In Strange Company: A Story of Chili and the Southern Seas

"Marcos," she said anxiously, steadying herself against the cuddy table, "there's something the matter with you; for heaven's sake take medicine at once; your face frightens me. Don't delay an instant! Oh! if anything should happen to you now!"

He laughed, and said huskily —

"Do you think you would care, my beauty? I rather doubt it." (Here he caught sight of his face in the glass.) "My God, but my face is bad though. I'll go and consult the skipper."

He turned towards the companion, but he was unable to reach it. He tottered, stretched his hands out feebly for the bulkhead, missed it, and fell prone upon the cuddy floor. With a scream Juanita sprang past him, and dashed up on deck. The skipper was beside the binnacle.

"Oh, captain!" she cried, "come quickly; he's dying, he's dying!"

It did not take the captain long to understand to whom she referred; the words were hardly uttered before he had passed the order for the bos'un to come aft and take charge, and was down in the cuddy, kneeling beside the sick man. The mysterious disease had found another victim.

Veneda's face was distorted almost beyond recognition; his limbs were strangely twisted and cramped; his breath came in great gasps; only his skin retained its extraordinary pallor. Juanita understood the captain to say that the symptoms were the same as in each of the previous cases.

Between them they carried him to his bunk.

"Now, ma'am," said Boulger, turning to Juanita, "I'm sorry, but I'll just have to trouble you to go to your own berth for a while. I can't have you running any risks here. Mr. Veneda's quite safe in my hands, and I'll let you know from time to time how he gets on."

But this was not in the least to her taste. She was not prepared to let any one else pry into her private concerns.

"Oh, Captain Boulger," she began, throwing all the sweetness she could muster into her voice and looks, "it's inhuman to think that I can remain away from him; you cannot expect it; let me help you with him. I'll be as patient and quick as possible, and I've had some experience in nursing – I really have."

"No, no, ma'am, I'd like to, but I can't allow it," Boulger replied, "it wouldn't be fair to ask me. What this devilish disease may be is more than I can tell, but as it's certain there's infection in it, I can't let any risks be run. Now, do go; you're only hindering me, and I must be looking after him, poor chap; he wants all the attention I can give him."

After this there was nothing for her but to submit, and I must do her the justice to admit that she did it with as good grace as possible.

In the security of her cabin a vague terror seized her. What if Veneda should die, and the locket be cast into the sea with him? The thought almost took her breath away. Come what might, she must have a few moments alone with the sick man, or, in the event of his death, with his body.

True to his word, at regular intervals, hour after hour, the skipper presented himself at her door with the latest bulletins of his patient's condition. "Just a leetle better" – "Just so so" – "Not much change" – "Seems a bit weaker" – "Another awful attack," was the order in which they ran. On hearing the last she broke down completely, and for some reason which I am unable to explain, fell to sobbing as if her heart would break.

Suddenly a strange craving came over her, and rising from her bunk she procured and propped her crucifix against the tiny wash-hand basin, and kneeling on the sloping floor before it, endeavoured to frame a prayer for the passing of the man's soul. Her long black hair hung in glorious profusion about her shoulders; tears streamed down her pallid cheeks; and her lips continually faltered over the words she tried to utter. When she had finished, her spirits recovered, and crawling back into her bed, she fell asleep.

It was long after daybreak before she awoke. The sun was shining brightly through the porthole above her bunk, and from the angle at which the schooner was lying, she knew a fresh breeze must be blowing.

Urged by a great anxiety to learn the latest news of Veneda's state, she dressed with all the haste she could command, and passed into the cuddy. As she entered it, the captain emerged from the berth opposite and greeted her with a mournful face. She divined the worst.

"You're going to tell me that he is dead," she said, clutching at the table.

"Ma'am, it's a thing which must come sooner or later to all of us. I won't deceive you – he is dead – passed away in the hope of a glorious resurrection, twelve minutes afore three bells in this morning's watch. Now, don't take on about it too much, there's a good girl, for he's better as he is than suffering the agonies he went through all night. You couldn't wish it, I know."

