Lucius Davoren 4Book the Third · An Old Friend Reappears
18
Literature · Romance
Lucius Davoren 4
Book the Third · An Old Friend Reappears
BraddonEnglish
Lucius had been working a little harder than usual on one of those September afternoons, and was just a shade more weary of Shadrack-Basin and its surroundings than his wont. He looked at the forest of spars visible yonder above the housetops, and wished that he and Lucille could have sailed together in one of those great ships, far out into the wild wide main, to seek some new-made world, where care was not, only love and hope. He had often envied the stalwart young Irishmen, the healthy apple-cheeked girls, the strong hearty wayfarers from north and south and east and west, whom he had seen depart, happy and hopeful, from possible penury here to follow fortune to the other side of the globe, in some monster emigrant-ship, which sailed gaily down the river with her cargo of human life. To-day he had felt more than usually oppressed by the fetid atmosphere of narrow alleys, the dirt-poison which pervaded those scenes in which he had been called to minister—human dens, many of them, which only he and the pale-faced High-Church curate of St. Winifred’s, Shadrack-road, ever penetrated, excepting always the landlord’s agent, who came as regular as Monday morning itself, with his book and his little ink-bottle in his waistcoat-pocket, ready to make his entry of the money which so very often was not to hand. He gave a great sigh of relief as he came out of the last of the narrow ways to which duty had called him; a lane of tall old houses, in which one hardly saw the sky, and where smallpox had lately appeared—a more hateful visitor than even the agent with his ink-bottle.
‘I must get the taint of that place blown out of me somehow before I go to her,’ thought Lucius. ‘I’ll take a walk down by the docks, and get what air is to be had from the river.’
Air in those narrow streets there was none; life in a diving-bell could hardly have been much worse. The fresh breeze from the water seemed more invigorating than strong wine. Lucius got all he could of it—which was not very much—so completely was the shore occupied by tall warehouses, stores, provision-wharfs, and so on.
He walked as far as St. Katharine’s Wharf, always hugging the river; and here, having some time to spare before his usual hour for presenting himself at Cedar House, he folded his arms and took his ease, lazily watching the bustle of the scene around him.
He had been here before many times in his rare intervals of leisure—the brief pauses in his long day’s work—and had watched the departing steamers with a keen envy of the travellers they carried—a longing for quiet old German cities—for long tranquil summer days dawdled away in the churches and picture-galleries of quaint old Belgian towns—for idle wanderings in Brittany’s sleepy villages, by the sunlit Rance,—for anything, in short, rather than the dusty beaten track of his own dull life. Of course this was before he knew Lucille; all his aspirations nowadays included her.
On this bright sunny afternoon, a west wind blowing freshly down the river, he lounged with folded arms, and watched the busy life of that silent highway with a sense of supreme relief at having ended his day’s work. The wharf itself was quiet enough at this time. A few porters loitered about; one or two idlers seemed on the look-out, like Lucius, for nothing in particular. He heard the porters say something about the Polestar, from Hamburg—heard without heeding, for his gaze had wandered after a mighty vessel—an emigrant-ship, he felt assured—which had just emerged from the docks, and was being towed down the broadening river by a diminutive black tug, which made no more of the business than if that floating village had been a cockle-shell. He was still watching this outward-bound vessel, when a loud puffing and panting and snorting arose just below him. A bell rang: the porters seemed to go suddenly mad; a lot of people congregated from nowhere in particular, and the wharf was all life and motion, frantic hurry and eagerness.
The Polestar steamer had just arrived from Hamburg, three hours after her time, as he heard the porters tell each other. Lucius looked down at that vessel, with her cargo of commonplace humanity—looked listlessly, indifferently—while the passengers came scrambling, up the gangway, all more or less dilapidated by the sea voyage.
But presently Lucius gave a great start. Just beneath him, among those newly disembarked voyagers, he beheld a little fat man, with a round comfortable florid face, close shaven—a supremely calm individual, amidst all that turmoil and hurry, carrying a neat little shiny portmanteau, and resolutely refusing all assistance from porters. Lucius had last seen this man on the shores of the Pacific. That round contented Saxon visage belonged to none other than Absalom Schanck.
