Her claim to mischief was the fairer—
A rule in courts that firm hath stood
Before and ever since the flood.’ ’
“As he ran on in this wild way, eating his heart, as it were, in sheer desperation of feeling, something in my look, as I felt my soul struggling to rise against the mendacious wretch, sent him from his vile sneers and accursed Hudibrastic lines, back to his narrative. Garbled and imperfect as that was, I was mad to hear it to the end; for while bitterly rueing the ruin which my own folly had wrought, I could not help burning to know by what damnable arts or eloquence she had ever been persuaded to yield her hand to him.
“His eyes sunk before mine and he moved restlessly on his seat as a sound, so like to a sigh that it made me start, came apparently from the door of the closed state-room; it might have been the Circassian—or the rats in their ramblings—and drinking off a brimmer of grog, he resumed in a different tone.
“ ‘At the end of the time I spoke of, the old man fell sick, and somehow his friends had dropped off, so that I spent most of my time almost alone with him. At last he consented that we should be married at his bedside. He had been growing weaker day by day, and I was the more anxious for the match, as his house was close to a place of fashionable resort, and Ellen had, somehow or other, become acquainted with some of the young blades from the city. There was some talk about her and one of them, while I was absent on a tour to the great lakes, that had like to have set me mad on my return. However, the youngster—who was, by all accounts, to the full as deeply in love and as fiery as myself, besides being, at least, my equal in fortune and connexions—had got himself involved in a quarrel with an acquaintance about this same report, which, in the end, sent one man to his grave and the other out of the country. As the duel made a great noise in the city, I determined to marry Ellen privately, and to remove from the village altogether as soon as her father died.
“ ‘Well,’ continued he, in a husky tone, ‘the thing was done, and when we rose from our knees, after the prayer, the old man was dead. We had no idea that he was so near his end, and I leave you to imagine, Mr. Miller, the horror of my bridal-night.
“ ‘However, when this was over, and we were alone together in the world, Ellen seemed to cling the closer to me, and it was not long, as you may suppose, before we left —— behind. I directed my course to Boston where I had made arrangements to enter into business with an old shipmate, a son of one of the firm in whose employ I had sailed on my first voyage. In the course of a few weeks I found myself comfortably settled at last, with most of my funds invested in the purchase of a ship and a brig, engaged in a trade to the Spanish Main. I commanded the ship myself, and for several years things went well—when by the villainy of my partner, suddenly as a whirlwind strips a ship, the house went by the board. After this I commanded vessels on the African and Brazil coasts, until the last ship was sold to a whaling house at New Bedford. I had agreed to deliver her into her new owners’ hands, and, as my wife’s health was rather unsettled at the time, I took her with me for the sake of the jaunt. It was then that I received offers from the man who had purchased the ship, which first directed my attention to this particular service. It was true that I knew nothing of the business, and had a sailor’s prejudice against it; but the man treated us with such considerate kindness, and made me offers so tempting to a broken man, pointing out how easily the difficulties might be obviated in time, and enlarging on the importance of having good navigators in the Indian seas, that, in an evil hour, I consented to take charge of my old ship.
“ ‘I removed from the hotel to a house in the upper part of the town, and after making the necessary arrangements for a protracted absence, and three weeks from the time I went into the Wisemans’ employ, I found myself at sea. The first voyage—and it was a short one, not exceeding a twelvemonth—put me up to the business, and investing all I had cleared in the ship, after a stay of six weeks on shore, leaving my wife to mingle in the best society which the place could afford, I put again to sea. It was on the homeward bound passage, in a full ship, after an absence of little more than fifteen months, that within a degree or two of the line I spoke a clean ship, with letters on board from my wife and the owners. Before I could board her, however, we were separated by a sudden squall, and night coming on lost sight of her altogether. We did not see her again, and it was when giving way to some natural vexation at the accident that I received the first intimation from Mr. Jinney, my mate, of the secret intimacy which had long existed between Ellen and the younger Wiseman. The man’s tale was a straight one, corroborated by several circumstances too trivial for notice at the moment of their occurrence, yet of sufficient importance, when taken together in connection with his story, to darken the past and cast an ominous shadow over the time to come.
“ ‘Though I had thought to strike her dead at first sight, with the stretch of sea between us, yet old ocean, wiser than a thousand graybeards, played the soother again, even in this great sorrow—the faster it bore me toward her, as the ship heeled to the trades—the wilder the gale I encountered off the very shores where she breathed, the more it seemed to uplift its voice against the tempest of fury which must have inevitably involved me in the ruin it brought down. It was well done,’ he exclaimed fiercely, ‘here’s to thee, old theme of the poets—broad pathway for spirits like mine to sweep! Neither the frailty of woman nor the malice of man’—here his voice grew too hoarse for utterance, and drinking off the liquor like water, he dashed the glass to the deck, walking the cabin with hasty strides, like a tiger chafing in his cage—while I, with a curse on my lips for what, as God is my judge, in spite of the man’s emotion, I believed to be a lie, sat chained to my seat, as by some predestined spell.