 CHAPTER I. THE WEDDING Miss Lucretia Lane stood at the toilet-glass in her bedroom in Cheapstow Place, bays water, pressing herself for her marriage. She was watched from the embrace of an arm-chair by a young lady who was to accompany her to the church, and who was dressed for the solemnity. How? In a hat and jacket and skirt, for this was to be a very simple ceremony, and Miss Lucretia was putting on her hat and thrusting pins into it, and toying with it as ladies do with their headgear when they adjust it, whilst her friends sat and watched her. Miss Lane was a handsome, tall, well-proportioned, finely molded young woman, aged twenty-four, with dark red hair, large shining brown eyes, a little Roman nose, a firm mouth with red lips, a throat of a rich whiteness, close-seated ears delicately tinted like certain beautiful shells, a low-square tranquil brow, dark and clearly penciled eyebrows, white, ivory-bright even teeth, rather small hands, the fingers long and nervous, and the nails so shaped that taking them with the ears, and a certain delicacy in the carving of the liniments of her face, you would have guessed she had a strain of good old blood in her. The other girl, Miss Constance Ford, takes so small a part in this story that there is no occasion to say more about her than name her. You had better make haste, said Miss Ford, do you know what the time is? I am certain that it was Major Stroud who knocked some minutes ago. What makes you linger and pause so? Don't you feel well, Lucretia? Lucretia turned her head slowly, brought her fine eyes to bear up on her friend, and said, with a slight frown and a note of temper, Don't tease me! Miss Ford stepped to the window and looked out. It was Wednesday, in September, 1890, villas over the way, dull sky, with shadows of fog looking like rain-clouds, hanging over the pointing fingers on the chimney-stacks. A piano organ under the window began to play Old Robin Gray. Miss Ford started to sing. She sang audibly, with her face averted, and her eyes screwed into their corners upon Lucretia. My father argued there, my mother didn't speak, but she looked me in the face till my heart was like to break. They geed him my hand, but my heart was in the sea, and so Old Robin Gray, he was good man to me. Lucretia went on fiddling with her hat. What ailed the girl? Was she going to be married to Old Robin Gray? Was her heart in the sea? How should a young woman look while she is dressing or being helped to dress for her wedding? She is taking a momentous step. The event is the most significant that can happen to her in all her days. It is more heavily freighted with consequences than the circumstance of her birth. It is a harbor out of which she will sail into an ocean wider and more awful in its appeals to, its demands upon, her five mortal senses, than the imagined life into which the grave cradles, as the launch ship is cradled, the disembodied and therefore the functionless spirit. How should a young woman look then on the eve of her marriage? Not surely in the main, as Lucretia Lane looked. She was extremely fidgety. The rovings of her fingers were often aimless. She sometimes trembled. Several times Miss Ford had observed Lucretia's reflection in the glass talking to herself. It might have been suspected by a medical observer that had a strong man been rent with the mental conflict which was obviously raging in the heart and in the soul of Lucretia Lane, he would have sweated. Lucretia, not being a strong man, was suffering from the war within her after the manner of her sex, at least of those of them who cannot put down their foot and mean, though their heartbreak as they resolve, that their yea shall be nyes, and that their nay shall mean no. I think I had better go downstairs and tell them that you are coming in a minute, said Miss Ford. As she spoke, Mrs. Lane entered the room. A comely, clean little gentle woman aged about sixty, with the word neatness writ large on every turn of her. A trifle bustling with nerve as she entered in black silk, black lace, and jet cape, black bonnet with white feathers rather rakishly perched on a black comb, a woman of whom you might safely affirm that her bedroom would be a model of folded up things, a woman to touch and adjust objects into symmetrical bearings, on whose bedroom mantelpiece, for example, the shepherd and the shepherdess would be exactly equidistance from the marble clock and the painted china candlesticks. She did not seem to observe her daughter's manner, mood or bearing. Her mind was capable of dealing with one idea only at a time, and the idea that now possessed her was not the face of her daughter as the girl stood before the looking-glass putting on her hat. Not ready yet, Lucretia, cried Mrs. Lane, who always gave her daughter the full pomp of her baptismal title. The major is downstairs walking about with his watch in his hand. He thought he would be late and actually ran a part of the way, and has scarcely got his breath yet. You know how impatient he is. All these little retired indium men are, and irritable. I think we are most fortunate to have got him to give you away. He is afraid the clergymen won't wait if he's kept. How long are you likely to be, dear? Two minutes answered Lucretia, without turning her eyes from the mirror into which she was directing their beauty and brilliance, and which was reflecting a countenance glacial in expression. Under that sort of ice of reserve, what a vast number of disagreeable and dangerous properties may be floating. I'll go downstairs and keep the major company, said Miss Bored, and as she passed Mrs. Lane, she whispered, Lucretia seems very uncomfortable. You are quite happy at heart, my darling, I hope, said the mother, getting hold of that idea and none other, and approaching her daughter to look at her reflection in the toilet glass. I cannot make haste if you talk to me, mother, answered the girl. There, this hat must do. She put on her gloves and went downstairs, followed by her mother, whose face wore an expression of uneasiness and surprise, as well it might. About the little parlor flitted with agitation the figure of Major Stroud, a shape of bristling whisker and wiry moustache, buttoned up in the form of a cask of ale in a frock coat, and there was temper in the Indian duskiness of his eye. Miss Ford stood in the window. On the sideboard were displayed the wedding gifts, from Major and Mrs. Stroud, a silver tea-service, from Mr. Featherbridge, a full-regged ship under a glass shade, from Miss Giddens, a silver-mounted paper knife, from Miss Ford, a set of silver salt-sellers, from Dr. Phillips, who could not come, the works of Shakespeare, from an old servant who was married, a biscuit tin, from Mrs. Lane, a watch and chain, a diamond brooch and gold bracelet, the gifts of her husband, deceased. I am sorry to have kept you waiting, Major Stroud, said Lucretia. I am afraid we shall be late as it is. Are we quite ready? answered the Major. But the irritability went out of his eyes as he looked at the handsome girl, bowing to her and then smiling. The marriage was to take place at St. Stephen's Church, which is within a convenient walk of Cheapstow Place. They might have driven, but they chose to walk. Lucretia walked with her mother, the Major and Miss Ford, behind them. Mrs. Lane endeavored to get her daughter to talk, but the girl was extraordinarily silent. She would answer yes or no, or I don't know, languidly, abstractedly, and with a visible and indeed pronounced in attention, as though she was under a spell, or as if she was in that sort of sleep in which the slumberer responds to questions without recollecting anything that was said when she awakens. Mrs. Lane was without much talent, and therefore unequal to the establishment of any sort of satisfactory hypothesis. Even the intuition of the mother failed her, that marvelous penetration, which is nature's gift of the interpretation without mental effort. In a foggy sort of way, she desired to believe that her daughter was too high-spirited to appear to be fretting over what was not indeed to prove an immediate farewell to her mother-in-home, but which was, nevertheless, the most absolute of all solutions of continuity, a complete severance in effect, though she might continue to dwell for a long time with Mama. Mrs. Lane remembered that she had felt this way herself when she was married, when she wanted to cry whilst walking up the aisle on her father's arm, and made strange faces under her veil to hide her emotion. Little did she foresee, good woman, the bolt that was to drop with a meteoric blast at her feet. At the church door Major Stroud gave his arm to Lucretia, who took it with an exterior of frigid impassivity, and together they approached the altar preceded by Mrs. Lane and Mrs. Ford. A few spectators spotted the sittings. Though all ends and parts of London swarm with business and hurry, there are always plenty of people with leisure enough to make a crowd at a wedding. Even a walking and hadded and jacketed wedding is sufficiently extraordinary in an age when, of course, people are very seldom married, very rarely born, almost never buried, to delay the yelp of the milkman, to arrest the motion of the perambulator, to retard the delivery of Sir Thomas's piece of salmon, and to bewilder the blind man following his dog upon the pavement. Some figures were near the altar awaiting the arrival of the bride. There was nobody answering to the appearance of old Robin Gray amongst them. One was a tall, deep-chested, clean-shaven man, with a straight nose, standing out a little in a sort of seeking-way. Greenish gray eyes, like saltwater in soundings, hair parted down the middle, close-cropped like a soldier's, a rather military-looking man on the whole, with something marine in the motions of his body as though he was on board ship in a small sea-way, under thirty years of age. His smile was slow in formation, like that of an actor whose business it is to keep his face. He had very good teeth, which made his slow smile like the gliding of sunshine upon his countenance. He was Captain Francis Reynolds of the British Merchant Service, and he was waiting near the altar in St. Stephen's Church to be married to Lucretia Lane. His best man stood near him, Mr. William Featherbridge, a brown-eyed, bearded person of twenty-eight, sheep-like instead fastness of gaze, but with hints in his shape of considerable alertness at the call of duty. Captain Reynolds, as Lucretia approached, viewed her with a face moving with love, and a smile eloquent of devotion and of manly affection. She did not meet his eye. Her face was uninterpretable. You could not have detected the