TWICE LOST.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1106, 12 May 1893, Page 11

TWICE LOST.

[NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.]

©— —— A TALE OF LOVE ANDFORTUNE. BY BICHAED DOWLING, Author of' A Hidden Flame,'' Fatal Bonds,' ' Tempest Driven,'' A Baffling Quest,' &g. [COPYKIGHT.] CHAPTER LI. Husband and Wife. As Pollie Jeaters sat that evening in Edith Orr's room at the open window gazing out on the Thames, all silver in the moonlight, she was at peace, and nearer to happiness than for many a long day. Mrs Natchbrook's had been a haven, but it had afforded nothing beyond safety and peace, and so long as she was there she had before her eyes sights which recalled the supreme misery of her lot, and the terrible ending to her married life. Here in this cheerful room, high above the ever-moving river, she found variety and a scene of movement to keep her from stagnating. Edith's voice, and spirit, and manner, and sympathy, even in her own troubles, were more potent for good than the rough kindness of Mrs Natchbrook and Jim's young wife, Nancy.

Looking out on the moonlit placid stream she gave play to her fancy, and pictured to herself the river bringing baek to her all it had swept away, all that had been finally lost to her on its bank, in its waters. If not on earth perhaps in a clearer and higher life the old state would be renewed, the state of the first few months after marriage, when she had nothing to do all day long but think of her handsome gentleman husband, who, in part, thought of nothing but honouring her and anticipating her wish in all things. She never for one moment regretted her marriage. If it were given her to live her whole life over again she would marry Frank Jeaters again. She would risk all, suffer all for the sake of the intoxicating sweetness drunk by her when

she believed he loved her, had loved her only and would never love other woman. Oh, to be his love once more for but a day she would take all the illness, pain, disappointment, and woe she had ever known since she could remember !

Ay, she would go back to that last awful empty house under which flowed the river she then dreaded and loathed. She would go back to that fearful place and live there the remainder of her life if she might have one day only of the perfect bliss she once knew, one evening even, one evening of the moon like this with her head resting on his shoulder, with him singing softly the songs she loved and running his fingers through her hair, and stooping now and then to kiss her forehead, her ear, her neck! All at once her thoughts stopped. All at once her thoughts stopped as absolutely as the motion of the river would stop if the water were frozen fathoms deep. Suddenly her ear caught a sound which filled her soul with ecstatic awe.

She rose stealthily from the chair and drew near the open window as cautiousiy as though she had lighted on a gathering of midnight fairies and feared to scare them. The moon stood low in the east, and no more of its direct beams entered the room than made a narrow zone of white radiance on the floor and a pilaster of shining marble on the western wall. Into this region of light she moved and, reaching the lower sill of the window, leaned out over the river, listening as though her soul took life from a sound.

The deep voice of a man came upward to her bent ear as though the sound rose from the silvery surface of the water. She could see no one. It was a spirit voice; a spirit voice singing a song, she knew well, 'As I view those scenes so charming,' was the song. This spirit not only sang the song she knew so well, had heard him sing so often, but had borrowed his voice, had borrowed the very quality of the voice which had made her feel insolently secure of her perfect happiness as she lay in his arms while he sang. If this sprit-music was so heavenly up here, so like the music she had long ago heard, and felt until her very heart trembled with ecstacy. it must be a thousand times more exquisite lower down.

She rose from the window-sill and with a footstep soft as the music's self, crept down in dark, stair by stair, steadying herself by the ballustrade lest any noise might mar or destroy the melody. When she reached the foot of the stairs she found the door leading into the parlour open. The song was almost ended. No such mimicry as this could be the work cf mortal man, and no man could be here but Edward Fancourt, the rich suiter of Edith Orr. No light but the light of the moon came from the parlour, so that no one was there. If there was no one in the parlour and yet the voice came from that room, it was plain the music was spirit music, and was sounding here as clear and strong because it came in from the surface of the silver water under the witchery of the moon.

