Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/334

 It may well have been that among the band of exiles were some unjustly sentenced, mixed up accidentally with a crowd of excited rustics engaged in unlawful deeds—wondering spectators rather than actors. Such a victim was probably the unhappy Annetts, a vacant-faced farm labourer, from Essex or Dorset, whose wife, accompanied by their two children, came daily to see him before the ship sailed.

I seem to remember the wretched group, though most probably it was my good nurse's description that imprinted it indelibly on my memory.

There would they sit, hour after hour, bathed in tears—he, with the irons on his limbs and the ugly prison garb; she almost a girl, with traces of rustic beauty, as he was hardly more than a boy—holding each other's hands and weeping silently for hours; then, sobbing in paroxysms of lamentation, both repeatedly declaring his innocence, the children wondering gravely at the strange surroundings, at times mingling their tears with those of their parents. It was a sight to touch the heart of the sternest. Then the last agonised parting, when the fainting woman was carried on shore, when the hopeless outcast watched his native land recede, instinctively aware that he gazed on it for the last time.

Is there such a physiological process as a broken heart? It would seem so, even in this world of lightly-borne sorrows and forgotten joys. He, at least, was not thus fashioned, stolid peasant as he seemed to outward view, untaught, uncared-for, born to the plough and the monotonous labour of the farm animals, which in his undeveloped intelligence he so closely resembled. But their fidelity to the heart's deepest feelings was rooted in his being. He never raised his head afterwards, as the phrase goes. He moved and spoke, went through the ordinary motions of humanity, as in a dream. Day by day he pined and wasted; in little more than a month, from no particular ailment, he died and found burial in that mysterious main which before his sentence he had never seen.

The only other death on board was that of the second mate, a fine young seaman named Keeling. Strange to say, he had a presentiment that drowning would be the manner of his end. He would say as much, on one occasion telling us that he was one of three brothers. Two had been lost at sea. He knew the same fate was in store for him. He even put his