I will not pretend that our passage home was uneventful. Out of it might readily be spun another considerable narrative; but here I may but glance at it. The ship was named the Greyhound. She was a tall, black, softwood-built ship, of American birth, with a white figurehead, and fine lines of planking, and three lofty skysail poles, and an almost perpendicular bow, and she had, to use the old term, the sailing qualities of a witch. There went with her a number of passengers, Spanish and English, who, thanks, I suppose, to the gossip of the British consul and his wife and family, were perfectly informed of every article of our story, and in consequence made a very great deal of us—of Miss Temple in particular. But how great had been the change wrought in her character! No more supercilious airs, haughty looks, chilling glances of contemptuous surprise. Her sweetness and cordiality rendered her as completely a favourite as she had been before disliked and feared by her fellow-passengers of the Indiaman.
It took her a long while, however, to recur without exquisite distress to the man Forrest whom she had shot. But I was never weary of putting the matter before her in its just light; and at last she suffered me to persuade her that what she had done it had been her duty to do, that every law of God and man was at the back of such a deed to justify and even consecrate it, and that so far from suffering the recollection to render her wretched, she should proudly honour herself for the instant’s coolness, courage, and presence of mind she had exhibited at sight of the scoundrel. Yet it was inevitably a memory to linger darkly with her for some time.
Our being incessantly together from the hour of our sailing down to the hour of our arrival strengthened her love for me, and her passion became a pure and unaffected sentiment. This I could have by no means sworn it was when I spoke my love to her in the Pacific. I was sure that she liked me, that she even had a warm affection for me, inspired by gratitude and by esteem for as much of my character as she could understand in my behaviour to her. But I could not satisfy myself that she loved me, or that, subject to her mother’s approval, she would have consented to marry me, but for our extraordinary experiences, that had coupled us together in an intimacy which most people might consider matrimony must confirm for her sake if not for mine.
But if that had ever been her mood—she never would own it—it ripened during this voyage into a love that the most wretchedly sensitive heart could not have mistaken. And now it remained to be seen what reception Lady Temple would accord me. She would be all gratitude, of course; she would be transported with the sight and safety of her daughter; but ambition might presently dominate all effusion of thankfulness, and she would quite fail to see any particular obligation on her daughter’s part to marry merely because we had been shipmates together in a series of incredible adventures.
But all conjecture was abruptly ended on our arrival by the news of Lady Temple’s death. A stroke of paralysis had carried her off. The attack was charged to her fretting for her daughter, of whose abandonment upon the wreck she had received the news from no less a person than the Honourable Mr. Colledge. Let me briefly describe how this had come about.
When the cutter containing Mr. Colledge and the men of the Magicienne had lost sight of the wreck in the sudden vapour that had boiled down over it, the fellows, having lost their lieutenant and being without a head, hurriedly agreed to pull dead away before the wind in the direction of the Indiaman, not doubting that she would be lying hove-to, and that they must strike her situation near enough to disclose the huge loom of her amidst the fog. They missed her, and then, not knowing what else to do, they lashed their oars into a bundle and rode to it. It was hard upon sunset when a great shadow came surging up out of the fog close aboard of them. It was the corvette under reefed topsails. The cutter was within an ace of being run down. Her crew roared at the top of their pipes, and they were heard; but a few moments later the Magicienne had melted out again upon the flying thickness. The boat, however, had been seen, and her bearings accurately taken; and twenty minutes later, the corvette again came surging to the spot where the cutter lay. Scores of eyes gazed over the ship-of-war’s head and bulwarks in a thirsty, piercing lookout. The end of a line was flung, the boat dragged alongside, and in a few minutes all were safe on board. Colledge related the story of the adventure to his cousin—how the lieutenant had fallen overboard and was drowned, as he believed; how Miss Temple and I were left upon the wreck, and were yet there. But the blackness of a densely foggy night was now upon the sea; it was also blowing hard, and nothing could be done till the weather cleared and the day broke.
That nothing was done, you know. When the horizon was penetrable, keen eyes were despatched to the mastheads; but whether it was that the light wreck had drifted to a degree entirely out of the calculations of Sir Edward Panton, or that his own drift during the long, black, blowing hours misled him, no sign of us rewarded his search. For two days he gallantly stuck to those waters, then abandoned the hunt as a hopeless one, and proceeded on his voyage to England.
Mr. Colledge on his arrival immediately thought it his duty to write what he could tell of the fate of Miss Temple to Lady Temple’s brother, General Ashmole. The General was a little in a hurry to communicate with poor Lady Temple. His activity as a bearer of ill tidings might perhaps have found additional animation in the knowledge that if Miss Temple were dead, then the next of her kinsfolk to whom her ladyship must leave the bulk of her property would be the General and his four charming daughters. Be this as it will, the news proved fatal to Lady Temple. The uncertainty of her daughter’s fate, doubt of the possibility of her having been rescued from the wreck, fears of her having met with a slow, miserable, most dreadful death, preyed upon such poor remains of health as paralysis and a long term of motionless confinement had left her; and her maid one morning on entering her room found her dead in her bed.
The shock was a terrible one to Louise. Again and again she had said to me that if the news of her having been lost out of the Indiaman reached her mother before she arrived home, it would kill her. And now she found her prediction verified! I was a deal grieved for the girl’s sake; but it was not a thing for me to take very seriously to heart. Indeed it was not long before I got to hear that her ladyship had been an exceedingly ambitious woman, with the highest possible notions of her own importance, and of an insufferable condescension of manner; and I was assured had she lived, I should have found her a formidable, perhaps an immovable obstacle to my marriage. But had she been the most amiable of women, the stroke of her death must have been considerably softened to my mind by understanding that it made Louise the absolute mistress of a mansion and large grounds and a clear income of three thousand five hundred a year. This was very well, and quite worth being shipwrecked and kidnapped for.
But if her ladyship’s death cleared the road for me in one way, it temporarily blocked it for me in another by enforcing delay. Louise must not now marry for a year. No; anything less than a year was out of the question. It would be an insult to the memory of an adored parent even to think of happiness under a twelvemonth. I resigned myself in silence to the affliction of waiting, leaving it to time to unsettle her resolution. She had many relatives, and she went from house to house; but I was never very far off. I loved her too fondly to lose her. I had won her, and I meant to have and hold the supreme title to her that had come to me from old ocean. Not that I had a doubt of her own devotion; I was afraid of her relatives. Some of them were titled people; they were all of them social star-gazers, with their intellectual eyes rooted upon objects that shone more splendidly than they and higher in life’s atmosphere; and there was such an army of them in one shape or another, such battalions of uncles and aunts, of cousins and connections spreading out like the tendrils of creepers, that I feared their influence if I did not take care to keep hovering close by to guard my Louise’s heart against any relaxation of sentiment.