An Ocean Tragedy

by William Clark Russell

‘When did your wife leave you, Wilfrid?’

‘A week to-day.’

‘You know, of course, without doubt, that Hope-Kennedy is the man she has gone off with?’

He nodded savagely, with a smile like a scowl passing over his face.

‘But how do you know for certain?’ I cried, determined to make him talk.

He pulled a number of letters from his side-pocket, overhauled them, found one, glanced at it, and handed it to me with a posture of the arm that might have made one think it was some venomous snake he held.

‘This was found in my wife’s bedroom,’ said he, ‘read it to yourself. Every line of it seems to be written in fire here.’ He struck his breast with his fist.

What I am telling happened a long time ago, as you will notice presently. The letter my cousin handed to me I read once and never saw again, and so, as you may suppose, I am unable to give it as it was written. But the substance of it was this: It was addressed to Lady Monson. The writer called her, I recollect, ‘my darling,’ ‘my adorable Henrietta.’ It was all about the proposed elopement, a complete sketch of the plan of it, and the one document Sir Wilfrid could have prayed to get hold of, had he any desire to know what had become of his wife, and on what kind of rambles she and her paramour had started. The letter was signed, boldly enough, ‘Frank Hope-Kennedy,’ and was filled with careful instructions to her how and when to leave her house. Railroads were few and far between in those days. Sir Wilfrid Monson’s estate was in Cumberland, and it was a long journey by coach and chaise to the town that was connected with the metropolis by steam. But the Colonel had made every arrangement for her ladyship, and it was apparent from his instructions that she had managed her flight first by driving to an adjacent village, where she dismissed the carriage with orders for it to return for her at such and such an hour; then, when her coachman was out of sight, she entered a postchaise that was in readiness and galloped along to a town through which the stage coach passed. By this coach she would travel some twenty or thirty miles, then post it to the terminus of the line that conveyed her to London. But all this, though it ran into a tedious bit of description, was but a part of the gallant Colonel’s programme. Her ladyship would arrive in London at such and such an hour, and the Colonel would be waiting at the station to receive her. They would then drive to a hotel out of Bond Street, and next morning proceed to Southampton, where the ‘Shark’ lay ready for them. It was manifest that Colonel Hope-Kennedy intended to sail away with Lady Monson in a vessel named the ‘Shark.’ He devoted a page of small writing to a description of this craft, which, I might take it—though not much in that way was to be gathered from a landsman’s statement—was a large schooner yacht owned by Lord Winterton, from whom the Colonel had apparently hired it for an indefinite period. He assured his adorable Henrietta that he had spared neither money nor pains to render the vessel as luxurious in cuisine, cabin fittings, and the like as was practicable in a sea-going fabric in those days. He added that what his darling required for the voyage must be hastily purchased at Southampton. She must be satisfied with a very slender wardrobe; time was pressing; the madman to whom the clergyman who married them had shackled her would be off in wild pursuit, helter-skelter, flying moonwards mayhap in his delirium on the instant of discovering that she was gone. Time therefore pressed, and when once the anchor of the ‘Shark’ was lifted off the ground he had no intention of letting it fall again until they had measured six thousand miles of salt water.

I delivered a prolonged whistle on reading this. Six thousand miles of ocean, methought, sounded intolerably real as a condition of an elopement. My cousin never removed his eyes from my face while I read. I gave him the letter, which he folded and returned to his pocket. He was now looking somewhat collected, though the surging of the passion and grief in him would show in a momentary sparkle of the eye, in a spasmodic grin and twist of the lips, in a quick clenching of his hands as though he would drive his finger-nails into his palms. I hardly knew what to say, for the letter was as full a revelation of the vile story as he could have given me in an hour’s delivery, and the injury and misery of the thing were too recent to admit of soothing words. Yet I guessed that it would do him good to talk.

‘Have they sailed yet, do you know?’ I inquired.