 CHAPTER XIII She stood so close that he could see the stars of the moonlight in her eyes. Her face was pale as marble in that sheen. She was dressed in dark clothes that expressed her figure, and her sailor hat was of colored straw. She gave him no more heed than she bestowed on the people who passed. The lovely picture of the rising moon and its rippling reflection, and the black brig sulkily stemming and panting to the right of the flowing radiance in the sea, appeared to have fascinated her. A sensation of tightness was about his heart, and its pulse throbbed, half strangled. His throat grew dry as in fever, and the sudden passion of his spirit ran a momentary paralysis through him, and he stood as one seized with tetanus after taking poison. She was before him, even as he had viewed her spiritually from his fissure in the dell, pallid in the star-white light that closed her. Who is the artist that can throw such a passage of life upon the mental gaze of his reader without shrinking from the dread of the derision that attends exaggeration? She passed on without noticing him, for this was a figure to court the male eye, and she was used to being stared at. He watched, and then followed her. That old mole in the earth, Goodheart, was his prophecy to be fulfilled? Was the old magic to exert the old spell now that she was there? Be informed, unchanged, unless the moon lied, by so much as a single stroke of the pencil of time? She stopped again to look at the sea, and he halted and turned his back, again followed when she moved, and so kept her in sight, down Augusta Road into the Bellevue Road, where she vanished. But he had marked the house she entered and presently passed it and read the number. It was a road mainly of poor lodging-houses. He returned to the esplanade, and sat down to think. His heart had cooled, memory had flooded and chilled him as the night with its cold moisture descends upon the sea. Moonlight makes all things beautiful, says Wordsworth, the moon doth with delight look round her when the heavens are bare. But it had not adorned the beauty of Lucretia by throwing over her its concealing ethereal veil of silver. In eight years she had not physically changed. He was sure of that. If materially she had not altered, why should he expect or hope that she had morally altered? What right had he to believe that her passionless nature was not still as frosty as it was eight years ago, with its ice-bleak presence of a form of chastity that was a distemper of mind? And if this was true, would it not be equally true to predict that the revelation of his identity, the confession of his individuality as Francis Reynolds, would provoke precisely the same disgust, induce exactly the same horror and revulsion which had attended her marriage and made of her a moral phenomenon? This was a consideration that brought his brows together and his hand tightened upon his stick. For he knew himself well enough to understand that his self-respect as a man, that the honor in which it is the duty of every man to hold his own character, seeing that to the degree of honor a man does himself is the dignity of his man had lifted, must fall irretrievably into ruin if he again courted and gained the aversion which had dispatched her to her bedroom from the church, and filled his arms with the killing mockery of a phantom. He resolved to pursue a course and walked to the hotel. He entered the reading room and seated himself at a desk at a table, and wrote to Mr. Wembley Jones. I am here, and by accident have discovered that the Mrs. Reynolds whom you were good enough to inquire about, is lodging at twenty-eight Bellevue Road, in this town. Will you kindly send her the enclosed draft for one hundred fifty pounds, stating the facts as I related them to you, and oblige, etc.? He signed the name of John Goodheart. He mused a bit after writing and stamping his letter. Suppose, he thought, unreceived of this money Lucretia leaves Ramsgate? I may be unable to trace her again, and he plausibly represented to himself that his desire to hold her in view was because she was obviously poor, and apparently alone and might want a friend. The judgment is always willing to be betrayed by one's tastes, rather than be controlled by one's interests. He entered the hall and posted the letter. The morning, said a gentleman, who next day was seated at breakfast at the same table with Reynolds, is always the pleasantest part of the seaside in June, when fine. The dip, then the breakfast, then the pipe, where does tobacco discharge so delicate a richness, so nutty an aroma as by the sea? The fresh fried soul for breakfast yields a sweetness and flavor it never delivers inland. There is a savouriness by the sea, in the incense sent up by the dish of eggs and bacon which must often make the gods lament their divinity as a form of being which requires neither palate nor stomach. This rhapsodist, who was rather deaf, and who had told Reynolds that he was a stockbroker with a great taste for literature, in which he had sought eminence without achieving it. This man, who had formed Reynolds in the smoking room, that he had read Burton's Anatomy fourteen times, that he possessed the first folio edition of Beaumont and Fletcher, and that he had refused six hundred pounds for a collection of autographs from Wycliffe to the Prince Consort, might have added to his list of the engaging pleasures of the seaside on a fine June morning, the breakfasting at an open window which frames a broad plain of water sparkling with sun-stars, over whose surface firm ruled against the sky, glide shapes of steamer and sailing ships, the solemn mailboat, stately in sentiency of human life, of precious freight, of beautiful engineering, of elegance in mould of whole, the cargo tramps that, perceptive of the undermanned look out aboard her, strains the eyes of her haws-pipes at the sea from her rearing boughs, that coaster of the coast, the barge, discoloring the water under her with dyes of red mainsail and white top-sail. Pleasant also is it to breakfast in the fanning of the fresh salt air, to the stealthy seething of waters upon the sands and rocks, to the thin, undistracting orchestra composed of the town band afar, piano organs muffled round the corner, blackened minstrels upon the beach, human voices calling or singing, the vibration of bells, the cries of the hawker, faint as though in partial vacool, bending and contained within that frame of open window, with the hollow dome on high, full of blue air and moving clouds. Before and during breakfast, Reynolds had kept a look out for his wife. He was consumed with the desire to behold her by daylight. One road to the town, from the place where she lived, would carry her past the north and east windows of the hotel. How did she occupy the day? Did she teach? And if so, at a school, or did she receive pupils? After breakfast, he went for a walk. His heart prompted his legs, and he made for the arbor by way of Augusta Road and the road in which Lucretia lodged. He looked at the house as he slowly passed. A somewhat dingy, poorly draped, fifth-rate lodging house, whose character was not improved by the yells of a man gutting fish at a barrel opposite the door, with a couple of cats rubbing themselves against his fear-knot trousers, and by another fellow with a basket on his arm, trying to burst through the first man's shouts of, Beautiful fresh souls, by bawling in ear-splitting notes, how the beautiful fresh Pegwell Bay shrimps! Lucretia was not to be seen. He walked on, lost in thought about her, and passed through the pier gates into a scene that was as familiar to him then as it had been a quarter of a century before. It was a richly-colored picture of English longshore life. The breeze filled it with motion. In places it was a dance of prisms. Every flag rippled and waved seawards. The wearies swayed upon the pulsation of the waters. Shadows like that of gigantic