It is well for the wounded spirit when the body falls sick in
sympathy, and the piercing thoughts become blunted into vague fancies,
and the heavy load of doubt and despair falls off with the
responsibilities of sane and sound existence.
George Lauriston, who had been unconsciously sickening ever since the
day when he was arrested, and, stupefied by misery, had gone off to
prison in clothes which had been saturated with the rain, was, on the
day after his conviction, too ill to stand; his skin was hot and dry,
his eyes were glazed and dull, and his limbs racked with pains. The
surgeon, on being sent for to see him, ordered his immediate removal
to the hospital, where for three weeks he was laid up with a sharp
attack of rheumatic fever. He recovered very slowly, but as this is a
common case with sick prisoners, who not unnaturally prefer the
relaxed discipline and better food of the hospital ward to the
monotonous life and meagre fare which awaits them on their
convalescence, he received no special attention on that account, and
as soon as he was declared fit to be removed, he was consigned to
Toulon with a batch of other convicts destined, like himself, for work
in the dockyards. He was visited in his illness by Ella Millard, but
he was unable either to recognise her, or to learn from her lips the
painful tidings that every effort to find his wife had proved
fruitless. He started on his miserable journey, therefore, without one
parting word to cherish during the long months which must elapse
before he could see a friend’s face again, and knowing nothing of the
efforts that were being made on his behalf.
The New World energy which poor little Lady Millard had used only to
force herself into the same mould as her husband’s less vivacious
compatriots, had blossomed out in her youngest daughter to a quality
of the highest order, capable, on occasion, of transforming the plain,
unobtrusive girl into something like a heroine. Ella was convinced
that the sentence passed upon George Lauriston was unduly severe, and
further, that if carried out it would kill him; therefore she put
forth all her powers of perseverance and resource in the endeavour to
get it mitigated. To her uncle, Lord Florencecourt, and her aunt Lady
Crediton, both of whom were persons of influence, she did not allow
one moment’s rest until, through the English ambassador at Paris, she
had obtained a hearing of the French Minister of the Interior. In
this, however, she did not succeed until the following spring, by
which time her poor friend’s release by surer means seemed to be
drawing near.
Before the winter was more than half through George believed that he
was dying. The authorities of the prison thought so too, and out of
compassion for the “_bel Anglais_,” whose athletic form, distinction
of movement and manner, and the old thoroughness and absorption with
which he did whatever work he had to do, had gained him the same sort
of reputation among the lowest of mankind that he had formerly held
among the highest, they shortened the preliminary term of confinement
within the walls, and put him with the workers in the dockyard, in the
hope that the open air, nipping and keen as it was in these winter
days, might restore the failing vigour of his frame, and check a
hacking cough which made even the warders shrug their shoulders and
mutter “_pauvre diable!_” as they walked up and down the echoing stone
corridors in the frosty nights of the early year.
March had come, with bitter winds and no sign of the winter’s
breaking, when George Lauriston was sent, as one of a small gang of
convicts, to repair a breach in the harbour made during a storm the
day before. There was some hard and hazardous work involved, a portion
of the structure having been rendered unsafe by the tearing away, by
the action of the waves, of the outer piles placed to break their
force. Glad of the excitement, however, and of the nearer approach to
their kind of the outer world which the walk to and from the harbour
afforded, the gang of convicts, picked out of the smartest and
best-conducted men, went to this novel work with more alacrity than
usual. The weather was still rough; the waves, of a troubled
greenish-brown colour, were crested with white, and the wind drove the
drizzling sleet straight from the north.
In spite of the fierce gusts of wind, of the clouds of saturating
spray which broke up against the wall of the harbour and fell with a
patter and a hiss on to the stone, on the first day that the convicts
worked there, a small, slender woman, poorly dressed, who fought the
wind with difficulty and caught her breath with deep-drawn, struggling
sobs as if the exertion hurt her, crept slowly along the outer side of
the slippery pier through the dense sea-showers, until she was within
a few feet of the warder who walked, with fixed bayonet, up and down,
guarding the convicts on the land side. The warder stopped, and asked
her rather brusquely what she wanted.
“Nothing; I only want to get as near as I can to the sea. It’s good
for me,” she answered fluently, but in a foreigner’s French.
