Stories by English Authors: Africa (Selected by Scribners). Коллектив авторов

Also, his hands trembled much, and he began to lose flesh. All this troubled me, for his own sake as well as my own, and I resolved to ask him to see the doctor of the next mail-steamer that came. With this idea I went one day to the end of the Point, and found him in his usual attitude, seated on the long grass, looking seaward. He did not hear me approach, and when I spoke he started to his feet, and demanded fiercely why I disturbed him. I replied, as mildly as I could, for I was rather afraid of the glittering look that was in his eyes, that I wished to ask him if he did not feel ill.

      He regarded me with a steady but softened glance for a little, and then said:

      “My lad, I thank you for your trouble; but I want no doctor. Do you think I’m looking ill?”

      “Indeed you are,” I answered, “ill and thin; and, do you know, I hear you talk to yourself in your sleep nearly every night.”

      “What do I say?” he asked eagerly.

      “That I cannot tell,” I replied. “It is all rambling talk; the same things over and over again, and nearly all about one person – Lucy.”

      “Boy!” he cried out, as if in pain, or as if something had touched him to the quick, “sit you down, and I’ll tell you why I think of her – she was my wife.”

      He moved nearer to the edge of the cliff, and we sat down, almost over the restless sea beneath us.

      “She lives in my memory,” he continued, speaking more to himself than to me, and looking far out to the horizon, beneath which the setting sun had begun to sink, “in spite of all I can do or think of to make her appear base in my eyes. For she left me to go with another man – a scoundrel. This was how it was,” he added, quickly: “I married her, and thought her as pure as a flower; but I could not take her to sea with me because I was only the mate of a vessel, so I left her among her own friends, in the village where she was born. In a little cottage by herself I settled her, comfortable and happy as I thought. God! how she hung round my neck and sobbed when I went away the first time! and yet – yet – within a year she left me.” And he stopped for several minutes, resting his head upon his hands. “At first I could get no trace of her,” he resumed. “Her friends knew nothing more of her than that she had left the village suddenly. Gradually I found out the name of the scoundrel who had seduced her away. He had bribed her friends so that they were silent; but I overbribed them with the last money I had, and I followed him and my wife on foot. I never found them, nor did I ever know why she had deserted me for him. If I had only known the reason; if I could have been told of my fault; if she had only written to say that she was tired of me; that I was too old, too rough for her soft ways, – I think I could have borne the heavy stroke the villain had dealt me better. The end of my search was that I dropped down in the streets of Liverpool, whither I thought I had tracked them, and was carried to the hospital with brain-fever upon me. Two months afterward I came out cured, and the sense of my loss was deadened within me, so that I could go to sea again, which I did, before the mast, under the name of Jackson, in a bark that traded to this coast here.” And the old sailor rose to his feet and turned abruptly away, leaving me sitting alone.