“I have five more days of self and liberty left me,” said Miss Viner. “That is my life’s allowance.”
“For Heaven’s sake do not say words that are so horrible.”
“But am I to lie for Heaven’s sake, and say words that are false; or shall I be silent for Heaven’s sake, and say nothing during these last hours that are allowed to me for speaking? It is so. To you I can say that it is so, and why should you begrudge me the speech?”
“I would begrudge you nothing that I could do for you.”
“No, you should not. Now that my incubus has gone to Barbados, let me be free for a day or two. What chance is there, I wonder, that the ship’s machinery should all go wrong, and that we should be tossed about in the seas here for the next six months? I suppose it would be very wicked to wish it?”
“We should all be starved; that’s all.”
“What, with a cow on board, and a dozen live sheep, and thousands of cocks and hens! But we are to touch at Santa Martha and Cartagena. What would happen to me if I were to run away at Santa Martha?”
“I suppose I should be bound to run with you.”
“Oh, of course. And therefore, as I would not wish to destroy you, I won’t do it. But it would not hurt you much to be shipwrecked, and wait for the next packet.”
“Miss Viner,” he said after a pause—and in the meantime he had drawn nearer to her, too near to her considering all things—“in the name of all that is good, and true, and womanly, go back to England. With your feelings, if I may judge of them by words which are spoken half in jest—”
“Mr. Forrest, there is no jest.”
“With your feelings a poorhouse in England would be better than a palace in Peru.”
“An English workhouse would be better, but an English poorhouse is not open to me. You do not know what it is to have friends—no, not friends, but people belonging to you—just so near as to make your respectability a matter of interest to them, but not so near that they should care for your happiness. Emily Viner married to Mr. Gorloch in Peru is put out of the way respectably. She will cause no further trouble, but her name may be mentioned in family circles without annoyance. The fact is, Mr. Forrest, that there are people who have no business to live at all.”
“I would go back to England,” he added, after another pause. “When you talk to me with such bitterness of five more days of living liberty you scare my very soul. Return, Miss Viner, and brave the worst. He is to meet you at Panama. Remain on this side of the isthmus, and send him word that you must return. I will be the bearer of the message.”
“And shall I walk back to England?” said Miss Viner.
“I had not quite forgotten all that,” he replied, very gently. “There are moments when a man may venture to propose that which under ordinary circumstances would be a liberty. Money, in a small moderate way, is not greatly an object to me. As a return for my valiant defence of you against your West Indian Cerberus, you shall allow me to arrange that with the agent at Colon.”
“I do so love plain English, Mr. Forrest. You are proposing I think, to give me something about fifty guineas.”
“Well, call it so if you will,” said he, “if you will have plain English that is what I mean.”
“So that by my journey out here, I should rob and deceive the man I do know, and also rob the man I don’t know. I am afraid of that bourne beyond the waters of which we spoke; but I would rather face that than act as you suggest.”
“Of the feelings between him and you, I can of course be no judge.”
“No, no; you cannot. But what a beast I am not to thank you! I do thank you. That which it would be mean in me to take, it is noble, very noble, in you to offer. It is a pleasure to me—I cannot tell why—but it is a pleasure to me to have had the offer. But think of me as a sister, and you will feel that it would not be accepted;—could not be accepted, I mean, even if I could bring myself to betray that other man.”
Thus they ran across the Carribbean Sea, renewing very often such conversations as that just given. They touched at Santa Martha and Cartagena on the coast of the Spanish main, and at both places he went with her on shore. He found that she was fairly well educated, and anxious to see and to learn all that might be seen and learned in the course of her travels. On the last day, as they neared the isthmus, she became more tranquil and quiet in the expression of her feelings than before, and spoke with less of gloom than she had done.
“After all ought I not to love him?” she said. “He is coming all the way up from Callao merely to meet me. What man would go from London to Moscow to pick up a wife?”
“I would—and thence round the world to Moscow again—if she were the wife I wanted.”
“Yes; but a wife who has never said that she loved you! It is purely a matter of convenience. Well; I have locked my big box, and I shall give the key to him before it is ever again unlocked. He has a right to it, for he has paid for nearly all that it holds.”
“You look at things from such a mundane point of view.”
“A woman should, or she will always be getting into difficulty. Mind,
