The strong wind blew throughout the day and the yacht made a gallant run, floating buoyant in foam from one blue knoll to another, with nothing living outside our decks saving a grey gull that overhung the seething line torn up by the furrow of our keel. A bright look-out was kept aloft; rarely did I send a glance that way but that I saw one or another of the men whose duty lay in overhanging the topgallant-yard sweeping the windy sallow sky against which the ridged horizon was beating, with Wilfrid’s polished, lance-bright tube.
In the first dog-watch before we sat down to dinner the breeze thinned and the ocean flattened out into a softly-heaving surface flowing in folds of tender blue to the dark orange of the west, where lines of the hectic of the crimsoning orb hung like mouldy stains of blood. All cloths were crowded on our little ship, and when after dinner I came on deck I found her sliding through the evening shadow, large and pale, like a body of moon-tinctured mist that floats off some great mountain-top and sails stately on the indigo-blue air, melting as it goes, as our canvas seemed to dissolve to the deepening of the dusk upon its full bosoms. A sailor was playing a concertina forward, and a man was singing to it. Here and there upon the forecastle was a dim grouping of outlines with a scarlet tipping of the darkness by above half-a-score of well-sucked tobacco pipes, making one think of a constellation of fire-flies or of a cluster of riding lights.
I had asked Miss Jennings to join me on deck, but she declined, on the plea—which two or three sneezes emphasised in the most reassuring way—that she felt chilly and was afraid of catching cold. Wilfrid produced his diary again, if a diary it was, and sat writing. I tried to court him into a walk and a smoke, but he said no; he had a fancy for writing just then; it was a humour whose visits were somewhat rare, and therefore, the mood being on him, he wished to encourage it as he had a very great deal to commit to paper.
‘Well,’ said I, ‘I’ll just go and smoke one cigar, and then, with your permission, Miss Jennings, I’ll endeavour to win a six-pence from you at beggar-my-neighbour again, and you shall tell me my fortune once more.’
I yawned as I stepped on deck. Dull enough work, by George! thought I. Only think of this sort of thing lasting till we get to the Cape, with Wilfrid’s intention that even by that time, if we don’t fall in with the ‘Shark,’ little more than a beginning shall have been made! Let me once see the inside of Table Bay and[117] her ladyship may go hang for any further pursuit that I shall be concerned in. The worst of it was that poor Wilfrid’s troubles, warnings, health and the like, engrossed Miss Jennings. Nearly all our talk was about my cousin. I had hoped that the sunshine of her nature, that was bright in her laugh just as you seemed to see it glowing in her hair, would have somewhat cleared the gloom that Wilfrid cast upon our social atmosphere; but she seemed to lie under a kind of spell; it was keen womanly sympathy, no doubt, beautiful for its sincerity, animated too by an honourable sensitiveness—by the feeling, I mean, that the runaway was her sister, and that she to that degree at least shared in the responsibility of the blow that had been dealt the poor fellow’s fond and generous heart. All this was doubtless as it should be; nevertheless her qualities went to fashion a behaviour I could not greatly relish simply because it came between us. Her thoughts were so much with my cousin and her sister’s wrong-doing, that the side of her I was permitted to approach I found somewhat blind.
All was now quiet on deck; the concertina had ceased; the watch below had gone to bed; those who were on duty stowed themselves away in various parts, and sat, mere shapes of shadow, blending with the deep gloom betwixt the bulwarks, nodding but ready to leap to the first call. There were many shooting stars this night; one of them scored the heavens with a bright line that lingered a full ten minutes after the meteor had vanished in a puff of spangles, and it was so glittering as to find a clear reflection in the smooth of the swell where it writhed, broadened and contracted like a dim silver serpent of prodigious length. There was some dew in the air, and the sparkle of it upon the rail and skylight flashed crisply to the stars to the quiet rise and fall of the yacht upon the black invisible heave that yearned the whole length of her, with an occasional purr of froth at the cutwater, and a soft, rippling washing noise dying off astern into the gloom. The phosphorus in the sea was so plentiful that you might have thought yourself inside the tropics. It glared like sheet-lightning under each ebony slope running westwards, and in every small play of froth there was the winking of it like the first scratching of lucifer matches. Under the counter where the wake was the streaming of this light was like a thin sheathing of the water there with gold-beater’s skin, rising and falling, and of a greenish tint, of the light of the moon. The flash of the sea-glow forward when the bow broke the swell would throw out the round of the staysail and jib as though the clear lens of a bull’s-eye lamp had glanced upon the canvas. This greenish, baffling twinkling, this fading and flickering of flames over the side thickened the obscurity to the sight within the rails. Somehow, too, the mystic illumination seemed to deepen the stillness that lay upon the deep, spite of the welter and the breeze that had weight enough to lift a streak of foam here and there. It might be that the sight of those fires made one think of the crackling and noise of flame, so that the very dumbness of the[118] burning lay like a hush upon the darkling surface with nothing aboard us to vex it, for our canvas swelled silent as if carved in mother-of-pearl, and not so much as the chafe of a rope or the stir of a sheave in its block fell from above to trouble the ear.
I spied a figure standing a foot or two before the main rigging, leaning over the side. Not knowing whether Finn or Crimp had the watch, and supposing this man to be one of them, I approached close and peered.
‘Is that you, captain?’ said I, for the shadow of the rigging was upon him to darken him yet.
‘No sir, it’s me, Mr. Monson. Muffin, sir.’
He had no need to mention his name, for his greasy, most remarkable voice, along with its indescribable tone of insincere habitual obsequiousness would have proclaimed him Muffin had he spoken as one of a crowd out of the bottom of a coal mine.
‘Feel sick?’ said I.
‘No, I am obliged to you, sir,’ he answered with a simper in his tone. ‘I am taking the liberty of breathing the hair just a little, sir.’
‘I suppose you’ll not be sorry to get home again, Muffin?’
‘Indeed, sir,’ he exclaimed, ‘I shall be most humbly thankful, I assure you.’
‘You’re an Englishman, aren’t you?’
‘Oh dear yes, quite English, sir. Born at ’ammersmith, sir.’
‘Then you ought to be very fond of the sea.’
‘I should be more partial to it, sir, I believe,’ said he, ‘if it was a river. I have a natural aversion to the hocean, sir. I can swim and I can row. I’ve pulled on the Serpentine, sir, and four years ago I made a voyage to the Continong as far as Cally, and found the water very hentertaining. But there’s so much hocean here, sir, that it’s alarming to think of. On a river, Mr. Monson, sir, one can never seem distant, but here—why, sir, if my mother’s ’ouse was in one of them stars, it couldn’t seem further off, and every day I suppose’ll make the distance greater.’
‘That you must expect,’ said I, turning with a notion of seeking Finn or Crimp.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ he said, ‘but could you tell me what them fires are that’s burning in the water?’
‘Phosphorus,’ said I.
‘Phosphorus?’ he ejaculated as though startled, ‘hoh, indeed sir! And might I wenture to ask why it is that the water don’t put it out?’
‘There are more kinds of fire than one,’ said I, laughing, and not much relishing the prostrative nature of the fellow’s respectfulness I walked aft.
Close to a boat that hung inboards by the davits, only a few strides from where Muffin was standing, I spied another figure standing with his back against the rail. It proved to be Mr. Jacob Crimp.
‘Plenty of fire in the water to-night,’ said I.
‘Is there?’ he answered, slowly rounding his sturdy little figure to look. ‘I ain’t took notice.’
‘Have you followed the sea many years, Mr. Crimp?’ said I, feeling the need of a chat, and willing moreover to humour the quizzical mood that commonly came to me when I conversed with this sour little chap.
‘Thirty year.’
‘A long spell!’
‘Sight too long.’
‘I suppose you’ll be settling down ashore soon?’
‘Ay, if I ain’t drownded. Then settling ashore with me’ll sinnify a hole in the airth.’
‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘after thirty years of hard labour there’ll be surely dollars enough for a clean shirt and a roof. But you may be married, though?’
‘No I ain’t,’ he answered with a snap like cocking a gun.
‘Well, a sailor is a fool to get married,’ said I. ‘Why should a man burthen himself with a wife whose society he cannot enjoy, with whom he accepts all the obligations of a home without the privilege of occupying it, save for a few weeks at a time?’
‘Well, I ain’t married, so I don’t care. It’s nothen to me what other men do. Talk o’ settling! If you come to my berth I’ll show you the fruits of thirty year of sea sarvice; an old chest, a soot or two of clothes, and ’bout as much ready cash as ’ud purchase a dose of ratsbane.’ Here emotion choked him and he remained silent.
At this moment a low, mocking, most extraordinary laugh came out of the blackness upon the sea in the direction I happened to be gazing in. The sound was a distinct ha! ha! ha! and before the derisive, hollow, mirthless note had fairly died off the ear, a brisk angry voice within apparently a pistol-shot of us exclaimed, ‘That yacht is cursed!’ A laugh like the first followed and then all was still.
Crimp started, and I was grateful to heaven he did so, since it was an assurance the noise had been no imagination of my own. I will not deny that I felt exceedingly frightened. My legs trembled like an up-and-down lead line in a strong tideway. It was not only the suddenness, the unexpectedness of such a thing; it was the combination of deep gloom upon the waters, the play of the phosphoric fires there, the oppressive mystery of the sombre vastness stretching from over our rail as it seemed to the immeasurably remote dim lights of heaven lying low upon the edge of the ocean, and languishing in the darkness there.
‘Did you hear it?’ I cried in a subdued voice to Crimp.
‘Ay,’ responded the man in a startled voice. ‘I don’t see anything. Do you?’
I peered my hardest. ‘Nothing,’ I exclaimed. ‘Hush, the cry may be repeated.’
We strained our eyes and ears too, but all was silent; nor was there any livelier sparkle in the liquid dusk to indicate the dip of an oar or the stirring of the fiery water by a boat’s stem.
‘Did the fellow at the wheel hear it, think you?’ said I.
We both stepped aft, the mate looking to right and left, and even up at the stars overhead as though he feared something would tumble down upon us out of the dark air. He approached the man who was at the helm and said, ‘Thomas, did you hear anybody a-laughing like just now out on the quarter there?’
‘No,’ answered the man.
‘Are ye a bit deaf?’
‘Ne’er a bit.’
‘And you mean to say you heard nothen?’
‘Nothen.’
Grumbling with astonishment and perplexity, Crimp turned to me. ‘If it wur fancy,’ he muttered, ‘call me a dawg’s flea.’
I believe I could see Muffin’s figure still leaning over the rail. Had he heard the voice? As I passed the skylight I looked down and perceived him standing with drooped head and folded arms before Wilfrid in the cabin. My cousin appeared to be giving him some instructions. Advancing yet a little I discovered that what I had taken to be the valet’s figure was merely a coil of rope on a pin, the outline of which was blackened up and enlarged to the proportions and even the posture of a human shape by the illusive character of the obscurity made by the shrouds just there. I threw my half-finished cigar overboard.
‘Enough to make a man feel as if he’d like to be turned in,’ said Crimp. ‘It’s gone blooming cold, han’t it?’
‘It’s the most puzzling thing that ever happened to me,’ said I; ‘but of course if we were in the secret we should find nothing wonderful in it. In the West Indian waters, you know, there is a fish to be caught that talks well enough to put a ship about. Who’s to tell in a midnight blackness of this sort what amazing marine thing may not rise to the surface and utter sounds which an alarmed ear would easily interpret into something confoundedly unpleasant?’
‘What did it say?’ inquired Crimp.
‘Why, after the laugh, “that yacht’s cursed,” then another laugh. So it seemed to me,’ said I, with my eyes going blind against the blackness whence the noise had proceeded.
‘That’s just what I heard,’ said Crimp gruffly, ‘exactly them words. Two ears ain’t a going to get the same meaning out of what’s got no sense in it to start with.’
‘Pooh!’ I exclaimed, mentally protesting against an argument that was much too forcible to be soothing, ‘what could it have been, man, if it were not, say, some great bird, mayhap, flapping past us unseen, and uttering notes which, since they sounded the same to you and me, would have sounded the same to the whole ship’s company had they been on deck listening?’
‘Beats all my going a-fishing anyhow,’ growled Crimp, going to the rail and looking over.
‘Well, take my advice and don’t speak of it,’ said I; ‘you’ll only get laughed at, especially as the fellow at the wheel heard nothing.’
‘His starboard ear’s caulked; he’s hard o’ hearing,’ rumbled Crimp.
I walked to the taffrail and looked astern. There was nothing to be seen but faint phantasmal sheets of phosphoric light softly undulating, with the brighter glow of our wake. I was really more agitated than I should have liked to own, and I must have stood for nearly a quarter of an hour speculating upon the incident and striving to reassure myself. One thought led to another and presently I found myself starting to a sudden odd suspicion that came into my head with the vivid gleam of a broad space of the sea-glow that flashed out bright as though it reflected a lantern hung over the side from the run of the yacht where the bends hollowed in from the sternpost. It was a suspicion that had no reference whatever to the voice that Crimp and I had heard, yet it did me good by drawing my mind away from that bit of preternaturalism, and a few minutes later I found myself below alongside of Miss Jennings.
‘The cigar you lighted to-night must have been an unusually big one,’ said she with a light glance, in which, however, it was easy to see that she noted my expression was something different from what was usual in me.
I smiled, and measuring on my finger, told her that I had smoked but that much of the cigar and thrown the rest of it overboard. Wilfrid sat at the table with a tumbler of seltzer and brandy before him, and he was filling his large meerschaum pipe as I arrived.
‘Help yourself, Charles,’ said he, pointing to the swing tray that was full of decanters. ‘I was about to join you on deck. How goes the night?’
‘Dark, but fine; the wind just a small pleasant air. I am tired, or I should accompany you.’
‘We are sailing though, I hope,’ said he.
‘Ay, some four knots or thereabouts, and heading our course. We have no right to grumble. It has blown a fine gale all day, and from the hour of our start down to the present moment I think we have had fairer weather and brisker breezes than we had a right to hope for.’
He emptied his tumbler, lighted his pipe, and said that he would go and take a turn or two. ‘If I should loiter,’ he added, ‘don’t sit up. If I am not to sleep when I turn in, the night will be all too long for me were I to go to bed at four o’clock in the morning.’
As he mounted the cabin steps I rose to mix a glass of seltzer and brandy, and when I returned to my seat near Miss Jennings,[122] she at once said, ‘I hope nothing has happened to worry you, Mr. Monson?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘You had a slightly troubled look when you came into the cabin just now.’
‘What will you think,’ said I, ‘if I tell you that I have had a warning?’
Her eyes glittered to the rounding of the brows, and her lips parted as though with a sigh of surprise. I shook my head, looking with a smile at her. ‘I see how it is. If I am candid, you will think there are two instead of one!’
‘No, no,’ she cried.
I was in the midst of telling her about the voice Crimp and I had heard when Muffin passed through the cabin, seemingly from his own berth on his way to his master’s. He held a little parcel of some kind. On arriving at the opening of the short alley or corridor that divided the after berths, he stopped, looked round, and said in his humblest manner, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but is the bayronet in his cabin, d’ye know, sir?’
‘He’s on deck,’ I answered.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he exclaimed, and vanished.
I proceeded with my story and finished it.
‘It must have been some trick of the hearing, Mr. Monson,’ exclaimed the girl; ‘some sea-fowl winging slowly past, as you suggest, or—it is impossible to say. I can speak from experience. Often I have been alone and have heard my name called so distinctly that I have started and looked round, though there might have been nobody within a mile of me. The senses are conjurors; they are perpetually playing one tricks, and, which is very mortifying, with the simplest appliances.’
‘True enough that, Miss Jennings. The creak of a door will be a murdered man’s groan sometimes. I remember once being at a country house and holding a pistol in my hand ready to cover the figure of a man that was watching the old-fashioned building with burglarious intentness; which same man, after I had stood staring at him her a long twenty minutes, was resolved by the crawl of the moonshine into the original fabric and proportions of a neatly-clipped bush. No; I shall not suffer that mysterious voice to sink very deep. It was passing strange and that’s all. I hope sour old Crimp has some sense of the ridiculous and will keep his mouth shut. Heaven deliver us if he should take it upon himself to tell Wilfrid a mysterious sea-voice sung out just now that this yacht was cursed!’
I rose with a glance at the skylight. ‘Excuse me for a few minutes. I am going to Wilfrid’s cabin to confirm a suspicion that has entered my head. Should my cousin arrive whilst I am absent, endeavour to detain him here until I return. I shall know how to excuse myself for entering his bed-room.’
She looked at me wonderingly, but asked no questions. I[123] walked swiftly but softly to the corridor aft. Wilfrid’s cabin was on the port side. It was the aftermost berth, two cabins there having been knocked into one. I turned the handle of the door and entered. The flame of a silver-bright bracket lamp filled the place with light. It was a very handsome sea apartment, with no lack of mirrors, hangings, small costly furniture, all designed for the comfort and happiness of her ladyship. I nimbly closed the door behind me and stood for an instant beholding the precise spectacle I had entered fully expecting to witness. It was Muffin, who stood close against the bulkhead at the foot of the bunk my cousin occupied, grasping in his left hand a small white jar such as might be used for jam, whilst in the other hand he flourished a brush, with which he was apparently painting or scoring marks upon the bulkhead as I entered. The occasional kick of the rudder, with frequent creaking, straining noises arising from the movement of the yacht, hindered him from hearing me turn the handle of the door and from being conscious of my presence, whilst I stood looking on. He had made some progress with his mysterious lettering; for, having dipped the brush into the jar, he fell to writing a big B after several preliminary flourishes of his arm as though he had a mind to give an artistic curve to the letter; he was then beginning to paint a small A, though the brush left no mark, when I exclaimed, ‘How many b’s are there in baby?’
He looked round slowly, keeping his right hand nevertheless lifted, and preserving his posture in all save the turn of his head as though he had been blasted into motionlessness by a flash of lightning. I walked up to him:
‘So,’ said I, ‘you are the warning, eh? You are the mysterious fiery message which has distracted my cousin for the last two days and nights, and which, if continued, must end in driving him mad? You scoundrel!’
He faced round, his right hand slowly sinking to his side like a pump-handle gradually settling. For a moment there was a look of malevolent defiance in his face, but it yielded to one of consternation, terror, eager entreaty.
‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ he exclaimed in a voice that was the very double-distilled extract of oily accent, ‘I am discovered, sir. I meant the honourable bayronet no ’arm. My ’umble wish is to get ’ome.’
‘What is that stuff you have there?’
‘A remedy for wermin, sir, which they told me was numerous on board ship.’
‘Open that porthole!’
He did so after giving me a look as if he suspected I meant to squeeze him overboard through the aperture.
‘Out now with that pot and brush.’