The sight of that once-familiar face had a powerful effect upon Lucius. It brought back the memory of those dark days in the forest—the vision of the log-hut—those three quiet figures sitting despondently by the desolate hearth, where the pine-branches flared and crackled in the silence—three men who had no heart for cheerful talk—who had exhausted every argument by which hope might be sustained. And still more vividly came back to him the image of that fourth figure—the haggard face, with its tangled fringe of unkempt hair, the wild eyes and tawny skin, the long claw-like hands. Yes, it came back to him as he had seen it first peering in at the door of the hut—as he had seen it afterwards in the lurid glare of the pine-logs—as he had seen it last of all, distorted with a sudden agony—the death pang—when those bony hands relaxed their clutch upon the shattered casement.
Swiftly did these hated memories flash through his mind. His time for thought was of the briefest, for the little sea-captain had not far to come before he must needs pass his old travelling companion. He looked about him gaily as he mounted, his cheery countenance and bearing offering a marked contrast to the dishevelled and woebegone air of his fellow passengers. Presently, as his gaze roved here and there among the crowd, his eyes lighted upon Lucius. His face became instantly illuminated. He had been warmly attached to the captain of the small band, yonder in the West.
‘Thank God,’ thought Lucius, seeing that glad eager look, ‘at least he doesn’t think of me as a murderer. The sight of me inspires no horror in his mind.’
‘Yase,’ said the sea-captain, holding out his plump little hand; ‘there is no misdakes—it is my froint Daforen.’
He and his ‘froint Daforen’ grasped hands heartily, and suffered themselves to be pushed against the wooden railing of the wharf, while the crowd surged by them.
‘I thought you were in California,’ said Lucius, after that cordial salutation.
‘Ah, zat is der vay mit von’s froinds. Man goes to a place, and zey tink he is pound to sday there for the ewigkeit. He is gone, zey say, as if he had the bower of logomotion ferlost. Man dalks of him as if he vas dead. Yase, I have to Galifornia gebeen. I have diggit, and golt not gefounden, and have come to England zuruck; and have gone to Hampurg to see my families; and have found my families for the mosten dead, and am come back to my guddy at Pattersea, vhere my little housegeeper geep all things sdraight vhile I am avay. If I am in the Rocky Moundains, if I am in Galifornia, it is nichts. She geep my place didy. She haf my case-bottle and my bipe bereit vhen I go home. And now, Daforen, come to Pattersea one time, and let us have one long talk.’
‘Yes,’ answered Lucius thoughtfully. ‘I want a long talk with you, my dear old Schanck. The time when we parted company seems to me something like a dream. I can just remember our parting. But when I look back to those days I see them through a mist—like the dim outline of the hills in the cloudy autumn daybreak. Our journey through the forest with those Canadians—our arrival at New Westminster. I know that such things were, but I feel as if they must have happened to some one else, and not to me. Yet all that went before that time is clear enough, God knows. I shall never lose the memory of that.’
‘Ah, you was fery ill—you valked in your head, for long time. If I hat not mate one little hole in your arm, and let the blood spurten, like one fountain, you might have shall died becomen been,’ said the German, somewhat vague in his grasp of English compound tenses, which he was apt to prolong indefinitely, ‘Yes, you valk in your talk—vat it is you say? ramblen. But come now, shall ve dake a gab—it is long vays to Pattersea—or vait for a steamer at Dowers Varf.’
‘The steamer will be quicker, perhaps,’ said Lucius, ‘and we can talk on board her. There are some questions I want to ask you, Schanck. I shall have to touch upon a hateful subject; but there are some points on which I want to be satisfied.’
‘You shall ask all questions das you vish. Come quick to Dowers Varf.’
‘Stay,’ said Lucius, ‘I am expected somewhere this evening, and the Battersea voyage will take some time. You want to get home at once, I suppose, old fellow?’
‘That want I much. There is the little housewife. I want that she has not run away to see.’
‘Run away to sea,’ cried Lucius, puzzled. ‘Has she any proclivity of that kind?’
‘I want to see she not has run away. Where is it you English put your verb?’