With inaudible tread she stole into the parlour. In this room there was part of a zone of moonlight on the floor and part of a pilaster of gleaming moonlight-made marble against the western wall. But neither the zone nor pilaster was perfect. Each were broken by shadows, the shadow of a man seated on a chair. The moonlight fell full on his face, shone on the moist underlip, shone on the gleaming white teeth, making them white as pearls, with the sparkle of diamonds. The whole of the man's face was in the full light of the moon, his eyes glittered cold and white like small moons. They were fixed on the moon herself, and as he sang with perfect ease and free from all consciousness and preoccupation his appearance was weird, spiritual. When Pollie saw the man she said in her mind, 'lt is his ghost, his spirit. He- never looked so sweet and tender. He will look like that when we meet in Heaven. I am glad I came down. As soon as the song is finished he will disappear—he will melt into mist—he will glide away through the open window.' She stood inside the door and gazed at him until the song was over. He did not disappear or melt away; he simply turned his head and glanced out at the stream. She drew a step nearer with the utmost caution. The sight was unutterably precious to her, and she dreaded that motion of hers might cause it to vanish, and yet it was so intolerably dear it drew her towards it.

The window was no higher than a man's thigh. The chair in which Jeater's sat was low. He leaned forward, and resting his elbow on the sill looked up and down the river, taking his fill of beauty from the lovely night. It was April, the spring. There was no liklihood of Edith and him being married before summer, but in the summer they should be married, and they would go north. They should go on a sea voyage along the Norway coast, inside the multitudinous isles. There the unmooned summer night was never darker than the Thames now. He had read of these sheltered mazes of the sea, and they yield interminable surprises and delight fit for his wondrous sweetheart's eyes. He had never kissed his Edith yet. He had never put his hand round her waist; he had never held her hand unduly. Partly, this was owing to a kind of fear he had of her, partly owing to the fact that they had never met alone, and partly owing to a strange, sickening shirking he had to touch the mourning worn so newly for the man she loved. She had put John Crane's engaged ring away from the finger on which Jeater's ring was to go, but she clad her whole body in mourning for the man who owned her body and soul. But when she came to him here tonight in the moon she would be all white. Even her black gown would borrow radiance from the splendour of the moon, and he should take her quietly in his arms as though it were the mere form of shaking hands when they were alone, and he should kiss her lips as though no other form of greeting were known. When he should hear the front door shut and this late customer had been dismissed he should rise. When the door between himself and this room opened he should go to the door and take his Edith's hand. While he was leading her across the room he should put his arm round her waist, and when they got into the moonlight ho should put his arm'

round his neck and kiss her. He should do it all mechanically, as though no other form of greeting were possible—all—except the kissing. When he held her head in the loop of his arm he should kiss her—as it pleased him —as it might arise—but certainly not as though no other form of greeting were possible. At this point of his thoughts he felt a hand on his arm.

She had come in without his hearing the front door shut, without his noticing the door of communication with the shop open. She was at the right-hand side of the window, the dark side.

1 Dearest!' he cried, spring to his feet. ' Dearest, I did not hear you enter.' She said nothing. He put his arm round her. He had never done so before, and he thought she seemed less tall because he had never touched her waist until now, He had judged her height always in the daylight and by sight, and now he was judging by touch in the dark.

He put his arm round her neck and gathered her head to him with infinite tenderness.

'My love, my love! My only love !' he moaned into her ear, and kissed her upturned lips before he moved his feet. Then, that he might feast his eyes on her sweet beauty before these not unwilling lips again, he drew her into the moonlight, holding her neck still in the loop of his arm. He moved slowly. He moved so that the full light of the moon might fall upon her faee.

When he saw what he had kissed and he still held in the loop of his arm, it was the corpse of his wife. God had found out his crime and sent the dead body of his wife as witness.

With the yell of a lost soul seeing its accuser and knowing its doom Jeaters sprang through the window into the Thames. Pollie uttered a piercing shriek, and sank gibbering on a chair. ' What is the matter,' cried Crane, bursting open the door from the shop. ' It was not his ghost,' whispered Pollie. ' It was my husband himself. When he kissed me felt the broken tooth against my lip.' CHAPTER LII. The Last. Whether Frank Jeaters was drowned that night or not no one ever knew. The fate which he had designed for his wife had befallen himself. He had dropped into the Thames and never been heard of after. Whatever chance Pollie had of recovering her reason was for ever lost that night. She waxed in body and waned in mind. She reremained the gentle, uncomplaining companion of Edith, who remained no longer Edith Orr than it took John Crane to sell his gems and buy up the business of Whighton and Fry. Upon the investigation of Wrighton and Fry it came out that the business stood in no way responsible for the collapse of the firm. Neither of the partners were satisfied with twenty per cent trade profits. Both had plunged into speculations in hides or railways

