V.

They brought Harry Pallant ashore, cold and lifeless, and carried him up

in haste to the hotel. There the village doctor saw him at once, and

detected a faint tremor of the heart. At the end of an hour the lungs

began to act faintly of themselves, and the heart beat a little in some

feeble fashion.

With care Harry Pallant came round, but it took a week or two before he

was himself again, and Louie nursed him meanwhile in fear and

trembling, with breathless agony. She had one consolation--Harry loved

her. In the long nights the whole truth dawned upon her, clear and

certain. She saw how Harry had opened the letter, had jumped at once to

the natural conclusion, and had tried to drown himself in order to

release her. Oh, why had he not trusted her? Why had he not asked her? A

woman naturally thinks like that; a man knows in his own soul that a man

could never possibly do so.

She dared not tell him yet, for fear of a relapse. She could only wait

and watch, and nurse him tenderly. And all the time she knew he

distrusted her--knew he thought her a hypocrite and a traitor. For

Harry's sake she had to bear it.

At last, one day, when he was getting very much stronger, and could sit

up in a chair and look bitterly out at the sea, she said to him in a

gentle voice, very tentatively, "Harry, Dora Ferrand and her husband

have gone to spend the summer in Norway."

Harry groaned. "How do you know?" he asked. "Has Hugh written to you?

What is it to us? Who told you about it?"

Louie bit her lip hard to keep back the tears. "Dora telegraphed to me

herself," she answered softly. "She telegraphed to me as soon as

ever"--she hesitated a moment--"as soon as ever she saw your answer to

her in the _Monitor_."

Harry's face grew white with horror. "My answer to _her_!" he cried in a

ghastly voice, not caring to ask at the moment how Louie came to know it

was he who wrote the answers in the _Young People's Monitor_. "My answer

to _you_, you mean, Louie. It was your letter--yours, not Dora's. You

can't deceive me. I read it myself. My poor child, I saw your

handwriting."

It was an awful thing that, in spite of all, he must have it out with

her against his will; but he would not flinch from it--he would settle

it then and there, once and for ever. She had introduced it herself; she

had brought it down upon her own head. He would not flinch from it. It

was his duty to tell her.

Louie laid her hand upon his arm. He did not try to cast it off.

"Harry," she said, imploringly, persuasively, "there is a terrible

mistake here--a terrible misunderstanding. It was unavoidable; you could

not possibly have thought otherwise. But oh, Harry, if you knew the

suffering you have brought upon me, you would not speak so, darling--you

would not speak so."

Harry turned towards her passionately and eagerly. "Then you didn't want

me to die, Louie?" he cried in a hoarse voice. "You didn't really want

to get rid of me?"

Louie withdrew her hand hastily as if she had been stung. "Harry," she

gasped, as well as she was able, "you misunderstood that letter

altogether. It was not mine--it was Dora Ferrand's. Dora wrote it, and I

only copied it. If you will listen a minute I will tell you all, all

about it."

Harry flung himself back half incredulously on his chair, but with a

new-born hope lighting up in part the gloom of his recovered existence.

