NEW NOVELS.

THE DUCHESS OF POWYSLAND. By Grant Allen. 3 vols.

CORINTHIA MARAZION. By Cecil Griffith. 3 vols.

A SONG OF SIXPENCE. By Henry Murray. 1 vol.

SANTA BARBARA, &c. By Ouida. 1 vol.

IN THE MIDST OF LIFE. By Ambrose Bierce. 1 vol.

TRACKED TO DOOM. By Dick Donovan. 1 vol.

COLONEL STARBOTTLE’S CLIENT, AND SOME OTHER PEOPLE. By Bret Harte. 1 vol.

ADVENTURES OF A FAIR REBEL. By Matt. Crim. 1 vol.

IN A STEAMER CHAIR. By Robert Barr. 1 vol.

THE FOSSICKER: a Romance of Mashonaland. By Ernest Glanville. 1 vol.

London: CHATTO & WINDUS, 214 Piccadilly, W.

ALONE
ON A WIDE WIDE SEA
VOL. I.

PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA

BY

W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF
MY SHIPMATE LOUISE ‘THE ROMANCE OF JENNY HARLOWE’
ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES

VOL. I.

London
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1892

CONTENTS
OF
THE FIRST VOLUME

ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA

CHAPTER I
PIERTOWN

In the West of England stands a city surrounded by hills. Its streets are wide, its shops fine and plentiful, and there are many handsome and some stately terraces of houses in it. In the heart of the city a gem of ecclesiastical architecture rears its admirable tower, and this fine old structure is known everywhere as the Abbey Church.

How am I to convey to one who has never beheld them the beauties of the scene when viewed from some commanding eminence—say on a rich autumn afternoon whilst the sun paints every object a tender red, and before the shadows have grown long in the valley? Orchards colour the landscape with the dyes of their fruit and leaves. White houses gleam amidst trees and tracts of vegetation. The violet shadow of a cloud floats slowly down some dark green distant slope. In the pastures cattle are feeding, and the noise of the barking of dogs ascends from the river-side. Rows and crescents of buildings hang in clusters upon the hills, blending with the various hues of the country and lending a grace as of nature’s own to the scene. The river flows with a red glitter in its breast past meadows and gardens and nestling cottages.

Many roads more or less steep conduct to the several eminences, in the valley of which peacefully stands this western city. One of them in a somewhat gentle acclivity winds eastwards, and as the wayfarer proceeds along this road he passes through a long avenue of chestnuts, which in the heat of the summer cast a delicious shade upon the dust, and here the air is so pure that it acts upon the spirits like a cordial. The ocean is not very many miles distant, and you taste the saltness of its breath in the summer breeze as it blows down the hill-sides, bringing with it a hundred perfumes, and a hundred musical sounds from the orchards and the gardens.

About a mile beyond this avenue of chestnuts there stood—I say there stood, but I do not doubt there still stands—a pretty house of a modern character, such as would be offered for letting or for selling as a ‘villa residence.’ I will speak of it as of a thing that is past. It was situated on the edge of the hill; on one side the white road wound by it; on the other side its land of about one acre and a half sloped into meadows and pastures, and this wide space of fields sank treeless, defined by hedges, well stocked in the seasons with sheep and cows and other cattle, to the silver line of the river.

Now have I brought you to my home, to the home in which I was living a little while before the strange and terrible experience that, with the help of another pen, I am about to relate befel me. And that you may thoroughly understand the story which I shall almost immediately enter upon, it is necessary that I should submit a little home picture to you.

It was a Sunday afternoon early in the month of October in a year that is all too recent for the endurance of memory. A party of four, of which one was a little boy aged two, were seated at table drinking tea in the dining-room of the house, which stood a mile beyond the chestnut avenue. Upon the hearth-rug, where was stretched a soft white blanket, lay a baby of eight months old, tossing its fat pink legs and dragging at the tube of a feeding-bottle. A lady sat at the head of the table.

This lady was in her twenty-sixth year—no one better knew the date of her birth than I. She was a handsome woman, and presently you will understand why I exhibit no reluctance in speaking of her beauty. I will be brief in my description of her, but I will invite your attention to a sketch that, in its relations to this tale, carries, as you will discover, a deeper significance than ordinarily accompanies the portraits of the heroes or heroines of romance.

She was in her twenty-sixth year, I say. Her hair was dark, not black. I am unable to find a name for its peculiar shade. It was so abundant as to be inconvenient to its owner, whose character was somewhat impatient, so that every morning’s wrestle with the long thick tresses was felt as a trouble and often as a cause of vexatious delay. Her eyebrows were thick and arched, and, as she wore her hair low, but a very little of her white well-shaped brow was to be seen. Her nose was after the Roman type, but not too large nor prominent, yet it gave her an air as though she held her head high, and it also communicated an expression of eagerness to the whole countenance. Her complexion was a delicate bloom, her mouth was small, the teeth very white and regular. She had a good figure, a little above the medium height of women, with a promise in her shape of stoutness when her years should have increased. She was simply dressed, and wore but little jewellery, no more than a thin watch-chain round her neck and a wedding-ring and two other rings on the same finger.

Such was the lady in her twenty-sixth year who sat at the head of the tea-table on that October Sunday afternoon.

At her side was her little boy, two years old. He was a beautiful child with golden hair and dark blue eyes. He sat in a high child’s chair on his mother’s left, and whilst he waited for her to feed him he beat the table with a spoon.

At the table on the right sat the husband of this lady, a man entering upon his thirty-first year. He was tall, thin, and fair, and wore small whiskers, and his eyes were a dark grey. Handsome he was not, but he had a well-bred air, and his face expressed a gentle and amiable nature.

Confronting the lady at the head of the table was her twin sister. Nearly always between twins there is a strong family likeness. I have heard of twins who resembled each other so closely as to be mistaken one for the other unless they were together, when, to be sure, there must be some subtle difference to distinguish them. There was undoubtedly a family likeness between these two sisters, but it appeared rather in their smile and in certain small tricks of posture and of gesture, and in their walk and in the attitudes which they insensibly fell into when seated; in these things lay a family likeness rather than in their faces. Their voices did not in the least resemble each other’s. That of the lady who sat at the head of the table was somewhat high-pitched; her accents were delivered with impulse and energy, no matter how trivial might be the subject on which she discoursed. Her sister, on the other hand, had a sweet, low, musical voice; she pronounced her words with a charming note of plaintiveness, and she never spoke much at a time nor often. Her hair was not so plentiful as her sister’s; it was a light bright brown, with a gloss upon it like that of the shell of a horse-chestnut, but it had not the rich deep dye of that nut. She wore it with a simplicity that was infinitely becoming to her beauty. Beautiful she was, far more so than her sister; hers was a beauty far more tender and womanly than her sister’s; you thought of the meekness and the sweetness of the dove in looking at her, and the expression of her dark-brown eyes was dove-like. She was shorter than her sister, but equally well shaped, and she was the younger.

These four sitting at table, and the little baby of eight months tossing its tiny toes shod with knitted shoes upon a blanket on the hearth-rug, formed the occupants of that parlour, and were the living details of the domestic picture that the curtain of the terrible drama of my life rises upon. The rays of the westering sun streamed upon the windows of the room, and the atmosphere was warm with crimson light. One window stood open, but the church bells had not yet begun to ring for evening service, and the peace of the English Sabbath lay upon the land outside: a peace scarcely disturbed by the distant barking of dogs, by the occasional moaning lowing of near cattle, and by the drowsy murmuring hum of bees and flies amongst the flowers under the windows.

Who were these people, and what was their name? The name of the gentleman was John Campbell, and the lady seated at the head of the table was his wife, Agnes—Agnes Campbell, whose story she herself now relates, and the sweet sister at the foot of the table was Mary Hutchinson.

I had been married at the time when my story opens a little above three years. My father was Colonel Hutchinson, of the Honourable East India Company’s service. He had distinguished himself in India in a period of terrible peril, but he had died before he could reap the reward of his valour and his judgment. He died a poor man, his whole fortune amounting to no more than five thousand pounds; but the pension my mother drew, conjointly with the interest of my father’s little fortune, enabled her to live in tolerable comfort, and after my father’s death we took up our abode in the noble old city of Bath, where we dwelt happily, making many friends and enjoying a round of simple pleasures.

Society in Bath is largely, almost wholly, composed of ladies; young men are scarce, and marriage at the best is but vaguely dreamed of, though hope is sufficiently constant to support the spirits.

It chanced that Mary and I were invited one evening to play a round game of cards at the house of a friend. We went, expecting to find the company formed entirely of girls like ourselves, with perhaps one or two old fogeys. But soon after our arrival a gentleman was shown into the room, and introduced to us as Mr. John Campbell. He was the only young man present; the other gentlemen were composed of a general, a colonel, and an admiral, whose united ages I afterwards calculated would have exactly amounted to two hundred years. I did not notice that Mr. Campbell paid me much attention that evening. Mary afterwards said he seldom had his eyes off me, but that I did not observe. On the contrary, I thought he looked very often and very admiringly at her.

Well, he saw us to the door of our house, to use the homely phrase, and on the following afternoon he called upon us; but if it was love at first sight on his part, I cannot say that he illustrated his fervour by his behaviour. He was very polite, very kind, very attentive; seemed happy in my society, was a frequent visitor at our house, would steal an hour from business to find himself an excuse to meet us in the gardens or park where we walked; but that was all.

