CHAPTER XLIICONCLUSION

I have kept you long at sea. With my escape in the barque from Captain Braine’s island in company with my shipmate Louise, the story of my adventure—the narrative, indeed, of the romance of the wreck—virtually ends. Yet you will wish to see Miss Temple safely home; you will desire to know whether I married her or not; you will also want to hear the latest news of the people of theCountess Ida, to learn the fate of the Honourable Mr. Colledge, of the crew of theMagicienne’scutter, and of the carpenter Lush and his merry gold-hunting men. All may be told in the brief limits of a chapter.

For five days Wetherly and Miss Temple and myself navigated the barque without assistance. We managed it thus: the girl took her turn in steering the vessel, and after a very few trials steered with the expertnessof a trained hand. I can see her now as she stands at the wheel: her fine figure clear cut against the soft Pacific blue over the stern; her dark and shining eyes bent upon the compass card, or lifting in the beauty of the shadow of their lashes to the white canvas; her hands of ivory delicacy grasping the spokes, and always a smile of sweetness and gladness and hope for me when our glances met. To think of the haughty, aristocratic Miss Louise Temple reduced to it! But she did a deal more than that: she helped us to pull and haul; she cooked for us, she kept a lookout, walking the weather-deck whilst Wetherly steered and I was resting. No complaint ever left her lips; she was gentle and happy in all she did. The sea had dealt with her to some purpose; and she was now as sweet, tender, compliant, as she was before self-willed, insolent, and objectionable in all things but her beauty.

The struggle, indeed, would have been a desperate one for us but for the weather. The small but steady sailing breeze that had blown us away from the island continued with a shift of three points only in those five days, and a trifling increase one night, so that wehad never occasion to start a sheet or let go a halliard; nothing more were we called upon to do with the gear than to slacken away the braces.

It was on the afternoon of the fifth day that we fell in with a Peruvian man-of-war brig. She backed her topsail and sent a boat. The young officer in command spoke French very fluently, and Miss Temple and I between us were able to make him understand our story. He returned to his ship to report what I had said, and presently came back with a couple of Irish seamen, to whose services to help us to carry the barque to Valparaiso we were, he said, very welcome. This I considered an extraordinary stroke of fortune, for in so slender a ship’s company as we should still make it was of the utmost consequence that all orders given should be perfectly and instantly intelligible. The Peruvian brig was bound on a cruise amongst the islands, and I earnestly entreated the officer to request his commander to head first of all for the reef upon which I had left Lush and his men, that they might be taken off, if they had not recovered their boat.

Down to this point, the three of us in onefashion and another had managed so fairly well, that the acquisition of the two Irish seamen communicated to me a sense of being in command of a very tolerable ship’s company. Miss Temple and I could now enjoy some little leisure apart from a routine that had been harassing with its vexations and incessant demands upon our vigilance. Night after night descended upon us in beauty; the warm wind blew moist with dew; the reflection of the rich and trembling stars quivered in cones of an icy gleam amid the ripples of the breeze-brushed sea; the curl of new moon shone in the west in the wake of the glowing sun to rise nightly fuller and more brilliant yet, till for awhile the barque sailed through an atmosphere that was brimful of the greenish glory of the unclouded planet. There was scarcely, indeed, a condition of this tender tropic passage to Valparaiso that was not favourable to sentiment. Yet my pride rendered it an obligation upon me that before I spoke my love I must make sure of the girl’s own feelings towards me. I watched her with an impassioned eye; I listened to every word that fell from her lips with an ear eager to penetrate to the spirit of her meaning; asmile that seemed in the least degree ambiguous would keep me musing for a whole watch together. Then I would inquire whether I could in honour ask her to be my wife until my protection and care for her had ceased, and she stood to me in the position she had occupied when we had first met aboard the Indiaman. But to this very fine question of conscience I would respond with the consideration that if I did not ask her now, I must continue in a distracting state of suspense and anxiety for many weeks, running, indeed, into months—that is to say, until we should reach home; that she might misconstrue my reserve, and attribute it to indifference; that to make her understand why I did not speak would involve the declaration that my honour was supposed to regard as objectionable.

But all this self-parleying simply signified that I was waiting to make sure of her answer before addressing her. In one quarter of an hour one fine night, with a high moon riding over the topsail yardarm and the breeze bringing an elfin-like sound of delicate singing, out of the rigging, it was settled! A glance from her, a moment of speaking silence,brought my love to my lips, and standing with her hand in mine in the shadow of a wing of sail curving past the main-rigging, with the brook-like voice of running waters rising, I asked her to be my wife.

