An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘Wilf,’ said I, ‘she may fall very low, and then, when nobody, else will have anything more to do with her, she will return to you as your lawful wife, and play the devil with your peace and good name.’

‘I am not going to free her,’ said he snappishly.

‘Do you mean to make any stay in London?’ said I.

‘I am waiting till the gout leaves me,’ he answered, ‘and shall then go abroad. I have been recommended to do so. It is pretty sure to come to the ears of Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s friends that I shot him in a duel. He was a widower and childless, but he has a sister, a Lady Guthrie, who adored the ground he trod on and thought him the noblest creature in the universe. My solicitors advise me not to wait until I am charged with the fellow’s death, and so I am going abroad.’

‘Humph,’ said I; ‘and how am I to be dealt with as an accessory?’

‘Pooh!’ he exclaimed, ‘one never hears of seconds being charged.’

‘You will take baby with you, I presume?’

He answered no. During his absence a cousin of his had lost her husband, a colonel in India. She had arrived in England with two grown-up daughters, and was so poor that she had asked Wilfrid to help her. He had arranged that she and the girls should occupy his seat in the North and take charge of his child. This in fact had been settled, and Mrs. Conway and her daughters were now installed at Sherburne Abbey. On hearing this it instantly suggested itself to me that Mrs. Conway would provide Laura with the very home that she needed until we heard from Mr. Jennings. Wilfrid of course acquiesced; he was delighted; he loved Laura as a sister, and his little one would be doubly guarded whilst she was with it. So here was a prompt and happy end to what had really threatened to prove a source of perplexity, and indeed in some senses a real difficulty.

And now to end this narrative. A fortnight later Wilfrid went abroad to travel, as he said, in Italy and the South of France, and with him proceeded Mr. Muffin. During that fortnight Laura and I were frequently with him, but it was only on the day previous to his departure that he mentioned his wife’s name. In a careless voice and offhand manner he asked if we had heard of her, but neither of us could give him any news. We had not chosen to learn by calling if she continued at the hotel to which she had gone on her arrival. She had not written to her sister, nor had she communicated with Wilfrid’s solicitors. However, about a fortnight after I had returned to London from the North, whither I had escorted Laura, there came a letter to my lodgings addressed to my sweetheart. I guessed the handwriting to be Lady Monson’s. I forwarded it to Laura, who returned it to me. It was a cold intimation of her ladyship’s intention to sail in such and such a vessel to Melbourne on the Monday following, so that when I read the missive she had been four days on her way. For my part I was heartily glad to know that she was out of England.

Soon after my arrival I sent a description of the volcanic island and the galleon on top of it to a naval publication of the period. It was widely reprinted and excited much attention and brought me many letters. But for that article I believe I should have heard no more of Dowling and Head. It chanced, however, that my account of the island was republished in a West Indian journal, and I think it was about five months after my return to this country that I received a letter from the master of a vessel dated at the Havannas and addressed to me at the office of the journal in which my narrative had been published. This man, it seems, having sighted the rock about three weeks after we had got away from it in the ‘Star of Peace,’ hauled in close to have a good look at an uncharted spot that was full of the deadliest menace to vessels, and observed signals being made to him from what he was afterwards informed was the hull of a fossilised ship. He sent a boat and brought off two men, who, it is needless to say, were Dowling and Head. They very frankly related their story, told the master of the vessel how they were survivors of the schooner-yacht ‘Bride,’ and how they had declined to leave the island because of their expectation of meeting with treasure aboard that strange old ship of weeds and shells. Day after day they had toiled in her, but to no purpose. They broke into the piles of shells, but found nothing save rottenness within, remains of what might have been cargo but of a character utterly indistinguishable. There was not a ha’p’orth of money or treasure; so there was an end of the poor fellows’ princely dreams. They were received on board and worked their passage to Rio, where they left the ship, which then proceeded to the Havannas.