‘Sir Wilfrid Monson, sir,’ exclaimed my man.
It was half-past ten o’clock at night, and I was in my lodgings in Bury Street, St. James, slippers on feet, a pipe of tobacco in my hand, seltzer and brandy at my elbow, and on my knees the ‘Sun’ newspaper, the chief evening sheet of the times.
‘Sir Wilfrid Monson, sir.’
My cousin! thought I, starting, and looking round at my man with a fancy in me for a moment that he had got the wrong name. ‘Show him in.’
Sir Wilfrid entered in a sort of swift headlong way, full of nervousness and passion, as was to be seen easily enough; and then he came to a dead stop with a wild look round the room, as if to make sure that I was alone, and a frowning stare at my servant, who was lingering a moment on the threshold as though suddenly surprised out of his habits of prompt sleek attendance by a fit of astonishment.
He stood about six feet high; he had a slight stoop, and was something awkward in arms and legs; yet you were sensible of the indefinable quality of breeding in him the moment your eye took in his form and face, uncommon as both were. He was forty-four years of age at this time, and looked fifty. His hair was long and plentiful, but of an iron grey streaked with soft white. He had a protruding under-lip, and a nose which might have been broken for the irregularity of its outline, with unusually high-cut nostrils. His eyes were large, short-sighted, and grey, luminous and earnest, but with a tremulous lid that seemed to put a quivering into their expression that was a hint in its way of cunning and mental weakness. He had a broad, intellectual forehead, brilliantly white teeth, high cheek bones, a large heavy chin, rounding into a most delicately moulded throat. He was a man, indeed, at[2] whom, as a stranger, one might catch one’s self staring as at something sufficiently puzzling to be well worth resolving. Ill-looking he was not, and yet one seemed to seek in vain for qualities of body or mind to neutralise to the sight what was assuredly a combination of much that was uncomely, and indeed, in one or two directions, absolutely grotesque. But then I had the secret.
The long and short of it was, my cousin, Sir Wilfrid Monson, was not entirely straight-headed. Everything was made clear to the mind, after a glance at his strange, weak, yet striking profile, with the hint that there had been madness in his mother’s family. He was the eighth baronet, and on his father’s side (and that was my side, I am thankful to say) all had been sound as a bell; but my uncle had fallen in love with the daughter of a Scotch peer whose family were tainted with insanity—no matter her real name: the Lady Elizabeth will suffice. He was frankly warned by the old Earl, who was not too mad to be candid, but the lovesick creature grinned in his lordship’s face with a wild shake of the head at the disclosure, as though he saw no more in it than a disposition to end the engagement. Then the honest old madman carried him to a great window that overlooked a spacious sweep of lawn, and pointed with a bitter smile and a despairful heave of the shoulders to three women walking, two of whom were soberly clad in big bonnets and veils down their back, whilst the third, who was between them, and whose arms were locked in the others’, glided forwards as though her feet travelled on clockwork rollers, whilst she kept her head fixedly bent, her chin upon her breast, and her gaze rooted upon the ground; and as the amorous baronet watched—the Earl meanwhile preserving his miserable smile as he held his gouty forefinger levelled—he saw the down-looking woman make an effort to break away from her companions, but without ever lifting her head.
‘That’s Lady Alice,’ said the Earl, ‘speechless and brainless! Guid preserve us! And the Lady Elizabeth is her seester.’
‘Ay, that may be,’ answers the other; ‘but take two roses growing side by side: because some venomous worm is eating into the heart of one and withering up its beauty, is the other that is radiant and flawless to be left uncherished?’
‘Guid forbid!’ answered the Earl, and then turned away with a weak hech! hech! that should have proved more terrifying to one’s matrimonial yearnings than even the desolate picture of the three figures stalking the emerald-green sward.
These were dim memories, yet they flashed into my head with the swiftness of thought, along with the workings of the eager conjecture and lively wonder raised in me by Wilfrid’s visit, and by his peculiar aspect, too, during the few moments’ interval of pause that followed his entrance. My servant shut the door; Wilfrid looked to see that it was closed, then approached me with a sort of lifting of his face as of a man half choked with a hurry[3] and passion of sentences which he wants to be quit of all at once in a breath, staggering as he moved, his right arm outstretched with a rapid vibration of the hand at the wrist; and, without delivering himself of a syllable, he fell into a chair near the table, dashing his hat to the floor as he did so, buried his face in his arms, and so lay sobbing in respirations of hysteric fierceness.
This extraordinary behaviour amazed and terrified me. I will not deny that I at first suspected the madness that lurked as a poison in his blood had suddenly obtained a strong hold, and that he had come to see me whilst seized with a heavy fit. I put down my pipe and adopted a steadier posture, so to speak, in my chair, secretly hoping that the surprise his manner or appearance had excited in my valet would render the fellow curious enough to hang about outside to listen to what might pass at the start. I kept my eyes fixed upon my cousin, but without offering to speak, for, whatever might be the cause of the agitation that was convulsing his powerful form with deep sobbing breathings, the emotion was too overwhelming to be broken in upon by speech. Presently he looked up; his eyes were tearless, but his face was both dusky and haggard with the anguish that worked in him.
‘In the name of Heaven, Wilfrid,’ I cried, witnessing intelligence enough in his gaze to instantly relieve me from the dread that had possessed me, ‘what is wrong with you? what has happened?’
He drew a long tremulous breath and essayed to speak, but was unintelligible in the broken syllable or two he managed to utter. I poured what sailors term a ‘two-finger nip’ of brandy into a tumbler, and added a little seltzer water to the dram. He seized the glass with a hand that shook like a drunkard’s, and emptied it. But the draught steadied him, and a moment after he said in a low voice, while he clasped his hands upon the table with such a grip of each other that the veins stood out like whipcord: ‘My wife has left me.’
I stared at him stupidly. The disclosure was so unexpected, so wildly remote from any conclusion my fears had arrived at, that I could only look at him like a fool.
‘Left you!’ I faltered, ‘what d’ye mean, Wilfrid? Refused to live you?’
‘No!’ he exclaimed with a face darkening yet to the effort it cost him to subdue his voice, ‘she has eloped—left me—left her baby for—for—’ he stopped, bringing his fist to the table with a crash that was like to have demolished everything upon it.
‘It is an abominable business,’ said I soothingly; ‘but it is not to be bettered by letting feeling overmaster you. Come, take your time; give yourself a chance. You are here, of course, to tell me the story. Let me have it quietly. It is but to let yourself be torn to pieces to suffer your passion to jockey your reason.’
‘She has left me!’ he shrieked, rising bolt upright from his chair, and lifting his arms with his hands clenched to the ceiling.[4] ‘Devil and beast! faithless mother! faithless wife! May God——’
I raised my hand, looking him full in the face. ‘Pray sit, Wilfrid. Lady Monson has left you, you say. With or for whom?’
‘Hope-Kennedy,’ he answered, ‘Colonel Hope-Kennedy,’ bringing out the words as though they were rooted in his throat. ‘My good friend Hope-Kennedy, Charles; the man I have entertained, have hunted with, assisted at a time when help was precious to him. Ay, Colonel Hope-Kennedy. That is the man she has left me for, the fellow that she has abandoned her baby for. It is a dream—it is a dream! I loved her so. I could have kissed her breast, where her heart lay, as a Bible for truth, sincerity, and all beautiful thought.’
He passed his hand over his forehead and seated himself again, or rather dropped into his chair, resting his chin upon the palm of his hand with the nails of his fingers at his teeth, whilst he watched me with a gaze that was rendered indescribably pathetic by the soft near-sighted look of his grey eyes under the shadow of his forehead, that had a wrinkled, twisted, even distorted aspect with the pain his soul was in. There was but one way of giving him relief, and that was by plying him with questions to enable him to let loose his thoughts. He extended his hand for the brandy and mixed himself a bumper. There was little in spirits to hurt him at such a time as this. Indeed I believe he could have carried a whole bottle in his head without exhibiting himself as in the least degree oversparred. This second dose distinctly rallied him, and now he lay back in his chair with his arms folded upon his breast.
‘When did your wife leave you, Wilfrid?’
‘A week to-day.’
‘You know, of course, without doubt, that Hope-Kennedy is the man she has gone off with?’
He nodded savagely, with a smile like a scowl passing over his face.
‘But how do you know for certain?’ I cried, determined to make him talk.
He pulled a number of letters from his side-pocket, overhauled them, found one, glanced at it, and handed it to me with a posture of the arm that might have made one think it was some venomous snake he held.
‘This was found in my wife’s bedroom,’ said he, ‘read it to yourself. Every line of it seems to be written in fire here.’ He struck his breast with his fist.
What I am telling happened a long time ago, as you will notice presently. The letter my cousin handed to me I read once and never saw again, and so, as you may suppose, I am unable to give it as it was written. But the substance of it was this: It was addressed to Lady Monson. The writer called her, I recollect, ‘my darling,’ ‘my adorable Henrietta.’ It was all about the proposed[5] elopement, a complete sketch of the plan of it, and the one document Sir Wilfrid could have prayed to get hold of, had he any desire to know what had become of his wife, and on what kind of rambles she and her paramour had started. The letter was signed, boldly enough, ‘Frank Hope-Kennedy,’ and was filled with careful instructions to her how and when to leave her house. Railroads were few and far between in those days. Sir Wilfrid Monson’s estate was in Cumberland, and it was a long journey by coach and chaise to the town that was connected with the metropolis by steam. But the Colonel had made every arrangement for her ladyship, and it was apparent from his instructions that she had managed her flight first by driving to an adjacent village, where she dismissed the carriage with orders for it to return for her at such and such an hour; then, when her coachman was out of sight, she entered a postchaise that was in readiness and galloped along to a town through which the stage coach passed. By this coach she would travel some twenty or thirty miles, then post it to the terminus of the line that conveyed her to London. But all this, though it ran into a tedious bit of description, was but a part of the gallant Colonel’s programme. Her ladyship would arrive in London at such and such an hour, and the Colonel would be waiting at the station to receive her. They would then drive to a hotel out of Bond Street, and next morning proceed to Southampton, where the ‘Shark’ lay ready for them. It was manifest that Colonel Hope-Kennedy intended to sail away with Lady Monson in a vessel named the ‘Shark.’ He devoted a page of small writing to a description of this craft, which, I might take it—though not much in that way was to be gathered from a landsman’s statement—was a large schooner yacht owned by Lord Winterton, from whom the Colonel had apparently hired it for an indefinite period. He assured his adorable Henrietta that he had spared neither money nor pains to render the vessel as luxurious in cuisine, cabin fittings, and the like as was practicable in a sea-going fabric in those days. He added that what his darling required for the voyage must be hastily purchased at Southampton. She must be satisfied with a very slender wardrobe; time was pressing; the madman to whom the clergyman who married them had shackled her would be off in wild pursuit, helter-skelter, flying moonwards mayhap in his delirium on the instant of discovering that she was gone. Time therefore pressed, and when once the anchor of the ‘Shark’ was lifted off the ground he had no intention of letting it fall again until they had measured six thousand miles of salt water.
I delivered a prolonged whistle on reading this. Six thousand miles of ocean, methought, sounded intolerably real as a condition of an elopement. My cousin never removed his eyes from my face while I read. I gave him the letter, which he folded and returned to his pocket. He was now looking somewhat collected, though the surging of the passion and grief in him would show in a momentary sparkle of the eye, in a spasmodic grin and twist of the lips,[6] in a quick clenching of his hands as though he would drive his finger-nails into his palms. I hardly knew what to say, for the letter was as full a revelation of the vile story as he could have given me in an hour’s delivery, and the injury and misery of the thing were too recent to admit of soothing words. Yet I guessed that it would do him good to talk.
‘Have they sailed yet, do you know?’ I inquired.
‘Yes,’ he answered, letting out his breath in a sigh as though some thought in him had arrested his respiration for a bit.
‘How do you know?’
‘I arrived an hour ago from Southampton,’ he replied, ‘and have got all the information I require.’
‘There cannot be much to add to what the letter contains,’ said I, ‘It is the completest imaginable story of the devilish business.’
He looked at me oddly, and then said, ‘Ay, it tells what has happened. But that did not satisfy me. I have gone beyond that, and know the place they are making for.’
‘It will be six thousand miles distant, anyhow,’ said I.
‘Quite. The villain reasoned with a pair of compasses in his hand. It is Cape Town—the other side of the world; when ’tis ice and northern blasts with us, it is the fragrance of the moon-lily and a warm heaven of quiet stars with them.’
He struck the table, smothering some wild curse or other behind his set teeth, next leaped from his chair and fell to pacing the room, now and again muttering to himself with an occasional flourish of his arm. I watched him in silence. Presently he returned to the table and mixed another glass of liquor. He sat lost in thought for a little, then, with a slow lifting of his eyes, till his gaze lay steadfast on me, he said: ‘Charlie, I am going to follow them to Cape Town.’
‘In some South African trader?’
‘In my yacht. You know her?’
‘I have never seen her, but I have heard of her as a very fine vessel.’
‘She sails two feet to the “Shark’s” one,’ he exclaimed, with a queer gleam of satisfaction glistening in the earnest stare he kept fastened on me. ‘I gave her square yards last year—you will know what a great hoist of topsail, and a big squaresail under it, and a large topgallantsail should do for such a model as the “Bride.” The “Shark” is fore and aft only.’ He fetched his leg a smack that sounded like the report of a pistol. ‘We’ll have ’em!’ he exclaimed, and his face turned pale as he spoke the words.
‘Let me understand you,’ said I; ‘you propose to sail in pursuit of the Colonel and your wife?’
He nodded whilst he clasped his hands upon the table and leaned forward.
‘What proof have you that they have started for Cape Town?’
He instantly answered: ‘The captain of the “Shark” is a man[7] named Fidler. My captain’s name is Finn. His wife and Mrs. Fidler are neighbours at Southampton, and good friends. Mrs. Fidler told my captain’s wife that her husband was superintending the equipment of Lord Winterton’s yacht for a voyage round the world, and that the first port of call would be Table Bay. She knew that the “Shark” had been let by Winterton to a gentleman, but at the time of her speaking to Mrs. Finn she did not know his name.’
‘You said just now,’ I exclaimed, ‘that you had assisted this fellow, Hope-Kennedy, when help was precious to him. I suppose you mean that you lent him money? How can he support the expense of a yacht, for, if I remember rightly, the “Shark’s” burthen is over two hundred tons?’
‘I lent him money before I was married; within the last three years he has come into a fortune of between eighty and a hundred thousand pounds.’
I paused a moment and then said, ‘Have you thoroughly considered this project of chasing the fugitives?’
His eyes brightened to a sudden rage, but he checked the utterance of what rose to his lips and said with a violent effort to subdue himself: ‘I start the day after to-morrow.’
‘Alone?’
‘No, my sister-in-law will accompany me;’ then, after a breath or two, ‘and you.’
‘I?’
‘Oh,’ he cried, ‘it would be ridiculous in me to expect you to say at once that you will come; but before I leave this room I shall have your promise.’ And as he said this he stretched his arms across the table and took my hand in both his and fondled it, meanwhile eyeing me in the most passionate, wistful manner that can be imagined.
‘Wilfrid,’ said I softly, touched by his air and a sort of beauty as I seemed to think that came into his strange face with the pleading of it, ‘whatever I can do that may be serviceable to you in this time of bitter trial, I will do. But let me reason with you a little.’
‘Ay, reason,’ he responded, relinquishing my hand and folding his arms, and leaning back in his chair.
‘I have been a sailor in my time, as you know,’ said I, ‘and have some acquaintance with the sea, even though my experience goes no further than a brief spell of East African and West Indian stations; and, therefore, forgive me for inquiring your expectations. What do you suppose? The “Shark” will have had three days’ start of you.’
‘Five days,’ he interrupted.
‘Five days, then. Do you expect to overhaul her at sea, or is it your intention to crowd on to the Cape, await her arrival there, or, if you find that she has already sailed, to follow her to the next port, providing you can learn it?’
‘You have named the programme,’ he answered. ‘I shall chase her. If I miss her I shall wait for her at Table Bay.’
‘She may get there before you,’ I said, ‘and be under way for another destination whilst you are still miles to the nor’ard.’
‘No,’ he cried hotly, ‘we shall be there first; but we shall not need to go so far. Her course must be our course, and we shall overhaul her; don’t doubt that.’
‘But put it,’ said I, ‘first of all, that you don’t overhaul her. You may pass her close on a dark night with never a guess at her presence. She may be within twenty miles of you on a clear, bright day, and not a creature on board suspect that a shift of helm by so much as half a point would bring what all hands are dying to overhaul within eyeshot in half an hour.’
He listened with a face clouded and frowning with impatience; but I was resolved to weaken if I could what seemed to me an insane resolution.
‘Count upon missing her at sea, for I tell you the chances of your picking her up are all against you. Well, now, you arrive at Table Bay and find that the “Shark” sailed a day or two before for some port of which nobody knows anything. What will you do then? How will you steer your “Bride”? For all you can tell, this man Hope-Kennedy may make for the Pacific Islands by way of Cape Horn, or he may head north-east for the Mozambique and the Indian waters, or south-east for the Australias. It is but to let fly an arrow in the dark to embark on such a quest.’
