CAPTAIN NEMO—HIS FIRST WORDS—HISTORY OF A HERO OF LIBERTY—HATRED OF THE INVADERS—HIS COMPANIONS—THE LIFE UNDER WATER—ALONE—THE LAST REFUGE OF THE NAUTILUS—THE MYSTERIOUS GENIUS OF THE ISLAND.
At these words the man arose, and the light shone full upon his face: a magnificent head, with abundance of hair thrown back from a high forehead, a white beard, and an expression of haughtiness.
This man stood, resting one hand upon the divan, from which he had risen. One could see that a slow disease had broken him down, but his voice was still powerful, when he said in English, and in a tone of extreme surprise:——
“I have no name, sir!”
“I know you!” answered Smith.
Captain Nemo looked at the engineer as if he would have annihilated him. Then, falling back upon the cushions, he murmured:——
“After all, what does it matter; I am dying!”
Smith approached Captain Nemo, and Spilett took his hand, which was hot with fever. The others stood respectfully in a corner of the superb saloon, which was flooded with light.
Captain Nemo withdrew his hand, and signed to Smith and the reporter to be seated.
All looked at him with lively emotion. Here was the being whom they had called the “genius of the island,” the being whose intervention had been so efficacious, the benefactor to whom they owed so much. Before their eyes, here where Pencroff and Neb had expected to find some godlike creature, was only a man-a dying man!
But how did Smith know Captain Nemo? Why had the latter sprung up on hearing that name pronounced?
The Captain had taken his seat upon the divan, and, leaning upon his arm, he regarded the engineer, who was seated near him.
“You know the name I bore?” he asked.
“I know it as well as I know the name of this admirable submarine apparatus.”
“The Nautilus,” said the Captain, with a half smile.
“The Nautilus.”
“But do you know-do you know, who I am?”
“I do.”
“For thirty years I have had no communication with the inhabited world, for thirty years have I lived in the depths of the sea, the only place where I have found freedom! Who, now, has betrayed my secret?”
“A man who never pledged you his word, Captain Nemo, one who, therefore, cannot be accused of betraying you.”
“The Frenchman whom chance threw in my way?”
“The same.”
“Then this man and his companions did not perish in the maelstrom into which the Nautilus had been drawn?”
“They did not, and there has appeared under the title of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, a work which contains your history.”
“The history of but a few months of my life, sir,” answered the Captain, quickly.
“True,” replied Smith, “but a few months of that strange life sufficed to make you known—”
“As a great criminal, doubtless,” said Captain Nemo, smiling disdainfully. “Yes, a revolutionist, a scourge to humanity.”
The engineer did not answer.
“Well, sir?”
“I am unable to judge Captain Nemo,” said Smith, “at least in what concerns his past life. I, like the world at large, am ignorant of the motives for this strange existence, and I am unable to judge of the effects without knowing the causes, but what I do know is that a beneficent hand has been constantly extended to us since our arrival here, that we owe everything to a being good, generous, and powerful, and that this being, powerful, generous, and good, is you, Captain Nemo!”
“It is I,” answered the captain, quietly.
The engineer and the reporter had risen, the others had drawn near, and the gratitude which swelled their hearts would have sought expression in words and gesture, when Captain Nemo signed to them to be silent, and in a voice more moved, doubtless, than he wished:—
“When you have heard me,” he said. And then, in a few short, clear sentences, he told them the history of his life.
The history was brief. Nevertheless, it took all his remaining strength to finish it. It was evident that he struggled against an extreme feebleness. Many times Smith urged him to take some rest, but he shook his head, like one who knew that for him there would be no to-morrow, and when the reporter offered his services—
“They are useless,” he answered, “my hours are numbered.”
Captain Nemo was an Indian prince, the Prince Dakkar, the son of the rajah of the then independent territory of Bundelkund, and nephew of the hero of India, Tippo Saib. His father sent him, when ten years old, to Europe, where he received a complete education; and it was the secret intention of the rajah to have his son able some day to engage in equal combat with those whom he considered as the oppressors of his country.
From ten years of age until he was thirty, the Prince Dakkar, with superior endowments, of high heart and courage, instructed himself in everything; pushing his investigations in science, literature, and art to the uttermost limits.
He travelled over all Europe. His birth and fortune made his company much sought after, but the seductions of the world possessed no charm for him. Young and handsome, he remained serious, gloomy, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, with implacable anger fixed in his heart.
He hated. He hated the only country where he had never wished to set foot, the only nation whose advances he had refused: he hated England more and more as he admired her. This Indian summed up in his own person all the fierce hatred of the vanquished against the victor. The invader is always unable to find grace with the invaded. The son of one of those sovereigns whose submission to the United Kingdom was only nominal, the prince of the family of Tippo-Saib, educated in ideas of reclamation and vengeance, with a deep-seated love for his poetic country weighed down with the chains of England, wished never to place his foot on that land, to him accursed, that land to which India owed her subjection.
