by Mrs. Ward.
Originally published in Bentley's Miscellany (Richard Bentley) vol.28 #166 (Oct 1850).
The following story is not merely "founded" on fact—the chief incidents are literally true, and the scene is from nature. The real name of the heroine was Arnold, and she was the daughter of a lieutenant in H. Majesty's navy. His pernicious habits drove his child from his roof, and she, exchanging clothes with a village playfellow, hired herself as cabin boy on board a vessel bound for the Cape. An accident brought her under the notice of a surgeon on board the ship, and the events followed as I have related them in the tale.
Between the fishing village of L— and the town of E—, there once stood on the slope of a hill facing the sea, a row of dwellings surrounded by neat gardens, where those bright flowers throve which enliven many a tenement, sheltered only by the cliffs of our coast. The first of these attracted the eye by its tasteful transformation from a common building to the picturesque residence of a fragile looking lady, who was seldom seen except when she would step beyond the bowery porch, twined with clematis and passionflower, and, shading her eyes from the glare of the ocean, would gaze up the road watching for the postman.
Few knew her history, but it was understood that, against the consent of her father, she had married a young and handsome Lieutenant in the navy; that, soon after her marriage, her husband had gone to sea, and that she had improved the poor cottage after such a fashion as her taste dictated and her slender means permitted, and was now expecting his return.
Within a bay window of this dwelling a breakfast-table was laid, and at this sat the lady, with a child of five years old beside her. Both had been enjoying the fragrance of the sunny garden, and the pale lady's eyes had brightened as she had looked on her preparations of welcome. Her dress, as well as her child's, was of the plainest fashion, yet exquisitely neat. The little girl, with her doll upon her knee, burst out into a merry laugh from time to time, at the gambols of a kitten, as it tried hard to overcome the gravity of its sober mother, who sat blinking her eyes in the sunny eastern window, but the lady gave no heed to her daughter's repeated entreaties that she would "only just look at Dot:" she was scanning the shipping list of a newspaper with nervous haste and trepidation.
"Off Dover, H.M. frigate 'Rainbow,' arrived on the 4th instant, from Jamaica; the ship proceeds to the Downs, where a court-martial will assemble for the trial of Lieutenant Richard Temple, R.N., under arrest for being drunk on duty." Mrs. Temple sat paralysed with the paper in her hand; the child and the kitten continued their play, and when Margaret, the only attendant on the cottage inmates, entered the room to remove the breakfast things, she found her mistress transfixed like a statue in her chair. There was a sharp tap at the porch door. It was the postman who had brought back a letter which he had carried on by mistake.
The thoughtful Margaret sent the little girl to the next cottage to tell Captain Wilmot, their kind neighbour, and an old naval officer, that "mamma was in very great trouble," and to entreat that he would come to her forthwith.
"Under arrest!—disgraced, disgraced!—my Richard, my husband! oh, my husband!"
Mrs. Temple was sitting on the floor as she uttered these depairing words, with an open letter in her hand; but there was not a tear upon her clay pale face, though the whitened lips were rigid with great agony.
"My friend, my friend!" she cried, as the good old captain of the navy raised her in his arms from the ground, "my friend, my only friend. I shall never hold up my head again."
Truly she had need of his friendship, and as that poor pale afflicted creature cast herself in utter abandonment upon the old sailor's breast, the tears poured down his bronzed and honest face upon her shining hair.
For three long weeks the miserable wife of the drunkard, Richard Temple, waited in all the agony of suspense the issue of the court-martial sitting on board the "Rainbow;" evening after evening Captain Wilmot found her pacing her little drawing-room, her eyes glazed and tearless, but with those black circles round them, that marked how restless had been her state by day and night. Oh, the agony of suspense! how the dread predominates over the hope!
The fatal news came at last. The broken-hearted wife ceased to pace the floor, the faithful servant and the weary child sat beside the bed-side of the sufferer, and Captain Wilmot awaited the arrival of Richard Temple.
When the unhappy man knocked at the porch-door of his cottage-home, it was opened by Margaret in deep morning: there had been some delay in communicating with him, and ere he could be prepared for the shock, he learned from Captain Wilmot that his wife's constitution had sunk under the mind's affliction, and he sat down beneath the roof she had adorned for his reception, a widowed and a ruined man.
Seven years passed away. Captain Wilmot was lying in the church-yard near the child's unfortunate mother. Margaret, compelled to leave the service of the misguided Richard Temple, had married a widower, a fisherman, with one son, and happy was the wretched little girl when she could escape from her miserable home to the fire-side of her former nurse.
