THE BEARER OF A DISGRACED NAME, IN ENGLAND--A STRANGE QUEST
AND A STRANGE UNREST--HURRYING OVER TO IRELAND--TOO LATE FOR
THE PACKET--THE LITTLE DESPATCH-STEAMER--HENRY FITZMAURICE,
THE JOURNALIST--AN UNEXPECTED PASSAGE--THE PERIL OF THE
EMERALD, AND THE END OF ALL QUESTS SAVE ONE.
Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half
the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the
principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and
shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time,
* * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be
little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events
without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will
apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the
bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the
Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.
It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on
the twentieth day of July, with the place of his residence attached.
Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure
that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the
respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other
regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous
knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer, _because_ the
lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in
London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of
that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed
in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the
lawyer, _as_ the lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of
past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who
went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic
round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming,
sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always
more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue
of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in
which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and
dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their
dens of hiding?
Or was there, leaving the profession of the lawyer out of the question,
something in the peculiar surroundings of this man--something in the
relations of character and connection which he had allowed to grow around
him, unfitting him for other amusements and researches in a city which he
had never before visited, and one supplying such marvellous temptations to
the sight-seer and the antiquarian? Or was he paying the penalty of the
past in an unrest which left him no peace except he found it in continual
motion and in the companionship and the study of those far more outlawed by
statute but not more in social position than himself? Strange questions,
again, and questions which cannot be answered, at this time, by any thing
more than the mere suggestion.
Certain it is, whatever the motive, that Westminster Abbey, with its every
stone sacred to the memory of the great dead, seemed to present no
attractions to him, commensurate with those of Seven Dials, sacred to every
phase of poverty and villany; that the Houses of Parliament were ignored in
favor of St. Giles and Bermondsey, noted for debates of a very different
character from those heard before the occupant of the Woolsack and the
Speaker of the Commons; and that (this seeming so peculiarly strange in a
lawyer of admitted character and power) even the Lord Chancellor, rendering
one of those decisions calculated to affect not only the laws of property
in England but the whole legal system wherever the English language was
spoken, seemed to have far less attention paid to him or his dicta, than
was given to some gownless libel on the practice of criminal law, who could
point out the habits and haunts of Burly Bill, the noted burglar whom he
had lately saved from transportation by proving that he was in three
different places at once, and neither of them the spot where the crime was
committed,--or Snivelling Sall, reputed to be in the near companionship of
the most successful utterer of forged notes who had so far escaped the
clutches of the detective birds of prey. Night and day, during all those
two weeks, he seemed to eat hastily and to sleep only as if sleep was a
secondary necessity of nature, to be thrown overboard whenever some
all-absorbing thought should make continual wakefulness necessary.
Then the fancy (might it not be called madness?) seemed to change. He had
either exhausted the crime of London or he had skimmed that compound until
there was no novelty of rich villainy remaining. Without having examined
one work of art or one antiquarian curiosity (so far as could be known),
and certainly without having made one effort to find a footing in that
society for which education and past associations would so well have fitted
him,--he flitted away from London and the name of Carlton Brand was to be
found inscribed on the books of one of the leading hotels at Manchester.
And what did he there? Precisely what he had been doing in London, it
appeared--nothing less and nothing more. Alternately in conversation with
one of the detective force or with some one of the wretches whom the
detective force was especially commissioned to bring to justice--the
Manchester looms (not yet _all_ stopped by the dearth of cotton and the
"fratricidal war" in America) presented no more charm to him than had been
afforded by the high-toned and rational attractions of the metropolis. At
times dressed with what seemed a studied disregard of the graces of person,
and scarcely ever so arraying himself that he would have dreamed of
presenting himself in such a guise in the midst of any respectable circle
at home--two or three days ran him through the criminal life of Manchester.