‘Well, just let me send a message, Salom’—Salom was short for Absalom, a pet name bestowed on the little German in the brighter days of their expedition—‘and I’m at your service.’
Lucius scrawled a few lines in pencil on a leaf of his pocket-book, which he tore out and folded into a little note. This small missive he addressed to Miss Sivewright, Cedar House, and intrusted to a porter, whose general integrity and spotlessness of character were certified by a metal badge, and who promised to deliver the note for the modest sum of sixpence.
The note was only to inform Lucille that Lucius had an unexpected engagement for that evening, and could not be at Cedar House till late. It had become a custom for him to drink tea in the sick room, with Lucille, and Mrs. Milderson, who was overflowing with sympathy.
This small duty accomplished, Lucius accompanied Mr. Schanck to Tower Wharf, where they speedily embarked on a steamer bound for the Temple Pier, where they could transfer themselves to another bark which plied between that pier and Chelsea.
The boat was in no wise crowded, yet Lucius felt it was no place for confidential talk. Who could say what minion of Mr. Otranto’s might be lurking among those seedily-clad passengers, most of whom had a nondescript vagabond look, as if they had neither trade nor profession, and had no motive for being on board that boat save a vague desire to get rid of time?
Influenced by this insecurity Lucius spoke only of indifferent subjects, till, after stopping at innumerable piers, and lowering their chimney beneath innumerable bridges, as it seemed to Lucius, they came at last to Cadogan Pier, whence it was an easy walk across Battersea-bridge to the sea-captain’s domicile.
This bit of the river-side has an old-world look, or had a few years ago—a look that reminded Mr. Schanck pleasantly of little waterside towns on the shores of the mighty Elbe. The wooden backs of the dilapidated old houses overhung the water; the tower of Chelsea Church rose above the flat; there were a few trees, an old bridge; a generally picturesque effect produced out of the humblest materials.
‘It buts me in mint of my faterlant,’ said Absalom, as they paused on the bridge to look back at the Chelsea shore.
Mr. Schanck’s abode was small and low—on a level with the river; whereby at spring-tide the housewife’s kitchen was apt to be flooded. A flagstaff adorned the little square of garden, which was not floral, its chief decorations being a row of large conk shells, and two ancient figure-heads, which stood on either side of the small street-door, glaring at the visitor, painted a dead white, and ghastly as the spectres of departed vessels.
One was a gigantic Loreley, with flowing hair; the other was Frederick the Great; and these were the tutelary gods of Mr. Schanck’s home.
Within, the visitor descended a step or two—the steps steep and brassbound, like a companion-ladder—to the small low-ceiled sitting-room which Mr. Schanck called his cuddy. Here he was provided with numerous cupboards with sliding-doors—in fact, the walls were all cupboard—in which were to be found all a ship’s stores on a small scale, from mathematical instruments and case-bottles to tinned provisions and grocery. From these stores Mr. Schanck dealt out the daily rations to his housewife, a little woman of forty-five or so, whose husband had been his first mate, and had died in his service. There was a small cellar, approached by a trap-door, below this parlour or cuddy, where there were more tinned provisions, groceries, ship-biscuit, and case-bottles, and which Mr. Schanck called the lazarette. The galley, or kitchen, was on the other side of a narrow passage, and a stair of the companion-ladder fashion—steep and winding—led to three small staterooms or bedchambers, one of which was furnished with the hammock wherein Mr. Schanck had slept away so many unconscious hours, rocked in the cradle of the deep.
Above these rooms was the well-drained and leaded roof, which the proprietor of the mansion called the poop-deck—the place where, in fine weather, he loved best to smoke his long pipe and sip his temperate glass of schiedam-and-water.
He produced a case-bottle and a couple of bright little glasses from one of the cupboards, gave the housewife a tin labelled ‘stewed rumpsteak’ out of another, and bade her prepare a speedy dinner. She seemed in no wise disturbed or fluttered by his return, though he had been absent three months, and had sent no intimation of his coming home.
‘All’s well?’ he said interrogatively.
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ answered the housekeeper. And thus the question was settled.