There was hesitation without reluctance, a manner of mingled doubt and delight. I had won her heart; and her hand must follow; but her mother, her dearest mother! Her consent must be obtained; and from what she said in disjointed sentences, with earnest anxiety to say nothing that might give me pain, with a voice that trembled with the emotions of gratitude and affection, I gathered that Lady Temple’s matrimonial schemes for her daughter soared very considerably above the degree of a commoner.

‘But Louise, I have your love?’

‘Yes, yes, yes! my love, my gratitude, and my admiration.’

‘And you need but your mother’s consent to marry me?’

‘Yes, and she will consent. This long association—this astonishing adventure’——

‘Ay, but there is no obligation of marriage inthat. I have your love, and your mother will consent because you love me?’

She fixed her eyes on my face, and by the haze of moonlight floating off the sand-white planks into the shadow in which we stood, I saw such meaning in them that the sole sequel of my interpretation of it must be to put my lips to hers.

‘My first kiss, Louise! My God! how little did I dream of this happiness when I used to look at you and almost hate you aboard theCountess Ida!’

But enough of this. It all happened so many years ago now, that I am astonished by my memory that enables me to put down even so much of this little passage of my experiences with Louise as I have written.

After days of delightful weather and prosperous winds, we came to an anchor at Valparaiso. I at once waited upon the British consul, related my story, delivered over the ship, and was treated by him with the utmost courtesy, consideration, and hospitality. A large English vessel was sailing for Liverpool eight days after the date of our arrival. I inspected her, and promptly took berths for myself and Miss Temple; and the rest of the time we spent in providing ourselves with the necessary outfit for another long voyage.The consul informed me that the deposition I made as to theLady Blanchewould suffice in respect of the legal manœuvring that would have to follow, and that I was at liberty to sail whenever I chose. I empowered him to hand over any salvage money that might come to me to Wetherly, whom I also requested to call upon me when he should arrive in England, that I might suitably reward him for the very honest discharge of his duties from the time of our leaving the island in the barque.

I will not pretend that our passage home was uneventful. Out of it might readily be spun another considerable narrative; but here I may but glance at it. The ship was named theGreyhound. She was a tall, black, softwood-built ship, of American birth, with a white figurehead, and fine lines of planking, and three lofty skysail poles, and an almost perpendicular bow, and she had, to use the old term, the sailing qualities of a witch. There went with her a number of passengers, Spanish and English, who, thanks, I suppose, to the gossip of the British consul and his wife and family, were perfectly informed of every article of our story, and in consequencemade a very great deal of us—of Miss Temple in particular. But how great had been the change wrought in her character! No more supercilious airs, haughty looks, chilling glances of contemptuous surprise. Her sweetness and cordiality rendered her as completely a favourite as she had been before disliked and feared by her fellow-passengers of the Indiaman.

It took her a long while, however, to recur without exquisite distress to the man Forrest whom she had shot. But I was never weary of putting the matter before her in its just light; and at last she suffered me to persuade her that what she had done it had been her duty to do, that every law of God and man was at the back of such a deed to justify and even consecrate it, and that so far from suffering the recollection to render her wretched, she should proudly honour herself for the instant’s coolness, courage, and presence of mind she had exhibited at sight of the scoundrel. Yet it was inevitably a memory to linger darkly with her for some time.

Our being incessantly together from the hour of our sailing down to the hour of our arrival strengthened her love for me, and herpassion became a pure and unaffected sentiment. This I could have by no means sworn it was when I spoke my love to her in the Pacific. I was sure that she liked me, that she even had a warm affection for me, inspired by gratitude and by esteem for as much of my character as she could understand in my behaviour to her. But I could not satisfy myself that she loved me, or that, subject to her mother’s approval, she would have consented to marry me, but for our extraordinary experiences, that had coupled us together in an intimacy which most people might consider matrimony must confirm for her sake if not for mine.

But if that had ever been her mood—she never would own it—it ripened during this voyage into a love that the most wretchedly sensitive heart could not have mistaken. And now it remained to be seen what reception Lady Temple would accord me. She would be all gratitude, of course; she would be transported with the sight and safety of her daughter; but ambition might presently dominate all effusion of thankfulness, and she would quite fail to see any particular obligation on her daughter’s part to marry merelybecause we had been shipmates together in a series of incredible adventures.

But all conjecture was abruptly ended on our arrival by the news of Lady Temple’s death. A stroke of paralysis had carried her off. The attack was charged to her fretting for her daughter, of whose abandonment upon the wreck she had received the news from no less a person than the Honourable Mr. Colledge. Let me briefly describe how this had come about.

