Читать книгу Abandoned - W Clark Russell - Страница 5

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NEXT day, shortly after twelve, Captain Reynolds called at Chepstow Place. He was shown into the parlour, and Mrs. Lane speedily arrived. She was pale and agitated. When this poor woman's spirits were fluttered she could not keep her seat, but flitted about the table, lifting a pinch of her dress and pinning it to the table's side, so to speak, as though she would fasten herself securely.

"Well," said Captain Reynolds, with profound anxiety, "what does Creeshie say?"

"I am sorry to answer that she is as obstinate this morning as she was yesterday. Indeed she is firmer and harder. She will not listen to me. She declares, in the most imperious way, that she will not live with you."

Reynolds' face darkened as though to a sudden scowl of the sky. He held a stick in his right hand. He raised it to his left hand and broke it with an unconscious and obviously involuntary effort, looked at the pieces, and threw them into the grate. The strength of the stick, the ease with which it had been broken, the mood the action expressed, frightened Mrs. Lane, who pinned her pinch of gown to the edge of the table half a dozen times in as many seconds.

"Can you, as her mother, give me any idea why she will not live with me?" said Captain Reynolds.

"None—none whatever," answered Mrs. Lane, shaking her head.

"Has she explained her reasons for refusing?"

"No. She told me that the change came over her whilst she was dressing for the marriage. It worked in agony in her, but failed to give her resolution enough to decide not to go to church. All the rest of her words may be summed up in her one determined remark, 'I do not mean to live with him.'"

He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out an envelope containing perhaps half a dozen letters. He replaced the envelope without looking at its contents.

"I was reading them," he said, "last night. They are a few that I like to carry about with me. She calls me her darling, and tells me that she is mine. One letter, not a fortnight old"—he pressed his hand upon the pocket containing the envelope as though his heart, that beat close under, was paining him—"is full of love, of everything that a man could wish to read in a letter from a woman he is shortly to marry. What have I done to deserve this treatment? What have I been guilty of that she should take her love and her marriage vows away from me? Is she at home?"

"Oh yes; but do not attempt to see her," cried the mother.

"But why not? Why mightn't the very sight of me induce a change in her, and bring about what you must wish, surely?"

Again his brow was dark, as though his face was shadowed by a thunder squall in the sweep of the wind over a heaving deck at sea.

"She knows you were coming. Had she wished to see you she would have said so. Her threat to poison herself haunts me like a nightmare. I know she is in that state of mind when she could commit some frightful, heart-breaking act if you attempted by roughness, or command, or any other manner you might adopt to bend her mind, which is now as rigid as that poker."

The little woman spoke with unusual energy. Conviction of the truth of her views compacted her reasoning faculties and supplied ideas and words to her tongue.

"Will you go and tell her that I am here, that I wish to see her if only for five minutes," said Captain Reynolds.

"Oh yes; but I know what her answer will be," answered Mrs. Lane, moving to the door as though she was weary, and she went upstairs, whilst Captain Reynolds stood at the window, with his arms folded and his lips set, as though his teeth were clenched behind them.

Mrs. Lane was at least a quarter of an hour absent, and at every sound Captain Reynolds started, and looked, and listened. When at last the old lady returned, he stared beyond her, but she was alone. She began to pin her dress to the table as rapidly as her fingers could work, whilst she exclaimed—

"I knew how it would be. She went to her bedroom and locked me up with her, and then turned me out and locked herself in again; and she swears that the thought of living with you is dreadful to her. She would rather die, and as I am sure she has poison hidden in her bedroom, she will kill herself if you persist."

She burst into tears.

"Good-bye, Mrs. Lane. I don't know when we shall meet again," said Captain Reynolds; and, taking his hat from a chair, he walked out of the house.

He repaired to the hotel at which he had slept, and wrote a letter of six pages to his wife. The letter was lighted with flashes of sentiment. It was moving with impassioned appeal. It teemed with memories of kisses and endearments, of promises, vows, and hopes; he described his life of loneliness on board ship, and asked her why she had abandoned him; why she refused to know him as her husband, when in a few weeks his ship would be sailing; when in a few weeks the solitude and the desolation of the ocean would be his, without the light and love of her spirit to brighten the hours of the solitary watch on deck, to set up a beacon of home upon which he could keep his eyes fixed, which should be as a star to him to bring him round the world of waters to his love.

