The Great Secret

Front matter

THE GREAT SECRET

BY.

HUME NISBET

Chapter I

THE GREAT SECRET.

———o———

CHAPTER I.

THE EMBARKATION.

Philip Mortlake stood near the gangway of the Rockhampton, and watched with languid attention the passengers who were to be his companions for the next six weeks. He had come early on board, and alone—a weary and world-worn man, the wrong side of forty, disappointed with life, disillusioned, prematurely grey, with what might have been ties and fetters of affection snapped and withered. He was leaving England, hopeless and indifferent, and going where or to what he neither knew nor cared.

Philip Mortlake was in a very bad way, and likely to be worse if something did not come to give him the rousing up which was required in his case. He was troubled with a disease which is considerably on the increase at the close of this busy century, a trouble not unlike and yet different from ennui, because it proceeds from opposite causes, a longing for our class, a weariness which is all-devouring, a melancholy and apathy which cannot be lifted.

The victim to ennui has been born aimless, and surfeited himself by indulgences; but the victim to this trouble is the active worker who has over-exerted himself, the passionate lover who has been wantonly maltreated in the court of love, and who at last breaks down, in spite of his frantic efforts to act the part of a man.

Philip Mortlake, after years of battling with Destiny, had been struck down, and, like the wounded animal, all that he knew yet of his wounds was the desire for solitude.

His doctors had advised him to go for a long voyage, not by himself, but where there was good company, people who did not know about him or his peculiar reasons for leaving England. The condolences of friends were poison to his mind. A man may be comforted by friendship if death has snatched all that he loves from him, but not in such a case as Philip's.

He had loved, wooed and married a woman who gave him her heart in return, then, after a period of trust and happiness, she had changed towards him; instead of trust she had plagued him almost to the point of madness with vile suspicions, evil and groundless charges, until gradually, without reason or provocation on his part, her love and faith had become the direst hatred. She had grown to be his most bitter enemy, who would pause at nothing to encompass his ruin and destruction.

Had they been lovers only they might have parted, and the hatred on one side and the passionate gnawing misery on the other might have been fought down in the course of time. But they were married, and could not be liberated from the yoke, except at the loss of their reputation.

Philip Mortlake loved his wife, or would have loved her if she had allowed him to do so. She was a virtuous and religious woman—intensely religious, as far as her mistaken ideas about religion went. He was not religious, but he had a certain moral dignity which made him abhor being what his hating partner so constantly charged him with.

His friends told him that she was insane, and should be shut up; that it was a monomania which he should not trouble himself about. They were friends only who could not be expected to enter into his memory of the past fond days; they saw only an evil-minded woman trying to drag a man down to shame and perdition; but he carried with him for ever the picture of a fresh young girl who had loved him once, but whom he had always adored; and this was his misery and humiliation now, the calamity that had broken him down at last.

Yes, he was now a liberated man, as far as the law could free him, and the woman could curse and revile him when she was not praying.

He had humbled himself to the dust first in the futile effort to win her back; then, seeing how idle all these efforts were, he gave her what she wanted—her liberty.

It was easily enough managed with a little money. The creature was bought to swear in court that she was his mistress, while he had only to remain silent under the charges of cruelty and unfaithfulness; and she had not spared him.

The papers had recounted all his dastardly acts of unmanly abuse of this pure wife; the audience in the court hissed him when he departed, shamed, yet free; the judges had said in strong terms that hanging was too mild a punishment for such an unmitigated scoundrel; and so he had become a branded criminal, and his wife an universally pitied martyr, on this day when he stood alone, watching the passengers bidding their friends farewell at the dock of Tilbury.

He had some friends who had known him in the past and who would have been glad enough to have wished him God-speed on his voyage, but he did not want them, and therefore had taken his passage out without letting them know his intentions. It seemed ridiculous for a man at his time of life (for he had felt very old for some years past) to let such a trifle as love trouble him so greatly, such a mere modern incident as divorce prey so much upon his mind.

If he had been a young man and lived in the romantic first half of the century, his trouble might have been defined as a broken-heart; but, alas! he was no longer young, and the doctors decided that his trouble was a complication of mental fag, rheumatic gout and a disorganised liver, therefore they ordered him first to take a course of mineral waters and afterwards a tour round the world, and doubtless they were correct in their diagnosis.

He had taken their advice, as men must do when they have lost their will-grip and have become nervous and demoralised, and spent a couple of preliminary weeks at a Hydropathic in the company of other health-wrecks, who find the most absorbing topic of conversation the recounting of their different real or imaginary ailments.