When the cutter containing Mr. Colledge and the men of theMagiciennehad lost sight of the wreck in the sudden vapour that had boiled down over it, the fellows, having lost their lieutenant and being without a head, hurriedly agreed to pull dead away before the wind in the direction of the Indiaman, not doubting that she would be lying hove-to, and that they must strike her situation near enough to disclose the huge loom of her amidst the fog. They missed her, and then, not knowing what else to do, they lashed their oars into a bundle and rode to it. It was hard upon sunset when a great shadow came surging up out of the fog close aboard of them. It was the corvette under reefed topsails. The cutterwas within an ace of being run down. Her crew roared at the top of their pipes, and they were heard; but a few moments later theMagiciennehad melted out again upon the flying thickness. The boat, however, had been seen, and her bearings accurately taken; and twenty minutes later, the corvette again came surging to the spot where the cutter lay. Scores of eyes gazed over the ship-of-war’s head and bulwarks in a thirsty, piercing lookout. The end of a line was flung, the boat dragged alongside, and in a few minutes all were safe on board. Colledge related the story of the adventure to his cousin—how the lieutenant had fallen overboard and was drowned, as he believed; how Miss Temple and I were left upon the wreck, and were yet there. But the blackness of a densely foggy night was now upon the sea; it was also blowing hard, and nothing could be done till the weather cleared and the day broke.

That nothing was done, you know. When the horizon was penetrable, keen eyes were despatched to the mastheads; but whether it was that the light wreck had drifted to a degree entirely out of the calculations of Sir Edward Panton, or that his own drift duringthe long, black, blowing hours misled him, no sign of us rewarded his search. For two days he gallantly stuck to those waters, then abandoned the hunt as a hopeless one, and proceeded on his voyage to England.

Mr. Colledge on his arrival immediately thought it his duty to write what he could tell of the fate of Miss Temple to Lady Temple’s brother, General Ashmole. The General was a little in a hurry to communicate with poor Lady Temple. His activity as a bearer of ill tidings might perhaps have found additional animation in the knowledge that if Miss Temple were dead, then the next of her kinsfolk to whom her ladyship must leave the bulk of her property would be the General and his four charming daughters. Be this as it will, the news proved fatal to Lady Temple. The uncertainty of her daughter’s fate, doubt of the possibility of her having been rescued from the wreck, fears of her having met with a slow, miserable, most dreadful death, preyed upon such poor remains of health as paralysis and a long term of motionless confinement had left her; and her maid one morning on entering her room found her dead in her bed.

The shock was a terrible one to Louise.Again and again she had said to me that if the news of her having been lost out of the Indiaman reached her mother before she arrived home, it would kill her. And now she found her prediction verified! I was a deal grieved for the girl’s sake; but it was not a thing for me to take very seriously to heart. Indeed it was not long before I got to hear that her ladyship had been an exceedingly ambitious woman, with the highest possible notions of her own importance, and of an insufferable condescension of manner; and I was assured had she lived, I should have found her a formidable, perhaps an immovable obstacle to my marriage. But had she been the most amiable of women, the stroke of her death must have been considerably softened to my mind by understanding that it made Louise the absolute mistress of a mansion and large grounds and a clear income of three thousand five hundred a year. This was very well, and quite worth being shipwrecked and kidnapped for.

But if her ladyship’s death cleared the road for me in one way, it temporarily blocked it for me in another by enforcing delay. Louise must not now marry for a year. No; anythingless than a year was out of the question. It would be an insult to the memory of an adored parent even to think of happiness under a twelvemonth. I resigned myself in silence to the affliction of waiting, leaving it to time to unsettle her resolution. She had many relatives, and she went from house to house; but I was never very far off. I loved her too fondly to lose her. I had won her, and I meant to have and hold the supreme title to her that had come to me from old ocean. Not that I had a doubt of her own devotion; I was afraid of her relatives. Some of them were titled people; they were all of them social star-gazers, with their intellectual eyes rooted upon objects that shone more splendidly than they and higher in life’s atmosphere; and there was such an army of them in one shape or another, such battalions of uncles and aunts, of cousins and connections spreading out like the tendrils of creepers, that I feared their influence if I did not take care to keep hovering close by to guard my Louise’s heart against any relaxation of sentiment.

Indeed, I was uneasy till I got her down to my mother’s house, and I could fill a volume in describing the manœuvring I was forcedinto to accomplish so simple a matter against the devices and stratagems of her superior connections. Already there was one young man dying of love for her. He was the eldest son of a baronet, and his mother was one of the most intriguing old wretches that ever perplexed the wishes or confounded the respectable pleasures of her fellow-creatures. Single-handed I had to fight the battle of my love against this young man, who was dying of passion, and my lady his mother, both of them backed by a large proportion of Louise’s relatives; and I say I scarcely enjoyed an hour’s tranquillity of mind until I had her under my mother’s roof.

