Chapter XVIII. Saved.

Yet two were saved.

Two who, knowing that not even death could so utterly divide them as life, were perhaps of all that ship's human freight least desirous that the sea should spare them. Stranger even than the miracle of their rescue was the fact of their being rescued separately.

Edgar Paget was the first. Dhashed adrift directly after the ultimate break-up, he, clutching about as only a drowning man can clutch, caught at a portion of the wreck and held on, holding his breath at each wave that rushed over him, and renewing it again in the brief intervals. In the lull of the storm he heard a shout, and shouted back under the conviction that it was to some poor wretch in as sore a strait as his own.

But then he saw a light, and knew the truth; rescue was at hand. The wind fell almost as suddenly as it had risen. The sea was still furious, yet a human cry could be heard above its roar. He shouted again, and felt himself drifting nearer and nearer the light. Presently he was aboard a small coasting Vessel that had done her battle with the storm; suffered too, and page 126lost two men; but had weathered it at last, and lay sobbing now on the breast of the sea.

Partly at Paget's earnest entreaty, partly because the ship was crippled and could not well do other, the captain tacked about the same place till morning, all the men shouting incessantly and casting out whatever floatable articles they could spare, in the dim hope of giving some sinking wretch another chance. But nothing came of it, and daylight showed them only a sullen subsiding sea, whose long swell might easily wash away any sign of the wreck—away—away beyond sight and recovery.

'All gone, sir! stake your life on that,' said the skipper of the coaster to Paget, who scanned with despairing eyes the great grey cruel grave that stretched everywhere round him out to the dim horizon.

He had suffered some damage to his left arm. It was broken, but he did not know this till afterwards. Something had struck him as he drifted towards the little ship; something like human flesh had touched his own at the moment of the blow. He had almost lost his hold from the suddenness of the concussion; then it—whatever it was—had drifted off from him. It might have been—God!—it might have been Berta. Why had he not let go his own plank and clung to that? he could at least then have drowned with her.

'It is always possible that wrecked people may be picked up by stray vessels?' he said to the captain inquiringly.

'Always possible,' with a melancholy emphasis on the last word. 'Wood will always float. Bodies lashed tightly on will float too.'

'Bodies!' The skipper's verdict lay in that word.

'Nobody could last long in such a sea as that,' he added. 'You would have been a goner in ten more minutes, you know.' But the skipper was not quite right in his conclusions that time.

In forty-eight hours they were all in Dunedin, and the news of the wreck of a great steamer went out all over the world.

Philiberta was always singularly reticent of information re-page 127gardingthat period of her life directly subsequent to the wreck. It is my opinion that she was so because she dreaded people's incredulity.

Adventurers, generally speaking, lay themselves sadly open to suspicion of drawing the long bow in anecdote and narrative; and the rare few truthful ones naturally shrink from inviting a share of the general unbelief.

There is that remarkable and eccentric sea-serpent now. Who believes anything anyone says about him?

Yet there can be little doubt that such an animal, or reptile, or insect (impossible to fix his category until we catch him, you know) exists; or that it has been seen by a favoured (or afflicted) few. But not even the word of a missionary will be taken about it now. I saw half a dozen newspapers the other day in all of which were articles cutting, slashing, and in all ways ridiculing a certain reverend gentleman who bad published a most graphic account of a personal interview with the sea-serpent. The ship the missionary was on was the K——, bound for an island of savage heathens with a cargo of tracts, glass beads, and rum; principally rum. And the authors of said newspaper articles made ironical observations that, considering the cargo, the public ought to be much obliged to the missionary and other passengers for seeing only one sea-serpent. On another vessel, when the sea-serpent came along to exchange friendly notes about the state and prospects of things in general, the captain ordered every soul on board below, and himself mounted guard with a revolver in each hand to prevent and one catching so much as a glimpse of the snaky denizen of the mighty deep. Afterwards, the captain bound every man, woman, and child, by an awful and solemn oath, never, to reveal that the ship had come anywhere within hail of a sea-serpent, lest on him and his vessel should fall the blighting scorn and 'chaff' of an unbelieving public.

He told me all this himself, and I know it must have been true, because that captain was almost as particular about telling a lie as George Washington was. In fact, if he had a fault, it was his exaggerated regard and respect for truth—a page 128commodity that should, as a new philosopher remarks, ever be used sparingly on account of its preciousness. But there was one dear friend to whom Philiberta, at intervals, unbosomed herself of strange revelations. And it was to this same friend that she described the odd sensations of death by drowning, and the awfulness of coming back to life from such a death.