"I went over to Dora Ferrand's the day after the Ogilvies' dance," Louie

began tremulously, "and I found Dora sitting in her boudoir writing a

letter. I walked up without being announced, and when Dora saw me she

screamed a little, and then she grew as red as fire, and burst out

crying, and tried to hide the letter she was writing. So I went up to

her and began to soothe her, and asked her what it was, and wanted to

read it. And Dora cried for a long time, and wouldn't tell me, and was

dreadfully penitent, and said she was very, very miserable. So I said,

'Dora, is there anything wrong between you and Mr. Ferrand?' And she

said, 'Nothing, Louie; I give you my word of honour, nothing. Poor

Wetherby's as kind to me as anybody could be. But----' And then she

began crying again as if her heart would burst, worse than ever. And I

took her head on my shoulder, and said to her, 'Dora, is it that you

feel you don't love him?' And Dora was in a dreadfully penitent fit, and

she flung herself away from me, and said to me, 'Oh, Louie, don't touch

me! Don't kiss me! Don't come near me! I'm not fit to associate with a

girl like you, dear.... Oh, Louie, I don't love him; and--what's

worse--I love somebody else, darling.' Well, then, of course, I was

horribly shocked, and I said, 'Dora, Dora, this is awfully wicked of

you!' And Dora cried worse than before, and sobbed away, and wouldn't be

comforted. And there was a copy of the _Monitor_ lying on the table, and

I saw it open at the correspondence, and I said, 'Were you writing for

advice to the _Monitor_, Dora?' And she looked up and nodded 'Yes.' So I

coaxed her and begged her to show me the letter, and at last she showed

it to me; but she wouldn't tell me who she was in love with, Harry; and,

oh, Harry, my darling, my darling, I never so much as dreamt of its

being you, dear--the thought never even crossed my mind. I ran over

everybody I could imagine she'd taken a fancy to, but I never for a

moment thought of you, darling. I suppose, Harry, I loved you too dearly

even to suspect it. And then, I dare say, Dora saw I didn't suspect it;

but, anyhow, she went on and finished the letter--it was nearly done

when I came in to her--and after that she said she couldn't bear to send

it in her own handwriting, for fear anybody should know her and

recognize it. So I said if she liked I'd copy it out for her, for by

that time I was crying just as hard as she was, and so sorry for her and

for poor Mr. Ferrand; and it never struck me that anybody could ever

possibly think that I wrote it about myself. And--and--and that's all,

Harry."

Harry listened, conscience-smitten, to the artless recital, which bore

its own truth on the very surface of it, as it fell from Louie's

trembling lips, and then he held her off at arm's length when she tried

to fall upon his neck and kiss him, whispering in a loud undertone, "Oh,

Louie, Louie, don't, don't! I don't deserve it! I have been too

wicked--too mistrustful!"

Louie drew forth a letter from her pocket and handed it to him silently.

It was in Dora's handwriting. He read it through in breathless anxiety.

"Louie,--I dare not call you anything else now. You know it all by

this time. We have heard about Harry's accident from your sister.

Nobody but ourselves knows it was not an accident. And I have seen

the answer in the _Monitor_. Of course Harry wrote it. I see it all

now. You can never forgive me. It is I who have brought all this

misery upon you. I am a wretched woman. Do not reproach me--I

reproach myself more bitterly than anything you could say would

ever reproach me. But don't forgive me and pity me either. If you

forgive me I shall have to kill myself. It's all over now. I will

do the only thing that remains for me--keep out of your way and his

for ever. Poor Wetherby is going to take me for the summer to

Norway, as I telegraphed to you. We are just starting. When we

return we shall winter in Italy. I will leave London in future

altogether. Nobody but our three selves need ever know or suspect

the reason. Harry will recover, and you two will be happy yet. But

I--I shall be as miserable for ever, as I truly deserve to be.

"Your wretched friend,

"D. F."

Harry crumpled up the letter bitterly in his hand. "Poor soul," he said.

"Louie, I forgive her. Can I myself ever hope for forgiveness?"

Louie flung herself fiercely upon him. "My darling," she cried, "we will

always trust one another in future. You couldn't help it, Harry. It was

impossible for you to have judged otherwise. But oh, my darling, what I

have suffered! Let us forgive her. Harry, and let us love one another

better now."

_THE SEARCH PARTY'S FIND._

I can stand it no longer. I must put down my confession on paper, since

there is no living creature left to whom I can confess it.

The snow is drifting fiercer than ever to-day against the cabin; the

last biscuit is almost finished; my fingers are so pinched with cold I

can hardly grasp the pen to write with. But I _will_ write, I must

write, and I am writing. I cannot die with the dreadful story

unconfessed upon my conscience.

It was only an accident, most of you who read this confession perhaps

will say; but in my own heart I know better than that--I know it was a

murder, a wicked murder.