He lay back looking at me a little without speaking, and then said, in a more collected manner than his face might promise, ‘I may miss this man upon the high seas; I may find his yacht has arrived and gone again when I reach Table Bay; and I may not know, as you say, in what direction to seek her if there be no one in Cape Town able to tell me what port she has started for; but’—he drew a deep breath—‘the pursuit gives me a chance. You will admit that?’
‘Yes, a chance, as you say.’
‘A chance,’ he continued, ‘that need not keep me waiting long for it to happen. D’ye think I could rest with the knowledge that that scoundrel and the woman he has rendered faithless to me are close yonder?’ he exclaimed, pointing as though there had come a vision of the Atlantic before his mind’s eye, and he saw the yacht afloat upon it. ‘Who’s to tell me that before the month is out our friend the Colonel will not be drifting somewhere fathoms deep with a shot through his heart?’
‘If you catch him you will shoot him?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘And Lady Monson?’
He looked down upon his hands without answering.
‘I am a single man,’ said I, ‘and am, therefore, no doubt disqualified from passing an opinion. But I vow to heaven, Wilfrid, if my wife chose to leave me for another man, I would not lift a[9] finger either to regain her or to avenge myself. A divorce would fully appease me. Who would not feel gay to be rid of a woman whose every heart-throb is a dishonour? What more unendurable than an association rendered an incomparable insult, and the basest lie under heaven, by one’s wife’s secret abhorrence and her desire for another?’
On a sudden he sprang to his feet as though stabbed. ‘Cease, for Christ’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘The more truthful your words are, the more they madden me. If I could tear her from me,’ clutching at his breast in a wild, tragical way—‘if I could cleanse my heart of her as you would purify a vessel of what has lain foul and poisonous in it; if disgust would but fall cool on my resentment and leave me loathing her merely; if—if—if! But it is if that makes the difference betwixt hell and heaven in this bad world of unexpected things.’ He sat afresh, passing the back of his hand over his brow, and sighing heavily. ‘There is no if for me,’ said he. ‘I love her passionately yet, and so hate her besides that——’ He checked himself with a shake of the head. ‘No, no, perhaps not when it came to it,’ he muttered as though thinking aloud. ‘We are wasting time,’ he cried, pulling out his watch. ‘Charlie, you will accompany me?’
‘But you say you start the day after to-morrow?’
‘Yes.’
‘From Southampton?’
‘Yes.’
‘And, should you find the “Shark” gone when you arrive at the Cape——’
‘Well?’
‘Ay,’ said I, ‘that’s just it. We should be like Adam and Eve, with all the world before us where to choose.’
‘Charlie, will you come? I counted upon you from the moment of forming my resolution. You have been a sailor. You are the one man of them all that I should turn to in such a time as this. Say you will come. Laura Jennings, my wife’s—my—my sister-in-law I mean—will accompany us. Did I tell you this? Yes; I recollect. She is a stout-hearted little woman, as brave as she is beautiful, and so shocked, so shocked!’ He clasped his hands upon his brow, lifting his eyes. ‘She would pass through a furnace to rescue her sister from this infamy. Come!’
‘You give me no time.’
‘Time! You have all to-morrow. You may easily be on board by four o’clock in the afternoon on the following day. Time! A sailor knows nothing of time. I must have you by my side, Charlie. We shall meet them, and I shall need a friend. The support and help of your company, too——’
‘Will your yacht be ready for sea by the day after to-morrow?’
‘She is ready now.’
‘Your people will have worked expeditiously,’ said I, fencing a little, for he was leaning towards me and devouring me[10] with his eyes, and I found it impossible to say yes or no right off.
‘Will you come?’
‘How many form your party?’
‘There is myself, there is Laura, then you, then a maid for my sister-in-law, and my man, and yours if you choose to bring him.’
‘In short, there will be three of us,’ said I; ‘no doctor?’
‘We cannot be too few. What would be the good of a doctor? Will you come?’
‘Do you sleep in town to-night?’
‘Yes,’ he replied, naming a hotel near Charing Cross.
‘Well, then, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘you must give me to-night to think the thing over. What are your plans for to-morrow?’
‘I leave for Southampton at ten. Laura arrives there at six in the evening.’
‘Then,’ said I, ‘you shall have my answer by nine o’clock to-morrow morning. Will that do?’
‘It must do, I suppose,’ said he wearily, moving as if to rise, and casting a dull, absent sort of look at his watch.
A quarter of an hour later I was alone.
Time was when I had been much thrown with my cousin. I had served in the Royal Navy for a few years, as I have said, but abandoned it on my inheriting a very comfortable little fortune from my father, who survived my mother a few months only. I say I quitted the sea then, partly because I was now become an independent man, partly because I was comparatively without influence and so found the vocation unpromising, and partly because my frizzling equatorial spells of service had fairly sickened me of the life.
It was then that Wilfrid, who was a bachelor, and my senior by some ten years or thereabouts, invited me down to Cumberland, where I hunted and shot with him and passed some merry weeks. He took a great liking to me, and I was often with him, and we were much together in London. There came a time, however, when he took it into his head to travel. He thought he would go abroad and see the world; not Paris, Brussels, and Rome, but America and the Indies and Australia—a considerable undertaking in those ambling days of the tea waggon and the cotton kettle-bottom, when the passage from the Thames to Bombay occupied four months, and when a man who had made a voyage round the world believed he had a right to give himself airs.
Well, my cousin sailed; I went down to Gravesend with him[11] and bade him good-bye there. His first start was for New York, and then he talked of proceeding to the West Indies and afterwards to the Cape, thence to India or Australia, and so on. He was away so long that the very memory of him grew dim in me, till one day I heard some men in a club that I belonged to speaking about the beautiful Lady Monson. I pricked up my ears at this, for Monson is my name and the word caught me instantly, and, gathering from the talk that one of the group, a young baronet with whom I was well acquainted, could satisfy my curiosity about the lady, I waited till he was alone and then questioned him.
He told me that Lady Monson was my cousin’s wife; Sir Wilfrid had met her at Melbourne and married her there. She was the daughter of a squatter, a man of small beginnings, who had done amazingly well. She was exceedingly beautiful, my young friend assured me. He had met her twice at county balls, and had never seen her like for dignity, grace, and loveliness of form and face. He told me that she was very fond of the sea, so some friends or acquaintances of hers had informed him, and that, to gratify her taste in this way, Sir Wilfrid sold his cutter—a vessel of twenty tons, aboard which I had made one or two excursions with him—and replaced her by a handsome schooner which he had rechristened the ‘Bride.’ I understood from the young baronet that my cousin and his wife were then away cruising in the Mediterranean.
I had not before heard of Wilfrid’s marriage, and, though for the moment I was a little surprised, and perhaps vexed, that he had never communicated so interesting a piece of news as this to me, who, as a blood relation and an intimate friend, had a claim upon his candour and kindness, yet on reflection I judged that his memory had been weakened by separation as mine had; and then I considered that he was so much engrossed by his wife as to be able to think of little besides, whilst, though he had then been married many months, he had apparently spent with Lady Monson a good deal of his time out of England.
About six weeks before the opening of this story I met him in Bond Street. I was passing him, for time and travel had wonderfully changed him, and in his long hair and smooth face I must certainly have failed, in the hurry of the pavement, to have recognised the cropped and bewhiskered young fellow whom I had taken leave of at Gravesend, but for his starting and his peculiar way of peering at me. My rooms were conveniently near; I carried him to them, and a couple of hours passed whilst he told me of his adventures. I noticed that he said much less about his wife than I should have expected to hear from him. He referred to her, indeed; praised her beauty, her accomplishments, with an almost passionate admiration in his way of speaking, yet I remarked a sort of uneasiness in his face too, a kind of shadowing as though the having to speak of his wife raised thoughts which eclipsed or dimmed the brightness of the holiday memories he was full of. Still I was so little sure that when I came to think it over I was convinced it was mere fancy[12] on my part, or at the worst I took it that, though he was worth ten thousand a year, she might be making him uneasy by extravagance, or there might have been a tiff between them before leaving his home to come to London, the memory of which would worry a man of his temperament, a creature of nerves, and tainted besides, as you know. He told me he was in London for a couple of days on a matter of business, and that he had asked Lady Monson to accompany him, but she had said it vexed her to leave her baby for even a day, and that it was out of the question to subject the bairn to the jolting, risks, and fatigue of a long journey. He looked curiously as he said this, but the expression fled too nimbly from his face to be determinable.
What was I doing? When would it suit me to visit him? If I had no better engagement would I return with him? But, though I had missed nothing of the old cordiality in his greeting and in his conversation that had reference to our bygone jinks and to his travels, his invitation—if invitation it could be called—was lifeless. So much so, indeed, that it was as good or bad as his telling me he did not want me then, however welcome I might be by-and-by. We parted, and I did not see or hear of him again until he came, as I have related, to tell me that his wife had eloped with Colonel Hope-Kennedy.
I had now to decide how to act, and I was never more puzzled or irresolute in the whole course of my life. Had he proposed an ocean cruise as a mere yachting trip, I should have accepted the offer right out of hand.
The sea, as a vocation, I did not love; but very different from the discipline of a man-of-war’s quarter-deck, and the fever-breeding tedium of stagnant and broiling stations, was the business of navigating the blue brine in a large richly-equipped yacht, of chasing the sun as one chose, of storing one’s mind with memories of the glittering pageantry of noble and shining rivers, and green and sparkling scenes of country radiant and aromatic with the vegetation of tropic heights and distant sea-board cities, past the gleam of the coral strand with a scent of sandalwood in the offshore breeze, and boats of strange form and rig, gay as aquatic parrots, sliding along the turquoise surface to the strains of a chant as Asiatic as the smell of the hubble-bubble. No man ever loved travel more than I; only, unfortunately, in my time, when I had the right sort of health and spirit for adventure, journeys by land and by sea were tedious and fatiguing. Very few steamers were afloat: one might have sought in vain for a propeller to thrash one to the world’s end with the velocity of a gale of wind. I had often a mind, after Wilfrid had started on his voyage to various parts of the world, to follow his example; but I would shake my head when I came to think of the passenger ship, the chance of being locked up for months with a score or two of people, half of whom might prove disagreeable, not to mention indifferent food and a vile ship’s cook, with weeks of equatorial deadness, and everything to be gone[13] through again as one went from place to place by sea, and myself companionless the while.
But a yachting cruise was another matter, and I say I should have accepted Wilfred’s proposal without an instant’s reflection, even if I had had to be on board by noon next day, but for the extraordinary motive of the trip. It was very plain that he had no clear perception of his own programme. He talked as though everything that happened would correspond with his anticipations. He seemed cocksure, for instance, of overhauling the ‘Shark’ in mid-ocean, when in reality the possibility of such an encounter was so infinitesimally small that no man in his senses would dream of seriously entering it as an item in his catalogue of chances. Then, supposing him to miss the ‘Shark,’ he was equally cocksure of arriving at Table-Bay before her. The ‘Bride’ might be the swifter vessel, but the course was six thousand miles and more; the run might occupy two and perhaps three, ay, and even four months, and, though I did not make much of the ‘Shark’s’ five days’ start, yet, even if the ‘Bride’ outsailed her by four feet to one, so much of the unexpected must enter as conditions of so long a run and so great a period of time—calms, headwinds, disaster, strong favourable breezes for the chased, sneaking and baffling draughts of air for the pursuer—that it was mere madness to reckon with confidence upon the ‘Bride’s’ arrival at Cape Town before the ‘Shark.’ So that, as there was no certainty at all about it, what was to follow if my cousin found that the runaways had sailed from Cape Town without leaving the faintest hint behind them as to their destination!
Moreover, how could one be sure that the Colonel and Lady Monson would not change their minds and make for American or Mediterranean ports? Their determination to put the whole world between them and England was not very intelligible, seeing that our globe is a big one, and that scoundrels need not travel far to be lost to the eye. If Lady Monson discovered that she had left behind her the remarkable letter which Wilfrid had given to me to read, then it would be strange if she and the Colonel did not change their programme, unless, indeed, they supposed that Wilfrid would never dream of following them upon the high seas.
But these were idle speculations; they made no part of my business. Should I accompany my cousin on as mad an undertaking as ever passion and distraction could hurry him into? I was heartily grieved for the poor fellow, and I sincerely desired to be of use to him. It might be that after we had been chasing for a few weeks his heart would sicken to the sight hour after hour of the bare sea-line, and then perhaps, if I were with him, I might come to have influence enough over his moods to divert him from his resolution, and so steer us home again; for I would think to myself, grant that we fall in with the ‘Shark,’ what can Wilfred do? Would he arm his men and board her? Yachtsmen are a peaceful body of sea-farers, and before it could come to a boarding match and a hand-to-hand[14] fight, he would have to satisfy his crew that they had signed articles to sell their lives as well as work his ship. To be sure, if the yachts fell within hail and Sir Wilfrid challenged the Colonel, the latter would not, it may be supposed, decline the duel.
But, view the proposal as I might, I could see nothing but a mad scheme in it; and I think it must have been two o’clock in the morning before I had made up my mind, so heartily did I bother myself with considerations; and then, after reflecting that there was nothing to keep me in England, that my cousin had come to me as a brother and asked me in a sense to stand by him as a brother, that the state of his mind imposed it almost as a pious obligation upon me to be by his side in this time of extremity and bitter anguish, that the quest was practically so aimless—the excursion was almost certain to end on this side the Cape, or, to put it at the worst, to end at Table Bay, which, after all, would prove no formidable cruise, but, on the contrary, a trip that must do me good and kill the autumn months very pleasantly—I say that, after lengthily reflecting on these and many other points and possibilities of the project, I made up my mind that I would sail with him.
Next morning I despatched my man with a note—a brief sentence: ‘I will be on board to-morrow by four,’ and received Wilfrid’s reply, written in an agitated sprawling hand: ‘God bless you! Your decision makes a double-barrelled weapon of my purpose. I have not slept a wink all night—my fifth night of sleeplessness; but I shall feel easier when the clipper keel of the “Bride” is shearing through it in hot and sure pursuit. I start in a quarter of an hour for Southampton. Laura will be overjoyed to hear that you are to be one of us; from the moment of my determining to follow that hell-born rascal she has been exhorting me to choose a companion—of my own sex, I mean, but it would have to be you or nix. My good angel be praised, ’tis all right now! We’ll have ’em, we’ll have ’em! Mark me! Would to heaven the pistol-ball had the power to cause in the heart of a ruffian and a seducer the intolerable mental torments he works for another ere it fulfilled its mission by killing him!’ He signed himself, ‘Yours ever affectionately.’
Wild as the tone of this note was, it was less suggestive of excitement and passion and restlessness than the writing. I locked it away, and possess it still, and no memorial that I can put my hand on has its power of lighting up the past. I never look at it without living again in the veritable atmosphere and colour and emotions of the long-vanished days.
Being a bachelor, my few affairs which needed attention were speedily put in order. My requirements in regard to apparel for a voyage to the Cape I exactly knew, and supplied them in three or four hours. The railroad to Southampton had been opened some months, so I should be spared a long and tiresome journey by coach. By ten o’clock that night I was ready bag and baggage—a creditable performance in a man who for some years had been used[15] to a lounging, inactive life. I offered to take my servant, but he told me he was a bad sailor and afraid of the water, and was without curiosity to view foreign parts; so I paid and discharged him, not doubting that I should be able to manage very well without a man; and, leaving what property I could not carry with me in charge of my landlord, I next morning took my departure for Southampton.
I believe I did not in the least degree realise the nature of the queer adventure I had consented to embark on until I found myself in a wherry heading in the direction of a large schooner-yacht that lay a mile away out upon Southampton Water. She was the ‘Bride,’ the boatman told me, and the handsomest vessel of her kind that he knew.
‘A finer craft than the “Shark”?’ said I.
‘Whoy yes,’ he answered, ‘bigger by fourteen or fifteen ton, but Oi dunno about foiner. The “Shark” has the sweeter lines, Oi allow; but that there “Bride,”’ said he with a toss of his head in the direction of the yacht, sitting with his back upon her as he was, ‘has got the ocean-going qualities of a line-of-battle ship.’
‘Take a race between them,’ said I, ‘which would prove the better ship?’
‘Whoy, in loight airs the “Shark,” Oi daresay, ’ud creep ahead. In ratching, too, in small winds she’d go to wind’ard of t’other as though she was warping that way. But in anything loike a stiff breeze yonder “Bride” ’ud forereach upon and weather the “Shark” as easy as swallowing a pint o’ yale, or my name’s Noah, which it ain’t.’
‘The “Shark” has sailed?’
‘Oy, last week.’
‘Where bound to, d’ye know?’
‘Can’t say, Oi’m sure. Oi’ve heerd she was hired by an army gent, and that, wherever his cruise may carry him to, he ain’t going to be in a hurry to finish it.’
‘Does he sail alone? Or, perhaps, he takes his wife or children with him?’
‘Well,’ said the waterman, pausing on his oars a minute or so with a grin, whilst his damp oyster-like eyes met in a kind of squint on my face, ‘the night afore the “Shark” sailed Oi fell in with one of her crew, a chap named Bobby Watt; and on my asking him if this here military gent was a-going to make the voyage alone he shuts one oye and says “Jim,” he says, Jim being one of my names, not Noah, “Jim,” says he, “when soldiers go to sea,” says he, “do they take pairosols with ’em? and are bonnet boxes to be found ’mongst their luggage? Tell ye what it is, Jim,” he says, “they can call yachting an innocent divarsion, but bet your life, Jim,” says he, “’taint all as moral as it looks!” by which Oi understood,’ said the waterman, falling to his oars again, ‘that the military gent hain’t sailed alone in the “Shark,” nor took his wife with him neither, if so be he’s a wedded man.’