If I had been led by the reading of novels to suppose that a man looks love when he means love, I might have searched Mr. Campbell’s face in vain for any expression of deep-seated sentiment. Indeed, after three months, I could not have said that he was more in love with me than with my sister. But by the end of that time I must own that I was very much in love with him. And though so tenderly did I love my sister that I would gladly have relinquished him to her, had her love for him been as mine, yet to no other woman could I have parted with him without the belief—which to be sure I used to laugh at after I was married—that my heart would break if he did not make me his. But my heart was not to be broken because of his not loving me and making me his, for within six months from the date of our meeting we were married, and I was the happiest girl in all England, and my sister as happy as I in my happiness.

My husband was a solicitor. His practice in those days was small and would not have supported him even as a bachelor; but he had been the only son of a man who was able to leave him an income of several hundreds a year. We went abroad for a month, and I returned to find my poor mother dead. This loss left my sister without a relative in the world saving myself. It is seldom that this can be said of man or woman. To be without a relative in this complicated world of aunts and uncles, of nieces and nephews, and of cousins no matter how far removed, seems incredible. There may be plenty of people who are alone in the sense of not knowing who their relatives are, though they would find they had relations in plenty were they to seek them or were they to come into a fortune; but it is rare indeed to hear of anyone who out of his or her perfect knowledge of the family connections can positively assert, ‘I have not a relative in the world.’

Yet thus it was with my sister and me when my mother died. But I will not delay my story to explain how this happened. Therefore, being alone in the world, my sister came to live with my husband and me. How greatly her making one of us added to my happiness I cannot express. I will not pretend that it did grieve me to leave my poor mother: no, nature works forwards; the fruit falls from the tree, the young bird flutters from its nest; it is nature’s law that a child should part from its parent, and deep as the sadness of separation may seem at the time, it will show but as a light-hearted grief at the best when looked back upon and contrasted with other sorrows of life.

But it was a bitter pain to me to part with my sister. We had grown up side by side; we were as blossoms upon one stalk, and the sap of the single stalk fed the two flowers.

And now as we sat drinking tea in the parlour of our house on that fine October Sunday afternoon, our conversation was as homely as the picture we made. Nevertheless it involved a topic of considerable interest to us. My little boy Johnny had been looking somewhat pale, and his appetite was not as I, his mother, considered it should be. The summer had been a very hot one, and when it is even moderately warm in most parts of England, it is commonly very broiling indeed in our city of the Abbey Church, where there are tall hills to protect the population from the breeze, where the roads are steep, glaring, and dusty, and where the width of many of the streets is quite out of proportion to the stature of the houses, so that you do not know where to look for shade.

My husband’s business would not suffer him to leave home until the early autumn, and he could not prevail upon me to go away without him; but now he was able to take a holiday for a month, and the doctor had recommended the seaside for little Johnny and the baby, and as we sat drinking tea we talked of the best place to go to.

‘It does not matter to me what part of the coast you choose,’ said my husband. ‘I only stipulate that you shall not select a town that is confidently recommended by the whole of the medical faculty, and whose medical officer every year sends to the newspapers a statement that the death-rate is the lowest in England, and that it is the healthiest seaside resort in the United Kingdom.’

‘Then you shut every seaside town against us,’ said my sister, ‘for every seaside town is the healthiest in England.’

I named Margate; my husband made a grimace.

‘No,’ he exclaimed, ‘I should not like to return to Bath and say we have been to Margate. It was only the other day I heard General Cramp swear that Margate was not the vulgarest place in all England, oh no! but the vulgarest place in all the world.’

‘Its air is very fine,’ said I, ‘and it is fine air that we want.’ And here I looked at Johnny. ‘What does it matter to us what sort of people go to Margate, if its air is good?’

‘I will not go to Margate,’ said my husband.

My sister named two or three towns on the coast.

‘Let us,’ said my husband, ‘go to some place where there is no hotel and where there is no pier.’

‘And where there is no circulating library,’ cried I, ‘and where there are two miles of mud when the water is out.’

And then I named several towns as my sister had, but my suggestions were not regarded. At this point baby began to roar, and my husband rose to ring for the nurse, but it was nurse’s ‘Sunday out,’ and Mary and I were taking her place. Mary picked baby up off the blanket, and holding its cheek to hers, sung softly to it in her low sweet voice. The darling was instantly silent. The effect of my sister’s plaintive melodious voice upon fretful children was magical. I remember once calling with her upon a lady who wished that we should see her baby. The baby was brought into the room, and the moment it saw us it began to yell. My sister stepped up to it as it sat on the nurse’s arm, and looking at it in the face with a smile began to sing, and the infant, silencing its cries, stared back at her with its mouth wide open in the very posture of a scream, but as silent as though it had been a doll. When she ceased to sing and turned from it, it roared again, and again she silenced it by singing.

My baby lay hushed in her arms, and the sweet eyes of Mary looked at us over the little fat cheek that she nestled to her throat, and we continued to discourse upon the best place to go to.

My husband named a small seaside town, and I could see by the expression of his face he meant that we should go there. It was many years since he had visited it, but he recollected and described the beauties of the scenery of the coast with enthusiasm. It was on the Bristol Channel, at no very considerable distance from the city in which we dwelt, and he said he wished to go there because, should there come a call upon him from the office, he would be able to make the double journey, with plenty of leisure between for all he might have to do, in a day, computing that day from eight till midnight.

‘Oh! it is a beautiful romantic spot, Agnes,’ said he. ‘Its sands, when the water is out, are as firm as this floor. It has high, dark cliffs, magnificently bold and rugged, and when the breaker bursts upon the sand, the cliffs echo its voice, and you seem to hear the note of an approaching tempest.’

‘But it is a cheerful place, John? Cliffs and sands are very well, but in a month one wearies of cliffs and sands, and in a month again how many days of wet will there be?’

‘It is cheerful—very,’ said my husband. ‘Its cheerfulness is inborn, like good-nature in a man. It owes nothing of its brightness to excursionists, to steamboats, to Punch and Judy, and to German bands. It has three good streets and a number of clean lodging-houses.’

‘Has it a pier and a hotel?’ asked Mary.

‘It has what the cockneys call a jetty,’ answered my husband. ‘I should prefer to term it a pier. What is the difference between a pier and a jetty? This jetty is short, massive, very richly tarred, and just the sort of jetty for Johnny to fall over the edge of if he is not looked after. There is a wooden canopy at the extremity of it under which, Mary, you will be able to sit and read your favourite poet without risk of being intruded upon. The verses of your favourite poet will be set to music by the rippling of the water among the massive supports of the pier, and you will have nothing to do but to be happy.’

‘Are there any boats?’ I asked.

‘Many capital boats,’ he answered.

‘Sailing boats?’ said I.

‘Sailing boats and rowing boats,’ said he.

‘I shall often want to go out sailing,’ said I. ‘What is more heavenly than sailing?’

‘You will have to go alone so far as I am concerned, Agnes,’ said Mary.

‘Yes, but John will often accompany me,’ said I.

‘Not very often,’ he exclaimed. ‘Had I been a lover of sailing I should have gone to sea, instead of which I am a solicitor, and I spell sails with an “e” and not with an “i.” Well, is it settled?’ he continued, drawing a pipe case from his pocket and extracting the pipe from it. ‘I believe there will be time for half a pipe of tobacco before we go to church.’

But the nurse being out I could not go to church, and my sister would not leave me alone with the children, and my husband, instead of filling half a pipe filled a whole one, and took no heed of the church bells when their happy peaceful chimes floated through the open window. Indeed it was not settled; the subject was too interesting to be swiftly dismissed, yet my husband had his way in the end, as usually happened, for before evening service was over we had arranged to spend a month at the little town whose praises he had sung so poetically.

Next day he made a journey to the shores of the Bristol Channel to seek for lodgings. But the accommodation he required was not to be found in apartments, and when he returned he told me that he had taken a house standing near the edge of the cliff in a garden of its own. A few days later our little family proceeded to the sea coast. We left two servants behind us to look after the house, and the only domestic we took with us was the nurse, a person of about my own age, who had been with me at this time about six weeks, having replaced an excellent, trustworthy young woman who had left me to get married.

I will call the little place from which dates the story of my terrific experiences, Piertown.

What with having to change here, and to get out there, and to wait somewhere else, the journey was a tedious one, and when we arrived it was raining hard and blowing very strong, and I remember as we drove from the railway station catching sight through the streaming window glass of the white waves of the sea rushing like bodies of snow out of the pale haze of the rain and the spray, and I also remember that I heard a strange low voice of thunder in the air, made by the huge breakers as they tumbled in hills of water upon the beach and rushed backwards into the sea in sheets of froth.

It was so cold that we were very glad to find a cheerful fire in the parlour, that was rendered yet more hospitable to the sight by the table being equipped for a two o’clock dinner. The house was small, but very strongly built, with thick plate-glass windows in the lower rooms, against which the wind and the rain were hissing as though an engine were letting off steam close by. A couple of maid-servants had been left in the house. Never could I have imagined that servants would be willing to sleep as those two did in one small bed, in a tiny garret where all the light they had fell through a skylight window about the size of a book. But I have noticed in the country, that is to say, in rural parts and quiet towns such as Piertown, servants are grateful and dutiful for such food and lodging as would cause them to be incessantly grumbling and changing their places in cities like Bath.