'It seems not a second of time,' she said, with that dramatic intensity of speech and gesture peculiar to her in moments of deep feeling,' since you sank down—down—with the rushing of water in your ears, the numbing of blood in your veins, in your throat the gurgling instinctive cry to Heaven for aid in your extremity, and then the sense of great eternal calm. Not a second of time from this, and yet you are alive again, with a painful life that tingles excruciatingly in every limb, throbs torturingly in every pulse—alive, and still so weary all over with an unutterable weariness that you cannot keep the tears back. So weak, that the burden of life—the heavy, grinding burden that must be taken up again and borne to the bitter end—seems all too great and oppressive for human strength. Thus must the Son of Man have felt as His persecutors goaded and spurned Him back to consciousness when, under the cruel weight of the Cross, He had fainted and fallen by the wayside. Ah, Great One! whether Thou wert divine or only human, aching hearts and weary heads even to this day, and through all time, must bleed for Thee and bow to Thee, because of the bitter suffering that makes all living things akin. How must Thy tortured, fainting, dying heart have been glad to send forth the cry, "It is finished!" '

The ship that picked up our heroine was the barque Star, bound from Australia to Hong Kong with a large number of Chinese passengers. These passengers, with the economy characteristic of the Mongolian exile, all travelled steerage. The odour of them pervaded the whole ship, fore and aft. Presently it was discovered that the stench was not wholly caused by the living; that they, in conformity with an unpleasant custom of theirs, were transporting their dead for burial in their native land. These dead celestials were packed neatly in trunks page 129and boxes and labelled 'luggage,' probably on account of the absurd prejudice of European seamen against sailing with a corpse. Some of the dead men had been merely bones and dust for a long time, and were of course easily packed and comparatively inoffensive. But others had not been so long under ground, and their friends had not thought it conscientious to leave them, or convenient to wait for them, so they just brought them along to continue their decomposition as they best might on the voyage. The daily increasing suspicions and disapprobation of the sailors reached the culminating point when the Star suffered a ten days' calm in a tropical latitude and became worse than a charnel-house. The men insisted upon searching the luggage; the Chinese objected. The captain and officers made some show of quelling the seamen, and were immediately put in irons. There is reason to believe they were rafter glad of this; and who will wonder at their rejoicing to be compelled to acquiesce in an act they could not in honour have countenanced, but which doubtless saved them all from death by some horrible fever? The encounter was brief but bloody. The Chinese numbered three hundred, to twenty British Islanders and one Italian steward (whose kindness to Philiberta, by-the-bye, and talent for manufacturing dough-nuts and similar delicacies, were never forgotten by her). When the trouble was over, and the litter cleared away, and the decks washed, the captain and officers were released and permitted to reckon up results, which were—a considerably lightened hold (not a scrap of passengers' luggage was there left) and a hundred and ten living Chinamen in place of the three hundred originally shipped. Perhaps we had better say, for sake of rigid accuracy, one hundred, because the odd ten were damaged beyond repair, and went to join the departed within a few days afterwards.

How rejoiced Philiberta was to quit this vessel for a Fijian trader they fell in with about a fortnight after this the reader may imagine without any strong effort.

There was some mystery about the Fijian experience that Philiberta's friends could never quite make out, and she always page 130put so stern a check on conjecturing curiosity that she was seldom offended by it. When that great exposure of 'black-birding' came about, her friends thought they had a link, but it never amounted to anything. Some became possessed of the idea that she had been compelled to take an oath of secrecy about something, and had found it inadvisable to break that oath. One, and I think that one was nearest the mark, believed that gratitude to the captain, who was excessively kind to her, kept Philiberta silent about matters that could not have been ventilated to his advantage.

I believe that the captain wanted to marry Philiberta, but that is merely speculative. The space of time between the wreck and our heroine's return to Melbourne measured eight months, but it made a difference of almost as many years in her appearance and feelings, But, if there had been nothing else, that sudden awful wreckage of her life's faith and love and hope up there on the hill, near Dunedin reservoir, would have made all the difference in her.

She stepped on to the Sandridge pier at noon of a scorching day in February, when Melbourne and all its surroundings were obscured in a haze of dust She had come straight from Sydney in the Dandenong, which had sailed exactly six hours after she had landed there from Fiji; so it will appear that she had not stayed to make observances of New South Wales.

'Age, the Argus, and Daily Telegraph!' shouted small boys in furious competition, as they darted in and out of the throng on Sandridge pier.

Philiberta arrested one and bought a copy of each paper. Then she went up to the ladies' waiting room in the railway station and sat down there to read. And this is what she saw in the first column of the very first page her eyes fell on:

'Next of kin to Philiberta Campbell, who was lost in the SS.——off the coast of New Zealand on the tenth of last June, will hear of something to their advantage on application to Otto Berliner, missing friends agency office.'

For the first time in her life, perhaps, a sense of her utter and perfect loneliness in the world came over her.

page 131

'Next of kin!' She had no kin. Friends? Well, yes; Mrs. Retlaw had mourned her doubtless; and the Hugills—ah, yes, the Hugills had sorrowed for her surely. And Edgar, he must have been drowned—but if he were alive, he would grieve about her.

