CHAPTER XXI.
The Bearer of a Disgraced Name, in England—A Strange Quest and a Strange Unrest—Hurrying over to Ireland—Too Late for the Packet—The little Despatch-steamer—Henry Fitzmaurice, the Journalist—An Unexpected Passage—The Peril of the Emerald, and the end of all Quests save one.
Far back in the progress of this narration, when it had only reached half the distance to which it has now arrived, it was said of one of the principal persons therein involved: "Something indescribably dim and shadowy grows about the character and action of Carlton Brand at this time, * * * motives become buried in obscurity, and the narrator grows to be little more than a mere insignificant, powerless chronicler of events without connection and action without explanation." The same remark will apply with quite as much force, at this stage, to the movements of the bearer of that dishonored name, in his movements on the other side of the Atlantic, which must now be briefly recorded in their due order.
It will be remembered that the American entered his name at Liverpool, on the twentieth day of July, with the place of his residence attached. Thenceforward enough is known, through hotel and other records, to be sure that he spent some two weeks in London, occupying lodgings at one of the respectable houses of the great metropolis, but spending his time, in other regards, in a manner scarcely to have been expected from any previous knowledge of his life and antecedents. Was it the lawyer, because the lawyer, who visited Scotland Yard the very next day after his arrival in London, and spent so much time with some of the leading men in charge of that great police-establishment, that he might have seemed to be employed in studying the whole English system of criminal detection? And was it the lawyer, as the lawyer and consequently on account of his remembrance of past connection with the ferreting out of crime in his native land, who went immediately afterwards into a continuous and apparently systematic round of visits to the worst haunts of vice in the Modern Babel, becoming, sometimes in disguise and sometimes in his own proper person, but always more or less closely accompanied by some member of the force, the habitue of streets in which burglars and thieves most congregated, and of lanes in which receivers of stolen property, forgers and all disreputable and dangerous characters were known to have their places of business or their dens of hiding?
Or was there, leaving the profession of the lawyer out of the question, something in the peculiar surroundings of this man—something in the relations of character and connection which he had allowed to grow around him, unfitting him for other amusements and researches in a city which he had never before visited, and one supplying such marvellous temptations to the sight-seer and the antiquarian? Or was he paying the penalty of the past in an unrest which left him no peace except he found it in continual motion and in the companionship and the study of those far more outlawed by statute but not more in social position than himself? Strange questions, again, and questions which cannot be answered, at this time, by any thing more than the mere suggestion.
Certain it is, whatever the motive, that Westminster Abbey, with its every stone sacred to the memory of the great dead, seemed to present no attractions to him, commensurate with those of Seven Dials, sacred to every phase of poverty and villany; that the Houses of Parliament were ignored in favor of St. Giles and Bermondsey, noted for debates of a very different character from those heard before the occupant of the Woolsack and the Speaker of the Commons; and that (this seeming so peculiarly strange in a lawyer of admitted character and power) even the Lord Chancellor, rendering one of those decisions calculated to affect not only the laws of property in England but the whole legal system wherever the English language was spoken, seemed to have far less attention paid to him or his dicta, than was given to some gownless libel on the practice of criminal law, who could point out the habits and haunts of Burly Bill, the noted burglar whom he had lately saved from transportation by proving that he was in three different places at once, and neither of them the spot where the crime was committed,—or Snivelling Sall, reputed to be in the near companionship of the most successful utterer of forged notes who had so far escaped the clutches of the detective birds of prey. Night and day, during all those two weeks, he seemed to eat hastily and to sleep only as if sleep was a secondary necessity of nature, to be thrown overboard whenever some all-absorbing thought should make continual wakefulness necessary.
