ALL'S WELL.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue 4252, 26 June 1895, Page 6

ALL'S WELL.

"All's well!" " All's well !" The musical cry floated down from the two black figures that stood vaguely outlined through the mist, high above the vessel's deck. It floated down in ever widening ripples, round the great black hull and over the tossing waters. It was caught by the waves as they dashed from the vessel's prow and raced past her tall sides and foamed and splashed and eddied in her wake. It was caught up and thrown back and carried on again and swept out into the night— out into the night and shrouding mist and the rolling waves of the Atlantic, and there the ripples of its sound quivered for the last time and died away. It floated down, already muffled by the mist, over the long wet decks to the ears of a man who paced to and fro in the after part of the vessel. It floated down and struck upon his ears and vibrated in them like the ringing of a bell. And the man turned in his restless walk and paced back again, with the cry still echoing in his ears " All's well." He even repeated it to himself, softly, slowly, like one trying to reassure himself of some good news, too good to be as yet believed. He murmured it to himself with half-closed lips each time that he paused in that monotonous pacing to and fro. His footsteps fell upon the deck and beat out the rhythm of the same two words. And each time that he murmured them, each time that his listening brain caught that sound in the rushing of the wind, or the whistling of the ropes, or the steady tramp of his own footfalls, there was a smile upon his face that was not good to 1 see. His fellow passengers on board the ship knew him as the Silent Man. No doubt he had some other name, no doubt the captain knew it, and the ship's books held it written down in full, but to all the passengers who knew him he was known only as the Silent Man. And there were few on board who knew him not ; few who had not noticed the tall, gaunt figure that strode incessantly to and fro and up and down upon the deck ; few who had not shrunk insensibly from that haggard face and the lips that murmured forever to themselves, but could hardly be brought to fame an answer to another ; few who had not wondered who this man was, with his murmuring lips, and his taciturnity, and his ceaseless tramp on the ship's deck ; who had not speculated on the business that brought him on that voyage of the Amsterdam across the broad Atlantic. Once more the bell sounded, and the voices rang out through the darkness. And the Sijent Man still paced, with bowed head and folded arms, up and down, to and fro, in the gathering mist. Once again the bell was almost due to sound, but the cry that broke then from one of the two motionless figures on the look-out bridge was not the same— a cry of sudden fear, of wild alarm, with waving arms, and frantic gestures, and hands pointing out into the darkness, pointing into the darkness no longer now, pointing at something vast and shapeless, like a cloud rising from the water; something that came swiftly, noiselessly, loomingly out of the fog, ever nearer and nearer, or towering high above the vessel's masts, lit with a strange glimmering light ; something that a moment later, with a noise of crackling ice, with a horrible, rending, grinding jar, with a blow that made the great ship quiver like a compass needle, crashed into the bows of the Amsterdam. For an instant she remained reared up against the iceberg, held fast in the jagged cleft that her prow had cut, then slowly, with a rushing swirl of water, slid back into the waves. She was sinking in mid- Atlantic ! One of the first boats that were launched contained the Silent Man. He had taken his place quietly, almost mechanically. He was rowing now, and the beat of his oar in the rowlock seemed to him as he gazed back at the misty outline of the sinking ship to be still grimly, darkly, ominously echoing those words "All's well ! " All that night they rowed, menaced incessantly by masses of detached ice, by floating wreckage, by foam - topped surf that broke over the open boat— all that night and the next day and for many days after. Who can tell the horror of those days ? Of days when the shrouding mist robbed them of all hope of rescue ; when the sun beat down through the damp-laden atmosphere for hour after hour on their uncovered heads ; when no cloud in the sky came to screen them for an instant from its scorching, dazzling rays ; when they drifted they scarcely knew whither, and heard afar off the fog signals of vessels that passed them unheeded in the mist ; when arms ached and strength was failing, and hunger and thirst were doing their fell work, and courage and hope together were well-nigh spent. Through all those days he lived, untouched by hunger or thirst, by heat or chill, by fatigue or exposure or despair ; through all those days, unheeding everything around him, living in a sort of dream. He had dreamed the same waking dream i that night when he paced to and fro on the I deck of the Amsterdam. He had dreamed the same dream, but not quite all of it, had seen the same figures, sleeping and waking, for twelve months past j but now, in his weakness and the horror of his daily life, with madness and delirium and death all around him, the figures gathered color and vividness and substantiality — they became to his disordered brain as living comrades, living and moving with him in a different world. The scenes of the vision always recurred in the same order. A cottage lying at the end of a long shaded garden. The sun shining on the red- tiled roof, and the white muslin curtains in the little windows, and the rustic porch of trellis work, on which a rose tree climbs Btragglingly. The garden bright with flowering lilac and drooping arbors of laburnum and all the uncultured profusion of English country flowers. The air around filled with the fragrance of the blossoms and the spring songs of the countless birds. And over all a sense of brightness and happiness and home. A little two-year-old child, toddling with open arms and laughing eyes, down the gravel path. A fair haired young mother, that runs and catches up the little girl and bears her, with merry laughter, held aloft in her arms, down the path to meet the dreaming man. A moment of exquisite happiness, of mutual love, of joy so boundless that it seems to fill the soul and brim over. A time of happy rest, of unimpaired content, when those two sit in the rose twined porch, with the child playing at their feet, and watch the sun as he sinks to his rest. A shadow that falls like a knife between the dreaming man and his wife. i A shadow at first thin and grey, that seems, for all it is so slight, to rob the sunshine of all its warmth and brightness and leave the evening cold and cheerless. A shadow that grows quickly broader and blacker and icier until it blots out the figures of the wife and child and darkens the little j porch, that steals up quickly, like a cloud of deadly vapor, round the red tiles of the cottage roof and wraps all the picture at last in an impenetrable shroud. A shadow that somehow gathers itself gradually into the form of a man's face — coarse, thick lipped, sensuous, with gloating