We were now rapidly approaching the ‘Bride,’ and as there was little to be learnt from the waterman, I ceased to question him, whilst I inspected the yacht as a fabric that was to make me a home for I knew not how long. Then it was, perhaps, that the full perception of my undertaking and of my cousin’s undertaking, too, for the matter of that, broke in upon me with the picture of the fine vessel straining lightly at her cable, whilst past her ran the liquid slope into airy distance, where, in the delicate blue blending of azure radiance floating down and mingling with the dim cerulean light lifting off the face of the quiet waters, you witnessed a faint vision of dashes of pale green and gleaming foreshore, with blobs and films of land beyond, swimming, as it seemed, in the autumn haze and distorted by refraction. It was the Isle of Wight, and the shore on either hand went yawning to it till it looked a day’s sail away; and I suppose it was the sense of distance that came to me with the scene of the horizon past the yacht, touched with hues illusive enough to look remote, that rendered realisation of Wilfrid’s wild programme sharp in me as I directed a critical gaze at the beautiful fabric we were nearing.
And beautiful she was—such a gallant toy as an impassioned sweetheart would love to present to the woman he adored. In those days the memory of the superb Baltimore clippers and of the moulded perfections of the schooners which traded to the Western Islands and to the Mediterranean for the season’s fruits, was still a vital inspiration among the shipwrights and yacht-builders of the country. I had never before seen the ‘Bride,’ but I had no sooner obtained a fair view of her, first broadside on, then sternwise, as my boatman made for the starboard gangway, than I fell in love with her. She had the beam and scantling of a revenue cutter, with high bulwarks, and an elliptical stern, and a bow with the sheer of a smack, but elegant beyond expression with its dominating flair at the catheads, where it fell sharpening to a knife-like cutwater, thence rounding amidships with just enough swell of the sides to delight a sailor’s eye.
The merest landsman must instantly have recognised in her the fabric and body of a sea-going craft of the true pattern. This was delightful to observe. The voyage might prove a long one, with many passages of storm in it, and the prospect of traversing the great oceans of the world; and one would naturally want to make sure in one’s floating home of every quality of staunchness and stability. A vessel, however, of over two hundred tons burthen in those times was no mean ship. Crafts of the ‘Bride’s’ dimensions were regularly trading as cargo and passenger boats to foreign parts; so that little in my day would have been made of any number of voyages round the world in such a structure as Sir Wilfrid’s yacht. It is different now. Our ideas have enlarged with the growth of the huge mail boat, and a voyage in a yacht driven by steam and of a burthen considerably in excess of many West Indiamen, which half a century ago were regarded as[17] fine large ships, is considered a performance remarkable enough to justify the publication of a book about it, no matter how destitute of interest and incident the trip may have proved. The fashion of the age favoured gilt, and forward and about her quarters and stern the ‘Bride’ floated upon the smooth waters all ablaze with the glory of the westering sun striking upon the embellishments of golden devices writhing to the shining form of the semi-nude beauty that, with arms clasped Madonna-wise, sought with an incomparable air of coyness to conceal the graces of her form under the powerful projecting spar of the bowsprit; whilst aft the giltwork, in scrolls, flowers, and the like, with a central wreath as a frame for the virgin-white letters of the yacht’s name, smote the satin surface under the counter with the sheen of a sunbeam. All this brightness and richness was increased by her sheathing of new copper that rose high upon the glossy bends, and sank with ruddy clearness under the water, where it flickered like a light there, preserving yet, even in its tremulous waning, something of the fair proportions of the submerged parts.
The bulwarks were so tall that it was not until I was close aboard I could distinguish signs of life on the yacht. I then spied a head over the rail aft watching me, and on a sudden there sprang up alongside of it a white parasol edged with black, and the gleam as it looked of a fair girlish face in the pearly twilight of the white shelter. Then, as I drew close, the man’s head uprose and I distinguished the odd physiognomy of my cousin under a large straw hat. He saluted me with a gloomy gesture of the hand, with something, moreover, in his posture to suggest that he was apprehensive of being observed by people aboard adjacent vessels, though I would not swear at this distance of time that there was anything lying nearer to us than half a mile. You would have thought some one of consequence had died on board, all was so quiet. I lifted my hat solemnly in response to Wilfrid’s melancholy flourish, as though I was visiting the craft to attend a funeral; the boat then sheered alongside, and, paying the waterman his charges, I stepped up the short ladder and jumped on deck.
Sir Wilfrid was coming to the gangway as I entered, leaving his companion, whom I at once understood to be Miss Laura Jennings, standing near the wheel. He grasped my hand, gazing at me earnestly a moment or two without speaking, and then exclaimed in a low faltering voice, ‘You are the dearest fellow to come! you are the dearest fellow to come! Indeed it is good, true, and noble of you.’
He then turned to a man dressed in a suit of pilot-cloth, with[18] brass buttons on his waistcoat and a round hat of old sailor fashion on his head, who stood at a respectful distance looking on, and motioned to him. He approached.
‘Charles, this is Captain Finn, the master of the yacht. My cousin, Mr. Monson.’
Finn lifted his hat with a short scrape of his right leg abaft.
‘Glad to see you aboard, sir, glad to see you aboard,’ said he, in a leather-lunged note that one felt he had difficulty in subduing. ‘A melancholy errand, Mr. Monson, sir, God deliver us! But we’re jockeying a real sweetheart, your honour, and if we ain’t soon sticking tight to Captain Fidler’s skirts I don’t think it’ll be for not being able to guess his course.’
He shook his head and sighed. But there lay a jolly expression in his large protruding lobster-like eye that twinkled there like the flame of a taper—enough of it to make me suspect that his mute-like air and Ember-week tone of voice was a mere piece of sympathetic acting, and that he was a merry dog enough when Wilfrid was out of sight.
‘See Mr. Monson’s luggage aboard, captain,’ said my cousin, ‘and stowed in his cabin, and then get your anchor. There’s nothing to keep us now.’
‘Ay, ay, sir.’
‘Step this way, Charlie, that I may introduce you to my sister-in-law.’
He passed his arm through mine and we walked aft, but I noticed in him a certain manner of cowering, so to speak, as of one who fears that he is being watched and talked about—an involuntary illustration of profound sensitiveness, no doubt, for, as I have said, the yacht lay lonely, and he was hardly likely to dread the scrutiny of his own men.
The girl he introduced me to seemed about nineteen or twenty years old. Lady Monson had been described to me as tall, stately, slow in movement, and of a reposeful expression of face that would have been deemed spiritless in a person wanting the eloquence of her rich and tropic charms: so at least my club friend the young baronet had as good as told me; and it was natural perhaps that I should expect to find her sister something after her style in height and form, if not in colour.
Instead, she was a woman rather under than above the average stature, fair in a sort of golden way, by which I wish to convey a complexion of exquisite softness and purity, very faintly freckled as though a little gold-dust had been artfully shaken over it—a hue of countenance, so to speak, that blended most admirably with a great quantity of hair of a dark gold, whereof there lay upon her brow many little natural curls and short tresses which her white forehead, shining through them, refined into a kind of amber colour. Her eyes were of violet with a merry spirit in them, which defied the neutralising influence of the sorrowful expression of her mouth. By some she might have been held a thought too stout, but for my[19] part I could see nothing that was not perfectly graceful in the curves and lines of her figure. I will not pretend to describe how she was dressed; in mourning I thought she was at first when she stood at a distance. She was sombrely clad, to keep Wilfrid’s melancholy in countenance perhaps, and I dare say she looked the sweeter and fairer for being thus apparelled, since there is no wear fitter than dark clothes for setting off such skin and hair as hers. Indeed, her style of dress and the fashion of her coiffure were the anticipation of a taste of a much later date. In those days women brushed their hair into a plaster-like smoothness down the cheeks, then coiled it behind the ear, and stowed what remained in an ungainly lump at the back of the head, into which was stuck a big comb. The dress, again, was loose about the body, as though the least revelation of the figure were an act of immodesty, and the sleeves were what they called gigots; all details, in short, combining to so ugly a result as to set me wondering now sometimes that love-making did not come to a dead stand. Miss Laura Jennings’s dress was cut to show her figure. The sleeves were tight, and I recollect that she wore gauntlet-shaped gloves that clothed her arm midway to the elbow.
This which I am writing was my impression, at the instant, of the girl with whom I was to be associated for a long while upon the ocean, and with whom I was to share in one adventure, at all events, which I do not doubt you will accept as amongst the most singular that ever befell a voyager. She curtsied with a pretty old-world grace to Wilfrid’s introduction, sending at the same time a sparkling glance full of spirited criticism through the fringe of her lids, which drooped with a demureness that was almost coquettish, I thought. Then she brightened into a frank manner, whilst she extended her hand.
‘I am very pleased to meet you, Mr. Monson; glad indeed to feel sure now that you will be of our party. Sir Wilfrid has talked of you much of late. You have acted far more kindly than you can imagine in joining us.’
‘We have a fine vessel under us, at all events, Miss Jennings,’ said I, with a look at the unsheltered decks which stretched under the declining sun white as freshly-peeled almonds. ‘She seems to have been born with the right kind of soul, Wilfrid; and I think if your skipper will tell her quietly what is expected of her she will fulfil your utmost expectations.’
He forced a melancholy smile which swiftly faded, and then, with a start and a stare over the rail on either hand, he exclaimed, ‘It makes me uneasy to be on deck, d’ye know. I feel—though ’tis stupid enough—as if there were eyes yonder and yonder on the watch. This restlessness will pass when we get to sea. Let us go below, dinner will be ready by half-past five,’ pulling out his watch, ‘and it is now a little after four.’
He took his sister-in-law’s hand in a brotherly, boyish way, and the three of us descended.
The cabin was as shining and sumptuous an interior as ever I[20] was in, or could imagine, indeed, of a yacht’s internal accommodation. Mirrors, hand-painted bulkheads, combinations of gilt and cream, thick carpets, handsome lamps, silver swinging-trays, and twenty more elegancies which I will not bore you with, made you feel, as you stood at the foot of the companion steps, as though you had entered some delicious, sparkling, fragrant little drawing-room. The bedrooms were at each extremity. The berth allotted to me was a roomy, airy apartment forward, with a stout bulkhead at the end of the short passage that effectually closed this part of the craft from whatever might be amidships and beyond. There was a stand of arms fixed here, and my thoughts instantly went to Colonel Hope-Kennedy and Lady Monson, and the crew of the ‘Shark,’ as I counted twenty fowling-pieces with long polished barrels and bright stocks, with hooks alongside from which hung a number of cutlasses and pistols of the sort you then found in the small-arms chests aboard men-of-war. The pattern of these weapons persuaded me that they had been collected in a hurry, purchased out of hand off some Southampton or Gosport dealer in such ware. They can signify but one sort of business, thought I; but, bless my heart! does he seriously entertain notions of boarding if we fall in with the craft? And do his men suspect his intentions? And has he provided for all things by shipping a fighting crew?
I peered into my berth, saw that it would make me as comfortable a sea bedroom as it was possible to desire, and returned to the cabin, where Wilfrid and Miss Jennings were sitting, he at a small table right aft, sprawling upon it with his elbow, his chin in his hand, his face gloomy with melancholy and anger, and his eyes fixed upon a porthole through which he might just get a glimpse of green shore with a tremble of water yellow under the western light steeping to it; she near him on a short sofa, with her back against the vessel’s side, toying with her hat which lay in her lap, so that I was now able to see that she was indeed a very sweet woman to the topmost curl of gold that gleamed upon her head. Indeed, you seemed to witness her charms as in a light of her own making. There was something positively phosphoric in the irradiation on her face and hair, as though in sober truth they were self-luminous. A couple of fellows were bringing my luggage down the hatch, but very quietly. I knew they were getting the anchor on deck by the dim chink chink of the windlass pawls, but I could hear no other sounds, no singing out of orders, nothing save the pulsing of the windlass barrel to indicate that we were about to start. There was an element of solemnity in this our first step, at all events, along the prodigious liquid highway we were about to enter that was not a little irksome to me. After all, it was not my wife who had run away, and whom I was starting in pursuit of, and, though I keenly sympathised with my cousin, it was impossible that I could feel or look as though I was broken down by grief.
‘We are not a numerous party,’ said I, in a hearty way, seating myself, ‘one less, indeed, than we bargained for, Wilfrid, for I am[21] without a servant. My fellow funked the very name of salt water, and there was no time to replace him.’
‘There are two stewards to wait upon you, and my own valet besides,’ said Wilfrid, bringing his eyes with an effort from the porthole, through which he was staring, to my face. ‘Trust me to see that you are made perfectly comfortable.’
‘My dear fellow—comfortable! Why this is palatial!’ I cried, with a comprehensive sweep of my hand round the cabin; ‘much too luxurious, in my humble opinion; don’t you think so, Miss Jennings? Only figure all these fine things going down to swell the navies that lie green on the Atlantic ooze.’
‘The “Bride” is a lovely boat,’ she answered, ‘and very swift, Wilfrid says.’
‘Swift enough to serve my turn, I expect,’ said he, with what the Scotch call a raised look coming into his face.
‘But why not come on deck?’ said I; ‘no fear of being noticed, Wilfrid. Who is there to see us, and who is there to care if anybody should see us?’
He drew his tall, awkward figure together with a shake of the head.
‘Get you on deck by all means, Charles, and take Laura with you if she will go. I have occupation to last me until the dinner-bell in my cabin.’
‘Will you accompany me, Miss Jennings?’ said I.
‘Indeed I will,’ she exclaimed with an alacrity that exhibited her as little disposed as myself to rest passive in the shadow of my cousin’s heavy, resentful melancholy.
He seized my hand in both his as I rose to escort the girl on deck. ‘God bless you once again, my dear boy, for joining us. Presently I shall feel the stronger and perhaps the brighter for having you by my side.’ He looked wistfully, still holding my hand, at Miss Jennings, as though he would address a word to her too, but on a sudden broke away with a sigh like a sob, and walked hastily to the after passage, where his cabin was.
In silence, and much affected, I handed the girl up the companion steps. Gay and glittering as was the cabin, its inspirations were but as those of a charnel-house compared with the sense of life and the quickness of spirit you got by mounting on deck and entering the shining atmosphere of the autumn afternoon, with the high blue sky filled with the soft and reddening light of the waning luminary, whilst already the land on either side was gathering to its green and gold and brown the tender dyes of the evening. The distance had been clarified by a small easterly air that had sprung up since I first stepped on board, and the Isle of Wight hung in a soft pure mass of many dyes upon the white gleam of the water that brimmed to it. There was a large frigate, as I imagined her, drawing slowly up past Gosport way, heading westwards, and the eye fastened upon her with a sort of wonder; for, though she looked to be hull down, and the merest toy, and indistinguishable[22] by the careless glance as a sail, yet she was too defined to pass for a cloud either, whilst the silver brightness seemed impossible in canvas, and you watched her with a fancy in you of a large bland star that would be presently afloat in the blue; and sparkling there on the brow of the rising night. There were a few vessels of different kinds anchored off Southampton, and the scene in that direction looked wonderfully fair and peaceful, with the spars of the craft gilt with sunshine, and a flash in their hulls where paint or glass caught the declining beam, and past them the higher reaches of the light blue water with the twinkling of little sails that carried the gaze shorewards to the town.
All this my sight took in quickly. The men had quitted the windlass, and were making sail upon the yacht nimbly, but so quietly, even with a quality of stealth in their manner of pulling and hauling, that we could not have been a stiller ship had we been a privateersman getting under way on a dark night with a design of surprising a rich fabric or of escaping a heavily-armed enemy. They looked a stout crew of men, attired without the uniformity that is usual in yachting companies in these days, though the diversity of dress was not sufficiently marked to offend. I gathered that the vessel carried a mate as well as a captain, and detected him in the figure of a sturdy little fellow, with a cast in his eye and a mat of red hair under his chin, who stood betwixt the knightheads forward, staring aloft at a hand on the topsail yard. Captain Finn saluted the girl and me with a flourish of a hairy paw to his hat, but was too full of business to give us further heed.
‘We shall be under way very soon now, Miss Jennings,’ said I; ‘it is a strange voyage that we are undertaking.’
‘A sad one too,’ she answered.
‘You show a deal of courage in accompanying Wilfrid,’ I exclaimed.
‘I hesitated at first,’ said she, ‘but he seemed so sure of overtaking the “Shark,” and pressed me so earnestly to join him, believing that the sight of me, or that by my pleading to—to—’ She faltered, flushing to the eyes, and half turned from me with such a tremulous parting of her lips to the gush of the mild breeze, which set a hundred golden fibres of her hair dancing about her ears, that I expected to see a tear upon her cheek when she looked at me afresh. I pretended to be interested in nothing but the movements of the men who were hoisting the mainsail.
‘What do you think of the voyage, Mr. Monson?’ she exclaimed after a little pause, though she held her face averted as if waiting for the flush to fade out of her cheeks.
