CONCLUSION
I have kept you long at sea. With my escape in the barque from Captain
Braine’s island in company with my shipmate Louise, the story of my
adventure—the narrative, indeed, of the romance of the wreck—virtually
ends. Yet you will wish to see Miss Temple safely home; you will desire
to know whether I married her or not; you will also want to hear the
latest news of the people of the _Countess Ida_, to learn the fate of
the Honourable Mr. Colledge, of the crew of the _Magicienne’s_ cutter,
and of the carpenter Lush and his merry gold-hunting men. All may be
told in the brief limits of a chapter.
For five days Wetherly and Miss Temple and myself navigated the barque
without assistance. We managed it thus: the girl took her turn in
steering the vessel, and after a very few trials steered with the
expertness of a trained hand. I can see her now as she stands at the
wheel: her fine figure clear cut against the soft Pacific blue over the
stern; her dark and shining eyes bent upon the compass card, or lifting
in the beauty of the shadow of their lashes to the white canvas; her
hands of ivory delicacy grasping the spokes, and always a smile of
sweetness and gladness and hope for me when our glances met. To think of
the haughty, aristocratic Miss Louise Temple reduced to it! But she did
a deal more than that: she helped us to pull and haul; she cooked for
us, she kept a lookout, walking the weather-deck whilst Wetherly steered
and I was resting. No complaint ever left her lips; she was gentle and
happy in all she did. The sea had dealt with her to some purpose; and
she was now as sweet, tender, compliant, as she was before self-willed,
insolent, and objectionable in all things but her beauty.
The struggle, indeed, would have been a desperate one for us but for the
weather. The small but steady sailing breeze that had blown us away from
the island continued with a shift of three points only in those five
days, and a trifling increase one night, so that we had never occasion
to start a sheet or let go a halliard; nothing more were we called upon
to do with the gear than to slacken away the braces.
It was on the afternoon of the fifth day that we fell in with a Peruvian
man-of-war brig. She backed her topsail and sent a boat. The young
officer in command spoke French very fluently, and Miss Temple and I
between us were able to make him understand our story. He returned to
his ship to report what I had said, and presently came back with a
couple of Irish seamen, to whose services to help us to carry the barque
to Valparaiso we were, he said, very welcome. This I considered an
extraordinary stroke of fortune, for in so slender a ship’s company as
we should still make it was of the utmost consequence that all orders
given should be perfectly and instantly intelligible. The Peruvian brig
was bound on a cruise amongst the islands, and I earnestly entreated the
officer to request his commander to head first of all for the reef upon
which I had left Lush and his men, that they might be taken off, if they
had not recovered their boat.
Down to this point, the three of us in one fashion and another had
managed so fairly well, that the acquisition of the two Irish seamen
communicated to me a sense of being in command of a very tolerable
ship’s company. Miss Temple and I could now enjoy some little leisure
apart from a routine that had been harassing with its vexations and
incessant demands upon our vigilance. Night after night descended upon
us in beauty; the warm wind blew moist with dew; the reflection of the
rich and trembling stars quivered in cones of an icy gleam amid the
ripples of the breeze-brushed sea; the curl of new moon shone in the
west in the wake of the glowing sun to rise nightly fuller and more
brilliant yet, till for awhile the barque sailed through an atmosphere
that was brimful of the greenish glory of the unclouded planet. There
was scarcely, indeed, a condition of this tender tropic passage to
Valparaiso that was not favourable to sentiment. Yet my pride rendered
it an obligation upon me that before I spoke my love I must make sure of
the girl’s own feelings towards me. I watched her with an impassioned
eye; I listened to every word that fell from her lips with an ear eager
to penetrate to the spirit of her meaning; a smile that seemed in the
least degree ambiguous would keep me musing for a whole watch together.
Then I would inquire whether I could in honour ask her to be my wife
until my protection and care for her had ceased, and she stood to me in
the position she had occupied when we had first met aboard the Indiaman.