By this time her grief had abated; the recollection of her past sufferings lay lightly upon her mind. We were now once more together, as we had been when at sea. She soon learned to love my gentle old mother, and was so happy that after awhile her relatives ceased in despair to attempt to coax her back to them. By that time little more than six months had elapsed since our return, and, consequently, since she had received the news of her mother’s death. But our being together in constant close association frommorning till night, almost as much alone as ever we had been when on the wreck, what with delightful drives, delicious hand-in-hand rambles, ended in rendering me mighty impatient, and impatience is usually importunate. I grew pressing, and one day she consented to our being married at the expiration of a fortnight.

It was much too plain a wedding for such a heroine as our adventures had made Louise, but it was her own choosing. A few intimate friends of my own family, two poor but exceedingly ladylike and well-bred cousins of her own, the vicar who joined our hands, and his homely agreeable wife—these formed the company. I sent an invitation to Mr. Colledge, against the inclination of Louise, who associated him with all our misfortunes, though for my part I could have strained him to my heart on my marriage day as the involuntary promoter of all my happiness. He neither wrote nor presented himself; but this was afterwards explained by a letter dated from Palestine, in which country he was then travelling, having made up his mind to trust himself and his fortunes as little as possible to the ocean in his determination to see theworld. It was a stupid amiable letter, full of good-wishes and kindest regards, with much rambling on in reference to the wreck and his own narrow escape. I observed that he did not mention the name of Miss Fanny Crawley.

An effusion of the local good-will and sympathy was visible in the decoration of the church. Never stood any man before the altar more proud of the girl of his heart’s choice than did I with Louise by my side. Beautiful she had always shown to me from the first moment of my gaze resting on her aboard the Indiaman, but never more beautiful in the eyes of my passion than on that day. The sweetness that had come to her from suffering was in every smile and look.

‘We have started on another voyage now,’ I whispered as we passed out of the church.

‘There must be no wrecks in it,’ she answered.

And for years, I thank God, it was all summer sailing with us; but I am old now, and alone.

In those times, the round voyage to India averaged a twelvemonth, and I was unable to obtain news of theCountess Idauntil the August that had followed the June of ourarrival at Liverpool in theGreyhound. I was in London when I heard of the Indiaman as having been reported off Deal. In the course of a few days I despatched a note to old Keeling, addressed to the East India Docks, asking him to come and dine with me, that I might tell him of my adventures, and learn what efforts he had made to recover us from the wreck. He arrived in full shore-going fig, with the old familiar skewered look, in the long, tightly buttoned-up coat, and the tall cravat and stiff collars, in which his sun-reddened face rested like a ball in a cup.

He was heartily glad to see me, and continued to shake my hand until my arm ached again. Of my story he had known nothing; for the first time he was now hearing it from my lips. He listened with acute attention, with a countenance over which expression chased expression; and when I had done, seized my hand again, and shook it long and vehemently, whilst he complimented me on my success in navigating theLady Blancheto the island, and on the judgment I had shown in planning and effecting my escape from Mr. Lush and his crew.

He had little to tell me, however, that wasvery interesting. He had been blown away from the neighbourhood of the wreck; and though, when the weather cleared, he had luffed up to the spot where he believed she was to be found, he could see nothing of her. Mr. Prance was looking at the hull through his glass when the smother came driving down upon her, and saw the cutter shove off; and he believed that Miss Temple and I were in her. He had no time to make sure, for the vapour swiftly blotted the boat out of sight. But his conviction was—and Keeling owned himself influenced by it—that if they fell in with the wreck they would not find us aboard her. Poor old Mrs. Radcliffe nearly went crazy with grief and distress; and to satisfy her mind, he cruised over the supposed situation of the hull till the night fell; then satisfied that we had either perished by the capsizal of the cutter, or been picked up by the corvette, he trimmed sail for his course and proceeded.

The disaster that had befallen us, he said, had cast a heavy gloom over the ship, and it was heightened by Mrs. Radcliffe’s serious illness, due to the poignant wretchedness caused her by the loss of her niece. Hemmeridge was entreated to prescribe for her, but hesullenly refused, hoped that her illness might be epidemical, that more might suffer than she, and could breathe nothing but threats of having the law of Keeling on the ship’s arrival at Bombay. However, by the time the vessel was up with the Cape, Mrs. Radcliffe had recovered; and when Keeling last saw her, she seemed as hopeful as she was before despairful of her niece being yet accounted for.

Abreast of the Cape also, the spirits of the passengers had sufficiently lightened to enable some love-making to proceed briskly amongst them.