And as she looked ill enough for every breath she drew to be already
numbered, and fixed her eyes yearningly on the horizon as if no nearer
object was of moment to her, he let her stay. But each time that his
back was turned on his walk she was up like a hare, in spite of her
evident weakness, eagerly scanning the workers in their coarse grey
uniforms, searching, searching, until at last, at her third scrutiny,
she discovered the man she wanted. It was George Lauriston. He was
working with a will, pickaxe in hand, his feet now in, now out of the
water, his back towards her, his arms rising at regular intervals, as
he dealt blow after blow at the solid masonry. She did not cry out as
she recognised him; she did not even try to attract his attention; but
fell back into her former position and retained it unchanged through
two or three turns and returns of the warder up and down. The one
glance had intoxicated her; she doubted her own powers of
self-restraint, that gave her the blessed privilege of seeing him, her
own husband, in the flesh, after those long dark months of absence
when he had come to her only in dreams.
After a little while she noted, sitting crouched under the wall, out
of sight of the convicts, that the blows of the pickaxe had ceased. If
for a few moments he was resting, he might, if God would be kind, turn
this way, see her, meet her gaze with his, give her one short kiss of
the eyes that she might carry home and nurse in her memory through the
long nights when she lay awake thinking of him. She waited, scarcely
drawing breath, till the warder turned again. She had ten full seconds
for her venture. Scudding over the great stones like a lapwing she
reached the breach again, and looked over. A cry rose from her heart,
but she stifled it as, through spray, rain, mist, the wind-driven rain
cutting her tender face like stones, the waves shooting up great
geysers of white foam close to her, she met the look that through long
weeks of illness she had hungered for.
“Nouna!” cried George, with a hoarse shout that the waves drowned with
their thunder.
Finger on lip she sped back in a moment, leaving him dazed, stupefied,
half believing, half hoping the figure he had seen was only a vision
of his imagination. For could that little pinched, wasted face, in
which the great brown eyes stood out weirdly, be the bonny bride whose
beauty had seemed to him almost supernatural? He set to work again
mechanically, hardly knowing what he did; but when the short day began
to draw in, and a veil of inky clouds to bring a shroud-like shadow
over the sea, and the warders gave the word to cease work and muster
for the march back to the prison, he saw the little weird face again,
read the short sad message of unwavering love and weary longing in her
great passion-bright eyes, and resisting, with one supreme effort of
the old soldierly habit of discipline, the dangerous temptation to
risk everything and break the ranks for an embrace, which his failing
health told him would certainly be the last, he marched on with the
rest, and left her to creep--benumbed with cold and wet to the skin,
but feverishly happy in the knowledge that she had seen him
again--back to her home to live on the hope of another such meagre
meeting.
The next day was wild, stormy, and bitterly cold, with a driving
north-east wind, and intermittent snow-showers. But when the convicts
were marched down to the harbour, Nouna was already there,
crouching--a small, inert bundle of grey waterproof--under the shelter
of a pile of huge stones, watching for her husband’s coming with
hungry eyes. When the tramp, tramp, upon the flags told her the gang
was approaching she peeped out cautiously, and then, afraid lest in
her desire to escape the notice of any one but George, she should
escape his also, she rose, crept out a few paces from her shelter, and
turned her face boldly towards the advancing men. George was in the
front rank to-day; in the morning light, which beat full upon his
face, she saw him well, saw a terrible change in him; even while he,
on his side, noted more fully the transformation in the little fairy
princess who had taken his whole nature by storm less than a year
ago--from a lovely unthinking child into a sick and desolate woman.
How could he think, as he looked at her, that there was anything but
loss in a change which rent his very heart, and moved him as no
allurement of her beauty, no wile of her sensuous coquetry had ever
done? In spite of the educational enthusiasm he had spent upon his
sixteen-year-old bride, in spite of his genuine anxiety to surround
her with elevating and spiritualising influences, it thus happened
that when at last the spirit instead of the senses shone out of her
yearning eyes, it gave him no gladness, but rather a deep regret, and
instead of thanking heaven for waking the soul he had in vain longed
to reach, he cursed his own fate that he had brought about this change
in the woman for whom he was at all times ready to die.
He did not pass very near to her, for the little creature was cowed
and shy, afraid of bringing some punishment upon him by any sign of
intelligence. He tried to speak to her, tried to tell her not to wait
there, exposed to the bitter wind and the lightly falling snow; but
his voice was hoarse and broken, nothing escaped his lips but guttural
sounds, which did not even reach her ears. So that when, after a
couple of hours’ work upon the rough stones of the pier, he again came
in sight of his wife, crouching in the same place, watching patiently
for another brief sight of him, he took, to save her from the risks
her fragile frame was running, a resolve, the execution of which cut
him like a knife. He went up to the warder and said:
“That is my wife. She will die of cold if she stays. Please speak to
her gently.”