Then away to Birmingham, and there--but why weary with repetition when a
succeeding fact can be so well indicated by one that has preceded it? The
same unsettled and apparently aimless life--if not aimless, certainly with
tendencies the most singular and unaccountable. Thence to Bristol, and from
Bristol to Liverpool. From Liverpool, with flying haste the whole length of
the island and over the border to Edinburgh, paying no more attention,
apparently, to the scenes of Scottish song and story by which he dashed,
than might have been necessary to remember the cattle-rievers and
free-booters who had long before furnished pattern for his late
associates,--and seeing in the old closes and wynds frowned down upon by
Calton Hill and the Castle, only retreats in which robbers could take
refuge without serious risk of being unearthed. Then, strangely enough,
away southward again to Dover, with a passage-ticket for Calais taken but
countermanded before use, indicating that Paris had been in view but that
some sudden circumstance had made a change in the all-the-while
inexplicable calculation. What was all this--the question arises once
more--the following out of some clue on which the whole welfare of a life
was believed to depend, or merely the vague and purposeless pursuit of some
melancholy fancy furnishing the very mockery of a clue through that
labyrinth which borders the realm of declared madness?
The American had been something more than a month in England, and far away
beyond his knowledge all the events before recorded as occurring to
Margaret Hayley and her group of society in the White Mountains had already
taken place,--when one afternoon, late in August, the train that dashed
into Holyhead from Birmingham and Chester, by Anglesey and over the Menai,
bore this exemplification of unrest as a passenger. Those who saw him
emerge from the carriage upon the platform noticed the haste with which he
appeared to step and the eagerness of his inquiry whether the train, which
had been slightly delayed by an accident, was yet in time for the boat for
Dublin. She had been gone for more than an hour, and the black smoke from
her funnel was already fading away into a dim wreath driven rapidly
northward before the sharp south-easter coming up the Channel. Night was
fast falling, with indications that it would be any thing rather than a
quiet one on that wild and turbulent bit of water lying between the two
islands; and some of the old Welsh coastmen who yet lingered on the pier,
when they saw the impatient man striding up and down and uttering
imprecations on the delayed train, shrugged their shoulders with the
remark, which he did not hear or did not choose to heed, that "_they_
should be much obliged to any train that had kept them from taking a
rocking in that cradle the night!"
Brow knit, head bent, tread nervous and almost angry, and manifesting all
the symptoms of anxiety and disappointment, the American traversed the
wharf, his tall form guarded against the slight chill of the summer evening
on the coast by a coarse gray cloak which he drew closely around him as he
walked, thus adding to the restless stateliness of his appearance. At one
of his turns he was sufficiently disengaged to see a man of middle height,
dressed in a somewhat dashing civilian costume, standing at a little
distance up the pier and conversing with two or three of the coastmen. One
of the latter was pointing towards himself; and the moment after the
stranger approached with a bow. He was a young man of twenty-five or
thereabouts, side-whiskered and moustached, decidedly good-looking, with
quite as much of the Irishman as the Englishman in his face, and seemed at
all points a gentleman--more, that much rarer combination, especially on
the soil of the mother island, a frank, clever fellow!
"They tell me, sir," said the stranger, "that you were one of the
passengers on that delayed train, and that you manifest some disappointment
at missing the Dublin boat."
"They are entirely correct, sir," answered the American, returning the bow.
"I was very anxious, for particular reasons, to be in Dublin to-morrow; and
in fact the whole object of my visiting Ireland at all, just now, may very
probably be defeated by the accident that brought in the train that half
hour too late."
He spoke in a tone very earnest and not a little agitated. The other
remarked the fact, but he thought himself too good a judge of character to
suspect, as some other persons under similar circumstances might have done,
that the anxious man was a hunted member of the swell-mob or a criminal of
some other order, who thought it politic to get off English soil as soon as
possible. He determined, at the second glance, that he had to do with a
gentleman, and proceeded with the words that he had evidently intended to
say on first accosting the delayed passenger.
"You have made no arrangements for getting over, I suppose?"
"None, whatever!" answered the American. "How can I, until the boat of
to-morrow, when--when it may be too late altogether for my purpose? I was
walking off my disappointment, a sort of thing that I have been more or
less used to all my life!" and the other noticed that he seemed to sigh
wearily--"walking it off before going to find a hotel and lying awake all
night, thinking of where I ought to have been at each particular hour."
"Well," said the stranger, "I had a motive not personal to myself, in
accosting you, or I should not have taken the liberty. I am Mr. Henry
Fitzmaurice, one of the London correspondents of the Dublin _Evening Mail_.
I believe that I am not mistaken in supposing that I am speaking to an
American?"