Still, though my hands are very numb, and my head swimming wildly with

delirium, I will try to be coherent, and to tell my story clearly and

collectedly.

* * * * *

I was appointed surgeon of the _Cotopaxi_ in June, 1880. I had reasons

of my own--sad reasons--for wishing to join an Arctic expedition. I

didn't join it, as most of the other men did, from pure love of danger

and adventure. I am not a man to care for that sort of thing on its own

account. I joined it because of a terrible disappointment.

For two years I had been engaged to Dora--I needn't call her anything

but Dora; my brother, to whom I wish this paper sent, but whom I

daren't address as "Dear Arthur"--how could I, a murderer?--will know

well enough who I mean; and as to other people, it isn't needful they

should know anything about it. But whoever you are, whoever finds this

paper, I beg of you, I implore you, I adjure you, do not tell a word of

it to Dora. I cannot die unconfessed, but I cannot let the confession

reach _her_; if it does, I know the double shock will kill her. Keep it

from her. Tell her only he is dead--dead at his post, like a brave man,

on the _Cotopaxi_ exploring expedition. For mercy's sake don't tell her

that he was murdered, and that I murdered him.

I had been engaged, I said, two years to Dora. She lived in Arthur's

parish, and I loved her--yes, in those days I loved her purely,

devotedly, innocently. I was innocent then myself, and I really believe

good and well-meaning. I should have been genuinely horrified and

indignant if anybody had ventured to say that I should end by committing

a murder.

It was a great grief to me when I had to leave Arthur's parish, and my

father's parish before him, to go up to London and take a post as

surgeon to a small hospital. I couldn't bear being so far away from

Dora. And at first Dora wrote to me almost every day with the greatest

affection. (Heaven forgive me, if I still venture to call her Dora! her,

so good and pure and beautiful, and I, a murderer.) But, after a while,

I noticed slowly that Dora's tone seemed to grow colder and colder, and

her letters less and less frequent. Why she should have begun to cease

loving me, I cannot imagine; perhaps she had a premonition of what

possibility of wickedness was really in me. At any rate, her coldness

grew at last so marked that I wrote and asked Arthur whether he could

explain it. Arthur answered me, a little regretfully, and with brotherly

affection (he is a good fellow, Arthur), that he thought he could. He

feared--it was painful to say so--but he feared Dora was beginning to

love a newer lover. A young man had lately come to the village of whom

she had seen a great deal, and who was very handsome and brave and

fascinating. Arthur was afraid he could not conceal from me his

impression that Dora and the stranger were very much taken with one

another.

At last, one morning, a letter came to me from Dora. I can put it in

here, because I carried it away with me when I went to Hammerfest to

join the _Cotopaxi_, and ever since I have kept it sadly in my private

pocket-book.

"Dear Ernest" (she had always called me Ernest since we had been

children together, and she couldn't leave it off even now when she

was writing to let me know she no longer loved me), "Can you

forgive me for what I am going to tell you? I thought I loved you

till lately; but then I had never discovered what love really

meant. I have discovered it now, and I find that, after all, I only

liked you very sincerely. You will have guessed before this that I

love somebody else, who loves me in return with all the strength of

his whole nature. I have made a grievous mistake, which I know will

render you terribly unhappy. But it is better so than to marry a

man whom I do not really love with all my heart and soul and

affection; better in the end, I am sure, for both of us. I am too

much ashamed of myself to write more to you. Can you forgive me?

"Yours,

"DORA."

I could not forgive her then, though I loved her too much to be angry; I

was only broken-hearted--thoroughly stunned and broken-hearted. I can

forgive her now, but she can never forgive me, Heaven help me!

I only wanted to get away, anywhere, anywhere, and forget all about it

in a life of danger. So I asked for the post of surgeon to Sir Paxton

Bateman's _Cotopaxi_ expedition a few weeks afterwards. They wanted a

man who knew something about natural history and deep-sea dredging, and

they took me on at once, on the recommendation of a well-known man of

science!

