features do not help. I seemed to find a look of hate and contempt in
hers. Her face continued marble hard. Not being able to coax a syllable
out of her, though I spared nothing of professional patience in the
attempt, I left the cabin, and, calling the stewardess, bade her see that
the lady was kept without means to do herself a mischief.
That day and the next passed. Miss Dunbar continued dumb as a corpse. I
visited her several times, and twice Captain Smallport accompanied me;
but never a word would she utter. Nay, she would not even lift her eyes
to look at us. I told the captain that it might be mere mulishness or a
condition of mind that would end in madness. It was impossible to say.
The stewardess said she ate and drank and went obediently to bed when
ordered. She was as passive as a broken-spirited child, she said. For her
part she didn’t believe the lady had killed the poor man.
It was on the fourth day following the murder that the glass fell; it
blackened in the north-west, and came on to blow a hard gale of wind.
A mountainous sea was running in a few hours upon which the ship made
furious weather, clothed in flying brine to her tops, under no other
canvas than a small storm main-trysail. The hatches were battened down,
the decks were full of water, which flashed in clouds of glittering smoke
over the lee bulwark rail. The passengers for the most part kept their
cabins. The cook could do no cooking; indeed the galley fire was washed
out, and we appeased our appetites with biscuit and tinned meat.
The gale broke at nine o’clock on the following morning, leaving a wild,
confused sea and a scowling sky all round the horizon, with ugly yellow
breaks over our reeling mastheads. I was in my gloomy quarters, whose
atmosphere was little more than a green twilight, with the wash of the
emerald brine swelling in thunder over the porthole, when the steward
arrived to tell me that one of the passengers had met with a serious
accident. I asked no questions, but instantly followed him along the
steerage corridor into the cuddy, where I found a group of the saloon
people standing beside the figure of the young fellow named John Burgess,
who lay at his length upon the deck. I had not set eyes on him for days
and days.
I thought at first he was dead. His eyes were half closed; the glaze of
approaching dissolution was in the visible part of the pupils, and at
first I felt no pulse. Two or three of the sailors who had brought him
into the cuddy stood in the doorway. They told me that the young fellow
had persisted in mounting the forecastle ladder to windward. He was
hailed to come down, as the ship was pitching heavily and often dishing
bodies of green water over her bows. He took no notice of the men’s
cries, and had gained the forecastle-deck when an unusually heavy lurch
flung him; he fell from a height of eight or nine feet, which might have
broken a limb for him only; unhappily he struck the windlass end, and lay
seemingly lifeless.
I bade them lift and carry him to the cabin that I might examine him, and
when they had placed him in his bunk I told them to send the steward to
help me and went to work to partially unclothe the lad to judge of his
injuries.
On opening his coat I discovered that he was a woman.
On the arrival of the steward I told him that the young fellow called
John Burgess was a girl, and I requested him to send the stewardess, and
whilst I waited for her I carefully examined the unconscious sufferer,
and judged that she had received mortal internal injuries. All the while
that I was thus employed some extraordinary thoughts ran in my head.
The stewardess came. I gave her certain directions and went to the
captain to report the matter. He was in no wise surprised to learn that a
woman dressed as a man was aboard his ship; twice, he told me, had that
sort of passenger sailed with him within the last four years.
“Captain,” said I, “I’ll tell you what’s in my head! That woman below who
styled herself John Burgess murdered Sheringham.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because I believe that she’s his wife.”
“Ha!” said Captain Smallport.
I gave several reasons for this notion; what I observed in the disguised
woman’s behaviour when hidden behind the mainmast; then her being a
foreigner, in all probability a South American, as Leonora Dunbar was,
and so on.
He said, “What about the blood on Miss Dunbar’s hand and night-dress?”
“She told us she had felt over the body.”
“Yes, yes!” he cried, “doctor, you see things more clearly than I do.”
When I had conversed for some time with Captain Smallport, I walked to
Miss Dunbar’s cabin, knocked, and entered. I found her on this occasion
standing with her back to the door, apparently gazing at the sea through
the portholes; she did not turn her head. I stood beside her to see her
face and said—
“I have made a discovery; Mrs. Sheringham is on board this ship.”
On my pronouncing these words she screamed, and looked at me with a face
in which I clearly read that her silence had been sheer sullen mulish
obstinacy, with nothing of insanity in it, pure stubborn determination to
keep silence that we might think what we chose.
