Jack looked at me and shook his head.
“You’ve much to learn yet, Una,” he answered. “The story’s a long one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You’ve been deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older than Mr. Callingham pretended. You’re twenty-six now, not twenty-two as you think. Wait, and in time you’ll hear all about it.”
He went on with his story. I listened, spell-bound. The unhappy man explained to Jack how he had been wrecked on the voyage, and escaped on a raft with one other passenger: how they had drifted far south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this wretched island: how they remained there for a month or two, picking up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds: and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay—to find, to his amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that desolate island. His fellow-castaway, he knew then, had deceived and deserted him!
There was no room, indeed, to doubt the treachery of the wretched being who had so basely treated him. As he looked, a ship under full sail stood away to northward. In vain the unhappy man made wild signals from the shore with his tattered garments. No notice was taken of them. His companion must deliberately have suppressed the other’s existence, and pretended to be alone by himself on the island.
“And his name?” Jack asked of the poor old man, horrified.
The stranger answered without a moment’s pause:
“His name, if you want it—was Vivian Callingham.”
“And yours?” Jack continued, as soon as he could recover from his first shock of horror.
“And mine,” the poor castaway replied, “is Richard Wharton.”
As Jack told me those words, another strange thrill ran through me.