fingers ran through the white heights of hoisted canvas. Marble-like forms of seagulls hovered on tremorless wings between the pier heads, where the surface of the brine glanced and frolicked with the splendor of a herring shoal. Reynolds, pensive with memories of boyhood, watched a tug head slowly out, slapping her wake of foam at the mud-barge she towed. A cluster of large pleasure-boats called yachts lay at the pier steps, and their captains were competing for fares and voices which could be heard half a mile off. Someway this side lay the lifeboat reposing peacefully at her buoy, a noble, a significant symbol of the life of the sea to the sailor. One of those yachtmasters on the pier was exhorting the public to step on board his swift and lovely ship and sail to the Goodwin Sands, where they would land to play at Cricket, an incident of travel to Bostov on their return home. And hard by was the lifeboat, so fraught with memories of those same deadly Goodwins that you might almost fancy if you pressed your ear against one of her thwarts, whispers of tragedies. Breathings, such as fabrics made sentient by their burden and business of humanity converse with, would penetrate to your consciousness and group upon your spiritual retina many shocking, many wild, many ghastly visions. What sailor but knows then? The dead bodies lashed in the lean mizzen rigging. Men who had drowned in the freezing foam when the mast went, watched by a shivering crowd of wretches in the foretop. The saloon of the stranded liner with the dead bodies of nuns and others floating about. The streaming reddening flare that lights up the sea for miles and flings upon the flying raven wings of the storm a low, sullen radiance, in which the rocket of the light ship flashes and fades. Would you like to go for an hour's row, sir? Beautiful day for a sail, some nice fishing to be had. Very fine pouton, caudalons long as my arm, said an elderly man, coming up to Reynolds. His face was like the inside of a crumpet with its recollections of smallpox, and though the dog days were not far off, he wore a yellow saw wester and lounged in breeches as heavy as winter blankets. Aren't you, Jill Cooper? said Reynolds. Yes. I remember you twenty-five years ago. Have you been here ever since? I, ever since I was born, so did father. So did his father. Shall I get the bort ready, sir? How's old John Goldsmith? Old John? He must add the pilot. But he comes down here at three years ago, just where we're standing. And after looking at his pilot, he says, Joe, he says, says he, the old bort lies safe. I, safe enough, says I. I feels a bit tired, says he in a soft way. I think I'll go on Lloyd down. Lloyd down he did, and he's still a lion. William, he bowed, got any bait in that dark can? Reynolds gave him two shillings and walked away. He had fished so much in his day that he wanted no more of that sport. He went on the pier, but all the time that he walked, his eyes hunted for a sight of Lucretia. But throughout that day, he saw nothing of her, though he was studiously much about. On the sands, on the West Pier and West Cliff, at at 10 o'clock that night, when he sat in the smoking room conversing with a stockbroker and one or two others, he had not seen her. Next morning, he received a letter from Mr. Wembley Jones, acknowledging the receipt of his check for 150 pounds and informing him that he had sent the money to Mrs. Reynolds at the address given by Mr. Goodheart, together with the particulars which he had been asked to communicate. He added that he did not doubt that Mrs. Reynolds would do herself the pleasure to call upon Mr. Goodheart to personally thank him for his kindness. This was naturally Reynolds' expectation, but he did not suppose that she would call in the morning. On his return, however, to the hotel to lunch, a card was given to him, and the porter said that a lady had called to see him and that she would come again at half past four. The card bore the engraved name of Mrs. Reynolds and she had written her address in the corner. He had flattered himself that he had schooled his face and drilled his spirit into qualifying him for such a meeting as to betray on his side no more than if indeed he was veritably the man he personated. But as he walked to the luncheon table with his wife's card in his hand, he was conscious of a perturbation, a hurry and tumult of mind, a collision and recoil of sensations which occurred him. It was vastly well, truly, that he had not met his wife without this advice of her coming. Indeed, he could scarcely swallow the meal he ordered, and when his acquaintance, the literary stockbroker, asked from an adjacent table if he would join him in a shilling trip in one of the pleasure boats that afternoon, the answer he received was so abrupt in a person whose demeanor was uniformly mild, somewhat melancholy, but pleasantly flavored with geniality that the stockbroker thought that Mr. Goodheart must be feeling ill and looked at him for a little while in friendly inquiry. Reynolds, conceiving that the ordeal of the first meeting with his wife would lose intention if it were unwitnessed, asked for a private room in which to receive his visitor, and at half past four he was pacing its carpet. Precisely at the time named in the message, the knuckles of a waiter drummed on the door, which was flung wide open and Mrs. Reynolds, sir, was announced in a strong German accent. Reynolds stood with his back to the light and bowed low with a tranquility that would have reassured any secret spectator who had been his well-wisher. Had the moon the night before last told a flattering tale? Had she deceived him with her cold pencils of white brightness? It is a fact that eight years had robbed Lucretia of nothing and had added something. As the red rose of June is to the same red rose of July was Lucretia of the altar in St. Stephen's Church to the Mrs. Reynolds, who sank her head in a queenly movement to Mr. Goodheart. Hers indeed had been some trial of poverty, not severe. But no discipline of maternity, no death of babe, no anxiety of always ailing child, no kitchen murmurous with grievances, and the poor pay of a shitmaster as a thread for the pearls of the faith of Hyman. She was richer in color, fuller and rounder in figure than when they had parted. But one characteristic time had robbed no change in, and this was the inherent quality of coldness in the residual expression of her face, which, had she been ugly, would have ascended to the degree of a viral austerity. But though her beauty held this element in solution, it was present and visible as the label of her nature. And Reynolds, at a glance, saw that if Lucretia had not lost an external charm as a woman, neither had anything come on the spiritual side to help her as a woman. Her sailor's hat suited her, and her dress fitted her. Her left hand was gloved. He could not know at once if she wore his ring. She put her right hand behind her in search of her pocket, and said, with calmness, a little colored with the glow of gratitude. I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Goodheart. Again he bowed and begged her to sit. There was clearly nothing in the sound of his voice that struck her. Her demeanor proved this. It was a self-possession of a lady in the presence of a stranger. I received this morning this letter, she said, producing it. From my father's solicitor, Mr. Wembley-Jones, he enclosed your check for one hundred and fifty pounds, for which I do not know how to express my gratitude to you. The story you told him is naturally of the deepest interest to me, and I shall feel greatly obliged if you can add anything to what Mr. Wembley-Jones writes. I fear I can add nothing, said Reynolds, in a low but steady voice. It was my duty as a man and a sailor to carry out this poor shipwrecked fellow's wishes. It has given me no trouble. It has been a pleasure. I could enter into the feelings that