 CHAPTER IV A CHANGE OF MIND The cabin servant, as we have seen, knocked upon the door of Lucretia's birth, but obtained no reply. He applied his knuckles more boisterously, and Captain Reynolds turned in his chair at the head of the table to look and listen. "'Doesn't she answer?' he exclaimed, springing up. He tried the handle and strained the door with his shoulder. The key was turned in the lock. Reynolds smote the door four or five times with his fist, crying, "'We must force this door if you will not unlock it!' and this he shouted in his strong, stern note of command. His face changed when the silence continued beyond a few seconds. He cried with a swiftness of alarm. Go forward and tell the boss until a aft at once with tools to force this door. John sprang up the companion steps as though driven by a bayonet. The ship's pitching and tossing filled the interior with all sorts of noises, and though Reynolds bent his ear in such passion of attention as rose to pain, no sounds that he could attribute to the lips of Lucretia reached him. "'I hope to God nothing has come to her,' said he, to Mr. Featherbridge, who had risen from his meal, and was standing beside his Captain and friend. She has not been seen all the morning, sir. "'She has not come on deck,' said the Captain. She breakfasted, and John reported her to me as all right. But whilst he spoke Lucretia's threat to her mother to poison herself if her husband attempted force or broke through the door, recurred to him. And before the bosson arrived, the man's heart was wild with anxiety and apprehension. The daylight in the companion-way was eclipsed by the intervention of a figure, and down came the bosson, who was also the ship's carpenter. A sturdy seaman named Martin Webb, whose eagle nose stood out like a flying jib betwixt a pair of whiskers standing from his cheeks like the frill of an enraged hen going open-beaked at another. "'As quick as you can, Webb,' said the Captain. And after a few sounds resembling the hammering of the old-fashioned carpenter before the old-fashioned anchor falls from the old-fashioned cat-head and fills the hollow forecastle with the roaring of iron links and an iron eye, the door flew open and Reynolds rushed in. "'What did he? What did the others, who stood in the doorway, behold? Merely a woman with dark red hair and a face of the pallor of virgin wax, lying in a bunk under an eider-down quilt with half-closed eyes, motionless in the prostration of that dire distemper sea-sickness. The wash-basin was on the deck beside her bunk. One arm overhung the bunk-board, and the hand, with its long, nervous fingers, was suspended just above the deck, and looked as though shaped from the petals of the moon-lily. Reynolds knelt by her side. She was not dead, but she was scarcely conscious, and the whites of her eyes visible past the lashes of the half-sealed lids, made of her face such a counterfeit presentment of death as might have misled a skilled medical inspection. The husband felt the pale, cold hanging wrist and found a thin pulse in it. Then, lifting the hand and placing it upon the eider-down, he turned his head and asked Featherbridge for a wine-glass of brandy and water, which was immediately procured and given to him. Notting at the fiddles on the toilet-table, he told Featherbridge to bring him that bottle of Oda Cologne. He put his arm, with a wonderful tenderness of love and sympathy, under his wife's head, and succeeded in draining some brandy and water through her lips, and extending his handkerchief to Featherbridge, he bade him soket with Oda Cologne, and this he put to his wife's forehead, kneeling beside her, watching, and now waiting. My poor sweet he thought, alone and so ill, almost dying. Oh, why, dearest, you wish to abandon me? He told Featherbridge to finish his meal and close the door upon him, to relieve the second mate, and to instantly report if a shift of wind happened, as he would get under way forthwith. And he was left alone with his wife, whose lips he kissed, whose hair he smoothed, whose hand he caressed. Until in about half an hour she exhibited some signs of returning animation. The white lids lifted, and the rich brown irises rolled down, but fireless, though with a little life of wonder in them when the shape of her husband filled their horizon. Throughout that afternoon he hung over his wife, never suffering the tenderness of his ministering to be affected by her silence. That silence which is more irritating than a sneer, as an expression of the aversion she sought to render as manifest as Nagia would permit, of the wounding and inflaming nature of her resolution to release herself from him, and preserve this severe chastity of the beautiful, passionless, faithless, and cruel ego which she doted on, and whose deliciousness was not likely to cloy her. No, the sweet idea of her purity was not to sicken her soon, if ever, and there was his deception to resent and his outrage on her liberty to punish. Never once would she answer him, though his few appeals to her to be his wife were most affecting with his pity for her sufferings, and eloquent with his love for her, and sweet with his contrition for the trick which had betrayed her to her honourable place by his side. She did not know where the ship was. She would naturally bring the ignorance of his schoolgirl to the sea. What could she have told you about the English Channel? Had she been informed that the town of Deal which she had visited when spending a fortnight at Ramsgate was within a twenty minutes' pull, she would not have been too seasick to have demanded her release, to have raged in her request to be put ashore. But the vessel was rolling and pitching, and Lucretia was convinced that the flying spur was miles out of sight of land upon the ocean, sailing on a voyage of which the contemplation was like that of eternity. Towards sundown Captain Reynolds sent for some tea, cake, and thin bread and butter, and placed the tray by her side. She would not look at him. She would not speak to him. No corpse could have been more mute under the grief stricken gaze of the mourner. He went to the door with a dark face, and removing the key from the lock turned to her and said, I would not advise you to bolt yourself in. At sea tragic surprises come any moment. If we should be run into so that the ship might easily found her in five minutes, how are you to be rescued if you shoot this bolt or turn this key and are too ill to leave your bunk or lie in ignorance of what is happening? He paused to hear if she would answer. Her response was a sneer and a diligently averted gaze. With a heavy sigh and a hot heart he walked out and went on deck. This man had dreamt of a long honeymoon on the ocean. He and Lucretia would have watched the sunset together. He would have explained to her the heraldry of the sky, talked of eyeless fish and water three miles deep. She would have viewed with him the moon-like bleakness and desolation and lifelessness of the iceberg. He would have instructed her in the causes of the colors of the ocean. Why it is green or gray or blue or black? In his handsome young wife he knew that he could and she had been willing, have found a companion whose intellect was capable of translating the pictures she viewed into a wide poetic and romantic meaning. Such behavior as hers, such a disappointment as his, might well clothe the manliest and most cheerful spirit in crepe and deeply black-edged the remaining pages in the story of his life. He paced the deck alone, lost in thought. The beacons of the sea were here and there leaping into the dusk from the light-ships off that yellow serpent of shoal called the Goodwins, ashore from the windy headland whence streamed a far-reaching splendor, from the forest-days of moored ships and the familiar red eye of the port lantern whence sliding up channel, dimming yet the shadow that conveyed it, and the familiar green eye stole glimmering down, wan and elusive as a glowworm on a summer evening misty with dew. It was still blowing a fresh moist breeze from the westward of southwest and a starless night was at hand. The waters ran and flickers of froth and broken to sounds of sobbing along the bends, and the tall masts waved in stately measures, growing spectral under the translating wand of the dusk. Featherbridge stood in the waist, leaning upon the rail, gazing shorewards, a riding-light shone on the stay-forward, and shapes of men were on the forecastle, but you heard nothing but the noise of the wind aloft and of streaming waters, and a dreary clattering of booms ill-secured. After many turns Reynolds went to the side of the mate and said, Featherbridge, she is making me the unhappiest man under God. Shall I persevere? Shall I send her ashore? I have her and I tell you that the idea of parting with her is hell to me. Well, sir, answered Featherbridge after a little thinking. As I ventured to tell you when this scheme came into your head, it seemed to me, and I still think, that had you taken this voyage and left her to her mother, you would have found her all you could wish on your return. It is a state of mind that wants time, and I fancy that violence will harden it. Captain Reynolds looked during a considerable interval at the lights ashore, and then, with a stamp of the foot and a slap of his thigh, he burst out vehemently. No, by God! It has given me great trouble to get her. She is with me, and so far as that goes, things are as they ought to be. I'll not part with her. If time is to operate ashore, why not here? Here there is at least the constant appeal of the sight of me, of the knowledge of my presence in the ship. But she ashore and I away? Why, this craze might induce her to take some extraordinary step. Her mother has no control over her. She might enter a convent. Not as a married woman, sir, I think, said the mate with a slow shake of his head. A married woman exclaimed the captain with bitter scorn. Is it the wedding ring? Is it the words uttered by the priests that make a woman married to a man? No, I've got her and I'll keep her. The wind shifted at daybreak. It had slipped well into the eastward of south and was a clear steady breeze. The bosom summoned the crew of the flying spur to get the ship under way. The windlass was manned, and the castanets of the Pauls timed the chorus which accompanied the entrance, link by link, of the cable through the hawspipe. The date was the 10th of October. The morning broke fair, with a fine high sky of feather-shaped clouds. The sea was a magazine of colors and floating life in motion, for all the outward bound vessels were getting their anchors, and the sun-porty delicate pink light upon mounting canvas and leaning shafts of cloths, the dark red sail of the coaster and the white wings of the yacht. Old deal stretched salt and sweet as a fresh mackerel with its wool-white line of surf and its greenish sparkle of window to the risen day-beam. On the flying spur sail by sail was set until the ship was clothed in breasts of cloth, narrowing at each summit, three pyramids with curves of canvas like the seagull's wings between and glowing with the soft purity of untrodden snow in that autumn morning sunshine. When breakfast was on the table, John knocked on Lucretia's door. He was told to enter. Once it appears that the door was not bolted, whilst it could not have been locked as Reynolds had withdrawn the key. The captain was eating some breakfast, and the maid had charge of the ship. The cabin servant, coming out of Lucretia's berth, stepped to Reynolds's side and said, �The lady asks for some tea and dry toast, sir. Is she dressed? Yes, sir, the same as yesterday. She is lying in her bunk. How does she seem? She looks nicely,� answered John. �Get her whatever she wants,� said Reynolds. His brow was heavy with thought as he sat alone eating. It was not difficult to see that some consideration which had suddenly visited him had sunk deep and was perplexing him. There was in his glances from his plate to the bulkheads about him, and up through the skylight that imperious vivacity of eye which tells of his soul and storm and conflict. The lightning of the mind was in his regard. He closed his knife and fork, left his seat, and tapped on his wife's door. �Who's that?