The disaster that had befallen us, he said, had cast a heavy gloom over the ship, and it was heightened by Mrs. Radcliffe’s serious illness, due to the poignant wretchedness caused her by the loss of her niece. Hemmeridge was entreated to prescribe for her, but he sullenly refused, hoped that her illness might be epidemical, that more might suffer than she, and could breathe nothing but threats of having the law of Keeling on the ship’s arrival at Bombay. However, by the time the vessel was up with the Cape, Mrs. Radcliffe had recovered; and when Keeling last saw her, she seemed as hopeful as she was before despairful of her niece being yet accounted for.
Abreast of the Cape also, the spirits of the passengers had sufficiently lightened to enable some love-making to proceed briskly amongst them.
‘Much about twenty degrees of south latitude,’ said old Keeling in his dry voice, ‘young Mr. Fairthorne, the fellow that lisped, you remember, Mr. Dugdale, succeeded in tempting that nice young lady, Constance Hudson, to accept his hand and heart. Old Mrs. Hudson was very well pleased, sir. About the latitude of the Chagos Archipelago, Mr. Emmett induced Miss Helen Trevor to betroth herself to him. And off the Laccadive Islands, Peter Hemskirk, to the astonishment of all hands, deposited his person and his fortune at the feet of Miss Mary Joliffe.’
‘I had thought Mr. Emmett was a married man,’ I said.
‘Apparently not, sir,’ he answered.
‘And your friend Hemmeridge?’
He replied that the surgeon consulted a solicitor at Bombay, and had no doubt been advised to take certain proceedings; but three weeks after the arrival of the ship the doctor had been thrown from a horse, and so injured in the spine and head, that he died within a fortnight.
‘What he could have done I’m sure I don’t know, Mr. Dugdale,’ said the old fellow. ‘I believe I was within my rights. Yet he might have given me trouble, and I hate law. The two fellows, Crabb and Willett, I handed over to the police. Mr. Saunders got the drug the scoundrel had used carefully analysed, and it turned out that he was right: it proved to be what he’d termed it; and I afterwards heard the stuff was not unknown in India, where it’s used for some religious purposes; but in what way I don’t know.’
This was all the news that old Keeling had to give me.
When I left Lush and the sailors of the Lady Blanche upon the reef, I had little thought of ever hearing of them again. I knew the nature of sailors. If they came off with their lives, I might be sure they would disperse and utterly vanish. Great was my surprise, then, one morning some months after my marriage, to find, on opening my morning newspaper, a column-long account of the trial of a seaman named Lush for the murder of a man named Woodward. The evidence was substantially my story with a sequel to it. The witnesses against Lush were three of the seamen of the Lady Blanche. The counsel for the prosecution related the adventures of the barque down to the time of my swimming off to her and sailing away with her. The boat had been in charge of the man Woodward when I detached the line to let her slip away. He had fallen into a deep sleep, overcome by fatigue and drink. The yells and roaring of the crew, one of whom had started up and observed the boat drifting out, had aroused the sleeper after the uproar had been some time continued. He was thick and stupid, went clumsily to work to scull the heavy boat ashore, and was a long time in doing it. The carpenter dragged him on to the beach and asked him if he had fallen asleep. The unfortunate wretch answered yes; the carpenter struck him fiercely; Woodward returned the blow; and, mad with rage, Lush whipped out his sheath-knife and stabbed the man to the heart.