governed him as he wrote. I wish I had preserved his letter. So far absolutely nothing in his voice, nor in his aspect to invite her regard outside the interest of the subject she had called about. You may have been told, she said, that Captain Reynolds was my husband. Oh, yes. Do you believe he is dead? Mr. Wembley-Jones does not seem to consider your discovery of his letter a proof of his death. He wrote in words such as only a man who is convinced that his death is at hand would use. And yet that is no proof. He might have been taken off the island. Would not you have heard from him? She was silent whilst she looked at the letter she held, and he watched her. Can you tell me when his letter was dated? She asked. For the best of my recollection, he answered, it was dated January 1892. Six years ago, she exclaimed, and the shadow of thought was on her face as her large dark eyes fastened themselves in the carpet. She looked up and exclaimed, there has not been a line of reference to the loss of his ship in the papers. The uncertainty has been very hard to bear, but time reconciles us too much. The waiter entered with a tea tray. Lucretia took off her gloves, and Reynolds saw his wedding ring. May I give you a cup, Mr. Goodheart? said she. The same graceful posture at table, the same fine motions of arm, like the swaying of stately branches and summer winds, the same flower-like curve of neck, the same glow of hair and brilliancy of teeth. The magic was there, and the spell was working. But in a way. Shall I call you Captain Goodheart? No, madam. I have given up the sea. You retired as Captain? I am Mr. John Goodheart. In the merchant service we are not entitled to be called captains, we are master mariners. Will you tell me about that island? I will tell you what I saw and what my chief officer reported. When he used the words chief officer, she looked at him intently, under slightly knitted brows, as though something in the tone in which he pronounced the words affected her. But the expression vanished like the shadow of a cloud crossing a brook, and she listened with single-hearted attention. The island is called Santo Cristo. It is about a mile long, and not a mile broad. It rears a green hill in the middle, out of which halfway down spout two cascades. Its foreshore is of white coral sand. It's an island of which something could be made where it's situated on a lake on an estate. Did the officer see no signs of Captain Reynolds? None. If he died on the island, she did not like to continue. Nature is kind, said Reynolds, calmly and gravely. And in six years she would not only have found him a tomb that ornamented his resting place with a memorial, a bush, a little growth of flowers. It is shocking to me to think of his dying on that island. Was he alone, do you think? I should say so. Few ships cite that bit of land. Had we not been blown out of our course, we should not have come within fifty miles of it. Then again, the mere circumstance of his letter about you, lying nailed on top of a chest in a cave for nearly six years, proves that the island was unvisited. Anybody who landed and explored the island would find the cave and take the letter. He paused and added, Have you any children? No, she answered, with an expression of face which he readily translated into an emotion of tingling self-consciousness, but it never could have been so construed by a stranger. How did you find out where I lived, Mr. Goodheart? It was necessary to fib. He was acting apart. The actor must tell lies off the stage as well as on. He was Goodheart to this spectator, and he must play up to the part, just as though he was King Lear or Joseph Surface, watched by rows and tears. I saw you on the Esplanade the other evening, and ascertained your name, which induced me to inquire after your address, in the conviction that, if I was mistaken, a plain explanation of the facts would be accepted by you as my apology. Never was falsehood nearer the truth, nor more satisfying. He saw that she was not displeased by the initial curiosity the incident implied. He had manifestly been attracted by her appearance, had asked who she was, had been surprised on hearing her name, sought her address, and taken his chance of her proving the woman he wanted. She began to put on her gloves. How do you think, she asked, did my poor unfortunate husband contrive to clothe and feed himself on that wretched lonely island? On his grave we shook his head, and slightly shrugged his shoulders, as though he should say, how can I tell? She rose. His Mrs. Goodheart with you, she asked, with a smile that was easily interpreted, into meaning that, if Mrs. Goodheart is here, I will formally call upon her. Mrs. Goodheart has been lying in her grave in Sydney since 1878, answered Reynolds. She bowed her head in apology for asking the question. I wish you to believe, Mr. Goodheart, that I am deeply obliged to you for your kindness. Nothing could have given me more pleasure. I trust this may not be our only meeting. Are you making any stay here? I like the place, and shall linger until I weary of it. And you, Mrs. Reynolds? Oh, I'm a fixture, I'm afraid. My mornings and afternoons are occupied. One must live, Mr. Goodheart. Woman's opportunities are fearfully limited. If I had been born a man, I should not teach for a living. This money is a great godsend. She looked away to the window, and her fine eyes wore the softened glow, which tells of abstraction. But she was back again in a second. So many, many thanks for your kindness. She extended her hand. He clasped, but released it swiftly, then opened the door, and attended her as far as a corridor that led to the hall, bowed, and returned to sit down and think. It will seem incredible that Lucretia should not have recognized her husband. Put it thus, for six or seven years you have thought of a man as dead. The conviction of his death is a custom, and custom lies upon us, like a weight, heavy as frost, and deep almost as life. Suppose this man, to reappear, absolutely transformed in aspect. Would you, without information, accept him as the person you know is dead? You might witness features physiological and moral to suggest resemblance, but this resemblance would be accident, and not revelation. And short of revelation, you were bound by the custom of your thought to believe the person you knew dead, and the same man, when he presents himself, another. How stood the thing with this couple? In the first place, it had been a sailors' courtship. She had not seen half as much of him in the wooing time, as she would have seen had he filled a short appointment. Next, she had not been a wife to him. She could not found herself on such knowledge as would have been hers had they lived together. She had abandoned him on her wedding day, and believed him dead after eight years, during which time she had not heard of him, or set eyes on him, and memory now was holding only the image of him as he figured whilst he courted her. A fugitive figure, thanks to his calling. Here he was now as good-heart, not as Reynolds. So changed in face, he had started and not known himself, when for the first time after twenty months he had looked at himself in a looking-glass in a cabin in the tentaclear. The sight of his left eye was so impaired that he could barely see with it. The orb was lusterless and charged the face with a new expression. He used spectacles for reading and pinceness for surveying distant objects. His left eyebrow and side of the head were warped by the healing of the wound, and this, combined with the blow which had wrecked one side of the mouth, completed a metamorphosis of which other features were the white hair and gray beard and mustache, a singular modification in his normal enunciation owing to the damage done to the mouth, a shadow of melancholy that had never before been visible, that is, in the Cretia's time. It was inconceivable that the wife, believing the