Your Wife.

eyes and a false smile — a face that might for all its coarseness be made attractive by that luring smile, yet in itself cruel and dissolute and evil looking. Slowly the face emerges from behind that shadowy curtain. Slowly the features come dimly forth as one by one they recur to the tortured mind of the man in his waking dream. Slowly the eyes of the dream face turn and gaze down upon him mockingly. Then a great surge of blood-red light floods over the gibing face and hides it from view, and there is only the grey shadow left. So far the vision has always been the same, but lately, since the Silent Man had taken his passage on board the Amsterdam, there had been something more which folfowed it— another ending to the never ending dream. An ending in which he sees a scrap of paper, traced over with trembling characters — a letter dated four weeks before from 26 Omaha avenue, Lumberville, U.S A. The characters range themselves unerringly before his mind: — I have sinned, and God knows I have repented. I do not ask to be forgiven. That cannot be. But for our child's sake, for little Goldie's sake, come quickly. She who was once Your Wife. The Silent Man's hand steals into the breast of his coat and touches something there — something hard and cold, made of metal ; something that he touches softly and caressingly, looking at his fingers afterward to make sure that the sea water has not reached it ; something that in the darkness of the night, as he lies crouching in the bows of the tossing boat, he takes from his breast and examines and weighs in his hand. And he listens to the washing of the waves as they splash on the boat's side and laughs softly to himself as they, too, seem to bear the same message : " All's well !" All was yet well— for what he had to do. The morning dawned at last, when there were but two living souls besides himself on board the boat — dawned with a glorious uprising of the sun to show that the deathly fog had rolled away ; that all was clear as far as the horizon line ; that a sailing ship was standing down toward them. They were saved ! Who shall say what those men felt ? Who shall describe the weeping and laughter intermixed, the incoherent cries of joy, the frantic waving of the emaciated arms, the wild ejaculations of confused thanksgiving and imprecation that burst from their blackened lips? Who shall wonder that but for their failing strength they would have cast themselves into the waves and struggled to gain the boat that was lowered Qo rescue them ; that in the moment of their preservation from a death but a few hours distant their minds became distraught ? All save the Silent Man. He alone was calm. To him alone their rescue seemed not unexpected. To him alone it was not a miracle like the raising from the dead. To him alone it was but the fulfilment of an omen. The sailing ship that picked them up was bound for Rio, but the Silent Man was destined to dream that strange dream many a time yet before land was reached. For several weeks they beat about on the Atlantic. They were delayed by head winds, thrown out of their course by constantly recurring gales, becalmed for three whole days on the Equator. It was close upon two months from that glorious dawn when the little boat had been espied drifting on the waste of tossing waters that they first saw the coast of Brazil, like a streak of bluish cloud rising behind the sea line, opening out before them. Their voyage was nearly at an end. The bluish cloud resolved itself into dark green masses of vegetation, growing down to the water's edge. The vegetation became dotted and broken by the white roofs of buildings. The buildings collected themselves together, tier beyond tier, and blocked out the vegetation. A great concourse of masts and spars rose before the buildings. They were entering Rio harbor. It was long yet before the Silent Man resumed his journey. There were inquiries to be made — inquiries wherein the object of that journey was sought for but not revealed. The story of the loss of the Amsterdam and of the awful days that followed it had to be told and told again. A sum of money was raised and paid to him. At last he was embarked for New York. Then followed more days of dazzling heat and glittering water and the rising and falling of the ship's deck, days in which he lay inactive watching the feathery clouds that floated across the sky, tracing the ship's wake as it wound over the glassy surface of the sea, nights in which he again saw the chill shadow creep up the cottage wall, and the face fashion itself out of the shadow, and the flash of blood that ended it all. And then his hand would seek the thing that he carried in his breast, and he would look at it stealthily in the moonlight and laugh exultingly to himself. Once more he was on land, in the crowded streets of New York. He wanted to get to Lumberville. It is a long distance, almost half way across the continent. But he had got plenty of time to do that which he had come to do. His money would not suffice to carry him the whole way. For two days he travelled by the railroad, fancying in the motion of the cars that he was still at sea, expecting almost as he looked from the windows of the car to see the leaden-colored waves and the grey mist and the tangles of floating seaweed. Then his money was gone, and he must walk. Rough, loosely made roads, thick with sand and grit. Long days' tramps under the broiling sun, when the little hillock or the stunted tree that looked so close at hand across the unbroken level of the prairie was only reached after half an hour's weary walking. Starlit nights, when he cast himself down on the long coarse grass, to sleep the deathlike sleep of exhaustion, to dream once more that never - changing dream. Homesteads of hewn timber, where he wa, made welcome in a rough yet kindly fashions where he was allowed to sleep perhaps on a bed of straw in the empty barn, where round-eyed children brought him milk and hunches" of bread, and stayed behind to stare at the silent uncouth man. Cities of six months' growth, proud in their uprising buildings, which never would be finished, and their mighty streets, which never would be built. Cities in which he was received with cold suspicion, as another competitor in that struggling throng of hungered humanity, whence he was watched on his departure with unconcealed relief. More homesteads, more aspiring cities, more of the rolling boundlessness of the prairies. And then — Lumberville. It was half-past three in the afternoon when the limpering figure, his clothes torn and grimed with dust, his face and hands scorched and seamed and blackened by ex- ! posure, slouched up undei- the shade of the eucalyptus trees that skirted Omaha avenue. His right hand was hidden in his breast. Hiß hungry, bloodshot eyea scanned the houses furtively as he passed. No. 26. The man faltered. His hand trembled, even twitched once or twice convulsively, beneath his coat. His eyes turned involuntarily, as it were, towards the house and met the eyes of the woman who was sitting . in the porch. A middle-aged woman with a pleasant, comely face, who lay back in her chair, fanning herself: and rocking gently to and fro in the shadow of the verandah. As the eyes of the Silent Man met hers in a vacant,