Baby and little Johnny were taken upstairs by the nurse, and my husband and Mary and I went to the window and stood gazing at the sea. We had a very clear view of it. The house stood within a few yards of the edge of the cliff, and the extremity of the garden between was bounded by a dwarf wall of flint which left the prospect open.

‘What do you think of that sight, Agnes?’ said my husband. ‘Would sailing be heavenly to-day, do you think?’

‘Never more heavenly if one could feel safe,’ said I. ‘How swiftly a boat would rush before such a wind as this! Hark to the roaring in the chimney! It makes me feel as if I were in the cabin of a ship. It is delightful. It is like being at sea and enjoying the full spirit of it without suffering the horrors of being tossed and bruised, and without any chance of being upset and shipwrecked.’

‘You should have married a sailor,’ said my husband dryly.

‘What have you been reading lately, Agnes, to put this sudden love of the sea into your head?’ said Mary. ‘You used not to care for the water.’

‘I have been reading nothing to make me love the sea,’ I answered; ‘but when I look at such a sight as that I feel that if I were a man I should consider that the earth was formed of something more than land, and that the best part of it is not where trees grow and where houses are built.’

My husband laughed. ‘One hour of that would cure you,’ said he pointing. ‘One hour, indeed! Ten minutes of it. I tell you what—there is a very heavy sea running to-day. It must be so, for we are high-perched here, and look how defined are the shapes of the waves as they come storming out of the mist towards the land.’

‘I wish a ship would pass,’ said I. ‘I should like to see her roll and plunge.’

And for some time after my husband and Mary had withdrawn from the window I stood gazing at the bleared and throbbing scene of ocean, hoping and longing to see a ship go by, little suspecting that my wishes were as wicked as though they were those of a wrecker, for had any ship been close enough in to the coast to enable me to see her amid the thickness that was upon the face of the streaming and rushing waters, nothing could have saved her from being driven ashore, where in all probability her crew would have perished.

But in the afternoon the weather cleared; it continued to blow a strong wind right upon the land, but the sky opened into many blue lakes, and changed into a magnificent picture of immense bodies of stately sailing cream-coloured cloud, upon which the setting sun shone, colouring their skirts with a dark rich gold, and the horizon expanded to as far as the eye could pierce, with one staggering and leaning shaft of white upon the very rim of the sea.

‘Let us go and look at the town,’ said my husband; and Mary and I put on our hats and jackets and the three of us sallied forth.

We had to walk some distance to reach the little town, and when we arrived there was not very much to see. The three streets were neither spacious nor splendid; on the contrary, they struck me as rather mean and weather-beaten. But then people do not leave cities in order to view the shops and streets of little seaside towns. Piertown lay in a sort of chasm. It was as though a party of fishermen in ancient days, wandering along the coast in search of a good site for the erection of their cottages, and falling in with this great split in the cliff, as though an earthquake had not long before happened, had exclaimed, ‘Let us settle here.’ There was a peculiar smell of salt in the streets, and the roadways and pavements presented a sort of faint sparkling surface, as though a great deal of brine had fallen upon them and dried up. There was also a smell of kippered herring in the strong wind, and it seemed to proceed from every shop door that we passed.

Very few people were to be seen. We were much stared at by the shopmen through their windows, and here and there a little knot of lounging men dressed as boatmen hushed their hoarse voices to intently gaze at us.

‘This is what I like,’ said my husband. ‘Here is all the privacy that we could desire, and the most delightful primitiveness also. A professional man when he takes a holiday ought to give crowded places a very wide berth, and put himself as close to nature—to nature, rugged, homely and roaring, after this pattern,’ said he with a sweep of his hand, ‘as his requirements of eating and drinking and sleeping will permit.’

‘It seems a very dull place,’ said I when, having reached the top of one of the three steep streets, we turned to retrace our steps. ‘If the weather does not allow me to have plenty of boating I shall soon wish myself home again.’

‘You will not find a circulating library here,’ said Mary, looking around her. ‘I should not suppose that many people belonging to Piertown are able to read.’

‘The place is made up of grocers’ shops,’ said my husband. ‘What a queer smell of bloaters!’

I amused myself by counting no less than five grocers’ shops in one street, and I did not see a single person resembling a customer in any one of them. I pulled my husband’s arm to stop him opposite a shop in whose windows I believed I saw three men hanging by the neck. They proved to be complete suits of oilskins, each surmounted by one of those nautical helmets called sou’-westers, and at a little distance, as they dangled in the twilight within the windows, they exactly resembled three mariners who had committed suicide.

We now walked down to the pier, and there the great plain of the ocean stretched before us without the dimmest break of land anywhere along its confines, and the white surf boiled within the toss of a pebble from us. The pier projected from a short esplanade; along this esplanade ran a terrace of mean stunted structures, eight in all; and my husband, after looking and counting, exclaimed: ‘Five of them are public-houses. Yes! this is the seaside.’

The pier forked straight out for a short distance, then rounded sharply to the right, thus forming a little harbour, in the shelter of which lay a cluster of boats of several kinds. The massive piles and supports of the pier broke the weight of the seas, which rushed hissing white as milk amongst the black timbers; but the water within was considerably agitated nevertheless, and the boats hopped and plunged and jumped and rubbed their sides one against another, straining at the ropes which held them, as though they were timid living creatures like sheep, terrified by the noise and appearance of the waters, and desperately struggling at their tethers in their desire to get on shore.

We stood looking, inhaling deeply and with delight the salt sweetness of the strong ocean breeze. The land soared on either hand from the little town, and ran away in dark masses of towering cliff, and far as the eye could follow went the white line of the surf, with a broad platform of grey hard sand betwixt it and the base of the cliff. Here and there in one or another of the public-house windows glimmered a face whose eyes surveyed us steadfastly. We might make sure by the manner in which we were looked at, that Piertown was not greatly troubled by visitors.

There was a wooden post near the entrance of the pier, and upon it leaned the figure of a man clad in trousers of a stuff resembling blanket, a rusty coat buttoned up to his neck, around which was a large shawl, and upon his head he wore a yellow sou’-wester. He might have been carved out of wood, so motionless was his posture and so intent his gaze at the horizon, where there was nothing to be seen but water, though I strained my sight in the hope of perceiving the object which appeared to fascinate him. A short clay pipe, of the colour of soot, projected from his lips. He seemed to hold it thus as one might wear an ornament, for no smoke issued from it.

We drew close, and my husband said: ‘Good afternoon.’

The man looked slowly round, surveyed us one after another, then readjusting himself upon his post and fastening his eyes afresh upon the horizon, he responded in a deep voice: ‘Good arternoon.’

‘Is there anything in sight?’ said my husband.

‘No,’ answered the man.

‘Then what are you looking at?’

‘I ain’t looking,’ answered the man; ‘I’m a-thinking.’

‘And what are you thinking of?’

‘Why,’ said the man, ‘I’m a-thinking that I han’t tasted a drop o’ beer for two days.’

‘This, indeed, is being at the seaside,’ said my husband cheerfully, and putting his hand in his pocket he produced a sixpence, which he gave to the man.

The effect was remarkable; the man instantly stood upright, and went round to the other side of the post to lean over it, so that he might confront us. And it was remarkable in other ways; for no sooner had my husband given the man the sixpence than the doors of two or three of the public-houses opposite opened, and several figures dressed like this man emerged and approached us very slowly, halting often and looking much at the weather, and then approaching us by another step, and all in a manner as though they were acting unconsciously, and without the least idea whatever that my husband had given the man some money.

He was a man of about forty-five or fifty years of age, with a very honest cast of countenance, the expression of which slightly inclined towards surliness. You will wonder that I should take such particular notice of a mere lounging boatman; and yet this same plain, common-looking sailor, was to become the most memorable of all the persons I had ever met with in my life.

CHAPTER II
A BOATING TRIP

It was not yet evening, but the sun was very low in the west on our right hand; a large moon would be rising a little while before eight; the breeze continued to blow strong, and the ocean rolled into the land in tall dark-green lines of waves, melting as they charged in endless succession into wide spaces of foam, orange coloured by the sunset.

‘Do you hear that echo of thunder in the cliff I told you about?’ said my husband.

I listened and said ‘Yes.’

‘It is like a distant firing of guns,’ said Mary.

‘You have some good boats down there dancing beside the pier,’ said my husband to the boatman.

‘Ay,’ answered the boatman, ‘you’ll need to sail a long way round the coast to find better boats than them.’

‘That is a pretty boat, Mary,’ said I, pointing to one with two masts—a tall mast in the fore-part and a short mast at the stern; she was painted green and red, and she was very clean and white inside, and she appeared in my eyes the prettiest of all the boats as she dived and tumbled and leaped buoyantly and not without grace upon the sharp edges of the broken water.

‘That’s my boat, lady,’ said the sailor.

‘What is her name?’ inquired Mary.

‘The Mary Hann, he answered. ‘I named her after my wife. My wife is gone dead. I’ve got no wife now but she,’ and he pointed with his thumb backwards at his boat, ‘and she’s but a poor wife too. She airns little enough for me. T’other kept the home together with taking in washing, but nobody comes to Piertown now. Folks want what’s called attractions. But the Local Board’ll do nothen except buy land as belongs to the men who forms the Local Board, and the likes of me has to pay for that there land, and when it’s bought fower five times as much as it’s worth, it’s left waste. Lord, the jobbery! Are you making any stay here, sir?’