The very day I joined the ship at Hammerfest, in August, I noticed

immediately there was one man on board whose mere face and bearing and

manner were at first sight excessively objectionable to me. He was a

handsome young fellow enough--one Harry Lemarchant, who had been a

planter in Queensland, and who, after being burned up with three years

of tropical sunshine was anxious to cool himself apparently by a long

winter of Arctic gloom. Handsome as he was, with his black moustache and

big dark eyes rolling restlessly, I took an instantaneous dislike to his

cruel thin lip and cold proud mouth the moment I looked upon him. If I

had been wise, I would have drawn back from the expedition at once. It

is a foolish thing to bind one's self down to a voyage of that sort

unless you are perfectly sure beforehand that you have at least no

instinctive hatred of any one among your messmates in that long forced

companionship. But I wasn't wise, and I went on with him.

From the first moment, even before I had spoken to him, I disliked

Lemarchant; very soon I grew to hate him. He seemed to me the most

recklessly cruel and devilish creature (God forgive me that I should say

it!) I had ever met with in my whole lifetime. On an Arctic expedition,

a man's true nature soon comes out--mine did certainly--and he lets his

companions know more about his inner self in six weeks than they could

possibly learn about him in years of intercourse under other

circumstances. And the second night I was on board the _Cotopaxi_ I

learnt enough to make my blood run cold about Harry Lemarchant's ideas

and feelings.

We were all sitting on deck together, those of us who were not on duty,

and listening to yarns from one another, as idle men will, when the

conversation happened accidentally to turn on Queensland, and Lemarchant

began to enlighten us about his own doings when he was in the colony. He

boasted a great deal about his prowess as a disperser of the black

fellows, which he seemed to consider a very noble sort of occupation.

There was nobody in the colony, he said, who had ever dispersed so many

blacks as he had; and he'd like to be back there, dispersing again, for,

in the matter of sport, it beat kangaroo-hunting, or any other kind of

shooting he had ever yet tried his hand at, all to pieces.

The second-lieutenant, Hepworth Paterson, a nice kind-hearted young

Scotchman, looked up at him a little curiously, and said, "Why, what do

you mean by dispersing, Lemarchant? Driving them off into the bush, I

suppose: isn't that it? Not much fun in that, that I can see, scattering

a lot of poor helpless black naked savages."

Lemarchant curled his lip contemptuously (he didn't think much of

Paterson, because his father was said to be a Glasgow grocer), and

answered in his rapid, dare-devil fashion: "No fun! Isn't there, just!

that's all you know about it, my good fellow. Now I'll give you one

example. One day, the inspector came in and told us there were a lot of

blacks camping out on our estate down by the Warramidgee river. So we

jumped on our horses like a shot, went down there immediately, and began

dispersing them. We didn't fire at them, because the grass and ferns and

things were very high, and we might have wasted our ammunition; but we

went at them with native spears, just for all the world like

pig-sticking. You should have seen those black fellows run for their

lives through the long grass--men, women, and little ones together. We

rode after them, full pelt; and as we came up with them, one by one, we

just rolled them over, helter-skelter, as if they'd been antelopes or

bears or something. By-and-by, after a good long charge or two, we'd

cleared the place of the big blacks altogether; but the gins and the

children, some of them, lay lurking in among the grass, you know, and

wouldn't come out and give us fair sport, as they ought to have done,

out in the open: children will pack, you see, whenever they're hard

driven, exactly like grouse, after a month or two's steady shooting.

Well, to make them start and show game, of course we just put a match to

the grass; and in a minute the whole thing was in a blaze, right down

the corner to the two rivers. So we turned our horses into the stream,

and rode alongside, half a dozen of us on each river; and every now and

then, one of the young ones would break cover, and slide out quietly

into the stream, and try to swim across without being perceived, and get

clean away into the back country. Then we just made a dash at them with

the pig-spears; and sometimes they'd dive--and precious good divers they

are, too, those Queenslanders, I can tell you; but we waited around till

they came up again, and then we stuck them as sure as houses. That's

what we call dispersing the natives over in Queensland: extending the

blessings of civilization to the unsettled parts of the back country."

