A characteristic of Wilfrid’s mental feebleness was his inability to keep his attention long fixed. This symptom would be more or less acute according to the hold his trouble had of him. He arrived at the luncheon table to the second summons, and I was really startled, after conversing with him a little, to gather from what he said that the whole incident of the testing of the men’s eyesight had gone sheer out of his memory. This being so, no purpose could have been served by recurring to it, though, had he mentioned the subject, I had made up my mind to use it as a text that I had might exhort him not to meddle with his crew, nor in any way step between Captain Finn and the navigation of the ‘Bride.’
However I found something to raise a hope in me too, in his odd, variable, imperfect intellect; namely, that he might come presently to but dimly comprehend the purport of this voyage, and then I did not doubt of being able to influence him and carry him back home, in short; for the wild uncertainty of the adventure was made to my mind more extravagant still by the inspiration of it being due to my poor cousin’s weak brains; in fact, not to mince my meaning, it would have been a mad undertaking in the sanest man’s hands; to my fancy, then, it became the completest expression of madness possible, when I thought of a madman as conceiving and governing it.
Finn, as I afterwards learnt, sent the other watch aloft whilst we were at lunch, and there they hung, staring away for an hour; when, just as the captain was about to sing out to them to come down, a fellow on the foreyard (the lowest of the three yards) signalled a sail, and then all hands saw it together! so, to arrest any further grumbling, Finn gave five shillings to the foreyard man and made the watch draw lots for the other two five-shilling prizes. This arrangement satisfied them, and it seemed to soothe the fellows in the other watch as well, who perhaps now perceived that[59] there was little but inanity in the test, and that the only sensible way to treat the whole affair was to look upon it as a joke.
This I learnt afterwards from Finn, who did not show himself much surprised to hear that Sir Wilfrid had apparently forgotten the incident of the morning.
‘You’ll forgive me saying of it, Mr. Monson,’ he exclaimed, ‘seeing it is your own cousin I’m speaking about, sir; but I’ve been master of his yacht now since he bought her for her ladyship, and I know this much of Sir Wilfrid, that his mind ain’t as if it were half the time with the orders he gives. He’ll say a thing without the eyes of his intellects being upon it. The result is that soon after the words is off his lips the sentiment of ’em is gone from his recollection. It is like breathing on a looking-glass; there’s the mark, but it don’t last long.’
It came on a bit thick that afternoon, with now and again a haze of rain in the gust of a squall, sweeping like the explosion of a gun into the straining canvas out of the heart of the hard but steady breeze, and this weather, together with some strange edge of cold that had entered it since luncheon time, kept us below, though I was on deck for a little while when I had that chat with the skipper which I have just repeated. Wilfrid lighted his big pipe in the cabin, telling Miss Laura that she had given us leave to smoke there on the preceding night, an odd proof of his power to remember little things. The interior was a bit gloomy with the ashen atmosphere of the grey day sifting through the skylight and down the companion hatch, and with a green dimness coming yet into it from time to time to the burying of the glass of the ports in the pale emerald of the clear brine under the froth that was roaring away past on the surface. But there was nothing much to incommode one in the movements of the vessel; wind and sea, as I have said, were on the quarter, and the lift of the tall Channel surge came soft as its own melting head to the weather counter, running the shapely fabric into a long arrowy floating launch ahead, with a lean down that was wrought by rhythmic action into a mere bit of cradle-play.
Snugged in the cushions of a most luxurious arm-chair, with the consoling scent of a fine cigar under my nose and a noble claret within arm’s reach chilled to the temperature of snow by the richly-chased silver jug which contained it, I felt that there must be greater hardships in life than yachting, even when the sailing cruise came to a hunt for a runaway wife. Miss Jennings sat near me, with a novel in her lap, on whose open page her violet eyes would sometimes rest when the conversation languished. There was a mirror in the bulkhead just behind me and her hair shone in it as though a sunbeam rested on her tresses. Wilfrid lay at full length upon a couch, blowing clouds from his pipe with his large strange weak eyes fixed upon the upper deck. He talked a good deal of his travels, always rationally, and often with evidences of a shrewd perception; but again and again he would withdraw his[60] pipe from his mouth and seem to forget that he held it, sigh deeply, a long tremulous inspiration that was full of the tears of a heart which sobbed continuously, then start on a sudden, sit upright and send a crazy wandering look at the porthole near him; after which he would stretch his form again and resume his pipe and fall to talking afresh, but never picking up the thread he had let drop, or speaking with the least reference to the anecdote, experience, incident, or what not, from whose relation he had just before broken.
Once he jumped up, after lying silent for five or ten minutes, during which Miss Jennings seemed to read; whilst I, thinking of nothing in particular, lazily watched the rings of cigar smoke I expelled float to the wreathing of flowers and foliage painted with delightful taste upon the cabin ceiling. His movement was extraordinarily abrupt; he put his pipe down and stalked to his cabin—stalk is the one word that expresses my cousin’s peculiar walk when any dark or strange mood was upon him—and I presumed that he had gone into hiding for a while; but he quickly reappeared. There was a light in his eye and a spot of red on each high cheekbone as he put a case in my hand, saying, ‘Will these do, d’ye think, Charles?’
It contained a handsome pair of duelling pistols.
‘Upon my word, Wilfrid,’ said I, in an offhand way whilst I toyed with one of the weapons as if admiring it, ‘our little ship is not without teeth, eh? What with your gun forward and the small arms near my cabin, and now these—you’ll be having a powder magazine on board, I suppose?’
‘There’ll be as much powder as we need, I dare say. What think you of those weapons?’
‘They are quite killing. For what purpose are pills like these gilded so sumptuously? Is all this garnishing supposed to make death more palatable?’
Miss Laura extended her hand, and I gave her the weapon I was examining. A look came into her face that made me feel glad I wasn’t Colonel Hope-Kennedy just then. She flushed to some thought with a sudden sweep of her gaze to the porthole, then looked again at the pistol while she bit her lip. I found something fascinating in this brief passage of spirit in her. Wilfrid, holding the other pistol, drew himself erect before a length of looking-glass against the starboard bulkhead, and levelled the weapon at his own reflection. He stood motionless, save for the swaying of his figure upon the rolling deck, his head thrown back, his nostrils large, his countenance a sallow white; it was absolutely as though he believed in the reality of his own impersonation, and waited for the signal to fire.
‘Bless me, Wilfrid!’ cried I, ‘I hope these affairs of yours aren’t loaded! Hair triggers, by Jingo! Mind—if they are—you’ll destroy that fine piece of plate glass.’
Of course I knew better; but his rapt posture was a little[61] alarming, and I said the first thing that came into my head to break the spell. His arm sank to his side, and he turned to me with a grin that was bewildering with its confliction emotions of anger, misery, and triumph.
‘Let that man give me a chance!’ said he, in a low but deep voice.
‘Ay, but my dear boy,’ said I, relieved by his slowly returning the pistols to the case, ‘figure the boot on the other leg;—supposing he kills you?’
‘Good God!’ cried he, ‘d’ye think that consideration would hinder me from attempting the life of the ruffian who has brought shame and dishonour upon me and my child?’
‘No,’ said I, with a glance at Miss Laura, whom I found eyeing me with a look of surprise that sparkled with something more than a hint of temper; ‘but if we should meet this fellow on the open sea, and you challenge him, and he should kill you, what will you have done for yourself? Suffered him to put you quietly out of the road and achieve the double triumph of first taking your wife from you and then making a widow of her!—which, of course, would answer his purpose very well, whether he designed matrimony or not, seeing that there could not be much peace of mind for him with the knowledge either that you were on his track, or waiting with spider-like patience in England for his return.’
‘By Heaven, Charles!’ he roared out, ‘no man but you would dare talk to me like this——’
I raised my hand. ‘Wilfrid, nothing that you can say, no temper that you can exhibit, no menaces that you may utter, will prevent me from remembering that I am here at your earnest request as the one male friend you wished at your side in such a time, and from speaking to you as freely as I should think within myself. This, to be sure, is ridiculously premature. We have yet to fall in with the “Shark.” Supposing that happens, and that Colonel Hope-Kennedy consents to fight you, and you insist, then it will not be for me to say you nay. But, believe me, nothing shall intimidate me from trying to make you understand that, honour or no honour, to give that rascal an opportunity of assassinating you would be the very maddest act your most righteous wrath could hurry you into.’
He looked at me a little while in silence, was about to speak, checked himself, or maybe it was his voice that failed him; a dampness came into his eyes; he compressed his lips till they were bloodless in the effort to suppress his tears; then, flourishing his arm with a gesture grievously expressive of the anguish he was feeling at that moment, he went to his cabin, and we saw no more of him till dinner-time.
I thought Miss Jennings would rebuke me for what I had said, and I gathered myself together, in an intellectual sense, for a little gentle fencing with her for a bit; for, let her hate the Colonel as[62] she might, and let her be as eager as she would that her sister should be speedily rescued from the villain she had sacrificed her honour for, I had made up my mind not to suffer her to imagine that I regarded a meeting between the two men as a necessary effect of the Colonel’s action; but that, on the contrary, I should consider it my duty to vehemently discountenance a duel, until I found that there was nothing in argument to dissuade my cousin; when of course I would render him such services as he might expect from me.
In short, as you will see, I took a cold-blooded view of the whole business. The prosaic arbitrament of the law! that was my notion! The shears of a dispassionate judge: no pistols and coffee for two, thank’ee! Methinks when it comes to one’s wife preferring Jones or Tomkins to one’s own lovely self, her new emotions should be helped, not by giving the latest darling of her heart the chance to kill one, but by starting one’s attorney to play upon the blissful couple with the cold black venom of his ink-horn!
Miss Jennings, however, made no reference to my speech, nor to the manner of Wilfrid’s going. She remained quiet, and showed herself subdued and grieved for some time, and then we talked about the testing of the men’s sight, and I repeated what Captain Finn had said to me on that subject. On a sudden she exclaimed:
‘You told me, Mr. Monson, that you have never seen my sister?’
‘No, only heard of her, and then quite indirectly.’
She went to her cabin, moving in a very inimitable, floating, graceful, yielding way to the heave of the deck, never offering to grasp anything for support, though the lee-lurches were at times somewhat staggering, and I thought I never saw a more perfect little figure as she withdrew, her hair glowing when her form was already vague as she flitted into the shadow astern of the companion steps towards the dark corridor or passage which conducted to her cabin. She returned after a short absence with a miniature painting set in a very handsome case, on which was my cousin’s crest with initials beneath, signifying that it was a gift from him to Laura Jennings. I carried it under the skylight to see it clearly.
‘When was this done?’ I asked.
‘About a year ago,’ she answered. ‘Wilfrid sent it to Melbourne as a gift to me.’
Now it might be that I was then—taste, of course, changes—no very passionate admirer of dark women; brunettes, I mean, of a South European sort, which the face in the miniature was after the pattern of; and that is why, no doubt, the expectation in me of the ripe and tropic graces I was to behold was not a little disappointed. Anyone could see by the likeness that Lady Monson was a fine woman; her hair was raven black, but there was a want of taste in the fashion in which it was dressed; her eyes were bright, imperious, rather too staring, with something of haughty astonishment in their expression; but this might have been the artist’s misinterpretation[63] of their character. She was as like her sister Laura as I was like her. Her mouth was somewhat large, rich, voluptuous; the throat very beautiful, with something about the line or curve of the jaw which would have made you suspect, without knowing the original, that the character of this part of the face was exquisitely reproduced. It was a heaviness to communicate a slightly masculine air to the whole countenance. I turned to Miss Jennings and found her eyes intent on my face.
‘She is a handsome lady,’ said I, ‘handsomer, I should think, than she is here represented: quite apart, I mean, from the glow of countenance, the animation of look, and all the rest of the things which go to make up two-thirds at least of human beauty.’
She took the miniature in silence.
‘She is not like you,’ said I.
‘Not in the least,’ she exclaimed. ‘I am little; she is very tall. She has a commanding manner, a rich voice, and indeed,’ she added with a smile, and then looking down, ‘anyone might suppose her of noble blood.’
I should have liked to tell her how very much sweeter and prettier she was than her sister; what a very different sort of heart, as it seemed to me, from her ladyship’s, looked out at you from her violet eyes; how very much more good, pure, gentle, sympathetic, womanly, was the expression of her mouth compared with what I had found in the portrait’s. But our friendship was rather too new just then for such candour as this; yet I would not swear that some faint suspicion did not cross her of what was in my mind, though so subtle are women’s ways, so indeterminable by words the meaning that may be perfectly emphatic to every instinct in one in the turn of the head, a droop of the lid, a sudden soft tincturing of the cheek, that I have no reason to offer for supposing this.
She took the miniature to her cabin, and I waited awhile, thinking she would return. I then lighted a cigar, but as I stepped towards the companion with the design of killing the rest of the afternoon till the dinner-hour on deck, Muffin came down the steps. He looked hideously sallow, and carried a horribly dismal expression of countenance, but he appeared to be no longer in liquor.
‘Well,’ said I shortly, ‘how are you now, Muffin?’
‘Uncommonly queer, I am sorrowful to say, sir,’ he answered, patting his stomach and falling away on his left leg with a humbly respectful downcast look and a writhe of the lips into a smile that would have been expressionless if it was not that it increased his ugliness by the exhibition of a row of fangs of the colour of the keys of an ancient harpsichord. ‘The sea is not a congenial spear, sir.’
‘Sphere, I suppose you mean,’ said I; ‘but give yourself a day or two, man; the sickness will wear off.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’—he paused, still keeping his eyes[64] downward whilst he bowed meekly and respectfully, but with an air of profound dejection.
‘Well?’ I exclaimed, running my gaze over the fellow’s odd figure with a yearning to laugh in me at the sight of the gouty bulgings of his feet over his pumps.
‘May I take it, sir,’ said he, clasping his hands humbly upon his waistcoat, ‘that there is no dispogition on the Bayronet’s part to give up chasing of her ladyship by water?’
‘You may,’ said I, bluntly. ‘Why, confound it, Muffin, we’ve only just entered on the run!’
He turned up his eyes to heaven till nothing showed but the bloodshot whites: ‘Sir, I humbly beg your pardon. It seems an ordacious liberty for the likes of me to be questioning the likes of you; but may I ask, sir—is the voyage likely to carry us fur?’
‘Well, it is about six thousand miles to the Cape, to begin with,’ said I.
‘Good God!’ he cried, startled out of all respectfulness. ‘Why, there’ll be years of sailing in that distance, sir, begging your pardon for the hexclamation my agitation caused me to make, sir.’
‘If you want to return,’ said I, feeling a sort of pity for the poor devil, for the consternation that worked in him lay very strong upon his yellow face, ‘your plan must be to obtain Sir Wilfrid’s permission to tranship yourself into the first vessel we speak that will be willing to receive you and carry you to England. It is the only remedy I can suggest.’
He bowed very meekly and with a manner of respectful gratitude; nevertheless, something in him seemed to tell me that he was not very much obliged by my suggestion, and that if he quitted Wilfrid’s service it would not be in the manner I recommended.
Nothing worth noting happened till next day. It was in the afternoon. The Scillies were astern and the broad Atlantic was now stretching fair under our bows. A strong fine wind had bowled us steadily down Channel, and the utmost had been made of it by Captain Finn, who, despite his talk of studdingsails and stowed anchors, had sent his booms aloft ere we had brought Prawle Point abeam and the ‘Bride’ had swept along before the strong wind that would come in slaps at times with almost the spite of a bit of a hurricane in them, under a foretopmast studdingsail; whence you will gather that the yacht was prodigiously crowded; but then Finn was always under the influence of the fear of Wilfrid’s head in the companion hatch; for I learnt that several times in the night my cousin unexpectedly made his appearance on deck, and his hot incessant command to both Finn and old Jacob Crimp, according as he found one or the other in charge, was that they were to sail the yacht at all hazards short of springing her lower masts, for in the matter of spare booms and suits of canvas she could not have been more liberally equipped had her errand signified a three years’ fighting voyage.
Well, as I have said, it was the afternoon of the third day of[65] our leaving Southampton. The breeze had slackened much about the time that Finn stood ogling the sun through his sextant, and then it veered in a small puff and came on to blow a gentle, steady wind from south-south-east, which tautened our sheets for us and brought the square yards fore and aft. There was a long broad-browed swell from the southward that flashed under the hazy sunlight like splintered glass with the wrinkling of it, over which the yacht went rolling and bowing in a rhythm as stately and regular as the swing of a thousand-ton Indiaman, with a sulky lift of foam to her cutwater at every plunge and a yeasty seething spreading on either quarter, the recoiling wash of it from the counter as snappish as surf. Suddenly from high above, cleaving the vaporous yellow of the atmosphere in a dead sort of way, came a cry from the look-out man on the topgallant yard, ‘Sail ho!’ and the sparkle of the telescope in his hands as he levelled the glittering tube at the sea, over the starboard bow, rendered the customary echo of ‘Where away?’ unnecessary.
There was nothing however to take notice of in this; the cry of ‘Sail ho!’ had been sounding pretty regularly on and off since the look-out aloft had been established, as you will suppose when you think of the crowded waters we were then navigating; though everything thus signalled so far had hove into view broad on either bow or on either beam. We were all on deck; that is to say, Miss Jennings, snug in a fur cloak,—for the shift of wind had not softened the temperature of the atmosphere,—in a chair near the skylight; Wilfrid near her, lying upon the ivory-white plank smoking a cigar, with his head supported on his elbow, and I stumping the deck close to them, with Finn abreast of the wheel to windward. We were in the midst of some commonplace chatter when that voice from aloft smote our ears, and when we saw the direction in which the fellow was holding his glass levelled we all looked that way, scarce thinking for the moment that if the stranger were heading for us she would not be in sight from the deck for a spell yet, and as long again if she were travelling our course.