He tossed them into the sea. I turned down the lamp till only the feeblest glimmer of flame remained, and then sure enough[124] there stole out upon the bulkhead in a feeble, green, glittering scrawl that seemed to wink upon the sight with its coming and going the words ‘Return to Ba—.’
‘Rub that off at once,’ said I, ‘and be quick about it too. If Sir Wilfrid arrives I shall have to explain; and he’s a man to shoot you for such an act as this.’
He pulled a pocket handkerchief out of his coat-tail and fell to rubbing the bulkhead with a terrified hand, backing to see if the letters were gone, then applying himself afresh, breathing hard meanwhile and manifesting much fear, for no doubt he believed that my hint that Wilfrid would shoot him was very well founded, seeing that he had a half-crazy man to deal with in his master. He rubbed till nothing was left of the letters. I turned up the lamp and ordered him out of the cabin. He was about to address me.
‘Not a word,’ I cried, subduing my voice, for though my temper was such that I could scarce keep my hands off him, yet I was exceedingly anxious too that Wilfrid should not overhear me nor come to his berth and find me in it with his valet. ‘Get away forward now to your own cabin.’
‘For God’s sake, Mr. Monson, don’t tell Sir Wilfrid, sir,’ he exclaimed, in a hoarse, broken tone.
‘Away with you! I promise nothing. This is a matter to think over. I shall require to talk with you in the morning.’
I held open the cabin door and he passed out in a sideways fashion as if he feared I should hit him, and then travelled swiftly forwards with such a twinkling of the white socks bulging over his pumps as made me believe he ran. My cousin was still on deck. Miss Jennings gazed at me earnestly; I looked to see if the coast was clear, and exclaimed: ‘It proved as I had supposed. I have interpreted the warning Wilfrid has received.’
She gazed at me in silence.
‘The mysterious handwriting is Muffin’s,’ I continued. ‘The flaming admonition is wrought by a brush dipped in a phosphoric composition for—for—beetles!’
‘You mean to say, Mr. Monson——’ She paused to take a long breath whilst her eyes shone with astonishment.
‘The long and short of it is, Miss Jennings,’ said I, ‘that our friend Muffin hates the sea; he has been cursing the voyage from the bottom of his soul pretty nearly ever since we started, and has hit upon this device to appeal to Wilfrid’s instincts as a father and to his poor, weak, credulous nerves as—as—well as a man not wholly sound, in the hope, not ill-founded, that provided the warning be repeated often enough, my cousin would return to baby.’
‘The horrid wretch! You actually found him——?’
‘Yes, he had got as far as Return to Ba—.’
‘Shall you tell Wilfrid?’
‘No,’ I answered; ‘not a word must be said to him on the[125] subject. I told Muffin—and I believe in my own notion too—that if my cousin were to hear that the sufferings occasioned him by the mysterious writing on his cabin wall were due to a trick of his valet, he would pistol the scoundrel. No, we must keep our counsel. I shall confer with Finn in the morning and contrive that our melancholy humourist be wholly and effectually sundered henceforth from all intercourse with this end of the yacht.’
Well, she was thunderstruck, and could hardly be brought to credit that a servant should play his master so cruel a trick. I told her that in my opinion Muffin would do well as keeper of a private lunatic asylum, since so artful a wretch might be warranted to drive anyone whose nerves were not ‘laid up’ with galvanised iron strands into a condition of sullen imbecility or clamorous lunacy within any time specified by the friends and relatives of the sufferer. When, however, the pretty creature’s surprise had somewhat abated, she expressed herself as wonderfully grateful that the discovery had been so early made. ‘Had the writing been continued,’ she said, ‘I am sure it would have ended in completely crazing poor Wilfrid. And I am glad too for another reason, Mr. Monson—it proves at all events that there was nothing insane in your cousin’s fancy of a warning. After all, the healthiest-minded person would be startled and dismayed, and afterwards, perhaps, dangerously affected, by finding a reference to his baby shining out upon him in the dark, night after night.’
‘I believe I should have got up and rubbed the reference out,’ said I, ‘had it glimmered upon me.’
‘But you are not Wilfrid. What made you suspect Muffin?’
‘I suspected not Muffin, but a trick, and then that Muffin must be the man. It came to me with the sight of a bright sheet of phosphoric fire flaming off the yacht’s quarter as I overhung the rail, staring into the gloom and puzzling over the cry Crimp and I had heard. One can’t give a reason for the visitations of fancy. Instinct I take to be the soul’s forefinger with which it points out things to the reason.’
‘I hope it will point to the true cause of the mysterious voice you heard,’ she exclaimed, smiling, but with something of uneasiness in her face nevertheless.
We continued chatting a little; she then went to her cabin. Soon after she had withdrawn, Wilfrid arrived. He yawned, and without seating himself spoke of the weather, the yacht’s progress, and other commonplace matters. For my part I had too much on my mind just then to feel in the humour to detain him, so after a few sentences as carelessly spoken as I could manage, I advised him after his sleepless nights to try once more for a spell of rest, and so saying went away to my own berth.
I rose next morning shortly after seven, bathed and went to the cabin for a cup of coffee. I could see through the skylight that it was a fine day. The air showed a bright blue against the glass, and a rich tremble of sunlight was on the thick crystal of every weather porthole, the glory rippling with the reflective throbbing and running of the sea, as it broke upon the polished panels abreast or flashed in the confronting mirrors. The ocean was quiet too; the heave of the yacht was gentle, though the heel of her gave assurance of a breeze of wind. The two stewards were busy in the cabin. I knew that Finn would have the forenoon watch, since Crimp had had charge from eight to midnight, and I called to the head steward to know if the captain was about.
‘Not yet, sir, I believe.’
‘Take my compliments to him, and say I should like to see him at once, if possible—here, in the cabin, I mean.’
Whilst I waited, Muffin, hearing my voice, came from his berth. I watched him out of the corner of my eyes; he slowly advanced in a sort of writhing way, making many grimaces as he approached, as if in the throes of rehearsing a speech, and presently stood before me, first casting a look at the second steward who was polishing a looking-glass, and then clasping his hands before him and hanging his head.
‘Mr. Monson, I ’umbly ask your pardon, sir. May I beg that out of your kind ’art you will overlook my doings last night? Sir, I do not find myself partial to the hocean, and my desire is to return ’ome, sir. I meant no ’arm. I would not wrong an ’air of Sir Wilfrid’s ’ed. My five years’ character from the Right Honourable the Lord Sandown speaks to my morals, sir. I am sincerely remorseful, Mr. Monson, and trust to be made ’appy by your forgiving me, sir.’
I listened to what he had to say, and then exclaimed, ‘My forgiveness has nothing to do with the matter. You are not a person fit to wait upon Sir Wilfrid Monson, and—but I shall have something to tell you a little later on. Meanwhile, you can go.’
He said unctuously, ‘Am I to take Sir Wilfrid his ’ot water as usual, sir?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘continue to wait on him.’
He plucked up at this and withdrew with an ill-dissembled smirk upon his countenance. Presently Captain Finn came trundling down the cabin steps, cap in hand, his long face bright with recent cleansing, and full of expectation. I asked him to sit, and[127] then, without a word of preface, I bluntly told him about the ‘warnings’ my cousin had received for two nights running, and how last night my suspicion, in some unaccountable way, having been aroused, I entered the baronet’s berth and found Muffin painting the sentence in a vermin-killing composition of phosphorus. Finn whistled.
‘The weasel!’ he cried; ‘how is he to be punished for this? Will ye have him ducked from the yard-arm, or seized up aloft, or played on with the hose for spells of half-an-hour, or whipped up for a grease-down job that’ll last him nigh a day? Say the word, sir. I feel to want the handling of a chap whose veins look to run slush, to judge by his colour and the lay of his hair.’
‘No,’ said I, ‘no need to deal with him as you suggest. But he must be turned out of this end of the vessel and sent into the forecastle. Before we decide, however, can you make use of him?’
‘Ay, can I. Leave him to me, your honour,’ said Finn, grinning. ‘I’ll make a man of him.’
‘Steward,’ I called, ‘send Muffin to me.’
The valet arrived, looking hard at Finn. I made some excuse to get the stewards out of the cabin, and then said, ‘Now, Muffin, attend. You are at once to decide whether you will go forward amongst the men, live with them in the forecastle and do such work as Captain Finn appoints, or whether Sir Wilfrid shall be told of last night’s business, that he may deal with you as he thinks proper.’
Finn gazed at him with a frown and a cheek purpled by indignation and contempt. The fellow fixed his dead black eye on me, and said, ‘I would rather go ’ome, sir.’
‘I dessay you would!’ burst out Finn. ‘How will ’ee travel? By locomotive or post-chay? By my grandmother’s bones! if one of my men had played such a trick on me as you’ve played on your master, I’d spreadeagle him with these here hands if he was as tall as my mainmast, and lay on till there wasn’t a rag of flesh left to tickle.’
I motioned silence with an indication with my head in the direction of Sir Wilfrid’s berth.
‘Take your choice, and be sharp about it,’ said I, turning hotly upon Muffin, whose very sleekness at such a time was a kind of insolence in him somehow; ‘either decide to be dealt with by Sir Wilfrid, who probably will shoot you for what you have done, or go to him after he has risen, tell him that you have made up your mind to discontinue your services as a valet, and that you have requested Captain Finn to place you upon the articles as a boy.’
‘Ay, as a boy,’ echoed Finn in a half-suppressed note of storm, and fetching his leg a mighty thump with his clenched fist.
Muffin’s left leg fell away, he clasped his hands in a posture of prayer upon his shirt-front, and, after looking in a weeping way[128] from Finn to me, and from me to Finn, he said, snuffling as he spoke, ‘Gentlemen, give me an ’arf hour to think it over, I beg of you.’
I pulled out my watch. ‘I must have your decision by eight o’clock,’ said I. ‘See to it. If you do not decide for yourself, I shall choose for you, and give my cousin the whole truth; though for your sake,’ I added, with a menacing look at him, ‘as well as for his, I am very desirous indeed that he should remain ignorant of your conduct. Go!’
I sat talking with Finn. His indignation increased upon him as we spoke of Muffin’s behaviour.
‘It was enough to drive his honour clean mad, sir,’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, though there’s little I believes in outside what my senses tells me of, I allow I should feel like jumping overboard if so be on putting out the light I found a piece of adwice wrote upon the dark in letters of fire. But I’ll work his old iron up for that job. There’s something leagues out of the ordinary in that there slush made cove, sir. ’Taint that I hobjects to a man who never looks me in the eye. But there’s something in the appearance of that there Muffin which makes me think that if he could pull his heart out of his breast he’d find it like a piece of rotten ship’s bread, full of weevils and holes.’
‘The man is pining for the shore,’ said I. ‘The fellow thought to work upon the weak side of my cousin’s intellect. He meant no more, I believe, than to frighten Sir Wilfrid into returning. He remains a very good valet all the same, though we must have him out of this. He will not be the only servant in the world who has procured his or her ends by working on the master’s or mistress’s fears.’
‘Well, I suppose not, sir,’ said Finn; ‘taking men-servants all round they’re a bad lot. I never yet see one, specially if he wore big calves and had got white hair, but that I felt a longing to have him at sea for a month. By the way, sir, talking of this here Muffin’s mystifying of his honour, what d’ye think, Mr. Monson, sir? Blowed if old Crimp, who I shouldn’t ha’ credited with a single idea outside the tar bucket, hain’t gone and fallen superstitious! When I relieved him at midnight he up and spins a long twister about you and him having heard a woice holloing a curse upon this yacht away out on the starboard quarter somewhere.’
He broke into a low, deep sea laugh, which he endeavoured to check by clapping his hand to his mouth.
‘We heard something,’ said I, ‘that sounded like a voice, and we made out the noise to signify the same thing. It may have been a bird, or some mysterious fish come up to breathe, or some singular sound produced by the yacht herself. No matter what—I have dismissed it from my mind.’
‘Poor old Jacob!’ he continued, smothering another laugh; ‘why sir, he’d actually thought hisself into a clam when I went on deck, and said he reckoned this part of the hocean much colder than[129] the coast o’ Greenland. Jacob’s being so werry commonplace is the reason of my thinking nothen of the yarn. Had he even a little bit more mind than belongs to him I’d be willing to allow his story was a queer one; but he’s so empty of any sort o’ intellects short of the ones that he needs to enable him to keep a look-out and attend to the navigation of the craft, that his werry hollowness touches t’other extreme of a brain chock ablock with fantastical ideas; by which I mean that I’d as lief attend to a madman’s notion of a strange woice as to Jacob’s. Not but that he ain’t as trustworthy, practical a sailor as I could wish to have by my side if I ever found myself in a quandary.’
I cast my eye at the clock under the skylight. As I did so, Muffin came sliding towards us with exactly the same sort of gait and countenance you would expect in a well-practised funeral mute. He approached close before speaking, and postured in front of me, preserving a respectful silence, whilst he kept his eyes fastened on the deck.
‘Well?’ said I.
‘I’ve been considering the matter, sir, and beg to state that I’ve made up my mind.’
‘Well?’ I repeated.
‘It might ’urt Sir Wilfrid’s feelings, gentlemen, if you, Mr. Monson, sir, explained away the cause of what had alarmed him, and I’ll not deny that as his strength of mind isn’t such as to give him control over his passions, sir, I should go in fear. Which being so, I’m willing to tell him that I desire to discontinue my services as valet, and should be glad to become what I’ve ’eard Captain Finn describe as an ’and until such times as we fall in with a ship that may be willing to carry me ’ome. To which, Mr. Monson, sir, and you, Capt’n Finn, I trust, gentlemen, both, you’ll have no objection.’
I preserved my gravity with difficulty.
‘Very well,’ said I, witnessing in the vague indeterminable twinkle of the unpolished jet of his eye that he detected in me the mirth I flattered myself I had concealed; ‘after breakfast you will convey your resolution to Sir Wilfrid, of course taking care to insist if he should object, for after what has happened your connection with him must cease.’
‘As you wish; sir,’ he exclaimed, giving me a bow with the whole spine of him; ‘but, gentlemen, I should like to state that whatever may be the work Captain Finn puts me too, I would rather do it as an ’and than as a boy.’
I felt a bit sorry for the poor devil. It seemed to me that he had accepted his alternative with some pluck.
‘A boy is the next grade to ordinary seaman,’ said I; ‘you will be a hand just the same.’
‘What can you do?’ exclaimed Finn, running his eye over the figure of the man with an expression that was not one of quite unmixed contempt. ‘Can ’ee go aloft?’
The fellow clasped his hands and turned up the whites of his eyes. ‘Not to save my precious soul, sir.’
‘You can row,’ said I.
‘I’ll feather an oar agin any Thames waterman,’ exclaimed Muffin.
‘Enough has been said,’ I exclaimed, rising. ‘The stewards wait to lay the cloth for breakfast,’ and so saying, I mounted on deck, followed by the captain, who, after I had exchanged a few words with him, went forward to break his fast before relieving old Crimp.
There was a large full-rigged ship on the weather beam. We were slowly passing her. She was an East Indiaman, I think, of a frigate-like stateliness, with her white band and black ports, and her spacious rounds of canvas tapering in spires, to the delicate gossamer of the top-most cloths. The red ensign was waving at her peak as it was at ours, but then she was from England as we were, and had no more news to give us than we her. The bosoms of her canvas arched towards us with the rigging under each curve fine as wire against the sky that sloped to the horizon white and blinding as irradiated steel with the eastern gushing of glory there. There was just swell enough to heave a little space of her coppered forefoot out of the glittering brine that came brimming to her in a liquid blue light, and the rhythmic flash of the metal over the curl of snow at the stem gave an inexpressible grace to the dignity and majesty of the lofty and swelling fabric of cream-coloured cloths, each softened by an airy pinion of shadow at its lee clew. ’Twas wonderful the magic that ship had to vitalise and to subdue to human sympathy the brilliant, weltering wilderness of the morning ocean. She carried the thoughts away to the Thames and to Gravesend, to leave-takings and weeping women and the coming and going of boats, to the hurricane note of the Jacks getting the anchor, to the waving of handkerchiefs up on the poop, to the smell of hay for the live-stock, the gabble of poultry, the cries of children, the loud calls of officers, the ceaseless movements of passengers, stewards, friends, sailors, crowding and elbowing, talking, shaking hands, and crying upon the main deck. All this, I say, she made one think of, with a fancy, too, of the rushing Hooghley, a burning atmosphere sickly with the smell of the incense of the hubble-bubble, with a flavour of hot curry about, a dead black body gliding slowly past, the lip, lip, of the rushing stream against the ship’s bow and seething to the gangway ladder, the fiery cabins o’ nights vibratory with the horns of the mosquitoes like a distant concert of Jew’s harps mingling with the distant unearthly wail of the jackal. Pooh! ’twas a fit of imagination for its torrid atmosphere and Asiatic smells to make one mechanically mop the brow with one’s handkerchief. Why, far off as that Indiaman was the clear cool wind seemed to breeze down hot from her with an odour of bamboo and cocoanut rope, and chafing gear wrought from the jungle with strange aromas of oils along with the shriek of the paroquet[131] and the hoarse musings of the macaw. I turned to surly old Jacob.
‘Good-morning, Mr. Crimp.’
‘Marning.’
‘Fine ship out yonder.’
‘Well, I’ve seen uglier vessels.’
I approached him close. ‘Heard any more voices, Mr. Crimp?’
‘No,’ he answered, thrusting his fingers into the door-mat of oakum upon his throat, ‘and I don’t want to.’
‘I advised you to keep your counsel,’ said I, ‘but I find that you have spoken to Captain Finn.’
‘Who wouldn’t? My mind ain’t a demijean, smother me! It’s not big enough to hold the likes of last night’s job. Told the capt’n? ’Course I did.’
I saw that he was a mule of a man, and not proper to reason with. I said with an air of indifference, ‘Have you thought the thing over? Was it a bird, as I said at the time, or a noise breaking out perhaps from the inside of the yacht, and by deception of the hearing sounding in syllables apparently away out upon the sea?’
He eyed me dully, and after a stupid, staring pause, exclaimed, ‘I wish you hadn’t heard it.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? ’Cause then I might ha’ believed it was my fancy; but as I says to the capt’n, two collected intellects ain’t going to get the same meaning out o’ what’s got no sense. I hope that this here trip may turn out all right, that’s all. I’ve been a going to sea now for thirty year, but smite me if ever I was in a wessel afore that was damned in the first watch by a woice a-sounding out of the blackness with nothen for it to come from.’
The breakfast bell now rang, and I went below not a little surprised by this exhibition of superstitious alarm in so sour and matter-of-fact a seaman as Jacob Crimp. For my part, though I admit the thing greatly puzzled me, it was only as some conjuring trick might. Perhaps with old Crimp I should have been better satisfied had but one of us heard the voice; or, presuming us both to have caught the sound, had we each made a different sentence of it. There lay the real oddness of the incident, but as to supposing there was anything supernatural in it, I should have needed the brains of my cousin, who could interpret Muffin’s stale and vulgar trick into a solemn injunction, perhaps from heaven, to think so.
