Transcriber's Note:
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

HEART OF OAK

VOL. III.

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

HEART OF OAK

A THREE-STRANDED YARN

BY

W. CLARK RUSSELL

AUTHOR OF
'THE WRECK OF THE GROSVENOR' 'THE PHANTOM DEATH'
'THE CONVICT SHIP' ETC.

IN THREE VOLUMES—VOL. III.

LONDON
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY
1895

CONTENTS

OF

THE THIRD VOLUME

HEART OF OAK

CHAPTER XX STARTLING NEWS

Sir Mortimer received the news of the loss of the ship whilst he was in Paris. He had sent his foreign address to the office in the Minories, always hoping to hear from, or of, his daughter, and Mr. Butcher wrote to him, unknown to me, and perhaps to Mr. Hobbs.

He at once came to London: he arrived in the afternoon. The bank was closed and he drove to my rooms, where he found me. He was very pale and looked ill, but whether he had disciplined his mind during his journey, or was a person of more fortitude than I had imagined, his behaviour was almost calm compared to what I had expected to find it on our first meeting.

'When we surrendered her,' were almost his first words after holding me by the hand and struggling as though with his tears, 'I had a feeling we should never again meet. I ought not to have permitted her to take so long a voyage. She was too delicate, her health was too poor, she was too used to have comforts'—he could not proceed for some moments. He then said, 'She was my only child. I am now alone in the world,' and, casting himself into a chair, he hid his face and gave way.

'I will not believe there is no hope,' I exclaimed, and, sitting down beside him, I repeated all that I had gathered from my talk with the boatswain Wall, with whom I had conversed for above a couple of hours on the previous day, having brought him to the bank by a letter and taken him into a private room, where, with my father, I had closely questioned him, getting all that his experiences as an old seaman could reveal of the chances a shipwrecked company had in those seas where Marie had been abandoned.

Sir Mortimer listened to me with passionate interest, dwelling upon every syllable, catching me up if he did not clearly understand. Sometimes his eyes brightened, as with a little struggle of hope, but often he shook his head.

'Consider,' he exclaimed, 'the "Lady Emma" was dismasted July 2.' (I had all necessary notes of dates and the like in my note-book.) 'The crew left her on the fourth. This is October 5; you cannot believe that the helpless hull has continued to float in such frightful seas as run off Cape Horn all this while.'

'I don't say so. I don't dream it. God forbid, indeed; for that would put an end to all chance of our ever seeing Marie again. But may we not believe that she was fallen in with long ago?'

'Why have we not heard? There has been time!'

'No. Suppose the vessel that rescued them was proceeding to Australia. We might need another three months to hear.'

'Oh, but think!' he exclaimed, 'a dismasted hull, utterly helpless; the horrors and perils of ice close to, a wild sea continually running—she has not the strength to meet such sufferings; they will have broken her poor heart. Oh! Archie, she has been taken! She is dead! We shall never see her again.'

He had made up his mind to this, and I daresay his comparative calmness rose from his resolution to accept the worst at once. Though he knew little or nothing about the sea, he could not listen to my version of Wall's story without regarding the wreck of the 'Lady Emma' as hopelessly complete as any in the maritime records. He said that the mere circumstance of the 'Planter' cruising and finding nothing was of itself a death-blow to hope.

'And what is there to hope for?' he exclaimed, rising and moving about the room with something of feebleness. 'We are to wait; but for what? This sort of waiting in grief breaks down the intellect—the mourner goes mad. In my youth I knew a woman whose only son had been drowned in a shipwreck. She would not believe it; she hoped on; and ten years after his death saw her on the beach with her eyes fixed upon the sea, gazing, with a joyous welcoming face, at the apparition of her child whom, in her craziness, she beheld approaching her in a boat. Oh no!' he cried with a sudden, most moving, passionate wringing of his hands, 'Marie has perished; she is lost to us! Why did not the good God hinder me from sending her away? They told me that nothing could save her life but a voyage, and I, who would have given my life for her, despatched her to her death!'

I could not bear this, for I, too, was heartbroken. I grasped him by the hands, and then he became silent, after looking in my face.

But still, as I have said, his behaviour throughout this meeting with me, even when the first horror and shock of the news was renewed to us both by this our first meeting, was calmer than I had expected. He stayed in London that night, and next day accompanied me to the City, where he had an interview with Mr. Butcher. We then drove to a street out of the West India Dock Road, where Wall lodged.

The substance of Mr. Butcher's talk was that ships homeward bound from the Australias frequently touched the latitude the hull had been left in; there was, therefore, reason to hope that Captain Burke and the ladies had been rescued by one of the many vessels which every year were navigating those seas. He said he had spoken to several captains of experience on the subject, also two or three underwriters of long standing, and on the whole their opinion was, Burke and his companions would be preserved.

Wall had nothing to add—no further conjectures to offer. He went very fully into the story of the dismasting of the vessel and her abandonment, and answered with intelligence the questions Sir Mortimer put to him about Marie, how she looked, if she had picked up, if he (Wall) considered she was strong enough to outlive the horrors and sufferings of her situation, supposing the hull to be encountered within a reasonable time—say a week—from the date of the men's quitting her.

Sir Mortimer went to his home by the seaside next day. I promised to visit him on the following Saturday, but fretting had done its work—I was too ill to travel. I was ceaselessly haunted by the vision of the hull, white with snow, brilliant with ice, clouded with the foam of beating seas, wearily rolling with my dear one, with my Marie, alone in her. Somehow I could not think of her as associated with the Burkes. She was the one, the solitary, figure in the gloomy interior of that tempest-tossed fabric, as I witnessed the vision awake and in my dreams. I was aware that Mrs. Burke had been a most devoted servant, a faithful and honest nurse and friend to Marie, but I had got it into my head that her husband had lost his reason, which would drain his wife's sympathies from my sweetheart; and then, again, realising the misery of a time spent in such a hulk, under such circumstances, I could not suppose that poor Mrs. Burke would in her distraction take heed of more outside her husband than the doom that every hour brought closer.

So the vision of that wreck was always present to the eye of imagination, waking or sleeping, with one figure only in the maimed and beaten fabric.

On the morning of October 20, I went to the bank, having resumed work there two days before. My father had not arrived. I went into my private room and sat down with a heart of loathing at sight of a pile of letters which it would be my business to read and deal with.

I had hardly broken the first envelope when a clerk entered and said that a Mr. Norman, an old customer of the bank, wished to see me. I supposed he had called on business, and after reading the letter I held, I opened the glass door and bade Mr. Norman step in.

He was a merchant doing business with Natal and Cape Colony. He at once said, without offering to sit:

'I have not called on business, Mr. Moore. I heard of your trouble, and grieve to find it but too visible in your face. This morning I received a batch of South African newspapers, and met with an account, which—I don't know, I'm sure—it may be ill-advised on my part——' He broke off, and his hand went nervously to his side pocket.

I looked at him inquiringly, wondering what his Colonial newspaper account was about.

'I think,' said he, his hand still nervously twitching at his breast-pocket, 'that where sorrow is speculative the sooner expectation is ended, one way or the other, the better. This may signify nothing'—and now he produced a newspaper—'and yet it may tell everything.'

He was proceeding; I extended my arm abruptly, feeling a sickness at heart, for now imagination leaped to the very height of fear—I believed I was to read something which would prove that Marie and her companions had perished.

But Mr. Norman must needs open the paper himself; and, in order to find the passage, he required to put on his glasses. The piece of intelligence in the journal ran thus:—

'Cape Town, August 10. Arrival of the schooner "Emerald." A strange discovery! Romantic action on the part of the captain! The three-masted schooner "Emerald" arrived yesterday from the west coast of South America. When in lat. 58° S., long. 48° W., the body of a female was seen floating upon the water. Its appearance was so lifelike that, the weather at the time being quiet, the captain ordered a boat to be lowered, and the body was brought on board. The master (Goldsmith), on inspecting the corpse, was convinced by its appearance that it was the remains of the wife of a friend of his. She had been bound round the Horn to join her husband at Monte Video. Feeling persuaded of this he caused the body to be placed in a cask of spirits, with a view to carrying it to Cape Town, his first port of call, that it might have decent Christian interment; also that the husband should, if his wife did actually prove to be missing, be able to procure the exhumation of the corpse for identification.

