Chapter XI

’Twas strange: in youth, all action, and all life,
Burning for pleasure, not averse from strife,
Woman--the field--the ocean--all that gave
Promise of gladness, peril of a grave,
In turn he tried.
BYRON.

There be land rats, and water rats, land thieves, and water thieves.
SHAKSPEARE.

It is always irksome, in the progress of an “ower true tale,” when any circumstance has to be explained through the medium of an extraordinary coincidence, knowing, as one does, that any instance of the kind, particularly the fortuitous appearance of a necessary agent at the appointed moment, occurring as such things do in actual life, and passing unheeded, yet when recorded on paper they are received with a revulsion of incredulity. The chances of events sometimes mould themselves into strange combinations. It was but two or three years back that two men threw themselves down at the same day and the same hour, one from the leaning tower of Pisa, the other from St. Mark’s at Venice. There could have been no possible connexion between these acts. But if a similar coincidence had been interwoven in a framework of fiction, it would have caused the manufacture to be rejected as unworkmanlike. If, on the other hand, the same sort of combination, had favoured a superstitious presentiment, it would have been taken as an undeniable confirmation of the preternatural.

I have volunteered this preface, though hardly, I think, a necessary one, before explaining the manner in which Lord Castleton’s life was preserved: to do which effectually, it will be necessary to allude a little to one or two incidents in his early life. It will have been collected, though merely from Alice Darnell’s collateral tale, that he lost his father when very young; and it will also have been inferred from the same source, that, during his earlier years, he could have seen but little of his mother, who had lived separate from her husband on the Continent. Young Somers remained under his grandfather’s roof, whilst his mother was amusing herself abroad, and his father was constantly shifting about in country quarters with his militia regiment. His infantine years would therefore have been deprived of any but mercenary female superintendence, except for the unremitting care of his foster-mother: whose affection for him was certainly too pure and truly maternal, to be attributed to any mercenary motives. She had sought, and easily obtained from his grandfather, the permission to continue her care of him long, very long after he had completely outgrown the discharge of her original functions. The only condition with which this request was mixed up, was not for remuneration, for that, being in easy circumstances, was not an object, though, left to Lord Castleton, it followed as a matter of course,--but was, that she might be allowed to have her own son, the foster-brother of young Somers, also under the roof. This was thought, at the time, rather an advantage than otherwise, by the grandfather of our hero; but it turned out quite the contrary, for the characters of both the parties concerned. It accustomed the young heir to require a dependent companion, and it habituated the future yeoman to notions of expense quite beyond his rank in life. One thing, however, it certainly promoted, a lasting attachment between the boys: this, on the side of Somers, subject to the alloy of caprice, and occasional forgetfulness of a superior; on the part of Harry, ripening into that feeling of utter devotion to its object, which the relation of foster-brother in the earlier stages of society was said constantly to produce; and which has not been entirely without example in our own times.

The earliest event which made a permanent impression on either of the boys, was the melancholy end of Colonel Somers. Old Lord Castleton, being at the time it happened very infirm, and almost bedridden, had, upon being informed of his son’s self-inflicted death, sent Nurse Carter to make the necessary arrangements for his remains.

She had, upon her return from the seaport where it was mentioned he had destroyed himself, collected her two young charges round her, and, with the irresistible desire of her age and station to make the most of a shocking story, had not spared them the slightest particular of what she had heard and seen. Much of this, of course, only served to frighten them out of their wits for many nights afterwards, but, as she put it in the shape of warning, she took a locket which she had found round the deceased’s neck, and hung it round young Somers, saying, “I know not what this may mean, but your father wore it till his death; do you wear it till yours, and mayhap the sight of it may sometime save you from rashly daring the same fate.”

Old Lord Castleton lived enough to appoint guardians for his grandson, quite independent of the mother, whose second marriage he much disapproved. The immediate effect of most of this was, that young Somers remained much longer than perhaps he ought to have done with the Carters. But at length he was sent to a public school, and from thence to the University; and of course, for some time, lost sight entirely of young Henry Carter. But the latter had been long enough with him to contract habits which did not exactly enable him to confine his attention to the process which intervenes between the plough and the reaping-hook. On the contrary, his exclusive preferences of the horse-race and the cock-pit soon engrossed him entirely. His mother did not live long enough to suffer all the uneasiness that these confirmed habits, on his part, would have caused her, but died in the firm confidence that the day of the return of her dear young Lord, when of age, to take possession of the lands of his ancestors, would be the date of the commencement of a brilliant career for the only other object of her equally divided solicitude, his early playmate and foster-brother.

In the mean time Harry Carter fell, step by step, into the most desperate courses, and went on from one extravagance to another. He was at length so completely ruined that he was obliged to decamp, and make for the nearest seaport, hardly knowing whether he would seek out his patron, who was still on the Continent, or start for America with some choice companions, who were thither bound, and who tried to persuade him to try his luck with them. His option, however, on this subject, was rendered superfluous by a press-gang, who entered the public-house where they were assembled, and carried them all on board a tender; from thence Harry Carter, in due time, was transferred to a man-of-war, which was to cruise in the Mediterranean. Though not inclined to work if he could help it,--when he could not, he made the best of a bad job, and soon became an able seaman.