"Not at all mistaken!" answered the American, pleased with a frankness so
much more like that of his native land than he had been in the habit of
meeting during his short sojourn abroad. "I am called Mr. Brand--Carlton
Brand, and on ordinary occasions I am a lawyer of the city of
Philadelphia."
"That little matter over, which I should not have been able to manage under
half an hour had I been a pure John Bull instead of two-thirds Irishman,"
said the man who had introduced himself as Fitzmaurice, in a vivacious
manner very well calculated to put the other at his ease--"now, not being
either of us members of the Circumlocution Office, we will get at the gist
of the matter at once. I am going over to Ireland to-night, or at least I
am going to make a start in that direction, and I believe that I can manage
to secure you a passage if you will accept one."
"Certainly, and with many thanks, but how?" was the reply.
"Well, I am not so sure about the thanks," said Fitzmaurice, in the same
pleasant tone which had before won his companion. "It is going to be a wild
night on the Channel, if I am any judge of weather, and I have crossed it
often enough to begin to have some idea. But I _must_ cross, and so must
you, if you can, as I understand you to say."
"I must, certainly, if any thing in the shape of a vessel does so," said
the American. "But you have not yet told me--"
"No, of course not!" the newspaper man ran on. "Always expect an Irishman
to begin his story in the middle and tell it out at each end, and you will
not be far from the fact. Well, there are some despatches for the Lord
Lieutenant that need to be across before noon to-morrow, as the Secretary
for Ireland has an insane fancy, and a special train left London to make
the connection with the steamer that has just gone. I came in it, and with
the Queen's messenger,--with some matters that must reach the _Mail_ in
advance of the other Dublin papers. They have a little despatch-steamer
lying just below, and the messenger telegraphed to fire her up, from one of
the back stations, when he found the chances against him. In an hour she
will have a full head of steam, and before it is quite dark we shall be
clear of the coast. I have no doubt that I can procure you a passage, and
if you will step round with me to the wharf where she lies, I will
certainly try the experiment. Now you have it."
"And a very kind and generous thing I have at the same time!" exclaimed the
American, warmly.
"As I said before, I do not know about the generosity!" replied the
correspondent, as they took their way around the warehouses that headed the
packet-wharf, towards the pier below, where the despatch-boat lay. "The
fact is that the Emerald is not much bigger than a yawl, and though she is
a splendid little sea-boat and never has found any gale in which she could
not outlive the biggest of the merchant steamers, she is very much of a
cockle-shell in the way of jumping about; and people who have any
propensity for sea-sickness, a thing a good deal worse than any ordinary
kind of _death_, are very likely to have a little turn at it under such
circumstances."
"I have never been very much at sea, but I believe that I am beyond the
vulgarity of sea-sickness!" was the answer; and just then they reached the
despatch-steamer.
She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the
American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages--very low
in hull, rakish in pipe and masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of
evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance
of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately
perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up
and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from
her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and
cinders.
A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain
of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of the _Mail_ had not
overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was
booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more
the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to
shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two
passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of
antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head,
tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing
more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like
a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and
her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the
morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before
by the packet.
The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper
correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the
extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the
generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of
disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with
his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed--a
gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a
young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had
something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about
countries lying beyond sea, and he had the true journalist's admiration
for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years
than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened
with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and
willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of
the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the
reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war,
which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a
spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious
and deplorable.
Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of
our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in
which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have
been shown in such unfavorable proportions--acquainted with most of the
leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the
conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,--he had
much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been
notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character
and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks
residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament
Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the
debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!
But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the
conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its
continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the
rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and
the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the
violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps
of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow of
the steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.
It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so
different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the
amenities of social intercourse,--began to feel the demands of sleep
overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below
to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them.
The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in
his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that
nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start
on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying
from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of
individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no
more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message
that thrills along it--to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and
exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the
art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even
in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last
forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which
reference has before been made--the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero?
Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal
peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to
the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his
all-important despatches!
So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow
berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into
slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and
stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the
"cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the
handsome and vivacious young Anglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he
had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case
of his watch,--not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and
energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little
more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and
shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to
be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired,
and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.
How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion
of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be
wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel
and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he
partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant
after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver
through every plate and rivet of her iron hull--through every board and
stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by
such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of
them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away
almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was
broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his
eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work
with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel,
while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.
