CHAPTER II
ON BOARD THE ARGUS
HE threw the end of his cigar into the water, and leaning his elbows upon the bulwarks, stared meditatively at the waves.
‘How wearisome they are,’ he said; ‘blue, and green, and opal; opal, and blue, and green; all very well in their way, of course, but three months of them are rather too much, especially—’
He did not attempt to finish his sentence; his thoughts seemed to wander in the very midst of it, and carry him a thousand miles or so away.
‘Poor little girl, how pleased she’ll be!’ he muttered, opening his cigar case, and lazily surveying its contents; ‘how pleased and how surprised! Poor little girl! After three years and a half, too; she will be surprised.’
He was a young man of about five-and-twenty, with a dark face, bronzed by exposure to the sun; he had handsome brown eyes, with a feminine smile in them, that sparkled through his black lashes, and a bushy beard and moustache that covered the whole of the lower part of his face. He was tall, and powerfully built; he wore a loose grey suit, and a felt hat, thrown carelessly upon his black hair. His name was George Talboys, and he was an aft-cabin passenger on board the good ship Argus, laden with Australian wool, and sailing from Sydney to Liverpool.
There were very few passengers in the aft-cabin of the Argus. An elderly wool-stapler,* returning to his native country with his wife and daughters, after having made a fortune in the colonies; a governess of five-and-thirty years of age going home to marry a man to whom she had been engaged fifteen years; the sentimental daughter of a wealthy Australian wine merchant, invoiced to England to finish her education, and George Talboys, were the first-class passengers on board.
This George Talboys was the life and soul of the vessel; nobody knew who or what he was, or where he came from, but every body liked him. He sat at the bottom of the dinner-table, and assisted the captain in doing the honours of the friendly meal. He opened the champagne bottles, and took wine with every one present; he told funny stories, and led the laugh himself with such a joyous peal, that the man must have been a churl who could not have laughed for pure sympathy. He was a capital hand at speculation and vingt-et-un,* and all the merry round games, which kept the little circle round the cabin lamp so deep in innocent amusement, that a hurricane might have howled overhead without their hearing it; but he freely owned that he had no talent for whist, and that he didn’t know a knight from a castle upon the chessboard.
Indeed, Mr Talboys was by no means too learned a gentleman. The pale governess had tried to talk to him about fashionable literature, but George had only pulled his beard, and stared very hard at her, saying occasionally, ‘Ah, yes!’ and, ‘To be sure, ha!’.
The sentimental young lady, going home to finish her education, had tried him with Shelley and Byron, and he had fairly laughed in her face, as if poetry were a joke. The wool-stapler sounded him upon politics, but he did not seem very deeply versed in them; so they let him go his own way, smoke his cigars and talk to the sailors, lounge over the bulwarks and stare at the water, and make himself agreeable to every body in his own fashion. But when the Argus came to be within about a fortnight’s sail of England everybody noticed a change in George Talboys. He grew restless and fidgety; sometimes so merry that the cabin rang with his laughter; sometimes moody and thoughtful. Favourite as he was amongst the sailors, they grew tired at last of answering his perpetual questions about the probable time of touching land. Would it be in ten days, in eleven, in twelve, in thirteen? Was the wind favourable? How many knots an hour was the vessel doing? Then a sudden passion would seize him, and he would stamp upon the deck, crying out that she was a rickety old craft, and that her owners were swindlers to advertise her as the fast-sailing Argus.* She was not fit for passenger traffic; she was not fit to carry impatient living creatures, with hearts and souls; she was fit for nothing but to be laden with bales of stupid wool, that might rot on the sea and be none the worse for it.
The sun was dropping down behind the waves as George Talboys lighted his cigar upon this August evening. Only ten days more, the sailors had told him that afternoon, and they would see the English coast. ‘I will go ashore in the first boat that hails us,’ he cried; ‘I will go ashore in a cockle-shell. By Jove, if it comes to that, I will swim to land.’