'The body is described as that of one who in life must have been singularly prepossessing and genteel in appearance; the hair is of a dark amber or gold, the eyes of a light blue or grey, height about 5 ft. 6 in., of a figure that had apparently been full of grace and beauty. No rings were on the hands. Captain Goldsmith conjectures that the rings, including the wedding ring, slipped off the fingers through shrinkage of the flesh by immersion. Owing to the condition of the body, it has been found impossible to form an opinion as to the length of time it was in the water; it is judged, however, from the appearance of the clothes, which were in a fair state of preservation, that the period could not have exceeded three days. The body was attired in a thick serge dress, and a warm jacket, trimmed with a rich fur, of which but a little remained. One garment only was marked: namely, with the letter O, which Captain Goldsmith believes stands for Ollier, his friend's name. The remains will be buried to-day. A romantic mystery nevertheless survives, and it remains to be seen whether Captain Goldsmith is right in his conjectures as to the identity of the poor nameless remains of one who in life must have been "exceeding fair," found floating far south of the stormiest headland in the world.'

I read this very slowly, and when I had come to the last word I read it all over again. Mr. Norman's eyes were fixed upon my face. I fell into deep thought, and was silent for many minutes, with my gaze rooted upon the paper. I then pulled out my pocket-book, in which I carried the memoranda I had collected from Mr. Butcher and Wall, and compared the date of the dismasting of the 'Lady Emma' with the date of the discovery of the body. The 'Lady Emma' was dismasted July 2, the body was seen and picked up on July 10; the situation of the 'Lady Emma' when the crew abandoned her, according to the 'Planter's' log-book, was lat. 58° 45´ S. and long. 45° 10´ W.; the body was picked up in lat. 58° S. long. 48° W.; the minutes and seconds, if any there were, were probably omitted in the newspaper report, or Captain Goldsmith may have given the situation in round numbers.

Be this as it may, there could be a difference of but a very few miles between the spot where the body was found, and the spot where the hull was deserted by the sailors.

'It is extraordinary!' I exclaimed, fetching a deep breath.

'I hope it may not prove conclusive news,' said Mr. Norman. 'But if the body brought to Cape Town be that of the poor young lady, the fact ought to be known to you if only to spare you from the heart-sickness of deferred hope.'

'Dates and places correspond,' I exclaimed. 'The description is true. She had dark amber hair. Her height might be as it is here stated.'

'And then there is the letter O,' said Mr. Norman, observing that I paused.

'How am I to find out if among the clothes she took were such a dress and jacket as the body was found clothed in?'

At this moment my father entered. He immediately observed that I was deeply agitated, and glanced from me to Mr. Norman. The latter bowed, then turned to me and, begging me to keep the newspaper, and to command his services in any direction in which I could render them profitable, withdrew.

I handed the paper to my father, who read the account with a face of astonishment and dismay.

'Is it credible?' he cried. 'Is it a hoax, d'ee think? Or some story vamped up, for—for—? But,' he cried, turning his glasses again upon the paper, 'they name the ship and her captain, they give dates, they say that the body was to be buried on that day,' looking at the date of issue. 'Is it conceivable that a body would float, apparelled as this woman's was?'

'If the story is no lie, then a body thus apparelled was found floating,' I answered.

'You had better send the paper at once to Sir Mortimer,' said my father.

'I'll run down with it, but first I'll see Mr. Butcher and Wall. How am I to find out if Marie had a serge dress and that sort of jacket?' I reflected, and then said, 'Father, I must have the whole day, I cannot work, I wish to satisfy myself by some inquiries before seeing Sir Mortimer, and then I may resolve to go to the Cape.'

He gazed at me with mild astonishment, then put his hand caressingly on my shoulder, and told me I should go where I pleased and do what I liked; he advised me, however, not to act precipitately; the Cape was a long way off! What good could I do there, even supposing the body brought to Cape Town by the schooner should prove to be Marie?'

'What good? I must know; I must make sure! Supposing it is Marie—but it might be another.'

'The body is buried.'

'Yes; but I would get an order for its exhumation. It was buried with a view to disinterment should the man whose wife was to join him at Monte Video arrive in Cape Town.'

I had heard Mrs. Burke talk of some of the shops Marie had completed her outfit at. Her old nurse had herself attended her in most of her shopping excursions before the sailing of the ship, and after exchanging a few further sentences with my father, I left the bank, called a cab, and was driven to a dressmaker's near Cavendish Square.

Here, however, I could not learn that Marie had ordered a serge dress; but on inquiring at a shop in Regent Street, I discovered, with much pains—they were very busy and very slow—that Miss Otway had, on a day towards the close of March, purchased a jacket trimmed with fur; the fur was described; and certainly the 'garment,' as the shopman called it, corresponded with the brief description of the jacket that had been found on the body of the woman.

I could recollect no other shops; but hoped that Sir Mortimer might be able to tell me if a serge gown had been included in Marie's outfit. This should have been, and no doubt was, known to Marie's maid. But the girl, on the departure of Miss Otway, had gone, I had some recollection of hearing, with a family to Germany.

In this same day I drove to the offices of Messrs. Butcher and Hobbs, and had scarcely entered the place when Wall came in, greatly to my satisfaction, as I particularly desired his opinion. Both partners were present, and on my showing them the Cape newspaper they called Wall to us and we thoroughly talked the matter over. To the seaman, who was somewhat illiterate, I read and re-read the newspaper account.

'It's wonderful!' he exclaimed. 'Most sartinly it answers to the young lady. I've heered of females lying afloat like that. 'Taint so long ago that a woman was picked up alive arter washing about for thirty-six hours on her back.'

'But how can the body be Miss Otway's?' said Mr. Butcher, 'if the master of a schooner recognises it as a Mrs. Ollier's?'

'The coincidence would be quite too extraordinary,' said Mr. Hobbs. 'Mr. Moore,' he added, with one of his depressing bows, 'it would give me far more pleasure to take a cheerful view; but consider—the body of a lady is found floating much about the place where the hull was abandoned; the description, as I understand, answers to that of Miss Otway'—he said no more, but buried his hands in his pockets with a very gloomy shake of the head.

Mr. Butcher, however, inclined to the belief that the body was the person's the schooner's skipper took it to be. He wished to believe Miss Otway alive; he was by no means for despairing; whilst they were talking of this body, Miss Otway might be actually on her way home. What did Wall think?

The honest seaman faltered; he saw that Mr. Butcher wished to cheer me up, but there could be no doubt he was of Mr. Hobbs's mind. They were all three agreed, however, that it was a puzzling, most wonderful thing.

'There's nothen for Mr. Moore to do,' said Wall, who, having been admitted into this council, considered himself at liberty to talk out, perhaps thinking he was expected to do so. 'Let him give the lady's portrait to some respectable man who'll go by steam, afore it's too late, and view the body and settle it.'

'To whose satisfaction?' inquired Mr Butcher, looking at me.

'Not to mine,' I exclaimed. 'I must decide with my own eyes.'

'In them warmer climates,' said Wall, 'ye've got to bear a hand in jobs of that sort.'

Mr. Hobbs admonished the man with a frown.

'Surely, Mr. Moore,' exclaimed Mr. Butcher, 'you would be able to identify the young lady by the wearing apparel they removed, and are, of course, preserving at Cape Town?'

I told him I had ascertained that morning that a jacket answering to the one found on the body had been sold to Miss Otway.

