The Mysterious Island, Jules Verne [freenovel24 txt] 📗

The Captain had taken his seat upon the divan, and, leaning upon his arm, he regarded the engineer, who was seated near him.

“You know the name I bore?” he asked.

“I know it as well as I know the name of this admirable submarine apparatus.”

“The Nautilus,” said the Captain, with a half smile.

“The Nautilus.”

“But do you know⁠—do you know who I am?”

“I do.”

“For thirty years I have had no communication with the inhabited world, for thirty years have I lived in the depths of the sea, the only place where I have found freedom! Who, now, has betrayed my secret?”

“A man who never pledged you his word, Captain Nemo, one who, therefore, cannot be accused of betraying you.”

“The Frenchman whom chance threw in my way?”

“The same.”

“Then this man and his companions did not perish in the maelstrom into which the Nautilus had been drawn?”

“They did not, and there has appeared under the title of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a work which contains your history.”

“The history of but a few months of my life, sir,” answered the Captain, quickly.

“True,” replied Smith, “but a few months of that strange life sufficed to make you known⁠—”

“As a great criminal, doubtless,” said Captain Nemo, smiling disdainfully. “Yes, a revolutionist, a scourge to humanity.”

The engineer did not answer.

“Well, sir?”

“I am unable to judge Captain Nemo,” said Smith, “at least in what concerns his past life. I, like the world at large, am ignorant of the motives for this strange existence, and I am unable to judge of the effects without knowing the causes, but what I do know is that a beneficent hand has been constantly extended to us since our arrival here, that we owe everything to a being good, generous, and powerful, and that this being, powerful, generous, and good, is you, Captain Nemo!”

“It is I,” answered the captain, quietly.

The engineer and the reporter had risen, the others had drawn near, and the gratitude which swelled their hearts would have sought expression in words and gesture, when Captain Nemo signed to them to be silent, and in a voice more moved, doubtless, than he wished:⁠—

“When you have heard me,” he said. And then, in a few short, clear sentences, he told them the history of his life.

The history was brief. Nevertheless, it took all his remaining strength to finish it. It was evident that he struggled against an extreme feebleness. Many times Smith urged him to take some rest, but he shook his head, like one who knew that for him there would be no tomorrow, and when the reporter offered his services⁠—

“They are useless,” he answered, “my hours are numbered.”

Captain Nemo was an Indian prince, the Prince Dakkar, the son of the Rajah of the then-independent territory of Bundelkund, and nephew of the hero of India, Tippo-Saib. His father sent him, when ten years old, to Europe, where he received a complete education; and it was the secret intention of the Rajah to have his son able someday to engage in equal combat with those whom he considered as the oppressors of his country.

From ten years of age until he was thirty, the Prince Dakkar, with superior endowments, of high heart and courage, instructed himself in everything; pushing his investigations in science, literature, and art to the uttermost limits.

He travelled over all Europe. His birth and fortune made his company much sought after, but the seductions of the world possessed no charm for him. Young and handsome, he remained serious, gloomy, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, with implacable anger fixed in his heart.

He hated. He hated the only country where he had never wished to set foot, the only nation whose advances he had refused: he hated England more and more as he admired her. This Indian summed up in his own person all the fierce hatred of the vanquished against the victor. The invader is always unable to find grace with the invaded. The son of one of those sovereigns whose submission to the United Kingdom was only nominal, the prince of the family of Tippo-Saib, educated in ideas of reclamation and vengeance, with a deep-seated love for his poetic country weighed down with the chains of England, wished never to place his foot on that land, to him accursed, that land to which India owed her subjection.

The Prince Dakkar became an artist, with a lively appreciation of the marvels of art; a savant familiar with the sciences; a statesman educated in European courts. In the eyes of a superficial observer, he passed, perhaps, for one of those cosmopolites, curious after knowledge, but disdaining to use it; for one of those opulent travellers, high-spirited and platonic, who go all over the world and are of no one country.

It was not so. This artist, this savant, this man was Indian to the heart, Indian in his desire for vengeance, Indian in the hope which he cherished of being able someday to reestablish the rights of his country, of driving on the stranger, of making it independent.

He returned to Bundelkund in the year 1849. He married a noble Indian woman whose heart bled as his did at the woes of their country. He had two children whom he loved. But domestic happiness could not make him forget the servitude of India. He waited for an opportunity. At length it came.

The English yoke was pressed, perhaps, too heavily upon the Indian people. The Prince Dakkar became the mouthpiece of the malcontents. He instilled into their spirits all the hatred he felt against the strangers. He went over not only the independent portions of the Indian peninsula, but into those regions directly submitted to the English control. He recalled to them the grand days of Tippo-Saib, who died heroically at Seringapatam for the defense of his country.

In 1857 the Sepoy mutiny broke forth. Prince Dakkar was its soul. He organized that immense uprising. He placed his talents and his wealth at