Perhaps, had God spared the gentle wife to the ruined Richard, he might have recovered in some measure his position; but God was merciful; and had spared the fragile creature a burden too heavy for such as her to bear.
The cottage she had ornamented was soon dismantled, the garden became a wilderness of weeds; a vicious woman had ere long taken Margaret's place, as housekeeper, and poor Emma was sent to a day-school at L—. The few people who remembered her mother, looked with mingled pity and horror on the child's unwashed face, closely clipped hair, and torn and soiled clothes, as she wended her way, sometimes alone, sometimes with a troop of children as dirty and ragged as herself, between her desecrated home and the petty school-house in a by-street of the great sea-port.
She had one friend in the world besides Margaret: this was Margaret's step-son, a boy a little older than herself, and when she could not visit her former nurse, for her father, in his drunken fits, would sometimes keep her at home to spite the abandoned woman he chose to place at his table—such as it was—she would bound down to the beach and forget her misery for awhile, as she sailed her little ships in the pools under the cliffs, or at times dared to venture out in the red-sailed wherry with Edward's bluff but good-natured father.
The two children were very merry one day: it was noon in a sultry summer's month, and a troop of giddy creatures were launching their tiny boats in a shady creek. Edward had made a feast of apples, and ship's biscuits, and had caught some fish, which were broiling on a real fire; and they were just about to enjoy their banquet when a scream from Emma, and an upward glance drew the attention of the little crew to the cliff above.
For there stood Mr. Temple, Emma's father, his ashy cheeks, his livid lips, and blood-shot orbs, gave him the appearance of some frightful ogre; and, mute with terror, they gazed on the apparition which had "broke up the meeting with most admired disorder."
He sprang down from the dizzy height into the midst of the trembling group.
"Oh, papa, papa, forgive me!" shrieked his child, shrinking in an agony of dread from an uplifted leather strap; "I will go to school directly, indeed I will, but Mrs. Jones said her bill was not paid, and I—"
A blow across the mouth silenced the lips from which the blood now poured; the children flew apart like startled birds; but, as the angry man raised the leather thong again, Edward made a dart at it; Temple stepped back to bestow the heartier blow on his opponent, but as he was preparing to make a rush at the boy, Edward's father turned the angle of the rock, and stood before them.
"Go home, Mr. Temple, for God's sake, for the sake of the poor lady, who is lying under the green flag in the churchyard. You a man," continued David, as he saw the state of the bruised and shivering Emma; "you a man and strike that miserable child! God help you, my poor little girl! Come home with me to Margaret; Edward go on before us," said David, who knew his son's determined disposition too well to trust him alone with Temple. And the poor weeping child looked back to her father, hoping he might utter one kind word, but he stood with frowning brow, and made no sign. David carried her home, and laid her in her old nurse's arms, where she fell asleep, fanned by the soft breeze that floated into the homely but peaceful fisher's hut.
Some kind people suggested the magistrate's interference in the case, but, then, who was to take charge of the unfortunate child? Even the most charitably disposed shrunk from undertaking the care of one, whose father might at any moment cast his shadow in her path, and fight for his right upon his victim.
All distinctions of position having been as we have seen levelled between Edward and Emma by the state of vice in which her father had long lived, they sat down together on the beach, and held a long consultation, the result of which did not transpire for some weeks after Emma's disappearance from home, for next day a cry was raised that Mr. Temple's ill-used daughter was missing.
Some weeks after Emma's departure, Edward was questioned on the subject of it by a magistrate, who had, with great difficulty, collected evidence to prove that the girl had been seen on a particular night wending her way, through a storm of wind and rain, towards the beach.
The boy's statement, in the abstract, was as follows:—
That Emma and he had long and often consulted together on the subject of her escape from the sad thraldom she endured—that he had given her his own old clothes—that he had a friend named Brent, a steward on board a large merchant-ship, who had often asked him how he should like to go to sea with him—that Edward knew his father and step-mother could ill spare his assistance in fishing, and occasionally helping the pilots at L—, and that he had told Brent that he had a playmate who was friendless and poor, and who would be thankful for a berth on board the "Dartmouth"—that he would bring his playmate to him, and that Brent must not betray the boy—that Brent, who was an honest, cautious man, had at first refused to hear of "carrying off" a boy to sea who was a runaway, but that afterwards he had consented to see the child, and finally decided on taking the little bruised and half-starved wretch under his care.
:"And by what name," asked the magistrate of Edward, when he had told this strange tale, in all its details, "by what name was the girl entered on the books of the 'Dartmouth.'"
"We had forgotten all about a name," replied the boy ingenuously, "till Brent asked her what she was called; so then I put my arm round her neck, and kissed her, and gave her a little pinch, and said 'Good bye, Johnny Marvel,' and Johnny Marvel I suppose she is now aboard the 'Dartmouth.'"
