My dear, long-suffering, martyred darling!
It makes my blood boil to see how the very powers of darkness, in the
name of religion, morality, philanthropy and the judgment of God, were
persecuting my poor little woman.
But why speak of myself at all, or interrupt my darling's narrative,
except to say what was happening in my efforts to reach her?
While we were swinging along in our big liner over the heaving bosom of
the Mediterranean the indefinable sense of her danger never left me day
or night.
That old dream of the glacier and the precipice continued to haunt my
sleep, with the difference that, instead of the aurora glistening in my
dear one's eyes, there was now a blizzard behind her.
The miserable thing so tortured me as we approached Malta (where I
expected to receive a reply to the cable I had sent from Port Said to
the house of Daniel O'Neill) that I felt physically weak at the thought
of the joy or sorrow ahead of me.
Though there was no telegram from my darling at Malta, there was one
from the chairman of my committee, saying he was coming to Marseilles to
meet our steamer and would sail the rest of the way home with us.
Indirectly this brought me a certain comfort. It reminded me of the
letter I had written for my dear one on the day I left Castle Raa.
Sixteen months had passed since then, serious things had happened in the
interval, and I had never thought of that letter before.
It was not to her father, as she supposed, and certainly not to her
husband. It was to my chairman, asking him, in the event of my darling
sending it on, to do whatever was necessary to protect her during my
absence.
If my chairman had not received that letter, my conclusion would be that
my dear little woman had never been reduced to such straits as to
require help from any one. If he had in fact received it, he must have
done what I wished, and therefore everything would be well.
There was a certain suspense as well as a certain consolation in all
this, and before our big ship slowed down at Marseilles I was on deck
searching for my chairman among the people waiting for us on the pier.
I saw him immediately, waving his travelling cap with a flourish of joy,
and I snatched a little comfort from that.
As soon as the steamer was brought to, he was the first to come aboard,
and I scanned his face as he hurried up the gangway. It was beaming.
"It's all right," I thought; "a man could not look as happy as that if
he were bringing me bad news."
A moment afterwards he was shaking my hand, clapping me on the shoulder,
and saying:
"Splendid! Magnificent! Glorious achievement! Proved your point up to
the hilt, my boy!"
And when I said something about not having gone all the way he cried:
"Never mind! You'll do it next time," which made some of my shipmates
who were standing round with shining eyes say, "Aye, aye, sir," and then
one of them (it was good old O'Sullivan) shouted:
"By the stars of heaven, that's thrue, my lord! And if anybody's after
saying that the Commanther was turned back this time by anything less
than the almighty power of Nature in her wrath, you may say there's
forty-eight of us here to tell him he lies."
"I believe it," said the chairman, and then there were further
congratulations, with messages from members of my committee, but never a
word from my dear one.
Thinking the chairman might hesitate to speak of a private matter until
we were alone, I took him down to my state-room. But he had nothing to
say there, either, except about articles to be written, reports to be
compiled, and invitations to be accepted.
Several hours passed like this. We were again out at sea, and my longing
to know what had happened was consuming me, but I dared not ask from
fear of a bad answer.
Before the night was out, however, I had gone to work in a roundabout
way. Taking O'Sullivan into my confidence, I told him it had not been my
parents that I had been anxious about (God forgive me!), but somebody
else whom he had seen and spoken to.
"Do you mean Mal . . . I should say Lady . . ."
"Yes."
"By the holy saints, the way I was thinking that when I brought you the
letter at Port Said, and saw the clouds of heaven still hanging on you."
I found that the good fellow had a similar trouble of his own (not yet
having heard from his mother), so he fell readily into my plan, which
was that of cross-questioning the chairman about my dear one, and I
about his, and then meeting secretly and imparting what we had learned.
Anybody may laugh who likes at the thought of two big lumbering fellows
afraid to face the truth (scouting round and round it), but it grips me
by the throat to this day to see myself taking our chairman into a quiet
corner of the smoke-room and saying:
"Poor old O'Sullivan! He hasn't heard from his old mother yet. She was
sick when he sailed, and wouldn't have parted with him to go with
anybody except myself. You haven't heard of her, have you?"
And then to think of O'Sullivan doing the same for me, with:
"The poor Commanther! Look at him there. Faith, he's keeping a good
heart, isn't he? But it's just destroyed he is for want of news of a
great friend that was in trouble. It was a girl . . . a lady, I mane.
You haven't heard the whisper of a word, sir . . . eh?"
Our chairman had heard nothing. And when (bracing myself at last) I
asked point-blank if anything had been sent to him as from me, and he
answered "No," I might have been relieved, but I wasn't. Though I did
not know then that my darling had burnt my letter, I began to feel that
she was the last person in the world to use it, being (God bless her!)
of the mettle that makes a woman want to fight her own battles without
asking help of any one.
This quite crushed down my heart, for, seeing that she had sent no reply
to my cables, I could not find any escape from the conclusion that she
was where no word could come from her--she was dead!
Lord God, how I suffered when this phantom got into my mind! I used to
walk up and down the promenade deck late into the night, trying and
condemning myself as if I had been my own judge and jury.
"She is dead. I have killed her," I thought.
Thank God, the phantom was soon laid by the gladdest sight I ever saw on
earth or ever expect to see, and it wouldn't be necessary to speak of it
now but for the glorious confidence it brought me.
It was the same with me as with a ship-broken man whom Providence comes
to relieve in his last extremity, and I could fix the place of mine as
certainly as if I had marked it on a chart. We had called at Gibraltar
(where O'Sullivan had received a letter from his mother, saying she was
splendid) and were running along the coast of Portugal.
It was a dirty black night, with intervals of rain, I remember. While my
shipmates were making cheerful times of it in the smoke-room (O'Sullivan
with heart at ease singing the "Minsthrel Boy" to a chorus of noisy
cheers) I was walking up and down the deck with my little stock of
courage nearly gone, for turn which way I would it was dark, dark, dark,
when just as we picked up the lights of Finisterre something said to me,
as plainly as words could speak:
"What in the name of thunder are you thinking about? Do you mean to say
that you were turned back in the 88th latitude, and have been hurried
home without the loss of a moment, only to find everything over at the
end of your journey? No, no, no! Your poor, dear, heroic little woman is
alive! She may be in danger, and beset by all the powers of the devil,
but that's just why you have been brought home to save her, and you
_will_ save her, as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow morning."
There are thoughts which, like great notes in music, grip you by the
soul and lift you into a world which you don't naturally belong to. This
was one of them.
Never after that did I feel one moment's real anxiety. I was my own man
once more; and though I continued to walk the deck while our good ship
sped along in the night, it was only because there was a kind of wild
harmony between the mighty voice of the rolling billows of the Bay and
the unheard anthem of boundless hope that was singing in my breast.
I recollect that during my walk a hymn was always haunting me. It was
the same that we used to sing in the shuddering darkness of that
perpetual night, when we stood (fifty downhearted men) under the shelter
of our snow camp, with a ninety mile blizzard shrieking above us:
"_Lead, kindly Light, amid th' encircling gloom,
Lead Thou me on_."
But the light was within me now, and I knew as certainly as that the
good ship was under my feet that I was being carried home at the call of
the Spirit to rescue my stricken darling.
God keep her on her solitary way! England! England! England! Less than a
week and I should be there!
That was early hours on Saturday morning--the very Saturday when my poor
little woman, after she had been turned away by those prating
philanthropists, was being sheltered by the prostitute.
Let him explain it who can. I cannot.