"Dead! dead!" was all she could say. It seemed impossible that it could be true. The news stunned her. Though she had expected and dreaded the worst, she had no idea that it would have come so soon. What should she do now? In spite of her consternation, her own position was always uppermost in her mind. It behoved her to play her cards carefully, or she might lose everything. Assuming a look of hopeless grief, unable to find relief in tears, she faltered —

"Take me to him."

Without another word Boulger led the way across to the cabin, and opened the door. She prepared to enter, but he would not permit it.

"No, ma'am," he said kindly, but with determination, "as I said last night, you cannot go in; this ship's mine, and while there's infection aboard, I'm not the man to run risks. But seeing he's your husband – and I'm real grieved for you – I'll stretch a point, and let you see him from here. But I dare not pass you in."

So saying, he went in himself, and approached the figure lying stiff and stark under a blanket in the bunk. Pulling the covering aside, he allowed Juanita a view of the drawn and pallid face beneath. A terrible change had come over the man, and accustomed though she was to what are called horrible sights, she was compelled to avert her eyes. Seeing this, Boulger re-drew the blanket, and came out of the cabin, securely locking the door behind him. Then, with a fatherly air, he placed his arm around the woman's waist and led her on deck, whistling the Dead March softly as they went.

In the bright sunshine the horrors of the cabin were for a time dispelled from her memory. It was a glorious morning. The wind, which on the previous night had been so weak, now blew with invigorating freshness. The schooner, under a press of sail, was ploughing her way through the green water as if conscious of her strength, turning the sea away in two snowy furrows from either bow. Dotted about on either hand were numerous small islands; and thinking it might distract her thoughts, the skipper named them to her.

Ahead, across the curling seas, and not more than eight miles distant, rose the mountains of Vanua Lava, the largest island of the Banks Group. A few clouds rested gracefully on the topmost peaks, and so clear was the air that it was already just possible to make out the native villages ashore. Suddenly an idea leapt into Juanita's brain; a brilliant inspiration that she wondered had not occurred to her before. Turning to the captain, who stood beside her, and who was inwardly wondering at the vivacity of her expression, she said —

"Captain, there is one thing I should like you to get for me – I know you will not deny it – a locket he wears round his neck."

"No, ma'am; I'm real sorry, but that I can't do. He asked particularly that it should be buried with him. It's his mother's portrait, and we mustn't go against that."

Juanita could have cried with vexation. But she dared not show it. She had still another card to play.

"Where will you bury him? Not at sea, captain; oh, not at sea!"

"And pray why not at sea, ma'am?" the captain replied, pulling himself up short in a rendering of "Rock of Ages," – "many a good man has been buried at sea."

"Of course, I know that," she sobbed; "but oh, I cannot bear to think of his poor body tossing about for all time under those cruel waves, the prey of every shark and fish! Oh! no, no, I beseech you, do not let it be at sea."

Her grief was so sincere that the captain was visibly affected.

"What would you have me do then, my dear ma'am?" he asked tenderly, thinking he would go a long way towards obliging her if she always pleaded like that.

"Why not bury him on land?" she asked, turning her tear-laden eyes towards the island they were approaching; "surely it would not be so very difficult?"

"Well," replied the captain, after a moment's consideration, "if you're so set upon it, I don't know but what it can't be done; we'll see, at any rate. Now you just come along down and have a bit of breakfast. It'll cheer you up more than anything."

When they returned to the deck the island was abeam. The captain occupied himself with a careful study of authorities, and then selecting a spot, hove the schooner to off a thickly-wooded bluff. Sounds of carpentering came from forrard, and Boulger, who had quite constituted himself Juanita's protector, took care that she should not go too near lest she should see the work which occasioned it.

It was well into the afternoon before the arrangements for the funeral, including the digging of the grave ashore, were completed. As soon as all was ready the captain informed Juanita, who thereupon prepared herself to accompany the party.

When the long-boat was swung overboard and brought alongside, sounds of scrambling feet came up the companion-ladder, and next moment the captain, carpenter, and two of the crew appeared, bearing the rough coffin which the carpenter had managed to knock together. With some difficulty it was lowered into the boat, and then, the captain steering, Juanita sitting beside him, and two of the hands pulling, they set out for the shore.