Miss Jennings resumed her seat; Wilfrid stretched his length along the deck as before; and I went on pacing to and fro close beside them.
‘It will be a Monday on which we sight the “Shark,”’ said Wilfrid.
‘How do you know?’ said I.
‘I dreamt it,’ he answered.
Miss Jennings looked at him wistfully as if she believed in dreams.
‘It was an odd vision,’ he continued, with a soft far-away expression in his eyes, very unlike the usual trouble in them. ‘I dreamt that on hearing of the—of the——’ he pushed his hair from his forehead and spoke with his hand to his brow—‘I say that I dreamt I flung myself on horseback—it was a favourite mare—Lady[66] Henrietta, Laura’—she bowed her head—‘and gave chase. I did not know which way to go, so I let fall the reins on the animal’s neck and left the scent to the detection of her instincts. She carried me to the sea-coast, a desolate bit of a bay, I remember, with the air full of the moaning of vexed waters and a melancholy crying of wind in the crevices and chasms of the cliff, and the whole scene made gaunter than it needed to have been, as I fancied, by a skeleton that was one moment that of a big fish and the next of a man, fluctuating upon the sight like an image seen three fathoms deep floating in such glass-clear water as you get in the West Indian latitudes.’ He paused. ‘Where was I?’ he inquired, with an air of bewilderment.
‘Your horse had carried you to the sea-shore,’ said Miss Laura, with her face full of credulity. I love a superstitious girl, and who is the woman that does not believe in dreams?
‘Ha!’ he cried, after a brief effort of memory; ‘yes, the mare came to a stand on the margin of the beach, and heaven knows whence the apparition rose: but there was an empty boat tossing before me, with a sort of sign-post erected in her, a pole with a black board upon it on which was written, in letters that glowed as though wrought by a brush dipped in a sunbeam, the single word Monday!’
‘Pooh!’ said I, scornfully, and fancying at the moment that something stirred in the companion-way, I moved a step or two in that direction and saw Muffin with his head a trifle above the level of the top step apparently taking the air, though no doubt he was diverting himself too, by listening to our talk. On seeing me he descended, stepping backwards with a sickly respectful smile of apology.
‘Why do you say pooh, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings. ‘Wise people never ridicule dreams until they have been disproved.’
I admired her arch air that floated like a veil of gauze over her sympathy with Wilfrid.
‘I don’t want to believe in dreams,’ said I, ‘my own dreams are much too uncomfortable to make me desire faith in that direction.’
I glanced at Wilfrid; his eyes were staring right up at the vane at the maintopmast-head, and it was easily seen that he was no longer thinking of what we had been talking about. Miss Jennings opened the novel that lay in her lap and seemed to read; there was a store of this sort of literature in the yacht, laid in, I dare say, by Sir Wilfrid for Lady Monson, who, I don’t doubt, was a great devourer of novels; the trash in one, two, and three volumes of an age of trashy fiction, of a romantic literature of gorgeous waistcoats, nankeen breeches, and Pelham cravats. I don’t think Miss Jennings had read much of the book she held. It was called ‘The Peeress,’ and I believe it had taken her two days to arrive at the end of the first chapter. But then, who can read at sea? For my part I can never fix my attention. In a dead calm I am prone to snooze; in a brisk breeze, every sweep of surge, every leap of froth[67]ing head, every glance of sunshine, every solemn soaring of white cloud up the slope of the liquid girdle is an irresistible appeal to me to quit my author for teachers full of hints worth remembering; and then, indeed, I yield myself to that luxury of passivity Wordsworth rhymes about—that disposition to keep quiet until I am visited with impulses—the happiest apology ever attempted by a home-keeping poet for an unwillingness to be at the trouble to seek beyond his hillside for ideas.
‘Here is a flowery fancy!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings, and she began to read. It was something—I forget what—in the primitive Bulwerian vein; plenty of capitals, I dare say, and without much sense that I could make out to linger upon the ear; but one sentence I remember: ‘He had that inexpressible air of distinction which comes as a royal gift from heaven to members of old families and only to them.’
‘Stupid ass!’ exclaimed Wilfrid, whom I had imagined to be wool-gathering.
‘But there is truth in it, though,’ said Miss Jennings.
‘What is an old family?’ I exclaimed.
‘Why a good family, surely, Mr. Monson,’ she answered.
‘No, no, Laura,’ grumbled Wilfrid. ‘I could introduce you to a longshore sailor who can’t sign his name, and whose sole theory of principle lies in successfully hoodwinking the revenue people, who will tell you that his forefathers have been boatmen and smugglers for over three hundred years, and who could feel his way back along a chain of Jims, Dicks, and Joes without a link missing, down, maybe, to a time when the progenitors of scores of our Dukes, Earls, and the rest of them were—tush! That boatman belongs to an old family.’
‘Then, pray, what is a good family?’ inquired Miss Jennings.
‘Yonder’s the sail that was sighted awhile gone, Sir Wilfrid,’ sung out Captain Finn in his leather-lunged voice.
My cousin sprang to his feet, and the three of us went to the rail to look.
On the lee-bow was a dash of orange light, much less like the sails of a ship than a feather of vapour bronzed by a sunset and vanishing in the tail of a cloud.
‘How does she head, Finn?’ cried Wilfrid to the skipper, who was viewing her through a long, heavy, powerful glass of his own.
‘Coming dead on end for us, sir.’
‘What’ll she be, captain?’ said I.
He eyed her a bit, and answered, ‘A square rig, sir; a bit of a barque, I dare say.’
My cousin suddenly slapped his leg—one of his favourite gestures when a fit of excitement seized him. ‘Charles,’ he bawled, ‘we’ll speak her. D’ye hear me, Finn? We’ll speak her, I say!’
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ cried the captain.
‘She may have news for us,’ Wilfrid proceeded; ‘it is about time we fell in with something that has sighted the “Shark.”’
‘A bit betimes, sir,’ said Finn, touching his cap and approaching to give me his telescope which I had extended my hand for.
‘Confound it, man!’ cried Wilfrid, in a passion, ‘everything’s always too soon with you. Suppose by this time to-morrow we should have the schooner in sight—what then, hey? What would be your arguments? That she had no business to heave in sight, yet?’
Finn made no answer, but pulled his cap off to scratch his head, with his lips muttering unconsciously to himself to the energy of his secret thoughts, and his long face, which his mouth seemed to sit exactly in the middle of, working in every muscle with protest.
The distant vessel was showing in the glass as high as the curve of her fore-course, with now and again a dim sort of refractive glimmer of wet black hull rising off a head of sea into an airy, pale length of light that hung in a low gleam betwixt the junction of sea and sky. The sun was westering though still high, but his orb was rayless, and the body of him looked no more than an oozing of shapeless yellow flame into the odd sky that seemed a misty blue in places, though where it appeared so you would notice a faint outline of cloud; and as he waned, his reflection in the wind-wrinkled heave of the long head-swell, seemed as if each broad soft brow was alive with runnings of flaming oil.
There was to be no more argument about good and bad families. Wilfrid now could think of nothing but the approaching vessel, and the child-like qualities which went to the creation of his baffling, unfixable nature showed in an eager impatience, in which you seemed to witness as much of boyish desire for something fresh and new to happen as of anything else. For my part, I detest arguments. They force you to give reasons and to enter upon definitions. I fancied, however, I was beginning to detect Miss Laura’s little weakness. There was a feminine hankering in her after ancient blood, sounding titles, high and mighty things. As I glanced at her sweet face I felt in the humour to lecture her. What but this weakness had led to her sister’s undoing? Wilfrid was a worthy, honest, good-hearted, generous-souled creature, spite of his being a bit mad: but I could not imagine he was a man to fall in love with; and in this queer chase we had entered upon there was justification enough of that notion. His wife had married him, I suppose, for position, which she had allowed the first good-looking rogue she met to persuade her was as worthless as dust and ashes unless a human heart beat inside it. And the scoundrel was right, though he deserved the halter for his practical illustration of his meaning. I met Miss Jennings’ eye and she smiled. She called softly to me:
‘You are puzzling over the difference between a good and an old family!’
‘I wish my countenance were less ingenuous,’ said I.
‘Hadn’t you better run up some signal,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, turning upon Finn, ‘to make yonder craft know that we want her to stop?’
‘Lay aft here a couple of hands,’ shouted Finn in a sulky note.
Two seamen instantly came along. The flag-locker was dragged from its cleats or chocks under the small, milk-white grating abaft the wheel; Finn, with a square, carrot-coloured thumb ploughed into the book of directions; then, after a little, a string of butterfly bunting soared gracefully to the topmost head, where the flags were to be best seen, a long pennant topping the gay colours like a tongue of flame against the rusty yellow of the atmosphere; the dip of the yacht to the swell became a holiday curtsey, and you thought of her as putting on a simper like some pretty country wench newly pranked out by her sweetheart with a knot of ribbons.
‘Aft and haul up the main-tack; round in on the weather fore braces and lay the topsail to the mast; down hellum! so—leave her at that!’ and the ‘Bride,’ with the wide ocean heave lifting to the bow, came to a stand, her way arrested, the wind combing her fore and aft canvas like the countless invisible fingers of giant spirits, and a dull plash and sulky wash of water alongside, and a frequent sharp clatter of wheel chains to the jar of the churning rudder. There was the true spirit of the deep in this picture then, for the seamen had dropped the various jobs they were upon, and stood awaiting orders about the decks, every man’s shadow swaying upon the salt sparkling of the spotless planks, and all eyes directed at the approaching craft that had now risen to her wash streak and was coming along in a slow stately roll with her canvas yearning from flying jib to fore royal, every cloth yellow as satin, and flashes of light like the explosion of ordnance breaking in soft sulphur-coloured flames from her wet side as she lifted it sunwards from the pale blue brine that melted yeastily from her metalled forefoot into two salival lines, which united abaft and went astern in a wake that looked as if she were towing some half mile length of amber-tinctured satin. Yet there was no beauty in her as in us; it was the sweetness and grace of airy distance working in her and the mild and misty gushing of the afternoon radiance, and the wild enfolding arms of the horizon sweeping as it were the very soul of the mighty ocean loneliness into her solitary shape and into her bland and starlike canvas, until you found her veritably spiritualised out of her commonplace meaning into a mere fairy fancy, some toy-like imagination of the deep; but she hardened rapidly into the familiar prosaics of timber, sailcloth and tackling, as she came floating down upon us, sinking to her narrow white band, then poised till a broad width of her green sheathing was exposed, with a figure in a tall chimney-pot hat standing on the rail holding on by a backstay.
She was a slow old waggon, and one saw the reason of it as she came sliding along, rolling like an anchored galliot in a sea-way, in her bows as round as an apple and her kettle-bottom run; and Wilfrid’s impatience grew into torture to us to see almost as much as to him to feel as he’d pace the deck for a minute or two tumultuously, then fling against the rail with a wild stare at the approaching craft as if indeed he was cocksure she was full of news for him, though for my part it seemed mere trifling with the yacht’s routine to back her yard that we might ask questions at that early time of day. She steered so as to come within easy hail and then boom-ending her foretopmast studdingsail she backed her main topsail and floated the full length of her out abreast of us within pistol shot, pitching clumsily and bringing her bows out of it with the white brine frothing like lacework all about her there, her line of bulwarks dotted with heads watching us, the sounds of the creaking of her aloft very clear along with a farmyard noise of several cocks crowing one after the other lustily, and the lowing of bulls or cows.
‘Barque ahoy?’ sung out Captain Finn, funnelling his hands as a vehicle for his voice.
‘Halloa?’ cried the figure that stood upon the rail in the most cheery, laughing voice that can be conceived.
‘What ship is that?’
‘The “Wanderer.”’
‘Where are you from? and where are you bound to?’
‘From Valparaiso to Sunderland,’ answered the other, in a way that made one think he spoke with difficulty through suppressed mirth.
‘Will you tell us,’ bawled Finn, ‘if you’ve sighted an outward bound fore and aft schooner-yacht within the past week?’
‘Sighted a fore and aft schooner-yacht? ay, that I have, master, fine a vessel as yourn pretty nigh,’ shouted the other as though he must burst in a moment into a roar of laughter.
‘Ask him aboard! ask him aboard!’ cried Wilfrid wild with excitement, slapping his knee till it was like a discharge of pistols. ‘Beg him to do me the favour of drinking a bottle of champagne with me; ask him—ask him—but first ascertain if he has made an entry of the meeting in his log-book.’
‘Ay, ay, sir. Ho the barque ahoy!’
‘Halloa?’
‘Can you tell us when and whereabouts ye fell in with that there schooner?’
‘Tell ye! to be sure I can; got it in black and white, master. Ha! ha! ha!’ and here the old figure in the tall hat clapped his hand to his side and laughed outright, toppling and reeling about on the rail in such a manner that I took it for granted he was drunk and expected every moment to see him plunge overboard.
‘Ask him aboard! ask him aboard!’ shrieked Wilfrid. ‘Request him to bring his log-book with him. We will send a boat.’
Finn hailed the barque again. ‘Sir Wilfrid Monson’s compli[71]ments to you, sir, and will be pleased to see you aboard to drink a bottle of champagne with him. Will you kindly bring your log-book with you? We will send a boat.’
‘Right y’are,’ shouted the old chap with a humorous flourish of his hand, and so speaking he sprang inboard, laughing heartily, and disappeared down his little companion hatch.
A boat was lowered with four men in charge of surly old Crimp. My cousin’s excitement was a real torment to witness. He smote his hands violently together whilst he urged the men at the top of his voice to bear a hand and be off or the barque would be swinging her topsail and sailing away from us. He twitched from head to foot as though he must fall into convulsions; he bawled to the sailors not to wait to cast anything adrift but to put their knives through it as though somebody were drowning astern and the delay of a single moment might make all the difference between life or death. ‘By heaven!’ he cried, halting in front of me and Miss Jennings with a fierceness of manner that was rendered almost delirious by the quality of savage exultation in it, ‘I knew it would fall out thus! They cannot escape me. Of course it is the “Shark” that that fellow has sighted.’ He broke from us and ran to the rail and overhung it, gnawing his nails whilst he watched the receding boat with his eyelids quivering and his face working like that of a man in acute pain.
‘I fear,’ said I, in a low voice, to Miss Jennings, ‘that it would not require more than two or three incidents of this sort to utterly dement him. His resolution is strong enough. Why in the name of pity will not he secure his mind to it? It’s bound to go adrift else, I fear.’
‘But realise what he has suffered, Mr. Monson,’ she answered gently, ‘such a blow might unseat a stronger reason than his. I cannot wonder at his excitement. Look how I am trembling!’ She lifted her little hand, which shook as though she had been seized with a chill, but there was tremor enough in her voice to indicate her agitation. ‘The mere idea that the “Shark” may be much nearer to us than we imagine—that this chase may very shortly bring her within sight of us——’ a strong shiver ran through her. ‘Do you believe it is the “Shark” that that old man saw?’
‘I shall be better able to judge when he comes aboard,’ said I. ‘See, our boat is alongside. They must fend her off handsomely, by George, if she is not to be swamped. Heavens! how that old cask wallows!’
In a few moments the little old man in the tall hat came to the gangway and looked over; there was apparently some discussion; I imagined the elderly humourist was going to funk it, for I fancied I saw him wag his head; but on a sudden, all very nimbly, he dropped into the wide main chains, whence, watching his opportunity, he toppled into the boat, which immediately shoved off. Wilfrid went to the gangway to receive him. I was a little apprehensive of the effect of my cousin’s behaviour—which had some[72]thing of the contortions and motions of a galvanised body—upon the old sea-dog that was coming, and I say I rather hoped that this captain might be a bit too tipsy to prove a nice observer. I took a view of him as he sat in the stern sheets, the boat sinking and rising from peak to hollow as she burst through the water to the gilded, sparkling sweep of the admirably handled oars, and could have laughed out of mere sympathy with the broad grin that lay upon his jolly, mottled countenance. His face was as round as the full moon, and of the appearance of brawn; his nose was a little fiery pimple; small white whiskers went in a slant in the direction of his nostrils, coming to an end under either eye. His hat was too big for him, and pressed down the top of his ears into the likeness of overhanging flaps under the Quaker-like breadth of brim; his mouth was stretched in a smile all the time he was approaching the yacht, and he burst into a loud laugh as he grasped the man-ropes and bundled agilely up the side of the ‘Bride.’
‘You are very good to come on board, sir,’ cried Wilfrid, bowing with agitation, and speaking as though suffering from a swollen throat, with the hurry, anxiety, impatience, which mastered him. ‘I thank you for this visit. I see you have your log-book with you. Let me inquire your name?’
‘Puncheon, sir. Ha! ha! ha! Toby Puncheon, sir; a rascally queer name, ho! ho! And your honour’s a lord, ain’t ye? I didn’t quite catch the words. He! he! he!’ rattled out the old fellow, laughing after almost every other word, and staring at us one after another as he spoke without the least diminution of his prodigious grin.
‘No, no; not a lord,’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘but pray step this way, Captain Puncheon. Charles, please accompany us. Captain Finn, I shall want you below.’
He led the road to the companion, calling to the steward, whilst he was yet midway down the steps, to put champagne and glasses upon the table.