least quiver of lip, the faintest hint of agitation, and any of the smallest working of the liniments of her countenance. The doos alone knows how it was with her, what she was about, why she was there, why, being there, she did not look the radiant maiden. She did not bear the label of the rosy and modest virgin who was to find a blissful haven for life in the manly bosom alongside of her. Some who watched her put it down to nervousness, some to that sort of conceit which makes people superior to any kind of situation they may happen to find themselves in, some to acting, none, not even the mother, not even the bridegroom who, standing next to her, looked at her marble-hard face a minute before the clergyman began to read, attributed the girl's behavior to the right cause, which was an impassioned sense of chastity dominating all other emotion with a vigor of hysteria, yet without force of spirit in it to subdue her to the none-like path she scarcely knew whether she wished to tread or not. She was in a state of mind that froze the sources of feeling, that closed the portals of every corridor of the heart and soul, that numbed the brain till volition was mere mechanism, till the will might have been compared to a dumb and stirless raven perched upon a bust like that of Pallas in the poem. The clergyman began to read the service. The responses were scarcely whispered by Lucretia. The officiating minister, a curate, looked at her over his spectacles somewhat pointedly, then at the man whom he was transmuting into the golden state of husband. God-what! In the vestry Captain Reynolds took his wife's hand, and, with a face full of love, sought to kiss her, but she shrank from his lips, almost shrank indeed from her mother's, and the name which she inscribed under that of her husband was scarcely legible for the tremors that ran through her hand. Captain Reynolds's face was clouded. His eyebrows were arched into a fixed expression of astonishment. He was profoundly confused, and looked about him with perplexity. In the vestry he received an inquiring stare from his best man, Mr. Featherbridge, and his answering glance was as blank as that of the gaze of a man in a black room. He offered his wife his arm, and she took it, and together they walked down the church to the door followed by Mrs. Lane. The others lingered to join them a little later on. The moment they gained the pavement, Lucretia withdrew her hand. Mrs. Lane, said Captain Reynolds, Cretia will not speak to me. What is the matter? What have I done? Lucretia exclaimed Mrs. Lane, who walked on her daughter's right, and who spoke in a voice that showed that tears were not far off. I cannot understand your conduct. Do you feel ill, my darling? No. Does your marriage make you unhappy? said Captain Reynolds. She returned no answer, keeping her eyes obstinately bent upon the ground. It is such a wretched beginning, said Mrs. Lane. I gave my sanction. I thought you both wanted this. Whatever is the cause of this change in you, Lucretia? I can scarcely hear what you say with these omnibuses and cabs and boys whistling, answered Lucretia. I do not think it very kind of you, I am sure, said Mrs. Lane, in a whimpering way. It is very hard upon Frank. I could not have treated your father like this, certainly not at the very outset. It is incredible, she said, projecting her head past her daughter to peer at Reynolds. What will our friends think if you carry on like this? The husband of a few minutes was dredging his wife's face with his eyes, but could find no meaning in it outside its beauty pleading to him. No hint to convey a physical or spiritual explanation of the mystery of this sudden metamorphosis. He was bitterly concerned. Could it be possible that she was mad, that she had suddenly given light to a latent but pregnant seed of hereditary distimper, a strain in the family that had been concealed from him, a quality of intellectual structure of which the girl and the mother herself might have been ignorant, as a part of the paternal or maternal legacy? He had kissed her often. She had never repulsed him. They had often sat together alone in the twilight hand in hand. A couple or seldom married without certain happenings having gone before. Memories of the tender green of the May of Love were sweet and scented between them. It was not to be supposed that she could forget all of a sudden. She must remember everything, though she gave no visible expression to recollection by dramatization of her mood. He felt that she should know better than to act like this. She was now his wife. She could not get away from that. She had always been very willing to marry him. What, in the devil's name, had gone wrong with the fine creature? Yet never was his love more consuming than whilst he walked to Cheapstow Place with the beautiful, chaste, animated statue he had wedded. The moment the house door was opened, Lucretia passed in, ran upstairs to her bedroom, and locked the door. Captain Reynolds and Mrs. Lane walked into the parlor where a hired waiter was trimming the refreshments—cakes, ices, chicken, sandwiches, fruit, jellies, and so on—with champagne. Doesn't she mean to return, do you think? said Reynolds. Oh, dear, her conduct is most extravagant and unintelligible. She ought to be in the drawing-room to receive our guests. I haven't the least idea what to do, and the eyes of the neat, comely little gentlewoman fairly streamed. It must be a passing fit, said Reynolds, in a low voice, frowning and tapping the floor from the heel with the toe of one boot. It may be a matter for a doctor. I'll go upstairs and see what she means to do, said Mrs. Lane. Stay in the drawing-room, Frank. If she keeps on like this, some excuse must be made. We must say that she's ill, but oh, how silly of her, and what an awful position to place us in! And she trudged upstairs to her daughter's bedroom, whilst Frank went to the floor above where the drawing-room was. Who's there? exclaimed the voice of Lucretia. It's I, your mother! answered Mrs. Lane, talking at the door handle which she had turned without producing further consequences. For goodness' sake, unlock the door and let me in, that we may talk rationally. There is yet time, the people haven't arrived, though they are coming. I don't mean to live with Captain Reynolds, said the voice of Lucretia. A pause followed this terrific remark. The mother scarcely seemed to hear, or hearing, to understand. The black bonnet with the white feathers swayed from side to side like the head of a listening hen. What? then gasped Mrs. Lane, and seizing the handle of the door with both hands, she shook it as though she had got hold of her daughter, crying, Let me in! How dare you behave like this, Miss? Forgetting that the Miss was now Mrs. Do you want to break my heart? Open this door, Lucretia. I don't intend to live with Captain Reynolds, said the lady inside, speaking with such deliberation that there was the interval of a pulse at least, between the dropping of every syllable. Now, this girl had sanctioned and expressed delight in Reynolds' arrangements for them after marriage. They were to take a run to Edinburgh and the North for a week or so, and then the bride would return to her mother and live with her until her husband's return. Why don't you come out and join Frank and me and behave yourself properly? cried Mrs. Lane. No answer was returned. Captain Reynolds, on the lower platform, came on to the landing to listen. When, as he swiftly did, he discovered that Lucretia did not answer her mother, he called out in a loud, stern sea voice. She's my wife, Mrs. Lane. She has no right to withdraw herself from me. If she will not open the door, I can easily put my shoulder against it. The house was small, and the Captain's voice very filling, and the hired waiters stood half in and half out of the parlor door with his left ear cocked upwards, and a grin of astonishment on his face, while the housemaid, with a nose-gay in her bosom, listened at the front of the staircase. Lucretia could not fail to hear Frank's voice. She exclaimed from her bed on which she had seated herself. You may tell him that if he attempts to force, I will swallow this bottle of poison I am holding. Mrs. Lane shrieked. At that moment the hall bell rang, and the house door was hammered upon. With the echo of her shriek, as it might seem on the expression of her face, poor Mrs. Lane went downstairs, and with a toss of both hands cried, I can do nothing with her. She threatens to poison herself if you approach her. Is it not a case for a doctor? said Captain Reynolds. Shall I go for Dr. Phillips, and explain matters and bring him round? Dr. Phillips can't help us, moaned Mrs. Lane. If I can't influence her, how should Dr. Phillips? Major and Mrs. Stroud, said the housemaid, and they entered, and were quickly followed by others of the invited. The curate who had officiated, Miss Giddens, Miss Ford, Mr. Featherbridge, and one or two more. The major was a little man who asked questions. A conversation with him consisted of a series of interrogatories. He was a Paul Pry, always hoping, without saying so, that he didn't intrude, and intruding to a degree that he was often offensive. He rather relished the misfortunes of others. He was one of those people who, according to the French cynic, find something that does not displease them in Les Maldes Attours. This major, with all the rest, must instantly have seemed there was trouble in the little house, and so, consistently with his nature, he went to work to ask questions. Whereas Mrs. Reynolds he inquired, rolling his eyes over the room, as though he expected to see her shape herself out of a cabinet or an armchair. She's not very well, Major, responded Mrs. Lane, discovering the greatest disorder of spirits, sincere uneasiness, and much misery by her manner. Not well, cried the Major. Why, she was quite well ten minutes ago. People sometimes fall ill in one minute, said Mr. Featherbridge. What can be the matter? whispered Miss Giddens to Miss Ford. She was very singular before she went to church, and very remarkable during the service was the reply faintly delivered. I am afraid we intrude, said Mrs. Stroud. Can I be of any service, asked the curate, who, stepping close to Mrs. Lane, added in her ear, I did observe a strange constraint in your daughter's manner at the altar, which made me fear she was not quite happy at heart. She refuses to live with her husband, said Mrs. Lane, in a ghastly whisper. The curate, who was blue about the upper lip and cheeks, and had a face like a beardless saint without a halo in a church window, composed his face into the exact posture of a whistle. The expression