‘Yes,’ answered my husband, ‘we are here for a month.’

‘And when might ye have arrived?’ inquired the boatman.

‘To-day,’ replied my husband.

‘There’s some very good fishing to be had here, sir,’ said the boatman. ‘If I may make so bold, whenever you wants a trip out, whether for fishing or rowing or sailing, if so be as you’ll ask for me, my name being William Hitchens, best known as Bill Hitchens, pronounced in one word Billitchens—for there’s parties here as’ll swear they didn’t know who you vos asking for if you don’t call me Billitchens—if you ever want a boat, sir, and you ladies, if you’ll ask for Billitchens, you’ll meet with satisfaction. There’s nothen to touch the Mary Hann in sailing, whilst for fishing she’s as steady as a rock, as you may guess, sir, by obsarving her beam.’

‘When I want a boat I will ask for Billitchens,’ said my husband, glancing at me with a smile in his eye. ‘This lady—my wife—is fonder of the sea than I am. I dare say she will sometimes take a cruise with you. But the weather must be fine when she does so.’

‘You trust the weather to me, lady,’ said the boatman. ‘Man and boy for over forty-eight year I’ve been a-crawling about this beach and a-studying the weather. You leave him to me. Whenever you want a cruise you ask for Billitchens and the Mary Hann, and if the weather ain’t promising for the likes of such a lady as you, you shall have the truth.’

‘What are your charges?’ said my husband.

‘Wan and sixpence an hour,’ answered the boatman cheerfully, ‘but if you’d like to engage my boat by the week ye shall have her at your own price, giving me so much every time ye takes me along.’

‘Is she not heavy to row?’ said I.

‘Lord love ye!’ he cried, gazing at his boat with a sour smile of wonder at the question. ‘A hinfant could send her spinning. ‘Sides,’ he added, ‘I’ll take care to ship a pair o’ light oars for you, lady, what’s called sculls, nigh as light as this here baccay-pipe.’

‘Well, good afternoon, Mr. Hitchens,’ said my husband, and we strolled in the direction of our home, for the shadow of the evening was now upon the sea, and the strong wind seemed to have grown very cold on a sudden.

However, before we retired to rest the night fell silent, the sea stretched in a dark sheet, and from our windows, so high seated was the house, the ocean looked to slope steep into the sky, as though, indeed, it were the side of a mighty hill. The moon rode over it, and under the orb lay a column of glorious silver which stirred like the coils of a moving serpent as the swell or the heave of the water ran through it. The dark body of a ship passed through that brilliant path of light as we stood looking, and the sight was beautiful.

My little ones were sleeping well. Johnny slept in our room and the baby with the nurse, for my husband could not bear to be disturbed in his sleep. I looked at my boy, and asked my husband to tell me if he did not think there was already a little bloom on Johnny’s cheek, and I kissed my child’s sweet brow and golden hair.

But it was long before my eyes closed in sleep. I lay hearkening to the dull subdued thunder of the surf beating upon the beach far below at the foot of the cliffs. It was a new strange noise to me, and I lay listening to it as though to a voice muttering in giant whispers out of the hush of midnight; and when at last I fell asleep I dreamt that I was in the Mary Hann, and that Bill Hitchens was steering the boat, and that she was sailing directly up the line of glorious silver under the moon; and I remember that I asked him in my dream how long it would take to reach the moon that as we sailed waxed bigger and soared higher; but instead of answering he put his knuckles into his eyes and began to sob and cry, and I awoke to hear little Johnny calling to me to take him into my bed.

And now followed days as happy as light hearts and bright skies and good health could render them. The weather continued splendid. Sometimes it was as hot as ever it had been during the month of July in the city of the Abbey Church. There was a pleasant neighbourhood, a country of woods and verdant dingles and swelling pastures, and we made many excursions, and in particular did we enjoy a visit to some old ruins which had once been an abbey, but now its windows yawned, its roof was gone, large portions of masonry had fallen, its floor was a tangled growth of rank grass and weeds. We listened to the wind whistling through these ruins: we listened with bated breath and with raised imaginations, for the noise of the wind was like the chanting of friars intermixed with a thin wailing of women’s voices; and as I listened I could not help thinking to myself that it was as though the ghosts of long-departed monks and chaste and holy nuns had viewlessly assembled round about us to sing some solemn dirge, and that if our eyes were as fine a sense as our hearing—if, indeed, we could see the invisible as we could hear it—we might behold the vision of the building itself spread over our heads and on either hand of us, in roof, in glorious coloured window, in sepulchral monument.

Here it was that my little Johnny, in running from me towards the grass which grew upon what had been the pavement of this ancient abbey, tripped and fell and lay screaming as though fearfully hurt. Mary took him up: he was not hurt. My husband, looking into the grass to observe what had tripped the child, put his hand upon something grey and picked up a little skull. ‘Good God!’ he cried, casting it from him with a shudder, ‘let us get away from this place.’ But Mary remained behind alone for some minutes, with her eyes bent upon the little skull, musing upon it.

Though we made several inland excursions our chief haunts were the pier and the beach. Those were happy days indeed. My sister and I would take camp-stools down on to the sands, and long mornings did we thus pass, my husband moving indolently here and there, smoking, examining pools of water, stooping to pick up a shell; Johnny scooping with a stick at my side; baby sleeping in the arms of the nurse. There we would sit and watch the quiet surface of the sea that melted into the blue air where the sky came down to it, and gaze at the oncoming breaker poising its tall emerald-green head for a breathless instant, like some huge snake about to strike, ere tumbling in thunder and snow and roaring seawards in a cataract of yeast.

We seemed—indeed, I believe we were—the only visitors in the place. Nobody intruded upon us; the miles of sand were our own. Robinson Crusoe’s dominion was not more uninterrupted.

The boatman named William Hitchens had called twice at the house early in the morning to know if we would go for a nice little sail or row during the day, but the answer I had sent by the servant was, ‘Not yet.’ I was in no hurry to go for a nice little sail or a row. When I was on the sands the sea was so close to me that it was almost the same as being on it; and the novelty of having the sea feathering to my feet in white and broken waters remained too great an enjoyment for some days to induce a wish in me for wider experiences. And then again, neither Mary nor my husband had the least taste for boating, so that if I went I must go alone. I was not even able to have my children with me, for the nurse declared that the mere looking from the beach at a boat rocking upon the water made her feel ill, and I dared not single-handed take the children, for how could I, holding the baby, have looked after little Johnny, who was always on the move, crawling here and creeping there, and who was just the sort of child to wriggle on to a seat of the boat and tumble overboard whilst my head was turned?

However, after we had been at Piertown five days we walked down to the sands as usual after breakfast, and as we passed the entrance of the pier Bill Hitchens approached us, pulling at a grey lock of hair that hung upon his forehead under an old felt bandit-shaped hat.

‘A beautiful morning for a sail or a row, lady,’ said he, addressing himself to me as though he had long before made up his mind that there was no custom to be got out of my husband and my sister, ‘why not wenture on an hour, mum? There’s as pretty a little offshore wind a-blowing as could be wished. And look how smooth the water is! Only let me draw you clear of this here ground swell, and ye won’t know you’re afloat. Or if you don’t like sailing, I’ll put a small oar into the boat, and with me rowing agin ye, lady, ye shall see how light a boat she is.’

‘Go, Agnes,’ said my husband, observing that I looked wistfully at the water.

‘Come, Mary!’ said I.

‘No, dear,’ she answered, ‘I am certain to suffer from headache afterwards.’

‘Why don’t you come along, sir?’ said the boatman to my husband.

‘Because I am very well, thank you, Billitchens, and I wish to remain well,’ answered my husband.

‘I will go,’ said I, and instantly the boatman was in motion. He ran with uncouth gestures to a ladder that descended the pier-side, disappeared down it, and presently emerged in a little skiff which he propelled with an oar over the stern. Having arrived at his boat, which was moored in the middle of the small harbour, if I may so term the space of water within the embrace of the crooked arm of the pier, he freed and brought her to some steps. I entered, perhaps a little nervously, sat down, and Bill Hitchens throwing his oars over pulled the boat out to sea. Little Johnny screamed and wept, imagining that I was leaving him for ever. I kissed my hand and waved it to him, and Mary, taking the little fellow in her arms, comforted him.

Now out of that simple English scene of coast life, out of the familiar commonplace experience of a boating trip, what, if it were not death, what should be able to shape itself so potent in all horror as to utterly and absolutely shipwreck my happiness and make a frightful tragedy of my life? Death it might well have been; again and again small sailing boats are capsizing and their inmates are thrown into the water and drowned; but worse than death was to befal me. When I close my eyes and behold with the vision of my mind the scene of that little town, and the terraces of the cliffs, though I am able to connect the long chain of circumstance link by link, the memory of the disaster and all that followed the disaster affects me even at this instant of time with the violence of a paralysing revelation. I know the past to be true, and still I gaze dumbly and with terror backwards, incapable of crediting it.