“Mrs. Sheringham in this ship?” she cried, with starting eyes and the
wildest, whitest countenance you can imagine.
“Yes,” I answered.
“Then it’s she who murdered Sheringham. She is capable of it, she is a
tigress!” she cried in a voice pitched to the note of a scream.
“That’s what I have come to talk to you about, and I am glad you have
found your voice.”
“Where is she?” she asked, and a strong shudder ran through her.
“She is in her cabin below, dying; she may be dead even now as we
converse.”
She uttered something in Spanish passionately and clasped her hands.
“Now hear me,” said I, “since you have your ears and have found your
tongue. You are suspected of having murdered the man you eloped with.”
“It is false!” she shrieked. “I loved him—oh, I loved him!”
She caught her breath and wept bitterly.
“In my own heart,” said I, touched by her dreadful misery, “I believe you
guiltless. I am sure you are so now that we have discovered that Mrs.
Sheringham is on board. Will you answer a question?”
“Yes,” she sobbed.
“You know that Sheringham was stabbed to the heart with a dagger?”
“Yes.”
“It bears this inscription: ‘_Charles Winthrop Sheringham to Leonora
Dunbar._’ Was that dagger in your possession in this ship?”
“No. Mr. Sheringham gave it to me. There was no such inscription as you
name upon it. I left it behind when I came away. I swear before my God I
speak the truth!”
Her voice was broken with sobs; she spoke with deepest agitation. Her
manner convinced me it was as she represented.
I said, “Come with me and see the woman and tell me if she is Mrs.
Sheringham.”
She shrank and cried out that she could not go. She was perfectly
sane: all her stubbornness was gone from her; she was now a miserable,
scared, broken-hearted woman. I told her that the person I took to be
Mrs. Sheringham lay insensible and perhaps dead at this moment, and,
by putting on an air of command, I succeeded at last in inducing, or
rather obliging, her to accompany me. She veiled herself before quitting
the cabin. The saloon was empty. We passed into the steerage, and she
followed me into the cabin where the woman was.
The poor creature was still unconscious; the stewardess stood beside the
bunk looking at its dying white occupant. I said to Miss Dunbar—
“Is it Mrs. Sheringham?”
She was cowering at the door, but when she perceived that the woman lay
without motion with her eyes half closed, insensible and, perhaps, dead,
as she might suppose, she drew near the bunk, peered breathlessly, and
then, looking around to me, said—
“She is Mrs. Sheringham. Let me go!”
I opened the door and she fled with a strange noise of sobbing.
I stayed for nearly three hours in Mrs. Sheringham’s berth. There was
nothing to be done for her. She passed away in her unconsciousness, and
afterwards, when I looked more closely into the nature of her injuries, I
wondered that she could have lived five minutes after the terrible fall
that had beaten sensibility out of her over the windlass end.
I went to the captain to report her death, and in a long talk I gave
him my views of the tragic business. I said there could be no question
that Mrs. Sheringham had followed the guilty couple to sea with a
determination so to murder her husband as to fix the crime of his death
upon his paramour. How was this to be done? Her discovery at her home of
the dagger her husband had given to Leonora Dunbar would perhaps give
her the idea she needed. If Miss Dunbar spoke the truth, then, indeed,
I could not account for the inscription on the dagger. But there could
be no question whatever that Mrs. Sheringham had been her husband’s
murderess.
This was my theory: and it was afterwards verified up to the hilt. On
the arrival of the _Chiliman_ at Melbourne Miss Dunbar was sent home
to take her trial for the murder of Mr. Sheringham; but her innocence
was established by—first, the circumstance of a woman having been found
aboard dressed as a man; next, by the statement of witnesses that a woman
whose appearance exactly corresponded with that of “John Burgess” had
been the rounds of the shipping offices to inspect the list of passengers
by vessels bound to Australia; thirdly, by letters written to Leonora
Dunbar by Sheringham found among Mrs. Sheringham’s effects, in one of
which the man told the girl that he proposed to carry her to Australia.
Finally, and this was the most conclusive item in the whole catalogue of
evidence, an engraver swore that a woman answering to Mrs. Sheringham’s
description called upon him with the dagger (produced in court) and
requested him without delay to inscribe upon the thin plate, “Charles
Winthrop Sheringham to Leonora Dunbar.”