The Prince Dakkar became an artist, with a lively appreciation of the marvels of art; a savant familiar with the sciences; a statesman educated in European courts. In the eyes of a superficial observer, he passed, perhaps, for one of those cosmopolites, curious after knowledge, but disdaining to use it; for one of those opulent travellers, high-spirited and platonic, who go all over the world and are of no one country.
It was not so. This artist, this savant, this man was Indian to the heart, Indian in his desire for vengeance, Indian in the hope which he cherished of being able some day to re-establish the rights of his country, of driving on the stranger, of making it independent.
He returned to Bundelkund in the year 1849. He married a noble Indian woman whose heart bled as his did at the woes of their country. He had two children whom he loved. But domestic happiness could not make him forget the servitude of India. He waited for an opportunity. At length it came.
The English yoke was pressed, perhaps, too heavily upon the Indian people. The Prince Dakkar became the mouthpiece of the malcontents. He instilled into their spirits all the hatred he felt against the strangers. He went over not only the independent portions of the Indian peninsula, but into those regions directly submitted to the English control. He recalled to them the grand days of Tippo-Saib, who died heroically at Seringapatam for the defense of his country.
In 1857 the Sepoy mutiny broke forth. Prince Dakkar was its soul. He organized that immense uprising. He placed his talents and his wealth at the service of that cause. He gave himself; he fought in the first rank; he risked his life as the humblest of those heroes who had risen to free their country; he was wounded ten times in twenty battles, and was unable to find death when the last soldiers of independence fell before the English guns.
Never had British rule in India been in such danger; and, had the Sepoys received the assistance from without which they had hoped for, Asia would not to-day, perhaps, be under the dominion of the United Kingdom.
At that time the name of Prince Dakkar was there illustrious. He never hid himself, and he fought openly. A price was put upon his head, and although he was not delivered up by any traitor, his father, mother, wife, and children suffered for him before he knew of the dangers which they ran on his account.
Once again right fell before might. Civilization never goes backwards, and her laws are like those of necessity. The Sepoys were vanquished, and the country of the ancient rajahs fell again under the strict rule of England.
Prince Dakkar, unable to die, returned again to his mountains in Bundelkund. There, thenceforward alone, he conceived an immense disgust against all who bore the name of man—a hatred and a horror of the civilized world—and wishing to fly from it, he collected the wreck of his fortune, gathered together twenty of his most faithful companions, and one day disappeared.
Where did Prince Dakkar seek for that independence which was refused him upon the inhabited earth? Under the waters, in the depths of the seas, where no one could follow him.
From a man of war he became a man of science. On a desert island of the Pacific he established his workshops, and there he constructed a submarine ship after plans of his own. By means which will some day be known, he utilized electricity, that incommensurable force, for all the necessities of his apparatus as a motor, for lighting and for heat. The sea, with its infinite treasures, its myriads of fishes, its harvests of varech and sargassum, its enormous mammifers, and not only all that nature held, but all that man had lost, amply sufficed for the needs of the Prince and his equipage;—and thus he accomplished his heart’s desire, to have no further communication with the earth. He named his submarine ship the Nautilus, he called himself Captain Nemo, and he disappeared under the seas.
During many years, the Captain visited all the oceans, from one pole to the other. Pariah of the earth, he reaped the treasures of the unknown worlds. The millions lost in Vigo Bay, in 1702, by the Spanish galleons, furnished him with an inexhaustible mine of wealth, which he gave, anonymously, to people fighting for their independence.
For years he had had no communication with his kindred, when, during the night of the 6th of November, 1866, three men were thrown upon his deck. They were a French professor, his servant, and a Canadian fisherman. These men had been thrown overboard by the shock of the collision between the Nautilus and the United States frigate Abraham Lincoln, which had given it chase.
Captain Nemo learned from the Professor that the Nautilus, sometimes taken for a gigantic mammifer of the cetacean family, sometimes for a submarine apparatus containing a gang of pirates, was hunted in every sea.
Captain Nemo could have thrown these three men, whom chance had thrown across his mysterious life, into the ocean. He did not do it, he kept them prisoners, and, during seven months, they were able to perceive all the marvels of a voyage of 20,000 leagues under the sea.
One day, the 22nd of June, 1867, these three men, who knew nothing of Captain Nemo’s past life, seized the boat belonging to the Nautilus and attempted to escape. But just then the Nautilus was upon the coast of Norway in the eddy of the Maelstrom, and the Captain believed that the fugitives, caught in its terrible vortex, had been swallowed up in the gulf. He was unaware that the Frenchman and his companions had been miraculously thrown upon the coast, that the fishermen of the Loffodin Islands had rescued them, and that the Professor, on his return to France, had published a book in which seven months of this strange and adventurous navigation was narrated.