On his entrance to the establishment he was interviewed by a doctor attached to the place, who gave him his first little bit of amusement and so assisted in his cure, therefore he did not grudge him his fee. He, the doctor, gravely felt his pulse, commanded him to exhibit his tongue, and then proceeded to tap his body.

"Do you feel a fluttering of the heart?" asked the doctor.

"No," replied the patient.

"But if you were to walk rapidly up a hill, would you?"

"I think I might."

"Ah! very bad symptoms," continued the doctor, with an ominous shake of his head. "You are in a most critical state, I can assure you—heart disorganised, liver abnormally enlarged, kidneys seriously deranged—"

"How long have I got to live?" asked the patient, with the first twinkle of humour in his wearied eyes that he had been able to call up for some time.

"I cannot answer that question, but you must be very careful. I shall write you out a course of treatment, and I think you will find this place suit you, if you stay long enough."

The doctor took him to the bath-room and ordered him a vapour bath with a mustard pack and then filled up a form for three days' treatment, in which massage formed part.

He obeyed the doctor's advice, but added a little to it, as he had no desire to stay longer than he could help in this nest of valetudinarians, and opened the bathman's eyes when he told him what the doctor had ordered. It was the most heroic course that had ever been attempted at that health resort.

"I never knew the doctor push on a patient like this before," said the bathman, as he obeyed the supposed orders from headquarters. "Why, you will be better in a week."

"That's what the doctor wants—to work a miracle," replied the audacious Philip, as he plunged recklessly into vapour baths, mustard packs, wet and electric massages, with copious draughts from the sacred wells.

In a week he was reduced to a fine state of passive quietude, and could look round and observe his neighbour. One lady opposite him at dinner had been ordered to abstain rigidly from taking any salt with her food; another, close at hand, to regard sugar as poison to her system. The husband of the saltless lady was forced to exist on jugged hare exclusively; in fact, he began to think, as he heard the varied treatment of the patients, what a series of practical and remunerative jokes a doctor's life must be, and he no longer wondered that the successful ones wore such compressed lips and stolid faces, or that they could tell such capital stories after dinner without grinning. If he had only studied medicine and practised, he might have been able to endure his domestic calamities much more easily.

One patient, after fixing him with a glassy eye for several nights in the smoke-room without speaking, abruptly broke the spell of silence at last by saying,—

"I believe in diet entirely; but what do you think of the marriage laws?"

Philip thought for a moment, and then replied that "dieting was a good idea and that the marriage laws were decidedly faulty."

"Women are born devils—that's my opinion of them," replied the man savagely, and then he relapsed into gloomy silence.

"Another victim to matrimony," thought Philip, as he looked at the fire and puffed his pipe.

He spent an innocent week at this Hydropathic, where each visitor took the other on trust and made themselves agreeable, and if he had been at all impressionable might have drifted easily into matrimony a second time; yet it did him good, for he was tenderly treated, and therefore was able to hold up his head a little and shove back his shame and brooding care.

He had learnt one thing also, which, if hurtful to his vanity as a man, consoled him in other ways. He was too old to interest young women, although not yet old enough to get them to make up to him, therefore he might safely indulge himself in their company. Professional flirts, middle-aged spinsters and widow's might lay traps for him, but woman's devotion was over as far as he was concerned; he must remain an outsider and watch the game of life for the rest of his days.

Therefore he leaned carelessly against the side of the steamship and looked at the people, young and old, passing along to their different cabins, or fussing about their luggage, with something of the same curiosity that a disembodied spirit might be supposed to feel if it revisited earth. His wife had gone from him, and all his interests and ties were snapped. He was no longer a human being, he was only a spectator.

There was nothing about his personal appearance to attract attention or engage interest. His hair and beard were getting rapidly grey; very soon they would be bleached white, and then he would take his place as a veteran. His eyes were blue, and had once been keen and bright, his figure strongly built but carelessly dressed; and what if his heart tingled for sympathy, he did not show this desire, therefore no careless spectator could perceive it. To such he was only an ordinary, middle-aged man, with a good-natured face, who stood quietly, smoking heavily, waiting for the ship to unmoor and the friends to say farewell, before he went down to arrange his cabin or prepare for the rough waters of Biscay Bay.

That is all that people can see of the tragedies of real life, except on the stage where the morose comrades pose, unless they happen to have suffered themselves. Then perhaps they acquire an extra sense or instinct, such as Philip Mortlake now possessed—the gift of reading below the surface.

