ALL’S WELL.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XIV, Issue I, 5 January 1895, Page 14

ALL’S WELL.

CHAPTER I. ELL’S well!’ • All’s well I’ The masical 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 the 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 >-".ek 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 halfclosed 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 be murmured them, each time that his listening biain 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 see.

His fellow passengers on board the ship knew him as the silent man. No doubt he bad some other name ;no doubt the captain knew it, and the ship’s book 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 frame an answer to another; few who bad not wondered who this man was, with his murmuring lips and his taciturnity and bis 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 silent 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 dne to sound—but the cry that broke then from one of the two motionless figures on the lookout 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 an iceberg, held fast in the jagged cleft that her prow bat cut—then slowly, with a rushing swirl of the 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 lieat of his oar in the rowlock seemed to him, as be 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 horrors 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. Of nights when the rising breeze blew through their saturated clothes and chilled the very life within them ; when other boats, the companions of their fate, were missed and lost sight of; when the great rolling swell threatened in the darkness to overwhelm them, and each giant wave as it passed seemed only to delay the death that the next must surely bring ; when the misery and anguish and despair were made deeper and blacker and more intolerable by the darkness.

Of days and nights later on, when the beat, and thirst, and weakness had done their work, and men began to rave and sing aloud, and say wild unmeaning things; when fever and death came among them ; when it was no longer a strange sight to see dead men—their bodies stripped that their clothing might afford protection to the living— cast over into the gray waves without a prayer, almost without a thought; when the number of living souls on board that little boat shrank awfully from day to day. When there were at last but six alive—but five—and then, one dim, gray morning, only three 1 The Silent Man still lived. Through all those days he lived. Through all those days be lived—silent, unmoved, uncomplaining, working at his oar like a tireless machine, possessed, as it were, with a very greed for life. Through all those days he lived—untouched by hunger or thirst, by heat or cbil), 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 that night when he paced to and fro on the deck of the Amsterdam. He had dreamed the same dream but not quite all of it: had seen the same dream-figures, sleeping and waking, for twelve months past; but now —in his weakness and the horror of his daily life, with madness and delirium and death all around him—the dream figures gathered colour 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 trelliswork, on which a rose tree climbs stragglingly. The garden, bright with flowering lilac and drooping arboursof laburnum, and all the uncultured profusion of Englsh conntry flowers. The air around filled with the fragrance of the blossoms and tbe spring song of 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 nnimpaired 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.

A shadow at first thin and gray, that seems, for all it is so slight, to rob the sunshine suddenly 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 tbe little porch; that steals up swiftly, like a cloud of deadly vapour, 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 eyes and a false smile—a face that might, for all its coarseness, be made attractive by that luring smile, yet in itself cruel, atql 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 sprge of blood-red light floods over the gibing face, and hides it from view, and there is only the gray shadow left. So far, tbe vision.had always been the same ; but lately, since tbe Silent Man had taken his passage on board the Amsterdam, there had been something more which followed 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 No. 26 Omaha avenue, Lnmberville, U.S.A. The characters range themselves unerringly before his mind: * I have sinned, and God knows I have repented. Ido not ask to be forgiven. That cannot be. But for our child's sake, our 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 snre 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 listened to the washing of the waves as they splashed on the boat's side, and laughs softly to himself as they, too, seem to bear the same message—• All’s well I’ 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 tbe sun to show that the deathly fog had rolled a way,that all was clear as far as the horizon line, that a sailing ship was standing down towards 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 to rescue them ; that in the moment of their preservation from 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 to 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 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 tbe equator. It was close on two months from that glorious dawn when the little boat bad 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 roots 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 harbour. 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 saw the chill shadow creep up the cottage wall, and the face fashion itself out of the shadow, and tbe 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 ;itis 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. Hu 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-coloured waves, and tbe gray 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 was made welcome in a rough, yet - kindly fashion ; 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 tbe silent, uncouth man. Cities of six months’ growth proud in their uprising buildings, which never would be finished, and their mighty streets, which never wonld 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. CHAPTER 11. It was 3 30 in the afternoon when the limping figure—his clothes torn and grimed with dust, bis face and hands scorched and seamed and blackened by exposure—slouched up under the shade of the eucalyptus trees that skirted Omaha Avenue. His right band was hidden in his breast His hungry, bloodshot eyes scanned the houses furtively as he passed. Number twenty-six. 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 a 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 as you’ve been doin’ a bit of walking,’ continued the woman, still smiling. * And by ’pearauces 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 conld give yer a bite and a drop of ice water, and not hurt myself. ’ The man wetted 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 got to do with you, anyhow ? Are ye a friend of Mr Spencer’s ?’ He started, and a sudden light came into his filmy, bloodshot eyes. * Then he does live here ? I am—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 bis 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 you're just wrong,’ she answered with some asperity, rocking herself a trifle more energetically. * And not much loss either. And if you’re a friend of his, I don’t envy you, 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 and go clean off, he’s what I 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 1’