‘It bothers me considerably,’ I answered; ‘there is nothing to make heads or tails of in it that I can see.’
‘But why?’ and now she stole a sidelong look at me.
‘Well, first of all,’ I exclaimed, ‘I cannot imagine that there is the faintest probability of our picking up the “Shark.” She may be below the horizon, and we may be sailing three or four leagues[23] apart for days at a stretch, and neither ship with the faintest suspicion of the other being close. The ocean is too big for a hunt of this sort.’
‘But suppose we should pick her up, to use your term, Mr. Monson?’
‘Suppose it, Miss Jennings, and add this supposition: that the gallant Colonel’—she frowned at his name, with a sweet curl of horror on her lip as she looked down—‘who will long before have twigged us, declines to heave-to or have anything whatever to do with us; what then?’
‘I suggested this to your cousin,’ she answered quickly; ‘it is a most natural objection to make. He answered that if the “Shark” refused to stop when he hailed her—that is the proper term, I know—he would compel her to come to a stand by continuing to fire at her, even if it came to his sinking her, though his object would be to knock her mast down to prevent her from sailing.’
I checked a smile at the expression ‘knock her mast down,’ and then caught myself running my glance round in search of any hint of ordnance of a persuasive kind; and now it was that I noticed for the first time, secured amidships of the forecastle, and comfortably housed and tarpaulined, something that my naval instincts were bound to promptly interpret into a Long Tom, and of formidable calibre too, if the right sort of hint of it was to be obtained out of its swathing. I also observed another feature that had escaped me: I mean a bow-port on either side the bowsprit—a detail of equipment so uncommon in a pleasure craft as to force me to the conclusion that the apertures had been quite newly cut and fitted.
I uttered a low whistle, whilst I found my companion’s gaze rooted upon me with the same critical attention in the spirited blue gleam of it I had before noticed.
‘Well!’ said I, taking a bit of a breath, ‘upon my word, though, I should not have thought he had it in him! Yes, yonder’s a remedy,’ I continued, nodding in the direction of the forecastle, ‘to correspond with Wilfrid’s intentions if he’s fortunate enough to fall in with the “Shark.” Will she be armed, I wonder? It would then make the oddest of all peppering matches.’
‘If the yacht escapes us, we are certain to meet with her at the Cape,’ said Miss Jennings.
It was idle to argue on matters of seamanship with the pretty creature.
‘Wilfrid has said little on the subject to me,’ I remarked. ‘He was dreadfully overcome when he called to ask me to accompany him. But it is good and brave of you to enter upon this wild experiment with a womanly and a sisterly hope of courting the fugitive back to her right and only resting-place. My cousin will receive her, then?’
‘He means to come between her and the consequences of her—of[24] her folly,’ said she, colouring again with a flash in her eye and a steady confrontment of me, ‘let the course he may afterwards make up his mind to pursue be what it will.’
I saw both distress and a little hint of temper in her face, and changed the subject.
‘Have you been long in England?’
‘I arrived three months ago at Sherburne Abbey’ (my cousin’s seat in the North). ‘You know I am an Australian?’
‘Yes, but not through Wilfrid, of whose marriage I should have learned nothing but for hearing it talked about one day in a club. A young baronet who had met Lady Monson was loud in her praises. He described her as a wonderfully beautiful woman, but dark, with fiery Spanish eyes and raven tresses’; and here I peeped at her own soft violet stars and sunny hair.
‘Yes, she is beautiful, Mr. Monson,’ she answered sadly, ‘too beautiful indeed. Her face has proved a fatal gift to her. What madness!’ she exclaimed, whispering her words almost. ‘And never was there a more devoted husband than Wilfrid. And her baby—the little lamb! Oh, how could she do it! how could she do it!’
‘With whom has the child been placed?’ said I.
‘With a cousin—Mrs. Trevor.’
‘Oh, I know, a dear good creature; the bairn will be in excellent hands.’
‘Sir Wilfrid was too affectionate, Mr. Monson. You know,’ she continued, looking at me sideways, her face very grave, ‘if you have ceased to love or to like a person, your aversion will grow in proportion as he grows fond of you. It is not true, Mr. Monson, that love begets love. No; if it were true, my sister would be the happiest of women.’
‘Have you met Colonel Hope-Kennedy?’
‘Oh yes, often and often. He was a very constant visitor at Sherburne Abbey.’
‘Pretty good-looking?’
‘Tall, very gentlemanly, not by any means handsome to my taste, but I have no doubt many women would think him so.’
‘The name is familiar to me, but I never met the man. Did he live in the North?’
‘No; whenever he came to Sherburne Abbey he was your cousin’s guest.’
Phew! thought I. ‘And, of course,’ I said, willing to pursue the subject afresh, since it did not seem now to embarrass her to refer to it, whilst I was curious to learn as much of the story as could be got, ‘my cousin had no suspicion of the scoundrelism of the man he was entertaining.’
‘No, nor is he to be blamed. He is a gentleman, Mr. Monson, and, like all fine, generous, amiable natures, very, very slow to distrust persons whom he has honoured with his friendship. When he came to me with the news that Henrietta had left him I believed[25] he had gone utterly mad, knowing him to be just a little’—she hesitated, and ran her eyes over my face as though positively she halted merely to the notion that perhaps I was a trifle gone too; and then, clasping her hands before her, and hanging her head so as to look as if she was speaking with her eyes closed, she went on: ‘I was much with Henrietta, and often when Colonel Hope-Kennedy was present. I had ridden with them, had watched them whilst they played billiards—a game my sister was very fond of—observed them at the piano when she was singing and he turning the music, or when she accompanied him in a song; he sang well. But—it might be, it is true, because I was as unsuspicious as Wilfrid—yet I declare, Mr. Monson, that I never witnessed even so much as a look exchanged between them of a kind to excite a moment’s uneasiness. No! Wilfrid cannot be charged with blindness; the acting was as exquisite as the object was detestable.’ And she flushed up again, half turning from me with a stride towards the rail and a wandering look at the green country, which I accepted as a hint that she wished the subject to drop.
The yacht was now under way. They had catted, and were fishing the anchor forwards; I noticed that the man I had taken to be the mate had arrived aft and was at the wheel. The vessel’s head was pointing fair for the Solent, and already you heard a faint crackling sound like a delicate rending of satin rising from under the bows, though there was so little weight in the draught of air that the ‘Bride’ floated without the least perceptible list or inclination, spite of all plain sail being upon her with the exception of the top-gallant sail.
‘Fairly started at last, Miss Jennings,’ said I.
She glanced round hastily as though disturbed in an absorbing reverie, smiled, and then looked sad enough to weep, all in a breath.
Well, it was a solemn moment for her, I must say. She had her maid with her, it is true; but she was the only lady on board. There was none of her own quality with whom she could talk apart—no other woman to keep her in countenance, so to speak, with the sympathy of presence and sex; she was bound on a trip of which no mortal man could have dated the termination—an adventure that might carry her all about the world for aught she knew, for, since she was fully conscious of the very variable weather of my cousin’s mind, to use the old phrase, she would needs be too shrewd not to conjecture that many wild and surprising things were quite likely to happen whilst the power of directing the movements of the yacht remained his.
And then, again, she was in quest of her sister, without a higher hope to support her than a fancy—that was the merest dream to my mind, when I thought of the little baby the woman had left behind her, to say nothing of her husband—that her passionate entreaties backing Wilfrid’s appeals might coax her ladyship to quit the side of the gallant figure she had run away with.
Just then the merry silver tinkling of a bell smartly rung sounded through the open skylight, and at the same moment the form of a neat and comely young woman arose in the companion hatch.
‘What is it, Graham?’ inquired Miss Jennings.
‘The first dinner-bell, Miss. The second will ring at the half-hour.’
The girl pulled out a watch of the size of a thumbnail and exclaimed, ‘It is already five o’clock, Mr. Monson. It cannot be a whole hour since you arrived! I hope the time will pass as quickly when we are at sea.’
She lingered a moment gazing shorewards, sheltering her eyes sailor-fashion with an ungloved hand of milk-white softness, on which sparkled a gem or two; then, giving me a slight bow, she went to the companion and stepped down the ladder with the grace and ease of a creature floating on wings. Ho, ho! thought I, she will have her sea-legs anyhow; no need, therefore, Master Charles, to be too officious with your hand and arm when the hour of tumblefication comes. But that she was likely to prove a good sailor was a reasonable conjecture, seeing that she was comparatively fresh from probably a four months’ passage from Melbourne.
I followed her after a short interval, and then to the summons of the second dinner-bell entered the cabin. The equipment of the table rendered festal the sumptuous furniture of this interior with the sparkle of silver and crystal, and the dyes of wines blending with the central show of rich flowers. The western sunshine lay upon the skylight, and the atmosphere was ruddy with it. One is apt to be curious when in novel situations, and I must confess that yachting in such a craft as this was something very new to me, not to speak of the uncommon character one’s experiences at the onset would take from the motive and conditions of the voyage; and this will prove my apology for saying that, whilst I stood waiting for Wilfrid and his sister-in-law to arrive, I bestowed more attention, furtive as it might be, upon the two stewards and my cousin’s man than I should have thought of obliging them with ashore. The stewards were commonplace enough, a pair of trim-built fellows, the head one’s face hard with that habitual air of solicitude which comes at sea to a man whose duties lie amongst crockery and bills of fare, and whose leisure is often devoted to dark and mysterious altercations with the cook; the second steward was noticeable for nothing but a large strawberry-mark on his left cheek; but Wilfrid’s man was worth a stare. I had no recollection of him, and consequently he must have been taken into my cousin’s service since I was last at the Abbey, as we used to call it. He had the appearance of a man who had been bred to the business of a mute, a lanthorn-jawed, yellow, hollow-eyed person whose age might have been five-and-twenty or five-and-forty; hair as black as coal, glossy as grease, brushed flat to the tenacity of sticking-plaster, and fitting his egg-shaped skull like a wig. He was[27] dressed in black, his trousers a little short and somewhat tight at the ankles, where they revealed a pair of white socks bulging with a hint of gout over the sides of a pair of pumps. He stood behind the chair that Wilfrid would take with his hands reverentially clasped upon his waistcoat, his whole posture indicative of humility and resignation. Nothing could be more in harmony with the melancholy nature of our expedition than this fellow’s countenance.
Miss Jennings arrived and took her place; she was followed by my cousin, who walked to the table with the gait of a person following a coffin. This sort of thing, thought I, must be suffered for a day or two, but afterwards, if the air is not to be cleared by a rousing laugh, it won’t be for lack of any effort on my part to tune up my pipes.
The dinner was exquisitely cooked, and as perfectly ordered a repast as the most fastidious could devise or desire; but very little was said, mainly, I suspect, because our thoughts were filled with the one subject we could not refer to whilst the attendants hung about us. What fell was the merest commonplace, but I noticed that whilst Wilfrid ate little he offered no objection to the frequent replenishing of his glass with champagne by the melancholy chap who stood behind him.
By-and-by we found ourselves alone.
‘That is very honest port; you need not be afraid of it, Charles,’ said my cousin. ‘Do you understand gunnery?’
‘I believe I could load a piece and point it,’ said I, smiling, ‘but beyond that——’
‘Have you seen the gun on the forecastle?’
‘Just the outline of a cannon,’ I answered, ‘under a smother of tarpaulin. What is called a Long Tom, I think.’
‘You will have guessed the object of my mounting it?’ said he, with a frown darkening his face to one of those angry moods which would sweep athwart his mind like the deep but flitting shadows of squall clouds over a gloomy sky sullen with the complexion of storm.
‘Yes; Miss Jennings explained,’ I answered, glancing at her and meeting her eye, in which I seemed to find the faintest hint of rebuke, as though she feared I might be laughing in my sleeve. ‘What’s the calibre, Wilfrid?’
‘Eighteen pounds,’ he answered.
‘An eighteen-pounder, eh! That should bring the “Shark’s” spars about their ears, though. Let me think: the range of an eighteen-pounder will be, at an elevation of five degrees, a little over a mile.’
‘If,’ cried my cousin—lifting his hand as though to smite the table, then bringing his clenched fist softly down, manifestly checked in some hot impetuous impulse by the sense of the presence of the girl, who regarded him with a face as serious as though she were listening to a favourite preacher—‘if,’ he repeated, sobering his voice with the drooping of his arm, ‘we succeed in overhauling the “Shark,” and they refuse to heave her to, my purpose is to wreck her aloft, and then, should they show fight, to continue firing at her until I sink her.’
There was a vicious expression in his eyes as he said this, to which the peculiar indescribable trembling or quivering of the lids imparted a singular air of cunning.
‘Is the “Shark” armed, do you know?’ said I.
‘She carries a couple of small brass pieces, I believe, for purposes of signalling. Pop-guns,’ said he, contemptuously. ‘But I fancy she has an armoury of her own. Lord Winterton was constantly cruising north on shooting excursions, and it is quite likely that he let the weapons which belong to him with the yacht.’
‘If Colonel Hope-Kennedy’s programme,’ said I, ‘includes a ramble amongst the South Sea Islands, you may reckon upon his having equipped himself with small arms and powder enough, if only with an eye to man-eating rogues. But to revert to your Long Tom, Wilfrid. It should not be hard to sink a yacht with such a piece; but you are not for murdering your wife, my dear fellow?’
‘No, no,’ said he slowly, and speaking to me, though he kept his eyes fixed upon his sister-in-law, ‘have no fear of that. It is I that am the murdered man.’ He pressed his hand to his heart. ‘Rather put it thus: that when they find their vessel hulled and sinking they will get their boats over and be very willing to be picked up by us.’
‘But your round shot may knock their boats into staves,’ said I, ‘and what then?’
‘Our own boats will be at hand to rescue them,’ said he, now looking at me full with an expression of relish of the argument.
‘But, my dear Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘don’t you know that when a craft founders she has a trick of drowning most of the people aboard her, and amongst the few survivors, d’ye see, who contrived to support themselves by whatever lay floating might not be Lady Monson!’
He took a deep breath, and said, so slowly that he seemed to articulate with difficulty, ‘Be it so. I have made up my mind. If we overhaul the “Shark” and she declines to heave to, I shall fire into her. The blood of whatever follows will be upon their heads. This has been forced upon me; it is none of my seeking. I do not mean that Colonel Hope-Kennedy shall possess my wife, and I will take her from him alive if possible; but rest assured I am not to be hindered from separating them though her death should be the consequence.’
Miss Jennings clasped her fingers upon her forehead and sat motionless, looking down. For a little I was both startled and bewildered; one moment he talked as though his wish was that his wife should not be harmed, and the next, in some concealed convulsion of wrath, he betrayed a far blacker resolution than ever I could have imagined him capable of. Yet in the brief silence that followed I had time to rid myself of my little fit of consternation by considering, first of all, that he was now talking just as, according to my notion, he was acting—insanely; next, that it was a thousand to one against our falling in with the yacht; and again, supposing we came up with her, it was not very probable that the crew of the ‘Bride’ could be tempted, even by heavy bribes, into a measure that might put them in jeopardy of their necks or their liberty.
It was new dark, and the cabin lamps had been for some time lighted. The evening looked black against the portholes and the skylight, but the cheerfulness and beauty of the cabin were greatly heightened by the sparkling of the oil-flames in the mirrors, the swing-trays, the glass-like surface of the bulkheads, and so on. Miss Laura’s golden loveliness—do not laugh at my poor nautical attempts to put this amber-coloured, violet-eyed woman before you—showed, as one may well suppose of such a complexion and tints, incomparably perfect, I thought, in the soft though rich radiance diffused by the burning sperm. I wondered that she should listen so passively to Wilfrid’s confession of his intentions should we overhaul the ‘Shark.’ My gaze went to her as he concluded that little speech I have just set down; but I witnessed no alteration in as much of her face as was visible, nor any stir as of one startled or shocked in her posture. Possibly she did not master all the significance of his words; for how should a girl realise the full meaning of plumping round shot out of an eighteen-pounder into a vessel till she was made a sieve of? Or it might be that she was of my mind in regarding the expedition as a lunatic undertaking, and in suspecting that a few weeks of this ocean hunt would sicken Wilfrid of his determination to chase the ‘Shark’ round the world. Or mingled with these fancies, besides, there might be enough of violent resentment against her sister, of grief, pain, shame, to enable her to listen with an unmoved countenance to fiercer and wilder menaces than Wilfrid had as yet delivered himself of.
These thoughts occupied my mind during the short spell of silence that followed my cousin’s speech. He suddenly rang a little handbell, and his melancholy servant came sliding up to him out of the after cabin.
‘Tell Captain Finn I wish to see him—that is, if he can leave the deck.’
The fellow mounted the steps.
‘What is the name of that gloomy-looking man of yours, Wilfrid?’
‘Muffin,’ he answered.
‘Have I not seen somebody wonderfully like him,’ said I, ‘holding on with drunken gravity to the top of a hearse trotting home from the last public-house along the road from the graveyard?’
Miss Laura laughed; and there was a girlish freshness and arch cordiality in her laughter that must have put me into a good humour, I think, had it been my wife instead of Wilfrid’s that Colonel Hope-Kennedy was sailing away with.
