very little girl in Australia you had a papa who seems different
to you still from the papa in your later childish memories?"
"I remember it very well," I replied. "It came back to me on the
Sarmatian. I think of him always now as the papa in the loose white
linen coat. The more I dwell on him, the more does he come out to me
as a different man from the other one--the father...I shot at The
Grange, at Woodbury. The father that lives with me in that
ineffaceable Picture."
"He WAS a different man," Jack answered, with a sudden burst, as if
he knew all my story. "Una, I may as well relieve your mind all at
once on that formidable point. You shot that man"--he pointed to the
white-bearded person in the photograph,--"but it was not parricide:
it was not even murder. It was under grave provocation...in more
than self-defence...and he was NOT your father."
"Not my father!" I cried, clasping my hands and leaning forward in
my profound suspense. "But I killed him all the same! Oh, Jack, how
terrible!"
"You must quiet yourself, my child," he said, still soothing me
automatically. "I want your aid in this matter. You must listen to
me calmly, and bring your mind to bear on all I say to you."
Then he began with a regular history of my early life, which came
back to me as fast as he spoke, scene by scene and year by year, in
long and familiar succession. I remembered everything, sometimes
only when he suggested it; but sometimes also, before he said the
words, my memory outran his tongue, and I put in a recollection or
two with my own tongue as they recurred to me under the stimulus of
this new birth of my dead nature. I recalled my early days in the
far bush in Australia; my journey home to England on the big steamer
with mamma; the way we travelled about for years from place to place
on the Continent. I remembered how I had been strictly enjoined,
too, never to speak of baby; and how my father used to watch my
mother just as closely as he watched me, always afraid, as it
appeared to me, she should make some verbal slip or let out some
great secret in an unguarded moment. He seemed relieved, I
recollected now, when my poor mother died: he grew less strict with
me then, but as far as I could judge, though he was careful of my
health, he never really loved me.
Then Jack reminded me further of other scenes that came much later
in my forgotten life. He reminded me of my trip to Torquay, where I
first met him: and all at once the whole history of my old visits to
the Moores came back like a flood to me. The memory seemed to
inundate and overwhelm my brain. They were the happiest time of all
life, those delightful visits, when I met Jack and fell in love with
him, and half confided my love to my Cousin Minnie. Strange to say,
though at Torquay itself I'd forgotten it all, in that little
Canadian house, with Jack by my side to recall it, it rushed back
like a wave upon me. I'd fallen in love with Jack without my
father's knowledge or consent; and I knew very well my father would
never allow me to marry him. He had ideas of his own, my father,
about the sort of person I ought to marry: and I half suspected in
my heart of hearts he meant if possible always to keep me at home
single to take care of him and look after him. I didn't know, as
yet, he had sufficient reasons of his own for desiring me to remain
for ever unmarried.
I remembered, too, that I never really loved my father. His nature
was hard, cold, reserved, unsympathetic. I only feared and obeyed
him. At times, my own strong character came out, I remembered, and I
defied him to his face, defied him openly. Then there were scenes in
the house, dreadful scenes, too hateful to dwell upon: and the
servants came up to my room at the end and comforted me.
So, step by step, Jack reminded me of everything in my own past
life, up to the very night of the murder, from which my Second State
dated. I'd come back from Torquay a week or two before, very full
indeed of Jack, and determined at all costs, sooner or later, to
marry him. But though I had kept all quiet, papa had suspected my
liking on the day of the Berry Pomeroy athletics, and had forbidden
me to see Jack, or to write to him, or to have anything further to
say to him. He was determined, he told me, whoever I married, I
shouldn't at least marry a beggarly doctor. All that I remembered;
and also how, in spite of the prohibition, I wrote letters to Jack,
but could receive none in return--lest my father should see them.
And still, the central mystery of the murder was no nearer solution.
I held my breath in terror. Had I really any sort of justification
in killing him?
Dimly and instinctively, as Jack went on, a faint sense of
resentment and righteous indignation against the man with the white
beard rose up vaguely in my mind by slow degrees. I knew I had been
angry with him, I knew I had defied him, but how or why as yet I
knew not.
Then Jack suddenly paused, and began in a different voice a new part
of his tale. It was nothing I remembered or could possibly remember,
he said; but it was necessary to the comprehension of what came
after, and would help me to recall it. About a week after I left
Torquay, it seemed, Jack was in his consulting-room at Babbicombe
one day, having just returned from a very long bicycle ride--for he
was a first-rate cyclist,--when the servant announced a new
patient; and a very worn-out old man came in to visit him.
The man had a ragged grey beard and scanty white hair; he was clad
in poor clothes, and had tramped on foot all the way from London to
Babbicombe, where Jack used to practice. But Jack saw at once under
this rough exterior he had the voice and address of a cultivated
gentleman, though he was so broken down by want and long suffering
and exposure and illness that he looked like a beggar just let loose
from the workhouse.
I held my breath as Jack showed me the poor old man's photograph. It
was a portrait taken after death--for Jack attended him to the end
through a fatal illness;--and it showed a face thin and worn, and
much lined by unspeakable hardships. But I burst out crying at once
the very moment I looked at it. For a second or two, I couldn't say
why: I suppose it was instinct. Blood is thicker than water, they
tell us; and I have the intuition of kindred very strong in me, I
believe. But at any rate, I cried silently, with big hot tears,
while I looked at that dead face of silent suffering, as I never had
cried over the photograph of the respectable-looking man who lay
dead on the floor of the library, and whom I was always taught to
consider my father. Then it came back to me, why... I gazed at it
and grew faint. I clutched Jack's arm for support. I knew what it
meant now. The poor worn old man who lay dead on the bed with that
look of mute agony on his features--was my first papa: the papa in
the loose white linen coat: the one I remembered with childlike love
and trustfulness in my earliest babyish Australian recollections!