man dead, should translate this unfamiliar figure of Mr. John Goodheart into her husband, Frank Reynolds. She had not done so, and when Reynolds returned to the private sitting room, whose atmosphere still cherished the memory in fragrance of her presence, he felt that he was as dead to her as though he occupied the grave he had dug for his friend. This had been a meeting that had imposed a desperate restraint on him, and now that the pressure was removed, his spirits and feelings swelled into turbulencey, and he paced the room deeply agitated. As his passions cooled, he asked himself, what should he do? Nothing was more certain than that his wife, unchanged by time, unsophoned by experiences, was still that same Lucretia of the altar, who had repulsed him after she had vowed before God to love, honor, and obey him. But he loved her, he desired her. The secret of his heart was not to be concealed from his understanding. He thought her a nobler looking, a more beautiful woman now than when he had first met and fallen in love with her. What depth of spirituality in those dark eyes? How sudden, like the play of light, was the sweetness of her smile. How tranquil her brow, as virginal to his, her husband's eyes, as an angels, who in this world was a little child. How resolved the expression of her bright lips. How excellent in this ignoble world of carnal sensation, whether a finger or nose or eye, that spirit of chastity which had held her from him. He must woo and try to win her as good heart. But though in his wife's unchanged nature he thought he saw the necessity for this, it was a prospect, his vanity, by no means relished. Good God, what would be his feelings to find himself accepted as good heart when he had been spurned as Reynolds? To find himself accepted as another man by the wife who would have none of the real man? It was enough to make him feel jealous of himself as good heart. Next afternoon at about five o'clock Reynolds was seated with his acquaintance, the stockbroker, on a bench on the east cliff. A very flowery young lady of about thirty-eight past. She was powdered and vermilioned under a white veil to the aspect of about twenty. Eyes doctored by pigments into an expression of licorice-langer, dangerous to old and middle-aged men, round in hip, plump and clean in waste, ripe in bust. Ha! exclaimed the stockbroker, fetching a sigh and following the gaudy nymph with his eyes, and the rhapsodist burst out. How beautiful and mysterious is that creature, woman! Think of the loveliness of her shape, its marvelous adaptability to the purposes for which it is intended, her power of germinating, the rapture she can excite, the inspiration she can fire the imagination with, the mighty or the mean actions she can induce the performance of. Think of her too as incarnating that holy mundane trinity, life, mother, sister. Mr. Goodheart, of all God's miracles, woman is the greatest. And what is your opinion of man? asked Reynolds, a little dryly. I have the highest opinion of man in the aggregate, but the individual man does not always recommend himself to me. He does not always pay his bills. He tells lies. He runs away with your wife. With the greatest of all miracles? Yes, he'll even go so far as that. But the aggregate man, look at that noble steamer yonder. Look at that pier down there. Feel the rumble of the train passing through the tunnel cut in the solid chalk on which we are seated. It's not man's failures that should dismay us. It is his achievements that should astonish and stimulate us. He comes into the world with five senses only. In most cases, these senses are defective. His knowledge is limited to his capacity of perceiving by these senses. And their doubtful reports are to be construed by that fallible organ the brain. Thus slenderly, and indeed almost impotently equipped, the man you ask me my opinion of points to the noble bridge that spans the river, to the locomotive shrieking into the tunnel, to the steamship tearing with iron tooth through the mad heart of the living gale, to the message that passes the antipodes in the twinkling of a star. Think of these products of five senses only. Two or three of them abortive. Depending in their poor efforts to report a right on the interpretation of that misleading condition of life, the human reason. I say that on the terms of his existence, man's achievements are godlike. Not bad for a stockbroker, thought Reynolds, who sincerely agreed with the rhapsodist. Just then Lucretia turned the corner of the Esplanade. As she approached, Reynolds stood up and raised his cap. The stockbroker, after a glance at this further illustration of the greatest miracle, walked off. They saluted each other. They agreed that it was a fine evening. I should like to hear more of What's the name of the island? she said. Santo Cristo. Won't you sit? She took the place vacated by the rhapsodist. She was slightly flushed. It was not the heat. She was fresh from teaching, and all the while she had walked from the house, she was secretly resenting the manner in which her two pupils' mama had expressed her regret that Lillian's handwriting should show no signs of improvement, and that violet spelling should continue wretched, as if I had had any share in giving those creatures their brains, thought the proud and passionless Lucretia, as she left the house, which was in Wellington Crescent. I don't think that I could add a sentence to the description I gave you yesterday, said Reynolds. It's just a poor little uninhabited island. Nothing, I should suppose, could live upon it but a man or a sea bird. If my husband had been taken off by a ship, should not I have heard, undoubtedly, either through the owners of his ship or from himself, what do you really think, she asked, fastening her full dark eyes upon him? You are reconciled to the idea of his death? His ship was never accounted for after she sailed, and I am forced to believe that he is dead. Since you are reconciled, I should hold to that view if I were you. Had you been married long before he sailed? No, she answered, slightly contracting her brow as she looked at the French coast, which was lifted in a delicate orange mirage and hovered like a cloud over the sea line. Do you like Ramsgate? He asked. Yes, but not the reason that keeps me in it. There is nothing that worries the nerve so much as teaching stupid children, whose mothers think them clever and capable of rapid progress. He looked at her with a quiet face, when again she gave him a steady view of her profile, which was the aspect of her beauty he most admired, whilst she gazed at the French coast. You have friends here, of course. None. I have not been here long enough to form acquaintances. Besides, teaching makes one unsociable. I used to think schoolmasters disagreeable company, because they bring with them the peremptory, domineering, correcting ways they employ in the schoolroom. I am afraid if I went into society, people would find me objectionable for the same reason, which indeed I can't help, for one contracts bad habits insensibly in this world of all sorts of misdemeanors. She rose. Good afternoon, Mr. Goodheart. I'm sorry you should be in a hurry. I'm not in a hurry. I'm going to my lodgings to drink a cup of tea, said she with a smile. Will you do me the pleasure to drink tea with me at the hotel? I am a stranger here, and I assure you your society is a singular privilege, which you will not allow me to lose for a cup of tea? I shall be very pleased, she answered without hesitation. I'm sure your thoughtful kindness, the trouble you have taken in carrying out my husband's wishes, make me very glad indeed to meet you. Naturally, as a lady whose income was very limited indeed, and who is obliged to teach in order to live, she was greatly touched by the kindness of the man who had taken the trouble to find her out, that he might hand her the handsome and welcome sum of one hundred and