The lodging-house was even more crowded than it had been on the previous night, and the proprietor was more drunk and less accommodating. A couple of dirty sacks on the landing, outside the wretched dormitory, was all that the sailor could procure by way of a bed; and when he asked for a pillow, he was told that he might roll up his clothes, and use them for that purpose--they hadn't got no pillows--advice which was accompanied by a coarse jest at the luxuriousness of his requirements, and which was overheard by one of the men whose efforts at conversation the sailor had met, on the previous night, with sullen moroseness.
'Pillow,' said this man; 'what do you want with a pillow? Where's that 'ere bundle you were so particular about last night? One would think it was stuffed with diamonds, you was so fond of it.'
'I've been robbed of it,' replied the man, with an oath. 'Worse luck.'
'Well, you weren't robbed of it here,' said the proprietor of the establishment.
'No, that you weren't, Tom Summers,' struck in his neighbour; 'we ain't fine gentlemen here as are above being spoken to, but we're on the square, and pals is safe with us.' With which testimony to the virtues of the company, and protest against the surliness of the new-comer, this gentleman turned on his bed of sacking and went to sleep.
And so the night wore on in Liverpool, and the dawn brightened over the fair ship with her happy and hopeful company out at sea, and over the stark figure of the dead man who lay with wide-open eyes upon the landing of the great warehouse, where many hurrying feet would shortly be arrested beside him in horror at the fate of the unknown, unclaimed stranger.
[CHAPTER III.]
HELEN'S JOURNAL.
Sitting down this morning to make a beginning towards the fulfilment of my promise to my husband, I ask myself if I am indeed the same person as I was when he left me. It seems to me that a great gulf lies between me and that time, and that the experience which I have gained of human nature and of the possibilities of life has completely changed me. With all the relief which the absence of Alston's friend has given me there is a great pang of pain for Alston himself, and a horrid sense of a barrier of concealment between us. I have allowed so many days to elapse before I force myself into commencing this self-communing, in sheer uncertainty of what my line of duty is, and though I am now tolerably clearly convinced that neither now nor ever must I reveal to Alston what has passed, the conviction invests my task of writing to him with great pain and difficulty. Somehow we seem to be doubly parted; first by distance, then by secret. Will this additional sense of parting yield even to his return? How shall I bear to see him take up his relations with Warren just where he dropped them, and to know, as I do know, how his confidence is betrayed? Not in business matters, I daresay; so far as I understand anything about them, there is no likelihood that Alston's interests and Warren's could ever clash, and so far he is safe. It would do my husband such harm in every way to know what has occurred; his own frankness and loyalty of nature could hardly withstand so great a shock; the world would be changed for him. No, he shall never know it; I will trust to the chapter of accidents, or rather, I should say, to the beneficence of Providence, to preserve us harmless from his false friend.
But my journal, to which he looked forward with such pleasure, and which I determined should be so frank and free and full a record of my life, telling it all out to him in so far as one human heart can break the bar of its solitude in words to another--what has become of that? To keep any freshness and any truth in it at all, I must make this record of what has passed for myself, waiting it indeed, but laying it by as a thing that is done with--as a chronicle of the truth for reference, for precisely that which must not be brought into my letters to Alston is that relief for the feelings and the fears which must be hidden from him. What are these fears? How often I ask myself that question, and I never find an answer! The man has gone; not alone has he pledged his word--he could hardly expect me to set much store by that; but he knows it is for his own interest, for his own safety, for the future preservation of the good relations between him and Alston, which, false as all pretext to friendship is on his part, are, nevertheless, valuable to him, that he should keep his promise to me--that he should remain away; that he should never attempt to see me or to communicate with me while I am alone. A thousand times a day I tell myself this; I strive to feel my freedom; I recall the oppression of his presence: I remember my dislike to him long before I knew the secret unconscious origin it had; and I ask myself why I do not exult, why I am not able to bear with more than composure anything which has led to such an emancipation? But it is not so. The presence of the enemy seems to hem me in, an evil influence is in the air I breathe; no effort frees me from this morbid terror, of which I am half ashamed, while I write this secret record no eyes but my own are ever to see. How cleverly, how skilfully this man has carried out this sudden and complete change of all his plans; how reasonably he seems to have accounted for leaving New York! No one seems surprised, and I am quite certain not the slightest shade of suspicion that his departure is of any consequence to me has presented itself to the mind of any of our common acquaintance, though the close tie between him and Alston is perfectly well known. It is just this power, this influence over others, which makes me so afraid of him even now. What if on Alston's return he took some other means of alienating him from me! The feminine inferiority, the absence of a power of understanding business matters, will serve him no longer: he won't try to revive that theory when Alston returns; he shall find that I have administered every affair which he left in my charge too well to be set down as an incapable for the future; but he may try a more subtle means. I believe the love of a man like Warren is half passion, half hatred, and that the hatred swallows up the passion when it is effectually checked. Whence that notion has come to me, I know not, but it has come, and with it a fear of this man's hatred, greater, if possible, than my horror of his love.