Erema; Or, My Father's Sin

“How nobly our Lyceum stands!” the Major shouted, for any thing less than a shout was dumb. “This is the time to try institutions. I am proud of my foundations.”

In answer to his words appeared a huge brown surge, a mountain ridge, seething backward at the crest with the spread and weight of onset. This great wave smote all other waves away, or else embodied them, and gathered its height against the poor worn pebble bank, and descended. A roar distinct above the universal roar proclaimed it; a crash of conflict shook the earth, and the shattered bank was swallowed in a world of leaping whiteness. When this wild mass dashed onward into the swelling flood before us, there was no sign of Lyceum left, but stubs of foundation, and a mangled roof rolling over and over, like a hen-coop.

“Well, that beats every thing I ever saw,” exclaimed the gallant Major. “What noble timber! What mortise-work! No London scamping there, my lads. But what comes here? Why, the very thing we wanted! Barnes, look alive, my man. Run to your house, and get a pair of oars and a bucket.”

It was the boat, the last surviving boat of all that hailed from Bruntsea. That monstrous billow had tossed it up like a school-boy’s kite, and dropped it whole, with an upright keel, in the inland sea, though nearly half full of water. Driven on by wind and wave, it labored heavily toward us; and more than once it seemed certain to sink as it broached to and shipped seas again. But half a dozen bold fishermen rushed with a rope into the short angry surf—to which the polled shingle bank still acted as a powerful breakwater, else all Bruntsea had collapsed—and they hauled up the boat with a hearty cheer, and ran her up straight with, “Yo—heave—oh!” and turned her on her side to drain, and then launched her again, with a bucket and a man to bail out the rest of the water, and a pair of heavy oars brought down by Barnes, and nobody knows what other things.

“Naught to steer with. Rudder gone!” cried one of the men, as the furious gale drove the boat, athwart the street, back again.

“Wants another oar,” said Barnes. “What a fool I were to bring only two!”

“Here you are!” shouted Major Hockin. “One of you help me to pull up this pole.”

Through a shattered gate they waded into a little garden, which had been the pride of the season at Bruntsea; and there from the ground they tore up a pole, with a board at the top nailed across it, and the following not rare legend: “Lodgings to let. Inquire within. First floor front, and back parlors.”

“Fust-rate thing to steer with! Would never have believed you had the sense!” So shouted Barnes—a rough man, roughened by the stress of storm and fright. “Get into starn-sheets if so liketh. Ye know, ye may be useful.”

“I defy you to push off without my sanction. Useful, indeed! I am the captain of this boat. All the ground under it is mine. Did you think, you set of salted radicals, that I meant to let you go without me? And all among my own houses!”

“Look sharp, governor, if you has the pluck, then. Mind, we are more like to be swamped than not.”

As the boat swung about, Major Hockin jumped in, and so, on the spur of the moment, did I. We staggered all about with the heave and roll, and both would have fallen on the planks, or out over, if we had not tumbled, with opposite impetus, into the arms of each other. Then a great wave burst and soaked us both, and we fell into sitting on a slippery seat.

Meanwhile two men were tugging at each oar, and Barnes himself steering with the sign-board; and the head of the boat was kept against the wind and the billows from our breakwater. Some of these seemed resolved (though shorn of depth and height in crossing) to rush all over us and drown us in the washer-women’s drying ground. By skill and presence of mind, our captain, Barnes, foiled all their violence, till we got a little shelter from the ruins of the “Young Men’s Christian Institute.”

“Hold all!” cried Barnes; “only keep her head up, while I look about what there is to do.”

The sight was a thing to remember; and being on the better side now of the scud, because it was flying away from us, we could make out a great deal more of the trouble which had befallen Bruntsea. The stormy fiord which had usurped the ancient track of the river was about a furlong in width, and troughed with white waves vaulting over. And the sea rushed through at the bottom as well, through scores of yards of pebbles, as it did in quiet weather even, when the tide was brimming. We in the tossing boat, with her head to the inrush of the outer sea, were just like people sitting upon the floats or rafts of a furious weir; and if any such surge had topped the ridge as the one which flung our boat to us, there could be no doubt that we must go down as badly as the Major’s houses. However, we hoped for the best, and gazed at the desolation inland.