He looked very grave at this, and I saw Mr. Hobbs exchange a glance with the seaman. Soon after this I thanked them for their sympathy and patience, and took my leave. I could think of nothing but the story of the body found at sea, and next morning went by an early train to the little seaside town where Sir Mortimer lived. As I drove from the station I passed by the ravine down which Marie and I had gone for a stroll upon the long, hard platform of sands one afternoon in the keen grey month that preceded the April she sailed in. It was October now—six months later; what had happened between? The blue sea ran up to the sky in a trembling, silken slope streaked with long gleams. I remembered how Marie had checked me in our walk to look at a passing sail, and how together we had watched the glimmering white square of her fade like mist in the evening gloom. Many gulls wheeled over the water. I saw them flying past the edge of the cliff, and remembered how Marie had paused and looked up to admire the marvellous grace of the windward flight of the birds then on the wing—perhaps those I now caught a glimpse of. An ocean life of many months had stretched before her, and whilst we walked I had noticed how she was letting the spirit of the sea sink into her, finding in the coil of the breaker, in the flight of the birds, in the shadowy distance of the horizon, a meaning she had never before heeded, only, perhaps, that she might enter with a little spirit into a scene of life from which I knew her very inmost soul shrank.

Sir Mortimer was at home; he was in mourning. The sight of his sombre figure and ashen countenance, of resigned but settled sorrow, startled and even shocked me. It was like a confirmation of fear, an assurance that Marie was dead and that hope must end. My visit was unexpected, and whilst he welcomed me he held my hand and stood looking at me in a posture of eager, sorrowful inquiry.

Presently, when we were seated, I pulled out the paper and pointed to the story of the discovery. He was a high-bred, fine-looking old gentleman, and I see him now as he sat holding his glasses to his eyes, the paper trembling in his hand, and his face slowly taking what the Scotch call a 'raised' look as he read. He turned, dropping his glasses and letting the paper sink to his knee, and said in a voice a little above a whisper:

'What is this?'

'What do you think?'

'You don't believe it was Marie?' he said.

'If we are to think that, she is dead to us!' I exclaimed. 'But if it was not Marie, whose was the body that was picked up by the schooner close to the spot where the hull had been abandoned?'

He stared at me, drew a deep breath, and referred again to the paper.

'Have you seen that seaman—the boatswain—I forget his name—upon this?' he asked.

'Yes; and the two owners. But what can their opinion be worth? How could their ideas help us, Sir Mortimer? Read the description of that body, the dark amber hair, the looks which in life must have been those of a refined——' I faltered, controlled myself, and went on: 'I have discovered,' and I named the shop where I had obtained the information, 'that Marie's outfit included such another jacket as the body had on. Can you remember if she took a serge dress with her?'

'Two or three,' he answered quickly. 'They were of dark blue. Two she had. A third was added at Mrs. Burke's suggestion. What was the colour of the dress described here?'

He looked; but no colour was named. I got up and paced about the room.

'I have made up my mind,' I exclaimed. 'I will go to the Cape. If it be Marie—but I must make sure at all costs. The suspense, the waiting, the not knowing whether she lies dead at Cape Town, whether she has gone down in the hull, whether she has been rescued, carried to a distant port, and is lying ill, so that months might elapse before we should get news of her—all this I could not bear! I am already half mad with the grief of it. I will go to Cape Town,' I cried, 'and see with my own eyes, and settle expectation, so far as that body is concerned, one way or another, for ever.'

CHAPTER XXI MR. MOORE SAILS

I think, I will not be sure, that the date on which I returned to London from this visit to Sir Mortimer was October 26. In the year 1860 sailing ships bound to the Australias and the East Indies frequently, many of them regularly, touched at the Cape; small vessels, such as brigs and barques, also traded to that colony. There was steam communication, however, then. I believe the first of the steamers of the Union Steamship Company was despatched three years earlier, namely, in 1857.

Be this as it may, since steam was to be got I was resolved to have nothing to do with what the sailor calls tacks and sheets. A sailing ship might keep me four months upon the ocean in her struggles with head winds and failing catspaws. On the other hand, the Cape, by steam, was to be reached certainly within forty days. But having made up my mind, I found there was no time to lose, that is, if I resolved on steam; for, on reaching London, I learnt that the next Union steamer was the 'Cambrian,' sailing from Southampton on November 6.

It was this obligation of despatch, perhaps, which hardened me in my resolution. I meant to sail by the 'Cambrian' and there was no leisure for hesitation, no time for second thought. Not, indeed, that I was not passionately resolved; I had been so from the hour of clearly understanding that I must proceed to the Cape and procure the exhumation of the body if my mind was to be set at rest one way or the other. I mean, if I had been obliged to wait a month, say, for a sailing ship, I might have found myself troubled, my resolution a little unsettled, by the counsels of friends.

My father, for example, fully sanctioned my going, but advised me to consider how it would be with my memory if, when the coffin was opened, I recognised the body as Marie's.

I answered I had thought over that, and knew it would prove a terrible ordeal. But it must be worse with me if I stayed at home, never stirring to find out if the body that lay in Cape Town cemetery was indeed that of the girl I loved.

'Suppose she is drowned,' I reasoned, 'I should not believe it for months, perhaps years. No man could persuade me she was dead. Time alone must convince me. But how long should I allow myself? Meanwhile I must live in expectation. My life would be a torment of suspense. But by going to the Cape I shall satisfy myself at once.'

'Yes,' said my father, 'but you will only be able to satisfy yourself that Marie does not lie buried in Cape Town if, when the grave is opened, the remains should prove another's.'

'It will satisfy me to know that, at all events,' I exclaimed.

'Will they let you exhume the body?'

This staggered me somewhat; but I replied I would take my chance of it. The corpse had been brought to Cape Town, and there buried with a view to identification. The case was extraordinary; and when the Colonial authorities heard my story they would not refuse to let me disinter the remains.

Several friends offered like objections. One suggested I should ask that the clothes should be sent home, and submitted to the inspection of those from whom Marie bought her outfit; the shopmen would know their own wares. If they asserted the clothes had been sold by them—had at any time passed through their hands—there would be something solid to go upon; I could then sail for the Cape and confirm by inspection what to most would pass as a foregone conclusion.

But my answer was, it was not very conceivable that those who held the clothes would part with them; it was no case of suspected murder, so as to admit of the introduction of the machinery of the law; moreover, if I waited, the remains would become unrecognisable. It was already a question how far the climate would admit of an identification of them. The body arrived at the Cape August 10; this was the close of October. December would have come before I landed; and December is the burning midsummer of South Africa.

But herein, as in all the rest, I was prepared to take my chance. I felt a secret reluctance in one direction only. It shocked me even in imagination to think, if the remains should prove Marie's, of the memory I must return home with and be haunted by to my death-bed.

On November 5 I travelled to Southampton, and on the following day embarked in the steamship 'Cambrian' for Cape Town. I had said good-bye to my friends in London and went on board alone. Never did passenger tread a ship's deck with heavier heart than I. The vessel was full of bustle and confusion; she was taking out a large number of passengers who, with their friends, filled her fore and aft, overflowing the saloon, and crowding the raised deck or poop.

It is at such a time as this, and amid such a crowd as littered the 'Cambrian's' decks, that you learn what real loneliness is. I looked around me and saw not one face I had ever met before. There was much surging and elbowing of figures in the gangway, a constant dragging here and there of baggage, shouts from the ship to the shore, from the shore to the ship, with stewards dodging and shoving in and out, officers of the steamer twinkling and flitting in the finery of the merchant service.

I contrasted all this noise—threaded by strange groaning rumblings down in the bowels of the metal keel, as though the giant, steam, lying imprisoned, was beginning to mutter in his impatience and shake his chains—with the peace on board the 'Lady Emma' when I mounted her side with Marie and her father and Mrs. Burke. All was quiet there, the masts pointed their crossed and knitted heights silent in the breeze as a tree that sleeps in the dead calm of a summer's night; about was spread a shining scene of river abounding in life and colour, in gliding and in stately motion; but the ear was not vexed.

However, it would not be long before the 'Cambrian' was under way, and, indeed, whilst I was seeing to my baggage in my berth, and taking a view of the bedroom I was to sleep in for thirty-five or forty days, I heard noises and felt a vibration which satisfied me we were about to start.

