His dark face became suddenly irradiated with a terrible joy.
‘Come!’ he said. ‘Over the snow and over the ice! Come! where no human footsteps have ever trodden and where no human trace is ever left.’
Blindly, instinctively, Crayford made an effort to part them. His brother officers, standing near, pulled him back. They looked at each other anxiously. The merciless cold, striking its victims in various ways, had struck in some instances at their reason first.
Everybody loved Crayford. Was he, too, going on the dark way that others had taken before him? They forced him to seat himself on one of the lockers. ‘Steady, old fellow!’
they said kindly—‘steady!’ Crayford yielded, writhing inwardly under the sense of his own helplessness. What in God’s name could he do? Could he denounce Wardour to Captain Helding on bare suspicion—without so much as the shadow of a proof to justify what he said? The Captain would decline to insult one of his officers by even mentioning the monstrous accusation to him. The Captain would conclude, as others had already concluded, that Crayford’s mind was giving way under stress of cold and privation. No hope—literally, no hope now but in the numbers of the expedition. Officers and men, they all liked Frank. As long as they could stir hand or foot they would help him on the way—they would see that no harm came to him.
The word of command was given; the door was thrown open; the hut emptied rapidly.
Over the merciless white snow—under the merciless black sky—the exploring party began to move. The sick and helpless men, whose last hope of rescue centred in their departing messmates, cheered faintly. Some few whose days were numbered sobbed and cried like women. Frank’s voice faltered as he turned back at the door to say his last words to the friend who had been a father to him.
‘God bless you, Crayford!’
Crayford broke away from the officers near him, and, hurrying forward, seized Frank by both hands. Crayford held him as if he would never let him go.
‘God preserve you, Frank! I would give all I have in the world to be with you. Good-bye! Good-bye!’
Frank waved his hand—dashed away the tears that were gathering in his eyes—and hurried out. Crayford called after him, the last, the only, warning that he could give:
‘While you can stand, keep with the main body, Frank!’
Wardour, waiting till the last—Wardour, following Frank through the snow-drift—
stopped, stepped back, and answered Crayford at the door:
‘While he can stand, he keeps with Me.’
THIRD SCENE
THE ICEBERG
XII
Alone! alone on the Frozen Deep!
The Arctic sun is rising dimly in the dreary sky. The beams of the cold northern moon, mingling strangely with the dawning light, clothe the snowy plains in hues of livid grey.
An ice-field on the far horizon is moving slowly southward in the spectral light. Nearer, a stream of open water rolls its slow black waves past the edges of the ice. Nearer still, following the drift, an iceberg rears its crags and pinnacles to the sky; here, glittering in the moonbeams; there, looming dim and ghostlike in the ashy light.
Midway on the long sweep of the lower slope of the iceberg, what objects rise and break the desolate monotony of the scene? In this awful solitude can signs appear which tell of human life? Yes! The black outline of a boat just shows itself, hauled up on the berg. In an ice-cavern behind the boat the last red embers of a dying fire flicker from time to time over the figures of two men. One is seated, resting his back against the side of the cavern. The other lies prostrate with his head on his comrade’s knee. The first of these men is awake, and thinking. The second reclines, with his still white face turned up to the sky—sleeping or dead. Days and days since, these two have fallen behind on the march of the expedition of relief. Days and days since, these two have been given up by their weary and failing companions as doomed and lost. He who sits thinking is Richard Wardour. He who lies sleeping or dead is Frank Aldersley.
The iceberg drifts slowly, over the black water, through the ashy light. Minute by minute the dying fire sinks. Minute by minute the deathly cold creeps nearer and nearer to the lost men.
Richard Wardour rouses himself from his thoughts, looks at the still white face beneath him, and places his hand on Frank’s heart. It still beats feebly. Give him his share of the food and fuel still stored in the boat, and Frank may live through it. Leave him neglected where he lies, and his death is a question of hours, perhaps minutes—who knows?
