His Unknown Wife

The third method was the direct one. A series of iron rungs led vertically up the face of the superstructure, and, as sailors occasionally passed that way, the girl would not necessarily be alarmed by seeing a man coming up.

The officer on duty might detect him, of course; but even he was liable to mistake him for one of the ship’s company.

It has been seen already that Maseden was of the rare order of mankind which, having once made up its mind, acts unhesitatingly. No sooner had he elected for the iron ladder than he had crossed the deck and was mounting rapidly. It chanced that the officer did not see him.

In a few seconds he was standing on the promenade deck. Then he had an attack of stage-fright. Many an actor has strode valiantly from wings to footlights only to find his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. This was Maseden’s “star turn,” and not a word could he utter!

By a singular coincidence, the lady was equally nervous. She gave scant attention to the commonplace occurrence that a member of the crew should walk aft from the dim interior of the forecastle and hurry up the ladder, but the situation altered dramatically when a faint gleam from a window of the smoking-room fell on the tarnished silver braid and gilt buttons of Maseden’s jacket of black cloth and velvet.

The light, such as it was, fell directly on the girl’s face as she turned towards the intruder. Her eyes, blue sapphires by day, were now strangely dark. Maseden saw that her expression was one of panic if not of actual terror. He was unpleasantly reminded of a bird fascinated by a snake; the displeasing simile stirred his wits and unlocked his tongue.

“I’m sorry if I have frightened you,” he said quietly, “but the chance of securing a few words of explanation seemed too good to be lost. You owe me something of the kind, don’t you?”

“Why?” came the truly feminine reply.

“Because, unless I am greatly mistaken, you are the lady whom I had the honor of marrying in the Castle of San Juan at Cartagena. You may be known as Miss Madge Gray on board this ship, but your name in the register was Madeleine.”

“My name is Nina, not Madge.”

Maseden was taken aback for a few seconds, yet the fact could not be gainsaid that the speaker, whether Madge or Nina, did not repudiate the general accuracy of his statement. Moreover, he was almost sure of his ground now. His “wife” was probably flirting with Sturgess. Nina, as usual, was left to her own devices, since the forecastle steward had reported that Señor Gray was ill and confined to his cabin.

“At any rate, you do not deny that either your sister or yourself is legally entitled to pose as Mrs. Philip Alexander Maseden?” he said.

“I am not aware that either of us can fairly be described as posing in that distinguished capacity.”

The retort was glib enough. It amused the man.

“Perhaps I put the bald truth rather awkwardly,” he said. “Let me, then, ask a plain question. Did I marry you, or your sister, last Tuesday morning?”

“You certainly err if you think that I shall discuss the affairs of my family with a complete stranger,” was the unhesitating answer.

“Yet you, or your sister, did not scruple to marry one.”

“Are you Mr. Maseden?”

“I am. Haven’t I said so? I implied it, at any rate.”

“Then why are you in disguise, posing – it is your own word – as a Spanish cowboy?”

“Because I’m trying to save my miserable life. Don’t think me ungrateful, madam. I owe my escape to the phenomenal circumstances brought about by the desire of a charming young lady to become Mrs. Maseden, if only for a brief half hour. I am not claiming any – privileges, shall I say? – on that account. But I can hardly credit that, having gone through the ordeal of such a ceremony, you would refuse to tell me your motive, so I reluctantly revert to my first opinion, namely, that your sister is my wife.”

“Reluctantly! Why reluctantly?”

There was more than a touch of bewilderment in the cry. Maseden interpreted it as a fencer’s trick to gain time.

“I don’t mind being absolutely candid,” he laughed. “You see, time hangs heavy on my hands here. I have nothing to do except watch for a glimpse of an unknown wife. Queer, isn’t it? Anyhow, my fate doesn’t seem to worry sister Madge, who finds consolation elsewhere; so, of the two, if I must be wed to one of you, I imagine I would prefer you.”

“I think you are intolerably rude, Mr. Maseden. Madge was right when she said – ”

She checked herself with a little gasp of dismay. Maseden laughed again.

“Please don’t spare me,” he cried. “What did Madge say?”

“I decline to discuss the matter any further.”