But the dreadful misfortune that was to overwhelm me did not happen at once. No: my short excursion that morning I thoroughly enjoyed. All was safe, well, and delightful. I told the boatman to keep somewhat close in to the shore, and I held my husband and sister and children in view all the while. The boatman rowed leisurely, and my dear ones on the shore kept pace with the boat until they had arrived at their favourite spot on the sands, where they seated themselves and watched me. I rowed a little and found the oar the man had placed in the boat for my use very light and manageable; but I plied it unskilfully; indeed I was but a wretched oarswoman. Yet it amused me to dip the blade into the water however clumsily, and to feel that the boat received something of her impulse from the swing of my figure.

Bill Hitchens talked much, and had I heeded his conversation I might have found his queer words and odd thoughts and expressions amusing; but I was too much occupied with my oar, and with looking at the group on the sands, and with admiring the coast, to attend to his queer speech. And, indeed, we were at just such a distance from the coast as enabled me to witness in perfection its incomparable romantic beauties. The cliffs rose in dark and rugged ramparts, and their gloomy massy colours were peculiarly defined by the line of white surf which, the fall of the breakers being continuous, seemed fixed as though painted along the foot of the coast. The windows of the house we occupied sparkled over the edge of the heights, but the structure was so high lodged, the altitude from the sea appeared so prodigious, that spite of the softening shadow of trees behind it, and spite of its quaint and cosy shape, it had an odd, wild, windy look to my eyes, and I wondered as I gazed at it that it had not been levelled long ago by one of the many hurricanes of wind which Bill Hitchens told me thundered across the sea and against the land in winter time, blind with snow and black with flying scud. And the town made me think of Tennyson’s description of a coastal village, for there was a frosty sparkle upon the houses as though they were formed of blocks of rock salt. The sky was a deep blue, and I noticed that it seemed to tremble and thrill where the bend of it disappeared past the edge of the cliffs, as if the dye of the cliffs themselves were lifting and sifting into it, and deepening the beauty of its hue just there. The water was everywhere flashful with the light wind that was blowing from the land. Presently the boatman said:

‘Lady, let me gi’ you a bit of a sail?’

I consented, and he took my oar from me and laid it in the boat, then loosed a big sail that lay upon the seats and hoisted it, and afterwards he set a little sail at the stern, and then sat down at the tiller and steered, making the boat skim along on a line with the beach. My dear ones flourished their hands to me.

This was enjoyment indeed. The boat seemed to me to sail wonderfully fast; I looked over the stern and perceived that she left behind her a long furrow as beautiful with its ornamentation of foam and bubble and eddies as a length of rich lace. Hitchens sailed the boat to and fro, and all the time he was bidding me observe what a beautiful boat she was, how there was nothing whatever to be afraid of, how in such a boat as the Mary Hann, as he called her, a party of people might sail round the United Kingdom in perfect comfort and security.

‘Only make it worth my while,’ said he, ‘and I’d go to Ameriky in this here boat. Make it worth my while, lady, and I’d double the Harn in her. Ameriky was discovered by folks as would have swopped their precious eyes for such a boat as this here to make the voyage in. I don’t speak of Australey, for Cook he had a ship; but I’ve heered tell of Columbus; there’s one of us chaps as has read all about that gent and is always a-yarning about him; and ower and ower I’ve heard him say that that there Columbus would have swopped his precious eyes for the likes of such a boat as the Mary Hann for to make his discovery with.’

In this manner Bill Hitchens discoursed about his boat, as he sat beside the tiller with his head well between his shoulders and his back rounded like a cat’s at the sight of a dog.

After this I was continually making excursions with Bill Hitchens. Having got to know him, I never would hire another in his place. Indeed, he took care that nobody should supplant him, and called for orders every morning with the punctuality of the butcher or the grocer. Often I would go out twice a day, so keen was my enjoyment of the pastime of sailing and rowing. Twice my husband accompanied me, but after the second time he told me he had had enough, and he went no more in the boat. Once I coaxed Mary into joining me, and in less than five minutes the boatman was obliged to put her ashore, and when I returned two hours later I found her motionless on the sofa with a sick headache.

The behaviour of the boatman did not belie the character I seemed to find written in his face. He proved a very honest, civil, deserving fellow, possessed of a quality of sourness that imparted a particular relish to his odd manner of speaking. I did not fear to be alone with this man. I had every confidence in his judgment and prudence. He was allowed by his comrades of the beach to be one of the smartest boatmen on the coast. My husband ascertained this, and he also agreed with me in my opinion of the fellow’s respectability, and day after day I would enter the boat and my husband would stand watching me without the faintest misgiving of any sort in either of us.

On several occasions Hitchens carried me out to so great a distance that the features of the land were indistinguishable, and these long trips I enjoyed most of all; they were like voyages, and when I stepped on shore I would feel as though I had just arrived from the other side of the world.

We had now been a day over three weeks at Piertown. The weather had continued fine and warm throughout—in truth, a more beautiful October I never remember—and we had all benefited vastly by the change. But on the morning of this day my husband received a letter. He opened it, read it attentively, and exclaimed to me across the breakfast table, ‘I shall have to leave you for a couple of days.’

‘Why?’ I asked.

He passed the letter to me: it was a business letter, addressed to him by his clerk. The nature of the business does not concern us; enough that the call was important and peremptory. The business, my husband said, would certainly detain him in Bath until the hour of the departure of a late train on the following night, if indeed he should be able to return then.

I packed his handbag, and Mary and I walked with him to the railway station. I kissed him, and we parted.

My sister and I returned home to take the children to the sands. We passed the morning under the cliffs, talking and reading and playing with the children. It was a bright day, but I afterwards remembered noticing that the blue of the heavens was wanting in the beautiful clear vividness of hue of the preceding days. The azure had a somewhat dim and soiled look, such as one might fancy it would exhibit in a very fine, thin dust-storm. I also afterwards remembered having observed that there was a certain brassiness in the glare of the sun, as if his light were the reflection of his own pure golden beams cast by a surface of burnished brass or copper. These things I afterwards recollected I had noticed, yet I do not remember that I spoke of them to my sister.

We dined at one o’clock. The road from our house to the sands carried us past the entrance to the pier. As we leisurely strolled, Bill Hitchens lifted his breast from the post which he was overhanging, and approached us with a respectful salutation of his hand to his brow.

‘Will you be going out this afternoon, lady?’ he asked.

‘My husband has been called away,’ I replied, ‘and I do not feel as if I should care to go upon the water during his absence.’

‘You will find the afternoon tedious, dear,’ said Mary.

‘It’s a beautiful day, lady,’ said the boatman. ‘There’s a nice little air o’ wind stirring. Couldn’t ask for a prettier day for a sail, lady.’

‘It is somewhat cloudy,’ said I, directing my gaze at the sky.

‘Fine weather clouds, lady,’ said the boatman. ‘Keep your sight upon ’em for a bit and you’ll find they’re scarcely moving.’

‘That is true,’ said I.

‘If you go,’ said Mary, ‘I will take Johnny and baby for a drive.’

‘You’ll soon be leaving Piertown, lady, worse luck!’ said the boatman, with an insinuating grin. ‘This here fine weather ain’t a-going to last neither. It won’t be long afore we’ll be laying our boats up. It may be blowing hard to-morrow, lady, and it may keep on blowing until your time’s up for retarning.’

I reflected and said, ‘Well, Hitchens, you can get your boat ready for me by half-past two or a quarter to three. I’ll be back by four,’ said I, addressing Mary, as we walked home, ‘and by that time you’ll have returned. Do not keep baby out later than four,’ and we talked of my husband and on home matters as we climbed the road that led to the level of the cliff.

At a quarter-past two I was ready to walk to the pier for a trip which I thought might likely enough prove my last, and which was not to exceed an hour and a quarter. I was dressed in the costume in which I usually made these excursions—in a blue serge dress, a warm jacket, and a sailor’s hat of grey straw. An old-fashioned fly stood at the door waiting for Mary and the nurse and children. I took baby in my arms and kissed her, and I lifted Johnny and kissed him and saw the little party into the fly, which drove off.

I lingered a moment or two. A strange sense of loneliness suddenly possessed me. I cannot imagine what could have caused it if it were not the silence that followed upon the fly driving off, together with the thought that my husband was away. I entered the little parlour to ascertain the time by the clock on the mantelpiece, for my watch had stopped and I had left it in my bedroom. Upon the table lay a pair of baby’s shoes, and a horse and cart that my husband had bought for Johnny was upon the floor. As I looked at these things I was again visited by an unaccountable feeling of loneliness. But it could possess no possible signification to me, and passing out of the house I closed the hall-door and walked briskly down to the pier.

The boat was ready. I entered her, and Hitchens rowed out of the harbour. The surface of the water was smooth, for the small breeze of the morning had weakened and was now no more than a draught of air; but the sea undulated with what sailors call ‘a swell,’ upon which the boat rose and sank with a sensation of cradling that was singularly soothing to me. The horizon was somewhat misty, and I observed that the extremities of the coast on either hand in the distance were blurred, showing indeed as though they were mirrored in a looking-glass upon which you had slightly breathed.

‘It looks somewhat foggy out upon the sea,’ said I.

‘Nothen but heat, lady, nothen but heat. I like to see fog myself with the wind out at Nothe. When that happens with fine weather it sinifies that fine weather’s a-going to last.’

