Recalled to Life, Grant Allen [best books to read for beginners TXT] 📗

showed me the poor old man's photograph. It was a portrait taken after death--for Jack attended him to the end through a fatal illness;--and it showed a face thin and worn, and much lined by unspeakable hardships. But I burst out crying at once the very moment I looked at it. For a second or two, I couldn't say why: I suppose it was instinct. Blood is thicker than water, they tell us; and I have the intuition of kindred very strong in me, I believe. But at any rate, I cried silently, with big hot tears, while I looked at that dead face of silent suffering, as I never had cried over the photograph of the respectable-looking man who lay dead on the floor of the library, and whom I was always taught to consider my father. Then it came back to me, why... I gazed at it and grew faint. I clutched Jack's arm for support. I knew what it meant now. The poor worn old man who lay dead on the bed with that look of mute agony on his features--was my first papa: the papa in the loose white linen coat: the one I remembered with childlike love and trustfulness in my earliest babyish Australian recollections!

I couldn't mistake the face. It was burnt into my brain now. This was he, though much older and sadder, and more scarred and lined by age and weather. It was my very first papa. My own papa. I cried silently still. I couldn't bear to look at it. Then the real truth broke upon me once more. This, and this alone, was in very deed my one real father!

I seized the faded photograph and pressed it to my lips.

"Oh, I know him!" I cried wildly. "It's my father! My father!"

Some minutes passed before Jack could go on with his story. This rush of emotions was too much for me for a while. I could hardly hear him or attend to him, so deeply did it stir me.

At last I calmed down, still holding that pathetic photograph on the table before me.

"Tell me all about him," I murmured, sobbing. "For, Jack, I remember now, he was so good and kind, and I loved him--I loved him."

Jack went on with his story, trying to soothe me and reassure me. The old man introduced himself by very cautious degrees as a person in want, not so much of money, though of that to be sure he had none, as of kindness and sympathy in a very great sorrow. He was a shipwrecked mariner, in a sense: shipwrecked on the sea of Life and on the open Pacific as well. But once he had been a clergyman, and a man of education, position, reputation, fortune.

Gradually as he went on Jack began to grasp at the truth of this curious tale. The worn and battered stranger had but lately landed in London from a sailing vessel which had brought him over from a remote Pacific islet: not a tropical islet of the kind with whose palms and parrots we are all so familiar, but a cold and snowy rock, away off far south, among the frosts and icebergs, near the Antarctic continent. There for twenty long years that unhappy man had lived by himself a solitary life.

I started at the sound.

"For twenty years!" I exclaimed. "Oh, Jack, you must be wrong; for how could that be? I was only eighteen when all this happened. How could my real father have been twenty years away from me, when I was only eighteen, and I remember him so perfectly?"

Jack looked at me and shook his head.

"You've much to learn yet, Una," he answered. "The story's a long one. You were NOT eighteen but twenty-two at the time. You've been deliberately misled as to your own age all along. You developed late, and were always short for your real years, not tall and precocious as we all of us imagined. But you were four years older than Mr. Callingham pretended. You're twenty-six now, not twenty-two as you think. Wait, and in time you'll hear all about it."

He went on with his story. I listened, spell-bound. The unhappy man explained to Jack how he had been wrecked on the voyage, and escaped on a raft with one other passenger: how they had drifted far south, before waves and current, till they were cast at last on this wretched island: how they remained there for a month or two, picking up a precarious living on roots and berries and eggs of sea-birds: and how at last, one day, he had come back from hunting limpets and sea-urchins on the shore of a lonely bay--to find, to his amazement, his companion gone, and himself left alone on that desolate island. His fellow-castaway, he knew then, had deceived and deserted him!

There was no room, indeed, to doubt the treachery of the wretched being who had so basely treated him. As he looked, a ship under full sail stood away to northward. In vain the unhappy man made wild signals from the shore with his tattered garments. No notice was taken of them. His companion must deliberately have suppressed the other's existence, and pretended to be alone by himself on the island.

"And his name?" Jack asked of the poor old man, horrified.

The stranger answered without a moment's pause:

"His name, if you want it--was Vivian Callingham."

"And yours?" Jack continued, as soon as he could recover from his first shock of horror.

"And mine," the poor castaway replied, "is Richard Wharton."

As Jack told me those words, another strange thrill ran through me.

"Richard Wharton was the name of mamma's first husband. Then I'm not a Callingham at all!" I cried, unable to take it all in at first in its full complexity. "I'm really a Wharton!"