Captain Puncheon’s grin grew alarmingly wide as he surveyed the glittering cabin. ‘My eye!’ he cried, after a rumbling laugh full of astonishment, ‘them’s looking-glasses and no mistake! and pickle me blue if ever I see the likes of such lamps afore on board ship!’ growing grave an instant to utter a low whistle. ‘Why, it’s finer than a theaytre, ain’t it?’ he exclaimed, turning to me, once more grinning from ear to ear, and addressing me as if I was his mate that had come off with him. His glass was filled; he drank to us, and pulled his log-book out of the piece of newspaper in which he had brought it wrapped up.
‘Will you kindly give us,’ said Wilfrid, ‘the date on which you passed the schooner-yacht?’
‘Aye, that I will,’ cried Puncheon, turning back the pages of his log, and then pouncing upon an entry with a forefinger curled by rheumatism into the aspect of a fish-hook as though the piece of writing would run away if he did not keep it squeezed down upon[73] the page. He felt about his coat with his other hand, and then bursting into a laugh exclaimed: ‘Gents, you must read for yourselves. Blow’d if I ain’t gone and forgot my glasses.’
The entry was perfectly ship-shape, and written in a round, somewhat trembling old hand. There were the usual records of weather, courses steered, and the like, and under the heading of observations was: ‘Passed large schooner-yacht steering west-south-west. Hoisted our ensign, but she showed no colours.’ The log gave the latitude and longitude of this encounter as 16° West longitude, 41° 30′ North latitude.
I hurriedly made certain calculations after reading aloud this entry, and addressing Finn said, ‘If that vessel be the “Shark” she has managed to hold her own so far.’
‘Ay, sir,’ answered Finn, peering at my figures, ‘but what’s been her weather?’
‘Are you chasing of her, gents?’ whipped out Puncheon, smiling as though he only waited for us to answer to break into a roar of laughter.
‘Yes,’ cried Wilfrid fiercely, ‘and we mean to catch her;’ then, controlling himself, ‘Captain, will you be so good as to describe the vessel you met?’
‘Describe her? ’Course I will,’ answered the old chap, and forthwith he gave us a sailorly picture of a yacht apparently of the burthen of the ‘Shark’: a fore and aft schooner, a long, low, black, handsome vessel, loftily rigged even for a craft of her kind. She passed within a mile and a half of the ‘Wanderer’; it was about eight o’clock in the morning, the sunshine bright, the wind north-east, a pleasant air. I asked Puncheon if he examined her with his glass? ‘Examine her through my glass? Ay, that I did,’ he answered in his hilarious way. ‘I see some figures aboard aft. No lady. No, ne’er a hint of a female garment. Happen if there was women they was still abed, seeing how young the morn was for females as goes to sea for pleasure. I took notice of a tall gent in a white cap with a naval peak and a white jacket.’ That was about as much as he could tell us, and so saying he regaled himself with a hearty laugh. Finn questioned him as one sailor would another on points of the yacht’s furniture aloft, but the old fellow could only speak generally of the impression left upon him. Wilfrid’s face was flushed with excitement.
‘Finn,’ he exclaimed, ‘what do you think?’
‘Why, your honour,’ said the man deliberately, ‘putting two and two together, and totalling up all sarcumstances of rig, haspect, time and place, I don’t doubt that the schooner-yacht Captain Puncheon here fell in with was the “Shark.”’
Puncheon rose.
‘Empty this bottle,’ cried Wilfrid to him. ‘By heaven, man, the news you give me does me good, though!’
The old chap filled up, grinning merrily.
‘Gents,’ he cried, holding the foaming glass aloft and looking at it[74] with one eye closed, ‘your errand’s an honest one, I’m sure, and so here’s success to it. The craft I fell in with has got legs, mind ye. Yes, by thunder, ha! ha! ha! she’s got legs, gents, and’ll require all the catching I expects your honours have stomachs for. ’Tain’t to be done in the inside of a month, he! he! he! and so I tells ye. See her slipping through it under her square sail! God bless my body and soul, ’twas like the shadow of a cloud running ower the waters. But give yourselves a long course, gents all, and you’ve got a beauty here as must lay her aboard—in time, ha! ha! ha! Your honours, my respects to you.’
Down went the wine and up he got, pulling his hat to his ears and stepping with a deep sea roll up the companion ladder. We followed him to the gangway.
‘Is there nothing more to ask, Charles?’ cried Wilfrid.
But Puncheon had given us all he had to tell, and though I could have wished him to hint at something distinctive in the vessel’s hull, such as her figure-head or any other point of the like kind in which the ‘Shark’ might differ from vessels of her build and appearance, yet there was the strongest possible reason to suppose that the craft he reported was Lord Winterton’s schooner, with Lady Monson and Colonel Hope-Kennedy on board.
Whilst Captain Puncheon waited for the yacht’s boat to haul alongside Sir Wilfrid sent for a box of cigars which he presented to the old chap. The gift produced such a grin that I saw some of the hands forward turn their backs upon us to conceal their mirth.
‘Do you think, captain,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, once more rendered almost alarmingly convulsive in his movements by the excitement that filled him, ‘that there are men aboard your vessel who took note of more than you did in the yacht’s appearance? If so——’
But Puncheon interrupted him by saying that he was the only man who examined the schooner through a glass, and therefore neither his mate nor any of the seamen who were on deck at the time could possibly have observed her so fully as he.
‘Make haste and return,’ bawled my cousin to the fellows in the boat as they shoved off with the grinning old skipper in the stern sheets. ‘Every moment is precious,’ he muttered, walking briskly in short turns opposite Miss Jennings and me. ‘To think of them sneaking along like the shadow of a cloud, hey!’ he sent a wildly impatient look aloft and brought his foot with a heavy stamp to the deck.
‘It is the “Shark” then?’ whispered Miss Jennings.
‘No doubt of it,’ I answered.
She glanced at me as if she had been wounded and her lips turned pale. Well, thought I, anticipation, to be sure, is often the worst part of an affair of this sort, but if the mere hearing of the ‘Shark’ affects this little sweetheart so violently, how will the sighting of the craft serve her, and the boarding of her, if ever it comes to it? In a few minutes the yacht’s boat was returning, whilst you saw the figure of old Puncheon clambering out of his[75] main chains over the bulwarks of the ‘Wanderer.’ A little later and there were hands tailing on to the falls, the boat rising dripping to the davits, and the foretopsail yard slowly pointing its arm to the wind; then, to the full weight of the breeze sweeping red with the sunset into her hollowed canvas, the ‘Bride’ leaned down, sullenly shouldering the swell into foam with the first stubborn push of her bows, till gathering way she was once more swinging into the west and south with the gloom of the evening growing into a windy vagueness on her lee-beam, whilst on the weather quarter, black as indigo against the dull western redness, was the figure of the barque rolling with filled maintopsail over the long Atlantic heavings, and rapidly diminishing into the fragile beauty of some exquisitely carved toy of ebony wood on the skirts of the rising and falling fan-shaped stretch of seething paleness that marked the limits of the ‘Bride’s’ wake.
Wilfrid, who had been standing at the compass staring with a frown at the card, with his arms folded, whilst the men trimmed sail and started the yacht afresh, marched up to me when that business was over and exclaimed, ‘What did you make the average of the “Shark’s” daily runs according to Puncheon’s reckonings of the place of his meeting her?’
‘About a hundred and eighty miles a day,’ I answered.
‘We haven’t been doing that though!’
‘No: but wait a little,’ said I; ‘let your “Bride” feel the trade wind humming aloft.’
‘Finn,’ he bawled. The captain came running to us. ‘Fetch the track chart, Finn. There’s light enough yet to see by.’
The man disappeared and very quickly returned, with a handy chart of the world which he unrolled and laid on the top of the skylight. We all overhung it, Miss Jennings amongst us. The men forward watched us curiously. Something in the manner of them suggested to the swift glance I sent their way that the perception our voyage was more serious, with a wilder, sterner purpose in it than they had imagined, was beginning to dawn upon them since Puncheon’s visit.
‘Mark the spot, Finn,’ exclaimed Wilfrid in the dogged voice of a man sullenly and obstinately struggling to master a feeling of exhaustion, ‘the exact spot where the barque fell in with the “Shark.”’
Finn produced a parallel ruler, a pair of compasses, a pencil and the like, calculated and indicated the spot by a little cross.
‘How short the distance she has sailed seems!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘Fifteen degrees of latitude, though,’ said I; ‘these charts are mighty deceptive. A very small pencil mark will cover a tremendously long course.’
Wilfrid stood motionless with his eyes fixed upon the mark Finn had made. He talked a little to himself, but voicelessly. The captain watched him nervously. My cousin came to himself[76] with a start. ‘What will have been the “Shark’s” course by magnetic compass, Finn, say from the latitude of the Scillies to the spot where the “Wanderer” met her?’
The captain put his parallel rules on the chart and named the course; what it was I forget,—south-west by south, I believe, or something near it.
‘Supposing the wind not to head her, Finn,’ continued my cousin, ‘would she steer the same course down to the time when the “Wanderer” met her?’
‘No, your honour. There’s no call for Fidler any more than there is for me to go to the westwards of Madeira.’
‘Now, Finn, show me on this chart where, steering the course you are now heading, you will have arrived when you have run nine hundred miles?’
‘How’s her head?’ sung out Finn to the fellow at the wheel. The man answered. ‘You hear it, Sir Wilfrid?’ said Finn. My cousin nodded. The captain put his rules on the chart, adjusting them to the course the ‘Bride’ was then sailing, and the measure of nine hundred miles brought the mark he made to touch the cross that represented the ‘Shark’s’ place. ‘That’s right, I think, Mr. Monson,’ said he, turning a sober face of triumph on me.
‘Quite right,’ I answered, and I spoke no more than the truth, for the poor fellow had made his calculations with laborious anxiety.
Wilfrid clapped his hands together with a shout of laughter that carried his voice to a shriek almost, and without speaking a word he strode to the hatch and went below.
Although Finn’s calculations showed very well upon the chart, it will not be supposed I could find anything in them upon which to ground that hope of falling in with the ‘Shark’ which had become a conviction with Wilfrid. The look-out man at our masthead might perhaps, on a clear day, compass a range of some twenty miles, even thirty if it came to a gleam of lofty canvas hovering over a hull a league or two past the slope of waters; but what was a view of this kind to signify in so vast an ocean as we had entered? As I have elsewhere said, the difference of a quarter of a point would in a few hours, supposing a good breeze of wind to be blowing, carry the ‘Bride’ wide of the wake of the ‘Shark,’ and put the two yachts out of sight fair abreast of one another.
Finn understood this as well as I; but when I fell into a talk with him on the subject that evening—I mean the evening of the day on which we had spoken the ‘Wanderer’—he told me very honestly that the odds indeed were heavy against our heaving the[77] ‘Shark’ into view, though he was quite sure of outsailing her if the course was to extend to the Cape of Good Hope; but that as there was a chance of our picking her up, whether by luck, if I chose to think it so, or by his hitting with accuracy upon the line of direction that Fidler would take, he had made up his mind to regard the thing as going to happen, for his own ease of mind as well as to keep my cousin’s expectations lively and trusting.
‘A man can but do his best, sir,’ he said to me. ‘Sir Wilfrid needs a deal of humouring; you can see that, sir. I knew all along, when he first came and told me what had happened and gave me my orders, that the job of keeping him pacified would have to go hand in hand with the business of sailing the “Bride” and lighting upon the “Shark,” if so be she’s discoverable. My notion is that if you’re called upon so to act as to fit an employer’s taste and keep his views and wishes gratified, though by no more than maintaining expectation in him, the best thing is to tarn to and try to think as fur as you can the same way as he do. I don’t mind saying, Mr. Monson, that I allow the whole of this here voyage to be as wague as wagueness can well be; therefore why worrit over parts of it? Suppose we overhaul the “Shark”—then it’ll be all right; suppose we don’t—then it won’t be for the want of trying.’
This was the substance of Finn’s opinion as he imparted it to me that night. His sincerity touched me; besides, I saw worry enough in the poor fellow to make me sorry for him. Indeed, I resolved from that hour to back him up, heartily agreeing with him that the adventure was quite too vague to justify anxiety in respect of any one detail of the programme.
The weather was quiet when I went to bed that night. I came below from my long yarn with Finn, leaving a windy smear of moon over our mastheads and a dark sky going down from it to the obscured sea-line, with here and there a pale and vapoury point of star hovering sparely over a wing of cloud that lay still in the dusk, as though what wind there was blew low upon the waters. The wide sea came to the yacht in a dusky throbbing, like folds of gloom rolling with a sort of palpitation in them to the eye; the foam glanced in places, but there was little weight in the wind, and the pallid spires of the yacht’s canvas floated nearly upright through the dark atmosphere, with a sound of the sob of water coming off her weather bow and the dead plash of the hidden billow falling without life from her quarter, in a way that made one think there were fellows emptying buckets over the side abreast of the wheel.
Wilfrid had been moody and reserved throughout the dinner, and retired early to bed. I sat an hour with Miss Laura, with the mild diversion of a draught-board between us; but we soon forgot to play in talking. We had been but a few days together, yet I had already made the discovery that I wonderfully enjoyed her company, and that I immensely relished a quality of arch na?veté[78] in her conversation, which owed something of its effect to the contrast between a sort of coquettish sagacity in many things she said and the nun-like artlessness and virginal sweetness I seemed to find in the gentle girlish regard of her charming eyes. I also observed in myself that the more I saw of her the more her beauty gained upon me. I never remember meeting a woman’s face that I would sooner have taken as a frank expression of mind; there was a softness and delicacy of feature that one instinctively accepted as an illustration of habitual refinement and purity of thought. Her manner, save when aroused, was of engaging gentleness and tenderness, and her smile the most amiable of any I remember. Her position was of great delicacy, and could not have failed to painfully distress one of your self-conscious women. Our adventure, every reference to it, every mention of the ‘Shark,’ every expression in Wilfrid of grief, shame, temper, was as it were a rude withdrawal of the veil from before her sister’s frailty. There was no other lady on board to help her to bear, so to speak, the burthen of the inevitable topic, and yet she never made it appear as though there was pain and shame to her in the subject, outside her grief for Wilfrid, her eagerness that her sister should be recovered, her resentment against the man who had betrayed and dishonoured his friend.
I may fail to convey what I thought of her maidenly acceptance of her share in this strange adventure, but I am certain that nobody but a person of exquisite instincts could have acted, as she did, the delicate and exacting part allotted her by my cousin.
The weather was still very quiet when I bade her good-night. I went to my cabin, and do not suppose I was ten minutes in my bed before I fell asleep. I awoke to a sound of a great roaring all about, accompanied by the cries of men on deck, the sharp flinging down of coils of rope and the thunder of shaking canvas trembling in every fibre of the hull. My bunk was an athwart-ship one, and I had turned-in, to employ the proper sea parlance, with my head to windward; but now the yacht was lying over on t’other side, and I awoke to find my heels in the air and the weight of my body upon my neck; but the angle of the craft was so sharp that it was not without a prodigious amount of heaving and floundering I managed to get my legs over and to sit upright.
A squall! thought I, feeling for my pillow, which I placed in the port end of my bedstead and once again lay down. A flash of sun-bright lightning glanced through the port-hole as though a gun had been fired into my cabin, and the interior glanced out into a noon-tide effulgence for one breathless instant, in which, however, I managed to catch sight of the angle formed by a coat with a stanchion, upon which it hung by a peg. Upon my word, it was as though the yacht was upon her beam ends—such a heel as was not to be realised by one lying in a bunk or even sitting upright in it: then came the darkness like a sea of ink,[79] rolling to the sight in which the reflection of the flash still writhed, followed by a mighty shock of thunder that died away in a hundred rattling peals, as though ’twas high mountainous land all around the horizon, honeycombed with caverns and every peak as resonant as a hollow dome.
A sharp squall! thought I, but there was too much noise for sleep. It was all hands on deck I was pretty sure by the numerous scampering over my head; the harsh voices of the sailors bawling at the ropes would be swept into faint cries by the rush of the wind, and now and again a heavy lumpish sound that put a quiver into every plank, followed by a snarling noise like the hissing of half a dozen locomotives blowing off steam, was warrant enough to ears not unused to such sounds that the ‘Bride’ was taking large doses of water in pretty freely over her rail.
I lay quiet, and was presently sensible that the yacht was off the wind; the righting of her was no small comfort; she was manifestly going through it like a comet; the sea was now well aft, and the suggestion of swiftness I found in the mere feel of the hull, somehow or other, black as my cabin was and the blacker as it remained for the flash of lightning, was accentuated by the thunderous rush of each surge outstripping us in the race and hurling its black length along the vessel’s side, and the fierce spitting and crackling of the smother of spume that was raised by the vessel’s headlong flight, and that went raging and racing astern on top of the swelling ebony fold that swept forwards from the opposite direction.
Humph! thought I, if this is a case of ‘up keeleg’ with friend Finn he’ll have to enter into something shrewder and surer than dead reckoning to find his way back again into the ‘Shark’s’ wake. I had a mind to see what was happening, and after a spell of troublesome groping and clawing, during which I had like to have broke my nose by striking it against the edge of a chest of drawers built into a corner, I succeeded in lighting my lamp, and was presently snug in a pea coat and a sou’-wester which I had been wise enough to include in the slender sea outfit I had purchased for this voyage. The cabin light was always kept burning throughout the night, dimmed by one of the stewards, after we had retired to our berths, but with plenty of flame left to see by, and on emerging the first object I caught sight of was the figure of a man on his knees on the cabin floor in a posture of prayer and apparently in an agony of fright. Nothing was to be heard of him until I had approached close, for the roaring of the wind and the washing and foaming of seas drowned all other noises; but on stooping to make sure of the fellow, whose hands were clasped over his eyes whilst he held his face upturned as he swayed upon his knees, I could hear him praying with all his might, with an energy indeed that might of itself have accounted for the drops of perspiration that glistened upon his brow, if it wasn’t that his attitude of terror explained the secret of that[80] moisture. It was Muffin. There was something so shameful in the fellow’s cowardice that all in an instant I lost my temper and gave him a kick which flung him at his length, face down, upon the deck. He set up a horrible howl.