Then the fancy (might it not be called madness?) seemed to change. He had either exhausted the crime of London or he had skimmed that compound until there was no novelty of rich villainy remaining. Without having examined one work of art or one antiquarian curiosity (so far as could be known), and certainly without having made one effort to find a footing in that society for which education and past associations would so well have fitted him,—he flitted away from London and the name of Carlton Brand was to be found inscribed on the books of one of the leading hotels at Manchester. And what did he there? Precisely what he had been doing in London, it appeared—nothing less and nothing more. Alternately in conversation with one of the detective force or with some one of the wretches whom the detective force was especially commissioned to bring to justice—the Manchester looms (not yet all stopped by the dearth of cotton and the "fratricidal war" in America) presented no more charm to him than had been afforded by the high-toned and rational attractions of the metropolis. At times dressed with what seemed a studied disregard of the graces of person, and scarcely ever so arraying himself that he would have dreamed of presenting himself in such a guise in the midst of any respectable circle at home—two or three days ran him through the criminal life of Manchester. Then away to Birmingham, and there—but why weary with repetition when a succeeding fact can be so well indicated by one that has preceded it? The same unsettled and apparently aimless life—if not aimless, certainly with tendencies the most singular and unaccountable. Thence to Bristol, and from Bristol to Liverpool. From Liverpool, with flying haste the whole length of the island and over the border to Edinburgh, paying no more attention, apparently, to the scenes of Scottish song and story by which he dashed, than might have been necessary to remember the cattle-rievers and free-booters who had long before furnished pattern for his late associates,—and seeing in the old closes and wynds frowned down upon by Calton Hill and the Castle, only retreats in which robbers could take refuge without serious risk of being unearthed. Then, strangely enough, away southward again to Dover, with a passage-ticket for Calais taken but countermanded before use, indicating that Paris had been in view but that some sudden circumstance had made a change in the all-the-while inexplicable calculation. What was all this—the question arises once more—the following out of some clue on which the whole welfare of a life was believed to depend, or merely the vague and purposeless pursuit of some melancholy fancy furnishing the very mockery of a clue through that labyrinth which borders the realm of declared madness?
The American had been something more than a month in England, and far away beyond his knowledge all the events before recorded as occurring to Margaret Hayley and her group of society in the White Mountains had already taken place,—when one afternoon, late in August, the train that dashed into Holyhead from Birmingham and Chester, by Anglesey and over the Menai, bore this exemplification of unrest as a passenger. Those who saw him emerge from the carriage upon the platform noticed the haste with which he appeared to step and the eagerness of his inquiry whether the train, which had been slightly delayed by an accident, was yet in time for the boat for Dublin. She had been gone for more than an hour, and the black smoke from her funnel was already fading away into a dim wreath driven rapidly northward before the sharp south-easter coming up the Channel. Night was fast falling, with indications that it would be any thing rather than a quiet one on that wild and turbulent bit of water lying between the two islands; and some of the old Welsh coastmen who yet lingered on the pier, when they saw the impatient man striding up and down and uttering imprecations on the delayed train, shrugged their shoulders with the remark, which he did not hear or did not choose to heed, that "they should be much obliged to any train that had kept them from taking a rocking in that cradle the night!"
Brow knit, head bent, tread nervous and almost angry, and manifesting all the symptoms of anxiety and disappointment, the American traversed the wharf, his tall form guarded against the slight chill of the summer evening on the coast by a coarse gray cloak which he drew closely around him as he walked, thus adding to the restless stateliness of his appearance. At one of his turns he was sufficiently disengaged to see a man of middle height, dressed in a somewhat dashing civilian costume, standing at a little distance up the pier and conversing with two or three of the coastmen. One of the latter was pointing towards himself; and the moment after the stranger approached with a bow. He was a young man of twenty-five or thereabouts, side-whiskered and moustached, decidedly good-looking, with quite as much of the Irishman as the Englishman in his face, and seemed at all points a gentleman—more, that much rarer combination, especially on the soil of the mother island, a frank, clever fellow!
"They tell me, sir," said the stranger, "that you were one of the passengers on that delayed train, and that you manifest some disappointment at missing the Dublin boat."
"They are entirely correct, sir," answered the American, returning the bow. "I was very anxious, for particular reasons, to be in Dublin to-morrow; and in fact the whole object of my visiting Ireland at all, just now, may very probably be defeated by the accident that brought in the train that half hour too late."
He spoke in a tone very earnest and not a little agitated. The other remarked the fact, but he thought himself too good a judge of character to suspect, as some other persons under similar circumstances might have done, that the anxious man was a hunted member of the swell-mob or a criminal of some other order, who thought it politic to get off English soil as soon as possible. He determined, at the second glance, that he had to do with a gentleman, and proceeded with the words that he had evidently intended to say on first accosting the delayed passenger.
"You have made no arrangements for getting over, I suppose?"
"None, whatever!" answered the American. "How can I, until the boat of to-morrow, when—when it may be too late altogether for my purpose? I was walking off my disappointment, a sort of thing that I have been more or less used to all my life!" and the other noticed that he seemed to sigh wearily—"walking it off before going to find a hotel and lying awake all night, thinking of where I ought to have been at each particular hour."