He was able with this misery-given gift to read most of the passengers as they passed him and pretty accurately gauge their habits and pursuits, for it is astonishing how plainly the occupations of humanity print indexes on the faces, and, as he afterwards found on closer intimacy, his first impressions had not been far out.

But what struck him most curiously was the foreign element who came on board on this morning—a few to the saloon, but the greater bulk to the second cabin. In the first class he saw all sorts and conditions of men and women—Christians and Jews, men and women travelling for health or pleasure, others business bent, with more than the usual sprinkling of people who did not speak the English language.

It was the first long trip that the Rockhampton was taking. One of the latest improvements in passenger packets, she had done her trial trip satisfactorily, and was now about to prove her superior speed round the world. A splendid specimen of ironwork and machinery, with fittings like the finest West End hotel, so that her complement of passengers was complete.

Philip noticed that most of the passengers for the second class were dark-bearded, dark-eyed and swarthy-visaged men, with only a small proportion of women. Most of these men carried their own meagre luggage themselves, and bore it carefully along, inquiring their way in broken English, and jealously keeping themselves aloof from each other. About a couple of dozen went to the first-class division, the rest, as we have said, went to the second cabin.

While Philip was languidly watching this migration, his attention was attracted by one woman who came alone, like himself, without friends to see her off.

A thin woman, plainly dressed, about twenty-five, with dim, grey eyes, pale cheeks and brown hair—a woman who might have been good-looking if she had been happy, but who looked, as he himself was, uninteresting as she glided along, looking at no one.

He knew the symptoms which that pale face with the wearied eyes expressed, and felt a surge of sympathy swell up in his breast as he followed her slowly down to the saloon. She had tried the world as he had, and found it wanting. They were both desolate souls on an arid strand, waiting hopelessly and helplessly on their fate.

And Fate had brought them together on this ocean hotel.

They might hate each other, perhaps, for they were both defiant and miserable. Philip Mortlake was inured to hatred, and prepared almost to court it again as he took his seat beside her at the lunch prepared for the passengers and their friends.

Chapter II

CHAPTER II.

THE VAGUE HORROR.

A couple of weeks at sea is sufficient to bring the stranger passengers together and make them tolerably intimate. A month, and they know all about each other, and belong, more or less, all to one family. Families quarrel and make up again, so do passengers at sea. Some vow friendships, which are forgotten, when they land; some make love which lasts a little longer; others remember those bewitching days and nights at sea longer and more tenderly than they ought to do.

The Rockhampton was rushing with regular piston-drives to her doom. She had touched at Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Suez, Ceylon, and was now pushing her way through the soft waves, azure by day, phosphorescent by night, towards the centre belt of the world, those vast and trembling waters, brimful of mystery and deliciousness as well as terror, for here the monsters of the deep have their abode—the blue-nosed shark, most ferocious of all its vicious tribe, with other strange scaly mammoths, which old sailors tell about and no one believes in this cynical age of cold reason.

Philip Mortlake had recovered his nerves and mental equilibrium during this month at sea. He had quitted England with the shamed feeling upon him that he was a pariah, and his excited nerves gave him this morbid self-consciousness. Now that he had recovered tone, he knew that the world does not care one iota what any man and woman does with their lives. It is vanity, born of solitude and brooding, which makes us fancy that we are of importance enough to disturb the daily routine of our friends and neighbours. If we write a big book, paint a great picture, win a battle, or commit a monstrous crime, we only rise to the surface for a moment, show our heads, as it were, with a portion of our shoulders over the other swimmers, and then we subside once again into the general crowd.

He could wonder now why he had given up his clubs and shunned his friends, which was the best sign of returning health. Who need care about the nasty remarks of a purblind old judge, more than the schoolboy does about the cut of the master's cane? What although his club friends might say behind his back that he was a brute, he knew before that they had called him a fool? They would shake hands with him the same, drink with him, eat with him, and revile some other dear absentee to him as heartily as ever, for in the end of the nineteenth century all the glass houses are broken, and no one thinks about re-glazing their shattered property, with so many brick-bats flying all round. Virtue gets no more credit than does vice. It has become an optional habit, like the putting on of a dress-suit.

He had known a literary notoriety, who was much admired and sought after, by some people. This thing had been kicked times out of number for his opinions and insinuations, but that made no difference to him, he still went about with unabashed brow, ready to present the appropriate portions of his anatomy to any aggressive toe, and men smoked, drank and dined with him the same as usual, abusing him no more than they did the most virtuous members. These things Philip could now recall with philosophy, as he lounged and smoked about the deck on these eternal summer days through which they rushed.