‘Oh Lord! oh mercy! we’re gone! we’re gone! Oh, if I was only on dry ground——’
Here I seized him by the collar. ‘Get up, you fool,’ I cried. ‘Do you know where you are, you idiot? Cease! If you alarm Miss Jennings——’ and I hauled him on to his legs, shaking him heartily as I did so.
‘Oh, Mr. Monson,’ he whined, ‘is it you, sir? Tell me we ain’t all dead and gone, sir! Oh, this is ’orrible, though! ’orrible! Never no more; never no more for me!’
‘Be off to your berth at once,’ cried I angrily, though my temper died out of me at the absurd sight of his yellow, working, terrified face, rendered ugly enough to challenge the skill of a Cruikshank by the manner in which, during his devotions, he had streaked his forehead and nose and his cheeks past his eyes with his plaister-like lengths of coal-black hair. He was for speaking, but I grasped him by the shoulder and ran him towards his berth that lay some little distance forward of mine on the starboard side, and when he had shut himself in I made my way on deck, with a peep aft, as I went up the steps, where all seemed quiet.
The night was still very dark, but of a clearer dusk. The moon made a red streak low in the west amongst some ragged clouds that seemed to fall like a short flight of steps, every one edged with blood, to the sea-line, where the muddy crimson drained out, just showing the lurid staining of it now and again when some surge beneath reared an unbroken head to the lustre. The night was made to look amazingly wilder than it was in reality by that western setting jumble of ugly lustre and torn vapour, like a flock of giant bats heading from the moon for ocean solitude of deeper blackness. To windward there was a great lake of indigo-blue in the sky, in which a number of trembling stars were floating and vast white puffs of cloud crossing it with the swiftness of scud in the gale; but to leeward it was just a mass of heaped-up gloom, one dye of dusk on top of another in blocks of blackness such as a poet might dream of in picturing the hellish walls and battlements of a beleaguered city of demons; and upon this mass of darkness that looked as substantial as stone to the eye there was a plentiful play and crackle of violet lightning; but no thunder, at least none that I could hear. It was blowing fresh, but the wind had taken off considerably within the last ten minutes; the ‘Bride’ was close hauled; there was a strong sea on the bow and she was plunging; smartly, with at frequent intervals a brisk squall of spray over her head that rattled upon the deck like a fall of hail in a thunderstorm; a dark gleam would break first here and then there from her deck to her rolling, but the water was draining off fast, flashing in a loud hissing through the scupper holes at every lee send,[81] but with weight enough yet remaining in each rush of it to enable me to gather that it must have been pretty nearly waist-high between the bulwarks with the first shipping of the seas and the first downrush of the fierce squall.
They had snugged the ‘Bride’ to very small canvas; the play of the white waters round her threw out her shape clear as black paint on canvas; at moments she dived till you would think the tall black coil arching at her past the creaming glare crushed out of the sea by the smiting of her forefoot must leap right aboard her; but her staunch and buoyant bow, the truest piece of ocean moulding I ever saw in a ship, would regularly swing with a leap to the peak of the billow, shattering it with a saucy disdain that seemed to be followed by an echo of derisive laughter in the yelling ring of the wind splitting upon the rigging or sweeping into the iron hard cavities of the diminished spaces of wan and spectral canvas.
I took all this in as I stood a minute in the companion hatch; then perceiving the figure of a man to windward almost abreast of me, I crossed to him. It was Finn.
‘Very ugly squall that, Mr. Monson,’ said he after peering at me to make sure of my identity; ‘it found us with tops’l and t’gallants’l set and took us slap aback. It was the most onexpected thing that ever happened to me; as onnatural as that there moon. Talk of keeping a look-out! I was staring hard that way with the wind a pleasant air blowing off t’other side and saw nothing and heard nothing until I felt it.’
‘You had to run?’
‘Ay, but not for long, sir.’
‘How’s her head now, Captain Finn?’
‘Her proper course, Mr. Monson.’
‘Well, the weather is brightening. You’ll be making sail again on your ship, I suppose, presently?’
‘Ay, but let that muck blow away first,’ he answered, pointing with a shadowy arm into the mass of obscurity where the lightning still winked fitfully. ‘After such a blow-me-aback job as this I ain’t going to trust the weather till I can see more of it.’
I lingered a little, watching the slow opening of the sky to windward, and the gradual unfolding of the stars down the velvet declivity, that looked as though purified by the cleansing of the black wet squall, and then bidding good-night to Finn, who seemed a bit subdued by the wildly disconcerting attack of the weather, that to a sober, vigilant seaman was about as uncomfortable a snub in its way as could be administered, I went below, intending to walk straight to my berth and go to bed again. On entering the cabin, however, I found the lamp turned up, and Wilfrid pacing the carpet with long strides and with an agitation of manner that was grotesquely deepened by the occasional stagger of his gait by the plunging of the yacht and the hurried lift of his arm to clutch the nearest thing at hand for support. I concluded that he had been aroused by the commotion of the squall, but thought it[82] strange he had not stepped on deck to see how things were. On seeing me he put his hand on the back of a fixed revolving chair, and swung, or rather reeled, himself into it, then leaned his cheek upon his hand in a posture of extreme moodiness, whilst he kept his eyes bent downwards.
I took a seat opposite him, after a glance round in search of Miss Jennings, who, I thought, might also be up.
‘The noise above disturbed you, I suppose, Wilfrid?’ said I.
‘I have not slept,’ he answered.
‘Not since half-past nine! You went to bed then, you know, and it’s now two o’clock,’ I exclaimed, looking at the dial under the skylight.
‘I have not slept,’ he repeated.
‘I wonder that the squall did not bring you on deck.’
‘For what purpose?’ he exclaimed gloomily. ‘I could hear Finn’s voice; I could follow what the men were doing. If every squall we are likely to meet is to bring me from my bed, I may as well order a hammock to be slung for me on deck.’
‘What is the matter, Wilfrid?’ said I, earnestly and soothingly. ‘Something, I fear, has happened to vex and bother you.’
He passed his hand over his eyes, and looking down said, ‘I have had a warning.’
‘A what?’ I exclaimed.
‘A warning,’ he answered, fetching a deep sigh and making as if to rise, retaining, however, his posture of profound melancholy, whilst he sent a slow, wandering look around, finally fastening his eyes upon me.
‘From whom came this warning, Wilfrid?’ said I cheerfully. ‘Muffin? Egad, you’ll be getting a warning from him soon, I reckon. I found the chap on his knees just now, sweating with fear and praying like clockwork. I gave him a kick, and I wonder the howl that he raised did not bring you running out of your cabin.’ I jabbered this off in a reckless, laughing way, though I watched him narrowly, too, all the time I was speaking.
‘Nothing shall hinder me, Charles,’ he exclaimed, closing his right fist and letting it lie in a menacing way upon the table. ‘I have made up my mind to tear the creature who still remains my wife from the side of the man she has left me for; and before God’—he rolled his eyes up and raised his clenched hand—‘my vow is this: that I will hunt them from port to port, through ocean after ocean, until I meet with them! When that shall be I know not; but this I do know—that my time will come and I can wait. But I must be on the move. Nothing could render life tolerable to me now but the sense of action, the animation and hope of pursuit.’
‘But the warning——?’ said I.
‘Oh, to be vexed by ghostly exhortations—it is enough to craze one!’ he exclaimed. ‘Heaven knows, resolution grows weak enough in me as it is to any thought of my little one that visits me. Oh no,’ he cried, with a sarcastic shake of the head and a[83] singular smile, ‘do not believe that thoughts of my baby girl would cause me to falter even for one breathless instant on this course that I have made up my mind to pursue. But to think of the helpless lamb as alone——’
‘My dear fellow,’ I interrupted, ‘the child could not possibly be in tenderer hands.’
‘I know, I know,’ he cried, with a sob in his voice, ‘but she is motherless, Charles; and then how precarious is life at that age! I may never see her again!’
He broke down at this and hid his face.
‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘your nerves have been strained by the incident of this afternoon, or, I should say of yesterday afternoon—unduly, though intelligibly, excited by Puncheon’s report of having passed the “Shark.” Endeavour to get some rest, old fellow. These warnings, these visions, mysterious voices sounding out of heaven knows where, midnight shapes as thin as moonshine—Wilfrid, depend upon it, they all emanate from a disordered condition of that part of the body which the Chinese have most wisely selected as the true seat of the soul; I mean here,’ said I, patting my waistcoat.
He regarded me somewhat vacantly and sat awhile in silence, sighed tremulously, and stepped to the foot of the companion ladder, where he stood staring up into the arch of black night that filled the companion entrance. Presently Finn rumbled out an order on deck. There was the flash of bright stars upon the gleaming ebony of the cabin windows with every heave of the yacht; the sea was moderating, and the loud humming of the wind aloft gradually fining into a dull complaining noise. Ropes were thrown down overhead; voices began to sing out. I uttered a loud yawn. Wilfrid turned and exclaimed, ‘Don’t let me keep you up, Charles.’
‘It’s all right,’ said I, ‘but why not go to bed, too? Or first describe this warning that you have had; express the nature of it. Perhaps, like the proverbial onlooker who sees most of the game, I might be able to help you with some reassuring suggestion.’
But he merely shook his head; and now, feeling quite intolerably sleepy, and in no mood, therefore, as you will suppose, to reason with a mind so oppressed as his with superstitious melancholy, I called a cheery good-night to him, went to my cabin, and was soon fast asleep.
I was awakened by the brilliant daylight that filled my berth, and at once rose and sung out to the steward to prepare me a bath. All the time I bathed and dressed I was thinking of Wilfrid and of what he called his ‘warning.’ I supposed it was some voice that he had heard, and he had made it plain that it had referred, amongst other things maybe, to his little infant. Now, though of course I had known for years that he was ‘touched,’ as the expression goes, I had never understood that his craziness had risen to the height of hearing voices and beholding visions in his waking[84] hours; and I was, therefore, forced to believe that his mind was far more unhinged at present than his manners and speech, peculiar as they unquestionably were at times, had indicated. Well, thought I, assuredly if he gets worse, if the symptoms should grow more defined, this chase will have to come to an end. I, for one, should most certainly call a halt. Why, what could be fuller of madness than his vow last night before me—to go on sailing from port to port, and traversing ocean after ocean, until he has captured her ladyship; as if a pursuit on such lines as these were going to end in anything better than driving all hands daft and converting the ‘Bride’ into a floating lunatic asylum? So far, it is true, I have found method enough to keep my mind tolerably easy; but if poor Wilfrid is going to become very much worse, hang me, thought I, plying a pair of hair-brushes with very agitated hands, if Captain Finn don’t haul his wind for the handiest port and set me ashore for one.
It was a fresh sweet ocean morning, one of the fairest I remember; the wind, a tender fanning from the west, warm enough to make one fancy an odour and balm of the tropics in it, leagues ahead as those parallels yet lay. The sky was one broad surface of curls and feathers of pearl-coloured vapour, an interweaving, as it were, of many-shaped links of silken cloud shot with silver and amber and gold from the early sun. I never beheld a lovelier dome of sky, so tender in glory and rich in delicate perfections of tints. The sea spread in a firm dark line to it like a blue floor under some mighty roof of marble; the sun’s wake came in a misty stream of light to the port bends of the yacht, where it was flashed by the mirror-like wet blackness of the glossy side back deep into the brimming azure of the brine in a great puff of radiance that made one think of a cloud of brightly illuminated steam ascending from the depths.
Everything was brilliant and clean and cheerful, the decks of the white softness of foam, brass sparkling, rigging flemish-coiled or festooned as by an artist’s hand upon the pins; forward stood the long cannon radiant as polished jet, a detail that gave an odd significance to the saucy knowing ‘spring,’ as it is called, of the yacht that way. The cocks and hens in the coops were straining their throats and blending with their cheerful voices was a noise of pigs; there was black smoke pouring away from the galley chimney, and now and again you got a whiff of something good frying for the men’s breakfasts, for my cousin fed his sailors well. The ‘Bride’ with erect masts was sliding over the wide folds of water whose[85] undulations were so long drawn and regular as to be scarce perceptible in the motion of the vessel; there was air enough to crisp the sea, and where the sun’s light lay the tremble was blinding; on either bow was a curl of silver and pale eddyings alongside with a line of oil-smooth water going away astern from under the counter; yet we were but creeping, too, spite of the yacht being a pile of white cloths—every stitch she owned abroad to her topgallant studdingsail.
The mate had charge, and was stumping the weather side of the quarterdeck in his sour way when I arrived.
‘Good morning, Mr. Crimp.’
‘Marning,’ he answered.
‘Ugly squall that last night.’
‘Ugly? ay.’
The fellow gave the word sir to no man, restricting its use when ashore to dogs as Finn once told me; but his surly tricks of speech and manner were so wholly a part of him, so entirely natural, so unconsciously expressed, that it would have been as idle to resent them as to have quarrelled with him for having an askew eye or lost one’s temper because his beard resembled rope yarns.
‘Anything in sight?’ I asked, looking round.
‘Ay,’ he answered.
‘Where?’ I exclaimed, running my eye over the sea.
‘Up yonder,’ he responded, indicating with a gesture of his chin the topgallant-yard where was perched the inevitable figure of a look-out man.
‘But where away, Mr. Crimp,—where away, sir?’
‘On the starboard bow,’ he answered, ‘’tain’t long been sighted.’
Breakfast would not be ready for some time yet, and having nothing to do I thought I would make a journey aloft on my own account and take a view of the distant sail and of the spacious field of the glittering morning ocean from the altitude of the masthead. I stepped below for a telescope of my own, a glass I had many a time ogled the sea with when I was doing penance for past and future sins in African and West Indian waters. Muffin was at the foot of the companion steps holding a pair of Wilfrid’s boots. He cast his eyes down and drew his figure in though there was abundance of room for me to pass. A slow, obsequious, apologetic smile went twisting and curling down his lips; his yellow face had a burnished look; he was uncommonly clean-shaven, and his hair was brushed or plastered to the smoothness of his skull.
‘Got your courage back?’ said I.
‘Thank you, yes, sir,’ he answered humbly with his eyes respectfully cast down. ‘Richard’s himself again this morning, sir, as the saying is. But it was a ’orrible time, sir.’
‘You came near to making it so,’ said I. ‘Have you been to Sir Wilfrid yet?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘How is he?’
‘Asleep, sir,’ he replied in a blandly confidential way.
‘Glad to hear it,’ I exclaimed, ‘don’t disturb him. He passed a bad night down to two or three o’clock this morning.’ I was going; suddenly I stopped. ‘By the way,’ said I, rounding upon the fellow, ‘how long have you been in Sir Wilfrid’s service?’
My question appeared to penetrate him with a consuming desire to be exact. He partially closed one eye, cocked the other aloft like a hen in the act of drinking, and then said with the air of one happy in the power of speaking with accuracy, ‘It’ll be five months to the hour, sir, come height o’clock, Friday evening next.’
‘During the time that you have been in his service,’ said I carelessly, ‘have you ever heard him speak of hearing voices or seeing visions?’
‘Woices, no, sir,’ he answered; ‘but wisions,’ he added with a sigh and lengthening his yellow face into an expression of deep concern, ‘has, I fear, sir, more’n once presented theirselves to him.’
‘Of what nature, do you know?’
‘Sir Wilfrid’s a little mysterious, sir,’ he responded in a greasy tone of voice, and looking down as if he would have me understand that with all due respect he was my cousin’s valet and knew his place.
I said no more, but made my way on deck with a suspicion in me that the fellow had lied, though I hardly knew why I should think so. I trudged forward, and finding three or four of the men hanging about the galley I pulled out five shillings and gave the money to one of them, saying that I was going aloft and wished to pay my footing, for I was in no temper to be chased and worried. This made me free of the rigging, into which I sprang and had soon shinned as high as the topgallant-yard, upon which I perched myself so noiselessly that the man who overhung it on the other side of the mast and who was drowsily chewing upon a quid of tobacco with his eye screwed into Wilfrid’s lovely telescope, had no notion I was alongside of him. I coughed softly, for I had known seamen to lose their lives when up aloft by being suddenly startled. He put a whiskered face past the mast and stared at me as if I was Old Nick, out of the minutest pair of eyes I ever saw in the human head, mere gimlet-holes they seemed for the admission of light.
‘Thinking of your sweetheart, Jack?’ said I with a laugh, ignorant of his name but counting Jack to be a sure word.
‘Can’t rightly say what I was a-thinking of, sir,’ he answered hoarsely; ‘’warn’t my sweetheart anyways, seeing that the only gell I was ever really partial to sarved me as her ledship sarved Sir Wilfrid yonder,’ indicating the quarterdeck with a sideways motion of his head.
‘Cut stick, eh?’ said I.
‘Wuss than that, sir,’ he answered. ‘If she’d ha’ taken herself off and stopped at that I dunno as I should have any occasion[87] to grumble; but she prigged the furniture that I’d laid in agin getting married. Ay, prigged it. The boiling amounted to fourteen pound tew, a bloomin’ lot o’ money for a poor seafaring man to be robbed of for the sake of a master chimney-sweep.’ He cast a slow disgusted look round and expectorated with an air of loathing.
‘I hope you got the master chimney-sweep locked up,’ said I.