He laughed a pleasant laugh to himself quietly as he finished this

atrocious, devilish story, and showed his white teeth all in a row, as

if he thought the whole reminiscence exceedingly amusing.

Of course, we were all simply speechless with horror and astonishment.

Such deliberate brutal murderousness--gracious heavens! what am I

saying? I had half forgotten for the moment that I, too, am a murderer.

"But what had the black fellows done to you?" Paterson asked with a tone

of natural loathing, after we had all sat silent and horror-stricken in

a circle for a moment. "I suppose they'd been behaving awfully badly to

some white people somewhere--massacring women or something--to get your

blood up to such a horrid piece of butchery."

Lemarchant laughed again, a quiet chuckle of conscious superiority, and

only answered: "Behaving badly! Massacring white women! Lord bless your

heart, I'd like to see them! Why, the wretched creatures wouldn't ever

dare to do it. Oh, no, nothing of that sort, I can tell you. And our

blood wasn't up either. We went in for it just by way of something to

do, and to keep our hands in. Of course you can't allow a lot of lazy

hulking blacks to go knocking around in the neighbourhood of an estate,

stealing your fowls and fruit and so forth, without let or hindrance.

It's the custom in Queensland to disperse the black fellows. I've often

been out riding with a friend, and I've seen a nigger skulking about

somewhere down in a hollow among the tree-ferns; and I've just drawn my

six-shooter, and said to my friend, 'You see me disperse that confounded

nigger!' and I've dispersed him right off--into little pieces, too, you

may take your oath upon it."

"But do you mean to tell me, Mr. Lemarchant," Paterson said, looking a

deal more puzzled and shocked, "that these poor creatures had been doing

absolutely nothing?"

"Well, now, that's the way of all you home-sticking sentimentalists,"

Lemarchant went on, with an ugly simper. "You want to push on the

outskirts of civilization and to see the world colonized, but you're too

squeamish to listen to anything about the only practicable civilizing

and colonizing agencies. It's the struggle for existence, don't you see:

the plain outcome of all the best modern scientific theories. The black

man has got to go to the wall; the white man, with his superior moral

and intellectual nature, has got to push him there. At bottom, it's

nothing more than civilization. Shoot 'em off at once, I say, and get

rid of 'em forthwith and for ever."

"Why," I said, looking at him, with my disgust speaking in my face

(Heaven forgive me!), "I call it nothing less than murder."

Lemarchant laughed, and lit his cigar; but after that, somehow, the

other men didn't much care to talk to him in an ordinary way more than

was necessary for the carrying out of the ship's business.

And yet he was a very gentlemanly fellow, I must admit, and well read

and decently educated. Only there seemed to be a certain natural

brutality about him, under a thin veneer of culture and good breeding,

that repelled us all dreadfully from the moment we saw him. I dare say

we shouldn't have noticed it so much if we hadn't been thrown together

so closely as men are on an Arctic voyage, but then and there it was

positively unendurable. We none of us held any communications with him

whenever we could help it; and he soon saw that we all of us thoroughly

disliked and distrusted him.

That only made him reckless and defiant. He knew he was bound to go the

journey through with us now, and he set to work deliberately to shock

and horrify us. Whether all the stories he told us by the ward-room fire

in the evenings were true or not, I can't tell you--I don't believe they

all were; but at any rate he made them seem as brutal and disgusting as

the most loathsome details could possibly make them. He was always

apologizing--nay, glorying--in bloodshed and slaughter, which he used to

defend with a show of cultivated reasoning that made the naked brutality

of his stories seem all the more awful and unpardonable at bottom. And

yet one couldn't deny, all the time, that there was a grace of manner

and a show of polite feeling about him which gave him a certain external

pleasantness, in spite of everything. He was always boasting that women

liked him; and I could easily understand how a great many women who saw

him only with his company manners might even think him brave and

handsome and very chivalrous.