� she asked. �I, your husband, Frank.� She did not answer. He turned the handle and walked in. She was seated in the armchair very pale, but sleep and time had discharged the sunken hollow look of nausea, and the very neglect that her hair discovered rendered her the more admirable and pleasing to his sight. When he entered she looked down and stared with riveted eyes upon her lap as though she was in some hypnotic sleep, and the lashes of the lids were impenetrable veils of dark red golden hair. But he observed that she had formed her mouth into a sneer, and there was scorn and wrath in the dishonoring facial expression. It was as though he was a spider or a frog. �Won't you speak to me, Lucretia?� he said. She held her eyes steadily fixed upon her lap, nor did her sneer change by so much as an effect produced by a single touch of the pencil. �Won't you even look at me?� he said again. �Mary, come up, not she.� He stood viewing her for a little with a frown, but as she would not look at him nor speak to him he left the cabin feeling mortally humiliated. Here was conduct that was darting lances into his amour propra and his spirit writhed with the pain of the wounds. The old poet says, �Sweet are the kisses, the endearment sweet, when like desires and like affections meet.� Where was he to find sweetness in this union if she held on as she was? Was he not her husband? Was he not a gentleman? It is true he had brought her into the ship by a stratagem, but surely the love that lay at the root of his action should woo and win forgiveness for a greater offence than that. �On pardon ton culonnème� says the French cynic. �And Lucretia's inexorable resentment, vital even in the prostration of Nagia, was an augury he could not misinterpret. He had used her with a chivalry which the majority of husbands would have held her unworthy of. Moreover, her behavior was belittling him in the eyes of his officers, and the gossip of the strange affair would reach the forecastle, and he understood the character of sailors well enough to imagine that what might be said in that hollow humming sea-parlor with much expectoration and a vast variety of oaths would not contribute greatly to the dignity of command and the requirements of discipline. Once the swelling bosoms of the sails had taken impulse and life from the wind, the flying spur proved herself nimble of heel. She sloped her masts and slanted her cut water, and bit with a keen foretooth into the gleaming curves, filling the air round about her boughs with beauties and miracles. The lightning of foam, the rainbow of the prism, the emerald green and diamond white of gems. At noon the wind headed the ship, and she broke off three points with her yards braced well forwards. Manner was served to Lucretian her cabin, but in the afternoon about half-past three, when her husband was on deck, she made her appearance and stood in the companion-way, holding by the hand that wore her wedding-ring, and stared about her. A very fine form, as Jack at the wheel thought, her eyes dark and glowing like the heavens at night, her lips slightly parted as though in relish of the sweetness of the wind that swept betwixt them. She stepped out and crossed over to Mr. Rolland, the fat, warm- colored, yellow-haired second mate, and addressed him as though her husband had been left ashore, or was dead. In what part of the sea is the ship, she asked. In the English Channel, madam. Are we far from England? There is England yonder, madam, answered Mr. Rolland, with a smile that seemed satirical, but was not, pointing to some blue films hovering over the sea-line on the starboard quarter. Have we left Falmouth? No, madam, we are making for Falmouth. When are we likely to get there? Why, answered Mr. Rolland, looking aloft, the winds drawn ahead and were off our course, and shall have to go about unless the breeze shifts again. So that, said he, with a rather nervous look in the direction of the captain, whose interpretation of this conversation with his wife he did not like to think of. I don't expect we shall reach Falmouth much before late on the thirteenth, or it may be the fourteenth. She looked at the films of land with a hard pale face of resolution, and it was impossible, even for Mr. Rolland, to misobserving that she had arrived at a determination to take a step, and at this time she meant to score. Captain Reynolds was pacing the weather side of the quarter-deck when she arrived. She went to leeward to the gangway so as to remove herself as far from him as possible, without invading the precincts of the sailors' quarters, and she stood with her arms resting upon the bulwark rail, looking at the horizon, or at the forming or dissolving mounds of water, or at two or three colliers in a screw-tramp with raised vows in the outline of a cow lying down. Two sailors were working side by side forward. That they were British and not foreign seamen may be judged by the following sentences that passed between them. My young party that, what's called a piece of all right! She's the old man's wife, answered Bill, meaning by old man, Captain Reynolds. How do you know, says Jim. Ain't she a-treaten of him as if she was? If she warned his wife, and Bill, with a wink, nudges Jim in the ribs. What's she doing here if they don't get on, said Jim. Think he's going to leave the likes of her ashore, answered Bill? He'll wait upon you. Where'd she be when he tarned up? A wife may be like a bad thicken, sights better than the real thing to look at, but you're darsens spendin'. You've got to keep carryin' of it about. Yon's a thicken without much ring in her, you lay. Not even the wedding ring, perhaps, said Jim. Oh, I'll allow you'll find that all right. He'd live in fear of us men. How's the man going to command a ship that can't command a woman? asked Jim. If a woman won't answer her elm, replied Bill, what are you going to do? You bet the old man's tried at hard a port and hard a starboard. And what luffin' to do, and if elm's alley would mix nicely in the byling? I think myself, said he, very gravely, that some women is best left alone. If they prove unmanageable, then turn to and secure the elm, and you'll find the party will take up her own position and ride comfortable. It will be judged from this fragment of conversation the Captain Reynolds had not erred in the anticipation of his four castles' comments. As eight bells, four o'clock, were being struck, Lucretia left the rail at which she had been standing, and walked up to Mr. Rolland, who was in the gangway abreast of her. Captain Reynolds continued to stomp his lonely principality of quarter-deck, betwixt the wheel and the skylight. Of course, exclaimed Lucretia haughtily, you know that I am the Captain's wife. Mr. Rolland, staring at her, stuttered, yes, and instantly looked ill at ease. He was waiting for Mr. Featherbridge to relieve him, and disliked this being talked to by Mrs. Reynolds on the presence of the commander of the ship, whose despotic importance was great enough to ruin him, and the whole estate of this fat and voluntary cynic lay in his calling. I was brought to the ship by a base stratagem, said Lucretia, and I am imprisoned in her as you are easily able to see. I desire to return home to my mother. Will you tell your captain that if he does not allow me to leave the ship at Falmouth, I will ask the sailors to help me to free myself? I will appeal to those men who will not allow a woman to be ill-treated. I have always heard that sailors are warm-hearted, and I beg you to tell Captain Reynolds that unless he liberates me, I will go right amongst his crew there and tell them my story. So saying, she slightly inclined her head, and went towards the companion hatch as Mr. Featherbridge stepped out of it. She darted at him the lightning of her eyes, under the shadow of her frown, and sank down the hatchway out of sight. Mr. Rolland, with a mind slightly muddled, was about to go below to compose himself over a pipe and a book in his bunk, without the first dog-watch, should there not come a call for all hands, Captain Reynolds called him. Mrs. Reynolds has been asking you questions, I think. This second mate colored up an answer that she had. What does she want to know? Where we are, sir. Yes. And how long it will take us to fetch Falmouth? Yes. The fat and purple young man hung in the wind, and after a cough or two, said. She asked me to tell you, and he quoted Lucretia's threat word for word. Is that all? inquired Reynolds, whose expression of face was stern, but calm and rigidity. That's all, sir. Thanks. Mr. Rolland slung to his quarters. The Captain took a few turns, then catching Featherbridge's eye, he invited him to his side by a toss of the head. She'll do at this for another hour, said he. He looked aloft and to windward. Featherbridge, I have formed my resolution. I have made it my mind to send Mrs. Reynolds home when we arrive at Falmouth. I am sure I think you will be acting wisely if you do, sir, answered Featherbridge. She is not to be conquered. She is not to be got at. I could not have believed that her heart was so hard. I make every allowance for her indignation at being trapped, but is there no love in her to help me? Nothing left of the old feeling which induced her to take me? The Captain's voice trembled slightly, but his face continued stern and tranquil, with the tranquility of the marble face whose expression is that of deep resentment and a heart on fire. And in truth it was quite possible for the slow soul of Mr. Featherbridge to suspect in Captain Reynolds a languid motion of mind that must presently harden into aversion. For the elasticity of even such a love as this man bore this woman has its limitations. The tissue's crack, the passion sinks shapeless. It takes another name, and a feeling that may threaten the wreck of two lives replaces the ruined sentiment. I did what I thought it was right I should do, continued Captain Reynolds, and I find that I was mistaken. My blunder arose from an imperfect knowledge of the nature I was dealing with. Could I foresee that the change that has come to her would prove as fixed as though it had been inherent? Which it never was, for so help me God no woman could have been more tender, more sweet, and docile in the privileges she permitted. Many will tell me that I have not acted