arrested the eye of the Major, who fearlessly took a step towards the pair. Now, what is all this about, said he? Mrs. Lane, I plead the privilege of a friend. At your request I gave your daughter away. Why is she not here? The poor woman, looking at him under her white feathers, seemed to crack nuts, and rather spelt, then pronounced the words. She declines to live with Frank. Oh, that's all damned nonsense, burst out the Major. She is legally compelled to live with him. What's made her change her mind? They seem so very much in love. I thought she was deused cold during the service. Where is she? Shall I go and talk to her? I'm not a man to stand any Tom Fulory. If she were my daughter, she'd either favor me with a very complete explanation, or shall I go and see her? All this he exclaimed in so loud a voice that the whole room was in the secret, and many looks were exchanged. I am truly sorry, dear Mrs. Lane, said Mrs. Stroud very kindly. Our presence can only be an intrusion under the circumstances. I am awfully sorry, said Mrs. Ford, going up to the widow with her hand extended. But you'll find she'll come round. It's mere petulance. Too ridiculous in a girl that's just gone through the ceremony to be regarded seriously. Do, please, take some refreshments before you go, sobbed Mrs. Lane. In ten minutes everybody had cleared out, save Captain Reynolds and his best man, Mr. Featherbridge. Mrs. Lane and these two gentlemen sat staring into vacancy, said Featherbridge, breaking the silence. I have often thought that marriage is like the Great Sea Serpent. When it's not seen, it's believed in. And when it is seen, it's not believed in. I'll go up and see your, cried Captain Reynolds, starting from his chair. No, exclaimed Mrs. Lane, also starting from her chair. She has a bottle of poison. She will drink it. I know she will if you attempt to force by thrusting against the door, or even talk threateningly to her. I beg pardon, Captain, said Mr. Featherbridge, with something of the deference of an officer to his skipper. But may I make a suggestion? Suppose you leave Mrs. Reynolds for the day, and call to-morrow and see how things are going. It's just what I could wish, exclaimed Mrs. Lane. It's the advice I would give you, Frank. In the mood she is in, nothing can be done, I am sure. Well, you may be right, said the unfortunate husband slowly, engaging with a little bewilderment round the walls, much as he had looked in the vestry. It's a violent, strange change, something quite outside any bearings I can take. Could any girl have been more loving? I suppose people can have fits of mind just as they have fits of the body. This seems a fit of the mind, as if it was epilepsy, and she had fallen on the floor with a shriek or two, insensible. So much the more reason for giving her time, then, sir, said Featherbridge. Just so, said Mrs. Lane, a night's rest and reflection may work wonders, and I am here to reason with her. Is there a hotel in the neighbourhood? asked the captain. Yes, quite close, in Princess Square, replied Mrs. Lane. They've let my diggings, or I should return, said Captain Reynolds. Why, he continued pulling out his watch, we ought to be in a cab going to the station for Scotland. Well, till tomorrow, till tomorrow. He sighed and frowned and abruptly left the room, unwilling that his face should be seen. Mr. Featherbridge shook hands with sympathetic ardency with poor Mrs. Lane, and followed Captain Reynolds out of the house. Mrs. Lane went to her bedroom to remove her bonnet and cape and put on her cap, and then went upstairs to her daughter. Who's there? Your mother. What do you want, mother? Frank and Mr. Featherbridge have left the house. You can open the door, said Mrs. Lane. On this the door was unlocked, and the mother entered. Scarcely, however, could she command her faculties to address her daughter when the housemaid arrived. The waiter wants to know, please, if he's to remain. Give him this half sovereign and send him away, said Mrs. Lane, pulling out her purse. Lucretia had removed her hat and jacket, and stood with her hand upon the toilet table looking at her mother. Her hair seemed to glow as though there was sunshine in the room. It would be absurd to say that her dark eyes shown with the fire of resolution that was like wrath because the eyes do not change. It is the eyelids and eyebrows which dramatize those motions of spirit which the eyes themselves are believed to express. If this were not so, the actress's face would be a very imperfect representation of the part she takes. There was certain nobleness and dignity in Lucretia's bearing, which was owing to a sense of supernatural triumph of chastity, of a conquest of virtue by something even higher than virtue, as the cold star is more exalted than the lonely peak moon-like with virgin snow that points to it at some prodigious mountain altitude. Frank has left, began Mrs. Lane. I don't want to hear his name mentioned, interrupted Lucretia. The mother strained her eyes at her daughter's face. She could find nothing to hint in insanity, not the dimmest munition of aberration. She was, as she had always been, saving that now she had taken to herself a stateliness of demeanor, an importance, an even pomp of bearing, lofty and victorious as though her soul was swelled with exultation over the issue of her extraordinary battle. Why did you go through the service, Lucretia? asked your mother seating herself. I felt the change coming over me whilst I was dressing, answered the young wife. Mother, it was agony. I had not the courage to declare to myself I would not marry him. I ought to have had the courage. I can never live with him. But you'll wear his ring? Oh, yes. I don't mean to be faithless to myself. I know what I am, and how I intend to remain. How we shall be talked about. What is the value of the opinion of a few handfuls of dust in skirts or frock coats? I know that I have acted with sickening stupidity. But that is my concern. I am still queen of myself, and, slowly and deliberately, I do not mean to live with Captain Reynolds. A gleam of good sense at this moment irradiated the darksome cells of Mrs. Lane's brain. What could be more transparent than that her daughter was in no mood to be reasoned with? That the application of the remedial drug in her condition of mental sickness was certain to injure her and not benefit her. She might be managed with patience. She must be allowed time for reflection. You may soften a tough steak by beating it, but you shall not mend a broken leg with a mustard leaf. Mrs. Lane, influenced by good sense, quitted her daughter and went downstairs to find that five pounds' worth of refreshments had been left on her hands, untasted by, God help her, the wedding guests. CHAPTER II. THE MEDICAL CERTIFICATE Next day, shortly after twelve, Captain Reynolds called at Cheapstow Place. He was shown into the parlor, and Mrs. Lane speedily arrived. She was pale and agitated. When this poor woman's spirits were fluttered, she could not keep her seat, but flitted about the table, lifting a pinch of her dress and pinning it to the table's side, so to speak, as though she would fasten herself securely. Well, said Captain Reynolds, with profound anxiety, what does Creechy say? I am sorry to answer that she is as obstinate this morning as she was yesterday. Indeed, she is firmer and harder. She will not listen to me. She declares in the most imperious way that she will not live with you. Reynolds's face darkened, as though to a sudden scowl of the sky. He held a stick in his right hand. He raised it to his left hand and broke it with an unconscious and obviously involuntary effort, looked at the pieces, and threw them into the grate. The strength of the stick, the ease with which it had been broken, the mood the action expressed, frightened Mrs. Lane, who pinned her pinch of gown to the edge of the table half a dozen times in as many seconds. Can you, as her mother, give me any idea why she will not live with me? said Captain Reynolds. None. None whatever, answered Mrs. Lane, shaking her head. Has she explained her reasons for refusing? No. She told me that the change came over her whilst she was dressing for the marriage. It worked in agony in her, but failed to give her resolution enough to decide not to go to church. All the rest of her words may be summed up in her one determined remark. I do not mean to live with him. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out an envelope containing perhaps half a dozen letters. He replaced the envelope without looking at its contents. I was reading them, he said. Last night, they are a few that I like to carry about with me. She calls me her darling and tells me that she is mine. One letter, not a fortnight old, he pressed his hand upon the pocket containing the envelope as though his heart that beat close under was painting him. This full of love of everything that a man could wish to read in a letter from a woman he is shortly to marry. What have I done to deserve this treatment? What have I been guilty of that she should take her love and her marriage vows away from me? Is she at home? Oh, yes. But do not attempt to see her, cried the mother. But why not? Why mightn't the very sight of me induce a change in her and bring about what you must wish, surely? Again, his brow was dark, as though his face was shadowed by a thundersquall in the sweep of the wind over a heaving deck at sea. She knows you were coming. Had she wished to see you, she would have said so. Her threat to poison herself haunts me like a nightmare. I know she is in that state of mind when she could commit some frightful heart-breaking act if you attempted by roughness or command, or any other manner you might adopt, to bend her mind, which is now as rigid as that poker. The little woman spoke with unusual energy. Conviction of the truth of her views compacted her reasoning faculties and supplied ideas and words to her tongue. Will you go and tell her that I am here, that I wish to see her, if only for five minutes? said Captain Reynolds. Oh, yes. But I know what her answer will be, answered Mrs. Lane, moving to the door as though she was weary, and she went upstairs, whilst Captain Reynolds stood at the window with his arms folded and his lips set, as though his teeth were clenched behind them. Mrs. Lane was at least a quarter of an hour absent, and at every sound Captain Reynolds started, and looked, and listened. When at last the old lady returned, he stared beyond her, but she was alone. She began to pin her dress to the table as rapidly as her fingers could work whilst she exclaimed. I knew how it would be. She went to her bedroom and locked me up with