“But why should we quarrel over a minor point? You have tacitly admitted that your sister married me. Give me some notion of her motive. That is all I ask. It may help.”

“How help?”

“When I take unto myself a wife I expect to be allowed some freedom of choice in the matter. I certainly refuse to have her picked for me by a rascal like Steinbaum. If I win clear of Buenos Ayres and reach New York I shall take the speediest steps to undo the matrimonial knot tied in Cartagena. There may be legal complications, which will be attended, I suppose, by a certain amount of publicity. It will help some, as Mr. Sturgess would say, if I know just why the lady wanted to wed in the first instance. Surely there is reason behind that simple request. Your sister begged to be allowed to marry me because I was condemned to death. At least, such was Steinbaum’s story. Was that true, to begin with?”

No answer. Maseden felt that he had cornered her.

“There must have been some such ground for an extraordinary action,” he went on. “To the best of my knowledge she had never seen me. I question if she even knew my name. I – ”

A door opened, and a stream of light fell on the deck some feet away. Sturgess’s voice reached them clearly.

“Guess she’s tucked up cozy in a deck chair,” he was saying. “It’s no time to retire to roost yet, anyhow.”

“Please go now,” whispered Nina tremulously. “You mustn’t be seen talking to me. I – I’ll discuss things with Madge, and if possible, come here about the same hour to-morrow, or next day. I – I’ll do my best.”

Without another word, Maseden swung himself over the rail. When below the level of the deck he clung to the ladder and listened, not meaning to act ungenerously, but because of the other man’s rapid approach.

“Ah, there you are, Miss Nina!” cried Sturgess. “Sister Madge is bored stiff by my company, but was polite enough to pretend that she was anxious about you.”

“I’ve been star-gazing,” said the girl, hastening towards him.

“So’ve I,” grinned Sturgess. “You two girls have the finest eyes I’ve ever – ”

His voice trailed away into silence. Maseden dropped to the deck.

“Hang it all!” he muttered, strangely disconsolate. “When Fate took me by the scruff of the neck and married me to one of two sisters, neither of whom I had ever seen, she might have been kind enough, the jade, to tie me to the right one!”

Yet, even to his thinking, Madge and Nina were like as a couple of pins! Being an eminently sensible sort of fellow, he realized in the next breath that Madge might be quite as nice a girl as Nina.

Then the thought struck him that she was purposely making things easier for him by cultivating a friendship with Sturgess. In any case, Sturgess was obviously destined to act as a pawn in the game. Even he, Maseden, had not scrupled to use that gentleman at sight when anxious to board the Southern Cross without attracting the attention of the news-mongering boatmen of Cartagena.

That night he lay awake for hours. For one thing, the ship was running into bad weather again, and complained nosily of the buffeting her stout frame was receiving. For another, his own course was beset with difficulties. He failed completely to understand the attitude of sister Nina.

If Madeleine – or Madge, as he had better learned to distinguish her – had sought marriage with a man about to die as a means to escape from some unbearable duress, was her plight accentuated rather than bettered by the fact that her husband still lived? If so, the announcement that he meant to obtain a legal dissolution of the bond at the earliest possible moment would relieve the tension.

But what if her need demanded that she should remain wed, a wife in name only? A development of that sort foreshadowed complexities of a rare order. Maseden knew himself as one capable of Quixotic action – even the scheming Steinbaum had paid him that tribute – but it was asking too much that he should go through life burdened with a wife who treated him as a benevolent stranger.

Common sense urged that they should meet and discuss a most trying and equivocal situation as frankly and fully as might be. Why, then, had Nina Gray been so disturbed, so anxious to keep the married pair apart? Both girls knew he was alive. What purpose could it serve that the fact should be ignored?

He puzzled his brain to recall incidents he had heard of Steinbaum’s history, but investigation along that line drew a blank. Was Suarez mixed up in the embroglio? It was unlikely. Though the man had spent some years in the United States and in Europe, he had not left San Juan since he, Maseden, came there, and, before that period, both Madge and Nina Gray must have been girls in short frocks and long tresses.