But to this very fine question of conscience I would respond with the
consideration that if I did not ask her now, I must continue in a
distracting state of suspense and anxiety for many weeks, running,
indeed, into months—that is to say, until we should reach home; that she
might misconstrue my reserve, and attribute it to indifference; that to
make her understand why I did not speak would involve the declaration
that my honour was supposed to regard as objectionable.
But all this self-parleying simply signified that I was waiting to make
sure of her answer before addressing her. In one quarter of an hour one
fine night, with a high moon riding over the topsail yardarm and the
breeze bringing an elfin-like sound of delicate singing, out of the
rigging, it was settled! A glance from her, a moment of speaking
silence, brought my love to my lips, and standing with her hand in mine
in the shadow of a wing of sail curving past the main-rigging, with the
brook-like voice of running waters rising, I asked her to be my wife.
There was hesitation without reluctance, a manner of mingled doubt and
delight. I had won her heart; and her hand must follow; but her mother,
her dearest mother! Her consent must be obtained; and from what she said
in disjointed sentences, with earnest anxiety to say nothing that might
give me pain, with a voice that trembled with the emotions of gratitude
and affection, I gathered that Lady Temple’s matrimonial schemes for her
daughter soared very considerably above the degree of a commoner.
‘But Louise, I have your love?’
‘Yes, yes, yes! my love, my gratitude, and my admiration.’
‘And you need but your mother’s consent to marry me?’
‘Yes, and she will consent. This long association—this astonishing
adventure’——
‘Ay, but there is no obligation of marriage in _that_. I have your love,
and your mother will consent because you love me?’
She fixed her eyes on my face, and by the haze of moonlight floating off
the sand-white planks into the shadow in which we stood, I saw such
meaning in them that the sole sequel of my interpretation of it must be
to put my lips to hers.
‘My first kiss, Louise! My God! how little did I dream of this happiness
when I used to look at you and almost hate you aboard the _Countess
Ida_!’
But enough of this. It all happened so many years ago now, that I am
astonished by my memory that enables me to put down even so much of this
little passage of my experiences with Louise as I have written.
After days of delightful weather and prosperous winds, we came to an
anchor at Valparaiso. I at once waited upon the British consul, related
my story, delivered over the ship, and was treated by him with the
utmost courtesy, consideration, and hospitality. A large English vessel
was sailing for Liverpool eight days after the date of our arrival. I
inspected her, and promptly took berths for myself and Miss Temple; and
the rest of the time we spent in providing ourselves with the necessary
outfit for another long voyage. The consul informed me that the
deposition I made as to the _Lady Blanche_ would suffice in respect of
the legal manœuvring that would have to follow, and that I was at
liberty to sail whenever I chose. I empowered him to hand over any
salvage money that might come to me to Wetherly, whom I also requested
to call upon me when he should arrive in England, that I might suitably
reward him for the very honest discharge of his duties from the time of
our leaving the island in the barque.
I will not pretend that our passage home was uneventful. Out of it might
readily be spun another considerable narrative; but here I may but
glance at it. The ship was named the _Greyhound_. She was a tall, black,
softwood-built ship, of American birth, with a white figurehead, and
fine lines of planking, and three lofty skysail poles, and an almost
perpendicular bow, and she had, to use the old term, the sailing
qualities of a witch. There went with her a number of passengers,
Spanish and English, who, thanks, I suppose, to the gossip of the
British consul and his wife and family, were perfectly informed of every
article of our story, and in consequence made a very great deal of us—of
Miss Temple in particular. But how great had been the change wrought in
her character! No more supercilious airs, haughty looks, chilling
glances of contemptuous surprise. Her sweetness and cordiality rendered
her as completely a favourite as she had been before disliked and feared
by her fellow-passengers of the Indiaman.
It took her a long while, however, to recur without exquisite distress
to the man Forrest whom she had shot. But I was never weary of putting
the matter before her in its just light; and at last she suffered me to
persuade her that what she had done it had been her duty to do, that
every law of God and man was at the back of such a deed to justify and
even consecrate it, and that so far from suffering the recollection to
render her wretched, she should proudly honour herself for the instant’s
coolness, courage, and presence of mind she had exhibited at sight of
the scoundrel. Yet it was inevitably a memory to linger darkly with her
for some time.
