The Tragedy of Ida Noble

by William Clark Russell

"What you see," he cried, "is the work of her inhuman father and brother. Captain Noble, his son, and my wife had returned from a ball. We found the gate open, the carriage at the door: they had only just alighted, indeed, and the carriage was in the act of driving away; but the hall-door was closed. We knocked, and Captain Noble put his head out of a window and asked who was there. I told him that it was I, Don Christoval del Padron; that I had arrived to take possession of my wife, whom he had forcibly divorced from me and was keeping a prisoner—that is, never leaving her out of his own sight or the sight of others of his family. He disappeared, and then returned to the window. I did not know he was armed. He shouted insultingly to us to be off. "Give me my wife!" I cried. "I desire no struggle, no uproar. Give her to me, to whom she belongs, and we will withdraw peacefully." He fired, and Captain Dopping fell and died with a groan. On this we stormed the door; we put a pistol to the keyhole and blew away the lock. Strangely enough, the door was not bolted. No doubt, in the alarm our sudden appearance had caused, this had been overlooked, or possibly Captain Noble supposed that some one had shot the bolts. We entered; but what follows others may be better able to tell than I. All was confusion and cries. They had hidden my wife. We entered five rooms before we found her. This search was mine and Don Lazarillo's. The seamen guarded the door, and stood cutlass in hand over Captain Noble and his son. I found my wife locked in a room. When I turned the key and she beheld me she rushed to my arms with a cry of delight. I enveloped her in her opera cloak and conducted her downstairs, but on Captain Noble and his son beholding us they dashed themselves against the seamen, rushed upon us, and then it was that my wife suffered in her apparel and upon her neck, as you see. She fainted, she instantly became insensible. In the stupor that she now lies in we carried her to the boat. As we left the house I saw the red light of fire in a wing on the left, but it was not our doing; they can not charge that to me."

This extraordinary story he told in such broken-winded English as I have attempted to convey it in. While I listened, I had found it difficult to reconcile his statement that his wife had been imprisoned by her father with the circumstance of her having accompanied him and her brother to a ball. Then, again, while I listened, from time to time, looking at the figure of the girl as he spoke, I wondered, as I had before wondered again and again, in thinking over the object of this expedition, why, if the lady, as he had represented, had been all anxiety to rejoin her husband, should Don Christoval have considered it necessary to carry an armed force ashore with him? That she had not been a prisoner, in the sense of being confined to a room, or to a suite of rooms, was made manifest by the ball attire in which she lay as one dead upon the cabin sofa. Her liberty in a certain degree she must have enjoyed. Could she not, at some preconcerted signal, have stolen from the house secretly, and darkly joined her husband, and secretly and darkly sailed away with him, saving all this tremendous obligation of midnight landing and of armed seamen, with its tragic result of fire and a slain man, not to mention the condition of the wife, who, if not now actually dead, might be a corpse before the sun rose?

There might have been a pause of five or six seconds while I thus mused, during which I seemed to feel rather than see that his dark and burning eyes were scrutinizing me by aid of the cabin light that touched my face.

"The lady lies startlingly motionless, shockingly lifeless, Don Christoval," said I.

"But her pulse beats—her pulse beats."

"Shall you persist in sailing to Cuba, sir?"

"Certainly; we are now proceeding to Cuba," he exclaimed, and he half rose from the corner of the skylight as though with a mind to step to the compass.

"Cuba is a long way off," said I.

"What of that?" he cried, instantly, and with heat.

"Seeing the condition of that lady," said I, "I could not be sure but that you would wish to visit some near port to obtain medical help, and——"