For a long time Captain Nemo continued this mode of life, traversing the sea. One by one his companions died and found their rest in the coral cemetery at the bottom of the Pacific, and in time Captain Nemo was the last survivor of those who had sought refuge in the depths of the oceans.
He was then sixty years old. As he was alone, it was necessary to take his Nautilus to one of those submarine ports which served him in former days as a harbor.
One of these ports was under Lincoln Island, and was the present asylum of the Nautilus. For six years the Captain had remained there awaiting that death which would reunite him with his companions, when chance made him witness to the fall of the balloon which carried the prisoners. Clothed in his impermeable jacket, he was walking under the water, some cables’ lengths from the shore of the islet, when the engineer was thrown into the sea. A good impulse moved Captain Nemo—and he saved Cyrus Smith.
On the arrival of these five castaways he wished to go from them, but his port of refuge was closed. Some volcanic action had raised up the basalt so that the Nautilus could not cross the entrance to the crypt, although there was still sufficient water for a boat of light draught.
Captain Nemo, therefore, remained and watched these men, thrown without resources upon a desert island, but he did not wish to be seen. Little by little, as he saw their honest, energetic lives, how they were bound together in fraternal amity, he interested himself in their efforts. In spite of himself, he found out all the secrets of their existence. Clothed in his impermeable jacket, he could easily reach the bottom of the well in Granite House, and climbing by the projections of the rock to its mouth, he heard the colonists talk of their past and discuss their present and future. He learned from them of the struggle of America against itself, for the abolition of slavery. Yes! these men were worthy to reconcile Captain Nemo with that humanity which they represented so honestly on the island.
Captain Nemo had saved Smith. It was he who had led the dog to the Chimneys, who threw Top out of the water, who stranded the box of useful articles on Jetsam Point, who brought the canoe down the Mercy, who threw the cord from Granite House, when it was attacked by the monkeys, who made known the presence of Ayrton on Tabor Island by means of the paper inclosed in the bottle, who blew up the brig by means of a torpedo, who saved Herbert from certain death by bringing the quinine, who, finally, killed the convicts by those electric balls which he employed in his submarine hunting excursions. Thus was explained all those seemingly supernatural incidents, which, all of them, attested the generosity and the power of the Captain.
Nevertheless, this intense misanthrope thirsted to do good. He had some useful advice to give to his proteges, and moreover, feeling the approach of death, he had summoned, as we have seen, the colonists from Granite House, by means of the wire which reached from the corral to the Nautilus. Perhaps he would not have done it, had he thought that Smith knew enough of his history to call him by his name of Nemo.
The Captain finished the recital of his life, and then Smith spoke. He recalled all the instances of the salutary influences exercised over the colonists, and then, in the name of his companions, and in his own, he thanked this generous being for all that he had done.
But Captain Nemo had never dreamed of asking any return for his services. One last thought agitated his spirit, and, before taking the hand which the engineer held out to him, he said:—
“Now, sir, you know my life, judge of it!”
In speaking thus, the Captain evidently alluded to an incident of a serious nature which had been witnessed by the three strangers on the Nautilus—an incident which the French professor had necessarily recounted in his book, an incident whose very recital was terrible.
In brief, some days before the flight of the professor and his companions, the Nautilus, pursued by a frigate in the North Atlantic, had rushed upon her like a battering-ram, and sunk her without mercy.
Smith, understanding this allusion, made no answer.
“It was an English frigate, sir!” cried Captain Nemo, becoming for the moment Prince Dakkar, “an English frigate, you understand! She attacked me! I was shut in, in a narrow and shallow bay; I had to pass out, and—I passed!”
Then, speaking with more calmness:—
“I had right and justice on my side,” he added. “I did good when I could, and evil when I must. All justice is not in forgiveness.”
Some moments of silence followed this response, and Captain Nemo asked again:—
“What do you think of me?”
Smith took the hand of the Captain, and answered him in a grave voice:—
“Captain, your mistake has been in believing that you could bring back the old order of things, and you have struggled against necessary progress. It was one of those errors which some of us admire, others blame, but of which God alone can judge, and which the human mind exonerates. We can disagree with one who misleads himself in an intention which he believes laudable, and at the same time esteem him. Your error is of a kind which does not preclude admiration, and your name has nothing to fear from the judgment of history. She loves heroic follies, though she condemns the results which follow.”
The breast of Captain Nemo heaved; he raised his hand towards heaven.
“Was I wrong, or was I right?” he murmured.
Smith continued:—
“All great actions return to God, from whom they came! Captain Nemo, the worthy men here, whom you have succored, will always weep for you!”
Herbert approached him. He knelt down and took the hand of the captain, and kissed it.
A tear glistened in the eye of the dying man.
“My child,” he said, “bless you!”
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