And yet, but for the death of Mrs. Sheringham and my discovery of her
sex, it was far more likely than not that the wife would have achieved
her aim by killing her husband and getting her rival hanged for the
murder.
_THE SECRET OF THE DEAD MATE._
Black in the wake of the moon, in the heart of the trembling spread of
white splendour, floated a boat. The night was breathless: beyond the
verge of the eclipsing brightness of the moon the sky was full of stars.
A man sat in the stern-sheets of the boat motionless with his chin on his
breast and his arms in lifeless posture beside him. From time to time
he groaned, and after he had been sitting as though dead for an hour
he raised his head and lifted up his eyes to the moon, and cursed the
thirst that was burning his throat, then shifted his figure close to the
gunwale, over which he lay, with both hands in the water for the chill of
it.
The moonshine was nigh as bright as day. The sea-line ran firm as a sweep
of painted circle through the silver mist in the far recesses. An oar was
stepped as a mast in the boat, and athwart it was lashed another oar from
which hung a man’s shirt and coat. She looked dry as a midsummer ditch
in that piercing moonlight. At the feet of the man, distinctly visible,
were two or three little pellets or lumps of rag, which he had been
chewing throughout the day; but his jaws were now locked, the saliva had
run dry, his sailor’s teeth, blunted by junk and ship’s bread, could bite
no more moisture out of the fragment of stuff he had cut off his back.
Oh! it is dreadful to suffer the agony of thirst, the froth, the baked
and cracking lip, the strangled throat, whilst beholding a vast breast of
cold sea glazed into the beauty of ice by the moon, and whilst hearing
the fountain-like murmur and refreshing ripple of water alongside!
The moon rolled slowly into the south-west, trailing her bright wake with
her, and the boat and its solitary occupant floated into the shadow.
Again the man lifted his head and looked around him. A soft breeze, but
hot as the human breath, was blowing, and the shirt and coat dangling
from the athwartship oar were lifting to the light pressure. The man saw
that the boat was moving over the sea, but made no attempt to help her
with the helm; once more he cast his eyes up at the moon and cursed the
thirst that was choking him. But a boat, like a ship, has a life and a
spirit of her own. The little fabric ran as though, with the sentience
of a living organism, she knew there was something to hope for in the
darkness ahead; her wake was a short, arrow-like line, and it streamed
from her in emerald bubbles and circling wreaths of fire.
The sun rose, and the shadow of the earth rolled off the sea, which was
feathering into the south-west to the steady pouring of the north-east
wind. The boat ran straight, and now, the day being come, when the man
looked up and ahead, he saw the shadow of land over the bows. Life sprang
up in him with the sight, and a grin of hope twisted his face. With a
husky groan he shifted himself for a grasp of the helm, and, laying his
trembling hand upon the tiller, he held the boat—but not more steadily
than she had been going—for the land.
He was a man of about forty-five years of age; half his clothes were
aloft, and he was attired in fearnaught trousers of the boatman’s
pattern, and a waistcoat buttoned over his vest. Suffering had sifted
a pallor into the sun-brown of his skin, and his face was ghastly with
famine and thirst. His short yellow beard stood straight out. His yellow
hair was mixed with grey, and lay clotted with the sweat of pain into
long streaks over his brow and ears, covering his eyes as though he was
too weak or heedless to clear his vision.
The speed of the boat quickly raised the land, and by noon under the
roasting sun it lay within a mile. It was one of the Bahama Cays—a flat
island, with a low hill in the midst of it, to the right of which was a
green wood; the rest of the island was green with some sort of tropic
growth as of guinea-grass. The breeze was now very light—the sun had
eaten it up, as the Spaniards say. The man thought he saw the sparkle
of a waterfall, and the sight made him mad, and as strong in that hour
as in his heartiest time. He sprang from his seat, pulled down his queer
fabric of oar and flapping shirt and coat, and flinging the two blades
over, bent his back and drove the boat along. In a quarter of an hour
her forefoot grounded on a coral-white beach that swept round a point
clear of the foam of the breaker, and the man reeling out of her on to
the shore, grasped her painter, and secured it to an oar, which he jammed
into a thickness of some sort of bush that grew close to the wash of the
water, and then, rocking and stumbling, he went up the beach.
