by Grant Allen
Lemarchant curled his lip contemptuously (he didn’t think much of Paterson, because his father was said to be a Glasgow grocer), and answered in his rapid, dare-devil fashion: “No fun! Isn’t there, just! that’s all you know about it, my good fellow. Now I’ll give you one example. One day, the inspector came in and told us there were a lot of blacks camping out on our estate down by the Warramidgee river. So we jumped on our horses like a shot, went down there immediately, and began dispersing them. We didn’t fire at them, because the grass and ferns and things were very high, and we might have wasted our ammunition; but we went at them with native spears, just for all the world like pig-sticking. You should have seen those black fellows run for their lives through the long grass — men, women, and little ones together. We rode after them, full pelt; and as we came up with them, one by one, we just rolled them over, helter-skelter, as if they’d been antelopes or bears or something. By-and-by, after a good long charge or two, we’d cleared the place of the big blacks altogether; but the gins and the children, some of them, lay lurking in among the grass, you know, and wouldn’t come out and give us fair sport, as they ought to have done, out in the open: children will pack, you see, whenever they’re hard driven, exactly like grouse, after a month or two’s steady shooting. Well, to make them start and show game, of course we just put a match to the grass; and in a minute the whole thing was in a blaze, right down the corner to the two rivers. So we turned our horses into the stream, and rode alongside, half a dozen of us on each river; and every now and then, one of the young ones would break cover, and slide out quietly into the stream, and try to swim across without being perceived, and get clean away into the back country. Then we just made a dash at them with the pig-spears; and sometimes they’d dive — and precious good divers they are, too, those Queenslanders, I can tell you; but we waited around till they came up again, and then we stuck them as sure as houses. That’s what we call dispersing the natives over in Queensland: extending the blessings of civilization to the unsettled parts of the back country.”
He laughed a pleasant laugh to himself quietly as he finished this atrocious, devilish story, and showed his white teeth all in a row, as if he thought the whole reminiscence exceedingly amusing.
Of course, we were all simply speechless with horror and astonishment. Such deliberate brutal murderousness — gracious heavens! what am I saying? I had half forgotten for the moment that I, too, am a murderer.
“But what had the black fellows done to you?” Paterson asked with a tone of natural loathing, after we had all sat silent and horror-stricken in a circle for a moment. “I suppose they’d been behaving awfully badly to some white people somewhere — massacring women or something — to get your blood up to such a horrid piece of butchery.”
Lemarchant laughed again, a quiet chuckle of conscious superiority, and only answered: “Behaving badly! Massacring white women! Lord bless your heart, I’d like to see them! Why, the wretched creatures wouldn’t ever dare to do it. Oh, no, nothing of that sort, I can tell you. And our blood wasn’t up either. We went in for it just by way of something to do, and to keep our hands in. Of course you can’t allow a lot of lazy hulking blacks to go knocking around in the neighbourhood of an estate, stealing your fowls and fruit and so forth, without let or hindrance. It’s the custom in Queensland to disperse the black fellows. I’ve often been out riding with a friend, and I’ve seen a nigger skulking about somewhere down in a hollow among the tree-ferns; and I’ve just drawn my six-shooter, and said to my friend, ‘You see me disperse that confounded nigger!’ and I’ve dispersed him right off — into little pieces, too, you may take your oath upon it.”
“But do you mean to tell me, Mr. Lemarchant,” Paterson said, looking a deal more puzzled and shocked, “that these poor creatures had been doing absolutely nothing?”
“Well, now, that’s the way of all you home-sticking sentimentalists,” Lemarchant went on, with an ugly simper. “You want to push on the outskirts of civilization and to see the world colonized, but you’re too squeamish to listen to anything about the only practicable civilizing and colonizing agencies. It’s the struggle for existence, don’t you see: the plain outcome of all the best modern scientific theories. The black man has got to go to the wall; the white man, with his superior moral and intellectual nature, has got to push him there. At bottom, it’s nothing more than civilization. Shoot ’em off at once, I say, and get rid of ’em forthwith and for ever.”