Wilfrid joined us at breakfast; he made a good meal, and was easy in his spirits. I asked him if he had been troubled with any more warnings. He answered no, nothing whatever had occurred to disturb him. He had slept soundly, and had not passed so good a night for days and days. ‘But,’ said he with a glance round the cabin, for the valet had been hanging about, though he did not station himself behind his master’s chair as heretofore, ‘if I were[132] ashore I should be prepared for another kind of warning, I mean a warning from Muffin, if I may judge by his face and manner. Something is wrong with the fellow.’
‘You once suspected his sanity,’ said I, smiling. ‘Upon my word I cannot persuade myself that such a dial-plate as his covers sound clockwork. He strikes wrongly, I’m sure. He don’t keep true time, Wilf.’
‘Do you think so really?’ he exclaimed with some anxiety.
‘Do you believe Muffin to be perfectly sound, Miss Jennings?’ said I, giving her a significant glance.
‘I should be very sorry to trust him,’ she answered with a spirited gaze at Wilfrid.
The subject dropped; our conversation went to the Indiaman that lay for a little, whilst we sat at the breakfast table, framed in the cabin porthole abreast of us, coming and going with the light reel of the yacht, but whenever set for a moment then the most dainty and lovely image imaginable, like to some small choice wondrous carving in mother-of-pearl of a ship, shot with many subtle complexions of light as though you viewed her through a rainbow of fairy-like tenuity. Then, having talked of her, we passed on to our voyage, till on a sudden a fit of sullenness fell upon Wilfrid, and he became moody; but, happily, I had by this time finished my breakfast, and as I had no notion of an argument, nor of courting one of his hot, reproachful, vexing speeches touching his own anguish and my coldness, I left the table, telling Miss Jennings that she would find her chair, rugs, and novel ready for her on deck when she should be pleased to join me.
She arrived alone in about half-an-hour. There was something so fragrant in her presence, so flower-like in her aspect, that she could not approach you but that it was as though she brought a nosegay with her whose perfume had a sweetness for every sense of the body. We had not been long together, yet already I might have guessed what had happened with me by noticing in myself the impatience with which I desired her company, the repeated glances I would send at the companion hatch if I expected her on deck, the very comfortable feeling of satisfaction, the emotion indeed of quiet delight that possessed me when I had her snug by my side in her chair, with no one to break in upon us but Wilfrid, who troubled us very little in this way. I remember this morning when I took the novel off her lap to see what progress she had made in it, thinking, as my glance went in a smile from the mark in the middle of chapter the third to her eyes, in which lay a delicate light of laughter, that before long we should be having the weather of the tropics, the radiant ivory of the equinoctial moon, the dew-laden stillness of the equatorial calm, and that there might come night after night of oceanic repose for us to enjoy—and enjoy alone; but I almost started to the fancy, for it was a sort of secret recantation, a quiet confession of my heart to my reason that though to be sure this voyage was to be viewed as a goose-chase, I[133] was beginning to feel willing that it should not be so brief as I was quite lately trusting it would prove. No wonder the old poets represented love as a kind of madness, seeing that a man who suffers from this disorder will, like a madman, experience twenty different moods in an hour.
‘You do not appear to find the dukes and earls of this star-and-garter novel very engaging company,’ said I, placing the book in her lap again.
‘It is a good sort of novel to dream over,’ said she; ‘the moment I look at it I find my mind thinking of something else.’
‘A pity Wilfrid cannot read,’ said I, ‘but his mind, like the poet’s eye, glances too much. There are two unfailing tests of brain power: the appreciation of humour and the capacity of concentration.’
‘Might not a very clever man laugh at a very silly joke?’ she asked.
‘Yes, but his laugh will be of a different sort from a stupid fellow’s at the same joke. Where did you leave Wilfrid?’
‘In the cabin. Muffin came up to me just now, apparently on his way to his master, and begged me in a most strange, suppliant, hollow way to implore you not to allow Sir Wilfrid to suspect that the handwriting was a trick; “for,” said the man, “if he gets that notion into his head he will suspect me, and then, miss,” he said, “the baronet might take my life, for if he’s scarcely responsible for what he does when he’s in a good temper, what would he not be capable of when he’s in a dreadful passion?” This was in effect what he said. His language and manner are not to be imitated. I told him very coldly that neither of us was likely to tell Sir Wilfrid, not because we should not be very pleased to see him punished by his master as he deserved, even though it came to shooting him,’ she exclaimed, lifting her eyes to mine with roguish enjoyment of Muffin’s terror, ‘but because we were anxious that Sir Wilfrid should be spared the humiliation of the discovery.’
‘Muffin will be out of this end of the ship before noon,’ said I.
‘What have you arranged?’
‘His name will be entered in the articles as a boy, that is, as a sailor below the grade of an ordinary seaman.’
‘Is he to work as a sailor?’
‘Finn will try him.’
‘The poor wretch!’ she cried, looking aloft; ‘have you ever observed his feet? Such a man as that cannot climb.’
‘They’ll put him to deck work,’ said I, ‘scrubbing, polishing, scraping, painting.’ She fell silent, with her gaze upon the open book. Presently she sent a slow, thoughtful look along the sea and sighed.
‘Mr. Monson, I wonder if we shall fall in with the “Shark”?’
I shook my head.
‘But why not?’ she exclaimed with a pretty pettishness.
‘She might be yonder at this moment,’ said I, pointing to the[134] light-blue horizon that lined, like an edging of glass, the sky upon our starboard beam. ‘Who is to tell? Our field is too big for such a chase.’
‘We shall find them at Table Bay, then,’ she said defiantly.
‘Or rather, let us hope that they will find us there. But suppose we pick the “Shark” up; suppose we are lying in Table Bay when she arrives. What is to happen? What end is to be served? On my honour, if Lady Monson were my wife——’ I snapped my fingers.
‘You are cold-hearted.’
‘I am practical.’
‘You would not extend your hand to lift up one who has fallen.’
‘Do not put it so. The girl I marry will, of course, be an angel.’ Her lips twitched to a smile. ‘If she expands her wings and flies away from me, am I to pick up a blunderbuss with the notion of potting her as she makes sail? No, let her go. She is indeed still an angel, but a bad angel. A bad angel is of no use to a man. She poisons his heart, she addles his brains, she renders his sleep loathsome with nightmares, she buries a stiletto in the vitalest part of his honour. Follow her, forsooth! I could be eloquent,’ said I with a young man’s confident laugh, ‘but I must remember that I am talking to Laura Jennings.’
We were interrupted by Wilfrid. He came slowly forking up through the hatch in his long-limbed way, and approached us with excitement in his manner.
‘Mad!’ he cried with a look over his shoulder. ‘Mad, as you say, by George! you were both right, and I’m deuced glad to have made the discovery. Why, here was this fellow, d’ye see, Charles, hanging about me at all hours of the day, free to enter my room at any time when I might be in bed and sound asleep. Confoundedly odd, though.’
‘Are you talking of Muffin?’ said I.
‘Ay, of Muffin, to be sure.’
‘He’s not gone mad, I hope?’
‘I think so, any way,’ he answered with a wise nod that was made affecting to me by the tremble in his lids, and the childish assumption of shrewdness and knowingness you found in his eyes and the look of his face.
‘What has he done?’ asked Miss Jennings, playing with the leaves of the volume on her knee.
‘Why, he just now came to my cabin,’ answered my cousin, sending a glance at the skylight, ‘and told me that he was weary of his duties as a valet, and desired to be at once released. I said to him, “What do you mean? We’re at sea, man. This is not a house that you can walk out from!” He answered he knew that. He desired to go into the forecastle and work as a sailor—as a sailor! Figure Muffin astride of a lee yardarm in a gale of wind.’ He broke into one of his short roars of laughter, but immediately[135] grew grave, and proceeded: ‘There was a tone of insolence in the fellow that struck me. It might have been because he had made up his mind, expected that I should refuse, and had come resolved to bounce, even to offensively bounce me into consenting. Besides, too, there was an expression in his eye which satisfied me that yours and Laura’s suspicions were sound—were sound. But I did not need to witness any physical symptom of mental derangement. Enough surely that this sleek, obsequious, ghostly, though somewhat gouty rascal, whom I cannot imagine fit for any post in the world but that of valet, should throw up his comfortable berth with us in the cabin to become what he calls “an ’and.” Ha! ha! ha!’ His vast, odd shout of laughter rang through the yacht from end to end.
‘Of course,’ said I, ‘you told him to go forward.’
‘Oh, certainly. I should not love to have a lunatic waiting upon me. Why, damme, there are times when I have let that fellow shave me. But—I say, Charles—Muffin as an ’and, eh?’
He turned on his heel, shaking with laughter, and walked up to Finn, to whom I heard him tell the whole story, though repeatedly interrupting himself with a jerky, noisy shout of merriment. He asked the skipper what work he could put Muffin to, and Finn rumbled out a long answer, but they stood at too great a distance to enable me to catch all that was said. Presently Finn put his head into the companion hatchway and called. After a little Muffin emerged. Wilfrid recoiled when he saw the man, turned his back upon him, and stepped hastily right aft past the wheel. I whispered to Miss Jennings, ‘Did you mark that? Each will go in terror of the other now, I suppose; Wilfrid because he thinks Muffin mad, and Muffin because he thinks that Wilfrid, should he get to hear the truth, will shoot him.’
‘This way, my lad,’ cried Finn in a Cape-Horn voice, and a half smile that twisted the hole in the middle of his long visage till it looked like the mouth of a plaice. They both went forward and disappeared. The sailors who were at work about the deck stared hard at Muffin as he passed them, shrewdly guessing that something unusual had happened, and not a little astonished to observe the captain conducting him between decks to the mariners’ parlour. Soon the skipper came up, and called to a large, burly, heavily-whiskered man, who, as I had gathered, was a sort of acting boatswain, though I believe he had not signed in that capacity, but had been appointed by Finn to oversee the crew as being the most experienced sailor on board. The skipper talked with him, and the heavily-whiskered man nodded vehemently with a broad smile that compressed his face into a thousand wrinkles, under the rippling of which his little eyes seemed to founder altogether. Then Finn came aft, and Wilfrid and he fell to pacing the deck.
Miss Jennings read; I smoked occasionally, giving her an excuse to leave her book by asking a question, or uttering some commonplace remark. I was lying back in my easy, lounging deck-chair,[136] with my eyes sleepily following the languid sweep of the maintopmast-head, where the truck showed like a circle of hoar frost against the airy blue that floated in its soft cool bright tint to the edges of the sails whose brilliant whiteness seemed to overflow the bolt ropes and frame them with a narrow band of pearl-coloured film, when Miss Jennings suddenly exclaimed, ‘Oh, Mr. Monson, do look!’
I started, and, following the direction of her gaze, spied Muffin standing near the galley rigged out as a sailor. There may have been a slop-chest on board—I cannot tell; perhaps Finn had borrowed the clothes for the fellow from one of the seamen; anyway, there stood Muffin, divested of his genteel frock coat, his gentlemanly cravat and black cloth unmentionables, and equipped in a sailor’s jacket of that period, a coarse coloured shirt, rough duck or canvas breeches, whose bell-shaped extremities entirely concealed his gouty ankles. His head was protected by a nautical straw hat, somewhat battered, with one long ribbon floating down his back, under the brim of which his yellow face showed with the primrose tincture of the Chinaman, whilst his dead black eyes, gazing languishingly our way, looked the deader and the blacker for the plaster-like streak of hair that lay along his brow as though one of the Jacks had scored a line there with a brush steeped in liquid pitch.
‘Heavens, what an actor that fellow would make!’ said I, the laugh that seemed to have risen to my throat lying checked there by wonder and even admiration of the astonishing figure the man cut in his new attire. The burly, heavily-whiskered salt rolled up to him. What Muffin said I could not hear, but there was the air of a respectful bow in the posture of his odd form, and my ear easily imagined the oily tone of his replies to the huge sailor. They crossed to the other side of the deck out of sight.
Shortly afterwards I left my seat to join Wilfrid, and then the first object that I beheld on the port side of the vessel was Muffin washing the side of the galley with a bucket of water at his feet and the heavily-whiskered man looking on. Well, thought I, rounding on my heel with a laugh, ’twill make home the sweeter to him when he gets there, and meanwhile Wilfrid will be free from all further phosphoric visitations.
The time slipped by. Life is monotonous at sea, and, though the days seem to have speeded quickly past when one looks back, they appear to be crawling along on all-fours when one looks ahead.[137] We sighted nothing that carried the least resemblance to the vessel we were in chase of. Within a week we spoke two ships, both Englishmen, one a fine tall black clipper craft from Sydney, New South Wales, full of Colonials bound to the old country for a cruise amongst the sights there; the other a little north-country brig laden down to her chain plates in charge of the very tallest man I ever saw in my life, this side I mean of the giants who go on show, with a roaring voice that smote the ear like the blast of a discharged piece; but neither vessel gave us any news of the ‘Shark’; no craft of the kind had been sighted or heard of by either of them.
It was as I expected. For my part the adventure remained a most ridiculous undertaking, and never more so than when I thought of the speck a ship made in the vast blue eye of the wide ocean. We fell in with some handsome breezes for travelling, several of which drove us through it in thunder with a hill of foam on either quarter and an acre of creaming white spreading under the chaste golden beauty the yacht carried on her stem-head. The wind flashed blue into the violet hollows of the canvas, the curves of whose round breasts shone out past the shadowings to the sun, and rang splitting upon the iron taut rigging of the driven craft with joyous hunting-notes in its echoings as though the chase were in view and there were spirits in the air hallooing us into a madder speeding.
Wilfrid and Finn and I hung over the chart, calculating with sober faces, finding our position to be there and then there and then there, till we worked out an average speed from the hour of our departure that caused the skipper to swear if the ‘Shark’ was not already astern of us she could not be very far ahead, unless a great luck of wind had befallen her; a conjecture scarce fair to put down as a basis to build our figures upon, since it was a hundred to one that her fortune in the shape of breezes had been ours. For, be it remembered, we were in a well-scoured ocean; the winds even north of the ‘rains’ and ‘horse-latitudes’ were in a sense to be reckoned on, with the trades beyond as steady in their way as the indication of a jammed dogvane, and the ‘doldrums’ to follow—the equinoctial belt of catspaws and molten calms where one sailor’s chance was another’s the wide world round.
But so reasoned Finn, and I was not there to say him nay; yet it was difficult to hear him without a sort of mental shrug of the shoulders, though it was a talk to smooth down the raven plume of Wilfrid’s melancholy ‘till it smiled.’ My cousin managed very well without his valet, protested indeed that he felt easier in his spirits since the fellow had gone forward, as though, all unconsciously to himself, he had long been depressed by the funeral face of the man.
‘Besides,’ said he, in his simple, knowing way, with a quivering of the lids that put an expression of almost idiot cunning into the short, pathetic peering of his large protruding eyes, ‘he was[138] with me when my wife left my home; he it was who came to tell me that Lady Monson was not to be found; it was he, too, who put Hope-Kennedy’s letter into my hand, though it was picked up by one of the housemaids. These were thoughts that would float like a cloud of hellish smoke in my brain when he was hanging about me, and so I’m glad to have him out of my sight; yes, I’m the better for his absence. And then,’ he added, lowering his voice, ‘his behaviour proves that he is not sound in his mind.’
That Muffin was as well content with the arrangement as his master I cannot say. They kept him at work forward upon small mean jobs, and he seldom came aft unless it was to lend a hand in pulling upon a rope. Yet after a little I would see him in a dog-watch on the forecastle with a huddle of seamen on the broad grin round him. One special evening I remember when the watch had run out into the dusk, and it might have been within half-an-hour of eight-bells, I arrived on deck from the dinner table and heard, as I supposed, a woman singing forward. The voice was a very good clear soprano, with a quality in it that might have made you imagine a middle-aged lady was tuning up. The song was ‘The Vale of Avoca.’ The concertina accompaniment was fairly played. I listened with astonishment for some time, wondering whether Miss Jennings’ maid had got among the men, and then called to Crimp—
‘Who’s that singing?’ said I.
‘Him they’ve nicknamed the mute,’ said he.
‘What, Muffin?’
‘Ay! sounds as if he’d swallowed his sister and she was calling out to be released.’
There happened inside this particular week with which I am dealing an incident much too curious not to deserve a place here. All day long it had been blowing a fresh breeze from north-east, but as the sun sank the wind went with him, and about an hour before sunset there was a mild air breathing with scarce weight enough in it to blow the scent off a milkmaid, as sailors say, though it was giving the yacht way as you saw by the creep of the wrinkles at her stem working out from the shadow of the yacht’s form in the water into lines that resembled burnished copper wire in the red western light. Miss Laura and Wilfrid were on deck, and I was leaning over the rail with a pipe in my mouth, all sorts of easy, dreamy fancies slipping into me out of the drowsy passage of the water alongside with its wreath of foam bells eddying or some little cloudy seething of white striking from our wet and flashing side into a surface which hung so glass-like with the crimson tinge in the atmosphere sifting down into it that you fancied you could see a hundred fathoms deep. Presently running my eyes ahead I caught sight of some minute object three or four points away on the weather bow, which every now and again would sparkle like the leap of a flame from the barrel of a musket. I stepped to the companion, picked up the telescope and made the thing out to be a bottle, the[139] glass of which gave back the sunlight in fitful winkings to the twists and turns of it upon the ripples.
‘What are you looking at?’ cried Wilfrid.
‘A bottle,’ I answered.
‘Ho!’ he laughed, ‘what you sailors call a dead marine, ha? What sort of liquor will it have contained, I wonder, and how long has it been overboard?’
The glass I held was Captain Finn’s; it was a very powerful instrument, and the bottle came so close to me in the lenses that it was like examining it at arm’s length.
‘It is corked,’ said I.
‘Can we not pick it up?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘Oh, but an empty bottle, my dear,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, with a shrug.
I examined it again. ‘I tell you what, Wilfrid; that it is corked should signify there is something in it. Who troubles himself to plug an empty bottle when it is flung overboard unless it is intended as a messenger?’
He was instantly excited. ‘Why, by all means then——,’ he broke off, looking round. The mate had charge; he was sulkily pacing the deck to leeward with a lift of his askew eye aloft and then a stare over the rail, all as regular as the recurrence of rhymes in poetry. ‘Mr. Crimp,’ called Wilfrid. The man came over to us. ‘Do you see that bottle?’
Crimp shaded his eyes and took a steady view of the water towards which my cousin pointed, and then said, ‘Is that there thing flashing a bottle?’
‘Yes, man; yes.’
‘Well, I see it right enough.’
