His rejoinder was the bell ringing out loudly in our engine-room below. To the quartermaster he cried in a captain’s sharp voice: “One point starboard,” and was answered, “One point starboard it is.” I perceived that we had altered our course almost imperceptibly, and were now steering almost direct to the north-east, which must bring us to the islands of the Azores, and the coal we needed so sorely. If there were any regrets, one man alone suffered them and remained silent. It had been so much my own emprise from the beginning; I had hoped so much, dared so much, feared so much, because of it, that this silent flight from the scene, this abandonment of the quest, this abject submission to our necessity could be accounted no less than a personal humiliation which must remain with me whatever the subsequent achievement.
I had set out to drag the Jew to justice. A voice ironical reminded me that Valentine Imroth was free and ashore, that he mocked my knowledge, and might yet outwit a sullen police. The great house of crime he had erected must be pulled down for a season; but who would say that it would not be rebuilt upon a foundation of human credulity more sure, and to be relied upon, than any he had yet discovered? I had not brought this arch-villain to justice; I knew nothing of the confederates he had upon the high seas, of the ships which befriended him, it may be of other refuges as safe and unnamed as this vast hulk now sinking below the horizon and disappearing from my view. And what was this but failure, failure as complete as any in the history of the police I had derided—a failure which no circumstances could atone, no explanations justify? Such were my reflections—such the thoughts that came to me as the great ship faded from my vision, downward to the nether world where the voices of the lost should welcome her, and the spirits of the damned give her greeting.
Long I stood there, my eyes upon the horizon, my vision enchained by the void as though a voice must come to me from the unknown and say “This is the truth; this is the hour.” We were alone on the waste of waters now: a brave ship running homeward to the cities and the cottages of England; a ship that carried stout hearts and merry men; upon whose decks the prattle of little children might in fancy be heard, their childish forms uplifted, their young lips kissed. From all this joy I stood apart. What had home to give, what were the shores of England to me if I might not find there the love and confidence of my little Joan?
Not as a child but as a woman had she spoken last night when she said—“Tell me the story of my life and I shall have the right to listen to you.” There could be no rest for me, no thought of man’s love for her until the record proved her not the daughter of General Fordibras, but his victim. I had been conscious of this from the beginning, but the inevitability of it recurred to me now when the great ship had disappeared from my ken, and all my hopes seemed to sink with her. To win Joan’s love I must snatch her secret from a rogue’s keeping, carry it triumphantly to her, and so write it that all the world might read. God alone knew how such a task as this might be accomplished. I wonder not that its very magnitude appalled me.
And so the new day waxed old, and found me still alone, my eyes upon the void; my heart heavy with the burden I must carry. The great sea had spoken and I had heard her voice and bowed to the destiny of her judgments. Let the land now answer me—that land for which my friends yearned as exiles, who have heard a call from home and answered it with tears of gladness because their faces are toward the light.
CHAPTER XXXII.
WE HEAR OF THE JEW AGAIN.
Once More in London.
I am not one of those who touch the posts by Temple Bar with that rare delight which betrays the true-blue Londoner. Foreign scenes are ever a safer tonic to me than any fret and striving of our own cities; and gladly as I turn to London sometimes, it is rarely that I do not quit her shadows with a greater pleasure. Perhaps I am conscious of a subtle change creeping upon her, and destroying much of her charm. To me she seems as the great growing child which has lost its strength in the act. Vast beyond all belief, her energies are perceptibly weakening. She is no longer an example to the provinces; they do not imitate her fashions, and are ready to scoff at her pretensions. The old London of the gloomy theatres, the narrow, dirty streets, the London of Simpson’s and Evans’, and the decent supper rooms, was a thousand times more romantic a city in my eyes than this County Council Babylon, with its raucous prophets and its perpetual cant of moralities. Let the blame be on my head which dares to think such treason. I am lonely in wide streets, and the gospel of modernity depresses me.
Unrepentant, I write these lines, and yet they can conjure up for me a vision of London so desired that all the years will never blot it from my memory. I had been in England two months then. A littered writing table in my private sitting-room at a great Strand hotel bore witness to my activities—an untasted elixir in a wineglass by my side spoke of a woman’s anxieties and of her devotion. Certainly my dear sister Harriet had sufficiently impressed upon these people the necessity of treating all carpets and curtains by an antiseptic process, and the profound wisdom of warming the interiors of those hats which subsequently were to adorn the heads of males. Her debates with a German Prince in command, neither understanding the tongue of the other, were a little protracted, and not always without heat. She was determined that I should not cut my finger-nails with unaired scissors, and convinced that the only way of saving me from the troubles which beset the path of my indifference lay in the frequent administration of advertised tonics, and a just sampling of the whole of them. I suffered her and was happy. Is it not something that there should be one woman in all the world who lives for us a life so wholly unselfish that no thought of her own needs ever enters into it?