‘No fear!’ cried he, talking very fast; ‘smite me, your honour, if that there gell didn’t tarn to and swear that that furniture was hers, bought out of her own savings, and that she guv me the money to order it with. Thinking o’ my sweetheart!’ he grumbled, lifting the telescope in an abstracted manner to his eye, ‘if it worn’t for women dummed if this ’ere earth wouldn’t be worth a-living in.’
I smothered a laugh, and catching sight of the sail shining faintly in the blue air, leagues and leagues distant as it seemed, I pointed the glass and easily distinguished the royal, topgallant-sail and a snatch of the topsail of a ship heading directly for us.
‘I wonder if she’ll have any news?’ said I.
‘Beg your pardon, sir,’ exclaimed the man, ‘but could you tell me how long it’s reckoned in the cabin this here ramble’s a-going to last?’
‘What was the nature of the voyage you signed for?’
‘Why,’ he replied, ‘a yachting cruise to Table Bay and home.’
‘It’ll not exceed that, I believe,’ I exclaimed.
‘And if we picks up that there “Shark” and recovers the lady afore we git to the Cape, shall we keep all on or shift our hellum for Southamptin again?’
‘Captain Finn will be able to tell you more about it than I,’ I responded in a tone that silenced him, though his tiny eyes looked athirst for information as he regarded me aslant over one of his huge whiskers.
The height from which I surveyed the vast plain of sea, the spirit of whose loneliness seemed to find the one touch of emphasis it needed to render its magnitude realisable by human instincts in that remote flaw of ship’s canvas which broke the continuity of the boundless horizon filled me with a feeling of exhilaration I cannot express; the sweet mild ocean breeze high on that slender yard sank through and through me, and vitality to its most secret recesses was quickened by it into a very intoxication of life, new, free, ardent; the air hummed gently in a vibratory metallic note as though it were some echo of a distant concert of harps and violins; far down the hull of the yacht, plentiful as was her beam in reality, looked like a long slender plank rounded at the bows, the whiteness of the deck showing with a sort of radiance as though it were thinly sheeted with crystal upon which the shadows of the rigging, masts, and canvas lay dark and beautifully clear, with a fitful swaying of them to the heave of the fabric, off polished and brilliant things such as the skylight or the brass decorations, when flashes of fire would leap forth to be veiled again in the violet[88] gloom of the recurrent shade. The thin curve of foam on either hand the cutwater looked like frosted silver; my eye went to the airy confines of the ocean spreading out into a delicate haze of soft azure light where it washed the marble of that magnificent morning firmament, and then it was that, sharper than ever I had before felt it, there rose the perception in me of the incalculable odds against our sighting the yacht we were in pursuit of, so measureless did the ocean distance appear when with the gaze going from the ‘Bride’s’ masthead I thought of the distance that made the visible and compassable sphere, big as it was, as little as a star compared with the heavenly desert it floats in.
When I looked down again I observed Miss Jennings watching me from the gangway with her hand shading her eyes. I raised my hat and she bowed, and being wistful of her company I bade my friend Jack keep his eyes polished, as the piece that was nailed to the mast would help to lessen the loss that his sweetheart had occasioned him, and descended, hearing him rumbling in his gizzard as I got off the foot rope, though what he said I did not catch.
‘What is there to be seen, Mr. Monson?’ was Miss Jennings’ first question, with a delicate fire of timorous expectation in her eyes.
‘Only a ship,’ said I.
‘Not—not——’
‘No! not the “Shark” yet,’ I exclaimed smiling.
‘I am stupid to feel so nervous. I dare say I am as passionately anxious as Wilfrid to see my sister in this vessel safe—and separated from—from’—she faltered and quickly added, bringing her hands together and locking them, ‘but I dread the moment to arrive when the “Shark” will be reported in sight.’
‘Well, if we are to pick up that craft,’ said I, ‘we shall do so and then there’ll be an end on’t. But I give you my word, Miss Jennings, the ocean looks a mighty big place from that bit of a stick up there.’
‘Too big for this chase?’
‘Too big I fear to give Wilfrid the chance he wants.’
She sent a bright glance at the topgallant yard and said, ‘Does not that great height make you feel dizzy?’
‘Ay, as wine does. There is an intoxication as of ether in the air up there. Oh, Miss Jennings, if I could only manage to get you on to that yard—see how near to heaven it is! You would then be able not only to say that you looked like an angel, but that you felt like one.’
She laughed prettily and turned as if to invite me to walk. After a bit I spoke of the squall last night. It had not disturbed her. Then I told her of Wilfrid’s melancholy perturbation, on which her face grew grave and her air thoughtful.
‘He did not tell you the nature of the warning?’ she inquired.
‘No. It evidently had reference to his baby. I wished to[89] ascertain whether it was a voice or a vision—though I really don’t know why; for an hallucination is an hallucination all the world over, and it signifies little whether it be a sheeted essence to affect the eye or a string of airy syllables to affright the ear.’
‘I am sorry, I am sorry,’ she exclaimed anxiously; ‘it is a bad symptom, I fear. Yet it ought not to surprise one. The shock was terrible—so recent too! Scarcely a fortnight ago he felt safe and happy in his wife’s love and faith——’
‘Maybe,’ I interrupted, ‘but I wouldn’t be too sure though. When I last met him—I mean somewhile before he came to ask me to join him in this trip—his manner was very clouded, I thought, when he spoke of his wife. I fancy even then suspicion was something more than a seed. But still, as you say, it is all desperately recent, and it certainly is a sort of business to play havoc with such a mind as his. Did you ever hear of his having warnings or seeing visions before?’
‘Never.’
‘I asked his valet that question just now, and he told me he did not know that his master heard “woices,” but he believed he was troubled with “wisions,” as he called them.’
‘Wilfrid has been very secret then. My sister spoke much to me of the oddness of his character, made more of it indeed than ever I could witness,—but then one understands why, now,’ she exclaimed with an angry toss of her head. ‘But she never once hinted at his suffering from delusions of the kind you name. How should his man know then? Wilfrid is not a person to be so very confidential as all that with his servant. I never liked Muffin, and I believe he is a story-teller.’
‘So do I,’ said I, ‘and a coward to boot,’ and I told her of my finding him on his knees, and how I had prostrated him with a kick. This provoked one of her cordial, sweet, clearing laughs. It was a music to fit to gayer thoughts than we had been discoursing, and presently we were chatting lightly about dress, society, some maestro’s new opera and other light topics very much more suitable for a yacht’s quarter-deck under such a morning heaven as was then shining upon us, than the raven, owl, and bat-like subjects of ghosts, warnings, visions, and insanity.
The breakfast bell rang; Muffin arrived with a soap-varnished face and a humble bow, and in greasy accents delivered his master’s compliments to us and, please, we were not to wait breakfast for him. But when we were half through the meal Wilfrid came from his cabin and seated himself. He looked worn and worried; his expression was that of a man who has succeeded in calming himself after a secret bitter mental conflict, but whose countenance still wears the traces of his struggle. He called for a cup of tea, which with a slice of dry toast formed his breakfast. Now and again I saw him glancing wistfully at Miss Jennings, but his eyes fell from her when she looked at him as though he feared the detection of some wish or thought in the manner of his watching her.[90] He inquired languidly about the weather, the sail the yacht was under, and the like.
‘There’ll be a ship in sight over the bow,’ said I, ‘by the time we are ready to go on deck.’
‘Ha!’ he exclaimed, instantly briskening; ‘we must speak her. Were it to come to twenty vessels a day passing us we should hail them all. But it is the wind’s capriciousness that makes the fretting part of an excursion of this kind. Here are we creeping along as though in tow of one of our boats, whilst where the “Shark” is there may be half a gale driving her through it as fast as a whale’s first rush to the stab of a harpoon.’
‘Heels were given to us in the small hours of this morning though,’ said I. ‘We covered more space of sea in five minutes than I should like to swim if I had a month to do it in.’
‘Oh, but she was off her course,’ exclaimed Wilfrid.
‘Only to the first of the squall,’ I exclaimed; ‘when I went on deck she was lying fair up again and crushing through it with the obstinacy of a liner.’
He glanced at me absently as though he barely attended to my words, and then looked round him, as I supposed, to observe if Muffin and the stewards were out of hearing. He lay back in his chair, eyeing Miss Jennings for a little with a thoughtful regard that was made pathetic by the marks of care and grief in his face.
‘Laura,’ he said, ‘I am worrying about baby.’
‘Why, Wilfrid?’ she answered gently.
‘Oh, it may be a mere instinctive anxiety, some secret misgiving, well founded but quite inexplicable and therefore to be sneered at by friend Charles here—who knows not yet the subtleties of a flesh-and-blood tie—as mere sentiment.’
‘But why allow a fancy to worry you, Wilfrid?’ said I.
‘I fear it is no fancy,’ he answered quickly.
‘I told Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘that you have been vexed and upset by what you interpreted into a warning.’
‘Did it particularly refer to baby?’ she asked.
‘Wholly,’ he responded gloomily.
‘But confound it all, Wilfrid,’ cried I somewhat impatiently, ‘won’t you put this miserable vision into words? What form did it take? A warning! If you choose to view things asquint they’re full of warnings. Consider the superstitions which flourish; the signs of luck and of ill-luck; the meaning of the stumble on the threshold, the capsized salt-cellar, and the rest of the inventions of the wicked old hags who ride a cock-horse on broomsticks. Why,’ I cried, talking vehemently with the idea of breaking through the thickness upon his mind, though it was no better than elbowing a fog, ‘I protest, Wilfrid, I would rather swing at your lower-yardarm and be cut down after a reasonable time to plomb the deep peace of the green silence beneath our keel, than live in a torment of apprehension of shadows, and convert life into a huge mustard[91] poultice to adjust to my quivering anatomy staggering onwards to the grave!’
He surveyed me with a lack-lustre eye whilst he listened.
‘Might not this warning, as you call it, Wilfrid,’ said Miss Jennings, ‘have been some brief, vivid dream, the impression of which was keen enough, when you awoke, to make you imagine you had viewed what had appeared with open eyes?’
‘No!’ he answered emphatically, ‘what I saw I saw as I see you.’
‘Then it wasn’t a voice?’ I exclaimed.
‘No matter,’ he said, ‘God’s eye is upon the innocent. Surely he will protect my little one. Still—still—’ he seemed to struggle with some thought and paused.
I made up my mind to attempt a bold stroke. ‘Wilf,’ said I, ‘your child must be dearer to you than your wife. Since you are uneasy about the bairn why not abandon a pursuit which, I give you my word, seems to me about as aimless as a chase after the flying shadow of a cloud, and shift your helm for home, where you will be able to have the child by your side and where there will be no need for warnings relating to her to worry you?’
A dangerous light came into his eyes; his strangely cut nostrils enlarged and trembled, half a dozen dark moods went like ripples of shadow over his face. I regarded him steadfastly, but I will own not without a good deal of anxiety, for his bearing at this moment had more of the madman in it than I had ever before witnessed. He breathed deep several times before speaking.
‘You are right,’ he said; ‘my child is dearer to me than my wife, but my honour stands first of all. For God’s sake do not craze me with such suggestions. Look at me!’ he cried, extending his arms, ‘gripped here,’ clasping his left hand, ‘by my child that in its sweet innocence would withhold me from this pursuit; and dragged here,’ and here he clenched his right hand with a menacing shake of it, ‘by a sense of duty that must have its way though it should come to my never setting eyes on my baby again. Charles’—his voice sank—‘at your hands I should have expected something better than such advice as this. If you are weary of the voyage——’
‘No, no,’ I interrupted.
‘Why torment me then,’ he shouted, ‘by representing this pursuit as idle as a chase of shadows? Is it so? Great heaven, man! you yourself read out the entry in Captain Puncheon’s log-book.’
‘Well, well, Wilfrid,’ said I soothingly, ‘I am very sorry to have said anything to annoy you. The fact is I am too prosaic in my views of things to be as helpful as I should like to be in a quest of this sort. Come, shall we go on deck now and see if that chap which I sighted from the topgallant-yard has hove into view yet?’
The poor fellow rose slowly from his chair, straightening up his figure till he looked twice as tall again as he was. His anger had left him.
‘Oh for the privilege,’ he exclaimed, ‘of being able to catch but a single glimpse of the future! Would to heaven I had been born a saint with a glory round my head, for by that light only is it possible to interpret the hieroglyphs in which the page of life is printed.’
‘Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘your sunny hair comes so near to this sort of nimbus my cousin desires, that I am sure if you would cast your eyes upon the mystical page that puzzles him you could read it aloud to us both by the light of those golden tresses.’
‘Charles,’ exclaimed Wilfrid shortly, ‘you are for making fun of everything,’ and he stalked to his cabin, but only to fetch his pipe, as I afterwards found.
I could not discover, however, that Miss Jennings wholly agreed in Wilfrid’s notion of my ridiculing propensity.
Right over the bows on either hand the sky had cleared since the early morning; the fairy drapery of linked, prismatic, shell-like cloud had lifted, leaving the sea-line a dark blue sweep of water against the delicate effulgence of the heavens, and like a star climbing above that most exquisite horizon shone the sail that was approaching us, still distant a fair eight miles, but already distinctly visible from the low altitude of the ‘Bride’s’ quarter-deck. Sir Wilfrid, leaning over the side, sent a long, yearning look at her, then with a glance at the man on the topgallant-yard he walked over to Finn, who had relieved the mate at eight bells, and conversed with him. I got a chair for Miss Jennings, fetched her novel—the end of the first volume of which seemed still as far off as the Cape of Good Hope—and a rug for her feet, and having made her comfortable I loaded a pipe and squatted myself on deck under the lee of the mainmast.
I was not perhaps in the very sweetest of tempers; for though what I had said below might have been a bit provoking, Wilfrid had turned upon me for it a little too hotly methought. This expedition, to be sure, had a special interest for him, as it had a special interest for Miss Jennings; but so far as I was concerned it was a mere sympathetic undertaking. My cousin, to be sure, was ‘wanting’; but that consideration was not going to render any indignation I might unwarily provoke in him the more endurable. My quarrel, however, just then lay with myself. I was beginning to consider that I had joined Wilfrid in this cruise too hurriedly; that had I insisted upon more time for reflection I should have declined the adventure for the very good reason that I was unable to see how I could be of the least use to him in it. The ocean[93] makes people selfish; its monotony presses upon and contracts the mind as its visible girdle circumscribes the sight. Thought is forced inwards, and the intellect devours itself as the monkey eats its tail. I was already pining somewhat for the diversions of the shore. Had I been sensible of any limit to the daily and nightly routine of eating, sleeping, keeping a look-out and discussing probabilities, my humour might have lightened somewhat; but on what date was this voyage to end? Where was this white fabric that was floating in beauty over the quiet waters going to carry me? Heavy clouds of smoke floated from my lips when I thought that for months and months I might be sundered from my club, from the opera, of which I was a very great lover, from the engaging recreation of billiards, from the quarter of a hundred of pleasures with which the idle man of means loads the blunderbuss of life to shoot at and kill the flying hours as they pass.
Poor Wilfrid, though! I thought with a sigh; and an emotion of pity rose in me as a rebuke when I glanced at his long, awkward figure, thought of the bitter heart-ache that left him only when he slept, of his love for his little one, of the dreadful grief and dishonour that had come to him, of this apparently aimless pursuit upon the boundless surface of the ocean of a faithless woman, with the subtle distressing quality of madness in all he did, in all he thought, to make his conduct a sadder thing than can be described.
I peeped round the mast for a short view of Miss Jennings. She seemed to have lighted on a chapter in the novel that was interesting. Under the droop of her long lashes her half-closed violet eyes showed with a drowsy gleam; her profile had the delicacy of a cameo, clear and tender, against the soft grey of the bulwarks past her. Deuced odd, thought I, that I should find her prettiness so fascinating; as though, forsooth, she was the first sweet girl I had ever seen! I filled another pipe and sat awhile puffing slowly, with these lines of haunting beauty running in my head:
Have you seen but a bright lily grow,
Before rude hands have touched it?
Have you marked but the fall of the snow
Before the soil hath smutch’d it?
Have you felt the wool of the beaver?
Or swan’s down ever?
Or have smelt o’ the bud o’ the briar?
Or the nard in the fire?
Or have tasted the bag of the bee?
O so white! O so soft! O so sweet is she!
The poet is also the prophet; and maybe, thought I, when old Ben Jonson planned this fairy temple of words, he had his eye on some such another little delicate goddess as that yonder.
But there was to happen presently something of a kind to send sentiment flying.
Bit by bit the cloud-mailed sky had drawn away down into the northward, until far past our mastheads that way it was clear blue[94] heaven with an horizon ruling it of a sort of transparent sharpness that made you imagine you saw the atmosphere beyond through it as though it were the edge of some huge lens. The breeze was weak and the yacht’s pace very leisurely; there were hints of a calm at hand, here and there in certain long glassy swathes which wound like currents amongst the darker shadow of the wrinkling breeze upon the water; to every small roll upon the long sleepy undulation, the main boom swang in with a short rattle of canvas in the head of the sail and a flap or two forwards with the smite of the mast by the square topsail as though there were hands aloft lazily beating a carpet.
The vessel ahead was steering dead for us, her masts in one. She was much smaller than I had supposed from the first glimpse I caught of her from the masthead—a little brig, apparently, her cloths showing out rusty to the brilliance as she neared us, albeit afar they had shone like a star of white fire. Her hull was of a dirty yellow—a sort of pea soup colour, and the foot of her foresail was spread by a bentinck boom. She was without an atom of interest in my eyes—a small foreigner, as I supposed, sluggishly lumbering home to some Spanish or Italian port with her forecastle filled with chocolate-coloured Dagos, and the cabin atmosphere poisonous with the lingering fumes of bad cooking.