in Peru, or ostrich farming at the Cape, into everything or anything so long as it had nothing to do with the trade to which either had been brought up. Those who had known John Crane during the few years of his manhood placed unlimited confidence in his grasp of his business, his shrewdness, his inventive genius, and his absolute integrity. One of his first acts on getting into the new premises was to offer Ben Sherwin the best position that highly respectable married man was qualified to fill in the grand establishment on the viaduct. The salary attached to Ben's new position was of so satisfactory a character that Ben told Kate, his wife, he was now able to support not one wife but" two, and that he intended to marry another as soon as he found a second in every respect the double of Kate herself. But as he informed her with mock dolour, neither he nor anyone else could find anyone within four thousand per cent of the requirements of the case, there was a very strong chance of his remaining to the end of his life an insufficiently married man. ' Under these melancholy circumstances, my dear,' he said to his wife, ' I think the best thing I can do is to give you your own share of the money and the share of the other wife, as well as two or three times the love I would give to each of you if I was married to both of you. I am firm about the money, my dear, but if you want more of the love say the i word, and I'll try .jand meet you in the lane when the clock strikes nine, or in any other way that may be for our mutual advantage—please address care of Wrighton and Fry, Holborn Viaduct, London, E.C., post paid enclosing a penny postage stamp for a reply, not necessarily for publication, but as a guarantee of good faith.' After the marriage of Edith and John Crane, and when they were living most happily, but with Mrs Orr inHampstead, John Crane set. up Nancy Natchbrook as a stationer and paper seller at No 8, Muscovy Place, at which she was much nearer to the great arsenal where Jim was employed than she had been in the Isle of Dogs. Mrs Natchbrook, the elder, did not require help from anyone, and would have resented the offer of it, as she had not only a business which more than sufficed, but a stocking as well as the embroidered handkerchiefs. It was more than suspected at the Isle of Dogs stairs that George Sayers would, notwithstanding his sayings against women, have been glad to have signed a fresh deed of partnership with one of the name of Natchbrook at any church licensed for the registration of such deeds. Mrs Natchbrook did not, however, at all second his desires, and upon George ascertaining the unwillingness of the widow, it is said his gloom could not be expressed by any words man is acquainted with, and that after a period of silence his language was such towards women in general that no respectable printer could be supposed to keep letters capable of set them up in type, The story of John Crane's extraordinary adventures in foreign parts had got noised abroad, and great curiosity being felt in the

expedition which resulted in so astounding a piece of luck, one of the.interviewers of the Evening Bulletin waited On him to obtain an account of his adventure from the time of his leaving Balize. At first Grane's modesty made him decline even seeing the journalist; But Ben Sherwin's love of romance, which, owing to some strange perversion of riiind, he connected with anything in print, was brought to bear on his friend, to the resuljt that the following account appeared in the Bulletin one fine evening that summer.

'Since Mr John Crane's return from Central America he has not been able to spare time for househouating. At present he occupies spacious and handsomely furnished apartments in Bedford Row, Russell Square. Mr Crane is the most modest and unassuming of men. In an interview accorded a representee of the Evening Bulletin, he began by saying that all ;his adventures had come to him by accident, that he was a cockney born, and would have been quite content to end his days without sight of a more savage landscape than thi view from Hampstead Heath or Greenwich Park, or experience of more dangerous seas than the English Channel at Brighton.

'Mr Crane's mission io Guatemala was undertaken in connection with the death of an uncle out there. For the purposes of this interview it will be sufficient to say that instead of receiving a considerable sum of money in Vera Paz, Mr Crane found himself in a wild, half-civilised country, without the prospect of a penny of the fortune he expected, that he was robbed of everything he had by a band of marauders, that for days and days he wandered alone through the trackless primeval forest, emerging finally on the Pineridge of British Honduras, where the first person he met was an'outlawed Englishman, the leader of a brigand -band, and that Mr Crane finally found himself in Balize, the only town in British Honduras, without a farthing or a friend. In Balize, Mr Crane succeeded in borrowing a few pounds and shipped as ' boy' on the Opal, a barque hailing from Hull and bound to London with a cargo otlogwood. Interviewer: ' I believe, Mir Crane, you knew nothing of the sea?' Mr Crane: 'Nothing whatever. lam a watchmaker and optician by trade, and was never at sea even as a passenger until I went to America. Of course, Captain Bains, of the Opal, was aware of this. He told me he would not expect me to go aloft, I was to make myself useful on deck.'

