The other exception was a man, of thirty-two years of age—but who looked very considerably older. He stood six feet one inch in his socks; was of exceptionally muscular build, without an ounce of superfluous flesh anywhere about him; rather thin and worn-looking as to face—which was clean-shaven and tinted a ruddy bronze, as though the owner had been long accustomed to exposure to the weather; of a gloomy and saturnine cast of countenance; and a manner so cold and unapproachable that, although on this particular night he had been on board the Golden Fleece just a fortnight, no one in the ship knew anything more about him than that he went by the name of Richard Leslie; and that he was—like the rest of the passengers—on his way to Australia.
Now, there is no need to make a secret of this man’s history; on the contrary, a brief sketch of it will lead to a tolerably clear understanding of much that would otherwise prove incomprehensible in his character and actions. Let it be said, therefore, at once, that he was the second, and at one time favourite, son of the Earl of Swimbridge, whom the whole world knows to be beyond all question the proudest member of the British peerage. Amiable, generous, high-spirited, and with every trait of the best type of the British gentleman fully developed in him, this son had joined the British navy at an early age, as a midshipman, and had made rapid progress in the profession of his choice—to his father’s unbounded satisfaction and delight—up to a certain point. Then, when he was within a few months of his twenty-fifth birthday, a horrible thing happened. Without a shadow of warning, and like a bolt from the blue, disgrace and disaster fell upon and morally destroyed him; and almost in a moment the once favoured child of good fortune found himself an outcast from home and society; disowned by those nearest and dearest to him; with every hope and aspiration blasted; branded as a felon; and his whole life ruined, as it seemed to him, irretrievably. In his father’s house, and while enjoying a short period of well-earned leave, he was arrested upon a charge of forgery and embezzlement; and, after a short period of imprisonment, tried, found guilty, and sentenced to a period of seven years’ penal servitude! Vain were all his protestations of innocence; vain his counsel’s representation that there was no earthly motive for such a crime on the part of his client; the evidence adduced against him was so overwhelmingly complete and convincing—although the greater part of it was circumstantial—that his protestations were regarded as a positive aggravation of his offence; and the last news that reached him ere the prison gates closed upon him were that the girl who had promised to be his wife had already given herself to his rival; while his father, stricken to earth by the awful blow to his family pride, as well as to his affection, was not expected to live.
That so fearfully crushing a catastrophe should have fallen with paralysing effect upon the moral nature of the convict himself was only what might naturally be expected. With the pronouncement of that terrible sentence by the judge the victim’s character underwent a complete and instantaneous transformation, as was evidenced by the fact that to him the worst feature of the case seemed to be that he was innocent! He felt that had he been guilty he could have borne his punishment, because he would have richly merited it; but that, being innocent, he should thus be permitted to suffer such abasement and disgrace seemed incomprehensible to him; the injustice of it appeared to him so rank, so colossal, as to destroy within him, in a moment, every atom of his former faith in the existence of a God of justice and of mercy! And with his loss of faith in God went his faith in man. Every good instinct at once seemed to die within him; while as for life, henceforth it could be to him only an intolerable burden to be laid down at the first convenient opportunity.
Feeling thus, as he did, full of rebellion against fate, full of anger and resentment against his fellow-man for the bitterly cruel injustice that had been meted out to him, and kicking hard against the pricks generally, it was scarcely to be expected that he would prove very amenable to the harsh discipline of prison life; and as a matter of fact he did not; he was very careful to avoid the committal of any offence sufficiently serious to bring down upon him the disgrace of a flogging—that crowning shame he could not have endured and continued to live—but, short of that, he was so careless and intractable a prisoner, and gave so much trouble and annoyance to the warders in charge of him, that he earned none of those good marks whereby a prisoner can purchase the remission of a certain proportion of his sentence; and as a result he served the full term of his imprisonment, every moment of which seemed crowded with the tortures of hell! And when at length he emerged once more into the world, he did so as a thoroughly soured, embittered, cynical, utterly hopeless and reckless man, without a shred of faith in anything that was good.