‘Get it picked up, Mr. Crimp,’ said Wilfrid.
The mate walked aft. ‘Down hellum,’ he exclaimed to the fellow who was steering. The wheel was put over and the bottle was brought almost directly in a line with the yacht. The topgallant-sail ‘lifted,’ but what air blew was abaft the beam and the distance was too short to render necessary the handling of the braces and sheets. Crimp went a little way forward and hailed the forecastle, and presently a man stood ready at the gangway with a canvas bucket slung at the end of a line. A very small matter will create a great deal of interest at sea. Had the approaching bottle been a mermaid the group of sailors could not have observed it with livelier attention nor awaited its arrival with brisker expectations. Presently splash! the bottle was cleverly caught, hauled up, dried and brought aft.
‘It’s not been in the water long,’ said I; ‘the wooden plug in the mouth looks fresh.’
‘Mr. Crimp, sing out for a corkscrew,’ cried Wilfrid.
‘No good in that,’ cried I; ‘break the thing. That will be the speediest way to come at its contents.’
I held the bottle to the sun a moment, but the glass was thick[140] and black, and revealed nothing. I then knocked it against the rail, the neck fell and exposed a letter folded as you double a piece of paper to light your pipe with. I pulled it out and opened it; Miss Laura peeped over one shoulder, Wilfrid over the other; his respirations swift, almost fierce. It was just the thing to put some wild notions about the ‘Shark’ into his head. From the forecastle the sailors were staring with all their eyes. The paper was quite dry; I opened it carefully with an emotion of awe, for trifling as the incident was apparently, yet to my fancy there was the mystery and the solemnity of the ocean in it too. Indeed, you thought of it as having something of the wonder of a voice speaking from the blue air when your eye sought the liquid expanse out of whose vast heart the tiny missive had been drawn. It was a rude, hurried scrawl in lead pencil, and ran thus:
‘Brig Colossus. George Meadows, Captain. Waterlogged five days—all hands but two dead; fast breaking up. No fresh water. Raw pork one cask. Who finds this for God’s sake report.’
The word September was added, but the writer had omitted the date, probably could not remember it after spelling the name of the month. I gave Crimp the note that he might take it forward and read it to the men, telling him to let me have it again.
‘They will all have perished by this time, no doubt,’ said Wilfrid in his most raven-like note.
‘Think of them with raw pork only! The meat crystallised with salt, the hot sun over their heads, not a thimbleful of fresh water, the vessel going to pieces plank by plank, the horrible anguish of thirst made maddening by the mockery of the cold fountain-like sounds of that brine there flowing in the hold or washing alongside with a champagne-like seething! Oh,’ groaned I, ‘who is that home-keeping bard who speaks of the ocean as the mother of all? The mother! A tigress. Why, if old Davy Jones be the devil, Jack is right in finding an abode for him down on the ooze there. Mark how the affectionate mother of all torments its victims with a hellish refinement of cruelty before strangling them! how—if the land be near enough—she will fling them ashore, mutilated, eyeless, eaten, in horrid triumph and enjoyment of her work, that we shuddering radishes may behold and understand her power.’
‘Cease, for God’s sake!’ roared Wilfrid; ‘you’re talking a nightmare, man! Isn’t the plain fact enough?’ he cried, picking up the broken bottle and flinging it in a kind of rage overboard, ‘why garnish?’
‘I want to see the ocean properly interpreted,’ I cried. ‘Your poetical personifications are claptrap. Great mother, indeed! Great grandmother, Wilfrid. Mother of whales and sharks, but when it comes to man——’
‘Oh, but this is impiety, Mr. Monson,’ cried Miss Laura, ‘it is really dangerous to talk so. One may think—but here we are upon[141] the sea, you know, and that person you spoke of just now (pointing down) might with his great ears——’
‘Now, Laura, my dear,’ broke in Wilfrid, ‘can’t we pick up a wretched bottle and read the melancholy message it contains without falling ill of fancy?’ He went to the skylight—‘Steward, some seltzer and brandy here! Your talk of that salt pork,’ he continued, coming back to us, ‘makes my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth. I would give much for a little ice, d’ye know. Heigho! Big as this ocean is, I vow by the saints there’s not room enough in it for the misery there is in the world!’ with which he set off pacing the deck, though he calmed down presently over a foaming glass; but he showed so great a dislike to any reference to the bottle and its missive that, to humour him, Miss Jennings and I forbore all allusion to the incident.
It was next forenoon, somewhere about the hour of eleven o’clock, that the lookout man on the topgallant yard—whom I had noticed playing for some time the polished tubes, which glanced like fire in his lifted hands as he steadied the glass against the East—suddenly bawled down with a voice of excitement, ‘Sail ho!’
Wilfrid, who was lounging on the skylight, jumped off it; I pricked up my ears; Miss Laura hollowed her gloved hands to take view of the man aloft.
‘Where away?’ cried Finn.
‘Right ahead, sir.’
‘What do you make her out to be?’
The seaman levelled the telescope again, then swinging off from the yard by his grip of the tie, he sung out, ‘She looks to be a wreck, sir. I don’t make out any canvas set.’
‘She’ll be showing afore long, your honour,’ said Finn, and he cast his eye upon the water to judge of our speed.
All night long it had blown a weak wind, and the draught was still a mere fanning, with a hot sun, that made the shelter of the awning a necessary condition of life on deck by day; a clear, soft, dark-blue sky westwards, and in the east a broad shadowing of steam-like cloud with a hint in the yellow tinge of it low down upon the sea of the copper sands of Africa, roasting noons and shivering midnights, fever and cockroaches, and stifling cabins. So that, merely wrinkling through it as we were, it was not until we had eaten our lunch, bringing the hour to about a quarter before two o’clock, that the vessel sighted from aloft in the morning had risen above the rim of the ocean within reach of a glass directed at her over the quarterdeck rail.
‘It will be strange,’ said I, putting down the telescope after a long stare at her, ‘if yonder craft don’t prove the “Colossus.” Look at her, Wilfrid. A completer wreck never was.’
He seized the glass. ‘By George, then,’ he cried, ‘if that’s so the two men that paper spoke of may be still alive. I hope so, I hope so. We owe heaven a life, and it is a glorious thing to[142] succour the perishing.’ His hand shook with excitement as he directed the glass at the vessel.
Points of her stole out as we approached. She had apparently been a brig. Both masts were gone flush with the deck, bowsprit too, channels torn from their strong fastenings, and whole lengths of bulwark smashed level. I supposed her cargo to have been timber, but her decks showed bare, whence I gathered that she was floating on some other sort of light cargo—oil, cork; no telling what indeed. She swayed wearily upon the long ocean heave with a sulky, sickly dip from side to side, as though she rocked herself in her pain. There was a yard, or spar, in the water alongside of her, the rigging of which had hitched itself in some way about the rail, so that to every lurch on one side the boom rose half its length, with a flash of the sun off the wet end of it, and this went on regularly, till after watching it a bit I turned my eyes away with a shudder, feeling in a sense of creeping that possessed me for an instant the sort of craziness that would come into a dying brain aboard the craft to the horrible maddening monotony of the rise and fall of that spar.
‘Such a picture as that,’ whispered Miss Jennings softly in my ear, ‘realises your idea of the ocean as a tigress. What but claws could have torn her so? And that soft caressing of the water—is it not the velvet paw stroking the dead prey?’
‘There’s a man on board,’ cried Wilfrid wildly; ‘look, Charles.’
He thrust the glass into my hand whilst he pointed with a vehement gesture. I had missed him before, but the broadside opening of the wreck to our approach disclosed his figure as he sat with folded arms and his chin on his breast in a sleeping posture against the companion that remained intact, though the wheel, skylight, and all other deck fixtures that one could think of were gone. I eyed him steadily through the lenses, but though he never raised his head nor stirred his arms, which lay folded, yet owing to the roll of the hulk it was impossible to say that his body did not move.
‘There’s the word “Colossus,”’ said I, ‘painted plainly enough upon her bow. Yonder may be the writer of the letter received. Wilf, you should send a boat. He may be alive—God knows! But though he be dead there might be another living.’
‘Finn,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘bring the yacht to a stand and board that wreck instantly, d’ye hear?’
‘Ay, ay, sir.’
‘I’ll make one of the boat’s crew with your good leave, captain,’ I sung out.
‘Take charge by all means, Charles,’ said Wilfrid.
‘With pleasure,’ said I. ‘See two things in the boat, Finn, before we start—fresh water and a drop of brandy or rum.’
The yacht’s topsail was backed, the helm put down and the vessel’s way arrested. We came to a halt within half-a-mile of[143] the wreck. The ocean swung smoothly in wide-browed folds that went brimming to the bulk in rounds polished enough at times to catch the image of her till she showed as she leaned from us with her reflection leaning too as if she had broken in halves and was foundering. The boat was lowered and brought to the gangway; I jumped in and we shoved off. Five fellows pulled, and on a sudden I had to turn my head away to smother a laugh whilst I seemed to wave a farewell to Wilfrid and Miss Laura on noting that one of the rowers was no less a man than Muffin. Whether he had thrust himself into this errand owing to some thirst for any momentary change in the discipline of his shipboard life, or whether Finn had remembered that the fellow talked much of being able to feather an oar and had ordered him into the boat I cannot tell, but there he was, as solemn as a sleeping ape, his old straw hat pulled down to his nose and his eyes steadfastly fixed upon the oar that he plied. He pulled well enough, but his anxiety to keep time and to feather besides was exceedingly absurd, and it cost me no small effort to master my face, though the struggle to look grave and ignorant of his presence was mightily helped in a minute by the sight of the silent figure seated upon the wreck’s deck.
I earnestly overhauled with my eyes the wallowing fabric as we approached her, but saving that lonely man motionless in his posture of slumber there was nothing to be distinguished outside the melancholy raffle of unrove rigging and ropes’ ends in the bow, vast rents in the planks of the deck, splinters of bulwark, stanchion, and the like. The fellow that pulled stroke was the big-whiskered man that acted as boatswain, named Cutbill. I said to him as he came stooping towards me for the sweep of his oar, ‘She’s so jagged the whole length of her broadside, that I believe her stern, low as it lies, will be the easiest and safest road to enter by.’
He looked over his shoulder and said, ‘Ay, sir. But there is no need for you to trouble to step aboard. I’ll overhaul her if you like, sir.’
‘No, I’ll enter. It’s a break, Mr. Cutbill. But you will accompany me, for I may want help.’
He shook his head. ‘You’ll find nothing living there, sir.’
‘No telling till we’ve found out anyway,’ said I. ‘Oars!’ I sung out.
We floated under the wreck’s counter, hooked on, and, waiting for the lift of the swell, I very easily sprang from the boat’s gunwale to the taffrail of the hulk, followed by Cutbill. The decks had blown up, and the sort of drowning rolling of the hulk rendered walking exceedingly dangerous. The water showed black through the splintered chasms, with a dusky gleam in the swaying of it like window-glass on a dark night; and there was a strange noise of sobbing that was desperately startling, with its commingling of sounds like human groans, and hollow frog-like[144] croakings, followed by blows against the interior caused by floating cargo driven against the side, as if the hull was full of half-strangled giants struggling to pound their way out of her.
From the first great gap I looked down through I remember recoiling with a wildness that might easily have rolled me overboard to the sight of a bloated human face, with long hair streaming, floating on the surface of the water athwart the ragged orifice. It was like putting one’s eye to a camera obscura and witnessing a sickening phantom of death, saving that here the horror was real, with the weeping noises in the hold to help it, and the great encompassing sea to sweep it into one’s very soul as a memory to ride one’s sleepless hours hag-like for a long term.
We approached the figure of a man. He was seated on a three-legged stool, with his back resting against the companion. I stooped to look at his face.
‘Famine is the artist here!’ I cried instantly, springing erect. ‘My God! what incomparable anguish is there in that expression!’
‘See, sir,’ cried the burly sailor by my side in a broken voice, and he pointed to a piece of leather that lay close beside the body. One end of which had been gnawed into pulp, which had hardened into iron again to the air and the sun.
‘Yet the letter we picked up,’ said I, ‘stated there was a cask of raw meat on board.’
‘That was chewed for thirst, sir,—for thirst, sir!’ exclaimed the seaman. ‘I suffered once, and bit upon a lump of lead to keep the saliva a-running.’
‘Best not linger,’ said I. ‘Take a look forward, will you?’
He went towards the forecastle; I peered down the little companion way; it was as black as the inside of a well, with the water washing up the steps within reach of my arm. There could be nothing living down there, nor indeed in any other part of the wreck if not on deck, for she was full of water. The men in the boat astern were standing up in her with their heads bobbing together over the line of the taffrail to get a view of the figure, for it was seated on the starboard side, plain in their sight, all being clear to the companion; yet spite of that lump of whiskered mahogany faces, with Muffin’s yellow chops in the heart of it to make the whole group as commonplace as a sentence of his, never in all my time did so profound a sense of desolation and loneliness possess me as I stood bringing my eyes from the huge steeping plain of the sea to that human shape with its folded arms and its bowed head. Heavens, thought I, what scenes of human anguish have the ocean stars looked down upon! The flash past of the ghastly face in the hold beneath—that bit of gnawed leather, which even had you thought of a dog coming to such a thing would have made your heart sick—the famine in that bowed face where yet lay so fierce a twist of torment that the grin of it made the slumberous attitude a horrible sarcasm——
‘Nothing to be seen, sir,’ exclaimed Cutbill, picking his way aft with the merchantman’s clumsy rolling step.
I went in a hurry to the taffrail and dropped into the boat, he followed, and the fellow in the bow shoved off. Scarce, however, had the men dropped their oars into the rowlocks, each fellow drawing in his breath for the first stretch back, when a voice hailed us from the deck:
‘For God’s sake don’t leave me!’
‘Oh!’ shrieked Muffin, springing to his feet and letting his oar slide overboard; ‘there’s someone alive on board!’
‘Sit, you lubber!’ thundered the fellow behind him, fetching him a chip on the shoulder that brought him in a crash to his hams, whilst the man abaft picked up the oar.
Every face wore an expression of consternation. Cutbill’s, that looked like a walnut-shell between his whiskers, turned of an ashen hue; he had stretched forth his arms to give the oar its first swing, and now they forked out paralysed into the stiffness of marline-spikes by astonishment.
‘Smite my eyes,’ he muttered as though whispering to himself, ‘if it ain’t the first dead man’s voice I ever heard.’
‘Back water!’ I cried out, for the swell had sheered the boat so as to put the companion way betwixt us and the figure. I stood up and looked. The man was seated as before, though spite of the sure and dreadful expression of death his famine-white face bore, spite of my being certain in my own mind that he was as dead as the creature whose face had glimmered out upon the black water in the hold, yet the cry to us had been so unmistakably real, had come so unequivocally, not indeed only from the wreck, but from the very part of the hulk on which the corpse was seated, that I found myself staring at him as though I expected that he would look round at us.
‘There’s no one alive yonder, men,’ said I, seating myself afresh.
‘What was it that spoke, think ’ee, sir?’ exclaimed the man in the bow, bringing his eyes full of awe away from the sheer hulk to my face.
‘Mr. Monson, sir, I ’umbly beg pardon,’ exclaimed Muffin, in the greasy deferential tone he was used to employ when in the cabin, ‘but there must be something living on board that ship, unless it were a sperrit.’
‘A spirit, you fool!’ cried I in a passion, ‘what d’ye mean by such talk? There’s nothing living on that wreck, I tell you. Jump aboard anyone of you who doubts me and he can judge for himself.’
Muffin shook his head; the others writhed uneasily on the thwarts of the boat.
‘Cutbill and I overhauled the vessel; she’s full of water. What is on her deck you can see for yourselves, and nothing but a fish could live below. Isn’t that right, Cutbill?’
‘Ay, sir,’ he answered; and then under his breath, ‘but what voice was it that hailed us then!’
‘Come, give way!’ I cried, ‘they’ll be growing impatient aboard the yacht.’
The oars dipped, feathered, flashed, and in an instant the blue sides of the smart and sparkling little craft were buzzing and spinning through it in foam. It was like coming from a graveyard to the sight of some glittering, cheerful, tender poetic pageant to carry the eye from the hull to the yacht. She seemed clad by the contrast with new qualities of beauty. You found the completest expression of girlish archness in the curtseying of her shapely bows, with a light at her forefoot like a smile on the lip when she lifted her yellow sheathing there, pouting, as one might say, from the caressing kiss of the blue brine, to gleam like gold for a moment to the sunlight. We swept alongside and I sprang on board.
‘The poor creature is dead, I suppose?’ exclaimed Wilfrid, inspecting the wreck through a binocular glass.
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘dead as the dead can be; too dead to handle, faith. I might have sought in his pockets for some hints to found a report upon, but his face had the menace of a fierce whisper.’
‘It seems cruel to leave him unburied,’ said Miss Laura, with her soft eyes full of pity, and the emotions begotten of the presence of death.
‘That hulk must soon go to pieces,’ said I, ‘and then she will give him a sailor’s funeral.’
‘When nature acts the part of high priestess, if there be such a part,’ exclaimed Wilfrid in a low, tremulous voice, not without a kind of sweetness in its way, thanks, perhaps, to the mood of tender sentiment that was upon him, ‘how grandly she celebrates the humblest sailor’s obsequies! how noble is her cathedral! Observe the altitude of that stupendous roof of blue. How sublime are the symphonies of the wind; how magnificent the organ notes which they send pealing through this great echoing fabric! Nature will give yonder poor fellow a nobler funeral than it is in our power to honour him with. But Charles,’ he cried, with a sudden change of voice, and indeed with a new manner in him, ‘have you ever remarked the exquisite felicity with which nature invents and fits and works her puppet shows? Take yonder scene at which we have been suffered to steal a peep. What could be more choicely imagined than that a dead man should have charge of such a dead ship as that, and that the look-out he is keeping upon her deck should be as black as the future of the vessel he still seems to command?’
‘Well, well,’ said I, ‘all this may be as you put it, Wilf. But all the same, I am glad to see that topsail-yard swung and that spectre there veering astern. I protest my visit has made me feel as though I must lie down for a bit;’ and, in a sober truth, the[147] body I had inspected, coupled with the thrill of amazement that had shot through me to the voice we had heard, had proved a trifle too much for my nerves, topped, as it all was, with certain superstitious stirrings, the crawling, as it might be, upon the memory of that ghostly, insoluble hail, along with the workings of an imagination that was too active for happiness when anything approaching to a downright horror fell in its way. So I went below and lay upon a sofa, but had scarcely hoisted my legs when Wilfrid arrived, bawling to the steward for a bottle of champagne, and immediately after came Miss Jennings, who must needs fetch me a pillow, and then, as though she had a mind to make me feel ridiculous, saturate a pocket handkerchief with eau de Cologne, all which attentions I hardly knew whether to like or not till, having swallowed a bumper of champagne, I hopped off the couch with a laugh.