The vessel was something less than nine hundred tons; she was fitted with a saloon, on either hand of which went a range of sleeping berths, and the amidships was filled with a long table. She was rigged as a schooner, with a couple of yards on each mast, and sat with a promise of swiftness in her posture, her bow being yacht-like and sharp, dominant, that is, with a good spring, whilst the run of her vanished in a very pretty mould of stern.

She would be laughed at now; side by side with the Cape white giantess of to-day, thrashing from the top of the North Atlantic to the other bottom of the South Atlantic in a trifle more than a fortnight, how meanly would she show! even as a pinnace or steam launch in the shadow of the man-of-war that owns her. No splendour of internal fittings; nothing rememberable in the form of smoke-room or bath-room. And still my heart swells with the memory of that little iron steamer, which long since ceased, save as one of the countless spectres of the deep, the true and only phantom ships of the sea.

It was a bleak, dark November day when we started; a strong wind blew, and the sky was thick and near with rolling snow-clouds. We passed along Southampton Water in a squall of sleet, and though imagination was never an inactive quality in me, yet then, more keenly than at any previous time, was I able to realise the significance of Wall's story of the dismasted hull, the high foaming seas of the great ocean past the Horn, the mountains of ice rocking their lofty summits in the smoke of flying flakes.

It was blowing fresh in the open, clear of the Isle of Wight; the little steamer pitched and sprang and made vile weather of the spiteful snap of that November Channel surge. She drove the most of us to our berths, and for four days I was a prisoner, stupidly sick and helpless. Then I stepped forth feeling well again, and making my way on to the poop found a fine day, a swelling sea, a rattling breeze astern, before which the vessel, with bladder-like canvas swelling hard from her yards and black funnel pouring smoke over the bows to the horizon ahead, was bowling and rolling, with an occasional kick up astern which drove a shock and vibration of exposed screw through the length of her.

Abreast on the right was a little ship under full sail braced sharp up, tearing through the seas; the red flag of England stood like a board at her mizzen peaks. She was apparently bound home. The water swept in sheets from her steering stem, and every flash of the white brine was magically spanned by a rainbow. She was painted black, and to my land-going eye exactly resembled the 'Lady Emma,' though the practised nautical glance would doubtless have witnessed plenty that distinguished her from the other. I watched her with fascinated gaze, and in deep melancholy, as she swept through the brilliant curls of sea, clouding her path as she dived and scoring the rolling blue astern of her with an arrow-like line of light.

Just such sailing as that had Marie described in the fragment of journal we had received. She had named the sails, flung with dexterous pen the very sheen of the lustrous rounds of canvas upon the vision of the mind, painted the picture of the deck, the dark wet length of plank gleaming along the sobbing scuppers at every roll, sailors hanging in the rigging with marling-spikes and coils of small stuff, or stitching on spaces of canvas in the sun, the mate walking the weather side of the deck, her own dear self seated under a short awning talking with her old nurse about the home she was leaving, about the countries she was to visit. I caught my breath with a spasm and turned from the beautiful picture.

We were a great number of passengers for so small a vessel. When the fine weather came and the people got their stomachs, no more hospitable scene at meal-time was ever afloat than that saloon of over thirty years ago. There is plenty of finery at sea in this age; but the picturesque is almost dead; it flourished then. Much of the old Indiaman, the old Caper and South Spanier survived in the early steamer. You found this in colours and fittings, and in rig; for, none of us yet making cocksure of the cub of the engine-room, a fabric nigh as spacious and wide as that of the sailing ship was reared to draw from the wind the help the propeller might refuse.

This little steamer, too, would go along in an ambling way when it was fine, like any large ship with the wind on the quarter, taking the wide heaves of the deep in a procession of curtseys whilst she fanned the sky with her squares of canvas. I see again the dinner-picture of a fine afternoon: a row of well-dressed people filling the long table; the captain bland and watchful at one end; someone trembling in brass buttons at the other; the claret-coloured light of the setting sun ripples in polished bulkhead and makes rubies of diamonds on moving hands; every shadow sways with slow grace, and the large round cabin windows deepen into dark blue, or glance out in crimson light as the vessel softly rolls them from sea to sky.

My place at table was at top, on the captain's right: a seat of distinction, but a matter of accident so far as I was concerned. The commander of this steamer, to give the worthy skipper a sounding name, was a kindly hearted seaman named Strutt, who had used the sea for many years in sailing ships, and had much to tell about the ocean life. One of the passengers was a retired shipmaster who, I understood, was making the voyage to the Cape to seek some waterside berth in South Africa; he was a Newcastle man and had been bred to the sea in the coal trade; such was his contempt of steam he could find nothing in his rude and quaint dialect vigorous enough to dress it in. He sat within three or four of the captain on the left and they often argued, and their speech was my diversion.

I remember one day, shortly before we made the island of Madeira, that these two men got upon the subject of Polar expeditions. The captain said that the discovery of the North Pole would be as important to navigation and science as the discovery of America was to civilisation. The other replied that the North Pole was of no use to any mortal man. What was it? An imagination. Nothing you could see, or sit upon, or lean against. At this a great many people laughed.

A middle-aged lady sitting at a little distance on my right begged that the North Pole would not be mentioned; she had lost a promising nephew in consequence of it. He had sailed in one of the expeditions and had fallen into a deep hole beside the ship when she lay upon the ice, and, marvellous to relate, though the body of the poor young man was not discovered until six weeks afterwards, it was so perfectly fresh, the face so lifelike, the colour on the cheeks so exactly as in health, that all wondered he did not speak and smile.

'There's no perishing in ice,' said the retired shipmaster in a deep voice, 'once dead, ye keep arle on. Sir John Franklin was to be found. Nought was wanting but the right sort of men to look for him. He's somewhere up there still, just as he died, poor chap, hard as a statue, him and the rest of them, saving those they fed on.'

'What's the action of salt water on a body?' said an old gentleman sitting five or six down on the opposite side.

'It drowns,' replied the retired shipmaster.

'I don't mean that,' said the other, 'does it preserve as ice does?'

'No, sir,' answered the shipmaster. 'The sea sarves a drowned sailor as the crimps sarve the live ones. It strips him, and when he's naked it tarns to and kicks and beats him till his mother wouldn't know whose child it was.'

'Not always,' exclaimed the old gentleman with emphasis.

The retired shipmaster leaned forward to see him, but made no reply.

Then the captain, at the head of the table, exclaimed: 'I knew a man years ago who had penetrated far north in a whaler. They were frozen up for a spell, hard bound in white ice, with hills to the horizon, till the season came and they broke adrift, the piece they were on floated round a point and gave them the sight of a little barque stranded on a slope, her topmast was standing, sails furled, everything in its place—she looked as if she had gone ashore the day before. They boarded her and found by her log and papers she had been in that situation eight years. But that wasn't it,' said he with a glance down the double line of listening faces turned his way, one of the most eagerly attentive of which I observed was the old gentleman's. 'In the cabin they found five frozen men, they looked to have died without a groan one after the other, every man in the act of doing something, none guessing that the forefinger of the grinning king was on his heart. One sat with a pipe in his hand, another leaned on the table as though he was meditating, a third lay back in his chair, his eyes on the skylight as if he heard a noise on deck. That's what cold will do,' said he.

Something at this point diverted the conversation, and the subject was dropped.

When I left the table I went on deck; the west was still full of warm splendour, the sea ran heaving in deep blue folds to an horizon crystalline in the delicate sweep of it against the east, on whose violet slope—that looked to thrill with the depth of its own hue as the blue of the calm trembles under the eye—a large star was flashing.

I lighted a cigar, sunk in thought over the talk about the ice. If the body should not prove Marie's, then, supposing the hull had got locked, how long would she be able to support life in the bleak dark cabin? I had often asked that of myself and of others. I asked it again now, and whilst my mind ran upon the dinner talk Captain Robson, the old retired Newcastle shipmaster, stepped up to me.

They did not allow you to smoke on the poop; I stood in what would be called the gangway, and Captain Robson came along with a great meerschaum pipe in his hand, stuffing the bowl with a queer kind of granulated tobacco which he pulled out of a little sack.