"Well," said the stranger, "I had a motive not personal to myself, in accosting you, or I should not have taken the liberty. I am Mr. Henry Fitzmaurice, one of the London correspondents of the Dublin Evening Mail. I believe that I am not mistaken in supposing that I am speaking to an American?"
"Not at all mistaken!" answered the American, pleased with a frankness so much more like that of his native land than he had been in the habit of meeting during his short sojourn abroad. "I am called Mr. Brand—Carlton Brand, and on ordinary occasions I am a lawyer of the city of Philadelphia."
"That little matter over, which I should not have been able to manage under half an hour had I been a pure John Bull instead of two-thirds Irishman," said the man who had introduced himself as Fitzmaurice, in a vivacious manner very well calculated to put the other at his ease—"now, not being either of us members of the Circumlocution Office, we will get at the gist of the matter at once. I am going over to Ireland to-night, or at least I am going to make a start in that direction, and I believe that I can manage to secure you a passage if you will accept one."
"Certainly, and with many thanks, but how?" was the reply.
"Well, I am not so sure about the thanks," said Fitzmaurice, in the same pleasant tone which had before won his companion. "It is going to be a wild night on the Channel, if I am any judge of weather, and I have crossed it often enough to begin to have some idea. But I must cross, and so must you, if you can, as I understand you to say."
"I must, certainly, if any thing in the shape of a vessel does so," said the American. "But you have not yet told me—"
"No, of course not!" the newspaper man ran on. "Always expect an Irishman to begin his story in the middle and tell it out at each end, and you will not be far from the fact. Well, there are some despatches for the Lord Lieutenant that need to be across before noon to-morrow, as the Secretary for Ireland has an insane fancy, and a special train left London to make the connection with the steamer that has just gone. I came in it, and with the Queen's messenger,—with some matters that must reach the Mail in advance of the other Dublin papers. They have a little despatch-steamer lying just below, and the messenger telegraphed to fire her up, from one of the back stations, when he found the chances against him. In an hour she will have a full head of steam, and before it is quite dark we shall be clear of the coast. I have no doubt that I can procure you a passage, and if you will step round with me to the wharf where she lies, I will certainly try the experiment. Now you have it."
"And a very kind and generous thing I have at the same time!" exclaimed the American, warmly.
"As I said before, I do not know about the generosity!" replied the correspondent, as they took their way around the warehouses that headed the packet-wharf, towards the pier below, where the despatch-boat lay. "The fact is that the Emerald is not much bigger than a yawl, and though she is a splendid little sea-boat and never has found any gale in which she could not outlive the biggest of the merchant steamers, she is very much of a cockle-shell in the way of jumping about; and people who have any propensity for sea-sickness, a thing a good deal worse than any ordinary kind of death, are very likely to have a little turn at it under such circumstances."
"I have never been very much at sea, but I believe that I am beyond the vulgarity of sea-sickness!" was the answer; and just then they reached the despatch-steamer.
She was indeed a little thing, as compared with the steamers which the American had been in the habit of seeing sent away on sea-voyages—very low in hull, rakish in pipe and masts, looming black in the gathering dusk of evening, and her bulwarks seeming so low as to present the same appearance of insecurity against falling overboard that a landsman's eye immediately perceives in a first glance at a pilot-boat. The steam was already well up and hissing from her escape valves, while the black smoke rolled away from her pipe as if it had a mission to cloud the whole port with soot and cinders.
A few words with the Queen's messenger and an introduction to the Captain of the little Emerald followed; and the correspondent of the Mail had not overrated his influence with either, for in ten minutes the lawyer was booked for a passage over, under government auspices. In half an hour more the despatch-boat steamed away; and when the deep dusk of night fell to shut away the Welsh coast, while the half dozen officers and their two passengers were trifling over a very pleasant supper with wines of antediluvian vintage accompanying, the Emerald was well off the Head, tossing about like a cork in the sea that seemed to be every moment growing more and more violent, but making fine weather through it all, flying like a race-horse, and promising, if every thing held, to land the messenger and her other passengers at Kingstown, at very near as early an hour in the morning as those touched the shore who had left Holyhead two hours before by the packet.