‘Maybe, Charles, maybe,’ he answered, with a dull smile; ‘he may have been an undertaker’s man for all I know; though I doubt it, because I had him from Lord —— with a five years’ character, every word of which has proved true. But I knew you would have your joke. The fellow fits my temper to a hair; he has a hearse-like face, I admit; but then he is the quietest man in the world—a very ghost; summon him, and if he shaped himself out of thin air he couldn’t appear at your elbow more noiselessly. That’s his main recommendation to me. Any kind of noise now I find distracting; even music—Laura will tell you that I’ll run a mile to escape the sound of a piano.’
At this moment a pair of pilot breeches showed themselves in the companion-way, and down came Captain Finn. As he stood, hat in hand, soberly clothed, with nothing more gimcrack in the way of finery upon him than a row of brass waistcoat-buttons, I thought he looked a very proper, sailorly sort of man. There was no lack of intelligence in his eyes, which protruded, as from a long habit of staring too eagerly to windward, and trying to see into the inside of gales of wind. He was remarkable, however, for a face that was out of all proportion too long, not for the width of his head only, but for his body; whilst his legs, on the other hand, were as much too short, so that he submitted himself as a person whose capacity of growth had been experimentally distributed, insomuch that his legs appeared to have come to a full stop when he was still a youth, whilst in his face the active principle of elongation had continued laborious until long after the term when Nature should have made an end.
‘A glass of wine, captain?’ said Sir Wilfrid.
‘Thank your honour. Need makes the old wife trot, they say, and I feel a-dry—I feel a-dry.’
‘Put your hat down and sit, Finn. I want you to give my cousin, Mr. Monson, your views respecting this—this voyage. But first, where are we?’
‘Why,’ answered the captain, balancing the wine-glass awkwardly betwixt a thumb and a forefinger that resembled nothing so much as a brace of stumpy carrots, whilst he directed a nervous look from Wilfrid to me and on to Miss Laura, as though he would have us observe that he addressed us generally; ‘there’s Yarmouth lights opening down over the port bow, and I reckon to be clear of the Solent by about three bells—half-past nine o’clock.’
‘The navigation hereabouts,’ said I, ‘needs a bright look-out. The captain may not thank us for calling him below.’
‘Lord love ’ee, Mr. Monson, sir,’ he answered, ‘the mate, Jacob Crimp, him with the one eye slewed—if so be as you’ve noticed the man, sir—he’s at the helm, and I’d trust him for any inshore navigation, from the Good’ens to the Start, blindfolded. Why, he knows his soundings by the smell of the mud.’
‘How is the weather?’ inquired my cousin.
‘Fine, clear night, sir; the stars plentiful and the moon arising; the wind’s drawed a bit norradly, and’s briskening at that; yet it keeps a draught, with nothing noticeable in the shape of weight in it. Well, your honour, and you, Mr. Monson, sir, and you, my lady, all I’m sure I can say, is, here’s luck,’ and down went the wine.
‘Captain,’ said Sir Wilfrid, ‘oblige me by giving Mr. Monson your views of the chase we have started upon.’
Finn put down the wine-glass and dried his lips on a pocket handkerchief of the size of a small ensign.
‘Well,’ he began, with a nervous uneasy twisting about of his legs and feet, ‘my view’s this: Fidler isn’t likely to take any other road to the Cape than the one that’s followed by the Indiemen. Now,’ said he, laying a forefinger in the palm of his big hand, yellow still with ancient stains of tar, whilst Wilfrid watched him in his near-sighted way, leaning forward in the posture of one absorbed by what is said, ‘you may take that there road as skirting the Bay o’ Biscay and striking the latitude of forty at about fifteen degrees east; then a south by west half west course for the Canaries; the Equator to be cut at twenty-five degrees west, and a straight course for Trinidad to follow with a clean brace up to the South-east trades. What d’ye think, sir?’
‘Oh, ’tis about the road, no doubt,’ said I, for whatever might have been my thoughts, I had no intention to drop a discouraging syllable then before Finn in my cousin’s hearing.
‘But,’ said the captain, eyeing me nervously and anxiously, ‘if so be as we should have the luck to fall into that there “Shark’s” wake, you know, we shan’t need to trouble ourselves with the course to the Cape south of the Equator.’
‘Of course not,’ exclaimed Sir Wilfrid.
‘By which I mean to say,’ continued the captain, giving his back hair a pull as though it were some bell-rope with which he desired to ring up the invention or imagination that lay drowsy in his brain, ‘that if we aren’t on to the “Shark” this side the Line it’ll be better for us to tarn to and make up our mind to crack on all for Table Bay to be there afore her, without further troubling ourselves about her heaving in sight, though, of course, the same bright look-out’ll be kept.’
‘Good,’ said Wilfrid with a heavy emphatic nod; ‘that’s not to be bettered, I think, Charles.’
‘I suppose,’ said I, addressing Finn, ‘that, though your hope[32] will be to pick up the “Shark” any day after a given period, and though you’ll follow the scent of her as closely as your conjecture of Fidler’s navigation will admit, you will still go on sweating—pray pardon this word in its sea sense, Miss Jennings—your craft as though the one business of the expedition was to make the swiftest possible passage to the Cape of Good Hope?’
‘Ay, never sparing a cloth, sir, and she’s something to jockey, Mr. Monson. You don’t know her yet, sir.’
‘The “Shark”’s a fore-and-aft schooner?’
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘She carries a square sail, no doubt?’
‘Ay, a big ’un, but good only for running, and we ain’t without that canvas, too, you must know,’ he added with the twinkle of humour in his gaze that I had observed in him when Wilfrid had first made him known to me. ‘Enough of it, Mr. Monson, to hold wind to serve a Dutchman for a week, not to mention a torps’l and a t’gallants’l fit for a line-o’-battle ship to ratch under.’
This was vague talk, but it pleased Wilfrid.
‘Square yards are very well,’ said I; ‘but surely they don’t allow a vessel to look up to it as though her canvas was fore and aft only? I merely ask for information. My marine experiences were limited to square rigs.’
‘There’s nothen to prevent the “Bride” from looking up to it as close as the “Shark,”’ answered Finn. ‘The yards’ll lie fore and aft; what’s to hinder them? There ain’t no spread, sir, like what you get in ships with your futtock rigging and backstays and shrouds in the road of the slings elbowing their way to channels big enough for a ball-room. Besides,’ he added, ‘suppose it should be a matter of a quarter of a pint’s difference, we need but stow the square cloths, and then we ain’t no worse off than the “Shark.”’
‘True,’ said I, thinking more of Miss Jennings than of what Finn was saying: so perfect a picture of girlish beauty did she happen to be at that instant as she leaned on her elbow, supporting her chin with a small white hand, her form in a posture that left one side of her face in shadow, whilst the other side lay bright, golden, and soft in the lamplight over the table. She was listening with charming gravity, and a countenance of sympathy whose tenderness was unimpaired by an appearance of attention that I could not doubt was just a little forced, since our sailor talk could not but be Greek to her. Besides, at intervals, there was a lift of the white lid, a gleam of the violet eye, which was like assuring one that thought was kept in the direction of our conversation only by constraint.
I was beginning to feel the want of a cigar, and I had been sitting long enough now to make me pine for a few turns on deck, but I durst not be abrupt in the face of my cousin’s devouring stare at his skipper and the pathetic spectacle of the contending passions in him as he hearkened, now nodding, now gloomily[33] smiling, now lying back on a sudden with a frown which he made as if to smooth out by pressing his hand to his brow.
‘The “Shark,”’ said I, ‘has five days’ start of us. Give her a hundred miles a day, for the mere sake of argument; she should be, at that, well in the heart of the Bay.’
‘By Heaven! within arm’s length of us, when you put it so!’ cried Wilfrid, extending his hand in a wild, darting, irrelevant gesture, and closing his fingers with a snap as though upon some phantom throat he had seen and thought to clutch.
‘Five hundred miles,’ exclaimed Finn, apparently giving no heed to the baronet’s action. ‘Well, sir, as a bit of supposing, there’s no harm in it. It might be more. I should allow less. There’s been no weight of wind down Channel. What’s happened then to blow her along? But there’s no telling. Anyhow,’ said he, picking up his cap and rising, ‘there’s nothing in five hundred miles, no, nor in a thousand, to make us anxious with such a race-course as lies afore us. ’Tain’t as if we’d got to catch the craft before she’d made Madeira.’ He paused, looking a little irresolute, and then said, addressing Wilfrid, ‘I don’t know if there’s anything more your honour would like to ask of me?’
‘No, not for the moment,’ answered my cousin dully, with the air of a man languid with a sudden sense of weariness or exhaustion following some internal fiery perturbation; ‘it is just this, Finn. Mr. Monson served in the Royal Navy for a few years, and I was anxious that he should be at once made acquainted with your views, so that he and you could combine your experiences. You have chased in your time, Charles, no doubt!’
‘Not very often, and then always something that was in sight,’ I answered with a slight glance at Finn, whose gaze instantly fell whilst he exclaimed:
‘Well, sir, any suggestion you can make I’ll be mighty thankful to receive. But it’ll be all plain sailing, I don’t doubt; it’ll be all plain sailing,’ he repeated, rumbling out the words in a stifled hurricane note, and, giving us a bow, he went up the steps.
Wilfrid gazed at me vacantly when I proposed a cigar on deck.
‘What do you think of Finn?’ he asked.
‘He seems as honest a man and as practical a seaman as needs be. But he has had command of this yacht since you bought her?’
He nodded. ‘Well then, of course, you know all about him. He has clearly been a merchant Jack in his day, and has all necessary experience, I dare say, to qualify him for this charge. But I say, Wilfrid, let us go on deck, my dear fellow. Miss Jennings, I am sure, will not object to the scent of a cigar in the open air.’
‘Nor down here either,’ she exclaimed.
‘I shall remember that,’ said I gratefully. ‘Now, Wilfrid, won’t you——?’
‘No,’ he interrupted; ‘I am drowsy, and thank Heaven for a sensation that threatens to become a novelty. If I get no rest[34] to-night it will be my eighth of sleeplessness, and I must humour myself; yes, I must humour myself,’ he repeated, talking in a sort of muttering way, and rising.
I advised him by all means to withdraw if he really felt tired, and further recommended a boatswain’s caulker of whisky to top off the champagne and port he had been swallowing.
‘How will you amuse yourself, Laura?’ he exclaimed, turning to her. ‘It will be dull work for you, I fear.’
‘No, no,’ cried I blithely, ‘why need Miss Jennings be dull? It must be our business to keep her lively.’
‘I can sit and read here,’ said she, ‘till it is time to go to bed. What is the hour, Mr. Monson?’
‘Just on the stroke of eight,’ said I.
She made a pretty little grimace, and then burst into one of her refreshing cordial laughs.
‘A little early for bed, Wilfrid,’ she exclaimed.
He smothered a yawn and responded: ‘I will leave you to Charles. Would to Heaven I had his spirits! God bless you both—good night.’
He rang for his valet and stalked with hanging arms and drooping head, in the most melancholy manner picturable, to his cabin. I asked Miss Jennings to accompany me on deck.
‘There is a moon in the air,’ said I; ‘you may see the haze of it through this porthole; but I must not forget that it is an autumn night so let me beg you to wrap yourself up warmly whilst I slip on a pea-coat.’
I fancied she hung in the wind an instant, as a girl might who could not promptly see her way to walking the deck of a yacht alone with a young man on a moonlight or any other night, but she assented so quickly in reality that I dare say my suspicion was an idle and groundless bit of sensitiveness. Five minutes later we were on deck together.
The yacht was floating through the dusk—that was tinctured into glimmering pearl by the broad face of the silver moon, which had already climbed several degrees above the black sky-line of the Isle of Wight—without the least perceptible stir or tremor in her frame. The wind was well abaft the starboard beam; the great main boom overhung the port quarter; the white sail rose wan to the moonshine with a large gaff topsail above it—for those were the days of gaffs—dimming into a space of airy faintness to the masthead, above the white button of whose truck you caught the icy gleam of a metal vane as though it was a piece of meteoric scoring under the dust of the stars that hovered in the velvet gloom like a sheet of undulating silver glooming out into hollows in places. Light as the breeze was, and following us besides, it held the canvas asleep; but that every cloud-like cloth was doing its work, too, the ear quickly noted in the pleasant fountain-like sounds of running waters over the side, with a cool seething noise in the wake and a fairy tinkling of exploding foam-bells. The land to port loomed[35] black against the moonshine, save where some slope or other catching the slanting beam showed the faint green of its herbage or wooded growths in a very phantasm of hue, like some verdant stretch of land dyeing an attenuated veil of vapour witnessed afar upon the ocean. Over the port bow I caught sight of a light or two a long way down the dusky reach, as it seemed, with a brighter gleam to starboard where the land, catching the moonlight, came in visionary streaks and breaks to abeam and on past the quarter where it seemed to melt out into some twinkling beacon—off Calshot Castle, maybe, so far astern it looked.
I spied the sturdy figure of the mate standing beside the wheel, no longer steering, but manifestly conning the yacht. The skipper was abreast of the skylight, leaning over the rail with his arm round a backstay; there were figures moving forward tipping the gloom there with the scarlet points of glowing bowls of tobacco, but if they conversed it was in whispers. The stillness was scarce imaginable. It was heightened yet even to my fancy presently when, growing used to the light, I spied the phantom figure of what was apparently a large brig clouded to her royals with pale canvas stemming the Solent, outward bound, some half a mile distant.
‘There is no dew,’ said I; ‘the moon shines purely, and is full of promise so far as fine weather goes. Well! here we are fairly started indeed. It is almost a dream to me, Miss Jennings, d’ye know?’ I continued, staring about me. ‘Three days ago I had no notice of anything having gone wrong with my cousin, and therefore little dreamt, as you will suppose, of what I was to enter upon this blessed afternoon. Three days ago! And now here am I heading into God knows what part of this mighty globe of ocean as empty of all theory of destination as though I were bound in a balloon to the part the poets call interstellar space. How is it all to end, I wonder?’
She was pacing quietly by my side.
‘You think the pursuit a silly one, Mr. Monson?’
‘Yes, I do, and Wilfrid knows that I do. If he were not——He is my cousin, Miss Jennings, and a dear friend, and you are his sister-in-law and dear to him, too, I am sure, and so I dare be candid with you. If it were not that he—’ (I touched my forehead) ‘would he embark on such a quest as this?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, with just enough of heat or temper, or whatever you like to call it, in her voice to render her utterance distinct with unconscious emphasis; ‘he adored his wife. Can a man tear his love into pieces in a day, as though it were no more than a tedious old letter? He thinks he hates her; he does so in a sense, no doubt; but in a sense, too, he still worships her. Mad! that is what you mean.’
I was beginning to protest.
‘Yes, it is what you mean, and you are right and wrong. If he does not pursue her, if he does not recover her, she is lost for ever. She is lost now, you will tell me. Ay,’ she cried with a little[36] stamp, ‘lost so far as her husband’s heart goes, so far as her honour is concerned; but not so utterly lost as she will later be if she is not rescued from that—that man, who must be so served, Mr. Monson, as to render it impossible for him ever again to trouble the peace of another home, to break the heart of a noble-minded creature and rob a little infant of its mother. Hate him! Oh, girl as I am, I declare before my Maker I would shoot him with my own hand!’
There was nothing in the least degree theatrical in her way of speaking. The words came in a hurry to her lips from her indignant heart, and I heard the sincerity of them so clearly in the mere utterance, I did not doubt for an instant that, put a pistol in her hand and set up the figure of the Colonel in front of her, she would have sought for his heart, if he had one, with the barrel of the weapon without so much as a sigh at having to kill him. I felt abashed; her sincerity and resentment were overwhelming; her strength of feeling, too, won a peculiar accentuation from the character of airy delicacy, of tender fragility, the moonlight gave to her fair and golden beauty. It was like listening to a volume of sounds poured forth by a singing bird, and wondering that such far-reaching melody should be produced by so small a creature.
‘I fear,’ said I, ‘you don’t think me very sincere in my sympathy with Wilfrid——’
‘Oh, yes, Mr. Monson,’ she interrupted; ‘do not suppose such a thing. It is not to be imagined that you should take this cruel and miserable affair to heart as he does, or feel it as I do, who am her sister.’
‘The truth is,’ said I, ‘it is impossible for a bachelor not to take a cynical view of troubles of this sort. A man was charged with the murder of his sweetheart. The judge said to him, “Had the woman been your wife, your guilt would not have been so great, because you would have no other means of getting rid of her save by killing her; but the unhappy creature whose throat you cut you could have sent adrift without trouble.” What I mean to say is, Miss Jennings, that a husband does not merit half the pity that is felt for him if his wife elopes. He is easily quit of a woman who is his wife only by name. I am for pitying her. The inevitable sequel—the disgrace, desertion, and the rest of it—is as punctual as the indication of the hands of a clock.... But see how nimbly the “Bride” floats through all this darkness and quietude. We shall be passing that vessel shortly, and yet for canvas she might really be one of the pyramids of Egypt towing down Channel.’