fifty pounds. Her husband's farewell gift. They walked slowly to the hotel. End Chapter 13 Chapter 14 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. Abandoned by William Clark Russell Chapter 14 A Rescue As they walked, Reynolds said to Lucretia, It is said that you should be obliged to follow an uncongenial calling for a living. Mr. Wembley Jones told me that your income was small, I think he said seventy pounds a year. Mr. Wembley Jones had said nothing of the sort, but then Reynolds thought that he knew what he was talking about. It is less than that, answered Lucretia, with her cheek warmed by a little color discharged into it by half a dozen different feelings. Indeed, it is barely sixty. Their eyes met as she spoke, and she witnessed a sympathy that was deeper than any that could give life to pity in a stranger in his look. He saw a sudden trouble of mind as of perplexity in the shadow her brow took and in the compression of her lips. Had I thought of it, said he, I might, on learning the name of your father, have found out where you lived by looking at his will, your trustee would have given me your address. There were two and both are dead. Who sends you your money? It is received by the bank and forwarded to me. Mr. Wembley Jones told me that you were an Australian. Reynolds did not speak. The income I receive, she said, is derived from Australian bonds. I should know what they were called if I heard the name. New South Wales? No. Victoria? Yes. I also hold in Victoria they are very safe. She asked him some questions about Australia, and this brought them to the hotel. As they entered, one of two men who were conversing in the hall shrieked like a locomotive whistle and fell in a fit. From all parts, from offices and rooms, people rushed. Who was it? Only his grace, the Duke of Blank. When a Duke has a fit, the flap is usually great in the barnyard that is the theatre of his exploit. A duke's a duke. Reynolds and Lucretia blended their gaze in an expression of ah at the noble figure, five feet eight, as it was lifted and carried away. Who is it? Asked Reynolds of a waiter. The fellow told him. What was the matter? A fit, sir, but it's well known his viscera's wore out. After an uncontrollable fit of laughter, Reynolds ordered tea for two and passed with Lucretia into a great room and sat down with her at a table at an open window which framed the sea. When events come to pass, they lose the weight of meaning they held whilst in contemplation. Had Reynolds been told, whilst on the island of Santo Cristo, that a day might come when he would be sitting at tea opposite his wife in a hotel at Ramsgate, he personating the part of Goodheart and she accepting it to the very root of the credulity in her, he might with a shrug and a smile have held such a circumstance faintly possible, but in the uttermost degree improbable. Now that they were together, he found the situation reasonable, logical, easy, though to be sure curious. Very soon after they had seated themselves, she said to him, Do you know, Mr. Goodheart, that in some way I'm not able to explain, you recall my husband? And do you know, Mrs. Reynolds, he replied, that in some way I can't explain, you recall my wife. Not that you are a bit like Captain Reynolds, she went on, and yet you have that sort of resemblance which, if you were his brother, would be called a family likeness. You are like my wife in eyes, hair, color, and figure, said he, but she was slimmer and had not your voice nor the power of expression I find in your eyes. Lucretia believed that she concealed her pleasure, the pleasure of tickled vanity, but it is seldom that gratification can be so obscured that its light shall not appear in the face. Reynolds's instructions for tea had been liberal, strawberries and cream, prawns, brown and white bread, butter, cakes, and such things. He easily guessed that Lucretia dined in the middle of the day, and that her lonely repast would be very homely indeed, a mutton chop, say, cooked in a frying pan, ill-dressed and ill-served, a lone lorn Mrs. Gummidge of a potato, and perhaps a sponge cake for pudding. He had fed for twenty months upon fish fried in a shovel, and he was naturally in sympathy with Lucretia, who lived in a fifth-rate lodging-house. If he had been pleased with his breakfast at an open window with a London stockbroker, we may conceive him immeasurably happier at tea at an open window with Lucretia. It was the singular case of a man who had resolved to woo and win, in another name, and in an unrecognized aspect, the handsome and indecoriously chaste woman who had married him, and then cast him out as though he had been one of those abominable fiends whose misdeeds are recounted in holy writ. They had been married eight years. Commonly after eight years the most impassioned couple grow a little used to, if not a little tired of, each other. But here was a man who had got married and had been immediately prohibited to find out what a wife meant or what marriage was like. The painted dust still glorified this butterfly. The first love of his life still preserved the freshness and the glory of the dream. The virgin still slept in the shape of the married woman, and the wooing of her was to be made as sweetly and deliciously ardent as though she had never been one. An utter contradiction in human affairs could not confound the understanding. Nevertheless, there they sat at tea at an open window in a hotel in Ramsgate. He opened his purse and took out two guineas. The mate I sent ashore, said he, found these coins in the old chest to which your husband's letter and enclosures to you had been nailed. As they may have belonged to him, will you allow me to present them to you as mementos of his shipwreck? She slightly flushed, bowed with the stateliness her fine figure and shape enabled her to command, and, taking the guineas in her hand and examining them, said, I shall value them very much indeed. I have no doubt they belonged to him, said Reynolds, and that he put them into that mysterious old chest in preference to making a hole in the earth as the mariner's custom is when he meets with Booty or disburdens himself of treasure. If he was long on the island his clothes would fall into rags and he would be as badly off for pockets as young Colonel Jack. She looked pensively out the window, then her eyes came back to the money in her hand. She examined the coins afresh and put them in her purse. How long were you at sea, Mr. Goodheart? Many years. It is a hard calling and badly paid. Very, very. The only charm of the ocean as a life lies in it making you see the world. How mean I used to feel sometimes when Captain Reynolds was talking about the places he had visited. He tell me about Hong Kong and Calcutta and Sydney and Cape Town and dozens of other places and all I could answer was, do you know Ramsgate for I've been there? Reynolds was holding himself under wonderful control. Such control as he never could have exercised but for two reasons. First, he was a man of great intelligence, of instant sympathy, and at this particular juncture you will suppose that every instinct bristled in him with the spirit of alertness. Second, he was used as a sailor to sudden confusing and amazing confrontments and had taught himself never to be at a loss and this professional habit had been matured by his island isolation, by months of enforced introspection, by frequent contemplation of contingencies such, for example, as suddenly meeting his wife and how he should act and the like. He listened to Lucretia with an unchanged face whilst she talked. Though sailors travel far, they see little, said he. I want to ask you this question whilst I think of it. Do you suppose the sea-chest in the cave belonged to Captain Reynolds? To judge from the chief officer's description of it I should say certainly not. He considered it about a hundred years old. I don't think I ever saw his sea-chest, said