‘A pretty sailor I am, eh, Wilfrid?’ cried I; ‘a likely sort of figure to take command of the Channel Fleet. Miss Jennings, your eau de Cologne has entirely cured me.’
‘What’s to be the next incident now—the “Shark”?’ exclaimed Wilfrid. He thrust his hands deep into his trousers pocket and marched into his cabin, head hanging down.
I happened to be alone on deck after dinner, having left Wilfrid at his diary and Miss Jennings in her cabin, where she had gone to make ready to join me, as she had said. The wreck had faded out before sundown, melting upon the flashing purple under the sinking luminary like the memory of a nightmare off a mind upon which is streaming a light of cheerfulness. The night was clear but dark, with a pleasant wind through whose dryness the stars looked down purely. The yacht was sailing a fair six knots, as I gathered when I stepped from the companion to the lee-rail and peered over in a wool-gathering way at the emerald gushings and eddyings of the phosphoric fires which winked in the cloudy paleness along the bends, and fled into the dimness of glow-worms to the spectral racing of our wake.
I was worried and oppressed by a sort of heaviness of spirits. I had acted a cheerful part at dinner, but there was little of my heart in the tongue I wagged. The recollection of the motionless figure seated upon the wreck, and darker yet, the memory of that bloated, long-haired phantom face sliding in the space of a breath across the gape in the shattered deck, with the sobbing wash of the black water on which it floated to put a dreadful meaning of its own into the livid, nimble vision went for something—nay, went for a good deal, no doubt; but it was the hail that had come from the wreck[148] which mainly occasioned my perplexity and agitation, and, I may add, my depression. Twice now had syllables sounding from where there were no lips to pronounce them reached my ears. Had I alone heard them I should have been alarmed for my reason, not doubting an hallucination, though never for an instant believing in the reality of the utterance; but the voices had been audible to others, they were consequently real, and for that reason oppressive to reflect upon. The shadow of Wilfrid’s craziness lay on his ship; the voyage was begun in darkness, and was an aimless excursion, as I thought, with no more reasonable motive for it than such as was to be found in the contending passions of a bleeding heart. Hence it was inevitable that any gloomy incident which occurred during such an adventure as this should gather in the eye of the imagination a very much darker tincture than the complexion it would carry under sunnier and more commonplace conditions of an ocean run.
Whilst I lay over the rail lost in thought, I was accosted by Finn.
‘Beg pardon, Mr. Monson; couldn’t make sure in this here gloom whether it was you or Sir Wilfrid. May I speak a word with ’ee, sir?’
‘Certainly, Finn.’
‘Well now, sir, if that there old Jacob Crimp ain’t gone and took on so joyful a frame of mind that I’m a land-crab if his sperrits ain’t downright alarming in a man whose weins runs lime-juice!’
‘Old Crimp!’ cried I, ‘what’s the matter with him?’
‘Why, he comes up to me and says, “Capt’n,” he says, “there’s Joe Cutbill, Jemmy Smithers, that funeral chap Muffin, and the t’others who was in the boat that went to the wreck this afternoon, all a-swearing that they heard a voice in the air!” and so saying, he bursts out a laughing like a parrot. “A woice!” says he. “So me and Mr. Monson aren’t the only ones, d’ye see. Damme,” says he, “if it don’t do my heart good to think on’t. There’s the whole bloomin’ boiling of us now,” says he, “to laugh at, capt’n; not Jacob Crimp only,” and here he bursts into another laugh.’
‘What does the old chap want to convey?’ said I.
‘Why, sir, joyfulness as that he no longer stands alone as having heard a woice, for though to be sure you was with him that night, and some sound like to a cuss rose up off yon quarter, he feels like being alone in the hearing of it, for, ye see, a man in his position can’t comfortably hitch on to a gent like you, and it was the harder for him, for that the man at the wheel swore that he never heard the cry.’
‘He is superstitious, like most old lobscousers, no doubt,’ said I. ‘Have the others been talking about this mysterious hail from the wreck?’
‘Ay, sir; ’tis a pity. It’s raised an uneasiness ’mongst the men. There’s that Irish fool O’Connor, him that foundered the “Dago,”[149] going about with his face as long as a wet hammock and swearing that ’taint lucky.’
‘I don’t know about it’s being unlucky,’ said I, ‘but it certainly is most confoundedly curious, Captain Finn.’
I saw him peering hard at me in the dusk. ‘But surely your honour’s not going to tell me there was a woice?’ said he.
‘As we were shoving off,’ said I, ‘We were hailed in God’s name to return. Every man of us in the boat heard it. There were but two bodies in the wreck, as stone dead as if they had died before the days of the flood. What say you to that, Captain Finn?’
He pulled off his hat to scratch his head. After a pause he exclaimed slowly, ‘Well, I’m for leaving alone what isn’t to be understood. There was ghosts maybe afore I was born, but none since; and the dead h’aint talked, to my knowledge, since New Testament times. Old Jamaicy rum isn’t to be had by dropping a bucket over the side, and if a truth lies too deep to be fished up by creeps, better drop it, says I, and fix the attention on something else.’
‘You tell me the men are uneasy?’
‘Ay, sir.’
‘Do you mean all hands?’
‘Well, your honour knows what sailors are. When they’re housed together under one deck they’re like a box of them patent lucifer lights—if one catches, the whole mass is aflame.’
‘It’s a passing fit of superstition,’ said I. ‘Give it time. Best say nothing about it to Sir Wilfrid.’
‘Bless us, no, sir. Sorry it’s raised so much satisfaction in that there old Jacob, though. A laugh in Jacob don’t sound natural. Any sort o’ joyfulness in such a constitution is agin nature.’
At this point Miss Jennings arrived on deck, and Finn, with a shadowy fist mowing at his brow, stepped to the opposite rail, where his figure was easily distinguished by the stars he blotted out.
‘I hope your spirits are better,’ said Miss Laura.
‘I should be glad to turn the silent sailor of that wreck out of my memory; but my spirits are very well.’
‘Wilfrid noticed your depression at table, but he attributed it entirely to the dreadful sight you witnessed on the wreck.’ She passed her hand through my arm with a soft impulse that started me into a walk, but there was so much real unconsciousness in her way of doing this—a childlike intimation of her wish to walk without proposing it, and so breaking the flow of our speech at the moment—that for some little while I was scarce sensible that I held her arm, and that I was pacing with her. ‘But I think there is more the matter with you, Mr. Monson,’ she continued, with her face glimmering like pearl in the dusk, as she looked up at me, ‘than meets the ear—I will not say the eye.’
‘The fact is, Miss Jennings,’ said I abruptly, ‘I am bothered.’
‘By what?’
‘Well, what think you of the suspicion which grows in me that this yacht carries along with her, in the atmosphere that enfolds[150] her, some sort of Ariel, whose mission it is to bewilder out of its invisibility the sober senses of men of plain, practical judgment, like your humble servant?’
‘You want to frighten me by pretending that you are falling a little crazy.’
‘No!’
‘Or are you creating an excuse to return home.’
‘No again. How can I return home?’
‘Why, by the first convenient ship we happen to sight and speak. Is this some stratagem to prepare Wilfrid’s mind for your bidding us farewell when the chance happens?’
She spoke with a subdued note and a tremble of fretfulness in it.
‘Suffer me to justify myself,’ said I, and with that I led her to the captain, who stood with folded arms leaning against the rail near the main rigging. ‘Finn!’ He dropped his hands and stood bold upright. ‘Be so good as to tell Miss Jennings what the men are talking about forward.’
‘You mean the woice, sir?’
‘What the men are talking about,’ said I.
‘Well, miss,’ said Finn, ‘as the boat that Mr. Monson had charge of this afternoon was a-leaving the wreck, the men heard themselves hailed by a woice that begged ’em, in God’s name, not to leave the party as called behind. Mr. Monson, sir, you heard it likewise.’
‘I did,’ I answered.
‘Another mystery,’ exclaimed Miss Laura, ‘quite as dismal and astonishing as Muffin’s phosphoric warning.’
‘Thanks, Finn; that’s all I wanted to ask you,’ said I, and we left him to resume our walk.
‘Tell me about this voice,’ said the girl.
I did so, putting plenty of colour into the picture, too, for I wanted her to sympathise with my superstitious mood, whilst up to now there was nothing but incredulity and a kind of coquettish pique in her voice and manner.
‘And you are afraid of this voice, Mr. Monson? I wonder at you!’
‘You should have my full consent to wonder,’ said I, ‘if it were the first time; but there was the other night, you know, with solid, sour, uncompromising old Crimp to hear me witness, and now again to-day, with a boatful of men for evidence.’
‘Really, Mr. Monson, what do you want to make yourself believe?’ she asked, with a tone like a half-laugh in her speech; ‘the dead cannot speak.’
‘So ’tis said,’ I grumbled, sucking hard at my cigar to kindle it afresh.
‘Human syllables cannot be delivered save by human lips. What, then, could have spoken out of the darkness of the sea the other night?’
‘Does not Milton tell of airy tongues that syllable men’s names?’ said I gloomily.
‘Mr. Monson, I repeat that I wonder at you. How can you suffer your imagination to be cheated by some trick of the senses?’ she laughed. ‘Pray, be careful. You may influence me. Then what a morbid company shall we make? I am sure you would like me to believe in this mysterious voice of yours. But, happily, we Colonials are too young, as a people, to be superstitious. We must wait for our ruined castles, and our moated granges, and our long, echoing, tapestry-lined corridors. Then, like you English, we may tremble when we hear a mysterious voice.’
She started violently as she said this, giving my arm so smart a pull that it instantly brought me to a halt, whilst in a voice of genuine alarm she exclaimed, ‘Good gracious! what is that?’
Her face was turned up towards the weather yardarm of the square topsail, where, apparently floating a little above the studdingsail-boom iron, like to a flame in the act of running down the smoke of an extinguished candle ere firing the wick, shone a pendulous bubble of greenish fire, but of a luminosity sufficiently powerful to distinctly reveal the extremity of the black spar pointing finger-like into the darkness ahead, whilst a large space of the curve of the topgallant-sail above showed in the lustre with something of the glassy, delicate greenness you observe in a midsummer leaf in moonshine. The darkness, with its burden of stars, seemed to press to the yacht the deeper for that mystic light, and much that had been distinguishable outlines before melted out upon the sight.
‘What is it?’ exclaimed Miss Jennings in a voice of consternation, and I felt her hand tighten upon my arm with her fears thrilling through the involuntary pressure.
‘Figure an echoing corridor hung with aged tapestry stirring to cold draughts which seem to come like blasts from a graveyard, a noise as of the distant clanking of chains, and then the apparition of a man in armour, holding up such a lantern as that yonder, approaching you who are spell-bound and cannot move for horror.’ I burst out laughing.
‘What is that light, Mr. Monson?’ she cried petulantly.
‘Why, Miss Jennings,’ I answered, ‘’tis a saint, not a light; a reverend old chap called St. Elmo who transforms himself at pleasure into a species of snapdragon for the encouragement of poor Jack.’
‘See that corposant, sir?’ rumbled Finn out of the darkness.
‘Very well, indeed,’ I answered. ‘Finn has explained,’ I continued; ‘that light is what sailors call a corpusant—sometimes compreesant. If we were Catholics of the Columbian period we should tumble down upon our knees and favour it with a litany or oblige it with a hymn; but being bleak-minded Protestants all that we can do is to wonder how the deuce it happens to be burning on such a night as this, for I have seen scores of these corposants in[152] my time, but always either in dead calms or in gales of wind. But there it is, Miss Jennings, an atmospheric exhalation as commonplace as lightning, harmless as the glow-worm, though in its way one of the most poetic of old ocean’s hundred suggestions; for how easy to imagine some giant figure holding that mystic lamp, whose irradiation blends the vast spirit shape with the gloom and blinds the sight to it, though by watching with a little loving coaxing of fancy one should be able after a bit to catch a glimpse of a pair of large sorrowful eyes or the outline of some wan giant face.’
‘It is gone,’ she exclaimed with a shudder.
‘Hush!’ I exclaimed, ‘we may hear the rustling of pinions by listening.’
‘Mr. Monson, you are ungenerous,’ she cried with an hysterical laugh.
Suddenly the light glanced and then flamed at the foretopmast head, where it threw out, though very palely, the form of the lookout man on the topgallantyard, whose posture showed him to be crouching with his arm over his eyes.
‘I dare say that poor devil up there,’ I exclaimed, ‘fully believes the fire-bubble to be a man’s ghost.’
‘It is a startling thing to see,’ exclaimed Miss Jennings.
‘But Colonials are too young as a people to be superstitious,’ said I. ‘It is only we of the old country, you know, with our moated granges——’
‘What is the hour, Mr. Monson?’
‘I say, Charles, are you on deck?’ shouted Wilfrid from the companion hatch.
‘Ay; here I am with Miss Jennings. What’s the time, Wilfrid, d’ye know?’
As I spoke two silver chimes, and then a third, came floating and ringing from the forecastle—three bells, half-past nine.
‘See that corposant?’ bawled Wilfrid. And he came groping up to us. ‘An omen, by George!’ he cried with an odd hilarious note in his voice. ‘Laura, mark me, that flame isn’t shining for nothing. ’Tis a signal light fired by fortune to advise us of some great event at hand.’
‘Quarterdeck there!’ came down the voice of the lookout man, falling from sail to sail, as it seemed, in an echo that made the mysterious flame a wild thing to the imagination for a moment by its coming direct from it.
‘Hallo?’ roared Finn.
‘Can I lay down till this here blasted light’s burnt out? ’Tain’t right to be all alone with it up here.’
‘It is burnt out,’ cried Finn, in a way which showed he sympathised with the fellow. In fact, as the sailor called, the light vanished, and, though we stood looking awhile waiting for its reappearance, we saw no more of it.
That ocean corpse candle had shone at the right moment. Likely enough I should have made myself a bit merry over my[153] tender and beautiful companion’s fears in revenge for her pouting, pettish wonderment at the uneasiness which the mysterious voices had raised in me. But Wilfrid remained with us for the rest of the evening, and, as I was anxious that he should know nothing about the strange sound, I forbore all raillery. It was midnight when we went to bed. Our talk had been very sober, indeed somewhat philosophical in its way, with references to electrical phenomena. Wilfrid chatted with excitement, which he increased by two or three fuming glasses of seltzer and spirits. He told us a wild story of a ship that he was on board of somewhere down off the New Zealand coast, ploughing through an ocean of fire on a pitch-black night with a gale of wind blowing and a school of whales keeping pace with the rushing fabric, spouting vast feather-like fountains of burning water as they stormed through it. He talked like a man reciting a dream or delivering an imagination, and there was a passion in his speech due to excitement and old Cognac, along with a glow in his large peering eyes and a play of flushed features that persuaded me of a very defined mood of craziness passing over his mind. His fancy seemed to riot in the roaring, fiery scene he figured; the ship, plunging into hollows, which flashed about her bows like volcanic vomitings of flame, the heavens above black as soot, the ocean waving like sheet lightning to its confines, and the huge body of the whales crushing the towering surges as they rolled headlong through them into a moonlike brilliance, flinging on high their delicate emerald-green sparkling spouts of water, which floated comet-like over them against the midnight of the heavens.
On eight-bells striking we went to bed. All was quiet on deck; a pleasant breeze blowing under the hovering prisms and crystals of the firmament, the yacht leaning over in a pale shadow in the dusk and seething pleasantly along with a noise rising up from round about her like the rippling of a flag in a summer breeze. I fell asleep and slept soundly, and when I awoke it was to the beating of somebody’s knuckles upon my cabin-door. The day had broken, and my first glance going to the scuttle, I spied through the thick glass of it a windy sunrise with smoky crimson flakes and a tint of tarnished pink upon the atmosphere.
‘Hallo! Hallo there! Who’s that knocking?’
‘’Tis me, sir, Capt’n Finn. Can I have a word with your honour?’ exclaimed the skipper, who had subdued his voice to a note that was alarming with its suggestion of physical effort.
‘Come in, Finn. What is it now?’
The handle was turned, and the captain entered cap in hand. He closed the door carefully, and instantly said, ‘Sorry to disturb you, sir, but baste me for an old duckling, Mr. Monson, if I don’t believe the “Shark” to be in sight.’
‘What?’ I shouted, sitting bolt upright and flinging my legs over the edge of the bunk.
He glanced at the door, looking an intimation to me to make[154] no noise. ‘I thought I’d consult with ’ee first, sir, before reporting to Sir Wilfrid.’
‘Is she in sight from the deck?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Ay, Mr. Monson, I’m just off the t’gallant-yard, where I’ve been inspecting her ever since she was first reported, and that’ll be drawing on for five and twenty minutes.’
‘But she is hull down?’
‘Yes, sir, and still a schooner-yacht at that,’ said he emphatically. ‘Mind, I don’t say she is the “Shark.” All I want to report is a schooner with a yacht’s canvas—not American cotton. No, sir, canvas like ourn, nothen square forrards, and sailing well she looks.’
‘How heading?’
‘Why to the south’ard and west’ard as we are. I’m in your hands, sir. It’ll be a fearful excitement for Sir Wilfrid and a terrible blow if it’s another vessel.’
‘Oh, but you have to give him the news, happen what will! Wait, however, till I have had a look, will you? I shall be with you in a minute or two.’
He left the berth, and in red-hot haste with a heart beating with excitement I plunged into my clothes and ran on deck, passing softly, however, through the cabin; for, though I know not why it should be, yet I have observed that at sea there is something almost electrical in a time full of startling significance like this, an influence that, act as softly and be as hushed as you may, will yet arouse sleeping people and bring them about you in a dreaming way, wondering what on earth has happened. Pale and windy as the sunrise was, there was dazzle enough in the soaring luminary to stagger my sight on my first emergence. I stepped clear of the companion and stood whilst I fetched a few breaths gazing round me. The sea was a dull, freckled blue with a struggling swell underrunning it athwart the course of the wind as though the coming breeze was to be sought northwards. The horizon astern was gloomy and vague in the shadow of a long bank of clouds, a heap of sullen terraces of vapour rising from flint to saffron and then to a faint wet rose where the ragged sky-line of the compacted body caught the eastern colour. All was clear water, turn where the gaze would. On the topgallant-yard the fellow on the look-out lay over the spar with a telescope at his eye; his figure, as it swung through the misty radiance against the pale blue of the morning sky that south-east looked to be kindling into whiteness, was motionless with the intentness of his stare. If what the tubes were revealing to him was the ‘Shark,’ then, as he had been the first to sight her, that glittering heavy five-guinea piece nailed to the mainmast was his. It was as much the thought of this reward going from them as curiosity that had sent the watch on deck aloft too to have a look. The last of them was coming down[155] hand over hand as I went forward. Discipline was forgotten in the excitement of such a moment as this, and swabs and squiligees had been flung down without a word of rebuke from Cutbill, whose business it was to superintend the washing of the decks.