Richard Wardour lifts the sleeper’s head and rests it against the cavern side. He goes to the boat and returns with a billet of wood. He stoops to place the wood on the fire, and stops. Frank is dreaming, and murmuring in his dream.
A woman’s name passes his lips. Frank is in England again—at the ball—whispering to Clara the confession of his love.
Over Richard Wardour’s face there passes the shadow of a deadly thought. He rises from the fire; he takes the wood back to the boat. His iron strength is shaken, but it still holds out. They are drifting nearer and nearer to the open lea. He can launch the boat
without help; he can take the food and the fuel with him. The sleeper on the iceberg is the man who has robbed him of Clara—who has wrecked the hope and the happiness of his life. Leave the man in his sleep, and let him die!
So the tempter whispers. Richard Wardour tries his strength on the boat. It moves; he has got it under control. He stops and looks round. Beyond him is the open sea. Beneath him is the man who has robbed him of Clara. The shadow of the deadly thought grows and darkens over his face. He waits with his hands on the boat—waits and thinks.
The iceberg drifts slowly, over the black water, through the ashy light. Minute by minute the dying fire sinks. Minute by minute the deathly cold creeps nearer to the sleeping man. And still Richard Wardour waits—waits and thinks.
FOURTH SCENE
THE GARDEN
XIII
The spring has come. The air of the April night just lifts the leaves of the sleeping flowers. The moon is queen in the cloudless and starless sky. The stillness of the midnight hour is abroad, over land and over sea.
In a villa on the westward shore of the Isle of Wight, the glass doors which lead from the drawing-room to the garden are yet open. The shaded lamp yet burns on the table. A lady sits by the lamp, reading. From time to time she looks out into the garden, and sees the white-robed figure of a young girl pacing slowly to and fro in the soft brightness of the moonlight on the lawn. Sorrow and suspense have set their mark on the lady. Not rivals only, but friends who formerly admired her, agree now that she looks worn and aged. The more merciful judgment of others remarks, with equal truth, that her eyes, her hair, her simple grace and grandeur of movement have lost but little of their olden charms. The truth lies, as usual, between the two extremes. In spite of sorrow and suffering, Mrs Crayford is the beautiful Mrs Crayford still.
The delicious silence of the hour is softly disturbed by the voice of the younger lady in the garden.
‘Go to the piano, Lucy. It is a night for music. Play something that is worthy of the night.’
Mrs Crayford looks round at the clock on the mantlepiece.
‘My dear Clara, it is past twelve! Remember what the doctor told you. You ought to have been in bed an hour ago.
‘Half an hour, Lucy—give me half an hour more! Look at the moonlight on the sea. Is it possible to go to bed on such a night as this? Play something, Lucy—something spiritual and divine.~
Earnestly pleading with her friend, Clara advances towards the window. She too has suffered under the wasting influences of suspense. Her face has lost its youthful freshness; no delicate flush of colour rises on it when she speaks. The soft grey eyes which won Frank’s heart in the bygone time are sadly altered now. In repose they have a dimmed and wearied look. In action they are wild and restless, like eyes suddenly wakened from startling dreams. Robed in white, her soft brown hair hanging loosely over h
er shoulders, there is something weird and ghostlike in the girl, as she moves nearer and nearer to the window in the full light of the moon—pleading for music that shall be worthy of the mystery and the beauty of the night.
‘Will you come in here if I play to you?’ Mrs Crayford asks. ‘It is a risk, my love, to be out in the night air.’
‘No! no! I like it. Play—while I am out here, looking at the sea. It quiets me; it comforts me; it does me good.’
She glides back, ghostlike over the lawn. Mrs Crayford rises and puts down the volume that she has been reading. It is a record of explorations in the Arctic seas. The time has gone by when the two lonely women could take an interest in subjects not connected with their own anxieties. Now, when hope is fast failing them—now, when their last news of
the Wanderer and the Sea-Mew is news that is more than two years old—they can read of nothing, they can think of nothing, but dangers and discoveries, losses and rescues in the terrible Polar seas.