Interviewer:...' Did- anything remarkable happen at the beginning orthe voyage ?'

Mr Crane: 'No; 'we had beautiful weather.'

Interviewer: 'Perhaps you will be kind enough to tell me what befel later?' Mr Crane: *We were some days out when one morning I heard the mate say he did not like the look.of it. 1 >'lt"- at sea always means the weather.. The. day- was very hot and oppressive, with little or no wind, and we went along chiefly by the aid of the current, an aid which Captain Bains conld well do without, as he was new to the coast, which was at this point thick with coral islands, inside a line of which we had kept after leaving Balize. Next day it began to blow shortly after dawn, and almost instantly it seemed to me a terrible cyclone was upon us. When it struck us I was on the poop. The barque lay over, I rolled into the waist, and was washed clean out of the ship by; a tremendous wave which seemed to come along with the first of the wind.' / Interviewer:'You were washed overboard?'. Mr Crane: 'Yes.' . Interviewer: ' Was an effort made to rescue you?' I Mr Crane: 'Fortunately not, or rather fortunately I was not resound. If I had been rescued by the Opal then j I should not be here now. Within a few/miles of where I was swept overboard she struck on a coral reef, and she and every in her perished.' Interviewer: 'We lefli you, Mr Crane, struggling the water.' I Mr Crane: ' The Opal carried a few light spars lashed together on.'deck, and these were swept off by the sea which carried me overboard. They were tumbling and tossing about in the water, and*l swam for them as well as I could and succeeded in reaching them. There were four spars lashed together. Fortunately the lashing held and they formed a rude raft. In very few minutes the awful wind passed. The sea had not time to get up, and that evening the raft grounded on a long, low island, and I scrambled ashore.' Interviewer: ' Not much the worse of your wetting.' Mr Crane: ' Not much the worse of my ducking, but very much the worse of the rolling grinding of the long, loose spars. It appears Captain Bains ought not to have been in among these islands.' Interviewer: ' The island you found yourielf on was uninhabited.' Mr Crane: ' Oh, yes. It was uninhabited at the time.'Interviewer: ' And barren ?'

Mr Crane : 'On the contrary, it was covered with the most luxuriant growths of all kinds of tropical plants and flowers, but no trees.' Interviewer: ' And there you found something very wonderful ?' Mr Crane: ' Yes. The island proved almost perfectly flat. It was about two miles long by » mile broad, and there was a hollow, and in the hollow were three shallow artificial openings. These openings were about twenty feet deep, ten feet broad, and seven feet high. They were perfectly dry, and contained a few articles of old Spanish furniture dropping to pieces. There were two old rusty flint-lock guns, and a couple of swords eaten through with rust. In one of the caves I found a mouldering mass of what had been a man. It was lying among the ruins of a rotten chair. Before the chair lay the rotten remains of a table. A few old-fashioned drinking glasses lay among the fragments of the. table, and when I stirred the bones and rags of what had been a man, what must have been a stout waist-belt felt in powder, and among its dust I found three hundred and two large cut stones which I sold for twentyseven thousand pounds. Interviewer: 'Andhow long were you on the island V Sfr Crane! 1&, month.!

Interviewer: ' Had you any difficulty about food?'

Mr Crane : ' No. In the forest I almost starved. But in that region when you are not shut in under trees, or lost in a sea of grass, when, in fact, there is any kind of mixed vegetation, everything is food. You have only to stretch out your hand and pluck and eat.' Interviewer : ' And how did you get off ?' Mr Crane: ' I was taken off by another homeward bound vessel—the Sea Mew, bound for the Thames, with logwood, too. That is the most marvellous part of my story. Only that vessel, the Sea Mew, of Aberdeen, was out of her course too, the chances are that in another couple of hundred years someone might find a second heap of bones and rags in that cave and the treasure it has been my good fortune to carry to England.' Interviewer: 'So that you have been lost in the forest and lost in the sea ?' Mr Crane: ' Yes. I have been twice lost.' ' [The End.]