His friends in the aft-cabin, with the exception of the pale governess, laughed at his impatience: she sighed as she watched the young man, chafing at the slow hours, pushing away his untasted wine, flinging himself restlessly about upon the cabin sofa, rushing up and down the companion ladder, and staring at the waves.
As the red rim of the sun dropped into the water, the governess ascended the cabin-stairs for a stroll on deck, while the passengers sat over their wine below. She stopped when she came up to George, and standing by his side, watched the fading crimson in the western sky.
The lady was very quiet and reserved, seldom sharing in the after-cabin amusements, never laughing, and speaking very little; but she and George Talboys had been excellent friends throughout the passage.
‘Does my cigar annoy you, Miss Morley?’ he said, taking it out of his mouth.
‘Not at all; pray do not leave off smoking. I only came up to look at the sunset. What a lovely evening!’
‘Yes, yes, I dare say,’ he answered, impatiently; ‘yet so long, so long! Ten more interminable days and ten more weary nights before we land.’
‘Yes,’ said Miss Morley, sighing. ‘Do you wish the time shorter?’
‘Do I?’ cried George; ‘indeed I do. Don’t you?’
‘Scarcely.’
‘But is there no one you love in England? Is there no one you love looking out for your arrival?’
‘I hope so,’ she said, gravely. They were silent for some time, he smoking his cigar with a furious impatience, as if he could hasten the course of the vessel by his own restlessness; she looking out at the waning light with melancholy blue eyes: eyes that seemed to have faded with poring over closely-printed books and difficult needlework; eyes that had faded a little, perhaps, by reason of tears secretly shed in the dead hours of the lonely night.
‘See!’ said George, suddenly pointing in another direction from that towards which Miss Morley was looking, ‘there’s the new moon.’
She looked up at the pale crescent, her own face almost as pale and wan.
‘This is the first time we have seen it. We must wish!’ said George. ‘I know what I wish.’
‘What?’
‘That we may get home quickly.’
‘My wish is that we may find no disappointment when we get there,’ said the governess, sadly.
‘Disappointment!’
He started as if he had been struck, and asked what she meant by talking of disappointment.
‘I mean this,’ she said, speaking rapidly, and with a restless motion of her thin hands; ‘I mean that as the end of this long voyage draws near, hope sinks in my heart: and a sick fear comes over me that at the last all may not be well. The person I go to meet may be changed in his feelings towards me; or he may retain all the old feeling until the moment of seeing me, and then lose it in a breath at sight of my poor wan face, for I was called a pretty girl, Mr Talboys, when I sailed for Sydney, fifteen years ago; or he may be so changed by the world as to have grown selfish and mercenary, and he may welcome me for the sake of my fifteen years’ savings. Again, he may be dead. He may have been well, perhaps, up to within a week of our landing, and in that last week may have taken a fever, and died an hour before our vessel anchors in the Mersey. I think of all these things, Mr Talboys, and act the scenes over in my mind, and feel the anguish of them twenty times a day. Twenty times a day!’ she repeated; ‘why, I do it a thousand times a day.’
George Talboys had stood motionless, with his cigar in his hand, listening to her so intently that as she said the last words, his hold relaxed, and the cigar dropped into the water.
‘I wonder,’ she continued, more to herself than to him�
��‘I wonder, looking back, to think how hopeful I was when the vessel sailed; I never thought then of disappointment, but I pictured the joy of meeting, imagining the very words that would be said, the very tones, the very looks; but for this last month of the voyage, day by day, and hour by hour, my heart sinks, and my hopeful fancies fade away, and I dread the end as much as if I knew that I was going to England to attend a funeral.’
The young man suddenly changed his attitude, and turned his face full upon his companion, with a look of alarm. She saw in the pale light that the colour had faded from his cheek.
‘What a fool!’ he cried, striking his clenched fist upon the side of the vessel, ‘what a fool I am to be frightened at this! Why do you come and say these things to me? Why do you come and terrify me out of my senses, when I am going straight home to the woman I love; to a girl whose heart is as true as the light of heaven; and in whom I no more expect to find any change than I do to see another sun rise in to-morrow’s sky? Why do you come and try to put such fancies into my head, when I am going home to my darling wife?’