Our being incessantly together from the hour of our sailing down to the
hour of our arrival strengthened her love for me, and her passion became
a pure and unaffected sentiment. This I could have by no means sworn it
was when I spoke my love to her in the Pacific. I was sure that she
liked me, that she even had a warm affection for me, inspired by
gratitude and by esteem for as much of my character as she could
understand in my behaviour to her. But I could not satisfy myself that
she loved me, or that, subject to her mother’s approval, she would have
consented to marry me, but for our extraordinary experiences, that had
coupled us together in an intimacy which most people might consider
matrimony must confirm for her sake if not for mine.
But if that had ever been her mood—she never would own it—it ripened
during this voyage into a love that the most wretchedly sensitive heart
could not have mistaken. And now it remained to be seen what reception
Lady Temple would accord me. She would be all gratitude, of course; she
would be transported with the sight and safety of her daughter; but
ambition might presently dominate all effusion of thankfulness, and she
would quite fail to see any particular obligation on her daughter’s part
to marry merely because we had been shipmates together in a series of
incredible adventures.
But all conjecture was abruptly ended on our arrival by the news of Lady
Temple’s death. A stroke of paralysis had carried her off. The attack
was charged to her fretting for her daughter, of whose abandonment upon
the wreck she had received the news from no less a person than the
Honourable Mr. Colledge. Let me briefly describe how this had come
about.
When the cutter containing Mr. Colledge and the men of the _Magicienne_
had lost sight of the wreck in the sudden vapour that had boiled down
over it, the fellows, having lost their lieutenant and being without a
head, hurriedly agreed to pull dead away before the wind in the
direction of the Indiaman, not doubting that she would be lying hove-to,
and that they must strike her situation near enough to disclose the huge
loom of her amidst the fog. They missed her, and then, not knowing what
else to do, they lashed their oars into a bundle and rode to it. It was
hard upon sunset when a great shadow came surging up out of the fog
close aboard of them. It was the corvette under reefed topsails. The
cutter was within an ace of being run down. Her crew roared at the top
of their pipes, and they were heard; but a few moments later the
_Magicienne_ had melted out again upon the flying thickness. The boat,
however, had been seen, and her bearings accurately taken; and twenty
minutes later, the corvette again came surging to the spot where the
cutter lay. Scores of eyes gazed over the ship-of-war’s head and
bulwarks in a thirsty, piercing lookout. The end of a line was flung,
the boat dragged alongside, and in a few minutes all were safe on board.
Colledge related the story of the adventure to his cousin—how the
lieutenant had fallen overboard and was drowned, as he believed; how
Miss Temple and I were left upon the wreck, and were yet there. But the
blackness of a densely foggy night was now upon the sea; it was also
blowing hard, and nothing could be done till the weather cleared and the
day broke.
That nothing was done, you know. When the horizon was penetrable, keen
eyes were despatched to the mastheads; but whether it was that the light
wreck had drifted to a degree entirely out of the calculations of Sir
Edward Panton, or that his own drift during the long, black, blowing
hours misled him, no sign of us rewarded his search. For two days he
gallantly stuck to those waters, then abandoned the hunt as a hopeless
one, and proceeded on his voyage to England.
Mr. Colledge on his arrival immediately thought it his duty to write
what he could tell of the fate of Miss Temple to Lady Temple’s brother,
General Ashmole. The General was a little in a hurry to communicate with
poor Lady Temple. His activity as a bearer of ill tidings might perhaps
have found additional animation in the knowledge that if Miss Temple
were dead, then the next of her kinsfolk to whom her ladyship must leave
the bulk of her property would be the General and his four charming
daughters. Be this as it will, the news proved fatal to Lady Temple. The
uncertainty of her daughter’s fate, doubt of the possibility of her
having been rescued from the wreck, fears of her having met with a slow,
miserable, most dreadful death, preyed upon such poor remains of health
as paralysis and a long term of motionless confinement had left her; and
her maid one morning on entering her room found her dead in her bed.