Perhaps the father’s record would provide a clew. Somehow, though he had never set eyes on Mr. Gray save as a shadowy form on a dark night, Maseden sensed him as unsympathetic. He was forced to form a judgment on the flimsiest of material, having none other; but Gray’s voice, his way of speaking to his daughters, had grated.

First impressions are treacherous guides; nevertheless the philosopher whom they cannot mislead does not exist.

The following day was the longest in Maseden’s experience. Monotony, in itself, is wearying; when, to a dull routine of meals and occasional talk with men of an inferior type is added the positive discomfort of confinement in the most exposed and cramped part of a ship during a stiff gale, monotony becomes akin to torture.

At last, however, night fell. There was no improvement in the weather, which, if anything, grew worse; but a change in the ship’s course, or a shifting of the wind – no one to whom Maseden might speak could give him any reliable data on the point – brought the Southern Cross on a more even keel.

Here, at least, was some slight compensation for the leaden-footed hours of waiting. Nina Gray might be a good sailor, but it was hardly reasonable to expect that she would keep her tryst when the big steamer was trying alternately to stand on end or roll bodily over to port.

About nine o’clock Maseden made out a shrouded figure in the position where his “sister-in-law” had stood the previous night. He hastened from the shelter of the forecastle, and was promptly drenched from head to foot by a shower of spray. He was half-way up the ladder when a voice reached him.

“Please go back,” it said. “I’ll come to the gangway on the starboard side.”

He regained the deck, made for the right-hand gangway, and soon had the satisfaction of seeing the girl walking swiftly along the dimly-lighted corridor.

He hardly knew how to greet her. To bid her “Good evening,” or murmur some platitude about her goodness in keeping the appointment in such vile weather, would have sounded banal.

The lady, however, when they came face to face, settled all doubts on the question of etiquette by saying breathlessly:

“I have had a long talk with my sister, Mr. Maseden, and she bids me tell you that she cannot meet you herself. You were so generous, so kind to her, at a moment when your thoughts might well have been centered in your own terrible fate, that she cannot bear the ordeal of asking you the last favor of forgetting her.

“Of course, every facility will be given for the dissolution of the marriage. I have written here the address of a firm of lawyers in Philadelphia who will act with your legal representatives when the matter comes before the courts. For your own purposes, I understand, you wish to remain unknown while on board this ship. We have arranged to travel to New York by the first American liner sailing from Buenos Ayres after our arrival. Perhaps you will be good enough to choose another vessel, or, if your affairs are urgent, we would wait for a later one. Can you let me know your wishes now in that matter?”

Maseden was so astonished that he literally caught the girl by the shoulder and turned her partly round so that the light of a distant lamp fell on her face. The buffeting of the gale, aided, no doubt, by a feeling of excitement, had lent her a fine color, but, if her utterance was a trifle broken at first, it had soon become calm and measured, nor did she seem to resent his cavalier treatment.

“Are you joking?” he said, smiling in sheer perplexity.

“I fail to find any humor in my words,” came the instant reply.

“Quite so. They might have been framed by a lawyer. Isn’t there a ghost of a joke in that mere fact?”

“It appeared to my sister, and I fully agree with her, that we are suggesting the best way, the only way, out of an embarrassing dilemma.”

“Yes,” agreed Maseden, drawing a long breath. “I agree to all the terms; I insist only on priority of sailing from Buenos Ayres. I don’t see why I should risk my life just to save you a trifling inconvenience.”

“Then here is the address I spoke of,” and she proffered an envelope.

“Good. We’ll leave the rest to the law, Miss Nina.”

“Thank you. Good-by.”

She would have passed him, but he was on the after side of the gangway, and his outstretched hand restrained her.

“One moment, please,” he said. “I want you to tell your sister that she has thoroughly – disillusioned me.”

“I’ll do that,” she assured him, and he could not help but regard her airy self-possession as the most surprising factor in a remarkable situation.

“And you, too,” he went on. “Something has happened to you since last night. Somehow you are – harder. Forgive me if I choose unpleasant adjectives.”

She hesitated before replying. Perhaps she felt the quiet scorn underlying the words.

“Where my unhappy family is concerned, the forgiveness must come wholly from you,” she said at last. “May I go now, Mr. Maseden? Once more, thank you for all that you have done and will do. Remember, when this miserable affair reaches the newspapers, it is not your reputation that will suffer, but the woman’s!”