Unlike most approaches to the island, the deep water extended right up; consequently the boat was able to discharge its burden on the beach without much difficulty. Having landed, they marched to the grave, situated beneath a grove of cocoa-nut trees, some hundred yards from the shore. The captain, whom Nature seemed to have designed for the work, delivered a short but impressive address, and then the remains of Marcos Veneda were committed to the ground.

To Juanita it was all a whirl. She could not realize that the man had passed out of her life – that he whom she had admired for his strength in Chili was now an inanimate substance on Vanua Lava. The whole thing had been so sudden that she had had no time to prepare herself for the shock. Yesterday he was triumphant in all the consciousness of living; to-day he was only a memory, a part of the mysterious, irreclaimable Past!

The funeral over they returned to the schooner, which at sundown weighed anchor, and resumed her voyage to Thursday Island. It certainly seemed as if Veneda was to be the last victim of the malady, for not another soul was attacked.

The following morning, after breakfast, the captain escorted Juanita to the vacant cabin, and handed her the dead man's goods and chattels. With a well-simulated air of grief she bore them to her own berth, in order to examine them. They made only a small parcel, but hunt through them as she would, no sign of either letter or locket could she find. The contents were simple in the extreme – a few clothes, a pocket-book containing twenty pounds in English gold, a tattered Horace, a knife, a ring, and a few little personal odds and ends, completed the total. Waiting her opportunity, she again approached the captain on the subject of the locket, but he had only the same answer for her.

"What he had on him, ma'am," he solemnly declared, "I reckoned was his own property, and left there; so the locket you speak of is under three foot of earth now, back there in Vanua Lava; meaning no disrespect to you, ma'am."

This was all the information Juanita could gather on the subject. Nor did she press the matter further. Fortunately her own immediate comfort was provided for by the twenty pounds, of which she assumed undisputed possession. Had it not been for this she would have found herself placed in a very awkward situation.

The rest of the voyage needs little chronicling; suffice it that ten days later the schooner dropped her anchor off Thursday Island, her eventful journey completed.

When Captain Boulger bade Juanita farewell, he asked if she had formed any definite plans regarding her future. She hesitated before replying, but finally said that she thought of remaining in the island until she had communicated with her friends. He felt a touch of pity for her loneliness, and proffered any assistance within his power. She, however, declined it with thanks, and a day later the Island Queen departed on her return voyage to Tahiti.

The same night, the Thursday Island telegraph operator was in the act of closing his office, when the following mysterious message was handed in —

"To John Macklin,

Sydney.

"Schooner arrived. Man dead. Woman remains here."

PART II

CHAPTER I

JOHN RAMSAY TAKES UP THE TALE

It seems that when I induced my cousin by marriage, Luke Sanctuary, to write the first part of this history, I pledged myself to continue the work at the point where I became personally interested in it. That time, he tells me, has now arrived, and so it comes to pass that I find myself sitting before a blank sheet of paper, holding a brand-new pen in my hand, and wondering how on earth I'm going to set down all the extraordinary things I have to tell.

One assertion I can safely make, and that is that this is the first time I have ever undertaken such a contract. For writing was always a trouble to me; and now I come to think of it, it was that very hatred of penmanship which resulted in my being concerned in what I shall always call that "Chilian Mystery." For, had I proved an apt writer, I should in all probability have made a good clerk; and had I turned out a good clerk, I should never have become a sailor; and to continue the argument ad infinitum, had I not become a sailor, I should certainly never have known anything of the story my cousin has begun, and which I am now called upon to continue.

As I am perhaps the chief actor in the latter part of this history, and as in matters of this sort it is always best, according to my way of thinking, to begin at the very beginning, I may perhaps be excused if I briefly narrate the principal events of my life which led up to my connection with it.

To begin with, let me remark that I was born in the village of Coombe, near Salisbury, in the county of Wiltshire, where my father was a country doctor. He, poor man, had the misfortune to be peculiarly devoted to his profession, so much so, that it was neither more nor less than sheer overwork which occasioned his untimely end.