The figures of a few boatmen idly lounged upon the esplanade. A man in a white apron, smoking a pipe, stood in the door of one of the public-houses, watching us as the boat receded. A coastguardsman, stick in hand, leaned over the edge of the pier, gazing down at the little cluster of boats which swayed upon the gently heaving water of the harbour. The sun shone upon some bright gilt sign of a cock, or bird of some sort, over the door of one of the public-houses; and next door to this sign was another, the painted head and bust of a woman eagerly inclining forwards, with the right arm advanced and a wreath in her hand. It had probably been the figure-head of a ship.

These little details of the picture I remember remarking as I looked at the shore whilst the boat leisurely drew away. What a dull, motionless place did Piertown seem! The main street climbing the hill was visible past the curve of the pier, and only two figures were to be seen ascending it.

‘I cannot understand how you men get a living,’ said I to Bill Hitchens.

‘We don’t onderstand it ourselves, lady,’ said he.

‘You are boatmen, but nobody hires your boats,’ said I. ‘How do you live?’

‘It’s a riddle, mum,’ answered Hitchens, ‘and there ain’t no answer to it.’

‘Yet those boatmen,’ said I, ‘who are standing upon the esplanade are comfortably dressed, they appear neat and clean, their clothes may be rough but they are fairly good and warm, they are all smoking and I suppose they have to pay for the tobacco they smoke; they, and others like them, are constantly in and out of the public-houses, and the beer which they drink must cost them money. How do they manage?’

‘I’ve been man and boy getting on for eight and forty years upon that there beach,’ said Bill Hitchens, ‘and if you ask me to tell you how me and the likes of me manages, my answer is, lady, I gives it up.’

We were silent, and I continued to look at the shore and to admire the scene of it.

‘The time was,’ said Bill Hitchens meditatively, ‘when I hoped to live to see the day as ’ud find me the landlord of a public-house. When all’s said and done, lady, I don’t know that a plain man like myself could ask for a more enjoyable berth than a public. Take a dark, wet, cold night, blowing hard and the air full of snow and hail. Only think of the pleasure of opening the door just to look out, so as to be able to step back again into the light and warmth and all the different smells of the liquors,’ he added, snuffing. ‘Only think how pleasingly the time flies in yarning with customers. Then, if ever ye stand in need of a drain, there it is—anything ye like and nothen to pay; ’cos when a landlord drinks it’s always at the expense of his customers, whether they knows it or not. Then think again, lady, of a snug little parlour at the back, all shining with clean glasses and mugs like silver, with a warm fire and a kettle of boiling water always ready—ah!’ He broke off with a deep sigh.

‘I’ll take an oar,’ said I.

‘Lor’ bless me!’ he cried, running his eyes over the boat. ‘I’ve forgotten to ship a pair of sculls for you,’ by which term he signified the light oars he was in the habit of placing in the boat for my use.

‘The oar you are rowing with will be too heavy for me, I fear,’ said I.

I dorn’t think it will, mum,’ he answered. ‘Suppose ye try it. After you’re tired of rowing we’ll hoist the sail, for we shall find more wind stirring when we get out furder.’

He adjusted the oar and I seated myself at it and began to row. He sat in the bows of the boat near the tall mast and I upon a hinder seat near to that end of the boat which I had heard him call the ‘stern sheets.’ I did not find the oar so heavy as I had imagined. The boatman had placed it so as to fairly balance it and I continued to swing it without much trouble.

But after I had been rowing a few minutes the pressure of the handle of the oar in my grasp caused my rings to hurt me. I endured the inconvenience until it became a pain; then, tilting the oar and supporting it by my elbow, I pulled off my rings—that is to say, my wedding-ring and two others, all that I wore—and placed them by my side on the sail, which lay in a sort of bundle along the seats. I never had any superstitious feeling about my wedding-ring. Over and over again had I removed it to wash my hands. With many women, when once the wedding-ring is on, it is on for ever. Well would it have been for me had I possessed the sentiment of tender and graceful superstition that influences most wives in this way.

My rings being removed I applied myself again to the oar, and for about a quarter of an hour Bill Hitchens and I continued to row the boat out into the open sea. By this time we had reached a distance of a mile from the land. The faint air had been slowly freshening into a little breeze, and the water was rippling briskly against the side of the boat. I was now tired of rowing, and, asking Bill Hitchens to take the oar from me, I rose from my seat and sat down near the tiller.

‘May as well hoist the sail now, lady, don’t ye think?’ said Bill Hitchens.

‘Yes, you can hoist the sail,’ said I, ‘but I do not wish to go too far from the land. What o’clock is it?’

He extracted an old silver watch from somewhere under his jersey and gave me the time.

‘I wish to be home by about a quarter past four,’ said I.

He answered that he would see to it, and, seizing hold of a rope which passed through the top of the mast, he hoisted the sail. He then came to where I was sitting, and set the little sail upon the mast at the stern, and when this was done he grasped the tiller, and the boat, feeling the pressure of the breeze in her broad canvas—for though she was a small boat she carried a sail that I would think was disproportionately large for her size—heeled over and cut through the water on her side very quickly.

‘It’s a nice soldier’s wind for the land, lady,’ said the boatman.

‘What is a soldier’s wind?’ I asked.

‘Why,’ he answered, ‘a wind that allows ye to go there and back wherever ye may be bound to.’

‘The coast looks a long way off, Hitchens.’

‘It’s vurking up a bit hazy, lady, but there’s nothen to hurt.’

‘I expect the sky will be overcast before sunset,’ said I. ‘Do you see that bank of clouds hazily peering through the air over the coast there?’ and I indicated a portion of the land which certainly did not lie in the direction whence the wind was blowing; so that it was plain to me, ignorant as I was in all such matters, though my perception had been sharpened a little by being much upon the water, and by listening to Bill Hitchens discoursing upon the several aspects of his calling—I say it was plain to me that those clouds were working their way up over the land, and that if they did not promise a change of weather they must certainly betoken a shift of wind.

The boatman cast his eyes carelessly towards the coast and said ‘that there was nothing to hurt in them clouds, that he rather believed they were settling away instead of rising,’ and then he changed the subject by asking me if my husband had gone to London, and if I had ever seen London, and if it was as big a place as folks pretended it to be.

CHAPTER III
‘WHO AM I?’

I sat looking about me, now watching the pretty wreaths of foam spring past the sides of the boat, now gazing at the land whose features had blended into a long, dark, compact, but hazy line, sometimes addressing questions to Bill Hitchens, and always enjoying what to me was the exquisitely pleasurable sensation of the boat buoyantly sweeping over the little feathering ripples, when, my eyes going on a sudden to my left hand, I cried out, ‘Oh, where are my rings?’

‘Your rings, lady?’ exclaimed the boatman.

‘Yes, my rings. Did you not see me take off my rings? I put them on the sail that lay near me. Oh, where are they, where are they? I cannot lose them. One is my wedding-ring and the other two are my husband’s gifts. Oh, Hitchens, where are they?’ I cried, and, with a passion of eagerness and fear, I hunted over the bottom of the boat with my eyes, peering and straining my gaze at every crevice and hollow.

‘Now be calm, lady,’ said Hitchens, ‘it’ll come right. The rings can’t be fur off. Let me question you. Where did you say you put ’em?’

‘That sail up there lay along the seats, and I put my rings on it, on a corner of it that was close to me. I believed that they would be safe there. They could not slide off canvas.’

The man’s face fell as he looked into the bottom of the boat.

‘If you’ll catch hold of this here tiller, lady,’ said he, ‘I’ll have a search. They can’t be fur off, I hope,’ he added in a voice meant to encourage me.

I put my hand on the tiller, but hardly knew what more to do with it than to keep it steady. My distress was exquisite. When I looked over the bottom of the boat and could not see any glitter of my wedding-ring and the other two rings I shivered as though possessed with a passion of grief. Oh, if I had been careless in removing my rings, it shocked me to the heart to think of losing them—of losing my wedding-ring, that symbol of my wedded love and happiness.

‘Do you see any signs of them?’ I cried to Hitchens. ‘I shall not mind the loss of the other rings, but I must have my wedding-ring—I must not lose it—I cannot lose my wedding-ring.’

The poor fellow, with a face of real concern, groped about the bottom of the boat. He lifted up a board, and carefully felt about with his hand in some water that lay in a kind of well. But I was sure that if the rings were not to be seen at once they would not be seen at all, because there were three of them, and one at least must certainly be visible: for though there were many crevices in the boat they were all very shallow, and the gleam of the rings would be instantly perceptible.

‘I am afraid, lady,’ exclaimed the boatman, standing up, ‘that they’ve gone overboard.’

I moaned.

‘I didn’t,’ he continued, ‘take any notice of ’em, and in my sudden whipping up of the sail they must have been chucked ower the side. It’s a bad job true-ly,’ and again he bent his figure to look.

I now realised that I had lost my rings; it had not been a loss to be instantly felt and understood. My wedding-ring was gone; another wedding-ring I might easily buy, but the one that was consecrated to me by memory, the ring with which my husband had made me his wife, was irrecoverably gone, and as I looked upon my bare hand I wept, and then for a third time was I visited with a cold heart-subduing feeling of loneliness.

‘Turn the boat for the land,’ I said to Hitchens. ‘I am miserable and want to get home.’