‘The ship has leaked a bit now and then, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir, there was three feet of water in the lazarette last spring-tide.’
‘Ah, she is one good ship for all that. Now, Daforen, you will make yourself zu heim, and we will have some dinner presently.’
The dinner appeared in a short space of time, smoking and savoury. Mr. Schanck, in the mean while, had laid the cloth with amazing handiness, and had produced a little loaf of black bread from one of the cupboards, and a sour-smelling cheese of incredible hardness; they may both have been there for the last three months; and with these hors d’œuvres proceeded to take the edge off his appetite. Notwithstanding which prelude he devoured stewed rumpsteak ravenously; while Lucius, who was in no humour to eat, made a feeble pretence of sharing his meal.
Finally, however, Mr. Schanck’s appetite seemed to be appeased, or he had, at any rate, eaten all there was to eat, and he dismissed his housekeeper with a contented air.
‘Let us go up to the poop for our dalk and krok,’ he said; to which Lucius assented. They would seem more alone there than in close proximity to that busy little housewife, who was washing plates and dishes within earshot.
They ascended the companion-ladder, the host carrying a case-bottle in one hand, and a big brown water-jug in the other, and seated themselves on a wide and comfortable bench, which had once adorned the stern of Mr. Schanck’s honest brig. There was a neat little table for the case-bottle and jug, the glasses and pipes.
‘This is what I gall gomfortable,’ said Mr. Schanck, who got more English in his mode of expression, as he talked with Lucius, and forgot his ‘families’ in Hamburg, with whom he had lately held converse.
The sun was setting behind the western flats out Fulham way; the tide was low; the crimson orb reflected on the bosom of the shining mud, with an almost Turneresque effect.
‘It was to live at Chelsea that made your Turner one great painter,’ said Mr. Schanck, with conviction. ‘Where else out of Holland could he see such landscapes?’
They began to talk presently of those old days in America, but Lucius shrank with a strange dread from that one subject which he was most anxious to speak about. There was one faintest shadow of a doubt which a few words from Absalom Schanck could dispel. That worthy, in talking over past experiences, dwelt more on the physical privations they had undergone—above all, on their empty larder.
‘When I count my tinned provisions—man improves daily in the art of tinned provisions—I can scarcely believe I was one time so near to starve. I sometimes feel as if I could never eat enough to make up for that treatful beriod.’
‘Yes,’ said Lucius gloomily, without the faintest idea of what the other had been saying. ‘I was very ill yonder, wasn’t I, Schanck, when you bled me?’
‘Yes, and after. Vhen you did rave—ach, mein Gott, how you did rave!’
‘My brain was on fire when I shot that wretch. Yet I think, had I been full master of my senses, which I believe I was not, I should have done just the same. Tell me, Schanck, you who knew all, and were my witness in that trying hour, did I commit a great crime when I killed that man?’
‘I think you gommit no grime at all vhen you did shoot him, and if you had killed him it vould have been one very good job.’
‘If I had killed him!’ cried Lucius, starting up. ‘Is there any doubt of his death?’
‘Sit down, Daforen, be dranguil; the man is not worth that we should be uneasy for him. You asked if there is any doubt of his death? There is this much doubt, das when I saw him last he was alife.’
‘Good God!’ cried Lucius; ‘and I have suffered an agony of remorse about that man, wretch as I knew him to be. I have carried the burden of a great sin on my soul day and night; my dreams have been haunted, my lonely hours miserable.’
He clasped his hands before his face with a passionate gesture, and a hoarse sob broke from that breast, from which a load had been suddenly lifted. The sense of relief, of thankfulness, was keen as the keenest pain.
‘Tell me,’ he cried eagerly—‘tell me all about it, Schanck. Was not that shot fatal? I aimed straight at his heart.’
‘And you hit him zumvare,’ answered the German, ‘for vhen I vent out and looked apout for him an hour aftervarts, there were draces of bloot on the snow; but it couldn’t have been his heart, or he vould hardly have been able to grawl avay. I followed him a little vay by that drack of bloot, and the broken snow through which he had tragged himself along; but I could not go far; I was anxious about you, and I went back to the hut. If the man lay dead in the snow, or if he was shifering under the binedrees, kroaning with the bain of his vounds, I cared not.’