It was an uninhabited island, and nothing was in sight upon the whole
circle of the white shining sea saving the dim blue haze of land in the
north and a like film or delicate discoloration of the atmosphere in the
south-west. The man with rounded back and hanging arms and staggering
gait searched for water. The heat was frightful; the sunshine blazed in
the white sand, and seemed to strike upwards into the face in darting and
tingling needles, white hot. He went towards the wood, wading painfully
on his trembling legs through the guinea-grass and thick undergrowth,
with toadstools in it like red shields and astir with armoured creatures,
finger-long reptiles of glorious hue, and spiders like bunches of jewels.
Suddenly he stopped; his ears had caught a distant noise of water; he
turned his back upon the sun, and, thrusting onwards, came presently to
a little stream, in which the grass stood thick, green, and sweet. He
fell on his knees, and, putting his lips to the crystal surface, sucked
up the water like a horse, till, being full nearly to bursting, he fell
back with a moan of gratitude, his face hidden in his hands. He sat till
the broiling sunshine forced him to rise. The slender stream narrowed
in the direction of the wood, and he walked beside it; presently, after
pushing a little way into the green shade, he found the source in a rock
rich with verdure and enamelled with many strange and beautiful flowers.
The trees in this wood stood well apart, but their branches mingled in
many places, and the shade they made was nearly continuous.
He threw himself down beside the source of the little stream to rest
himself. The surf seethed with a noise of boiling through the silent,
blazing atmosphere outside. The miserable castaway now directed his eyes
round in search of food. He saw several kinds of berries, and things
like apples, but durst not eat of them for fear of being poisoned. Being
now rested and immeasurably refreshed, he cooled his head in the stream
and walked to the beach, and picked up a number of crabs. He saw to his
boat, hauling her almost high and dry. All that she contained besides
the clothes which had served him for a sail, was a carpenter’s hammer
and a bag of spikes. He whipped off his waistcoat and put his coat on,
and dropping the hammer into his pocket, returned to the wood with his
collection of crabs; then with his knife he cut down a quantity of dry
brushwood and set fire to it with the old-fashioned tinder-box that
seamen of this man’s rating sometimes carried in those days to light
their pipes. He roasted the crabs artfully, as one who has served an
apprenticeship to hardship, and having eaten, he drank again, and then
folded his arms to consider what he should do.
He knew that the island was one of the Bahama Cays, though which he
could not imagine. But other islands were in sight. He guessed that New
Providence was not out of reach of his boat, nor was the Florida coast
remote, and then there was all the traffic of the Gulf of Mexico. He
determined, whilst he reflected, to cook plenty of crabs and to seek for
turtle, and so store himself with provisions. But how about watering his
little craft? Fresh water, cold and sweet, there was in plenty, but he
had nothing to put it in, and what could he contrive or invent to serve
as a breaker? He thought to himself, if he could find cocoanuts he would
let the milk drain, and fill the fruit with water, and so carry away
enough to last him until he should be picked up or make a port.
He cast his eyes up aloft with a fancy of beholding in the trees
something growing that would answer his purpose, and started, still
looking and staring, as though fascinated or lightning-struck.
His eye had sought a tree whose long lower branches overshadowed the
little stream, and amidst the foliage he thought he saw the figure of
a man! The shape jockeyed a bough; its back was upon the tree; and now,
straining his vision steadily under the sharp of his hand, the man saw
that it was the skeleton of a human being, apparently lashed or secured
to the bough, and completely clothed, from the sugar-loaf hat upon his
skull down to the rusty yellow sea-boats which dangled amidst the leaves.
The sailor was alone, and the ghastly sight shocked him; the sense of his
loneliness was intensified by it; he thought he had been cast away upon
the principality of death himself. The diabolic grin in the tree froze
the blood in his veins, and for awhile he could do no more than stare and
mutter fragments of the Lord’s Prayer.