The shock was a terrible one to Louise. Again and again she had said to
me that if the news of her having been lost out of the Indiaman reached
her mother before she arrived home, it would kill her. And now she found
her prediction verified! I was a deal grieved for the girl’s sake; but
it was not a thing for me to take very seriously to heart. Indeed it was
not long before I got to hear that her ladyship had been an exceedingly
ambitious woman, with the highest possible notions of her own
importance, and of an insufferable condescension of manner; and I was
assured had she lived, I should have found her a formidable, perhaps an
immovable obstacle to my marriage. But had she been the most amiable of
women, the stroke of her death must have been considerably softened to
my mind by understanding that it made Louise the absolute mistress of a
mansion and large grounds and a clear income of three thousand five
hundred a year. This was very well, and quite worth being shipwrecked
and kidnapped for.
But if her ladyship’s death cleared the road for me in one way, it
temporarily blocked it for me in another by enforcing delay. Louise must
not now marry for a year. No; anything less than a year was out of the
question. It would be an insult to the memory of an adored parent even
to think of happiness under a twelvemonth. I resigned myself in silence
to the affliction of waiting, leaving it to time to unsettle her
resolution. She had many relatives, and she went from house to house;
but I was never very far off. I loved her too fondly to lose her. I had
won her, and I meant to have and hold the supreme title to her that had
come to me from old ocean. Not that I had a doubt of her own devotion; I
was afraid of her relatives. Some of them were titled people; they were
all of them social star-gazers, with their intellectual eyes rooted upon
objects that shone more splendidly than they and higher in life’s
atmosphere; and there was such an army of them in one shape or another,
such battalions of uncles and aunts, of cousins and connections
spreading out like the tendrils of creepers, that I feared their
influence if I did not take care to keep hovering close by to guard my
Louise’s heart against any relaxation of sentiment.
Indeed, I was uneasy till I got her down to my mother’s house, and I
could fill a volume in describing the manœuvring I was forced into to
accomplish so simple a matter against the devices and stratagems of her
superior connections. Already there was one young man dying of love for
her. He was the eldest son of a baronet, and his mother was one of the
most intriguing old wretches that ever perplexed the wishes or
confounded the respectable pleasures of her fellow-creatures.
Single-handed I had to fight the battle of my love against this young
man, who was dying of passion, and my lady his mother, both of them
backed by a large proportion of Louise’s relatives; and I say I scarcely
enjoyed an hour’s tranquillity of mind until I had her under my mother’s
roof.
By this time her grief had abated; the recollection of her past
sufferings lay lightly upon her mind. We were now once more together, as
we had been when at sea. She soon learned to love my gentle old mother,
and was so happy that after awhile her relatives ceased in despair to
attempt to coax her back to them. By that time little more than six
months had elapsed since our return, and, consequently, since she had
received the news of her mother’s death. But our being together in
constant close association from morning till night, almost as much alone
as ever we had been when on the wreck, what with delightful drives,
delicious hand-in-hand rambles, ended in rendering me mighty impatient,
and impatience is usually importunate. I grew pressing, and one day she
consented to our being married at the expiration of a fortnight.
It was much too plain a wedding for such a heroine as our adventures had
made Louise, but it was her own choosing. A few intimate friends of my
own family, two poor but exceedingly ladylike and well-bred cousins of
her own, the vicar who joined our hands, and his homely agreeable
wife—these formed the company. I sent an invitation to Mr. Colledge,
against the inclination of Louise, who associated him with all our
misfortunes, though for my part I could have strained him to my heart on
my marriage day as the involuntary promoter of all my happiness. He
neither wrote nor presented himself; but this was afterwards explained
by a letter dated from Palestine, in which country he was then
travelling, having made up his mind to trust himself and his fortunes as
little as possible to the ocean in his determination to see the world.
It was a stupid amiable letter, full of good-wishes and kindest regards,
with much rambling on in reference to the wreck and his own narrow
escape. I observed that he did not mention the name of Miss Fanny
Crawley.