Wilfrid and Finn stood looking at her together, the latter raising a glass to his eye from time to time. I knocked the ashes out of my bowl and crossed over to them.
‘It will be strange if she has any news to give us of the “Shark,”’ said I.
‘We will speak her, of course,’ said Wilfrid.
‘Looks as if she meant to give us the stem,’ exclaimed Finn, with a glance aft at the fellow at the helm; ‘she is steering dead on for us as if her course were a bee-line and we were athwart it.’
‘I expect she’ll not be able to talk to you in English,’ said I.
‘What is her country, do you think, Mr. Monson?’ asked Miss Jennings, closing her volume and joining us.
‘Italian. What say you, captain?’
‘Well, I can’t rightly tell what she is,’ he answered, ‘but I know what she ain’t—and that’s English.’ He stepped aft, bent on the ensign, and ran it aloft.
‘Does she see us?’ exclaimed Wilfrid; ‘really she is steering as if she would run us down.’
I took the captain’s glass and brought it to bear. She was bow on, and there was no sign of a head over the forecastle rail—nothing living in the rigging or upon the yards either; the foresail concealed the run of her abaft. ‘She appears derelict,’ said I, ‘with her helm secured amidships, and blowing like the wind—as she listeth.’
‘Time to get out of her road, I think,’ grumbled Finn. ‘Down hellum!’
The turn of a spoke or two brought the stranger on the lee bow.[95] Then it was that, on taking another view of her through the glass, I observed a couple of men standing near a jolly-boat, that swung at a pair of heavy wooden davits like a Nantucket whaler’s on the quarter. One of them wore a red cap resembling an inverted flower-pot; the other, whilst he addressed his companion, gesticulated with inconceivable vehemence.
‘Foreigners of a surety!’ said I; ‘they’ll have no news for us.’
All continued quiet; the two vessels approached each other slowly; the stranger now proving herself, as I had supposed her, a brig of about a hundred and eighty tons, as dirty a looking craft as ever I saw, stained in streaks about the hull, as though her crew washed the decks down with the water in which they boiled their meat; her rigging slack and grey for want of tar; the clews of her sails gaping at a distance from her yardarms; and at her mainmast-head an immense weather-cock, representing a boat with what I supposed to be a saint standing up in it, with gilt enough left upon the metal of which it was formed to flash dully at intervals as the rolling of the vessel swung the sunlight off and on to it. As she lifted to the floating heave of the sea she showed a bottom of ugly green sheathing, rich with marine growths, dark patches of barnacles, sea-moss, and long trailings of weed rising vividly green from the sparkle of the brine.
‘What a very horrid-looking boat,’ observed Miss Jennings.
As the girl said this, I saw the fellow at the stranger’s wheel revolve it with frantic gestures as though some deadly danger had been descried close aboard; the brig came heavily and sluggishly round right athwart our course, showing no colours, and dipping her channels to the run of the folds with the weary motion of a waterlogged vessel, and so lay all aback. Finn looked on, scarcely understanding the man?uvre, then bawled out, ‘Hard down! Hard down! Chuck her right up in the wind! Why, bless my body and soul, what are the fools aiming at?’
The yacht nimbly answering her helm came to a stand, her square canvas to the mast, her fore and aft sails fluttering.
‘Hail her, Finn!’ cried Wilfrid with excitement.
‘No need, sir; they’re coming aboard,’ answered the captain, and sure enough there were the men, the only two besides the man at the helm who were visible, working like madmen to lower away their jolly-boat. In their red-hot haste they let her drop with a run, and the fat fabric smote the water so heavily that I looked to see her floating in staves alongside. Then down one fall with the agility of a monkey dropped the man in the red nightcap into her and unhooked the blocks, jumping about like a madman. His companion swung himself down by the other fall, and in a trice both men, sitting so far in the head of the boat as to cock her stern high up whilst her nose was nearly under, were pulling for the yacht as though the devil himself were in pursuit of them.
‘What do they want? The “Bride”?’ exclaimed Wilfrid,[96] breaking into a huge roar of laughter, with a slap on his knee. He had been eyeing the approach of the boat with a sort of high, lifting stare—head thrown back, nostrils round and quivering like an impatient horse’s.
‘The desire of the moth for the star!’ said I to Miss Jennings.
‘But the simile won’t hold; yonder red nightcap spoils the fancy of the moth.’
‘Shall we receive them aboard, sir?’ exclaimed Captain Finn.
‘Certainly,’ responded Wilfrid, with another short shout of laughter.
‘Unship that there gangway,’ sung out Finn; ‘the steps over the side, one of ye.’
The two strange creatures pulled with amazing contortions. Small wonder that the heap of child-like disposition that pretty well made up the substance of Wilfrid’s manhood, should have been stirred into extravagant merriment by the wild movements of the two fellows’ bodies, the windmill-like flourishings of their oars, the flopping and flapping of the red cap, the incessant straining and twisting of the chocolate faces over the shoulder to see how they were heading, the shrill exclamations that sounded from the instant the fellows were within ear-shot and that never ceased until they had floundered and splashed alongside.
I never beheld two more hideous men. Their skins were begrimmed with dirt, and their colour came near to the complexion of the negro with sun and weather and neglect of soap; the hair of the seaman that wore the dirty red nightcap fell in snake-like coils upon his back and shoulders, black as tar and shining as grease. He wore thick gold hoops in his ears and a faded blue sash round his waist; his feet were naked, and for the like of them it would be necessary to hunt the forests of Brazil. The other man wore a slouched felt hat, a pair of grey trousers jammed into half Wellington boots, a jacket confined by a button at the neck, the sleeves thrown over his back, whilst his dark arms, naked to the elbows, were hairy as a baboon’s, with a glimpse to be caught of a most intricate network of gunpowder and Indian ink devices covering the flesh to the very finger-nails. This creature had a very heavy moustache, backed by a pair of fierce whiskers, with flashing, though blood-shot eyes, like a blot of ink upon a slice of orange-peel.
We were in a group at the gangway when they came sputtering alongside, flinging down their oars and walloping about in the wildest conceivable scramble as they made fast the painter and clawed their way up; and the instant they were on our deck they both let fly at us in a torrent of words, not attempting to distinguish amongst us, but both of them addressing first one and then another, all with such mad impetuosity of speech, such smiting of their bosoms, such snapping of their fingers and convulsive brandishing of their fists, that the irrecognisable tongue in which they[97] delivered themselves was rendered the most hopelessly confounding language that ever bewildered the ear. It was quite impossible to gather what they desired to state. First they would point to our ensign, then to their brig, then to the long gun upon our forecastle, meanwhile talking with indescribable rapidity. Finn tried to check them; he bawled, ‘Stop! stop! You no speakee English?’ but they only stared and let drive again the moment he ended his question.
‘There’s no good in all this,’ said Wilfrid, ‘we must find out what they want. What the deuce is their language, Charles, d’ye know?’
‘A sort of Portuguese, I imagine,’ said I, ‘but a mighty corrupt specimen of that tongue, I should think.’
‘I will try them in French,’ said he, and approaching the fellow in the red nightcap he bawled in French, with an excellent accent, ‘What is wrong with your ship? What can we do for you?’
Both men shook their heads and broke out together afresh. It was amazing that they should go on jabbering as though we perfectly understood them when one glance at our faces should have assured them that they might as well have addressed the deck on which they stood.
‘Try ’em in Latin, Wilf,’ cried I.
He addressed a few words to them in that tongue, but his English accent extinguished the hint or two they might have found in the words he employed had he pronounced them in South European fashion, and after glaring at him a moment with a deaf face the red-capped man stormed forth again into a passion of speech accompanied by the most incredible gesticulations, pointing to his brig, to our flag, to the cannon as before, winding up in the delirium of his emotion by flinging his cap down on deck and tearing a handful of hair out of his head.
Our crew were all on deck and had come shouldering one another aft as far as they durst, where they stood looking on, a grinning, hearkening, bewhiskered huddle of faces. I thought it just possible that one of them might understand the lingo of our grimy and astonishing visitors, and suggested as much to Captain Finn. He called out, ‘Do any one of you men follow what these chaps are a-saying?’
A fellow responded, ‘It’s Portugee, sir. I can swear to that, though I can’t talk in it.’
‘Try them in Italian, Laura,’ said Wilfrid.
She coloured, and in a very pretty accent that floated to the ear like the soft sounds of a flute after the hoarse, hideous, and howling gibberish of the two Dagos, as I judged them, she asked if they were Portuguese. The eyes of the fellow in the slouched hat flashed to a great grin that disclosed a very cavern of a mouth under his moustache widening to his whiskers, and he nodded violently. She asked again in Italian what they required, but this fell[98] dead. They did not understand her, but possibly imagining that she could comprehend them they both addressed her at once, raising a most irritating clattering with their tongues.
‘It looks to me,’ said Finn, ‘as if it was a case o’ mutiny. Don’t see what else can sinnify their constant pointing to that there gun and our flag and then their brig.’
I sent a look at the vessel as he spoke, and took notice now of a number of heads along the line of the main-deck rail, watching us in a sort of ducking way, by which I mean to convey a kind of coming and going of those dusky nobs which suggested a very furtive and askant look-out. She was not above a quarter of a mile off; the wheel showed plain and the man at it kept his face upon us continuously, whilst his posture, Liliputianised as he was, betrayed extraordinary impatience and anxiety. The craft lay aback, the light wind hollowing her sails in-board and her ugly besmeared hull rolling in a manner that I suppose was rendered nauseous to the eye by her colour, her form, her frowsy, ill-cut canvas and her sheathing of sickly hue, foul with slimy weed and squalid attire of repulsive sea-growth upon the long and tender lifting and falling of the sparkling blue. There were some white letters under her counter, but though I took a swift peep at them through Finn’s telescope the shadow there and the long slant of the name towards the sternpost rendered the words indecipherable. The glass showed such heads along the rail as I could fix to be strictly in keeping with the filth and neglect you saw in the brig and with the appearance of the two men aboard of the schooner. Most of them might have passed for negroes. There were indications of extreme agitation amongst them, visible in a sort of fretful flitting, a constant looking up and around and abaft in the direction of the man at the wheel.
I thought I would try my hand with the red-capped worthy, and striding up to him I sung out ‘Capitano?’
He nodded, striking himself, and then, pointing to his companion, spoke some word, but I did not understand him. By this time the crew had come shoving one another a little further aft, so that we now made a fair crowd all about the gangway; every man’s attention was fixed upon the two Portuguese. It was so odd an experience that it created a sort of licence for the crew, and Finn was satisfied to look on whilst first one and then another of our men addressed the two fellows, striving to coax some meaning out of them by addressing them in ‘pigeon’ and other forms of English, according to that odd superstition current amongst seaman that our language is most intelligible to foreigners when spoken in a manner the least intelligible to ourselves.
We of the quarterdeck were beginning to grow weary of all this. The hope of being able to pick up news of the ‘Shark’ had gone out of Wilfrid’s mind long ago; the humour, moreover, of the two creatures’ appearance and apparel was now stale to him, and with folded arms he stood apart watching their gesticulations and listen[99]ing to their jargon—in which it seemed to me they were telling the same story over and over and over again—with a tired air and a gloomy brow. I drew Finn apart.
‘What is the matter with them, think you?’
‘I don’t doubt it’s a mutiny, sir.’
‘It looks like it certainly. But how can we help them?’
‘We can’t help them, sir. The best thing we can do, I think, is to order ’em off. You can see, Mr. Monson, his honour’s growing sick of the noise.’
I started suddenly.
‘Why, Finn, look!’ I cried, ‘see! they have trimmed sail on the brig and she is under way!’
It was indeed as I had said. Unobserved by us, the people of the vessel had squared the mainyards and flattened in the head-sheets, and there she was away to windward, pushing slowly through it with a brassy wrinkling of water at her stem, her crew running about her as active as ants, whilst I noticed in the difference of costume that a new man had replaced the fellow who was at the wheel.
‘Mind,’ I shouted, ‘or by Jupiter they’ll run away with the ship and leave this brace of beauties on our hands.’
A single glance enabled Finn to see how it was. In a breath he sprang upon the red-capped man, caught him by the collar, twisted his head round in the direction of the brig, whilst he yelled in his ear, ‘Lookee! lookee! your ship go! your ship go; jumpee, jumpee or you loosee ship!’ It was not likely that the grimy creature would have met with a ghost of a hint of the truth in the ‘lookees’ and ‘jumpees’ of friend Finn, but his nose having being slewed in the right direction he instantly saw for himself. He broke out in a long ringing howl which I took to be some tremendous sea-curse in the Portuguese language, and calling his companion’s attention to the brig by striking him with his clenched fist between the shoulders and then indicating the vessel with both arms outstretched in a melodramatic posture that made one think of Masaniello, he uttered another wild roar that was no doubt a further example of Portuguese bad language, and went in a sprawl to the gangway, followed by his comrade. In a trice they were over the side and in the boat, and pulling furiously in the direction of the brig.
‘Better trim sail, Captain Finn, so as to lie up for that vessel,’ exclaimed Wilfrid. ‘We must see those men aboard and the little drama played out, though ’tis vexatiously delaying.’
It was now blowing a very light air of wind, yet there was weight enough in it to hold steady the canvas of the Portuguese brig even to the lifting of her foresail, lumpish as those cloths were made by the boom that spread the clews, and one saw by the wake of her that she was stirring through it at a pace to render the pursuit of the boat long and possibly hopeless, if the crew refused to back their yards for the two follows. The boat was a fat, tub-like[100] fabric, apparently heavy for her size, and the rowers pulled with such alternate heat and passion, that though they made the water buzz and foam about the bows, their motion was as erratic—first to right, then to left, then a spasmodic heave round as though they meant to return to us—as the course of a fly climbing a pane of glass. The whole picture was thrown out strong and clear by the background of sparkling azure water melting into a sort of trembling faintness off the horizon to above the height of the brig’s masts against the sky, which from there ran up in a tint of deepening blue till it whitened out into glory round about the sun. The boat rose and fell upon the long ocean heave, splashed wildly forwards by the two rowers, who again and again would turn their mahogany-coloured faces over their shoulders to yell to the withdrawing vessel. The brig’s crew stood in a crowd aft watching, most of them, as the glass disclosed, in a loafing, lounging posture, their bare arms folded or their hands sunk in their breeches-pockets, whilst one or another occasionally pointed at us or the boat with a theatrical attitude of leaning back as he did so that made one fancy one could hear the laughter or the curses which attended these gestures. On high rustily glittered the amazing old weathercock or dog-vane of the saint in his boat, from which would leap with pendulum regularity a dull flame sunwards, timing a like kind of fire which flashed wet from the dirty yellow and sickly green of the hull, as her side rolled streaming to the noon-tide blaze.
‘I say, Wilfrid,’ cried I, ‘it doesn’t seem as if those chaps meant to let that boat approach them.’
‘What’s to be done?’ he exclaimed.
I looked at Finn. ‘If they don’t pick those two fellows up,’ said I, ‘we shall have to do so, that’s cocksure. But they are a kind of beauties whose room is better than their company, I think, as the crew would find out when we approached the equinoctial waters.’
‘Ay, sir,’ cried Finn, ‘it would never do to have the likes o’ them aboard, your honour,’ addressing Sir Wilfrid. ‘No, no, the brig must pick ’em up. Dang their cruel hearts! I never seed a scurvier trick played at sea in all my days.’
‘But what’s to be done?’ cried Wilfrid impatiently and irritably. ‘Could one of our boats overhaul the brig and put the two fellows aboard her?’
Finn shook his head.
‘See here, Wilf,’ said I: ‘suppose we let slip a blank shot at her out of that eighteen-pounder yonder? The dirty herd of scow-bankers may take us to be a man of war. And another idea on top of this!’ cried I, bursting into a laugh. ‘Is there anything black aboard that we can fly at the masthead? It should prove a warrant of our honesty that must puzzle them gloriously.’
‘Would a black shawl do, Mr. Monson?’ said Miss Jennings.
‘The very thing,’ said I, ‘if it’s big enough.’
She immediately went below.
‘I think a blank shot’s a first-class idea,’ exclaimed Finn, ‘but as to a black flag——’ and he cocked his eye dubiously at the masthead, whilst his face visibly lengthened.
‘Why a black flag, Charles?’ cried Wilfrid.
‘Why, my dear Wilf,—the pirate’s bunting, you know. The rogues may take us for a picaroon—no telling the persuasive influence of a black banner upon the nerves of such gentry.’
‘Noble! noble!’ shouted Wilfrid, slapping his leg: ‘frighten them, Finn, frighten them. Why, man, they can’t be all fools, and some of them at least will very well know that that ensign up there,’ pointing to the commercial flag at our peak, ‘is not her Britannic Majesty’s red cross. But a black flag—oh, yes, by all means if we can but muster such a thing. And get that gun loaded, will ye, Finn? get it done at once, I say.’
The skipper walked hurriedly forward as Miss Laura arrived with a black cashmere or crape shawl—I do not recollect the material. We held it open between us.
‘The very thing,’ I cried, and full of excitement—for here was something genuine in the way of an incident to break in upon the monotony of a sea trip—I bent the shawl on to the signal halliards that led from the main-topmast head and sent it aloft in a little ball, ready to break when the gun should be fired.
Meanwhile all was bustle forwards. It is a question whether Jack does not love firing off a cannon even better than beating a drum. Miss Jennings walked right aft as far as she could go, holding her fingers in readiness for her ears and saying to me as she passed that sudden noises frightened her. Wilfrid stood alongside of me, glancing with a boyish expression of excitement and expectation from the seamen congregated round the gun to the little black ball at the masthead. The yacht was slowly overhauling the brig, but almost imperceptibly. The boat maintained an equidistance betwixt us and was struggling, wabbling, and splashing fair in a line with our cutwater and the lee-quarter of the Portuguese craft. The two rowers exhibited no signs of exhaustion, though I expected every minute to find one or both of them give up and disappear, dead beaten, in the bottom of their tub.