But there was no one to wear black for her, or to come and claim her money.

Suppose she were dead, she thought, what would eventually become of that money? Would most of it be expended in advertising and searching for her 'next of kin'? Or would some clever impostor come forward and prove himself 'next of kin,' and get it? Or would the inquiry be given up shortly and the money go to swell the Government Treasury?

She made up her mind, then and there, to make her will at the earliest opportunity. But here again was a puzzle. To whom should she give her wealth? The Hugills were never likely to need it. The Retlaws would always have plenty of their own. She would take her time and look round and find out what would be the very best and wisest use it could be put to. Just the she heard an uproar outside and went forth to see the cause. And she saw a man mercilessly cudgelling and kicking a horse, and cursing and 'carrying on' in a fashion that showed how well he knew his exemption, from punishment in this land of liberty.

Hotly indignant, Philiberta, hurried towards the ruffian, but before she could reach him, his poor overloaded, bruised victim made one great effort in the desperate energy of suffering, and dragged, its burden sway across the road.

Coming back towards the station, she saw two boys torturing a small wild bird that they had caught in a trap. She bade them let it go; they only laughed in her face. She entreated,' and they laughed still louder. Finally, she offered a shilling for the bird's liberty, and the chief torturer closed at once. The little fluttering thing flew lamely off, the boy got his shilling, and Philiberta, staying to watch against a second capture for a few minutes, heard the other little villain abuse his mate for not 'making the figure one-and-three!'

page 132

Then she went back to the station and into the well-crowded train, making resolutions and calculations as to the disposal of all her riches in the prevention of cruelty to animals.

The compartment she entered was filled with fashionably dressed women. Two who sat opposite to each other in corners of the carriage were holding animated converse in a high key. From the tenor of their talk Philiberta, gathered that they were old friends just met after a long separation. One was from 'the bush;' the other was a citizen.

'And when are you coming to town again?' inquired the latter.

'I can't say,' replied the other. 'Not for a long time, I am afraid. George has turned so economical, you know, through the last bad season. And he wants to purchase Paget's station when the sale comes off.'

'And when will that be?'

'Oh, not for a few months yet Paget's bankers will give him every possible chance, you know; but they are bound to close in on him before long.'

'Perhaps he will be able to redeem himself yet.'

'Not possible. He is too deeply involved.'

'How much?'

'Oh, it would take twelve thousand to clear him, George says. But pray don't talk of this to anyone. George told me in confidence.'

'My dear, did you ever know me betray confidence?"

Every woman in the carriage heard this and smiled. Philiberta, pale and eager, put her newspaper before her face and waited for more.

'What did you say Paget's place was called?'

'Yoanderruk.'

'Up Loddon way, isn't it?'

'Yes. Wilks is his next neighbour.'

'How did he manage to get into this fix?'

'Oh, things have gone against him of late years; and then—his wife, you know,'

'No, I don't know. What is it?'

page 133

Philiberta held her breath for the next sentence, and heard it though it was uttered in a whisper, the ladies bending their heads closer together. It was only one word.

'Dipsomania!'

'Dear me! How unpleasant! Poor man!'

'No doubt it is chiefly that that brought him to this pass. Not what she spent or wasted, you know; but the misery of the thing. And the homestead left entirety to the care of the servants. George told me that Paget was dreadfully reckless sometimes, and no wonder. Then he got his arm broken in that wreck, and it was badly set by some surgeon, and had to be done all over again, George says he is an entirely different man since the wreck, and looks ill. I expect it was the fright. However, nothing can save him now from utter ruin; and yet she goes on just the same.'

'Poor fellow! Have they got any children?'

'One—a little boy. It is a cripple. The mother threw it out of the window in one of her fits when it was a baby, and it sustained some injury to the spine.'

'What a fiend! And how old is the child now?'

'About five or six years, I think.'

'Well, what a time that poor man must have had! I wonder he didn't leave her long ago.'

'So do I, But he is fond of his place—or used to be, they say. And he has everything very nice up there. And I suppose he has lived in the hopes of her getting the better of this curse.'

'Well, it's a strange thing, really,'

'Is this our station? Yes. And there's our buggy waiting. Come along, dear.'

So Edgar Paget was alive, then, and back at his home with his wife. And his wife drank. This was the ban he had spoken of, but been unable to name. And he was altered, suffering, ruined.

'Well, thank God! I can save him from that,' said Philiberta, making her lonely, aimless way through the crowded Hobson's Bay railway station. 'My money can save him from that if I can only devise a scheme for giving it to him.'

page 134

One thing was patent as a duty to her mind; she must keep all knowledge of her existence from him. He must never know that she was saved. And how then convey the money to him?

'I will go to Mrs. Hugill,' said Philiberta.