Unwillingly, Mrs Crayford puts her book aside and goes to the piano—Mozart’s ‘Air in A, with Variations,’ lies open on the instrument. One after another she plays the lovely melodies, so simply, so purely beautiful, of that unpretending and unrivalled work. At the close of the ninth variation (Clara’s favourite) she pauses, and turns towards the garden.
‘Shall I stop there?’ she asks.
There is no answer. Has Clara wandered away out of hearing of the music that she loves—the music that harmonises so subtly with the tender beauty of the night? Mrs Crayford rises and advances to the window.
No! there is the white figure standing alone on the slope of the lawn—the head turned away from the house; the face looking out over the calm sea whose gently rippling waters end in the dim line on the horizon, which is the line of the Hampshire coast.
Mrs Crayford advances as far as the path before the window and calls to her.
‘Clara!’
Again there is no answer. The white figure still stands immovably in its place.
With signs of distress in her face, but with no appearance of alarm, Mrs Crayford returns to the room. Her own sad experience tells her what has happened. She summons the servants, and directs them to wait in the drawing-room until she calls to them. This done, she returns to the garden, and approaches the mysterious figure on the lawn.
Dead to the outer world, as if she lay already in her grave—insensible to touch, insensible to sound, motionless as stone, cold as stone—Clara stands on the moonlit lawn, facing the seaward view. Mrs Crayford waits at her side, patiently watching for the change which she knows is to come. ‘Catalepsy,’ as Some call it—hysteria, as others say—this alone is certain, the same interval always passes; the same change always appears.
It comes now. Not a change in her eyes; they still remain wide open, fixed, and glassy.
The first movement is a movement of her hands. They rise slowly from her side, and waver in the air like the hands of a person groping in the dark. Another interval—and the movement spreads to her lips; they part and tremble. A few minutes more, and words begin to drop, one by one, from those parted lips—words spoken in a lost vacant tone, as if she is talking in her sleep.
Mrs Crayford looks back at the house. Sad experience makes her suspicious of the servants’ curiosity. Sad experience has long since warned her that the servants are not to be trusted within hearing of the wild words which Clara speaks in the trance. Has any one of them ventured into the garden? No. They are out of hearing at the window, waiting for the signal which tells them that their help is needed.
Turning towards Clara once more, Mrs Crayford hears the vacantly-uttered words falling faster and faster from her lips.
‘Frank! Frank! Frank! Don’t drop behind—don’t trust Richard Wardour. While you can stand, keep with the other men, Frank!’
(The farewell warning of Crayford in the solitudes of the Frozen Deep, repeated by Clara in the garden of her English home!)
A moment of silence follows, and in that moment the vision has changed. She sees him on the iceberg now, at the mercy of the bitterest enemy he has on earth. She sees him drifting, over the black water, through the ashy light.
‘Wake, Frank! wake and defend yourself! Richard Wardour knows that I love you.
Richard Wardour’s vengeance will take your life! Wake, Frank—wake! You are drifting to your death!’ A low groan of horror bursts from her, sinister and terrible to hear.
‘Drifting! drifting!’ she whispers to herself; ‘drifting to his death!’
Her glassy eyes suddenly soften, then close. A long shudder runs through her. A faint flush shows itself on the deadly pallor of her face, and fades again. Her limbs fail her.
She sinks into Mrs Crayford’s arms.
The servants, answering the call for help, carry her into the house. They lay her insensible on her bed. After an hour or more, her eyes open again—this time with the light of life in them—open, and rest languidly on her friend sitting by the bedside.
‘I have had a dreadful dream,’ she murmurs faintly. ‘Am I ill, Lucy? I feel so weak.’
Even as she says the words sleep, gentle, natural sleep, takes her suddenly, as it takes young children weary with their play. Though it is all over now, though no further watching is required, Mrs Crayford still keeps her place by the bedside, too anxious and too wakeful to retire to her own room.