He posted this letter, though it was written within a few minutes' walk of Chepstow Place; and making his way to a cab-stand, got into a hansom, and told the man to drive to Mr. Turnover, solicitor, in a street out of Holborn. Mr. Turnover had acted for Captain Reynolds in a lawsuit which arose through a collision at sea. He was a bald, bland, little old man, with streaks of faded yellow whisker, gold-framed spectacles, dressed in the rusty black that Charles Lamb loved; and had he worn shoes with bows you would have thought him shod in keeping. They shook hands, and Captain Reynolds, sitting down, told his story.

"It is certainly a very singular case," said Mr. Turnover. "There is one celebrated case of the sort but it differs from yours because the parties had, apparently, agreed to separate at the church door. The husband, if I remember aright, left the country, and on his return after some years, claimed his wife, who refused to live with him; on which he kidnapped her and locked her up."

Reynolds frowned and looked at Mr. Turnover steadfastly.

"Her friends obtained access to her; her case was brought before the Courts, who decided that by the law of England a man has no right to detain his wife against her will."

"Is that so?" said Captain Reynolds.

"Quite so," responded Mr. Turnover. "The husband must not use force. If he does the law will punish him."

"But is not there such a thing as restitution of conjugal rights?" inquired Captain Reynolds.

"Yes; but in your case, as in the other, no rights were ever established by co-habitation; there is therefore no infraction upon which to base an appeal for restitution."

"Good God, what extraordinary laws we have in this country!" exclaimed Captain Reynolds.

"But I am quite sure, rights or no rights," said Mr. Turnover, "that you would never get a judge to sanction the detention of your wife by force and against her will."

"What would you call force?"

"Imprisoning her in her home and setting a guard over her."

"What do you advise me to do, Mr. Turnover? I am in love with my wife. I was, as I have told you, yesterday married to her in the presence of her mother and others. I am legally entitled to possess her."

"Yes, but even in post-nuptial arrangements there must be two to a contract," said Mr. Turnover, blandly. "It seems to be a case of perversity—a mood, let us hope, that will pass. I once said to Mrs. Turnover, I compare man and wife to a mill and stream: the mill turns one way and the stream runs the other. But betwixt them both the grain is ground."

"Not in my case," said Captain Reynolds, grimly.

"Are you leaving the country?"

"Yes."

"Shortly?" asked Mr. Turnover.

"I sail in command of a ship on October 8 next."

"Your wife may come round between this and then," said Mr. Turnover. "Her mother, I presume, is well disposed to you?"

"Oh yes. She is bitterly cut up by her daughter's conduct."

"I am pleased to hear that," said Mr. Turnover. "Often in these matrimonial troubles the mother-in-law is as the snake that lies coiled round the stem of the flower that hides it. Some mothers do not like to part with their daughters. They are unwholesomely and unnaturally jealous of the husbands, especially if the marriage was in opposition to their wishes, or ambitions, or, I regret to say, interests. If I were you I would trust your mother-in-law to help you with her influence, and leave the rest to the good sense of your wife."

Captain Reynolds paid the lawyer his fee and left the office, having got as much value for his money out of the Law as most men commonly receive who deal with it.

Who was Captain Reynolds? And who was Mr. Featherbridge? One of these men fills an important part in this sea drama, and whilst the captain sits over a chop and half a pint of sherry in an old inn in Holborn, thinking of how, by rights, he should be enjoying life with a handsome young wife in Scotland, and what he must do to get hold of her, we will expend a few minutes in some account of him and the other.