'This is Zooloo mundungus,' said he with a hoarse, shouting laugh; 'I am learning to like it. They say it is arle a man can get on the coast yon,' and he hove up three stout chins in a measured nod in the direction of the sea over the bows.

'Are you going to take charge of a ship?' said I.

'I'm going to seek a job,' he answered.

'Were you long at sea, captain?'

'Ay, was I? Since I was twelve. D'ee ken,' said he, broadening his accent for my entertainment, 'that I'm the original laddie of this yarn: A boy was holding a candle in the North Sea for the skipper whilst he overhauled his chart. "Eh, sir," says the boy, "if they did but ken war we was at home!" "If we kenned oursells," says the skipper, "I'd ne'er heed a dam!"'

'You seem to know a good deal about the ice,' said I.

'I knew too much about most things,' he answered, puffing. 'If you was to turn to and pump out my mind, more'd come up than what the poets call sparkling brine.'

He looked to right and left to observe if he was overheard, and I guessed he was a wag who liked the laughter of many.

Just then four Italian emigrants began to sing together on the forecastle; their voices swelled in a pleasing concert; the rude harmonies of the engine-room, dim and deep, as interpretable as human voices, so articulate was the metallic clangour, mingled with the music the singers made without vexing the ear.

I listened, then looked at Captain Robson, whose round face was staring deafly seawards.

'Captain,' said I, 'figure a dismasted hull in sixty degrees of south latitude and nothing of land nearer than the South Shetlands. When she was abandoned there was plenty of tall ice on the horizon in points, on both bows and astern. What's to become of that wreck?'

'Are ye speaking of the "Lady Emma"?' said he.

I started and exclaimed, 'Oh, you've heard of her loss?'

'I've known Jim Hobbs, one of her owners, ever since he was a boy,' he answered. 'A little while afore I left London I met him at a luncheon party and we talked that loss o'er. Loss! Well, ye've not to call it that yet, neither. The skipper and two females remained aboard, Hobbs told me. The crew was quick in desarting. There was twelve foot of stump forrard, Hobbs said; they should have given the capt'n a chance. With less than twelve foot of stump when I was a boy, good prizes have been blowed under jury canvas into safety. But when steam came in,' said he, turning to send a gaze of contempt at the funnel, 'the sailor went out. Let the master of the "Lady Emma" have had a collier crew of my time aboard, and they'd ha' made no more of the loss of all three masts—twelve foot of stump and the bowsprit remaining, according to Hobbs—than a dog of his tail.'

'What chance do you give the hull?' said I.

He viewed me with an arch lift of his eyebrows, as though his smile at the instant were in them only.

'I'll answer you as I answered Hobbs that same question,' said he, after discharging a number of puffs; 'she'll be heard of again. I don't care about the ice. Dismast your ship and she'll wash round an object. I'm not speaking of a dead-be shore leagues long. Plant an iceberg close aboard a hulk and she'll wallow clear. It's the height of spar, the weight of rigging, plenty of surface of stowed sail for the wind to shoulder, that keeps a vessel helpless in her drift when she's not under command.'

'But if she strikes she's gone, masts or no masts.'

'She'll swim for her life. It's like striking out clear of your clothes.'

'You give that hull a chance then, captain?'

'I give her this chance: first, as to the ice; she's a naked swimmer, light as a cask, with the wind for a buffer 'twixt her and the ice, and a backwash of sea which she'll make the most of. And then this: if a whaler falls in with her and she's sound they'll tow her clear. She was worth thirty-two thousand pounds, ship and cargo, when she left the Thames. There's sights of grease, mon, in that money.'

He ended this talk by giving a loud laugh and walking a little way forward, where he stood, pipe in hand, listening to a German Jew and his wife who were singing a duet.

CHAPTER XXII THE PHOTOGRAPHS

It was three or four days after this conversation with Captain Robson, a soft, blue glowing afternoon, the sparkling heaves of water lifting south along the course of the steamer, with a pearly feathering of the salt foam going straight as the metals of a railway astern where, in the distant blue air, hung the slowly dissolving shadow of the island of Madeira quitted by us that morning.

Many had gone ashore; we were now a thin company aft, the poop and saloon almost yacht-like with room and comparative privacy.

The name of the master of the steamer was Captain Strutt. I had been having a short chat with Captain Robson on the quarter-deck whilst the skipper of the steamer was on the bridge talking with the first mate; I went slowly aft and got upon the poop, and whilst I was there, looking over the side into the exquisitely pure liquid recess of ocean on the port-beam, with some orange star of sail glowing in it, whilst all between the burnished swell was working in glassy swathes rich with the gleams of the splendour in the south-west, Captain Strutt joined me.

'Robson,' said he, with a face of amusement, 'is a comical old gentleman. In my boyhood they called that sort of thing a sea-dog. It's a dying type. The skipper who wears the hat of the London streets and comes on deck in galoshes when the men are washing down, decays apace. We should take a long look at Robson, for when he is gone we shall not easily behold his like again.'

'His is a dry old mind,' said I, 'tough as sailor's beef, with the pickle of his experiences.'

'He was telling me last night, Mr. Moore,' said the captain, 'that you're interested in the loss of the "Lady Emma."'

'I have asked him, as a seaman, questions on the subject,' said I.

'I read the account of her being dismasted in one of the papers,' he exclaimed. 'It was made a bad job of, I thought, by three people being left aboard the hull, two of them women. D'ye ever see the "Shipping Gazette"?'

'No.'

'In a number of it a week or two before we sailed, there was a strange piece quoted out of a Cape paper.'

'A strange piece?' I exclaimed, scarcely understanding the expression. 'Had it anything to do with the "Lady Emma"?'

'Why, no,' he answered, leaning upon the rail and looking with a seaman's level, steady gaze at the orange-coloured sail on the horizon, talking carelessly, in evident intention to amuse me merely, 'a large three-masted schooner picked up the body of a woman much about the parts where the hull of the "Lady Emma" was washing about. The master took it to be the corpse of the wife of a friend of his, and put it into brine or spirit to preserve it for Christian interment ashore. A queer item of cargo, little relished by the jacks in the schooner, I warrant ye! And yet handsomely done, too, on the part of the master, if you think of it; for suppose one dear to you drowned, what would you give that the remains should be buried with a memorial atop? That's always the feeling along-shore, even amongst the humblest; they'll offer pounds reward for the body. It's sentiment—and only to bury it in earth after all; as if this,' said he, waving his hand, 'wasn't the freshest, the most spacious, the most splendid of all cemeteries, every white curl of sea a tombstone, and God's voice in the wind to keep ye sleeping and comforted.'

I listened in silence, but intently.

'The schooner carried the body to the Cape,' he went on, 'where of course it was promptly buried after they had photographed the poor thing.'

'Did they photograph the body?' I exclaimed.

He whipped upon me quickly, struck by my tone, no doubt, and eyed me keenly. He witnessed a change of face, and perhaps a sudden pallor, but took no further notice, lightly saying:

'Yes, the body was photographed, and a couple of the pictures are aboard.'

'In this steamer?'

He again looked at me; then, directing his eyes round the poop, said:

'Do you see that old gentleman sitting in the easy chair near the skylight?'

It was the old gentleman who some days previously had asked Captain Robson at the dinner table what was the action of salt water on a body, to which the north-country skipper had drily answered, 'It drowns.'

'Has that man photographs of the body?' I exclaimed, staring at the old gentleman with nervous tremors running through me, shaking the very voice in my throat, so sudden and unexpected was this.