her, and then turned me out and locked herself in again, and she swears that the thought of living with you is dreadful to her. She would rather die, and as I am sure she has poison hidden in her bedroom, she will kill herself if you persist. She burst into tears. Good-bye, Mrs. Lane. I don't know when we shall meet again, said Captain Reynolds, and taking his hat from a chair he walked out of the house. He repaired to the hotel at which he had slept, and wrote a letter of six pages to his wife. The letter was lighted with flashes of sentiment. It was moving with impassioned appeal. It teemed with memories of kisses and endearments, of promises, vows, and hopes. He described his life of loneliness on board ship, and asked her why she had abandoned him, why she refused to know him as her husband, when in a few weeks his ship would be sailing, when in a few weeks the solitude in the desolation of the ocean would be his without the light and love of her spirit to brighten the hours of the solitary watch on deck, to set up a beacon of home upon which he could keep his eyes fixed, which should be as a star to him to bring him round the world of waters to his love. He posted this letter, though it was written within a few minutes walk of Cheapstow Place, and making his way to a cab stand, got into a handsome, and told the man to drive to Mr. Turnover Solicitor, in a street out of Holburn. Mr. Turnover had acted for Captain Reynolds in a lawsuit which arose through a collision at sea. He was a bald, bland, little old man, with streaks of faded yellow whisker, gold frame spectacles, dressed in the rusty black that Charles Lamb loved, and had he worn shoes with bows he would have thought him shod in keeping. They shook hands, and Captain Reynolds, sitting down, told his story. It is certainly a very singular case, said Mr. Turnover. There is one celebrated case of the sort, but it differs from yours because the parties had, apparently, agreed to separate at the church door. The husband, if I remember a right, left the country, and on his return after some years, claimed his wife who refused to live with him, on which he kidnapped her and locked her up. Reynolds frowned and looked at Mr. Turnover steadfastly. Her friends obtained access to her. Her case was brought before the courts, who decided that by the law of England a man has no right to detain his wife against her will. Is that so? said Captain Reynolds. Quite so, responded Mr. Turnover. The husband must not use force. If he does, the law will punish him. But it's not there is such a thing as restitution of conjugal rights, inquired Captain Reynolds. Yes, but in your case, as in the other, no rights were ever established by cohabitation. There is therefore no infraction upon which to base an appeal for restitution. Good God, what extraordinary laws we have in this country, exclaimed Captain Reynolds. But I am quite sure, rights are no rights, said Mr. Turnover, that you would never get a judge to sanction the detention of your wife by force and against her will. What would you call force? Imprisoning her in her home and setting a guard over her. What do you advise me to do, Mr. Turnover? I am in love with my wife. I was, as I have told you, yesterday married to her in the presence of her mother and others. I am legally entitled to possess her. Yes, but even in post-nuptial arrangements, there must be two to a contract, said Mr. Turnover blandly. It seems to be a case of perversity. A mood let us hope that will pass. I once said to Mrs. Turnover, I compare a man and wife to a mill in stream. The mill turns one way, and the stream runs the other. But betwixt them both, the grain is ground. Not in my case, said Captain Reynolds grimly. Are you leaving the country? Yes. Shortly, asked Mr. Turnover, I sail in command of a ship on October 8 next. Your wife may come round between this and then, said Mr. Turnover. Her mother, I presume, is well disposed to you. Oh yes, she is bitterly cut up by her daughter's conduct. I am pleased to hear that, said Mr. Turnover. Often in these matrimonial troubles, the mother-in-law is as the snake that lies coiled round the stem of the flower that hides it. Some mothers do not like to part with their daughters. They are unhulsomely and unnaturally jealous of the husbands, especially if the marriage was in opposition to their wishes or ambitions, or I regret to say, interests. If I were you, I would trust your mother-in-law to help you with her influence and leave the rest to the good sense of your wife. Captain Reynolds paid the lawyer his fee and left the office, having got as much value for his money out of the law as most men commonly receive who deal with it. Who was Captain Reynolds? And who was Mr. Featherbridge? One of these men fills an important part of the sea drama, and whilst the captain sits over a chop and a half a pint of sherry in an old inn in Hallburn, thinking of how by rights he should be enjoying life with a handsome young wife in Scotland, and what he must do to get hold of her, we will expend a few minutes in some account of him and the other. Reynolds was the son of a gentleman farmer who fared ill on the goodly fruits of the earth in Essex. He received a middling education to the age of fourteen when he was sent to sea as an apprentice in a sailing ship in the English merchant service, vulgarly called the mercantile marine. He rose to command several tramps in sail and steam, and two male steamers. But having run into a ship in a fog, he lost his birth in the company he served, though he saved a certificate and was glad to accept the command of a sailing vessel called the Flying Spur of one thousand tons, owned by Mr. George Blaney of Lettenhall Street. She was bound to Poposa, a port in Chile, some distance north of Valpariso, and her very commonplace cargo would consist of bricks, coke, and coal, and of nitrate of soda on her returned voyage. Reynolds had saved a few hundred pounds, but he would have found, if questioned, no justification in his occupation or prospects for marrying, which was doubtless his reason as a sailor for getting married. He had hoped on his return from this next trip to take his wife to sea with him on a voyage, then establish her in a little home in some district where rent was cheap and where her mother might live with her during his absence. But what are the expectations of man? He certainly never, amidst his most gilded and expanded dreams of the future, could have conceived himself sitting on the day following his marriage over a chop and a half a pint of sherry and halberd, a more lonesome man than Daniel at his pulse, or Crusoe, over a kid's stake. Mr. Featherbridge was the son of a schoolmaster, and learning had been applied to him when a boy at more ends of his person than one. He had been caned by the paternal hand into a considerable knowledge of Latin, which was irrimediately lost on his first voyage when beating down the English Channel and a liberal equipment of mathematics which he preserved and which helped him in after years in passing his sundry examinations. He, too, like Reynolds, had been sent to see as an apprentice, and they had been shipmates on several occasions. Indeed, Reynolds had a warm liking for Mr. Featherbridge, and when his friend served under him a second mate, he dropped the dignity and importance of command, though he was extremely reserved to the mate, and walked the deck with Featherbridge in his watch, and talked to him with the pleasantness and candor of a brother. Thus it happened, when he obtained command of the flying spur, he sent a line to Featherbridge offering the birth of mate of the ship, and we now understand why it should have been that Mr. Featherbridge was Captain Reynolds's best man at his marriage. It will be supposed that Captain Reynolds was careful that his wife should know his address. He received no answer to his letter dated at the hotel in Bayswater. He took a lodging near the mill wall docks where his ship was loading, and made a second impassioned appeal to his wife, and he also wrote to Mrs. Lane, in treating her to help him by using her influence with her daughter, and telling her that his heart was aching for Lucretia, and that it must break with grief at sea if she made no sign before he departed, as he would be able to think of nothing but his wife. Mrs. Lane answered in a letter expressed in affectionate language, but could give him no hope. Lucretia was as chilling and determined as ever she had been, and reddened within patience and temper if her mother hazarded the subject of her husband. Mrs. Lane thought that the extraordinary mood which possessed Lucretia had not had time to be modified by thought, by recurrence of emotion which could not have perished, by the sense of dutifulness and loyalty which might visit her when she reflected upon her marriage vows. She strongly advised Frank not to dream of calling, as another visit could only end in a deeper degree of obduracy, and personally such a visit as he had last paid was so trying that she felt she had neither the strength nor the nerve to confront such another experience. So Captain Frank Reynolds found himself completely blocked out from the avenue at the extremity of which, on the pedestal of sentiment irradiated by the rosy light of his passion, stood the cold, chaste statue upon whose finger he had passed the ring which made her his, though there was no piece of sculpture in England at that time, though there was no picture of a beautiful woman hanging upon any wall in the country, more distant and hopeless to the yearning of love, to fruition of desire, than the wife whose parrot cry was, I will not live with Captain Reynolds. On Tuesday, October 7th, Mrs. Lane and Lucretia were at table in Sheepstow Place finishing lunch. It was about half past one, the day very bright and the air fresh, but the hearth trappings of the summer still decorated the grade in that little parlor. Lucretia was dressed in gray cloth that closely fitted her figure, and expressed its ripeness and beauties. Her hair was dressed high in the Greek style, and it shone upon her brow in a neglect of red gold threads, the effect of which no artist in hairdressing could have produced. She was somewhat pale and her looks were cold, but her fine eyes were alight with the strong spirit that was her husband's despair, and you witnessed the nerve character of the woman in the long white fingers with which she dismounted a beautiful Persian cat from a right shoulder onto which it had sprung without eliciting a scream or causing a start. The house bell rang and the knocker clattered. It was natural that Mrs. Lane should exclaim, who can that be, I wonder, and