"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.
"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and
preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements
are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction from
the shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have
sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.
"Why, we are in danger, I suppose--serious danger!" was the reply. "Do you
not feel the change in the motion of the boat? We are in the trough of the
sea, without steam, and as near as I can make out through the mist, driving
on the Irish coast with more rapidity than we bargained for!"
"Heavens!" was the very natural exclamation in reply, as the American
managed with some difficulty to throw on the one or two articles of
clothing of which he had divested himself.
"I suppose that it is a bad job," the journalist continued, "and what just
now makes me feel peculiarly bad about it is the fact that I was the means
of inducing you to come on board, and that if any thing serious should
happen--"
"Hush! not a word of that!" said the lawyer, appreciating fully that
chivalrous generosity which after conferring a great favor could take blame
to itself for any peril growing out of that favor. "Hush! You have treated
me, Mr. Fitzmaurice, with great kindness, and I hope you will believe me
man enough not to misunderstand our relative positions in any thing that
may occur."
Fitzmaurice, who seemed to be relieved by the words, but who certainly was
laboring under an amount of depression not incident alone to any peril in
which he stood personally involved,--grasped his hand with something more
than the ordinary pressure of brief acquaintance. The motion of the boat,
alternately a roll and then a heavy plunge, had now become absolutely
fearful, intermingled with occasional repetitions of that crashing blow
which had started the American from his slumber; but holding fast of each
other and of various substantial objects that fell in their course, the two
young men reached the companion way and the deck, the journalist detailing
meanwhile, in hasty and broken words, what he knew of the extent of the
difficulty in which they were involved.
Up to fifteen or twenty minutes before, the little Emerald, a capital
sea-boat but possessed of but a single engine (which description of single
engine boats, by the way, should never be allowed to make voyages by open
sea, except under the especial pilotage of one Malthus), had been making
good weather, though the blow had increased to a gale and the waves of the
Irish Channel increased to such size that they seemed to be opposed to the
Union and determined to make an eternal severance of the two islands.
Fitzmaurice had himself awoke about an hour before, and gone upon deck
because unable to sleep longer; and he had consequently become aware, a
little before the American in his berth did so, of an accident to the
vessel. One moment of cessation of the plunging roll with which she had
been ploughing ahead of the waves breaking on her larboard quarter--a
moment of almost perfect stillness, as if the little vessel lay moored in
some quiet haven--then a sudden veering round and that terrible crash and
shock of the waves under the counter, the wheel, and along the whole side,
which told that she was lying helpless in the trough of the sea, a marine
Samson as thoroughly disabled as if she had been shorn of all her strength
at once by the shears of one of the Fates. A word from one of the officers,
the moment afterwards, had told him of some disarrangement of the engine,
consequent on the severe strain of the heavy sea upon the boat; and he had
then been left to study out for himself the amount of peril that might be
involved, and to observe the coolness with which officers and men devoted
themselves to a task which might or might not be successful--which might
terminate at any moment in one of those terrible seas breaching the little
vessel and foundering her as if she had indeed been nothing but a
yawl-boat! It was at this stage that he had come down and wakened his
friend of a few hours, feeling some responsibility for his safety (as well
as a presentiment with regard to him which he by no means expressed in
words), and leaving the Queen's messenger to pursue his dreamless sleep
until it should end in Kingstown harbor or at the bottom of "Davy Jones'
locker."
By the time all this had been expressed in one tenth the number of words
here employed, they had reached the deck, and certainly the prospect there
was any thing but one calculated to reassure either. The Emerald was
rolling wheel-houses under, in the trough of the sea, but so far
mysteriously relieving herself through the scuppers as it seemed impossible
that she should do. Two men were at the wheel, but they stood necessarily
idle. Forward were half a dozen men, holding on to keep from going
overboard at the first lurch. Even above the roar of the storm could be
heard the sharp clink of hammers coming up from the engine-room and each
sounding yet one pulse-beat of Hope. The south-easter was howling with
demoniac fury, wailing through the rigging as if singing requiems for them
all in advance, and driving before it the thin mists that shut away any
idea of the sky. By the light on deck and on the troubled expanse of water
eastward it was evident that day was breaking; and it was through a
knowledge of that fact and of the rate of speed at which they had been
steaming and driving partially before the wind all night, that Fitzmaurice
had made his calculation expressed below, that they must be close on the
Irish coast, a lee-shore, in such a blow, of no pleasant character.