‘All ready forward, sir,’ shouted Finn; ‘will your honour give us the signal when to fire?’
As he sung out the group of seamen hustled backwards from the gun and thinned into meagre lines of spectators at a safe distance.
‘Fire!’ bawled Wilfrid.
There was a glance of flame past the bow port, a roar that tingled through the decks into one’s very marrow, and the sea turned blind with white smoke, iridescent as a cobweb, over the bows of the ‘Bride.’ I tugged at the signal halliards, broke my little ball, and the black shawl floated out fair from the masthead, as sinister a piratic symbol as one could have desired and not an[102] atom the less malignant in significance for wanting the old-fashioned embellishments of the cross-bones and skull. I saw the Jacks forward looking up at the sight with grinning wonderment. However, it was easy to see by their way of laughing, staring, and turning to one another, that they twigged the motive of that wild marine exhibition. I sprang to the peak signal halliards and hauled the ensign down, for the black flag combines but ill with the union Jack, and then went to the side to see what the brig was about. Either she did not understand our meaning, or was resolved not to take any hint from us. She held on doggedly without a touch of the braces or a shift of the helm by the length of a spoke, with her people watching us and the pursuing boat from over the taffrail, a cluster of sulphur-coloured faces, as they looked at that distance, but harmonising excellently well, I thought, with the dingy yellow of the canvas rising in ungainly spaces over their heads and the sickly hue of the brig’s hull with its shiny, pea-soup-like reflection in the water to the lift of the squalid fabric upon some polished brow of swell.
‘Wilfrid,’ cried I, ‘they don’t mean to pick up their boat.’
‘It looks like it,’ said he; ‘what’s to be done? There’s some thing confoundedly insulting in the rogues’ indifference to our gun and colours.’
‘Better consult with Finn,’ said I.
He called to the skipper, who came to us from the forecastle.
‘I say, Finn, what are we to do? We don’t want those two filthy fellows aboard this yacht; and yet, if that brig don’t pick them up, we can’t of course let them remain adrift here.’
‘Arm a boat’s crew,’ said I; ‘you have weapons enough below. Take those two fellows out of yonder boat and compel the brig to receive them. I’ll take charge with pleasure if Finn’ll permit.’
Finn, a slow, sober, steady old merchant seaman, did not seem to see this. The expression of worry made his long face comical with the puzzled twist at the corners of his mouth, which looked to be, in his countenance, where most men’s noses are situated.
‘Or,’ said I, observing him to hang in the wind, ‘make them really believe that those are the colours we sail under,’ pointing to the shawl, ‘by slapping a round-shot at them in sober earnest, leaving the missile to take its chance of missing or hitting.’
‘That’s it,’ almost shrieked Wilfrid in his excitement; ‘yes! that’ll save the botheration of boat-lowering and arguefication and perhaps bloodshed, by George! Run forward now, Finn, and let fly a round-shot at that ugly brute; hit her if you can, no matter where, that they may know we’re in earnest, and that they may believe if they don’t heave to we shall sink them. No remonstrance, Finn, for heaven’s sake! Jump, my dear fellow. Dash it, man,’ he cried passionately, with a quite furious gesture in the direction of the brig, ‘that’s not the object of our chase!’
Finn, with an air of concern, but awed also by Wilfrid’s temper[103] and insistence, hurried on to the forecastle. I watched them load the gun a second time, and burst into a laugh when I saw two fellows rise out of the fore hatch, each of them hugging an eighteen-pound shot to his heart.
‘Only one ball at a time,’ shouted Wilfrid, conceiving very likely that they meant to double-shot the gun.
‘Ay, ay, sir,’ responded Finn.
The crew backed away as before. The stout, whiskered sea man, with a face that made one think of a red apple snugged in a setting of horse-hair, who had previously fired the gun and who was apparently the ‘Bride’s’ gunner, sighted the piece with a deliberateness that made me expect wonders. We all held our breath. I fixed my eye on the brig to observe, if possible, where the shot struck her. Then, crash! Had the cannon been loaded to the muzzle the blast could not have been more deafening. The thunder of it swept with a thrill, out and away fiercer than the tremble of the first shock, through the deck, and was almost immediately followed by a loud and fearful yell from the forecastle. I thought the gun had burst.
‘Merciful powers! What has happened?’ cried Wilfrid.
Captain Finn came bowling aft fast as his legs would travel, shouting as he ran.
‘What is it? what is it?’ my cousin and I roared out in one voice.
‘The shot’s struck the boat, your honours, and sunk her!’ bellowed Finn.
I looked, and sure enough where the boat had been there was nothing to be seen but the violet slope of the swell softly drawing out of the cloud of powder-smoke that was settling in lengthening, glistening folds towards the brig! I thought I observed something dark, however, and snatching up Finn’s telescope from the skylight-top I levelled it and made out the head of the man with the red nightcap holding by an oar or bit of wreckage. I shouted out that one of the men was alive in the water. The dismay was universal, but there was no disorder, no commotion. By waiting a little the ‘Bride,’ even as she was heading, would have floated to the spot where that melancholy red beacon was bobbing; but the delay this would have involved was not to be dreamt of. With a smartness that excited my admiration, man-of-war’s-man as I had been in my time, our largest boat, a six-oared fabric, with sour old Crimp in the stern-sheets, was lowered and pulled away with splendid precision in the direction of the red nightcap. In a few minutes they had got the fellow in-boards; they then hung upon their oars, looking round and round; but the other unfortunate creature, he of the slouched hat and black and flashing eyes, had found a sailor’s grave. I sought with the glass over a broad field of water, but could see nothing. Indeed there was not a vestige left of the boat save what the red-capped chap had clung to.
‘One of them killed! Heaven have mercy upon us,’ groaned[104] Wilfrid in my ear, and his appearance was full of dreadful consternation.
Meanwhile the brig ahead was holding steadfastly on, her crowd of people aft gazing at us as before. I took a view of them; they all held a sort of gaping posture; there were no dramatic gesticulations, no eager and derisive turning to one another, no pointing arms and backward-leaning attitudes. They had as thunderstruck an air as can be imagined in a mob of men. What they supposed us to be now after our extermination of the boat and one of the two fellows who had sought our assistance, it was impossible to conjecture.
Our boat, that had sped away from us about four times faster than we were moving through the water, hung, with lifted oars, over the spot where our cannon-ball had taken effect until the ‘Bride’ had slowly surged to within hail; then up stood sour Crimp.
‘What are we to do?’
‘Have you got both men?’ bawled Finn, who perfectly well knew that they hadn’t.
‘No; there was but one to get, and here he is,’ and Crimp pointed into the bottom of the boat.
‘Put him aboard his ship,’ cried Finn. ‘If they refuse to receive him, find out if there’s e’er a one of ’em that can speak English, and then tell them that if they don’t take him we shall arm our men and compel ’em to it; and if that don’t do we’ll keep all on firing into ’em till they follow the road that’s been took by their jolly-boat.’
His long face was purple with temper and the effort of shouting, and he turned it upon Wilfrid, who nodded a fierce excited approval, whilst I cried, ‘That’s it, that’s it; they must take him.’
Crimp held up his hand in token of having heard the captain, then seated himself; the oars fell and flashed as they rose wet to the sun, every gold-bright blade in a line, and the foam went spinning away from the bows of the little craft in snow to the magnificent disciplined sweep of those British muscles. In a jiffy she was on the brig’s quarter, with Crimp erect in her, gesticulating to the crowd who overhung the rail. I kept the telescope bearing on them, and it seemed to me that the whole huddle of them jabbered to Crimp all together, an indistinguishable hubbub, to judge from the extraordinary contortions into which every individual figure flung itself, some of them going to the lengths of spinning round in their frenzy, whilst others leapt upon the rail and addressed the boat’s crew with uplifted arms, as though they called all sorts of maledictions down upon our men. This went on for a few minutes, then I saw the bow-oar fork out his boat-hook and drag the boat to the main channels into which, all very expeditiously, two or three brawny pairs of arms lifted the red-capped man. Then four of our fellows sprang into the chains, handed the little creature over the rail and let him drop in-boards. They then re-entered their boat and fell astern of the brig by a few fathoms, holding their[105] station there by a soft plying of oars, Crimp’s notion probably being, as ours was indeed, that the Portuguese crew would presently send our friend the red-cap to follow his mate.
We waited, watching intently. On a sudden I spied the red-cap in the heart of the mob of men that had clustered again near the wheel. His gesticulations were full of remonstrance; his people writhed round about him in the throes of a Portuguese argument, but it seemed to me as I followed their gestures and their way of turning their faces towards us, that their talk was all about our schooner, as though indeed their mutinous passions had been diverted by our cannon-shot in a direction that boded no particular evil to the red-capped man.
‘They’ll not hurt the creature, I believe,’ said I.
‘Call the men aboard, Finn,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, ‘and get the “Bride” to her course.’
I hauled down the shawl from the masthead, carefully unbent, folded, and gave it to Miss Jennings, who stood with Wilfrid watching the Portuguese brig. We had hoisted in our boat, and the men were busy about the decks coiling up after having trimmed sail.
‘Once more heading a fair course for the “Shark,”’ said I with a glance at the compass. ‘This has been a neat morning’s work. A few incidents of the kind should make out a lively voyage.’
‘Oh, but it’s dreadful to think of that poor man having been drowned!’ exclaimed Miss Jennings. ‘I was watching the boat before the gun was fired. In an instant she vanished. She might have been a phantom. She melted out upon the water as a snow-flake would. I pressed my eyes, for I could not believe them at first.’
‘Horrible!’ exclaimed Wilfrid in a hollow, melancholy voice; ‘what had that miserable creature done that we should take his life? Have we insensibly—insensibly—courted some curse of heaven upon this yacht? Who was the villain that did it?’ He wheeled round passionately: ‘Finn—Captain Finn, I say!’ he shouted.
The captain, who was giving directions to some men in the waist, came aft.
‘Who was it that fired that shot, Finn?’ cried my cousin in his headlong way, jerking his head as it were at Finn with the question, whilst his arms and legs twitched and twisted as though to an electric current.
‘A man named O’Connor, Sir Wilfrid,’ responded Finn.
‘Did he do it expressly, think you?’
‘I wouldn’t like to say that, your honour. The fellow’s a blunderhead. I inquired if there was e’er a man for’ard as could load and sight a cannon, and this chap stands up and says that he’d sarved for three years in a privateer and was reckoned the deadest shot out of a crew of ninety men.’
‘Call him aft,’ said Wilfrid. ‘If he aimed at that boat intentionally it’s murder—call him aft!’
He took some impatient strides to and fro with a face that worked like a ship in a seaway with the conflict of emotions within him, whilst Finn going a little way forward, sung out for O’Connor. Meanwhile we were rapidly widening the distance between us and the brig. I protest it was with an honest feeling of relief that I watched her sliding into a toy-like shape, with promise of nothing showing presently but some radiant film of her topmost canvas in the silver azure that streaked by a hand’s breadth, as it looked, the whole girdle of the horizon; for one was never to know but that her people might send the red-capped man adrift for us to pick up, or worry us in some other way.
Finn arrived, followed by the Irishman who had discharged the gun; his immense black whiskers stood out thick, straight, inflexible as the bristles of a chimney-sweep’s brush, contrasting very extraordinarily with the bright apple-red of his cheeks and the blue, Hibernian, seawardly eye that glimmered under a dense black thatch of brow. He stood bolt upright soldier-fashion, with his arms straight up and down by his side like pump-handles, and fixed an unwinking stare upon whoever addressed him.
‘You fired that gun, Captain Finn says,’ exclaimed Wilfrid.
‘Oi did, your honour.’
‘What made you take aim at the boat?’
‘Your honour, by the holy eleven, I took aim at the brig. There’s something wrong with the pace.’
‘Wrong with the piece. What d’ye mean?’
‘It was cast with a kink, sorr; it dhroops amidships and shoots as Mister Crimp’s larboard oye peeps, your honour, though loike his oye it manes well.’
‘Nonsense,’ I cried, ‘you must have covered the boat to hit it.’
‘By all that’s sacred then,’ cried the man, ‘I had the natest observation of the brig’s maintopmasht as ever oye could bring the muzzle of a pace to soight. The gun was cast with a kink, sorr.’
‘My belief is that you’re utterly ignorant of guns,’ cried Wilfrid. ‘The concussion was fierce enough to shake the yacht to pieces.’
‘’Twas your honour’s design to froighten ’em.’
‘But not to murder them, you dolt!’ shouted Wilfrid. ‘D’ye know I could have you hanged for this.’
‘It was but a haythen Portuguay, sorr,’ answered the fellow, preserving his ramrod-like posture and his unwinking stare.
‘Tell him to go forward, Finn; tell him to go forward,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘and see that he never has any more to do with that gun on any account whatever, d’ye understand?’
The seaman knuckled his forehead and wheeled round, but methought I could just catch a glimpse past his whisker of a sudden protrusion of the cheek as though he was signalling with his tongue to a brother Jack who was flemish-coiling a rope not very far from where he was standing.
The luncheon bell rang and we went below. At table we could talk of nothing but the unhappy Portuguese whom our round-shot had sent to the bottom. Muffin’s face of respectful horror was a feature of the time which I recall more vividly than even the disaster itself. This man, though he was in attendance on Wilfrid as a valet, regularly stood behind his master’s chair at meals. It was Wilfrid’s whim to have him at hand. He did not offer to wait unless it was to procure anything my cousin might require when the stewards were busy with Miss Jennings and myself, or one or both of them absent. His air of deferential consternation was exceedingly fine as he listened to our talk about the annihilated boat and the foundered foreigner—‘Who,’ said I, with a glance at his yellow visage, the shocked expression of which he tried to smother by twisting his lips into a sort of shape that might pass as a faint obsequious simper and by keeping his eyelids lowered, ‘let us trust was cut in halves, for then his extinction would be painless; for after all, drowning, though it is reckoned an agreeable death after consciousness has fled, is mortal agony, I take it, whilst the sensation of suffocation remains.’
Muffin’s left leg fell away with an exceedingly nervous crooking of it in the trouser, and he turned up his eyes an instant to the upper deck with so sickly a roll, that spite of myself I burst into a laugh, though I swiftly recovered myself.
‘It is strange, Charles,’ exclaimed my cousin in a raven-like note, ‘that a ghastly incident of this kind should sit so lightly on your mind, considering that you have quitted the sea for years and have led a far more effeminate life ashore than I who have been roughing it on the ocean when very likely you were lounging with a bored face in an opera stall or dozing over a cigar in some capacious club arm-chair. Had you been chasing slavers or pitching cannon shot into African villages down to the present moment, I could almost understand your indifference to a business that’s going to haunt me for the rest of my days.’
‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed, ‘it was a bad job I admit, but a pure accident, not more tragical than had the boat capsized and drowned the man. There would be nothing in a twenty-fold uglier mishap to haunt you. But I’ll tell you what, though,’ I continued, talking on to avert the sentimental argument which I saw strong in Wilfrid’s face, ‘the incident of this morning points a very useful moral.’
‘What moral?’ he demanded.
‘Why, that we must not be in too great a hurry to speak every sail we sight.’
‘Finn knows my wishes; we must hear all we can about the “Shark,”’ cried Wilfrid warmly.
‘The very vessel that we neglect to speak,’ exclaimed Miss Jennings softly—she had spoken but little, and it was easy to see through the transparency of her unaffected manner that the tragic affair of the morning had made a very deep impression on her—‘might prove the one ship of all we pass that could most usefully direct us.’
‘Two to one!’ said I, giving her a bow and smiling to the look of coy reproach in her charming eyes; ‘of course, Miss Jennings, I have no more to say. At least,’ I added, turning to Wilfrid, ‘on the head of speaking passing ships, though the moral I find in this forenoon trouble is not exhausted.’
‘Well?’ said he a little imperiously, leaning towards me on one elbow with his nails at his lips and the spirit of restlessness quick as the blood in his veins in every lineament.
‘Well,’ said I, echoing him, ‘my suggestion is that your Long Tom’s murderous mission should be peremptorily cut short by your ordering Finn to strike the noisy old barker at once down into the hold, where he’ll be a deuced deal more useful as ballast than as a forecastle toy for the illustration of Irish humour.’
‘No!’ shouted Wilfrid, fetching the table a whack with his fist: ‘so say no more about it, Charles. Strange that you, who should possess the subtlest and strongest of any kind of human sympathy for and with me—I mean the sympathy of blood—should so absolutely fail to appreciate my determination and to accept my purpose! That girl there,’ pointing with his long arm to Miss Laura, ‘can read my heart and, of her sweetness, justify and approve all she finds there. But you, my dear Charles’—he softened his voice though he continued speaking with warmth nevertheless—‘you, my own first cousin, you to whom my honour should be hardly less dear than your own—you would have me abandon this pursuit—forego every detail of my carefully prepared programme—blink with a cynical laziness at my own and my infant’s degradation and turn to the law—to the law forsooth!—for the appeasement or extinction of every just yearning and of every consuming desire of my manhood. No, by G—!’ he roared, ‘fate may be against me, but even her iron hand can be forced by a heart goaded as mine has been and is.’
He rose from the table and without another word went to his cabin.
We had been for some time alone—I mean that Muffin and the stewards had left us. When my cousin was gone I looked at Miss Jennings.