The American remained long on the deck, in conversation with the newspaper correspondent, delighted with the cordiality of his manner and the extensive scope of his information, as he had before been with the generosity which supplied himself with a passage over at the moment of disappointment. The Hiberno-Englishman seemed to be equally pleased with his new friend, whom he found all that he had at first believed—a gentleman, and neither pickpocket nor madman. Mr. Fitzmaurice, still a young man and a subordinate, had never been in America, but he had something more than the ordinary newspaper stock of information about countries lying beyond sea, and he had the true journalist's admiration for the young land that has done more for journalism within fifty years than all the other countries of the world through all the ages. He listened with pleasure to the descriptions which the lawyer was equally able and willing to impart, of the modes in which the news-gathering operations of the leading American newspapers were carried on, and especially of the reckless exposures of correspondents on the battle-fields of the great war, which have all the while exhibited so much bravery and so stupendous a spirit of enterprise, combined with a lack of judgment equally injurious and deplorable.
Mr. Fitzmaurice, on his part, resident in London during all the period of our struggle, necessarily present at most of the Parliamentary debates in which the good and ill feeling of Englishmen towards the United States have been shown in such unfavorable proportions—acquainted with most of the leading public men of the kingdom, and with an Irishman's rattle making the conveying of his impressions a thing of equal ease and pleasure,—he had much to say that interested the Philadelphian; and it would have been notable, could he have been fairly behind the curtain as to the character and movements of the other, to mark how the man who during two weeks residence in London had never stepped his foot within the Parliament Houses, could drink in and digest, from another's lips, the story of the debates which he might so easily have heard first-handed with his own ears!
But as the newspaper man could know nothing of this, enough to say that the conversation was a pleasant one, and that hours rolled away unheeded in its continuance, while the little Emerald skimmed over and plunged through the rough waves of the Irish Channel, and while those waves grew heavier, and the sky darker, and the wild south-easter increased every hour in the violence with which it whistled through the scant rigging and sent the caps of the waves whirling and dashing past the adventurous little minnow of the steam-navy, to fall in showers of foamy spray far to leeward.
It was past midnight when the young men, so strangely thrown together, so different in position and pursuit, but so pleasantly agreeing in all the amenities of social intercourse,—began to feel the demands of sleep overmastering the excitement of the situation, left the deck and went below to the berths in the little cramped cabin which had been prepared for them. The Queen's messenger had already retired and was sleeping so soundly in his four-by-seven state-room, with his despatches under his pillow, that nothing less than the going to pieces of the steamer or an order to start on a new journey could possibly have woke him. To such men, ever flying from one port to another, by sea and by land, bearing the lives of individuals and often the welfare of whole peoples in their hands, with no more knowledge of what they bear than has the telegraph wire of the message that thrills along it—to such men, habituated to excitement, hurry and exposure, that excitement really becomes a sort of second nature; and the art of sleeping on the ground, on a board, bolt upright in a chair or even in the saddle, is one of the accomplishments soonest learned and last forgotten. What are storms to them or to that other class to which reference has before been made—the rough Ariels of the newspaper Prospero? Nothing, except they cause hindrance! What is even the deepest personal peril by sea or land? Nothing, except because in putting a sudden period to the existence of the messenger it may interfere with the delivery of his all-important despatches!
So slept the Queen's messenger, and so, after a time, in their narrow berths, slept the American and his new-made friend. Once falling away into slumber, the very motion of the vessel made that slumber more intense and stupefying, old Mother Nature rocking her children somewhat roughly in the "cradle of the deep." And of what dreamed they? Who knows? Perhaps the handsome and vivacious young Anglo-Irishman of the girl whose miniature he had accidentally displayed to the eyes of the other, filling the back case of his watch,—not yet his wife, but to be so some day when talent and energy should bring their recompense and fortune shower her favors a little more liberally upon him. Perhaps the Philadelphia lawyer of wrongs and shames in his native land, of the apparently mad quest which he seemed to be urging, and of possible coming days when all errors should be repaired, and the great stake of his life won beyond a peradventure.