“Why,” I said, looking at him, with my disgust speaking in my face (Heaven forgive me!), “I call it nothing less than murder.”
Lemarchant laughed, and lit his cigar; but after that, somehow, the other men didn’t much care to talk to him in an ordinary way more than was necessary for the carrying out of the ship’s business.
And yet he was a very gentlemanly fellow, I must admit, and well read and decently educated. Only there seemed to be a certain natural brutality about him, under a thin veneer of culture and good breeding, that repelled us all dreadfully from the moment we saw him. I dare say we shouldn’t have noticed it so much if we hadn’t been thrown together so closely as men are on an Arctic voyage, but then and there it was positively unendurable. We none of us held any communications with him whenever we could help it; and he soon saw that we all of us thoroughly disliked and distrusted him.
That only made him reckless and defiant. He knew he was bound to go the journey through with us now, and he set to work deliberately to shock and horrify us. Whether all the stories he told us by the ward-room fire in the evenings were true or not, I can’t tell you — I don’t believe they all were; but at any rate he made them seem as brutal and disgusting as the most loathsome details could possibly make them. He was always apologizing — nay, glorying — in bloodshed and slaughter, which he used to defend with a show of cultivated reasoning that made the naked brutality of his stories seem all the more awful and unpardonable at bottom. And yet one couldn’t deny, all the time, that there was a grace of manner and a show of polite feeling about him which gave him a certain external pleasantness, in spite of everything. He was always boasting that women liked him; and I could easily understand how a great many women who saw him only with his company manners might even think him brave and handsome and very chivalrous.
I won’t go into the details of the expedition. They will be found fully and officially narrated in the log, which I have hidden in the captain’s box in the hut beside the captain’s body. I need only mention here the circumstances immediately connected with the main matter of this confession.
One day, a little while before we got jammed into the ice off the Liakov Islands, Lemarchant was up on deck with me, helping me to remove from the net the creatures that we had dredged up in our shallow soundings. As he stooped to pick out a Leptocardium boreale, I happened to observe that a gold locket had fallen out of the front of his waistcoat, and showed a lock of hair on its exposed surface. Lemarchant noticed it too, and with an awkward laugh put it back hurriedly. “My little girl’s keepsake!” he said in a tone that seemed to me disagreeably flippant about such a subject. “She gave it to me just before I set off on my way to Hammerfest.”
I started in some astonishment. He had a little girl then — a sweetheart he meant, obviously. If so, Heaven help her! poor soul, Heaven help her! For any woman to be tied for life to such a creature as that was really quite too horrible. I didn’t even like to think upon it.
I don’t know what devil prompted me, for I seldom spoke to him, even when we were told off on duty together; but I said at last, after a moment’s pause, “If you are engaged to be married, as I suppose you are from what you say, I wonder you could bear to come away on such a long business as this, when you couldn’t get a word or a letter from the lady you’re engaged to for a whole winter.”
He went on picking out the shells and weeds as he answered in a careless, jaunty tone, “Why, to tell you the truth, Doctor, that was just about the very meaning of it. We’re going to be marrie
d next summer, you see, and for reasons of her papa’s — the deuce knows what! — my little girl couldn’t possibly be allowed to marry one week sooner. There I’d been, knocking about and spooning with her violently for three months nearly; and the more I spooned, and the more tired I got of it, the more she expected me to go on spooning. Well, I’m not the sort of man to stand billing and cooing for a whole year together. At last the thing grew monotonous. I wanted to get an excuse to go off somewhere, where there was some sort of fun going on, till summer came, and we could get spliced properly (for she’s got some tin, too, and I didn’t want to throw her over); but I felt that if I’d got to keep on spooning and spooning for a whole winter, without intermission, the thing would really be one too many for me, and I should have to give it up from sheer weariness. So I heard of this precious expedition, which is just the sort of adventure I like; I wrote and volunteered for it; and then I managed to make my little girl and her dear papa believe that as I was an officer in the naval reserve I was compelled to go when asked, willy-nilly. ‘It’s only for half a year, you know, darling,’ and all that sort of thing — you understand the line of country; and meanwhile I’m saved the bother of ever writing to her, or getting any letters from her either, which is almost in its way an equal nuisance.”