Such was the situation--a deplorable one, as any one can readily perceive
who has ever seen its precise parallel; yet not entirely a hopeless one,
for they might not be so close upon the coast as had been feared, and the
engine might yet be thrown again into gear before the little vessel
foundered and in time to claw off from the danger lying to leeward.
Fitzmaurice had seen the position before: the American saw it at once
through his own eyes and from the explanations given him by the journalist.
The moment was not favorable for conversation, in that perilous motion,
that roar of wind and wave and that suspense of mind; and the two young
men held none except in a few words almost shouted to each other, but stood
far aft on the larboard quarter, waiting calmly as two men with human
instincts could be expected to wait for--what Heaven only knew! The face of
the Anglo-Irishman was almost thoughtlessly calm, in spite of the anxiety
which he had so plainly expressed: that of the American was dark, his lips
set and his brow contracted, but there was no sign of shrinking and no
indication of that basest passion, fear! Who could believe that the man
standing there in the gray light of morning and awaiting without one
apparent tremor of the muscles what might be an immediate and a painful
death, bore a name that had been so lately dishonored by the most abject
cowardice?
Suddenly there was a cry which has blanched many a cheek and made many a
lip tremble since Noah made his first sea-voyage in the Ark: "Land on the
starboard quarter!" followed by another and yet more startling call:
"Breakers to leeward!"
Fitzmaurice and the American both turned instantly in the direction
indicated, as was inevitable; and then they saw that the warning cry from
the look-out was not the result of any illusion. The daylight was rapidly
broadening, the mist had for the moment driven away leeward; and apparently
not more than a mile away rose a huge dark headland assuming the
proportions of a mountain, while at its base and in the exact direction
towards which the doomed vessel was drifting, the sea was breaking in
wreaths of white foam over ledges of rock which seemed to be already so
near that they must go grinding and crashing upon them before the lapse of
five minutes. They felt that the water shoaled, too, for the plunging roll
of the disabled steamer grew every moment more terrible, and just as the
cry was given she was breached at the waist by a sea from which she did not
immediately clear herself. It only needed an eye that had ever scanned
peril by sea and shore, to know at that moment that the Emerald and all on
board were as certainly doomed, in all human probability, as if the one had
been already broken up and scattered along the coast in fragments and the
others made food for fishes along the rocks of Ireland's Eye!
"The Hill of Howth and the rocks at the foot of it!" cried Fitzmaurice as
he recognized the position. "Now God help us, for they are dead to leeward,
and if we have any accounts to settle we had better settle them rapidly!"
There was little agitation in his tone, now, and there was none in that of
the American as he replied two words. They were the last he ever spoke, to
mortal ear. May they have been true when he awoke from his long sleep, as
they were before he fell into it! Those two words were:
"I see!"
The two men were standing, as has been said, very near the larboard
quarter. The Emerald, too, as has also been already said, was very low in
the bulwarks, as befitted her rake and her clipper appearance. Just as the
lawyer uttered the two words, one of the officers of the steamer came aft,
holding on amidst the terrible roll with something of the tenacity of a
cat, and took his place at the wheel. The mist had closed down again and
the Hill of Howth and the breakers were both for the moment shut away.
There was a jar--a creeping, trembling jar that seemed to run through the
little steamer, from stem to stern-post, and yet no blow from the fierce
waves and no grinding of her keel upon the dreaded rocks. It was
life--motion--the beat of machinery once more! At that critical juncture
the engine had moved again for the first time, and if not safety there was
yet at least another struggle with destiny. The officer had dashed back to
throw the steamer up into the wind, the very instant that he felt the steam
once more rushing into the cylinder.