It so happened, that once being ashore at a small retired bay on the Island of Sicily, he and others of his messmates got into a broil with some of the natives, and, as it had originated in an imputed act of sacrilege on their part, they were in great danger from the offended feelings of the priest-ridden peasants, who, congregating in numbers around them, cut off their retreat to their boats. Harry Carter, who was foremost in the defence, though he had not been a ringleader in the outrage, was himself sore beset, when a party of English travellers, who had been making the tour of the island on foot, coming up at the moment, interfered between them at no little risk to themselves; which danger was however removed, as soon as they came to explain matters; the quarrel having originated in misapprehension, and the attack having been provoked by the universal impatience of Englishmen, who, if from ignorance of the language of a people they cannot make use of their tongues, immediately have recourse to their hands. Harry Carter at once, through all the alterations of intervening years, recognized the playmate of his youth, Somers, now Lord Castleton, who was much hurt at the condition in life, that of a common sailor, in which he now found his foster-brother; which he could not help in some degree attributing to his own forgetfulness and neglect. But Carter would not allow him to reproach himself on the subject; and, as his duty prevented his farther stay, the parting between the foster-brothers was as sudden as the meeting was unexpected, and, in preparing to shove off, Harry Carter said, “It’s not like we should often meet again, as we used to do, my Lord: but now I have seen you, you’ve come like a guardian angel upon me, and I shall only pray that, if there ever should be an occasion in which you should stand in need of the like assistance, that may be the moment I may next cross your path.”

And this fervently devoted expression of his wishes, was heard and granted; for they next met at that most critical moment in Morden Bay.

At the Peace, Henry Carter had been discharged from the navy, and soon afterwards falling in with Kit Collett, a free trader’s life had too many temptations for his own confirmed irregular habits for him to resist the offers made him by that person to join him in “_La Pie voleuse_.” It so happened, that, being one of the sharpest and cleverest of the crew, he had been employed by his Captain confidentially, not long before this last venture, upon a line of coast on which they had not previously made a descent. He was sent to make a survey of it, and arrange matters with some loose characters in the neighbourhood for furthering their scheme.

In the early part of the labours of that eventful evening, Harry Carter had worked with all the zeal of a principal in stowing the kegs, thinking that much of the responsibility as to the success of the venture devolved on him who had so warmly counselled it. But when the wounded man was shot into the cave, by two of his comrades, with much less care than they had bestowed upon the other more valuable burthens with which they had been charged, Harry Carter’s natural good-nature induced him to devote a little more attention than any of his messmates seemed inclined to pay to their fellow-creature. This kindly disposition soon acquired an unexpected inducement to continue its good offices. The first thing that peculiarly excited his attention was, that upon attempting to stanch the wound which was just above the temple, he found that the hair which had clotted into it was false, being part of a wig which covered a plentiful crop of natural hair, of a different colour. The cave was already obscure, yet the light, crisply curling locks, which he now discovered, seemed to him to be such as he had never seen but on one person before. The apparent impossibility of a surmise which supposed so altered a condition in life, at first staggered him; yet it was evident, from the discovery he had just made, that the person, whoever he was, had for some reason or another assumed a disguise. It was difficult, even if the wounded man had been in a state to reply to verbal inquiries, to make any safely, whilst all his comrades were perpetually passing. He bethought him of the locket which his mother had put round Somers’s neck when a boy, with the positive injunction, never, under any circumstances, to remove it. This injunction, he knew, for some time had been rigidly observed. He remembered the form and shape of it himself, and he determined to be decided in his conduct by the circumstance of finding the locket there or not.

“If it is there,” thought he, “not only shall I feel sure that it really is my foster-brother, but I shall feel myself enforced as much by my mother’s memory, as by my own more recent vow, to do all in my power to save him.”

It was while endeavouring to ascertain this point by searching within his clothes that Lucy found him, as she thought, employed in plunder. If he had not actually had his hand on the locket when she addressed him, the obvious interest taken in him by a girl in that rank of life would again have staggered him, as he could only imagine that the disguise must have been temporarily assumed for the purpose, perhaps, of detecting that very illicit act in which they were then engaged. But still the locket was there, and in neither that nor the features, as far as he could discern them, could he be mistaken; and therefore his determination was fixed, at all risks, to save him. He was aware, however, that much immediate risk to himself might be incurred, without even a chance of effecting that object. Any open assistance would now have been set down for mutiny, and there is no legal discipline so severe as that which binds lawless men together in moments of danger. But he quickly formed in his head a plan which he thought could not fail.

He had been celebrated as one of the best swimmers in the navy: it was, then, without any uneasiness that he assisted to convey Castleton to the boat, and even helped to shove it off, knowing that the lugger would come quite as near the shore as the surf would permit; and the moment when the smugglers would be in all the confusion of holding on till the coble was empty, was that he had fixed for the execution of his intended escape with Castleton, trusting to the darkness of the night and the roar of the breakers to assist him in escaping unobserved. Till this time arrived, he sat stanching the temple of the wounded man with his hand, that he might not be too much exhausted by previous loss of blood to be able to sustain even his passive share in the escape. The confusion of the smugglers at that moment was increased by hearing that another sail, supposed to be a revenue cutter, was in sight; and this confusion was even more serviceable to him than he had anticipated.

Not only did he succeed in dropping overboard himself unnoticed, but also in pulling Castleton after him: in supporting himself to do which, his bloody hand had made that strongly marked impression, as of struggling fingers, which Captain Scudd had naturally enough interpreted to have been left by some one who had endeavoured to save himself when thrown over. Bearing his still unconscious burthen lashed to him in that manner which a skilful swimmer knows would least impede his own efforts, it is possible that he may have risen for a moment on the breakers in the manner Lucy imagined she had seen; but, carefully directing his course where he knew there was least surf and easiest landing, Carter made for the shore, which he reached just in time, being almost too much exhausted by the double weight he had carried to have been able to have struggled farther.