wild-looking stare she ceased rocking and smiled, but not unkindly. " Well, you're a pretty figure anyhow," she said. There was a pause. The Silent Man still looked at her. His hand still fumbled beneath his coat. " Seems to me you've been doin' a bit of walkin'," continued the woman, still smiling, " and by 'pearances it's been pretty rough. Are ye hungry?" she inquired suddenly, with a jerk. The Silent Man said nothing. The woman recommenced her rocking and went on talking in her quiet, even voice. "If so be, I s'pose I could give ye a bite and a drop of ice water and not hurt myself." . The man wet his lips with his tongue and spoke all at once, hoarsely, in a curious gabbling whisper : "Is there a man living here — Spencer ?" he said. The woman looked at him keenly. "What has that to do with ye, anyhow? Are ye a friend of Mr Spencer's ?" He started, and a sudden light came into his filmy, bloodshot ayes. " Then he does live here ? lam a friend of his." What is that hand doing that works nervously to and fro beneath his coat, that seems to be clutching something in its grasp, yet never comes from his breast ? The woman does not see it. She is looking across the road at a patch of golden sunflowers that grow in a hedge opposite. When she turns again to the Silent Man the hand is still. " Well, Mr Spencer don't live here now, so ye're just wrong," she answered, with some asperity, rocking herself a trifle more energetically. "And not much loss, either. And if ye're a friend of his I don't envy ye, not much. A man who could go and leave his wife, or who was a wife to him anyway, whatever she was, with a sick child and nary a dollar in the house, leave^her an' go clean off, he's what I'd call a skunk. See there ! " The man had to moisten his lips again before he could speak. " And she ?" he muttered. "She? D'ye mean Mrs Spencer? Well, she's dead, poor soul ! " "Dead!" He would have fallen but for the stem of the eucalyptus tree. He leaned against it, shivering. His eyes gazed dreamily at the sunshine in the road — at the sunshine, and the clump of nodding sunflowers, and the white pinafore of a little girl who was playing round their tall stalks. He even followed with his eyes the flight of the scarlet butterfly as it fluttered quiveringly from flower to flower. It seemed as if his brain was numbed and unable to think. Try as he would, he could not think. The woman looked at him compassionately. "I'm sorry if I'veskeered ye," she said more gently. " I didn't know as ye were acquainted with Mrs Spencer or I wouldn't have bluffed it out like that. But it's, the truth anyway, so it'd have had to come out all the same, one word or a thousand. Maybe ye'd like a drink of ice water," she added quickly as she rose from her chair. The man motioned to her with his hand. It had fallen from his breast now. " No, no," he whispered. " Tell me— how it was." The thoughts were coming back to him now— black, evil thoughts, that he shuddered vaguely to remember, thoughts of what he had come there for, thoughts of how it had all ended with that woman's word " Dead !" "Ye'd best have something, for ye do look real bad," the woman persisted. "But there, if ye won't, I s'pose ye won't. Well," she continued, settling herself once more in the chair and folding her ample arms, " I've said this yer Mr Spencer was a skunk, and a skunk he was to her ! And she was frit of him, downright frit — couldn't a-bear of him, far's I could see, and yet daren't speak to him hardly, she was that frit. Well, sir, I told ye that they had a child "—she was getting loquacious now Jin her placid, droning manner, and rocking herself with a steady swing that seemed to stimulate her conversation — "anyway there was a child with