turn her head to look out of the window, though of course the person at the hall door would be invisible to her. The servant came in and said to Mrs. Lane, Mr. Featherbridge would like to see you, ma'am. Where is he, hissed Lucretia? The servant slung her head sideways to intimate that he was in the passage. In the drawing-room, hissed Lucretia screwing her thumb up at the ceiling. What can he want? inquired Mrs. Lane, as though she addressed a ghost. Go to him, mother, said Lucretia. I shall be in my bedroom. She paused to add. But make him clearly understand that my mind as regards to living with Frank is absolutely made up. It is impossible. And with something that resembled a shutter of disgust in an instant's convulsion of her form, she went from the room of very Hermione of a figure. Mrs. Lane, with an expression on her face that reflected the prophetic promise of her soul to her of trouble, mounted the staircase and entered the drawing-room. Mr. Featherbridge stood at the round table in the middle of the apartment, bearded, slow-eyed, yet with alertness in the suggestion of his legs. He bowed to the old lady with the funeral solemnity of an undertaker. And indeed, had he been receiving pounds a week for the talent of his face, he could not have looked more solemn and afflicted. I am sorry to be the bearer of ill news, he said, on which Mrs. Lane laid her hand upon her heart. Indeed, I wish I could call it ill news. He gazed at her wistfully. Your son-in-law, Captain Reynolds, has met with a terrible, a frightful accident. Yesterday he fell through the main hatch into the hold of his ship, and is so injured that he is dying and may be dead before I can return to him. Oh, goodness me, how shocking! cried Mrs. Lane, breathing quickly. Dying, do you say? He may be dead as I talk to you, answered Mr. Featherbridge. Look at this, he added, and he drew out a letter which he gave to Mrs. Lane, who immediately groped behind her for her spectacle case, and put on her glasses with hands which shook as though she had been running down a hill. The letter went thus. Hours of consultation, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. 20 Gloucester Road, Gravesend, October 7, 1890 I have examined Captain Francis Reynolds and find him suffering from a compound fracture of the left leg, from fracture of the skull, and also from fracture of three or four ribs on the left side. He is severely collapsed, and this points to some internal hemorrhage, probably from rupture of the liver or kidney, but he is too ill to stand more minute examination, so I cannot state definitely which is the injured organ. It is quite impossible to remove him to hospital, and I fear that he will not live for more than about 10 or 12 hours. H. Padgett-Simes, F. R. C. S. Poor fellow, oh poor fellow, whined Mrs. Lane, who was seeing to him. I got a professional nurse last night from Gravesend, answered Mr. Featherbridge, receiving the letter, and viewing Mrs. Lane with his slow, melancholy stare. He is sensible, and his dying request is that he must see his wife, and I have come to ask her to accompany me to the ship to say goodbye forever, and to give him that one kiss which will send the poor fellow to his rest with a smile upon his face. Oh, she ought to go. She will go, I am sure, cried the widow. It must be her atonement. Oh, how shocked she will be! Give me that letter, and with a respiration full of sobs, due rather to nerves than to the mind, for consciousness had scarcely let time to absorb the full horror of the report. She went to her daughter's bedroom. She broke into it rather than walked in. What has he come to say? asked Lucretia. Read that, answered Mrs. Lane, handing the certificate to her daughter. Lucretia's cheeks paled to the aspect of white wax, as she read. How horrible, how awful, she exclaimed as the surgeon's certificate sank in her hand to her side. Where is he? Why, at grave's end, sobbed Mrs. Lane. No, on board his ship, I suppose. You see, the man says he couldn't be moved. He may be dead whilst I am talking to you. Was he conscious when Mr. Featherbridge left him, asked Lucretia, with an incomparable expression of horror and fear in her face? I suppose he was, blubbered Mrs. Lane, because he sent Mr. Featherbridge to ask you to come and see him to say goodbye, forever. Goodbye. It's most awful. The sentiment that had induced Lucretia to accept Frank's hand, to sweeten into a smile under the pressure of his lips, nay, to impel her to the altar with him, faithless in fidelity, an egoistic loyalty that was ignoble treacherous to her lover and husband, this sentiment was stirring in her as she held the letter listening to her mother. Come down and see, Mr. Featherbridge, said Mrs. Lane. She left the room, and Lucretia followed. Mr. Featherbridge slightly bowed. Do you think there is no hope? exclaimed Lucretia. Absolutely none, said Mr. Featherbridge. You have read that letter? he added, sending a glance at the certificate in her hand. Is he sensible? asked the wife. At intervals, was the answer. He sent the nurse to me this morning, and asked me to go to you and bring you to him to say farewell. I hope you will come. It is a sudden and shocking end, and I trust, Mrs. Reynolds, that you will not make this event more heartbreaking than it is by refusing his dying request. You must go. You must indeed, Lucretia, cried Mrs. Lane. I'll go with you. If people should get to hear that your husband was dying and you refused to go and see him, what would they think? What would be said? I should not be able to show my face. I should be ashamed to meet my friends. And oh, what an awful memory for life for you! I'll go and put on my bonnet. I do not think your presence would be advisable, Mrs. Lane, said Mr. Featherbridge, in his slow way. The meeting would be sacred. He loves you, I know, but it is not you that he wants. Such a meeting might be overwhelming if you made one. And how, and how, he looked in a formative sort of way at Lucretia. I mean, he went on, that something might be said which could not, and therefore would not, be said if witnesses, even if you, Mrs. Lane, were present. Well, will you go and get ready, Lucretia, said Mrs. Lane? How long is it to Gravesend, inquired Lucretia, glancing at the clock, but always preserving her marble white face of horror and fear, in which there was now suddenly mingled an expression which told of the woman's heart beating a little in love, and much in pain. Mr. Featherbridge drew out a railway guide from his pocket. A train leaves Charing Cross at a quarter to three, he said. We can catch that if you'll kindly not delay. The train leaves Gravesend at 6.40. You can easily be home again by nine or half past, and I will do myself the honour to see you to this house. I shall be ready in five minutes, said Lucretia, and quitted the drawing-room. The poor fellow has felt Mrs. Reynolds' abandonment dreadfully, said Mr. Featherbridge. God forbid that I should do him an injustice, but this fall in the hold seems strange. The ship lies motionless at boy. Nothing struck him to throw him forward. You don't say so? whispered Mrs. Lane in a voice of awe. I only hope that he may be alive when we reach the ships at Mr. Featherbridge. I shall have done my duty by a man who has always treated me as a brother, whose character is as beautiful, loyal, and true as any I have ever heard of in a sailor. Why would not she live with him? She loved him. She must have loved him to consent to be his wife. It was not as though he could give her a title in a greatest date, as though there was something outside the mere poor man himself which he was willing to wed. Oh, Mr. Featherbridge, you wring my heart, sobbed the widow, and she began to pin her gown to the edge of the drawing-room table. In five minutes, Lucretia appeared in a hat and jacket, and with an umbrella. Have you got any change, mother? she asked. Mrs. Lane gave her two sovereigns. I am ready, Mr. Featherbridge, said Lucretia. Give him a fond kiss and my dearest love, said Mrs. Lane, and tell him. Oh, Lucretia, tell him all that you feel and know I would say if I were at his side. Lucretia went downstairs. Mr. Featherbridge opened the hall door for her. They passed on to the pavement, and Mr. Featherbridge hailed a handsome cab that was passing. They got in and were driven to Charing Cross, which Mr. Featherbridge considered a safer and sureer way of reaching their destination in time than if they took the Underground Railway. Whilst they drove to the station, Lucretia asked a few questions about her husband, about his accident, if he suffered much pain, if he had the comforts he required, if there was the least hope of his living. She was very pale. Her quivering lip denoted much turbulencey of her heart. Her eyes were cheerless, but they were dull with saddening emotions. On their arrival at Gravesend, they immediately made for the waterside, and Featherbridge hailed a boat. The afternoon was fine, a dead calm, a light surly and mist floated in the atmosphere, and through it the sun darted his beams and tarnished silver sparkles upon the glass-smooth waters. It was the stream of ebb, and the ships at anchor pointed their bow spritz up river. A large and brilliant mail steamer lay in midstream waiting for something, and a black man holding a flag perched on the awning a stern. The tremors of the stream thrilled in harp-like lines through the shadow she floated on, and effaced the beauty of that piece of mirroring. The breast of the river bore its familiar burden of ships coming, of ships going, all sorts of ships, lofty steamers, lofty square rigs in tow, and the water was a mosaic of tents with a reflection of diverse colored canvas hanging at yard or gaff from one shape or another, straining at anchor or buoy, and all looking one way. That's the ship, said Mr. Featherbridge, as the waterman dipped his oars. He pointed to the flying spur. The marine eye easily perceived that she was something old-fashioned, a composite ship, metal ribs and timber frame with a handsome cut water and old-fashioned figurehead, and elliptical stern, and a white band running round her broken by painted ports. Her masks were lofty and well-stayed, that is, her long top-gallant masks had that faint curve forwards from the slight slant aft of the lower mass and top mass which was admired as a beauty in the old frigates. She was ready for sea, sails furrowed on the yards, all running rigging rove, a stout comely ship on the hull, one that had done good service to other owners in her time, and was then bought cheap as she lay capable of shifting without ballast in the West India docks by one George Blanny of Layden Hall Street. The