Then followed what cannot be described, because no one living can say
precisely what occurred. Gathering way almost in an instant from the mad
dash of her wheels into the water, the little Emerald plunged forward as
if for her life. She had but a hundred or two yards of vantage ground left,
and seemed to know it. As she gathered way and the quick whirl of the wheel
swept her head gradually round to the sea, one mighty wave, as if afraid of
being baulked of its prey and determined upon a final effort, struck her
under the weather bow and port wheel and sent her careening so low to
leeward that the starboard wheel-house and even the starboard quarter-rail
were under water. She rolled back again in an instant, triumphant over the
great enemy, and thenceforward dashed away from the white breakers on her
lee as if she had been merely tantalizing them with a futile prospect of
her destruction,--to make her way safely two hours afterwards into
Kingstown Harbor and to land the Queen's messenger (who had just then
awoke) and the correspondent of the _Evening Mail_, only an hour later than
the passengers by the packet had disembarked.
But she did not land the American. When the steamer rolled down with her
starboard quarter-rail under water, Fitzmaurice, standing nearest to the
larboard quarter, called out to his companion: "Look out and hold on!" then
clutched the bulwark with his own hands and obeyed his own injunction. But
when the steamer righted he was alone! Whether the lawyer had missed
footing and failed to grasp any point of support at the critical moment, or
whether he had lost head in the dizzying motion and gone over without even
knowing his danger,--certain it is that he had been swept overboard under
circumstances in which the whole British navy could have done no more to
save him than one child of ten years! Henry Fitzmaurice, missing him and
dreading what had really occurred, thought that for one second he saw a
human head, with the hair streaming up, away off in the yeasty water: but
that was all. And he said, bitterly, realizing all the painful facts of the
event, and taking to himself a thought of regret that was likely to cling
to him while his generous heart continued to beat:
"My God!--it was just as I thought! I have been the means of drowning that
splendid fellow, after all!"
* * * * *
A few hours later, little Shelah, the barefooted daughter of one of the
poor fishermen whose hut stood at the foot of Howth, around northward
towards Ireland's Eye--little Shelah, who had gone down over the rocks to
the beach when the worst of the storm was over, rushed back to the cabin
with terror in her eyes and broken words upon her lips:
"Oh, father!--there bees a man all dead and dhrownded down there by the
rocks beyant! And he bees so handsome and so much like a rale
gintleman!--how could he dhround? Come down and see till him, father!"
The fisherman went down, and he and his rough mates removed the body and
did their humble and ineffectual all to resuscitate a body from which the
breath of life had long departed. Then the fisherman and his wife and his
mates and little Shelah all mourned over the manly beauty that had been
sacrificed, and wondered who he could possibly be, and where his kindred
would mourn for him. It was only when Father Michael, the good old priest
of the parish was summoned, that they could form any nearer idea of the
personality of the drowned man. Then they knew, for Father Michael could
read, as they could not, and he told them, from one of the cards in the
pocket-book, that "his name had been Carlton Brand, and that he had
belonged to Philadelphia, away over in America, where they used to be so
free and happy, but where they were fighting, now, all the time, about the
naygurs that didn't seem to him worth the throuble!"
They buried him, with such lamentations as they might have bestowed upon
"one of their own," in consecrated ground in a little graveyard a mile away
from the Hill, westward; and Father Michael gave the dead man the benefit
of a benevolent doubt as to his religion, with the remark that "there were
good Christians over in America, and this was one of them, maybe!" uttering
a prayer for the repose of his soul that, if it bore him no nearer to the
Beautiful Gate, certainly left him no farther away from it, while it
fulfilled the behest of a simple and beautiful faith! This done, and a note
despatched to his favorite journal, giving the name and place of burial of
the unfortunate man, Father Michael felt, as he had reason to feel, that he
had done his whole melancholy duty.
Whatever the quest of the American, it was ended: whatever had been the
secret of his unrest, it was not a secret to the eyes that thenceforth
watched over a destiny no longer temporal but eternal.
* * * * *
It has been suggested that Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist, so strangely
thrown into the company of the Philadelphian, so much pleased with his
manner and impressed by his conversation, and so suddenly separated from
him by an accident which seemed to have something of his own handiwork in
its production,--was likely to bear with him, during life, a regret born of
that circumstance. Such being the case, it was eminently natural that in
giving a description of the accident to the despatch-steamer and the peril
to her passengers, on the day following, in the _Mail_, he should have
dwelt at some length on the sad fate of Mr. Carlton Brand, the American,
alluded in terms of warm respect to the character which had briefly fallen
under his observation, and felicitates the far-away friends of the
unfortunate man, on the fact already made public in the _Nation_, that the
body had been early recovered and received tender and honorable Christian
burial.