the part of a gentleman. But I am a man, and I feel as a man, and she has not treated me as I deserve to be treated by her. Featherbridge, you will continue your kindness to the end. I will ask you to see her ashore. No doubt her luggage will have been received at the station before our arrival. He broke off. He could not bring himself to say more. He was unmanned and went to his cabin to collect himself. Throughout that night the ship was a frequent scene of disturbance. The wind headed her off her course, and to prevent her from running now into the coast of France, or now into the coast of England, the captain put her about, an evolution in a merchantman that is commonly attended with great uproar. Men howl upon ropes as they drag at them. The captain shouts, the mate's ball, the ship plunges, staggers, stops and reels. The wind roars and the shrouds. The fingers of the gale sweep the canvas into a slatting like evolving of stones from a case side into a hold. And there is much confusion below of nimble crockery and sliding commodities. When it comes to let go and haul, the four top sail yard swings, the jib sheets leap the stays, the ship leans, and after a pause of thought let's drive her keen tooth into the surge, which parts in slinging and singing masses of giddy splendor, and she is again often away, with her sailors coiling the ropes over the pins, and the captain and mates staring aloft to observe the lay of the yards and the set of the canvas. The scene is one of inextricable complexity to a landsman's eye on a fine day and in summer waters. But in the darkness of an autumn channel moonless night when a strong head sea is running, and the work is to be discharged by two only of the five fallible mortal senses, namely touch and hearing. The scene, or at least as much of it as is visible, takes for the landsman an element of fear, and passengers have been known to go to prayers on their own account when the ship was in the agonies of mainsail hall on a dark night blowing hard, the captain suspecting that the white water on the horizon was breakers, and that he was several leagues out of his reckoning, and the mate convinced that if she hung another minute she would be in irons, and they would have to wear ship, shoal or no shoal. When the flying spur was put about a little before nine on the night of this day we are dealing with, the noise on the deck was so great that Lucretia and her cabin believed the vessel was sinking. The ship, as the helm was put down, met the seas and pitched heavily, the rudder jarred, the tramp of feet overhead was as though all hands were fighting for their lives to get into the boats. Lucretia heard shouts and loud horse ballings, and white with fear, with a heart beating quickly, for she could not but remember what her husband had told her about the ship being run into and sunk in five minutes. She opened the door of her birth, but nobody was in the cabin. It was all hands on deck and John was amongst them. She stood waiting and harkening in the doorway until she grew reassured by the comparative silence on deck and the steady floating motions of the ship, and then John's legs appeared on the ladder, and the man descended. What is the matter? cried Lucretia. We've been putting the ship about, Mum, answered John. What do you mean by that? Laying her on the port tack for another board, Mum. Had he answered her in Chinese he would have been equally intelligible. Is there any danger? she asked. Lord love me, no, Mum. On which she closed the cabin door upon herself, not choosing that her husband should descend and behold her. And then she sat down and cried with rage and other emotions and detested Frank for bringing her into such a situation and vowing whilst she mopped her fine eyes with her pocket handkerchief, that if he did not release her at Falmouth she would go amongst the crew, plead to them to help her to free herself and gain her end or render her husband's situation as captain of the ship impossible. The night passed, a night as has been said of commotion and going about. At the breakfast-table Captain Reynolds asked Mr. Featherbridge to visit his wife and acquaint her with her husband's intention to send her ashore at Falmouth. There had come a shift of wind in the morning watch, and the breeze was so blowing as to allow the ship to look up for her port. The morning sunshine clothed the glass of the skylight with silver brightness. The sea ran with a cradling motion. Through the scuttles you caught a glimpse of the sparkling azure of it. Mr. Featherbridge did not relish his mission, but he faced it like a man, and ascertaining from John after Reynolds had left the table that Mrs. Reynolds had finished her breakfast, he walked to the cabin door of the lady and knocked. Who was that, she wanted to know? Mr. Featherbridge, I have come with a message from the captain. May I enter? She immediately concluded that his errand was in the interests of peace and conjugal felicity. I decline to meet you and beg that you will not come in, she cried. I believe the news I bring is what you will be glad to hear, said Mr. Featherbridge. After a pause during which she thought of the doctor's certificate and the livery of trouble Featherbridge had cunningly warned during his interview with her mother at Chepstow Place, she said, You can come in. He entered, bowed, and said, I have been asked by Captain Reynolds to inform you that you will be put ashore at Falmouth according to your request. She stood holding by the table, swaying her fine figure with the motions of the deck. Her face slightly lightened as though to a sudden brightness of heart, but the expression soon faded. It is about time that Captain Reynolds acted like a man, she said coldly and hotly. Mr. Featherbridge secretly wondered what a clock it would be when Mrs. Reynolds should think a time to act like a woman. The captain expects, says the mate, that your luggage will be at the station, and I shall do myself the pleasure to attend to that and see you off. She curled her lips at him before answering and said, I shall not want to be seen off, thanks. I am quite capable of looking after myself. I shall require some money to pay my fare. I had but two sovereigns which you saw me borrow from my mother. Captain Reynolds will see to that, said Mr. Featherbridge, who thought to himself. If you were the only young woman in England, damn if I had have you! She turned to the scuttle, or little window, in token that the interview was ended, and after a slow look at her, Featherbridge walked out. He went to the captain, who was on deck. She is very willing to go, sir, but she won't allow me to escort her. She wishes to go alone. She shall have her way, answered Captain Reynolds in a hard voice. How does she seem? Quite well, I think, sir. A stubborn soul, a very stubborn soul to bend, said Captain Reynolds as though thinking aloud. Such spirits need but a very little bending to break. I never could have believed it of her or in her. How does she look, do you say? Why, very well, sir. What a fine creature to love and lose, to have and not to be able to hold, continued Reynolds, still talking as though he was thinking aloud. I suppose she and I will never meet again. I wouldn't think such a thing, sir. Oh, my God, look at the chances against our meeting, cried the captain, with a little storm of passion coming into his voice out of his heart. It's not the risks only of our lives at sea. There's her nature, which will hold her aloof, and the longer she remains divorced from me, the severer will grow the quality that keeps her divorced. A child, oh, a little child, something to humanize her, something to look with my eyes and to hers. He stepped to the rail and stared away to see. Featherbridge stood still. The captain returned. I suppose her reception of you was cold, perhaps insulting, said he. The maid answered, No, sir. She says she wants some money. I saw her borrow two pounds from her mother, and she changed one when she insisted on paying for her ticket at Graves End. I'll see to it, said Reynolds. Half an hour later he went below. He had lingered on deck trusting his wife would appear, for he loved to look at her. He entered his cabin, and opening a locker took out a desk which he unlocked, and from a corner of it picked up a small roll of Bank of England notes. He took two five-pound notes and placed them in a blank envelope, then stood hanging over the desk for a little while, musing. For a small parcel of his wife's letters lay there, and they set him thinking. He replaced the desk in the locker, and putting his head out called to John, and told him to give that envelope to Mrs. Reynolds. He then got into his bunk to take some rest, for the night had been full of business for him, and his whole being felt strained. End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 of Abandoned by William Clark Russell This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Terence Taylor Abandoned by William Clark Russell Chapter 5 The Wreck The flying spur anchored at Fulmouth Bay on the noon of October 13, 1890. She had no business at that port. When Mr. Blaney of Letton Hall Street, her owner, read the report in the shipping news of her having touched at Fulmouth, he would probably assume that the crew had given trouble. A Dutchman, perhaps, had stabbed an Englishman, and the captain had been forced to put into Fulmouth to supply the deficiencies caused by the knife, and to hand over the prisoner. As a matter of fact, Reynolds was here to fetch his wife's clothes, and the owner's demands on him as a skipper must yield to that skipper's claims upon himself as a newly married man. And now his wife was going ashore to fetch her clothes herself, and take them home with her, and leave him. The ship brought up with only her lightest canvas furled, for she was to sail again as soon as she might. It was noon, sweet and calm with the waters of this lovely harbour, glorious the land in the mantle of October. Pleasant and fair to see the ships floating upon the mirror, whose margin reflected the burning leaf of autumn. Lucretia was in her cabin when the anchor was let go. She felt the thrill of the chain cable as it thundered through the hues pipe, but did not know what it meant. Came a knock upon her door, the inevitable, who is there, followed. Mr. Rowland, oh, walk in. The second night entered, purple and shiny, cup-like in form, very nervous in demeanour. If you're ready to go ashore, madam, he said, the boat is ready alongside, and I will steer you to the landing place. She started not until when realising the arrival of the ship into the pallor of her face past a subtler shade of whiteness. If one may so speak, indicating the presence of the heart. I shall be on deck in five minutes, she answered, and Mr. Rowland's left her. In five minutes she was attired in hat and jacket, and with her went the umbrella, which she had bought from checkway place. She passed through the companion way into the atmosphere, quivering with brilliance, and without intention met the eyes of her husband, who was seated upon the grating above the wheel, in a place to command a view of the deck and the departure of the boat. She instantly looked away. No flush of cheek indicated emotion, no dullness of eye, the sudden gush of