‘Much about twenty degrees of south latitude,’ said old Keeling in his dry voice, ‘young Mr. Fairthorne, the fellow that lisped, you remember, Mr. Dugdale, succeeded in tempting that nice young lady, Constance Hudson, to accept his hand and heart. Old Mrs. Hudson was very well pleased, sir. About the latitude of the Chagos Archipelago, Mr. Emmett induced Miss Helen Trevor to betroth herself to him. And off the Laccadive Islands, Peter Hemskirk, to the astonishment of all hands, deposited his person and his fortune at the feet of Miss Mary Joliffe.’

‘I had thought Mr. Emmett was a married man,’ I said.

‘Apparently not, sir,’ he answered.

‘And your friend Hemmeridge?’

He replied that the surgeon consulted a solicitor at Bombay, and had no doubt been advised to take certain proceedings; but three weeks after the arrival of the ship the doctor had been thrown from a horse, and so injured in the spine and head, that he died within a fortnight.

‘What he could have done I’m sure I don’t know, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the old fellow. ‘I believe I was within my rights. Yet he might have given me trouble, and I hate law. The two fellows, Crabb and Willett, I handed over to the police. Mr. Saunders got the drug the scoundrel had used carefully analysed, and it turned out that he was right: it proved to be what he’d termed it; and I afterwards heard the stuff was not unknown in India, where it’s used for some religious purposes; but in what way I don’t know.’

This was all the news that old Keeling had to give me.

When I left Lush and the sailors of theLady Blancheupon the reef, I had littlethought of ever hearing of them again. I knew the nature of sailors. If they came off with their lives, I might be sure they would disperse and utterly vanish. Great was my surprise, then, one morning some months after my marriage, to find, on opening my morning newspaper, a column-long account of the trial of a seaman named Lush for the murder of a man named Woodward. The evidence was substantially my story with a sequel to it. The witnesses against Lush were three of the seamen of theLady Blanche. The counsel for the prosecution related the adventures of the barque down to the time of my swimming off to her and sailing away with her. The boat had been in charge of the man Woodward when I detached the line to let her slip away. He had fallen into a deep sleep, overcome by fatigue and drink. The yells and roaring of the crew, one of whom had started up and observed the boat drifting out, had aroused the sleeper after the uproar had been some time continued. He was thick and stupid, went clumsily to work to scull the heavy boat ashore, and was a long time in doing it. The carpenter dragged him on to the beach and asked him if he had fallenasleep. The unfortunate wretch answered yes; the carpenter struck him fiercely; Woodward returned the blow; and, mad with rage, Lush whipped out his sheath-knife and stabbed the man to the heart.

By this time the barque had almost faded out in the gloom of the night. Pursuit was not to be thought of. They waited till daylight; but instead of putting their remaining provisions and water in the boat and heading away in search of land or a passing ship, the fools fell to dicing afresh; and it was not until their little stock of water was almost gone that, being satisfied that there was no gold in that part of the shore where Captain Braine had said it lay hidden, they put to sea.

They were several days afloat before they, or at least the survivors, were rescued. Their sufferings were not to be expressed. They had been five days without water when picked up. Four of them had died, and one of the bodies had been preserved for a use that cannot be dwelt on. They were fallen in with by an English brig bound home, to the captain of which one of the sailors, who had been an old ‘chum’ of Woodward, toldthe story of the murder of that man by Lush. The skipper, not choosing to have such a ruffian as the carpenter at large in his little ship, clapped him in irons, and kept him under hatches until the arrival of the vessel in the Thames, when he was handed over to the police. I hardly wished the scoundrel hanged, richly as he deserved making such an ending; and it was with something of relief that I read when he was brought to the Old Bailey that the jury had found a verdict of manslaughter, and that he was sentenced to ten years’ transportation.

To this hour I am puzzled by Captain Braine and his island. My wife uniformly believed that the gold was there, and that the poor lunatic had mistaken the bearings of the spot where it lay. My own fancy, however, always inclined to this: that from the circumstance of his having rightly described the island, which he situated on a part of the sea where no reef or land of any sort was laid down on the charts, he had actually been wrecked upon it, and suffered as he had related to me; that by long dwelling upon his terrific experience he had imported certain insane fancies into it out of hisunsuspected madness when it grew upon him; until the hallucination of the gold hardened in his poor soul into a conviction. Yet I may be wrong; and, if so, then there must at this hour be upwards of a hundred and eighty thousand pounds’ worth of gold coins lying concealed somewhere in the reef whose latitude and longitude you have.

THE END

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESSpelling errors were left uncorrected.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

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