'I can tell you his story; he makes no secret of it,' said the captain. 'His name's Hoskins; he is Mrs. Ollier's father. He is going to the Cape to make sure that the body's his child by opening the coffin, if the authorities will permit it. But he's in no doubt; he showed me the pictures; the master of the schooner, knowing him very well, sent two by steamer. He says they're the portrait of his girl. She had been stopping at Santiago with her sister, a married woman there; and was bound round to Monte Video to join, or await the arrival of, her husband, who sailed from the Thames in August in command of the ship "York"—what's there in this?—Mr. Moore, I hope this matter——'

He began to stutter, and was full of concern, seeing me suddenly lean against the rail, breathing hard with oppression with a face which I might guess by my emotions alarmed him. But guessing that my agitation would speedily take the eye of the many who were walking or sitting about the deck, I asked, after pausing a minute to recover myself, if I could be alone with him for a little while, on which he at once conducted me to the chart room or some sort of interior dedicated to him as commander, but not a bedroom, furnished with a horsehair couch, a clock, and the several instruments and conveniences for navigating a vessel.

He hooked the door, leaving it a little way open. Without preface I told him that Miss Marie Otway, only daughter of Sir Mortimer Otway, was my sweetheart; she had gone a voyage for her health in the 'Lady Emma'; soon after the news of that ship having been dismasted reached home, there arrived the extraordinary tale of the body of a woman having been picked up in the latitude and longitude the hull was in when abandoned by the crew; the description of the body, I told him, was that of Miss Otway, and my only motive in making the voyage to the Cape was to examine the remains, if the exhumation would be permitted.

He listened with deep interest and a countenance of cordial sympathy.

'Now, sir,' said he, 'I can understand your motive in questioning old Captain Robson.'

'If the body be not Miss Otway I shall want to know what chance she's had aboard that hull. Robson's an old sailor, and I've drawn a little hope out of his talk, providing——'

'Well,' said he, gathering my meaning even from my pause, 'I should say, sir, that a man would know his own child. Old Mr. Hoskins assured me, whilst telling his story, with the tears standing in his eyes, that the portrait sent him was the likeness of Mrs. Ollier, his daughter. That being so, it's reasonable you should ask questions about the wreck.'

'Would Mr. Hoskins show me those portraits, do you think?'

'Show them? Why, yes, sir. When he hears the story, he'll be glad to be of use. If you'll stop here, I'll go and manage the matter out of hand for you.'

I thanked him and he departed.

I continued alone for some time with my mind tormented by anxiety and expectation. Though old Mr. Hoskins declared the portraits to be his daughter's, yet he might very well be mistaken, too. I waited in dread. The distress of expectation and suspense was complicated by the fear that the action of the sea, the convulsion and agony of drowning, had so wrought as to make a cheat of the face: to the old man it was to be his child, and to me it was to plead dimly as Marie out of its shrunk, ghastly looks! How should we decide then? Indeed, none might ever get to certainly know who it was, and I should go home fancying I had viewed the face of my beloved in death, and fancying, too, for months to come, that she had been rescued and, by the many strange crosses of travel and adventure, detained, but that she was coming and I should hear.

Thus I sat, my mind in anguish, starting up sometimes to pace the few feet of charterhouse deck, then flinging myself down miserable and mad with thought.

A canary suddenly sang loudly in a cage under the clock; in every plank was the pulse of the engines, like a tingling of blood in veins; from over the side came a note of stealthy hissing, subtly threading the noises of the deck like someone in a theatre low hissing through the voices of the actors.

In about twenty minutes the captain arrived with Mr. Hoskins. He brought the old gentleman in and hooked the door ajar.

Mr. Hoskins was a fresh-coloured old man, white bearded, with intensely black eye brows curling like moustaches over his glittering black eyes; he was dressed in black. I had observed in him a patient way of looking, of speaking; his voice was a little tremulous with time—he was probably sixty-five years of age.

He held a large envelope which, on entering, he put down on top of his hat, and making me a bow slowly, he exclaimed, in the broken tones of his years:

'It is truly extraordinary, sir, that you and I should be going to the Cape on the same errand, in the same ship.'

'Truly indeed,' I answered. 'The captain has told you my story?' and here I looked at Captain Strutt, who answered 'Yes. Those are the portraits,' and he pointed to the envelope.

I glanced at the package as at a sheet or veil which conceals a face you love which your heart shrinks from beholding in death.

'She's not your young lady, sir,' said Mr. Hoskins, slowly extending his arm to take up the envelope. 'She is my daughter. My niece instantly recognised the likeness.'

He sighed heavily, seating himself with a slow movement, whilst he put the envelope upon his knee to draw a spectacle case from his pocket. Meanwhile he spoke:

'She was twenty-four years of age and had been married three years. Her husband took her to Santiago and left her there with her sister. She was to have joined him at Monte Video—but you have heard, sir, you have heard?'

I bowed, trembling with impatience, and still cold at heart, spite of his words, with the dread that had been mine since I heard of those photographs. He put on his spectacles, and, laying his hand upon the envelope upon his knee, looked at me with magnified eyes.

'It is very wonderful,' said he, 'that your young lady should have been left in a wreck close to the place where my poor child's body was met with.'

Captain Strutt, with a sudden fidget of his whole figure, said, 'Mr. Hoskins, will you show Mr. Moore the portraits?'

But the old gentleman must first look at them himself. He pulled them out and surveyed them with a countenance of mourning, one in either hand, his underlip working garrulously, and again and again he sighed, till, lifting my eyes from the portraits to his face, I saw that his cheeks were wet. Then, but with one of his patient gestures, he put the pictures together and extended them to me.

I looked first at one, then at the other; the likenesses were not Marie. I could allow for the changes caused by drowning, by immersion, by the month-long action of spirits or brine; and still, with a wild throb of joy that half choked me, I saw that the likenesses were not Marie.

They were two dreadful portraits of one face, dreadful to look upon; one in profile, the other full, the body manifestingly having been turned to confront the camera. The whiteness of the face in the pictures was as shocking a part as any: the cheeks were so sunk you would have thought she had sucked in her breath, with horrid scorn, a living woman, when the lens of the instrument was turned upon her. They had swept her hair off her brow for a clear view of the face; I supposed it was pale hair by the look of it, but it was not Marie's—it was not grown low on the forehead as hers was; the eyebrows were not hers—they were too thick; the ears were too large for Marie's, and, which convinced me absolutely, the shape of the nose was not my dear one's; no wasting by the action of rolling water, no shrinkage by long immersion, whether in brine or spirits, could work any structural change in the nose.

I have those dreadful photographs in my mind's eye now, I cannot express their ghastliness. It was not only the forehead rendered naked by the manner in which the hair had been swept back by the artist, nor a more terrible sort of blindness in the droop and rigidity of the upper lids than anything to be imagined in death's cold glazing of the balls of vision, nor the meaninglessness in the look of the mouth, as though it had been some wild man's carving of a grin on an idol, neither human nor yet of the beast most sickening. The deep and subtle horror I found in that face was there through fancy of the terrific ocean solitude it had floated in, the icy surge that had tossed it, the pitiless stars which had looked down upon it, the roaring blasts of sleet and hail which had thundered over it.

I put the pictures together with a shudder and a face contorted by the pain and imaginations of the sight, and in silence handed them to Mr. Hoskins. Both men waited for me to speak. I stopped to fetch a few breaths, then said:

'This poor girl is not Miss Otway.'

'She is my daughter!' exclaimed the old man, again holding up the pictures to view them. 'Oh, my poor child!'

The canary began to sing loudly; the silencing of it enabled Captain Strutt to turn his back upon us. It was indeed moving to see that old man with his wet cheeks and talking inarticulate underlip, looking at the two portraits. He placed them in his pocket after a minute or two, then, pulling off his glasses, smiled faintly at me and said:

'The grief is mine, you see, sir.'

'And still mine, Mr. Hoskins,' I replied. 'Since that is your child you certainly know where she is, and therefore what has become of her; but what can any man tell of Miss Otway? She was dear to me, aye, even as she was to you,' said I, pointing to the breast of his coat where the pictures lay. 'We were to have been married—oh, pray think, sir! the news they brought home, the last news of her, told me of her as abandoned with two companions in a dismasted hull in the wildest ocean in the world—amongst the ice—heavenly God!' I cried, springing to my feet, am I to believe her as that poor girl is—but never to know—never to be sure that it was so—that it is so?'