Reynolds was the son of a gentleman farmer, who fared ill on the goodly fruits of the earth in Essex. He received a middling education to the age of fourteen, when he was sent to sea as an apprentice in a sailing-ship in the English Merchant Service—vulgarly called the Mercantile Marine. He rose to command several tramps in sail and steam and two mail steamers; but having run into a ship in a fog he lost his berth in the company he served, though he saved his certificate and was glad to accept the command of a sailing vessel called the Flying Spur of one thousand tons, owned by Mr. George Blaney of Leadenhall Street. She was bound to Poposa, a port in Chili, some distance north of Valparaiso, and her very commonplace cargo would consist of bricks, coke, and coal, and of nitrate of soda on her return voyage.

Reynolds had saved a few hundred pounds, but he would have found (if questioned) no justification in his occupation or prospects for marrying: which was doubtless his reason as a sailor for getting married. He had hoped on his return from this next trip to take his wife to sea with him on a voyage, then establish her in a little home in some district where rent was cheap and where her mother might live with her during his absence. But what are the expectations of man? He certainly never, amidst his most gilded and expanded dreams of the future, could have conceived himself sitting, on the day following his marriage, over a chop and half a pint of sherry in Holborn, a more lonesome man than Daniel at his pulse, or Crusoe over a kid steak.

Mr. Featherbridge was the son of a schoolmaster, and learning had been applied to him when a boy at more ends of his person than one. He had been caned by the paternal hand into a considerable knowledge of Latin, which was irremediably lost on his first voyage when beating down the English Channel, and a liberal equipment of mathematics, which he preserved, and which helped him in after years in passing his sundry examinations. He, too, like Reynolds, had been sent to sea as an apprentice, and they had been shipmates on several occasions; indeed Reynolds had a warm liking for Mr. Featherbridge, and when his friend served under him as second mate he dropped the dignity and importance of command though he was extremely reserved to the mate, and walked the deck with Featherbridge in his watch and talked to him with the pleasantness and candour of a brother. Thus it happened, when he obtained command of the Flying Spur he sent a line to Featherbridge offering the berth of mate of the ship, and we now understand why it should have been that Mr. Featherbridge was Captain Reynolds' best man at his marriage.

It will be supposed that Captain Reynolds was careful that his wife should know his address. He received no answer to his letter dated at the hotel in Bayswater. He took a lodging near the Millwall Docks, where his ship was loading, and made a second impassioned appeal to his wife, and he also wrote to Mrs. Lane, entreating her to help him by using her influence with her daughter, and telling her that his heart was aching for Lucretia, and that it must break with grief at sea if she made no sign before he departed, as he would be able to think of nothing but his wife.

Mrs. Lane answered in a letter expressed in affectionate language, but could give him no hope. Lucretia was as chilling and determined as ever she had been, and reddened with impatience and temper if her mother hazarded the subject of her husband. Mrs. Lane thought that the extraordinary mood which possessed Lucretia had not had time to be modified by thought, by recurrence of emotion which could not have perished, by the sense of dutifulness and loyalty which might visit her when she reflected upon her marriage vows. She strongly advised Frank not to dream of calling, as another visit could only end in a deeper degree of obduracy, and, personally, such a visit as he had last paid was so trying that she felt she had neither the strength nor the nerve to confront such another experience.

So Captain Frank Reynolds found himself completely blocked out from the avenue at the extremity of which, on the pedestal of sentiment, irradiated by the rosy light of his passion, stood the cold, chaste statue upon whose finger he had passed the ring which made her his, though there was no piece of sculpture in England at that time, though there was no picture of a beautiful woman hanging upon any wall in the country, more distant and hopeless to the yearning of love, to fruition of desire, than the wife whose parrot cry was, "I will not live with Captain Reynolds!"

On Tuesday, October 7, Mrs. Lane and Lucretia were at table in Chepstow Place finishing lunch. It was about half-past one, the day very bright and the air fresh, but the hearth trappings of the summer still decorated the grate in that little parlour. Lucretia was dressed in grey cloth that closely fitted her figure, and expressed its ripeness and beauties: her hair was dressed high in the Greek style, and it shone upon her brow in a neglect of red-gold threads, the effect of which no artist in hair-dressing could have produced. She was somewhat pale, and her looks were cold, but her fine eyes were alight with the strong spirit that was her husband's despair, and you witnessed the nerve-character of the woman in the long white fingers with which she dismounted a beautiful Persian cat from her right shoulder, on to which it had sprung without eliciting a scream or causing a start.