As he came to the tiller he directed a look out at the west, or rather I should say in the direction of the coast, for the haze had thickened magically within the last ten minutes or so, and though the land was scarcely above three miles distant it was little more than a dim shadow, that seemed to be fading out even as we looked. But I was still so grieved and distracted by the loss of my wedding-ring that I had no eyes save for my bare hand, and no thoughts save for what was at the bottom of the sea.

‘The wind’s shifted,’ said Hitchens. ‘It is off the land. You was right, lady, arter all. Them clouds was a-coming up. We shall have to ratch home.’

He dragged at some ropes which held the corners of the sails, and, moving his tiller, caused the boat to turn; but she did not turn so as to point the head for the land.

‘Why do you not steer for Piertown?’ I said.

‘The wind’s come dead foul, lady. We shall have to ratch home.’

‘What do you mean by “ratch”?’

‘We shall have to tack—we shall have to beat back.’

I did not understand his language, but neither would I tease him by questions. Now I was sensible that the wind had increased and was still increasing. I lifted up my eyes and judged that the wind was coming out of a great heap of cloud which lay over the land—the heap of cloud whose brows I had noticed rising above the edge of the cliff; but the mass had since then risen high, and there was a shadow upon it as if rain were falling. The boat lay sharply over upon her side, and her stem, as it tore through the water, made a strange stealthy noise of hissing as though it were red hot.

‘The land is fading out of sight,’ said I.

‘Ay, it’s drawed down thicker than I expected,’ answered the boatman.

‘Is not the wind very high?’

‘It’s blowing a nice sailing breeze,’ he answered; ‘though it’s a pity it’s shifted, as you’re in a hurry to get home.’

But as he gazed round the sea I seemed to witness an expression of uneasiness in his face. It appeared to me that he was sailing away from the land. I was alarmed, and questioned him. He drew a piece of chalk from his pocket and first marked down upon the seat the situation of the coast, then the situation of the boat, and then the process of tacking, and how we should have to sail at angles in order to reach Piertown harbour.

‘What time is it, Hitchens?’

He looked at his watch and said, ‘Just upon the hour of four.’

‘Oh! how the time has flown! Already four! When shall we arrive, do you think?’

‘I’m afeared,’ he answered, ‘that I sha’n’t be able to put ye ashore much before five.’

‘But the atmosphere continues to grow thicker. Look! some parts of the coast are invisible. If you should lose sight of the coast, how will you be able to steer for it?’

‘We’ll find our way home all right, lady,’ he exclaimed cheerfully. ‘Don’t be afeared. The loss of them there rings has worried ye, as well it might, and I’d give half the worth of this boat to be able to fish ’em up.’

I sat silent and motionless, gazing at the slowly dissolving line of coast over the gunwale. The water was now streaming in lines, and every line had its edging of spray, and often from these little foaming ridges there would flash a handful of glittering crystals, as though some hand within were hurling diamonds and prisms through the curling head of the brine. The thickness of the atmosphere lay around the sea, and so shrunk the plain of water that it looked no more than a lake in size. There was also the gloom of gathering clouds in the air, not only of the clouds which were rising off the land, but of vapour forming overhead and sailing athwart the course of the boat in dirty shreds and rags of the stuff that is called by sailors ‘scud!’

‘Will you hold the tiller for a moment, lady?’ said the boatman. ‘There’s summat wrong with——’ and he pronounced a technical word which I do not remember.

I grasped the tiller and he rose and went into the bows of the boat, where he paused for a moment, looking up; he then got upon the gunwale of the boat and stood with his back to the sea, with one hand upon a rope that ran from the front mast down to the bowsprit. He preserved that posture of standing and supporting himself and looking upwards whilst one might count ten; then let go of the rope, brought his hands together over his heart and, with a kind of short rattling groan, fell backwards.

The boat sat low on the water, and as the poor fellow therefore fell from no height, he rose to the surface before the boat had gone past him by her own length; he floated on his back, and made no effort to swim; I do not remember witnessing a single struggle in him; whence I judged, when I was able to think, that he had fallen dead from the gunwale of his little vessel; and the manner in which he had seemed to clutch at his heart, and the short rattling groan that he had delivered, confirmed me in this belief.

When he fell I sprang to my feet with a shriek of horror. For some moments, which would have been precious had he been alive and struggling, I did not know what to do. My heart stood still, I could not draw a breath. Then with lightning speed there swept into my head the thought that if he were drowned I should be alone, and, being alone, I should be absolutely helpless; and this thought electrified me, and not only enabled me to reflect, but gave me power to act. For, far more swiftly than I can relate what I did, yes, even though I was talking to you instead of writing, I grasped one of the long heavy oars and launched it towards the figure of the man as a spear is hurled. I needed, indeed, the strength of terror to accomplish this; at another time it would have taxed my strength to merely drag the oar to the side and let it fall.

The boat had been sailing fast when the poor man dropped from the gunwale, but when I sprang up I released the tiller, which I had been holding steady, having no knowledge whatever of steering, and the boat being released from the government of her helm, flew round into the wind, but not until she had left the body of the man a long distance behind; and then she stood upright upon the water, with her sails angrily shaking. Wild with thought and fear, wild with despair and terror, I kept my eyes fastened upon the body of the man. Oh, I cried to myself, can he not swim? Will he not attempt to reach the oar? And I screamed out his name, pointing to the direction where the oar lay. But as I continued to point and scream out his name the body sank. It vanished instantly, as though it had been desperately jerked under water by some hidden grasp or fang below. I stood straining my gaze, not knowing but that he might rise again, and then it was that the boat, being pointed a little away from the wind by the beat of the small, short waves, was smitten by the blast in her forward canvas; she turned and rushed through the water, whitening it, and lying dangerously down under the weight of her sails; but after she had started she, of her own accord, wound round into the wind again and sat upright, plunging quickly with her canvas rattling, and time after time this process was repeated, whilst I stood staring round me, seeing nothing of the land, beholding nothing, but the contracted plain of the ocean, around which the haze or fog stood as a wall, whilst overhead the sky was of the colour of slate, shadowed by speeding wings of scud.

It was raining, and when I looked in the direction whence the wind was blowing, the rain that drove aslant splashed in my face. I thought to myself, What will next happen? The boat will overset, and I shall be drowned! What am I to do?—what am I to do? And as I thought thus, weeping bitterly, and wringing my hands in the extremity of my grief and fright, the boat heeled over and depressed her side so low that the white foam she churned up flashed and roared to the level of the line of her gunwale. I grasped the opposite side to save myself from falling, by which I no doubt saved my life, because, had I slipped and staggered to the depressed side, my weight must certainly have capsized the boat. She rushed like an arrow round again into the wind and then stopped dead, plunging yet more sharply.

I wrung my hands again and cried aloud, What am I to do? But, happily, I had sense enough to understand that the very first thing to be done was to lower the sail, and as I had repeatedly observed poor Hitchens hoist the tall sheet of canvas, I knew what rope to undo, and, stepping over the seats, I released the rope, and, the boat being at that moment with her head pointing into the wind, the sail fell, but in falling it enveloped me and threw me down, and it was some minutes before I succeeded in extricating myself.

This, to be sure, was a trifling accident, for I was not in the least degree hurt, but the being thrown down and smothered by the canvas immeasurably heightened my distress and terror; I trembled from head to foot, my knees yielded under me, and I was forced to sit. It was raining hard, and the wet made the wind feel cruelly cold as it rushed athwart the boat, whipping the crests off the waves into an angry showering of spray. But after a little I began to find some faint comfort in the belief that the boat was stationary. Alas, how great was my ignorance! Because she did not appear to sail, and because she no longer lay dangerously over, I believed she was stationary. Yet two little sails were still set, a triangular sail at the bowsprit and a small square sail at the stern, and I must have been crazed indeed not to guess that whilst this canvas remained exposed the light fabric would be blown along by the wind, either sideways or forward, and that, as the wind blew directly from the west, every minute was widening my distance from Piertown.

But not understanding this, I found some heart in the belief that the boat was stationary, and I tried to comfort myself in other ways. I said to myself, this rain may be a passing shower, the weather will brighten presently, the boat will be in view from the coast, my situation will be guessed at by the boatmen who hang about the Esplanade, and they will put off to rescue me. And I also said to myself, even if this weather should not clear up, even if I remain out here invisible from the land, yet when my sister finds that it grows dark and I have not returned, she is sure to go down to the harbour and offer rewards for my rescue, and I may count upon several boats coming out to search for me.

Thus I thought, striving to give myself heart. But oh, the desolation of that mist-environed stretch of steel-grey water—chilly, leaping, and streaming in froth! Oh, the cruel cold of the rain-laden wind pouring shrilly past my ears and penetrating my wet clothes till my breast felt like marble! Not even now could I realise my situation. I knew that I was alone and that I was helpless, but the horizon of my fears and wretchedness was contained in these simple perceptions. I did not believe that I should perish. I was sure that succour would come, and my sufferings now lay in the agony of expectation, in the present and heart-breaking torment of waiting.

The time passed, the shadow of the evening entered the gloom of the afternoon. It continued to rain, and the horizon lay shrouded close to the boat, but I believe there was no increase in the wind: I noticed no increase. But indeed I was too ignorant, too despairful, too heartbroken to heed the weather, unless it were to observe, with eyes half-blind with my own tears and the flying rain that the sea was darkening, that the thickness lay close around the boat, and that nothing ever came out of that thickness save the dusky shapes of waves.