Not only the Major’s great plan, but all the lower line of old Bruntsea, was knocked to pieces, and lost to knowledge in freaks of wind-lashed waters. Men and women were running about with favorite bits of furniture, or feather-beds, or babies’ cradles, or whatever they had caught hold of. The butt ends of the three old streets that led down toward the sea-ground were dipped, as if playing seesaw in the surf, and the storm made gangways of them and lighthouses of the lamp-posts. The old public-house at the corner was down, and the waves leaping in at the post-office door, and wrecking the globes of the chemist.

“Drift and dash, and roar and rush, and the devil let loose in the thick of it. My eyes are worn out with it. Take the glass, Erema, and tell us who is next to be washed away. A new set of clothes-props for Mrs. Mangles I paid for the very day I came back from town.”

With these words, the lord of the submarine manor (whose strength of spirit amazed me) offered his pet binocular, which he never went without upon his own domain. And fisherman Barnes, as we rose and fell, once more saved us from being “swamped” by his clever way of paddling through a scallop in the stern, with the board about the first floor front to let.

The seamen, just keeping way on the boat, sheltered their eyes with their left hands, and fixed them on the tumultuous scene.

I also gazed through the double glass, which was a very clear one; but none of us saw any human being at present in any peril.

“Old pilot was right, after all,” said one; “but what a good job as it come o’ middle day, and best of all of a Sunday!”

“I have heered say,” replied another, “that the like thing come to pass nigh upon three hunder years agone. How did you get your things out, Jem Bishop?”

Jem, the only one of them whose house was in the havoc, regarded with a sailor’s calmness the entry of the sea through his bedroom window, and was going to favor us with a narrative, when one of his mates exclaimed,

“What do I see yonner, lads? Away beyond town altogether. Seemeth to me like a fellow swimming. Miss, will you lend me spy-glass? Never seed a double-barreled one before. Can use him with one eye shut, I s’pose?”

“No good that way, Joe,” cried Barnes, with a wink of superior knowledge, for he often had used this binocular. “Shut one eye for one barrel—stands to reason, then, you shut both for two, my son.”

“Stow that,” said the quick-eyed sailor, as he brought the glass to bear in a moment. “It is a man in the water, lads, and swimming to save the witch, I do believe.”

“Bless me!” cried the Major; “how stupid of us! I never thought once of that poor woman. She must be washed out long ago. Pull for your lives, my friends. A guinea apiece if you save her.”

“And another from me,” I cried. Whereupon the boat swept round, and the tough ash bent, and we rushed into no small danger. For nearly half a mile had we to pass of raging and boisterous water, almost as wild as the open sea itself at the breaches of the pebble ridge. And the risk of a heavy sea boarding us was fearfully multiplied by having thus to cross the storm instead of breasting it. Useless and helpless, and only in the way, and battered about by wind and sea, so that my Sunday dress was become a drag, what folly, what fatuity, what frenzy, I might call it, could ever have led me to jump into that boat? “I don’t know. I only know that I always do it,” said my sensible self to its mad sister, as they both shut their eyes at a great white wave. “If I possibly survive, I will try to know better. But ever from my childhood I am getting into scrapes.”

The boat labored on, with a good many grunts, but not a word from any one. More than once we were obliged to fetch up as a great billow topped the poor shingle bank; and we took so much water on board that the men said afterward that I saved them. I only remember sitting down and working at the bucket with both hands, till much of the skin was gone, and my arms and many other places ached. But what was that to be compared with drowning?

At length we were opposite “Desolate Hole,” which was a hole no longer, but filled and flooded with the churning whirl and reckless dominance of water. Tufts and tussocks of shattered brush and rolling wreck played round it, and the old gray stone of mullioned windows split the wash like mooring-posts. We passed and gazed; but the only sound was the whistling of the tempest, and the only living sight a sea-gull, weary of his wings, and drowning.

“No living creature can be there,” the Major broke our long silence. “Land, my friends, if land we may. We risk our own lives for nothing.”

