The Tragedy of Ida Noble

by William Clark Russell

Would Don Christoval challenge me for my suspicions? If so, I should be honest with him; tell him in unmistakable English what my conviction was; inform him that I would no longer share in the dastardly crime into which he had betrayed his sailors; and insist that I should be transshipped to the first vessel that passed, or that I should be suffered to carry the schooner close enough to a coast, the nearest at hand, to enable me to get ashore. It was likely enough that my full mind showed in my face. A few times I caught him eyeing me askance, but, beyond calling out some commonplace to me about the weather, the progress of the schooner, and so forth, he said nothing.

It was, however, clear to me that, let his thoughts be what they would, he could say nothing. I was the only navigator aboard the vessel; he was entirely at my mercy, therefore; he would rightly fear that any menaces, any bullying, any tall-talk, must only result in causing me to sullenly throw up my command; in which case the schooner would be but a little less helpless than were she reduced to the condition of a sheer hulk by a gale of wind.

At noon I took an observation. Butler came aft to relieve me, and I went to my quarters to work out my sights. When I had worked out my sights and found out the position of the schooner on the chart, I lighted a pipe and sat down to reflect. I was now so perfectly sure that the unhappy young lady in the cabin had been kidnapped that my thoughts were never for an instant influenced by the consideration that there might be a probability of the Spaniard's story proving true. Everything pointed to this expedition as an adventure of abduction. The sailors affirmed that the girl was bleeding and insensible when carried through the hall past the room in which two of them with drawn cutlasses were guarding her father and brother. This, then, signified that she had been forcibly seized, and the state of her apparel and the scratches upon her shoulder proved that there had been a struggle. Would she have struggled had Don Christoval been her husband, to whom she was yearning to be reunited?

My blood felt hot in my veins when I thought upon this outrage; when I reflected how I had been made a party to this deed of villainy; how I, as an Englishman, had been courted by a cunning, clever lie to abet the stealing of a countrywoman of my own from her father's home in England by a brace, as I might take them, of unprincipled Spanish adventurers.

Now, while I thus sat musing over my position, and considering what course to shape to carry me clear of the dangerous association into which misadventure had brought me, I was startled by a cry in the adjacent cabin—a cry sharp, abrupt, terrible: affecting the ear as a lightning flash affects the eye. The pipe I was about to raise to my lips was arrested midway. I believe I am no coward, yet I must own that that cry, that penetrating cry, seemed to thicken my blood, seemed to stop the pulsation of my heart.

But the pause with me was brief. I dashed down my pipe, sprang to the bulk-head door and flung it open. And now what a picture did I see! The tall, commanding figure of Don Christoval was in the act of sinking to the deck; his hand was upon the table, but the fingers were slowly slipping from the edge of it, and, even as I looked, the man without a sound fell at his length and lay motionless. In the doorway of the port or left-hand berth stood the lady whom I have heretofore styled Madame, but whom I will henceforth call Ida Noble. She grasped a knife in her hand—a long carving knife it seemed to me, and I remember noticing a red gleam in it as the vessel rolled, slipping the sunshine out of a mirror toward where the girl was. She stood erect, with her eyes fixed upon the body of the Spaniard; she was as stirless as he; the figures of them both at that instant might have passed as a brace of posture-makers representing a tragedy in one of those drawing-room performances called tableaux vivants. Behind a chair on the starboard side of the table crouched the figure of Mariana. He squatted, and his attitude was exactly that of a monkey. His face was green; his wide-open eyes disclosed twice the usual surface of eyeball; his features were convulsed with terror, and never yet was there an artist whose imagination could have reached to the height of that fellow's hideousness, as he crouched, stabbed also, as I then believed, though this was not so.

A mad woman grasping a long knife is a formidable object; much more formidable is she when that knife is stained with blood, and when the person she has slain is still in view, lying a corpse a little distance away from her. On my showing myself, Mariana cried out, but whether in Spanish or English I knew not. What was I to do? What would you do were you suddenly confronted by a mad woman armed with a long knife? I looked up at the skylight and saw the horror-stricken countenance of Don Lazarillo peering down; but even as my eye went in a glance to the Spaniard's livid face, one of the sailors, and then another of the sailors, came to his side. Count twenty, and the time you will occupy in doing so will comprise the period from the moment of my opening the door to look out down to this instant.

Next moment the girl threw the knife on the deck with a gesture of abhorrence, courtesied with irony to the body of Don Christoval, and closed the door of the berth upon herself. Then there was a rush. We could all find our courage now. Mariana sprang from behind his chair, overturning it; Don Lazarillo, followed by the two sailors, came in a few bounds through the companion-hatch. I stepped to the side of Don Christoval's body, and stood looking upon him. Stone dead I knew him to be. In Calcutta during a cholera outbreak, and on board an emigrant ship visited with fever, I had many a time stood beside the dying and the dead, and the spectacle of death was very familiar to me.

"Lock her door!" shrieked Don Lazarillo.