I send this to the Boston post-office in the hope of finding you. My aunt thinks she saw you in the street the other day; but I did not need that to tell me you were here. I have guessed it for a long time. I have almost felt you knew how I suffer. I am asking an impossible service. Captain Morton is abroad, and he refuses to come home. I am dying, and he will not believe it. I have written him and cabled him; but I have said I was dying for the last three years. Now it is true. Will you go over there and see him? Make him believe it. Make him come to me. I do not know how—but make him. His bankers are Baring Bros. Perhaps they can tell you where he is.
Francis Hume to Zoe Montrose
Dear lady,—I start to-night. It was generous of you to ask me. He shall come.
But Captain Morton was not to be found, either in England or on the Continent; and so there was much delay which must have tried the soul of the messenger beyond endurance. Through one of the foolish ironies of life, the captain ("rather fat," six years before!) had decided, in a futile blindness to his own limitations, to join an exploring party to the interior of Abyssinia. He had always a childish vanity; perhaps that led him to ignore all the habits of his luxurious past and seek healthier living through the means he had despised. Thus to nourish himself for more vices! So does the bon vivant recuperate at Spas.
Thither, as soon as Francis Hume could get upon his track, he followed him, through danger and delay, through wilderness and night. The difficulties of the journey were a thousandfold enhanced by his ignorance of any definite route; and he made many a maddening detour and experienced tragic loss in the treachery of guides. This, at least, is apparent from some crumpled notes of travel found among his possessions. At length, suddenly, dramatically, he came upon his man. What arguments he used, no one can say. Perhaps Morton had grown sick of his fool's errand, perhaps his heart was really touched, at last; but he did turn about and make all due speed to America. Francis accompanied him only to the fastest steamer route; and then dropped off to take another boat home. His notes keep rigid silence concerning the captain. Did he hate him to the last, or had hatred, like other spawn of evil, sunk, for him, in the unplumbed depths of larger seas? Captain Morton came home and found his wife still living. She died within a week, and there is a strange contradiction in her end. The nurse who was with her says that she moaned for him, like a child, through all those dreary days; and yet when he came into the room she looked at him, turned her face to the wall, and would not speak. It seemed almost as if she had held herself within a bond she loathed, and as if death had really freed her.
Francis returned to Boston on his slow-sailing boat. They were coming up the harbor in the flush of twilight, and the State-house dome stood like a golden beehive against the sky. He had kept very much to himself, said one of the passengers who was strongly drawn to him, and now he stood by the rail, not looking forward with the seeking glance of those whose voyage is done, but musingly into the sea. A little sailboat had been keeping alongside. Two men were in it, and they were plainly drunk. They had a little rough dog, and they were teasing him. The passengers looked on with indignant protest. One or two called out; but the men swore back and bullied him the more. Their last pleasantry was to hold him over the side with a feint of dropping him; and suddenly, in an access of cruelty, they called out that he should swim for it. And then they dropped him. Francis Hume had not followed the entire occurrence; but the passenger who told it happened to glance at him at the moment when the dog was thrown overboard. That he saw. She says he glowed at once with pure anger. His face lighted and flamed; and two seconds after the dog went down, Francis Hume sprang after him. There was an outcry on the instant. A boat was lowered, but some strange clumsiness of execution seemed to overshadow the whole thing; so that Hume had to keep himself afloat for what seemed a long time. In reality, she supposes, it was minutes. That was nothing. Miles of swimming were nothing to a man of his training; but when the boat reached him, he threw the dog into it and himself slipped away. That was all. The event is confused in the minds of everybody present, and no one can wholly account for it. It seemed fatality. He simply went down, and his body was not recovered. The men in the sailboat, shocked into soberness, put about, and left the steamer in all possible haste; and the passenger who told me the story dried the little dog in her shawl and promised him a home. But of this thing every one is convinced. Francis Hume must have gone willingly to his death, but he did not choose it. The sailors of the rescuing boat say that his face showed a strange bewilderment, but no refusal of their efforts; he did not mean to drown. There must have been, said the ship's doctor, some lesion of the heart.
Much as I know of the reality of his life (and it ended not so long ago), it never seems to me to belong to this actual world, this "city by the sea." For me, its mirror lies, strangely enough, in another life of noble ends and uncompleted action: Beauchamp's Career. There is your only parallel, even to the splendid futility of its close. Read this from Meredith's novel, which is, after all, nothing less than vivid biography, and fit it to the end of Francis Hume.
"An old man volunteered the information. 'That's the boy. That boy was in his father's boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and he and another, older than him, fell overboard; and just then Commander Beauchamp was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood, jump up and dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him in safe: that boy; and he dived again after the other, and was down a long time. Either he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he'd been rowing himself from the schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and must have been hot when he jumped in; either way, he fetched the second up, and sank with him. Down he went.'
"A fisherman said: ... 'Do you hear that voice thundering? That's the great Lord Romfrey. He's been directing the dragging since five o' the evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body.'