We went to the rail to look, I, for one, glad enough to change the subject, for it was nothing less than profanity to be arguing with so sweet a little woman as this—in the pure white shining of the moon, too, and with something of an ocean freshness of atmosphere all about us—on such a gangrenous subject as the elopement of Lady Monson with Colonel Hope-Kennedy. Out of all my sea-going experiences I could not pick a fairer picture than was made[37] by the brig we were passing, clad as she was in moonlight, and rising in steam-coloured spaces to mere films of royals motionless under the stars. She was a man-of-war; the white of her broad band, that was broken by black ports, gleamed like the ivory of pianoforte keys; her canvas was exquisitely out and set, and trimmed as naval men know how—one yardarm looking backwards a little over another, the rounded silent cloths, faint in the radiance with a gleam as of alabaster showing through a delicate haze, and high aloft the tremor of a pennant like the expiring trail of a shooting star. All was as hushed as death upon her; her high bulwarks concealed her decks; nothing was to be seen stirring along the whole length of the shapely, beautiful, visionary fabric that, as we left her slowly veering away upon our quarter, looked to lose the substance of her form, as though through the gradual absorption of the light her own white canvas made by the clearer and icy radiance of the soaring moon.
‘To think now,’ said I, ‘of the thunder of adamantine lips concealed within the silence of that heap of swimming faintness! How amazing the change from the exquisite repose she suggests to the fierce crimson blaze and headlong detonations of a broadside flashing up the dark land and dying out miles away in a sullen roar. But, d’ye know, Miss Jennings, I shall grow poetical if I do not light another cigar. Women should encourage men to smoke. Nothing keeps them quieter.’
We exchanged a few words with Captain Finn, who, together with the mate, was keeping a bright look-out, and then resumed our walk, and in a quiet chat that was ended only by a small bell on the forecastle announcing the hour of ten by four chimes, Miss Laura gave me the story of my cousin’s introduction to her family, described the marriage, talked to me about Melbourne and her home there, with more to the same purpose, all very interesting to me, though it would make the merest parish gossip in print. Her mother was dead; her father was a hearty man of sixty who had emigrated years before in dire poverty, ‘as you will suppose,’ said she, ‘when I tell you that he was the son of a dissenting minister who had a family of twelve children, and who died without leaving money enough to pay for his funeral.’ Mr. Jennings had made a fortune by squatting, but he had lost a considerable sum within the past few years by stupid speculation, and as Miss Laura said this I could see, by hearing her (to use a Paddyism), the pout of lip; for, bright as the moonlight was, the silver of it blended with the golden tint of her hair without defining any feature of her clearly saving her eyes, in which the beam of the planet would sparkle like a diamond whenever she raised them to my face. She told me her father was very proud that his daughter should become a lady of title, and yet he opposed the marriage, too. In short, he saw that Wilfrid’s mind was not as sound as it should be, though he never could point to any act or speech to justify his misgivings. But this was intelligible enough; for, to speak of my cousin as I[38] remembered him in earlier times, the notion you got that he was not straight-headed, as I have before said, was from his face, and the suspicion lay but dully in one, so rational was his behaviour, so polished and often intellectual his talk; till on a sudden it was sharpened into conviction on your hearing that there was insanity in his mother’s family.
‘What had Lady Monson to say to your father’s misgivings?’ I inquired.
‘She accepted him, and insisted upon marrying him. He was wonderfully fond of her, Mr. Monson.’
‘And she?’
I saw her give her head a little shake, but she made no reply. Perhaps she considered that this trip we had started on sufficiently answered the question. She said, after a brief pause, ‘I myself thought my father a great deal too critical in his estimate of Sir Wilfrid. No one talked more delightfully than your cousin. He was a favourite with everybody whom he met at Melbourne. He was fresh from his travels, and was full of entertaining stories and shrewd observations; and then, again, he had much to say about European capitals, of English university life, of English Society—you will not need me to tell you that we Colonials have little weaknesses in regard to lords and ladies and to the doings of high life, from which people in England are quite exempt, and for the having which I fear we are slightly sneered at and a good deal wondered at.’
I caught the sparkle of her lifted eye.
‘And pray, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘what would your papa think if he were to know that you had embarked on what, I must still take the liberty of calling, a very queer voyage?’
‘Oh,’ she cried quickly and almost hysterically, ‘don’t ask me what he would think of what I am doing! What will be his thoughts when he gets the news of what Henrietta has done?’
She turned her head away from me, and kept it averted long enough to make me suspect that there was a tear in her eye. It was then that a sailor forward struck the forecastle bell four times.
‘Ten o’clock!’ she exclaimed, knowing as an ocean traveller how to interpret sea time. ‘Good-night, Mr. Monson.’
I handed her down the companion-steps, and went to my own cabin, and was presently in my bunk. But it was after seven bells, half-past eleven, before I fell asleep.
The breeze had freshened—had drawn apparently more yet to the northward; and the yacht, having hauled it a bit now that we were out of the Solent, was leaning over a trifle with a sputtering and frisky snapping of froth along her bends and a quiet moaning sounding down into her heart out of the hollows of her canvas, whilst an occasional creak, breaking from one knew not what part of the structure, hinted at a taut drag of tacks and sheets, though there was no motion in the water, over whose surface our keel slided as steadily as a sleigh over a snow-covered plain.
It was one thing on top of another, I suppose; the fancies put[39] into me by the oddness of this adventure; the memory of the long gun forward; Wilfrid’s tragic intentions, the darker to my mind because it was so easy for me to see how grief, wrath, a sense of dishonour, bitter injury, with impulses not imaginable by me which every recurrence to the motherless little baby at home would visit him with, had quickened in him of late the deadly seminal principle that circulated in his blood. Then again, there was Miss Laura’s beauty, if beauty be the proper term to express a combination of physical charms which a brief felicitous sentence like a single line from some old poet would better convey than fifty pages of description; her conversation; her sympathy with the motive of this trip; her apparent heedlessness as to the time to be occupied by it; her indifference as to the magnitude of the programme that Wilfrid’s resolution to recover his wife might end in framing, if Table Bay should prove but a starting-point—I say it was one thing on top of another; and all reflections and considerations being rendered acute by the spirit of life one now felt in the yacht, and that awakened the most dormant or puzzled faculty to the perception that it was all grim, downright earnest, small wonder that I should have lain awake until half-past eleven. Indeed that I should have snatched a wink of sleep that first blessed night is a mystery only to be partially resolved by reflecting that I was young, heedless, ‘unencumbered’ as they say, a lover of adventure, and in no sense dissatisfied by the company I found myself among.
When I awoke the morning was streaming a windy light through the port-hole over my bunk. I lay a few minutes watching my coat and other suspended garments swinging against the bulkhead, and listening to the creaking and groanings of partitions and strong fastenings, and to a muffled humming sound that was like the distant continuous roll of a drum mixed with a faint seething that sent one’s fancy to the shingle of the English shore, and to the panting respiration of the recoiling breaker upon it; and then I guessed that there was a fresh breeze blowing.
I tumbled out of bed and stood awhile, partly with the notion of making sure of my sea-legs, and partly to discover if I was likely to be sea-sick. Finding myself happily sound in all ways, I drew on some clothing and looked out. Wilfrid’s melancholy man sat at the cabin table, leaning his head upon his elbow, with his fingers penetrating the black plaister of hair over his brow, so that he presented a very dejected and disordered appearance. I called to him; he looked in my direction with a wandering eye, struggled to get[40] up, put his hand upon his stomach with an odd smile and sat again. I entered the cabin to see what ailed the fellow.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ said I. ‘Sick?’
He turned his hollow yellow face upon me, and I saw that he was in liquor.
‘It’s here, sir,’ he exclaimed, pointing with an inebriated forefinger to the lower button of his waistcoat; ‘it’s a feelin’, sir, as if I was a globe, sir, with gold and silver fishes a-swimming round and round, and poking of their noses against me to get out.’
He spoke respectfully, but thickly, with sundry little feints at rising, as though very sensible that he should not be sitting whilst I stood.
‘Try a dose of brandy,’ said I, satirically.
‘Do you think it will help me, sir?’ he inquired, pulling his fingers out of his hair and clasping his hands upon his waistcoat, whilst his lips went twisting into an intoxicated grin on one side of his nose, as it looked. ‘I will try it, Mr. Monson, sir. There’s a something here as wants settling, sir. I never was partial to the hocean, sir.’
He was proceeding, but just then the second steward came below, on which I quitted the melancholy man, ordered a cold salt-water bath and a hot cup of coffee, and was presently on deck. It was a windy-looking morning, the sky high, grey, compacted; with here and there a dark curl of scud in chase of some bald lump of sulphur-coloured cloud blowing away to leeward like the first ball of powder smoke from a cannon’s mouth ere the wind has had time to shred it. The water was green, a true Channel sea with the foam of the curled ridges dazzling out in times to the touch of a wet, pale beam of sunshine dropping in a lance of light in some breathless moment through one of the dim blue lines that here and there veined the dulness aloft. There was no land to be seen; the haze of the sea-line ran the water into the sky, and the green of the horizon went blending into the soft greyness of the heavens till it looked all one with a difference of colour only.
The yacht was bowling through it at a noble pace; the wind sat as it should for such a craft as the ‘Bride’; the sea had quartered her and swept in hillocks of foam along her lustrous bends, sending an impulse to her floating rushes with every pale boiling of it to her frame, and the sputter and creaming all about her bows, and the swirl of the snow over the lee rail, and the milk-white race of wake rising and falling fan-shaped astern prismatic with the glint of chips and bubbles and feathers of spume swept out of the giddiness by the rush of the wind, might have made you think yourself aboard a ship of a thousand tons. Upon my word it was as though the ‘Bride’ had got the scent and knew that the ‘Shark’ was not far distant. Finn was not sparing her. He was to windward, close beside the wheel, as I emerged, and I knew he watched me whilst I stood a moment in the hatch looking from the huge thunderous hollow of the mainsail to the yawn of the big square-sail[41] they had clapped upon her with the whole square topsail atop of it, topgallant sail stowed, but the jibs yearning from their sheets taut as fiddle-strings, as though they would bodily uproot the timber and iron to which they were belayed.
Something of the exhilaration of a real chase came into one with the glad roaring aloft and the saw-like spitting at the cutwater, and the sullen crash of the arching billow repulsed by the cleaving bow; and it was the instinct in me, I suppose, due to my early training and recollection of the long pursuit of more than one polacre and nimble-heeled schooner flush to the hatches with a living ebony cargo that made me send a look sheer over the bows in search of some shining quarry there.
There were three or four coasters in a huddle on the weather beam, their outlines sharp, but their substance of a dingy black against the yellowish glare of light over the water that way as though the East were finding reflection in it; and to leeward, a mile off, a full-rigged sailing ship on a bowline bound up Channel, and plunging her round bows with clumsy viciousness into the green hollows with a frequent lift of white water to above the cathead, where it blew in a storm of crystals into the head canvas.
‘Good morning, captain.’
‘Good morning, sir,’ answered Finn, knuckling his forehead in the old-fashioned style. ‘Nice little breeze of wind, sir.’
‘Ay, one could pray for nothing better,’ said I, crossing over to him. ‘You’ve got a fine craft here certainly, captain; no stint of beam, and bulwarks stout and tall enough to serve the purpose of a pirate. And how finely she rounds forward to the eyes! Hillo! getting ready with your gun so soon?’
‘No, sir, only a cleaning of him,’ he answered with a grin.
They had removed the tarpaulin, and there stood the long piece, with a couple of seamen hard at work furbishing it up.
‘D’ye think,’ said I, making a step or two towards the rail to bring us out of earshot of the fellow who was standing at the wheel, ‘that Sir Wilfrid really means to let fly at the “Shark” should we overhaul her, if she refuses to heave to?’
‘I don’t doubt it, sir.’
‘But how about your crew? Will they be willing, think you, to fire into a vessel that’s a yacht like their own ship, that hails from the same port, and whose people may number amongst them acquaintances—old shipmates of your own men?’
‘They’ll obey orders, sir,’ said he quietly, with an air of caution in his long face.
‘Suppose it should come to our having to board the “Shark,” captain, and she shows fight—are you going to get your men to hazard their lives in the face of the pacific articles they, I presume, have signed?’
‘It’ll never come to a fight, Mr. Monson,’ he responded, ‘though I don’t say it may not come to our having to fire at the vessel to stop her; for you see if the Colonel commands Fidler to keep all[42] fast and take no notice of us there’ll be nothen for him but to obey: whilst stop her we must, do ye see, sir? But as to fighting——’ he shook his head. ‘No, sir; when the time’s come for boarding they’ll be willing to let us walk quietly over the side, no matter how much they may consider their feelings injured by our shooting at ’em. In short it’s like this; ne’er a man aboard the “Shark” but knows what the Colonel and her Ladyship’s gone and done; a good many, I dessay, are husbands themselves, not to speak of their being Englishmen, and ye may take it that ne’er a hand of ’em from Fidler down is going to resist Sir Wilfrid’s stepping on board to demand his own.’
‘You may be right,’ said I; ‘’tis hard to say, though. Do our crew know the errand we are on?’
‘Bound to it, sir. In fact, the shipping of that there gun wouldn’t allow the job to remain a secret. But the “Shark” was away first, and if all Southampton had got talking of our intention it couldn’t have signified, so far as consarns I mean their guessing at it aboard the “Shark.”’
‘You must have pushed your equipment forward with wonderful expedition?’
‘Yes, sir; we worked day and night. Of course we was all ready for sea, but there would be many things a-wanting for what might turn out a six or seven thousand mile run with ne’er a stoppage along the whole road of it.’
My eye was just then taken by something that glittered upon the mainmast within reach of a man’s uplifted arm. I peered, imagining it to be a little plate with an inscription upon it commemorating something that Wilfrid might have deemed worthy of a memorial. I caught Finn grinning.
‘D’ye see what it is, sir?’ said he.
I looked again, and shook my head. He walked to the mast, and I followed him, and now I saw that it was a handsome five-guinea piece, obviously of an old date—but it was too high to distinguish the impress clearly—secured by a couple of little staples which gripped without piercing or wounding it.
‘That piece of money,’ said Finn, ‘is for the first man that sights the “Shark.”’
‘Ha!’ I exclaimed, ‘an old whaling practice. My cousin has not viewed the world for nothing!’
It was but a trifling thing, yet in its way it was almost as hard a bit of underscoring of my cousin’s resolution as the long grinning piece they were cleaning forward, or the stand of arms against the bulkhead below.
‘What’s the pace, captain?’
‘A full ten, sir, by the last heave of the log.’
I fell a-whistling—for it was grand sailing, surely—with a lift of my eye to the topgallant sail that lay stowed in a snow-white streak with a proper man-of-war’s bunt amidships on the slender black yard.
‘Well, sir,’ said Finn, taking it upon himself to interpret my glance, ‘I know the “Bride,” and I’m likewise acquainted with a good many vessels which ain’t the least bit in the world like her, and my notion’s this, that a craft’ll do no more than she can do. I’ve hove the log to reefed canvas, and I’ve hove it in the same wind to whole sails and found a loss. No use of burying what you want to keep afloat. I might set that there little top-gallant sail without enjoying a hinch of way more out of it. Then what ’ud be the good of straining the spars?’
‘But you’ll be setting stun’ sails, I suppose, when a right chance for running them aloft occurs?’
‘Ay, sir. There’s the boom irons all ready. But my notion is, in a vessel of this sort, that it’s best to keep your stun’ sail booms out of sight till your anchors are stowed. Once out of soundings, and then let a man cut what capers he likes.’
As he said this, up rose my cousin’s long body through the companion hatch. He stood a little looking about him in his short-sighted way, but with an expression of satisfaction upon his face that gave a new character to it. I saw him rub his hands whilst he grinned to the swift salt rush of the wind. He caught sight of me, and instantly approached.
‘This will do! this will do, Charles!’ he cried, grasping my hand. ‘Don’t spare her, captain. These are slants to be made the most of. By Heaven, but it makes a new man of me to see such a sight as that!’ pointing to the white torrent that was roaring past to leeward.
He stared with a sort of pathetic eagerness at the vessels which we were passing as though they had their anchors down, afterwards shading his eyes for another long yearning look over either bow.
‘It is fine, though! it is fine, though!’ he muttered with the spirit of an unreasonable exhilaration working strong in every feature. ‘What is it, captain? Twelve?’ Finn gave him the figure. ‘And what would be the “Shark’s” pace supposing her yonder?’
‘Not all ours, Sir Wilfrid, not all ours,’ responded Finn, ‘though it is a fine sailing breeze, your honour. A craft would have to be a sawed-off-square consarn not to wash handsomely along this morning, sir.’
‘How have you slept, Wilfrid?’ said I.
‘Well,’ he answered. ‘But I say, Charles, what do you think?’ said he with a sudden boyish air that startled me with its suggestion of stupidity in him. ‘Muffin is drunk.’
‘Drunk!’ cried I; ‘but who the deuce is Muffin?’ forgetting the name.
‘Why, my man,’ he answered; ‘my valet. It’s very odd. I thought at first it was sea-sickness. He’s been crying. The tears, I give you my word, streamed down his cheeks. He begs to be set ashore, and swears that if he should choke with one of the fish[44] that are swimming about in him, his mother and two sisters would have to go to the union. Do you think he’s mad?’
‘Drunk, and sea-sick, too,’ said I. ‘Has he not been away with you on a yachting trip before?’