‘Your wife,’ she said; ‘that is different. There is no reason that my terrors should terrify you. I am going to England to rejoin a man to whom I was engaged to be married fifteen years ago. He was too poor to marry then, and when I was offered a situation as governess in a rich Australian family, I persuaded him to let me accept it, so that I might leave him free and unfettered to win his way in the world, while I saved a little money to help us when we began life together. I never meant to stay away so long, but things have gone badly with him in England. That is my story, and you can understand my fears. They need not influence you. Mine is an exceptional case.’
‘So is mine,’ said George, impatiently. ‘I tell you that mine is an exceptional case, although I swear to you that, until this moment, I have never known a fear as to the result of my voyage home. But you are right; your terrors have nothing to do with me. You have been away fifteen years; all kinds of things may happen in fifteen years. Now, it is only three years and a half this very month since I left England. What can have happened in such a short time as that?’
Miss Morley looked at him with a mournful smile, but did not speak. His feverish ardour, the freshness and impatience of his nature, were so strange and new to her, that she looked at him half in admiration, half in pity.
‘My pretty little wife! My gentle, innocent, loving, little wife! Do you know, Miss Morley,’ he said, with all his old hopefulness of manner, ‘that I left my little girl asleep, with her baby in her arms, and with nothing but a few blotted lines to tell her why her faithful husband had deserted her?’
‘Deserted her!’ exclaimed the governess.
‘Yes. I was a cornet* in a cavalry regiment when I first met my little darling. We were quartered at a stupid seaport town, where my pet lived with her shabby old father, a half-pay naval officer; a regular old humbug, as poor as Job,* and with an eye for nothing but the main chance. I saw through all his shallow tricks to catch one of us for his pretty daughter. I saw all the pitiful, contemptible, palpable traps he set for big dragoons* to walk into. I saw through his shabby-genteel dinners and public-house port; his fine talk of the grandeur of his family; his sham pride and independence, and the sham tears in his bleared old eyes when he talked of his only child. He was a drunken old hypocrite, and he was ready to sell my poor little girl to the highest bidder. Luckily for me, I happened just then to be the highest bidder; for my father is a rich man, Miss Morley, and as it was love at first sight on both sides, my darling and I made a match of it. No sooner, however, did my father hear that I had married a penniless little girl, the daughter of a tipsy old half-pay lieutenant, than he wrote me a furious letter, telling me he would never again hold any communication with me, and that my yearly allowance would stop from my wedding-day. As there was no remaining in such a regiment as mine, with nothing but my pay to live on, and a pretty little wife to keep, I sold out, thinking that before the money that I got for my commission was exhausted, I should be sure to drop into something. I took my darling to Italy, and we lived there in splendid style as long as my two thousand pounds lasted; but when that began to dwindle down to a couple of hundred or so, we came back to England, and as my darling had a fancy for being near that tiresome old father of hers, we settled at the watering-place where he lived. Well, as soon as the old man heard that I had a couple of hundred pounds left, he expressed a wonderful degree of affection for us, and insisted on our boarding in his house. We consented, still to please my darling, who had just then a peculiar right to have every whim and fancy of her innocent heart indulged. We did board with him, and finely he fleeced us; but when I spoke of it to my little wife, she only shrugged her shoulders, and said she did not like to be unkind to “poor papa”. So poor papa made away with our little stock of money in no time; and as I felt that it was now becoming necessary to look about for something, I ran up to London, and tried to get a situation as a clerk in a merchant’s office, or as accountant, or bookkeeper, or something of that kind. But I suppose there was the stamp of a heavy dragoon upon me, for do what I would I couldn’t get anybody to believe in my capacity; and tired out, and down-hearted, I returned to my darling, to find her nursing a son and heir to his father’s poverty. Poor little girl, she was very low-spirited; and when I told her that my London expedition had failed, she fairly broke down, and burst into a storm of sobs and lamentations, telling me that I ought not to have married her if I could give her nothing but poverty and misery; and that I had done her a cruel wrong in making her my wife. By Heaven! Miss Morley, her tears and reproaches drove me almost mad; and I flew into a rage with her, myself, her father, the world, and everybody in it, and then ran out of the house, declaring that I would never enter it again. I walked about the streets all that day half out of my mind, and with a strong inclination to throw myself into the sea, so as to leave my poor girl free to make a better match. “If I drown myself, her father must support her,” I thought; “the old hypocrite could never refuse her a shelter, but while I live she has no claim on him.” I went down to a rickety old wooden pier, meaning to wait there till it was dark, and then drop quietly over the end of it into the water; but while I sat there smoking my pipe, and staring vacantly at the sea-gulls, two men came down, and one of them began to talk of the Australian gold-diggings,* and the great things that were to be done there. It appeared that he was going to sail in a day or two, and he was trying to persuade his companion to join him in the expedition.
‘I listened to these men for upwards of an hour, following them up and down the pier with my pipe in my mouth, and hearing all their talk. After this I fell into conversation with them myself, and ascertained that there was a vessel going to leave Liverpool in three days, by which vessel one of the men was going out. This man gave me all the information I required, and told me, moreover, that a stalwart young fellow such as I was could hardly fail to do well in the diggings. The thought flashed upon me so suddenly, that I grew hot and red in the face, and trembled in every limb with excitement. This was better than the water at any rate. Suppose I stole away from my darling, leaving her safe under her father’s roof, and went and made a fortune in the new world, and came back in a twelvemonth to throw it into her lap; for I was so sanguine in those days that I counted on making my fortune in a year or so. I thanked the man for his information, and late at night strolled homewards. It was bitter winter weather, but I had been too full of passion to feel cold, and I walked through the quiet streets, with the snow drifting in my face, and a desperate hopefulness in my heart. The old man was sitting drinking brandy-and-water in his little dining-room; and my wife was upstairs, sleeping peacefully with the baby on her breast. I sat down and wrote a few brief lines, which told her that I never had loved her better than now when I seemed to desert her; that I was going to try my fortune in a new world; and that if I succeeded I should come back to bring her plenty and happiness, but that if I failed I should never look upon her face aga
in. I divided the remainder of our money—something over forty pounds—into two equal portions, leaving one for her, and putting the other in my pocket. I knelt down and prayed for my wife and child, with my head upon the white counterpane that covered them. I wasn’t much of a praying man at ordinary times, but God knows that was a heartfelt prayer. I kissed her once and the baby once, and then crept out of the room. The dining-room door was open, and the old man was nodding over his paper. He looked up as he heard my step in the passage, and asked me where I was going. “To have a smoke in the street,” I answered; and as this was a common habit of mine, he believed me. Three nights after this I was out at sea, bound for Melbourne—a steerage* passenger, with a digger’s tools for my baggage, and about seven shillings in my pocket.’
‘And you succeeded?’ asked Miss Morley.
‘Not till I had long despaired of success; not until poverty and I had become such old companions and bedfellows, that, looking back at my past life, I wondered whether that dashing, reckless, extravagant, luxurious, champagne-drinking dragoon could have really been the same man who sat on the damp ground gnawing a mouldy crust in the wilds of the new world. I clung to the memory of my darling, and the trust that I had in her love and truth, as the one keystone that kept the fabric of my past life together—the one star that lit the thick black darkness of the future. I was hail fellow well met with bad men; I was in the centre of riot, drunkenness, and debauchery; but the purifying influence of my love kept me safe from all. Thin and gaunt, the half-starved shadow of what I once had been, I saw myself one day in a broken bit of looking-glass, and was frightened of my own face. But I toiled on through all; through disappointment and despair, rheumatism, fever, starvation, at the very gates of death, I toiled on steadily to the end; and in the end I conquered.’
He was so brave in his energy and determination, in his proud triumph of success, and in the knowledge of the difficulties he had vanquished, that the pale governess could only look at him in wondering admiration.
Lady Audley's Secret (Oxford World's Classics) Page 7
