The Last Call of the Cassandra

I have never, in the long and wearisome course of my existence, been able to free my mind of that single cry which rang across the harbor upon the night the great ship Cassandra loosed herself from the dock and bore away, forever, the only creature I had ever loved. It was a steward's cry, nothing more, a common summons meant for common ears, yet to me it fell like the toll of some funereal bell, and even now, in the solitude of my chamber, I hear it still, sounding through the corridors of memory with a persistence that borders upon madness.

The hour was near midnight when I came upon the dock, and the Cassandra lay against the black water like some pale leviathan roused from an ancient slumber, her three great funnels breathing forth a smoke that mingled with the fog until sky and sea seemed one continuous shroud. Lanterns burned along her rail, feeble and yellow, casting upon the assembled crowd a glow more suited to a wake than to a departure, and indeed, looking back upon it now, I believe some dim prophetic instinct in my breast already understood that what I witnessed that night was nothing less than a funeral dressed, cruelly, in the garments of a celebration.

Marguerite stood near the rail in a gown the color of the midnight water below her, her throat bound in some dark and gleaming ornament that caught the lantern glow and returned it twofold, so that she seemed, to my fevered sight, a figure wrought half of flesh and half of some unearthly luminescence. She was leaving to marry a man of considerable fortune and considerable coldness, a man whose name I could never bring myself to speak aloud even in the privacy of my own thoughts, so thoroughly did the mention of him corrode my composure.

I approached her through the press of well wishers and porters, and when she beheld me her countenance betrayed no surprise, only a sorrow so old and so settled that I understood, with the sudden clarity that sometimes visits condemned men, that she had awaited my coming the entire evening, perhaps the entire year.

"You should never have come," she said, though her voice carried none of the reproach her words implied. "The gossips will make some cruel sport of it tomorrow."

"Let them make what sport they please," I answered. "I gave the gossips ample cause for cruelty long before tonight. One more tale can scarcely deepen my ruin."

She laughed then, a sound so mournful that it seemed to issue not from her throat but from some chamber deep within the ship itself, some hollow place built for the express purpose of grief. Behind us the steward's cry rose again, and the crowd upon the gangway began to thin, and somewhere below the deck an orchestra commenced a melody so slow and so sweetly melancholy that I felt my very soul incline toward it, as a flower inclines, helplessly, toward the last dying rays of an autumn sun.

"Three years past," I said, "upon a lawn in Southampton, I swore to you that my devotion would outlast every star in the heavens. You told me I was drunk with wine. I confess I was. Yet no wine ever coaxed from my lips a single word I did meant to utter, and I have spent three barren years discovering that truth was always my affliction, however poorly I disguised it."

Her dark eyes, enormous in the lantern's failing glow, filled with some emotion she refused to release. "You possessed your opportunity to speak, sir, when speaking might have mattered. You allowed one season to die, and then another, until I grew weary of waiting in doorways for a man who never once crossed the threshold."

"I know it," I said, and the confession cost me more agony than any physician's blade. "I believed, in my folly, that devotion was some inexhaustible treasury upon which a man might draw forever, requiring no toil, no sacrifice, no hour of reckoning. I was the veriest fool, sir to myself as much as to her, mistaking comfort for eternity."

The steward's cry sounded a third and final time, sharp as the crack of some funeral gun, and a woman nearby began to sob into her escort's shoulder as though the ship herself had dealt her some mortal wound. The great engines groaned to life beneath our very boots, a sound felt in the marrow long before it reached the ear, and the crew moved to draw the gangway home.

"You must depart now," Marguerite said. "The tide observes no lover's quarrel and holds itself for neither of us."

"Then flee with me," I said, and the words fell from my lips with a suddenness that astonished even my own fevered brain. "Abandon the gentleman awaiting you in his cold estate, abandon the arrangements your mother labored two years to construct, and descend this gangway with me now, before the sea claims you utterly."

For one interminable moment, standing amid the fog and the smoke and the dying strains of that funereal orchestra, I believed she would consent. Some softness stole across her countenance, some opening, like a tomb door yielding at last to a hand that had pressed against it for centuries. I believed, with the desperate faith peculiar to men who have never yet tasted true and irrevocable loss, that she would take my grasp and abandon the Cassandra to sail onward with one soul less aboard her.

But the moment fled, as such moments ever do, silently and with no herald of its passing, and her shoulders settled once more into the posture of a woman whose decision had been rendered long before I ever set boots upon that dock.

"Were I to flee with you tonight," she said, low, "I should spend the remainder of my days wondering whether you loved me truly, or whether you merely could no longer endure the sight of another man possessing what you yourself had refused to claim. I deserve better, sir, than to serve as any man's final desperate rescue. I deserve to be some man's first waking thought, every morning of his life, rather than his last expiring chance."

The crew called out once more, and this summons brooked no delay, for it heralded the final severance of ship from shore. I stood frozen at the rail, my heart laboring within my breast like some caged and dying bird, and watched her retreat from me as though the whole black ocean had already risen between us.

"Farewell," she said, and in her voice there dwelt some tenderness, some absolution I had scarcely dared to hope for. "Perhaps, in some other and kinder existence, we contrive our hours better."

I descended alone and stood upon that dock long after the Cassandra had dissolved into the fog forever, and I have understood, every night since, that the steward's cry was never truly bound to any ship, or any tide, or any hour. It was the herald of that darker truth every mortal heart eventually confronts that the chance we suffer to drift past us seldom returns twice, and that certain farewells, once uttered beneath so pitiless a sky, remain, through all the years that follow, entirely and eternally final.