sadness from the springs of the soul. She saw Mr. Rowland waiting at the open gangway and went to him. Mr. Featherbridge was doing some business of the ship on the four castle, but all the sail is on the deck. Idling or working took a look at that fine figure as it passed to the side, and could their secret thoughts have been interpreted. Literature would have been the richer by several pages of original ideas. The port quarterboat had been lowered and manned and lay under the gangway ladder, without looking aft where her husband was, without a glance around her at the ship she was deserting. Lucretia put her foot upon the steps and descended, and took her place in the stem sheets, where she was joined by Mr. Rowland, who, catching hold of the oak line, sang out, Shavoff. The oars dipped and Lucretia was going home. Reynolds, with his arms folded, watched the shape of the receding boat, watched the diminishing form of his wife, and his manhood broke him in a great sigh and a little hysterical shake of the head, as though he was wretched by an inward agony. But for his being in full view of the sailors, he would have covered his face and vented himself in the convulsed dry sob of his sex, to whom the tears of a woman, who make men weep in their way, are denied. She was gone. He rose and slowly went below, not unmarked by some of the men, who, rough seamen as they were, could, in their crude and instructed fashion, enter into his thoughts. He walked into the cabin, which had been occupied by his wife, and gazed around him. He looked at the trifling comforts at the toilet felons, which he had provided. He looked at the pots of flowers. It is true, as Tennyson sings after Dante, that a sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier things. But the ship must start afresh at sea, says Dana. There is no time for sentiment. The lily-white hand must be waved ashore, and the dark eyes of sweet Susan, reclining on a rock may be full of tears. The jack-on-board ship must heave and pour, must heave and raise the dead, must sheat home with a horse yo-ho, which slants tremulous to the mate's ear, unfoltering, though the heart-strings be crackling, gay as the leap of the sea at the bow, though the sailor's sweet heart is transformed into the pickled horse of the harness cask at the pressure of her ruby lips into their benesons of the quarter-deck. Within three hours of the arrival of the flying spur in Formos Bay, the quarterboat, in which Lucretia had been rowed ashore, was again hanging in its place at the ship's davits, and the crew were, for the second time since leaving London, breaking out the anchor to the melody of their voices and the cranking of the revolving windlass. The upper top-sail yards were mast-headed, the top-gallion sails and royals loosed and set, and the sinking sun shone upon that fair and still-visible picture of the sea. A full-rigged ship under all sail standing out from the land, her bow sprint pointing to the violet line of the water in the south, every rope gleaming as though threaded by a hair of gold, every cloth coloured as though touched with a brush dipped in gilt varnish, every piece of brasswork burning with an eye that was like a little scarlet sun. A thin raising of beaded bubbles marked the progress of the keel, and the song of the sea when the heavens are bright and the waters restful and the breeze was a pleasant impulse for the canvas was chanted under the boughs as the vessels slowly sailed out into the English Channel, out into the unfolding pinions of the evening, out into the star-studded raven darkness of the night on her long voyage to a port on the west coast of South America. The reader is to be spared on the account of this voyage of a sailing ship whose laden was bricks, coke and coal. Not but that the true romance of the deep is to be found in such vessels, for if it would well not in them you shall seek it in vain in those steamers which, of all floating structures, are most familiar to readers of novels. The marine muse shrinks from the giant edifice whose walls might have been designed for the storage of gas, whose saloon is the coffee room of the huge hotel, whose engine room is indeed a noble submission of human juniors, but on whose sliding rods and rotating cranks, the fairy foot of Posey finds no platform. We passed as a month of February in the year 1891, and the date was the second. The flying spur was off the coast of Chile, whose voyage down to this period had been absolutely uneventful. Three days earlier, that is, on the morning of January 31, a man had come running aft to Mr Furtherbridge to report that smoke was rising from the fore hatch. The covers were lifted, and the cargo of coal in the fore and main holes was found to be on fire. Prenching volumes of water by the tonne were poured in by hose, by bucket, through holes cut in the deck in vain. The stench of sulfurous gases drove the man out of the forecastle, and the captain and mates from their quarters in the cabin. The island of Santa Cristo then bore a few leagues' distance about west-northwest. On the first of February, the day following the discovery of the fire, which continued to burn with fury, rendering the decks too hot for the naked foot to endure, though no flames had yet been leapt up. It came on to blow from the southwest. It was first a fresh breeze in the tail of a heavy running swell, which it wrinkled with snappish little seas. But in the afternoon, the wind had stormed up into half a gale, and the burning ship with coils of black smoke streaming from her hatchways, flying low over the lee bore walks, was hoved to under her lower main top sail. A gale of wind and a ship on fire, it is difficult to conceive a more horrible combination of peril. A ship hoved to on fire, and an iron beach of an island close aboard. Out there, throughout the blackness of the night, throughout the leaden mum that hoved in fury as it came and stayed without brightening. The high seas were a shallow green, and poured cataracts of foam into the valleys at their feet. The foretop galleon mast had carried away. Some sails had been blown out of their gaskets, and were streaming in rags from the yards. The ship, laboring furiously, swung her spars in maddening shearing under the rushing soot of the storm, and the picture was ghastly and wild. Not by reason only of the flashing of torn canvas, flogging as it swept, shrieking as it was carried, like a pennant at a rolling masthead. Nor by the shattering of water falling like the avalanche, self-hurled from the mountain brow. But by the leaping of flames through the forehatch, tongues of scarlet fire which soared like the furnace wings of the smoke, shriveling shroud and stay, blackening and cracking and cinder-colored every mast and spar. In the morning Featherbridge had been talking with Captain Reynolds in a consultation as to what should be done. If the weather moderated, the boats might live. If the weather held and the fire grew as it was growing, what must follow? It is well said, Reynolds, that my wife is not here. These were the last words that he ever addressed to his friend. For when the Captain had spoken, Featherbridge went forward. The vessel at that moment plunged, as though she was going over the edge of then falls of Niagara. Before she could lift her bow, a huge green sea came with a roaring of a hundred thunderbolts aboard. And Featherbridge was seen no more. No one knew how he had perished, nor was he immediately missed. The mountain leapt of the sea, and then the sudden volcanic uprush of flame paralyzed the men with consternation. The three tremendous forces of nature were let loose upon and in, that frail and laboring and lamenting and brutally used example of human handiwork. The wind in the sea had united with fire and were a trinity of raging giant demon, to whom for sailors they were struggling and cancelling, who opposed nothing but the beating hearts of men. The hour of panic must come. It came when the decks blew up between the four and main masts and liberating a belching hell of white fire, blinding as the sunbeam and roasting as the furnace. The seamen rushed to the boats. The second mate and a little crowd were lowered, but it was the act of men driven mad by fire and fright. In a moment the boat went to pieces under them, and they were battling in the water. The senses of a sailor suddenly left him, and he jumped overboard, flinging into the wind as he hurled himself from the rail, a wilder cry than any made by the gale. Reynolds had no orders to give, no councils to deliver, to stay was to be broiled, to go was to be drowned. What instructions, then, could he convey at a moment in which the alternative that nearly every crisis supplies, and that enables the vigorous will to form its resolution, had been slaughtered by the wrath of the sea on the one hand and the rage of the fire on the other. But faithful to the traditions of the British captain, he was the last to leave the ship. He pulled the life-belt over his head and got it under his arms, and standing on the lee side of the taff rail, watched for the lift of the sea that his fall might not be far and plunged. The ship roared herself out in flames and explosions, and much mighty hissing. The evening came, the night came. The dawn glimmed one and sad along the eastern sea-line. The sun soared into a blue sky along which sailed a thousand little clouds like old men of war, and poured his glory upon an island glittering with dew, sparkling with cascades radiant with foreshore of coral strand, green with tall grass and little trees and bushes. Standing in the heart of a shoreless sea like a many faceted gem, that flashes the green and yellow and red of the spectrum. It was the island of Santicristo in latitude, 40 degrees, 16 minutes south, and longitude, 80 degrees, 39 minutes west. It is about one mile long and three quarters of a mile wide. Two small cascades fall from a hill and unite in a little horseshoe river on the southern side, prettily fringed with trees. Around the island, to the mouth of the horseshoe river, at the eastmost extremity of this little sea garden, runs a beach of brilliant sand. In parts the ground is covered with brushwood, and some of the growths resemble, or perhaps are, cassarena trees. The grass is long and coarse, and amongst it may be found ferns and mosses and mushrooms. Even in gentle weather the seas break in thunder on the coast between the east and south of the island. The huge blue swell, even though uncreased by the catspore, slides with the weight of countless tons and bursts into the magnificence of foam as it recoils from the blow it delivers. There is a ceaseless play of white water on the north side, where a ledge of rock or coral comes within a foot or two of the surface, and troubles a piece of a deep, even, its most tranquil mood. The sun had been risen an hour when the figure of a man, lying on the white sand on the south-west side, stirred and presently sat up. He was in a life-belt. He was Captain Francis Reynolds. Apparently sole survivor of the ship, flying spur. No bodies of men were to be seen upon the white sand. No sparkle of wet spear. No blot of blackened beam. Invited the eye to the sea. The ship was absolutely vanished, and with her, her people and nothing remained to denote