That sad event occurred within a week of my seventh birthday. And with the remembrance of his funeral, a peculiarly sombre picture rises before my mind's eye. I see a dreary autumnal day; thick mists upon the hill-tops, dripping trees, and a still more dismal procession, winding its way along the high-road, unrelieved by any touch of colour. And, incongruously enough, the whole recollection is heightened by the remembrance of a pair of black cloth breeches worn by me on that melancholy occasion for the first time. By such small and seemingly unimportant things are great events impressed upon our memories.

Perhaps after my father's death I proved myself a handful to manage; perhaps my mother really thought it the best thing for me. At any rate, a boarding-school was chosen for me at Plymouth, to which she herself reluctantly conducted me. Being her only child, and having hitherto been accustomed to get my own way at all times and seasons, this maternal abandonment was a proceeding I could not appreciate. I evinced, I believe, a decided objection to saying farewell to her, and I know I found only inadequate consolation in either the ancient dame who kept the school (who promised my parent to be a mother to me, and for that reason perhaps caned me soundly before I had been twenty-four hours under her charge), the house, or my school-fellows, who figure in my memory as the most objectionable set of young ruffians with whom I had ever come into contact.

For three years I continued a pupil of this "Seminary for the Sons of Gentlemen," and should perhaps have remained longer had I not experienced the misfortune of being expelled, for laying a fellow-scholar's head open with a drawing-board; a precocity at ten years which was plainly held to foreshadow my certain ultimate arrival at the condemned cell and the gallows. After that, from the age of ten until fifteen, I drifted from school to school, deriving but small benefit from any one of them, and every term bringing my dear mother's grey hairs (as she would persist in putting it) nearer and nearer to the grave, by reason of the unsatisfactory nature of my reports.

At fifteen, being a well-set-up stripling for my years, and like to fall into all sorts of errors as to my proper importance in life, if allowed to remain any longer with boys younger than myself, I was taken away and carried to London, in order that my mother might consult with an old friend as to my future. How well I remember that journey, and the novelty of seeing London for the first time!

Arriving at Waterloo, we drove to Notting Hill, and next morning went by omnibus into the city to discover Sir Benjamin Plowden in the East India Avenue.

Never, if I live to be a hundred, shall I forget my first impression of that office, and the unaccustomed and humiliating feeling which stole over me as I crossed the threshold behind my mother, to await an audience with this mysterious Sir Benjamin. It was one thing, I discovered, to be the cock of a small country school, and quite another to be an applicant for a junior clerkship, at a salary of five shillings a week, in a London merchant's office.

At the end of five minutes a liveried servant entered the waiting-room, and informed us that "Sir Benjamin would see us now, if we'd be good enough to step this way." Thereupon my mother gathered up her impedimenta, including a reticule, a small black handbag, an umbrella, a shawl, a paper bag of sponge-cakes, and her spectacle-case, and toddled down the passage after him, leaving me to follow in her wake, my heart the while thumping like a flail against my ribs.

Ever since that morning, when I desire to realize a man in every way embodying my idea of what a merchant prince should be, I recall my first impression of Sir Benjamin. At the date of our visit he was on the hither side of fifty, of medium height, stout and bald, with curly white whiskers, a shaven chin and upper lip, very rosy as to his complexion, dignified in his bearing, and given to saying "Hum, ha!" on all possible occasions.

He received my mother with cordiality, and even went so far as to recognize my presence with an expressive speech, – "So this is your boy, – a big fellow, – like his father about the mouth, – too old to be idling about country towns, getting into mischief, and deriving a false idea of his own importance. Hum, ha!" After which I was left to my own thoughts, while they entered upon an animated discussion for perhaps the space of half-an-hour.

At the end of this time he rose – I think, as a hint to my mother – and rang the bell. It was answered by the same dignified man-servant who had ushered us into his presence; whereupon Sir Benjamin bade us farewell, promising to communicate with my mother on the subject they had been discussing at an early date; and we were escorted out. I, for one, was not sorry that the interview was over.