I sprang into the foreshrouds, and was presently alongside the lookout fellow. ‘Give me hold of that glass,’ said I. To the naked eye up here the sail hung transparently visible upon the edge of the sea, a point of lustrous white like the head of a marble obelisk lustrous with the silver of sunrise. But the telescope made a deal more of that dash of light than this. I threw a leg over the yard, steadied the glass against the mast, and instantly witnessed the white canvas of what seemed unquestionably a large schooner-yacht risen to her rail upon the horizon where the thin black length of her swam like an eel with the fluctuations of the refractive atmosphere; but all above was the steady brilliant whiteness of the cloths of the pleasure ship mounting from boom to gaff; a wide and handsome spread with a flight of triangular canvas hovering between jibboom and topmast, as though a flock of seafowl were winging past just there.
‘Do you know the “Shark”?’ said I to the man.
‘I’ve seen her once or twice at Southampton, sir.’
‘Is that she, think you?’
‘Ay, sartin as that there water’s salt.’
‘Well, there’ll be good pickings for you on the mainmast,’ said I, handing him back the glass.
His face seemed to wither up between his whiskers to the incredible wrinkles of the smile which shrunk it to the aspect of an old dried apple. I got into the rigging and descended to the deck. The sailors stared hard at me as I went out. I suppose they imagined that I was well acquainted with the ‘Shark,’ and they eyed my countenance with a solicitude that was almost humorous. Finn stood near the main rigging perspiring with impatience and anxiety, fanning his long face with his cap and sending glances in the direction of the sea, where presently those two alabaster-like spires now hidden would be visible.
‘Is it the “Shark,” think ’ee, sir?’ he cried in a breathless way.
‘My good Finn, how the dickens should I know? I know no more of the “Shark” than of Noah’s Ark. But, seeing that the vessel we want is a schooner of some two hundred tons, of a fore and aft rig, bound our way, and a yacht to boot, then, if yonder little ship be not the chap we are in search of, this meeting with her will be an atrociously strange coincidence.’
‘Just what I think, sir,’ he cried, still breathless.
‘Do you mean to shift your helm for her?’
‘She was abeam when first sighted, sir. I have brought her on the bow since then, as ye can see. But I’ll head straight if ye should think proper,’ he exclaimed with a look aloft and around.
‘Oh, by all means go slap for her, captain!’ said I. ‘That you know will be my cousin’s first order.’
‘Trim sail, the watch!’ he bawled out.
The helm was put over and the yacht’s head fell off till you saw by the line of the flashing glass through which the fellow aloft continued to peer that the hidden sail had been brought about two points on the lee bow. All was now bustle on deck with trimming canvas, setting studdingsails, and the like. The dawn had found us close hauled with the topgallantsail lifting and every sheet flat aft, and now we were carrying the wind abaft the beam with a subdued stormy heave of the yacht over the sulky swell. Indeed, Finn should have made sail to the first shift of helm; but the poor fellow seemed to have lost his head till he had talked with me, scarce knowing how to settle his mind as to the right course to be instantly adopted in the face of that unexpected apparition which was showing like a snow-flake from aloft. For my part, I thought, I could not better employ the leisure that yet remained than by preparing for what was to come by a cold brine bath. So down I went, telling Finn that I would rout out Sir Wilfrid as I passed through the cabin and give him the news.
I descended into the cabin, walked straight to the door of Wilfrid’s berth and knocked.
‘Who’s there?’
‘I, Charles. I have news for you.’
‘Come in, come in!’
I entered and found Wilfrid in his bunk propped up on his elbow, his eyes looking twice their natural size with the intensity of his stare, and one long uncouth leg already flung over the edge so that his posture was as if he had been suddenly paralysed whilst in the act of springing on to the deck.
‘What news in the name of heaven? Quick, now, like a dear boy!’
‘There’s a schooner-yacht uncommonly like your “Shark” away down on the lee bow visible from aloft.’
He whipped his other leg out of bed and sat bold upright. I had expected some extravagance of behaviour in him on his hearing this, but greatly to my surprise he sat silent in his bunk eyeing me, his brow dark and his lips moving for several seconds, which might have been minutes for the time they seemed to run into.
‘What is to-day, Charles?’
‘Thursday.’
‘Ha! It should be Monday. That light last night was an[157] omen, as I told you. I knew some great event could not be far off.’ His eyes kindled under their quivering lids and an odd smile twisted his mouth into the expression of a sarcastic grin. It was as ugly a look in him as I had ever seen, and it gained heavily in the effect it produced by his comparatively quiet manner.
‘We are heading directly for her, of course?’
‘Finn has her about two points on the lee bow,’ said I.
‘Will that do?’ he exclaimed.
‘Why, yes; hold a weather-gage of the chase, it is said; though I think we shall be having a northerly blast upon us before the sun touches his meridian.’
‘Is she the “Shark,” Charles?’
‘You know I never saw the vessel, Wilf. But Finn and the chap on the yard seem to have no doubt of her, and the skipper ought to know anyway.’
On this he leapt to the deck with a cry of laughter, and coming up to me let fall his hand heavily upon my shoulder with such a grip of it that, spite of my having my coat on, it ached after he had let go like an attack of rheumatism. ‘Now what say you?’ said he, stooping, for he was a taller man than I, and peering and grinning close into my face. ‘You looked upon this chase as a crazy undertaking, didn’t you? The sea was such a mighty circle, Charles! the biggest ship in the world but an insignificant speck upon it, hey?’
He let go of me and brought his hands together, extending and slowly beating the air with them, with his body rocking. I awaited some passionate outfly, but whether his thoughts were too deep for words or that he was satisfied to think what at another time he might have stormed out with, he held his peace. Presently and very suddenly he abandoned his singular attitude and fell to collecting articles of his clothing which he pulled on as though he would tear them to pieces.
‘I’ll be with you on deck immediately,’ said I, going to the door. But he did not seem to know that I was present; all the time he strained and dragged at his clothes he talked to himself rapidly, fiercely; pausing once to smite his thigh with his open hand; following this on with a low, deep laugh, like that of a sleeper dreaming.
Well, thought I, as I stepped out and went to my berth, whether it prove the ‘Shark’ or not we shall have to ‘stand by,’ as Finn hinted, for some queer displays to-day. I met Miss Jennings’ maid in the cabin and asked if she was going to her mistress. She replied yes. ‘Then,’ said I, ‘give her my compliments and tell her that we have raised a large schooner-yacht during the night, and that Finn seems to think she is the “Shark.”’
As I entered my berth I caught myself smiling over my fancy of the look that would come into the sweet girl’s face when her maid gave her the message; the brilliant gleam of mingled alarm, temper, astonishment in her eyes, the sudden flush of her cheek[158] and its paleness afterwards, the consternation in the set of her lips and the agitation of her little hands like the fluttering of falling snow-flakes as she dressed. But in good sooth I too was feeling mightily excited once more; I had cooled down somewhat since going on deck and viewing the distant sail from the masthead; now that I was alone and could muse, my pulse rose with my imaginations till it almost came to my thinking of myself as on the eve of some desperate and bloody business, boarding a pirate, say, with the chance of a live slow match in his magazine, or cutting out something heavily armed and full of men under a castle bristling with artillery. Supposing the craft to be the ‘Shark,’ what was to be the issue? The ‘Bride’ would be recognised; and Hope-Kennedy was not likely, as I might take it, to let us float alongside of him if he could help it. Suppose we maimed her and compelled her to bring to; what then? I had asked Finn this question long before, and he had said it would not come to a hand-to-hand struggle. But how could he tell? If we offered to board they might threaten to fire into us, and a single shot, let alone a wounded or a killed man, might raise blood enough to end in as grim an affray as ever British colours floated over. Small wonder that my excitement rose with all these fancies and speculations. And then again, supposing the stranger to be the ‘Shark,’ there was (to me) the astonishing coincidence of falling in with her—picking her up, indeed, as though we had been steered dead into her wake by some spirit hand instead of blundering on her through a stroke of luck, which had no more reference to Finn’s calculations, and suppositions and hopings, than to the indications of the nose of our chaste and gilded figure-head.
When I went on deck I spied Wilfrid coming down the forerigging. He held on very tightly and felt about with his sprawling feet with uncommon cautiousness for the ratlines ere relaxing his grip of the shrouds. Finn was immediately under him, standing by, perhaps, to shoulder him up if he should turn dizzy. They reached the deck and came aft.
‘She’s not yet in sight from the cross-trees,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, puffing and irritable from nervousness and exertion and disappointment, ‘and I can’t climb higher.’
‘If she’s the “Shark,”’ said I, ‘you’re not going to raise her upon the horizon as if she were a beacon. But there’s a spread of wings here that she can’t show anyhow, and it will be strange if her white plumes are not nodding above that blue edge by noon.’
‘Ay, sir,’ rumbled Finn, ‘specially with that coming along,’ pointing to the north, where the weather looked heavy and smoky and thunderous with a purple rounding of shadow upon the sea-line and a hot-looking copperish light flowing off the jagged summits into the dusty blue as though it were sundown that was reflected there, whilst the troubled roll of the swell out of the shadow on the ocean put a finishing touch to the countenance of storm you found spreading astern from north-east to north-west. ‘There’ll be wind enough[159] there, sir,’ said Finn, keeping his square-ended stumpy fore-finger levelled, ‘to give us white water to above our bow ports anon, or I’m a codfish.’
Wilfrid turned about and fell to pacing the deck; he struck out as though walking for a wager, tossing his legs and swinging his arms and measuring the planks from the wheel to very nearly abreast of the galley. Such of the sailors as were to windward slided to the other side, where you saw them exchanging looks though there was no want of respect in their manner, but on the contrary an air of active sympathy as if they were getting to master the full meaning of the existence of that sail below the horizon by observing how the report of it worked in the baronet.
‘We must try and raise her,’ muttered Finn in my ear, ‘if only to pacify his honour by the sight of her. He can’t climb, and he’ll go out of himself if he don’t see her soon.’
‘But do you gain on her!’
‘Why, yes, she is visible from the cross-trees already. But Sir Wilfrid can’t get so high.’ Well, thought I, this should surely signify slower heels than the ‘Shark’ is allowed to have.
I went to the taffrail and overhung it, watching the sky astern with an occasional mechanical glance at the wool-white spin of the wake gushing over the surface of the jumble of the swell like steam from the funnel of a locomotive. It was blowing a fresh wind, though I guessed it would slacken away soon to pipe up in a fresh slant presently. The yacht was a great fabric of cloths, every stitch abroad that would hold air, and she drove through it humming, troubled as she was by the irregular heave of the sea. In fact her movements were so awkward as to render walking inconvenient, and nothing, I believe, but the not knowing what he was about could have furnished Wilfrid with his steady shanks that morning. It was like a bit of sleep-walking, indeed, where a man who awake could not look down forty feet without desiring to cast himself out of a window, safely and exquisitely treads a narrow ledge of roof as high as the top of London Monument.
I was startled from my reverie by an exclamation, and turning, saw him hastily approaching Miss Jennings, who had just arrived on deck. He came to her with his arms extended as though he would embrace her.
‘Laura, have you heard?’
‘Is it the “Shark,” Wilfrid?’
‘Finn says yes. She exactly answers to the “Shark’s” description. Hereabouts she should be, this is her track,—yes, yes, it is the “Shark.” Would God it were Monday!’ Then, seeing me looking, he bawled, ‘Eh, Charles, what other ship should she prove? Fore and aft—fore and aft, of the “Shark’s” burthen, as you and Finn say, a schooner, a pleasure craft by the colour of her canvas—’ his face suddenly darkened, and he said something to Miss Jennings, but what I could not gather. She half turned away as if overcome by a sudden sense of sickness or faintness; the[160] effect of some expression of fierce joy, I dare say, on his part, some savage whisper of assurance that his opportunity was not far distant now which acted upon her nervous system that trembled yet to the surprise of the news I had sent her through her maid. There was something so sad and appealing in her beauty just then that but for the feelings it possessed me with I might scarcely have suspected what a lover’s heart I already carried in my breast for her. The troubled sweetness of her glances, her pale cheeks and lips, the swift rise and fall of her bosom, betokened consternation and the conflict of many emotions and, as I could not but think, a subduing sense of loneliness. Well, I must say I loved her the better for this weakness of spirit, for this recoil from the confrontment that she had been endeavouring to persuade herself she was looking forward to with a longing for it only a little less venomous than Wilfrid’s. Nothing, I had thought again and again, but the soul of a fond, tender, chaste woman, gentle in mind and of a nature loveable, with the best weaknesses of her sex, could go clad in such graces as she walked in withal from her topmost curl of gold to the full, firm, elegant little foot on which she seemed to float to the buoyant measures of the yacht’s deck.
Wilfrid addressed her again hurriedly and eagerly with the gesticulations of a Jew in a passion. She answered softly, continuously sending scared looks over the yacht’s bow. I heard him name his wife, but it was not for me to join them nor to listen, so I overhung the taffrail afresh, observing that even now there was a noticeable weakening in the weight of the wind, whilst the swing of the swell from a little to the westward of north was growing more regular, a longer and fuller heave with an opalescent glance in the vapour immediately over the sea-line as though the weather was clearing past the rim of the ocean.
‘Mr. Monson.’
I turned. Miss Laura stood by my side. Wilfrid had left the deck. ‘Is that vessel, that is said to be ahead of us, the ‘Shark,’ do you think?’
‘I wish I knew positively for your sake, that I might relieve your anxiety.’
‘If she should prove to be the vessel that my sister is in’—she drew a long, tremulous breath—‘it will be a marvellous meeting, for I feel now as you have felt all through—now that that yacht is in sight from the mast up there—that this ocean is a vast wilderness.’ She slowly ran her eyes, which were still charged with their scared look, along the sea-line.
‘Well, Miss Jennings, hanging and marriage go by destiny, they say, and so does chasing a wife at sea apparently. I give you my word I am so excited I can scarcely talk.’
‘But it may not be the ‘Shark.’’
‘Why, no.’
‘I hope it is not,’ she cried, starting to the rise in her voice with a glance at the helmsman, who stood near us.
‘I can see that in your face,’ said I.
‘Oh, I hope it is not, and yet I want it to be the “Shark” too. Wilfrid must recover Henrietta. But it makes my heart stand still to think of our meeting. Oh, her shame! her shame! and then to find me here. And what is to happen?’
‘Best let that craft turn out to be the “Shark” though,’ said I. ‘Here we are with a programme of rambles that threatens the world’s end if we don’t fall in with the Colonel. Keep your heart up,’ said I gently. ‘What have you to fear? It is for the galled jade to wince. Why t’other night you would have shot Hope-Kennedy had he stood up before you.’
She tried to smile, but the movement of her lips swiftly faded out into their expression of grief and consternation.
‘I will play my part,’ she exclaimed, twisting her ring upon her finger. ‘If my sister refuses to leave Colonel Hope-Kennedy I have made up my mind not to leave her. Where she goes I’ll go.’
‘I hope not,’ I interrupted, ‘for it might come, Miss Jennings, to my saying that where you go I’ll go, and the Colonel may have rather curious views on the subject of guests.’
‘You said you were too excited to talk,’ she exclaimed with a little colour mounting. ‘It may be that I am stupidly influenced by old memories. I was always afraid of Henrietta. She had an imperious manner, and an old lord whom I met at your cousin’s—I forget his name—told Wilfrid that her eyes made him think of Mrs. Siddons in her finest scenes. I fear her influence upon me when I begin to entreat her. I know how she will look.’
‘All this is mere nervousness,’ said I. ‘You thought of these things before, yet you are here. Besides, the sense of wrong-doing will mightily weaken the genius of wizardry in her—her power at least of exercising it and subduing by it—subduing even you, the tenderest and gentlest of girls; or depend on’t she’s no true member of your sex, but one of those demon-women whom Coleridge describes as wailing for their, or rather in her case for new, lovers.’
She made no reply. Shortly afterwards the breakfast bell summoned us below.
At table Wilfrid spoke little, but his manner was collected; whether it was that excitement was languishing in him or that he had managed to master himself, what he said was rational, his words and manner unclouded by that hectic which was wont to give the countenance of a high fever to all he said and did when anything happened to stir him up. He was stern and thoughtful, and it was easy to see that he accepted the vessel ahead as the ‘Shark,’ and that he was settling his plans. I was heartily grateful for this posture in him. I never knew anyone so fatiguing with his restlessness as my cousin. Half an hour of his company when he was much excited left one as tired, dry, and hollow as a four hours’ argument with an illogical man. He was too much preoccupied to notice how pale and subdued and scared Miss Laura[162] was, struggle as she might in his presence to seem otherwise. I talked very cautiously for fear of provoking a discussion that might heat him. Once he asked me in an angry, twitting way, as though to the heave-up within him of a sudden mood of wrath with a parcel of words atop which were bound to find the road out, whether I felt disposed now to challenge his judgment, whether I was still of opinion that the ocean was too wide a field for such a chase as this, and so on, proceeding steadily but with rising warmth through the catalogue of my early objections to the voyage, but instead of answering him I praised the bit of virgin corned beef off which I was breakfasting, wondered why it was that poultry was always insipid at sea, and so forced him back into his dark and collected silence or obliged him to quit his subject.
However, his inability to keep his attention long fixed helped me here, for he never attempted to pick up the end of the thread I had cut, though, little as he spoke, two-thirds of what he delivered himself of might have been worked into hot arguments but for my cautious answers.
I was not surprised on going on deck to find the wind no more than a light draught with the main boom swinging to the long roll of the yacht and the canvas flapping with vicious snaps at sheet and yard-arm. The water seemed to wash thick as oil from the yacht’s sides, a dirty blue that went into an oozy sort of green northwards. There was a deadness in the lift of the swell that made you think of an idiot shouldering his way through a crowd, and the eye sought in vain for a streak of foam for the relief of the crisp vitality of it.
‘Is that wind or thunder, think you, Mr. Crimp?’ said I to the mate, whom I found in charge, whilst I pointed to the heaped-up folds of cloud astern, the brows of which were not far off the central sky that, spite of the sunshine, was blurred to the very luminary himself with the shadow in the north and with tatters and curls and streaks of rusty brassish vapour risen off the line of the main body and sulkily floating southwards.
‘Wind or thunder?’ answered Crimp with a dull, indifferent look; ‘well, ’tain’t tufted enough for thunder, but there’ll be a breeze, I allow, behind this here swell.’
‘Are we rising the chap ahead?’
‘Not noticeably. She’ll have to shift her hellum for us for that to happen at this pace,’ sending an askew glance over the side. I was leaving him. ‘Heard any more woices?’ he asked.
‘No, have you?’