And now I know that the sight of those portraits had wrenched me to the very soul, by speaking of Marie as she might be. This, with the reaction; for it was not my sweetheart who lay at Cape Town. I had felt an instant's joy on the discovery; that was past and it was as before—black uncertainty troubled and thick with a hundred shapeless fears and fancies.

'It's a great pity,' said Captain Strutt bluntly, 'that you didn't know Mr. Hoskins had those pictures. You could have gone ashore at Madeira and got home some time before we arrive at the Cape.'

'Pray what may have convinced you that my poor girl, as described in the papers, was Miss Otway?' said Mr. Hoskins.

I gave him all the reasons: the description, tallying feature by feature, point by point in hair, stature, refinement of features and the like; the letter O on the garment; the serge dress and fur-trimmed jacket. The old gentleman lifted his hands and his gaze with one of his patient gestures and look, now of surprise.

'It is more than remarkable,' he cried; 'it exceeds belief.'

'Your daughter was married and therefore wore a wedding ring,' said Captain Strutt. 'That ring's commonly a tight fit.'

'It was no doubt as Captain Goldsmith wrote,' said Mr. Hoskins, 'the water shrivelled the fingers and the ring slipped off.'

'Miss Otway wore rings,' said I; 'the lady had none. Therefore its having no rings proves nothing. Plunge your warm living hand into ice-cold water, and your tightest ring will wonderfully slacken.'

'True,' said Captain Strutt. 'And still, Mr. Moore, if I was in your place, I shouldn't rest satisfied with the evidence of those portraits.'

'Oh, but Mr. Hoskins and I are agreed,' said I. 'He recognises his child and I know that it is not Miss Otway.'

'It's my intention to exhume the remains—a sorrowful task—if they'll grant me permission,' said Mr. Hoskins. 'Since you must now proceed to the Cape, then, if it would satisfy you to look into the coffin when it is opened, you will be very welcome, sir.'

I thanked him, adding, however, that I could not be more satisfied than I was. And so, after some further conversation, we quitted the captain's private room.

I might have supposed this discovery of the body not being Marie—and I was as convinced of it as though I positively knew she was alive—would have comforted me, helped something towards the cheering of my spirits; instead, I seemed in my heart as much depressed as if the portrait of the dead girl had been hers. This was because, had I known she was dead, the worst would have been reached. But now I was to make a weary journey to the Cape to no imaginable purpose. I was to linger there till a returning steamer sailed, then measure all these leagues of water afresh, to arrive home as ignorant of her fate as though I had never set foot out of London.

During the rest of the passage, which was absolutely uneventful, I held much aloof from the people; I was too low-spirited to join in their conversation and amusements; I begged the captain and Mr. Hoskins to allow my trouble to remain their secret, and they very faithfully obliged me. Captain Strutt would often pace the deck for half an hour at my side, and in such quiet walks our talk nearly always concerned the 'Lady Emma.' He by no means gave me the encouragement I had got from old Robson; he told me honestly that it was as likely as not the three had been taken off the wreck, but advised me not to hope too much in that way after I returned to England, 'because,' said he, 'the news of such a rescue is bound to come to hand soon; things are not as they were forty years ago; you have the telegraph and the steamer and the newspaper. They were wrecked in July,' said he. 'If it was my business, I'd allow eight months, then, hearing nothing, I'd give them up.'

He flatly differed from old Robson's notion of the comparative safety of a dismasted hull amongst icebergs. 'How,' he exclaimed, in a grave wondering voice, 'could any sailorman talk such stuff? It's like his prejudice against the North Pole. What's to hinder a dismasted vessel from being flung against ice, and hammered to pieces? I don't talk to dispirit you, sir, but my reasoning is, if a loss must be a loss, then for God's sake let it be made and have done.'

The 'Cambrian' entered Table Bay, December 13. It was early in the morning, but the sun was already high, and when I went on deck and looked around me, I beheld as flashing and noble a scene of blue water and mountain as this earth has to show. The atmosphere was brimful of white and even splendour, so that the azure of the sky looked cold in it. Wonderful to my eyes was the sight of a gale of wind so local in its fury that freshing confines of the torn water, curved like a line of beach, this side being smooth and glittering, softly fanned with a little air out of the west, where the white light was so lustrous that the leaning sails of the Malay boats flickered in it with a look of frosted silver.

Afar, and marvellously clear cut in their hundred miles of distance, loomed a range of lofty mountains; the fierce wind was blowing out of a glorious white mist which veiled, with falling and ascending draperies of vapour, the greater bulk of the tawny mass on the right; but so marvellously brilliant was the atmosphere through which the gale was rushing, the sense of distance vanished, the huge steep lifting and disappearing in its splendour of mist, drew close, I saw the curves of the cloofs, every wrinkle of broken rock, and patches of the bush, though it was all miles off and high in air. The white houses spread like toys of ivory to the base; and the wide waters of the bay, full of the gleam of the brushing westerly air, and rushing in froth under the shriek and lash of the gale, where the breast of blue rounded to the town, were framed by a sparkling snow-white beach, past which the swelling country showed in reds and greens till the sight died upon the phantom blue of distant heights.

There were no docks in those days, nor can I recollect that they had begun to build the breakwater. We brought up in the splendid weather outside the thrashing storm, but it seemed we were to be kept aboard till the south-easter had blown itself out. Many ships, a few very large and fine, lay straining at their anchors, some within and some without that spray-white sheet of foul weather. I stood at the rail looking at a little barque which lay within easy hail of the voice; Mr. Baynton, chief officer of the 'Cambrian' approached to look at a boat that lay close under alongside. But his seaman's eye went quickly to the barque, and turning to me, he said:

'That's what they call a spouter.'

'A whaler?'

'Yes. She looks it, sir. See the boats at her cranes. What sort of daylight filters through those greasy grimy scuttles in her side, I wonder? She is an American, and draws decently; three years out by the looks of her, fresh from parts where its always too hot or always too cold, and with how many barrels aboard, ha! It's said no seaman thinks anything of a man as a sailor who's learnt his trade in a greaser. For my part I look upon 'em with respect and admiration. What Jack of us all sees the like of their seafaring? Let alone the weather, and that touches the extremes. What magnificent work in boats! what nerve and determination! To think of one of those egg-shells,' said he, nodding at the boats at the whaler's cranes, 'being in tow of a rushing mountain of stinking black flesh, shooting blood and brine sky high, every thrash of the tail a Niagara drench of rearing white water—ha!'

He sucked in his cheeks, blew them out again in a low whistle of admiration, and walked off.

I did not land till four o'clock in the afternoon. Mr. Hoskins, when we parted, put his card into my hand, with an address at Cape Town upon it, and begged me to let him know the house I put up at, that he might communicate in case I should think proper to confirm the revelation of the photographs by an inspection of the remains.

CHAPTER XXIII THE SHIP SEEN ON THE ICE

I was advised against the two or three bad hotels in Cape Town, and whilst in the ship had obtained the address of a boarding-house. It was a comfortable big Dutch-built house, low, without chimneys; it stood in a garden full of moon-lilies, and many lovely flowers, the fairest of them scentless. Here I found a colonel from India for his health, a Dutch couple, and one or two others. From the stoep of this house you saw the grand mass of Table Mountain, seemingly close to; the shadow of its noble bulk seemed to fill the heavens and swell with sensible, usurping presence into the far reaches of the country. I had travelled in mountainous parts in Europe, but never before witnessed such a tyrannous domination as this. The colossal ramparts caught up the whole prospect whilst you looked in a swinging sweep of their length, till 'twas all mountain with the steam-like vapour shredding away from the boiling whiteness atop, and the houses clustering into the base like things of life shuddering back into the giant refuge.

Such were the fantastic notions I got of the thing as I sat, cigar in mouth, on the stoep of the boarding-house on the first night of my arrival. The full moon was shining over the bay. I saw through the trees a space of the silvered waters, with the black figures and lines of ships anchored in the trembling glow, spotting it with their riding lights. The breeze was falling in sighs down the steep and troubling the vegetation into the shedding of some perfume upon the night air; the tinkling of the crickets spread low, like a noise of fairy bells, over the land, surging up in the warm, damp breeze and dying. I heard a band of music in the distance, but the mountain shone upon by the moon and now radiant at the summit with snow-white mist, looked the tranquility of its great face into the night, and the peace of its sublime silence dwelt like a spirit everywhere, to the very height of the stars, down to the waters trembling under the moon.

