LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VI, Issue 663, 4 August 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

THE ONE AND THE OTHER. Chapter 11. (Continued .) He carried the dagger in unrelaxed solicitude : it might help him to make his own life possible; for it might help him out of life, should his scheme fail. The lighter man had never seen, and did not know the darker, until he had come aboard the previous night; the darker man had never seen the lighter until the night before, but he knew him. He was there because the other was there. He had come all the way from England to make this voyage with this man. To make with this man this voyage—or a portion of it, rather; not all—not all. It was his plan that they should not go the whole way together; yet the ship would touch at no port until she reached her final destination. There were four state-rooms in the ship . two at the foot of the companion ladder, one occupied by the captain and his wife, the other by the chief mate; two off the main cabin, one on the left as you entered, that is at the starboard side, occupied by the fair man—one on the right, close to the door, occupied by the dark man. A slip of thick glass, two inches wide and twelve long, was let into the deck over each state room. Through this a weak, thin light penetrated, and filled the state-rooms with a feeble phosphorescent mist, enough to discover large objects, without clearly disclosing their forms. By the skylight of the main cabin a broader and fuller light entered; and close to the barometer suspended in the skylight hung a lamp with a floating wick, which made a dull yellowglow. The door of the state-room on the left was unfastened, because its occupant suspected no one. The door of the stateroom on the right was fastened, because its occupant suspected every one of suspecting. At half-past eleven the officer of the watch came down to the main cabin to look at the barometer and examine the chart. He carried a lantern with him; for the light of the lamp was not sufficient to see the chart by. He staid a few minutes, and then went away, taking the lantern with him. At midnight the door of the room on the right was slowly and cautiously opened, and the occupant of the room crept noiselessly out into the main cabin. He was fully dressed. He shielded his eyes from the light of the lamp with one hand, and with the other steadied himself as he crossed the floor on tiptoe to the door of the other room. Here he bent down and listened intently for a long time. ‘He is asleep,’ he thought, and, pulling the door softly towards him, entered the other’s room, and drew the door close once more. He remained half an hour, crept cautiously back, regained his own stateroom, and flung himself into his berth without undressing. He wiped his forehead, shuddered, and, putting his hand under the pillow, brought forth the dagger, muttering as he did so ; ° ‘ It’s -well I hadn’t you with me I If I had had you with me when he struck, you should be red now, and all would be spoilt. There is no good in wasting a life. Either he or I must go; but it would be folly for me to send both off. I must not tempt myself again in that way. I must not hear him breathing in the dark again. I must not feel again his arms elapsed tightly across his chest, as though he held her, and dreamed her arms were around him, her sighs in his ears, her breath upon his face. Oh—oh —oh ! ’ He growled, and kneeling up, and raising the dagger as high as the deck-planks would allow, he grasped the bed-clothes, dug his knees into them, as though he held his enemy beneath him, and, uttering a suppressed yell, struck with the dagger at the bed, and ground his teeth with a hoarse cry of delight when he felt that the blade had passed through the clothes and the shallow mattress, and bitten deeply into the wool beneath. He lay back exhausted, and mused : * He’s a powerful man. He could take me across his knee and break my back as he would a sapling. He could lift me with one hand, and fling me down yards away. I felt his muscles. I felt them creep like steel beneath my fingers before he struck. If that blow had met me, I should have been killed, or stunned, or maimed for life. . . . And what better am I than one maimed for life ? Am I not maimed for life ? 111-made, puny, mean-looking, and yet with the fire of ten thousand rages shaking me asunder. Why do not some of my paroxysms kill me! That bullet through my shoulder did not help to strengthen me much. Oh that woman !—that woman ! I have been mad about her. I am mad still, I am always mad, only people do not see it. If a man is free with his money, they call him mad. If a man sacrifice himself for his country, or his creed, or humanity, they call him mad. If a man forgives his enemies, they call him mad. If a man tell all the truth, they call him mad. If a man render up treasure-trove, they call him mad. If a man cannot reconcile being edifying in speech and criminal in action, they call him mad. But no man who has the reputation of being a thorough, sound, whole, undeviating, unscrupulous money-grubber has ever yet been called mad by any son of Adam who once had held gold in his hands. And I affect the universal specific; and because I talk figures and quote exchanges I pass current as sane, and will to the end, though I swear the sun is blue and man’s body incorruptible.’ Next morning at breakfast the taller passenger said to the captain : ‘ Are there rats in the ship ?’ ‘ There are few ships afloat without them. They’re lucky.’ ‘But I mean are there any aft—hereabouts.’ ‘ Well, one crept across my throat last night. I felt him. I waited until I judged him to be on the edge of the berth, and then I struck at him, missed him, and hit the back of a chair. Look.’ And he held up his great right hand, the outer edge of which was swollen and blue. ‘Oh!’ cried the captain’s wife, ‘his poor hand ! You must put it in warm water. I’ll fetch some from the galley. ’ And si e went, and returned soon with hot water in a basin, and stuped his hand. He smiled, and made little of his mishap, and the captain’s wife smiled at him. ‘ Such a hand !’ she murmured, in soothing admiration. * What a blow it could strike ! Why, the poor chair must be in splinters. Does it,’