‘Was that the last you saw of him,’ asked Lucius—‘those traces of blood on the snow?’
‘It vas the last for one long time. If you vill be patient I vill tell you all the story.’
Then, with many peculiarities of expression—desperate compound substantives, and more desperate compound tenses of the subjunctive mood, which it were well to leave unrecorded—the little German told all he had to tell of that which followed Lucius Davoren’s fire. How, while Geoffrey slowly mended, Lucius lay in the torments of fever, brain distracted, body enfeebled, and life and death at odds which should be master of that frail temple.
‘You were still very ill when, by God’s mercy, the Canadian party came our way. Geoffrey met them in the woods, while he was prowling about with his gun on the look-out for a moose, or even a martin, for we were as near starvation as men could be and not starve. We had kept ourselves alive somehow, Geoffrey and I, on the pieces of buffalo you brought home the night before your illness, and when those were gone, on a tin of arrowroot which Geoffrey had the luck to find in his travelling bag. When the Canadians offered to take us on with their party, you were very feeble, helpless as a little child. Geoffrey and I looked at each other; it seemed hard to lose such a chance. They had a spare horse, or at least a horse only laden with a little baggage—their provisions having shrunk on the journey—they offered to put you on this horse, and we accepted the offer. Geoffrey walked beside you and led the horse; we made a kind of bed for you on the animal’s back, and there you lay tied safely to the saddle.’ This was, in brief, what the sea-captain told him.
‘For Heaven’s sake, come to the other part of your story, when you saw that man alive,’ cried Lucius; ‘never mind the journey. I have a faint memory—as if at best I had been but half conscious—of travelling on and on, under everlasting pine-trees, of perpetual snow that dazzled my aching eyes, of pains in every limb, and a horrible throbbing in my head, and a parching thirst which was the worst torment of all. I am not likely to forget that journey.’
‘And you remember how we parted at New Vestminster? I left you and Geoffrey to gome back to England your own way, while I went to the golt dickens. Your dravels had been for bleasure; I had an eye to pusiness. “Since I can make nothing out of furs,” I said to myself, “let me see what I can do with golt. It can require no great genius to dik for golt.” You puy a spade and pickaxe, and you dik; you get a bail of vater, and you vash; dat is all.’
‘But the man?’ cried Lucius, in an agony of impatience. ‘When and where did you see him?’
‘Dear heaven, how impatient he is!’ exclaimed the little German, puffing stolidly at his pipe, and without the faintest intention of quickening his accustomed jog-trot pace. ‘It was long ways off, it was long times after I wisht you both farewell at New Vestminster. I leaf you, and go off to San Francisco, and then to the dickens. Here I find rough savage men. I have no chance among them; the life is hart. I am knocked about; I am not strong enough for the work. I wish myself—ach, how I wish myself at home here in my snug little guddy, or sitting to watch the sun go down on my poop-deck! I begin to feel what it is to be olt. One day after I have toiled—all zu nichts—I stretch my veary limbs to rest unter my wretched shelter. At mitternacht I hear a lout voice in a tent near at hant—the voice of a man playing at euchre with other men—a voice I know. My heart beats fast and lout. “It is that teufel,” I say to myself, “who eats his fellow-men!” I grawl out of my tent along the ground, to the tent from which I hear the sound of that voice—a tent which had been set up only that night; they are close together, my own tent and this new one, just a little space between, in which I am hidden, in the dark night. I lift the edge of the canvas and look in. There are men playing cards on the head of a barrel by the light of a candle. The candle shines on the face of one man. He is talking, with loud voice and excited gestures. “If this new claim over here turns out as well as our claim yonder, mates, a month longer I shall go back to England,” he says. “Pack to England,” I say to myself; “you are von vicked liar; for in the log-hut you tell us you have never to England been.” I stopped to listen to no more. Varever your pullet may have hit him—and it did hit him somevare, for I saw the bloot—there he vas.’
‘You have mistaken some one else for him,’ said Lucius, ‘in that doubtful light.’