He would have fallen but for tbe stem of the eucalyptus tree. He leaned against it, shivering. His eyes gazed dreamily at tbe 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 a scarlet butterfly, as it fluttered quiveringly from flower to flower. It seemed as if his brain were numbed and unable to think. Try as he would he could not think.

The woman looked at him compassionately. * I’m sorry if I’ve skeered yon, she said more gently. •! just didn t know as you were acquainted with Mrs Spencer, or I wouldn’t have bluffed it out like that. But it’s tbe truth anyway ; so it 'ud have had to come out all the same way, one word or one 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 hie hand. It- had fallen from bis breast now.

• No, no,’ he whispered. • Tell me how it was.’ Tbe thoughts were coming back to him now—black evil thoughts, that he shuddered vaguely to remember; thoughts of what he had came there for, thoughts of how it had all ended with that woman’s word, * Dead 1’

• You’d best have something, for yon do look real bad, the woman persisted. * Bat there, if you won’t, I s pose you 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 I And she was frit of him, downright frit—conldn t shear of him, far’s J could see, and yet daren’t speak to him hardly, she was that frit. Well, sir, I told you that they had a child * —she was getting loquacious now, in 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 onderstand exactly whose 'twas, and he was more of a skunk to that child then it’s in the natur of man to be to his own, and the child was took sick with the dipbthery. 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 to her while the man was with her—l don’t mind confessin’— with her dolly face and fool ways and no more spir’t 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 ehild, and sat up with her, day and night and Sundays and workdays, and never took no food, so 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 I And I—you’d j ust as well change your mind and have something,* the woman interposed earnestly, * you’re lookin’ that skeered.* The man shook his head irritably.

■Go on.’ * Well, there ain’t mnch more to tell. She took the dipbthery then, as I said, and took it bad. And there was no one to nurse her—'cept what I did, and that wasn’t much—and she’d sorter taken the grit out of herself with all the nursin’ and watchin’ and starving herself, and she couldn’t seem ter 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 tike care of her, if you understand ; so me and my husban’ 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 wee playing in the hedge by the patch of sunflowers roee and turned toward them, an instant she hesitated, shyly, wonderingly; then suddenly she Stretched out her little arms and began to run across the ro&d. * Daddy !’ she cried.

The last tinge of golden light was fading from the crests of the waves. The last faint flush of the sunset was fading from the western sky. A tall, lna “ the haired girl, ripening into womanhood, werestandingonthe hurricane-deck of the ocean steamer, watching the flush as rict m2’from out West, everybody knew. Had been Mayor of Lumberville, some said, and had made a great fortune in livestock and grain. A self-made man, who had risen from nothing, but deserved his success by straightforwardness and hard work. And the girl was his dS The flush faded from the violet summer sky. The stars came out, one by one, shining brightly in its cle *J, de P tt !’’ 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. Wien it rose on the mono, 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 voice rang out once more over the silent waters : • All’s well!’ •All’s well I’