He parried, remarking only that she had the face of a lady, and was handsome.
I pressed him. “But did it resemble any one you had ever seen?”
With a slight droop of his eyelids, he said: “Don’t ask foolish questions, Marmion. Well, the castaway had a hard pull for life. He wouldn’t have lived at all, if a breeze hadn’t come up and let us get away to the coast. It was the beginning of the monsoon, and we went bowling down towards Port Darwin, a crowd of Malay proas in our wake. However, the poor beggar thought he was going to die, and one night he told me his story. He was an escaped convict from Freemantle, Western Australia. He had, with others, been taken up to the northern coast to do some Government work, and had escaped in the dingey. His crime was stealing funds belonging to a Squatting and Mining Company. There was this extenuating circumstance: he could have replaced the money, which, as he said, he’d only intended to use for a few weeks. But a personal enemy threw suspicion on him, accounts were examined, and though he showed he’d only used the money while more of his own was on the way to him, the Company insisted on prosecuting him. For two reasons: because it was itself in bad odour, and hoped by this trial to divert public attention from its own dirty position; and because he had against him not only his personal enemy, but those who wanted to hit the Company through him. He’d filched to be able to meet the large expenses of his wife’s establishment. Into this he didn’t enter minutely, and he didn’t blame her for having so big a menage; he only said he was sorry that he hadn’t been able to support it without having to come, even for a day, to the stupidity of stealing. After two years he escaped. He asked me to write a letter to his wife, which he’d dictate. Marmion, you or I couldn’t have dictated that letter if we’d taken a year to do it. There was no religion in it, no poppy-cock, but straightforward talk, full of sorrow for what he’d done, and for the disgrace he’d brought on her. I remember the last few sentences as if I’d seen them yesterday. ‘I am dying on the open sea, disgraced, but free,’ he said. ‘I am not innocent in act, but I was not guilty of intentional wrong. I did what I did that you should have all you wished, all you ought to have. I ask but this—and I shall soon ask for nothing—that you will have a kind thought, now and then, for the man who always loved you, and loves you yet. I have never blamed you that you did not come near me in my trouble; but I wish you were here for a moment before I go away for ever. You must forgive me now, for you will be free. If I were a better man I would say, God bless you. In my last conscious moments I will think of you, and speak your name. And now good-bye—an everlasting good-bye. I was your loving husband, and am your lover until death.’ And it was signed, ‘Boyd Madras.’
“However, he didn’t die. Between the captain and myself, we kept life in him, and at last landed him at Port Darwin; all of us, officers and crew, swearing to let no one know he was a convict. And I’ll say this for the crew of the ‘Dancing Kate’ that, so far as I know, they kept their word. That letter, addressed in care of a firm of Melbourne bankers, I gave back to him before we landed. We made him up a purse of fifty pounds,—for the crew got to like him,—and left him at Port Darwin, sailing away again in a few days to another pearl-field farther east. What happened to him at Port Darwin and elsewhere, I don’t know; but one day I found him on a fashionable steamer in the Indian Ocean, looking almost as near to Kingdom Come as when he starved in the dingey on No Man’s Sea. As I said before, I think he didn’t recognise me; and he’s lying now in 116 Intermediate, with a look on him that I’ve seen in the face of a man condemned to death by the devils of cholera or equatorial fever. And that’s the story, Marmion, which I brought you to hear—told, as you notice, in fine classical style.”
“And why do you tell ME this, Hungerford—a secret you’ve kept all these years? Knowledge of that man’s crime wasn’t necessary before giving him belladonna or a hot bath.”
Hungerford kept back the whole truth for reasons of his own. He said: “Chiefly because I want you to take a decent interest in the chap. He looks as if he might go off on the long voyage any tick o’ the clock. You are doctor, parson, and everything else of the kind on board. I like the poor devil, but anyhow I’m not in a position to be going around with ginger-tea in a spoon, or Ecclesiastes under my arm,—very good things. Your profession has more or less to do with the mind as well as the body, and you may take my word for it that Boyd Madras’s mind is as sick as his torso. By the way, he calls himself ‘Charles Boyd,’ so I suppose we needn’t recall to him his former experiences by adding the ‘Madras.’”
Hungerford squeezed my arm again violently, and added: “Look here, Marmion, we understand each other in this, don’t we? To do what we can for the fellow, and be mum.”
Some of this looks rough and blunt, but as it was spoken there was that in it which softened it to my ear. I knew he had told all he thought I ought to know, and that he wished me to question him no more, nor to refer to Mrs. Falchion, whose relationship to Boyd Madras—or Charles Boyd—both of us suspected.
“It was funny about those verses coming to my mind, wasn’t it, Marmion?” he continued. And he began to repeat one of them, keeping time to the wave-like metre with his cheroot, winding up with a quick, circular movement, and putting it again between his lips:
“‘There’s never a ripple upon the tide,
There’s never a breath or sound;
But over the waste the white wraiths glide,
To look for the souls of the drowned.”’