An effusion of the local good-will and sympathy was visible in the
decoration of the church. Never stood any man before the altar more
proud of the girl of his heart’s choice than did I with Louise by my
side. Beautiful she had always shown to me from the first moment of my
gaze resting on her aboard the Indiaman, but never more beautiful in the
eyes of my passion than on that day. The sweetness that had come to her
from suffering was in every smile and look.
‘We have started on another voyage now,’ I whispered as we passed out of
the church.
‘There must be no wrecks in it,’ she answered.
And for years, I thank God, it was all summer sailing with us; but I am
old now, and alone.
In those times, the round voyage to India averaged a twelvemonth, and I
was unable to obtain news of the _Countess Ida_ until the August that
had followed the June of our arrival at Liverpool in the _Greyhound_. I
was in London when I heard of the Indiaman as having been reported off
Deal. In the course of a few days I despatched a note to old Keeling,
addressed to the East India Docks, asking him to come and dine with me,
that I might tell him of my adventures, and learn what efforts he had
made to recover us from the wreck. He arrived in full shore-going fig,
with the old familiar skewered look, in the long, tightly buttoned-up
coat, and the tall cravat and stiff collars, in which his sun-reddened
face rested like a ball in a cup.
He was heartily glad to see me, and continued to shake my hand until my
arm ached again. Of my story he had known nothing; for the first time he
was now hearing it from my lips. He listened with acute attention, with
a countenance over which expression chased expression; and when I had
done, seized my hand again, and shook it long and vehemently, whilst he
complimented me on my success in navigating the _Lady Blanche_ to the
island, and on the judgment I had shown in planning and effecting my
escape from Mr. Lush and his crew.
He had little to tell me, however, that was very interesting. He had
been blown away from the neighbourhood of the wreck; and though, when
the weather cleared, he had luffed up to the spot where he believed she
was to be found, he could see nothing of her. Mr. Prance was looking at
the hull through his glass when the smother came driving down upon her,
and saw the cutter shove off; and he believed that Miss Temple and I
were in her. He had no time to make sure, for the vapour swiftly blotted
the boat out of sight. But his conviction was—and Keeling owned himself
influenced by it—that if they fell in with the wreck they would not find
us aboard her. Poor old Mrs. Radcliffe nearly went crazy with grief and
distress; and to satisfy her mind, he cruised over the supposed
situation of the hull till the night fell; then satisfied that we had
either perished by the capsizal of the cutter, or been picked up by the
corvette, he trimmed sail for his course and proceeded.
The disaster that had befallen us, he said, had cast a heavy gloom over
the ship, and it was heightened by Mrs. Radcliffe’s serious illness, due
to the poignant wretchedness caused her by the loss of her niece.
Hemmeridge was entreated to prescribe for her, but he sullenly refused,
hoped that her illness might be epidemical, that more might suffer than
she, and could breathe nothing but threats of having the law of Keeling
on the ship’s arrival at Bombay. However, by the time the vessel was up
with the Cape, Mrs. Radcliffe had recovered; and when Keeling last saw
her, she seemed as hopeful as she was before despairful of her niece
being yet accounted for.
Abreast of the Cape also, the spirits of the passengers had sufficiently
lightened to enable some love-making to proceed briskly amongst them.
‘Much about twenty degrees of south latitude,’ said old Keeling in his
dry voice, ‘young Mr. Fairthorne, the fellow that lisped, you remember,
Mr. Dugdale, succeeded in tempting that nice young lady, Constance
Hudson, to accept his hand and heart. Old Mrs. Hudson was very well
pleased, sir. About the latitude of the Chagos Archipelago, Mr. Emmett
induced Miss Helen Trevor to betroth herself to him. And off the
Laccadive Islands, Peter Hemskirk, to the astonishment of all hands,
deposited his person and his fortune at the feet of Miss Mary Joliffe.’
‘I had thought Mr. Emmett was a married man,’ I said.
‘Apparently not, sir,’ he answered.
‘And your friend Hemmeridge?’
