Spike stared at the speaker intently; and when her
cracked voice ceased, his look was that of a man who
was terrified as well as bewildered. This did
not arise still from any gleamings of the real state
of the case, but from the soreness with which his conscience
pricked him, when he heard that his much-wronged wife
was alive. He fancied, with a vivid and rapid
glance at the probabilities, all that a woman abandoned
would be likely to endure in the course of so many
long and suffering years.
“Are you sure of what you say, Jack? You
would n’t take advantage of my situation to
tell me an untruth?”
“As certain of it as of my own existence.
I have seen her quite lately—talked with
her of you—in short, she is now at
Key West, knows your state, and has a wife’s
feelin’s to come to your bed-side.”
Notwithstanding all this, and the many gleamings he
had had of the facts during their late intercourse
on board the brig, Spike did not guess at the truth.
He appeared astounded, and his terror seemed to increase.
“I have another thing to tell you,” continued
Jack, pausing but a moment to collect her own thoughts.
“Jack Tier—the real Jack Tier—he
who sailed with you of old, and whom you left ashore
at the same time you desarted your wife, did
die of the fever, as you was told, in eight-and-forty
hours a’ter the brig went to sea.”
“Then who, in the name of Heaven, are you?
How came you to hail by another’s name as well
as by another sex?”
“What could a woman do, whose husband had desarted
her in a strange land?”
“That is remarkable! So you’ve
been married? I should not have thought that
possible; and your husband desarted you, too.
Well, such things do happen.”
Jack now felt a severe pang. She could not but
see that her ungainly—we had almost said
her unearthly appearance—prevented the
captain from even yet suspecting the truth; and the
meaning of his language was not easily to be mistaken.
That any one should have married her, seemed
to her husband as improbable as it was probable he
would run away from her as soon as it was in his power
after the ceremony.
“Stephen Spike,” resumed Jack, solemnly,
“I am Mary Swash—I am
your wife!”
Spike started in his bed; then he buried his face
in the coverlet—and he actually groaned.
In bitterness of spirit the woman turned away and
wept. Her feelings had been blunted by misfortune
and the collisions of a selfish world; but enough of
former self remained to make this the hardest of all
the blows she had ever received. Her husband,
dying as he was, as he must and did know himself to
be, shrunk from one of her appearance, unsexed as she
had become by habits, and changed by years and suffering.
The trusting heart’s repose, the
paradise
Of home, with all its loves, doth fate
allow
The crown of glory unto woman’s
brow.