The house bell rang and the knocker clattered. It was natural that Mrs. Lane should exclaim, "Who can that be, I wonder?" and turn her head to look out of window, though of course the person at the hall door would be invisible to her.

The servant came in, and said to Mrs. Lane, "Mr. Featherbridge would like to see you, m'am."

"Where is he?" hissed Lucretia.

The servant slung her head sideways to intimate that he was in the passage.

"In the drawing-room!" hissed Lucretia, screwing her thumb up at the ceiling.

"What can he want?" inquired Mrs. Lane, as though she addressed a ghost.

"Go to him, mother!" said Lucretia, "I shall be in my bedroom." She paused to add, "But make him clearly understand that my mind as regards living with Frank is absolutely made up. It is impossible." And with something that resembled a shudder of disgust in an instant's convulsion of her form she went from the room, a very Hermione of a figure.

Mrs. Lane, with an expression on her face that reflected the prophetic promise of her soul to her of trouble, mounted the staircase and entered the drawing-room. Mr. Featherbridge stood at the round table in the middle of the apartment, bearded, slow eyed, yet with alertness in the suggestion of his legs. He bowed to the old lady with the funeral solemnity of an undertaker, and indeed had he been receiving pounds a week for the talent of his face, he could not have looked more solemn and afflicted.

"I am sorry to be the bearer of ill news," he said, on which Mrs. Lane laid her hand upon her heart. "Indeed, I wish I could call it ill news." He gazed at her wistfully. "Your son-in-law, Captain Reynolds, has met with a terrible—a frightful accident! Yesterday he fell through the main hatch into the hold of his ship, and is so injured that he is dying, and may be dead before I can return to him!"

"Oh, goodness me, how shocking!" cried Mrs. Lane, breathing quickly. "Dying, do you say?"

"He may be dead as I talk to you," answered Mr. Featherbridge. "Look at this!" he added; and he drew out a letter, which he gave to Mrs. Lane, who immediately groped behind her for her spectacle case, and put on her glasses with hands which shook as though she had been running down a hill. The letter went thus—

"Hours of Consultation—

10 a.m. to 1 p.m.

"20, Gloucester Road, Gravesend,

October 7, 1890. "I have examined Captain Francis Reynolds, and find him suffering from a compound fracture of the left leg, from fracture of the skull, and also from fracture of three or four ribs on the left side. He is severely collapsed, and this points to some internal hemorrhage, probably from rupture of the liver or kidney, but he is too ill to stand more minute examination, so I cannot state definitely which is the injured organ. It is quite impossible to remove him to hospital, and I fear that he will not live for more than about ten or twelve hours. "H. PAGET-SYMES, F.R.C.S."

"Poor fellow, oh poor fellow!" whined Mrs. Lane. "Who is seeing to him?"

"I got a professional nurse last night from Gravesend," answered Mr. Featherbridge, receiving the letter, and viewing Mrs. Lane with his slow melancholy stare. "He is sensible, and his dying request is that he must see his wife, and I have come to ask her to accompany me to the ship to say good-bye for ever, and to give him that one kiss which will send the poor fellow to his rest with a smile upon his face."

"Oh, she ought to go! She will go, I am sure," cried the widow. "It must be her atonement. Oh, how shocked she will be! Give me that letter!"

And with a respiration full of sobs, due rather to nerves than to the mind, for consciousness had scarcely yet time to absorb the full horror of the report, she went to her daughter's bedroom. She broke into it rather than walked in.

"What has he come to say?" asked Lucretia.

"Read that!" answered Mrs. Lane, handing the certificate to her daughter.

Lucretia's cheeks paled into the aspect of white wax as she read.

"How horrible! How awful!" she exclaimed, as the surgeon's certificate sank in her hand to her side. "Where is he?"