that such a creation had ever been. And that a few hours earlier a ship of a thousand tons was on fire and struggling with half a hurricane. Saved that lonely figure in a life-belt sitting on the coral sand. Trying to move his arms, he found them encumbered by the life-belt. He languidly passed a thing over his head. But seemed to get no ideas from the ship's name that was painted upon it. He was sensible of a smarting pain about his left eye, and at the right-hand junction of his lips in the cheek, and touching those parts, he found that he had been badly hurt and was bleeding. Had he viewed himself in a mirror he would surely not have known who he was. He had been flung by the breach of the sea against a rock which had cut deep into the flesh and bone about the eye and ripped the end of the mouth, as likely as not would lose the sight of that eye, and perhaps the other would perish in sympathy. His senses began to come to him, and he felt his legs and moved himself to try his ribs, and then got up and stood, and found that his bones were unbroken. He gazed somewhat vacantly about him, first staring at the sea, and then round upon the land, and again he cast his eyes upon his legs, and looked at his arms, and pressed his hand against his head from which his cap had been washed. His catching the sight of one of the sweet and sparkling cascades made him feel as though his throat was of hot brass whilst his tongue stung behind his teeth. He walked very slowly towards the foot of the falls, where they sung in a glory of froth and went away in a horseshoe-shaped river. He knelt, fashioning his hands into a cup, drank, and then he bathed his face, by which time his five wits were once more vigorous, and he clearly understood that he was Frank Rendles, and that he had been cast ashore on the little empty island of Santa Cristo, and that, so far as he could judge, for the view of parts of the island were interceded by rising and little downs, he was the sole survivor of the crew of the ship. When his thirst was usurged he felt hungry and sent a look at certain birds which were wheeling about the island, petrels, gulls, whalebirds, and penguins. They were not many, but they gave a vitality to the air, and enriched its brilliance with the grace of their flight and the soft hues of their plumage, but they were not to be come at for a meal. Reynolds Eye fell upon a creek, about one hundred fathoms long, in the bite of which was a flat rock. The water had sunk, and this rock was covered with coloured oysters, limpets, and mussels. He was an old hand. He had sought oysters at Sydney and elsewhere, and knew what to do. He looked about him for a hammer, and found what he wanted in a heavy cucumber-shaped stone, which was undoubtedly a meteorite. Armed with this stone, he slowly made his way to the creek, and stepping onto the rock which was black and gleaming, salt-smelling, and hairy with weed, he knocked off a meal of oysters, which he opened with a strong clasped knife he had carried about with him at sea for years past. He was a very good repast, when he had eaten as much as he needed, and whilst he ate, he took notice of certain large fish of a rock cod sort, floating deep in the crystal water, betweenst the rock and the shore. He stepped from the rock onto the land, which was scarcely at the distance of a jump, and going to where the grass was growing, he seated himself under a tree with his back against the trunk, and as quickly as a man dies whose heart fails him, he fell asleep. He slept for three hours, and if his good angel stood beside him and watched him as he slumbered, her heart would have been melted by pity, for never did ocean reject the life of a more forlorn figure than this broken and wounded man, scarce recognisable as the comely, somewhat military-looking Captain Reynolds, who had commanded the flying spur. The whole spirit of the mighty desolation round about was incarnate in him. When he awoke, he stared about as before with a wondering eye, but was soon as sensible as ever he had been. He knew where he was, and that the coast of Chile lay at a distance of about 250 miles. What were his chances of escape? He must keep through, out the day, a sharp look out for ships, and prepare and hold in readiness a big heap of rubbish to make a thick black tall smoke with when a sail should shine upon the horizon. How was he to make fire? He might rub two sticks together for years and scarcely warm them. This getting fire by friction is a trick which one must be a savage to have the art of. Fortunately for Reynolds he carried in his waistcoat pocket a burning glass, a piece of crystal with which at sea he used under a high sun to light his pipe or cigar for love of the purity of the flame. So whilst the sun shone he could never lack fire, and whilst those oysters clung to the rock he could not starve. And the cascades of fresh water were as sweet to the palette as they were lovely in their glancings and flashings to the eye. Still sitting at the foot of the tree under which he had slept he thought of his wife. Had he forced her to accompany him she must have perished in the shipwreck. He knew when he recalled with shudders those days of horror, of tempest, of fire, that when the crisis came he could not have saved her life unless God's hand had brought her ashore as he had been. But his salvation of her would not have been of his working. What had he lost by the shipwreck? He had brought with him a hundred and fifty pounds of which he had given ten to his wife. And this money had gone down likewise all his clothes, charts, chronometers and nautical instruments. Should ever he be rescued he would have to begin life afresh. Would life, any form of life, be worth the effort of its maintenance, deserted as he was by his wife, ruined as he was by the sea? Never was any man more bankrupt in heart and estate than this poor lonely fellow, who had been guilty of the great blunder of loving not wisely, but too well. After looking at the brilliant beach or as much of it as his vision compassed, as it swept from rock and soil into the tall feathering wash of the sea, for in every break of it rolled upon that little island dwelt the power of the mighty Pacific. An idea visited him and he walked down the coral stretch. He looked along it to the north where it terminated at the margin of a little bay whose low face of cliff was abrupt. Here and there were rocks, lumps of large grey stone, but no corpse and no signs of a living man. He sighed and a sense of solitude oppressed him. He clenched his hands, thinking as he turned around to look along the beach towards the west. I am alone. The thought of the extinction of the sailors he had commanded, for he had been the last to leave the ship, and since no man had saved his life by this island, he knew that it was inevitable that all had perished. This thought and the memory of Featherbridge, a shipmate he had loved, and the comrade of many a quiet watch, overwhelmed him and he wept. He continued to walk slowly, and a speculation which seemed somewhat out of place in a maimed and hopeless castaway troubled his poor brains. He said to himself, As life is a property of vital matter, and as we are taught that nothing is destructible, what becomes of life at death? What has become of the life that enabled Featherbridge to talk to me? I can conceive, perhaps explain, the passage of heat and all forms of energy from the human body at death into other states. But what becomes of that property called life, which is in me now whilst I reflect, and which, as like heat and all other things, it is indestructible, cannot cease to exist, because it has quitted my body. Perhaps, he mused, still thinking of Featherbridge and his drowned sailors, the belief in the human soul may be based upon our knowledge of the indestructibility of all created things. No, he argued to himself, belief in the soul existed long before it was known that matter, and all the conditions of matter, cannot be destroyed, can only be changed. The hope of the soul is based upon the innate and inborn desire of every man to project his life beyond the grave. These were strange speculations to trouble him in such a place and under such circumstances. But the mind is not responsible for the ideas which spring in it. There is a frequent impertinence in thought, as, for instance, when you find yourself humming some tune of which you are heartily sick, but which teases you with irritating iteration. Be your mood what it will, for a man will hum such an air within himself at the grave-side, or when occupied, in business, which should utterly remove him from the vexing ghost of melody. He walked along by the beach around the western extremity of the island, until he was within sight of the mouth of the little, all-shoe-shaped river, and constantly as he walked he looked up at the slope or frown of land with a dumb and throbbing yearning, like a pain in his heart for the sight of a human figure. The sun was rolling low down the sky, and the west was gorgeous with colors, and in this beautiful light the two waterfalls, or cascades, leaping midway from an altitude of about 300 feet, shone like ropes of fine pale amber, and the picture was made exquisite by the fern-like delicacy of the boughs of trees, defining their foliage and their branches upon the tender depths of the eastern blue. He climbed a green slope and gained the higher parts of the island, and looked about him for a spot in which he might shelter himself for the night. Hard-bye was a little dell, covered with mosses and other grays, and he observed on one side of it a horizontal fissure about six feet deep, whilst the gap was about five feet. He gazed carefully about him in search of snakes or other dangerous reptiles, but saw nothing of the kind. That fissure, he judged, would provide him with a bed-place, so he walked towards a tract of tall grass, like guinea grass, and, pulling out his knife, cut down a quantity, enough to make a little bundle to serve as a pillow. This bundle, he compacted by binding it with grass, which he knitted into witches, for this man was a sailor. He could lay up a senate or weave grass into a hat. He put his pillow into the crevice and went across the island to the beach again to get his supper off the rock. How sad were the splendid colours of the west, how heart subduing the vastness of the solitude. The voice of the spirit of desolation was heard in the sound of the wind in the trees, in the organ roll of crushed and seething swell, in the troubled rustling on the shoal, in whispers of running waters coming from afar. He got upon the rock, armed with his meteorite. It was but a long stride from the edge of the land to the rock. The oysters were large and sweet, and provided him with an excellent meal. It was a calm evening, the swell came rolling from the sun in liquid gold. The seafowl were fishing diligently, and some of them, whose plumage gave resilience to the western light, wheeled in shapes of brass and ivory through the air. Reynolds regained the shore and ascending the slope behind which was the dell that was the shelter him from the night, sat down and watched the sunset and the sumptuous pageantry fade, watched the sea line that perished in the evening shadow, which was trembling with stars. He