‘Am I to be out in this boat all night?’ I thought to myself. ‘If so, I shall die of cold and exhaustion. I cannot pass the whole long night alone in this open boat in the rain, and in the bitter cold wind, wet through to the skin as I already am, without anybody to speak to, without food or drink, without a ray of light for my eyes to find comfort in resting on. O God! O God! I cried, and I went down upon my knees in the boat, and, clasping my hands, I gazed upwards into the grey, wet shadow of the sky, under which the naked mast of the boat was reeling, and I prayed to God to be with me, to watch over me, to bring help to me before I expired of fear and cold, and to return me to my sister, and to my little ones who were waiting for me.

And now I scarcely know how to proceed. What followed was a passage—a horribly long passage—of mental suffering incommunicable by the pen, nay scarcely to be remembered or understood by the sufferer herself. It fell dark, and the black night came, the blacker because there was no moon and because of the rain and the mist. I had gathered the wet cloths of the sail about me as a sort of shelter, and I sat with my head above the line of the gunwale, for ever looking to left and to right, and to right and to left, and never seeing more than the pale, near gleam of froth. At times thought grew maddening, and I shrieked like one in a fit or like a woman insane. It was not the fear of death that maddened me, it was not the anguish of the cold and the wet, nor even the fearful loneliness of my situation, a loneliness that cannot be imagined, for what magic is there in ink to figure the impenetrable blackness of the night, to imitate the snapping and sobbing sounds of the water and the hissing of the wind? No, it was the thought of my husband and my children; and it was chiefly the thought of my children. Again and again, when my mind went to them, I would catch myself moaning, and again and again I shrieked. With the eye of imagination I saw them sleeping: I saw my darling boy slumbering restfully in his little bed, I saw my baby asleep in her little cot; I bent over them in fancy; I kissed the golden hair of my boy, and I kissed the soft cheek of my baby; and then the yearnings of my heart grew into agony insupportable.

And there was a dreadful fancy that again and again visited me. Amid the crawling and blinking foam over the boat’s side I sometimes imagined I saw the body of Hitchens. It came and went. I knew it was a deception of the senses, yet I stared as though it were there indeed. Sometimes there would come a sound in the wind that resembled the groan he had uttered when he fell overboard.

At some hour of the night, but whether before or after midnight I could not have told, I was looking over the right side of the boat when a large shadow burst out of the darkness close to. It swept by wrapped in gloom. It was a vessel, and she whitened the throbbing dusky surface over which she passed with a confused tumble of froth. There was not a single spot of light upon her. Her sails blended with the midnight obscurity, and were indistinguishable. Indeed she was to be heard rather than seen, for the noise of the wind was strong and shrill in her rigging, and the sound of her passage through the water was like a rending of satin. She was visible, and then she was gone even as I looked.

All night long it rained, and it was raining at daybreak in a fine thin drizzle. The sea was shrouded as on the previous afternoon. When the cold and iron grey of the dawn was upon the atmosphere, I feebly lifted up my head, marvelling to find myself alive. I looked about me with my eyes as languid as those of a dying person’s, and beheld nothing but the streaming waters running out of the haze on one side and vanishing in the haze on the other side. Had I then possessed the knowledge of the sea that I afterwards gained, I might have known by the character of the waves that during the night the boat had been swept a long distance out. The billows were large and heavy, and the movements of the boat, whose sails were too small to steady her, were wild. Yet she rose and fell buoyantly. These things I afterwards recollected.

I was without hunger, but the presence of daylight sharpening my faculties somewhat I felt thirsty, and no sooner was I conscious of the sensation of thirst than the perception that it was not to be assuaged raised it into a torment. There was water in the bottom of the boat; I dipped my finger into one of the puddles and put the moisture to my lips. It was brackish, almost indeed as salt as the water of the sea. I pressed my parched lips to the sodden sail, which I had pulled over my shoulders, and the moisture of it was as salt as the puddle I had dipped my finger into.

And now, after this time, I have but a very indistinct recollection of what followed. All my memories are vague, as though I had dimly dreamed of what I saw and suffered. I recollect that I felt shockingly ill, and that I believed I was dying. I recollect that during some hour of this day I beheld a smudge in the grey shadow of mist and rain on my right, that it kindled an instant’s hope in me, that I held open with difficulty my heavy wet eyelids and watched it in a sickly and fainting way, believing it might prove a boat sent in search of me. I followed it with my gaze until it melted away in the thickness. I recollect that the day passed, and that the blackness of a second night came; but, this remembered, all else is a blank in my brain.

I opened my eyes and found myself in gloom. A few inches above me was a shelf; I supposed it to be a shelf. Dim as the light was, there was enough of it to enable me to see that what was stretched just above me was not part of a ceiling. I lay looking at it. I then turned my head on to my right cheek and beheld a wall. I touched it to make sure. I passed my hand slowly over it, and then looked up again at the shelf that was stretched over my head. I then turned my head and perceived a little circle of greenish light. I stared at this strange glimmering disk of light for a long while, again looked upwards, and again feebly passed my hand over the wall.

I did not ask myself where I was; I felt no curiosity. I was as one in whom an intellect has been suddenly created, and who passively accepts what the sight rests on. I lay turning my head from cheek to cheek for some ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, during which my eyes, having grown used to the gloom that was faintly touched by that circle of greenish light, began to distinguish objects. And first I saw that I was in a very little dark room, lying upon a sort of shelf which, with the upper shelf, resembled a long box, of which one side was wanting; and scarcely had I perceived that I was in a little dark room than I became sensible that I was upon the water: for, as I lay on the shelf, I felt that my body was rolled from side to side, and I also felt an upwards motion and then a downwards motion, and I knew that I was at sea.

Then I thought to myself, I am in the cabin of a ship. But how did I get here and who am I? Having said to myself Who am I? I repeated the words over and over again; but as yet without surprise, without terror. The question haunted my mind with languid iteration, but it induced no emotion. I felt sick and extraordinarily weak. Something irritated my brow, and, lifting my hand, I found my right temple and the eyebrow and a portion of the nose as far as the bridge of it pasted over with some hard substance. I ran my fingers over this substance, but without wonderment, and then my arm fell exhausted to my side, and feebly turning my head on to my left cheek, I stared at the glimmering green disc, whilst I kept on thinking to myself, but without agitation or fear, Who am I?

It did not strike me as in the least degree strange that I should not know who I was. I lay looking, and I saw a man’s coat swinging by a nail near the little circle of dim light. I also saw a common cane-bottom chair and a dark chest, which I have since learnt to call by its proper name of ‘locker.’ From the ceiling of this little room there swung, suspended by thin brass chains, a strange-looking lamp, formed of a globe of metal with a glass chimney. I continued to watch that lamp swing until my eyelids closed, but whether I fainted or slumbered I am unable to say.

When I awoke or regained consciousness the glimmering circle of glass had changed from dim green into bright yellow. It rippled with brilliance as from the reflection of sunshine upon water, and there was daylight in the little cabin. I heard the sound of a fiddle and the voice of a man singing. The sounds were on the other side of the wall which I had felt over with my hand when I first awoke. Presently the music ceased, and almost at the moment that it ceased I heard the rattle of a door-handle and what looked to be a shapeless bulk stood at my side.

On straining my dim sight I saw that the figure was that of an immensely fat man. He stood with his back to the circular window, and for some while I was unable to discern his features. Meanwhile he stared at me as though there was nothing in my fixed look to satisfy him that I was alive or dead. His face was perfectly round and his cheeks puffed out as if he were in the act of blowing. Upon his upper lip were a few short straggling hairs, iron grey; his hair was scanty and grizzled; his complexion was a brick red, apparently from exposure to weather. Yet his fat face was deprived of the expression of stupid good nature that one commonly finds in such countenances by a pair of heavy, shaggy, almost white eyebrows, which, coming close together over the top of his nose, stamped the look of an habitual frown upon his forehead. His eyes were small, black and piercing, and his age might have been anything between fifty and sixty. He wore a red cap, the tasselled point of which fell over his ear, and his dress consisted of a soiled and well-worn pilot-coat hanging loose over an equally soiled and well-worn velveteen jacket. A large shawl was wound round his neck, and there were gold hoops in his ears. These points I afterwards witnessed. All that I now observed was his large round face of a dusky crimson and the small black eyes in it fixed upon me.

At last he exclaimed, in a deep voice: ‘Tiens, vous voilà enfin éveillée, après trois jours de sommeil! Eh bien, j’espère que maintenant vous soyez en état de prendre quelque nourriture et de me dire ce que vous êtes. Peste! que n’avez-vous donc échappé! C’est vrai les femmes peuvent supporter plus que les hommes. Elles ne sont pas si facilement écrasées que nous autres pauvres diables.’

I listened to these words and understood them, but I did not know they were French. Yet though I could not have given a name to the tongue in which the man spoke I knew what he said. My knowledge of French suffered me to read it and slightly understand it when spoken, but I was unable to converse in it.

What he had said was: ‘So then you are awake at last! Three days of sleep! Well, now you will be able to eat and drink, I hope, and tell me who you are. Peste! what an escape! But women have more endurance than men. They are not so easily destroyed as us poor devils.’

I gazed at him without answering. He addressed me again in French.

‘What do you say?’ I whispered.