George saw, as he turned to go back to his work, the poor child’s
white frightened face as the warder addressed her. Slowly, with one
long straining gaze, as if she would draw her loved one into her arms
by the passionate force of her yearning eyes, she turned, and George
saw her hurry away down the pier as fast as her chilled limbs would
let her: and he felt that the little retreating figure which soon
became a mere speck against grey sky, grey sea, grey stone, had
carried away the last shred of human hope and human feeling that
prison life and failing health had left in his breast.
Next day, which was the last of the work in the harbour, Nouna was not
on the pier; but as George took his place with the rest he found,
roughly cut with a knife or some other sharp instrument in one of the
large stones, the letters filled in with red chalk, these words:
“I have been quite good all the time. Good-bye. N.”
It was his wife’s last message to him. George knelt down and put his
lips upon the stone. He had forgotten that he was not alone, but if he
had remembered, it would have made no difference. The waves might wear
out next tide the feebly scrawled marks which perhaps no eye but his
could decipher, or the words might be read by every man, woman and
child in the town--it was all the same to him now; they were engraved
upon his own heart, a complete, a holy answer to every doubt which had
ever troubled him, to every aspiration he had ever had for the young
life he had bound to his own. Love and sorrow had sanctified her;
there was no danger for his darling now.
The man, on the other hand, had only his worst feelings intensified by
misfortune which he could not but look upon as unmerited. George’s
love for his wife remained as strong as ever, but it was now the one
soft spot in a nature rapidly hardening under the influence of a
struggle with fortune in which he had been signally worsted. In the
long hours of the night, when his cough kept him awake even though he
was tired out by a hard day’s labour, he brooded over the wrongs he
had suffered, until the canker of disappointment ate into his heart
and bred there a burning, murderous wish for revenge: not upon the
French law which had condemned him, as he maintained, unjustly--that
was impersonal, intangible, a windmill to fight; not upon the Colonel,
who had faltered in his friendship; not upon Chloris, whose
mischievous caprice had set in motion the force which had indirectly
destroyed him; but a man’s indignant righteous revenge upon the rascal
who had tried from his very wedding-day to come between him and his
wife. George began to feel that it was even more for the sake of
finding Rahas than of meeting Nouna again that he yearned with a sick
man’s longing to live until the time of his release, and prayed for
strength to drag on an existence which with its hopelessness and its
morbid cravings for the savage excitement of vengeance, was an
infernal torment which told, by its intensity, on his waning strength.
The prison authorities noticed the change in him, and treated him with
what little consideration was possible. The old priest, in particular,
stirred by the fact that “number 42” was a heretic into giving him
something better than the conventional doses of religious advice which
he administered to the devotees of “the true Church,” proved a most
kind friend to him, and it was with a manner of sincere and warm
sympathy that the good father while paying him his usual visit one day
in April, let fall at parting a mysterious whisper about good news and
good friends who had not forgotten him. The brooding prisoner hardly
heeded him. But next morning he was brought up before the governor,
and a paper was formally read out to him, in which he was informed
that the Minister of the Interior, on having brought under his notice
the case of the Englishman, George Lauriston, now undergoing a
sentence of penal servitude at Toulon, had come to the conclusion that
the said sentence was unduly severe, and that, as the evidence went to
show that the crime was unpremeditated, and committed under strong
provocation, a short term of imprisonment would have been adequate
punishment, and that, in view of the fact that the said George
Lauriston had been already at Toulon working as a convict for nearly
four months, the Minister had decided to remit the remainder of the
allotted term of imprisonment. George listened, but he hardly
understood; the governor, in a few kindly words, then told him that he
was a free man, that he could go back to his friends.
“Friends!” echoed George in a dull voice.
“Come, you cannot deny that you have friends; it is to some of them
that you owe the good news you have just received,” said the governor.
“I understand they are in the town waiting to meet you. Sir
Henry--something I do not recollect, is the name of the gentleman; and
the lady----”
A light broke over George’s face; he spoke some broken words of thanks
in a more human voice.
That evening he was a free man, and was holding, dazed and trembling
as with palsy, on one side the hand of Sir Henry Millard, on the other
that of his daughter Ella.