"Why, at Gravesend," sobbed Mrs. Lane. "No, on board his ship, I suppose. You see, the man says he couldn't be moved. He may be dead whilst I am talking to you."

"Was he conscious when Mr. Featherbridge left him?" asked Lucretia, with an incomparable expression of horror and fear in her face.

"I suppose he was," blubbered Mrs. Lane; "because he sent Mr. Featherbridge to ask you to come and see him to say good-bye—for ever—good-bye. It is most awful!"

The sentiment that had induced Lucretia to accept Frank's hand, to sweeten into a smile under the pressure of his lips, nay to impel her to the altar with him, faithless in fidelity, an egoistic loyalty that was ignobly treacherous to her lover and husband, this sentiment was stirring in her as she held the letter listening to her mother.

"Come down and see Mr. Featherbridge!" said Mrs. Lane.

She left the room, and Lucretia followed. Mr. Featherbridge slightly bowed.

"Do you think there is no hope?" exclaimed Lucretia.

"Absolutely none," said Mr. Featherbridge. "You have read that letter?" he added, sending a glance at the certificate in her hand.

"Is he sensible?" asked the wife.

"At intervals," was the answer. "He sent the nurse to me this morning, and asked me to go to you and bring you to him to say farewell. I hope you will come. It is a sudden and shocking end, and I trust, Mrs. Reynolds, that you will not make this event more heart-breaking than it is by refusing his dying request."

"You must go—you must indeed, Lucretia," cried Mrs. Lane. "I'll go with you. If people should get to hear that your husband was dying and you refused to go and see him, what would they think? What would be said? I should not be able to show my face. I should be ashamed to meet my friends, and oh, what an awful memory for life for you! I'll go and put on my bonnet."

"I do not think your presence would be advisable, Mrs. Lane," said Mr. Featherbridge, in his slow way. "The meeting would be sacred. He loves you, I know, but it is not you that he wants. Such a meeting might be overwhelming if you made one, and how—and how——" He looked in a formative sort of way at Lucretia, "I mean," he went on, "that something might be said which could not, and therefore would not, be said if witnesses—even if you, Mrs. Lane, were present."

"Well, will you go and get ready, Lucretia?" said Mrs. Lane.

"How long is it to Gravesend?" inquired Lucretia, glancing at the clock, but always preserving her marble-white face of horror and fear, in which there was now subtly mingled an expression which told of the woman's heart beating a little in love and much in pain.

Mr. Featherbridge drew out a railway guide from his pocket

"A train leaves Charing Cross at a quarter to three," he said. "We can catch that, if you'll kindly not delay. A train leaves Gravesend at 6.40. You can easily be home again by nine or half-past, and I will do myself the honour to see you to this house."

"I shall be ready in five minutes," said Lucretia, and quitted the drawing-room.

"The poor fellow has felt Mrs. Reynolds' abandonment dreadfully," said Mr. Featherbridge. "God forbid that I should do him an injustice, but this fall in the hold seems strange; the ship lies motionless at a buoy. Nothing struck him to throw him forward...."

"You don't say so?" whispered Mrs. Lane, in a voice of awe.

"I only hope he may be alive when we reach the ship," said Mr. Featherbridge. "I shall have done my duty by a man who has always treated me as a brother, whose character is as beautiful, loyal, and true as any I have ever heard of in a sailor. Why would not she live with him? She loved him—she must have loved him to consent to be his wife. It was not as though he could give her a title and a great estate, as though there was something outside the mere poor man himself which she was willing to wed."

"Oh, Mr. Featherbridge, you wring my heart!" sobbed the widow; and she began to pin her gown to the edge of the drawing-room table.

In five minutes Lucretia appeared in a hat and jacket, and with an umbrella.

"Have you got any change, mother?" she asked.

Mrs. Lane gave her two sovereigns.

"I am ready, Mr. Featherbridge," said Lucretia.

"Give him a fond kiss and my dearest love," said Mrs. Lane, "and tell him—oh, Lucretia, tell him all that you feel and know I would say if I were at his side."