“I see,” said I shortly. “Not to put too fine a point upon it, you simply lied to her.”
“Upon my soul,” he answered, showing his teeth again, but this time by no means pleasantly, “you fellows on the Cotopaxi are really the sternest set of moralists I ever met with outside a book of sermons or a Surrey melodrama. You ought all to have been parsons, every man Jack of you; that’s just about what you’re fit for.”
On the fourteenth of September we got jammed in the ice, and the Cotopaxi went to pieces. You will find in the captain’s log how part of us walked across the pack to the Liakov Islands, and settled ourselves here on Point Sibiriakoff in winter quarters. As to what became of the other party, which went southwards to the mouth of the Lena, I know nothing.
It was a hard winter, but by the aid of our stores and an occasional walrus shot by one of the blue-jackets, we managed to get along till March without serious illness. Then, one day, after a spell of terrible frost and snow, the Captain came to me, and said, “Doctor, I wish you’d come and see Lemarchant, in the other hut here. I’m afraid he’s got a bad fever.”
I went to see him. So he had. A raging fever.
Fumbling about among his clothes to lay him down comfortably on the bearskin (for of course we had saved no bedding from the wreck), I happened to knock out once more the same locket that I had seen when he was emptying the drag-net. There was a photograph in it of a young lady. The seal-oil lamp didn’t give very much light in the dark hut (it was still the long winter night on the Liakov Islands), but even so I couldn’t help seeing and recognizing the young lady’s features. Great Heaven support me! uphold me! I reeled with horror and amazement. It was Dora.
Yes; his little girl, that he spoke of so carelessly, that he lied to so easily, that he meant to marry so cruelly, was my Dora.
I had pitied the woman who was to be Harry Lemarchant’s wife even when I didn’t know who she was in any way; I pitied her terribly, with all my heart, when I knew that she was Dora — my own Dora. If I have become a murderer, after all, it was to save Dora — to save Dora from that unutterable, abominable ruffian.
I clutched the photograph in the locket eagerly, and held it up to the man’s eyes. He opened them dreamily. “Is that the lady you are going to marry?” I asked him, with all the boiling indignation of that terrible discovery seething and burning in my very face.
He smiled, and took it all in in half a minute. “It is,” he answered, in spite of the fever, with all his old dare-devil carelessness. “And now I recollect they told me the fellow she was engaged to was a doctor in London, and a brother of the parson. By Jove, I never thought of it before that your name, too, was actually Robinson. That’s the worst of having such a deuced common name as yours; no one ever dreams of recognizing your relations. Hang it all, if you’re the man, I suppose now, out of revenge, you’ll be wanting next to go and poison me.”
“You judge others by yourself, I’m afraid,” I answered sternly. Oh, how the words seem to rise up in judgment against me at last, now the dreadful thing is all over!
I doctored him as well as I was able, hoping all the time in my inmost soul (for I will confess all now) that he would never recover. Already in wish I had become a murderer. It was too horrible to think that such a man as that should marry Dora. I had loved her once and I loved her still; I love her now; I shall always love her. Murderer as I am, I say it nevertheless, I shall always love her.
But at last, to my grief and disappointment, the man began to mend and get better. My doctoring had done him good; and the sailors, though even they did not love him, had shot him once or twice a small bird, of which we made fresh soup that seemed to revive him. Yes, yes, he was coming round; and my cursed medicines had done it all. He was getting well, and he would still go back to marry Dora.
The very idea put me into such a fever of terror and excitement that at last I began to exhibit the same symptoms as Lemarchant himself had done. The Captain saw I was sickening, and feared the fever might prove an epidemic. It wasn’t: I knew that. Mine was brain, Lemarchant’s was intermittent; but the Captain insisted upon disbelieving me. So he put me and Lemarchant into the same hut, and made all the others clear out, so as to turn it into a sort of temporary hospital.