‘No, and don’t want to. It’s been a puzzling me, though,’ he exclaimed, mumbling over a quid the juice of which had stained the corners of his mouth into so sour a sneer that no artist could have painted it better. ‘Tell’ee what it is. I’m a-going to believe in ghosts.’
‘You can’t do better,’ said I; ‘get hold of a ghost and it will explain everything for you.’
‘Well, ’taint a childish notion anyhow. There’s first class folks as believes in sperrits. What’s a ghost like? Ne’er a man as I’ve asked forrads knows saving the mute, who describes it as a houtline.’
‘What’s inside his outline?’ I asked.
‘Why, that there Muffin can’t get further than that. I says to him, how can a houtline speak? Look here, says he, answer me this: suppose ye takes a bottle and sucks out all the air from inside of it, what’s left? A wacuum, says I. And what’s a wacuum? says he. Why, I says, says I, space, ain’t it? I says. And what’s space? says he. Why nothen, I suppose, I says, says I. Then, says he, how can nothen exist? And yet, says he, it do exist, because ye can point to the bottle and say there it is. So with a ghost, says he; it’s a houtline with nothen inside it if you like, but it’s as real in its emptiness as the inside of a bottle with nothen in it.’
At any other time I should have hugely enjoyed an argument with this acrid old sailor on such a subject as ghosts. There is no company to my taste to equal that of a sour, prejudiced, ignorant salt of matured years, whose knowledge of life has been gained by looking at the world through a ship’s hawse pipe, and who is full to the throat with the sayings and the superstitions of the forecastle. Jacob Crimp was such a man. Indeed he was the best example of the kind that I can recollect, thanks, perhaps, to the help he got from his queer sea-eyes, glutinous in appearance as a jelly-fish, one peering athwart the other with a look of quarrelling about them that most happily corresponded with the sulky expression of his face and the growl of his voice that was like a sea-blessing. But it was impossible to think of the schooner ahead and talk with this man about ghosts. I left him and got into the fore-shrouds and ascended to the cross-trees, where, receiving the glass from the fellow on the yard above, I took a view of the sea over the bow, and caught plainly the canvas of the vessel we were heading for,—her mainsail visible to the boom of it with a glimpse of her bowsprit end wriggling off into the dusky blue air at every rise of her bow to the lift of the swell. I noticed, however, that she had taken in her main gaff topsail, possibly with an eye to the weather astern; but it was a thing to set me problemising. Supposing her to be the ‘Shark,’ either she had not yet sighted us or she had no suspicion of us. Fidler, her captain, would, when we showed fair, be pretty sure to twig us by our rig; but was it likely that the Colonel and Lady Monson would gravely suppose that Wilfrid had started in chase of them? That, indeed, might depend upon whether her ladyship had missed the Colonel’s letter to her, which my cousin had asked me to read. Well, we should have to wait a little. My heart beat briskly as I descended to the deck. Put yourself in my place, and think of the sort of excitement that was threatened before that morning sun shining up there had set!
Half an hour later the weak draught had died out; the rolling[164] of the ‘Bride’ was putting a voice of thunder into her canvas, and the strain on hemp and spar presently obliged old Crimp to take in his studdingsails, which he followed on by ordering the topgallant-sail to be rolled up and the gaff topsail hauled down. Wilfrid, who had arrived on deck, stood haggardly eyeing these man?uvres, but he said nothing, contenting himself with an occasional look, as dark as the shadow astern of us, at the weather there, and a fretful stride to the rail and a stormy stare at the sallow oil-smooth water that came swelling to the counter and washing the length of the little ship in a manner that made her stagger at times most abominably.
‘Let that vessel prove what she may,’ said I, sitting down on a grating abaft the wheel close to which he was standing, ‘we appear to have the heels of her in light airs, however it may be with her in a breeze of wind.’
‘How do you know?’ he inquired in a churchyard note.
‘Why,’ said I, ‘I was just now in the crosstrees and found her showing fair from them, whereas before breakfast she was only visible from the topgallantyard.’
He looked at me with a heavy, leaden eye, and said, ‘A plague on the wind! It has all gone; just when we want it too.’
‘We shall have a capful anon,’ I exclaimed; ‘no need to whistle for it. Mark how it brightens down upon the sea-line yonder as that shadow floats upwards. That means wind enough to whiten this tumbling oiliness for us.’
He directed his gaze in a mechanical way towards the quarter in which I was looking, but said nothing. Miss Jennings came out of the companion. I took her hand and brought her to the grating.
‘A strange, oppressive calm,’ she cried; ‘how sickly the sunshine is! Nature looks to be in as dull a mood as we are.’
‘Wilf,’ said I, ‘if that schooner is the “Shark,” what will you do?’
‘What would you do?’ he answered sternly, as though he imagined I quizzed him, when God knows I was in a more sober and anxious humour than I can express.
‘Well,’ said I very quietly and gravely, ‘when I got my yacht within reach of her glasses, if I could manage it, I should signal that I wanted to speak her.’
‘Quite right; that’s what I shall do,’ said he.
‘But after!’ I exclaimed.
‘After what?’ he cried.
‘Why, confound it, Wilf, suppose she makes no response, holds on all, as we say at sea, and bowls along without taking the slightest notice of us.’
He approached me close, laid his great hand upon my shoulder and thrust his long arm forth straight as a handspike pointing to the forecastle gun. ‘There’s my answer to that,’ he cried in my ear in a voice as disagreeable as the sound of a saw with irritability;[165] ‘you wished me to strike it down into the hold, d’ye remember? you were for ridiculing it from the moment of your catching sight of it; yet without that messenger to deliver my mind what answer would there be to the question you have just now put? Oh my God,’ he suddenly cried, smiting his forehead, ‘I feel as if I shall go mad.’
He crossed to the other side of the deck and paced it alone. Miss Jennings was too much dejected by all this, by the excitement of the time, by nervousness, grief, anxiety, to converse; nor, indeed, was my mood a very sociable one. I procured a chair for her, and, presently found myself alone, as Wilfrid was, wishing from the very bottom of my heart that Colonel Hope-Kennedy was hanged, her ladyship in a lunatic asylum, and myself in my old West End haunts again, though somehow a misgiving as to the accuracy of this last desire visited me on a sudden with the glance I just then happened to cast at Miss Laura, who sat with her hands folded upon her lap, her head bowed in a posture of meditation that took an indescribable character of pathos from the expression on her sweet face.
It was now a little after ten o’clock. Crimp, who was pacing near me that Wilfrid might have the whole range of the weather quarterdeck to himself, suddenly rumbled out, ‘Here comes the wind at last!’ The stern of the yacht was still upon the north, where, at the very verge of the waters which sluggishly heaved like molten lead under the dark canopy of vapour that overhung them, the sea was roughening and whitening to the whipping of wind which looked at that distance to be coming along in a straight line, though as it approached us I witnessed a strange effect of long fibrine feelers sweeping out of the hoarse and rushing ridges of foam which were seething towards us—like darting livid tongues of creatures hidden in the yeast behind tipped with froth that made one think of the slender stem of a vessel ripping through the surface. In a few minutes the boiling popple was all about us, hissing to our counter with a shriek of wind which flashed with such spite into the great space of mainsail and the whole spread of square topsail that the yacht for a moment was bowed down to her ways, fair as it took her on her quarter. An instant she lay so, then came surging back to an almost level deck with her rigging alive as with the ringing of bells, took a sudden plunge forward, throwing from either bow a mass of creaming sea the summit of which went spinning like a snowstorm ahead of her, then gathering impulse in a long, floating, launching plunge as it were, she went sliding through it faster and faster yet till she had a wake like a millrace in chase of her.
It was a scene full of the life and spirit and reality of the ocean after the spell of sulky calm with its dingy northern heaving of water and its haze of weak, moist sunlight in the south and east. Finn to the first of the blast came on deck and fell a-bawling, the sailors sprang from rope to rope with lively heartiness, the slack running gear blew out in semicircles, which with the curve of the canvas and the lean of the masts as the yacht swept forward with the brine boiling high along her, gave a wild, expectant, headlong[166] look to the whole rushing fabric, something indeed to make one fancy that the spirit of her owner, the expression of whose face had her own strained, eager, rushing air, so to speak, had passed into and vitalised her—mere structure of timber as she was—into passionate human yearnings.
It was not to prove a gale, though it would have been hard to guess what lay behind that dirty jumble of white and livid terraces which had been stealthily creeping all the morning zenithwards. The clouds scattered to the rush of the wind, the sun with a brightened disk leapt from one flying vaporous edge to another, dazzling out the snows of the dissolving seas till the eye reeled from the glare of the brilliant foam and the sharp and lovely sparkle of the pure dark blue between. Indeed, before long the wind steadied down into a noble sailing breeze with a piebald sky of warm and cheerful weather steadily swinging into the south-east, as though the whole heaven revolved from one quarter to another like a panorama on a cylinder. Wilfrid looked his wishes, but said nothing. He hung apart in a fashion that was the same as telling me to keep off, nor had he anything to say to Miss Jennings. Finn easily interpreting his master’s face, piled cloths on the yacht till it seemed as though another rag would blow the whole lofty white fabric of canvas, tapering spar, and rigging clean over the bows. We fled along in thunder, and to every curtsey of the vessel’s head the water recoiled in a roar of spume as far as the jibboom end, to speed aft as fast, you would have thought, as the eye could follow it, the swell washing to the counter as if to help her.
We held on in this way for some time, when suddenly Wilfrid, who had come to a stand at the weather rail and was looking ahead, bawled with the note of a shriek in his voice, ‘Look!’ and out sprang his long arm pointing directly on a line with our bowsprit.
‘Ay, there she is, sure enough!’ cried I, as I caught sight, to a floating lift of the deck at that moment, of the pearlish gleam of canvas of a milky brilliance slanting past the soft whiteness of a head of sea against the marble look of the sky there, where the sun-touched clouds were going down to the ocean edge in a crowd with a vein of violet here and there amongst them. I glanced at Wilfrid, not knowing what sort of mood this first glimpse of the yacht would put into him, but there was no alteration of face. His countenance had set into an iron hard expression; methought resolution could never show more grimly stubborn. Miss Jennings came to the side to look.
‘There is little to be seen as yet,’ said I to her, ‘but we shall be heaving her hull up very soon. She is taking it quietly.’
Finn stood near; I took his glass from him and levelled it. ‘Why, ’tis merely ambling with her, captain,’ said I; ‘gaff topsails down and no hint of squaresail that I can make out. The cloud we are making astern should puzzle her. D’ye think Captain Fidler will recognise this vessel?’
‘Why, yes, sir; bound to it,’ he answered; ‘we aren’t like the “Shark,” you know: our figure-head alone is as good as naming us. Then our sheer of bow ’ud sarve like a sign-post to Fidler. Back this by our square rig and he’d have to ha’ fallen dark to mistake,’ meaning by dark, blind.
‘Is the “Shark” to be as easily recognised?’ asked Miss Jennings, who stood close by me, occasionally laying her hand upon my arm to steady herself and putting the other to her lips to speak, for the breeze rang with a scream in it at times over the rail in a manner to sweep the words out of her mouth as though her syllables were the smoke of a cigarette. Finn shook his long head.
‘Lay me close aboard, miss,’ said he, ‘and I’ll tell you the “Shark” from another craft; but there’s nothen distinct about her as there is with us. She’s black without gilt like a great many others, of a slaving pattern, long, low, without spring forrads or aft, with apple sides like others again. But,’ said he after a pause, during which he had taken a look through his telescope at the glistening fragment hovering like a butterfly over the bow, ‘though I don’t want to say too much, sir, I’d be willing to lay down a good bit o’ money on the chance of yonder chap proving the “Shark.” Time, place, all sarcumstances point her out.’
‘True,’ said I; ‘but there are many schooners afloat.’
‘Ay, sir; but such a coincidence as that, your honour,’ said he pointing, ‘sits too far on the werge of what’s likely to fit it to sarve as part of a man’s reckonings.’
‘I agree with Captain Finn,’ said Miss Laura; ‘besides, I feel here that it is the vessel we are pursuing.’ She laid her hand upon her bosom and turned to cross the deck where her chair was.
I assisted her to her seat with a peep out of the corner of my eyes at Wilfrid, but there was no encouragement in his face; so, posting myself forward of the companion for the shelter of it, I lighted a cigar and puffed away in silence till the luncheon bell rang. Wilfrid did not come to table. When I returned on deck after lingering nearly an hour below, partly with the wish to put some heart into Miss Jennings, who was pitifully dejected and nervous, and partly because I had had a long spell in the open air and guessed that for some time yet there would be little enough of the schooner showing to be worth looking at—I say when I returned I found my cousin at the rail with his arms tightly clasped on his breast staring fixedly ahead, with a face grim, indeed, with the scowling contraction of the brows, but as collected in the determined severity of it as can be imagined. In fact, the sight of the schooner[168] ahead had gathered all his faculties and wandering fancies and imaginations into a bunch, so to speak, and his mind as you saw it in his eyes, in the set of his lips, in the resolved and contained posture of his body, was as steady as that of the sanest man aboard us. It was without wonder, however, that I perceived we had risen the yacht to the line of her rail, when I noticed that she still kept under short canvas whilst the ‘Bride’ was bursting through the surges to the impulse now even of the lower studdingsail. I took Finn’s glass from him and made out a very handsome schooner, loftily sparred with an immense head to her mainsail, the boom of which hung far over her quarter, whilst she swang in graceful floating leapings from hollow to ridge with the round of her stern lifting black and flashing off each melting brow that underran her. We had, indeed, come up with her hand over hand, but then it would be almost the worst point of sailing for a fore-and-aft vessel, whilst we were carrying in our square rig alone pretty nearly the same surface of canvas that she had abroad. She was too far off as yet, even with the aid of the glass, to distinguish her people.
‘What do you think, Finn, now?’ said I, turning to him. He stood close beside me with his long face working with anxiety, and straining his sight till I thought he would shoot his eyes out of their sockets.
‘If she ain’t the “Shark,”’ said he, ‘she’s the “Flying Dutchman.” I had but one doubt. Yonder craft’s boats are white, and my notion, but I couldn’t swear to him, was that the “Shark’s” boats were blue. I’ve been forrards amongst the men, a few of whom are acquainted with Lord Winterton’s yacht, and one of ’em says her boats was blue, whilst th’ others are willing to bet their lives that they are white.’
‘But the cut of her as she shows yonder proves her the “Shark,” you think?’
‘I do, sir,’ he answered emphatically.
‘Well,’ said I, fetching a deep breath, ‘after this hang me if I don’t burn my book and agree with your mate, old Jacob Crimp, to believe in ghosts.’
I levelled the glass again and uttered an exclamation as I got the lenses to bear upon her. ‘By thunder, Finn! yes, they look to have the scent of us now. See! there goes her gaff topsail?’
Wilfrid caught my words. ‘What are they doing?’ he roared, bursting out in a mad way from his rapt iron-like silence; ‘making sail, d’ye say?’ and he came running up to us with an odd thrusting forward of his head as though straining to determine what was scarce more than a blur to his short sight. He snatched the glass from my hand. ‘Yes,’ he shouted, ‘and there goes her squaresail. By every saint, Finn, there’s an end of my doubts;’ and he closed the glass with a ringing of the tubes as he telescoped them that would have made you think that the thing was in pieces in his hands.
‘Shall I signal her to heave to, your honour?’ exclaimed Finn, speaking with a doubtful eye as if measuring the distance.
‘Ay, at once,’ cried Wilfrid, ‘but’—he cast a look at the gaff end—‘she’ll not see your colours there,’ pointing vehemently.
‘I’ll run ’em up at the fore, Sir Wilfrid; they’ll blow out plain there with the t’gallant halliards let go.’
‘Do as you will, only you must make her know my meaning,’ cried my cousin, and he went with an impetuous stride right aft and resumed his former sentinel posture. Miss Jennings came timidly up to me.
‘She is the “Shark,” then?’ she said in a low voice.
‘All who know her are agreed, Finn says, saving here and there a doubt about the colour of her boats,’ I answered.
She had a sailor’s eye for sea effects, and instantly noticed that the schooner ahead had broadened her show of canvas.
‘Do they suspect who we are?’ she exclaimed, talking as though she were musing.
‘No doubt the “Bride” is recognised, and they will run away if they can.’
She looked at Wilfrid. ‘I do not like to speak to him,’ she exclaimed.
‘He’s killing Hope-Kennedy over and over again,’ said I: ‘his wife is before him too, and he is haranguing her. Bless us, what a wonderful thing human imagination is!’
Up went the signal flags forward in a string of balls, a man tugged, the bunting broke and streamed out in its variety of lustrous colours, every flag stiff as a sheet of horn handpainted, with the light of the sky past it showing through. I caught myself breathing short and hard whilst waiting for what was to follow this summons to the running craft. We had been crushing through it after her with the speed of a steamer, and, supposing her indeed to be the ‘Shark,’ had literally verified Wilfrid’s boast that the ‘Bride’ could sail two feet to her one. But now that she had broadened her wings there was a threat of considerable tediousness in the chase.
‘Do you suppose they have made out what yacht we are?’ I asked Finn.
‘Likely as not, sir. I shall think so for sartin if they don’t shorten sail on reading that bunting up there. A stranger ’ud be willing enough to speak us. Why not? ’Tis understandable that Fidler should have kept his rags small in the face of the muck that was crawling in the nor’rad this morning. He’s got nothen to chase, and was always a careful man, so I’ve heard, and I tell ye, sir,’ said he in a subdued way, speaking with his eyes fixed on Miss Jennings, who stood close with a white face, ‘that the sight of his easy canvas is almost the same to me as seeing of her ladyship a sitting there,’ levelling his hairy finger at the yacht, ‘for, fond as she was of the water, let anything of a breeze come and she was always for having Sir Wilfrid reduce sail.’ He put the glass to his eye as he spoke. ‘Hillo!’ he exclaimed in an instant, ‘they’re hoisting a colour. There it goes—there it blows. Oh my precious[170] eyes! What is it? what is it?’ he rumbled, talking to himself and working into the glass as though he would drive an eye clean through it. ‘Why, Mr. Monson,’ he bawled, ‘I’m Field Marshal the Duke o’ Wellington, sir, if she han’t hoisted Dutch colours.’
I snatched the glass from his hand, and sure enough made out the Batavian horizontal tricolour streaming from the peak signal halliards like a fragment of rainbow against the lustrous curve of the mainsail.
‘Wilfrid,’ I shouted, addressing him as he stood right aft, Miss Laura and I and the skipper being grouped a little forward of the main rigging, ‘they’ve hoisted Dutch colours. She’s a Hollander, not the “Shark!”’ and I fetched something like a breath of relief, for it was a condition of suspense that you wanted to see an end to one fashion or another as quickly as possible.
He approached us slowly, took the glass from my hand in silence, and after a steady inspection turned to Finn.