A black-leg and thief had to disappear for a moment, but he was soon forgotten; the murderer went into Newgate, and was buried in quicklime; the traducer got kicked, yet a fortnight covered them all mercifully in oblivion, and they emerged once more purified and made welcome, all save the poor fellow who had been covered with quicklime, of course—he had to be content with oblivion. That's fin-de-siècle society. The good and the evil drift together, and get the drift of the river over them both, until there does not seem much difference, for they are costumed and enshrined alike.

He had another excitement, however, which recalled the Englishman in him and made a man of him. There was something wrong about the passengers. There was a mystery going on aboard which called forth his active qualities, made him more observant, and did a lot to steady his nerves, by supplying him with another excitement.

There was danger on board this peaceful-looking steam packet,—treason, anarchy,—danger to each of the saloon passengers; a crowd of harmless enough people, who had done nothing particularly base to deserve death, and who did not covet that release from their mediocrity to a higher plane. They were content, as the pigs and aldermen are, in their eating, drinking and digestive periods, and Nature had made them so.

He had seen things on board the ship which had woke up his fighting qualities, the nearest approach to soul that Westerns can aspire to, according to the Easterns.

There are different qualities and degrees of danger which touch the human heart with more or less intensity. The danger of death in battle, or while the tempest is raging at its fiercest, and driving the vessel full butt against the rocks. These thrill the brave heart with an excitement which is almost a pleasure after the first pang of anticipated agony has passed. They know, who have been wounded, that the plunge of a dagger or a sword into the body gives no more pain than the prick of a pin, less if the stroke is swiftly dealt and deadly. Those who have been crushed by a fall or a heavy blow can never recall any sensation of pain when the smash came, it is afterwards, when Nature begins to set about the mending, that the pain comes.

A bed of sickness, if lingering, is probably one of the hardest ordeals humanity has to pass through before the friend of man—Death—liberates him, for that is Nature's inquisition, where no pity is shown to the victim while consciousness remains to endure. But the most excruciating of all dangers is when it attacks the imagination with its nightmare-like vagueness and suspense of uncertainty. Hell-fire is one of those dangers which has weighed upon and worn the imagination for so many centuries, making base slaves of the stoutest hearts, as Hamlet says":—

To die,—to sleep;— To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.

It was a vague and horrible uncertainty, and horror like that of Hades which had fallen upon the passengers of the Rockhampton. Ever since leaving Ceylon, a rumour had crept through the ship that there were Anarchists on board in force, with infernal machines, bombs, dynamite and other explosives, enough to wipe them off the face of the ocean as completely as if they had never existed.

How the rumour got about no one knew; perhaps the dynamitards themselves had originated it, knowing so well the paralysing effect of terror. It was not talked about nor discussed, for with the terror had come suspicion, and as they were all strangers, or at least had been before this voyage began, each eyed the other askance and waited with horror on the dénouement. Were the infernal clocks already wound up to go so many hours or days with that deadly precision and regularity until the fatal hour arrived? This was the thought which occupied each mind as they promenaded the deck, tried to enjoy the breakfast, tiffin, or dinner, or music of an evening. Was it annihilation the murderers had resolved upon, or only the practical capture of the ship. Could they have been sure that it was only the ship the demons wanted, the others would have been comparatively happy; but the uncertainty was the evil which troubled them one and all.

The captain and officers went about their duties outwardly calm, yet with the same uncertainty that tortured the passengers. The stewards brought round the dishes with trembling hands and pallid faces; the passengers played with their forks, knives and spoons, chattering noisily with each other while they waited, as the sleeper seems to wait on the unknown horror which has chained all his faculties of resistance. They talked wildly about anything to keep themselves from shrieking out their terror. Men as well as women were under the awful spell, and already were completely demoralised. Half a dozen resolute men could have taken that ship any hour.

Philip Mortlake found it an easy task to read this general panic. He was not quite free from it himself, yet he had the advantage of being a little more certain about the enemies than were the others, for he had kept his eyes open, and studied his fellow-passengers.

The quietest and most indifferent he saw was the woman who had so strangely interested him at first, by reason of the apathy which misery had fixed upon her.

She was an Englishwoman, by name Mrs Austin, but whether a widow or a wife no one as yet knew. Philip had watched her keenly on the first day, yet had not intruded himself upon her, preferring to wait her own time.