boat arrived alongside. The steps dangled from the gangway. I can mount by myself thanks, if you will hold my umbrella, said Lucretia, and Mr. Featherbridge, remaining in the boat, could not but admire Mrs. Reynolds's fine figure as she lay hold of the ladder and ascended. She put her foot on the gangway and stepped on to the deck, and Mr. Featherbridge, bidding the waterman wait, was immediately at her side. He had grown pale on a sudden, and an expression of nervousness was visible in his face. No doubt he was dreading the effect upon the wife's mind of the dreadful wreck her husband presented, bandaged, stained, broken, dying, or dead. He gave her the umbrella and led the road to the companion way, for this was a ship with under-deck accommodation. Some of the crew were at work about the deck. Some looked to be loafing on the forecastle-head, gazing gregariously at the shore. There is nothing more loafing or lounging than a sailor's posture when he leans over the headrail sucking a pipe. The mate, Mr. Featherbridge, conducted Lucretia down the companion steps into a tolerably well-lighted interior, a sufficiently roomy cabin containing five berths, of which one on the starboard side was the pantry, a table and chairs, a swing tray or two, and that was about all. A young man, evidently the cabin servant, was polishing some glasses. The mate preemptorily ordered him to drop the job and go on deck. Lucretia was trembling. This was a new world to her, a singular, unimaginable scene, a strange atmosphere with its old marine smells, and the giant shaft of mizzen mass piercing the upper and then piercing the lower deck, the coffee-colored bulkheads, the light troubled in the skylight by the glass's protection of brass wire, the telltale compass in the ceiling over the head of the table. All this was penetrated by the presence or knowledge of anguish if dying, of horror and misery if dead. Mr. Featherbridge went to the door of a cabin which was clearly the largest, and filled nearly the whole of the space aft, and opening it just a little way, enough to admit the passage of a human figure, he asked Lucretia to step in, then instantly closed the door, softening to his own ear the shriek which followed the wife's entrance. Please visit LibriVox.org Abandoned by William Clark Russell, Chapter 3. Trapped Lucretia was trapped. Instead of seeing her husband lying in a bunk, broken, hollow, bandaged, stained, dying, or dead, watched by a nurse, what did she behold? Her husband indeed, and only her husband, erect at a little square table, as healthy an aspect as ever he had shown, a fine figure of a man amongst the last one should say, to excite repulsion in a woman who had once owned she loved him, and who had been made one with him in the most sacred of human bonds. She shrieked. She swallowed, almost choking, a sob of terror and dire astonishment. The unexpectedness of this apparition as she viewed it, the abrupt astounding transmutation of the illusion that had filled her mind as a fact into the fact that confronted her, seemed, after she had screamed, to shock the life out of her limbs, to root her to the deck, to paralyze every function. Then, with the instinct of escape, she turned her head and her husband sprang to the door. No, dear, said he, not without a note of sternness in his voice, not without a shadow of austerity in his gravity. You belong to me. The law has given you to me. You gave your hand to me before God, who is my witness. You are mine and shall remain mine. And why not? What has happened to me that this change should have happened to you? Why have you refused to see me? Have I grown loathsome in appearance and manner since we met at the church? Have I, by any single deed, warranted your contempt and aversion? I love you as I have ever loved you. I am adoring you, my darling, even as I seem to address you in heat. Come to your own, and you will find him true. He extended his arms to her and smiled with such a commingling of pathos in the expression as softened the look almost into the tenderness of tears. Open the door and let me pass, she answered. You are a coward and a villain to have betrayed me as you have, sending a lying rascal to me to represent you as dying and making me—her voice broke. She swelled her breast and cried. Let me pass. I want to go home. You shall return home with me, said he, but in my own good time. You dare not imprison me! she almost screamed. You are here, and here you remain, he replied. We will not call it imprisonment. When a wife lives with her husband, whether at sea or ashore, she is not his prisoner. She is his companion, and in my case, his love. Are you really an earnest in keeping me here and taking me away to sea? She asked, with the very spirit of tragedy firing her fine eyes and making extraordinarily dramatic the forward-leaning, imperiously inquisitorial posture of her figure. I certainly am, he answered bluntly. She looked at him for a few seconds, and speculation passed from her glowing balls of vision. Her eyes swooned in their upward rolling under the descending lids, and the scarlet of wrath died out of her cheeks into their first pallor of virgin wax. She reeled and would have fallen, but he caught her and laid her tenderly in the one bunk of that cabin, supporting her head to remove her hat that he might pillow her, liberating her throat, now kissing, now fanning her, and brooding over her with the passion of a man whose love has been consecrated. Meanwhile, Mr. Featherbridge, who had received his instructions, was executing them. He hailed the waterman to bring his boat alongside, got in, and was rode ashore, and, making his way to the telegraph office, he stamped two forms already filled up and handed them to the clerk. The first ran thus. To Mrs. Lane Chepstow Place, Bayswater, London, shall remain to nurse Frank. Please send my clothes at once to care of Station Master Falmouth, Lucretia, Flying Spur, off Gravesend. The other telegram was thus. To Station Master Falmouth, please receive and hold boxes addressed to my wife to your care, Francis Reynolds, Master Flying Spur, Gravesend. This was applaud artfully planned and diligently prosecuted. It is not for the chronicler to pronounce upon its morality. His business is to relate and to leave the reader to judge. But that certificate was a third party in this scheme in the form of a medical man? No. Mr. Featherbridge, instructed by Captain Reynolds, had called upon a medical practitioner in Gloucester Road and complained of pains in the bowels and general malaise. He protruded a tongue as read as a powder flag. The doctor felt his pulse, which yielded the rhythm of the hammered anvil. The doctor took pen in hand to prescribe, and whilst he cast his eyes upon the ceiling in search of drugs, Featherbridge asked him for a sheet of headed paper, on which he feigned to scribble a note with a pencil. This blank sheet he folded once, ready for its square envelope, and pocketed it, and on this sheet in the cabin of the Flying Spur he wrote to the dictation of Captain Reynolds the remarkable and telling certificate which had lured Lucretia to gravesend and into captivity. He was rode aboard, having been absent a little over an hour. It was about five o'clock. At six the tugged deerstocker would be alongside to take the Flying Spur in tow for the channel. The air was amazingly tranquil. The delicate color of the October sun, sinking low, gave the picture of smooth river and restful ships, and houses ashore, and the melancholy flatness of the Tilbury Plains, a hue of warmth that made a summer scene of it. Every flag hung up and down like a streak of paint from the gaff or mast head of vessels rooted to their buoy or anchor. But the colors fluttered at the staff or gaff of the steamer, mail or tramp, noble in bulk or humped in bow, or hogged amid ships, or sagged aft where the leaning funnel threatened the demolition of that extremity of the ship. And these filled the horizon of the eye with the motions of life and the colors of commerce. Mr. Featherbridge climbed the side, and at the gangway found Mr. Vincent Ralland, the second mate, a rather fat, warm-colored, yellow-haired man, in a round coat that made his figure resemble a cup and ball, with a smile of natal origin which might have passed as satirical or cynical had his utterances justified such an assumption. The captain's been waiting for you, sir, said this man. Where is he? inquired Mr. Featherbridge. In the cabin, I think, sir. See all ready for the tug, I shall be on deck shortly, and Mr. Featherbridge went below. As he entered the cabin, Captain Reynolds came out of a berth on the port side. It was not the compartment into which Featherbridge had introduced Lucretia. The door of that berth was closed and locked, and Reynolds had the key of it in his pocket, and it would remain locked until the ship was fairly under way in tow of the tug. Did you send the wires? Yes, sir. Featherbridge, said the captain, extending his hand, I am extremely obliged to you for your part in this unhappy business. I am the more obliged because I know that much that you have undertaken on my behalf is in conflict with your views. I am glad to have served such a friend as you have been to me, Captain Reynolds, said Mr. Featherbridge, but Mrs. Reynolds will hate me like poison, and I shall be ashamed to meet her. And yet, what more proper than that a wife should live with her husband? She fainted, said Captain Reynolds, and was so long in coming, too, that I was alarmed. She cries silently, which goes to my heart. For God knows it is not in me to give her cause for a single tear. She shall not have reason to complain of my honour, though I have proved treacherous in my effort to possess that which I lawfully own and loyally love. She shall be as a virgin to her husband, but under his protection and within the embrace of his eyes, which must suffice until the woman's heart breaks through the woman's perversity, and the higher form of chastity asserts itself in union. These may seem flowery thoughts and shining words in the mouth of a captain in the merchant's service, but we shall see as we progress that Reynolds was a man of reflection in reading, one who had spent a great portion of his leisure in studies outside those to which he was courted by his profession. He had read well into the poets, and had followed science in some of the most eloquent of its exponents, such as Faraday, Tindall, and Kelvin, was not without some knowledge for conversation of sculpture, painting, and music. He was mainly self-educated and therefore well grounded, and indeed he had made but a small impression on Lucretia if his fascinations had been limited