The men lay back on their oars to fetch the gallant boat to the wind again, when through a great gap in the ruins they saw a sight that startled manhood. At the back of that ruin, on the landward side, on a wall which, tottered under them, there were two figures standing. One a tall man, urging on, the other a woman shrinking. At a glance, or with a thought, I knew them both. One was Lord Castlewood’s first love, the other his son and murderer.

Our men shouted with the whole power of their hearts to tell that miserable pair to wait till succor should be brought to them. And the Major stood up and waved his hat, and in doing so tumbled back again. I can not tell—how could I tell in the thick of it?—but an idea or a flit of fancy touched me (and afterward became conviction) that while the man heard us not at all, and had no knowledge of us, his mother turned round and saw us all, and faced the storm in preference.

Whatever the cause may have been, at least she suddenly changed her attitude. The man had been pointing to the roof, which threatened to fall in a mass upon them, while she had been shuddering back from the depth of eddying waves below her. But now she drew up her poor bent figure, and leaned on her son to obey him.

Our boat, with strong arms laboring for life, swept round the old gable of the ruin; but we were compelled to “give it wide berth,” as Captain Barnes shouted; and then a black squall of terrific wind and hail burst forth. We bowed our heads and drew our bodies to their tightest compass, and every rib of our boat vibrated as a violin does; and the oars were beaten flat, and dashed their drip into fringes like a small-toothed comb.

That great squall was either a whirlwind or the crowning blast of a hurricane. It beat the high waves hollow, as if it fell from the sky upon them; and it snapped off one of our oars at the hilt, so that two of our men rolled backward. And when we were able to look about again the whole roof of “Desolate Hole” was gone, and little of the walls left standing. And how we should guide our course, or even save our lives, we knew not.

We were compelled to bring up—as best we might—with the boat’s head to the sea, and so to keep it by using the steering gear against the surviving oar. As for the people we were come to save, there was no chance whatever of approaching them. Even without the mishap to the oar, we never could have reached them.

And indeed when first we saw them again they seemed better off than ourselves were. For they were not far from dry land, and the man (a skillful and powerful swimmer) had a short piece of plank, which he knew how to use to support his weak companion.

“Brave fellow! fine fellow!” the Major cried, little knowing whom he was admiring. “See how he keeps up his presence of mind! Such a man as that is worth any thing. And he cares more for her than he does for himself. He shall have the Society’s medal. One more long and strong stroke, my noble friend. Oh, great God! what has befallen him?”

In horror and pity we gazed. The man had been dashed against something headlong. He whirled round and round in white water, his legs were thrown up, and we saw no more of him. The woman cast off the plank, and tossed her helpless arms in search of him. A shriek, ringing far on the billowy shore, declared that she had lost him; and then, without a struggle, she clasped her hands, and the merciless water swallowed her.

“It is all over,” cried Major Hockin, lifting his drenched hat solemnly. “The Lord knoweth best. He has taken them home.”

CHAPTER LV

A DEAD LETTER

With that great tornado, the wind took a leap of more points of the compass than I can tell. Barnes, the fisherman, said how many; but I might be quite wrong in repeating it. One thing, at any rate, was within my compass—it had been blowing to the top of its capacity, direct from the sea, but now it began to blow quite as hard along the shore. This rough ingratitude of wind to waves, which had followed each breath of its orders, produced extraordinary passion, and raked them into pointed wind-cocks.

“Captain, we can’t live this out,” cried Barnes; “we must run her ashore at once; tide has turned; we might be blown out to sea, with one oar, and then the Lord Himself couldn’t save us.”

Crippled as we were, we contrived to get into a creek, or backwater, near the Major’s gate. Here the men ran the boat up, and we all climbed out, stiff, battered, and terrified, but doing our best to be most truly thankful.

“Go home, Captain, as fast as you can, and take the young lady along of you,” said Mr. Barnes, as we stood and gazed at the weltering breadth of disaster. “We are born to the drip, but not you, Sir; and you are not so young as you was, you know.”