On other occasions she is accustomed to dismiss from her mind the words which drop from Clara in the trance. This time the effort to dismiss them is beyond her power. The words haunt her. Vainly she recalls to memory all that the doctors have said to her in speaking of Clara in the state of trance. ‘What she vaguely dreads for the lost man whom she loves, is mingled in her mind with what she is constantly reading of trials, dangers, and escapes in the Arctic Seas. The most startling things that she may say or do are all attributable to this cause, and may be explained in this way.’ So the doctors have spoken; and, thus far, Mrs Crayford has shared their view. It is only to-night that the girl’s words ring in her ear with a strange prophetic sound in them. It is only to-night that she asks, herself: ‘Is Clara present, in the spirit, with our loved and lost ones in the lonely North?
Can mortal vision see the dead and living in the solitudes of the Frozen Deep?’
XIV
The night had passed.
Far and near, the garden-view looked its gayest and brightest in the light of the noonday sun. The cheering sounds which tell of life and action were audible all round the villa.
From the garden of the nearest house rose the voices of children at play. Along the road at the back sounded the roll of wheels, as carts and carriages passed at intervals. Out on the blue sea the distant splash of the paddles, the distant thump of the engines, told from time to time of the passage of steamers, entering or leaving the strait between the island and the mainland. In the trees the birds sang gaily among the rustling leaves. In the house the women-servants were laughing over some jest or story that cheered them at their work. It was a lively and pleasant time—a bright enjoyable day.
The two ladies were out together, resting on a garden seat, after a walk round the grounds.
They exchanged a few trivial words relating to the beauty of the day, and then said no more. Possessing the same consciousness of what she had seen in the trance which
persons in general possess of what they have seen in a dream—believing in the vision as a supernatural revelation—Clara’s worst forebodings were now, to her mind, realised as truths. Her last faint hope of ever seeing Frank again was now at an end. Intimate experience of her told Mrs Crayford what was passing in Clara’s mind, and warned her that the attempt to reason and remonstrate would be little better than a voluntary waste of words and time. The disposition which she had herself felt, on the previous night, to attach a superstitious importance to the words that Clara had spoken in the trance had vanished with the return of the morning. Rest and reflection had quieted her mind, and had restored the
composing influence of her sober sense. Sympathising with Clara in all besides, she had no sympathy, as they sat together in the pleasant sunshine, with Clara’s gloomy despair of the future. She, who could still hope, had nothing to say to the sad companion who had done with hope. So the quiet minutes succeeded each other, and the two friends sat side by side in silence.
An hour passed—and the gate-bell of the villa rang.
They both started—they both knew the ring. It was the hour when the postman brought their newspapers from London. In past days, what hundreds on hundreds of times they had torn off the cover which enclosed the newspaper, and looked at the same column with the same weary mingling of hope and despair! There to-day—as it was yesterday; as it would be, if they lived, to-morrow—there was the servant with Lucy’s newspaper and Clara’s newspaper in his hand! Would both of them do again to-day what both of them had done so often in the days that were gone?
No! Mrs Crayford removed the cover from her newspaper as usual. Clara laid her newspaper aside, unopened, on the garden seat.
In silence Mrs Crayford looked where she always looked, at the column devoted to the Latest Intelligence from foreign parts. The instant her eye fell on the page she started with a loud cry of joy. The newspaper fell from her trembling hand. She caught Clara in her arms. ‘Oh, my darling! my darling! news of them at last.’
Without answering, without the slightest change in look or manner, Clara took the newspaper from the ground, and read the top line in the column, printed in capital letters.
THE ARCTIC EXPEDITION.
She waited, and looked at Mrs Crayford.
‘Can you bear to hear it, Lucy,’ she asked, ‘if I read it aloud?’
Mrs Crayford was too agitated to answer in words. She signed impatiently to Clara to go on.
Clara read the news which followed the heading in capital letters. Thus it ran: