’Twas strange: in youth, all action, and all life,
Burning for pleasure, not averse from strife,
Woman--the field--the ocean--all that gave
Promise of gladness, peril of a grave,
In turn he tried.
BYRON.
There be land rats, and water rats, land thieves, and water thieves.
SHAKSPEARE.
It is always irksome, in the progress of an “ower true tale,” when
any circumstance has to be explained through the medium of an
extraordinary coincidence, knowing, as one does, that any instance of
the kind, particularly the fortuitous appearance of a necessary agent
at the appointed moment, occurring as such things do in actual life,
and passing unheeded, yet when recorded on paper they are received
with a revulsion of incredulity. The chances of events sometimes
mould themselves into strange combinations. It was but two or three
years back that two men threw themselves down at the same day and
the same hour, one from the leaning tower of Pisa, the other from
St. Mark’s at Venice. There could have been no possible connexion
between these acts. But if a similar coincidence had been interwoven
in a framework of fiction, it would have caused the manufacture to be
rejected as unworkmanlike. If, on the other hand, the same sort of
combination, had favoured a superstitious presentiment, it would have
been taken as an undeniable confirmation of the preternatural.
I have volunteered this preface, though hardly, I think, a necessary
one, before explaining the manner in which Lord Castleton’s life
was preserved: to do which effectually, it will be necessary to
allude a little to one or two incidents in his early life. It will
have been collected, though merely from Alice Darnell’s collateral
tale, that he lost his father when very young; and it will also have
been inferred from the same source, that, during his earlier years,
he could have seen but little of his mother, who had lived separate
from her husband on the Continent. Young Somers remained under his
grandfather’s roof, whilst his mother was amusing herself abroad,
and his father was constantly shifting about in country quarters
with his militia regiment. His infantine years would therefore have
been deprived of any but mercenary female superintendence, except
for the unremitting care of his foster-mother: whose affection for
him was certainly too pure and truly maternal, to be attributed to
any mercenary motives. She had sought, and easily obtained from his
grandfather, the permission to continue her care of him long, very
long after he had completely outgrown the discharge of her original
functions. The only condition with which this request was mixed up,
was not for remuneration, for that, being in easy circumstances,
was not an object, though, left to Lord Castleton, it followed as a
matter of course,--but was, that she might be allowed to have her
own son, the foster-brother of young Somers, also under the roof.
This was thought, at the time, rather an advantage than otherwise, by
the grandfather of our hero; but it turned out quite the contrary,
for the characters of both the parties concerned. It accustomed the
young heir to require a dependent companion, and it habituated the
future yeoman to notions of expense quite beyond his rank in life.
One thing, however, it certainly promoted, a lasting attachment
between the boys: this, on the side of Somers, subject to the alloy
of caprice, and occasional forgetfulness of a superior; on the part
of Harry, ripening into that feeling of utter devotion to its object,
which the relation of foster-brother in the earlier stages of society
was said constantly to produce; and which has not been entirely
without example in our own times.
The earliest event which made a permanent impression on either of the
boys, was the melancholy end of Colonel Somers. Old Lord Castleton,
being at the time it happened very infirm, and almost bedridden, had,
upon being informed of his son’s self-inflicted death, sent Nurse
Carter to make the necessary arrangements for his remains.
She had, upon her return from the seaport where it was mentioned he
had destroyed himself, collected her two young charges round her,
and, with the irresistible desire of her age and station to make
the most of a shocking story, had not spared them the slightest
particular of what she had heard and seen. Much of this, of course,
only served to frighten them out of their wits for many nights
afterwards, but, as she put it in the shape of warning, she took a
locket which she had found round the deceased’s neck, and hung it
round young Somers, saying, “I know not what this may mean, but your
father wore it till his death; do you wear it till yours, and mayhap
the sight of it may sometime save you from rashly daring the same
fate.”
Old Lord Castleton lived enough to appoint guardians for his
grandson, quite independent of the mother, whose second marriage he
much disapproved. The immediate effect of most of this was, that
young Somers remained much longer than perhaps he ought to have done
with the Carters. But at length he was sent to a public school, and
from thence to the University; and of course, for some time, lost
sight entirely of young Henry Carter. But the latter had been long
enough with him to contract habits which did not exactly enable him
to confine his attention to the process which intervenes between
the plough and the reaping-hook. On the contrary, his exclusive
preferences of the horse-race and the cock-pit soon engrossed him
entirely. His mother did not live long enough to suffer all the
uneasiness that these confirmed habits, on his part, would have
caused her, but died in the firm confidence that the day of the
return of her dear young Lord, when of age, to take possession of the
lands of his ancestors, would be the date of the commencement of a
brilliant career for the only other object of her equally divided
solicitude, his early playmate and foster-brother.
In the mean time Harry Carter fell, step by step, into the most
desperate courses, and went on from one extravagance to another. He
was at length so completely ruined that he was obliged to decamp, and
make for the nearest seaport, hardly knowing whether he would seek
out his patron, who was still on the Continent, or start for America
with some choice companions, who were thither bound, and who tried to
persuade him to try his luck with them. His option, however, on this
subject, was rendered superfluous by a press-gang, who entered the
public-house where they were assembled, and carried them all on board
a tender; from thence Harry Carter, in due time, was transferred to
a man-of-war, which was to cruise in the Mediterranean. Though not
inclined to work if he could help it,--when he could not, he made the
best of a bad job, and soon became an able seaman.
It so happened, that once being ashore at a small retired bay on the
Island of Sicily, he and others of his messmates got into a broil
with some of the natives, and, as it had originated in an imputed
act of sacrilege on their part, they were in great danger from the
offended feelings of the priest-ridden peasants, who, congregating
in numbers around them, cut off their retreat to their boats. Harry
Carter, who was foremost in the defence, though he had not been a
ringleader in the outrage, was himself sore beset, when a party of
English travellers, who had been making the tour of the island on
foot, coming up at the moment, interfered between them at no little
risk to themselves; which danger was however removed, as soon as
they came to explain matters; the quarrel having originated in
misapprehension, and the attack having been provoked by the universal
impatience of Englishmen, who, if from ignorance of the language
of a people they cannot make use of their tongues, immediately
have recourse to their hands. Harry Carter at once, through all
the alterations of intervening years, recognized the playmate of
his youth, Somers, now Lord Castleton, who was much hurt at the
condition in life, that of a common sailor, in which he now found his
foster-brother; which he could not help in some degree attributing
to his own forgetfulness and neglect. But Carter would not allow him
to reproach himself on the subject; and, as his duty prevented his
farther stay, the parting between the foster-brothers was as sudden
as the meeting was unexpected, and, in preparing to shove off, Harry
Carter said, “It’s not like we should often meet again, as we used
to do, my Lord: but now I have seen you, you’ve come like a guardian
angel upon me, and I shall only pray that, if there ever should be an
occasion in which you should stand in need of the like assistance,
that may be the moment I may next cross your path.”
And this fervently devoted expression of his wishes, was heard and
granted; for they next met at that most critical moment in Morden Bay.
At the Peace, Henry Carter had been discharged from the navy, and
soon afterwards falling in with Kit Collett, a free trader’s life
had too many temptations for his own confirmed irregular habits for
him to resist the offers made him by that person to join him in
“_La Pie voleuse_.” It so happened, that, being one of the sharpest
and cleverest of the crew, he had been employed by his Captain
confidentially, not long before this last venture, upon a line of
coast on which they had not previously made a descent. He was sent to
make a survey of it, and arrange matters with some loose characters
in the neighbourhood for furthering their scheme.
In the early part of the labours of that eventful evening, Harry
Carter had worked with all the zeal of a principal in stowing the
kegs, thinking that much of the responsibility as to the success of
the venture devolved on him who had so warmly counselled it. But when
the wounded man was shot into the cave, by two of his comrades, with
much less care than they had bestowed upon the other more valuable
burthens with which they had been charged, Harry Carter’s natural
good-nature induced him to devote a little more attention than any
of his messmates seemed inclined to pay to their fellow-creature.
This kindly disposition soon acquired an unexpected inducement to
continue its good offices. The first thing that peculiarly excited
his attention was, that upon attempting to stanch the wound which was
just above the temple, he found that the hair which had clotted into
it was false, being part of a wig which covered a plentiful crop of
natural hair, of a different colour. The cave was already obscure,
yet the light, crisply curling locks, which he now discovered, seemed
to him to be such as he had never seen but on one person before.
The apparent impossibility of a surmise which supposed so altered a
condition in life, at first staggered him; yet it was evident, from
the discovery he had just made, that the person, whoever he was, had
for some reason or another assumed a disguise. It was difficult, even
if the wounded man had been in a state to reply to verbal inquiries,
to make any safely, whilst all his comrades were perpetually passing.
He bethought him of the locket which his mother had put round
Somers’s neck when a boy, with the positive injunction, never, under
any circumstances, to remove it. This injunction, he knew, for some
time had been rigidly observed. He remembered the form and shape of
it himself, and he determined to be decided in his conduct by the
circumstance of finding the locket there or not.
“If it is there,” thought he, “not only shall I feel sure that it
really is my foster-brother, but I shall feel myself enforced as much
by my mother’s memory, as by my own more recent vow, to do all in my
power to save him.”
It was while endeavouring to ascertain this point by searching within
his clothes that Lucy found him, as she thought, employed in plunder.
If he had not actually had his hand on the locket when she addressed
him, the obvious interest taken in him by a girl in that rank of
life would again have staggered him, as he could only imagine that
the disguise must have been temporarily assumed for the purpose,
perhaps, of detecting that very illicit act in which they were then
engaged. But still the locket was there, and in neither that nor the
features, as far as he could discern them, could he be mistaken; and
therefore his determination was fixed, at all risks, to save him.
He was aware, however, that much immediate risk to himself might be
incurred, without even a chance of effecting that object. Any open
assistance would now have been set down for mutiny, and there is no
legal discipline so severe as that which binds lawless men together
in moments of danger. But he quickly formed in his head a plan which
he thought could not fail.
He had been celebrated as one of the best swimmers in the navy:
it was, then, without any uneasiness that he assisted to convey
Castleton to the boat, and even helped to shove it off, knowing
that the lugger would come quite as near the shore as the surf
would permit; and the moment when the smugglers would be in all
the confusion of holding on till the coble was empty, was that he
had fixed for the execution of his intended escape with Castleton,
trusting to the darkness of the night and the roar of the breakers
to assist him in escaping unobserved. Till this time arrived, he sat
stanching the temple of the wounded man with his hand, that he might
not be too much exhausted by previous loss of blood to be able to
sustain even his passive share in the escape. The confusion of the
smugglers at that moment was increased by hearing that another sail,
supposed to be a revenue cutter, was in sight; and this confusion
was even more serviceable to him than he had anticipated.
Not only did he succeed in dropping overboard himself unnoticed,
but also in pulling Castleton after him: in supporting himself to
do which, his bloody hand had made that strongly marked impression,
as of struggling fingers, which Captain Scudd had naturally enough
interpreted to have been left by some one who had endeavoured to
save himself when thrown over. Bearing his still unconscious burthen
lashed to him in that manner which a skilful swimmer knows would
least impede his own efforts, it is possible that he may have risen
for a moment on the breakers in the manner Lucy imagined she had
seen; but, carefully directing his course where he knew there was
least surf and easiest landing, Carter made for the shore, which he
reached just in time, being almost too much exhausted by the double
weight he had carried to have been able to have struggled farther.