“I am younger than ever I was,” the lord of the manor answered, sternly, yet glancing back to make sure of no interruption from his better half—who had not even heard of his danger. “None of that nonsense to me, Barnes. You know your position, and I know mine. On board of that boat you took the lead, and that may have misled you. I am very much obliged to you, I am sure, for all your skill and courage, which have saved the lives of all of us. But on land you will just obey me.”

“Sartinly, Captain. What’s your orders?”

“Nothing at all. I give no orders. I only make suggestions. But if your experience sees a way to recover those two poor bodies, let us try it at once—at once, Barnes. Erema, run home. This is no scene for you. And tell Margaret to put on the double-bottomed boiler, with the stock she made on Friday, and a peck of patent pease. There is nothing to beat pea soup; and truly one never knows what may happen.”

This was only too evident now, and nobody disobeyed him.

Running up his “drive” to deliver that message, at one of the many bends I saw people from Bruntsea hurrying along a footpath through the dairy-farm. While the flood continued this was their only way to meet the boat’s crew. On the steps of “Smuggler’s Castle” (as Bruntlands House was still called by the wicked) I turned again, and the new sea-line was fringed with active searchers. I knew what they were looking for, but, scared and drenched and shivering as I was, no more would I go near them. My duty was rather to go in and comfort dear Aunt Mary and myself. In that melancholy quest I could do no good, but a great deal of harm, perhaps, if any thing was found, by breaking forth about it.

Mrs. Hockin had not the least idea of the danger we had encountered. Bailiff Hopkins had sent her home in Rasper’s fly by an inland road, and she kept a good scolding quite ready for her husband, to distract his mind from disaster. That trouble had happened she could not look out of her window without knowing; but could it be right, at their time of life, to stand in the wet so, and challenge Providence, and spoil the first turkey-poult of the season?

But when she heard of her husband’s peril, in the midst of all his losses, his self-command, and noble impulse first of all to rescue life, she burst into tears, and hugged and kissed me, and said the same thing nearly fifty times.

“Just like him. Just like my Nicholas. You thought him a speculative, selfish man. Now you see your mistake, Erema.”

When her veteran husband came home at last (thoroughly jaded, and bringing his fishermen to gulp the pea soup and to gollop the turkey), a small share of mind, but a large one of heart, is required to imagine her doings. Enough that the Major kept saying, “Pooh-pooh!” and the more he said, the less he got of it.

When feelings calmed down, and we returned to facts, our host and hero (who, in plain truth, had not so wholly eclipsed me in courage, though of course I expected no praise, and got none, for people hate courage in a lady), to put it more simply, the Major himself, making a considerable fuss, as usual—for to my mind he never could be Uncle Sam—produced from the case of his little “Church Service,” to which he had stuck like a Briton, a sealed and stamped letter, addressed to me at Castlewood, in Berkshire—“stamped,” not with any post-office tool, but merely with the red thing which pays the English post.

Sodden and blurred as the writing was, I knew the clear, firm hand, the same which on the envelope at Shoxford had tempted me to meanness. This letter was from Thomas Hoyle; the Major had taken it from the pocket of his corpse; all doubt about his death was gone. When he felt his feet on the very shore, and turned to support his mother, a violent wave struck the back of his head upon Major Hockin’s pillar-box.

Such sadness came into my heart—though sternly it should have been gladness—that I begged their pardon, and went away, as if with a private message. And wicked as it may have been, to read was more than once to cry. The letter began abruptly:

“You know nearly all my story now. I have only to tell you what brought me to you, and what my present offer is. But to make it clear, I must enlarge a little.

“There was no compact of any kind between your father and myself. He forbore at first to tell what he must have known, partly, perhaps, to secure my escape, and partly for other reasons. If he had been brought to trial, his duty to his family and himself would have led him, no doubt, to explain things. And if that had failed, I would have returned and surrendered myself. As things happened, there was no need.