She left him gazing blankly after her. There was a tense vibrato in the tone of the girl’s voice that touched some responsive chord in the man’s breast.

Then he became aware that he was soaked to the skin, and the wind was piercingly cold.

He murmured a phrase strongly reminiscent of the Americano who took hunting trips into the interior of Central America, and hurried to his cabin, where he stripped and rubbed his limbs to a glow before turning in.

CHAPTER VI

AN UNFORESEEN DISASTER

During the night the storm developed into that elemental chaos which the landsman exaggerates into a hurricane and the sailor logs as a strong northwesterly gale. Passage along the open decks of the Southern Cross became a hazardous undertaking, an experiment just practicable for a strong man clad in oilskins and seaboots, but positively dangerous for one unable to interpret the vagaries of a ship plunging through a heavy sea. A broken limb or ugly bruise was the certain penalty of an incautious movement, if, indeed, one was not swept overboard.

For a passenger – a non-combatant, so to speak – the only certain way to insure physical safety was to lie prone in a bunk, with a hand ever ready to seize the nearest rail when an unusually violent lurch tilted the vessel to an angle of forty-five degrees and simultaneously drove her nose into a veritable mountain of water.

Maseden contrived to sleep fitfully until a thin gray light, trickling through a tiny port when momentarily free of wave-wash, told him that another day had dawned. The din was incessant. Inanimate things may be inarticulate to human ears, but they speak a language of their own on such occasions – an inchoate tongue made up of banging and clattering, of stunning vibrations, of wind-shrieks, of the groaning of steel framework, riveted plates, and seasoned timber.

The Southern Cross was tackling her work with stubborn energy, but she complained of its severity in every fibre. Ships, like men, prefer easy conditions, and growl in their own peculiar manner when compelled to wage a fierce and continuous fight for mere existence.

Of course a sailor never permits himself to think of his own craft in such wise. “Dirty weather” is simply an unpleasant episode in the routine of a voyage. He regards it much as the average city man views wind and rain – displeasing additions to life’s minor worries, but not to be considered as affecting the daily task.

In a modern, well-found steamship such negative faith is fully justified, and the ship’s company of the Southern Cross went about their several duties as methodically as though the vessel were roped securely alongside a pier in the North River.

The center of the forecastle held a roomy compartment in which meals were served for the crew, and Maseden took refuge there as soon as he was dressed. He obtained an early cup of coffee, and derived some comfort from the fact, communicated by the half-caste sailor he had saved from the falling pulley, that about the same time next day they would sight the Evangelistas light, and soon thereafter be in the land-locked water of the Straits of Magellan.

He realized, of course, that sight or sound of either Madge Gray or her sister was hardly to be expected during the next twenty-four hours. In fact, he might not see them again before Buenos Ayres was reached.

On the whole, it would be better so, he decided. A thrilling and most dramatic incident in a life not otherwise noteworthy for its vicissitudes would close when he was safe on board a homeward-bound mail steamer. After that would come some small experience of a court of law.

For the rest, if he contrived to cheat the newspapers of the full details, he would actually risk his repute as a veracious citizen if he told the plain truth about one day’s history in the Republic of San Juan.

Once, in his teens, when in London during a never-to-be-forgotten European tour, a friend of his father’s pointed out a small, alert man, dressed in gray tweeds, who was hailing a cab in Pall Mall, and said:

“Look, Alec! That is Evans of the Guides. I met him five years ago in Lucknow, and even at that date he had killed his sixty-first tiger on foot and alone. He never shoots stripes any other way. He says it isn’t quite sporting to tackle the brute from the comparative safety of a howdah or a machan– a platform rigged in a tree, you know.”

Philip Alexander Maseden, aged sixteen, neither knew nor cared what a machan was. His faculties were absorbed in the difficult task of reconciling a dapper little man in a gray suit, skipping nimbly into a cab in Pall Mall, with a redoubtable Nimrod who had bagged sixty-one tigers after tracking them into their jungles.

And that was the record of five years earlier. Perhaps in the meantime the bold shikari had added dozens to the total. A mighty hunter, Evans, but hard to reconcile with his environment.