Leaving the Avenue, we visited the British Museum, by way of counteracting the two serious impressions forced upon my mind by the ordeal we had just undergone, I suppose; and here my mother, in the middle of the Egyptian Department, surrounded by evidences of an extinct civilization, gravely prophesied the eminence to which I should some day attain, if only Sir Benjamin could be induced to take an interest in me.

As if in answer to her words, two days later I was the recipient of a letter signed by Sir Benjamin himself, in which it was stated that a position had been found for me in his own office, at a salary of ten shillings a week. I must leave you to picture my sensations. Surely no possessor of an autograph letter from the throne itself could have been prouder than I that day. As for my mother, she argued confidently that my Future (with a capital F) had undoubtedly commenced. And, between ourselves, I certainly think it had.

It is not necessary, for the understanding of the story I have to tell, that I should enter upon a recital of my life in the East India Avenue; let it suffice, that it did not come up to the expectations I had formed regarding it. The hours were long, the supervision was constant and irksome, the superiority of the other clerks humiliating, while the personal attention and affability which my dear mother had led me to expect from Sir Benjamin was not only not forthcoming, but showed no signs of making its appearance at any time within the next half-century.

However, there were many compensations to balance these petty annoyances, and chief among them I reckoned that of carrying letters and papers to the docks, where the ships which brought Sir Benjamin's merchandise from far countries discharged their cargoes.

Nothing gave me greater happiness than these little excursions, and when I had fulfilled my errand, it was my invariable custom to enter upon an investigation on my own account, wandering all over the mysterious vessels, asking questions innumerable about the strange places they visited, and, I have no doubt now, making myself a complete and insufferable nuisance generally. Perhaps that was why, throughout my sailoring career, I had always a sneaking sympathy with boys who boarded us, and asked permission to look round. At any rate, I am convinced that those journeys were what made me believe I had at last hit upon my vocation in life; for I know that every time I passed outwards through the dock-gates, I renewed my vow that before many years were over I would become a sailor, and the commander of just such another ship as that I had lately overhauled.

This sort of life continued with but slight variation until I was on the verge of seventeen, when I made a firm resolve to assert myself, and embark upon the calling I had marked out for my own. My mother was prepared in some manner for the blow, for she certainly could not have failed to notice the way my inclinations tended; so when I broached the subject she offered no objections, only sighed somewhat sadly, and said "she was afraid a time would come when I should repent it." Little did the poor soul know to what a fatal prophecy she was giving utterance.

A day later, for the second and last time in her life, she visited Sir Benjamin, and the following morning I was summoned to his presence.

"Your mother tells me you wish to leave my employ to become a sailor," he began, when I had closed the door behind me and approached his table. "Now you know your own business best, but remember it's a hard life, more kicks than halfpence; and what is worse, I can assure you that when you have once taken to it, you'll never be fit for anything else again. You have thought it over, I suppose?"

I modestly replied that I had devoted a good deal of consideration to the matter, and would have gone on to say that I wished for nothing better had he not interrupted me.

"Very good; I've promised your mother to do the best I can for you, so you'll be apprenticed to the Yellow Diamond Line as soon as I can see about it. You'll probably be surprised to hear that I think you're a fool, but I suppose in this world there must be a proportion of fools to balance the wise men, or we'd all come to grief. Hum, ha!"

He was true to his promise, for the following week I received a notification to attend at the head office of the Yellow Diamond Line of clipper ships. Here I complied with the formalities, signed the necessary papers, and had the satisfaction of leaving the Company's office to all intents and purposes a member of the nautical profession. It was arranged that I should desert Sir Benjamin's employment at the end of the month, and after that I was confident my real career would commence. It is, I think, one of the most wonderful things in our poor human nature, that we should always look forward to the future with so much confidence, PROportionately the more when we have perhaps the least justification for it. For my own part, when I left the Company's office I would not have changed places with the Prime Minister himself; yet such is the perversity of fate that, not six hours from the time of my signing the papers, I would have given anything I possessed to have been allowed to forfeit my premium and to remain ashore. This is how it came about.