"Mother," said Edward to his father's wife, whom he loved most sincerely, and who was sitting crying over her untasted cup of tea, in a state of nervous excitement, at the result of the lad's summons before the magistrate, "mother, don't cry; she is happier now than she was up yonder on the hill side."
"Ah!" sighed Margaret, "I shall never see her again, I know;" and she fell into a reverie sad and tearful.
She was right, she never did meet Emma Temple again; but Edward did, and that under circumstances so peculiar as to demand a revelation as strange as it is true.
The limits of my paper will not permit me to dwell on the career of this extraordinary sailor girl.
Neither must I follow our little "cabin-boy" through two or three voyages which "he" made in the "Dartmouth," always retaining the patronage and protection of the kind-hearted Brent when called upon as "he" grew older, to work "before the mast."
For "Johnny Marvel" soon became the pet of the crew. Active, merry, and intrepid, the captain was wont to point "him" out to passengers as "the cleverest little chap in the ship." It was well that our heroine's chief delight had been in sailing with Magaret's husband and step-son in the wherry whenever she had had opportunity. Many a stiff breeze had the child encountered, many a lecture had Margaret bestowed on the rough kind-hearted fisherman, little thinking what would be the result of such tutelage.
There was a heavy swell one day in the great Atlantic just where the trade winds cease. "Little Jack" was up in the tops, and went out upon the fore-yard, where he sat swinging in mid air to his own delight and the great terror of Brent. The sailors looked up and shook their heads, but laughed at the boy's bold bearing and reckless song. "Jack" was now nearly fifteen, and though not robust, was no longer the wretched creature he had been when Brent introduced him with some misgivings to the captain. As the ship rolled in the trough of the sea the young sailor dipped with the yard almost into the lead-coloured water, rose again with a shout, and played at this wild game till the captain, in an angry tone, ordered him "down." The sudden command startled him, and hurrying along the yard, his foot caught in a rope, while at some distance from the ground, and thus, losing his balance, he fell headlong on the deck.
He was taken up insensible and carried down the nearest hatchway to a messmate's hammock by his friend Brent; and a surgeon happening, with his wife, to be a passenger on board the ship, then bound for the Cape of Good Hope, he was summoned.
That night a "whisper fell" among the crew of the "Dartmouth" that the merry-hearted sea boy was like to die; then a lady, the surgeon's wife, moved along the silent deck, and passing the boundary of the passenger's promenade, was guided down the hatchway to the lower deck, a there, stretched on a hammock, a sickly lantern shedding its rays on her dark crisped locks, matted with blood from a wound in the head, was stretched poor Emma Temple, with Brent crying beside her.
The blue shirt collar was open, and a red stream was trickling across the slender throat of the girl bronzed by many a breeze, and strongly contrasted with the fairer proportions of the swelling bust; the sleeve had been ripped, and the rounded arm, with its bloody bandage, looked strangely white above the tanned and almost muscular palm.
She was removed as soon as possible to the lady's cabin, and gently tended; rest and care turned the scale in her favour, and then the sailors were told the wondrous tale, that their favourite, "Johnny Marvel," was a girl!
After such a career, young as she was, she was, truth to tell, little fitted to play the part of a lady; all that the kind and judicious wife of the surgeon could do for Emma she did. She took her into her own establishment as an attendant, but a summons to England deranging the plans she had formed for her protegée, under her own surveillance, our heroine found a new home in the house of a married officer of rank commanding a garrison of importance on the frontier of South Africa.
Her journey to this garrison was undertaken in one of the cumbrous conveyances of the colony, but ere this reached its destination, it met with a very common casualty, it broke down; and as there was a probability of delay, our heroine resolved, with her usual independence of spirit, to proceed on foot: being guided to the top of a hill, she looked down on the town, whither she was destined, descended the rough slope, crossed the bridge which spanned a turbid and swollen river, and inquiring her way to the residence of the commandant, proceeded to the gateway of the building pointed out to her.
A sentry paced up and down in front of the entrance; she was about to ask which would be her best mode of obtaining admittance, when the tall stripling interrupted her with, "Pass on young woman, it is against orders to speak on my post."
The voice was Edwards.
Yes, there stood her early companion, her friend, in the uniform of the 91st Regiment, and it is not to be wondered at, that a recognition took place in spite of rules and regulations. At length Emma, at Edward's earnest entreaties, and after a mutual promise to meet again, passed through the gateway, and presenting herself to her new mistress, entered upon her employments, without, however, alluding in any way to the singular circumstance attending her arrival.