“Through bad luck, with which I had nothing to do, though doubtless the whole has been piled on my head, your father’s home was destroyed, and he seems to have lost all care for every thing. Yet how much better off was he than I! Upon me the curse fell at birth; upon him, after thirty years of ease and happiness. However, for that very reason, perhaps, he bore it worse than I did. He grew imbittered against the world, which had in no way ill-treated him; whereas its very first principle is to scorn all such as I am. He seems to have become a misanthrope, and a fatalist like myself. Though it might almost make one believe the existence of such a thing as justice to see pride pay for its wickedness thus—the injury to the outcast son recoil upon the pampered one, and the family arrogance crown itself with the ignominy of the family.

“In any case, there was no necessity for my interference; and being denied by fate all sense of duty to a father, I was naturally driven to double my duty to my mother, whose life was left hanging upon mine. So we two for many years wandered about, shunning islands and insular prejudice. I also shunned your father, though (so far as I know) he neither sought me nor took any trouble to clear himself. If the one child now left him had been a son, heir to the family property and so on, he might have behaved quite otherwise, and he would have been bound to do so. But having only a female child, who might never grow up, and, if she did, was very unlikely to succeed, he must have resolved at least to wait. And perhaps he confirmed himself with the reflection that even if people believed his tale (so long after date and so unvouched), so far as family annals were concerned, the remedy would be as bad as the disease. Moreover, he owed his life to me, at great risk of my own; and to pay such a debt with the hangman’s rope would scarcely appear quite honorable, even in the best society.

“It is not for me to pretend to give his motives, although from my knowledge of his character I can guess them pretty well, perhaps. We went our several ways in the world, neither of us very fortunate.

“One summer, in the Black Forest, I fell in with an outcast Englishman, almost as great a vagabond as myself. He was under the ban of the law for writing his father’s name without license. He did not tell me that, or perhaps even I might have despised him, for I never was dishonest. But one great bond there was between us—we both detested laws and men. My intimacy with him is the one thing in life which I am ashamed of. He passed by a false name then, of course. But his true name was Montague Hockin. My mother was in very weak health then, and her mind for the most part clouded; and I need not say that she knew nothing of what I had done for her sake. That man pretended to take the greatest interest in her condition, and to know a doctor at Baden who could cure her.

“We avoided all cities (as he knew well), and lived in simple villages, subsisting partly upon my work, and partly upon the little income left by my grandfather, Thomas Hoyle. But, compared with Hockin, we were well off; and he did his best to swindle us. Luckily all my faith in mankind was confined to the feminine gender, and not much even of that survived. In a very little time I saw that people may repudiate law as well from being below as from being above it.

“Then he came one night, with the finest style and noblest contempt of every thing. We must prepare ourselves for great news, and all our kindness to him would be repaid tenfold in a week or two. Let me go into Freyburg that time to-morrow night, and listen. I asked him nothing as to what he meant, for I was beginning to weary of him, as of every body. However, I thought it just worth while, having some one who bought my wicker-work, to enter the outskirts of the town on the following evening, and wait to be told if any news was stirring. And the people were amazed at my not knowing that last night the wife of an English lord—for so they called him, though no lord yet—had run away with a golden-bearded man, believed to be also English.

“About that you know more, perhaps, than I do. But I wish you to know what that Hockin was, and to clear myself of complicity. Of Herbert Castlewood I knew nothing, and I never even saw the lady. And to say (as Sir Montague Hockin has said) that I plotted all that wickedness, from spite toward all of the Castlewood name, is to tell as foul a lie as even he can well indulge in.

“It need not be said that he does not know my story from any word of mine. To such a fellow I was not likely to commit my mother’s fate. But he seems to have guessed at once that there was something strange in my history; and then, after spying and low prying at my mother, to have shaped his own conclusion. Then, having entirely under his power that young fool who left a kind husband for him, he conceived a most audacious scheme. This was no less than to rob your cousin, the last Lord Castlewood, not of his wife and jewels and ready money only, but also of all the disposable portion of the Castlewood estates. For the lady’s mother had taken good care, like a true Hungarian, to have all the lands settled upon her daughter, so far as the husband could deal with them. And though, at the date of the marriage, he could not really deal at all with them—your father being still alive—it appears that his succession (when it afterward took place) was bound, at any rate, as against himself. A divorce might have canceled this—I can not say—but your late cousin was the last man in the world to incur the needful exposure. Upon this they naturally counted.