His Unknown Wife

“Hang it all!” he muttered, strangely disconsolate. “When Fate took me by the scruff of the neck and married me to one of two sisters, neither of whom I had ever seen, she might have been kind enough, the jade, to tie me to the right one!”

Yet, even to his thinking, Madge and Nina were like as a couple of pins! Being an eminently sensible sort of fellow, he realized in the next breath that Madge might be quite as nice a girl as Nina.

Then the thought struck him that she was purposely making things easier for him by cultivating a friendship with Sturgess. In any case, Sturgess was obviously destined to act as a pawn in the game. Even he, Maseden, had not scrupled to use that gentleman at sight when anxious to board the Southern Cross without attracting the attention of the news-mongering boatmen of Cartagena.

That night he lay awake for hours. For one thing, the ship was running into bad weather again, and complained nosily of the buffeting her stout frame was receiving. For another, his own course was beset with difficulties. He failed completely to understand the attitude of sister Nina.

If Madeleine – or Madge, as he had better learned to distinguish her – had sought marriage with a man about to die as a means to escape from some unbearable duress, was her plight accentuated rather than bettered by the fact that her husband still lived? If so, the announcement that he meant to obtain a legal dissolution of the bond at the earliest possible moment would relieve the tension.

But what if her need demanded that she should remain wed, a wife in name only? A development of that sort foreshadowed complexities of a rare order. Maseden knew himself as one capable of Quixotic action – even the scheming Steinbaum had paid him that tribute – but it was asking too much that he should go through life burdened with a wife who treated him as a benevolent stranger.

Common sense urged that they should meet and discuss a most trying and equivocal situation as frankly and fully as might be. Why, then, had Nina Gray been so disturbed, so anxious to keep the married pair apart? Both girls knew he was alive. What purpose could it serve that the fact should be ignored?

He puzzled his brain to recall incidents he had heard of Steinbaum’s history, but investigation along that line drew a blank. Was Suarez mixed up in the embroglio? It was unlikely. Though the man had spent some years in the United States and in Europe, he had not left San Juan since he, Maseden, came there, and, before that period, both Madge and Nina Gray must have been girls in short frocks and long tresses.

Perhaps the father’s record would provide a clew. Somehow, though he had never set eyes on Mr. Gray save as a shadowy form on a dark night, Maseden sensed him as unsympathetic. He was forced to form a judgment on the flimsiest of material, having none other; but Gray’s voice, his way of speaking to his daughters, had grated.

First impressions are treacherous guides; nevertheless the philosopher whom they cannot mislead does not exist.

The following day was the longest in Maseden’s experience. Monotony, in itself, is wearying; when, to a dull routine of meals and occasional talk with men of an inferior type is added the positive discomfort of confinement in the most exposed and cramped part of a ship during a stiff gale, monotony becomes akin to torture.

At last, however, night fell. There was no improvement in the weather, which, if anything, grew worse; but a change in the ship’s course, or a shifting of the wind – no one to whom Maseden might speak could give him any reliable data on the point – brought the Southern Cross on a more even keel.

Here, at least, was some slight compensation for the leaden-footed hours of waiting. Nina Gray might be a good sailor, but it was hardly reasonable to expect that she would keep her tryst when the big steamer was trying alternately to stand on end or roll bodily over to port.

About nine o’clock Maseden made out a shrouded figure in the position where his “sister-in-law” had stood the previous night. He hastened from the shelter of the forecastle, and was promptly drenched from head to foot by a shower of spray. He was half-way up the ladder when a voice reached him.

“Please go back,” it said. “I’ll come to the gangway on the starboard side.”

He regained the deck, made for the right-hand gangway, and soon had the satisfaction of seeing the girl walking swiftly along the dimly-lighted corridor.

He hardly knew how to greet her. To bid her “Good evening,” or murmur some platitude about her goodness in keeping the appointment in such vile weather, would have sounded banal.

The lady, however, when they came face to face, settled all doubts on the question of etiquette by saying breathlessly:

“I have had a long talk with my sister, Mr. Maseden, and she bids me tell you that she cannot meet you herself. You were so generous, so kind to her, at a moment when your thoughts might well have been centered in your own terrible fate, that she cannot bear the ordeal of asking you the last favor of forgetting her.

“Of course, every facility will be given for the dissolution of the marriage. I have written here the address of a firm of lawyers in Philadelphia who will act with your legal representatives when the matter comes before the courts. For your own purposes, I understand, you wish to remain unknown while on board this ship. We have arranged to travel to New York by the first American liner sailing from Buenos Ayres after our arrival. Perhaps you will be good enough to choose another vessel, or, if your affairs are urgent, we would wait for a later one. Can you let me know your wishes now in that matter?”