Lucretia went downstairs. Mr. Featherbridge opened the hall door for her; they passed on to the pavement, and Mr. Featherbridge hailed a hansom cab that was passing. They got in and were driven to Charing Cross, which Mr. Featherbridge considered a safer and surer way of reaching their destination in time than if they took the underground railway. Whilst they drove to the station Lucretia asked a few questions about her husband, about his accident, if he suffered much pain, if he had the comforts he required, if there was the least hope of his living. She was very pale; her quivering lip denoted much turbulency of heart. Her eyes were tearless, but they were dull with saddening emotions.

On their arrival at Gravesend they immediately made for the water-side, and Featherbridge hailed a boat The afternoon was fine, a dead calm; a light cerulean mist floated in the atmosphere, and through it the sun darted his beams in tarnished silver sparkles upon the glass-smooth waters. It was the stream of ebb, and the ships at anchor pointed their bowsprits up river. A large and brilliant mail steamer lay in midstream waiting for something, with a black man holding a flag perched on the awning astern. The tremors of the stream thrilled in harp-like lines through the shadow she floated on and defaced the beauty of that piece of mirroring. The breast of river bore its familiar burden of ships coming, of ships going: all sorts of ships, lofty steamers, lofty square rigs in tow, and the water was a mosaic of tints with the reflection of divers coloured canvas hanging at yard or gaff from one shape or another, straining at anchor or buoy, and all looking one way.

"That's the ship!" said Mr. Featherbridge, as the waterman dipped his oars.

He pointed to the Flying Spur. The marine eye easily perceived that she was something old-fashioned: a composite ship, metal ribs and timber frame with a handsome cutwater and old-fashioned figure-head, and elliptical stern, and a white band running round her, broken by painted ports. Her masts were lofty and well stayed—that is, her long topgallant masts had that faint curve forwards from the slight slant aft of the lower masts and topmasts which was admired as a beauty in the old frigates. She was ready for sea; sails furled on the yards, all running rigging rove: a stout comely ship on the whole, one that had done good service to other owners in her time, and was then bought cheap, as she lay capable of shifting without ballast in the West India Docks, by one George Blaney of Leadenhall Street. The boat arrived alongside: steps dangled from the gangway.

"I can mount by myself, thanks, if you will hold my umbrella," said Lucretia; and Mr. Featherbridge, remaining in the boat, could not but admire Mrs. Reynolds' fine figure as she lay hold of the ladder and ascended.

She put her foot on the gangway and stepped on to the deck, and Mr. Featherbridge, bidding the waterman wait, was immediately at her side. He had grown pale on a sudden, and an expression of nervousness was visible in his face. No doubt he was dreading the effect upon the wife's mind of the dreadful wreck her husband presented: bandaged, stained, broken, dying, or dead! He gave her the umbrella, and led the road to the companion-way, for this was a ship with under-deck accommodation. Some of the crew were at work about the deck. Some looked to be loafing on the forecastle head, gazing gregariously at the shore. There is nothing more loafing or lounging than a sailor's posture when he leans over the headrail sucking a pipe.

The mate, Mr. Featherbridge, conducted Lucretia down the companion-steps into a tolerably well-lighted interior: a sufficiently roomy cabin containing five berths, of which one on the starboard side was the pantry, a table and chairs, a swing tray or two, and that was about all. A young man, evidently the cabin servant, was polishing some glasses. The mate peremptorily ordered him to drop the job and go on deck. Lucretia was trembling. This was a new world to her, a singular unimaginable scene, a strange atmosphere with its old marine smells and the giant shaft of mizzen-mast piercing the upper and then piercing the lower deck, the coffee-coloured bulkheads, the light troubled in the skylight by the glass's protection of brass wire, the tell-tale compass in the ceiling over the head of the table: all this was penetrated by the presence or knowledge of anguish if dying, of horror and misery if dead.

Mr. Featherbridge went to the door of a cabin which was clearly the largest, and filled nearly the whole of the space aft, and opening it just a little way, enough to admit of the passage of a human figure, he asked Lucretia to step in: then instantly closed the door, softening to his own ear the shriek which followed the wife's entrance.