I won't go into the details of the expedition. They will be found fully

and officially narrated in the log, which I have hidden in the captain's

box in the hut beside the captain's body. I need only mention here the

circumstances immediately connected with the main matter of this

confession.

* * * * *

One day, a little while before we got jammed into the ice off the Liakov

Islands, Lemarchant was up on deck with me, helping me to remove from

the net the creatures that we had dredged up in our shallow soundings.

As he stooped to pick out a _Leptocardium boreale_, I happened to

observe that a gold locket had fallen out of the front of his waistcoat,

and showed a lock of hair on its exposed surface. Lemarchant noticed it

too, and with an awkward laugh put it back hurriedly. "My little girl's

keepsake!" he said in a tone that seemed to me disagreeably flippant

about such a subject. "She gave it to me just before I set off on my way

to Hammerfest."

I started in some astonishment. He had a little girl then--a sweetheart

he meant, obviously. If so, Heaven help her! poor soul, Heaven help her!

For any woman to be tied for life to such a creature as that was really

quite too horrible. I didn't even like to think upon it.

I don't know what devil prompted me, for I seldom spoke to him, even

when we were told off on duty together; but I said at last, after a

moment's pause, "If you are engaged to be married, as I suppose you are

from what you say, I wonder you could bear to come away on such a long

business as this, when you couldn't get a word or a letter from the lady

you're engaged to for a whole winter."

He went on picking out the shells and weeds as he answered in a

careless, jaunty tone, "Why, to tell you the truth, Doctor, that was

just about the very meaning of it. We're going to be married next

summer, you see, and for reasons of her papa's--the deuce knows

what!--my little girl couldn't possibly be allowed to marry one week

sooner. There I'd been, knocking about and spooning with her violently

for three months nearly; and the more I spooned, and the more tired I

got of it, the more she expected me to go on spooning. Well, I'm not the

sort of man to stand billing and cooing for a whole year together. At

last the thing grew monotonous. I wanted to get an excuse to go off

somewhere, where there was some sort of fun going on, till summer came,

and we could get spliced properly (for she's got some tin, too, and I

didn't want to throw her over); but I felt that if I'd got to keep on

spooning and spooning for a whole winter, without intermission, the

thing would really be one too many for me, and I should have to give it

up from sheer weariness. So I heard of this precious expedition, which

is just the sort of adventure I like; I wrote and volunteered for it;

and then I managed to make my little girl and her dear papa believe that

as I was an officer in the naval reserve I was compelled to go when

asked, willy-nilly. 'It's only for half a year, you know, darling,' and

all that sort of thing--you understand the line of country; and

meanwhile I'm saved the bother of ever writing to her, or getting any

letters from her either, which is almost in its way an equal nuisance."

"I see," said I shortly. "Not to put too fine a point upon it, you

simply lied to her."

"Upon my soul," he answered, showing his teeth again, but this time by

no means pleasantly, "you fellows on the _Cotopaxi_ are really the

sternest set of moralists I ever met with outside a book of sermons or a

Surrey melodrama. You ought all to have been parsons, every man Jack of

you; that's just about what you're fit for."

* * * * *

On the fourteenth of September we got jammed in the ice, and the

_Cotopaxi_ went to pieces. You will find in the captain's log how part

of us walked across the pack to the Liakov Islands, and settled

ourselves here on Point Sibiriakoff in winter quarters. As to what

became of the other party, which went southwards to the mouth of the

Lena, I know nothing.

It was a hard winter, but by the aid of our stores and an occasional

walrus shot by one of the blue-jackets, we managed to get along till

March without serious illness. Then, one day, after a spell of terrible

frost and snow, the Captain came to me, and said, "Doctor, I wish you'd

come and see Lemarchant, in the other hut here. I'm afraid he's got a

bad fever."