Edward's information was the first she had received touching the scenes of her early career, for it so happened that she had never revisited them from the time he had put her under Brent's care on the deck of the "Dartmouth" four years before. He had but a sorrowful tale of himself to tell. His father had been drowned out fishing, and it was not long ere Margaret followed; he had been induced, in what he at first thought an evil hour to enlist, and, said he to Emma, "what I am going to tell you will not cause you much sorrow for your own sake. Your father did not live long after you left; he put himself into a dreadful fury when he found out what I had had to do in getting you out of his clutches, and before my father and mother died I had begun to think I had best get out of his way, which you see I did at last, and I am glad of it now, for here we are again together, and I am sure this is the happiest day of my life!"
These two young adventurers upon the uncertain sea of life, had been enjoying the rest and peaceful recreation which the sabbath always brought them in a colony where the observance of the sacred day is decidedly more attended to than in England, and had extended their walk across the bridge entrance of the town, through a wooded valley, where bright birds were swaying on the branches of the myrtle and laurestinus, and impudent monkeys were swinging by their tails from the tall geranium and arbutus bushes. The river murmured at their feet, the sky, of an intense blue, would have blinded the eyes of all who gazed on it, but for the masses of snowy clouds floating between heaven and earth; and the deep stillness of the place would have been that of a wilderness, but for the occasional echoes of a bugle-call from the garrison, which broke upon the silence like a voice, and warned Edward that the hour of evening duty was approaching.
I have said before that all distinctions between these two young creatures had ceased in their childhood, and Emma Temple, the household servant, now looked on Edward as a superior being to herself. He was but a soldier, but he had been commended for steady conduct and good principle, and truly, a moral might be read in the history of the fisherman's son with his good name, and the gentleman's daughter with the curse of the drunkard upon her in her dependent, and, but for Edward, friendless condition.
And ere they parted they pledged their troth. He was to try and obtain rank and pay commensurate with the responsibilities of a man who marries the woman he loves; she was to relate her story to the kind lady whom she served, and who, although aware of a singular episode of Emma's life at sea, had not the slightest idea of a lover in the case.
In the course of a few months the young man, who had long acquired the confidence ef his superior officers, was promoted to the rank of sergeant; Emma had put by her earnings, and with her mistress's assistance had made up a tolerable sum wherewith to open another chapter of her eventful life.
The wedding-day was fixed, and a good-natured settler, who had become interested in the romantic story of the lovers, came forward with that considerate and liberal hospitality which forms so agreeable a feature in the character of the South African colonist. He threw open his house for a festal gathering, and summoned many friends to share the pleasures of the bridal, and to welcome the bride and bridegroom on the threshold of their new life.
It was a glorious day outwardly, but the fleecy clouds were coming up from the horizon, and shaping themselves into dense and swollen masses, which grew darker by degrees, and emitted, at sharp intervals fiery tongues of lightning: but these evidences of storm were far off, and in an opposite direction from the road which, on crossing a stream, led to the town whence the bridegroom was hourly expected.
The ground round the homestead presented the appearance of a gipsy camp, with its waggons drawn up in shady pathways, and the smoke of fires, for, as it was of course impossible to give houseroom by night to such a throng of guests, a bivouac was established on the good farmer's ground, and the travellers' cattle was dispersed about the bush that festooned the hills in the back-ground of the snug settlement.
A bridal assemblage is always a cheerful sight in a country where there is much labour, certain difficulties and dangers to surmount, and but little pastime. The present occasion had brought many together who came partly from pleasure, partly from curiosity, but all with hearty good will towards the pair whose history had been the theme of conversation in many a homestead, in camp and in quarter.
Women in gay dresses, and fair-haired English-looking children were assembled in the settler's garden, and turning their backs upon the angry clouds, looked anxiously beyond the Koonap river up the hill, Evening advanced, the thunder began to mutter above the clouds, and descending, rolled along the mountain ridges, and kept up an uneasy murmur in the ravines. A single traveller on horseback wended his unnoticed way down a bridle-road at the back of the settler's dwelling, within which the clergyman, for he it was, found a table bravely spread, but no guests. They were still intently gazing into the distance beyond the river, as some twenty minutes before, the figure of another traveller on horseback had appeared between a far hilltop and the now lurid sky.
The clergyman hung his horse's bridle on an iron hook at the gate of the farm-yard, in rear of the house, and took his way to the drift or ford where the guests had assembled to bid the bridegroom tarry on his way. There was a hoarse murmur of waters rising in the distance, where the cliffs overhung the swelling stream, and the bride turned an anxious and searching look upon the farmer, as, after listening to the roar of the mighty river, he exclaimed, "Now, God help him! for so sure as he tries to cross the drift this night he must perish."