wondered how long he would be forced to remain on this island, and if it was his destiny to die upon it, and his imagination grew morbid, and he pictured his dead body supine and the decay of it, till a shutter compacted his mind, and the tone of it grew more manly. Oh, for a companion, he thought, but one, but one to speak to. He tried to recollect the people who had been in his situation, and could recall but two. Peter Serrano and Alexander Selkirk. It brightened him for the moment to recollect that both were delivered from the horrors of an island's loneliness. Peter, he remembered, was covered with hair when he was secured, and looked like a furry imagination of pagan mythology, and was frightful to see. A shooting star caught his eye. He followed the brilliant track of it, and then his chin sank, and he put up a short prayer to God for mercy. Though never religious, Reynolds was always a devout man. He had read and reasoned himself into a full conviction as to the being of a creator. It is ridiculous, he would argue, to talk of chance when you witness design everywhere. If the theory of chance is right, then creation is nothing but a dicebox, the issue of every throw unforeseen. He held that in nothing is design more visible than in evolution, with its enduring elements of pre-vision and provision. If evolution were merely chance, creation would be chaos, and he once said to Lucretia, what the learned call chance, I, who am not learned, call intention. Look at this little daisy. Consider its color, its form, the hand that grasps the petals, the airy beauty of the orange throne in the heart of it, on which the viewless shape of the queen of the fairies sits on moonlighted nights, and let the Darwin's of the age call this miracle of the meadow chance, if they can, or dare. In taking a ramble in some fine scenery in New Zealand, he watched two birds, called huia birds, and were struck by the intention in form, which their procurer explained. The male had a short stout beak, the female a long curved bill. He observed that they earned their living in company thus. The male, hopping or flying to a tree with his strong bill, knocked off the bark and exposed the grub, and the female with her long curved bill took the grub out, and between them they made a meal. Thus it will be seen that when this man prayed to God, his heart spoke with conviction that he was addressing a spirit who would give him heed, though he made no sign. It was lonesome sitting there with nothing but the voice of the sea to hear, and nothing but the sparkling suns of the sky to behold. For the island sank into ink on a moonless night. He rose and made his way to the dell, and got into the cleft, and laid his broken face and weary head upon his grass pillow. He fell asleep and dreamed that his wife stood by his side. A cold star glittered on her forehead, and its radiation struck lances of ice into his heart. He awoke. He looked for his wife, and saw nothing but the stars shining at the edge of the fissure above the dell. But she had been with him, and with him in that same repellent spirit of chastity that had sundered them. Why should we deal lightly with, or speak in scorn of our dreams? Half our lives are formed of dreams. Whether the visions shape themselves to the slumber, or dwell in the stair of the waking abstract eye. The boy dreams of the sea, and of fairy lands for lawn. The maiden of that ideal man, whom she shall not meet the side of the grave. The politician of power, and the philosopher of the undiscovered born. The king of a people's love, and the beggar of a copper ear noon. Rob the mind of dreams, sleeping or waking, and you extinguish one third of the solid joys of life, and two-thirds of its solid troubles. Reynolds fell asleep again, but his wife did not return. End of chapter 5 Recording by Terence Taylor Chapter 6 The Fisherman When Reynolds again opened his eyes, the day was broad, brilliant, and noisy. He got out of the fissure which had supplied him with a sheltered, moss-coated couch, and immediately made his way to a rise of ground to obtain a view of the sea. He swept the horizon with the practised gaze of a sailor, observing in his wounded eye a little dimness of vision. Nothing that could be named a ship was in sight. Large, dark clouds were sailing with the wind, but above them was a ceiling of mother of pearl that was settling slowly westwards. A fresh breeze was blowing. The sea was alive and leaping. On the shoal the water was the glaring whiteness of wrestling waves. The blow of the surge on the southeast side boomed with the deep note of heavy guns through the wind. The trees sang and the surf bellowed, and the full and spacious scene from dome to liquid floor, throbbed and shouted and danced, and roared with the spirit of ocean liberty. Reynolds walked towards the foam-heap at the foot of the cataract and drank. Then, stripping himself, plunged into the bright water of the little river, which was as sweet as honey for the distance of a half a cable, with the force of the current that was rushed through the foam mound by those waterfalls when it grew brackish and rapidly passed into salt water. He was much refreshed by his bath and ran to and fro to dry himself, and when he had put on his clothes he walked to the sand and got upon the rocked breakfast. He ate heartily, for these were very fat and choice oysters, though big. And for condiment they needed neither vinegar nor pepper, but the contents of the best of all cruet stands, which he had, that is, appetite. Once he was thus occupied he saw swimming deep in the green crystal space of water betwixt the rock and the shore, where the creek began to widen a number of big fish of which he had before taken notice. He judged by their bulk that they would weigh from eight to thirty pounds. If they were not rock cod they resembled that fish, but some were of a different species and they were gay with colors and shaped like perch. Reynolds saw abundance of food beneath him, but how was he to get it? He was without hook or line, though there was plenty of bait in the thousands of limpets which adhered to this and other rocks. He recollected that a naval officer, who was in a surveying ship off Patagonia, had told him that the longshore natives of that country took fish in this way. They fashioned lines out of tendrils of shrubbery. To the end of a line they attached a limpet. This they dropped over the edge of their canoe. The fish gorged the limpet and was warily drawn to the surface by the fishermen, who then dexterously passed his hand under the fish and tossed it out of the water into the boat. This memory determined Reynolds to try his hand. He was a sailor and the possessor of a knife and burning glass, and thus he quipped he could not be at a loss. But as he never could be in want of food whist oysters and other shellfish abounded he resolved first to explore the island and to climb its highest point, which was a hill several hundred feet high. That hill from whose steeps the cataracts blew their trumpets. It must be his business to prepare the means of making a smoke should a sail heave into view. He wished to catch a sight of himself to judge of the extent of the injuries to his face, but there was no pool of water that was not blurred by the hurrying fingers of the wind. He got upon the shore and set out upon his adventures. This little principality was but a mile long, as you have heard, and three quarters of a mile wide, and it was to be compassed and examined without much fatigue of walking. He climbed the hill and gained the summit, and the island lay below him in green and brown and gray, tender with verder, and splendid with its mighty dazzle of foam on the southeast side, and the brilliant cream of the surf that roared upon its coral strand from north to right, around by west to south. It blew fresh up there where he was, and the salt song shrilled past his ears as though he was aloft in a squall on a top gallant yard. There was a hollow a short distance down, and in that hollow he determined to collect the materials for a fire, but he was compelled to make many journeys before his heap for burning was collected insufficient. There was no wood fit for his purpose on the hill. He cut and hacked with his knife, and painfully ascended with his arms full, but he did not cease in his toil until his work was ended, and then he sat down on the top of the hill to rest and muse and survey the sea-line. He asked himself, What is my chance of escape? The island was far out of the track of steamers bound north or south. Nothing was likely to come that way but a ship blown out of her course, or a whaler to whom this island might be known for the purity and value of its fresh water. He had again and again looked at his chart before the shipwreck, and memory submitted a clear map of his situation to him. He understood with a sense of dismay that grew into consternation as he realized the magnitude of his ocean loneliness, that weeks, that months, nay, that even years might pass and find him, if alive, a captive on this shore. The weight of a reflection so enormous was crushing, and he said to himself, Oh, my great God, it may happen as I fear! And again his heart was rent by an insupportable pang of yearning for one, but for one companion only to speak to. This passionate desire caused him to scrutinize the coast and foreshore of which he commanded the whole extent from where he sat, but he could not perceive the least signs of wreckage or anything resembling a stranded human body. His spirits were so sunk that he found no heart to make grass-lines for fishing that day, and until he laid himself down in the cleft in the side of the dell he rambled aimlessly here and there, often sending a forlorn gaze seawards, sometimes sitting with his head bowed upon his folded arms, sometimes going to the river for a drink of water, twice to his rock for oysters. He looked at the trees for fruit, but saw none. Here on this island was vegetation that he had met with in other parts of the world. Some flowers, one of which he plucked, but it was without smell, though he afterwards discovered that this flower blew a very sweet perfume at nightfall and through the darkness, and likewise when the moon whitened to the scene. The several growths were more or less familiar to him, for in his time Reynolds had visited many different parts of the globe, but in respect of knowledge he was like the boy who, in speaking of the letters of the alphabet, told the schoolmaster that he knew them by their faces but not by their names. Next morning, which was another windy, sparkling, singing day, much like that which was gone, he fell to his task of making fishing lines after he had bathed and breakfasted. He cut some long grass and plaited it, but found that when it was in six or eight strands it broke easily. He strolled to some of the trees, conceiving he might meet with some wild-like tendrils, and sure enough he discovered coiled round the trunks of several dwarf trees in a little bit of wood near the dell, a parasitic growth of the thickness of the thong of a coach whip, and as strong. He cut away one and uncoiled its embrace and found himself equipped with a supple fishing line between eight and ten feet long, strong enough to have hanged him with. He