she, musingly. And now another question, Mr. Goodheart. What chance do you think would a person, placed as I am, find in Australia? A very poor chance. Surely a better chance than England offers? No, you are not a cook or a housemaid, governesses are not in demand in Australia. Where are they wanted? she exclaimed, with a glow of eye, a color of temper he remembered well and remembered only to admire as he again admired. Where is the governess paid as a person who must look like a lady if she is unable to live as one? I started a young lady's school at Canterbury, two pupils could not maintain me, and I lost money, which reduced my income and drove me to Margate, where I was most unhappy. I cannot see why governesses should not be wanted in Australia. He laughed softly and answered that she would be deceiving herself if she acted under that impression. Forgive my apparent curiosity, he said. My desire is to be of use to you. Did not Captain Reynolds leave anything, any property, cash, a house? I believe he had two or three hundred pounds lying in savings at the London and Westminster Bank. She said, viewing him steadfastly as though struck by the idea he had put into her head. Have you claimed the money as his widow? No. Why? Because I never thought of doing so. Have you had no adviser in your time? I have consulted one or two solicitors, but on business that never could have suggested the thought you have given me. If you will authorise me to make a claim for this money as Captain Reynolds's widow, I will go to work. How much is it? Frank told me it was between two and three hundred pounds, but I know that he drew a part of it before he sailed on his last voyage, and perhaps that was the one hundred and fifty pounds he wished me to get, and which thanks, so many, many thanks to you, I have got. Will you address a letter to me here authorising me to act for you? I will most gladly. Indeed, Mr. Goodheart, you are very, very kind. She exclaimed, and her voice trembled, and the extremities of her mouth twitched, and her eyes softened with the shadow of an emotion as the sunbeam on the river gathers tenderness from the shadow of the delicate film of cloud. But, she continued, after a few moments' consideration, if my husband is alive, odd I, have I a right to take the money? My dear Madame, he answered, steadily returning her gaze, I understand that it is eight years since you parted from your husband. His ship has been overdue seven years. In those seven years you have not heard of or from him. If he were alive, would not he on his rescue have made haste to communicate with you? You must either take it that he is dead or that he has abandoned you. You knew your husband. Was he the man to abandon you? Her face expressed the complexity of her mood. She faintly responded, I do not know. I should hope not. Then as he was not the man to desert his wife, continued Reynolds, repressing with a violent effort the animation his voice and manner were beginning to betray, it must be that he is dead. Or how is it to stand with you, if you are to go on thinking of him as alive, yet never hearing from or knowing where he is? You told me you were newly married when he sailed. You were, so to speak, his bride. Do men desert their brides, and such brides as you? I do not think I could have deserted my wife whom I loved, and I am sure she would not have thought I deserted her if I had sailed and had not been heard of for eight years. She listened to him with an attention that made her beauty severe and colorless with the pain of that attention. She sighed suddenly and gave her body a little shake as though by the physical effort she could dislodge the gnats of thought which stung her. You are extremely kind to take so much interest, she said, feeling in her pocket for her gloves. I will gladly take your advice. You will write authorizing me to apply for the money? Yes, this evening. It will save a post if I send for it. I will leave it here. She looked about her for a clock. Reynolds pulled out Goodheart's blended gold watch somewhat ostentatiously surveyed it and said, It is half past six. I will leave the letter at about eight o'clock. He sprang the lid of the watch as if to inspect the face, so held it that she could not fail to see the monogram J.G. on the back, then closed and pocketed it. She stood up. When shall I have the pleasure of seeing you again? he said, rising. I am engaged morning and afternoon. And after? I usually take a walk on the pier after tea. Shall we say this hour on the pier tomorrow evening? She bowed. As they walked to the hall of the hotel they met the London stockbroker who after staring at Lucretia thought to himself, Well, this is coming at a bit thick, a pale melancholy white-haired man well on for sixty, professing to love science and philosophy, and he has not been in Ramsgate a couple days before he has managed to pick up the handsomest woman in the place. So accurate are men's judgments one of another. That evening Reynolds received the following. 28 Bellevue Road, Ramsgate Dear Mr. Goodheart, my husband, the late Captain Francis Reynolds, told me before we were married that he had saved up two or three hundred pounds with which he intended to furnish a little house for me on his return. This money he said he had placed in the hands of the London and Westminster Bank. I am quite sure this was the name of the bank in London. He sailed in the ship he commanded, the Flying Spur, from Falmouth in October 1890, and I have never heard of or from him since. As you inform me that I am entitled to this money as his widow, I should feel deeply grateful to you if you would help me to receive it, as I am poor and working as a governess, and this sum, whatever it may be, would be greatly helpful. I believe he drew a portion of it before he sailed, thanking you again and again, believe me sincerely and gratefully yours, Lucretia Reynolds. He slightly smiled, but his face swiftly resumed its habitual grave and melancholy expression, and he put the letter into his pocket with the slow motion of hand, which is one of the body's visible tokens that the spirit within it is in labour. Reynolds was a sailor, but he was also a good man of business. He easily understood that, as a stranger to Lucretia, he could not help her to get the money her husband had left on deposit. The procedure would have involved the starting of a gigantic mill of the law. First Mrs. Reynolds must apply to the courts for leave to presume her husband's death, and this leave being granted she must take out letters of administration or obtain probate of her husband's will, and in this case there was no will. The letters of administration or the probate would then have to be lodged with the London and Westminster Bank for registration after which the money standing to the credit of the husband could be withdrawn. Reynolds had no intention to disclose his identity and his secret must be imminently jeopardized if, feigning to be Goodheart, he placed himself within the radius of the light of that searching bullseye the law. He quite knew what to do and how to continue his appeals to the gratitude and to the deeper emotions of his wife by holding her as a lady who would be very willing to accept Mr. Goodheart's word, providing Mr. Goodheart's or another's check confirmed it. That was a fine month of June and the following day was as brilliant as any of the vanished flock of sunlit hours. At half past six Reynolds was on the east pier. The sun was reddening westwards and clouds as soft and white as foam came out of the east from the lips of the wind and floated across the sky to make more glorious the pavilions and the couch of the sinking god of day. Many people walked upon the pier. Here and there, within a mile or two, gambled a boat with men in her fishing. And here and there the canvas of a sailing boat resembled the breaking head of a little sea. The sand-witch shore swept along