He guessed from the costume that the figure had been lodged for a great
number of years in that tree. He recollected that when he was a boy he
had seen foreign seamen dressed as that skeleton up there was. It was
now late in the afternoon, and with a shuddering glance aloft he began
to consider how and where he should sleep. He walked out of the wood and
gained the highest point of the little central hill, and looked about
him for a sail. There was nothing in sight, saving the dim shadows of
land red in the ether of sunset. The skeleton, as though it had been a
devil, took possession of the castaway’s soul. He could think of nothing
else—not even of how he was to get away, how he was to store fresh water
for his voyage. He did not mean to sleep in a tree: but the leaves
provided a roof as sheltering as an awning, and he determined to lie down
in the wood, and take his chance of snakes. Yet, before he could rest,
he must have the skeleton out of it: the shadows would be frightful with
the fancy of that figure above riding the bough and rattling its bones to
every sigh of wind.
So with a resolved heart made desperate by superstition and fear, the
sailor walked to the wood, and coming to the tree, climbed it by the
aid of the strong tendrils of parasites which lay coiled round the
trunk stout and stiff as ropes. He bestrode a thick bough close to the
skeleton. It was a ghastly sight in that green glimmering dusk, darkening
swiftly with the sinking of the sun. The flesh of the face was gone;
the cloak hanging from the shoulders was lean, dusty, ragged as any
twelfth-century banner drooping motionless in the gloom of a cathedral.
The sailor saw that time and weather had rotted everything saving the
bones of the thing. It was secured to the bough by what was, or had been,
a scarf, as though the man had feared to fall in his sleep. The seaman
stretched forth his hand, and to the first touch the scarf parted as
though it had been formed of smoke; the figure reeled, dropped, and went
to pieces at the foot of the tree.
The sailor had not expected this. He was almost afraid to descend. When
he reached the ground he fled towards his boat, and lay in her all night.
He went for a drink of water at daybreak, and passing the scattered
remains of the skeleton—with some degree of heart, for daylight brought
courage, and a few hours of sleep had given him confidence—he spied
something glittering amongst the rags of the skeleton’s apparel. He
picked it up. It was a silver snuff-box. He opened it, and inside found
a piece of paper folded to the shape of the box. It was covered with
a scrawl in pencil, faint, yet decipherable. To the man it would have
been all one, whether the writing had been Chinese or English: he could
not read. But he was a wary and cunning old sailor; every instinct of
perception and suspicion was set a-crawling by the sight of this queer
faintly pencilled document, and by the look of the silver snuff-box which
weighed very handsomely in his horny palm, yellow with tar. He pocketed
the toy, and having refreshed himself with a drink of water, returned to
the fragments of wearing apparel and old bones, no longer afraid, and
with the handle of his hammer turned the stuff over, and in the course
of a few minutes met with and pocketed the following articles: a stump
of common lead pencil, three pieces of silver Spanish money, a clay pipe
mounted in silver in the bone of an albatross’s wing, a silver watch and
hair guard, and a small gold cross.
He talked to himself with a composed countenance as he examined these
trifles; then, having hunted after more relics to no purpose, he turned
his back upon the bones and rags, and went about the business of the day.
During the morning he collected many crabs, but all the while he could
not imagine how he was to carry away a store of water, till, chancing to
look along the brilliant curve of beach, he spied a turtle of about three
hundred pounds coming out of the sea, and then he made up his mind to
turn a turtle over after dark, and cut its throat, and make a tub of the
shell.
Happily for this castaway he was spared the distress of passing another
night upon the island. Two or three hours before sundown, a steady
breeze then blowing from the north, a large schooner suddenly rounded
the western point of the island at the distance of a couple of miles,
heading east, and steering so as to keep the island fair abeam. The man
had collected plenty of brushwood to roast his crabs with; he swiftly
kindled a fire, and made a smoke with damp leaves, and whilst this signal
was feathering down the wind, he launched and jumped into his boat, and,
with the nimble experienced hands of the seaman, crossed his oars and set
his sail of shirt and coat, and slowly blew away right before the wind
towards the schooner. She saw the smoke and then the boat, and hove to,
and in three-quarters of an hour the man was aboard.
“Who are you?” said the master of the schooner, when the man stood upon
the deck.
“Christian Hawke, carpenter of the _Morning Star_,” he answered.
“What’s become of your ship?” said the other.
“Don’t know,” answered Hawke.
“What’s your yarn?”
“Why,” answered Hawke, speaking in a hoarse level growling voice, “we was
becalmed, and the captain told me to get into a boat and nail a piece of
copper, which had worked loose, on the rudder. We was flying-light.”
“Where from?” said the captain, suspiciously.
“From New Orleans to Havannah, for orders.”
“Well?” said the captain.