‘No. This is a handsome vessel, don’t you think, Charles?’ he exclaimed, breaking from the subject as though it had never been in his mind, and following on his question with a curious fluttering smile and that trembling of the lids I have before described; though his gaze steadied miraculously as they rested upon the gun the fellows were at work upon, and a shadow came into his face which was as good as telling me that I need not respond to his inquiry, as his thoughts were already elsewhere.
‘Let’s go and have a look at my cannon,’ said he with the same odd boyish manner he had discovered a minute or two earlier.
We walked forward; the decks had been some time before washed down and were sand dry, white as a tree newly stripped of its bark, with a glitter all about them of the crystals of salt. The rigging was everywhere neatly coiled down; whatever was of brass shone as though it reflected a sunbeam; no detail but must have satisfied the most exacting nautical eye with an indication of frigate-like neatness, cleanliness, finish, and fore and aft discipline. The ‘Bride,’ after the manner of many yachts of those days, carried a galley on deck abaft her foremast. I peeped in as I passed and took notice of a snug little interior, brilliant with polished cooking vessels, and as clean and sweet as a dairy. A few of the sailors were standing about it waiting (as I took it) for the cook to furnish the messes with their breakfast. They had the air of a rough resolute set of men, with something of the inspiration of the yachting business, perhaps, in their manner of saluting Sir Wilfrid and myself, but with little of the aspect of the seafarer of the pleasure-vessel of these times. They were bushy-whiskered hard-a-weather fellows for the most part, with one odd face amongst them as yellow and wrinkled as the skin of a decayed lemon.
I asked Wilfrid carelessly if any of his crew had sailed with him before. He answered that a few of them had; but that the others had declined to start on a voyage to the end of which Finn was unable to furnish a date, so that the captain had made up the complement in a hurry out of the best hands he could find cruising about ashore. So this, thought I, accounts for the absence of that uniformity of apparel one looks for amongst the crews of yachts; yet all the sailors I had taken notice of were dressed warmly in very good clean nautical clothes, though I protest it made one think of the old picaroon and yarns of the Spanish Main to glance at one or two of the dry, tough, burnt, seawardly chaps who concealed their pipes and dragged a curl upon their foreheads to us as we passed them.
Wilfrid stared at his eighteen-pounder as though he were some lad viewing a toy cannon he had just purchased. He bent close[45] to it in his near-sighted way, and looked it all over whilst he asked me what I thought of it. I saw the two fellows who were still at work upon it chew hard on the junks in their cheek-bones in their struggle to keep their faces.
‘Why,’ said I, ‘it seems to me a very good sort of gun, Wilfrid, and a thing, when fired, I’d rather stand behind than in front of.’
‘I should have had two of them,’ said he with a momentary darkening of his looks to the rising in him of some vexing memory, pointing as he spoke to the bow ports, ‘but Finn thought one piece of such a calibre enough at this end of the vessel, and it would have been idle to mount a stern-chaser; for what we want to fire at—should it come to it—we can always manage to keep yonder,’ nodding in the direction of the jibboom.
I had no mind to talk with him in the presence of the two fellows, one of whom I would see screw up his eye like the twist of a gimblet at us whilst he went on polishing; so I stepped into the head to take a view of the shear of the cutwater as it drove knife-like into each green freckled and glass-smooth side of surge rolling transversely from us ere shattering it into a snowstorm; but the bulwarks being too tall to enable me to see all that I looked for, I sprang on to the bowsprit and laid out to the jibboom end, which I jockeyed, holding on to a stay and beckoning to Wilfrid to follow; but he shook his head with a loud call to me to mind what I was about.
One may talk of the joy of a swift gallop on horseback when the man and the animal fit like hand and glove, when all is smooth running, with a gallant leap now and again; but what is a flight of that sort compared with the sensations you get by striding the jibboom of such a schooner as the ‘Bride’ and feeling her airily leap with you over the liquid hollows which yawn right under you, green as the summer leaf or purple as the violet for a moment or two, before the smiting stem fills the thunderous chasm with the splendour of a cloud of boiling froth! It was a picture to have detained me an hour, so noble was the spectacle of the leaning yacht for ever coming right at me as it seemed, the rounds of her canvas whitened into marble hardness with the yearn and lean of the distended cloths to a quarter of the sea where hung a brighter tincture of sky through some tenuity of the eastern greyness behind which the sun was soaring. One felt a life and soul in the little ship in every floating bound she made, in every sliding blow of the bow that sent a vast smooth curl of billow to windward for the shrill-edged blast to transform into a very cataract of stars and diamonds and prisms! Lovely beyond description was the curtseying of her gilt figure-head and the refulgence of the gold lines all about it to the milk-white softness that seethed to the hawse-pipes.
I made my way inboards and said to Wilfrid, who stood waiting for me, ‘She’s a beauty. She should achieve your end for you if it is Table Bay only you are thinking of. But yonder[46] great horizon!’ I exclaimed, motioning with my hand. ‘We are still in the narrow sea—yet look how far it stretches! Think then of the Atlantic circle.’
‘We shall overhaul her!’ he exclaimed quickly, with a gesture that made an instant’s passion of his way of speaking. ‘Come along aft, Charles, and stump it a bit for an appetite. Breakfast can’t be far off now.’
Miss Laura did not make her appearance until we were at table. I feared that the ‘Bride’s’ lively dance had proved too much for her, and glanced aft for the maid that I might ask how her mistress did. Indeed, though on deck one gave no heed to the rolling and plunging of the yacht, the movements were rendered mighty sensible in the cabin by the swift, often convulsive, oscillations of lamps and swing-trays, by the sliding of articles of the breakfast equipment in the fiddles, by the monotonous ticking-like noise of doors upon their hooks, the slope of the cabin floor, sounds like the groanings of strong men in pain breaking in upon the ear from all parts, and above all by sudden lee-lurches which veiled the port-holes in green water, that sobbed madly till it flashed, with a shriek and a long dim roar, off the weeping glass lifted by the weather roll to the dull grey glare of the day.
But we had scarcely taken our seats when the girl arrived, and she brought such life and light and fragrance in her mere aspect to the table, that it was as though some rich and beautiful flower of a perfume sweetened yet by the coolness of dew had been placed amongst us. She had slept well, she said, but her maid was ill and helpless. ‘And where is Muffin?’ she demanded.
‘He’s a lying down, miss,’ exclaimed the head steward; ‘he says his blood-wessels is that delicate he’s got to be werry careful indeed.’
Wilfrid leaned across to her and said, in a low voice that the steward might not hear him, but with the boyish air that I had found odd, and even absurd, strong in him again, ‘Laura, my dear, imagine! Muffin is drunk.’ He broke into a strong, noisy laugh. ‘Weepingly drunk, Laura; talks of himself as a globe of fish, and indeed,’ he added, with a sudden recovery of his gravity, ‘so queer outside all inspirations of the bottle that I’m disposed to think him mad.’ Again he uttered a loud ha! ha! peering at me with his short sight to see if I was amused.
A look of concern entered Miss Jennings’ face, but quickly left it, subdued, as I noticed, by an effort of will.
‘I was afraid that Muffin would not suit you,’ she exclaimed, quietly. ‘I told you so, I remember. Those yellow, hollow men are miserable sailors. He has all good qualities as a valet on shore, but——’ she was proceeding when he interrupted her.
‘I say, Laura, isn’t this breeze magnificent, eh? Think, my dear—ten knots an hour! We are sweeping through it as though we were in tow of a comet. Why, if the devil himself were ahead we should overhaul him at this pace.’
He dropped his knife and fork as though to rub his hands—an action common to him when gratified—but his face darkened, a wild expression came into it with a sudden savage protrusion of his projecting under-lip to the bitter sneer of the upper one; he fell again to eating in a hurry, breathing short and masticating viciously with now and again a shake of the head, until all at once, ere he had half made an end of what was before him, he pushed his plate violently away and lay back in his chair, with his arms tightly folded upon his breast and his gaze intently fixed downwards, in a way to make me think of that aunt of his whom the old earl had pointed out to his father as she paced the green sward betwixt two keepers.
With the easiest air imaginable, though it was impossible that she could effectually blind to my sight the mingled expression of worry and dismay in her eyes as she directed them at me, Miss Jennings, making the breakfast upon the table her text, prattled about the food one gets on board ship, seizing, as it seemed to me, the first common-place topic she could think of.
I took an askant view of the stewards to see if they noticed Sir Wilfrid, but could find nothing to interpret in their wooden, waiting faces. After a little he seemed to wake up, coming back to his mind, as it were, with a long, tremulous sigh, and a puzzled look round at the table as though wondering whether he had breakfasted or not. Miss Jennings and I chatted common-places. He called for a cup of tea, and then, after listening with plenty of intelligence in his manner to a little experience I was relating to Miss Laura concerning the recovery of a captain’s pig that had been washed overboard in a sudden squall, he described a gale of wind he had encountered off Agulhas whilst on a voyage to India, during which the cuddy front was stove in, and an immense sow and her young, along with a fine specimen of an English cart-horse and a cow, washed bodily aft, and swept in thunder down the broad staircase in the saloon that conducted to the berths and living-room for what were then termed the steerage passengers. No story was ever more graphically related. He described the panic amongst the passengers, the horrible concert produced by the screams of the pigs and the terrified moaning and bellowing of the cow, the uproar of the cart-horse’s plunging hoofs against the resonant bulkheads, mingled with the shrieks of the people who were in bed and imagined the ship to be already under water; I say he described all this so well, with so keen an appreciation of the humour, as well as of the horror of the scene, with a delivery so free from all excitement, that it seemed almost incredible he should be the same man that just now sat fixed in the posture of a melancholy madman with a face, as I might have thought, dark with the shadow of eclipsed reason.
Breakfast ended, he quitted the table to fetch his pipe.
‘I had better have come without a man, after all,’ said he, laughing; ‘one condition of sea-going should be that a fellow must[48] help himself; and, upon my word, it comes to it no matter how many servants he brings with him. ’Tis the same ashore too, after all. It is the mistress who does most of the waiting’; and thus pleasantly speaking he went to his cabin.
Miss Laura made as if to rise.
‘An instant, Miss Jennings,’ said I. ‘I have seen nothing of Wilfrid of late years. You, on the other hand, have been a good deal thrown with him during the last three months. Tell me, then, what you think of his manner and language just now—that piece of behaviour, I mean, from which he started, so to speak, into perfect rationality?’
‘It was a sort of mood,’ she answered, speaking low, ‘that I have noticed in him, but never before saw so defined.’
‘It was madness,’ said I, with a shake of the head.
‘The shadow of a passing mood of madness,’ said she. ‘Was he on deck with you before breakfast?’
I answered yes.
‘Were his spirits good?’
‘Irrationally good, I thought. It was the sight of the flying schooner, no doubt, the picture of the running seas, the sense of headlong speed, with the black grin of the forecastle gun to quicken his wild craving into a very delirium of expectation and hope. But that kind of glee is quite as alarming as his melancholy.’
‘Yes, but you will find his melancholy strong as his spirits seem high. Do I make myself understood, Mr. Monson?’
‘Quite. One moment, you mean, he is looking down upon this extraordinary plan of his—this goose-chase, I must call it—with a bounding heart from the edge of a chasm; the next he is at the very bottom of the pit gazing upwards in an anguish of dejection. The deeper the precipice the gloomier the depth where he brings up. Certainly I understood you, Miss Jennings. But here is now a consideration that is bothering me,’ I continued, sending a look aft, and up at the open skylight and around, to make sure that we were unheard. ‘I am his cousin. As his associate in this voyage I have a right to regard myself as his best friend, for the time being anyway. Now what is my duty in the face of a condition of mind whose capriciousness fills it with menace? He brings me here as his right-hand man to help him, but to help him in or to what? I seem to understand his programme, yet I protest I cannot render it intelligible to my own common sense. Many might think me “wanting” myself to be here at all; but I will not go into that; what I mean is, is it not my duty to hinder him if possible from prosecuting a chase which, in my humble judgment, by continuing to irritate him with the disappointment of hope, may end in rendering organic what is now, let us pray, merely functional and fugitive?’
‘You may try, but I do not think you will succeed,’ she exclaimed. ‘Indeed,’ she cried, raising her voice, but immediately and nervously subduing it, ‘I hope you will not try, for it is not[49] hard to foresee what must follow. You will merely make his resolution more stubborn by rendering it angrier than it is, and then there might come a coolness between you—indeed, something worse than coolness on his side; for in such minds as your cousin’s it is impossible to imagine what dangerous ideas opposition may provoke.’
I bowed in recognition of the truth of this, admiring in her a quality of sagacity that, to the fancy at all events of a young man, as I then was, would gather a new excellence from her graces. She looked at me with a tremble of light in her gaze that vexed its serenity.
‘Besides, Mr. Monson, we must consider Henrietta.’
‘It is natural you should think wholly of her,’ said I.
‘Not wholly. But this pursuit may end in rescuing her from Colonel Hope-Kennedy. It gives her future a chance. But you would have her husband sit quietly at home.’
‘Well, not exactly,’ I interrupted.
‘What would you have him do?’ she asked.
‘Get a divorce,’ said I.
‘He won’t do that,’ she exclaimed. ‘Marriage in his sight is a sacrament. Do not you know his views, Mr. Monson?’
‘You see, I have long lost sight of him.’
‘Well, I know he would not seek a divorce. He would be mad indeed,’ she cried, flushing to her brows, ‘to give my sister the liberty she wants and Colonel Hope-Kennedy——’ She faltered and stopped, biting her underlip, with the hot emotions which mounted to her face imparting a sudden air of womanly maturity to her girlish beauty, whilst her breast rose and fell to her ireful breathing. ‘This is no mad pursuit,’ she continued after a brief pause, speaking softly. ‘What is there unreasonable in a man’s determination to follow his wife that he may come as swiftly as the ship, the coach, the railway will permit him between her and a life of shame and remorse and misery?’
As she spoke, my cousin arrived, holding a great meerschaum pipe in his hand. She at once rose and left the table with a faint smile at me and a glance on top of it that was as eloquent as a whisper of regret at having been betrayed into warmth. Well, thought I, you are a sweet little woman, and it is highly probable that before I have been a week in your company I shall be head over heels in love with you. But for all that, you fair and artless creature, I don’t agree with you in your views of this chase. Suppose Wilfrid recaptures his wife—what is he going to do with her? She is not a lunatic; he cannot lock her up—but I broke off to the approach of my cousin, fetched my pipe, and went on deck with him.
After all it was about time I should now see that, though we might shape a course for the yacht and give the wind the name of the compass points whence it blew, Chance was our skipper and helmsman, and the regions into which he was leading us as blind[50] and thick as smoke. Throughout life, and in all things, it is the same, of course; we sail with a fog that stands wall-like at the bows of our intentions, receding inch by inch with our advance, and leaving the water clear on either hand and astern, but ahead it remains for ever as thick as mud in a wineglass. Anyhow, the chase was a sort of consolation to Wilfrid; it had Miss Laura’s approval, and there was hope enough to be got out of it according to her to render her trustful. But for my part I could only view it as a yachting excursion, and I particularly felt this when I stepped on deck with my cousin, spite of my quite recent talk with his sweet sister-in law, and felt the sweep of the strong wind, and caught the roar of the divided waters sounding a small thunder upon the ears after the comparative calm of the breakfast-table below.
Little of interest happened at the outset. There were but three of us for company; our ship was a small one, and the inner life of it a monotonous round of eating, drinking, smoking, of taking the wheel, of pendulously stumping the quarter-deck, of keeping a look-out, of scrubbing and polishing, and making and shortening sail; whilst outside there was nothing but weather and sea; so that in a very short time I had lapsed into the old ocean trick of timing the passage of the hours by meals.
But that I may not approach in a staggering or disjointed way the huddle of astonishments which then lay many leagues’ distance past the gleam of the sea-line towards which our bowsprit was pointing, I will enter here in a sort of log-book fashion a few of the interests, features, and spectacles of this early passage of our singular excursion.
The fresh wind ran us well down Channel. Hour after hour the ‘Bride’ was driving the green seas into foam before her, and there was a continuous fretful heaving of the log to Wilfrid’s feverish demands, until I think, before we were two days out, the very souls of the crew had grown to loathe the cry of ‘Turn!’ and the rattle of the reel.
That same morning—the morning, I mean, that I have dealt with in the last chapter—after Wilfrid and I had been smoking a little while under the lee of the tall bulwark which the wind struck and recoiled from, leaving a space of calm in the clear above it to the height of a man’s hand, my cousin, who had been chatting with the utmost intelligence on a matter so remote from the object of this chase as a sale of yearlings which he had attended a few weeks before, sprang to his feet with the most abrupt breaking away imaginable from what he was talking about, and called to Captain[51] Finn, who was coming leisurely aft from the neighbourhood of the galley with a sailorly eye upturned at the canvas and a roll of his short legs that made you think he would feel more at home on all-fours.
‘Finn,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘there is no one on the look-out!’ and he pointed with his long awkward arm at the topgallant yard.
‘Why, hardly yet, sir,’ began Finn.
‘Hardly yet!’ interrupted Wilfrid, ‘my orders were, day and night from the hour of our departure.’