Every night I put out from the medicine-chest two quinine powders apiece, for myself and Lemarchant.
One night, it was the 7th of April (I can’t forget it), I woke feebly from my feverish sleep, and noticed in a faint sort of fashion that Lemarchant was moving about restlessly in the cabin.
“Lemarchant,” I cried authoritatively (for as surgeon I was, of course, responsible for the health of the expedition), “go back and lie down upon your bearskin this minute! You’re a great deal too weak to go getting anything for yourself as yet. Go back this minute, sir, and if you want anything, I’ll pull the string, and Paterson’ll come and see what you’re after.” For we had fixed up a string between the two huts, tied to a box at the end, as a rough means of communication.
“All right, old fellow,” he answered, more cordially than I had ever yet heard him speak to me. “It’s all square, I assure you. I was only seeing whether you were quite warm and comfortable on your rug there.”
“Perhaps,” I thought, “the care I’ve taken of him has made him really feel a little grateful to me.” So I dozed off and thought nothing more at the moment about it.
Presently, I heard a noise again, and woke up quietly, without starting, but just opened my eyes and peered about as well as the dim light of the little oil-lamp would allow me.
To my great surprise, I could make out somehow that Lemarchant was meddling with the bottles in the medicine-chest.
“Perhaps,” thought I again, “he wants another dose of quinine. Anyhow, I’m too tired and sleepy to ask him anything just now about it.”
I knew he hated me, and I knew he was unscrupulous, but it didn’t occur to me to think he would poison the man who had just helped him through a dangerous fever.
At four I woke, as I always did, and proceeded to take one of my powders. Curiously enough, before I tasted it, the grain appeared to me to be rather coarser and more granular than the quinine I had originally put there. I took a pinch between my finger and thumb, and placed it on my tongue by way of testing it. Instead of being bitter, the powder, I found, was insipid and almost tasteless.
Could I possibly in my fever and delirium (though I had not consciously been delirious) have put some other powder instead of the quinine into the two papers? The bare idea made me tremble with horror. If so, I might have poisoned Lemarchant, who had taken one of his powders already, and was now sleeping quietly upon his bearskin. At least, I thought so.
Glancing
accidentally to his place that moment, I was vaguely conscious that he was not really sleeping, but lying with his eyes held half open, gazing at me cautiously and furtively through his closed eyelids.
Then the horrid truth flashed suddenly across me. Lemarchant was trying to poison me.
Yes, he had always hated me; and now that he knew I was Dora’s discarded lover, he hated me worse than ever. He had got up and taken a bottle from the medicine-chest, I felt certain, and put something else instead of my quinine inside my paper.
I knew his eyes were fixed upon me then, and for the moment I dissembled. I turned round and pretended to swallow the contents of the packet, and then lay down upon my rug as if nothing unusual had happened. The fever was burning me fiercely, but I lay awake, kept up by the excitement, till I saw that he was really asleep, and then I once more undid the paper.
Looking at it closely by the light of the lamp, I saw a finer powder sticking closely to the folded edges. I wetted my finger, put it down and tasted it. Yes, that was quite bitter. That was quinine, not a doubt about it.
I saw at once what Lemarchant had done. He had emptied out the quinine and replaced it by some other white powder, probably arsenic. But a little of the quinine still adhered to the folds in the paper, because he had been obliged to substitute it hurriedly; and that at once proved that it was no mistake of my own, but that Lemarchant had really made the deliberate attempt to poison me.
This is a confession, and a confession only, so I shall make no effort in any way to exculpate myself for the horrid crime I committed the next moment. True, I was wild with fever and delirium; I was maddened with the thought that this wretched man would marry Dora; I was horrified at the idea of sleeping in the same room with him any longer. But still, I acknowledge it now, face to face with a lonely death upon this frozen island, it was murder — wilful murder. I meant to poison him, and I did it.