in purple shadow until its sword in dimming brightness where the foreland exalted her star. Whatever took the eye was rich with the colors of the dying day. The blue of the sea a deeper blue, the commonplace sail of the smack a symmetric space of cloth of gold, the granite of the key mellow as ancient marble, the steering chalk of the cliff as bland as the softness of cream, and every glass sparkle was a little golden sun and every reflection in the water the poetry of what was mirrored. Reynolds stood at the end of the pier and looked down upon the water which raced with the tide of flood and spat and snarled about the solid masonry, leaping in bayonets of blue brine, foaming in eddies, waltzing in mimic whirlpools away eastwards with an inward swirl that made somewhat heavy weather of it close in against the seaward facing pier wall, and by looking apace steadfastly down you would have thought that the pier itself was shouldering through it at the rate of knots. Good evening, Mr. Goodheart. Lucretia stood behind him. He could never weary of admiring her. Every time they met she grew in charm. Her presence was fairer with beauty. Though English to the root she had he always thought a something French, Parisian, in her several graces of demeanor and attire. Could she, even at this early date, fail to see that Mr. Goodheart was very seriously attracted by her, found her gravely engaging? Though his face was half-buried in hair and one eye lusterless, and the side of his face wrinkled like the shell of a walnut, there was window of countenance enough left for the man inside to peep out of and be detected. And she would not have been Lucretia Reynolds, in short she would not have been a woman, had she missed the import of Reynolds spirit that came and went in that facial show-box as an actor struts and withdraws. Was the spirit of chastity, adorable and thrice-blessed in the maid, but bitter and false in its animation of Lucretia as a wife? Was the spirit that had expelled her lover and her husband from her life to influence her afresh with like-results on the cognition by her heart of Goodheart's meaning? This was the problem Reynolds intended to solve when way or the other in his own fashion and by the light shed by his past. How do you do, Mrs. Reynolds? I received your letter last evening, and the matter is in hand. You shall not be kept waiting if I can help it. She thanked him smiling, and no smile of royalty taking its value from homage could be more gracious than hers. Have you been at work? He asked, whilst they seated themselves on the low coping that protects the extremity of the peer. Yes, from half-past two to half-past four, but I have done with that family. Mrs. Kendall is difficult to please. She has thin lips and pale eyes, and is one of those economical women who at table asks you to help the children plentifully to vegetables. She is a second wife and calls herself number two. Whose wife is she? An infatuated old man's, whose only son by his first wife was sent to see as an apprentice. She is naturally proud of her own children and spends all the money she can afford on them, said Reynolds. Yes, her baby is the most handsomely dressed infant in Ramsgate, and although the old man is always appealing for funds, Mrs. Kendall manages to keep two nurses. Lucretia spoke with a fine sultry glow of resentment and contempt in voice and eye. I am glad you've done with them. You'll enjoy more liberty, said Reynolds. I wish you would encourage me to try my fortune in Australia, Mr. Goodheart. If I come in for any money from my husband, a thing I never should have thought of but for you, that, with the money you kindly sent me, would help me to start a school. I cannot encourage you, answered Reynolds. This visiting governess work is a pitiful outlook, a hand-to-mouth struggle which subjects one to endless mortifications. Meanwhile, we will see what money Captain Reynolds left in the bank, said Reynolds. When I was at Canterbury I had some idea of starting a milliner's shop, but I am a miserable hand at business, and I am sure I should lose every penny I embarked. There is no particular hurry, I hope. I mean this, Mr. Goodheart, she exclaimed with energy. The money your goodness has been instrumental in getting for me, and the money you may succeed in obtaining on my behalf must soon be spent if I do not apply it to some practical purpose, and then I shall be reduced to my former position. I shall have to teach to eke out an income that does not support me, and I hate teaching. You don't mean to leave Ramsgate yet? I don't see why I should. What can I do elsewhere? I intend to remain here for some time, the place pleases and agrees with me. Between us we may yet devise some scheme that shall result in your establishment. The wistful expression vanished from her eyes. Her look indicated a faint inward recoil, an appearance of surprise which needed but a touch or two with a pencil of the emotions to deepen into dismay. He gazed at her calmly. His heart was well pleased. Certainly he was not very eager that Goodheart, on the merits of her needs, should lightly win the woman out of the little horizon of whose life Reynolds had been spurned. But she was bound to be grateful, so, inclining her head, she said, Your honourable conduct, Mr. Goodheart, and your kindness and sympathy assure me that I could not do wrong by accepting your advice. He smiled at her, and in a breath her face changed. It is very curious, she said, viewing him intently, but there are moments when you strikingly recall my husband to me. It is not the voice nor the appearance in the least. She paused and again searched him with her gaze. Resumblances are often startling, though there may be no affinity between the people, said Reynolds. Have you a portrait of your husband? Yes. I should like to see it. His story and yours make him an interesting character. She pulled a locket out of her breast, and he recognized one of his gifts, a locket containing a portrait of him cut from a photograph. It was suspended round the neck by a thin gold chain. She unclasped the chain and gave him the locket open. He inspected it with a tranquil face. He was indeed acting his part phenomenally well. But then he was acting that he might conquer, and he flung his whole genius into the effort as one who must either win a life or break a heart. This is a fine face, said he dwelling with affected attention upon the photograph. I like it. It is honest, open, handsome, I think. You flatter me by finding a resemblance. Take it, Mrs. Reynolds, and compare it. Why, this is a fine young man of thirty. She took the locket, glanced at it, and then looked at Reynolds, their eyes met. It is not the face, she said. The likeness is in the characteristics of speech and manner, and sometimes you wear an expression which might certainly easily make you pass as my husband's brother. It is a family resemblance. He asked for the locket, and again fastened his eyes upon it. There is thought in his face, there is much character in the mouth, and the eyes are those of a thinker. I should say this man was of a poetical cast of mind. Really! A bit of a dreamer, some sailors are. I incline that way a little. The middle watch makes one so. I mean if you are gifted with the poetic impulse. To most the middle watch is a prolonged yawn and a dreary stump of a dreary deck. I cannot believe that the owner of this face deserted you. I never said he did! She cried with some vehemence. If you have not heard from him, it is because he is dead. So this is that shipwrecked mariner whose legacy to his wife I was instrumental in discovering. Poor fellow! There is honour, there is loyalty in this man's face. I am certain that the character this face proclaims was too good, too honest, too faithful to desert such a bride as you made him. Oh, Mr. Goodheart, do not persist in telling me what I have never believed and never wished to believe. Could