Seated in the wet, creaking cabin, and watching through a window which opened aft the turmoil of seas leaping venomously at and over the stout bulk of the Southern Cross, Maseden thought of Evans of the Guides, and his cohort of tiger-ghosts. Yet not one tiger among the lot had brought Evans so near death as he, Maseden, was when Steinbaum entered his cell on that fateful morning, and, in the closest shave Evans was ever favored with, a violent end had not been averted by stranger means.

How would the story of “Madeleine,” Suarez, and Captain Gomez’s boots sound if told in a cosy corner of a Fifth Avenue club?

By reason of his position in the fore part of the vessel, Maseden could survey the bridge, chart-house and some part of the promenade deck. The head of the officer on watch was visible above the canvas screen which those who go down to the sea in ships have christened the “devil-dodger.” The officer’s sou’wester was tied on firmly, and the placid expression of the strong, weather-stained face was clearly discernible. For the most part, he looked straight ahead, with an occasional glance back, or over the side into the spume and froth churned up by the ship’s passage. Once in a while he would draw away from the screen and compare the course shown by the compass with that steered by the quartermaster at the wheel.

For lack of something better to occupy his mind, Maseden followed each movement of the man on the bridge. Thus, singularly enough, next to the officer himself, and possibly a look-out in the bows, he was the first person on board to become aware of a peril which suddenly beset the Southern Cross.

What that peril was he could not guess, but he saw that the officer was shouting instructions to the quartermaster, and in the same instant the clang of a bell showed that the engine-room telegraph was in use.

Almost immediately the ship’s speed slackened, and as she yielded to the pressure of wind and wave the clamor of her struggle sank to comparative silence.

A few seconds later the captain appeared on the bridge. He, like the officer, gave particular heed to something which lay straight ahead. Evidently he approved of the action taken by his subordinate, because, as well as Maseden could judge, he stood beside the telegraph, with a hand on the lever, but made no further alteration in the ship’s speed.

Naturally Maseden wondered what had happened and watched closely for developments. In better weather he would have gone outside, but it was positively dangerous now to stand close to the ship’s rail, or, indeed, remain on any part of the open deck, while the shadow of an attempt on his part to climb the forecastle ladder would have evoked a gruff order to return.

Within a minute or less, however, he made out that the Southern Cross was passing through a quantity of wreckage, mostly rough-hewn timber. Here and there a spar would unexpectedly thrust its tapering point high above the tawny vortex of the waves; at odd times a portion of a bulkhead and fragments of white-painted panels would be revealed for an instant. Some unfortunate sailing ship had been torn to shreds by the gale, and the steamer was just passing through that section of the sea-plain still cumbered by her fragments, though the tragedy itself had probably occurred many a mile away from that particular point on the map.

By this time the stopping of the engines had aroused every member of the crew not on watch. Some of the men, bleary-eyed with sleep, gathered in the cabin, and their comments were illuminating.

“Wind-jammer gone with all hands,” said one man, after a critical glance at the flotsam on both sides of the ship.

“What for have we slowed up?” inquired another. “The old man ain’t thinkin’ of lowerin’ a boat, is he?”

“Lower a boat, saphead, in a sea like this!” scoffed the first speaker.

“Wouldn’t he try to rescue any poor sailor-men who may be clingin’ to the wreck?” came the retort.

“As though any sort of blisterin’ wreck could live in this weather! Try again, Jimmy. We’re dodgin’ planks an’ ropes; that’s our special stunt just now. One o’ them hefty chunks o’ lumber would knock a hole in us below the water-line before you could say ‘knife’. An’ how about a sail an’ cordage wrappin’ themselves lovin’ly around the screw? Where ’ud we be then?.. There you are. What did I tell you?”

A heavy thud, altogether different from the blow delivered by a wave, shook the Southern Cross from stem to stern. The captain looked over the port side, and followed the movement of some unseen object until it was swept well clear of the ship. The engines, which had been stopped completely, were rung on to “Slow ahead” again. They remained at that speed for half a minute, not longer. Then they were stopped once more, and the officer of the watch quitted the bridge hurriedly.