John Leslie and Francis Drury had been perfect strangers to each other all their lives long till within the last few hours; and now, with the frank confidence begotten of youth and health, each knew more of the other, his failures and successes, than perhaps, under ordinary circumstances, he would have learned in a twelvemonth. Both were comparatively young men; Drury, Australian born, a native of Victoria, and one of those roving spirits one meets with sometimes, who seem to have, and care to have, no permanent place on earth’s surface, the wandergeist having entered into their very souls, and taken full possession thereof. The kind of man whom we are not surprised at hearing of, to-day, upon the banks of the Fly River; in a few months more in the interior of Tibet; again on the track of Stanley, or with Gordon in Khartoum.
So it had been with Francis Drury, ever seeking after fortune in the wild places of the world; in quest, so often in vain, of a phantasmal Eldorado—lured on, ever on, by visions of what the unknown contained. Ghauts wild and rocky had re-echoed the report of his rifle; his footsteps had fallen lightly on the pavements of the ruined cities of Montezuma, sombre and stately as the primeval forest which hid them; and his skiff had cleft the bright Southern rivers that Waterton loved so well to explore, but gone farther than ever the naturalist, adventurous and daring as he too was, had ever been. At length, as he laughingly told his friend, fortune had, on the diamond fields of Klipdrift, smiled upon him, with a measured smile, ‘twas true, but still a smile; and now, after an absence of some years, he had taken the opportune chance of a passage in the Decatur, and was off home to see his mother and sister, from whom he had not heard for nearly two years.
Leslie was rather a contrast to the other, being as quiet and thoughtful as Drury was full of life and spirits, and had been trying his hand at sheep-farming in Cape Colony, but with rather scanty results; in fact, having sunk most of his original capital, he was now taking with him to Australia very little but his African experience.
A strong friendship between these two was the result of but a few days’ intimacy, during which time, however, as they were the only passengers, they naturally saw a great deal of each other; so it came to pass that Leslie heard all about his friend’s sister, golden-haired Margaret Drury; and often, as in the middle watches he paced the deck alone, he conjured up visions to himself, smiling the while, of what this girl, of whom her brother spoke so lovingly and proudly, and in whom he had such steadfast faith as a woman amongst women, could be like.
The Decatur was now, with a strong westerly wind behind her, fast approaching the latitude of that miserable mid-oceanic rock known as the Island of St. Paul, when suddenly a serious mishap occurred. The ship was “running heavy” under her fore and main topsails and a fore topmast staysail, the breeze having increased to a stiff gale, which had brought up a very heavy sea; when somehow—for these things, even at a Board of Trade inquiry, seldom do get clearly explained—one of the two men at the wheel, or both of them perhaps, let the vessel “broach-to,” paying the penalty of their carelessness by taking their departure from her for ever, in company with binnacle, skylights, hencoops, &c., and a huge wave which swept the Decatur fore and aft, from her taffrail to the heel of her bowsprit, washing at the same time poor Francis Drury, who happened to be standing under the break of the poop, up and down amongst loose spars, underneath the iron-bound windlass, dashing him pitilessly against wood and iron, here, there, and everywhere, like a broken reed; till when at last, dragged by Leslie out of the rolling, seething water on the maindeck, the roving, eager spirit seemed at last to have found rest; and his friend, as he smoothed the long fair hair from off the blood-stained forehead, mourned for him as for a younger brother.
The unfortunate man was speedily ascertained to be nothing but a mass of fractures and terrible bruises, such as no human frame under any circumstances could have survived; and well the sufferer knew it; for in a brief interval of consciousness, in a moment’s respite from awful agony, he managed to draw something from around his neck, which handing to his friend in the semi-darkness of the little cabin, whilst above them the gale roared, and shrieked, officers and men shouted and swore, and the timbers of the old Decatur groaned and creaked like sentient things—he whispered, so low that the other had to bend down close to the poor disfigured face to hear it, “For Mother and Maggie; I was going to tell you about—it, and—Good-bye!” and then with one convulsive shudder, and with the dark-blue eyes still gazing imploringly up into those of his friend, his spirit took its flight.
The gale has abated, the courses are clewed up, topsails thrown aback, and the starry flag flies half-mast high, as they “commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption; looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead.” A sudden, shooting plunge into the sparkling water, and Francis Drury’s place on earth will know him no more. Gone is the gallant spirit, stilled the eager heart for ever, and Leslie’s tears fall thick and heavy—no one there deeming them shame to his manhood—as the bellying canvas urges the ship swiftly onward on her course.
Only a Quandong stone, of rather unusual size, covered with little silver knobs or studs, and to one end of which was attached a stout silver chain. Leslie, as he turned it over and over in his hand, thinking sadly enough of its late owner, wondering much what he had been about to communicate when Death so relentlessly stepped in. The value of the thing as an ornament was but a trifle, and, try as he might, Leslie could find no indication that there was aught but met the eye: a simple Australian wild-peach stone converted into a trifle, rather ugly than otherwise, as is the case with so many so-called curios. Still, as his friend’s last thought and charge, it was sacred in his sight; and putting it carefully away, he determined on landing at Melbourne, now so near, to make it his first care to find out Drury’s mother and his sister.