them, though I never could understand exactly whose 'twas, and he was more of a skunk to that child than it's in the natur' of man to be to his own, and the child was took sick with the diphthery. That was when he bolted. Sick as sick the child was, poor little mortal. And then Mrs Spencer come out— come out pretty strong too. I hadn't had much of a notion of her while the man was with her — I don'fc mind confessin' — with her dolly face and fool ways and no more spirt than a chipmunk ; but when she come out as she did come out I kinder changed my ideas of her. Yes, sir ! The way she nursed that child and sat up with her day and night and Sundays and workdays, and never took no food, so's she could buy medicines for the child, and got sick herself and didn't care, but went on nursin' just the same — well, it was pretty strong! And I— ye'd just as well change your mind and have somethin'," the woman interposed earnestly ; " ye're lookin' that skeered." The man shook his head irritably. " Go on." "Well, there ain't much more to tell. She took the diphthery then, as I said, and took it bad. And there was no one to nurse her, 'cept what I did, and thatjwasn't much, and she'd sorter taken the grit out of herself with all the nursin' and watchin' and starvin 3 herself, and she couldn't seem to stand out against it. And so — she died. That's all." There was a long pause. The woman was very quiet. There was a gleam in her eyes as she looked away across the sunny fields, as though tears were standing there. The man still leaned against the stem of the eucalyptus tree, twisting in his hands a fallen leaf that he had caught as it fluttered down. " And the child ?" he said at last. " Did she die?" "No, sir," the woman answered, still very quietly ; " she didn't die. I guess the nursin' saved her. When she come round," she continued presently, " there was no one left to take care of her, if ye understand, so me and my husband, considerin' the lonesomeness of the poor little critter, kinder 'dopted her, not having any children of our own. And she's settled down with us just wonderful. It's real good to have her. Goldie," she cried, "come here, dearie." The man turned quickly, shaking with a strange spasmodic tremor. " Goldie," she called again, softly, " Goldie ! " The little girl, who was playing in the hedge by the patch of sunflowers, rose and | turned towards them. For an instant she I hesitated, shyly, wonderingly. Then sud- | denly she stretched out her little arms and began to run across the road. " Daddy ! " she cried.

The last tinge of golden light was fading from the crest of the waves. The last faint flush of the sunset was fading from the western sky. A tall, grizzled man and golden-haired girl, ripening into womanhood, were standing on the hurricane deck of the ocean steamer, watching the flush as , it paled and died away. I He was a rich man from out West, everybody knew ; had been Mayor of Lumberville, some said, and had made a great fortune in live stock and grain. A selfmade man, who had risen from nothing, but deserved his success by straightforwardness

and hard work. And the girl was his daughter. The flush faded from the summer eky. The stars came out one by one, shining brightly in its clear depths. The man and girl turned from where they stood on the vessel's stern and began to walk slowly back in the direction where the sun, when it rose on the morrow morn, would rise on the rocky headlands and rugged cliffs that the man had last seen from the deck of the Amsterdam as they faded into the blueness of the sky, close on fourteen years before. And as they turned the clear voices rang out once more over the silent waters : "All's well!" "All's well !"— ' All the Year Round.'