to his person. Meanwhile in the captain's cabin sat or stood the captive Lucretia. Her husband's hand was visible in the furniture of this sea apartment. The bunk, the one bunk, was cozy with iderdown quilt, soft pillow, new hair mattress. A row of pegs supplied the absence of a wardrobe for the storage of skirts, jackets, and the like. A toilet table under the round scuttle with which this bedroom was illuminated bore fiddles for the preservation of a powder box, bottles of rosewater, ode cologne, and other dressing delicates. On the table were ivory hairbrushes and knickknacks, two commonplace to catalog. Several pots of plants in flour sweetened the atmosphere. Lucretia had ceased to weep. Her face had taken a hard look of rage and alarm. She gazed about her, but entirely missed the symptoms of marital affection through the resentment and indignation she was consumed with. Had the cabin been lighted by a porthole big enough to run a gun through, Lucretia would not have thrown herself into the Thames. She had threatened poison to her trembling mother outside, but she had not had a drop in the room, and she was a conspicuous figure amongst those people of this world who are the very last to lay violent hands upon themselves. No doubt she would have made a brave dash for liberty could she have found an exit, descended a rope ladder, say, or jumped a fall of fifteen feet into a boat. But she had no idea of destroying herself, and perhaps her husband knew enough of her character to form an opinion under this head. For would he otherwise have allowed a brand new pair of scissors to repose in a fiddle on the toilet table? Since even a bear bodkin suffices in the hands of those who will not fartles bear not to mention husbands. What a honeymoon was this for Lucretia! Her nostrils quivered, her lips worked, as she vowed that if ever she was permitted to return she would pursue her treacherous husband and the scoundrel feather bridge to the utmost recesses of the law. And still she gathered from the character of her sea bedroom, from the absence of all instruments for purposes of navigation, and of all hints of a masculine presence, that she was to dwell alone, and from this perception her cold, chaste, passionless spirit sucked in a little comfort. What would her mother think when she came to learn the truth? Unfortunately Lucretia felt secretly convinced that Mrs. Lane would approve on the whole of Frank's stratagem as rescuing both herself and her daughter from a most anomalous and gossip breeding position. It was not as though Captain Francis Reynolds had kidnapped Lucretia Lane, a disdainful, handsome young woman, a prize not only for beauty but for money. He had beguiled his own wife into his arms. The fittest of all harbors for her to bring up in, the safest and surest casket in which to deposit the jewel of her life. This sort of reasoning would occur to Lucretia no doubt, but not in a convincing way. She might have been agitated by such reflections but not persuaded as a sea-fowl when the waves pass under it is not carried forward but moves up and down. She had no fear of violence. She very well knew she was deeply and devotedly loved, but she burnt with wrath when she considered how she had been tricked and trapped. And again she wept and sometimes wildly stepped the narrow carpeted space of deck and sometimes paused to listen with vulgar surmises occasionally breaking in, such as would Frank keep her locked up until she consented? Did he mean to keep her throughout the voyage or did he merely intend to terrify her into the submission of a wife? If so, then persistent obstinacy must result in his sending her ashore before the ship was fairly away from England. Where would she be allowed to take her meals? Would she be permitted to go on deck? Hark! What noise was that? Merely the sounds of the helm, the scraping of the wheel-chain, the jar of an old-fashioned system of steering. She looked through the scuttle and perceived that the ship was in motion. The pilot was in charge and the captain was at large. Lucretia heard the key turned in her cabin door and Reynolds entered. He looked at her wistfully and said, We have started. The voyage has begun, Cretia. Though you may not forgive me for a little, I am happy. It is as it should be, as your mother could wish it to be, as you, dearest, will soon admit it ought to be. Do you mean to land me? she exclaimed with fire in her eyes. No. Do you intend to carry me all the way to the South American port you are sailing to? Yes, and back again. You are a black-hearted wretch, she exclaimed, working her hands hysterically. If I live, I'll punish you. The voyage will do you good, he said, in an easy voice of good nature, almost cheerful. This is a stout little ship, and in her day she was a proud one. You have the figure for a rolling deck and the eyes for a tropic calm. You are no gentleman, she exclaimed, frowning at him. Would any gentleman treat a woman as you are treating me? Talk to me as a wife, and I will listen to you, he responded. What good will scolding do? I am not changed. I am as I was when we first met, and as I was when you said yes to me, and we kissed, and you gave me a rose from your breast. You cannot forget such things. I have you, and I will keep you, and you shall thank me yet, crechey. I demand to be sent on shore, she exclaimed, lifting her foot and bringing it down with an angry slap on the deck. Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder, said Captain Reynolds. Why should I divorce you? We love and we lose, and the poet tells us that it is better to love and lose than never to love at all. I love you, and I don't mean to lose you. No creche, that ring has a meaning as deep as your life and mine, which are one. She passionately seized the wedding ring on her finger as though she would tear it off, but she did no more than that. In the minute of silence that followed he grew stern and looked at her gloomily and even forbiddingly, as though he would have her know that he was her lord, and that one of her vows was obedience, which formed the third of the trinity, which included love and honor. But if temper had not blinded her, she would have seen that this look was but a mask. Indeed, the glow of his love colored the whole man, and rendered her conduct inexplicable. For we recognize the passion of chastity in the vows of the none, but it is impossible to interpret precisely that quality in the vows of the bride. You will understand, said he, now that the ship is under way, that you can come and go and do what you please. This cabin has been prepared for you and for you only. You can take your meals alone or with me at the cabin table as you choose. In all this he was unconsciously answering the questions which had run in her head before he arrived. He proceeded. You have but to name a desire, and if it's in the power of the sea life to gratify it, you shall not be disappointed. You have nothing to fear. If you can find the elements of happiness in you, you shall not miss in me a solid foundation for the erection of your temple. He viewed her steadfastly whilst her eyes gloated him with indignation and scorn, and rounding on his heel he walked out. Her mind fell into a hurry of desperate thought. The idea possessed her to write a letter, she gazed about her for writing materials. Nothing of that sort was visible. She was very ignorant of the sea, had some vague fancy of a passing boat, of throwing a letter into it and begging the people to post it. But to whom should she write? There was but one, her mother. And what could her mother do, even if she proved willing to separate them now that they were together? Her reflections grew pale with something like despair. What a base trick to play her. Helplessness added fuel to wrath. To bring her away too without clothes. How on earth was she to manage with only the things she had on when she had understood from Frank, yes, she called him Frank to herself, that the outward passage might run into three or even four months, for the ship was bound round the horn, and from the Thames to Paposa is a long navigation for an old-fashioned composite sailing ship, hedged about by those conditions of calms and headwinds, and long heaving twos with the arrest of ice and other familiar causes of delay, which take no part in the voyage of the steamer. She determined to go on deck. Her cabin had been a prison, and was an exasperation to her. And now she resolved, even before she quitted her sleeping-room, to adopt and express a posture of mind that should prove a death blow to her husband's expectations. We shall presently see what she meant to do. The cabin was lighted. A broad flame of oil in a glass globe swung pulses of radiance through the atmosphere to the bulkheads, and the sheen rippled in bright wood in cutlery and crockery and glass. Stars of the evening trembled in the skylight. It was hard upon seven o'clock. The cloth was spread for a meal in the cabin. The servant, who no doubt had received instructions from the captain, stepped up to Lucretia with a mighty fine air of respect, and asked if he should serve tea to her. Yes, her throat was a little dry with tears and constriction and angry words, and she waited, not seated, standing beside the table, whilst the cabin's servant went forward to the galley. Occasionally sounds broke from the interior, noises of straining like to the groans delivered by old furniture at midnight. This was a very new scene of life to the lady, and she looked about her with petulant disgust, with a ceaseless complaining of heart that she should have been betrayed by a most ignoble trick into a captivity that was really worse than jail, as the sage pointed out, for in a ship you are not only locked up, but you stand to be drowned. Whilst she waited for a cup of tea, Mr. Featherbridge came down the companion steps on his way to the berth. He started at sight of her, and averted his face as he passed. She followed him with a gaze of withering intensity and dislike. She looked a handsome figure in her hat and jacket. The oil flame glorified her hair. It gave a delicacy to her extreme pallor. It accentuated the dark depth of her eyes, and lighted a little star of beauty in each. Why on earth could not this woman be commonly human and take her husband for better or for worse? It was Fontanel who proposed the erection of statues to beautiful women. He would have gone further, built an immense hall, in which figures and wax of the beautiful women of the country, appareled in the fashion, could be collected. In such a vast and engaging museum Lucretia would have made no inconsiderable show. The servant arrived with the teapot and milk, and