he have written he would? She said, with her eyes womanly with that softness of shadow which betokens the possession of the mood of tears. His thinking of you and leaving you what he had is a proof of loyalty to the last, said Reynolds gently, returning the locket to Lucretia. And surely it must make you happier to know that, though dead, he was yours to the end than to suppose that he lives and has abandoned you, at a time too of your life when you need the support, council, and home which only a husband can give you. She was looking away from him across the harbour crying silently. An expression of deep love, the light of a heart glowing with the purest and most exalted emotion, was upon his face as he watched her. Lady Rose walked away a few paces and seemed to be interested in the maneuvering of a boat that was making for the harbour, steered by a cockney in a cricket suit, apparently drunk. A short way down the pier, standing against the side that fronts the sea, was a young woman who held her little boy of some two or three years on top of the coping. This was one of those persons who should not visit the seaside unless attended by a sentry. It is this sort of person who, with a baby in her arms, enters a boat loaded down to her gunnels by tipsy excursionists, and screams with laughter when a young, red-faced man with a hard round hat at the back of his head gets upon a thwart or a seat on straddled legs and dangerously sways the boat from side to side to some roaring vulgar song of, send me a letter from home. This is the sort of person who, with a child, a spade and a bucket, is always caught by the tide and stands in a swiftly diminishing island of sand. This is the person who sits perched on a rock reading a cheap magazine whilst the flood is making, and who must be washed off and drowned if a coast-guardsman is not lowered and hauled up again with the party in his arms. This is the party who, always with the baby, is pulled out to sea by her husband or a friend, without regard to the aspect of the weather or the set of the tide, and who is as charmed as the man is who rose her by the velocity of the boat through the water, overlooking the trifling circumstance that two-thirds of the speed must be attributed to the tide, which is dispatching the boat into dangerous distance and ugly waters, from which her inmates must be rescued by three or four long shoremen who put off, and who, when they have towed the boat into harbour and safety, are rewarded by the man with an offer, after much heated talk about payment, to fight them all one after another. Suddenly Reynolds, but not only Reynolds, everybody within the area of the vibration, was startled by a fearful scream. What had happened? The young woman holding the boy on top of the coping had relaxed her grasp whilst turning her head to critically inspect the costumes of a couple of young ladies who were passing. The straining child broke from the weakened grip and fell like a stone into the troubled waters beneath. This end of the pier was well covered by people moving in procession or lounging or sitting. The shriek of the mother appeared to paralyse every limb. The walking figures stopped dead. Next followed a rush of men and women, and the coping was clothed with a mass of variegated projected shapes in the midst of which stood the mother, yelling as the vulgar exactly know how to yell in affliction, tossing her hands and crying, Oh, somebody save him! He is my only child! Oh, somebody save him! Reynolds ran and looked over, and saw in the trouble of water below a little mound of foam due to the windmill pantomime of the drowning child. According to a man next to him, heave me that rope there and send a boat. He pulled off his coat and cap, flung them down, spring with a sailor's grace onto the coping, and with the swimmer's art, without stretched hands meeting cut-water fashion, went a header. He rose buoyant, he swam well, no man ever carried a cooler heart or swifter-prompting brain in moments of extremity. He caught a glimpse of the vanishing child, and in a few powerful strokes of arm was beside him, had gripped him, had hoisted him breast-high out of the snappish wobble, and was making for the line which had been flung in which he speedily got a clutch of. And there he hung, holding the child on his shoulder, lifting and falling with the tumble of sea. A white-haired man, a most noble and heroic figure truly, and amongst those who looked down was Lucretia. The harbour boat lay at the foot of a fall of pier steps, almost abreast of the watch-house. Men are always on the lookout on Ramsgate Pier. The moment those on watch, these watchmen are gallant fellows, their ranks have supplied the life-boat with magnificent examples of British pluck and endurance in coxswans and men, knew what had happened, three of them sank down the pier ladder into the boat and pulled round the pier head with the steady controlled rage of seamen who perfectly understood the significance of time, yea of one moment too late, in all sea peril. The boats coming, they roared from the coping to Reynolds, who smiled and spoke to the child on his shoulder who answered him. The boat came hopping over the foam she made. Catch hold of the child, cried Reynolds, and the baby was seized and lifted in, and Reynolds, putting his hands upon the gun-all, hoisted himself in his sailor's way and with his sailor's knack to the height of his waist, and then flung a leg over and rolled in boards. Thanks, my lads, said he, now bear a hand, this youngster wants his mother, hand him to me, and then give way with the will. No need for the peer-men to ask this white-haired gray-bearded old gentleman, was you ever at sea, sir? There is what scientific men call a natural affinity among sailors. They mutually attract one another and are drawn together by a law which is as much ocean secret as that of gravitation is the earth's. The men pulled the boat round to the harbour landing-steps. A great crowd was there to witness what was to happen. Lucretia made one of that crowd and stood very near to the mother of the child, who was crying and trembling at the head of the flight of stone stairs. When Reynolds stepped out of the boat, sopping a soaked parcel of manhood, clasping another but a smaller parcel equally soaked, up went a cheer that was louder than the roar of the surf upon the sands. Oh, my ducky, oh, my darling! sobbed the young mother, taking the streaming child from Reynolds. How did I come to do it? Oh, I have nearly drowned you! Oh, my sweet pet lamb! And she kissed the child and mouthed and then burst out weeping hysterically. Oh, sir, how am I to thank you? How noble you are! How good you are! I shall always, always ask God to bless you! Now my dear lady, said Reynolds, your child needs attention. Walk away home with him as fast as you can. You'll know what to do, if not send for a doctor. He offered to make his way through the crowd, who formed a lane for him, and groaned at him in exclamations of respect and admiration. But Lucretia, who stood near, advanced with outstretched hand. Mr. Goodheart, she said, speaking with a vibratory note, so impassioned was the emotion that possessed her. I cannot express how much I honor and respect you for this act. It is beautiful. She wished to say more, but she had been crying just a little time before he jumped into the sea. The weakness of tears was still hers, and she turned away her head. We shall be meeting soon, said he, and walked down the pier as fast as he could, leaving a wake of wet behind him, for his pockets and boots were full, and he was buttoned up in a waistcoat that held water. A watchman ran after him with his cap and coat. He overtook the mother hurrying home with her damp but apparently cheerful burden, and begged her to be quick and dry the child and get it into blankets. He then walked to a cab stand, jumped into a cab, and was driven to the hotel. End of Chapter 14