‘She’s the “Shark,”’ he said, with a fierce snap in his manner that was like letting fly a pistol at the skipper.
‘Your honour thinks so?’
‘Don’t you?’
‘Them Dutch colours, Sir Wilfrid——’
‘A device, a trick! What could confirm one’s suspicions more than yonder display of a foreign ensign? She’s the “Shark,” I tell you, and that colour’s a stratagem. What do you say, Charles?’
‘I’m blest if I know what to think,’ said I. ‘If she’s the “Shark,” why has she taken it so leisurely, only just now setting her squaresail and gaff topsail though we have been in sight for a long time, crowding down upon her under a press that should awhile since have excited their suspicions? No need for them to hoist Dutch colours. If Fidler thinks he is chased, why don’t he haul his wind instead of keeping that fore-and-aft concern almost dead before it, as if he didn’t know on which side to carry his main boom?’
‘She’s the “Shark”!’ thundered Wilfrid, ‘the flag she is flying is a lie. Finn,’ he cried in a voice so savagely imperious, so confoundedly menacing, that I saw Miss Laura shrink, whilst the poor skipper gave a hop as though he had touched something red-hot; ‘are we overhauling that vessel?’
‘Yes, Sir Wilfrid.’
‘How long will it take us to come within gunshot of her?’
Finn scratched the back of his head. ‘Mr. Monson, sir,’ said he, addressing me, ‘that gun’ll throw about three-quarters of a mile, I allow.’
‘Call it a mile,’ said I.
My cousin, with his nostrils distended to the widest, his respiration hysteric, his whole body on the move, and with that raised look in his face I have formerly described, stared at Finn as though he would slay him with his gaze. The skipper scratched the back of his head again.
‘Well, your honour, if yon schooner holds as she is and this here breeze don’t take off, we ought to be within gun-shot,’ here he produced a silver watch of the size and shape of an apple, ‘in three hours’ time, making it about half-past five.’
‘How far is she distant now?’
‘Betwixt three and four mile, Sir Wilfrid.’
‘Get your gun ready.’
‘A blank shot, your honour?’
‘A blank devil and be damned to you. Load with ball. Who’s your gunner?’
‘We shall have to manage amongst us, Sir Wilfrid,’ turning a face of alarm upon me.
I was about to remonstrate, but there was an expression in the eye that my cousin bent on me at that instant that caused me to take Miss Jennings’ hand as an invitation to her to cross the deck and walk.
‘Charles,’ said he, ‘you told me that you knew something about gunnery. Will you handle that weapon yonder for me?’
‘Wilf, it is madness,’ said I. ‘What! plump a shot into a craft that may not be the vessel you want! or, which in my opinion is just as bad, fire at with a chance of sinking a yacht with a lady aboard—that lady your wife—the woman whom you have embarked on this extraordinary adventure to rescue?’
My blood rose with my words. I dared not trust myself to reason with him. I crossed the deck with Miss Laura, and when we faced round I spied Wilfrid marching forwards with Finn, and presently he was beside of the gun gesticulating vehemently to a body of seamen who had collected round the piece.
Our signals were kept flying at the fore, whilst with the naked eye one could behold the minute spot of colour steadfast at the schooner’s peak. Onwards she held her course, swarming steadily forward in long gliding curtseyings over each frothing surge that chased her, a most shapely and beautiful figure with a long flash of her low black wet side coming off the line of foam like a lift of dull sunshine, whilst on high soared the stretches of her sails with something of the airiness of a dragon-fly’s wing in the milk-white softness of their spaces against the cloudy distance beyond. The time passed, Wilfrid remained forward. He stood upon one of the anchors swaying with folded arms to the movement of the yacht, stiff as a handspike, his face fixedly directed at the schooner ahead. The sailors hung about, chewing hard, spitting much, saying things to one another past the hairy backs of their hands, here and there a whiskered face looking stupid with a sort of dull wonder that was like an inane smile; but the fact is, from Cutbill down to the youngest hand all the seamen were puzzled, excited, and uneasy. The state of my cousin’s mind showed plainly to the least penetrating of those nautical eyes. No man amongst them could imagine what wild directions would be delivered, and[172] though I made no doubt the gun would be let fly when the order to fire was given, I was pretty sure that should it come to a command to board the schooner by force the men would decline. Sometimes Finn was forward, fluttering near Wilfrid, sometimes aft, restlessly inspecting the compass or going feverishly to the side and looking over, when again and again I would hear him say in a voice as harsh as the sound of a carpenter’s plane, ‘Glory, glory! blow, my sweet breeze, blow!’ manifestly unconscious that he spoke aloud, but evidently obtaining some ease of mind from the ejaculation.
The sun went floating down westwards, the breeze shifted a point or two towards him and then slackened, though it continued to blow a fine sailing wind with a regular sea that had long before lost the early snappish and worrying hurl put into it by the first of the dark blast. Slowly we had been gaining upon the chase; minute after minute I had been expecting to see her put her helm down, flatten her sheets, and go staggering away into the reddening waters weltering and washing to the sky under the descending sun, on what she might know to be some best point of sailing. She kept her squaresail spread and the Dutch flag hoisted, and swung stubbornly ahead of us, making nothing of our signals, which still continued to fly. Through Finn’s glass I could distinguish the figures of a few seamen forward and a couple of men pacing the weather-side of the quarterdeck. Now and again a head would show at the rail as though watching us, but the suggestion I seemed to find in the general posture and air aboard the vessel was that of indifference, as though, in fact, we had long ago exhausted curiosity, and had been quitted as a spectacle for inboard jobs and the routine of such life as was led there.
‘Is she the “Shark,”?’ I said to Finn.
‘If she isn’t,’ said he, ‘my eyes ain’t mates, sir. It is but a question of the colour of the quarter-boats.’
‘I see no name on the counter.’
‘No, sir, the “Shark” has no name painted on her.’
‘She’s steered by a wheel,’ said I.
‘So is the “Shark,” sir.’
‘What do the men forward who know the “Shark” think now?’ I asked.
‘Two of ’em say that it ain’t her; the rest that it is. But ne’er a man aboard has that knowledge of her that ’ud give him conscience enough to take an oath upon it. Glory, glory, there she walks! By the piper that played afore Moses in the woods, your honour, ’twill be the fairest sunrise that ever I see that lights up the end of this damned mess, begging your pardon, Mr. Monson, and yours, miss, I’m sure. Fact is, I feel all of a work inside me, like a brig’s boom in a calm.’
‘I am unable to hold the glass steady,’ said Miss Laura. ‘Mr. Monson, I see no signs of a lady on board. Do you, Captain Finn?’
‘Not so much as the twinkle of a hinch of a petticoat, miss; but if her ladyship’s there, of course she’d keep below.’
‘You know Captain Fidler,’ said I.
‘Very well, sir.’
‘There are two figures walking that quarterdeck. Is one of them he?’
‘It’s too fur off, sir. I’ve been looking and looking, but it’s too fur off, I say, sir. Mind!’ he suddenly roared, ‘they’re a-going to fire,’ and he rolled hurriedly forwards.
A moment or two after, crash! went the gun. The blast broke in a dead shock upon the ear, and the smoke blew away over the lee bow as red with the tincturing of the sun as a veil of vapour at the edge of the crimson moon. Miss Jennings shrieked. A long yearning gush of sea catching the ‘Bride’ fair on the quarter swung her for a breadth or two so as to hide the schooner, then to her next yaw with Wilfrid still at the anchor bending forward in impetuous headlong pose and two or three sailors handling the gun and a crowd of men in the head staring their hardest, the chase swept into view afresh.
‘Ha!’ I shouted, ‘she’s heaving to.’
‘Oh, Mr. Monson!’ cried Miss Jennings, clasping her hands.
Instantly Finn fell to thundering out orders. ‘In stun’sails! clew up the t’garnsail! down squares’l; down gaff tops’l!’ Twenty such directions volleyed from him; in a trice the decks of the ‘Bride’ were as busy as an anthill; canvas rattled like musketry as it was hauled down; the strains of Cutbill’s whistle shrilled high above the voices of the men, and a true ocean meaning came rolling into the commotion and clamour from the yeasty seething over the side, the singing of the wind past the ear, and the frisky motions of the yacht as she brought the sea on her bow heading, to Finn’s yell to the man at the helm, to range to windward of the schooner that was now fast coming round with her squaresail descending, her main tack hoisting and her topsail withering with her head to the west.
Distance is mightily deceptive at sea. How far off the schooner was when they let drive at her from our forecastle I could not say. She was probably out of range; at all events she showed no damage as she came rounding to, away down upon the blue throbbing which had softened much within the hour, with a bronze gleam of sheathing, as she heeled over ere her canvas broke shivering in the eye of the wind, that wonderfully heightened the beauty of the long, low, black, most shapely hull, and the bland and elegant fabric of bright spar and radiant cloths shining white yet through the faint claret tinge in the atmosphere. Wilfrid came slowly aft, constantly looking at her as he walked. Under reduced canvas we swept down leisurely, sliding lightly upon the run of the surge that was now on the beam. I examined her carefully through the glass whilst Miss Laura stood by my side asking questions.
‘Is she the “Shark”?’
‘She may be. But such of her crew as I make out don’t look to me to be English.’
‘Can you distinguish any women on board?’
‘Nothing approaching a woman. They mean to board us. They have a fine boat of a whaling pattern hanging to leeward, and there are sailors preparing to lower her. They are not Englishmen, I swear. I see a large fat man delivering orders apparently with sluggish gesticulations, which strike me as distinctly Dutch. How about her figure-head?’ I continued, and I brought the glass to bear on the bows of the schooner. ‘Ha!’ I cried, and looked round.
Wilfrid was watching the schooner right aft, where he had stood during the greater part of the chase, his arms folded as before, the same iron-hard expression on his countenance. I called to him.
‘What is the figure-head of the “Shark”?’
He started, and answered, ‘I don’t know. Ask Finn,’ and so saying walked towards us.
The skipper was giving some instructions to Crimp on the other side of the deck.
‘Captain Finn,’ I called.
‘Sir.’
‘What’s the “Shark’s” figure-head?’
‘A gold ball in a cup shaped like a lily, your honour.’
‘Then, Wilfrid,’ I cried, shoving the glass into his hands, ‘your pursuit must carry you further afield yet, for that craft’s figure-head is a white effigy, apparently a woman’s head.’
His manner to the sudden, desperate surging of the disappointment in him fell in a breath into the old form of the craziness of his moods of excitement. He looked through the glass, and then roared out—
‘Finn.’
The skipper came bundling over to us.
‘That vessel is not the “Shark.”’
‘I’ve been afeared not, sir, I’ve been afeared not,’ said Finn. ‘Like as two eggs end on; but now she’s drawed out—’tain’t only the figure-head. She han’t got the “Shark’s” length of bowsprit.’
Wilfrid dashed the telescope down on to the deck. ‘A fool’s chase!’ he exclaimed, scarcely intelligible for the way he spoke with his teeth set. ‘Heavenly God, what a disappointment! But it should have been Monday, it should have been Monday,’ and his gaze went in a scowling, wandering way from us to the schooner.
‘I suppose you know,’ said I to Finn, ‘that they’re standing by to lower a boat when we shall have come to a stand?’
‘Ay, sir, I know it,’ exclaimed Finn, who had picked up his telescope and was feeling over it in a nervous, broken-down manner as though he feared it was injured, but durst not look to make sure while Wilfrid stood nigh. ‘I shall heave to to looard for their convenience,’ and with that he walked aft to the wheel.
Wilfrid looked crushed with something absolutely lifeless in the dull leaden blank of his eyes. It was perhaps fortunate for us, if not for him, that this sudden prodigious blow of disappointment should have completed the sense of physical and mental exhaustion which inevitably attended the war of emotions that had been going on all day in his weak mind, otherwise heaven alone knows what miserable and painful display might have followed this failure of his expectations. I was much affected by his manner, and endeavoured to console him, but he motioned me to silence with a gesture of the hand, and seated himself on the skylight, where he remained with his arms folded and his eyes fixed on the deck, apparently heeding nothing that passed around him.
‘He’ll rally after a little,’ said I to Miss Laura, who furtively watched him with eyes sad with the shadow of tears.
‘It ought to have been the “Shark,” Mr. Monson,’ she exclaimed in a low voice. ‘My cowardly heart all day has been praying otherwise; and now I would give ten years of my life that my sister were there—for his sake, for mine, and for yours too, that this wretched voyage of expectation and mistakes and superstitions—oh, and I do not know what else,’ she added with a little toss of her arms like a wringing of her hands, ‘might come to an end.’
The sailors forward were eyeing the vessel steadily as we approached her. By this time all hands were aware of the blunder that had been made, and one seemed to see a kind of suspense in the posture of the fellows, with a half-grin in it, too, as though ’twas an incident to be as much laughed at as wondered at. The breeze continued to slacken, the seas were momentarily losing weight as they rolled, the gushing of the western crimson floated in the air like a delicate red smoke, with a heap of flame-coloured clouds resting broodingly upon the southern confines and the new moon over the sun, a wonder for the bright sharpness of its curve in such a hectic as she stood in. We ran down and hove to within easy hailing distance to leeward of the schooner, but it was plain that Mynheer had no notion of talking to us from over his rail. His fine large boat hung manned at the davits as we rounded to, with a gang of fellows at either fall, and no sooner was our way arrested than down slowly sank the six-oared fabric. The oars sparkled in the red light, and away she came for us.
‘Charles,’ called my cousin from the skylight. I went to him. ‘I’m too ill to be worried,’ said he; ‘represent me, dear boy, will you? Get us out of this mess as best you can, and as quickly.’
He spoke faintly and slightly staggered after he had risen. Miss Jennings seeing this, took his arm and together they went below.
I stood at the gangway along with friend Finn. ’Twas a ludicrous position to be in, and what excuses to make I knew not, unless it was to come to my explaining the full motive and meaning of our expedition—a sort of candour I did not like the idea of. In the stern-sheets of the approaching boat was the large fat[176] man I had previously taken notice of on the schooner’s quarterdeck. His face was as round as the moon, with a smudge of bristly yellow moustache under a bottle-shaped nose: his person was the completest pudding of a figure that can be imagined, as though forsooth a huge suit of clothes had been filled out with suet. He wore a blue cap with a shovel-shaped peak and a piece of gold lace on it going from one brass button to the other.
‘That’s not Fidler,’ said I to Finn.
‘Fidler!’ he ejaculated, staring with all his might at the boat; ‘there’s twenty Fidlers in that man, your honour. Why Fidler’s a mere rib, lean enough to shelter himself under the lee of a rope-yarn.’
The boat came fizzing alongside handsomely, and the fat man, watching his opportunity, planted himself upon the steps and rose like a whale to our deck, upon which he stepped. In a very phlegmatic, leisurely way he stood staring around him for a little out of a pair of small, greenish, expressionless eyes, and with a countenance that discovered no signs of any sort of emotion; then in the deepest voice I ever heard in a man, a tone that literally vibrated upon the ear like the low note of a church organ, he said in Dutch, ‘Who speaks my language?’
I knew a few sentences in German, enough to enable me to understand his question, but by no means enough to converse with, even if the man spoke that tongue, so I said bluntly in English, ‘No one, sir.’
He wheezed a bit, looking stolidly at me, and exclaimed ‘You are captain?’
I motioned to Finn.
‘Vy you vire ot me?’ he demanded, turning his fat, emotionless face upon the skipper.
Finn touched his cap. ‘Heartily sorry, sir: ’twas all a blunder happening through our mistaking you for another craft. I’m very willing to ’pologise and do whatever’s right.’
The Dutchman listened apathetically, then slowly bringing his fist of the shape, if not the hue, of a leg of beef to his vast spread of breast, he exclaimed in a voice even deeper than his former utterance, ‘Vot I ask is, vy you vire at me?’
Finn substantially repeated his former apology. The Dutchman gazed at him dully, with an expression of glassiness coming into his eyes.
‘Vot schip dis?’
Finn answered with alacrity, ‘The schooner-yacht “Bride,” sir.’
‘Zhe vight vorr herr nation?’ sending a lethargic glance at our masthead as if in search of a pennant.
‘No, sir,’ cried Finn, ‘we’re a pleasure vessel.’
‘Dere is no var,’ exclaimed the Dutchman, shaking his head, ‘between mine coundry und yours.’
‘Ho no, sir,’ exclaimed Finn.
‘Den I ask,’ said the Dutchman, in a voice like a trombone, ‘vy you vire ot me?’
This promised no end. I hastily whispered to Finn, ‘Leave him to me. Turn to quietly and trim sail and get way upon the vessel. He’ll take no other hint, I fear.’ Finn sneaked off. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ said I, ‘you’ll have heard from the captain that our firing at you was a blunder into which we were led by mistaking your ship. We desire to tender you our humble apology, which I trust you will see your way to accept without delay as we are very desirous of proceeding on our voyage.’
He looked at me with a motionless head and a face as vacant of human intelligence as a cloud, with its fat, its paleness, its Alp upon Alp of chin, then ponderously and slowly putting his hand into his breast he pulled out a great pocket-book and said, ‘Vot dis schip’s name?’
‘The “Bridesmaid,”’ said I.
He wrote down the word, wheezing laboriously.
‘Your captain name?’
‘Fidler,’ I answered.
This he entered.
‘Owner!’
‘Colonel Hope-Kennedy.’
‘Ow you shpell?’
I dictated, and he put down the letters as I delivered them.
‘Where you vrom?’
‘Limerick,’ I answered.
‘Ow you shpell?’ He got the word, and then said, ‘Vere you boun’?’
‘To the Solomon Group,’ I answered.
This I had to spell for him too. He wrote with such imperturbability, with such a ponderosity of phlegmatic manner in his posture, with such whale-like asthmatic wheezings broken only by the trembling notes of his deep, deep voice, that again and again I was nearly exploding with laughter, and indeed, had I caught anybody’s eye but his, I must certainly have whipped out with the merriment that was almost suffocating me. He slowly returned the note-book to his pocket and exclaimed, ‘Goot. You hear more of dis,’ and with that walked to the gangway.
‘Pray forgive me,’ said I, following him and speaking very courteously, ‘will you kindly tell me the name of your ship?’
He regarded me with a kind of scowl as he hung an instant in the gangway—the only expression approaching intelligence that entered his face, and said, ‘Malvina.’
‘And pray where are you bound to, sir?’
‘Cura?oa.’
‘Are you the owner, sir?’
‘Captain,’ he responded with an emphatic nod, and so saying he put his foot on the ladder and entered his boat.
Five minutes later we were breaking the seas afresh, making a[178] more southerly course than was needful by two points, that we might give as wide a berth as soon as possible to the Dutch schooner, that, at the time I went below to the summons of the dinner-bell, was sliding away west-south-west a league distant under every cloth that she had to hoist.