He replied that the surgeon consulted a solicitor at Bombay, and had no
doubt been advised to take certain proceedings; but three weeks after
the arrival of the ship the doctor had been thrown from a horse, and so
injured in the spine and head, that he died within a fortnight.
‘What he could have done I’m sure I don’t know, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the
old fellow. ‘I believe I was within my rights. Yet he might have given
me trouble, and I hate law. The two fellows, Crabb and Willett, I handed
over to the police. Mr. Saunders got the drug the scoundrel had used
carefully analysed, and it turned out that he was right: it proved to be
what he’d termed it; and I afterwards heard the stuff was not unknown in
India, where it’s used for some religious purposes; but in what way I
don’t know.’
This was all the news that old Keeling had to give me.
When I left Lush and the sailors of the _Lady Blanche_ upon the reef, I
had little thought of ever hearing of them again. I knew the nature of
sailors. If they came off with their lives, I might be sure they would
disperse and utterly vanish. Great was my surprise, then, one morning
some months after my marriage, to find, on opening my morning newspaper,
a column-long account of the trial of a seaman named Lush for the murder
of a man named Woodward. The evidence was substantially my story with a
sequel to it. The witnesses against Lush were three of the seamen of the
_Lady Blanche_. The counsel for the prosecution related the adventures
of the barque down to the time of my swimming off to her and sailing
away with her. The boat had been in charge of the man Woodward when I
detached the line to let her slip away. He had fallen into a deep sleep,
overcome by fatigue and drink. The yells and roaring of the crew, one of
whom had started up and observed the boat drifting out, had aroused the
sleeper after the uproar had been some time continued. He was thick and
stupid, went clumsily to work to scull the heavy boat ashore, and was a
long time in doing it. The carpenter dragged him on to the beach and
asked him if he had fallen asleep. The unfortunate wretch answered yes;
the carpenter struck him fiercely; Woodward returned the blow; and, mad
with rage, Lush whipped out his sheath-knife and stabbed the man to the
heart.
By this time the barque had almost faded out in the gloom of the night.
Pursuit was not to be thought of. They waited till daylight; but instead
of putting their remaining provisions and water in the boat and heading
away in search of land or a passing ship, the fools fell to dicing
afresh; and it was not until their little stock of water was almost gone
that, being satisfied that there was no gold in that part of the shore
where Captain Braine had said it lay hidden, they put to sea.
They were several days afloat before they, or at least the survivors,
were rescued. Their sufferings were not to be expressed. They had been
five days without water when picked up. Four of them had died, and one
of the bodies had been preserved for a use that cannot be dwelt on. They
were fallen in with by an English brig bound home, to the captain of
which one of the sailors, who had been an old ‘chum’ of Woodward, told
the story of the murder of that man by Lush. The skipper, not choosing
to have such a ruffian as the carpenter at large in his little ship,
clapped him in irons, and kept him under hatches until the arrival of
the vessel in the Thames, when he was handed over to the police. I
hardly wished the scoundrel hanged, richly as he deserved making such an
ending; and it was with something of relief that I read when he was
brought to the Old Bailey that the jury had found a verdict of
manslaughter, and that he was sentenced to ten years’ transportation.
To this hour I am puzzled by Captain Braine and his island. My wife
uniformly believed that the gold was there, and that the poor lunatic
had mistaken the bearings of the spot where it lay. My own fancy,
however, always inclined to this: that from the circumstance of his
having rightly described the island, which he situated on a part of the
sea where no reef or land of any sort was laid down on the charts, he
had actually been wrecked upon it, and suffered as he had related to me;
that by long dwelling upon his terrific experience he had imported
certain insane fancies into it out of his unsuspected madness when it
grew upon him; until the hallucination of the gold hardened in his poor
soul into a conviction. Yet I may be wrong; and, if so, then there must
at this hour be upwards of a hundred and eighty thousand pounds’ worth
of gold coins lying concealed somewhere in the reef whose latitude and
longitude you have.
THE END
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Spelling errors were left uncorrected.
2. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.