placed some thin bread and butter and cake on the table. She filled a cup and sipped it standing. As she sipped, her husband came out of his cabin. I am glad to see you are taking some refreshment, said he, looking at her with an appearance of moving affection. She held her eyes off him and curled her lip and kept silence. Oh, I forgot to tell you, he continued briskly, as though he would have his good humor sheer, as the cut water of a ship, the wrathful billow, threw her rage and resentment. That I sent a wire to your mother to forward your clothes to Falmouth, where we shall call for them. Her answer, without looking at him, was a sneer, and she turned her back upon him and drank her tea. It was pretty clear now that she had made up her mind not to speak to him, to be to him a shape without a spirit, a statue without a soul, a lighthouse without a lantern, a moon without glory, a something of which the absence would be a blessing in comparison with the discomfort of its presence. He told the servant to light the lamp in Mrs. Reynolds' cabin and passed on deck. In a few minutes she put down the cup and went up the steps. Land and river were closed in the early October night. The ship was floating restfully in the wake of the tug, whose shape was a shadow, and whose line of smoke, as it rose almost perpendicular from the funnel, was often full of the spangles of the furnace. There was majesty in the figure of the ship, in the solemn lifting of her masts crossed with yards symmetrically braced, each glimmering with its length of pale canvas. There was poetry in the lonely figure of the helmsman at the wheel, the incarnation of that spirit of sentience, which to the meditative eye is visible in the motions of the compass. Gleams of light, falling one new not whence, swarmed capriciously on the water. Yellow sparks dotted the dark shores, and here and there a lighted house touched the gloom with a misty dash of radiance, like phosphor in brine. Visionary forms of ships passed, the colored signals of the sea in red and green and white shone in the gloom, or hovered over the dark breast of river like lights about a swamp, or the tremulous meteors of the highway, which affright the clown and hurry him along in sweat to report a lie, namely a ghost. Lucretia moved warily about the deck, giving her husband a wide berth. He stood in conversation with the pilot, but whilst she continued above, he held her in the tail of his eye. There was a sheen of lamp-light and star-light in the atmosphere, and if the expression of the face could not be read, the behavior of the eyes could be followed. Captain Reynolds observed the pilot watching Lucretia. She is my wife, he said. Oh yes, I thought as much, answered the Trinity houseman, whose square trunk, compact of coat and shawl, lightly swayed on round legs under skirts that half concealed them, and to himself he added, she may be his wife, but she don't seem much of a companion. The evening was perfectly tranquil, the river glass smooth. A large star or two that went in the water with the ship hung like a prism of white light, but the movement of the vessel made a little wind, and the threads of hair on Lucretia's brow danced to it as though they were Colleridge's summer leaf in an entranced night on a topmost bow, and she felt a bit chilly. She stepped from the side at which she had been looking at the shore, and occasionally glancing at the man who conversed with her husband, and going to the sailor at the wheel, asked who that person was who was with the captain. The pilot, Mom, answered the fellow, does he remain in the ship, inquired Lucretia. No, Mom, I expect he'll go ashore at deal. She said thanks, and walked to the ship's side again, where she debated whether she should appeal to the pilot to help her to return home, but the sense of the absurd flavored her anger. She was not without a good and even a strong understanding, and the ridiculous was inevitably the inherent condition of every emotion. For mind, like matter, has the power of selecting its color, and not the most tempestuous mood could be hers without its taking the hue of the imbecility of the position in which she had partly placed herself and partly been placed. It was not conceivable that the pilot would meddle with what he might regard as a two-penny quarrel betwixt husband and wife, some jibbing perhaps on her part in jealousy. At all events, she reflected that it would be impossible for her to explain to a rough seaman, such as a pilot, her reasons for declining to live with Captain Reynolds, whom she would be bound to admit was her husband. Nor was Lucretia a person to court discomforture. So, with a shudder, contrived partly by the temperature, partly by disgust and a sense of helplessness, she returned to her cabin and closed the door. Reynolds's appeal to her through the medium of the cabin furniture lay in other directions than that of the toilet table. Against a bulkhead were ranged some hanging bookshelves, and had she condescended to examine their burden, she would have found the volumes by her favorite authors, and those which were new to her were such as she would have chosen. This alone proved that Reynolds's scheme to kidnap her had been long preconcerted, and that he regarded the sequel as a certain triumph to him. She sat in an armchair as comfortable as the one in which Miss Ford had been seated whilst Lucretia dressed for her marriage, but remained clothed as for the deck or shore. In about half an hour, someone knocked at the door. She cried quickly, Who's that? I'm John, Mum. What do you want, I say? On this he opened the door and told her that the captain had sent him to inquire what she would like for supper. She was again thirsty, but answered, I want nothing. He stared at her with a mind that lagged heavily in the rear of his eyes and said, There's chicken and cold lamb and cold boiled beef and claret and sherry. What will it please you to take? Have you got any soda water? Yes, Mum. Bring me some claret and soda water. Yes, Mum, and what to eat? Cut a couple of thin ham sandwiches. He went out, and the moment he was gone she fell into a rage and began to cry. It was evident that she was the only woman on the ship. There was no stewardess to think of being waited on and perhaps nursed if she should be seasick by Atari young Jack in a sleeved waistcoat who breathed Spanish onions and who was so odd at the sight of her that, like people who cannot work and talk at the same time, he neglected his business in viewing her. The position was to be summed up in the old Frenchman's saying concerning a religious drama. C'est une chose à des risibles, mais il manque des rues. When the sandwiches had been brought to her, she locked the door. Her husband, however, did not trouble her. There was no motion as yet in the ship. The cabin deck seemed as fixed a platform as the land. Sometimes she heard the voices of men talking as they ate at table. The tiller chains overhead occasionally strained, and a voice of lamentation sometimes proceeded from some timber weary of its obligation of cohesion or from the cargo underfoot. Presently she looked at the time and found the hour half past nine. She wound up her watch in feeling extravagantly exhausted, what with her journey, what with the amazing passions her betrayal had lighted in her, and what with the tears she had shed, idle and most unworthy tears, she resolved upon taking some rest. So she removed her hat and jacket, and got into the bunk, otherwise fully apparelled, and covered herself with the light-eider-down quilt. It was a coffin of a bedstead, something very removed from all her experiences of going to rest at night. But novelty was not to negative the commands of nature, and in ten minutes she was sleeping peacefully. All through the night the ship was towed down the river into the opening breast of ocean, where the land to starboard rounds into the channel. But when, next day, a little forest of masts was shadowed the horizon, a breast of deal in delicate pencils, was hoeved into view, a southwest breeze sprang up, and a small swell came rolling along under it, and the flying spur began to drop curtsies to the mother whose child she was. A southwest wind tarnishes the brightness of the sky, and is often a wet breeze. It may lock a sailing ship up in the downs when she is outward bound, and the tug that was pulling the flying spur was hailed, and her master informed by Mr. Featherbridge, who shouted to him from the starboard cat-head, that the ship would bring up. Which she did in due course a breast of deal castle, and the pilot went ashore. Now at the hour of breakfast, John had knocked on Lucretia's door and found her up. He had received her orders and taken a tray to her. She was indeed pale, but looked the fresher and the better for many hours of profound oblivion. The sea was then smooth, and the ship floated steadily after the tug. The anchor had been let go shortly before one o'clock, and the tide had canted the vessel somewhat a thwart the swell. She rolled as well as pitched, nodded as true heavily, but with a behavior that could have been hardly deemed nursing by a sensitive stomach. It was breezing pleasantly for homeward bounders, and taxon sheetsmen of all rigs flew with the old moaning of the sea in their lifting white breasts through the galls, past anchored ships looking withered as winter pines, with here and there a gaunt steam-tramp yearning through the wide nostrils at the swell, now breaking into a wet flash of red light as she rolled, now soaring with balloon-round boughs, now immodestly kicking up her heels in her can-can of the water, to the shameless revelation of the blades of her propeller. Dirty clouds like smoke were scattering up from France, and at times slapped a shower into the eye. If it was in the east, said Captain Reynolds to the mate, I should consider this berth good for six weeks. If Mrs. Reynolds comes on deck and sees that town close aboard, they'll be trouble. His reference was to deal, which lay abreast, with the foam of the breaker snaked along the base of the slope of gray shingle, like a mighty hosser of silver wire. The church-spire stretched its vein to the flash of the noon, windows sparkled in terraces, in the foreground were shapes of boats on the pebbly eclivity, and the green land soared to the giant foreland, with its tower of splendor by night and its majesty of austere white rampart by day. It was the dinner hour, and the meal was served below, and the Captain and Mr. Featherbridge repaired to the table, leaving the second mate to watch the ship, and John went to Lucretia's door to knock and inquire what she would be pleased to have for dinner.