was pondering how he should attach a limpet to the end of this creeper, when his eye was taken by a little collection of bush, in the midst of which he seemed to see a sort of darkness. He approached the bushes and found himself looking into the mouth of a cave. The aperture was scarcely obstructed by the growth which stood thick on either hand, leaving the mouth a sort of blackness when viewed from a distance. The entrance was a little more than the height of a man. Though a natural formation the roof of the opening stood out from the slope of the land as though the invention of human labour. Reynolds went close and peered in, and as he stared a large sea-bird came sailing out. It looked like a ghost as it grew out of its own glimmering, and it hit Reynolds over the face with its wing. It would have knocked his cap off had he been covered. He started back in terror. The apparition was sudden and unexpected, and at the instant frightful to the man whose nerves were very low. But when following the thing with his eye he perceived that it was a very large kind of seagull, white and gray in feathers, seemingly sick for its flight was languid and it sank upon the ground after a short excursion. His spirits rallied, and again he peered into the cave. He entered by several paces and then stood stock still awaiting the passage of another sea-bird, for this might be a kind of hospital for decayed ocean fowl. And then his eyes growing used to the shadow he found himself in a natural cavern running back from its mouth about twenty feet, sloping low at the extremity so as to oblige one who went there to crouch, but in the middle part tall enough to stand under, the walls about eight feet apart. As his vision grew educated to the gloom objects shaped themselves within its horizon, and he judged that this in its day had been the haunt of one man or more. The floor was hard and sandy with a little dim sheen on it as though it was bestrune with grit which possessed a property of shining. On the left hand side stood an old-fashioned sea-chest. Close against it, resting against the wall, was a shovel of a very elderly pattern. Upon the ground were a musket and a carpenter's axe. He went to the chest and found it locked. He picked up the axe, and, forcing the sharp corner of the cutting-part, betwixt the lid and the side, he prized the lid open. Indeed it was something rotten, and not only did the wood split and yield very easily, but the metal of the lock and the screws and nails about it showed like old teeth grinning and rusty. The chest was furnished with a shelf in which he found a brass tobacco-box, some clay pipes, three spade guineas, and a few five-chilling pieces and some shillings, about three pounds of leaf tobacco bound in canvas and twine, a coil of copper wire, a roll of yellowing paper, and a flat pencil. In the chest were two pairs of cloth knee-breaches, several pairs of coarse-gray stockings, two pairs of buckle-shoes, two waist-coats, one coat, and a cloak with the chain to connect it at the throat. He judged the date of this apparel to be about 1800. On the lid of the chest were chiseled deep two letters, L, B. He looked about him for the remains of a man in the shape of human bones. Nothing in that way was to be seen. It was clear from the state of the chest that the cave had not been entered since the departure of the man or men who had used it. He conjectured that the furniture illustrated a story of shipwreck. Some men had come ashore from a foundered craft, bringing with them the sea-chest, the shovel, axe, and musket. Whether they had been taken off or whether they had perished or rotted out of being on this island was not to be gathered from their dumb memorials. And yet it warmed Reynolds with a little heat of cheerfulness to reflect that others had been here before him. The sense of previous life, though charged as that life might have been with dire suffering and a miserable ending, humanised the island. He again scrutinised this interior for signs of human remains and then stepped out into the daylight bearing with him the creeper he had cut from the tree. It is difficult to imagine any scene of human life more interesting than the spectacle of a man suddenly flung by some such stress of destiny as shipwreck, from all the resources of civilisation into the obligation of living as though he was something primordial, dwelling in a time that he knew not the plow nor the blacksmith nor the shop which calls itself stores. A man is cast almost naked upon an island coast. He is alone, a Caruso, a Selkirk. How shall he feed and clothe and shelter himself? His needs must fire his ingenuity. The mongrel dog knows as well as the two-legged customer the butchers of the town and lives by snatching. A hungry half-stripped man deals with nature as the mongrel with the butcher. He scrutinises her, not an admiration of her divine skill, but for what he can steal from her to eat. Whether a princely nobleman would, as a castaway, suffer equally with a sweep in a like situation, might depend upon the state of his health. It would be true, perhaps, if it be said that we should take more interest in the struggles of his grace to find a breakfast on a rock or a supper in a tree than in the labours of a man whom a bloater and a potato are a banquet. Outside the cave Reynolds felt considering his fishing-line and how he was debated with a limpet. And whilst he reflected he constantly sent looks at the horizon, for at any moment the white star of a sail or the stain of a steamer's smoke might break the continuity of that everlasting girdle. Suddenly it entered his head to use the copper wire in the sea-chest. He re-entered the cave and took the wire from its shelf, brought a guinea to the cavern's mouth to examine it, went back and picked up some of the clothes and carried them out into the light. They were perhaps a hundred years old, and almost rotten saved the cloak, which being made of some strong-ribbed material like corduroy seemed as stout and promised to be as useful as though it was fresh from the sign of the board and shears. He left the clothes on the ground as worthless to him, and by the help of the axe he struck a nail from the ripped lock of the sea-chest and hammered it into the side of the cave and hung up the cloak. He brought the little parcel of tobacco to the light and cut it open. But the leaves within crumbled to powder when he touched them and he threw the stuff away. Now, drawing forth the copper wire, he cut off a piece and passed it through the end of the creeper. Turning it up into the shape of a hook and thus armed, he made his way to the rock. This business occupied his mind and kept him a little away from melancholy. He took his meteorite, which lay on the shore near the rock and struck at some limpets. These creatures adhere with so much tenacity that to detach one you must strike with the force of sixty-two pounds, that is to say, close upon two thousand times its own weight. He baited his strange fishing line and dropped it into the water. In a few moments a fish of about ten pounds floated up and swallowed the bait, and then Reynolds perceived that he had calculated a miss. He brought the fish to the surface. But when he tried to land it, he drew the bait out of the creature's throat, and perceived, unless Patagonian wise, he could pass his hand or something else under the fish, his angling would be little more than a tickling. He must make a net, stout enough to lift the fish onto the rock. He regained the island, leaving his line and the cucumber-shaped stone on the shore opposite the rock, and walked inland, with many a glance at the horizon. He easily understood what to do. He selected two bows and curved them into a hoop, binding them with strong fibers of creepers. He then cut another bow for a handle, and this he skillfully secured to the hoop by cleaving one end of the stick and fitting the hoop into it, and securely binding it. He chose fibers of creepers for a mash, and, cutting as much as he needed, sat down in the shadow of a tree and began to weave. It was now past noon. The sun was high and shone with great splendor upon the sea, which was full of the life of the fresh breeze. The booming of the surf was like the roaring of a city heard from his church-top. The sea-birds slanted and curved in lovely flight, and the waterfalls sparkled like quick silver into the glory of foam at their foot. From time to time he would remit the diligent plying of his fingers to look sea-words, and then around him. It was a kind of toil that suffered plenty of room for thought. His fancies flowed to his wife and he said to himself, supposing she had consented to stay with me, and she had been saved with me only, and we too had found ourselves alone upon this island. How strange it would have been! How would I have cherished her? What delight should I have found in this imprisonment in providing for her once? So that hereafter, should it have ever come to our being rescued, we should both recall this island as a happy garden, and Oceans' gift of a dwelling for us will star honeymoon ran. He sighed, and his hands sank, and for some minutes he sat motionless with his eyes fixed upon the grass. The tree overheads sang and shivered and scintillated with little suns, and the taller shrubs and bushes were gay, with nods and becks and wreathed smiles, as though there were a minstrel-see in the breeze which made them dance. A great quantity of mushrooms flourished in this island. Reynolds had peered at the trees for fruit, but it had not occurred to him to look upon the earth for food. His eye lighting on some mushrooms it struck him that they would be good to eat and supply the absence of bread, and going to them he picked one and knew enough of the vegetable world to distinguish at once the eatable fungus from the toadstool. He skinned some and eat them with relish. His work of weaving was not half-ended when the dust came. He had often dropped the job to climb a height and scan the sea, to walk to the river to drink, and twice to the rock for oysters. In that part of the world it was the season that corresponds with our July, and extremely warm. Indeed, the sun bit with a fang of fire, but the shadows cast by the trees were deliciously found by the fresh wind. Another night had come. He had no mind to occupy the cave. He was a sailor accustomed to the wide freedom of the sea, and the idea of the natural bed in the dell, over which sparkled the firmament, pleased him better than the thought of the cave, which was a sort of sepulcher to his imagination, with its mute memorials of human life which had passed. He, however, entered it to fetch the cloak which he spread on the floor of the fissure, and it made him, with the moss beneath, a softer coach than many he had dreamed deeply on at sea. Next morning, after bathing in breakfasting as before, he went to work again upon his landing net, which he completed in the early afternoon. Already the spirit of solitude was doing its work in him. His beard and mustache had sprouted, and accented a melancholy shadow in the hollows under his cheekbones. He was bareheaded, and his hair lay wild. The wounds at the corner of his mouth and eye had healed. He was sensible that the sight of his left eye was affected, but he could not