‘Beg your honour’s pardon, I’m sure, sir,’ said Finn. ‘I didn’t quite take ye as meaning to be literal. Five days’ start, you know, Sir Wilfrid——’
‘What is that to me?’ cried my cousin impetuously; ‘it’s the unexpected you’ve got to make ready for at sea, man. Figure something having gone wrong with the “Shark”—her masts overboard—a leak—fire. Any way,’ he cried with the heat of a man who means to have his will, but who grows suddenly sensible of the weakness of his arguments, ‘have a fellow stationed aloft day and night. D’ye hear me, Finn?’
‘Certainly I hear you, Sir Wilfrid.’
He knuckled his forehead, and was in the act of moving away to give directions, when my cousin stopped him.
‘No use sending blind men aloft, Finn—mere gogglers like myself, worse luck! You must find out the men with eyes in their heads in this ship.’
Finn hung in the wind, sending a dull rolling glance at the five-guinea piece nailed to the mainmast. ‘If it worn’t for that,’ he exclaimed, pointing to it, ‘it wouldn’t matter; but if I pick and choose, ’twill be like stirring up the inside of a sty. The men’ll argue that the piece of money is for the first man that sights the “Shark,” and they’ll think it hard that a few of them only should be selected to stand a look-out aloft; for it will be but one of ’em that’s chosen as can airn the money.’
‘Very true,’ said I.
‘Confound it, Charles!’ cried my cousin angrily, ‘what’ll be the good of posting a short-sighted man up there?’
‘All hands, Captain Finn, have got two eyes apiece in their heads?’ said I.
‘All, sir,’ he answered after a little reflection, ‘saving the mate, and he’s got two eyes too; only one makes a foul hawse of t’other.’
‘You may take it, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘that your men are able to see pretty much alike.’
‘Is there no way of testing the fellows’ sight?’ cried Wilfrid excitedly, with an unnecessary headlong manner about him as though he would heave his body along with every question he put or exclamation he uttered: ‘then we could uproot the moles among them. Dash me, Finn, if I’m going to let the “Shark” slip astern of us for want of eyesight.’
The skipper sent a slow uncertain look around the horizon, evidently puzzled; then his face cleared a bit. He went to the weather rail and stared ahead, crossed to leeward and fastened his eyes on the sea on the lee bow; then, coming up to windward again, he hailed a man who was at work upon the topsail yard doing something to one of the stirrups of the foot-rope.
‘Aloft there!’
‘Hillo!’
‘Jump on to the topgallant yard and let me know if there’s anything in sight ahead or on either bow?’
‘Ay, ay, sir.’
The fellow got upon the yard, and leaned from it with one hand grasping the tie, whilst with the other he shaded his eyes and took a long whaling look. His figure was soft and firm as a pencil drawing against the hard and windy greyness of the heavens, and the rippling of his trousers to the wind, the yellow streak of his lifted arm naked to the elbow, the inimitable, easy, careless pose of him as he swayed to the swift vibrations of the spar on which he stood, with the ivory white curves of the jib and stay foresail going down past him till they were lost forward of the topsail that yawned in a shadowed hollow which looked the duskier for the gleam of the pinion of staysail this side of it, made a little sea picture of quiet but singular beauty.
‘Nothing in sight, sir,’ he bawled down. Finn raised his hand in token that he heard him and turned to Wilfrid.
‘Now, sir,’ said he, ‘something’s bound to be heaving into view shortly ahead of us. We might test the men thus: one watch at a time; two men on the topgallant yard, which can be hoisted without setting the sail; four men on the topsail yard; and two men on the foreyard. I’ll send Crimp on to the forecastle to see all’s fair. There’s to be no singing out; the man that sees the sail first is to hold up his arm. That’ll test the chaps on the topgallant yard, who from the height they’re posted at are bound to see the hobject first; then it’ll come to the tops’l yard, and then to the foreyard. What d’ye say, sir? It’ll take the men off their work, but not, for long, I reckon, for something’s bound to show soon hereabouts.’
‘An excellent notion!’ shouted Wilfrid gleefully, all temper in him gone. ‘Quick about it, Finn; and see here, there’ll be a crown piece for the man on each yard who’s the first to hold up his arm.’
‘That’ll skin their eyes for ’em,’ rumbled Finn in half-suppressed hurricane note, and he went forward grinning broadly.
The port watch were mustered; I heard him explaining; the cock-eyed mate walked sulkily to the forecastle and took up his place between the knight-heads in a sullen posture; his arms folded and his eyes turned up. ‘Away aloft!’ there was a headlong rush of men, the rigging danced to their springs, and in a few moments every yard had its allotted number of look-outs.
It was a test not to believe in, for the instant an arm on the topgallant yard was brandished the fellows below would know that something had hove into view, and the dishonest amongst them, calculating upon its appearance in due course, might flourish their fists before their eyes gave them the right to do so. However, Wilfrid looked hugely pleased, and you witnessed the one virtue of the test in that. He bet me a sovereign to ten shillings that the man on the port topgallant yard-arm would be the first to lift his hand. I took him, and then naturally found the affair interesting.
In the midst of this business Miss Jennings arrived, cosily dressed in a jacket that fitted her shape and a little hat that looked to be made of beaver curled on one side to a sort of cockade where a small black plume rattled to the wind as I caught her hand and conducted her to my chair under the bulwarks. She started when she saw those sailors aloft all apparently staring in one direction with the intentness which the inspiration of five shillings would put into the nautical eye.
‘What is in sight?’ she exclaimed, looking round at Wilfrid with a pale face. ‘Surely—surely——’
I explained, whilst my cousin, rubbing his hands together and breaking into a loud but scarcely mirthful laugh, asked if she did not think it was a magnificent idea.
‘Positively,’ she cried with alarm still bright in her eyes, ‘I believed at first that the “Shark” or some vessel like her was in sight. But, Wilfrid, when a man climbs up there to look-out, will not he have a telescope?’
‘Yes, by day,’ he answered, ‘and a night-glass when the dark comes.’
‘Then what good is there in that sort of test?’ she inquired. ‘The shortest-sighted man with a telescope at his eye would be able to see miles farther than the longest-sighted.’
‘Aye,’ cried my cousin, ‘but a good sight’ll see further through a glass than a feeble one, and I want to find out who have got the good sight amongst those fellows.’
I saw her peep askant at me to gather what I thought of this business. Very clearly she found nothing but childishness in it. Meanwhile Wilfrid kept his large weak eyes fixed upon the two fellows on the topgallant yard. They might have been a couple of birds perched on a bough and he a great hungry tom-cat watching them. Finn was at the wheel, having sent the man who had been steering to join the others aloft. The mate on the forecastle looked sulkily up; the growling that was going on within him, and his astonishment and scorn of the whole proceeding, were inimitably expressed in his posture. Twenty minutes passed. I was sick of staring, and filled another pipe, though without venturing to speak, for the breathless intensity of expectation in Wilfrid’s manner, along with the eager, aching, straining expression of his face upturned to where the men were, was a sort of spell in its way upon one, and I positively felt afraid to break the silence. On a sudden[54] the man on the port side of the topgallant yard raised his hand, and in the space of a breath afterwards up went the other fellow’s arm. But my cousin had won his bet; he hit his leg a blow with boyish delight strong in his face.
‘A magnificent test, isn’t it?’ he whispered, as though he feared his voice would travel aloft; ‘now watch the topsail yard. The fellows there haven’t seen the gestures of the chaps above them. Another sovereign to ten shillings, Charles, that the outermost man to windward will hold up his hand first.’
I took the bet, and, as luck would have it, he won again, for a very few minutes after the sail had been descried from the loftiest yard the man whom Wilfrid had backed signalled, and then up went the arms of the other three along with the arms of the two fellows who were stationed on the fore yard as though they were being drilled, whilst a rumble of laughter sounded from amongst a group of the starboard watch, who were standing near the galley awaiting the issue of the test.
The hands came down; the mate set the crew to work; the fellow whose trick it was at the wheel relieved the captain, who walked up to us.
‘That’s what they sighted, sir,’ he exclaimed, pointing ahead, where we could just catch a glimpse of an airy streak of a marble hue, which showed only whenever our speeding schooner lifted upon some seething brow that washed in thunder slantwise to leeward, but which presently enlarged to the proportions of a powerful cutter, apparently a revenue boat, staggering under a press as though in a hurry, steering north for an English port.
Wilfrid’s satisfaction was unbounded; his exuberance of delight was something to startle one, seeing that there was nothing whatever to justify it. As I looked at him I recalled Miss Laura’s remark as to fits of excessive gloom following these irrational soarings of spirits, and expected shortly to find him plunged in a mood of fixed black melancholy. He told Captain Finn to have the other watch tested in the same way before the day was out, and produced fifteen shillings, ten of which were to go to the two men whom he had backed, and half-a-crown apiece to the fellows on the fore yard. Finn took the money with an eye that seemed actually to languish under its load of expostulation, but he made no remark. He anticipated, as I might, indeed, that fathom after fathom of hoarse forecastle arguments would attend this distribution, for assuredly the men on the foreyard were no more entitled to the money than the others who received none.
‘Now, captain,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘send the man who first sighted that sail yonder aloft at once. Let the foretopgallant yard be the look-out station; d’ye understand?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Call Muffin.’
But Muffin was too ill, or drunk, or both, to appear, so one of the stewards was summoned and ordered to bring from Sir[55] Wilfrid’s cabin a telescope that he would find in such and such a place. The man returned with the glass, a lovely Dollond, silver-mounted.
‘Try it, Charles,’ my cousin said to me.
I pointed it at the cutter, and found the lenses amazingly powerful and brilliant. ‘A superb glass, indeed,’ said I, returning it to him.
‘Now, captain,’ said Wilfrid with that raised look I have before referred to, ‘I dedicate this glass to the discovery of the “Shark.”’ His teeth met in a snap as he spoke the word, and his breathing grew laboured. ‘Let this telescope be carried aloft by that topgallant-yard man who was the first to lift his hand, and there let it remain, passing from sunrise to sunset from hand to hand as the look-outs are relieved. Never on any account whatever is it to be brought down from that masthead until the image of the craft we want is reflected fair in it. See to this, Finn.’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ responded the captain with his long face still charged with expostulation, though you saw he would not have disputed for the value of his wages.
‘By-and-by,’ continued my cousin, ‘I’ll give you a night glass of equal power, to be dedicated to the same purpose.’
‘Thank ’ee, Sir Wilfrid; but your honour’—and here the worthy fellow looked nervously from Sir Wilfrid to me—‘am I to understand, sir, that this here beautiful instrument,’ handling it as if it were a baby, ‘along with t’other which you’re to give me, is to be kept aloft day and night no matter the weather?’
‘Day and night, no matter the weather,’ said Wilfrid, in a sepulchral voice.
‘Very good, sir, but I should just like to say——’
‘Now, pray, don’t say anything at all,’ interrupted my cousin, peevishly; ‘you’re losing time, Finn. Send that fellow aloft, will you? Gracious Heaven! can’t you see it makes one feel desperate to understand that there’s nobody on the look-out?’
He jumped up and fell to pacing the deck with long, irritable strides. Finn, without another word, hurried forward. Presently the fellow who had first signalled sprang into the rigging with the glass slung over his shoulder. He ran nimbly aloft, and was speedily on the topgallant yard; and there he sat, with an arm embracing the mast, from time to time levelling the polished tube that glanced like a ray of light in his hand, and slowly sweeping the sea from one beam to another. Wilfrid came to a stand at sight of him; he clasped his arms on his breast, his gaze directed aloft, whilst he swayed on one leg, with the other bent before him to the heave of the deck; his melodramatic posture made one think of a Manfred in the act of assailing some celestial body with injurious language. It pained me to look at him. He was pale and haggard, but there was the spirit of high breeding in every lineament to give the grace of distinction and a quality of spiritual tenderness to his odd, irregular, uncomely face. He stared so long and so fixedly at the[56] man that I saw the fellows forward looking up too, as though there must be something uncommon there to detain the baronet’s gaze. After a while he let his arms drop with an awakening manner, and slowly sent his eyes around the sea in the most absent way that could be thought of, till, his gaze meeting mine, he gave a start, and cried, with a flourish of one hand, whilst he pointed to the topgallant yard with the other, ‘Day and night, Charles; day and night! And keep you on the look-out, too, will you, old friend? You carry a sailor’s eye in your head, and have hunted under canvas before. We mustn’t miss her! We mustn’t miss her!’ And with a shake of his head he abruptly strode to the companion and went below.
I sat with Miss Jennings under the shelter of the bulwarks until hard upon luncheon-time. Wilfrid did not again make his appearance on deck that morning. The girl asked me if the test the men’s eyesight had been put to was my cousin’s notion. I answered that it was the captain’s.
‘Then how stupid of him, Mr. Monson!’
‘Well, perhaps so,’ said I, ‘but I’m rather sorry for Finn, do you know. It is not only that he has to execute orders which he may consider ridiculous; he has to plot so as to harmonise the plain routine of shipboard life with Wilfrid’s irrational or extravagant expectations. But there is the mate. I have not spoken to him yet. Let’s hear what he thinks of the skipper’s testing job.’
He was pacing the lee quarter-deck, being in charge of the yacht, though Finn had been up and down throughout the morning, sniffing about uneasily as though he could not bear to have the picture of the little ship out of his sight too long. I called to him, and he crossed over to us slowly, as though astonished that I should want him. His face had something of a Cape Horn look, with its slewed eye and a number of warts riding the wrinkles of his weather-seasoned skin, and a mat of hair upon his throat as coarse as rope-yarns. He was no beauty certainly, yet I fancied him somehow as a good seaman; maybe for the forecastle sourness of his face and a general sulkiness of demeanour, which I have commonly found as expressing excellent sea-going principles.
‘You’re the mate, I think, Mr. Crimp?’ said I, blandly.
‘Yes, I’m the mate,’ he answered, staring from me to Miss Jennings, and speaking in a voice broken by years of bawling in heavy weather, and possibly, too, by hard drinking.
‘We’re blowing along very prettily, Mr. Crimp. If this breeze holds it cannot be long before we are out of soundings.’
‘No, I don’t suppose it will be long,’ he answered.
‘Do you know the “Shark?”’
‘Why, yes.’
‘Are we going to pick her up, think you?’
‘Well, if we gets into her wake and shoves along faster nor she, there’ll be nothin’ to stop us picking her up,’ he answered, steadily[57] viewing Miss Jennings and myself alternately, to satisfy his mind, as I took it, that we were not quizzing him.
‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘that the captain will be testing the eyesight of the other watch presently?’
‘Ay,’ said he, with a sort of sneer, ‘they’ll go aloft after dinner.’
‘Isn’t it a good test?’
‘Don’t see no use in it at all,’ he answered gruffly, sending a look aloft and following it on with an admonitory stare at the fellow at the wheel. ‘Suppose nothen had hove into view; the men ’ud be still on the yards a-watching. ’Sides, observing an object at sea depends upon where your eyes is. One chap may be looking in another direction when his mate sings out. Is that going to stand for a sign that his sight’s poor?’
‘What do the men think?’ said I, anxious to get behind the forecastle, so to speak, for I was never to know how far knowledge of this kind might be serviceable to us later on.
‘Why, the watch has been a-grumbling and a-quarrelling over the rewards. They say ’tain’t fair. If t’other watch is to be tested on the same terms, stand by for something like a melhee, says I.’
‘Oh, but that must be stopped,’ I exclaimed, ‘we want no “melhees” aboard the “Bride,” Mr. Crimp.’
Just then I caught sight of Captain Finn. I beckoned to him, and the mate passed over to leeward, where he fell to pacing the deck as before. I told the skipper what Crimp had said, and he burst into a laugh.
‘Melhees!’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s just what old Jacob ’ud like. He’s a regular lime-juicer, sir, and distils hacid at every pore; but he’s a first-class seaman. I’d rather have that man by my side at a time of danger than the choicest of all the sailors as I can call to mind that I’ve met in my day. But there’ll be no melhee, sir—there’ll be no melhee, lady. The men are grumbling a bit; and why? ’Cause they’re sailors. But it’ll be all right, sir. That there notion of testing, I don’t mind owning of it to you, was merely to pacify Sir Wilfrid, sir. I’ll carry out his orders, of course, and send the other watch aloft arter dinner. It’ll have to cost another fifteen shillin’, otherwise I don’t mean to say there mightn’t come a feeling of onpleasantness amongst the sailors. But Sir Wilfrid’ll not mind that, sir.’
I drew the money from my pocket and gave it him. ‘Here,’ said I, ‘you needn’t trouble Sir Wilfrid; I’ll make it right with him. Only,’ I exclaimed, ‘keep the crew in a good temper. We do not want any disaffection. Heaven knows there’s trouble enough aboard, as it is!’
He knuckled his forehead, and the luncheon bell now sounding, I handed Miss Jennings below; but I could not help saying to her, as we stood a moment together in the cabin, that I saw one part of my duty would lie in advising Wilfrid to have as little as possible to do with his crew and the working of the yacht; for grief and[58] heart-bitterness had so sharpened his eccentricities that one never could tell what orders he might give of a nature to lead to difficulty and trouble with the men. ‘Perhaps,’ I added, ‘it might be thought that a sincere friendship would suffer him to have his way, in the hope that some measure of his would bring this goose-chase to an abrupt end and force him home. But, then, you are interested in the pursuit, Miss Jennings, and Heaven forbid that any active or passive effort, or influence, or agency of mine should hinder you from realising the hope with which you have embarked on this strange adventure.’