"But he hears our warning," cried Emma, as she waved her hands to her lover. "See, he laughs, and lifts his forage cap, and stops his horse. And he is alone; ah! I know how it is; he has been waiting for his comrade;[1] if he had not done so, he would have been here in the morning. Oh, Edward, Edward!" exclaimed the unhappy girl in an agony, the depths of which could not be understood by her auditors, "Oh, Edward, how could you put faith in him, and he a drunkard!"
And her lover, now at the edge of the drift, saw her distorted features, her clasped hands, and resolved on trying to comfort her in her distress. Her surmise was too true, he had put faith in a drunkard, and finding that if he waited longer, there would not be
sufficient light for him to make the journey before the time appointed for the marriage,[2] he had started alone on a horse borrowed from a friend whose household cares did not permit his joining the bridal party; and, observing the storm gathering along the hills, had made such haste as the roads, strewed with loose stones, and a horse taken off grass, permitted.
The river lay between him and happiness. He could not distinguish a word uttered by the group on the opposite side, for the waters roared and tumbled over the stones, and the alder boughs swayed to and fro, as the wind came whistling up the stream, Would that the shriek which burst from the lips of his betrothed could have reached his ears as his tired horse put its foot into the turgid river, drew it back, snorted, and resisting the blow of the sambok[3] bestowed on its smoking flanks by the impatient rider, less wary of his danger than the sagacious beast, turned its face towards the stony hill, and would have retraced its path, but for Edward's determination that it should ford the drift.
After resisting the whip for several minutes, the horse, as though bent on revenging itself on its master, plunged into the river, rose gallantly at the stones over which the restless element tumbled with the violence of a cascade, scattered the spray right and left, and had just reached the last ledge of the rocks, when its hoofs slipped under it, and it was borne with its rider down the foaming current.
For a few moments only the spectators on the bank had a view of the young soldier's face as he shook himself from his struggling horse, spread out his arms in a vain attempt to swim, sunk in the bubbling eddies, rose again, and tossing helplessly in the surge, was cast within a few feet of the bank. His cap had fallen from his head, his brow was knit with despair—one more desperate plunge, but a flood of water that loosened the largest rock, and carried it onward, lifted the youth from the footing he had for an instant gained, whirled him over and over, and rapidly swept him down. They heard his cry; they rushed along the brink of the dangerous stream, swinging from bough to bough when their feet failed them on the clayey soil; they followed, though they knew they could not help. Still that despairing cry, mingling with the roar of the river, and the whistling boughs of alders and long-tressed willows, and the crashing of falling rocks! Still that cry—fainter—fainter—it dies away; an unearthly scream!—the agonised farewell of the drowning horse, rises with shrill power above the tumult, the lightning scathes a noble tree, and the terrified and sorrowful people come back to tell that the hapless Edward has passed into the illimitable ocean of eternity!
As the interest of this extraordinary tale rests chiefly on the events connected with the career of the young soldier and the sailor girl, I have deemed it advisable to drop the curtain on the scene of Edward's melancholy death. But there is a sequel to Emma's history, which is as follows:—
After the shock experienced at so fatal an occurrence, she again obtained employment in a respectable household, and, some time afterwards united herself to a sergeant of Dagroons, who, in a few weeks, was ordered into the field against the Kafirs, and returning severely wounded, subsequently obtained his discharge and a comfortable appointment under Government.
During the latter part of the Kafir war, in 1847, a little party, of which I was one, was brought into circumstances of difficulty, not unattended with danger; and as it was of moment that there should be no delay in our transit across the Koonap river, we were fain to beg additional escort, as well as forage for our horses, at a wayside inn. The escort was a voluntary one, and proved to be the husband of the intrepid sailor girl.
As we rode from the door, the sergeant (a very picture of a gallant Dagroon), heading our cavalcade as guide, his wife came to the steps with a child in her arms; there was nothing in her appearance indicative of the hard life she had led, the trials she had endured; and she was doubtless unconscious of the interest with which we surveyed her.
Our guide gave his steed the rein, I turned to take a last look, but my horse shook his head, whisked his tail, arched his neck, in short, displayed those gestures of impatience unmistakable in the palfreys of South Africa,—we turned a clump of bush—and the wayside inn, with the figure on the door-step, was hidden from our sight.
1. Every soldier has a "comrade," each being bound to assist the other in taking charge of his effects when absent on duty from the barracks, helping him in accoutring for parade, &c.
2. In South Africa, where the clergyman has sometimes a ride of seventy miles, the weddings often take place at night.
3. Whip of sea cow's hide.