have imagined how great was the structural change in his face, in consequence of the injuries. To be sure, when his mustache grew the disfigurement at the corner of the mouth would be concealed, but the real transformation lay in the left side of his face, owing to distortion of the eyebrow and to a new expression of the eye drawn by the pencils of the healed flesh. He had looked into some pools of water here and there, but in no silent surface even could he find an adequate portrait. The misery of his situation had already wrought in him, and was strangely visible in the infixed sadness of his looks. But it was not only his shipwreck, his being a lamentable castaway, his being so alone that if he had been that last man described by the poet Campbell, he could not have been lonelier. There was memory to yellow and skeletonize what had otherwise been the green leaves of his mind. Even as he sat making his landing net, he would think of his wife and wonder why she had forsaken him, whether through some perversion of brain she had when standing before the altar conceived something in him, a quality of mind, a characteristic of person that had suddenly excited in her a deep and abiding loathing. Then, too, he mourned the death of his friend Featherbridge and the shocking, tragic extinction of the whole of the ship's company, for men who are cooped up for many long weeks together in a ship will take that colouring of sentiment which the sailor feels when he speaks of a messmate and a shipmate. All those men whom he had commanded, who had sprang readily to his order, who had proved dutiful and an excellent crew, for he was a sailor who knew how to treat sailors, were as clean gone out of life as the cloud that sailed two hours before across the sky. Here were thoughts to put a pang into every heartbeat, a sigh into every respiration. His fish-lifter was a basket rather than a net. He carried it to the rock and baited his line. The fish, unused to the sight of the human figure and ignorant of the human character, exhibited a tameness that would have been as shocking to Reynolds as Cowper thought a like sort of indifference must have proved to Selkirk had he heated it. They floated in various sized green and silver shapes beneath him, and scarce was the limpet under the water when a fine fish gorged it. Reynolds softly brought his prey to the surface and then, quickly putting his basket under it, whipped the noble fish onto the rock, a prize of fifteen pounds weight where it sprang and gasped. This was a clever achievement and Reynolds was sensible of a little heat of triumph. Whilst he watched his victim, he considered how he should cook him. His first idea had been to dig a pit for a furnace which was now quite easy as there was a shovel in the cave. Over this pit he proposed to arch a stout bow and hang by grass a stake of fish over the fire. He foresaw trouble, first because only the lower part of the fish would be baked, and next because the fire was certain to burn the grass lanyard and let the fish fall into the flames. But it now occurred to him to use the shovel for a frying pan. So, full of this business, he took up the fish and carried it to the mainland and walked with it to the cave where he placed it for safety as he had no mind after his labours to be robbed by those insatiate gentry of the air who were wheeling and curving over the sea by the shore and sometimes over the land. He laid hold of the shovel and saw that it would serve very well indeed as a frying pan after it had dug him an oven. He pulled off his coat and waistcoat and placed them in the cave and began to dig outside and dug with such diligence as though he were a trappist intent on his own grave that in a very short time he had made a considerable square hole. He took care that it should be well in the sun as he needed the fire of that luminary for his burning glass. He then collected a quantity of fuel and set fire with his burning glass to some grass as dry as hay and the fire burnt merrily. With the axe which was in the cave he cut wood into little logs and presently the hole was glowing and a delicate blue smoke was soaring and arching over when the wind took it like a feather. He thoroughly cleaned the inside of the shovel, then stepped into the cave and gutted his fish and cut it into stakes, two or three of which he lay in the shovel along with the creature's liver and some slices of mushroom. Next going to the fire with his shovel thus furnished he placed his queer frying pan upon the furnace, contriving that it should rest without his support, and with his knife he turned at the slices of fish about until one of the goodliest smells he had smelt for a long time passed arose. For here was a fish wonderfully fresh and sweet from its native brine resembling a cod, though the flesh looked like turbot. It was a real treat to the poor fellow whose nature loneliness was coloring with a childlike simplicity in so much that presently he would be finding a joy in very little things, and a keen distress in trifles as a prisoner long confined gets to love a spider and tears his hair when it dies, or as a sailor after a long voyage takes delight or finds trouble in things whose triviality excites the wonder of the people he steps ashore amongst. A number of seabirds flew in circles over his head whilst he cooked. When the meal was prepared he plucked a large leaf for a table cloth and set a fried steak and mushrooms upon it and fell to scarcely missing salt. Maybe the sweat of his toil supplied that seasoning for his appetite. Never had he banqueted more sumptuously, and when he had drank from the river he felt strongly the force and truth of the line, man once but little here below, even if he should want that little long. This day passed and the next, and the hours moving into weeks swelled into a month, which was like to prove a twelve month and perhaps a lifetime for all this man could tell, for never once, though he was ever on the watch, did he catch sight of a sail or the shadow of smoke. Constantly he would ascend the hill from the hollow where he had assembled the materials for a fire, and strain his sight until the balls of vision ached. He was now bearded and his mouth concealed by hair. Although no more than a month had passed he looked as wild, pale, and ragged as any wretched popper that one meets on a highway, with his skirts and ribbons, and limping in old boots, of which you shall presently meet one left in the middle of the road, discarded forever, an object very fit to muse upon. This brought him into the month of March. One night he had put himself away in his cleft, which he continued to occupy, as his first aversion to sleeping in the cave had by now, by the strain of melancholy that was in his mind, being changed into a sort of superstition, and as a lonesome man he was afraid to rest in that place. The moon was up and her light shone in a fine silver haze in the dell. The night was still, the trees slumbered. The little white cloud on high lingered as though for the love of the glorious glowing star that gemmed its skirt. But old ocean, perturbed by memories of wrecking ruin, tossed in her dreams and shouted as she drove her liquid shoulders at the island's step, and muttered mootily and hissed her own thoughts on the coral strand. The whiteness and coolness and calmness of the night brought Lucretia into Reynolds' mind, and he remembered his dream as she appeared to him with a light on her brow that froze his heart with lances of ice. He thought of her. Her eyes were a clear liquid dusk, within whose tender horizons admiration witnessed the passions, the sensibilities, the tastes it desired for so fine a figure of a woman. What was the truth? Her eyes were altars on which her spirit had placed the cold white lamps of chastity, lights which like the remote stars revealed themselves only and warmed and illuminated nothing. He lay thinking of his wife with his eyes upon the moon, which, with a considerable circle of sky over the dell, was visible to him in the position he occupied on that natural shelf. The moon stands as a symbol of purity. Such beautiful women as Lucretia should be viewed by the moonlight only. The moon stands as a symbol of desolation, and the words which Tennyson makes Lucretius use in his reference to the seat of the gods are strangely applicable to our satellite. Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind, nor ever falls the least white star of snow, nor ever lowest roll of thunder mourns, nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar its sacred everlasting calm. He fell asleep for about two hours, then opened his eyes, waking suddenly. The dell was still bathed in the moonshine, and he saw the figure of a man who was walking very slowly. Every bush cast its ebony shadow, but the figure of this man was shadowless. He was dressed in a long coat with side skirts of the old-fashioned sort, knee breeches and shoes, and held his hat in his hand. His face in the moonlight was pale and fallen, it was without hair. He was bald, with flowing hair falling from the semi-circle it made at the back of his head between his ears. Reynolds heart beat hard. He stared, and if that which was perceptible to him had been visible to an onlooker, it would have been difficult for him to decide which was the stranger sight, the face of the living man in that cleft, or the apparition he watched. He took notice again that it was shadowless, whist at the foot of every bush slept its ebb and ghost. He threw his legs over and got out and stood looking at the shape as it walked. Approached a step with his heart thundering, like the swell against the cleft in his ear, stood still and looked, and found he was alone. Slowly he turned his eyes round the del. The vision of the brain had vanished. He was odd and terrified. He perfectly understood that what he had beheld was an illusion, and he conceived that it was a sign he was losing his reason. Or could it be that he had dreamt vividly that he had seen a ghost and had left the ledge to watch it, and it had disappeared because he awoke, having quitted his bed in his sleep, with the dream working in his head? He was without superstition. He had never believed in ghosts. He knew that what had stalked in the del was an imagination, a deceit, a coinage of some brain-cell that had mutinied and irresponsibly acted, but for the rest of the night he could not sleep. Nor for many days afterwards could he shake off the horror that that vision of the del was a premonition of madness. Wherein he proved that not then at all events was he mad, for he was unwittingly following the logic of Coleridge who said, If I see a figure enter a room and know that it is unreal, I am not mad. But if I start and believe it real in behave, whether by a cost or by other conduct, as though it were an actual entity, I am mad. The poet's reasoning ran to this effect, not quite in these words. It was certainly very strange that the shape should have been attired in the costume in the sea-chest in the cave. Yet it might easily have been that the irresponsible brain-cell in indulging in this freak would select the garb and figure, a presentiment of one who was perhaps the last man who had lived on this island. The months rolled on, and Reynolds remained alone.