The first thing that he learned, upon attaining his freedom, was that although the Earl, his father, had, after all, survived the shock of his son’s disgrace, he had made a solemn vow never to forgive him, never to see him again, and never to have any communication with him. He had, however, made arrangements with his solicitors that his son should be met at the prison gates and conveyed thence to London, where he was lodged in a quiet hotel until arrangements could be made for his shipment off to Australia. This was quickly done; and within a week of his release the young man, under the assumed name of Richard Leslie, found himself a saloon passenger on board the Golden Fleece, with a plain but sufficient outfit for the voyage, and one hundred pounds in his pocket to enable him to make a new start in life at the antipodes; the gift of the money, however, was accompanied by a request from the Earl that he would never again show his face in England, or even in Europe.
At the moment when this story opens the sound of the ship’s bell—upon which “four bells” had just been struck—was still vibrating upon the wet, fog-laden air; the steerage passengers were all below, and most of them in their bunks; while the cuddy people, with one solitary exception, were in the brilliantly lighted saloon, amusing themselves with cards, books, and music. The exception was Leslie, who, having changed out of his dress clothes into a comfortable suit of blue serge, was down in the waist of the ship, smoking a gloomily retrospective pipe. The ship’s reckoning, that day, had placed her, at noon, in Latitude 32 degrees 10 minutes North, and Longitude 26 degrees 55 minutes West; she was therefore about midway between the parallels of Madeira and Teneriffe, but some four hundred miles, or thereabouts, to the westward of those islands. The wind was blowing a moderate breeze from about south-east by South; and the ship, close-hauled on the port tack, and with all plain sail set, to her royals, was heading south-west, and going through the water at the rate of a good honest seven knots. The helmsman was steering by compass, and not by the sails, since it was impossible to see anything above a dozen feet up from the deck; hence the ship was going along with everything a-rap full.
Captain Rainhill was very far from being easy in his mind. Seven knots, he meditated, was a good pace at which to be sailing through a fog thick enough to cut with a knife, and would mean something very much like disaster if the ship happened to run up against anything, particularly if that “anything” happened also to be travelling at about the same speed in the opposite direction; from this point of view, therefore, the speed of the Golden Fleece just then constituted a decided element of danger. On the other hand, however, it enabled her to promptly answer her helm, and thus might be the means of enabling her to swerve quickly aside and so avoid any danger that might suddenly loom up out of the fog around her; and in this sense it became a safeguard. Then there was the fact that the Golden Fleece was no longer in a crowded part of the ocean; it was three days since they had sighted a craft of any description, and there might be at that moment nothing within a couple of hundred miles of them, in which case there was absolutely nothing to fear. Furthermore, his owners made an especial point of persistently impressing upon their captains the great importance of—nay, more, the urgent necessity for—making quick passages; there were two keen-eyed lookouts stationed upon the topgallant-forecastle, and between them a third man provided with a fog-horn, upon which he at brief intervals blew the weirdest of blasts. Taking into consideration all these circumstances the skipper finally decided to leave things as they were, and put his trust in the “sweet little cherub that sits up aloft to look after the life of poor Jack.”
“Five bells” pealed out upon the dank air, and the responsive cry of “All’s well” from the look-outs came wailing aft from the forecastle. Leslie’s pipe was out. He knocked out the dead ashes, and turned to go below. Then, considering the matter further, he decided that it was full early yet to turn in, and, sauntering across the deck to the port rail, he stood gazing abstractedly out to windward as he slowly filled his pipe afresh. The man with the fog-horn was still industriously blowing long blasts to windward when, ruthlessly cutting into one of these, there suddenly came—from apparently close at hand, on the port bow—the loud discordant yell of a steam syren; and the next instant three lights—red, green, and white, arranged in the form of an isosceles triangle—broke upon Leslie’s gaze with startling suddenness through the dense fog, broad on the port bow of the Golden Fleece. A large steamer, coming along at full speed, was close aboard and heading straight for the sailing ship!
Leslie’s professional training at once asserted itself and, as a frenzied shout of “Steamer broad on the port bow!” came pealing aft from the throats of the two startled lookouts, he made a single bound for the poop ladder, crying, in a voice that rang through the ship, from stem to stern—
“Port! hard a-port, for your life! Over with the wheel, for God’s sake!”