How long the lawyer had slept he knew not, when some change in the motion of the boat produced the same effect on his slumbers that is said to be wrought on the sleeping miller by the stoppage of the splashing water-wheel and the rumbling burr-stones. He had slept amidst the violent motion: he partially woke when there was a momentary cessation of it. In an instant after the vessel seemed to be struck one tremendous blow that sent a shiver through every plate and rivet of her iron hull—through every board and stanchion of her cabin-work. There are men who can remain undisturbed by such a sensation on shipboard, but the American was by no means one of them; and the fumes of sleep, partially dissipated before, rolled away almost as suddenly as morning mists before a brisk north-wester. He was broad awake to feel a hand grasping him by the shoulder, and opened his eyes to see Fitzmaurice standing by the berth and holding the joiner-work with one hand to support himself against the fearful lurches of the vessel, while he had employed the other in arousing the apparently slumbering man.
"Get up and come out at once!" he said, his voice hoarse and agitated.
"What has happened?" asked the American, springing upright in his berth and preparing to leap from it as men will do when such unpleasant announcements are made. He seemed to know, intuitively and without any instruction from the shock which had just startled him, that some marked peril must have sent the journalist down to arouse him in that melodramatic manner.
"Why, we are in danger, I suppose—serious danger!" was the reply. "Do you not feel the change in the motion of the boat? We are in the trough of the sea, without steam, and as near as I can make out through the mist, driving on the Irish coast with more rapidity than we bargained for!"
"Heavens!" was the very natural exclamation in reply, as the American managed with some difficulty to throw on the one or two articles of clothing of which he had divested himself.
"I suppose that it is a bad job," the journalist continued, "and what just now makes me feel peculiarly bad about it is the fact that I was the means of inducing you to come on board, and that if any thing serious should happen—"
"Hush! not a word of that!" said the lawyer, appreciating fully that chivalrous generosity which after conferring a great favor could take blame to itself for any peril growing out of that favor. "Hush! You have treated me, Mr. Fitzmaurice, with great kindness, and I hope you will believe me man enough not to misunderstand our relative positions in any thing that may occur."
Fitzmaurice, who seemed to be relieved by the words, but who certainly was laboring under an amount of depression not incident alone to any peril in which he stood personally involved,—grasped his hand with something more than the ordinary pressure of brief acquaintance. The motion of the boat, alternately a roll and then a heavy plunge, had now become absolutely fearful, intermingled with occasional repetitions of that crashing blow which had started the American from his slumber; but holding fast of each other and of various substantial objects that fell in their course, the two young men reached the companion way and the deck, the journalist detailing meanwhile, in hasty and broken words, what he knew of the extent of the difficulty in which they were involved.
Up to fifteen or twenty minutes before, the little Emerald, a capital sea-boat but possessed of but a single engine (which description of single engine boats, by the way, should never be allowed to make voyages by open sea, except under the especial pilotage of one Malthus), had been making good weather, though the blow had increased to a gale and the waves of the Irish Channel increased to such size that they seemed to be opposed to the Union and determined to make an eternal severance of the two islands. Fitzmaurice had himself awoke about an hour before, and gone upon deck because unable to sleep longer; and he had consequently become aware, a little before the American in his berth did so, of an accident to the vessel. One moment of cessation of the plunging roll with which she had been ploughing ahead of the waves breaking on her larboard quarter—a moment of almost perfect stillness, as if the little vessel lay moored in some quiet haven—then a sudden veering round and that terrible crash and shock of the waves under the counter, the wheel, and along the whole side, which told that she was lying helpless in the trough of the sea, a marine Samson as thoroughly disabled as if she had been shorn of all her strength at once by the shears of one of the Fates. A word from one of the officers, the moment afterwards, had told him of some disarrangement of the engine, consequent on the severe strain of the heavy sea upon the boat; and he had then been left to study out for himself the amount of peril that might be involved, and to observe the coolness with which officers and men devoted themselves to a task which might or might not be successful—which might terminate at any moment in one of those terrible seas breaching the little vessel and foundering her as if she had indeed been nothing but a yawl-boat! It was at this stage that he had come down and wakened his friend of a few hours, feeling some responsibility for his safety (as well as a presentiment with regard to him which he by no means expressed in words), and leaving the Queen's messenger to pursue his dreamless sleep until it should end in Kingstown harbor or at the bottom of "Davy Jones' locker."