‘Forgive me, Mr. Monson,’ she exclaimed with a little blush and speaking with an enchanting diffidence, ‘but I fear—indeed I am sure, that any, even the lightest, suggestion that runs counter[109] to Wilfrid’s wishes irritates him. And,’ she added almost in a whisper, ‘I think it is dangerous to irritate him.’
‘I have no wish to irritate him, believe me, Miss Jennings,’ said I. ‘I desire to be of some practical help, and my recommendations have no other motive. But I give you my word if this sort of thing goes on I shall grow selfish, nay, alarmed if you like. I certainly never anticipated these melodramatic displays, these tragic rebukes, when I accepted his offer of the voyage. Pray consider: if Wilf, poor fellow, should grow worse, if his actions should result in exhibiting him as irresponsible, what’s to be done? Heaven forbid that I should say a word to alarm you—’ she shook her head with a smile: I was a little abashed but proceeded nevertheless—‘we are not upon dry land here. The ocean is as full of the unexpected as it is of fish. Finn is a plain steady man with brains enough, but then he is not in command in the sense that a captain is in command when we speak of a ship whose skipper is lord paramount. He will obey as Wilfrid orders, and I say, Miss Jennings, with all submission to your engaging, to your beautiful desires as a sister, that if Wilfrid’s humour is going to gain on him at the rate at which I seem to find it growing, it will be my business, as I am certain it will be my duty for everybody’s sake as well as for yours and his own, so to contrive this unparalleled pursuit as to end it swiftly.’
She was silent—a little awed, I think, by my emphatic manner, perhaps by a certain note of sternness, for I had been irritated, besides being nervous; and then, again, my distaste for the trip worked very strongly in me whilst I was talking to her.
We were a somewhat gloomy ship for the rest of the day. I noticed that the seamen wore tolerably grave faces at their several jobs, and it was easy to gather that, now they had had time to digest the incident of the morning, it was as little to their taste as it was to ours aft. Indeed it was impossible to tell what kind of omen they might manufacture out of so tragic an affair. Sailors were very much more superstitious in those days than they are now; the steam fiend has wonderfully cleared the atmosphere of the forecastle, and the sea-goblin has long since made his final dive from the topgallant-rail to keep company with the mermaid in her secret bower of coral in a realm fathoms deep beneath the ocean ooze. O’Connor tried very hard to look as if he felt that on the whole he almost deserved to be hanged for his blundersome extermination of the Portugee heathen; at least this seemed his air when, as he sat stitching on a sail in the waist, he suspected a quarterdeck gaze to be directed at him. But it is hard for a man with merry blue eyes and cheeks veritably grinning with ruddiness in the embrace of a huge hearty pair of carefully doctored whiskers to look contrite. The Irishman did his best, but I laughed to see how the instant he forgot his part nature jovially broke out in him again.
Crimp had charge that afternoon, and when I arrived on deck with a cigar in my mouth, leaving Miss Jennings and her maid hanging together over a hat whose feather in some way or other[110] had gone wrong, I asked the mate what was his opinion of the accident of the morning.
‘Ain’t got any opinion about it at all,’ he answered.
‘It was an accident, let us believe,’ said I.
‘Pure hignorance more like,’ he answered. ‘That there O’Connor’s regularly ate up with pride. He’s all bounce. Says he’s descended from kings and if he had his rights he’d be at the head o’ Ulster or some such place as that ’stead of an able seaman. He know anything ’bout firing off cannons!’ making a horrible face and going to the side to spit.
‘Did they understand what you said aboard the brig when you talked to them from the boat?’
‘Ne’er a word.’
‘Was the red-capped man hurt?’
‘Dazed. Eyes pretty nigh out on’s cheeks. He was too full o’ salt water to curse, I allow, so when we hauled him into the boat he fell on his knees and prayed. A bloomin’ poor job; a measly mean business! Knocking of a boat to pieces an’ drownding of a man. What’s the good o’ that there gun? Only fit to kick up a plaguey shindy. Next time it may bust and then, stand by! for I once see an explosion.’
‘Is there anything wrong with the piece as O’Connor suggests!’ said I, much enjoying the old chap’s sourness, which I may say was not a little in harmony with my mood that afternoon.
‘Couldn’t tell if ye offered me all ye was worth. My business ain’t guns. I shipped to do my bit and my bit I’ll do, but the line’s chalked a mighty long way this side o’ hordnance.’
I walked on to the forecastle to inspect the gun for myself. O’Connor watched me with the whole round of his face, broad and purple as the rising moon. The gun was of an elderly fashion, but it looked a very substantial weapon, with a murderous grin in the gape of it and a long slim throat that warranted a venomous delivery. The kink the Irishman spoke of was altogether in his eye.
I returned to the quarterdeck, relighted my cigar, stowed myself comfortably away in the chair I had at an earlier hour procured for Miss Jennings, and pulling from my pocket a little handy edition of one of Walter Scott’s novels, was speedily transported leagues away from the ocean by the spells of that delightful wizard. Thus passed the afternoon. Miss Jennings remained below, and Wilfrid lay hid in his cabin. It was very pleasant weather. The sky was a clear blue from line to line, with just a group of faint bronze-browed clouds of a dim cream at the horizon looming in the azure air far away down in the north-west. The wind was cool though salt, a pleasant breeze from the east with a trifle of northing in it, and very steadily the yacht travelled quietly over the plain of twinkling waters, cradled by a soft western heaving. She made no stir forwards saving now and again a sound as of the pressure of a light foot upon tinderish brushwood; every sail that would draw was packed on her, to her triangular lower studdingsail, the[111] reflection of which waved in the tremulous blue like a sheet of quicksilver, fluctuating as it drained downwards.
Still it was dull work. I would often break away from Scott to send a glance at the skylight where I could just get a peep at the ruddy glow of Miss Laura’s hair, as she sat at the table with her maid near her, and heartily wished she would join me. Crimp’s company was like pickles, a very little of it went a long way. Had etiquette permitted I should have been glad to go amongst the men and yarn with them, for I could not doubt there was a store of amusing experiences lying behind some of the rugged hairy countenances scattered about the decks. Indeed no summons ever greeted my ear more cheerfully than the first dinner bell; for whether one has an appetite or not, sitting down to a meal on board ship is something to do.
Nothing that need make a part of this story happened that night. Wilfrid was reserved, but his behaviour and the little he said were collected enough to make one wonder at the lengths he would occasionally go the other way. He brought a large diary from his cabin, and sat writing in it up to a short while before going to bed. I cannot imagine what he had to put down, unless, indeed, he were posting up the book from some old date. It found him occupation, however, and he was a good deal in labour too throughout, I thought, often biting the feather of his pen, casting his eyes up, plunging his fingers into his hair and frowning upon the page, and comporting himself, in a word, as though he were composing an epic poem. I played at beggar-my-neighbour with Miss Jennings, showed her some tricks at cards, and she told my fortune. She said she could read my future by looking at my hand, and I feel the clasp of her fingers still, and smell the perfume of her hair and behold the brightness of it, and see her poring upon my palm, talking low that Wilfrid should not be disturbed, tracing the lines with a rosy finger-nail with an occasional lift of her eyes to mine, the violet of them dark as hazel and brilliant in the oil flames—it might have happened an hour ago, so keen is this particular memory.
It was as peaceful an ocean night as any man could imagine of the weather up in the seas which our yacht was still stemming; moonless, for the planet rose late now, but spacious and radiant with stars. There was the phantasm of a craft when I went on deck about a mile on the bow of us, in the spangled dusk looking like ice, so fine and delicate was the white of her canvas; but no notice was taken of her. Finn trudged over to the gloom to leeward when I rose up through the hatch, possibly mistaking me for my cousin, and manifestly anxious to shirk the job of having anything to do with the stranger. I watched her pass—a mere wraith of a ship she looked, sliding her three stately spires that seemed to melt upon the eye as you watched them under the red tremble and green and diamond-like sparkling of the luminaries which looked down upon her. By the time she had faded out like a little puff[112] of steam in the dumb shadow astern, my pipe was smoked out, and I went below and to bed, scarce having exchanged three words with Finn, and musing much on my fortune that Miss Laura had read in my hand—that my ‘line of life’ was very long, that in middle life I should meet with a woman who would fascinate me, but that, nevertheless, I should die as I had lived, a bachelor.
Next morning Wilfrid did not appear at the breakfast-table. Muffin informed me that his master had passed a very bad night, had not closed his eyes, indeed, and for hour after hour had paced the cabin, sometimes going on deck.
‘Is he ill, do you think?’ I inquired.
‘Not exactly ill, sir,’ he answered in his sleekest manner, with the now familiar crock of one knee and his arms hanging straight up and down.
‘What then?’ I demanded, perceiving that the fellow had more to say, though his very humble and obsequious respectfulness would not suffer him to express much at a time.
‘I fear, sir,’ he exclaimed, looking down, ‘that yesterday’s ’orrid tragedy has preyed upon his nerves, which, as you are of course aweer, sir, is uncommonly delicate.’
I thought this probable, and, as the man was going to his master’s cabin with a cup of tea from the breakfast-table, I told him to give Sir Wilfrid my love and to say that I should be glad to look in and sit with him. He returned to tell me my cousin thanked me, but that he would be leaving his berth presently, and would then join me in a pipe on deck.
There was a fresh breeze blowing, and the yacht was plunging through it in a snowstorm, rising buoyant to the bow surge with a broad dazzle of racing water over the lee-rail, and a smother of white roaring in a cataract from under her counter. There was wind in the misty shining of the sun and in the spaces of dim blue between the driving clouds. The ocean was gay with tints, flying cloud-shadows of slate, broad tracts of hurrying blue rich and gloriously fresh, with a ceaseless flashing of the heads of the dissolving billows, dashes of lustrous yellow to the touch of the sun that you would see sweeping a rusty ball of copper through a mass of smoke-like vapour, and then leaping out, moist and rayless, into some speeding lagoon of clear heaven. The horizon throbbed to the walls of the dimness that circled the line all the way round, and my first glance was for a ship; but all was bare ocean. From time to time the fellow on the topgallant-yard ogled the slope over either bow in a way that made me imagine some sort of hope of the ‘Shark’ heaving into view had come to the sailors out of this rushing morning. I waited for Miss Jennings, thinking she would arrive on deck; but, after stumping to and fro for a half-hour or thereabouts, and passing the skylight, I saw her and Wilfrid in close conversation standing almost directly beneath, he gesticulating with great energy, but speaking in a subdued voice, and she watching him with a troubled face. Passing the skylight again, a[113] little later on, I caught sight of Wilfrid’s figure marching up and down with irregular, broken strides, whilst the girl, leaning with her hand upon the back of a chair, continued to gaze at him, with now and again a little movement of the arm which suggested that she was endeavouring to reassure or to reason with him.
I got alongside of Finn and fell into a yarn with him. One thing led to another, and Lady Monson’s name was mentioned.
‘Was she a pleasant lady?’ said I.
‘Ay, to look at, your honour. Up to the hammer. A little too much of her, some folks might think, but such eyes, sir! such teeth! and talk of figures!’ and here he delivered a low prolonged whistle of admiration.
‘She was a tolerably amiable lady, I suppose?’ said I carelessly.
‘Well, sir, if you’ll forgive me for saying of it, that’s just what she wasn’t,’ he replied. ‘She was one of them parties as can be very glad and very sorry for themselves and for nobody else. She steered Sir Wilfrid as I might this here “Bride.” She needed but to set her course, and the craft answered the shift of helm right away off. Ye never saw her, sir?’
‘Never.’
‘Well, she hadn’t somehow the appearance of what I tarm a marrying woman. She looked to be one of them splendid females as can’t abide husbands for the reason that, being made up of wanity, nothing satisfies ’em but the sort of admiration that sweethearts feels. I took notice once that, she being seated in a cheer, as it might be there,’ said he, indicating a part of the deck with a nod of his long head, ‘Sir Wilfrid draws up alongside of her to see if she were comfortable and if he could run on any errand for her; she scarcely gave him a look as she answered short as though his merely being near fretted her. But a minute arter up steps a gent from the cabin, the Honourable Mr. Lacy, and dawdles up to her, pulling at his bit of a whisker and showing of his teeth over a long puking of “Haw! haws!” and “Yaases:” and then see the change in her ladyship! Gor bless my heart and soul, your honour, ’twarn’t the same woman. She hadn’t smiles enough for this here honourable. Her voice was like curds and whey. She managed the colour in her cheeks, too, somehow, and bloomed out upon the poor little dandy when a minute afore her face to her husband was as blank as a custard. No, Mr. Monson, sir, her ladyship wasn’t a marrying woman. She was one of them ladies meant by natur to sit in a gilt cheer in the heart of a crowd of young men all a-bowing to and a-worshipping of her; very different from her sister, sir. That little lady down below there I allow’ll have the true makings of an English wife and an English mother in her, for all she’s an Australian.’
‘I suppose, then, you were not very much surprised when you heard of Lady Monson’s elopement?’
‘No more surprised, your honour, than a man can be when a thing that he’s been expecting has happened. But she’s not going to stick to the colonel. If his honour don’t overhaul the “Shark”[114] and separate ’em, she’ll be separating herself long afore the time it ’ud occupy the schooner to sail round the world. Lord love ’ee, sir; if I were to hear of her heeloping with some African king, atop of an elephant, it wouldn’t surprise me. When a woman like her allows a chap to cut her cable he must be a wiser man than e’er a prophet of them all that’s writ about who’s going to tell you where the hull’ll strand or bring up.’
As he delivered himself of these words Sir Wilfrid showed in the hatch handing Miss Jennings up the ladder, and my companion started away on a lonely quarterdeck walk. The girl looked very grave and worried; my cousin, gaunt and haggard, with a fire in his weak, protruding eyes that was like the light of fever or of famine. He grasped my hand and held it whilst he sent a look round. I spoke lightly of the fine breeze and the yacht’s pace and the good runs we should be making if this weather held, finding something in his instant’s assumption of a hearty demeanour, a sort of strained liveliness far more affecting than his melancholy, that was like a request to me not to venture upon any sort of personal inquiries. He called to Finn to know the speed, then said, ‘Charles, give Laura your arm, will you? There’s too much wind to sit. She looks a little pale, but a few turns will give roses to her cheeks. My head aches, and I must keep below out of this air till I am better.’
Miss Jennings took my arm, for there would happen a frequent lee swing with a rise of the bow and a long slanting rush to the whole weight of the cloths till you could have spooned up the white water over the side with your hand that rendered walking difficult and fatiguing; very soon I placed chairs under the weather bulwarks, snugging her with rugs and shawls, and in the comparative calm of that shelter we were able to converse.
‘Wilfrid looks very ill this morning,’ said I.
‘He has had another warning,’ she answered.
‘The deuce he has. When?’
‘Last night.’
‘What sort of a warning is it this time?’
‘Precisely the same as the first one,’ she replied.
‘I am grieved but not surprised,’ said I. ‘I very much fear he is going from bad to worse. I still hold with the views I expressed last evening. A time may, nay, a time must come, when you yourself, Miss Jennings, ardent as is your sisterly desire, will look to me for some resolution that shall preserve us and himself too from the schemes of a growing distemper.’ She was silent. ‘Did he tell you,’ I continued, ‘the nature of the warning?’
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘In confidence? If so, of course——’
‘No,’ she interrupted, ‘he came from his cabin after breakfast when you had gone on deck, and I saw at once that something was very wrong with him. I was determined to get at the truth and questioned him persistently, and then he told me all.’
‘All!’ exclaimed I, opening my eyes, for the word seemed to indicate some very large matter lying behind his confession.
‘What he has seen,’ she said, ‘for two nights running has been a mysterious writing upon his cabin wall.’
‘Humph!’ said I.
‘Do you remember, Mr. Monson, that he told us of a dream in which he had seen a boat with a sort of sign-board in it on which was inscribed the word Monday in letters of flame? Well, he sees the same sort of fiery scrawl now in his cabin.’
‘What is the nature of the message?’
‘He says that the words are, “Return To Baby!”’
‘He has dreamt this,’ said I, ‘or it is some wretched trick of the sight or brains; but I would rather believe it a dream.’
‘It is an illusion of some kind, no doubt,’ she exclaimed, ‘but it is strange that it should occur, be the cause what it will, on two successive nights, and much about the same time. No wonder the poor fellow is depressed this morning. It is not only that he fears this warning as signifying that something is seriously wrong with baby, and that it is a mysterious command to him to return to her at once; he dreads that it may occur again to-night and to-morrow night, continuously, indeed, until it actually drives him mad by obliging him to make up his mind either to neglect his child or to abandon his pursuit of his wife.’
‘The long and short of it is, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘that when it comes to one’s being thrown with a man whose mind is a misfit that’s apt to shift like an ill-stowed cargo to any breeze of wind that heels the craft over, one must “stand by,” as sailors say, for troublesome half-hours and bewilderingly unexpected confrontments.’
But there was no use in my telling her the wish was strong in my mind that if it was to be Wilfrid’s unhappy destiny to grow worse, then the sooner he acted in such a way as to force all hands to see that it would be at his own as well as at our peril to leave him at large and to suffer him to preserve control over the movements of the yacht, and by consequence the lives and fortunes of those who sailed in her, the better; for I protest that even in the thick of my talk with the girl, I never sent a glance at the white roll of spinning waters twisting and roaring away alongside without a sense of the absurdity of the whole business, the aimlessness of the pursuit, the futility of it as a project of revenge, its profound idleness as a scheme of recovering Lady Monson, guessing, as anyone could from my cousin’s talk and from what Laura Jennings had let fall, that if Wilfrid should succeed in regaining his wife, he wouldn’t know what in the world to do with her!