‘Mistaken! Den I am’mistaken in myself; dis is not me, but only some von like me. De light vas not toubtful. I see his face blain as I see yours; dis eye-vink, dis moment, de teep-set plack eyes—such eyes, eyes like der teufel’s—and ze little beak of hair on ze forehead. There was no mistakes. No, Daforen, es war der mann.’
‘Did you see any more of him?’
‘Nein,’ answered the little man, shaking his head vehemently; ‘ein mal vas enough. I vent back to San Francisco next day, and started for England in the first fessel dat vould confey me. I had had enough of de dickens.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘It is von year dass I am returned.’
‘A year!’ repeated Lucius dreamily. ‘And I did not kill that man after all—grazed his shoulder perhaps, instead of shooting him through the heart. The wretch was wriggling in at the window like an eel when I fired, and care and famine may have made my hand unsteady. Thank God—ay, with all my heart and soul—that his blood is not on my head. He deserved to die; but I am glad he did not die by my hand.’
‘I do not pelieve he vill effer die,’ said Mr. Schanck. ‘He is a deffil, and has more lifes dan a cat.’
‘He had made money,’ mused Lucius, ‘and was coming to England. He is in England at this very moment perhaps, and may claim his daughter, or the girl he called his daughter. It is time that I should solve the mystery of those letters.’
This discovery materially altered the aspect of things. Ferdinand Sivewright living and in England meant danger. Would he leave Cedar House unassailed? Would he fail to discover sooner or later the fact that it contained valuable property? Would he not by some means or other endeavour to possess himself of that property?
He would come back to his old father with pretended affection, would act the part of the remorseful prodigal, would cajole Homer Sivewright into forgetfulness or forgiveness of the past, and thus secure the inheritance of his father’s treasures.
Then a new idea flashed across Lucius Davoren’s brain. What if this spirit of evil, this relentless villain, were at the bottom of the robbery? He remembered that lithe figure seen so briefly in the glare of the lightning, just such a form as that of the gaunt wanderer in the pine-wood. What more likely than that Ferdinand Sivewright was the thief, and Wincher only the accomplice? The old servant might have been bribed to betray his master by promises of future reward, or by some division of the plunder in the present.
‘In any case, at the worst, I think I have securely shut the door upon this villain now and henceforward,’ thought Lucius.
Yet the idea of Ferdinand Sivewright’s possible presence in England filled him with a vague anxiety. It was an infinite relief to feel himself no longer guilty of this man’s death; but it was a new source of trouble to know that he was alive. Of all men, this man was the most to be feared. His presence—were he indeed the man Lucius had seen enter Cedar House after midnight—would account for the poison. That secret staircase might have given him access to his father’s room. Yet how should he, a stranger to the house, know of the secret staircase?
Here Lucius was at fault. There was now a new element in that mystery, which had so far baffled his penetration.
‘I will see old Wincher, and try to get the truth out of him,’ he said to himself. ‘If he is, as I now suspect, only an accomplice, he may be willing to inform against his principal.’
After this revelation, so calmly recited by the worthy Schanck, Lucius was eager to be gone. The proprietor of the sea-worthy little dwelling, having said his say, sat placidly contemplating the level Middlesex shore, now wrapped in the mists of evening. He could not sympathise with his friend’s feverish condition.
‘Led us have some subber,’ he remarked presently, as if in that suggestion there was balm for all the ills of life. ‘A gurried rappit vould not pe pad, or a lopster varmed in a zauzeban mit some mateira.’
Even these delicacies offered no temptation to Lucius.
‘I must get to the City as soon as I can,’ he said. ‘Good-bye, Schanck. I’ll come and see you again some day; or you, who are an idle man, might come to see me. Here’s my card with the address, ever so far eastward of the wharf where you landed this afternoon. I thank Providence for our meeting to-day. It has taken a great load off my mind; but it has also given me a new source of anxiety.’
This was Greek to Mr. Schanck, who only sighed, and murmured something about ‘subber,’ and ‘gurried rappit,’ strong in his supply of tinned provisions. Lucius bade him a hearty good-night, and departed from the calm flats of Battersea, eager to wend his way back to the Shadrack-road.