By the time all this had been expressed in one tenth the number of words here employed, they had reached the deck, and certainly the prospect there was any thing but one calculated to reassure either. The Emerald was rolling wheel-houses under, in the trough of the sea, but so far mysteriously relieving herself through the scuppers as it seemed impossible that she should do. Two men were at the wheel, but they stood necessarily idle. Forward were half a dozen men, holding on to keep from going overboard at the first lurch. Even above the roar of the storm could be heard the sharp clink of hammers coming up from the engine-room and each sounding yet one pulse-beat of Hope. The south-easter was howling with demoniac fury, wailing through the rigging as if singing requiems for them all in advance, and driving before it the thin mists that shut away any idea of the sky. By the light on deck and on the troubled expanse of water eastward it was evident that day was breaking; and it was through a knowledge of that fact and of the rate of speed at which they had been steaming and driving partially before the wind all night, that Fitzmaurice had made his calculation expressed below, that they must be close on the Irish coast, a lee-shore, in such a blow, of no pleasant character.
Such was the situation—a deplorable one, as any one can readily perceive who has ever seen its precise parallel; yet not entirely a hopeless one, for they might not be so close upon the coast as had been feared, and the engine might yet be thrown again into gear before the little vessel foundered and in time to claw off from the danger lying to leeward. Fitzmaurice had seen the position before: the American saw it at once through his own eyes and from the explanations given him by the journalist. The moment was not favorable for conversation, in that perilous motion, that roar of wind and wave and that suspense of mind; and the two young men held none except in a few words almost shouted to each other, but stood far aft on the larboard quarter, waiting calmly as two men with human instincts could be expected to wait for—what Heaven only knew! The face of the Anglo-Irishman was almost thoughtlessly calm, in spite of the anxiety which he had so plainly expressed: that of the American was dark, his lips set and his brow contracted, but there was no sign of shrinking and no indication of that basest passion, fear! Who could believe that the man standing there in the gray light of morning and awaiting without one apparent tremor of the muscles what might be an immediate and a painful death, bore a name that had been so lately dishonored by the most abject cowardice?
Suddenly there was a cry which has blanched many a cheek and made many a lip tremble since Noah made his first sea-voyage in the Ark: "Land on the starboard quarter!" followed by another and yet more startling call: "Breakers to leeward!"
Fitzmaurice and the American both turned instantly in the direction indicated, as was inevitable; and then they saw that the warning cry from the look-out was not the result of any illusion. The daylight was rapidly broadening, the mist had for the moment driven away leeward; and apparently not more than a mile away rose a huge dark headland assuming the proportions of a mountain, while at its base and in the exact direction towards which the doomed vessel was drifting, the sea was breaking in wreaths of white foam over ledges of rock which seemed to be already so near that they must go grinding and crashing upon them before the lapse of five minutes. They felt that the water shoaled, too, for the plunging roll of the disabled steamer grew every moment more terrible, and just as the cry was given she was breached at the waist by a sea from which she did not immediately clear herself. It only needed an eye that had ever scanned peril by sea and shore, to know at that moment that the Emerald and all on board were as certainly doomed, in all human probability, as if the one had been already broken up and scattered along the coast in fragments and the others made food for fishes along the rocks of Ireland's Eye!
"The Hill of Howth and the rocks at the foot of it!" cried Fitzmaurice as he recognized the position. "Now God help us, for they are dead to leeward, and if we have any accounts to settle we had better settle them rapidly!"
There was little agitation in his tone, now, and there was none in that of the American as he replied two words. They were the last he ever spoke, to mortal ear. May they have been true when he awoke from his long sleep, as they were before he fell into it! Those two words were:
"I see!"
The two men were standing, as has been said, very near the larboard quarter. The Emerald, too, as has also been already said, was very low in the bulwarks, as befitted her rake and her clipper appearance. Just as the lawyer uttered the two words, one of the officers of the steamer came aft, holding on amidst the terrible roll with something of the tenacity of a cat, and took his place at the wheel. The mist had closed down again and the Hill of Howth and the breakers were both for the moment shut away.
There was a jar—a creeping, trembling jar that seemed to run through the little steamer, from stem to stern-post, and yet no blow from the fierce waves and no grinding of her keel upon the dreaded rocks. It was life—motion—the beat of machinery once more! At that critical juncture the engine had moved again for the first time, and if not safety there was yet at least another struggle with destiny. The officer had dashed back to throw the steamer up into the wind, the very instant that he felt the steam once more rushing into the cylinder.