It chanced, whether by accident or fate, that they were placed together at the table during the voyage, and thus a kind of intimacy grew between them. They talked commonplaces at the table, and often found themselves together on the deck, where naturally they sat and conversed, or walked occasionally, so that he had greater opportunities of observing her, and it must be said his admiration grew as the days passed, for she was not an ordinary woman.

A refined lady undoubtedly she was. Philip Mortlake could not have been interested in any other type of woman. Quiet and grave always, it seemed as if those lips had lost the art of smiling, the grey eyes all humidity or light. They were fine eyes, and would have been softly grey had they not been so steadfast and dry. The time for tears seemed to have gone past for this lonely spirit, as it was for him. Cynicism also had passed, for after grief comes the period of defiance, which produces cynicism, and after that the death-in-life—apathy. She was at the apathetic stage, which even the shock of an anticipated bomb could not shake or terrorise.

She partook of the dishes regularly, and with moderation, dressed always well, yet without ostentation, as a lady must do. When speaking, she uttered her words evenly and correctly, with a voice that was silvery and soft, yet, like her eyes, a little too colourless. To the others she seemed to be an uninteresting person, for the jokes passed without any recognition from her, and humorists, great or little, do not like that kind of reception of their small change, yet, if the subject was serious, she took her share in it, without any apparent effort, and conversed modestly and well.

She looked to be twenty-nine or thirty; possibly she was younger, for sorrow and disappointment age one quickly. Philip saw more than a few white hairs shining amongst her brown tresses; these, with the tiny lines at the side of her firm lips and across and between the brows, revealed a history to him which he would fain have penetrated for the purpose of consoling. Perhaps she read that intuition in him, as well as something of his own drama, for she made him more of an intimate than she did the others.

Her figure was willowy and slender, yet firmly built and healthy; the hands were white, small, and carefully cared for—such hands, long and shapely, that wearied men like to have passed over their fevered brows. The wedding-ring and keeper were on the left hand, with a few other rings. The strongest minded of women cannot dispense with those feminine adornments. This taste has come down the ages with them from the days when they were the slaves and toys of men, as they must always be when they are happy.

Her face would have been a pretty one under the conditions of content and happiness, the face of a woman made to honour and worship the man whom she recognised as her master. It was feminine to the core, although it had been petrified by disillusions. "Curse the man who had wrought this woeful change," thought Philip as he watched that face, for only a man could have done it, and the alteration must have been the work of time, as the soft sands of past ages have been turned into stone by slow degrees, degrees of hardening with, perhaps, the final convulsion which buried all from the light of hope.

She had a fair face this lonely Mrs Austin. The features were Greek-like, sensitive and refined; while they lived they had been mobile and quick to flash into warmth, the red lips to part lovingly, the eyes to become deep and lustrous, the oval cheeks to flush with rosy dyes, and the brown hair to gleam with sunshine. She had once been a woman tender and pulsating, she was now a statue calm and cold.

He had looked at that face day after day, and built up its history in his own heart. He did not love her, for he could as yet love no one, but he had the interest that a tender brother might feel towards a broken sister. He remembered his religious, remorseless wife, and how he had flung his own heart against her strong nature, as the yielding surf beats against the boulders in vain to move the impediment. So must this woman have beaten upon the iron nature the warm waves of her passion until the tide went down, and lay still after the storm of love was past.

He was a disappointed and lonely man, she was a disappointed and lonely woman. Neither of them had life enough yet to appreciate or ask for sympathy. Both had the past memories, cravings and dead passions to separate them. They could never again love as they had loved. A man and a woman had put out that flame. They were both patient and sober. This friendship, if even they were friends, could only be the friendship of the dead and buried.

Chapter III

CHAPTER III.

THE OCEAN LINER.

Captain Nelson was a man well fitted for his post, and one not easily moved. He had served his time in the royal navy, and was now well advanced in years. Ruddy-faced, with short-cropped hair and moustache both white, which contrasted well with his red complexion, black eyebrows and jetty eyes, he looked like a French general. He was an able commander, and insisted on rigid discipline from his subordinates, yet was jovial and courteous when off duty with his male passengers, and gallant to the fair sex. He had sailed the seas so often in the service of the company who owned this fine new vessel that it took some time to make him the least uneasy respecting this dynamitard scare, and as he had no real grounds to interfere with the private property of the passengers, he did his best to inspire his guests with confidence that all must go well. Yet he was not quite so tranquil as he appeared to be, for he, like the others, had read about the doings of the Anarchists on the Continent, and knew that no feat was too outrageous for them to contemplate.