This rest was grateful and exquisitely refreshing after the ceaseless motions of the ship and the senseless chatter of the engine-room. And yet, though I was but just arrived, I now, after my first meal ashore for many days, sat alone, considering what I should do.

I had learnt at table there were ships in the bay homeward bound, also I was aware and had been long aware that I must wait a month for the next Union steamer to England. I could not, however, bring myself to endure the prospect of sailing home. The voyage by steam had already proved unendurably long; and now I might take shipping under a topsail, make a passage of two months to the line, lie in a month-long trance upon the burnished swathes of the molten silver swell of the Doldrums, then wish myself dead in six weeks of tempest to the Scillies, with a long flounder up Channel to round off all.

Therefore, on this the first night of my arrival at Cape Town, I resolved to return by steam, taking anything in that way which might come from the Indies, or, failing that, then the monthly Union steamer.

The colonel came out of the house with a long cheroot in his mouth, and sat down by my side. He was a man with bland manners, and a sarcastic voice. He talked contemptuously of Cape Town and its people, and cursed the indisposition that had driven him into such a barbarous hole, where you were distempered by bad cooks, poisoned by dreadful smells, maddened by the horns of the coloured costermongers. I was in no temper to hear him and was glad when he got up and strolled off.

Here was I, thousands of miles from home—for what purpose? I was no nearer to Marie! Would she ever be heard of? Was she alive? I looked up at the full moon and asked of God if its splendour rested anywhere upon her.

But then—but then—and my heart ached again as I reflected; it was in July that her ship was dismasted and last heard of, and this was December, almost the middle of it—five whole months! And the hard part was that I should have to live through another interminable period of expectation before reaching home, where alone I must hope to get news. Why, even whilst I sat there, with the two Atlantics between England and me, she might have arrived, or they might have got news that she was coming, and thus was I sure to go on thinking and hoping until I returned—when they would tell me they had heard nothing!

My thoughts went but seldom and lightly to the body of the girl who was resting in her grave somewhere past those trees yonder. She was not Marie. I'd look upon her if the coffin was lifted and Hoskins invited me; but she was not Marie! The wonder and pity of her to my mind now that I had seen the photographs lay in the coincidence of her discovery, and in the ghastly vision of her floating figure—so young and fair as she had been—a fancy of ocean loneliness I could somehow realise better here than at sea, maybe because of the height the lofty shadow of the mountain sent the stars to, its blotting presence widening the scene of heaven by exciting imagination of the magnitude of the hidden slope going over and past it to Agulhas and to where the ice was.

After this, for two or three days, I went about alone, struggling with a mood of depression that discoloured everything I beheld. It robbed all grace of freshness from the beauty and the splendour of the sights which lay about me. My favourite haunt was the waterside, where I'd stand watching the Atlantic comber form, huge and polished, out of the silken swell, arching and rushing onwards in a sparkling bravery of foam and sunlight; but my thoughts were always with Marie, and again and again I'd catch myself sighing as I brought my eyes away from the remote blue distance pass Robben Island.

It was on the fourth day of my arrival, in the afternoon, that strolling slowly under the shade of an umbrella from that part of the waterside close to where the docks now are, I met the colonel who lodged with me in the boarding-house. He turned from gazing at the bay under the sharp of his hand, and approached me.

'Were you ever aboard a whaler?' he asked.

'Never,' I answered.

'That ship yonder's a whaler,' said he pointing.

'Yes, I know,' I replied. 'I had a good look at her from the side of the steamer—we lay within a biscuit-toss.'

'I went aboard of her this morning,' said he, causing me to stop by halting and looking towards the vessel as though he would have me observe her whilst he talked. 'She is well worth a visit. Half of her crew are Kanakas, and the remainder Yankees, and a wild, queer, hairy lot they are. The captain's a Quaker, a strange, tall, formal fellow, buttoned up, lean and yellow, and thee's and thou's you; most unlike a seaman of any I ever saw. He was very civil though, mighty communicative. I sat an hour in his little cabin and 'twas as good as going awhaling to hear him. Such an array of harpoons and lances, decks dark with the mess of blubber boiling—'trying out' the captain called it. If you want to agreeably pass an hour and forget that you're in a land of smells and noise, visit her.'

I answered it was probable I would do so.

'Not that she's a nosegay,' said he, with a short, sarcastic laugh, 'but there's nothing Malay in the odour, nothing Dutch. The captain related an odd incident that happened whilst he was off the Horn, a bit south of it I think.'

Here he stepped out and I strolled by his side, pricking my ears, for there was a magic in the name of Cape Horn that never failed to arrest my attention.

'She'd been fishing in the South Seas and finding no quarry was coming into this ocean. She was running before a strong gale of wind off—I forget the name of the island; it lies south of the Horn. The land, coated with ice, stretched along their starboard beam; the captain had no notion he was so close in. He was looking at the land through his telescope when, in a sudden flaw that thinned the weather out into a momentary brilliance, he caught sight of a large dismasted ship upright on her keel upon a huge projection of ice that fell sheer to the wash of the surf. He reckons the height of cliff on which that hull was poised about thirty feet. How devilish odd! You can figure ships in many situations, but how in ghosts are they going to cradle themselves on an elevation of thirty or forty feet?'

When he said this I stopped dead; a fancy then, at that instant, flashed into me in pang after pang as though every drop of blood in my veins was living fire. It brought me to a stand just as if I had been paralysed, or struck by lightning.

Presently looking at him and rather gasping than speaking, I said:

'A dismasted ship, was it? On an island south of the Horn, did he say? Why, my God, I wonder—I wonder——'

'What's the matter? What's there in this to—— I hope I—— Catch hold of my arm!' exclaimed the colonel, staring at me with astonishment. 'What's it—sunstroke? Not under your umbrella?'

And he directed his aquiline nose and keen blue eyes right up into the sky; then put his arm through mine, and we walked slowly, he meanwhile surveying me askant with every mark of amazement.

After going a little way, during which I thought I should be unable to command my tongue or collect my wits, so heart-staggering had been that leap of fancy in me, I said:

'You have given me an extraordinary piece of news. I am deeply interested in a ship that was abandoned in a dismasted state in the neighbourhood of the Horn.'

'By gad! then,' said he, halting me with a violent, nervous pull at my arm, 'you had better go aboard and get a description at first hand, for the whaler's here to refresh only; she's been in the bay a fortnight and sails to-morrow.'

Without exchanging a word I walked, almost ran, to the waterside.

A number of boats lay rippling close in to the beach. A couple of Malay or Africander boatmen seeing me coming jumped into one of the little craft, and in a few minutes I was being rowed in the direction of the whaler.

It was about half-past four o'clock in the afternoon; the light of the high South African midsummer sun fell on the water in a blaze that made one think of a sky-wide bolt of flame; the scorching heat steamed to the face off the surface in tingling red-hot needles; there was not a breath of air; along the polished surface, breathing with the swell of the sea, slipped the small thunder of the distant surf. We drew close to the whaler and I read her name upon her counter 'Sea Queen, Nantucket.' Her sides were blistered and honeycombed with heat and conflict; her cabin scuttles or windows, in a row of three above her green sheathing, stared in their dirt blearedly across the water, like the eyes of a blind man; a number of seamen of several dyes of complexion and queerly attired overhung the bulwark rails.

She was a little ship of about four hundred tons and looked to be dropping to pieces with use, so deeply was she seamed, so ill were her masts stayed, so rusty and pale was her rigging, so worn and ragged the complexion and suggestion of the canvas heaped clumsily and negligently bound. When the boat was alongside I looked up at a copper-coloured face covered with black prickles of hair, and asked if the captain was aboard.

'Ay,' was the answer.

'I wish to see him on very particular business,' said I.