Then followed what cannot be described, because no one living can say precisely what occurred. Gathering way almost in an instant from the mad dash of her wheels into the water, the little Emerald plunged forward as if for her life. She had but a hundred or two yards of vantage ground left, and seemed to know it. As she gathered way and the quick whirl of the wheel swept her head gradually round to the sea, one mighty wave, as if afraid of being baulked of its prey and determined upon a final effort, struck her under the weather bow and port wheel and sent her careening so low to leeward that the starboard wheel-house and even the starboard quarter-rail were under water. She rolled back again in an instant, triumphant over the great enemy, and thenceforward dashed away from the white breakers on her lee as if she had been merely tantalizing them with a futile prospect of her destruction,—to make her way safely two hours afterwards into Kingstown Harbor and to land the Queen's messenger (who had just then awoke) and the correspondent of the Evening Mail, only an hour later than the passengers by the packet had disembarked.
But she did not land the American. When the steamer rolled down with her starboard quarter-rail under water, Fitzmaurice, standing nearest to the larboard quarter, called out to his companion: "Look out and hold on!" then clutched the bulwark with his own hands and obeyed his own injunction. But when the steamer righted he was alone! Whether the lawyer had missed footing and failed to grasp any point of support at the critical moment, or whether he had lost head in the dizzying motion and gone over without even knowing his danger,—certain it is that he had been swept overboard under circumstances in which the whole British navy could have done no more to save him than one child of ten years! Henry Fitzmaurice, missing him and dreading what had really occurred, thought that for one second he saw a human head, with the hair streaming up, away off in the yeasty water: but that was all. And he said, bitterly, realizing all the painful facts of the event, and taking to himself a thought of regret that was likely to cling to him while his generous heart continued to beat:
"My God!—it was just as I thought! I have been the means of drowning that splendid fellow, after all!"
A few hours later, little Shelah, the barefooted daughter of one of the poor fishermen whose hut stood at the foot of Howth, around northward towards Ireland's Eye—little Shelah, who had gone down over the rocks to the beach when the worst of the storm was over, rushed back to the cabin with terror in her eyes and broken words upon her lips:
"Oh, father!—there bees a man all dead and dhrownded down there by the rocks beyant! And he bees so handsome and so much like a rale gintleman!—how could he dhround? Come down and see till him, father!"
The fisherman went down, and he and his rough mates removed the body and did their humble and ineffectual all to resuscitate a body from which the breath of life had long departed. Then the fisherman and his wife and his mates and little Shelah all mourned over the manly beauty that had been sacrificed, and wondered who he could possibly be, and where his kindred would mourn for him. It was only when Father Michael, the good old priest of the parish was summoned, that they could form any nearer idea of the personality of the drowned man. Then they knew, for Father Michael could read, as they could not, and he told them, from one of the cards in the pocket-book, that "his name had been Carlton Brand, and that he had belonged to Philadelphia, away over in America, where they used to be so free and happy, but where they were fighting, now, all the time, about the naygurs that didn't seem to him worth the throuble!"
They buried him, with such lamentations as they might have bestowed upon "one of their own," in consecrated ground in a little graveyard a mile away from the Hill, westward; and Father Michael gave the dead man the benefit of a benevolent doubt as to his religion, with the remark that "there were good Christians over in America, and this was one of them, maybe!" uttering a prayer for the repose of his soul that, if it bore him no nearer to the Beautiful Gate, certainly left him no farther away from it, while it fulfilled the behest of a simple and beautiful faith! This done, and a note despatched to his favorite journal, giving the name and place of burial of the unfortunate man, Father Michael felt, as he had reason to feel, that he had done his whole melancholy duty.
Whatever the quest of the American, it was ended: whatever had been the secret of his unrest, it was not a secret to the eyes that thenceforth watched over a destiny no longer temporal but eternal.
It has been suggested that Henry Fitzmaurice, the journalist, so strangely thrown into the company of the Philadelphian, so much pleased with his manner and impressed by his conversation, and so suddenly separated from him by an accident which seemed to have something of his own handiwork in its production,—was likely to bear with him, during life, a regret born of that circumstance. Such being the case, it was eminently natural that in giving a description of the accident to the despatch-steamer and the peril to her passengers, on the day following, in the Mail, he should have dwelt at some length on the sad fate of Mr. Carlton Brand, the American, alluded in terms of warm respect to the character which had briefly fallen under his observation, and felicitates the far-away friends of the unfortunate man, on the fact already made public in the Nation, that the body had been early recovered and received tender and honorable Christian burial.