We both listened intently, for fully a minute, without detecting any sound whatever confirmatory of Roberts’ evident suspicions; and at length I said, turning once more to the examination of the fire engine—
“Tush, man, you were mistaken; you heard nothing. The fact is, Mr Roberts, you are not quite yourself to-night. You seem nervous, and fidgety, and anxious. The heat of to-day has upset you; and I think you had better let me give you a good stiff dose of quinine when you go below, at eight bells.”
“Thank you, sir, no,” answered Roberts; “I don’t need any quinine, or anything else in the shape of medicine to brace me up. There’s nothing the matter with me, bodily; but, to be perfectly candid, I do feel a little bit off my mental balance, as it were, to-night. The fact is—I know you’ll laugh at me, sir, but I can’t help that, and it don’t matter, but I’ve got the feeling strong upon me that something’s going to happen to me to-night. For three nights running—that is to say, last night, and the night before, and the night before that again—I’ve started up out of a sound sleep with the idea that my dear wife was calling me; ay, and with the very sound and tone of her sweet voice in my ears. Now, sir, do you think that is only a coincidence, as they say ashore; or isn’t it more likely to be a sign that something is going to happen to me?”
“Why, what nonsense is this for a sensible, educated man like yourself to be talking!” I exclaimed half angrily. “Let me feel your pulse.”
He held out his hand to me, and I laid my fingers upon his wrist. Contrary to what I had expected, I found the skin to be cool and moist, and the pulse beneath it beating with the steadiness and regularity of a machine.
“Umph! there doesn’t seem to be very much wrong there,” I admitted. “But I didn’t know you were a married man, Roberts; I understood you once to say that you were quite alone in the world—not a soul belonging to you.”
“Quite right, sir; that’s the exact truth,” returned the mate. “But I had a wife once, sir; as sweet, true, and tender-hearted a little woman as you ever met, I’ll be bound. And pretty, she was, too. My little Nellie—I only had her six months, sir.
“We were spliced early in the spring; and I stayed ashore and spent the whole summer and well into the autumn with her; six months—six blessed, happy, joyous months with the sweetest woman that ever lived. We were all by ourselves, excepting for one servant maid, in a pretty little house on the outskirts of Teignmouth. Ah! that was a time for a man to look back upon for the rest of his life. Then by-and-by, when the autumn days began to grow short, the cash began to grow short, too; and I had to go to sea again to earn more. I’m not a particularly soft-hearted man, as a rule, Captain Saint Leger, but I tell you, sir, that that parting from Nellie was just as much as I could stand up against: to be obliged to untwine her loving, clinging arms from about my neck, and to deliberately turn away and leave her standing there by the gate, crying her dear eyes out, was cruel work, sir; it was like tearing my very heartstrings asunder. But it had to be done.
“Of course when we arrived at Durban—for it was while I was in the Natal trade, in this same little barque—there were a couple of letters waiting for me that had passed us on the road out; and every mail that arrived while we were lying in the harbour brought me another, each more cheerful than the last, because the time was passing away and bringing our reunion nearer.
“And when at last I got home again, sir, all that they had to show me was my darling’s new-made grave. She had taken typhoid fever, died, and was carried out of the house in her coffin at the moment that the telegram announcing my arrival in England was handed in.”