Maseden was so astonished that he literally caught the girl by the shoulder and turned her partly round so that the light of a distant lamp fell on her face. The buffeting of the gale, aided, no doubt, by a feeling of excitement, had lent her a fine color, but, if her utterance was a trifle broken at first, it had soon become calm and measured, nor did she seem to resent his cavalier treatment.

“Are you joking?” he said, smiling in sheer perplexity.

“I fail to find any humor in my words,” came the instant reply.

“Quite so. They might have been framed by a lawyer. Isn’t there a ghost of a joke in that mere fact?”

“It appeared to my sister, and I fully agree with her, that we are suggesting the best way, the only way, out of an embarrassing dilemma.”

“Yes,” agreed Maseden, drawing a long breath. “I agree to all the terms; I insist only on priority of sailing from Buenos Ayres. I don’t see why I should risk my life just to save you a trifling inconvenience.”

“Then here is the address I spoke of,” and she proffered an envelope.

“Good. We’ll leave the rest to the law, Miss Nina.”

“Thank you. Good-by.”

She would have passed him, but he was on the after side of the gangway, and his outstretched hand restrained her.

“One moment, please,” he said. “I want you to tell your sister that she has thoroughly – disillusioned me.”

“I’ll do that,” she assured him, and he could not help but regard her airy self-possession as the most surprising factor in a remarkable situation.

“And you, too,” he went on. “Something has happened to you since last night. Somehow you are – harder. Forgive me if I choose unpleasant adjectives.”

She hesitated before replying. Perhaps she felt the quiet scorn underlying the words.

“Where my unhappy family is concerned, the forgiveness must come wholly from you,” she said at last. “May I go now, Mr. Maseden? Once more, thank you for all that you have done and will do. Remember, when this miserable affair reaches the newspapers, it is not your reputation that will suffer, but the woman’s!”

She left him gazing blankly after her. There was a tense vibrato in the tone of the girl’s voice that touched some responsive chord in the man’s breast.

Then he became aware that he was soaked to the skin, and the wind was piercingly cold.

He murmured a phrase strongly reminiscent of the Americano who took hunting trips into the interior of Central America, and hurried to his cabin, where he stripped and rubbed his limbs to a glow before turning in.

CHAPTER VI

AN UNFORESEEN DISASTER

During the night the storm developed into that elemental chaos which the landsman exaggerates into a hurricane and the sailor logs as a strong northwesterly gale. Passage along the open decks of the Southern Cross became a hazardous undertaking, an experiment just practicable for a strong man clad in oilskins and seaboots, but positively dangerous for one unable to interpret the vagaries of a ship plunging through a heavy sea. A broken limb or ugly bruise was the certain penalty of an incautious movement, if, indeed, one was not swept overboard.

For a passenger – a non-combatant, so to speak – the only certain way to insure physical safety was to lie prone in a bunk, with a hand ever ready to seize the nearest rail when an unusually violent lurch tilted the vessel to an angle of forty-five degrees and simultaneously drove her nose into a veritable mountain of water.

Maseden contrived to sleep fitfully until a thin gray light, trickling through a tiny port when momentarily free of wave-wash, told him that another day had dawned. The din was incessant. Inanimate things may be inarticulate to human ears, but they speak a language of their own on such occasions – an inchoate tongue made up of banging and clattering, of stunning vibrations, of wind-shrieks, of the groaning of steel framework, riveted plates, and seasoned timber.

The Southern Cross was tackling her work with stubborn energy, but she complained of its severity in every fibre. Ships, like men, prefer easy conditions, and growl in their own peculiar manner when compelled to wage a fierce and continuous fight for mere existence.

Of course a sailor never permits himself to think of his own craft in such wise. “Dirty weather” is simply an unpleasant episode in the routine of a voyage. He regards it much as the average city man views wind and rain – displeasing additions to life’s minor worries, but not to be considered as affecting the daily task.

In a modern, well-found steamship such negative faith is fully justified, and the ship’s company of the Southern Cross went about their several duties as methodically as though the vessel were roped securely alongside a pier in the North River.

The center of the forecastle held a roomy compartment in which meals were served for the crew, and Maseden took refuge there as soon as he was dressed. He obtained an early cup of coffee, and derived some comfort from the fact, communicated by the half-caste sailor he had saved from the falling pulley, that about the same time next day they would sight the Evangelistas light, and soon thereafter be in the land-locked water of the Straits of Magellan.

He realized, of course, that sight or sound of either Madge Gray or her sister was hardly to be expected during the next twenty-four hours. In fact, he might not see them again before Buenos Ayres was reached.

On the whole, it would be better so, he decided. A thrilling and most dramatic incident in a life not otherwise noteworthy for its vicissitudes would close when he was safe on board a homeward-bound mail steamer. After that would come some small experience of a court of law.

For the rest, if he contrived to cheat the newspapers of the full details, he would actually risk his repute as a veracious citizen if he told the plain truth about one day’s history in the Republic of San Juan.