Jack nodded his head in assent.

"Yes, you're really a Wharton," he said. "You're the baby that died, as we all were told. Your true Christian name's Mary. But, Una, you were always Una to all of us in England; and though the real Una Callingham died when you were a little girl of three or four years old, you'll be Una always now to Elsie and me. We can't think of you as other than we've always called you."

Then he went on to explain to me how the stranger had landed in London, alone and friendless, twenty years later, from a passing Australian merchant vessel which had picked him up on the island. All those years he had waited, and fed himself on eggs of penguins. He landed by himself, the crew having given him a suit of old clothes, and subscribed to find him in immediate necessaries. He began to inquire cautiously in London about his wife and family. At first, he could learn little or nothing; for nobody remembered him, and he feared to ask too openly, a sort of Enoch Arden terror restraining him from proclaiming his personality till he knew exactly what had happened in his long absence. But bit by bit, he found out at last that his wife had married again, and was now long dead: and that the man she had married was Vivian Callingham, his own treacherous companion on the Crozet Islands. As soon as he learned that, the full depth of the man's guilt burst upon him like a thunderbolt. Richard Wharton understood now why Vivian Callingham had left him alone on those desert rocks, and sailed away in the ship without telling the captain of his fellow-castaway's plight. He saw the whole vile plot the man had concocted at once, and the steps he had taken to carry it into execution.

Vivian Callingham, whom I falsely thought my father, had gone back to Australia with pretended news of Richard Wharton's death. He had sought my widowed mother in her own home up country, and told her a lying tale of his devotion to her husband in his dying moments on that remote ocean speck in the far Southern Pacific. By this story he ingratiated himself. He knew she was rich: he knew she was worth marrying: and to marry her, he had left my own real father, Richard Wharton, to starve and languish for twenty years among rocks and sea-fowl on a lonely island!

My blood ran cold at such a tale of deadly treachery. I remembered now to have heard some small part of it before. But much of it, as Jack told it to me, was quite new and unexpected. No wonder I had turned in horror that night from the man I long believed to be my own father, when I learned by what vile and cruelly treacherous means he had succeeded in imposing his supposed relationship upon me! But still, all this brought me no nearer the real question of questions--why did I shoot him?


CHAPTER XXI.

THE PLOT UNRAVELS ITSELF


As Jack went on unfolding that strange tale of fraud and heartless wrong, my interest every moment grew more and more absorbing. But I can't recall it now exactly as Jack told me it. I can only give you the substance of that terrible story.

When Richard Wharton first learned of his wife's second marriage during his own lifetime to that wicked wretch who had ousted and supplanted him, he believed also, on the strength of Vivian Callingham's pretences, that his own daughter had died in her babyhood in Australia. He fancied, therefore, that no person of his kin remained alive at all, and that he might proceed to denounce and punish Vivian Callingham. With that object in view, he tramped down all the way from London to Torquay, to make himself known to his wife's relations, the Moores, and to their cousin, Courtenay Ivor of Babbicombe--my Jack, as I called him. For various reasons of his own, he called first on Jack, and proceeded to detail to him this terrible family story.

At first hearing, Jack could hardly believe such a tale was true--of his Una's father, as he still thought Vivian Callingham. But a strange chance happened to reveal a still further complication. It came out in this way. I had given Jack a recent photograph of myself in fancy dress, which hung up over his mantelpiece. As the weather-worn visitor's eye fell on the picture, he started and grew pale.

"Why, that's her!" he cried with a sudden gasp. "That's my daughter--Mary Wharton!"

Well, naturally enough Jack thought, to begin with, this was a mere mistake on his strange visitor's part.

"That's her half-sister," he said, "Una Callingham--your wife's child by her second marriage. She may be like her, no doubt, as half-sisters often are. But Mary Wharton, I know, died some eighteen years ago or so, when Una was quite a baby, I believe. I've heard all about it, because, don't you see, I'm engaged to Una."

The poor wreck of a clergyman, however, shook his head with profound conviction. He knew better than that.

"Oh no," he said decisively: "that's my child, Mary Wharton. Even after all these years, I couldn't possibly be mistaken. Blood is thicker than water: I'd know her among ten thousand. She'd be just that age now, too. I see the creature's vile plot. His daughter died young, and he's palmed off my Mary as his own child, to keep her money in his hands. But never mind the money. Thank Heaven, she's alive! That's her! That's my Mary!"

The plot seemed too diabolical and too improbable for anybody to believe. Jack could hardly think it possible when his new friend told him. But