I couldn't mistake the face. It was burnt into my brain now. This
was he, though much older and sadder, and more scarred and lined by
age and weather. It was my very first papa. My own papa. I cried
silently still. I couldn't bear to look at it. Then the real truth
broke upon me once more. This, and this alone, was in very deed my
one real father!
I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.
"Oh, I know him!" I cried wildly. "It's my father! My father!"
Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story. This
rush of emotions was too much for me for a while. I could hardly
hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.
At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the
table before me.
"Tell me all about him," I murmured, sobbing. "For, Jack, I remember
now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him--I loved him."
Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me.
The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person
in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had
none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow. He was a
shipwrecked mariner, in a sense: shipwrecked on the sea of Life and
on the open Pacific as well. But once he had been a clergyman, and a
man of education, position, reputation, fortune.
Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this
curious tale. The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed
in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a
remote Pacific islet: not a tropical islet of the kind with whose
palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock,
away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the
Antarctic continent. There for twenty long years that unhappy man
had lived by himself a solitary life.
I started at the sound.
"For twenty years!" I exclaimed. "Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for
how could that be? I was only eighteen when all this happened. How
could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was
only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?"
Jack looked at me and shook his head.
"You've much to learn yet, Una," he answered. "The story's a long
one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You've been
deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed
late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and
precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older
than Mr. Callingham pretended. You're twenty-six now, not
twenty-two as you think. Wait, and in time you'll hear all about
it."
He went on with his story. I listened, spell-bound. The unhappy
man explained to Jack how he had been wrecked on the voyage, and
escaped on a raft with one other passenger: how they had drifted far
south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this
wretched island: how they remained there for a month or two, picking
up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds:
and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and
sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay--to find, to his
amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that
desolate island. His fellow-castaway, he knew then, had deceived and
deserted him!
There was no room, indeed, to doubt the treachery of the wretched
being who had so basely treated him. As he looked, a ship under full
sail stood away to northward. In vain the unhappy man made wild
signals from the shore with his tattered garments. No notice was
taken of them. His companion must deliberately have suppressed the
other's existence, and pretended to be alone by himself on the
island.
"And his name?" Jack asked of the poor old man, horrified.
The stranger answered without a moment's pause:
"His name, if you want it--was Vivian Callingham."
"And yours?" Jack continued, as soon as he could recover from his
first shock of horror.
"And mine," the poor castaway replied, "is Richard Wharton."
As Jack told me those words, another strange thrill ran through me.
"Richard Wharton was the name of mamma's first husband. Then I'm not
a Callingham at all!" I cried, unable to take it all in at first in
its full complexity. "I'm really a Wharton!"
Jack nodded his head in assent.
"Yes, you're really a Wharton," he said. "You're the baby that died,
as we all were told. Your true Christian name's Mary. But, Una, you
were always Una to all of us in England; and though the real Una
Callingham died when you were a little girl of three or four years
old, you'll be Una always now to Elsie and me. We can't think of you
as other than we've always called you."
Then he went on to explain to me how the stranger had landed in
London, alone and friendless, twenty years later, from a passing
Australian merchant vessel which had picked him up on the island.
All those years he had waited, and fed himself on eggs of penguins.
He landed by himself, the crew having given him a suit of old
clothes, and subscribed to find him in immediate necessaries. He
began to inquire cautiously in London about his wife and family. At
first, he could learn little or nothing; for nobody remembered him,
and he feared to ask too openly, a sort of Enoch Arden terror
restraining him from proclaiming his personality till he knew
exactly what had happened in his long absence. But bit by bit, he
found out at last that his wife had married again, and was now long
dead: and that the man she had married was Vivian Callingham, his
own treacherous companion on the Crozet Islands. As soon as he
learned that, the full depth of the man's guilt burst upon him like
a thunderbolt. Richard Wharton understood now why Vivian Callingham
had left him alone on those desert rocks, and sailed away in the
ship without telling the captain of his fellow-castaway's plight. He
saw the whole vile plot the man had concocted at once, and the steps
he had taken to carry it into execution.
Vivian Callingham, whom I falsely thought my father, had gone back
to Australia with pretended news of Richard Wharton's death. He had
sought my widowed mother in her own home up country, and told her a
lying tale of his devotion to her husband in his dying moments on
that remote ocean speck in the far Southern Pacific. By this story
he ingratiated himself. He knew she was rich: he knew she was worth
marrying: and to marry her, he had left my own real father, Richard
Wharton, to starve and languish for twenty years among rocks and
sea-fowl on a lonely island!
My blood ran cold at such a tale of deadly treachery. I remembered
now to have heard some small part of it before. But much of it, as
Jack told it to me, was quite new and unexpected. No wonder I had
turned in horror that night from the man I long believed to be my
own father, when I learned by what vile and cruelly treacherous
means he had succeeded in imposing his supposed relationship upon
me! But still, all this brought me no nearer the real question of
questions--why did I shoot him?