holding and chafing the hand in both hers, •belong to any one ?’ 1 ‘Yes,’ he answered, with a soft smile of memory and expectation. ‘The hand is going back to some one that owns it, and. it must get well in a hurry ; for, although it s so big and clumsy, you’d be surprised how well satisfied a small white one is to lie in it.* . . -I • ‘ No, no—not surprised. It is a man s hand, big and powerful. I am not surprised. Are you suprised V glancing at her husband, ‘ No. But you will make it soft like a woman’s if you keep it too long in that water. The hurt is nothing—the cure very bad.’ He laughed a simple-hearted laugh at his own wit. The dark passenger rose hastily, and went on deck. ‘The coffee must have scalded him, laughed the captain’s wife. ‘ Upon my word,’ smiled the fair passenger, looking at his hand, ‘it seemed more like jealousy than a burn.’ The three enjoyed this joke a great deal, and continued their breakfast. When the other gained the deck, he walked quickly up and down awhile. Then going amidships, he swung himself up on the bulwarks, and seizing the gunwale of a boat still hanging on the davits, leaped into her, flung himself down on the sternsheet, and lay upon his back, with eyes of devouring jealousy turned upon the blue chasm between the two bluff cliffs of sails rising at each side of him to the pale sky. ‘ Did you see it ?’ he cried in tremulous rage. * Did you see it ? She—this woman, this captain's wife—smiled on him, and laughed at me 1 That is always the way. Always my fate. Can I help myself ? No, But what has made me vile ? What has made me reckless? What has driven me mad? It is this contrast of smiles. This captain’s wife is half in love with him—or at least has that reflected interest in him which a good wife, the wife of a good husband, feels for the good husband of another woman. It is a kind of great-hearted freemasonry of which I can never learn the signs, Never! Never! Never! What delicious sympathy. I saw that captain’s wife play with this man’s hand as though she sought to soothe his pain by deceiving him into the belief a hand far away was caressing him. Oh ! that hand far away ! I would give all my life, my soul, the whole inventory of my passion, for that hand !’ He glared at the sky, as though it were a living foe. Then he drew up his knees to his chin, uttered a wild imprecation, and shot out all his limbs suddenly and lay still, with white, damp face, exploring the viewless depths of the chasm of sky between the two buff cliffs of sails. * # * * The ship had sailed out of the southern winter seas into spring of the southern tropics. For days she had been becalmed, rolling slowly to and fro in a warm, placid ocean. An awning had been spread over the quarter-deck, and here in the cool afternoons the captain, his wife, and the two passengers walked or sat. The dull monotony of the p.fllm weighed heavily upon all, and various Elans had been tried to beguile the tedious ours. An hour before dusk one evening, the captain ordered a bottle to be suspended from the foreyard by a string, and getting up a gun, the three men spent the time till dusk trying to strike the bottle with a bullet. At dark the bottle still hung uninjured, and they agreed to let it swing, and renew the pastime the next evening. Since they had entered milder latitudes, the fair passenger had slept on deck for coolness. Ttie other passenger still slept in his state-room. On the night of the first evening’s shooting, all but the watch had retired before eleven o’clock. The tall passenger lay on his mattress under the awning. The captain and his wife had withdrawn to their stateroom. The dark traveller was in his stateroom, All but the watch and the dark tra veller were asleep. He lay on his back, with his eyes fixed on the dull blur of blue where the glass was let into the deck. There was not a sound aboard the vessel, save now and then a slumberous creak of spar or cordage, as the ship rolled slightly to one side or the other. The waking man was thinking—thinking in words, as the miserable always do, the happy never, ‘We are nearly halfway home now,’he mused, ‘ and yet there has been no chance. I have been utterly useless, powerless. It is not as easy as 1 thought it would be. To think that two men are shut up in this vessel face to face, meeting every day, never two hundred feet apart, and yet I can devise no plan ! It seems incredible. I have been wasting time. I must look around me sharply. Ay, that’s easy to say, but how is the thing to be done ?’ He stopped thinking for awhile to rest his mind, in order that it might be in full vigor when he took up the main subject. But his mind began to run on again before he had given it permission, and in a direction not exactly such as he had reserved it for. * It is utterly impossible that we two land ever again. If such a thing happened, I should be in 'a dock within a month. She would, of course, tell no one now near her of that night.l got the bullet in my shoulder. But when he is back ; when they sit in the evening looking at the sea; when his arm is around her waist, and her head is on his shoulder ; when they have kissed and sighed, and sighed and kissed again, great, alow, long kisses—Ugh ! Curse me ! . . . lam killing myself with such pictures; and worse, 1 am confusing my head, and confounding my purpose. . . . She will tell him, and he will not lie still. I shall be arrested ; I shall be tried for attempting to break into a house with a burglarious intent; I shall be convicted. That won’t do. Death is a trifle compared to that. My own death is a trifle compared to that; and his death—nothing at all.’ (To he continued.)